NINETEENTH CENTURY
QUESTIONS

BY
JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1897.

COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY ELIOT C. CLARKE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PREFATORY NOTE

Shortly before his death, Dr. Clarke selected the material for this book, and partly prepared it for publication. He wished thus to preserve some of his papers which had excited interest when printed in periodicals or read as lectures.

With slight exceptions, the book is issued just as prepared by the author.

CONTENTS

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LITERARY STUDIES

LYRIC AND DRAMATIC ELEMENTS IN LITERATURE AND ART

The German philosophy has made a distinction between the Subjective and the Objective, which has been found so convenient that it has been already naturalized and is almost acclimated in our literature.

The distinction is this: in all thought there are two factors, the thinker himself, and that about which he thinks. All thought, say our friends the Germans, results from these two factors: the subject, or the man thinking; and the object, what the man thinks about. All that part of thought which comes from the man himself, the Ego, they call subjective; all that part which comes from the outside world, the non-Ego, they call objective.

I am about to apply this distinction to literature and art; but instead of the terms Subjective and Objective, I shall use the words Lyric and Dramatic.

For example, when a writer or an artist puts a great deal of himself into his work, I call him a lyric writer or artist. Lyrical, in poetry, is the 4 term applied to that species of poetry which directly expresses the individual emotions of the poet. On the other hand, I call an artist or poet dramatic when his own personality disappears, and is lost in that which he paints or describes. A lyric or subjective writer gives us more of himself than of the outside world; a dramatic or objective writer gives us more of the outside world than of himself.

Lyric poetry is that which is to be sung; the lyre accompanies song. Now, song is mainly personal or subjective. It expresses the singer's personal emotions, feelings, desires; and for these reasons I select this phrase "lyric" to express all subjective or personal utterances in art.

The drama, on the other hand, is a photograph of life; of live men and women acting themselves out freely and individually. The dramatic writer ought to disappear in his drama; if he does not do so he is not a dramatic writer, but a lyrist in disguise.

The dramatic element is the power of losing one's self—opinions, feeling, character—in that which is outside and foreign, and reproducing it just as it is. In perfect dramatic expression the personal equation is wholly eliminated. The writer disappears in his characters; his own hopes and fears, emotions and convictions, do not color his work.

But the lyric element works in the opposite way. In song, the singer is prominent more than what 5 he sings. He suffuses his subject with his own thoughts and feelings. If he describes nature, he merely gives us the feelings it awakens in his own mind. If he attempts to write a play, we see the same actor thinly disguised reappearing in all the parts.

Now, there is a curious fact connected with this subject. It is that great lyric and dramatic authors or artists are apt to appear in duads or pairs. Whenever we meet with a highly subjective writer, we are apt to find him associated with another as eminently objective. This happens so often that one might imagine that each type of thought attracts its opposite and tends to draw it out and develop it. It may be that genius, when it acts on disciples who are persons of talent, draws out what is like itself, and makes imitators; when it acts on a disciple who himself possesses genius, it draws out what is opposite to itself and develops another original thinker. Genius, like love, is attracted by its opposite, or counterpart. Love and genius seek to form wholes; they look for what will complete and fulfill themselves. When, therefore, a great genius has come, fully developed on one side, he exercises an irresistible attraction on the next great genius, in whom the opposite side is latent, and is an important factor in his development. Thus, perhaps, we obtain the duads, whose curious concurrence I will now illustrate by a few striking instances.

6 Beginning our survey with English literature, who are the first two great poets whose names occur to us? Naturally, Chaucer and Spenser. Now, Chaucer is eminently dramatic and objective in his genius; while Spenser is distinctly a lyrical and subjective poet.

Chaucer tells stories; and story-telling is objective. One of the most renowned collections of stories is the "Arabian Nights;" but who knows anything about the authors of those entertaining tales? They are merely pictures of Eastern life, reflected in the minds of some impersonal authors, whose names even are unknown.

Homer is another great story-teller; and Homer is so objective, so little of a personality, that some modern critics suppose there may have been several Homers.

Chaucer is a story-teller also; and in his stories everything belonging to his age appears, except Chaucer himself. His writings are full of pictures of life, sketches of character; in one word, he is a dramatic or objective writer. He paints things as they are,—gives us a panorama of his period. Knights, squires, yeomen, priests, friars, pass before us, as in Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shalott."

The mind of an objective story-teller, like Chaucer, is the faithful mirror, which impartially reflects all that passes before it, but cracks from side to side whenever he lets a personal feeling enter 7 his mind, for then the drama suddenly disappears and a lyric of personal hope or fear, gladness or sadness, takes its place.

Spenser is eminently a lyric poet. His own genius suffuses his stories with a summer glow of warm, tender, generous sentiment. In his descriptions of nature he does not catalogue details, but suggests impressions, which is the only way of truly describing nature. There are some writers who can describe scenery, so that the reader feels as if he had seen it himself. The secret of all such description is that it does not count or measure, but suggests. It is not quantitative but qualitative analysis. It does not apply a foot rule to nature, but gives the impression made on the mind and heart by the scene. I have never been at Frascati nor in Sicily, but I can hardly persuade myself that I have not seen those places. I have distinct impressions of both, simply from reading two of George Sand's stories. I have in my mind a picture of Frascati, with deep ravines, filled with foliage; with climbing, clustering, straggling vines and trees and bushes; with overhanging crags, deep masses of shadow below, bright sunshine on the stone pines above. So I have another picture of Sicilian scenery, wide and open, with immense depths of blue sky, and long reaches of landscape; ever-present Etna, soaring snow-clad into the still air; an atmosphere of purity, filling the heart with calm content. It may be that 8 Catania and Frascati are not like this; but I feel as if I had seen them, not as if I had heard them described.

It is thus that Spenser describes nature; by touching some chord of fancy in the soul. Notice this picture of a boat on the sea:—

You notice that you are in the boat yourself, and everything is told as it appears to you there; you see the bending of the "stiff oars" by your side, and the little bubbles dancing on the water, and the islands, not as they are , rock-anchored, but as they seem to you, floating on the water. This is subjective description,—putting the reader in the place, and letting him see it all from that point of view. So Spenser speaks of the "oars sweeping the watery wilderness;" and of the gusty winds "filling the sails with fear."

Perhaps the highest description ought to include both the lyric and dramatic elements. Here is a specimen of sea description, by an almost unknown American poet, Fenner, perfect in its way. The poem is called "Gulf Weed:"—

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All nature becomes alive in the Spenserian description. Take, for example, the wonderful stanza which describes the music of the "Bower of Bliss:"—

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Consider the splendid portrait of Belphœbe:—

If we examine this picture, we see that it is not a photograph, such as the sun makes, but a lover's description of his mistress. He sees her, not as she is, but as she is to him . He paints her out of his own heart. In her eyes he sees, not only brilliancy and color, but heavenly light; he reads in them an untouched purity of soul. Looking at her forehead, he sees, not whiteness and roundness, but goodness and honor.

11 Shakespeare's lovers always describe their mistresses in this way, out of their own soul and heart. It is his own feeling that the lover gives, seeing perhaps "Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt."

After Chaucer and Spenser the next great English poets whose names naturally occur to us are Shakespeare and Milton.

Now, Shakespeare was the most objective dramatic writer who ever lived; while Milton was eminently and wholly a subjective and lyrical writer.

It is true that Shakespeare was so great that he is one of the very few men of genius in whom appear both of these elements. In his plays he is so objective that he is wholly lost in his characters, and his personality absolutely disappears; in his sonnets he "unlocks his heart" and is lyrical and subjective; he there gives us his inmost self, and we seem to know him as we know a friend with whom we have lived in intimate relations for years. Still, he will be best remembered by his plays; and into them he put the grandeur and universality of his genius; so we must necessarily consider him as the greatest dramatic genius of all time. But he belonged to a group of dramatic poets of whom he was the greatest: Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, Ford, Webster,—any one of whom would make the fortune of the stage to-day. It was a great age of dramatic literature, and it came very naturally to meet a demand. The play then was what the novel is to-day. As 12 people to-day have no sooner read a new novel than they want another, so, in Shakespeare's time, they had no sooner seen a new play than they ran to see another. Hence the amazing fertility of the dramatic writers. Thomas Heywood wrote the whole or a part of two hundred and twenty plays. The manager of one of the theatres bought a hundred and six new plays for his stage in six years; and in the next five years a hundred and sixty. The price paid to an author for a play would now be equal to about two or three hundred dollars. The dramatic element, as is natural, abounds in these writings, though in some of them the author's genius is plainly lyrical. Such, for example, is Massinger's, who always reminds me of Schiller. Both wrote plays, but in both writers the faculty of losing themselves in their characters is wanting. The nobleness of Schiller appears in all his works, and constitutes a large part of their charm. So in Massinger all tends to generosity and elevation. His worst villains are ready to be converted and turn saints at the least provocation. Their wickedness is in a condition of unstable equilibrium; it topples over, and goodness becomes supreme in a single moment. Massinger could not create really wicked people; their wickedness is like a child's moment of passion or willfulness, ending presently in a flood of tears, and a sweet reconciliation with his patient mother. But how different was it with Shakespeare! Consider his Iago. 13 How deeply rooted was his villainy! how it was a part of the very texture of his being! He had conformed to it the whole philosophy of his life. His cynical notions appear in the first scene. Iago believes in meanness, selfishness, everything that is base; to him all that seems good is either a pretense or a weakness. The man who does not seek the gratification of his own desires is a fool. There is to Iago nothing sweet, pure, fair, or true, in this world or the next. He profanes everything he touches. He sneers at the angelic innocence of Desdemona; he sneers at the generous, impulsive soul of Othello. When some one speaks to him of virtue, he says "Virtue? a fig! ’tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to which our wills are gardeners." You can plant nettles or lettuce as you please. That is to say, there is no reality in goodness. The virtue of Desdemona will be gone to-morrow, if she takes the whim. The Moor's faith in goodness is folly; it will cause him to be led by the nose. There is no converting such a man as that; or only when, by means of terrible disappointments and anguish, he is brought to see the reality of human goodness and divine providence. And that can hardly happen to him in this world.

Iago is a murderer of the soul, Macbeth a murderer of the body. The wickedness of Macbeth is different from that of Iago; that of Shylock and of Richard Third different again from either. 14 Macbeth is a half-brute, a man in a low state of development, with little intellect and strong passions. Shylock is a highly intellectual man, not a cynic like Iago, but embittered by ill-treatment, made venomous by cruel wrong and perpetual contempt. Oppression has made this wise man mad. Richard Third, originally bad, has been turned into a cruel monster by the egotism born of power. He has the contempt for his race that belongs to the aristocrat, who looks on men in humbler places as animals of a lower order made for his use or amusement. Now, this wonderful power of differentiating characters belongs to the essence of the dramatic faculty. Each of these is developed from within, from a personal centre, and is true to that. Every manifestation of this central life is correlated to every other. If one of Shakespeare's characters says but ten words in one scene, and then ten words more in another, we recognize him as the same person. His speech bewrayeth him. So it is in human life. Every man is fatally consistent with himself. So, after we have seen a number of pictures by any one of the great masters, we recognize him again, as soon as we enter a gallery. We know him by a certain style. Inferior artists have a manner; great artists have a style; manner is born of imitation; style of originality. So, there is a special quality in every human being, if he will only allow it to unfold. The dramatic faculty recognizes this. Its knowledge 15 of man is not a philosophy, nor a mere knowledge of human nature, but a perception of individual character. It first integrates men as human beings; then differentiates them as individuals. Play-writers, novelists, and artists who do not possess this dramatic genius cannot grow their characters from within, from a personal centre of life; but build them up from without, according to a plan. In description of nature, however, Shakespeare is, as he ought to be, subjective and lyric; he touches nature with human feelings. Take his description of a brook:—

The brook is gentle; then it becomes angry; then it is pacified and begins to sing; then it stops to kiss the sedge; then it is a pilgrim; and it walks willingly on to the ocean.

So in his sonnet:—

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From Shakespeare, the marvel of dramatic genius, turn to Milton, and we find the opposite tendency unfolded.

The "Paradise Lost" is indeed dramatic in form, with different characters and dialogues, in hell, on earth, and in heaven. But in essence it is undramatic. Milton is never for a moment lost in his characters; his grand and noble soul is always appearing. Every one speaks as Milton would have spoken had Milton been in the same place, and looked at things from the same point of view. Sin and Satan, for example, both talk like John Milton. Sin is very conscientious, and before she will unlock the gate of hell she is obliged to argue herself into a conviction that it is right to do so. Satan, she says, is her father, and children ought to obey their parents; so, since he tells her to unlock the gate, she ought to do so. Death reproaches Satan, in good set terms, for his treason against the Almighty; and Satan, as we all know, utters the noblest sentiments, and talks as Milton would have talked, had Milton been in Satan's position. 1

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Coming down nearer to our own time, we find a duad of great English poets, usually associated in our minds,—Byron and Scott.

Scott was almost the last of the dramatic poets of England, using the word dramatic in its large sense. His plays never amounted to much; but his stories in verse and in prose are essentially dramatic. In neither does he reveal himself. In all his poetry you scarcely find a reference to his personal feelings. In the L'Envoi to the "Lady of the Lake" there is a brief allusion of this sort, touching because so unusual, and almost the only one I now recall. Addressing the "Harp of the North" he says:—

Scott, like Chaucer, brings before us a long succession of characters, from many classes, countries, and times. Scotch barons and freebooters, English kings, soldiers, gentlemen, crusaders, Alpine peasants, mediæval counts, serfs, Jews, Saxons,—brave, cruel, generous,—all sweep past us, in a long succession of pictures; but of Scott himself nothing appears except the nobleness and purity of the tone which pervades all. He is therefore eminently a dramatic or objective writer.

But Byron is the exact opposite. The mighty 18 exuberance of his genius, which captivated his age, and the echoes of which thrill down to ours, in all its vast overflow of passion, imagination, wit,—ever sounded but one strain,—himself. His own woes, his own wrongs are the ever-recurring theme. Though he wrote many dramas, he was more undramatic than Milton. Every character in every play is merely a thinly disguised Byron. It was impossible for him to get away from himself. If Tennyson's lovely line tells the truth when he says,—

then Byron never really loved; for in his poetry the chord of self never passes out of sight.

In his plays the principal characters are Byron undiluted—as Manfred, Sardanapalus, Cain, Werner, Arnold. All the secondary characters are Byron more or less diluted,—Byron and water, may we say? Never, since the world began, has there been a poet so steeped in egotism, so sick of self-love as he; and the magnificence of his genius appears in the unfailing interest which he can give to this monotonous theme.

But he was the example of a spirit with which the whole age was filled to saturation. Almost all the nineteenth century poets of England are subjective, giving us their own experience, sentiments, 19 reflections, philosophies. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, revolve in this enchanted and enchanting circle. Keats and Coleridge seem capable of something different. So, in the double star, made up of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the first is absolutely personal and lyric, the second sometimes objective and dramatic. And in that other double star of Shelley and Keats the same difference may be noted.

A still more striking instance of the combination of these antagonisms is to be found in our time, in Robert Browning and his wife. Mrs. Browning is wholly lyric, like a bird which sings its own tender song of love and hope and faith till "that wild music burdens every bough;" and those "mournful hymns" hush the night to listening sympathy.

But in her husband we have a genuine renaissance of the old dramatic power of the English bards. Robert Browning is so dramatic that he forgets himself and his readers too, in his characters and their situations. To study the varieties of men and women is his joy; to reproduce them unalloyed, his triumph.

One curious instance of this self-oblivious immersion in the creations of his mind occurs to me. In one of his early poems called "In a Gondola"—as it first appeared—two lovers are happily conversing, until in a moment, we know not why, the tone becomes one of despair, and they bid each 20 other an eternal farewell. Why this change of tone there is no explanation. In a later edition he condescends to inform us, inserting a note to this effect: "He is surprised and stabbed." This is the opposite extreme to Milton's angels carefully explaining to each other that they possess a specific levity which enables them to drop upward.

If we think of our own poets whose names are usually connected,—Longfellow and Lowell, for instance,—we shall easily see which is dramatic and which lyric. But the only man of truly dramatic faculty whom we have possessed was one in whom the quality never fully ripened,—I mean Edgar Allan Poe.

In foreign literature we may trace the same tendency of men of genius to arrange themselves in couplets. Take, for instance, in Italy, Dante and Petrarch; in France, Voltaire and Rousseau; in Germany, Goethe and Schiller. Dante is dramatic, losing himself in his stern subject, his dramatic characters; his awful pictures of gloomy destiny. Petrarch is lyrical, personal, singing forever his own sad and sweet fate. Again, Voltaire is essentially dramatic,—immersed in things, absorbed in life, a man reveling in all human accident and adventure, and aglow with faith in an earthly paradise. The sad Rousseau goes apart, away from men; standing like Byron, among them, but not of them; in a cloud of thoughts that are not their thoughts. And, once more, though 21 Goethe resembles Shakespeare in this, that some of his works are subjective, and others objective,—though, in the greatness of his mind he reconciles all the usual antagonisms of thought,—yet the fully developed Goethe, like the fully developed Shakespeare, disappears in his characters and theme. Life to him, in all its forms, was so intensely interesting that his own individual and subjective sentiments are left out of sight. But Schiller stands opposed to Goethe, as being a dramatist devoid of dramatic genius, but full of personal power; so grand in his nobleness of soul, so majestic in the aspirations of his sentiment, so full of patriotic ardor and devotion to truth and goodness, that he moves all hearts as he walks through his dramas,—the great poet visible in every scene and every line. As his tried and noble friend says of him in an equally undying strain:—

Goethe's characters and stories covered the widest range: Faust, made sick with too much thought, and seeking outward joy as a relief; Werther, a self-absorbed sentimentalist; Tasso, an 22 Italian man of genius, a mixture of imagination, aspiration, sensitive self-distrust; susceptible to opinion, sympathetic; Iphigenia, a picture of antique calm, simplicity, purity, classic repose, like that of a statue; Hermann and Dorothea, a sweet idyl of modern life, in a simple-minded German village with an opinionated, honest landlord, a talkative apothecary, a motherly landlady, a sensible and good pastor, and the two young lovers.

This law of duality, or reaction of genius on genius, will also be found to apply to artists, philosophers, historians, orators. These also come in pairs, manifesting the same antagonistic qualities.

Some artists are lyric; putting their own souls into every face, every figure, making even a landscape alive with their own mood; adding—

In every landscape of Claude we find the soul of Claude; in every rugged rock-defile of Salvator we read his mood. These artists are lyric; but there are also great dramatic painters, who give you, not themselves, but men and women; so real, so differentiated, characters so full of the variety and antagonism of nature, that the whole life of a period springs into being at their touch.

Take for instance two names, which always go together, standing side by side at the summit of Italian art,—Michael Angelo and Raphael. 23 Though Raphael was a genius of boundless exuberance, and poured on the wall and canvas a flood of forms, creating as nature creates, without pause or self-repetition, yet there is a tone in all which irresistibly speaks of the artist's own soul. He created a world of Raphaels. Grace, sweetness, and tenderness went into all his work. Every line has the same characteristic qualities.

Turn to the frescoes by Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel. As we look up at those mighty forms—prophets, sibyls, seers, with multitudes of subordinate figures—we gradually trace in each prophet, king, or bard an individual character. Each one is himself. How fully each face and attitude is differentiated by some inward life. How each—David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, the Persian and the Libyan sibyl—stands out, distinct, filled with a power or a tenderness all his own. Michael Angelo himself is not there, except as a fountain of creative life, from whose genius all these majestic persons come forth as living realities.

Hanging on my walls are the well-known engravings of Guido's Aurora and Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper. One of these is purely lyrical; the other as clearly dramatic.

The Aurora is so exquisitely lovely, the forms so full of grace, the movement of all the figures so rapid yet so firm, that I can never pass it without stopping to enjoy its charms. But variety is absent. The hours are lovely sisters, as Ovid describes sisters:—

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But when we turn to the Last Supper, we see the dramatic artist at his best. The subject is such as almost to compel a monotonous treatment, but there is a wonderful variety in the attitudes and grouping. Each apostle shows by his attitude, gesture, expression, that he is affected differently from all the others. Even the feet under the table speak. Stand before the picture; put yourself into the attitude of each apostle, and you will immediately understand his state of mind. 2

The mediæval religious artists were subjective, sentimental, lyrical. In a scene like the crucifixion, all the characters, whether apostles, Roman soldiers, or Jewish Pharisees, hang their heads like bulrushes.

But see how Rubens, that great dramatic painter, 25 represents the scene. The Magdalen, wild with grief, with disheveled hair, has thrown herself at the foot of the cross, clasping and kissing the feet of Jesus. On the other faces are terror, dismay, doubt, unbelief, mockery, curiosity, triumph, despair,—according to each person's character and attitude toward the event. Meantime the Roman centurion, seated on his splendid horse, is deliberately and carefully striking his spear into the side of the sufferer. His face expresses only that he has a duty to perform and means to fulfill it perfectly.

As Rubens is greatly dramatic, his pupil and follower, Vandyke, is a great lyrical artist, whose noble aspiration and generous sentiment shows itself in all his work.

The school of Venice, with Titian and Tintoretto at its head, is grandly dramatic and objective. The school of Florence, with Guido and Domenichino at its head, eminently lyrical and subjective.

If we had time, we might show that the two masters of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, are, the one lyrical, and intensely subjective, platonizing the universe; and the other as evidently objective, immersed in the study of things; rejoicing in their variety, their individuality, their persistence of type.

The two masters of Greek history, Herodotus and Thucydides, stand opposed to each other in the 26 same way. Herodotus is the story-teller, the dramatic raconteur, whose charming tales are as entertaining as the "Arabian Nights." Thucydides is the personal historian who puts himself into his story, and determines its meaning and moral according to his own theories and convictions.

We have another example in Livy and Tacitus.

The two great American orators most frequently mentioned together are Webster and Clay. Though you would smile if I were to call either of them a lyric or a dramatic speaker, yet the essential distinction we have been considering may be clearly seen in them. Clay's inspiration was personal, his influence, personal influence. His theme was nothing; his treatment of it everything. But Webster rose or fell with the magnitude and importance of the occasion and argument. When on the wrong side, he failed, for his intellect would not work well except in the service of reality and truth. But Clay was perhaps greatest when arguing against all facts and all reason. Then he summoned all his powers,—wit, illustration, analogy, syllogisms, appeals to feeling, prejudice, and passion; and so swept along his confused and blinded audience to his conclusions.

I think that subjective writers are loved more than dramatic. We admire the one and we love the other. We admire Shakespeare and love Milton; we admire Chaucer and love Spenser; we admire Dante and love Petrarch; we admire 27 Goethe and love Schiller; and if Byron had not been so selfish a man, we should have loved him too. We admire Michael Angelo and love Raphael; we admire Rubens and love Vandyke; we admire Robert Browning and love Mrs. Browning. In short, we care more for the man who gives us himself than for the man who gives us the whole outside world.

I have been able to give you only a few hints of this curious distinction in art and literature. But if we carry it in our mind, we shall find it a key by which many doors may be unlocked. It will enable us to classify authors, and understand them better.

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DUALISM IN NATIONAL LIFE

The science of comparative ethnology is one which has been greatly developed during the last twenty-five years. The persistence of race tendencies, as in the Semitic tribes, Jews and Arabs, or in the Teutonic and Celtic branches of the great Aryan stock, has been generally admitted. Though few would now say, with the ethnologist Knox, "Race is everything," none would wholly dispense with this factor, as Buckle did, in writing a history of civilization.

Racial varieties have existed from prehistoric times. Their origin is lost in the remote past. As far as history goes back, we find them the same that they are now. When and how the primitive stock differentiated itself into the great varieties which we call Aryan, Semitic, and Turanian, no one can tell. But there are well-established varieties of which we can trace the rise and development; I mean national varieties. The character of an Englishman or a Frenchman is as distinctly marked as that of a Greek or Roman. There is a general resemblance among all Englishmen; and the same kind of resemblance among all Frenchmen, Spaniards, Swedes, Poles. But this crystallization 29 into national types of character has taken place in a comparatively short period. We look back to a time when there were no Englishmen in Great Britain; but only Danes, Saxons, Normans, and Celts; no Frenchmen in France; but Gauls, Franks, and Romans. Gradually a distinct quality emerges, and we have Frenchmen, Italians, Englishmen. The type, once arrived at, persists, and becomes more marked. It is marked by personal looks and manners, by a common temperament, a common style of thinking, feeling, acting; the same kind of morals and manners. This type was formed by the action and reaction of the divers races brought side by side—Normans and Saxons mutually influencing each other in England, and being influenced again by climate, conditions of life, forms of government, national customs. So, at last, we have the well-developed national character,—a mysterious but very certain element, from which no individual can wholly escape. All drink of that one spirit.

Thus far I have been stating what we all know. But now I would call your attention to a curious fact, which, so far as I am aware, has not before been noticed. It is this,—that when two nations, during their forming period, have been in relation to each other, there will be a peculiar character developed in each. That is to say, they will differ from each other according to certain well-defined lines, and these differences will repeat themselves 30 again and again in history, in curious parallelisms, or dualisms.

To take the most familiar illustration of this: consider the national qualities of the French and English. The English and French, during several centuries, have been acting and reacting on each other, both in war and peace. Now, what are the typical characteristics of these two nations? Stated in a broad way they might be described something as follows:—

The English mind is more practical than ideal; its movement is slow but persistent; its progress is by gradual development; it excels in the industrial arts; it reverences power; it loves liberty more than equality, not objecting to an aristocracy. It tends to individualism. Its conquests have been due to the power of order, and adherence to law.

The French mind is more ideal than practical; versatile, rather than persistent; its movements rapid, its progress by crises and revolution, rather than by development; it excels in whatever is tasteful and artistic; it admires glory rather than power; loves equality more than liberty; objects to an aristocracy, but is ready to yield individual rights at the bidding of the community; renouncing individualism for the sake of communism; and its successes have been due to enthusiasm rather than to organization.

Next, look at the Greeks and Romans. These peoples were in intimate relations during the forming 31 period of national life; and we find in them much the same contrasts of character that we do in the English and the French. The Romans were deficient in imagination, rather prosaic, fond of rule and fixed methods, conservative of ancient customs. The Greeks were quick and versatile; artistic to a high degree; producing masterpieces of architecture, painting, statuary, and creating every form of literature; inventing the drama, the epic poem, oratory, odes, history, philosophy. The Romans borrowed from them their art and their literature, but were themselves the creators of law, the organizers of force. The Greeks and Romans were the English and French of antiquity; and you will notice that they occupy geographically the same relative positions,—the Greeks and French on the east; the Romans and English on the west.

But now observe another curious fact. The Roman Empire and the Greek republics came to an end; and in Greece no important nationality took the place of those wonderful commonwealths. But in Italy, by the union of the old inhabitants with the Teutonic northern invaders, modern Italy was slowly formed into a new national life. No longer deriving any important influence from Greece (which had ceased to be a living and independent force), Italy, during the Middle Ages, came into relations with Spain and the Spaniards. In Spain, as in Italy, a new national life was in process of formation by the union of the Gothic 32 tribes, the Mohammedan invaders, and the ancient inhabitants. The Spaniards occupied Sicily in 1282, and Naples fell later into their hands, about 1420, and in 1526 took possession of Milan. Thus Italy and Spain were entangled in complex relations during their forming period. What was the final result? Modern Italians became the very opposite of the ancient Romans. The Spaniards on the west are now the Romans, and the Italians, the Greeks. The Spaniards are slow, strong, conservative; the Italians, quick-witted, full of feeling and sentiment, versatile. The Spaniards trust to organization, the Italians to enthusiasm. The Spaniards are practical, the Italians ideal. In fine, the Spaniards, on the west, are like the English and the ancient Romans; the Italians, on the east, like the French and the Greeks. The English pride, the Roman pride, the Spanish pride, we have all heard of; but the French, the Greeks, and the Italians are not so much inclined to pride and the love of power, as to vanity and the love of fame. England, Rome, and Spain, united by law and the love of organization, gradually became solidified into empires; Greece, Italy, and France were always divided into independent states, provinces, or republics.

Now, let us go east and consider two empires that have grown up, side by side, with constant mutual relations: Japan and China. The people of Japan, on the east, are described by all travelers 33 in language that might be applied to the ancient Greeks or the modern French. They are said to be quick-witted, lively, volatile, ready of apprehension, with a keen sense of honor, which prefers death to disgrace; eminently a social and pleasure-seeking people, fond of feasts, dancing, music, and frolics. Men and women are pleasing, polite, affable. On the other hand, the Chinese are described as more given to reason than to sentiment, prosaic, slow to acquire, but tenacious of all that is gained, very conservative, great lovers of law and order; with little taste for art, but much national pride. They are the English of Asia; the Japanese, the French.

Go back to earlier times, when the two oldest branches of the great Aryan stock diverged on the table-lands of central Asia; the Vedic race descending into India, and the Zend people passing west, into Persia. The same duplex development took place that we have seen in other instances. The people on the Indus became what they still are,—a people of sentiment and feeling. Like the French, they are polite, and cultivate civility and courtesy. The same tendency to local administration which we see in France is found in India; the commune being, in both, the germ-cell of national life. The village communities in India are little republics, almost independent of anything outside. Dynasties change, new rulers and kings arrive; Hindoo, Mohammedan, English; but the 34 village community remains the same. Like the Japanese, the French, the Italians, the inhabitants of India are skillful manufacturers of ornamental articles. Their religion tends to sentiment more than to morality,—to feeling, rather than to action. This is the development which India took when these races inhabited the Punjaub. But the ancient Persians were different. Their religion included a morality which placed its essence in right thinking and right action. A sentimental religion, like that of India and of Italy, tends to the adoration of saints and holy images and to multiplied ceremonies. A moral religion, like that of Persia, of Judea, and of the Teutonic races, tends to the adoration and service of the unseen. The Hindoos had innumerable gods, temples, idols. The Persians worshiped the sacred fire, without temple, priest, altar, sacrifice, or ritual. The ancient Persians, wholly unlike the modern Persians, were a people of action, energy, enterprise. But when the old Persian empire fell, the character of the people changed. Just as in Italy the old Roman type disappeared, and was replaced by the opposite in the modern Italian, so modern Persia has swung round to the opposite pole of national character. The Persians and Turks, both professing the Mohammedan religion, belong to different sects of that faith. The Turks are proud, tenacious of old customs, grave in their demeanor, generally just in their dealings, keeping their word. The 35 Persians, as they appear in the works of Malcolm and Monier, are changeable, kindly, polite, given to ceremonies, fond of poetry, with taste for fine art and decoration,—a mobile people. The Turk is silent, the Persian talkative. The Turk is proud and cold, the Persian affable and full of sentiment. In short, the Persian is the Frenchman, and the Turk the Englishman. And here again, as in the other cases, the French type of nationality unfolds itself on the east, and the English on the west.

These national doubles have not been exhausted. We have other instances of twin nations, born of much the same confluence of race elements, of whom, as of Esau and Jacob, it might be predicted to the mother race, "Two nations shall be born of thee; two kinds of people shall go forth from thee; and the one shall be stronger than the other." Thus there are the twin races which inhabit Sweden and Norway; the Swedes, on the east, are more intelligent, quick-witted, and versatile; the Norwegians, on the west, slow, persistent, and disposed to foreign conquest and adventure, as shown in the sea-kings, who discovered Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland; and the modern emigrants who reap the vast wheatfields of Minnesota. So, too, we might speak of the Poles and Germans. The Polish nation, on the east, resembling the French; the German, on the west, the English.

But time will not allow me to carry out these 36 parallels into details. The question is, are these mere coincidences, or do they belong to the homologons of history, where the same law of progress repeats itself under different conditions, as the skeleton of the mammal is found in the whale. Such curious homologons we find in national events, and they can hardly be explained as accidental coincidences. For instance, the English and French revolutions proceeded by six identical steps. First, an insurrection of the people. Secondly, the dethronement and execution of the king. Thirdly, a military usurper. Fourthly, the old line restored. Fifthly, after the death of the restored king, his brother succeeds to the throne. Sixthly, a second revolution drives the brother into exile, and a constitutional king of a collateral branch takes his place.

But if these doubles which I have described come by some mysterious law of polar force, as in the magnet, where the two kinds of electricity are repelled to opposite poles, and yet attract each other, how account for the regularity of the geographical position? Why is the French, Greek, Hindoo, Persian, Italian, Polish, Swedish type always at the east, and the English, Roman, Iranic, Ottoman, Spanish, German, Norwegian type always at the west? Are nations, like tides, affected by the diurnal revolution of the globe? This, I confess, I am unable to explain; and I leave it to 37 others to consider whether what I have described is pure coincidence, or if it belongs in some way to the philosophy of history and comes under universal law.

38

DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE BACON'S WORKS 3

The greatest of English poets is Shakespeare. The greatest prose writer in English literature is probably Bacon. Each of these writers, alone, is a marvel of intellectual grandeur. It is hard to understand how one man, in a few years, could have written all the masterpieces of Shakespeare,—thirty-six dramas, each a work of genius such as the world will never let die. It is a marvel that from one mind could proceed the tender charm of such poems as "Romeo and Juliet," "As You Like It," or "The Winter's Tale;" the wild romance of "The Tempest," or of "A Midsummer Night's Dream;" the awful tragedies of "Lear," "Macbeth," and "Othello;" the profound philosophy of "Hamlet;" the perfect fun of "Twelfth Night," and "The Merry Wives of Windsor;" and the reproductions of Roman and English history. It is another marvel that a man like Bacon, immersed nearly all his life in business, a successful lawyer, an ambitious statesman, a courtier cultivating the society of the sovereign and the favorites of the sovereign, should also be 39 the founder of a new system of philosophy, which has been the source of many inventions and new sciences down to the present day; should have critically surveyed the whole domain of knowledge, and become a master of English literary style. Each of these phenomena is a marvel; but put them together, and assume that one man did it all, and you have, not a marvel, but a miracle. Yet, this is the result which the monistic tendency of modern thought has reached. Several critics of our time have attempted to show that Bacon, besides writing all the works usually attributed to him, was also the author of all of Shakespeare's plays and poems.

This theory was first publicly maintained by Miss Delia Bacon in 1857. It had been, before, in 1856, asserted by an Englishman, William Henry Smith, but only in a small volume printed for private circulation. This book made a distinguished convert in the person of Lord Palmerston, who openly declared his conviction that Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's plays. Two papers by Appleton Morgan, written in the same sense, appeared last year in "Appletons' Journal." But far the most elaborate and masterly work in support of this attempt to dethrone Shakespeare, and to give his seat on the summit of Parnassus to Lord Bacon, is the book by Judge Holmes, published in 1866. He has shown much ability, and brought forward every argument which has any plausibility connected with it.

40 Judge Holmes was, of course, obliged to admit the extreme antecedent improbability of his position. Certainly it is very difficult to believe that the author of such immortal works should have been willing, for any reason, permanently to conceal his authorship; or, if he could hide that fact, should have been willing to give the authorship to another; or, if willing, should have been able so effectually to conceal the substitution as to blind the eyes of all mankind down to the days of Miss Delia Bacon and Judge Holmes.

What, then, are the arguments used by Judge Holmes? The proofs he adduces are mainly these: (1st) That there are many coincidences and parallelisms of thought and expression between the works of Bacon and Shakespeare; (2d) that there is an amount of knowledge and learning in the plays, which Lord Bacon possessed, but which Shakespeare could hardly have had. Besides these principal proofs, there are many other reasons given which are of inferior weight,—a phrase in a letter of Sir Tobie Matthew; another sentence of Bacon himself, which might be possibly taken as an admission that he was the author of "Richard II.;" the fact that some plays which Shakespeare certainly did not write were first published with his name or his initials. But his chief argument is that Shakespeare had neither the learning nor the time to write the plays, both of which Lord Bacon possessed; and that there are curious 41 coincidences between the plays and the prose works.

These arguments have all been answered, and the world still believes in Shakespeare as before. But I have thought it might be interesting to show how easily another argument could be made of an exactly opposite kind,—how easily all these proofs might be reversed. I am inclined to think that if we are to believe that one man was the author both of the plays and of the philosophy, it is much more probable that Shakespeare wrote the works of Bacon than that Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare. For there is no evidence that Bacon was a poet as well as a philosopher; but there is ample evidence that Shakespeare was a philosopher as well as a poet. This, no doubt, assumes that Shakespeare actually wrote the plays; but this we have a right to assume, in the outset of the discussion, in order to stand on an equal ground with our opponents.

The Bacon vs. Shakespeare argument runs thus: "Assuming that Lord Bacon wrote the works commonly attributed to him, there is reason to believe that he also wrote the plays and poems commonly attributed to Shakespeare."

The counter argument would then be: "Assuming that Shakespeare wrote the plays, and poems commonly attributed to him, there is reason to believe that he also wrote the works commonly attributed to Bacon."

42 This is clearly the fair basis of the discussion. What is assumed on the one side on behalf of Bacon we have a right to assume on the other on behalf of Shakespeare. But before proceeding on this basis, I must reply to the only argument of Judge Holmes which has much apparent weight. He contends that it was impossible for Shakespeare, with the opportunities he possessed, to acquire the knowledge which we find in the plays. Genius, however great, cannot give the knowledge of medical and legal terms, nor of the ancient languages. Now, it has been shown that the plays afford evidence of a great knowledge of law and medicine; and of works in Latin and Greek, French and Italian. How could such information have been obtained by a boy who had no advantages of study except at a country grammar school, which he left at the age of fourteen, who went to London at twenty-three and became an actor, and who spent most of his life as actor, theatrical proprietor, and man of business?

This objection presents difficulties to us, and for our time, when boys sometimes spend years in the study of Latin grammar. We cannot understand the rapidity with which all sorts of knowledge were imbibed in the period of the Renaissance. Then every one studied everything. Then Greek and Latin books were read by prince and peasant, by queens and generals. Then all sciences and arts were learned by men and women, by young 43 and old. Thus speaks Robert Burton—who was forty years old when Shakespeare died: "What a world of books offers itself, in all subjects, arts and sciences, to the sweet content and capacity of the reader! In arithmetic, geometry, perspective, opticks, astronomy, architecture, sculptura , pictura , of which so many and elaborate treatises have lately been written; in mechanics and their mysteries, military matters, navigation, riding of horses, fencing, swimming, gardening, planting, great tomes of husbandry, cookery, faulconry, hunting, fishing, fowling; with exquisite pictures of all sports and games.... What vast tomes are extant in law, physic, and divinity, for profit, pleasure, practice.... Some take an infinite delight to study the very languages in which these books were written: Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Chaldee, Arabick, and the like." This was the fashion of that day, to study all languages, all subjects, all authors. A mind like that of Shakespeare could not have failed to share this universal desire for knowledge. After leaving the grammar school, he had nine years for such studies before he went to London. As soon as he began to write plays, he had new motives for study; for the subjects of the drama in vogue were often taken from classic story.

But Shakespeare had access to another source of knowledge besides the study of books. When he reached London, five or six play-houses were in 44 full activity, and new plays were produced every year in vast numbers. New plays were then in constant demand, just as the new novel and new daily or weekly paper are called for now. The drama was the periodical literature of the time. Dramatic authors wrote with wonderful rapidity, borrowing their subjects from plays already on the stage, and from classic or recent history. Marlowe, Greene, Lyly, Peele, Kyd, Lodge, Nash, Chettle, Munday, Wilson, were all dramatic writers before Shakespeare. Philip Henslowe, a manager or proprietor of the theatres, bought two hundred and seventy plays in about ten years. Thomas Heywood wrote a part or the whole of two hundred and twenty plays during his dramatic career. Each acted play furnished material for some other. They were the property of the play-houses, not of the writers. One writer after another has accused Shakespeare of indifference to his reputation, because he did not publish a complete and revised edition of his works during his life. How could he do this, since they did not belong to him, but to the theatre? Yet every writer was at full liberty to make use of all he could remember of other plays, as he saw them acted; and Shakespeare was not slow to use this opportunity. No doubt he gained knowledge in this way, which he afterward employed much better than did the authors from whom he took it.

The first plays printed under Shakespeare's 45 name did not appear till he had been connected with the stage eleven years. This gives time enough for him to have acquired all the knowledge to be found in his books. That he had read Latin and Greek books we are told by Ben Jonson; though that great scholar undervalued, as was natural, Shakespeare's attainments in those languages.

But Ben Jonson himself furnishes the best reply to those who think that Shakespeare could not have gained much knowledge of science or literature because he did not go to Oxford or Cambridge. What opportunities had Ben Jonson? A bricklayer by trade, called back immediately from his studies to use the trowel; then running away and enlisting as a common soldier; fighting in the Low Countries; coming home at nineteen, and going on the stage; sent to prison for fighting a duel—what opportunities for study had he? He was of a strong animal nature, combative, in perpetual quarrels, fond of drink, in pecuniary troubles, married at twenty, with a wife and children to support. Yet Jonson was celebrated for his learning. He was master of Greek and Latin literature. He took his characters from Athenæus, Libanius, Philostratus. Somehow he had found time for all this study. "Greek and Latin thought," says Taine, "were incorporated with his own, and made a part of it. He knew alchemy, and was as familiar with alembics, retorts, crucibles, etc., as if 46 he had passed his life in seeking the philosopher's stone. He seems to have had a specialty in every branch of knowledge. He had all the methods of Latin art,—possessed the brilliant conciseness of Seneca and Lucan." If Ben Jonson—a bricklayer, a soldier, a fighter, a drinker—could yet find time to acquire this vast knowledge, is there any reason why Shakespeare, with much more leisure, might not have done the like? He did not possess as much Greek and Latin lore as Ben Jonson, who, probably, had Shakespeare in his mind when he wrote the following passage in his "Poetaster:"

The only other serious proof offered in support of the proposition that Bacon wrote the immortal Shakespearean drama is that certain coincidences of thought and language are found in the works of the two writers. When we examine them, however, they seem very insignificant. Take, as an example, two or three, on which Judge Holmes relies, and which he thinks very striking.

Holmes says (page 48) that Bacon quotes Aristotle, 47 who said that "young men were no fit hearers of moral philosophy," and Shakespeare says ("Troilus and Cressida"):—

But since Bacon's remark was published in 1605, and "Troilus and Cressida" did not appear until 1609, Shakespeare might have seen it there, and introduced it into his play from his recollection of the passage in the "Advancement of Learning."

Another coincidence mentioned by Holmes is that both writers use the word "thrust:" Bacon saying that a ship "thrust into Weymouth;" and Shakespeare, that "Milan was thrust from Milan." He also thinks it cannot be an accident that both frequently use the word "wilderness," though in very different ways. Both also compare Queen Elizabeth to a "star." Bacon makes Atlantis an island in mid-ocean; and the island of Prospero is also in mid-ocean. Both have a good deal to say about "mirrors," and "props," and like phrases.

Such reasoning as this has very little weight. You cannot prove two contemporaneous writings to have proceeded from one author by the same words and phrases being found in both; for these are in the vocabulary of the time, and are the common property of all who read and write.

My position is that if either of these writers wrote the works attributed to the other, it is much 48 more likely that Shakespeare wrote the philosophical works of Bacon than that Bacon wrote the poetical works of Shakespeare. Assuming then, as we have a right to do in this argument, that Shakespeare wrote the plays, what reasons are there for believing that he also wrote the philosophy?

First, this assumption will explain at once that hitherto insoluble problem of the contradiction between Bacon's character and conduct and his works. How could he have been, at the same time, what Pope calls him,—

He was, in his philosophy, the leader of his age, the reformer of old abuses, the friend of progress. In his conduct, he was, as Macaulay has shown, "far behind his age,—far behind Sir Edward Coke; clinging to exploded abuses, withstanding the progress of improvement, struggling to push back the human mind." In his writings, he was calm, dignified, noble. In his life, he was an office-seeker through long years, seeking place by cringing subservience to men in power, made wretched to the last degree when office was denied him, addressing servile supplications to noblemen and to the sovereign. To gain and keep office he would desert his friends, attack his benefactors, and make abject apologies for any manly word he might have incautiously uttered. His philosophy rose far above earth and time, and sailed supreme 49 in the air of universal reason. But "his desires were set on things below. Wealth, precedence, titles, patronage, the mace, the seals, the coronet, large houses, fair gardens, rich manors, massy services of plate, gay hangings," were "objects for which he stooped to everything and endured everything." These words of Macaulay have been thought too severe. But we defy any admirer of Bacon to read his life, by Spedding, without admitting their essential truth. How was it possible for a man to spend half of his life in the meanest of pursuits, and the other half in the noblest?

This difficulty is removed if we suppose that Bacon, the courtier and lawyer, with his other ambitions, was desirous of the fame of a great philosopher; and that he induced Shakespeare, then in the prime of his powers, to help him write the prose essays and treatises which are his chief works. He has himself admitted that he did actually ask the aid of the dramatists of his time in writing his books. This remarkable fact is stated by Bacon in a letter to Tobie Matthew, written in June, 1623, in which he says that he is devoting himself to making his writings more perfect—instancing the "Essays" and the "Advancement of Learning"—"by the help of some good pens, which forsake me not." One of these pens was that of Ben Jonson, the other might easily have been that of Shakespeare. Certainly there was no better pen in England at that time than his.

50 When Shakespeare's plays were being produced, Lord Bacon was fully occupied in his law practice, his parliamentary duties, and his office-seeking. The largest part of the Shakespeare drama was put on the stage, as modern research renders probable, in the ten or twelve years beginning with 1590. In 1597 Shakespeare was rich enough to buy the new place at Stratford-on-Avon, and was also lending money. In 1604 he was part owner of the Globe Theatre, so that the majority of the plays which gained for him this fortune must have been produced before that time. Now, these were just the busiest years of Bacon's life. In 1584 he was elected to Parliament. About the same time, he wrote his famous letter to Queen Elizabeth. In 1585 he was already seeking office from Walsingham and Burleigh. In 1586 he sat in Parliament for Taunton, and was active in debate and on committees. He became a bencher in the same year, and began to plead in the courts of Westminster. In 1589 he became queen's counsel, and member of Parliament for Liverpool. After this he continued active, both in Parliament and at the bar. He sought, by the help of Essex, to become Attorney-General. From that period, as crown lawyer, his whole time and thought were required to trace and frustrate the conspiracies with which the kingdom was full. It was evident that during these years he had no time to compose fifteen or twenty of the greatest works in any literature.

51 But how was Shakespeare occupied when Bacon's philosophy appeared? The "Advancement of Learning" was published in 1605, after most of the plays had been written, as we learn from the fact of Shakespeare's purchase of houses and lands. The "Novum Organum" was published in 1620, after Shakespeare's death. But it had been written years before; revised, altered, and copied again and again—it is said twelve times. Bacon had been engaged upon it during thirty years, and it was at last published incomplete and in fragments. If Shakespeare assisted in the composition of this work, his death in 1616 would account, at once, for its being left unfinished. And Shakespeare would have had ample time to furnish the ideas of the "Organum" in the last years of his life, when he had left the theatre. In 1613 he bought a house in Black Friars, where Ben Jonson also lived. Might not this have been that they might more conveniently coöperate in assisting Bacon to write the "Novum Organum"?

When we ask whether it would have been easier for the author of the philosophy to have composed the drama, or the dramatic poet to have written the philosophy, the answer will depend on which is the greater work of the two. The greater includes the less, but the less cannot include the greater. Now, the universal testimony of modern criticism in England, Germany, and France declares that no larger, deeper, or ampler intellect 52 has ever appeared than that which produced the Shakespeare drama. This "myriad-minded" poet was also philosopher, man of the world, acquainted with practical affairs, one of those who saw the present and foresaw the future. All the ideas of the Baconian philosophy might easily have had their home in this vast intelligence. Great as are the thoughts of the "Novum Organum," they are far inferior to that world of thought which is in the drama. We can easily conceive that Shakespeare, having produced in his prime the wonders and glories of the plays, should in his after leisure have developed the leading ideas of the Baconian philosophy. But it is difficult to imagine that Bacon, while devoting his main strength to politics, to law, and to philosophy, should as a mere pastime for his leisure, have produced in his idle moments the greatest intellectual work ever done on earth.

If the greater includes the less, the mind of Shakespeare includes that of Bacon, and not vice versa . This will appear more plainly if we consider the quality of intellect displayed respectively in the dramas and the philosophy. The one is synthetic, creative; the other analytic, critical. The one puts together, the other takes apart and examines. Now, the genius which can put together can also take apart; but it by no means follows that the power of taking apart implies that of putting together. A watch-maker, who can put 53 a watch together, can easily take it to pieces; but many a child who has taken his watch to pieces has found it impossible to put it together again.

When we compare the Shakespeare plays and the Baconian philosophy, it is curious to see how the one is throughout a display of the synthetic intellect, and the other of the analytic. The plays are pure creation, the production of living wholes. They people our thought with a race of beings who are living persons, and not pale abstractions. These airy nothings take flesh and form, and have a name and local habitation forever on the earth. Hamlet, Desdemona, Othello, Miranda, are as real people as Queen Elizabeth or Mary of Scotland. But when we turn to the Baconian philosophy, this faculty is absent. We have entered the laboratory of a great chemist, and are surrounded by retorts and crucibles, tests and re-agents, where the work done is a careful analysis of all existing things, to find what are their constituents and their qualities. Poetry creates, philosophy takes to pieces and examines.

It is, I think, a historic fact, that while those authors whose primary quality is poetic genius have often been also, on a lower plane, eminent as philosophers, there is, perhaps, not a single instance of one whose primary distinction was philosophic analysis, who has also been, on a lower plane, eminent as a poet. Milton, Petrarch, Goethe, Lucretius, Voltaire, Coleridge, were primarily 54 and eminently poets; but all excelled, too, in a less degree, as logicians, metaphysicians, men of science, and philosophers. But what instance have we of any man like Bacon, chiefly eminent as lawyer, statesman, and philosopher, who was also distinguished, though in a less degree, as a poet? Among great lawyers, is there one eminent also as a dramatic or lyric author? Cicero tried it, but his verses are only doggerel. In Lord Campbell's list of the lord chancellors and chief justices of England no such instance appears. If Bacon wrote the Shakespeare drama, he is the one exception to an otherwise universal rule. But if Shakespeare coöperated in the production of the Baconian philosophy, he belongs to a class of poets who have done the same. Coleridge was one of the most imaginative of poets. His "Christabel" and "Ancient Mariner" are pure creations. But in later life he originated a new system of philosophy in England, the influence of which has not ceased to be felt to our day. The case would be exactly similar if we suppose that Shakespeare, having ranged the realm of imaginative poetry in his youth, had in his later days of leisure coöperated with Bacon and Ben Jonson in producing the "Advancement of Learning" and the "Novum Organum." We can easily think of them as meeting, sometimes at the house of Ben Jonson, sometimes at that of Shakespeare in Black Friars, and sometimes guests at that private house built 55 by Lord Bacon for purposes of study, near his splendid palace of Gorhambury. "A most ingeniously contrived house," says Basil Montagu, "where, in the society of his philosophical friends, he devoted himself to study and meditation." Aubrey tells us that he had the aid of Hobbes in writing down his thoughts. Lord Bacon appears to have possessed the happy gift of using other men's faculties in his service. Ben Jonson, who had been a thorough student of chemistry, alchemy, and science in all the forms then known, aided Bacon in his observations of nature. Hobbes aided him in giving clearness to his thoughts and his language. And from Shakespeare he may have derived the radical and central ideas of his philosophy. He used the help of Dr. Playfer to translate his philosophy into Latin. Tobie Matthew gives him the last argument of Galileo for the Copernican system. He sends his works to others, begging them to correct the thoughts and the style. It is evident, then, that he would have been glad of the concurrence of Shakespeare, and that could easily be had, through their common friend, Ben Jonson.

If Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare, it is difficult to give any satisfactory reason for his concealment of that authorship. He had much pride, not to say vanity, in being known as an author. He had his name attached to all his other works, and sent them as presents to the universities, and 56 to individuals, with letters calling their attention to these books. Would he have been willing permanently to conceal the fact of his being the author of the best poetry of his time? The reasons assigned by Judge Holmes for this are not satisfactory. They are: his desire to rise in the profession of the law, the low reputation of a play-writer, his wish to write more freely under an incognito, and his wish to rest his reputation on his philosophical works. But if he were reluctant to be regarded as the author of "Lear" and "Hamlet," he was willing to be known as the writer of "Masques," and a play about "Arthur," exhibited by the students of Gray's Inn. It is an error to say that the reputation of a play-writer was low. Judge Holmes, himself, tells us that there was nothing remarkable in a barrister of the inns of court writing for the stage. Ford and Beaumont were both lawyers as well as eminent play-writers. Lord Backhurst, Lord Brooke, Sir Henry Wotton, all wrote plays. And we find nothing in the Shakespeare dramas which Bacon need have feared to say under his own name. It would have been ruin to Sir Philip Francis to have avowed himself the author of "Junius." But the Shakespeare plays satirized no one, and made no enemies. If there were any reasons for concealment, they certainly do not apply to the year 1623, when the first folio appeared, which was after the death of Shakespeare and the fall of Bacon. The acknowledgment 57 of their authorship at that time could no longer interfere with Bacon's rise. And it would be very little to the credit of his intelligence to assume that he was not then aware of the value of such works, or that he did not desire the reputation of being their author. It would have been contrary to his very nature not to have wished for the credit of that authorship.

On the other hand, there would be nothing surprising in the fact of Shakespeare's laying no claim to credit for having assisted in the composition of the "Advancement of Learning." Shakespeare was by nature as reticent and modest as Bacon was egotistical and ostentatious. What a veil is drawn over the poet's personality in his sonnets! We read in them his inmost sentiments, but they tell us absolutely nothing of the events of his life, or the facts of his position. And if, as we assume, he was one among several who helped Lord Bacon, though he might have done the most, there was no special reason why he should proclaim that fact.

Gervinus has shown, in three striking pages, the fundamental harmony between the ideas and mental tendencies of Shakespeare and Bacon. Their philosophy of man and of life was the same. If, then, Bacon needed to be helped in thinking out his system, there was no one alive who would have given him such stimulus and encouragement as Shakespeare. This also may explain his not mentioning 58 the name of Shakespeare in his works; for that might have called too much attention to the source from which he received this important aid.

Nevertheless, I regard the monistic theory as in the last degree improbable. We have two great authors, and not one only. But if we are compelled to accept the view which ascribes a common source to the Shakespeare drama and the Baconian philosophy, I think there are good reasons for preferring Shakespeare to Bacon as the author of both. When the plays appeared, Bacon was absorbed in pursuits and ambitions foreign to such work; his accepted writings show no sign of such creative power; he was the last man in the world not to take the credit of such a success, and had no motive to conceal his authorship. On the other hand, there was a period in Shakespeare's life when he had abundant leisure to coöperate in the literary plans of Bacon; his ample intellect was full of the ideas which took form in those works; and he was just the person neither to claim nor to desire any credit for lending such assistance.

There is, certainly, every reason to believe that, among his other ambitions, Bacon desired that of striking out a new path of discovery, and initiating a better method in the study of nature. But we know that, in doing this, he sought aid in all quarters, and especially among Shakespeare's friends and companions. It is highly probable, 59 therefore, that he became acquainted with the great dramatist, and that Shakespeare knew of Bacon's designs and became interested in them. And if so, who could offer better suggestions than he; and who would more willingly accept them than the overworked statesman and lawyer, who wished to be also a philosopher?

Finally, we may refer those who believe that the shape of the brow and head indicates the quality of mental power to the portraits of the two men. The head of Shakespeare, according to all the busts and pictures which remain to us, belongs to the type which antiquity has transmitted to us in the portraits of Homer and Plato. In this vast dome of thought there was room for everything. The head of Bacon is also a grand one, but less ample, less complete—less

These portraits therefore agree with all we know of the writings, in showing us which, and which only, of the two minds was capable of containing the other.

60

THE EVOLUTION OF A GREAT POEM 4

There are at least three existing manuscripts of Grays "Elegy," in the author's autograph. The earliest, containing the largest number of variations and the most curious, is that now in the possession of Sir William Fraser in London, and for which he paid the large sum of £230, in 1875. By the kindness of Sir William Fraser, I examined this manuscript at his rooms in London, in 1882. A facsimile copy of this valuable autograph, photographed from the original in 1862, is now before me. A second copy in the handwriting of Gray, called the Pembroke manuscript, is in the library of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. A facsimile of this autograph appears in Matthias's edition of Mason's "Gray," published in 1814. A third copy, in the poet's handwriting, copied by him for his friend, Dr. Wharton, is in the British Museum. I examined this, also, in 1882, and had an accurate copy made for me by one of the assistants in the museum. This was written after the other two, as is evident from the fact that it approaches most nearly to the form which the "Elegy" finally assumed when printed. There are only nine or 61 ten expressions in this manuscript which differ from the poem as published by Gray. Most of these are unimportant. " Or " he changed, in three places, into "and." " And in our ashes" he changed into "Even in our ashes," which was a clear improvement. It was not until after this third copy was written that the improvement was made which changed

into

Another important alteration of a single word was also made after this third manuscript was written. This was the change, in the forty-fifth stanza, of "Reins of Empire" into "Rod of Empire."

"The Elegy in a Country Churchyard" became at once one of the most popular poems in the language, and has remained so to this time. It has been equally a favorite with common readers, with literary men, and with poets. Its place will always be in the highest rank of English poetry. The fact, however, is—and it is a very curious fact—that this first-class poem was the work of a third-class poet. For Thomas Gray certainly does not stand in the first class with Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. Nor can he fairly be put in the second class with Dryden, Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, and Byron. He belongs to the third, with 62 Cowley, Cowper, Shelley, and Keats. There may be a doubt concerning some of whom I have named, but there can be no doubt that Gray will never stand higher than those who may be placed by critics in the third class. Yet it is equally certain that he has produced a first-class poem. How is this paradox to be explained?

What is the charm of Gray's "Elegy"? The thoughts are sufficiently commonplace. That all men must die, that the most humble may have had in them some power which, under other circumstances, might have made them famous,—these are somewhat trite statements; but the fascination of the verses consists in the tone, solemn but serene, which pervades them; in the pictures of coming night, of breaking day, of cheerful rural life, of happy homes; and lastly, in the perfect finish of the verse and the curious felicity of the diction. In short, the poem is a work of high art. It was not inspired, but it was carefully elaborated. And this appears plainly when we compare it, as it stands in the Fraser manuscript, with its final form.

This poem was a work of eight years. Its heading in the Fraser manuscript is "Stanzas Wrote in a Country Churchyard." It was, however, begun at Stoke in 1742, continued at Cambridge, and had its last touches added at Stoke-Pogis, June 12, 1750. In a letter to Horace Walpole of that date, Gray says, "Having put an end to a 63 thing whose beginning you saw long ago, I immediately send it to you."

The corrections made by Gray during this period were many, and were probably all improvements. Many poets when they try to improve their verses only injure them. But Gray's corrections were invariably for the better. We may even say that, if it had been published as it was first written, and as it now stands in the Fraser manuscript, it would have ranked only with the best poetry of Shenstone or Cowper. Let me indicate some of the most important changes.

In line seventeen, the fine epithet of "incense-breathing" was an addition.

for the Fraser manuscript reads—

Nineteenth line, Fraser manuscript has—

corrected to

Twenty-fourth—"Coming kiss" was corrected to "envied kiss."

Forty-third—"Awake the silent dust" was corrected to "provoke the silent dust."

Forty-seventh—The correction of "Reins of Empire" to "Rod of Empire" first appears in the margin of the Pembroke manuscript.

64 Fifty-seventh—In the Fraser manuscript it reads—

In the Pembroke manuscript, these classical personages have disappeared, and the great improvement was made of substituting Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell, and thus maintaining the English coloring of the poem.

Fifty-first—This verse, beginning, "But Knowledge," etc., was placed, in the Fraser manuscript, after the one beginning, "Some village Cato," but with a note in the margin to transfer it to where it now stands. The third line of the stanza was first written, "Chill Penury had damped." This was first corrected to "depressed," and afterward to "repressed."

Fifty-fifth—"Their fate forbade," changed to "Their lot forbade."

Sixty-sixth—"Their struggling virtues" was improved to "Their growing virtues."

Seventy-first—"Crown the shrine" was altered to "heap the shrine," and in the next line "Incense hallowed by the muse's flame" was wisely changed to "Incense kindled by the muse's flame."

After the seventy-second line stand, in the Fraser manuscript, the following stanzas, which Gray, with admirable taste, afterward omitted. But, before he decided to leave them out altogether, 65 he drew a black line down the margin, indicating that he would transfer them to another place. These stanzas were originally intended to close the poem. Afterward the thought occurred to him of "the hoary-headed swain" and the "Epitaph."

After these stanzas, according to the Fraser manuscript, were to follow these lines, which I do not remember to have seen elsewhere:—

But Gray soon dispensed with this feeble stanza, 66 and made a new one by changing it into the one beginning:—

The ninety-ninth and one hundredth lines stand in the Fraser manuscript—

The following stanza is noticeable for the inversions so frequent in Gray, and which he had, perhaps, unconsciously adopted from his familiarity with the classics. He afterward omitted it:—

In the manuscript the word is spelled "whistful." In line 101, "hoary beech" is corrected to "spreading beech," and afterward to "nodding beech."

Line 113—"Dirges meet" was changed to "dirges dire;" and after 116 came the beautiful stanza, afterward omitted by Gray as being de trop in this place:—

Even in this verse there were two corrections. "Robin" was altered in the Fraser manuscript into "redbreast," and "frequent violets" into "showers of violets."

67 One of the most curious accidents to which this famous poem has been subjected was an erroneous change made in the early editions, which has been propagated almost to our time. In the stanza beginning—

Gray wrote

And so it stands in all three manuscripts, and in the printed edition which he himself superintended. His meaning was, "The inevitable Hour awaits everything. It stands there, waiting the boast of Heraldry," etc. But his editors, misled by his inverted style, supposed that it was the gifts of Heraldry, Power, Beauty, etc., that were waiting, and therefore corrected what they thought Gray's bad grammar, and printed the word "await." But so they destroyed the meaning. These things were not waiting at all for the dread hour; they were enjoying themselves, careless of its approach. But "the hour" was waiting for them. Gray's original reading has been restored in the last editions.

In tracing the development of this fine poem, we see it gradually improving under his careful touch, till it becomes a work of high art. In some poets—Wordsworth, for example—inspiration is at its maximum, and art at its minimum. In Gray, I think, inspiration was at its minimum, and art at its maximum.

69

71

RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL

AFFINITIES OF BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY 5

It has long been known that many analogies exist between Buddhism and Christianity. The ceremonies, ritual, and rites of the Buddhists strikingly resemble those of the Roman Catholic Church. The Buddhist priests are monks. They take the same three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience which are binding on those of the Roman Church. They are mendicants, like the mendicant orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic. They are tonsured; use strings of beads, like the rosary, with which to count their prayers; have incense and candles in their worship; use fasts, processions, litanies, and holy water. They have something akin to the adoration of saints; repeat prayers in an unknown tongue; have a chanted psalmody with a double choir; and suspend the censer from five chains. In China, some Buddhists worship the image of a virgin, called the Queen of Heaven, having an infant in her arms, and holding a cross. In Thibet the Grand Lamas wear a mitre, dalmatica, and cope, and pronounce a benediction on the laity by extending the right hand over their heads. The 72 Dalai-Lama resembles the Pope, and is regarded as the head of the Church. The worship of relics is very ancient among the Buddhists, and so are pilgrimages to sacred places.

Besides these resemblances in outward ceremonies, more important ones appear in the inner life and history of the two religions. Both belong to those systems which derive their character from a human founder, and not from a national tendency; to the class which contains the religions of Moses, Zoroaster, Confucius, and Mohammed, and not to that in which the Brahmanical, Egyptian, Scandinavian, Greek, and Roman religions are found. Both Buddhism and Christianity are catholic, and not ethnic; that is, not confined to a single race or nation, but by their missionary spirit passing beyond these boundaries, and making converts among many races. Christianity began among the Jews as a Semitic religion, but, being rejected by the Jewish nation, established itself among the Aryan races of Europe. In the same way Buddhism, beginning among an Aryan people—the Hindoos—was expelled from Hindostan, and established itself among the Mongol races of Eastern Asia. Besides its resemblances to the Roman Catholic side of Christendom, Buddhism has still closer analogies with the Protestant Church. Like Protestantism, it is a reform, which rejects a hierarchal system and does away with a priestly caste. Like Protestantism, it has emphasized the purely 73 humane side of life, and is a religion of humanity rather than of piety. Both the Christian and Buddhist churches teach a divine incarnation, and both worship a God-man.

Are these remarkable analogies only casual resemblances, or are they real affinities? By affinity we here mean genetic relationship. Are Buddhism and Christianity related as mother and child, one being derived from the other; or are they related by both being derived from some common ancestor? Is either derived from the other, as Christianity from Judaism, or Protestantism from the Papal Church? That there can be no such affinity as this seems evident from history. History shows no trace of the contact which would be required for such influence. If Christianity had taken its customs from Buddhism, or Buddhism from Christianity, there must have been ample historic evidence of the fact. But, instead of this, history shows that each has grown up by its own natural development, and has unfolded its qualities separately and alone. The law of evolution also teaches that such great systems do not come from imitation, but as growths from a primal germ.

Nor does history give the least evidence of a common ancestry from which both took their common traits. We know that Buddhism was derived from Brahmanism, and that Christianity was derived from Judaism. Now, Judaism and Brahmanism have few analogies; they could not, therefore, have 74 transmitted to their offspring what they did not themselves possess. Brahmanism came from an Aryan stock, in Central Asia; Judaism from a Semitic stem, thousands of miles to the west. If Buddhism and Christianity came from a common source, that source must have antedated both the Mosaic and Brahmanical systems. Even then it would be a case of atavism in which the original type disappeared in the children, to reappear in the later descendants.

Are, then, these striking resemblances, and others which are still to be mentioned, only accidental analogies? This does not necessarily follow; for there is a third alternative. They may be what are called in science homologies; that is, the same law working out similar results under the same conditions, though under different circumstances. The whale lives under different circumstances from other mammalia; but being a mammal, he has a like osseous structure. What seems to be a fin, being dissected, turns out to be an arm, with hand and fingers. There are like homologies in history. Take the instance of the English and French revolutions. In each case the legitimate king was tried, condemned, and executed. A republic followed. The republic gave way before a strong-handed usurper. Then the original race of kings was restored; but, having learned nothing and forgotten nothing, they were displaced a second time, and a constitutional monarch placed on the throne, 75 who, though not the legitimate king, still belonged to the same race. Here the same laws of human nature have worked out similar results; for no one would suggest that France had copied its revolutions from England. And, in religion, human nature reproduces similar customs and ceremonies under like conditions. When, for instance, you have a mechanical system of prayer, in which the number of prayers is of chief importance, there must be some way of counting them, and so the rosary has been invented independently in different religions. We have no room to point out how this law has worked in other instances; but it is enough to refer to the principle.

Besides these resemblances between Buddhism and Christianity, there are also some equally remarkable differences, which should be noticed.

The first of these is the striking fact that Buddhism has been unable to recognize the existence of the Infinite Being. It has been called atheism by the majority of the best authorities. Even Arthur Lillie, who defends this system from the charge of agnosticism, says: 6 "An agnostic school of Buddhism without doubt exists. It professes plain atheism, and holds that every mortal, when he escapes from re-births, and the causation of Karma by the awakenment of the Bodhi or gnosis, will be annihilated. This Buddhism, by Eugène Burnouf, Saint-Hilaire, Max Müller, Csoma de Körös, and, 76 I believe, almost every writer of note, is pronounced the original Buddhism,—the Buddhism of the South." Almost every writer of note, therefore, who has studied Buddhism in the Pâli, Singhalese, Chinese, and other languages, and has had direct access to its original sources, has pronounced it a system of atheism. But this opinion is opposed to the fact that Buddhists have everywhere worshiped unseen and superhuman powers, erected magnificent temples, maintained an elaborate ritual, and adored Buddha as the supreme ruler of the worlds. How shall we explain this paradox? All depends on the definition we give to the word "atheism." If a system is atheistic which sees only the temporal, and not the eternal; which knows no God as the author, creator, and ruler of Nature; which ascribes the origin of the universe to natural causes, to which only the finite is knowable, and the infinite unknowable—then Buddhism is atheism. But, in that case, much of the polytheism of the world must be regarded as atheism; for polytheism has largely worshiped finite gods. The whole race of Olympian deities were finite beings. Above them ruled the everlasting necessity of things. But who calls the Greek worshipers atheists? The Buddha, to most Buddhists, is a finite being, one who has passed through numerous births, has reached Nirvana, and will one day be superseded by another Buddha. Yet, for the time, he is the Supreme Being, Ruler 77 of all the Worlds. He is the object of worship, and really divine, if in a subordinate sense.

I would not, therefore, call this religion atheism. No religion which worships superhuman powers can justly be called atheistic on account of its meagre metaphysics. How many Christians there are who do not fully realize the infinite and eternal nature of the Deity! To many He is no more than the Buddha is to his worshipers,—a supreme being, a mighty ruler, governing all things by his will. How few see God everywhere in nature, as Jesus saw Him, letting his sun shine on the evil and good, and sending his rain on the just and unjust. How few see Him in all of life, so that not a sparrow dies, or a single hair of the head falls, without the Father. Most Christians recognize the Deity only as occasionally interfering by special providences, particular judgments, and the like.

But in Christianity this ignorance of the eternal nature of God is the exception, while in Buddhism it is the rule. In the reaction against Brahmanism, the Brahmanic faith in the infinite was lost. In the fully developed system of the ancient Hindoo religion the infinite overpowered the finite, the temporal world was regarded as an illusion, and only the eternal was real. The reaction from this extreme was so complete as to carry the Buddhists to the exact opposite. If to the Brahman all the finite visible world was only maya —illusion, to the Buddhists all the infinite unseen world was unknowable, and practically nothing.

78 Perhaps the most original feature of Christianity is the fact that it has combined in a living synthesis that which in other systems was divided. Jesus regarded love to God and love to man as identical,—positing a harmonious whole of time and eternity, piety and humanity, faith and works,—and thus laid the foundation of a larger system than either Brahmanism or Buddhism. He did not invent piety, nor discover humanity. Long before he came the Brahmanic literature had sounded the deepest depths of spiritual life, and the Buddhist missionaries had preached universal benevolence to mankind. But the angelic hymn which foretold the new religion as bringing at once "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men" indicated the essence of the faith which was at the same time a heavenly love and an earthly blessing. This difference of result in the two systems came probably from the different methods of their authors. With Jesus life was the source of knowledge; the life was the light of men. With the Buddha, reflection, meditation, thought was the source of knowledge. In this, however, he included intuition no less than reflection. Sakya-muni understood perfectly that a mere intellectual judgment possessed little motive power; therefore he was not satisfied till he had obtained an intuitive perception of truth. That alone gave at once rest and power. But as the pure intellect, even in its highest act, is unable to grasp 79 the infinite, the Buddha was an agnostic on this side of his creed by the very success of his method. Who, by searching, can find out God? The infinite can only be known by the process of living experience. This was the method of Jesus, and has been that of his religion. For what is faith but that receptive state of mind which waits on the Lord to receive the illumination which it cannot create by its own processes? However this may be, it is probable that the fatal defect in Buddhism which has neutralized its generous philanthropy and its noble humanities has been the absence of the inspiration which comes from the belief in an eternal world. Man is too great to be satisfied with time alone, or eternity alone; he needs to live from and for both. Hence, Buddhism is an arrested religion, while Christianity is progressive. Christianity has shown the capacity of outgrowing its own defects and correcting its own mistakes. For example, it has largely outgrown its habit of persecuting infidels and heretics. No one is now put to death for heresy. It has also passed out of the stage in which religion is considered to consist in leaving the world and entering a monastery. The anchorites of the early centuries are no longer to be found in Christendom. Even in Catholic countries the purpose of monastic life is no longer to save the soul by ascetic tortures, but to attain some practical end. The Protestant Reformation, which broke the yoke 80 of priestly power and set free the mind of Europe, was a movement originating in Christianity itself, like other developments of a similar kind. No such signs of progress exist in the system of Buddhism. It has lost the missionary ardor of its early years; it has ceased from creating a vast literature such as grew up in its younger days; it no longer produces any wonders of architecture. It even lags behind the active life of the countries where it has its greatest power.

It is a curious analogy between the two systems that, while neither the Christ nor the Buddha practiced or taught asceticism, their followers soon made the essence of religion to consist in some form of monastic life. Both Jesus and Sakya-muni went about doing good. Both sent their followers into the world to preach a gospel. Jesus, after thirty years of a retired life, came among men "eating and drinking," and associating with "publicans and sinners." Sakya-muni, after spending some years as an anchorite, deliberately renounced that mode of religion as unsatisfactory, and associated with all men, as Jesus afterward did. Within a few centuries after their death, their followers relapsed into ascetic and monastic practices; but with this difference, that while in Christendom there has always been both a regular and a secular clergy, in the Buddhist countries the whole priesthood live in monasteries. They have no parish priests, unless as an exception. 81 While in Christian countries the clergy has become more and more a practical body, in sympathy with the common life, in Buddhist lands they live apart and exercise little influence on the civil condition of the people.

Nor must we pass by the important fact that the word Christendom is synonymous with a progressive civilization, while Buddhism is everywhere connected with one which is arrested and stationary. The boundaries of the Christian religion are exactly coextensive with the advance of science, art, literature; and with the continued accumulation of knowledge, power, wealth, and the comforts of human life. According to Kuenen, 7 one of the most recent students of these questions, this difference is due to the principle of hope which exists in Christianity, but is absent in Buddhism. The one has always believed in a kingdom of God here and a blessed immortality hereafter. Buddhism has not this hope; and this, says Kuenen, "is a blank which nothing can fill." So large a thinker as Albert Réville has expressed his belief that even the intolerance of Christianity indicated a passionate love of truth which has created modern science. He says that "if Europe had not passed through those ages of intolerance, it is doubtful whether the science of our day would ever have arrived." 8 It is only within the boundaries of nations professing 82 the Christian faith that we must go to-day to learn the latest discoveries in science, the best works of art, the most flourishing literature. Only within the same circle of Christian states is there a government by law, and not by will. Only within these boundaries have the rights of the individual been secured, while the power of the state has been increased. Government by law, joined with personal freedom, is only to be found where the faith exists which teaches that God not only supports the universal order of natural things, but is also the friend of the individual soul; and in just that circle of states in which the doctrine is taught that there is no individual soul for God to love and no Divine presence in the order of nature, human life has subsided into apathy, progress has ceased, and it has been found impossible to construct national unity. Saint-Hilaire affirms 9 that "in politics and legislation the dogma of Buddhism has remained inferior even to that of Brahmanism," and "has been able to do nothing to constitute states or to govern them by equitable rules." These Buddhist nations are really six: Siam, Burma, Nepaul, Thibet, Tartary, and Ceylon. The activity and social progress in China and Japan are no exceptions to this rule; for in neither country has Buddhism any appreciable influence on the character of the people.

To those who deny that the theology of a people 83 influences its character, it may be instructive to see how exactly the good and evil influences of Buddhism correspond to the positive and negative traits of its doctrine. Its merits, says Saint-Hilaire, are its practical character, its abnegation of vulgar gratifications, its benevolence, mildness, sentiment of human equality, austerity of manners, dislike of falsehood, and respect for the family. Its defects are want of social power, egotistical aims, ignorance of the ideal good, of the sense of human right and human freedom, skepticism, incurable despair, contempt of life. All its human qualities correspond to its doctrinal teaching from the beginning. It has always taught benevolence, patience, self-denial, charity, and toleration. Its defects arise inevitably from its negative aim,—to get rid of sorrow and evil by sinking into apathy, instead of seeking for the triumph of good and the coming of a reign of God here on the earth.

As regards the Buddha himself, modern students differ widely. Some, of course, deny his very existence, and reduce him to a solar myth. M. Emile Senart, as quoted by Oldenberg, 10 following the Lalita Vistara as his authority, makes of him a solar hero, born of the morning cloud, contending by the power of light with the demons of darkness, rising in triumph to the zenith of heavenly glory, then passing into the night of Nirvana and disappearing from the scene.

84

The difficulty about this solar myth theory is that it proves too much; it is too powerful a solvent; it would dissolve all history. How easy it would be, in a few centuries, to turn General Washington and the American Revolution into a solar myth! Great Britain, a region of clouds and rain, represents the Kingdom of Darkness; America, with more sunshine, is the Day. Great Britain, as Darkness, wishes to devour the Young Day, or dawn of light, which America is about to diffuse over the earth. But Washington, the solar hero, arrives. He is from Virginia, that is, born of a virgin. He was born in February, in the sign of Aquarius and the Fishes,—plainly referring to the birth of the sun from the ocean. As the sun surveys the earth, so Washington was said to be a surveyor of many regions. The story of the fruitless attempts of the Indians to shoot him at Braddock's defeat is evidently legendary; and, in fact, this battle itself must be a myth, for how can we suppose two English and French armies to have crossed the Atlantic, and then gone into a wilderness west of the mountains, to fight a battle? So easy is it to turn history into a solar myth.

The character of Sakya-muni must be learned from his religion and from authentic tradition. In many respects his character and influence resembled that of Jesus. He opposed priestly assumptions, taught the equality and brotherhood 85 of man, sent out disciples to teach his doctrine, was a reformer who relied on the power of truth and love. Many of his reported sayings resemble those of Jesus. He was opposed by the Brahmans as Jesus by the Pharisees. He compared the Brahmans who followed their traditions to a chain of blind men, who move on, not seeing where they go. 11 Like Jesus, he taught that mercy was better than sacrifices. Like Jesus, he taught orally, and left no writing. Jesus did not teach in Hebrew, but in the Aramaic, which was the popular dialect, and so the Buddha did not speak to the people in Sanskrit, but in their own tongue, which was Pâli. Like Jesus, he seems to have instructed his hearers by parables or stories. He was one of the greatest reformers the world has ever seen; and his influence, after that of the Christ, has probably exceeded that of any one who ever lived.

But, beside such real resemblances between these two masters, we are told of others still more striking, which would certainly be hard to explain unless one of the systems had borrowed from the other. These are said to be the preëxistence of Buddha in heaven; his birth of a virgin; salutation by angels; presentation in the temple; baptism by fire and water; dispute with the doctors; temptation in the wilderness; transfiguration; 86 descent into hell; ascension into heaven. 12 If these legends could be traced back to the time before Christ, then it might be argued that the Gospels have borrowed from Buddhism. Such, however, is not the fact. These stories are taken from the Lalita Vistara, which, according to Rhys Davids, 13 was probably composed between six hundred and a thousand years after the time of Buddha, by some Buddhist poet in Nepaul. Rhys Davids, one of our best authorities, says of this poem: "As evidence of what early Buddhism actually was, it is of about the same value as some mediæval poem would be of the real facts of the gospel history." 13 M. Ernest de Bunsen, in his work on the "Angel Messiah," has given a very exhaustive statement, says Mr. Davids, of all the possible channels through which Christians can be supposed to have borrowed from the Buddhists. But Mr. Davids's conclusion is that he finds no evidence of any such communications of ideas from the East to the West. 14 The difference between the wild stories of the Lalita Vistara and the sober narratives of the Gospels is quite apparent. Another writer, Professor Seydel, 15 thinks, after a full and careful examination, that only five facts in 87 the Gospels may have been borrowed from Buddhism. These are: (1) The fast of Jesus before his work; (2) The question in regard to the blind man—"Who did sin, this man, or his parents"? (3) The preëxistence of Christ; (4) The presentation in the Temple; (5) Nathanael sitting under a fig-tree, compared with Buddha under a Bo-tree. But Kuenen has examined these parallels, and considers them merely accidental coincidences. And, in truth, it is very hard to conceive of one religion borrowing its facts or legends from another, if that other stands in no historic relation to it. That Buddhism should have taken much from Brahmanism is natural; for Brahmanism was its mother. That Christianity should have borrowed many of its methods from Judaism is equally natural; for Judaism was its cradle. Modern travelers in Burma and Tartary have found that the Buddhists hold a kind of camp-meeting in the open air, where they pray and sing. Suppose that some critic, noticing this, should assert that, when Wesley and his followers established similar customs, they must have borrowed them from the Buddhists. The absurdity would be evident. New religions grow, they are not imitations.

It has been thought, however, that Christianity was derived from the Essenes, because of certain resemblances, and it is argued that the Essenes must have obtained their monastic habits from the Therapeutæ in Egypt, and that the Therapeutæ 88 received them from the Buddhists, because they could not have found them elsewhere. This theory, however, has been dismissed from the scene by the young German scholar, 16 who has proved that the essay on the Therapeutæ ascribed to Philo was really written by a Christian anchorite in the third or fourth century.

The result, then, of our investigation, is this: There is no probability that the analogies between Christianity and Buddhism have been derived the one from the other. They have come from the common and universal needs and nature of man, which repeat themselves again and again in like positions and like circumstances. That Jesus and Buddha should both have retired into the wilderness before undertaking their great work is probable, for it has been the habit of other reformers to let a period of meditation precede their coming before the world. That both should have been tempted to renounce their enterprise is also in accordance with human nature. That, in after times, the simple narratives should be overlaid with additions, and a whole mass of supernatural wonders added,—as we find in the Apocryphal Gospels and the Lalita Vistara,—is also in accordance with the working of the human mind.

Laying aside all such unsatisfactory resemblances, we must regard the Buddha as having 89 been one of the noblest of men, and one whom Jesus would have readily welcomed as a fellow worker and a friend. He opposed a dominant priesthood, maintained the equal religious rights of all mankind, overthrew caste, encouraged woman to take her place as man's equal, forbade all bloody sacrifices, and preached a religion of peace and good will, seeking to triumph only in the fair conflict of reason with reason. If he was defective in the loftiest instincts of the soul; if he knew nothing of the infinite and eternal; if he saw nothing permanent in the soul of man; if his highest purpose was negative,—to escape from pain, sorrow, anxiety, toil,—let us still be grateful for the influence which has done so much to tame the savage Mongols, and to introduce hospitality and humanity into the homes of Lassa and Siam. If Edwin Arnold, a poet, idealizes him too highly, it is the better fault, and should be easily forgiven. Hero-worshipers are becoming scarce in our time; let us make the most of those we have.

90

WHY I AM NOT A FREE-RELIGIONIST 17

What is meant by "Free Religion"? I understand by it, individualism in religion. It is the religious belief which has made itself independent of historic and traditional influences, so far as it is in the power of any one to attain such independence. In Christian lands it means a religion which has cut loose from the Bible and the Christian Church, and which is as ready to question the teaching of Jesus as that of Socrates or Buddha. It is, what Emerson called himself, an endless seeker, with no past behind it. It is entire trust in the private reason as the sole authority in matters of religion.

Free Religion may be regarded as Protestantism carried to its ultimate results. A Protestant Christian accepts the leadership of Jesus, and keeps himself in the Christian communion; but he uses his own private judgment to discover what Jesus taught, and what Christianity really is. The Free Religionist goes a step farther, and decides by his own private judgment what is true and what false, no matter whether taught by Jesus or not.

91 Free Religion, as thus understood, seems to me opposed to the law of evolution, and incompatible with it. Evolution educes the present from the past by a continuous process. Free Religion cuts itself loose from the past, and makes every man the founder of his own religion. According to the law of evolution, confirmed by history, every advance in religion is the development from something going before. Jewish monotheism grew out of polytheism; Christianity and Mohammedanism out of Judaism; Buddhism out of Brahmanism; Protestant Christianity out of the Roman Catholic Church. Jesus himself said, "Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the Prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." The higher religions are not made; they grow. Of each it may be said, as of the poet: "Nascitur, non fit." Therefore, if there is to arrive something higher than our existing Christianity, it must not be a system which forsakes the Christian belief, but something developed from it.

According to the principle of evolution, every growing and productive religion obeys the laws of heredity and of variation. It has an inherited common life, and a tendency to modification by individual activity. Omit or depress either factor, and the religion loses its power of growth. Without a common life, the principle of development is arrested. He who leaves the great current which comes from the past loses headway. This current, 92 in the Christian communion, is the inherited spirit of Jesus. It is his life, continued in his Church; his central convictions of love to God and to man; of fatherhood and brotherhood; of the power of truth to conquer error, of good to overcome evil; of a Kingdom of Heaven to come to us here. It is the faith of Jesus in things unseen; his hope of the triumph of right over wrong; his love going down to the lowliest child of God. These vital convictions in the soul of Jesus are communicated by contact from generation to generation. They are propagated, as he suggested, like leaven hidden in the dough. By a different figure, Plato, in his dialogue of Ion, shows that inspiration is transmitted like the magnetic influence, which causes iron rings to adhere and hang together in a chain. Thoughts and opinions are communicated by argument, reasoning, speech, and writing; but faith and inspiration by the influence of life on life. The life of Jesus is thus continued in his Church, and those who stand outside of it lose much of this transmitted and sympathetic influence. Common life in a religious body furnishes the motive force which carries it forward, while individual freedom gives the power of improvement. The two principles of heredity and variation must be united in order to combine union and freedom, and to secure progress. Where freedom of thought ceases, religion becomes rigid. It is incapable of development. 93 Such, for instance, is the condition of Buddhism, which, at first full of intellectual activity, has now hardened into a monkish ritual.

Free Religion sacrifices the motive power derived from association and religious sympathy for the sake of a larger intellectual freedom. The result is individualism. It founds no churches, but spends much force in criticising the Christian community, its belief, and its methods. These are, no doubt, open to criticism, which would do good if administered sympathetically and from within, but produce little result when delivered in the spirit of antagonism. Imperfect as the Christian Church is, it ought to be remembered that in it are to be found the chief strength and help of the charities, philanthropies, and moral reforms of our time. Every one who has at heart a movement for the benefit of humanity appeals instinctively for aid to the Christian churches. It is in these that such movements usually originate, and are carried on. Even when, as in the antislavery movement, a part of the churches refuse to sympathize with a new moral or social movement, the reproaches made against them show that in the mind of the community an interest in all humane endeavor is considered to be a part of their work. The common life and convictions of these bodies enable them to accomplish what individualism does not venture to undertake. Individualism is incapable of organized and sustained 94 work of this sort, though it can, and often does, coöperate earnestly with it.

The teaching of Jesus is founded on the synthesis of Truth and Love. Jesus declares himself to have been born "to bear witness to the truth," and he also makes love, divine and human, the substance of his gospel. The love element produces union, the truth element, freedom. Union without freedom stiffens into a rigid conservatism. Freedom without union breaks up into an intellectual atomism. The Christian churches have gone into both extremes, but never permanently; for Christianity, as long as it adheres to its founder and his ideas, has the power of self-recovery. Its diseases are self-limited.

It has had many such periods, but has recovered from them. It passed through an age in which it ran to ascetic self-denial, and made saints of self-torturing anchorites. It afterward became a speculative system, and tended to metaphysical creeds and doctrinal distinctions. It became a persecuting church, burning heretics and Jews, and torturing infidels as an act of faith. It was tormented by dark superstitions, believing in witchcraft and magic. But it has left all these evils behind. No one is now put to death for heresy or witchcraft. The monastic orders in the Church are preachers and teachers, or given to charity. No one could be burned to-day as a heretic. No one to-day believes in witchcraft. The old creeds 95 which once held the Church in irons are now slowly disintegrating. But reform, as I have said, must come from within, by the gradual elimination of those inherited beliefs which interfere with the unity of the Church and the leadership of Christ himself. The Platonic and Egyptian Trinity remaining as dogma, repeated but not understood,—the Manichæan division of the human race into children of God and children of the Devil,—the scholastic doctrine of the Atonement, by which the blood of Jesus expiates human guilt,—are being gradually explained in accordance with reason and the teaching of Jesus.

Some beliefs, once thought to be of vital importance, are now seen by many to be unessential, or are looked at in a different light. Instead of making Jesus an exceptional person, we are coming to regard him as a representative man, the realized ideal of what man was meant to be, and will one day become. Instead of considering his sinlessness as setting him apart from his race, we look on it as showing that sin is not the natural, but unnatural, condition of mankind. His miracles are regarded not as violations of the laws of nature, but anticipations of laws which one day will be universally known, and which are boundless as the universe. Nor will they in future be regarded as evidence of the mission of Jesus, since he himself was grieved when they were so looked upon, and he made his truth and his character the 96 true evidence that he came from God. The old distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" will disappear when it is seen that Jesus had a supernatural work and character, the same in kind as ours, though higher in degree. The supreme gifts which make him the providential leader of the race do not set him apart from his brethren if we see that it is a law of humanity that gifts differ, and that men endowed with superior powers become leaders in science, art, literature, politics; as Jesus has become the chief great spiritual leader of mankind.

Men are now searching the Scriptures, not under the bondage of an infallible letter, but seeking for the central ideas of Jesus and the spirit of his gospel. They begin to accept the maxim of Goethe: "No matter how much the gospels contradict each other, provided the Gospel does not contradict itself." The profound convictions of Christ, which pervade all his teaching, give the clue by which to explain the divergences in the narrative. We interpret the letter by the light of the spirit. We see how Jesus emphasized the law of human happiness,—that it comes from within, not from without; that the pure in heart see God, and that it is more blessed to give than to receive. We comprehend the stress he lays on the laws of progress,—that he who humbleth himself shall be exalted. We recognize his profound conviction that all God's children are dear to him, 97 that his sun shines on the evil and the good, and that he will seek the one lost sheep till he find it. We see his trust in the coming of the Kingdom of God in this world, the triumph of good over evil, and the approaching time when the knowledge of God shall fill the earth as the waters cover the sea. And we find his profound faith in the immortal life which abides in us, so that whoever shares that faith with him can never die.

The more firmly these central ideas of Jesus are understood and held, the less importance belongs to any criticism of the letter. This or that saying, attributed to Jesus in the record, maybe subjected to attack; but it is the main current of his teaching which has made him the leader of civilized man for eighteen centuries. That majestic stream will sweep on undisturbed, though there may be eddies here or stagnant pools there, which induce hasty observers to suppose that it has ceased to flow.

I sometimes read attacks on special sayings of the record, which argue, to the critic's mind, that Jesus was in error here, or mistaken there. But I would recommend to such writers to ponder the suggestive rule of Coleridge: "Until I can understand the ignorance of Plato, I shall consider myself ignorant of his understanding;" or the remark of Emerson to the youth who brought him 98 a paper in which he thought he had refuted Plato: "If you attack the king, be sure that you kill him."

When the Christian world really takes Jesus himself as its leader, instead of building its faith on opinions about him, we may anticipate the arrival of that union which he foresaw and foretold—"As thou, father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." Then Christians, ceasing from party strife and sectarian dissension, will unite in one mighty effort to cure the evils of humanity and redress its wrongs. Before a united Christendom, what miseries could remain unrelieved? War, that criminal absurdity, that monstrous anachronism, must at last be abolished. Pauperism, vice, and crime, though continuing in sporadic forms, would cease to exist as a part of the permanent institutions of civilization. A truly Catholic Church, united under the Master, would lead all humanity up to a higher plane. The immense forces developed by modern science, and the magnificent discoveries in the realm of nature, helpless now to cure the wrongs of suffering man, would become instruments of potent use under the guidance of moral forces.

According to the law of evolution, this is what we have a right to expect. If we follow the lines of historic development, not being led into extreme individualism; if we maintain the continuity 99 of human progress, this vast result must finally arrive. For such reasons I prefer to remain in the communion of the Christian body, doing what I may to assist its upward movement. For such reasons I am not a Free Religionist.

100

HAVE ANIMALS SOULS 18

To answer this question, we must first inquire what we mean by a soul. If we mean a human soul, it is certain that animals do not possess it,—at least not in a fully developed condition. If we mean, "Do they possess an immortal soul?" that is, perhaps, a question difficult to answer either in the affirmative or the negative. But if we mean by the soul an immaterial principle of life, which coördinates the bodily organization to a unity; which is the ground of growth, activity, perception, volition; which is intelligent, affectionate, and to a certain extent free; then we must admit that animals have souls.

The same arguments which induce us to believe that there is a soul in man apply to animals. The world has generally believed that in man, beside the body, there is also soul. Why have people believed it? The reason probably is, that, beside all that can be accounted for as the result of the juxtaposition of material particles, there remains a very important element unaccounted for. Mechanical and physical agency may explain much, but the most essential characteristic of vital phenomena 101 they do not explain. They do not account for the unity in variety, permanence in change, growth from within by continuous processes, coming from the vital functions in an organized body. Every such body has a unity peculiar to itself, which cannot be considered the result of the collocation of material molecules. It is a unity which controls these molecules, arranges and rearranges them, maintains a steady activity, carries the body through the phenomena of growth, and causes the various organs to coöperate for the purposes of the whole. The vital power is not merely the result of material phenomena, but it reacts on these as a cause. Add to this that strange phenomenon of human consciousness, the sense of personality,—which is the clear perception of selfhood as a distinct unchanging unit, residing in a body all of whose parts are in perpetual flux,—and we see why the opinion of a soul has arisen. It has been assumed by the common sense of mankind that in every living body the cause of the mode of existence of each part is contained in the whole. As soon as death intervenes each part is left free to pass through changes peculiar to itself alone. Life is a power which acts from the whole upon the parts, causing them to resist chemical laws, which begin to act as soon as life departs. The unity of a living body does not result from an ingenious juxtaposition of parts, like that of a watch, for example. For the unity of a living body implies 102 that which is called "the vital vortex," or perpetual exchange of particles.

A watch or clock is the nearest approach which has been made by man to the creation of a living being. A watch, for instance, contains the principle of its action in itself, and is not moved from without; in that it resembles a living creature. We can easily conceive of a watch which might be made to go seventy years, without being wound up. It might need to be oiled occasionally, but not as often as an animal needs to be fed. A watch is also like a living creature in having a unity as a whole not belonging to the separate parts, and to which all parts conspire,—namely, that of marking the progress of time. Why, then, say that a man has a soul, and that a watch has not? The difference is this. The higher principle of unity in the watch, that is, its power of marking time, is wholly an effect, and never a cause. It is purely and only the result of the arrangement of wheels and springs; in other words, of material conditions. But in man, the principle of unity is also a cause. Life reacts upon body. The laws of matter are modified by the power of life, chemical action is suspended, living muscles are able to endure without laceration the application of forces which would destroy the dead fibre. So the thought, the love, the will of a living creature react on the physical frame. A sight, a sound, a few spoken words, a message seen in a letter, cause an immense revulsion 103 in the physical condition. Something is suddenly told us, and we faint away, or even die, from the effect of the message. Here mind acts upon matter, showing that in man mind is not merely a result, but also a cause. Hence men have generally believed in the existence of a soul in man. They have not been taught it by metaphysicians, it is one of the spontaneous inductions of common sense from universal experience.

But this argument applies equally to prove a soul in animals. The same reaction of soul on body is constantly apparent. Every time that you whistle to your dog, and he comes bounding toward you, his mind has acted on his body. His will has obeyed his thought, his muscles have obeyed his will. The cause of his motion was mental, not physical. This is too evident to require any further illustration. Therefore, regarding the soul as a principle of life, connected with the body but not its result, or, in other words, as an immaterial principle of activity, there is the same reason for believing in the soul of animals that there is for believing in the soul of man.

But when we ask as to the nature of the animal soul, and how far it is analogous to that of man, we meet with certain difficulties. Let us see then how many of the human qualities of the soul are to be found in animals, and so discover if there is any remainder not possessed by them, peculiar to ourselves.

104 That the vital soul, or principle of life, belongs equally to plants, animals, and men, is evident. This is so apparent as to be granted even by Descartes, who regards animals as mere machines, or automata, destitute of a thinking soul, but not of life or feeling. They are automata, but living and feeling automata. Descartes denies them a soul, because he defines the soul as the thinking and knowing power. But Locke (with whom Leibnitz fully agreed on this point) ascribes to animals thought as well as feeling, and makes their difference from man to consist in their not possessing abstract ideas. We shall presently see the truth of this most sagacious remark.

Plants, animals, and men are alike in possessing the vital principle, which produces growth, which causes them to pass through regular phases of development, which enables them to digest and assimilate food taken from without, and which carries on a steady circulation within. To this are added, in the animal, the function of voluntary locomotion, perception through the senses of an outward world, the power of feeling pleasure and pain, some wonderful instincts, and some degree of reflective thought. Animals also possess memory, imagination, playfulness, industry, the sense of shame, and many other very human qualities.

Take, for example, Buffon's fine description of the dog ("Histoire du Chien"):—

"By nature fiery, irritable, ferocious, and sanguinary, 105 the dog in his savage state is a terror to other animals. But domesticated he becomes gentle, attached, and desirous to please. He hastens to lay at the feet of his master his courage, his strength, and all his abilities. He listens for his master's orders, inquires his will, consults his opinion, begs his permission, understands the indications of his wishes. Without possessing the power of human thought, he has all the warmth of human sentiment. He has more than human fidelity, he is constant in his attachments. He is made up of zeal, ardor, and obedience. He remembers kindness longer than wrong. He endures bad treatment and forgets it—disarming it by patience and submission."

No one who has ever had a dog for a friend will think this description exaggerated. If any should so consider it, we will cite for their benefit what Mr. Jesse, one of the latest students of the canine race, asserts concerning it, in his "Researches into the History of the British Dog" (London, 1866). He says that remarkable instances of the following virtues, feelings, and powers of mind are well authenticated:—

"The dog risks his life to give help; goes for assistance; saves life from drowning, fire, other animals, and men; assists distress; guards property; knows boundaries; resents injuries; repays benefits; communicates ideas; combines with other dogs for several purposes; understands language; 106 knows when he is about to die; knows death in a human being; devotes his whole life to the object of his love; dies of grief and of joy; dies in his master's defense; commits suicide; remains by the dead; solicits, and gives alarm; knows the characters of men; recognizes a portrait, and men after long absence; is fond of praise and sensible to ridicule; feels shame, and is sensible of a fault; is playful; is incorruptible; finds his way back from distant countries; is magnanimous to smaller animals; is jealous; has dreams; and takes a last farewell when dying."

Much of this, it may be said, is instinctive. We must therefore distinguish between Instinct and Intelligence; or, rather, between instinctive intelligence and reflective intelligence. Many writers on the subject of animals have not carefully distinguished these very different activities of the soul. Even M. Leroy, one of the first in modern times who brought careful observation to the study of the nature of animals, has not always kept in view this distinction—as has been noticed by a subsequent French writer of very considerable ability, M. Flourens. 19 The following marks, according to M. Flourens, distinguish instinct from intelligence:—

107

Thus the building faculty of the beaver is an instinct, for it acts spontaneously, and always in the same way. It is not a general faculty of building in all places and ways, but a special power of building houses of sticks, mud, and other materials, with the entrance under water and a dry place within. When beavers build on a running stream, they begin by making a dam across it, which preserves them from losing the water in a drought; but this also is a spontaneous and invariable act. The old stories of their driving piles, using their tails for trowels, and having well-planned houses with many chambers, have been found to be fictitious. That the beaver builds by instinct, though intelligence comes in to modify the instinct, appears from his wishing to build his house or his dam when it is not needed. Mr. Broderip, the English naturalist, had a pet beaver that manifested his building instinct by dragging together warming-pans, sweeping-brushes, boots, and sticks, which he would lay crosswise. He then would fill in his wall with clothes, bits of coal, turf, laying it very 108 even. Finally, he made a nest for himself behind his wall with clothes, hay, and cotton. As this creature had been brought from America very young, all this procedure must have been instinctive. But his intelligence showed itself in his adapting his mode of building to his new circumstances. His instinct led him to build his wall, and to lay his sticks crosswise, and to fill in with what he could find, according to the universal and spontaneous procedure of all beavers. But his making use of a chest of drawers for one side of his wall, and taking brushes and boots instead of cutting down trees, were no doubt acts of intelligence.

A large part of the wonderful procedure of bees is purely instinctive. Bees, from the beginning of the world, and in all countries of the earth, have lived in similar communities; have had their queen, to lay eggs for them: if their queen is lost, have developed a new one in the same way, by altering the conditions of existence in one of their larvæ; have constructed their hexagonal cells by the same mathematical law, so as to secure the most strength with the least outlay of material. All this is instinct—for it is spontaneous and not deliberate; it is universal and constant. But when the bee deflects his comb in order to avoid a stick thrust across the inside of the hive, and begins the variation before he reaches the stick, this can only be regarded as an act of intelligence.

109 Animals, then, have both instincts and intelligence; and so has man. A large part of human life proceeds from tendencies as purely, if not as vigorously, instinctive as those of animals. Man has social instincts, which create human society. Children play from an instinct. The maternal instinct in a human mother is, till modified by reflection, as spontaneous, universal, and necessary as the same instinct in animals. But in man the instincts are reduced to a minimum, and are soon modified by observation, experience, and reflection. In animals they are at their maximum, and are modified in a much less degree.

It is sometimes said that animals do not reason, but man does. But animals are quite capable of at least two modes of reasoning, that of comparison and that of inference. They compare two modes of action, or two substances, and judge the one to be preferable to the other, and accordingly select it. Sir Emerson Tennent tells us that elephants, employed to build stone walls in Ceylon, will lay each stone in its place, then stand off and look to see if it is plumb, and, if not, will move it with their trunk, till it lies perfectly straight. This is a pure act of reflective judgment. He narrates an adventure which befell himself in Ceylon while riding on a narrow road through the forest. He heard a rumbling sound approaching, and directly there came to meet him an elephant, bearing on his tusks a large log of wood, which he 110 had been directed to carry to the place where it was needed. Sir Emerson Tennent's horse, unused to these monsters, was alarmed, and refused to go forward. The sagacious elephant, perceiving this, evidently decided that he must himself go out of the way. But to do this, he was obliged first to take the log from his tusks with his trunk, and lay it on the ground, which he did, and then backed out of the road between the trees till only his head was visible. But the horse was still too timid to go by, whereupon the judicious pachyderm pushed himself farther back, till all of his body, except the end of his trunk, had disappeared. Then Sir Emerson succeeded in getting his horse by, but stopped to witness the result. The elephant came out, took the log up again, laid it across his tusks, and went on his way. This story, told by an unimpeachable witness, shows several successive acts of reasoning. The log-bearer inferred from the horse's terror that it would not pass; he again inferred that in that case he must himself get out of the way; that, to do this, he must lay down his log; that he must go farther back; and accompanying this was his sense of duty, making him faithful to his task; and, most of all, his consideration of what was due to this human traveler, which kept him from driving the horse and man before him as he went on.

There is another well-authenticated anecdote of an elephant; he was following an ammunition 111 wagon, and saw the man who was seated on it fall off just before the wheel. The man would have been crushed had not the animal instantly run forward, and, without an order, lifted the wheel with his trunk, and held it suspended in the air, till the wagon had passed over the man without hurting him. Here were combined presence of mind, good will, knowledge of the danger to the man, and a rapid calculation of how he could be saved.

Perhaps I may properly introduce here an account of the manifestations of mind in the animals I have had the most opportunity of observing. I have a horse, who was named Rubezahl, after the mountain spirit of the Harz made famous in the stories of Musaeus. We have contracted his name to Ruby for convenience. Now I have reason to believe that Ruby can distinguish Sunday from other days. On Sunday I have been in the habit of driving to Boston to church; but on other days, I drive to the neighboring village, where are the post-office, shops of mechanics, and other stores. To go to Boston, I usually turn to the right when I leave my driveway; to go to the village, I turn to the left. Now, on Sunday, if I leave the reins loose, so that the horse may do as he pleases, he invariably turns to the right, and goes to Boston. On other days, he as invariably turns to the left, and goes to the village. He does this so constantly and regularly, that none of the 112 family have any doubt of the fact that he knows that it is Sunday; how he knows it we are unable to discover. I have left my house at the same hour on Sunday and on Monday, in the same carriage, with the same number of persons in it; and yet on Sunday he always turns to the right, and on Monday to the left. He is fed at the same time on Sunday as on other days, but the man comes back to harness him a little later on Sunday than at other times, and that is possibly his method of knowing that it is the day for going to Boston. But see how much of observation, memory, and thought is implied in all this.

Again, Ruby has shown a very distinct feeling of the supernatural. Driving one day up a hill near my house, we met a horse-car coming down toward us, running without horses, simply by the force of gravity. My horse became so frightened that he ran into the gutter, and nearly overturned me; and I got him past with the greatest difficulty. Now he had met the cars coming down that hill, drawn by horses, a hundred times, and had never been alarmed. Moreover, only a day or two after, in going up the same hill, we saw a car moving uphill, before us, where the horses were entirely invisible, being concealed by the car itself, which was between us and the horses. But this did not frighten Ruby at all. He evidently said to himself, "The horses are there, though I do not see them." But in the other case it seemed to 113 him an effect without a cause—something plainly supernatural. There was nothing in the aspect of the car itself to alarm him; he had seen that often enough. He was simply terrified by seeing it move without any adequate cause—just as we should be, if we saw our chairs begin to walk about the room.

Our Newfoundland dog's name is Donatello; which, again, is shortened to Don in common parlance. He has all the affectionate and excellent qualities of his race. He is the most good-natured creature I ever saw. Nothing provokes him. Little dogs may yelp at him, the cat or kittens may snarl and spit at him: he pays no attention to them. A little dog climbs on his back, and lies down there; one of the cats will lie between his legs. But at night, when he is on guard, no one can approach the house unchallenged.

But his affection for the family is very great. To be allowed to come into the house and lie down near us is his chief happiness. He was very fond of my son E——, who played with him a good deal, and when the young man went away, during the war, with a three months' regiment, Don was much depressed by his absence. He walked down regularly to the station, and stood there till a train of cars came in; and when his friend did not arrive in it, he went back, with a melancholy air, to the house. But at last the young man returned. It was in the evening, and Don was lying on the 114 piazza. As soon as he saw his friend, his exultation knew no bounds. He leaped upon him, and ran round him, barking and showing the wildest signs of delight. All at once he turned and ran up into the garden, and came back bringing an apple, which he laid down at the feet of his young master. It was the only thing he could think of to do for him—and this sign of his affection was quite pathetic.

The reason why Don thought of the apple was probably this: we had taught him to go and get an apple for the horse, when so directed. We would say, "Go, Don, get an apple for poor Ruby;" then he would run up into the garden, and bring an apple, and hold it up to the horse; and perhaps when the horse tried to take it he would pull it away. After doing this a few times, he would finally lie down on his back under the horse's nose, and allow the latter to take the apple from his mouth. He would also kiss the horse, on being told to do so. When we said, "Don, kiss poor Ruby," he leaped up and kissed the horse's nose. But he afterwards hit upon a more convenient method of doing it. He got his paw over the rein and pulled down the horse's head, so that he could continue the osculatory process more at his ease, sitting comfortably on the ground.

Animals know when they have done wrong; so far, at least, as that means disobeying our will or command. The only great fault which Don 115 ever committed was stealing a piece of meat from our neighbor's kitchen. I do not think he was punished or even scolded for it; for we did not find it out till later, when it would have done no good to punish him. But a week or two after that, the gentleman whose kitchen had been robbed was standing on my lawn, talking with me, and he referred, laughingly, to what Don had done. He did not even look at the dog, much less change his tones to those of rebuke. But the moment Don heard his name mentioned, he turned and walked away, and hid himself under the low branches of a Norway spruce near by. He was evidently profoundly ashamed of himself. Was this the result of conscience, or of the love of approbation? In either case, it was very human.

That the love of approbation is common to many animals we all know. Dogs and horses certainly can be influenced by praise and blame, as easily as men. Many years ago we had occasion to draw a load of gravel, and we put Ruby into a tip-cart to do the work. He was profoundly depressed, and evidently felt it as a degradation. He hung his head, and showed such marks of humiliation that we have never done it since. But on the other hand, when he goes out, under the saddle, by the side of a young horse, this veteran animal tries as hard to appear young as any old bachelor of sixty years who is still ambitious of social triumphs. He dances along, and goes sideways, 116 and has all the airs and graces of a young colt. All this, too, is very human.

At one time my dog was fond of going to the railway station to see the people, and I always ordered him to go home, fearing he should be hurt by the cars. He easily understood that if he went there, it was contrary to my wishes. Nevertheless, he often went; and I do not know but this fondness for forbidden fruit was rather human, too. So, whenever he was near the station, if he saw me coming, he would look the other way, and pretend not to know me. If he met me anywhere else, he always bounded to meet me with great delight. But at the station it was quite different. He would pay no attention to my whistle or my call. He even pretended to be another dog, and would look me right in the face without apparently recognizing me. He gave me the cut direct, in the most impertinent manner; the reason evidently being that he knew he was doing what was wrong, and did not like to be found out. Possibly he may have relied a little on my near-sightedness, in this manœuvre.

That animals have acute observation, memory, imagination, the sense of approbation, strong affections, and the power of reasoning is therefore very evident. Lord Bacon also speaks of a dog's reverence for his master as partaking of a religious element. "Mark," says he, "what a generosity and courage a dog will put on, when he finds himself 117 maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a God—which courage he could not attain, without that confidence in a better nature than his own." Who that has seen the mute admiration and trust in a dog's eye, as he looks up at his master, but can see in it something of a religious reverence, the germ and first principle of religion?

What, then, is the difference between the human soul and that of the animal in its highest development?

That there is a very marked difference between man and the highest animal is evident. The human being, weaker in proportion than all other animals, has subjected them all to himself. He has subdued the earth by his inventions. Physically too feeble to dig a hole in the ground like a rabbit, or to fell a tree like a beaver; unable to live in the water like a fish, or to move through the air like a bird; he yet, by his inventive power and his machinery, can compel the forces of nature to work for him. They are the true genii, slaves of his lamp. Air, fire, water, electricity, and magnetism build his cities and his stately ships, run his errands, carry him from land to land, and accept him as their master.

Whence does man obtain this power? Some say it is the human hand which has made man supreme. It is, no doubt, a wonderful machine; a box of tools in itself. The size and strength of the thumb, and the power of opposing it to the 118 extremities of the fingers, distinguishes, according to most anatomists, the human hand from that of the quadrumanous animals. In those monkeys which are nearest to man, the thumb is so short and weak, and the fingers so long and slender, that their tips can scarcely be brought in opposition. Excellent for climbing, they are not good for taking up small objects or supporting large ones. But the hand of man could accomplish little without the mind behind it. It was therefore a good remark of Galen, that "man is not the wisest of animals because he has a hand; but God has given him a hand because he is the wisest of animals."

The size of the human brain, relatively greater than that of almost any other animal; man's structure, adapting him to stand erect; his ability to exist in all climates; his power of subsisting on varied food: all these facts of his physical nature are associated with his superior mental power, but do not produce it. The question recurs, What enables him to stand at the head of the animal creation?

Perhaps the chief apparent distinctions between man and other animals are these:—

1. The lowest races of men use tools; other animals do not.

2. The lowest human beings possess a verbal language; other animals have none.

3. Man has the capacity of self-culture, as an individual; other animals have not.

119 4. Human beings, associated in society, are capable of progress in civilization, by means of science, art, literature, and religion; other animals are not.

5. Men have a capacity for religion; no animal, except man, has this.

The lowest races of men use tools, but no other animal does this. This is so universally admitted by science that the presence of the rudest tools of stone is considered a sufficient trace of the presence of man. If stone hatchets or hammers or arrowheads are found in any stratum, though no human bones are detected, anthropologists regard this as a sufficient proof of the existence of human beings in the period indicated by such a geologic formation. The only tools used by animals in procuring food, in war, or in building their homes, are their natural organs: their beaks, teeth, claws, etc. It may be added that man alone wears clothes; other animals being sufficiently clothed by nature. No animals make a fire, though they often suffer from cold; but there is no race of men unacquainted with the use of fire. 20

No animals possess a verbal language. Animals can remember some of the words used by men, and associate with them their meaning. But this is not the use of language. It is merely the memory of two associated facts,—as when the animal recollects where he found food, and goes to the same 120 place to look for it again. Animals have different cries, indicating different wants. They use one cry to call their mate, another to terrify their prey. But this is not the use of verbal language. Human language implies not merely an acquaintance with the meaning of particular words, but the power of putting them together in a sentence. Animals have no such language as this; for, if they had, it would have been learned by men. Man has the power of learning any verbal language. Adelung and Vater reckon over three thousand languages spoken by men, and any man can learn any of them. The negroes speak their own languages in their own countries; they speak Arabic in North Africa; they learn to speak English, French, and Spanish in America, and Oriental languages when they go to the East. If any animals had a verbal language, with its vocabulary and grammar, men would long ago have learned it, and would have been able to converse with them.

Again, no animal except man is capable of self-culture, as an individual. Animals are trained by external influences; they do not teach themselves. An old wolf is much more cunning than a young one, but he has been made so by the force of circumstances. You can teach your dog tricks, but no dog has ever taught himself any. Yet the lowest savages teach themselves to make tools, to ornament their paddles and clubs, and acquire 121 certain arts by diligent effort. Birds will sometimes practice the tunes which they hear played, till they have learned them. They will also sometimes imitate each other's songs. That is, they possess the power of vocal imitation. But to imitate the sounds we hear is not self-culture. It is not developing a new power, but it is exercising in a new way a natural gift. Yet we must admit that in this habit of birds there is the rudiment, at least, of self-education.

All races of men are capable of progress in civilization. Many, indeed, remain in a savage state for thousands of years, and we cannot positively prove that any particular race which has always been uncivilized is capable of civilization. But we are led to believe it from having known of so many tribes of men who have emerged from apathy, ignorance, and barbarism into the light of science and art. So it was with all the Teutonic races,—the Goths, Germans, Kelts, Lombards, Scandinavians. So it was with the Arabs, who roamed for thousands of years over the deserts, a race of ignorant robbers, and then, filled with the great inspiration of Islam, flamed up into a brilliant coruscation of science, literature, art, military success, and profound learning. What great civilizations have grown up in China, India, Persia, Assyria, Babylon, Phœnicia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Carthage, Etruria! But no such progress has ever appeared among the animals. As their parents were, five 122 thousand years ago, so, essentially, are they now.

Nor are animals religious, in the sense of worshiping unseen powers higher than themselves. My horse showed a sense of the supernatural, but this is not worship.

These are some of the most marked points of difference between man and all other animals. Now these can all be accounted for by the hypothesis in which Locke and Leibnitz both agreed; namely, that while animals are capable of reasoning about facts, they are incapable of abstract ideas. Or, we may say with Coleridge, that while animals, in common with man, possess the faculty of understanding, they do not possess that of reason. Coleridge seems to have intended by this exactly what Locke and Leibnitz meant by their statement. When my dog Don heard the word "apple," he thought of the particular concrete apple under the tree; and not of apples in general, and their relation to pears, peaches, etc. Don understood me when I told him to go and get an apple, and obeyed; but he would not have understood me if I had remarked to him that apples were better than pears, more wholesome than peaches, not so handsome as grapes. I should then have gone into the region of abstract and general ideas.

Now it is precisely the possession of this power of abstract thought which will explain the superiority of man to all other animals. It explains the 123 use of tools; for a tool is an instrument prepared, not for one special purpose, but to be used generally, in certain ways. A baboon, like a man, might pick up a particular stone with which to crack a particular nut; but the ape does not make and keep a stone hammer, to be used on many similar occasions. A box of tools contains a collection of saws, planes, draw-knives, etc., not made to use on one occasion merely, but made for sawing, cutting, and planing purposes generally.

Still more evident is it that the power of abstraction is necessary for verbal language. We do not here use the common term "articulate speech," for we can conceive of animals articulating their vocal sounds. But "a word" is an abstraction. The notion is lifted out of the concrete particular fact, and deposited in the abstract general term. All words, except proper names, are abstract; and to possess and use a verbal language is impossible, without the possession of this mental faculty.

In regard to self-culture, it is clear that for any steady progress one must keep before his mind an abstract idea of what he wishes to do. This enables him to rise above impulse, passion, instinct, habit, circumstance. By the steady contemplation of the proposed aim, one can arrange circumstances, restrain impulse, direct one's activity, and become really free.

In like manner, races become developed in civilization by the impact of abstract ideas. Sometimes 124 it is by coming in contact with other civilized nations, which gives them an ideal superior to anything before known. Sometimes the motive power of their progress is the reception of truths of science, art, literature, or religion.

It is not necessary to show that without abstract, universal, and necessary ideas no religion is possible; for religion, being the worship of unseen powers, conceived as existing, as active, as spiritual, necessarily implies these ideas in the mind of the worshiper.

We find, then, in the soul of animals all active, affectionate, and intelligent capacities, as in that of man. The only difference is that man is capable of abstract ideas, which give him a larger liberty of action, which enable him to adopt an aim and pursue it, and which change his affections from an instinctive attachment into a principle of generous love. Add, then, to the animal soul the capacity for abstract ideas, and it would rise at once to the level of man. Meantime, in a large part of their nature, they have the same faculties with ourselves. They share our emotions, and we theirs. They are made "a little lower" than man, and if we are souls, so surely are they.

Are they immortal? To discuss this question would require more space than we can here give to it. For my own part, I fully believe in the continued existence of all souls, at the same time assuming their continued advance. The law of life 125 is progress; and one of the best features in the somewhat unspiritual theory of Darwin is its profound faith in perpetual improvement. This theory is the most startling optimism that has ever been taught, for it makes perpetual progress to be the law of the whole universe.

Many of the arguments for the immortality of man cannot indeed be used for our dumb relations, the animals. We cannot argue from their universal faith in a future life; nor contend that they need an immortality on moral grounds, to recompense their good conduct and punish their wickedness. We might indeed adduce a reason implied in our Saviour's parable, and believe that the poor creatures who have received their evil things in this life will be comforted in another. Moreover, we might find in many animals qualities fitting them for a higher state. There are animals, as we have seen, who show a fidelity, courage, generosity, often superior to what we see in man. The dogs who have loved their master more than food, and starved to death on his grave, are surely well fitted for a higher existence. Jesse tells a story of a cat which was being stoned by cruel boys. Men went by, and did not interfere; but a dog, that saw it, did. He drove away the boys, and then took the cat to his kennel, licked her all over with his tongue, and his conduct interested people, who brought her milk. The canine nurse took care of her till she was well, and the cat and dog remained 126 fast friends ever after. Such an action in a man would have been called heroic; and we think such a dog would not be out of place in heaven.

Yet it is not so much on particular cases of animal superiority that we rely, but on the difficulty of conceiving, in any sense, of the destruction of life. The principle of life, whether we call it soul or body, matter or spirit, escapes all observation of the senses. All that we know of it by observation is that, beside the particles of matter which compose an organized body, there is something else, not cognizable by the senses, which attracts and dismisses them, modifies and coördinates them. The unity of the body is not to be found in its sensible phenomena, but in something which escapes the senses. Into the vortex of that life material molecules are being continually absorbed, and from it they are perpetually discharged. If death means the dissolution of the body, we die many times in the course of our earthly career, for every body is said by human anatomists to be changed in all its particles once in seven years. What then remains, if all the particles go? The principle of organization remains, and this invisible, persistent principle constitutes the identity of every organized body. If I say that I have the same body when I am fifty which I had at twenty, it is because I mean by "body" that which continues unaltered amid the fast-flying particles of matter. This life principle makes and remakes the material frame; that body 127 does not make it. When what we call death intervenes, all that we can assert is that the life principle has done wholly and at once what it has always been doing gradually and in part. What happens to the material particles, we see: they become detached from the organizing principle, and relapse into simply mechanical and chemical conditions. What has happened to that organizing principle we neither see nor know; and we have absolutely no reason at all for saying that it has ceased to exist.

This is as true of plants and of animals as of men; and there is no reason for supposing that when these die their principle of life is ended. It probably has reached a crisis, which consists in the putting on of new forms and ascending into a higher order of organized existence.

128

APROPOS OF TYNDALL 21

We have all read in our "Vicar of Wakefield" the famous speech made by the venerable and learned Ephraim Jenkinson to good Dr. Primrose: "The cosmogony, or creation of the world, has puzzled philosophers in all ages. Sanchoniathon, Manetho, Berosus, and Ocellus Lucanus have all attempted it in vain," etc. But we hardly expected to have this question of cosmogony reopened by an eminent scientist in an address to the British Association. What "Sanchoniathon, Manetho, Berosus, and Ocellus Lucanus have all attempted in vain" Professor Tyndall has not only discussed before a body of men learned in the physical sciences, but has done it in such a manner as to rouse two continents to a new interest in the question. One party has immediately accused him of irreligion and infidelity, while another has declared his statements innocent if not virtuous. But the question which has been least debated is, What has the professor really said? or, Has he said anything?

The celebrated sentence which has occasioned this excitement is as follows:—

129 "Abandoning all disguise, the confession that I feel bound to make before you is, that I prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that matter which we in our ignorance, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quality of life."

Does he, then, declare himself a materialist? A materialist is one who asserts everything which exists to be matter, or an affection of matter. What, then, is matter, and how is that to be defined? The common definition of matter is, that which is perceived by the senses, or the substance underlying sensible phenomena. By means of the senses we perceive such qualities or phenomena as resistance, form, color, perfume, sound. Whenever we observe these phenomena, whenever we see, hear, taste, touch, or smell, we attribute the affections thus excited to an external substance, which we call matter . But we are aware of other phenomena which are not perceived by the senses,—such as thought, love, and will. We are as certain of their existence as we are of sensible phenomena. I am as sure of the reality of love as I am of the whiteness of chalk. By a law of our mind, whenever we perceive sensible phenomena, we necessarily attribute them to a substance outside of ourselves, which we call matter. And by another law, or the same law, whenever 130 we perceive the phenomena of consciousness, we necessarily attribute them to a substance which we call soul, mind, or spirit. All that we know of matter, and all that we know of soul, is their phenomena, and as these are entirely different, we are obliged to assume that matter and mind are different. None of the qualities or attributes of matter belong to mind, none of those of mind to matter.

Does Tyndall deny this distinction? Apparently not. He not only makes Bishop Butler declare, with unanswerable power, that materialism can never show any connection between molecular processes and the phenomena of consciousness, but he distinctly iterates this in his own person at the end of the address; asserting that there is no fusion possible between the two classes of facts, those of sensation and those of consciousness. Professor Tyndall, then, in the famous sentence above quoted, does not declare himself a materialist in the only sense in which the term has hitherto been used. He does not pretend that sensation, thought, emotion, and will are reducible, in the last analysis, to solidity, extension, divisibility, etc.; he positively and absolutely denies this.

When Tyndall, therefore, asserts that he discerns in matter the promise and potency of every form and quality of life, he uses the word "matter" in a new sense. He does not mean by it the underlying subject of sensible phenomena. It is 131 not the matter which we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. What is it then? It is something beyond the limits of observation and experiment; for he says that in order to discover it we must "prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence." In short, it is something which we know nothing about. It is a conjecture, an opinion, a theoretical matter. In another place he calls this imaginary substance "a cosmical life." This something, which shall be the common basis of the phenomena of sense and soul, not only is not known, but apparently is not knowable. For he assures us that the very attempt to understand this cosmical life which makes the connection between physical and mental phenomena, is "to soar in a vacuum," or "to try to lift one's self by his own waistband."

Of course, then, the contents of the famous sentence are not science . It is not the great scientist, the profound observer of nature, the distinguished experimentalist, who speaks to us in that sentence, but one who is theorizing, as we all have a right to theorize. We also, if we choose, may imagine some "cosmical life" behind both matter and soul, as the common origin of both, and call this life spirit . We shall then be thinking of exactly the same substance that Tyndall is thinking of, only we give it another name. He has merely given another name to the great Being behind all the phenomena of body and soul, out of 132 which or whom all proceed. But to give another name to a fact is not to tell us anything more about it. All meaning having evaporated from the word "matter," the sentence loses its whole significance, and it appears that the alarming declaration asserts nothing at all! In "abandoning all disguise" Tyndall has run little risk, for our analysis shows that he has not asserted anything except, perhaps, this, that there is, in his judgment, some unknown common basis in which matter and mind both inhere. This assertion is not alarming nor dangerous, for it is only what has always been believed.

As there is no materialism, in any known sense of that term, in the doctrine of this address, so likewise there is no atheism. In fact, in this same sentence Tyndall speaks of the "creator" of what he likes to call "matter" or "cosmical life." He objects strongly to a creator who works mechanically, and he seems to reprove Darwin for admitting an original or primordial form, created at first by the Deity. "The anthropomorphism, which it seemed the object of Mr. Darwin to set aside, is as firmly associated with the creation of a few forms as with the creation of a multitude." In another passage he says: "Is there not a temptation to close to some extent with Lucretius, when he affirms that nature is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods?". But this last sentence shows 133 a singular vacillation in so clear a thinker as Tyndall. How can one close "to some extent" with such a statement as that of Lucretius? Either the gods meddle, or they do not meddle. They can hardly be considered as meddling "to some extent." In still another passage he contrasts the doctrine of evolution with the usual doctrine of creation, rejecting the last in favor of the other, because creation makes of God "an artificer, fashioned after the human model, and acting by broken efforts, as man is seen to act."

All these expressions are somewhat vague, implying, as it seems, a certain obscurity in Tyndall's own thought. But it is not atheism. His "cosmical life" probably is exactly what Cudworth means by "plastic life." It is well known that Cudworth, whose great work is a confutation of all atheism, himself admits what he calls "a plastic nature" in the universe as a subordinate instrument of divine Providence. Just as Tyndall objects to regarding the Deity as "an artificer," Cudworth objects to the "mechanic theists," who make the Deity act directly upon matter from without, by separate efforts, instead of pouring a creative and arranging life into nature. We can easily see that Cudworth, like Tyndall, would object to Darwin's one or two "primordial germs." His "plastic nature" is working everywhere and always, though under a divine guidance. It is "a life," and therefore incorporeal. It is an unconscious 134 life, which acts, not knowingly, but fatally. Man, according to Cudworth, partakes of this life from the life of the universe, just as he partakes of heat and cold from the heat and cold of the universe. Thus Cudworth, believing in some such "cosmical life" as Tyndall imagines, conceives it as being itself the organ and instrument of the Deity. Tyndall, therefore, though less clear in his statements than Cudworth, is not logically involved in atheism by those statements, unless we implicate in the same condemnation the writer whose vast work constitutes the fullest arsenal of weapons against all the forms of atheism.

Unfortunately, however, Tyndall does not come to any clearness on this point, which in one possessing such a lucidity of intellect must be occasioned by his leaving his own domain of science and venturing into this metaphysical world, with which he is not so familiar. His acquaintance with the history of these studies seems not to be extensive. For example, he attributes to Herbert Spencer, as if he were the discoverer, what both Hobbes and Descartes had already stated, that there is no necessary resemblance between our sensations and the external objects from which they are derived. In regard to a belief in God, he tells us that in his weaker moments he loses it, or that it becomes clouded and dim, but that when he is at his best he accepts it most fully. This belief, therefore, is not with Tyndall a matter of conviction, 135 founded on reason, but a question of moods. No wonder, then, that he relegates religion to the region of sentiment, and declares that it has nothing to do with knowledge. It must not touch any question of cosmogony, or, if it does, must "submit to the control of science" in that field. But what has science to do with cosmogony? Science rests on observation of facts; but our professor tells us that he obtains his great cosmological idea of "a cosmical life" by prolonging his vision backward "across the boundary of the experimental evidence." Such science as this, which is based on no experience, and is incapable of verification, has hardly the right to warn religious belief away from any field.

Tyndall seems a little astray in making creation and evolution contradictory and incompatible. Evolution, he tells us, is the manifestation of a power wholly inscrutable to the intellect of man. We know that God is,—that is, we know it in our better moods,—but what God is, we cannot ever know. At all events we must not consider him as a Creator. "Two courses," says Tyndall, "and only two, are possible. Either let us open our doors freely to the conception of creative acts, or, abandoning them, let us radically change our notions of matter." His objections to the idea of a Creator appear to be (1) that it is "derived, not from the study of Nature, but from the observation of men;" and (2) that it represents the Deity "as 136 an artificer, fashioned after a human model, and acting by broken efforts as man is seen to act."

Are these objections sound? When we study man, are we not then also studying Nature? Is not man himself the highest manifestation of Nature? If so, and if we see the quality of any power best in its highest and fullest operations, we can study the nature of God best by looking into our own. We should, in fact, know very little of Nature if we did not look within as well as without. Tyndall justly demands unlimited freedom of investigation in the pursuit of science. But whence came this very idea of freedom except from the human mind? Nothing in the external world is free; all is fatal. Such ideas as cause, force, substance, law, unity, ideality, are not observed in the outward world—they are given by the activity of the mind itself. Subtract these from our thought, and we should know very little of Nature or its origin.

No doubt the idea of a Creator, and of one perfect in wisdom, power, and goodness, is derived by man from his own mind. But it is not necessary that such a Creator should be an "artificer," or proceed by "broken efforts." He may act by evolution, or processes of development. He may create perpetually, by a life flowing from himself into all things. He may create the universe anew at every moment—not as a man lights a torch with a match and then goes away, but as the sun 137 creates his image in the water by a perpetual process. Thus God may be regarded as creating each animal and each plant, while he maintains the mysterious force of development by which it grows from its egg or its seed. The essential idea of creation is an infinite cause, acting according to a perfect intelligence, for a perfect good. There is nothing, necessarily, of an artificer or of broken efforts in this. It is the very idea of divine creation given in the New Testament. "From whom, and through whom, and to whom, are all things." "In him, we live, and move, and have our being." The theist may well accept the view given by Goethe, in his little poem, "Gott, Gemüth, und Welt."

Such a conception of God, as a perpetual Creator, is essential to the intellectual rest of the human mind, and it is painful to see the irresolution of Professor Tyndall in regard to it. "Clear and confident as Jove" in the domain which is his own, where his masterly powers of observation, discrimination, and judgment leave him without a peer, he seems shorn of his strength on entering this 138 field of metaphysics. He has warned theology not to trespass on the grounds of science; or, if she enters them, to submit to science as her superior. Theology has been in the habit of treating science in the same supercilious way; telling her that she was an intruder if she ventured to discuss questions of psychology or religion. This is equally unwise on either part. Theologians should be glad when men of science become seriously interested in these great questions of the Whence and the Whither. The address of Professor Tyndall is excellent in its intention as well as in its candid and manly treatment of the subject. Its indecision and indistinctness are probably due to his having accepted too implicitly the guidance of Spencer, thus assuming that religious truth is unknowable, that creation is impossible, and that only phenomena can become objects of knowledge. "Insoluble mystery" is therefore his final answer to the questions he has himself raised.

Goethe is wiser when he follows the Apostle Paul, and regards the Deity as "the fullness which filleth all in all." There is no unity to thought, and no hope for scientific progress, more than for moral culture, unless we see intelligence at the centre, intelligence on the circumference of being. To place an impenetrable darkness instead of an unclouded light on the throne of the universe, is to throw a shadow over the Creation.

We say that there is no unity in thought without 139 this conviction. The only real unity we know in the world is our own. All we see around us, including our own body, is divisible, subject to alteration and change. Only the ego, or soul, is conscious of a perfect unity in a perpetual identity. Unless we can attribute to the source of all being a similar personal unity, there can be no coherence to science, but it must forever remain fragmentary and divided. This is what we mean by asserting the personality of Deity. This idea reaches what Lord Bacon calls "the vertical point of natural philosophy" or "the summary law of Nature," and constitutes, as he declares, "the union of all things in a perpetual and uniform law."

And unless we can recognize in the ultimate fountain of being an intelligent purpose, the meaning of the universe departs. Without intelligence in the cause there is none in the effect. Then the world has no meaning, life no aim. The universe comes out of darkness, and is plunging into darkness again.

Take away from the domain of knowledge the idea of a creating and presiding intelligence, and there remains no motive for science itself. Professor Tyndall is sagacious enough to see and candid enough to admit that "without moral force to whip it into action the achievements of the intellect would be poor indeed," and that "science itself not unfrequently derives motive power from ultra-scientific sources." Faith in God, as an intelligent 140 creator and ruler of the world, has awakened enthusiasm for scientific investigation among both the Aryan and the Semitic races.

The purest and highest form of monotheism is that of Christianity; and in Christendom has science made its largest progress. Not by martyrs for science, but by martyrs for religion, has the human mind been emancipated. Mr. Tyndall says of scientific freedom, "We fought and won our battle even in the middle ages." But the heroes of intellectual liberty have been the heroes of faith. Hundreds of thousands have died for a religious creed; but how many have died for a scientific theory? Luther went to Worms, and maintained his opinions there in defiance of the anathemas of the church and the ban of the empire, but Galileo denied his most cherished convictions on his knees. Galileo was as noble a character as Luther; but science does not create the texture of soul which makes so many martyrs in all the religious sects of Christendom. Let the doctrine of cosmical force supplant our faith in the Almighty, and in a few hundred years science would probably fade out of the world from pure inanition. The world would probably not care enough for anything to care for science. The light of eternity must fall on this our human and earthly life, to arouse the soul to a living and permanent interest even in things seen and temporal.

Professor Tyndall says: "Whether the views of 141 Lucretius, Darwin, and Spencer are right or wrong, we claim the freedom to discuss them. The ground which they cover is scientific ground."

It is not only a right, but a duty to examine these theories, since they are held seriously and urged earnestly by able men. But we must doubt whether they ought to claim the authority of science. They are proposed by scientific men, and they refer to scientific subjects. But these theories, in their present development, belong to metaphysics rather than to science. Science consists, first, of observation of facts; secondly, of laws inferred from those facts; and thirdly, of a verification of those laws by new observation and experiment. That which cannot be verified is no part of science; astronomy is a science, since every eclipse and occultation verifies its laws; geology is a science, since every new observation of the strata and their contents accords with the established part of the system; chemistry is a science for the same reason. But Darwin's theory of the transformation of species by natural selection is as yet unverified. "There is no evidence of a direct descent of earlier from later species in the geological succession of animals." So says Agassiz, and on this point his testimony can hardly be impeached. Professor W. Thompson, another good geological authority, says: "In successive geological formations, although new species are constantly appearing, and there is abundant evidence of 142 progressive change, no single case has yet been observed of one species passing through a series of inappreciable modifications into another." Neither has any such change taken place within historic times, for the animals and plants found in the tombs of Egypt are "identical, in all respects," says M. Quatrefages, "with those now existing." He adds the opinion, after a very careful and candid examination of the hypothesis of Darwin, that "the theory and the facts do not agree." Not being verified, then, this theory is not yet science, but an unverified mental hypothesis, that is, metaphysics.

It is important that this should be distinctly said, for when men eminent in science propound new theories, these theories themselves are apt to be regarded as science, and those who oppose them are accused of being opposed to science. This is the tendency which Professor Tyndall has so justly described in this very address: "When the human mind has achieved greatness and given evidence of power in any domain, there is a tendency to credit it with similar power in any other domain." Because Tyndall is great in experimental science, many are apt to accept his cosmological conclusions. Because he is a great observer in natural history, his metaphysical theories are supposed to be supported by observation, and to rest on experience. Professor Tyndall's own address terminates, not in science, but nescience. It treats of a realm 143 of atoms and molecules whose existence science has never demonstrated, and attributes to them potencies which science has never verified. It is a system, not made necessary by the stringent constraint of facts, but avowedly constructed in order to avoid the belief in an intelligent Creator, and a universe marked by the presence of design. His theory, he admits, no less than that of Darwin, was not constructed in the pure interests of truth for its own sake. There was another purpose in both,—to get rid of a theology of final causes, of a theology which conceives of God as a human artificer. He wished to exclude religion from the field of cosmogony, and forbid it to intrude on the region of knowledge. Theologians have often been reproached for studying "with a purpose," but it seems that this is a frailty belonging not to theologians only, but to all human beings who care a good deal for what they believe.

Professor Tyndall accepts religious faith as an important element of human nature, but considers it as confined to the sentiments, and as not based in knowledge. He doubtless comes to this conclusion from following too implicitly the traditions of modern English psychology. These assume that knowledge comes only from without, through the senses, and never from within, through intuition. This prepossession, singularly English and insular, is thus stated by John Stuart Mill in his article on Coleridge. "Sensation, and the mind's consciousness 144 of its own acts, are not only the exclusive sources, but the sole materials of our knowledge. There is no knowledge a priori ; no truths cognizable by the mind's inward light, and grounded on intuitive evidence." These views have been developed in England by the two Mills, Herbert Spencer, Bain, and others, who have made great efforts to show how sensations may be transformed into thoughts; how association of ideas may have developed instincts; how hereditary impressions, repeated for a million years, may at last have taken on the aspect of necessary truths. In short, they have laid out great labor and ingenuity in proving that a sensation may, very gradually, be transformed into a thought.

But all this labor is probably a waste of time and of intellectual power. The attempt at turning sensation into thought only results in turning thought into sensation. It is an error that we only know what we perceive through the senses, or transform by the action of the mind. It is not true that we only know that of which we can form a sensible image. We know the existence of the soul as certainly as that of the body. We know the infinite and the eternal as well as we know the finite and temporal. We know substance, cause, immortal beauty, absolute truth, as surely as the flitting phenomena which pass within the sphere of sensational experience. These convictions belong, not to the sphere of sentiment and emotion, 145 but to that of knowledge. It is because they show us realities and not imaginations, that they nerve the soul to such vast efforts in the sphere of morals, literature, and religion.

The arguments against the independent existence of the soul which Tyndall puts into the mouth of his Lucretian disciple are not difficult to answer. "You can form no picture of the soul," he says. No; and neither can we form a mental picture of love or hate, of right and wrong, or even of bodily pain and pleasure. "If localized in the body, the soul must have form." Must a pain, localized in the finger, have form? "When a leg is amputated, in which part does the soul reside?" We answer, that the soul resides in the body, with reduced power. Its instrument is less perfect than before—like a telescope which has lost a lens. "If consciousness is an essential attribute of the soul, where is the soul when consciousness ceases by the depression of the brain?" Is there any difficulty, we reply, in supposing that the soul may pass sometimes into a state of torpor, when its instrument is injured? A soul may sleep, and so be unconscious, without being dead. "The diseased brain may produce immorality: can the reason control it? If not, what is the use of the reason?" To this we answer that the soul may lose its power with a diseased body; but when furnished with another and better body, it will regain it. "If you regard the body only as 146 an instrument, you will neglect to take care of it." Does the astronomer neglect to take care of his telescope?

These answers to the Lucretian may be far from complete; but they are at least as good as the objections. The soul, no doubt, depends on the body, and cannot do its work well when the body is out of order; but does that prove it to be the result of the body? If so, the same argument would prove the carpenter to be the result of his box of tools, and the organist to be the result of his organ. The organist draws sweet music from his instrument. But as his organ grows old, or is injured by the weather, or the pipes crack, and the pedals get out of order, the music becomes more and more imperfect. At last the instrument is wholly ruined, and the music wholly ceases. Is, then, the organist dead, or was he only the result of the organ? "Without phosphorus, no thought," say the materialists. True. So, "without the organ, no music." Just as in addition to the musical instrument we need a performer, so in addition to the brain we need a soul.

There are two worlds of knowledge,—the outward world, which is perceived through the senses, and which belongs to physical science, and the inward world, perceived by the nobler reason, and from which a celestial light streams in, irradiating the mind through all its powers. Religion and science are not opposed, though different; their 147 spheres are different, though not to be divided. Each is supreme in its own region, but each needs the help of the other in order to do its own work well. Professor Tyndall claims freedom of discussion and inquiry for himself and his scientific brethren, and says he will oppose to the death any limitation of this liberty. He need not be anxious on this point. Religious faith has already fought this battle, and won for science as well as for itself perfect liberty of thought. The Protestant churches may say, "With a great sum obtained we this freedom." By the lives of its confessors and the blood of its martyrs has it secured for all men to-day equal rights of thought and speech. What neither Copernicus, Kepler, nor Galileo could do was accomplished by the courage of Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, and Oliver Cromwell.

And now the freedom they obtained by such sacrifices we inherit and enjoy: "We are free-born." We may be thankful that in most countries to-day no repression nor dictation prevents any man from expressing his inmost thought. We are glad that the most rabid unbelief and extreme denial can be spoken calmly in the open day. This is one great discovery of modern times, that errors lose half their influence when openly uttered. We owe this discovery to the Reformation. The reformers made possible a toleration much larger than their own; unwittingly, while 148 seeking freedom for their own thoughts, they won the same freedom for others, who went farther than they. They builded better than they knew.

Professor Tyndall's address is tranquil yet earnest, modest, and manly. But its best result is, that it shows us the impotence of the method of sensation to explain the mystery of the universe. It has shown us clearly the limitations of "the understanding judging by sense"—shown that it sees our world clearly, but is blind to the other. It can tell every blade of grass, and name every mineral; but it stands helpless and hopeless before the problem of being. Science and religion may each say with the apostle, "We know in part and prophesy in part." Together and united, they may one day see and know the whole.

149

LAW AND DESIGN IN NATURE 22

In the paper which opens this discussion on "Law and Design in Nature," Professor Newcomb announces in a single sentence a proposition, the truth or falsehood of which, he tells us, is "the sole question presented for discussion in the present series of papers."

But, as soon as we examine this proposition, we find that it contains not one sole question, but three. The three are independent of each other, and do not necessarily stand or fall together. They are these:—

1. "The whole course of Nature, considered as a succession of phenomena, is conditioned solely by antecedent causes."

2. In the action of these causes, "no regard to consequences is traceable."

3. And no regard to consequences is "necessary to foresee the phenomena."

Of these three propositions I admit the truth of the first; deny the truth of the second; and, for want of space, and because of its relative unimportance, leave the third unexamined.

150 The first proposition is so evidently true, and so universally admitted, that it was hardly worth positing for discussion. It is merely affirming that every natural phenomenon implies a cause. The word "antecedent" is ambiguous, but, if it intends logical and not chronological antecedence, it is unobjectionable. So understood, we are merely asked if we can accept the law of universal causation; which I suppose we shall all readily do, since this law is the basis of theology no less than of science. Without it, we could not prove the existence of the first cause. Professor Newcomb has divided us into two conflicting schools, one of theology and the other of science. Taking my place in the school of theology, I think I may safely assert for my brethren that on this point there is no conflict, but that we all admit the truth of the law of universal causation. It will be noticed that Professor Newcomb has carefully worded his statement, so as not to confine us to physical causes, nor even to exclude supernatural causes from without, working into the nexus of natural laws. He does not say "antecedent physical causes," nor does he say "causes which have existed from the beginning."

Admitting thus the truth of the first proposition, I must resolutely deny that of the second; since, by accepting it, I should surrender the very cause I wish to defend, namely, that we can perceive design in Nature. Final causes are those which "regard consequences." The principle of finality 151 is defined by M. Janet (in his recent exhaustive work, "Les Causes finales") as "the present determined by the future." One example of the way in which we can trace in Nature "a regard to consequences" is so excellently stated by this eminent philosopher that we will introduce it here: "Consider what is implied in the egg of a bird. In the mystery and night of incubation there comes, by the combination of an incredible number of causes, a living machine within the egg. It is absolutely separated from the external world, but every part is related to some future use. The outward physical world which the creature is to inhabit is wholly divided by impenetrable veils from this internal laboratory; but a preëstablished harmony exists between them. Without, there is light; within, an optical machine adapted to it. Without, there is sound; within, an acoustic apparatus. Without, are vegetables and animals; within, organs for their reception and assimilation. Without, is air; within, lungs with which to breathe it. Without, is oxygen; within, blood to be oxygenized. Without, is earth; within, feet are being made to walk on it. Without, is the atmosphere; within, are wings with which to fly through it. Now imagine a blind and idiotic workman, alone in a cellar, who simply by moving his limbs to and fro should be found to have forged a key capable of opening the most complex lock. If we exclude design, this is what Nature is supposed to be doing."

152 That design exists in Nature, and that earthly phenomena actually depend on final causes as well as on efficient causes, appears from the industry of man. Man is certainly a part of Nature, and those who accept evolution must regard him as the highest development resulting from natural processes. Now, all over the earth, from morning till evening, men are acting for ends. "Regard to consequences is traceable" in all their conduct. They are moved by hope and expectation. They devise plans, and act for a purpose. From the savage hammering his flint arrowheads, up to a Shakespeare composing "Hamlet," a Columbus seeking a new way to Asia, or a Paul converting Europe to a Syrian religion, human industry is a constant proof that a large part of the course of Nature on this earth is the result of design. And, as man develops into higher stages, this principle of design rises also from the simple to the complex, taking ever larger forms. A ship, for instance, shows throughout the adaptation of means to ends, by which complex adaptations produce a unity of result.

And that there is no conflict between the action of physical causes and final causes is demonstrated by the works of man, since they all result from the harmonious action of both. In studying human works we ask two questions,—"How?" and "Why?" We ask, "What is it for?" and "How is it done?" The two lines of inquiry run parallel, 153 and without conflict. So, in studying the works of Nature, to seek for design does not obstruct the investigation of causes, and may often aid it. Thus Harvey is said to have been led to the discovery of the circulation of the blood by seeking for the use of the valves of the veins and heart.

The human mind is so constituted that, whenever it sees an event, it is obliged to infer a cause. So, whenever it sees adaptation, it infers design. It is not necessary to know the end proposed, or who were the agents. Adaptation itself, implying the use of means, leads us irresistibly to infer intention. We do not know who built Stonehenge, or some of the pyramids, or what they were built for; but no one doubts that they were the result of design. This inference is strengthened if we see combination toward an end, and preparation made beforehand for a result which comes afterward. From preparation, combination, and adaptation, we are led to believe in the presence of human design even where we did not before know of the presence of human beings. A few rudely shaped stones, found in a stratum belonging to the Quaternary period, in which man had before not been believed to exist, changed that opinion. Those chipped flints showed adaptation; from adaptation design was inferred; and design implied the presence of man.

Now, we find in Nature, especially in the organization 154 and instincts of animals, myriads of similar instances of preparation, combination, and adaptation. Two explanations only of this occurred to antiquity,—design and chance. Socrates, Plato, and others, were led by such facts to infer the creation of the world by an intelligent author—"ille opifex rerum." Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, ascribed it to the fortuitous concourse of atoms. But modern science has expelled chance from the universe, and substituted law. Laplace, observing forty-three instances in the solar system of planets and their satellites revolving on their axes or moving in their orbits, from west to east, declared that this could not be a mere coincidence. Chance, therefore, being set aside, the question takes another form: "Did the cosmos that we see come by design or by law?"

But does this really change the question? Granting, for example, the truth of the theory of the development of all forms of life, under the operation of law, from a primal cell, we must then ask, "Did these laws come by chance or by design?" It is not possible to evade that issue. If the universe resulted from non-intelligent forces, those forces themselves must have existed as the result of chance or of intelligence. If you put out the eyes, you leave blindness; if you strike intelligence out of the creative mystery, you leave blind forces, the result of accident. Whatever is not from intelligence is from accident. To substitute 155 law for chance is merely removing the difficulty a little further back; it does not solve it.

To eliminate interventions from the universe is not to remove design. The most profound theists have denied such interruptions of the course of Nature. Leibnitz is an illustrious example of this. Janet declares him to have been the true author of the theory of evolution, by his "Law of Continuity," of "Insensible Perceptions," and of "Infinitely Small Increments." Yet he also fully believed in final causes. Descartes, who objected to some teleological statements, believed that the Creator imposed laws on chaos by which the world emerged into a cosmos. We know that existing animals are evolved by a continuous process from eggs, and existing vegetables by a like process from seeds. No one ever supposed that there was less of design on this account in their creation. So, if all existing things came at first by a like process from a single germ, it would not argue less, but far more, of design in the universe.

The theory of "natural selection" does not enable us to dispense with final causes. This theory requires the existence of forces working according to the law of heredity and the law of variation, together with a suitable environment. But whence came this arrangement, by which a law of heredity was combined with a law of variation, and both made to act in a suitable environment? Here we find again the three marks of a 156 designing intelligence: preparation, combination, adaptation. That intelligence which combines and adapts means to ends is merely remanded to the initial step of the process, instead of being allowed to act continuously along the whole line of evolution. Even though you can explain by the action of mechanical forces the whole development of the solar system and its contents from a nebula, you have only accumulated all the action of a creative intelligence in the nebula itself. Because I can explain the mechanical process by which a watch keeps time, I have not excluded the necessity of a watchmaker. Because, walking through my neighbor's grounds, I come upon a water-ram pumping up water by a purely mechanical process, I do not argue that this mechanism makes the assumption of an inventor superfluous. In human industry we perceive a power capable of using the blind forces of Nature for an intelligent end; which prepares beforehand for the intended result; which combines various conditions suited to produce it, and so creates order, system, use. But we observe in Nature exactly similar examples of order, method, and system, resulting from a vast number of combinations, correlations, and adaptations of natural forces. Man himself is such a result. He is an animal capable of activity, happiness, progress. But innumerable causes are combined and harmonized in his physical frame, each necessary to this end. As the human intelligence is the only 157 power we know capable of accomplishing such results, analogy leads us to assume that a similar intelligence presides over the like combinations of means to ends in Nature. If any one questions the value of this argument from analogy, let him remember how entirely we rely upon it in all the business of life. We know only the motives which govern our own actions; but we infer by analogy that others act from similar motives. Knowing that we ourselves combine means designed to effect ends, when we see others adapting means to ends, we assume that they act also with design. Hence we have a right to extend the argument further and higher.

The result of what I have said is this: The phenomena of the universe cannot be satisfactorily explained except by the study both of efficient causes and of final causes. Routine scientists, confining themselves to the one, and routine theologians, confining themselves to the other, may suppose them to be in conflict. But men of larger insight, like Leibnitz, Newton, Descartes, and Bacon, easily see the harmony between them. Like Hegel they say: "Nature is no less artful than powerful; it attains its end while it allows all things to act according to their constitution;" or they declare with Bacon that "the highest link of Nature's chain is fastened to the foot of Jupiter's chair." But the belief in final causes does not imply belief in supernatural intervention, nor 158 of any disturbance in the continuity of natural processes. It means that Nature is pervaded by an intelligent presence; that mind is above and around matter; that mechanical laws are themselves a manifestation of some providing wisdom, and that when we say Nature we also say God. 23

159

161

HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL

THE TWO CARLYLES, OR CARLYLE PAST AND PRESENT 24

In Thomas Carlyle's earlier days, when he followed a better inspiration than his present,—when his writings were steeped, not in cynicism, but in the pure human love of his fellow beings,—in the days when he did not worship Force, but Truth and Goodness,—in those days, it was the fashion of critics to pass the most sweeping censures on his writings as "affected," "unintelligible," "extravagant." But he worked his way on, in spite of that superficial criticism,—he won for himself an audience; he gained renown; he became authentic. Now , the same class of critics admire and praise whatever he writes. For the rule with most critics is that of the bully in school and college,—to tyrannize over the new boys, to abuse the strangers, but to treat with respect whoever has bravely fought his way into a recognized position. Carlyle has fought his way into the position of a great literary chief,—so now he may be ever so careless, ever so willful, and he will be spoken of in high terms by all monthlies and quarterlies. When he deserved admiration, he was treated 162 with cool contempt; now that he deserves the sharpest criticism, not only for his false moral position, but for his gross literary sins, the critics treat him with deference and respect.

But let us say beforehand that we can never write of Thomas Carlyle with bitterness. We have received too much good from him in past days. He is our "Lost Leader," but we have loved and honored him as few men were ever loved and honored. It is therefore with tenderness, and not any cold, indifferent criticism, that we find fault with him now. We shall always be grateful to the real Carlyle, the old Carlyle of "Sartor Resartus," of the "French Revolution," of the "Life of Schiller," of "Heroes and Hero-Worship," and of that long and noble series of articles in the Edinburgh, Foreign Review, Westminster, and Frazer, each of which illuminated some theme, and threw the glory of genius over whatever his mind touched or his pencil drew.

Carlyle's "Frederick the Great" 25 seems to us a badly written book. Let us consider the volume containing the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth chapters. Nothing in these chapters is brought out clearly. When we have finished the book, the mind is filled with a confusion of vague images. 163 We know that Mr. Carlyle is not bound to "provide us with brains" as well as with a history, but neither was he so bound in other days. Yet no such confusion was left after reading the "French Revolution." How brilliantly distinct was every leading event, every influential person, every pathetic or poetic episode, in that charmed narrative! Who can forget Carlyle's account of the "Menads," the King's "Flight to Varennes," the Constitutions that "would not march," the "September Massacres," "Charlotte Corday,"—every chief tragic movement, every grotesque episode, moving forward, distinct and clear, to the final issue, "a whiff of grapeshot"? Is there anything like that in this confused "Frederick"?

Compare, for example, the chapters on Voltaire in the present volume with the article on Voltaire published in 1829.

The sixteenth book is devoted to the ten years of peace which followed the second Silesian war. These were from 1746 to 1756. The book contains fifteen chapters. Carlyle begins, in chapter i., by lamenting that there is very little to be known or said about these ten years. "Nothing visible in them of main significance but a crash of authors' quarrels, and the crowning visit of Voltaire." Yet one would think that matter enough might be found in describing the immense activity of Friedrich, of which Macaulay says, "His exertions were such as were hardly to be expected 164 from a human body or a human mind." During these years Frederick brought a seventh part of his people into the army, and organized and drilled it under his own personal inspection, till it became the finest in Europe. He compiled a code of laws, in which he, among the first, abolished torture. He made constant journeys through his dominions, examining the condition of manufactures, arts, commerce, and agriculture. He introduced the strictest economy into the expenditures of the state. He indulged himself, indeed, in various architectural extravagances at Berlin and Potsdam,—but otherwise saved every florin for his army. He wrote "Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg," and an epic poem on the "Art of War." But our author disdains to give us an account of these things. They are not picturesque, they can be told in only general terms, and Carlyle will tell us only what an eyewitness could see or a listener hear. Accordingly, instead of giving us an account of these great labors of his hero, he inserts (chapter ii.) "a peep at Voltaire and his divine Emilie," "a visit to Frederick by Marshal Saxe;" (chapter iii.) a long account of Candidate Linsenbarth's visit to the king; "Sir Jonas Hanway stalks across the scene;" the lawsuit of Voltaire about the Jew Hirsch; "a demon news-writer gives an idea of Friedrich;" the quarrel of Voltaire and Maupertuis; "Friedrich is visible in Holland to the naked eye for some minutes."

165 This is very unsatisfactory. Reports of eyewitnesses are, no doubt, picturesque and valuable; but so only on condition of being properly arranged, and tending, in their use, toward some positive result. Then the tone of banter, of irony, almost of persiflage, is discouraging. If the whole story of Friedrich is so unintelligible, uninteresting, or incommunicable, why take the trouble to write it? The poco-curante air with which he narrates, as though it were of no great consequence whether he told his story or not, contrasts wonderfully with his early earnestness. Carlyle writes this history like a man thoroughly blasé . Impossible for him to take any interest in it himself,—how, then, does he expect to interest us? Has he not himself told us, in his former writings, that the man who proposes to teach others anything must be good enough to believe it first himself?

Here is the problem we have to solve. How came this change from the Carlyle of the Past to the Carlyle of the Present,—from Carlyle the universal believer to Carlyle the universal skeptic,—from him to whom the world was full of wonder and beauty, to him who can see in it nothing but Force on the one side and Shams on the other? What changed that tender, loving, brave soul into this hard cynic? And how was it, as Faith and Love faded out of him, that the life passed from his thought, the glory from his pen, and the page, once alive with flashing ideas, turned into 166 this confused heap of rubbish, in which silver spoons, old shoes, gold sovereigns, and copper pennies are pitched out promiscuously, for the patient reader to sift and pick over as he can? In reading the Carlyle of thirty years ago, we were like California miners,—come upon a rich placer , never before opened, where we could all become rich in a day. Now the reader of Carlyle is a chiffonier , raking in a heap of street dust for whatever precious matters may turn up.

To investigate this question is our purpose now,—and in doing so we will consider, in succession, these two Carlyles.

I. It was about the year 1830 that readers of books in this vicinity became aware of a new power coming up in the literary republic. Opinions concerning him varied widely. To some he seemed a Jack Cade, leader of rebels, foe to good taste and all sound opinions. Especially did his admiration for Goethe and for German literature seem to many preposterous and extravagant. It was said of these, that "the force of folly could no further go,"—that they "constituted a burlesque too extravagant to be amusing." The tone of Carlyle was said to be of "unbounded assumption;" his language to be "obscure and barbarous;" his ideas composed of "extravagant paradoxes, familiar truths or familiar falsehoods;" "wildest extravagance and merest silliness."

But to others, and especially to the younger 167 men, this new writer came, opening up unknown worlds of beauty and wonder. A strange influence, unlike any other, attracted us to his writing. Before we knew his name, we knew him . We could recognize an article by our new author as soon as we opened the pages of the Foreign Review, Edinburgh, or Westminster, and read a few paragraphs. But it was not the style, though marked by a singular freedom and originality—not the tone of kindly humor, the good-natured irony, the happy illustrations brought from afar,—not the amount of literary knowledge, the familiarity with German, French, Italian, Spanish literature,—not any or all of these which so bewitched us. We knew a young man who used to walk from a neighboring town to Boston every week, in order to read over again two articles by Carlyle in two numbers of the Foreign Review lying on a table in the reading-room of the Athenæum. This was his food, in the strength of which he could go a week, till hunger drove him back to get another meal at the same table. We knew other young men and young women who taught themselves German in order to read for themselves the authors made so luminous by this writer. Those were counted fortunate who possessed the works of our author, as yet unpublished in America,—his "Life of Schiller," his "German Romance," his Review articles. What, then, was the charm,—whence the fascination?

168 To explain this we must describe a little the state of literature and opinion in this vicinity at the time when Carlyle's writings first made their appearance.

Unitarianism and Orthodoxy had fought their battle, and were resting on their arms. Each had intrenched itself in certain positions, each had won to its side most of those who legitimately belonged to it. Controversy had done all it could, and had come to an end. Among the Unitarians, the so-called "practical preaching" was in vogue; that is, ethical and moral essays, pointing out the goodness of being good, and the excellence of what was called "moral virtue." There was, no doubt, a body of original thinkers and writers,—better thinkers and writers, it may be, than we have now,—who were preparing the way for another advance. Channing had already unfolded his doctrine of man, of which the central idea is, that human nature is not to be moulded by religion, but to be developed by it. Walker, Greenwood, Ware, and their brave associates, were conducting this journal with unsurpassed ability. But something more was needed. The general character of preaching was not of a vitalizing sort. It was much like what Carlyle says of preaching in England at the same period: "The most enthusiastic Evangelicals do not preach a Gospel, but keep describing how it should and might be preached; to awaken the sacred fire of faith is not their endeavor; 169 but at most, to describe how faith shows and acts, and scientifically to distinguish true faith from false." It is "not the Love of God which is taught, but the love of the Love of God."

According to this, God was outside of the world, at a distance from his children, and obliged to communicate with them in this indirect way, by breaking through the walls of natural law with an occasional miracle. There was no door by which he could enter into the sheepfold to his sheep. Miracles were represented, even by Dr. Channing, as abnormal, as "violations of the laws of nature;" something, therefore, unnatural and monstrous, and not to be believed except on the best evidence. God could not be supposed to break through the walls of this house of nature, except in order to speak to his children on some great occasions. That he had done it, in the case of Christianity, could be proved by the eleven volumes of Dr. Lardner, which showed the Four Gospels to have been written by the companions of Christ, and not otherwise.

The whole of this theory rested, it will be observed, on a sensuous system of mental philosophy. "All knowledge comes through the senses," was its foundation. Revelation, like every other form of knowledge, must come through the senses. A miracle, which appeals to the sight, touch, hearing, is the only possible proof of a divine act. For, in the last analysis, all our theology rests on our 170 philosophy. Theology, being belief, must proceed according to those laws of belief, whatever they are, which we accept and hold. The man who thinks that all knowledge comes through the senses must receive his theological knowledge also that way, and no other. This was the general opinion thirty or forty years ago; hence this theory of Christianity, which supposes that God is obliged to break his own laws in order to communicate it.

But the result of this belief was harmful. It tended to make our religion formal, our worship a mere ceremony; it made real communication with God impossible; it turned prayer into a self-magnetizing operation; it left us virtually "without God and hope in the world." Thanks to Him who never leaves himself without a witness in the human heart, this theory was often nullified in practice by the irrepressible instincts which it denied, by the spiritual intuitions which it ridiculed. Even Professor Norton, its chief champion, had a heart steeped in the sweetest piety. Denying, intellectually, all intuitions of God, Duty, and Immortality, his beautiful and tender hymns show the highest spiritual insight. Still it cannot be denied that this theory tended to dry up the fountains of religious faith in the human heart, and to leave us in a merely mechanical and unspiritualized world.

Now the first voice which came to break this 171 enchantment was, to many, the voice of Thomas Carlyle. It needed for this end, it always needs, a man who could come face to face with Truth. Every great idol-breaker, every man who has delivered the world from the yoke of Forms, has been one who was able to see the substance of things, who was gifted with the insight of realities. Forms of worship, forms of belief, at first the channels of life, through which the Living Spirit flowed into human hearts, at last became petrified, incrusted, choked. A few drops of the vital current still ooze slowly through them, and our parched lips, sucking these few drops, cling all the more closely to the form as it becomes less and less a vehicle of life. The poorest word, old and trite, is precious when there is no open vision. We do well continually to resort to the half-dead form, "till the day dawn, and the day-star arise in our hearts."

But at last there comes a man capable of dispensing with the form,—a man endowed with a high degree of the intuitive faculty,—a born seer, a prophet, seeing the great realities of the universe with open vision. The work of such a man is to break up the old formulas and introduce new light and life. This work was done for the Orthodox thirty years ago by the writings of Coleridge; for the Unitarians in this vicinity, by the writings of Thomas Carlyle.

This was the secret of the enthusiasm felt for 172 Carlyle, in those days, by so many of the younger men and women. He taught us to look at realities instead of names, at substance instead of surface,—to see God in the world, in nature, in life, in providence, in man,—to see divine truth and beauty and wonder everywhere around. He taught that the only organ necessary by which to see the divine in all things was sincerity, or inward truth. And so he enabled us to escape from the form into the spirit, he helped us to rise to that plane of freedom from which we could see the divine in the human, the infinite in the finite, God in man, heaven on earth, immortality beginning here, eternity pervading time. This made for us a new heaven and a new earth, a new religion and a new life. Faith was once more possible, a faith not bought by the renunciation of mature reason or the beauty and glory of the present hour.

But all this was taught us by our new prophet, not by the intellect merely, but by the spirit in which he spoke. He did not seem to be giving us a new creed, so much as inspiring us with a new life. That which came from his experience went into ours. Therefore it might have been difficult, in those days, for any of his disciples to state what it was that they had learned from him. They had not learned his doctrine,—they had absorbed it. Hence, very naturally, came the imitations of Carlyle, which so disgusted the members of the old school. Hence the absurd Carlylish writing, 173 the feeble imitations by honest, but weak disciples of the great master. It was a pity, but not unnatural, and it soon passed by.

As Carlyle thus did his work, not so much by direct teaching as by an influence hidden in all that he said, it did not much matter on what subject he wrote,—the influence was there still. But his articles on Goethe were the most attractive, because he asserted that in this patriarch of German literature he had found one who saw in all things their real essence, one whose majestic and trained intelligence could interpret to us in all parts of nature and life the inmost quality, the terza essenza , as the Italian Platonists called it, which made each itself. Goethe was announced as the prophet of Realism. He, it should seem, had perfectly escaped from words into things. He saw the world, not through dogmas, traditions, formulas, but as it was in itself. To him

Consider the immense charm of such hopes as these! No wonder that the critics complained that the disciples of Carlyle were "insensible to ridicule." What did they care for the laughter, which seemed to them, in their enthusiasm, like "the crackling of thorns under the pot." Ridicule, in fact, never touches the sincere enthusiast. It is a good and useful weapon against affectation, but it falls, shivered to pieces, from the magic 174 breastplate of truth. No sincere person, at work in a cause which he knows to be important, ever minds being laughed at.

But besides his admirable discussions of Goethe, Carlyle's "Life of Schiller" opened the portals of German literature, and made an epoch in biography and criticism. It was a new thing to read a biography written with such enthusiasm,—to find a critic who could really write with reverence and tender love of the poet whom he criticised. Instead of taking his seat on the judicial bench, and calling his author up before him to be judged as a culprit, Carlyle walks with Schiller through the circles of his poems and plays, as Dante goes with Virgil through the Inferno and Paradiso. He accepts the great poet as his teacher and master, 26 a thing unknown before in all criticism. It was supposed that a biographer would become a mere Boswell if he looked up to his hero, instead of looking down on him. It was not understood that it was that "angel of the world," Reverence, which had exalted even a poor, mean, vain fool, like Boswell, and enabled him to write one of the best books ever written. It was not his reverence for Johnson which made Boswell a fool,—his reverence for Johnson made him, a fool, capable of writing one of the best books of modern times.

This capacity of reverence in Carlyle—this 175 power of perceiving a divine, infinite quality in human souls—tinges all his biographical writing with a deep religious tone. He wrote of Goethe, Schiller, Richter, Burns, Novalis, even Voltaire, with reverence. He could see their defects easily enough, he could playfully expose their weaknesses; but beneath all was the sacred undertone of reverence for the divine element in each,—for that which God had made and meant them to be, and which they had realized more or less imperfectly in the struggle of life. The difference between the reverence of a Carlyle and that of a Boswell is, that one is blind and the other intelligent. The one worships his hero down to his shoes and stockings, the other distinguishes the divine idea from its weak embodiment.

Two articles from this happy period—that on the "Signs of the Times" and that called "Characteristics"—indicate some of Carlyle's leading ideas concerning right thinking and right living. In the first, he declares the present to be an age of mechanism,—not heroic, devout, or philosophic. All things are done by machinery. "Men have no faith in individual endeavor or natural force." "Metaphysics has become material." Government is a machine. All this he thinks evil. The living force is in the individual soul,—not mechanic, but dynamic. Religion is a calculation of expediency, not an impulse of worship; no thousand-voiced psalm from the heart of man to his 176 invisible Father, the Fountain of all goodness, beauty, and truth, but a contrivance by which a small quantum of earthly enjoyment may be exchanged for a much larger quantum of celestial enjoyment. "Virtue is pleasure, is profit." "In all senses we worship and follow after power, which may be called a physical pursuit." (Ah, Carlyle of the Present! does not that wand of thine old true self touch thee?) "No man now loves truth, as truth must be loved, with an infinite love; but only with a finite love, and, as it were, par amours ."

In the other article, "Characteristics," printed two years later, in 1831, he unfolds the doctrine of "Unconsciousness" as the sign of health in soul as well as body. He finds society sick everywhere; he finds its religion, literature, science, all diseased, yet he ends the article, as the other was ended, in hope of a change to something better.

These two articles may be considered as an introduction to his next great work, "Sartor Resartus," or the "Clothes-Philosophy." Here, in a vein of irony and genial humor, he unfolds his doctrine of substance and form. The object of all thought and all experience is to look through the clothes to the living beneath them. According to his book, all human institutions are the clothing of society; language is the garment of thought, the heavens and earth the time-vesture of the Eternal. So, too, are religious creeds and ceremonies the clothing of religion; so are all symbols 177 the vesture of some idea; so are the crown and sceptre the vesture of government. This book is the autobiography of a seeker for truth. In it he is led from the shows of things to their innermost substance, and as in all his other writings, he teaches here also that sincerity, truthfulness, is the organ by which we are led to the solid rock of reality, which underlies all shows and shams.

II. We now come to treat of Carlyle in his present aspect,—a much less agreeable task. We leave Carlyle the generous and gentle, for Carlyle the hard cynic. We leave him, the friend of man, lover of his race, for another Carlyle, advocate of negro slavery, worshiper of mere force, sneering at philanthropy, and admiring only tyrants, despots, and slaveholders. The change, and the steps which led to it, chronologically and logically, it is our business to scrutinize,—not a grateful occupation indeed, but possibly instructive and useful.

Thomas Carlyle, after spending his previous life in Scotland, and from 1827 to 1834 in his solitude at Craigenputtoch, removed to London in the latter year, when thirty-eight years old. Since then he has permanently resided in London, in a house situated on one of the quiet streets running at right angles with the Thames. He came to London almost an unknown man; he has there become a great name and power in literature. He has had for friends such men as John Stuart Mill, Sterling, Maurice, Leigh Hunt, Browning, Thackeray, and 178 Emerson. His "French Revolution" was published in 1837; "Sartor Resartus" (published in Frazer in 1833, and in Boston in a volume in 1836) was put forth collectively in 1838; and in the same year his "Miscellanies" (also collected and issued in Boston in 1838) were published in London, in four volumes. "Chartism" was issued in 1839. He gave four courses of Lectures in Willis's rooms "to a select but crowded audience," in 1837, 1838, 1839, and 1840. Only the last of these—"Heroes and Hero-Worship"—was published. "Past and Present" followed in 1843, "Oliver Cromwell" in 1845. In 1850 he printed "Latter-Day Pamphlets," and subsequently his "Life of Sterling" (1851), and the four volumes, now issued, of "Frederick the Great."

The first evidence of an altered tendency is perhaps to be traced in the "French Revolution." It is a noble and glorious book; but, as one of his friendly critics has said, "its philosophy is contemptuous and mocking, and it depicts the varied and gigantic characters which stalk across the scene, not so much as responsible and living mortals, as the mere mechanical implements of some tremendous and irresistible destiny." In "Heroes and Hero-Worship" the habit has grown of revering mere will, rather than calm intellectual and moral power. The same thing is shown in "Past and Present," in "Cromwell," and in "Latter-Day Pamphlets," which the critic quoted above 179 says is "only remarkable as a violent imitation of himself, and not of his better self." For the works of this later period, indeed, the best motto would be that verse from Daniel: "He shall exalt himself, and magnify himself, and speak marvelous things; neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, but in his stead shall he honor the God of Forces, a god whom his fathers knew not."

Probably this apostasy from his better faith had begun, before this, to show itself in conversation. At least Margaret Fuller, in a letter dated 1846, finds herself in his presence admiring his brilliancy, but "disclaiming and rejecting almost everything he said." "For a couple of hours," says she, "he was talking about poetry, and the whole harangue was one eloquent proclamation of the defects in his own mind." "All Carlyle's talk, another evening," says she, "was a defence of mere force,—success the test of right; if people would not behave well, put collars round their necks; find a hero, and let them be his slaves." "Mazzini was there, and, after some vain attempts to remonstrate, became very sad. Mrs. Carlyle said to me, 'These are but opinions to Carlyle; but to Mazzini, who has given his all, and helped bring his friends to the scaffold, in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of life and death.'"

As this mood of Mr. Carlyle comes out so strongly in the "Latter-Day Pamphlets," it is perhaps best to dwell on them at greater leisure.

180 The first is "The Present Time." In this he describes Democracy as inevitable, but as utterly evil; calls for a government; finds most European governments, that of England included, to be shams and falsities,—no-government, or drifting, to be a yet greater evil. The object, he states, is to find the noblest and best men to govern. Democracy fails to do this; for universal balloting is not adequate to the task. Democracy answered in the old republics, when the mass were slaves, but will not answer now. The United States are no proof of its success, for (1st) anarchy is avoided merely by the quantity of cheap land, and (2d) the United States have produced no spiritual results, but only material. Democracy in America is no-government, and "its only feat is to have produced eighteen millions of the greatest bores ever seen in the world." Mr. Carlyle's plan, therefore, is to find, somehow, the best man for a ruler, to make him a despot, to make the mass of the English and Irish slaves, to beat them if they will not work, to shoot them if they still refuse. The only method of finding this best man, which he suggests, is to call for him . Accordingly, Mr. Thomas Carlyle calls , saying, "Best man, come forward, and govern."

The sum, therefore, of his recipe for the diseases of the times is Slavery .

The second pamphlet is called "Model Prisons," and the main object of this is to ridicule all attempts at helping men by philanthropy or humanity. 181 The talk of "Fraternity" is nonsense, and must be drummed out of the world. Beginning with model prisons, he finds them much too good for the "scoundrels" who are shut up there. He would have them whipped and hung (seventy thousand in a year, we suppose, as in bluff King Harry's time, with no great benefit therefrom). "Revenge," he says, "is a right feeling against bad men,—only the excess of it wrong." The proper thing to say to a bad man is, "Caitiff, I hate thee." "A collar round the neck, and a cart-whip over the back," is what he thinks would be more just to criminals than a model prison. The whole effort of humanity should be to help the industrious and virtuous poor; the criminals should be swept out of the way, whipt, enslaved, or hung. As for human brotherhood, he does not admit brotherhood with "scoundrels." Particularly disgusting to him is it to hear this philanthropy to bad men called Christianity. Christianity, he thinks, does not tell us to love the bad, but to hate them as God hates them. According, probably, to his private expurgated version of the Gospel, "that ye may be the children of your Father in heaven, whose sun rises only on the good, and whose rain falls only on the just."

"Downing Street" and "New Downing Street" are fiery tirades against the governing classes in England. Mr. Carlyle says (according to his inevitable refrain), that England does not want a 182 reformed Parliament, a body of talkers, but a reformed Downing Street, a body of workers. He describes the utter imbecility of the English government, and calls loudly for some able man to take its place. Two passages are worth quoting; the first as to England's aspect in her foreign relations, which is quite as true for 1864 as for 1854.

"How it stands with the Foreign Office, again, one still less knows. Seizures of Sapienza, and the like sudden appearances of Britain in the character of Hercules-Harlequin, waving, with big bully-voice, her sword of sharpness over field-mice, and in the air making horrid circles (horrid Catherine-wheels and death-disks of metallic terror from said huge sword) to see how they will like it. Hercules-Harlequin, the Attorney Triumphant, the World's Busybody!"

Or see the following description of the sort of rulers who prevail in England, no less than in America:—

"If our government is to be a No-Government, what is the matter who administers it? Fling an orange-skin into St. James Street, let the man it hits be your man. He, if you bend him a little to it, and tie the due official bladders to his ankles, will do as well as another this sublime problem of balancing himself upon the vortexes, with the long loaded pole in his hand, and will, with straddling, painful gestures, float hither and thither, walking the waters in that singular manner for a little 183 while, till he also capsize, and be left floating feet uppermost,—after which you choose another."

Concerning which we may say, that if this is the result of monarchy and aristocracy in England, we can stick a little longer to our democracy in America. Mr. Carlyle says that the object of all these methods is to find the ablest man for a ruler. He thinks our republican method very insufficient and absurd,—much preferring the English system,—and then tells us that this is the outcome of the latter; that you might as well select your ruler by throwing an orange-skin into the street as by the method followed in England.

Despotism, tempered by assassination, seems to be Carlyle's notion of a good government.

The pamphlet "Stump-Orator" is simply a bitter denunciation of all talking, speech-making, and writing, as the curse of the time, and ends with the proposition to cut out the tongues of one whole generation, as an act of mercy to them and a blessing to the human race.

Thus this collection of "Latter-Day Pamphlets" consists of the bitterest cynicism. Carlyle sits in it, as in a tub, snarling at freedom, yelping at philanthropy, growling at the English government, snapping at all men who speak or write, and ending with one long howl over the universal falsity and hollowness of mankind in general.

After which he proceeds to his final apotheosis of despotism pure and simple, in this "Life of 184 Frederick the Great." Of this it is not necessary to say more than that Frederick, being an absolute despot, but a very able one, having plunged Europe into war in order to steal Silesia, is everywhere admired, justified, or excused by Carlyle, who reserves his rebukes and contempt for those who find fault with all this.

That, with these opinions, Carlyle should have taken sides with the slaveholders' conspiracy against the Union is not surprising. His sympathies were with them; first, as slaveholders, secondly, as aristocrats. He hates us because we are democrats, and he loves them because they are despots and tyrants. Long before the outbreak of the rebellion, he had ridiculed emancipation, and denounced as folly and evil the noblest deed of England,—the emancipation of her West India slaves. In scornful, bitter satire, he denounced England for keeping the fast which God had chosen, in undoing the heavy burdens, letting the oppressed go free, and breaking every yoke. He ridiculed the black man, and described the poor patient African as "Quashee, steeped to the eyes in pumpkin." In the hateful service of oppression he had already done his best to uphold slavery and discourage freedom. And while he fully believed in enslaving the laboring population, black or white, and driving it to work by the cart-whip, he as fully abhorred republicanism everywhere, and most of all in the United States. He had exhausted the 185 resources of language in vilifying American institutions. It was a matter of course, therefore, that at the outbreak of this civil war all his sympathies should be with those who whip women and sell babies.

How is it that this great change should have taken place? Men change,—but not often in this way. The ardent reformer often hardens into the stiff conservative. The radical in religion is very likely to join the Catholic Church. If a Catholic changes his religion, he goes over to atheism. To swing from one extreme to another, is a common experience. But it is a new thing to see calmness in youth, violence in age,—to find the young man wise and all-sided, the old man bigoted and narrow.

We think the explanation to be this.

Thomas Carlyle from the beginning has not shown the least appreciation of the essential thing in Christianity. Brought up in Scotland, inheriting from Calvinism a sense of truth, a love of justice, and a reverence for the Jewish Bible, he has never passed out of Judaism into Christianity. To him, Oliver Cromwell is the best type of true religion; inflexible justice the best attribute of God or man. He is a worshiper of Jehovah, not of the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. He sees in God truth and justice; he does not see in him love. He is himself a prophet after the type of Elijah and John the Baptist. He is the 186 voice crying in the wilderness; and we may say of him, therefore, as was said of his prototype, "He was a burning and a shining light, and ye were willing, for a season, to rejoice in his light,"—but not always,—not now.

Carlyle does not, indeed, claim to be a Jew, or to reject Christ. On the contrary, he speaks of him with very sincere respect. He seems, however, to know nothing of him but what he has read in Goethe about the "worship of sorrow." The Gospel appears to him to be, essentially, a worship of sorrow. That Christ "came to save sinners,"—of that Carlyle has not the faintest idea. To him the notion of "saving sinners" is only "rose-water philanthropy." He does not wish them saved, he wishes them damned,—swept into hell as soon as convenient.

But, as everything which is real has two sides, that of truth and that of love ,—it usually happens that he who only sees one side at last ceases even to see that. All goodness, to Carlyle, is truth,—in man it is sincerity, or love of reality, sight of the actual facts,—in God it is justice, divine adherence to law, infinite guidance of the world and of every human soul according to a strict and inevitable rule of righteousness. At first this seems to be a providence,—and Carlyle has everywhere, in the earlier epoch, shown full confidence in Providence. But believe only in justice and truth,—omit the doctrine of forgiveness, 187 redemption, salvation,—and faith in Providence becomes sooner or later a despairing fatalism. The dark problem of evil remains insoluble without the doctrine of redemption.

So it was that Carlyle, seeing at first the chief duty of man to be the worship of reality, the love of truth, next made that virtue to consist in sincerity, or being in earnest. Truth was being true to one's self. In this lay the essence of heroism. So that Burns, being sincere and earnest, was a hero,—Odin was a hero,—Mohammed was a hero,—Cromwell was a hero,—Mirabeau and Danton were heroes,—and Frederick the Great was a hero. That which was first the love of truth, and caused him to reverence the calm intellectual force of Schiller and Goethe, soon became earnestness and sincerity, and then became power. For the proof of earnestness is power. So from power, by eliminating all love, all tenderness, as being only rose-water philanthropy, he at last became a worshiper of mere will, of force in its grossest form. So he illustrates those lines of Shakespeare in which this process is so well described. In "Troilus and Cressida" Ulysses is insisting on the importance of keeping everything in its place, and giving to the best things and persons their due priority. Otherwise, mere force will govern all things.

188

as Carlyle indeed openly declares that it ought to be,—

which Carlyle does not quite approve of in the case of Dr. Francia. But why not, if he maintains that strength is the measure of justice?

Just so, in the progress of Carlyle's literary career, first, force became right,—then, everything included itself in power,—next, power was lost in will, and will in mere caprice or appetite. From his admiration for Goethe, as the type of intellectual power, he passed to the praise of Cromwell as the exponent of will, and then to that of Frederick, whose appetite for plunder and territory was seconded by an iron will and the highest power of intellect; but whose ambition devoured himself, his country, and its prosperity, in the mad pursuit of victory and conquest.

The explanation, therefore, of our author's lapse, is simply this, that he worshiped truth divorced from love, and so ceased to worship truth, and fell into the idolatry of mere will. Truth without 189 love is not truth, but hard, willful opinion, just as love without truth is not love, but weak good-nature and soft concession.

Carlyle has no idea of that sublime feature of Christianity, which shows to us God caring more for the one sinner who repents than the ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance. To him one just person deserves more care than ninety-nine sinners. Yet it is strange that he did not learn from his master, Goethe, this essential trait of the Gospel. For Goethe, in a work translated by Carlyle himself, distinguishes between the three religions thus. The ethnic or Gentile religions, he says, reverence what is above us ,—the religion of the philosopher reverences what is on our own level ,—but Christianity reverences what is beneath us . "This is the last step," says Goethe, "which mankind were destined to attain,—to recognize humility and poverty, mockery and despite, disgrace and wretchedness, as divine,—nay, even on sin and crime to look not as hindrances, but to honor and love them as furtherances of what is holy ."

On sin and crime, as we have seen, Carlyle looks with no such tenderness. But if he does not care for the words of Christ, teaching us that we must forgive if we hope to be forgiven, if he does not care for the words of his master, Goethe, he might at least remember his own exposition of this doctrine in an early work, where he shows that the 190 poor left to perish by disease infect a whole community, and declares that the safety of all is involved in the safety of the humblest.

In 1840, when he wrote "Chartism," Carlyle seems to have known better than he did in 1855, when he wrote these "Latter-Day Pamphlets." Then he said:—

"To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here only as a nuisance to be abraded and abated, and in some permissible manner made away, and swept out of sight, is not an amiable faith."

Of Ireland, too, he said:—

"We English pay, even now, the bitter smart of long centuries of injustice to Ireland." "It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men. The brutalest black African feels it, and cannot bear that he should be used unjustly. No man can bear it, or ought to bear it."

This seems like the "rose-water philanthropy" which he subsequently so much disliked. In this book also he speaks of a "seven years' Silesian robber-war,"—we trust not intending to call his beloved Frederick a robber! And again he proposes, as one of the best things to be done in England, to have all the people taught by government to read and write,—the same thing which this American democracy, in which he could see not one good thing, has so long been doing. That was the plan by which England was to be 191 saved,—a plan first suggested in England in 1840,—adopted and acted on in America for two hundred years.

But just as love separated from truth becomes cruelty, so truth by itself—truth not tempered and fulfilled by love—runs sooner or later into falsehood. Truth , after a while, becomes dogmatism, overbearing assertion, willful refusal to see and hear other than one's own belief; that is to say, it becomes falsehood. Such has been the case with our author. On all the subjects to which he has committed himself he closes his eyes, and refuses to see the other side. Like his own symbol, the mighty Bull, he makes his charge with his eyes shut .

Determined, for example, to rehabilitate such men as Mirabeau, Cromwell, Frederick, and Frederick's father, he does thorough work, and defends or excuses all their enormities, palliating whenever he cannot justify.

What can we call this which he says 27 concerning the execution of Lieutenant Katte, by order of old King Friedrich Wilhelm? Tired of the tyranny of his father, tired of being kicked and caned, the young prince tried to escape. He was caught and held as a deserter from the army, and his father tried to run him through the body. Lieutenant Katte, who had aided him in getting away, having been kicked and caned, was sent to a court-martial 192 to be tried. The court-martial found him guilty not of deserting, but of intending to desert, and sentenced him to two years' imprisonment. Whereupon the king went into a rage, declared that Katte had committed high treason, and ordered him to be executed. Whereupon Carlyle thus writes:—

"'Never was such a transaction before or since in modern history,' cries the angry reader; 'cruel, like the grinding of human hearts under millstones; like——' Or, indeed, like the doings of the gods, which are cruel, but not that alone."

In other words, Carlyle cannot make up his mind frankly to condemn this atrocious murder, and call it by its right name. He must needs try to sophisticate us by talking about "the doings of the gods." Because Divine Providence takes men out of the world in various ways, it is therefore allowable to a king, provided he be a hero grim enough and "earnest" enough, to kick men, cane them, and run them through the body when he pleases; and, after having sent a man to be tried by court-martial, if the court acquits him, to order him to be executed by his own despotic will. A truth-telling Carlyle ought to have said, "I admit this is murder; but I like the old fellow, and so I will call it right." A Carlyle grown sophistical mumbles something about its being like "the doings of the gods," and leaves off with that small attempt at humbug. Be brave, my men, and defend my Lord Jeffreys next for bullying juries into hanging 193 prisoners. Was not Jeffreys "grim" too? In fact, are not most murderers "grim"?

We have had occasion formerly, in this journal, to examine the writings of another very positive and clear-headed thinker,—Mr. Henry James. Mr. James is, in his philosophy, the very antithesis of Carlyle. With equal fervor of thought, with a like vehemence of style, with a somewhat similar contempt for his opponents, Mr. James takes exactly the opposite view of religion and duty. As Carlyle preaches the law, and the law alone, maintaining justice as the sole Divine attribute, so Mr. James preaches the Gospel only, denying totally that to the Divine Mind any distinction exists between saint and sinner, unless that the sinner is somewhat more of a favorite than the saint. We did not, do not, agree with Mr. James in his anti-nomianism; as between him and Carlyle, we think his doctrine far the truer and nobler. He stands on a higher plane, and sees much the farther. A course of reading in Mr. James's books might, we think, help our English cynic not a little.

God is the perfect harmony of justice and love. His justice is warmed through and through with love, his love is sanctified and made strong by justice. And so, in Christ, perfect justice was fulfilled in perfect love. But in him first was fully revealed, in this world, the Divine fatherly tenderness to the lost, to the sinner, to those lowest down and farthest away. In him was taught that our 194 own redemption from evil does not lie in despising and hating men worse than ourselves, but in saving them. The hard Pharisaic justice of Carlyle may call this "rose-water philanthropy," but till he accepts it from his heart, and repents of his contempt for his fallen fellowmen, till he learns to love "scoundrels," there is no hope for him. He lived once in the heaven of reverence, faith, and love; he has gone from it into the hell of Pharisaic scorn and contempt. Till he comes back out of that, there is no hope for him.

But such a noble nature cannot be thus lost. He will one day, let us trust, worship the divine love which he now abhors. Cromwell asked, on his death-bed, "if those once in a state of grace could fall," and, being assured not, said, "I am safe then, for I am sure I was once in a state of grace." There is a truth in this doctrine of the perseverance of saints. Some truths once fully seen, even though afterward rejected by the mind and will, stick like a barbed arrow in the conscience, tormenting the soul till they are again accepted and obeyed. Such a truth Carlyle once saw, in the great doctrine of reverence for the fallen and the sinful. He will see it again, if not in this world, then in some other world.

The first Carlyle was an enthusiast, the last Carlyle is a cynic. From enthusiasm to cynicism, from the spirit of reverence to the spirit of contempt, the way seems long, but the condition of 195 arriving is simple. Discard Love , and the whole road is passed over. Divorce love from truth, and truth ceases to be open and receptive,—ceases to be a positive function, turns into acrid criticism, bitter disdain, cruel and hollow laughter, empty of all inward peace. Such is the road which Carlyle has passed over, from his earnest, hopeful youth to his bitter old age.

Carlyle fulfilled for many, during these years, the noble work of a mediator. By reverence and love he saw what was divine in nature, in man, and in life. By the profound sincerity of his heart, his worship of reality, his hatred of falsehood, he escaped from the commonplaces of literature to a better land of insight and knowledge. So he was enabled to lead many others out of their entanglements, into his own luminous insight. It was a great and blessed work. Would that it had been sufficient for him!

196

BUCKLE AND HIS THEORY OF AVERAGES 28

We welcomed kindly the first installment of Mr. Buckle's work, 29 giving a cursory account of it, and hinting, rather than urging, the objections which readily suggested themselves against theories concerning Man, History, Civilization, and Human Progress. But now it seems a proper time to discuss with a little more deliberation the themes opened before us by this intrepid writer,—this latest champion of that theory of the mind which in the last century was called Materialism and Necessity, and which in the present has been re-baptized as Positivism.

The doctrines of which Mr. Buckle is the ardent advocate seem to us, the more thoroughly we consider them, to be essentially theoretical, superficial, and narrow. They are destitute of any broad basis of reality. In their application by Mr. Buckle, they fail to solve the historic problems upon which he tries their power. With a show of science, they are unscientific, being a mere collection 197 of unverified hypotheses. And if Mr. Buckle should succeed in introducing his principles and methods into the study of history, it would be equivalent to putting backward for about a century this whole department of thought.

Yet, while we state this as our opinion, and one which we shall presently endeavor to substantiate by ample proof, we do not deny to Mr. Buckle's volumes the interest arising from vigorous and independent thinking, faithful study of details, and a strong, believing purpose. They are interesting and valuable contributions to our literature. But this is not on account of their purpose, but in spite of it; notwithstanding their doctrines, not because of them. The interest of these books, as of all good history, derives itself from their picturesque reproduction of life. Whatever of value belongs to Mr. Buckle's work is the same as that of the writings of Macaulay, Motley, and Carlyle. Whoever has the power of plunging like a diver into the spirit of another period, sympathizing with its tone, imbuing himself with its instincts, sharing its loves and hates, its faith and its skepticism, will write its history so as to interest us. For whoever will really show to us the breathing essence of any age, any state of society, or any course of human events, cannot fail of exciting that element of the soul which causes man everywhere to rejoice in meeting with man. He who will write the history of Arabians, Kelts, or Chinese, of the Middle 198 Ages, the Norman Sea-kings, or the Roman Plebs, so that we can see ourselves beneath these diverse surroundings of race, country, and period, and see that these also are really MEN ,—this writer instantly awakens our interest, whether he call himself poet, novelist, or historian. In all cases, the secret of success is to write so as to enable the reader to identify himself with the characters of another age. Great authors enable us to look at actions, not from without, but from within. When we read the historic plays of Shakespeare, or the historic novels of Scott, we are charmed by finding that kings and queens are, after all, our poor human fellow-creatures, sharing all our old, familiar struggles, pains, and joys. When we read that great historic masterpiece, the "French Revolution" of Carlyle, the magic touch of the artist introduces us into the heart of every character in the motley, shifting scene. We are the poor king escaping to Varennes under the dewy night and solemn stars. We are tumultuous Mirabeau, with his demonic but generous soul. We are devoted Charlotte Corday; we are the Gironde; we the poor prisoners of Terror, waiting in our prison for the slow morning to bring the inevitable doom. This is the one indispensable faculty for the historian; and this faculty Mr. Buckle so far possesses as to make his page a living one. It is true that his sympathy is intellectual rather than imaginative. It is not of the high order of Shakespeare, 199 nor even of that of Carlyle. But, so far as it goes, it is a true faculty, and makes a true historian.

Yet we cannot but notice how the effectual working of this historic organ is interfered with by the dogmatic purpose of Mr. Buckle; and, on the other hand, how his theoretic aim is disturbed by the interest of his narrative. His history is always meant to be an argument. His narrations of events are never for their own sake, but always to prove some thesis. There is, therefore, no consecutive narrative, no progress of events, no sustained interest. These volumes are episodes, put together we cannot well say how, or why. In the seventh chapter of the first volume we have a graphic description of the Court life in England in the days of Charles II., James II., William, and the Georges, in connection with the condition of the Church and clergy. From this we are taken, in the next chapter, to France, and to similar relations between Henry IV., Louis XIII., Richelieu, and the French Catholics and Protestants. We then are brought back to England, to consider the protective system there; and once more we return to France, to investigate its operation in that country. Afterward we have an essay on "The State of Historical Literature in France from the End of the Sixteenth to the End of the Eighteenth Century," followed by another essay on the "Proximate Causes of the French Revolution." Many very well finished biographic portraits are given 200 us in these chapters. There are excellent sketches of Burke, Voltaire, Richelieu, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Bichat, in the first volume; and of Adam Smith, Reid, Black, Leslie, Hutton, Cullen, Hunter, in the second. These numerous biographic sketches, which are often accompanied with good literary notices of the writings of these authors, are very ably written; but it is curious to remember, while reading them, that Mr. Buckle thinks that, as history advances, it has less and less to do with biography.

There is an incurable defect in the method of this work. On the one hand, the dogmatic purpose is constantly breaking into the interest of the narration; on the other, the interest of the narration is continually enticing the writer from his argument into endless episodes and details of biography. The argument is deprived of its force by the story; the story is interrupted continually on account of the argument. Mr. Buckle has mistaken the philosophy of history for history itself. A history of civilization is not a piece of metaphysical argument, but a consecutive account of the social progress either of an age or of a nation. This irreconcilable conflict of purpose, while it leaves to the parts of the work their value, destroys its worth as a whole.

Mr. Buckle might probably inquire whether we would eliminate wholly from history all philosophic aim, all teleologic purpose. He objects, and 201 very properly, to degrading history into mere annals, without any instructive purpose. We agree with him. We do not admire the style of history which feels neither passion nor sympathy, which narrates crimes without indignation, and which has no aim in its narration except to entertain a passing hour. But it is one thing deliberately to announce a thesis and bring detached passages of history to prove it, and another to write a history which, by its incidents, spirit, and characters shall convey impulse and instruction. The historian may dwell upon the events which illustrate his convictions, and may develop the argument during the progress of his moving panorama; but the history itself, as it moves, should impress the lesson. The history of Mr. Motley, for example, illustrates and impresses the evils of bigotry, superstition, and persecution on the life of nations, quite as powerfully as does that of Mr. Buckle; but Mr. Motley never suspends his narrative in order to prove to us logically that persecution is an evil.

Mr. Buckle, in his style of writing, belongs to a modern class of authors whom we may call the bullying school. It is true that he is far less extravagant than some of them, and indeed is not deeply tinged with their peculiar manner. The first great master of this class of writers is Thomas Carlyle; but their peculiarity has been carried to its greatest extent by Ruskin. Its characteristic feature is treating with supreme contempt, as 202 though they were hopeless imbeciles, all who venture to question the dicta of the writer. This superb arrogance makes these writers rather popular with the English, who, as a nation, like equally well to bully and to be bullied.

Buckle professes to have at last found the only true key to history, and to have discovered some of its important laws, especially those which regard the progress of civilization.

I. His View of Freedom. —Mr. Buckle's fundamental position is, that the actions of men are governed by fixed laws, and that, when these laws are discovered, history will become a science, like geometry, geology, or astronomy. The chief obstacle hitherto to its becoming a science has been the belief that the actions of men were determined, not by fixed laws, but by free will (which he considers equivalent to chance), or by supernatural interference or providence (which he regards as equivalent to fate). "We shall thus be led," he says (Vol. I. p. 6, Am. ed.), "to one vast question, which, indeed, lies at the root of the whole subject, and is simply this: Are the actions of men, and therefore of societies, governed by fixed laws, or are they the result either of chance or of supernatural interference?" Identifying freedom with chance, Mr. Buckle denies that there is such a thing, and maintains that every human action is determined by some antecedent, inward or outward, and that not one is determined by the free 203 choice of the man himself. His principal argument against free will is the law of averages, which we will therefore proceed to consider in its bearing on this point.

Statistics, carefully collected during many years and within different countries, show a regularity of return in certain vices and crimes, which indicates the presence of law. Thus, about the same number of murders are committed every year in certain countries and large cities, and even the instruments by which they are committed are employed in the same proportion. Suicide also follows some regular law. "In a given state of society, a certain number of persons must put an end to their own life." In London, about two hundred and forty persons kill themselves every year,—in years of panic and disaster a few more, in prosperous years not quite so many. Other actions of men are determined in the same way,—not by personal volition, but by some controlling circumstance. "It is now known that the number of marriages in England bears a fixed and definite relation to the price of corn." "Aberrations of memory are marked by this general character of necessary and invariable order." The same average number of persons forget every year to direct the letters dropped into the post-offices of London and Paris. Facts of this kind "force us to the conclusion," says Buckle, "that the offenses of men are the result, not so much of the vices of the 204 individual offender, as of the state of society into which he is thrown."

The argument then is: If man's moral actions are under law, they are not free, for freedom is the absence of law. The argument of Mr. Buckle is conclusive, provided freedom does necessarily imply the absence of law. But such, we think, is not the fact.

The actions of man do not proceed solely from the impact of external circumstances; for then he would be no better than a ball struck with a bat. Nor do they proceed solely from the impulses of his animal nature; for then he would be only a superior kind of machine, moved by springs and wheels. But in addition to external and internal impulse there is also in man the power of personal effort, activity, will,—to which we give the name of Free Choice, or Freedom. This modifies and determines a part of his actions,—while a second part come from the influence of circumstance, and a third from organic instincts and habitual tendencies.

Now, it is quite certain that no man has freedom of will enough to cause his whole nexus of activity to proceed from it. For if a man could cause all his actions to proceed by a mere choice or effort, he could turn himself at will into another man. In other words, there could be no such thing as permanent moral character. No one could be described; for while we were describing him, he might 205 choose to be different, and so would become somebody else. It is evident, therefore, that some part of every man's life must lie outside of the domain of freedom.

In what, then, does the essence of freedom consist? If it be not the freedom to do whatever we choose, what is it? Plainly, if we analyze our own experience, we shall find that it is simply what its scholastic name implies, freedom of choice, or liber arbitrio . It is not, in the last analysis, freedom to act, but it is freedom to choose.

But freedom to choose what? Can we choose anything? Certainly not. Our freedom of choice is limited by our knowledge. We cannot choose that which we do not know. We must choose something within the range of our experience. And our freedom of choice consists in the alternative of making this choice or omitting to make it,—exerting ourselves or not exerting ourselves. Consciousness testifies universally to this extent of freedom. We know by our consciousness that we can exert ourselves or not exert ourselves at any moment,—exert ourselves to act or not exert ourselves to act, to speak or not to speak. This power of making or not making an effort is freedom in its simplest and lowest form.

In this lowest form, it is apparent that human freedom is inadequate to give any permanent character to human actions. They will be directed by the laws of organization and circumstance. Freedom 206 in this sense may be compared to the power which a man has of rowing a boat in the midst of a fog. He may exert himself to row, he may row at any moment forward or backward, to the right or to the left. He has this freedom,—but it does not enable him to go in any special direction. Not being able to direct his boat to any fixed aim, it is certain that it will be drifted by the currents or blown by the winds. Freedom in this form is only willfulness, because devoid of an inward law.

But let the will direct itself by a fixed law, and it at once becomes true freedom, and begins to impress itself upon actions, modifying the results of organization and circumstance. Not even in this case can it destroy those results; it only modifies them. It enters as a third factor with those other two to produce the product. The total character of a man's actions will be represented by a formula, thus: John's Organization _× John's Circumstances _× John's Freedom = John's Character.

Apply this to the state of society where the law of averages has been discovered. In such a society there are always to be found three classes of persons. In the first class, freedom is either dormant or is mere willfulness. The law of mind is subject therefore in these to the law of the members. The will is an enslaved will, and its influence on action is a nullity, not needing to be taken into the account. From this class come the largest proportion of the crimes and vices, regular in number 207 because resulting from constant conditions of society. Of these persons we can predict with certainty that, under certain strong temptations to evil, they will inevitably yield.

But in another class of persons the will has learned to direct itself by a moral law toward a fixed aim. The man in the boat is now steering by a compass, and ceases to be the sport of current and gale. The will reacts upon organization, and directs circumstance. The man has learned how to master his own nature, and how to arrange external conditions. We can predict with certainty that under no possible influences will this class yield to some forms of evil.

There is also in each community a third class, who are struggling, but not emancipated. They are partly free, but not wholly so. From this class come the slight variations of the average, now a little better, now a little worse.

Applying this view of the freedom of the will to history, we see that the problem is far more complicated than Mr. Buckle admits. Man's freedom, with him, is an element not to be taken into consideration, because it does not exist. But the truth is, that human freedom is not only a factor, but a variable factor, the value of which changes with every variety of human condition. In the savage condition it obeys organization and circumstances, and has little effect on social condition. But as civilization advances, the power of freedom to react 208 on organization and circumstance increases, varying however again, according to the force and inspiration of the ideas by which it is guided. And of all these ideas, precisely those which Mr. Buckle underrates, namely, moral and religious ideas, are those which most completely emancipate the will from circumstances, and vitalize it with an all-conquering force.

To see this, take two extreme cases,—that of an African Hottentot, and that of Joan of Arc. Free will in the African is powerless; he remains the helpless child of his situation. But the Maid of Arc, though utterly destitute of Mr. Buckle's "Intellectual Truths" (being unable to read or write, and having received no instruction save religious ideas), and wanting in the "Skepticism" which he thinks so essential to all historic progress, yet develops a power of will which reacts upon circumstances so as to turn into another channel the current of French history. All bonds of situation and circumstance are swept asunder by the power of a will set free by mighty religious convictions. The element of freedom, therefore, is one not to be neglected by an historian, except to his own loss.

The law of averages applies only to undeveloped men, or to the undeveloped sides of human nature, where the element of freedom has not come in play. When the human race shall have made such progress that it shall contain a city inhabited by a million persons all equal to the Apostle Paul 209 and the Apostle John in spiritual development, it will not be found that a certain regular number kill their wives every year, or that from two hundred and thirteen to two hundred and forty annually commit suicide. Nor will this escape from the averages be owing to an increased acquaintance with physical laws so much as to a higher moral development. We shall return to this point, however, when we examine more fully Buckle's doctrine in regard to the small influence of religion on civilization.

II. Mr. Buckle's View of Organization. —Mr. Buckle sets aside entirely the whole great fact of organization, upon which the science of ethnology is based. Perhaps the narrowness of his mind shows more conspicuously in this than elsewhere. He attributes no influence to race in civilization. While so many eminent writers at the present day say, with Mr. Knox, that "Race is everything," Mr. Buckle quietly rejoins that Race is nothing. "Original distinctions of race," he says, "are altogether hypothetical." "We have no decisive ground for saying that the moral and intellectual faculties in man are likely to be greater in an infant born in the most civilized part of Europe, than in one born in the wildest region of a barbarous country." (Vol. I. p. 127, Am. ed.) "We often hear of hereditary talents, hereditary vices, and hereditary virtues; but whoever will critically examine the evidence will find that we have no 210 proof of their existence." He doubts the existence of hereditary insanity, or a hereditary tendency to suicide, or even to disease. (Vol. I. p. 128, note.) He does not believe in any progress of natural capacity in man, but only of opportunity, "that is, an improvement in the circumstances under which that capacity after birth comes into play." "Here then is the gist of the whole matter. The progress is one, not of internal power, but of external advantage." He goes on to say, in so many words, that the only difference between a barbarian child and a civilized child is in the pressure of surrounding circumstances. In support of these opinions he quotes Locke and Turgot.

It is difficult to understand how an intelligent and well-informed man, an immense reader and active thinker, can have lived in the midst of the nineteenth century and retain these views. For students at every extreme of thought have equally recognized the force of organization, the constancy of race, the permanent varieties existing in the human family, the steady ruling of the laws of descent. If there is any one part of the science of anthropology in which the nineteenth century has reversed the judgment of the eighteenth,—and that equally among men of science, poets, materialists, idealists, anatomists, philologists,—it is just here. To find so intelligent a man reproducing the last century in the midst of the present is a little extraordinary.

211 Perhaps there could not be found four great thinkers more different in their tendencies of thought and range of study than Goethe, Spurzheim, Dr. Prichard, and Max Müller; yet these four, each by his own method of observation, have shown with conclusive force the law of variety and of permanence in organization. Goethe asserts that every individual man carries from his birth to his grave an unalterable speciality of being,—that he is, down to the smallest fibre of his character, one and the same man; and that the whole mighty power of circumstance, modifying everything, cannot abolish anything,—that organization and circumstance hold on together with an equally permanent influence in every human life. Gall and Spurzheim teach that every fibre of the brain has its original quality and force, and that such qualities and forces are transmitted by obscure but certain laws of descent. Prichard, with immense learning, describes race after race, giving the types of each human family in its physiology. And, finally, the great science of comparative philology, worked out by such thinkers and students as Bopp, Latham, Humboldt, Bunsen, Max Müller, and a host of others, has proved the permanence of human varieties by ample glossological evidence. Thus the modern science of ethnology has arisen, on the basis of physiology, philology, and ethology, and is perhaps the chief discovery of the age. Yet Mr. Buckle quietly ignores the whole of it, 212 and continues, with Locke, to regard every human mind as a piece of white paper, to be written on by external events,—a piece of soft putty, to be moulded by circumstances.

The facts on which the science of ethnology rests are so numerous and so striking, that the only difficulty in selecting an illustration is from the quantity and richness of material. But we may take two instances,—that of the Teutons and Kelts, to show the permanence of differences under the same circumstances, and that of the Jews, the Arabs, and the Gypsies, to show the continuity of identity under different circumstances. For if it can be made evident that different races of men preserve different characters, though living for long periods under similar circumstances, and that the same race preserves the same character, though living for long periods under different circumstances, the proof is conclusive that character is not derived from circumstances only. We shall not indeed go to the extreme of such ethnologists as Knox, Nott, or Gliddon, and say that "Race is everything, and circumstances nothing," but we shall see that Mr. Buckle is mistaken in saying that "Circumstances are everything, and race nothing."

The differences of character between the German and Keltic varieties of the human race are marked, but not extreme. They both belong to the same great Indo-European or Aryan family. 213 They both originated in Asia, and the German emigration seems to have followed immediately after that of the Kelts. Yet when described by Cæsar, Tacitus, and Strabo, they differed from each other exactly as they differ now. They have lived for some two thousand years in the same climate, under similar political and social institutions, and yet they have preserved their original diversity.

According to the description of Cæsar 30 and Tacitus 31 the German tribes differed essentially from the Gauls or Kelts in the following particulars. The Germans loved freedom, and were all free. The Kelts did not care for freedom. The meanest German was free. But all the inferior people among the Kelts were virtually slaves. The Germans had no priests, and did not care for sacrifices. The Kelts had a powerful priesthood and imposing religious rites. The Germans were remarkable for their blue eyes, light hair, and large limbs. The Kelts were dark-complexioned. The Gauls were more quick, but less persevering, than the Germans. Ready to attack, they were soon discouraged. Tacitus, describing the Germans, says: "They are a pure, unmixed, and independent race; there is a family likeness through the nation, the same form and features, stern blue eyes, ruddy hair; a strong sense of honor; reverence for women; religious, but without 214 a ritual; superstitiously believing in supernatural signs and portents, but not in a priesthood; not living in cities, but in scattered homes; respecting marriage; the children brought up in the dirt, among the cattle; hospitable, frank, and generous; fond of drinking beer, and eating preparations of milk."

The German and Keltic races, thus distinguished in the days of Cæsar, are equally distinct to-day. Catholicism, the religion of a priesthood, a ritual, and authority, prevails among the Kelts; Protestantism among the Germans. Ireland, being mainly Keltic, is Catholic, though a part of a Protestant nation. France, being mainly Keltic, is also Catholic, in spite of all its illumination, its science, and its knowledge of "intellectual laws." But as France contains a large infusion of German (Frankish) blood, it is the most Protestant of Catholic nations; while Scotland, containing the largest infusion of Keltic blood, is the most priest-ridden of Protestant nations. This last fact, which Mr. Buckle asserts, and spends half a volume in trying to account for, is explained at once by ethnology. Wherever the Germans go to-day, they remain the same people they were in the days of Tacitus; they carry the same blue eyes and light hair, the same love of freedom and hatred of slavery, the same tendencies to individualism in thought and life, the same tendency to superstitious belief in supernatural events, even when 215 without belief in any religion or church; and even the same love for beer, and "lac concretum," now called "schmeercase" in our Western settlements. The Kelt, also, everywhere continues the same. He loves equality more than freedom. He is a democrat, but not an abolitionist. Very social, clannish, with more wit than logic, very sensitive to praise, brave, but not determined, needing a leader, he carries the spirit of the Catholic Church into Protestantism, and the spirit of despotism into free institutions. And that physical, no less than mental qualities, continue under all climates and institutions is illustrated by the blue eyes and light hair which the traveller meets among the Genoese and Florentines, reminding him of their Lombard ancestors; while their superior tendencies to freedom in church and state suggest the same origin.

Nineteen hundred years have passed since Julius Cæsar pointed out these diversities of character then existing between the Germans and Kelts. Since then they have passed from barbarism to civilization. Instead of living in forests, as hunters and herdsmen, they have built cities, engaged in commerce, manufactures, and agriculture. They have been converted to Christianity, have conquered the Roman empire, engaged in crusades, fought in a hundred different wars, developed literatures, arts, and sciences, changed and changed again their forms of government, have been organized 216 by Feudalism, by Despotism, by Democracy, have gone through the Protestant reformation, have emigrated to all countries and climates; and yet, at the end of this long period, the German everywhere remains a German, and the Kelt a Kelt. The descriptions of Tacitus and Cæsar still describe them accurately. And yet Mr. Buckle undertakes to write a history of civilization without taking the element of race into account.

Perhaps, however, the power of this element of race is illustrated still more strikingly in the case of the wandering and dispersed families, who, having ceased to be a nation, continue in their dispersions to manifest the permanent type of their original and ineffaceable organization. Wherever the Jew goes, he remains a Jew. In all climates, under all governments, speaking all languages, his physical and mental features continue the same. This amazing fact has been held by many theologians to be a standing miracle of Divine Providence. But Providence works by law, and through second causes, and uses in this instance the laws of a specially stubborn organization and the force of a tenacious and persistent blood to accomplish its ends. The same kind of blood in the kindred Semitic family of Arabs produces a like result, though to a less striking degree. The Bedouins wander for thousands of miles away from their peninsula, but always continue Arabs 217 in appearance and character. The light, sinewy body and brilliant dark eye, the abstemious habit and roaming tendency, mark the Arab in Hindostan or Barbary. It is a thousand years since these nomad tribes left their native home, but they continue the same people on the Persian Gulf or amid the deserts of Sahara.

The case of the Gypsies, however, may be still more striking, because these seem, in their wanderings over the earth, to have gradually divested themselves of every other common attribute except that of race. Unlike the Jews and Arabs, they not only adopt the language, but also the religion, of the country where they happen to be. Yet they always remain unfused and unassimilated.

The Gypsies first appeared in Europe in 1417, in Moldavia, and thence spread into Transylvania and Hungary. 32 They afterward passed into all the countries of Europe, where their number, at the present time, is supposed to reach 700,000 or 800,000. Everywhere they adopt the common form of worship, but are without any real faith. Partially civilized in some countries, they always retain their own language beside that of the people among whom they live. This language, being evidently derived from the Sanskrit, settles the question of their origin. It is common to all their 218 branches through the world; as are also the sweet voice of their maidens, and their habits of horse-dealing, fortune-telling, and petty larceny. Without the bond of religion, history, government, literature, or mutual knowledge and intercourse, they still remain one and the same people in all their dispersions. What gives this unity and permanence, if not race? Yet race, to Mr. Buckle, means nothing.

III. Mr. Buckle's Theory concerning Skepticism. —One of the laws of history which Mr. Buckle considers himself to have established, if not discovered, is that a spirit of skepticism precedes necessarily the progress of knowledge, and therefore of civilization. By skepticism he means a doubt of the truth of received opinions. He asserts that "a spirit of doubt" is the necessary antecedent to "the love of inquiry." (Vol. I. p. 242, Am. ed.) "Doubt must intervene before investigation can begin. Here, then, we have the act of doubting as the originator, or at all events the necessary antecedent, of all progress."

If this were so, progress would be impossible. For the great groundwork of knowledge for each generation must be laid in the minds of children; and children learn, not by doubting, but by believing. Children are actuated at the same time by an insatiable curiosity and an unquestioning faith. They ask the reason of everything, and they accept every reason which is given them. If 219 they stopped to question and to doubt, they would learn very little. But by not doubting at all, while they are made to believe some errors, they acquire an immense amount of information. Kind Mother Nature understands the process of learning and the principle of progress much better than Mr. Buckle, and fortunately supplies every new generation of children with an ardent desire for knowledge, and a disposition to believe everything they hear.

Perhaps, however, Mr. Buckle refers to men rather than children. He may not insist on children's stopping to question everything they hear before they believe. But in men perhaps this spirit is essential to progress. What great skeptics, then, have been also great discoverers? Which was the greatest discoverer, Leibnitz or Bayle, Sir Isaac Newton or Voltaire? A faith amounting nearly to credulity is almost essential to discovery,—a faith which foresees what it cannot prove, which follows suggestions and hints, and so traces the faintest impressions left by the flying footsteps of truth. The attitude of the intellect in all discovery is not that of doubt, but of faith. The discoverer always appears to critical and skeptical men as a visionary.

"To skepticism," says Mr. Buckle, "we owe the spirit of inquiry, which, during the last two centuries, has gradually encroached on every possible subject, and reformed every department of practical 220 and speculative knowledge." But this is plainly what logicians call a ὕστερον πρότερον {hysteron proteron}, or what common people call "putting the cart before the horse." It is not skepticism which produces the spirit of inquiry, but the spirit of inquiry which produces skepticism. It was not a doubt concerning the Mosaic cosmogony which led to the study of geology; the study of geology led to the doubt of the cosmogony. Skepticism concerning the authority of the Church did not lead to the discovery of the Copernican system; the discovery of the Copernican system led to doubts concerning the authority of the Church which denied it. People do not begin by doubting, but by seeking. The love of knowledge leads them to inquire, and inquiry shows to them new truths. The new truths, being found to be opposed to received opinions, cause a doubt concerning those opinions to arise in the mind. Skepticism, therefore, may easily follow, but does not precede inquiry.

Skepticism, being a negative principle, is necessarily unproductive and barren. To have no strong belief, no fixed opinion, no vital conviction for or against anything,—this is surely not a state of intellect favorable to any great creation or discovery. Goethe, who was certainly no bigot, says, in a volume of his posthumous works, that skepticism is only an inverted superstition, and that this skepticism is one of the chief evils of the present age. "It is worse," he adds, "than superstition, for 221 superstition is the inheritance of energetic, heroic, progressive natures; skepticism belongs to weak, contracted, shrinking men, who venture not out of themselves." Lord Bacon says ("Advancement of Learning," Book II.) that doubts have their advantages in learning, of which he mentions two, but says that "both these commodities do scarcely countervail an inconvenience which will intrude itself, if it be not debarred; which is, that when a doubt is once received, men labor rather how to keep it a doubt than how to solve it." It will be seen, therefore, that Lord Bacon gives to skepticism scarcely more encouragement than is given it by Goethe.

Mr. Buckle says (Vol. I. p. 250) that "Skepticism, which in physics must always be the beginning of science, in religion must always be the beginning of toleration." We have seen that in physics skepticism is rather the end of science than its beginning, and the same is true of toleration. Skepticism does not necessarily produce toleration. The Roman augurs, who laughed in each other's faces, were quite ready to assist at the spectacle of Christians thrown to the lions. Skeptics, not having any inward conviction as a support, rest on established opinions, and are angry at seeing them disturbed. A strong belief is sufficient for itself, but a half-belief wishes to put down all doubts by force. This is well expressed by Thomas Burnet (Epistola 2, De Arch. Phil.): " Non potui non in 222 illam semper propendere opinionem, Neminem irasci in veritate defendenda, qui eandem plene possidet, viditque in claro lumine. Evidens enim, et indubitata ratio, sibi sufficit et acquiescit: aliisque a scopo oberrantibus, non tam succenset, quam miseretur. Sed cum argumentorum adversantium aculeos sentimus, et quodammodo periclitari causam nostram, tum demum æstuamus, et effervescimus. "

The least firm believers have often been the most violent persecutors. Nero persecuted the Christians; Marcus Antoninus persecuted them; but neither Nero nor Antoninus had any religious reason for this persecution. Antoninus, the best head of his time, was a sufficient skeptic to suit Mr. Buckle, as regards all points of the established religion, but his skepticism did not prevent him from being a persecutor. Unbelieving Popes, like Alexander VI. and Leo X., have persecuted. True toleration is not born of unbelief, as Mr. Buckle supposes, but of a deeper faith. Religious liberty has not been given to the world by skeptics, but by such men as Milton, Baxter, Jeremy Taylor, and Roger Williams.

So far from general skepticism being the antecedent condition of intellectual progress and discovery, it is a sign of approaching intellectual stagnation and decay. A great religious movement usually precedes and prepares the way for a great mental development. Thus the religious activity 223 born of Protestantism showed its results in England in the age of Elizabeth, and in a general outbreak of intellectual activity over all Europe. On the other hand, the skepticism of the eighteenth century was accompanied by comparative stagnation of thought throughout Christendom.

IV. Mr. Buckle's View of the small Influence of Religion on Civilization. —Mr. Buckle thinks it is erroneous to suppose that religion is one of the prime movers of human affairs. (Vol. I. p. 183.) Religion, according to him, has little to do with human progress. In this opinion, he differs from nearly all other great historians and philosophical thinkers. In modern times, Hegel, Niebuhr, Guizot, Arnold, and Macaulay, among others, have discussed the part taken by religious ideas in the development of man, laying the greatest stress on this element. But Mr. Buckle denies that religion is one of the prime movers in human affairs. The Crusades have been thought to have exercised some influence on European civilization. But religion was certainly the prime mover of the Crusades. Mohammedanism exercised some influence on the development of European life. But Mohammedanism was an embodiment of religious ideas. The Protestant Reformation shook every institution, every nation, every part of social life, in Christendom, and Europe rocked to its foundations under the influence of this great movement. But religion was the prime mover of it all. The English 224 Revolution turned on religious ideas. The rise of the Dutch Republic was determined by them. In one form they colonized South America and Mexico; in another form, they planted New England. Such great constructive minds as those of Alfred and Charlemagne have been benevolently inspired by rational religion; such dark, destructive natures as those of Philip II. of Spain, Catharine de Medicis of France, and Mary Tudor of England have been malevolently inspired by fanatical religion.

On what grounds, then, does Mr. Buckle dispute the influence of religion? On two grounds mainly. First, he tells us that moral ideas are not susceptible of progress, and therefore cannot have exercised any perceptible influence on the progress of civilization. For that which does not change, he argues, cannot influence that which changes. That which has been known for thousands of years cannot be the cause of an event which took place for the first time only yesterday. "Since civilization is the product of moral and intellectual agencies," says Mr. Buckle, "and since that product is constantly changing, it cannot be regulated by the stationary agent; because when surrounding circumstances are unchanged, a stationary agent can produce only a stationary effect." On this principle, gravitation could not be the cause of the appearance of Donati's comet in the neighborhood of the sun. For gravitation is a 225 stationary and uniform agent; it cannot therefore produce an accelerated motion. Mr. Buckle will answer, that though the law of gravitation is one and the same in all ages, and uniform in its action, the result of its action may be different at different times, according to the position in the universe of the object acted upon. True; and in like manner we may say, that, though religious ideas are immutable, the result of their action on the human mind may be different, according to the position of that mind in relation to them. The doctrine of one God, the Maker and Lord of all things, was not a new one, or one newly discovered in the seventh century. Yet when applied by Mohammed to the Arabian mind, it was like a spark coming in contact with gunpowder. Those wandering sons of the desert, unknown before in the affairs of the world, and a negative quantity in human history, sprang up a terrible power, capable of overrunning and conquering half the earth. Religion awakened them; religion organized them; religion directed them. The fact that an idea is an old one is no proof, therefore, that it may not suddenly begin to act with awful efficiency on civilization and the destiny of man.

The other reason given by Mr. Buckle why religious ideas have little influence in history is, that the religion of a nation is symptomatic of its mental and moral state. Men take the religious ideas which suit them. A religion not suited to a people 226 cannot be accepted by it; or, if accepted, has no influence on it. This thought, argued at considerable length by Mr. Buckle, is so perfectly true as to be a truism. The religion of a people is no doubt an effect. But may it not also be a cause? It, no doubt, cannot be received by a people not prepared for it. But does it therefore exercise no influence on a people which it finds prepared? Fire cannot explode an unexplosive material, nor inflame one not inflammable. But does it follow that it effects nothing when brought into contact with one which is inflammable or explosive? A burning coal laid on a rock or put into the water produces no effect. But does this prove that the explosion of gunpowder is in no manner due to the contact of fire?

"The religion of mankind," says Mr. Buckle, "is the effect of their improvement, and not the cause of it." His proof is that missions and missionaries among the heathen produce only a superficial change among barbarous and unenlightened tribes. Knowledge, he says, must prepare the way for it. There must, no doubt, be some kind of preparation for Christianity. But does it follow that Christianity, when its way is prepared, is only an effect? Why may it not be also a cause? Judaism prepared the way for Christianity. But did not Christianity produce some effect on Judaism? The Arab mind was prepared for Mohammedanism. But did not Mohammedanism produce 227 some effect on the Arab mind? Europe was prepared by various influences for Protestantism. But did not Protestantism produce some effects on Europe?

It might, with equal truth, and perhaps with greater truth, be asserted that intellectual ideas are the result of previous training, and that they are therefore an effect, and by no means a cause. The intellectual truths accepted by any period depend certainly on the advanced condition of human culture. You cannot teach logarithms to Hottentots, trigonometry to Digger Indians, or the differential calculus to the Feejee Islanders. Hence, according to our author's logic, those very intellectual ideas which he thinks the only great movers in human affairs are really no movers at all, but only symptoms of the actual intellectual condition of a nation.

But it is a curious fact, that, while Mr. Buckle considers religious ideas of so little importance in the history of civilization, he nevertheless devotes a large part of both his volumes to proving the great evil done to civilization by erroneous forms of religious opinion. Nearly the whole of his second volume is in fact given to showing the harm done in Spain and Scotland by false systems of religious thought. Why spend page after page in showing the evil influence of false religion on society, if religion, whether true or false, has scarcely any influence at all? Why search through 228 all the records of religious fanaticism and superstition, to bring up to the day the ghosts of dead beliefs, if these beliefs are, after all, powerless either for good or evil?

The second volume, the recent publication of which has suggested this second review of Mr. Buckle's work, contains much of interest and value, but suffers from the imperfect method of which we complained at the beginning of this article. It is chiefly devoted to a description of the evils resulting from priestcraft in the two countries of Spain and Scotland. It contains six chapters. The first is on the History of the Spanish Intellect from the fifth to the middle of the nineteenth century. The other five chapters relate to Scotland.

In the chapter on Spain Buckle attempts to show how loyalty and superstition began in this nation, and what has been the result. Of course, according to his theory, he is obliged to trace their origin to external circumstances, and he finds the cause of the superstition in the climate, which produced drought and famine, and in the earthquakes which alarmed the people. And here Mr. Buckle, following the philosophy of Lucretius, confounds religion and fear, and puts the occasion for the cause. But, beside earthquakes, the Arian heresy helped to create this superstition, by identifying the wars for national independence with those for religion, 229 and so giving a great ascendency to the priests. Hence the Church in Spain early acquired great power, and, naturally allying itself with the government, gave rise to the sentiment of loyalty, which was increased by the Moorish invasion and the long wars which followed. Loyalty and superstition thus became so deeply rooted in the Spanish mind, that they could not be eradicated by the efforts of the government. Nothing but knowledge can cure this blind and servile loyalty and this abject superstition, and while Spain continues sunk in ignorance it must always remain superstitious and submissive.

Some difficulties, however, suggest themselves in the way of this very simple explanation. If superstitious loyalty to Church and king comes from earthquakes, why are not the earthquake regions of the West Indies and of South America more loyal, instead of being in a state of chronic revolution? And how came Scotland to be so diseased with loyalty and superstition, when she is so free from earthquakes? And if knowledge is such a certain cure for superstition, why was not Spain cured by the flood of light which she, alone of all European countries, enjoyed in the Middle Ages? Spain was for a long time the source of science and art to all Europe, whose Christian sons resorted to her universities and libraries for instruction. There was taught to English, French, and German students the philosophy of Aristotle, 230 the Græco-Arabic literature, mathematics, and natural history. The numerals, gunpowder, paper, and other inventions of the Arabs, passed into Europe from Spain. She possessed, therefore, that knowledge of physical laws which Mr. Buckle declares to be the only cure for superstition. Yet she was not cured. The nation which, according to his theory, ought to have been soonest delivered from superstition, according to his statements has retained its yoke longer than any other.

From Spain Mr. Buckle passes to Scotland, where he finds a still more complicated problem. Superstition and loyalty ought to go together, he thinks,—and usually do; but in Scotland they are divorced. The Scotch have always been superstitious, but disloyal. To the explanation of this fact Mr. Buckle bends his energies of thought, and of course is able to find a theory to account for it. This theory we shall not stop to detail; it is too complex, and at the same time too superficial, to dwell upon. Its chief point is that the Protestant noblemen and Protestant clergy quarreled about the wealth of the Catholic Church, and so there was in Scotland a complete rupture between the two classes elsewhere in alliance. Thus "the clergy, finding themselves despised by the governing class, united themselves heartily with the people, and advocated democratic principles." Such is the explanation given to the course of history in a great nation. A quarrel between its noblemen 231 and its ministers (who are of course represented as mercenary self-seekers) determines its permanent character!

Mr. Buckle, to whom the love of plunder appears as the cause of what other men regard as loyalty or religion, explains by the same fact the loyalty of the Highlanders to King Charles. They thought that, if he conquered, he would allow them to plunder the Lowlanders once more. This is Buckle's explanation. An ethnologist would have remembered the fact that the Gaels are pure-blooded Kelts, and that the Kelts pur sang are everywhere distinguished for loyalty to their chiefs.

Mr. Buckle encounters another difficulty in Scottish history in this, that though a new and splendid literature arose in Scotland at the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was unable to diminish national superstition. It was thoroughly skeptical, and yet did not produce the appropriate effect of skepticism. So that at this point one of Mr. Buckle's four great laws of history seems to break down. For a moment he appears discouraged, and laments, with real pathos, the limitations of the human intellect. But in the next chapter he addresses himself again to the solution of his two-fold problem, viz.: "1st, that the same people should be liberal in their politics and illiberal in their religion; and, 2d, that their free and skeptical literature in the eighteenth century should have been unable to lessen their religious illiberality."

232 In approaching this part of his task, in the fifth chapter, our author gives a very elaborate and highly colored picture of the religion of Scotland. It is too well done. Like some of Macaulay's descriptions, it is so very striking as to impress us almost inevitably as a caricature. Every statement in which the horrors and cruelties of Calvinism are described is indeed reinforced by ample citations or plentiful references in the footnotes. But some of these seem capable of a different inference from that drawn in the text. For instance, he charges the Scottish clergy with teaching, that, though the arrangements originally made by the Deity to punish his creatures were ample, "they were insufficient; and hell, not being big enough to contain the countless victims incessantly poured into it, had in these latter days been enlarged. There was now sufficient room." He supports the charge by this reference to Abernethy,—"Hell has enlarged itself,"—apparently not being aware that Abernethy was merely quoting from Isaiah. He says that to write poetry was considered by the Scotch clergy to be a grievous offence, and worthy of special condemnation. He supports his statement by this reference: "A mastership in a grammar school was offered in 1767 to John Wilson, the author of 'Clyde'" (a poet, by the by, not found among the twenty John Wilsons commemorated by Watt). "But, says his biographer, the magistrates and ministers of 233 Greenock thought fit, before they would admit Mr. Wilson to the superintendence of the grammar school, to stipulate that he should abandon 'the profane and unprofitable art of poem-making.'" This fact, however, by no means proves that poetry was considered, theologically, a sin, for perhaps it was regarded practically as only a disqualification. It is to be feared that many of our school committees now—country shopkeepers, perhaps, or city aldermen—would, apart from Calvinism, think that a poet must be necessarily a dreamer and an unpractical man.

A few exaggerations of this kind there may be. But, on the whole, the account seems to be correctly given; and it is one which will do good.

In the remaining portion of the second volume Mr. Buckle gives a very vigorous description of the intellectual progress of the Scotch during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His account of Adam Smith as a writer is peculiarly brilliant. His views of Hume and Reid are ably drawn. Thence he proceeds to discuss the discoveries of Black and Leslie in natural philosophy, of Smith and Hutton in geology, of Cavendish in chemistry, of Cullen and Hunter in physiology and pathology. These discussions are interesting, and show a great range of knowledge and power of study in the writer. Yet they are episodes, and have little bearing on the main course of his thought.

234 We have thus given a cursory survey of these volumes. We do not think Buckle's philosophy sound, his method good, or his doctrines tenable. Yet we cannot but sympathize with one who has devoted his strength and youth with such untiring industry to such a great enterprise. And we must needs be touched with the plaintive confession which breaks from his wearied mind and exhausted hope in the last volume, when he accepts the defeat of his early endeavor, and submits to the disappointment of his youthful hope. We should be glad to quote the entire passage, 33 because it is the best in the book, and because he expresses in it, in the most condensed form, his ideas and purposes as an historic writer. But our limited space allows us only to commend it to the special attention of the reader.

235

VOLTAIRE 34

Mr. Parton has given us in these volumes 35 another of his interesting and instructive biographies. Not as interesting, indeed, as some others,—for example, as his life of Andrew Jackson; nor as instructive as his lives of Franklin and of Jefferson. The nature of the case made this impossible. The story of Jackson had never been told till Mr. Parton undertook it. It was a history of frontier life, of strange adventures, of desperate courage, of a force of character which conquered all obstacles and achieved extraordinary results; a story

No such interest attaches to the "Life of Voltaire." His most serious adventure was being shut up in the Bastille for a pasquinade, and being set free again on his solemn protestation, true or false, that he never wrote it. It is an old story, told a thousand times, with all its gloss, if it ever had any, 236 quite worn off. The "Life of Franklin," which, on the whole, we think the best of Parton's biographies, was full of interest and instruction of another kind. It was the life of a builder,—of one who gave his great powers to construction, to building up new institutions and new sciences, to the discovery of knowledge and the creation of national life. Voltaire was a diffuser of knowledge already found, but he had not the patience nor the devotion of a discoverer. His gift was not to construct good institutions, but to destroy bad ones,—a work the interest of which is necessarily ephemeral. No wonder, therefore, that Mr. Parton, with all his practiced skill as a biographer, has not been able to give to the story of Voltaire the thrilling interest which he imparted to that of Franklin and of Jackson.

We gladly take the present opportunity to add our recognition of Mr. Parton's services to those which have come to him from other quarters. A writer of unequal merit, and one whose judgment is often biased by his prejudices, he nevertheless has done much to show how biography should be written. Of all forms of human writing there is none which ought to be at once so instructive and so interesting as this, but in the large majority of instances it is the most vapid and empty. The good biographies, in all languages, are so few that they can almost be counted on the fingers; but these are among the most precious books in the 237 literature of mankind. The story of Ruth, the Odyssey of Homer, Plutarch's lives, the Memorabilia of Xenophon, the life of Agricola, the Confessions of Augustine, among the ancients; and, in modern times, Boswell's "Johnson," the autobiographies of Alfieri, Benvenuto Cellini, Franklin, Goethe, Voltaire's "Charles XII.," and Southey's "Life of Wesley" are specimens of what may be accomplished in this direction. It has been thought that any man can write a biography, but it requires genius to understand genius. How much intelligence is necessary to collect with discrimination the significant facts of a human life; to penetrate to the law of which they are the expression; to give the picturesque proportions to every part, to arrange the foreground, the middle distance, and the background of the panorama; to bring out in proper light and shadow the features and deeds of the hero! Few biographers take this trouble. They content themselves with collecting the letters written by and to their subject; sweeping together the facts of his life, important or otherwise; arranging them in some kind of chronological order; and then having this printed and bound up in one or two heavy volumes.

To all this many writers of biography add another fault, which is almost a fatal one. They treat their subject de haut en bas , preferring to look down upon him rather than to look up to him. They occupy themselves in criticising his 238 faults and pointing out his deficiencies, till they forget to mention what he has accomplished to make him worthy of having his life written at all. We lately saw a life of Pope treated in this style. One unacquainted with Pope, after reading it, would say, "If he was such a contemptible fellow, and his writings so insignificant, why should we have to read his biography?" Thomas Carlyle has the great merit of leading the way in the opposite direction, and of thus initiating a new style of biography. The old method was for the writer to regard himself as a judge on the bench, and the subject of his biography as a prisoner at the bar. Carlyle, in his "Life of Schiller," showed himself a loving disciple, sitting at the feet of his master. We recollect that when this work first appeared there were only a few copies known to be in this country. One was in the possession of an eminent professor in Harvard College, of whom the present writer borrowed it. On returning it, he was asked what he thought of it, and replied that he considered it written with much enthusiasm. "Yes," responded the professor, "I myself thought it rather extravagant." Enthusiasm in a biographer was then considered to be the same as extravagance. But this hero-worship, which is the charm in Plutarch, Xenophon, and Boswell, inspired a like interest in Carlyle's portraits of Schiller, Goethe, Richter, Burns, and the actors in the French Revolution. So true is his own warning: 239 "Friend, if you wish me to take an interest in what you say, be so kind as to take some interest in it yourself"—a golden maxim, to be kept in mind by all historians, writers of travels, biographers, preachers, and teachers. A social success may sometimes be accomplished by assuming the blasé air of the Roman emperor who said, "Omnia fui, nihil expedit;" but this tone is ruinous for one who wishes the ear of the public.

Since the days of Carlyle, others have written in the same spirit, allowing themselves to take more or less interest in the man whose life they were relating. So Macaulay, in his sketches of Clive, Hastings, Chatham, Pym, and Hampden; so Lewes, in his "Life of Goethe;" and so Parton, in his various biographies.

In some respects Mr. Parton's biography reminds us of Macaulay's History. Both have been credited with the same qualities, both charged with the same defects. Both are indefatigable in collecting material from all quarters,—from other histories and biographies, memoirs, letters, newspapers, broadsides, and personal communications gathered in many out-of-the-way localities. Both have the power of discarding insignificant details and retaining what is suggestive and picturesque. Both, therefore, have the same supreme merit of being interesting. Both have strong prejudices, take sides earnestly, forget that they are narrators, and begin to plead as attorneys and advocates. 240 Both have been accused, rightly or wrongly, of grave inaccuracies. But their defects will not prevent them from holding their place as teachers of the English-speaking public. English and American readers will long continue to think of Marlborough as Macaulay represents him; of Jackson and Jefferson as Parton describes them. Such Rembrandt-like portraits fix the attention by their strange chiaro-oscuro. They may not be like nature, but they take the place of nature. The most remarkable instance of this kind is the representation of Tiberius by Tacitus, which has caused mankind, until very recently, to consider Tiberius a monster of licentiousness and cruelty, in spite of the almost self-evident absurdity and self-contradiction of this assumption. 36 Limners with such a terrible power of portraiture should be very careful how they use it, and not abuse the faculty in the interest of their prejudices.

If Mr. Parton resembles Macaulay in some respects, in one point, at least, he is like Carlyle: that is, that his last hero is the least interesting. From Schiller and Goethe to Frederic the Great was a fall; and so from Franklin to Voltaire. Carlyle tells us what a weary task he had with his Prussian king, and we think that Mr. Parton's labors over the patriarch of the eighteenth-century 241 literature must have been equally distressing. At a distance, Voltaire is a striking phenomenon: the most brilliant wit of almost any period; the most prolific writer; a successful dramatist, historian, biographer, story-teller, controversialist, lyrical poet, student of science. "Truly, a universal genius, a mighty power!" we say. But look more closely, and this genius turns into talent; this encyclopædic knowledge becomes only superficial half knowledge; this royalty is a sham royalty; it does not lead the world, but follows it. The work into which Voltaire put his heart was destruction—the destruction of falsehoods, bigotries, cruelties, and shams. It was an important duty, and some one had to do it. But it was temporary, and one of which the interest is soon over. If Luther and the other reformers had aimed at only destroying the Church of Rome, their influence would have speedily ceased. But they rebuilt, as they destroyed; the sword in one hand, and the trowel in the other. They destroyed in order to build; they took away the outgrown house, to put another in its place. Voltaire did not go so far as that; he wanted no new church in the place of the old one.

Voltaire and Rousseau are often spoken of as though they were fellow-workers, and are associated in many minds as sharing the same convictions. Nothing can be more untrue. They were radically opposite in the very structure of their 242 minds, and their followers and admirers are equally different. If all men can be divided into Platonists and Aristotelians, they may be in like manner classified as those who prefer Voltaire to Rousseau, and vice versa . Both were indeed theists, and both opposed to the popular religion of their time. Both were brilliant writers, masters of the French language, listened to by the people, and with a vast popularity. Both were more or less persecuted for their religious heresies. So far they resemble each other. But these are only external resemblances; radically and inwardly they were polar opposites. What attracted one repelled the other. Voltaire was a man of the world, fond of society and social pleasures; the child of his time, popular, a universal favorite. Rousseau shrank from society, hated its fashions, did not enjoy its pleasures, and belonged to another epoch than the eighteenth century. Rousseau believed in human nature, and thought that if we could return to our natural condition the miseries of life would cease. Voltaire despised human nature; he forever repeated that the majority of men were knaves and fools. Rousseau distrusted education and culture as they are commonly understood; but to Voltaire's mind they were the only matters of any value,—all that made life worth living. Rousseau was more like Pascal than like Voltaire; far below Pascal, no doubt, in fixed moral principles and ascetic virtue. 243 Yet he resembled him in his devotion to ideas, his enthusiasm for some better day to come. Both were out of place in their own time; both were prophets crying in the wilderness. Put Voltaire between Pascal and Rousseau, and it would be something like the tableau of Goethe between Basedow and Lavater.

The difference between Voltaire and Rousseau was really that between a man of talent and a man of genius. Voltaire, brilliant, adroit, full of resource, quick as a flash, versatile, with immense powers of working, with a life full of literary successes, has not left behind him a single masterpiece. He comes in everywhere second best. As a tragedian he is inferior to Racine; as a wit and comic writer far below Molière; and he is quite surpassed as a historian and biographer by many modern French authors. No germinating ideas are to be found in his writings, no seed corn for future harvests. He thought himself a philosopher, and was so regarded by others; but neither had his philosophy any roots to it. A sufficient proof of this is the fact that he shared the superficial optimism of the English deists, as expressed by Bolingbroke and Pope, until the Lisbon earthquake, by destroying thirty thousand people, changed his whole mental attitude. Till then he could say with Pope, "Whatever is, is right." After that, most things 244 which are, appeared to him fatally and hopelessly wrong. That thirty thousand persons should perish in a few minutes, in great suffering, he thought inconsistent with the goodness of God. But take the whole world over, thirty thousand people are continually perishing, in the course of a few hours or days. What difference does it make, in a philosophical point of view, if they die all at once in a particular place, or at longer intervals in many places? Voltaire asks, "What crime had those infants committed who lie crushed on their mother's breasts?" What crime, we reply, have the infants committed who have been dying by millions, in suffering, since the world began? "Was Lisbon," he asks, "more wicked than Paris?" But had Voltaire never noticed before that wicked people often live on in health and pleasure, while the good suffer and die? Voltaire did not see, what it requires very little philosophy to discover, that a Lisbon earthquake really presents no more difficulty to the reason than the suffering and death of a single child.

Another fact which shows the shallow nature of Voltaire's way of thinking is his expectation of destroying Christianity by a combined attack upon it of all the wits and philosophers. Mr. Parton tells us that "l'Infâme," which Voltaire expected to crush, "was not religion, nor the Christian religion, nor the Roman Catholic Church. It was," he says, " religion claiming supernatural authority, 245 and enforcing that claim by pains and penalties ." No doubt it was the spirit of intolerance and persecution which excited his indignation. But the object of that indignation was not the abstraction which Mr. Parton presents to us. It was something far more concrete. There is no doubt that Voltaire confounded Christianity with the churches about him, and these with their abuses; and thus his object was to sweep away all positive religious institutions, and to leave in their place a philosophic deism. Else what meaning in his famous boast that "it required twelve men to found a belief, which it would need only one man to destroy"? What meaning, otherwise, in his astonishment that Locke, "having in one book so profoundly traced the development of the understanding, could so degrade his own understanding in another"?—referring, as Mr. Morley believes, to Locke's "Reasonableness of Christianity." Voltaire saw around him Christianity represented by cruel bigots, ecclesiastics living in indolent luxury, narrow-minded and hard-hearted priests. That was all the Christianity he saw with his sharp perceptive faculty; and he had no power of penetrating into the deeper life of the soul which these corruptions misrepresented. We do not blame him for this; he was made so; but it was a fatal defect in a reformer. The first work of a reformer is to discover the truth and the good latent amid the abuses he wishes to reform, and for the 246 sake of which men endure the evil. A Buddhist proverb says, "The human mind is like a leech: it never lets go with its tail till it has taken hold somewhere else with its head." Distinguish the good in a system from the evil; show how the good can be preserved, though the evil is abandoned, and then you may hope to effect a truly radical reform. Radicalism means going to the roots of anything. Voltaire was incapable of becoming a radical reformer of the Christian Church, because he had in himself no faculty by which he could appreciate the central forces of Christianity. Mr. Morley says that Voltaire "has said no word, nor even shown an indirect appreciation of any word said by another, which stirs and expands that indefinite exaltation known as the love of God," "or of the larger word holiness." "Through the affronts which his reason received from certain pretensions, both in the writers and in some of those whose actions they commemorated, this sublime trait in the Bible, in both portions of it, was unhappily lost to Voltaire. He had no ear for the finer vibrations of the spiritual voice." And so also speaks Carlyle: "It is a much more serious ground of offense that he intermeddled in religion without being himself, in any measure, religious; that he entered the temple and continued there with a levity which, in any temple where men worship, can beseem no brother man; that, in a word, he ardently, and with long-continued effort, 247 warred against Christianity, without understanding beyond the mere superficies of what Christianity was." In fact, in the organization of Voltaire, the organ of reverence, "the crown of the whole moral nature," seems to have been at its minimum. A sense of justice there was; an ardent sympathy with the oppressed, a generous hatred of the oppressor, a ready devotion of time, thought, wealth, to the relief of the down-trodden victim. Therefore, with such qualities, Voltaire, by the additional help of his indefatigable energy, often succeeded in plucking the prey from the jaws of the lion. He was able to defeat the combined powers of Church and State in his advocacy of some individual sufferer, in his battle against some single wrong. But his long war against the Catholic Church in France left it just where it was when that war began. Its power to-day in France is greater than it was then, because it is a purer and better institution than it was then. That Sphinx still sits by the roadside propounding its riddle. Voltaire was not the Œdipus who could solve it, and so the life of that mystery remains untouched until now.

The Henriade has often been considered the great epic poem of France. This merely means that France has never produced a great epic poem. The Henriade is artificial, prosaic, and has no particle of the glow, the fire, the prolonged enthusiasm, which alone can give an epic poem to 248 mankind. In this sentence all competent critics are agreed.

Voltaire was busy with literature during his whole life. He not only wrote continually himself, but he was a critic of the writings of others. His mind was essentially critical,—formed to analyze, discriminate sharply, compare, and judge by some universal standard of taste. Here, if anywhere, he ought to be at his best; here, if in any department, he should stand at the head of the world's board of literary censors. But here, again, he is not even second-rate; here, more than elsewhere, he shows how superficial are his judgments. He tests every writer by the French standard in the eighteenth century. Every word which Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, have said of other writers is full of value and interest to-day. But who would go to Voltaire for light on any book or author? We have an instinctive but certain conviction that all his views are limited by his immediate environment, perverted by his personal prejudices. Thus, he prefers Ariosto to the Odyssey, and Tasso's Jerusalem to the Iliad. 37 His inability to comprehend the greatness of Shakespeare is well known. He is filled with indignation because a French critic had called Shakespeare "the god of the stage." "The blood boils in my old veins," says he; "and what is frightful to think of, it was I myself who first 249 showed to Frenchmen the few pearls to be found in the dunghill." 38 Chesterfield's Letters to his Son he considers "the best book upon education ever written." 39 This is the book in which a father teaches his son the art of polite falsehood, of which Dr. Johnson says that "it shows how grace can be united with wickedness,"—the book whose author is called by De Vere the philosopher of flattery and dissimulation. He admitted that there were some good things in Milton, but speaks of his conceptions as "odd and extravagant." 40 He thought Condorcet much superior to Pascal. The verses of Helvetius he believed better than any but those of Racine. The era was what Villemain calls "the golden age of mediocre writers;" and Voltaire habitually praised them all. But these writers mostly belonged to a mutual admiration society. The anatomist Tissot, in one of his physiological works, says that the genius of Diderot came to show to mankind how every variety of talent could be brought to perfection in one man. Diderot, in his turn, went into frantic delight over the novels of Richardson. "Since I have read these works," he says, "I make them my touchstone; those who do not admire them are self-condemned. O my friends, what majestic dramas are these three, Clarissa, Sir Charles Grandison, and Pamela!" Such was the eighteenth century; and Voltaire belonged to it with all the intensity 250 of his ardent nature. He may be said never to have seen or foreseen anything better. Living on the very verge of a great social revolution, he does not appear to have suspected what its nature would be, even if he suspected its approach. The cruelties of the Church exasperated him, but the political condition of society, the misery of the peasants, the luxury of the nobles, the despotism of the king, left him unmoved. He was singularly deficient in any conception of the value of political liberty or of free institutions. If he had lived to see the coming of the Revolution, it would have utterly astounded him. His sympathies were with an enlightened aristocracy, not with the people. In this, too, he was the man of his time, and belonged to the middle of his century, not the end of it. He saw and lamented the evils of bad government. He pointed out the miseries produced by war. He abhorred and denounced the military spirit. He called on the clergy, in the name of their religion, to join him in his righteous appeals against this great curse of mankind. "Where," he asks, "in the five or six thousand sermons of Massillon, are there two in which anything is said against the scourge of war?" He rebukes the philosophers and moralists, also, for their delinquency in this matter, and replies forcibly to Montesquieu's argument that self-defense sometimes makes it necessary to begin the attack on a neighboring nation. But he does not go back to trace 251 the evil to its root in the absence of self-government. In a letter to the King of Prussia he says, "When I asked you to become the deliverer of Greece, I did not mean to have you restore the democracy. I do not love the rule of the rabble" ( gouvernement de la canaille ). Again, writing to the same, in January, 1757, he says, "Your majesty will confer a great benefit by destroying this infamous superstition [Christianity]; I do not say among the canaille , who do not deserve to be enlightened, and who ought to be kept down under all yokes, but among honest people, people who think. Give white bread to the children, but only black bread to the dogs." In 1762, writing to the Marquis d'Argens, he says, "The Turks say that their Koran has sometimes the face of an angel, sometimes the face of a beast. This description suits our time. There are a few philosophers,—they have the face of an angel; all else much resembles that of a beast." Again, he says to Helvetius, "Consider no man your neighbor but the man who thinks; look on all other men as wolves, foxes, and deer." "We shall soon see," he writes to D'Alembert, "new heavens and a new earth,—I mean for honest people; for as to the canaille , the stupidest heaven and earth is all they are fit for." The real government of nations, according to him, should be administered by absolute kings, in the interest of freethinkers.

It is true that after Rousseau had published his 252 trumpet-call in behalf of democratic rights, Voltaire began to waver. It has been remarked that "at the very time when he expressed an increasing ill-will against the person of the author of 'Emile,' he was irresistibly attracted to the principal doctrines of Rousseau. He entered, as if in spite of himself, into paths toward which his feet were never before directed. As if to revenge himself for coming under this salutary influence, he pursued Rousseau with blind anger." 41 He harshly attacked the Social Contract, but accepted the sovereignty of the people; saying that "civil government is the will of all, executed by a single one, or by several, in virtue of the laws which all have enacted." He, however, speedily restricted this democratic principle by confining the right of making laws to the owners of real estate. He declares that those who have neither house nor land ought not to have any voice in the matter. He now began (in 1764) to look forward to the end of monarchies, and to expect a revolution. Nevertheless, he plainly declares, "The pretended equality of man is a pernicious chimera. If there were not thirty laborers to one master, the earth would not be cultivated." But in practical and humane reforms Voltaire took the lead, and did good work. He opposed examination by torture, the punishment of death for theft, the confiscation of the property of the condemned, the penalties 253 against heretics; secret trials; praised trial by jury, civil marriage, right of divorce, and reforms in the direction of hygiene and education.

And, above all, whatever fault may be found with Voltaire, let us never cease to appreciate his generous efforts in behalf of the unfortunate victims of the atrocious bigotry which then prevailed in France. It is not necessary to dwell here on the cases of Calas, the Sirvens, La Barre, and the Count de Lally. They are fully told by Mr. Parton, and to his account we refer our readers. In 1762 the Protestant pastor Rochette was hanged, by order of the Parliament of Toulouse, for having exercised his ministry in Languedoc. At the same time three young gentlemen, Protestants, were beheaded, for having taken arms to defend themselves from being slaughtered by the Catholics. In 1762, the Protestant merchant Calas, an aged and worthy citizen of Toulouse, was tortured and broken on the wheel, on a wholly unsupported charge of having killed his son to keep him from turning Catholic. A Protestant girl named Sirven was, about the same time, taken from her parents, and shut up in a convent, to compel her to change her religion. She escaped, and perished by accident during her flight. The parents were accused of having killed her to keep her from becoming a Catholic. They escaped, but the wife died of exposure and want. In 1766 a crucifix was injured by some wanton persons. The Bishop of Amiens 254 called out for vengeance. Two young officers, eighteen years old, were accused. One escaped; the other, La Barre, was condemned to have his tongue cut out, his right hand cut off, and to be burned alive. The sentence was commuted to death by decapitation. Voltaire, seventy years old, devoted himself with masterly ability and untiring energy to save these victims; and when he failed in that, to show the falsehood of the charges, and to obtain a revision of the judgments. He used all means: personal appeals to men in power and to female favorites, eloquence, wit, pathos in every form of writing. He called on all his friends to aid him. He poured a flood of light into these dark places of iniquity. His generous labors were crowned with success. He procured a reversal of these iniquitous decisions; in some cases a restoration of the confiscated property, and a public recognition of the innocence of those condemned. Without knowing it, he was acting as a disciple of Jesus. Perhaps he may have met in the other world with the great leader of humanity, whom he never understood below, and been surprised to hear him say, "Inasmuch as thou hast done it to the least of my little ones, thou hast done it unto me."

Carlyle tells us that the chief quality of Voltaire was adroitness . He denies that he was really a great man, and says that in one essential mark of greatness he was wholly wanting, that is, earnestness. He adds that Voltaire was by birth a 255 mocker; that this was the irresistible bias of his disposition; that the first question with him was always not what is true but what is false, not what is to be loved but what is to be contemned. He was shallow without heroism, full of pettiness, full of vanity; "not a great man, but only a great persifleur ."

But certainly some other qualities than these were essential to produce the immense influence which he exerted in his own time, and since. Beside the extreme adroitness of which Carlyle speaks, he had as exhaustless an energy as was ever granted to any of the sons of men. He was never happy except when he was at work. He worked at home, he worked when visiting, he worked in his carriage, he worked at hotels. Amid annoyances and disturbances which would have paralyzed the thought and pen of others, Voltaire labored on. Upon his sick bed, in extreme debility and in old age, that untiring pen was ever in motion, and whatever came from it interested all mankind. Besides the innumerable books, tracts, and treatises which fill the volumes of his collected works, there are said to be in existence fourteen thousand of his letters, half of which have never been printed. But this was only a part of the outcome of his terrible vitality. He was also an enterprising and energetic man of business. He speculated in the funds, lent money on interest, fitted out ships, bought and sold real estate, solicited and obtained pensions. In this 256 way he changed his patrimony of about two hundred thousand francs to an annual income of the same amount,—equal to at least one hundred thousand dollars a year at the present time. He was determined to be rich, and he became so; not because he loved money for itself, nor because he was covetous. He gave money freely; he used it in large ways. He sought wealth as a means of self-defense,—to protect himself against the persecution which his attacks on the Church might bring upon him. He also had, like a great writer of the present century, Walter Scott, the desire of being a large landed proprietor and lord of a manor; and, like Scott, he became one, reigning at Ferney as Scott ruled at Abbotsford.

In defending himself against his persecutors he used other means not so legitimate. One of his methods was systematic falsehood. He first concealed, and then denied, the authorship of any works which would expose him to danger. He took the tone of injured innocence. For example, he had worked with delight, during twenty years, on his wretched "Pucelle." To write new lines in it, or a new canto, was his refreshment; to read them to his friends gave him the most intense satisfaction. But when the poem found its way into print, with what an outcry he denies the authorship, almost before he is charged with it. He assumes the air of calumniated virtue. The charge, he declares, is one of the infamous inventions of his enemies. 257 He writes to the "Journal Encyclopédique," "The crowning point of their devilish manœuvres is the edition of a poem called 'La Pucelle d'Orléans.' The editor has the face to attribute this work to the author of the 'Henriade,' the 'Zaïre,' the 'Mérope,' the 'Alzire,' the 'Siècle de Louis XIV.' He dares to ascribe to this author the flattest, meanest, and most gross work which can come from the press. My pen refuses to copy the tissue of silly and abominable obscenities of this work of darkness." When the "Dictionnaire Philosophique" began to appear, he wrote to D'Alembert, "As soon as any danger arises, I beg you will let me know, that I may disavow the work in all the public papers with my usual candor and innocence." Mr. Parton tells us that he had a hundred and eight pseudonyms. He signed his pamphlets A Benedictine, The Archbishop of Canterbury, A Quaker, Rev. Josias Roussette, the Abbé Lilladet, the Abbé Bigorre, the Pastor Bourn. He was also ready to tell a downright lie when it suited his convenience.

When "Candide" was printed, in 1758, he wrote, as Mr. Parton tells us, to a friendly pastor in Geneva, "I have at length read 'Candide.' People must have lost their senses to attribute to me that pack of nonsense. I have, thank God, better occupation. This optimism [of Pangloss] obviously destroys the foundation of our holy religion." Our holy religion!

258 An excuse may be found for these falsehoods. A writer, it may be said, has a right to his incognito; if so, he has a right to protect it by denying the authorship of a book when charged with it. This is doubtful morality, but Voltaire went far beyond this. He volunteered his denials. He asserted in every way, with the most solemn asseverations, that he was not the author of a book which he had written with delight. But this was not the worst. He not only told these author's lies, but he was a deliberate hypocrite, professing faith in Christianity, receiving its sacraments, asking spiritual help from the Pope, and begging for relics from the Vatican, at the very time that he was hoping by strenuous efforts to destroy both Catholicism and Christianity.

When he was endeavoring to be admitted to a place in the French Academy, he wrote thus to the Bishop of Mirepoix: 42 "Thanks to Heaven, my religion teaches me to know how to suffer. The God who founded it, as soon as he deigned to become man, was of all men the most persecuted. After such an example, it is almost a crime to complain.... I can say, before God who hears me, that I am a good citizen and a true Catholic.... I have written many pages sanctified by religion." In this Mr. Parton admits that he went too far.

When at Colmar, as a measure of self-protection, 259 he resolved to commune at Easter. Mr. Parton says that Voltaire had pensions and rents to the amount of sixty thousand livres annually, of which the king could deprive him by a stroke of the pen. So he determined to prove himself a good Catholic by taking the sacraments. As a necessary preliminary, he confessed to a Capuchin monk. He wrote to D'Argens just before, "If I had a hundred thousand men, I know what I should do; but as I have them not, I shall commune at Easter!" But, writing to Rousseau, he thinks it shameful in Galileo to retract his opinions. Mr. Parton too, who is disposed to excuse some of these hypocrisies in Voltaire, is scandalized because the pastors of Geneva denied the charges of heresy brought against them by Voltaire; saying that "we live, as they lived, in an atmosphere of insincerity." In the midst of all this, Voltaire took credit to himself for his frank avowals of the truth: "I am not wrong to dare to utter what worthy men think. For forty years I have braved the base empire of the despots of the mind." Mr. Parton elsewhere seems to think it would have been impossible for Voltaire to versify the Psalms; as it was "asked him to give the lie publicly to his whole career." But if communing at Easter did not do this, how could a versification of a few psalms accomplish it? Parton quotes Condorcet as saying that Voltaire could not become a hypocrite, even to be a cardinal. Could 260 any one do a more hypocritical action than to partake the sacraments of a Church which he despised in order to escape the danger of persecution?

When building his house at Ferney, the neighboring Catholic curés interfered with him. They prohibited the laborers from working for him. To meet this difficulty he determined to obtain the protection of the Pope himself. So he wrote to the Pope, asking for a relic to put in the church he had built, and received in return a piece of the hair-shirt of St. Francis. He went to mass frequently. Meantime, in his letters to his brother freethinkers, he added his usual postscript, "Ecrasez l'Infâme;" begging their aid in crushing Catholicism and Christianity. Yet it does not seem that he considered himself a hypocrite in thus conforming outwardly to a religion which he hated. He thinks that others who do so are hypocrites, but not that he is one. In 1764 he writes to Madame du Deffand, "The worst is that we are surrounded by hypocrites, who worry us to make us think what they themselves do not think at all." So singular are the self-deceptions of the human mind. He writes to Frederic ridiculing the sacrament of extreme unction, and then solemnly partakes of the eucharist. Certainly he did not belong to the noble army of martyrs. He expected to overturn a great religious system, not by the power of faith, but by ingenious pamphlets, brilliant sarcasms, adroit deceptions. In thus thinking he was eminently superficial.

261 His theory on this subject is given in an article in the "Dictionnaire Philosophique," quoted by Mr. Parton: "Distinguish honest people who think, from the populace who were not made to think. If usage obliges you to perform a ridiculous ceremony for the sake of the canaille, and on the road you meet some people of understanding, notify them by a sign of the head, or a look, that you think as they do.... If imbeciles still wish to eat acorns, let them have acorns."

Mr. Parton describes in full (vol. ii. p. 410) the ceremony of the eucharist of which Voltaire partook in his own church at Ferney. It was Easter Sunday, and Voltaire mounted the pulpit and preached a sermon against theft. Hearing of this, the bishop was scandalized, and forbade all the curates of the diocese from confessing, absolving, or giving the sacrament to Voltaire. Upon this Voltaire writes and signs a formal demand on the curate of Ferney to allow him to confess and commune in the Catholic Church, in which he was born, has lived, and wishes to die; offering to make all necessary declarations, all requisite protestations, in public or private, submitting himself absolutely to all the rules of the Church, for the edification of Catholics and Protestants. All this was a mere piece of mystification and fun. He pretended to be too sick to go to the church, and made a Capuchin come and administer the eucharist to him in bed; Voltaire saying, "Having my 262 God in my mouth, I declare that I forgive all my enemies." No wonder that with all his marvelous ability and his long war upon the Catholic Church he was unable to make any lasting impression upon it. Talent is not enough to make revolutions of opinion. No serious faith was ever destroyed by a jest.

If we return to Rousseau, and compare his influence with that of Voltaire, we shall find that it went far deeper. Voltaire was a man of immense talent. Talent originates nothing, but formulates into masterly expression what has come to it from the age in which it lives. Not a new idea can be found, we believe, in all Voltaire's innumerable writings. But genius has a vision of ideal truth. It is a prophet of the future. Rousseau, with his many faults, weaknesses, follies, was a man of genius. He was probably the most eloquent writer of French prose who has ever appeared. He was a man possessed by his ideas. He had none of the adroitness, wit, ingenuity, of Voltaire. Instead of amassing an enormous fortune, he supported himself by copying music. Instead of being surrounded by admirers and flatterers, he led a solitary life, alone with his ideas. Instead of denying the authorship of his works, and so giving an excuse to the authorities to leave him quiet, he put his name to his writings. He worked for his bread with his hands, and in his "Emile" he recommended that all boys should be taught some manual 263 craft. Voltaire ridiculed the gentleman carpenter of Rousseau; but before that generation passed away, many a French nobleman had reason to lament that he had not been taught to use the saw and the plane.

If Voltaire belonged to the eighteenth century, and brought to a brilliant focus its scattered rays, Rousseau belonged more to the nineteenth. Amidst the persiflage , the mockery, the light and easy philosophy, of his day, he stood, "among them, but not of them, in a crowd of thoughts which were not their thoughts." This is the true explanation of his weakness and strength, and of the intense dislike felt for him by Voltaire and the school of Voltaire. They belonged to their time, Rousseau to a coming time.

The eighteenth century, especially in France, was one in which nature was at its minimum and art at its maximum. All was art. But art separated from nature becomes artificial, not to say artful. Decorum was the law in morals; the bienséances and convenances ruled in society. The stage was bound by conventional rules. Poetry walked in silk attire, and made its toilette with the elaborate dignity of the levée of the Grand Monarque. Against all this Rousseau led the reaction—the reaction inevitable as destiny. As art had been pushed to an extreme, so now naturalism was carried to the opposite extreme. Rousseau was the apostle of nature in all things. 264 Children were to be educated by the methods of nature, not according to the routine of old custom. Governments were to go back to their origin in human nature; society was to be reorganized on first principles. This voice crying in the wilderness was like the trumpet of doom to the age, announcing the age to come. It laid the axe at the root of the tree. Its outcome was the French Revolution, that rushing, mighty flood, which carried away the throne, the aristocracy, the manners, laws, and prejudices of the past.

In his first great work, the work which startled Europe, Rousseau recalled man to himself. He said, "The true philosophy is to commune with one's self,"—the greatest saying, thinks Henri Martin, that had been pronounced in that century. Rousseau condemned luxury, and uttered a prophetic cry of woe over the tangled perplexities of the time. "There is no longer a remedy, unless through some great revolution, almost as much to be feared as the evil it would cure,—which it is blamable to desire, impossible to foresee ."

" Man is naturally good ," says Rousseau. Before the frightful words "mine" and "thine" were invented, how could there have been, he asks, any vices or crimes? He denounced all slavery, all inequality, all forms of oppression. His writings were full of exaggeration, but, says the French historian, "no sooner had he opened his lips than he restored earnestness to the world." 265 The same writer, after speaking of the faults of the "Nouvelle Héloïse," adds that nevertheless "a multitude of the letters of his 'Julie' are masterpieces of eloquence, passion, and profundity; and the last portions are signalized by a moral purity, a wisdom of views, and a religious elevation altogether new in the France of the eighteenth century." Concerning "Emile," he says, "It is the profoundest study of human nature in our language; it was an ark of safety, launched by Providence on the waves of skepticism and materialism. If Rousseau had been stricken out of the eighteenth century, whither, we seriously ask, would the human mind have drifted?" 43

The "Social Contract" appeared in 1762. In this work Rousseau swept away by his powerful eloquence the arguments which placed sovereignty elsewhere than in the hands of the people. This fundamental idea was the seed corn which broke from the earth in the first Revolution, and bears its ripe fruit in republican France to-day. D'Alembert, who disliked Rousseau, said of "Emile" that "it placed him at the head of all writers." The "Social Contract," illogical and unsound in many things, yet tore down the whole framework of despotism. Van Laun, a more recent historian, tells us that Rousseau was a man of the people, who knew all their wants; that every vice he attacked was one that they saw really present 266 in their midst; that he "opened the flood-gates of suppressed desires, which gushed forth, overwhelming a whole artificial world." Villemain writes that the words of Rousseau, "descending like a flame of fire, moved the souls of his contemporaries;" and that "his books glow with an eloquence which can never pass away." Morley, to whom Rousseau is essentially antipathic, says of the "Social Contract" that its first words, "Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains," thrilled two continents,—that it was the gospel of the Jacobins; and the action of the convention in 1794 can be explained only by the influence of Rousseau. He taught France to believe in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Locke had already taught this doctrine in England, where it produced no such violent outbreak, because it encountered no such glaring abuses.

Such is the striking contrast between these two greatest writers in modern French literature. It is singular to observe their instinctive antagonism in every point of belief and character. The merits of one are precisely opposite to those of the other: their faults are equally opposed.

The events of Voltaire's life have been so often told that Mr. Parton has not been able to add much to our knowledge of his biography. He was born in 1694 and died in 1778, at the age of eighty-four, though at his birth he was so feeble 267 that those who believe that the world's progress depends on the survival of the fittest would have thought him not fit to be brought up. This was also the case with Goethe and Walter Scott. His father was a notary, and the name Arouet had that of Voltaire added to it, it being a name in his mother's family. This affix was adopted by the lad when in the Bastille, at the age of twenty-four. As a duck takes to water, so Voltaire took to his pen. In his twelfth year he wrote verses addressed to the Dauphin, which so pleased the famous Ninon de l'Enclos, then in her ninetieth year, that she left the boy a legacy of two thousand francs. He went to a Jesuits' school, and always retained a certain liking for the Jesuits. His father wished to make him a notary, but he would "pen a stanza when he should engross;" and the usual struggles between the paternal purpose and the filial instinct ended, as usual, in the triumph of the latter. He led a wild career for a time, in the society of dissipated abbès, debauched noblemen, and women to whom pleasure was the only object. Suspected of having written a lampoon on the death of Louis XIV., he was sent to the Bastille, and came forth not only with a new name, but with literature as his aim for the rest of his life. His first play appeared on the stage in 1718, and from that time he continued to write till his death. He traveled from the château of one nobleman to another, pouring out his satires 268 and sarcasms through the press; threatened by the angry rulers and priests who governed France, but always escaping by some adroit manœuvre. In England he became a deist and a mathematician. His views of Christ and Christianity were summed up in a quatrain which may be thus translated. Speaking of Jesus, he says,—

He lived many years at Cirey with the Marchioness of Châtelet; the marquis, her husband, accepting the curious relation without any objection. Then followed the still stranger episode of his residence with Frederic the Great, their love quarrels and reconciliations. After this friendship came to an end, Voltaire went to live near Geneva in Switzerland, but soon bought another estate just out of Switzerland, in France, and a third a short distance away, in the territory of another power. Thus, if threatened in one state, he could easily pass into another. Here he lived and worked till the close of his life, an untiring writer. He was a man of infinite wit, kind-hearted, with little malignity of any sort, wishing in the main to do good. His violent attacks upon Christianity may be explained by the fact of the corruptions of the Church which were around him. The Church of France in that day, in its higher circles, was a 269 persecuting Church, yet without faith: greedy for wealth, living in luxury, careless of the poor, and well deserving the attacks of Voltaire. That he could not look deeper and see the need of religious institutions of a better sort was his misfortune.

This work is a storehouse of facts for the history of Voltaire and his time. We do not think it will materially alter the judgment pronounced on him by such critics as Carlyle, Morley, and the majority of French writers in our day. Voltaire was a shining light in his age, but that age has gone by, and can never return.

270

RALPH WALDO EMERSON 44

Matt. vi. 23.— If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

It is natural and fit that many pulpits to-day should take for their theme the character and influence of the great thinker and poet who has just left us; for every such soul is a new revelation of God's truth and love. Each opens the gateway between our lower world of earthly care and earthly pleasure into a higher heavenly world of spirit. Such men lift our lives to a higher plane, and convince us that we, also, belong to God, to eternity, to heaven. And few, in our day, have been such mediators of heavenly things to mankind as Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Last Sunday afternoon, when the town of Concord was mourning through all its streets for the loss of its beloved and revered citizen; when the humblest cottage had on its door the badge of sorrow; when great numbers came from abroad to testify their affection and respect, that which impressed me the most was the inevitable response of the human heart to whatever is true and good. Cynics may tell us that men are duped by charlatans, 271 led by selfish demagogues, incapable of knowing honor and truth when set before them; that they always stone their prophets and crucify their saviors; that they have eyes, and do not see; ears, and never hear. This is all true for a time; but inevitably, by a law as sure as that which governs the movements of the planets, the souls of men turn at last toward what is true, generous, and noble. The prophets and teachers of the race may be stoned by one generation, but their monuments are raised by the next. They are misunderstood and misrepresented to-day, but to-morrow they become the accredited leaders of their time. Jesus, who knew well that he would be rejected and murdered by a people blind and deaf to his truth, also knew that this truth would sooner or later break down all opposition, and make him master and king of the world. "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me."

Last Sunday afternoon, as the grateful procession followed their teacher to his grave in the Concord cemetery, the harshness of our spring seemed to relent, and Nature became tender toward him who had loved her so well. I thought of his words, "The visible heavens and earth sympathized with Jesus." The town where "the embattled farmers stood;" where the musket was discharged which opened the War of the Revolution—the gun of which Lafayette said, "It was the alarm-gun of the world;" the town of Hawthorne's "Old Manse," 272 and of his grave, now that Emerson also sleeps in its quiet valley, has received an added glory. It has become one of the "Meccas of the mind."

Let me describe the mental and spiritual condition of New England when Emerson appeared. Calvinism, with its rigorous dogmatism, was slowly dying, and had been succeeded by a calm and somewhat formal rationalism. Locke was still the master in the realm of thought; Addison and Blair in literary expression. In poetry, the school of Pope was engaged in conflict with that of Byron and his contemporaries. Wordsworth had led the way to a deeper view of nature; but Wordsworth could scarcely be called a popular writer. In theology a certain literalism prevailed, and the doctrines of Christianity were inferred from counting and weighing texts on either side. Not the higher reason, with its intuition of eternal ideas, but the analytic understanding, with its logical methods, was considered to be the ruler in the world of thought. There was more of culture than of intellectual life, more of good habits than of moral enthusiasm. Religion had become very much of an external institution. Christianity consisted in holding rational or orthodox opinions, going regularly to church, and listening every Sunday to a certain number of prayers, hymns, and sermons. These sermons, with some striking exceptions, were rather tame and mechanical. In Boston, it is true, Buckminster had appeared,—that soul of flame which 273 soon wore to decay its weak body. The consummate orator Edward Everett had followed him in Brattle Square pulpit. Above all, Channing had looked, with a new spiritual insight, into the truths of religion and morality. But still the mechanical treatment prevailed in a majority of the churches of New England, and was considered, on the whole, to be the wisest and safest method. There was an unwritten creed of morals, literature, and social thought to which all were expected to conform. There was little originality and much repetition. On all subjects there were certain formulas which it was considered proper to repeat. "Thou art a blessed fellow," says one of Shakespeare's characters, "to think as other people think. Not a man's thought in the world keeps the roadway better than thine." The thought of New England kept the roadway. Of course, at all times a large part of the belief of the community is derived from memory, custom, and imitation; but in those days, if I remember them aright, it was regarded as a kind of duty to think as every one else thought; a sort of delinquency, or weakness, to differ from the majority.

If the movements of thought are now much more independent and spontaneous; if to-day traditions have lost their despotic power; if even those who hold an orthodox creed are able to treat it as a dead letter, respectable for its past uses, but by no means binding on us now, this is largely 274 owing to the manly position taken by Emerson. And yet, let it be observed, this influence was not exercised by attacking old opinions, by argument, by denial, by criticism. Theodore Parker did all this, but his influence on thought has been far less than that of Emerson. Parker was a hero who snuffed the battle afar off, and flung himself, sword in hand, into the thick of the conflict. But, much as we love and reverence his honesty, his immense activity, his devotion to truth and right, we must admit to-day, standing by these two friendly graves, that the power of Emerson to soften the rigidity of time-hardened belief was far the greater. It is the old fable of the storm and sun. The violent attacks of the tempest only made the traveler cling more closely to his cloak; the genial heat of the sun compelled him to throw it aside. In all Emerson's writings there is scarcely any argument. He attacks no man's belief; he simply states his own. His method is always positive, constructive. He opens the windows and lets in more light. He is no man's opponent; the enemy of no one. He states what he sees, and that which he does not see he passes by. He was often attacked, but never replied. His answer was to go forward, and say something else. He did not care for what he called the "bugbear consistency." If to-day he said what seemed like Pantheism, and to-morrow he saw some truth which seemed to reveal a divine personality, 275 a supreme will, he uttered the last, as he had declared the first, always faithful to the light within. He left it to the spirit of truth to reconcile such apparent contradictions. He was like his own humble-bee—

By this method of positive statement he not only saved the time usually wasted in argument, attack, reply, rejoinder, but he gave us the substance of Truth, instead of its form. Logic and metaphysic reveal no truths; they merely arrange in order what the higher faculties of the mind have made known. Hence the speedy oblivion which descends on polemics of all sorts. The great theological debaters, where are they? The books of Horsley and McGee are buried in the same grave with those of Belsham and Priestley, their old opponents. The bitter attacks on Christianity by Voltaire and Paine are inurned in the same dark and forgotten vaults with the equally bitter defenses of Christianity by its numerous champions. Argument may often be necessary, but no truth is slain by argument; no error can be kept alive by it. Emerson is an eminent example of a man who never replied to attacks, but went on his way, and saw at last all opposition hushed, all hostility at an end. He 276 devoted his powers to giving to his readers his insights, knowing that these alone feed the soul. Thus men came to him to be fed. His sheep heard his voice. Those who felt themselves better for his instruction followed him. He collected around him thus an ever-increasing band of disciples, until in England, in Germany, in all lands where men read and think, he is looked up to as a master. Many of these disciples were persons of rare gifts and powers, like Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Hawthorne. Many others were unknown to fame, yet deeply sensible of the blessings they had received from their prophet and seer of the nineteenth century. For this was his office. He was a man who saw. He had the vision and the faculty divine. He sat near the fountain-head, and tasted the waters of Helicon in their source.

His first little book, a duodecimo of less than a hundred pages, called "Nature," published in 1836, indicates all these qualities. It begins thus:—

"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticisms. The foregoing generations beheld God and Nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight, and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation 277 to us, and not the history of theirs?... The sun shines to-day also.... Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable."

This was his first doctrine, that of self-reliance. He taught that God had given to every man the power to see with his own eyes, think with his own mind, believe what seemed to him true, plant himself on his instincts, and, as he says, "call a pop-gun a pop-gun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth declare it to be the crack of doom." This was manly and wholesome doctrine. It might, no doubt, be abused, and lead some persons to think they were men of original genius when they were only eccentric. It may have led others to attack all institutions and traditions, as though, if a thing were old, it was necessarily false. But Emerson himself was the best antidote to such extravagance. To a youth who brought to him a manuscript confuting Plato he replied, "When you attack the king you ought to be sure to kill him." But his protest against the prevailing conventionalism was healthy, and his call on all "to be themselves" was inspiring.

The same doctrine is taught in the introductory remarks of the editors of the "Dial." They say they have obeyed with joy the strong current of thought which has led many sincere persons to reprobate that rigor of conventions which is turning them to stone, which renounces hope and only looks backward, which suspects improvement, and 278 holds nothing so much in horror as the dreams of youth. This work, the "Dial," made a great impression, out of all proportion to its small circulation. By the elders it was cordially declared to be unintelligible mysticism, and so, no doubt, much of it was. Those inside, its own friends, often made as much fun of it as those outside. Yet it opened the door for many new and noble thoughts, and was a wild bugle-note, a reveillé, calling on all generous hearts to look toward the coming day.

Here is an extract from one of Emerson's letters from Europe as early as March, 1833. It is dated Naples:—

"And what if it be Naples! It is only the same world of cakes and ale, of man, and truth, and folly. I will not be imposed upon by a name. It is so easy to be overawed by names that it is hard to keep one's judgment upright, and be pleased only after your own way. Baiæ and Pausilippo sound so big that we are ready to surrender at discretion, and not stickle for our private opinion against what seems the human race. But here's for the plain old Adam, the simple, genuine self against the whole world."

Again he says: "Nothing so fatal to genius as genius. Mr. Taylor, author of 'Van Artevelde,' is a man of great intellect, but by study of Shakespeare is forced to reproduce Shakespeare."

Thus the first great lesson taught by Mr. Emerson 279 was "self-reliance." And the second was like it, though apparently opposed to it, "God-reliance." Not really opposed to it, for it meant this: God is near to your mind and heart, as he was to the mind and heart of the prophets and inspired men of the past. God is ready to inspire you also if you will trust in him. In the little book called "Nature" he says:—

"The highest is present to the soul of man; the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or power, or beauty, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and by which they are. Believe that throughout nature spirit is present; that it is one, that it does not act upon us from without, but through ourselves.... As a plant on the earth, so man rests on the bosom of God, nourished by unfailing fountains, and drawing at his need inexhaustible power."

And so in his poem called "The Problem" he teaches that all religions are from God; that all the prophets and sibyls and lofty souls that have sung psalms, written scripture, and built the temples and cathedrals of men, were inspired by a spirit above their own. He puts aside the shallow explanation that any of the great religions ever came from priestcraft:—

280

In all that Emerson says of nature he is equally devout. He sees God in it all. It is to him full of a divine charm. "In the woods," he says, "is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reigns, and we return to reason and faith." "The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me. I am part and particle of God." For saying such things as these he was accused of Pantheism. And he was a Pantheist; yet only as Paul was a Pantheist when he said, "In Him we live and move and have our being;" "From whom and through whom are all things;" "The fullness of him who filleth all in all." Emerson was, in his view of nature, at one with Wordsworth, who said:—

Emerson has thus been to our day the prophet 281 of God in the soul, in nature, in life. He has stood for spirit against matter. Darwin, his great peer, the serene master in the school of science, was like him in this,—that he also said what he saw and no more. He also taught what God showed to him in the outward world of sense, as Emerson what God showed in the inward world of spirit. Amid the stormy disputes of their time, each of these men went his own way, his eye single and his whole body full of light. The work of Darwin was the easier, for he floated with the current of the time, which sets at present so strongly toward the study of things seen and temporal. But the work of Emerson was more noble, for he stands for things unseen and eternal,—for a larger religion, a higher faith, a nobler worship. This strong and tender soul has done its work and gone on its way. But he will always fill a niche of the universal Church as a New England prophet. He had the purity of the New England air in his moral nature, a touch of the shrewd Yankee wit in his speech, and the long inheritance of ancestral faith incarnate and consolidated in blood and brain. But to this were added qualities which were derived from some far-off realm of human life: an Oriental cast of thought, a touch of mediæval mysticism, and a vocabulary brought from books unknown to our New England literature. No commonplaces of language are to be found in his writings, and though he read the older writers, he 282 does not imitate them. He, also, like his humble-bee, has gathered contributions from remotest fields, and enriched our language with a new and picturesque speech all his own.

Let us, then, be grateful for this best of God's gifts,—another soul sent to us filled with divine light. Thus we learn anew how full are nature and life of God:—

One word concerning Mr. Emerson's relation to Christ and to Christianity. The distinction which he made between Jesus and other teachers was, no doubt, one of degree and not one of kind. He put no great gulf of supernatural powers, origin, or office between Christ and the ethnic prophets. But his reverence for Jesus was profound and tender. Nor did he object to the word "Christian" or to the Christian Church. In recent years, at least, he not unfrequently attended the services of the Unitarian Church in his town, and I have met him at Unitarian conventions, a benign and revered presence.

In the cemetery at Bonn, on the Rhine, is the tomb of Niebuhr, the historian, a man of somewhat like type, as I judge, to our Emerson. At least, some texts on his monument would be admirably appropriate for any stone which may be 283 placed over the remains of the American prophet and poet in the sweet valley of tombs in Concord.

One of these texts was from Sirach xlvii. 14, 17:

And equally appropriate would be this Horatian line, also on Niebuhr's monument:—

From a lifelong friend of Emerson I have just received a letter containing these words, which, better than most descriptions, give the character of his soul:—

"And so the white wings have spread, and the great soul has left us.

He had no vanity, no selfishness; no greed, no hate; none of the weights that drag on common mortals. His life was an illumination; a large, fair light; the Pharos of New England, as in other days our dear brother called him. And this light shone further and wider the longer it burned."

284

HARRIET MARTINEAU 45

The whole work 46 is very interesting. How could it be otherwise, in giving the history of so remarkable a life? The amount of literary work which Miss Martineau performed is amazing. She began to write for the press when she was nineteen, and continued until she could no longer hold her pen. The pen was her sword, which she wielded with a warrior's joy, in the conflict of truth with error, of right with wrong. She wrote many books; but her articles in reviews and newspapers were innumerable. We find no attempt in either part of this biography to give a complete list of her writings. Perhaps it would be impossible. She never seems to have thought of keeping such a record herself, any more than a hero records the number of the blows he strikes, in battle. No sooner had she dismissed one task than another came; and sometimes several were going on together. Like other voluminous writers, she enjoyed the exercise of her productive powers; and, as she somewhere tells us, her happiest hours were those in which she was seated at her desk with her pen.

285

Her principal works cover a large range of thought and study. One of her first books, "The Traditions of Palestine," she continued to regard long after with more affection than any other of her writings, except "Eastern Life." But her authorship began when she was nineteen, in an article contributed to a Unitarian monthly. Afterwards she obtained three separate prizes offered by the Central Unitarian Association for three essays on different topics. About the same time she wrote "Five Years of Youth," a tale which she never looked at afterward. But her first great step in authorship, and that which at once made her a power in politics and in literature, was taken when she commenced her series of tales on "Political Economy." She began, however, to write these stories, not knowing that she was treating questions of Political Economy, "the very name of which," she says, "was then either unknown to me, or conveyed no meaning." She was then about twenty-five years old. She had the usual difficulties with various publishers which unknown authors are sure to experience, and these tales, which became so popular, were rejected by one firm after another. One of them was refused by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, as being too dull. The president of that Society, Lord Brougham, afterward vented his rage on the sub-committee which rejected the offered story, and so had permitted their Society, "instituted for that very purpose, 286 to be driven out of the field by a little deaf woman at Norwich." At last a publisher was found who agreed to take the books on very unsatisfactory terms. As soon as the first number appeared, the success of the series was established. A second edition of five thousand copies was immediately called for,—the entire periodical press came out in favor of the tales,—and from that hour Miss Martineau had only to choose what to write, sure that it would at once find a publisher.

She was at this time thirty years old. She was already deaf, her health poor; but she then began a career of intellectual labor seldom equaled by the strongest man through the longest life. She began to write every morning after breakfast; and, unless when traveling, seldom passed a morning during the rest of her life without writing,—working from eight o'clock until two. Her method was, after selecting her subject, to procure all the standard works upon it, and study them. She then proceeded to make the plan of her work, and to draw the outline of her story. If the scene was laid abroad, she procured books of travels and topography. Then she drew up the contents of each chapter in detail, and, after this preliminary labor, the story was written easily and with joy.

Of these stories she wrote thirty-four in two years and a half. She was then thirty-two. She received £2,000 for the whole series,—a sufficiently small compensation,—but she established 287 her position and her fame. Her principal books published afterward were her two works on America, the novels "Deerbrook" and "The Hour and the Man;" nine volumes of tales on the Forest and Game Laws; four stories in the "Playfellow;" "Life in the Sick-Room;" "Letters on Mesmerism;" "Eastern Life, Past and Present;" "History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace;" "Letters on the Laws of Man's Social Nature and Development;" "Translation and Condensation of Comte's Positive Philosophy;" besides many smaller works, making fifty-two titles in Allibone. In addition to this, she wrote many articles in reviews and magazines; and Mrs. Chapman mentions that she sent to a single London journal, the "Daily News," sixteen hundred articles, at the rate sometimes of six a week. Surely Harriet Martineau was one who worked faithfully while her day endured.

But, if we would do her justice, we must consider also the motive and spirit in which she worked. Each thing she did had for its purpose nothing merely personal, but some good to mankind. Though there was nothing in her character of the sentimentalism of philanthropy, she was filled with the spirit of philanthropy. A born reformer, she inherited from her Huguenot and her Unitarian ancestors the love of truth and the hatred of error, with the courage which was ready to avow her opinions, however unpopular. Thus, her work 288 was warfare, and every article or book which she printed was a blow delivered against some flagrant wrong, or what she believed such,—in defense of some struggling truth, or something supposed to be truth. She might be mistaken; but her purposes through life were, in the main, noble, generous, and good.

And there can be no question of her ability, moral and intellectual. No commonplace mind could have overcome such obstacles and achieved such results. Apparently she had no very high opinion of her own intellectual powers. She denies that she possesses genius; but she asserts her own power. She criticises "Deerbrook" with some severity. And, in fact, Harriet Martineau's mind is analytic rather than creative; it is strong rather than subtle; and, if it possesses imagination, it is of rather a prosaic kind. Her intellect is of a curiously masculine order; no other female writer was ever less feminine. With all her broad humanity she has little sympathy for individuals. A large majority of those whom she mentions in her memoirs she treats with a certain contempt.

Her early life seems to have been very sad. We are again and again told how she was misunderstood and maltreated in her own home. Her health was bad until she was thirty; partly owing, as she supposed, to ill-treatment. She needed affection, and was treated with sternness. Justice she did not receive, nor kindness, and her heart was soured 289 and her temper spoiled, so she tells us, by this mismanagement. As she does not specify, or give us the details of this ill-treatment, the story is useless as a warning; and we hardly see the reason for thus publishing the wrongs of her childhood. As children may be sometimes unjust to parents, no less than parents to children, the facts and the moral are both left uncertain. And, on the whole, her chief reason for telling the story appears to be the mental necessity she was under of judging and sentencing those from whom she supposes herself to have received ill-treatment in any part of her life.

This is indeed the most painful feature of the work before us. Knowing the essentially generous and just spirit of Harriet Martineau, it is strange to see how carefully she has loaded this piece of artillery with explosive and lacerating missiles, to be discharged after her death among those with whom she had mingled in social intercourse or literary labors. Some against whom she launches her sarcasms are still living; some are dead, but have left friends behind, to be wounded by her caustic judgments. Is it that her deficiency in a woman's sensibility, or the absence of a poetic imagination, prevented her from realizing the suffering she would inflict? Or is it the habit of mind from which those are apt to suffer who devote themselves to the reform of abuses? As each kind of manual occupation exposes the workman to some 290 special disease,—as those who dig canals suffer from malaria, and file-grinders from maladies of the lungs,—so it seems that each moral occupation has its appropriate moral danger. Clergymen are apt to be dogmatic or sectarian; lawyers become sharp and sophistical; musicians and artists are irritable; and the danger of a reformer is of becoming a censorious critic of those who cannot accept his methods, or who will not join his party. That Harriet Martineau did not escape this risk will presently appear.

While writing her politico-economical stories she moved to London, and there exchanged the quiet seclusion of her Norwich life for social triumphs of the first order, and intercourse with every kind of celebrity. All had read her books, from Victoria, who was then a little girl perusing them with her governess, to foreign kings and savants of the highest distinction. So this young author—for she was only thirty—was received at once into the most brilliant circles of London society. But it does not appear that she lost a single particle of her dignity or self-possession. Among the great she neither asserted herself too much nor showed too much deference. Vanity was not her foible; and her head was too solidly set upon her shoulders to be turned by such successes. She enjoyed the society of these people of superior refinement, rank, and culture, but did not come to depend upon it; and in all this Harriet Martineau sinned not in her spirit.

291 But why, in writing about these people long afterward, should she have thought it necessary to produce such sharp and absolute sentences on each and all? Into this judgment-hall of Osiris-Martineau, every one whom she has ever known is called up to receive his final doom. The poor Unitarian ministers, who had taught the child as they best could, are dismissed with contemptuous severity. This religious instruction had certainly done her some good. Religion, she admits, was her best resource till she wrought her way to something better. Ann Turner, daughter of the Unitarian minister, gave her piety a practical turn, and when afraid of every one she saw, she was not at all afraid of God; and, on the whole, she says religion was a great comfort and pleasure to her. Nevertheless, she is astonished that Unitarians should believe that they are giving their children a Christian education. She accuses these teachers of her childhood of altering the Scripture to suit their own notions; being apparently ignorant that most of the interpolations or mistranslations of which they complained have since been conceded as such by the best Orthodox critics. But she does not hesitate to give her opinion of all her old acquaintances in the frankest manner, and for the most part it is unfavorable. Mrs. Opie and Mrs. John Taylor are among the "mere pedants." William Taylor, from want of truth and conviction, talked blasphemy. She speaks with contempt of a physician 292 who politely urged her to come and dine with him, because he had neglected her until she became famous. Lord Brougham was "vain and selfish, low in morals, and unrestrained in temper." Lord Campbell was "flattering to an insulting degree;" Archbishop Whately, "odd and overbearing," "sometimes rude and tiresome," and "singularly overrated;" Stanley, Bishop of Norwich, "timid," "sensitive," "heedless," "without courage or dignity." Macaulay "talked nonsense" about the copyright bill, and "set at naught every principle of justice in regard to authors' earnings." Macaulay's opposition to that bill was based on such grounds of perfect justice that he defeated it single-handed. But Harriet Martineau decided then and there that Macaulay was a failure, and that "he wanted heart," and that he "never has achieved any complete success." The poet Campbell had "a morbid craving for praise." As to women, Lady Morgan, Lady Davy, Mrs. Jameson, Mrs. Austin, "may make women blush and men be insolent" with their "gross and palpable vanities." Landseer was a toady to great people. Morpeth had "evident weaknesses." Sir Charles Bell showed his ignorance by relying on the argument for Design. The resources of Eastlake were very bornés . John Sterling "rudely ignored me." Lady Mary Shepherd was "a pedant." Coleridge, she asserts, will only be remembered as a warning; though twenty years ago she, Miss Martineau, 293 "regarded him as a poet." Godwin was "timid." Basil Montagu was "cowardly;" and Lord Monteagle "agreeable enough to those who were not particular about sincerity." Urquhart had "insane egotism and ferocious discontent." The Howitts made "an unintelligible claim to my friendship," their "tempers are turbulent and unreasonable." It may be some explanation of this unintelligible claim that it was heard through her trumpet. Fredrika Bremer is accused of habits of "flattery" and "a want of common sense." Miss Mitford is praised, but then accused of a "habit of flattery," and blamed for her "disparagement of others." And it is Miss Martineau who brings this charge! She also tells us that Miss Bremer "proposes to reform the world by a floating religiosity," whatever that may be. But perhaps her severest sentence is pronounced on the Kembles, who are accused of "incurable vulgarity" and "unreality." In this case, as in others, Miss Martineau pronounces this public censure on those whom she had learned to know in the intimacy of private friendship and personal confidence. She thus violates the rules rather ostentatiously laid down in her Introduction. For she claims there that she practices self-denial in interdicting the publication of her letters, 47 and gives her reasons 294 thus: "Epistolary conversation is written speech; and the onus rests with those who publish it to show why the laws of honor, which are uncontested in regard to conversation, may be violated when the conversation is written instead of spoken." Most of her sharp judgments above quoted are pronounced on those whom she learned to know in the private intercourse of society. Sometimes she recites the substance of what she heard (or supposed that she heard; for she used an ear-tube when she first went to live in London). Thus she tells about a conversation with Wordsworth, and reports his complaints of Jeffrey and other reviewers, and quotes him as saying about one of his own poems, that it was "a chain of very valooable thoughts." "You see, it does not best fulfill the conditions of poetry; but it is" (solemnly) "a chain of extremely valooable thoughts." She then proceeds to pronounce her sentence on Wordsworth as she did on Coleridge. She felt at once, she says, in Wordsworth's works, "the absence of sound, accurate, weighty thought, and of genuine poetic inspiration." She also informs us that "the very basis of philosophy is absent in him," and that it is only necessary "to open Shelley, Tennyson, or even poor Keats ... to feel that, with all their truth and all their charm, few of Wordsworth's pieces are poems." " Even poor Keats! " This is her de haut en bas style of criticism on Wordsworth, one of whose poems is generally 295 accepted as the finest written in the English language during the last hundred years. And this is her way of respecting "the code of honor" in regard to private conversation!

In 1834, at the age of thirty-two, Harriet Martineau sailed for the United States, where she remained two years. She went for rest; but the quantity of work done in those two years would have been enough to fill five or six years of any common life. At this point she began a new career; forming new ties, engaging in new duties, studying new problems, and beginning a new activity in another sphere of labor. The same great qualities which she had hitherto displayed showed themselves here again; accompanied with their corresponding defects. Her wonderful power of study enabled her to enter into the very midst of the phenomena of American life; her noble generosity induced her to throw herself heart, hand, and mind into the greatest struggle then waging on the face of the earth. The antislavery question, which the great majority of people of culture despised or disliked, took possession of her soul. She became one of the party of Abolitionists, of which Mr. Garrison was the chief, and lived to see that party triumph in the downfall of slavery. She took her share of the hatred or the scorn heaped on that fiery body of zealous propagandists, and was counted worthy of belonging to what she herself called "the Martyr Age of the United States."

296 Fortunately for herself, before she visited Boston, and became acquainted with the Abolitionists, she went to Washington, and traveled somewhat extensively in the Southern States. At Washington she saw many eminent Southern senators, who cordially invited her to visit them at their homes. In South Carolina she was welcomed or introduced by Mr. Calhoun, Governor Hayne, and Colonel Preston. Judge Porter took charge of her in Louisiana. In Kentucky she was the guest of Mrs. Irwin, Henry Clay's daughter and neighbor. Without fully accepting Mrs. Chapman's somewhat sweeping assertion that there was no eminent statesman, man of science, politician, partisan, philanthropist, jurist, professor, merchant, divine, nor distinguished woman, in the whole land, who did not pay her homage, there is no doubt that she received the respect and good-will of many such. She was deeply impressed, she says, on arriving in the United States, with a society basking in one bright sunshine of good-will. She thought the New Englanders, perhaps, the best people in the world. Many well-known names appear in these pages, as soon becoming intimate acquaintances or friends; among these were Judge Story, John G. Palfrey, Stephen C. Phillips, the Gilmans of South Carolina, Mr. and Mrs. Furness of Philadelphia, and in Massachusetts the Sedgwicks, the Follens, Mr. and Mrs. Ellis Gray Loring, Mr. and Mrs. Charles G. Loring, Dr. Channing, Mr. and Mrs. 297 Henry Ware, Dr. Flint of Salem, and Ephraim Peabody.

When Miss Martineau had identified herself with Mr. Garrison and his friends by taking part in their meetings, those who had merely sought her on account of her position and reputation naturally fell away. But it may be doubted whether she was in such danger of being mobbed or murdered as she and her editor suppose. She seems to think that Mr. Henry Ware did a very brave deed in driving to Mr. Francis Jackson's house to take her home from an antislavery meeting. She speaks of the reign of terror which existed in Boston at that time. No doubt she, and other Abolitionists, had their share of abuse; but it is not probable that any persons were, as she thought, plotting against her life. She and her friends were deterred from taking a proposed journey to Cincinnati and Louisville by being informed that it was intended to mob her in the first city and to hang her in the second. Now, the writer of this article was at that time residing in Louisville, and though antislavery discussions and antislavery lectures had taken place there about that period, and though antislavery articles not unfrequently appeared in the city journals, no objection or opposition was made to all this by anybody in that place. In fact, it was easier at that time to speak against slavery in Louisville than in Boston. The leading people in Kentucky of all parties were then openly 298 opposed to slavery, and declared their hope and purpose of making Kentucky a free State. A year later, Dr. Channing published his work on slavery, which was denounced for its abolitionism by the "Boston Statesman," and sharply criticised in a pamphlet by the Massachusetts attorney-general. But copious extracts from this work, especially of the parts which exposed the sophisms of the defenders of slavery, were published in a Louisville magazine, and not the least objection was made to it in that city. At a later period it might have been different, though an antislavery paper was published in Louisville as late as 1845, one of the editors being a native Kentuckian.

After her return from the United States she published her two works, "Society in America," and "Retrospect of Western Travel;" and then wrote her first novel, "Deerbrook." The books on America were perhaps the best then written by any foreigner except De Tocqueville. They were generous, honest, kind, and utterly frank,—they were full of capital descriptions of American scenery. She spoke the truth to us, and she spoke it in love. The chief fault in these works was her tone of dogmatism, and her ex cathedrâ judgments; which, as we have before hinted, are among the defects of her qualities.

In 1838, when thirty-six years old, she was taken with serious illness, which confined her to her room for six years. She attributes this illness 299 to her anxiety about her aged aunt and mother. Her mother, she tells us, was irritable on account of Miss Martineau's fame and position in society; in short, she was jealous of her daughter's success. Miss Martineau was obliged to sit up late after midnight to mend her own clothes, as she was not allowed to have a maid or to hire a working-woman, even at her own expense. How she could have been prevented is difficult to see, especially as she was the money-making member of the family. It seems hardly worth while to give us this glimpse into domestic difficulties. But, no doubt, she is quite correct in adding, as another reason for her illness, the toils which were breaking her down. The strongest men could hardly bear such a strain on the nervous system without giving way.

And here comes in the important episode of Mr. Atkinson, mesmerism, and the New Philosophy. She believes that she was cured of a disease, pronounced incurable by the regular physicians, by mesmerism. By this she means the influence exerted upon her by certain manipulations from another person. And as long as we are confessedly so ignorant of nervous diseases, there seems no reason to question the facts to which Miss Martineau testifies. She was, there is little doubt, cured by these manipulations; what the power was which wrought through them remains to be ascertained.

In regard to Mr. Atkinson and his philosophy, 300 accepted by her with such satisfaction, and which henceforth became the master-light of all her seeing, our allotted space will allow us only to speak very briefly. The results of this new mental departure could not but disturb and afflict many of her friends, to whom faith in God, Christ, and immortality was still dear. To Miss Martineau herself, however, her disbelief in these seemed a happy emancipation. She carried into the assertion of her new and unpopular ideas the same honesty and courage she had always shown, and also the same superb dogmatism and contempt for those who differed from her. Apparently it was always to her an absolute impossibility to imagine herself wrong when she had once come to a conclusion. In theory she might conceive it possible to be mistaken, but practically she felt herself infallible. The following examples will show how she speaks, throughout her biography, of those who held the opinions she had rejected.

Miss Martineau, being a Necessarian, says, "All the best minds I know are Necessarians; all, indeed, who are qualified to discuss the subject at all." "The very smallest amount of science is enough to enable any rational being to see that the constitution and action of will are determined by the influences beyond the control of the possessor of the faculty." She adds, that for more than thirty years she has seen how awful "are the evils which arise from that monstrous remnant of old 301 superstition,—the supposition of a self-determining power, etc." Now, among those she had intimately known were Dr. Channing and James Martineau, neither of them believing in the doctrine of Necessity.

Speaking of Christianity, after she had rejected it, she calls it "a monstrous superstition." Elsewhere she speaks of "the Christian superstition of the contemptible nature of the body;" says that "Christians deprave their moral sense;" talks of "the selfish complacencies of religion," and of "the atmosphere of selfishness which is the very life of Christian doctrine and of every other theological scheme;" speaks of "the Christian mythology as a superstition which fails to make happy, fails to make good, fails to make wise, and has become as great an obstacle in the way of progress as the prior mythologies it took the place of." "For three centuries it has been undermined, and its overthrow completely decided." Thus easily does she settle the question of Christianity.

Miss Martineau ceased to believe in immortality; and immediately all believers in immortality became, to her mind, selfish or stupid, or both. "I neither wish to live longer here," she says, "nor to find life again elsewhere. It seems to me simply absurd to expect it, and a mere act of restricted human imagination and morality to conceive of it." There is "a total absence of evidence for a renewed life." "I myself utterly disbelieve 302 in a future life." She would submit, though reluctantly, to live again, if compelled to. "If I find myself conscious after the lapse of life, it will be all right, of course; but, as I said, the supposition appears to me absurd."

Under the instructions of Mr. Atkinson, Miss Martineau ceased to believe in a personal God, or any God but an unknown First Cause, identical with the Universe. The argument for Design, on which Mr. John Stuart Mill, for instance, lays such stress, seemed to her "puerile and unphilosophical." The God of Christians she calls an "invisible idol." He "who does justice to his own faculties" must give up "the personality of the First Cause." She considered the religion in her "Life in the Sick-Room" to have been "insincere;" which we, who know the perfect honesty of Harriet Martineau, must take the liberty to deny. Though declaring herself to be no Atheist, because she believes in an unknown and unknowable First Cause, she regards philosophical Atheists as the best people she had ever known, and was delighted in finding herself unacquainted with God, and so at peace.

It is curious to read these "Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development," of which Harriet Martineau and Mr. Atkinson are the joint authors. The simple joy with which they declare themselves the proud discoverers of this happy land of the unknowable is almost touching. All 303 that we know, say they, is matter or its manifestation. "Mind is the product of the brain," and "the brain is not, as even some phrenologists have asserted, the instrument of the mind." The brain is the source of consciousness, will, reason. Man is "a creature of necessity." "It seems certain that mind, or the conditions essential to mind, is evolved from gray vesicular matter." "Nothing in nature indicates a future life." "Knowledge recognizes that nothing can be free, or by chance; no, not even God,—God is the substance of Law." Whereupon Miss Martineau inquires whether Mr. Atkinson, in speaking of God, did not merely use another name for Law. "We know nothing beyond law, do we?" asks this meek disciple, seeking for information. Mr. Atkinson replies that we must assume some fundamental principle "as a thing essential, though unknown; and it is this which I wrongly enough perhaps termed God." But if it is wrong to call this principle God, and if they know nothing else behind phenomena, why do they complain so bitterly at being charged with Atheism? And directly Mr. Atkinson asserts that "Philosophy finds no God in nature; no personal being or creator, nor sees the want of any." "A Creator after the likeness of man" he affirms to be "an impossibility." For, though he professes to know nothing about God, he somehow contrives to know that God is not what others believe him to be. 304 Eternal sleep after death he professes to be the only hope of a wise man. The idea of free-will is so absurd that it "would make a Democritus fall on his back and roar with laughter." "Christianity is neither reasonable nor moral." Miss Martineau responds that "deep and sweet" is her repose in the conviction that "there is no theory of God, of an author of Nature, of an origin of the Universe, which is not utterly repugnant to my faculties; which is not (to my feelings) so irreverent as to make me blush, so misleading as to make me mourn." And thus do the apostle and the disciple go on, triumphantly proclaiming their own limitations to the end of the volume.

And yet the effect of this book is by no means wholly disagreeable. To be sure, in their constant assertions of the "impossibility" of any belief but their own being true, their honest narrowness may often be a little amusing. They seem like two eyeless fish in the recesses of the darkness of the Mammoth Cave talking to each other of the absurdity of believing in any sun or upper world. But they are so honest, so sincere, so much in love with Truth, and so free from any self-seeking, that we find it easy to sympathize with their naïve sense of discovery, as they go sounding on their dim and perilous way. Only we cannot but think what a disappointment it must be to Harriet Martineau to find herself alive again in the other world. In her case, as Mr. Wentworth Higginson acutely 305 remarks, we are deprived of the pleasure of sympathizing with her gladness at discovering her mistake, since another life will be to her a disagreeable as well as an unforeseen event.

Nor is it extraordinary, to those who trace Harriet Martineau's intellectual history, that she should have fallen into these melancholy conclusions. In her childhood and youth, most of the Unitarians of England, followers of Priestley, adopted his philosophy of materialism and necessity. Priestley did not believe in a soul, but trusted for a future life to the resurrection of the body. He was also a firm believer in philosophical necessity. An active and logical mind like Miss Martineau's, destitute of the keenness and profundity which belonged to that of her brother James, might very naturally arrive at a disbelief in anything but matter and its phenomena. From ignorance of these facts, Mrs. Chapman expresses surprise that the inconsistency of Harriet Martineau's belief in necessity, with other parts of her Unitarianism, "should not have struck herself, her judges, or the denomination at large." It would have been inconsistent with American Unitarianism, but it was not foreign from the views of English Unitarians at that time.

The publication of these "Letters" naturally caused pain to religious people, and especially to those of them who had known and honored Miss Martineau for her many past services in the cause 306 of human freedom and progress. Many of these were Unitarians and Unitarian ministers, who had been long proud of her as a member of their denomination and one of their most valued co-workers. It seemed necessary for them to declare their dissent from her new views, and this dissent was expressed in an article in the "Prospective Review," written by her own brother, James Martineau. Mrs. Chapman now makes known, what has hitherto been only a matter of conjecture, that this review gave such serious offense to Miss Martineau that she from that time refused to recognize her brother or to have any further communication with him. Mrs. Chapman, who seldom or never finds her heroine in the wrong, justifies and approves her conduct also here, quoting a passage from the review in support of Miss Martineau's conduct in treating her brother as one of "the defamers of old times whom she must never again meet." In this passage Mr. Martineau only expresses his profound grief that his sister should sit at the feet of such a master as Mr. Atkinson, and lay down at his bidding her early faith in moral obligation, in the living God, in the immortal sanctities. He calls this "an inversion of the natural order of nobleness," implying that Mr. Atkinson ought to have sat at her feet instead; and, turning to the review itself, we find this the only passage in which a single word is said which could be regarded as a censure on Miss Martineau. 307 But Mr. Atkinson is indeed handled with some severity. His language is criticised, and his logic is proved fallacious. Much the largest part of the review is, however, devoted to a refutation of his philosophy and doctrines. Now, as so large a part of the "Letters" is pervaded with denunciations of the bigotry which will not hear the other side of a question, and filled with admiration of those who prefer truth to the ties of kindred, friendship, and old association, we should have thought that Miss Martineau would rejoice in having a brother who could say, "Amica Harriet, sed magis amica veritas." Not at all. It was evident that he had said nothing about herself at which she could take offense; but in speaking against her new philosophy and her new philosopher he had committed the unpardonable sin. And Mrs. Chapman allows herself to regard it as a natural inference that this honest and manly review resulted from "masculine terror, fraternal jealousy of superiority, with a sectarian and provincial impulse to pull down and crush a world-wide celebrity." She considers it "incomprehensible in an advocate of free thought" that he should express his thoughts freely in opposition to a book which argued against all possible knowledge of God and against all faith in a future life. It is, however, only just to Miss Martineau to say that she herself has brought no such charges against her brother, but left the matter in silence. We cannot but think 308 that it would have been better for Miss Martineau's reputation if her biographer had followed her example.

But, though we must object to Mrs. Chapman's views on this point, and on some others, we must add that her part of the second volume is prepared with much ability, and is evidently the result of diligent and loyal friendship. Miss Martineau could not have selected a more faithful friend to whom to confide the history of her life. On two subjects, however, we are obliged to dissent from her statements. One is in regard to Dr. Channing, whom she, for some unknown reason, systematically disparages. He was a good man, Mrs. Chapman admits, "but not in any sense a great one. With benevolent intentions, he could not greatly help the nineteenth century, for he knew very little about it, or, indeed, of any other. He had neither insight, courage, nor firmness. In his own Church had sprung up a vigorous opposition to slavery, which he innocently, in so far as ignorantly, used the little strength he had to stay." Certainly it is not necessary to defend the memory of Dr. Channing against such a supercilious judgment as this. But we might well ask why, if he is not a great man, and did not help the nineteenth century, his works should continue to be circulated all over Europe? Why should such men in France as Laboulaye and Rémusat occupy themselves in translating and diffusing them? Why 309 should Bunsen class him among the five prophets of the Divine Consciousness in Human History,—speaking of "his fearless speech," his "unfailing good sense," and "his grandeur of soul, which makes him a prophet of the Christianity of the Future"? Bunsen calls him a Greek in his manly nature, a Roman in his civic qualities, and an apostle in his Christianity. And was that man deficient in courage or firmness who never faltered in the support of any opinions, however unpopular, whether it was to defend Unitarianism in its weak beginnings, to appear in Faneuil Hall as the leader against the defenders of the Alton mob, to head the petition for the pardon of Abner Kneeland, and to lay on the altar of antislavery the fame acquired by past labors? Is he to be accused of repressing the antislavery movement in his own church, when there is on record the letter in which he advocated giving the use of the church building to the society represented by Mrs. Chapman herself; and when the men of influence in his society refused it? Nor, in those days of their unpopularity, did Mrs. Chapman and her friends count Dr. Channing's aid so insignificant. In her article on "The Martyr Age," Miss Martineau describes the profound impression caused by Dr. Channing's sudden appearance in the State House to give his countenance and aid to Garrison and the Abolitionists, in what, she says, was a matter to them of life and death. And she adds, 310 "He was thenceforth considered by the world an accession to their principles, though not to their organized body."

Nor do we quite understand Mrs. Chapman's giving to Miss Martineau the credit of being the cause of the petition for the pardon of Abner Kneeland; as his conviction, and the consequent petition, did not take place until she had been nearly two years out of the country. And why does Mrs. Chapman select for special contempt, as unfaithful to their duty to mankind, the Unitarian ministers? Why does she speak of "the cowardly ranks of American Unitarians" with such peculiar emphasis? It is not our business here to defend this denomination; but we cannot but recall the "Protest against American Slavery" prepared and signed in 1845 by one hundred and seventy-three Unitarian ministers, out of a body containing not more than two hundred and fifty in all. And it was this body which furnished to the cause some of its most honored members. Of those who have belonged to the Unitarian body, we now recall the names of such persons as Samuel J. May, Samuel May, Josiah Quincy, John Quincy Adams, John Pierpont, Mr. and Mrs. Ellis Gray Loring, John G. Palfrey, John P. Hale, Dr. and Mrs. Follen, Theodore Parker, John Parkman, John T. Sargent, James Russell Lowell, Wm. H. Furness, Charles Sumner, Caleb Stetson, John A. Andrew, Lydia Maria Child, Dr. S. G. Howe, Horace 311 Mann, T. W. Higginson. So much for the "cowardly ranks of American Unitarians."

The last years of Miss Martineau were happy and peaceful. She had a pleasant home at Ambleside, on Lake Windermere. She had many friends, was conscious of having done a good work, and if she had no hopes in the hereafter, neither had she any fears concerning it. She was a strong, upright, true-hearted woman; one of those who have helped to vindicate "the right of women to learn the alphabet."

312

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SLAVE POWER IN AMERICA 48

On the first day of January, 1832, when the American Antislavery Society was formed in the office of Samuel E. Sewall in Boston, the abolition of slavery through any such agency seemed impossible. Almost all the great interests of the country were combined to defend and sustain the system. The capital invested in slaves amounted to at least one thousand millions of dollars. This vast pecuniary interest was rapidly increasing by the growing demand for the cotton crop of the Southern States—a demand which continually overlapped the supply. The whole political power of the thirteen slave States was in the hands of the slaveholders. No white man in the South, unless he was a slaveholder, was ever elected to Congress, or to any important political position at home. The two great parties, Whig and Democrat, were pledged to the support of slavery in all its constitutional rights, and vied with each other in giving to these the largest interpretation. By a constitutional provision, which could not be altered, the slave States 313 had in Congress, in 1840, twenty-five more Representatives in proportion to their number of voters than the free States. By the cohesion of this great political and pecuniary interest the slaveholders, though comparatively few in number, were able to govern the nation. The Presidents, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court of the United States, the two great political parties, the press of the country, the mercantile interest, and that mysterious force which we call society, were virtually in the hands of the slaveholders. Whenever their privileges were attacked, all these powers rallied to their defense. Public opinion, in the highest circles of society and in the lowest, was perfectly agreed on this one question. The saloons of the Fifth Avenue and the mob of the Five Points were equally loyal to the sacred cause of slavery. Thus all the great powers which control free states were combined for its defense; and the attempt to assail this institution might justly be regarded as madness. In fact, all danger seemed so remote, that even so late as 1840 it was common for slaveholders to admit that property in man was an absurdity and an injustice. The system itself was so secure, that they could afford to concede its principle to their opponents. Just as men formerly fought duels as a matter of course, while frankly admitting that it was wrong to do so,—just as at the present time we concede that war is absurd and unchristian, but yet go to war continually, because 314 we know no other way of settling international disputes,—so the slaveholders used to say, "Slavery is wrong; we know that: but how is it to be abolished? What can we do about it?"

Such was the state of things in the United States less than half a century ago. On one side was an enormous pecuniary interest, vast political power, the weight of the press, an almost unanimous public opinion, the necessities of commerce, the authority of fashion, the teachings of nearly every denomination in the Christian church, and the moral obligations attributed to the sacred covenants of the fathers of the Republic. On the other side there were only a few voices crying in the wilderness, "It is unjust to claim property in man." The object of the work before us is to show how, after the slave power had reached this summit of influence, it lost it all in a single generation; how, less by the zeal of its opponents than by the madness of its defenders, this enormous fabric of oppression was undermined and overthrown; and how, in a few years, the insignificant handful of antislavery people brought to their side the great majority of the nation.

Certainly a work which should do justice to such a history would be one of the most interesting books ever written. For in this series of events everything was involved which touches most nearly the mind, the conscience, the imagination, and the heart of man. How many radical problems in 315 statesmanship, in political economy, in ethics, in philosophy, in theology, in history, in science, came up for discussion during this long controversy! What pathetic stories of suffering, what separation of families, what tales of torture, what cruelty grown into a custom, what awful depths of misery, came continually to light, as though the judgment-day were beginning to dawn on the dark places of the earth! What romances of adventure, what stories of courage and endurance, of ingenuity in contrivance, of determination of soul, were listened to by breathless audiences as related by the humble lips of the fugitives from bondage! How trite and meagre became all the commonplaces of oratory before the flaming eloquence of these terrible facts! How tame grew all the conventional rhetoric of pulpit and platform, by the side of speech vitalized by the immediate presence of this majestic argument! The book which should reproduce the antislavery history of those thirty years would possess an unimagined charm.

We cannot say that Mr. Wilson's volumes do all this, nor had we any right to expect it. He proposes to himself nothing of the sort. What he gives us is, however, of very great value. It is a very carefully collected, clearly arranged, and accurate account of the rise and progress, decline and catastrophe, of slavery in the United States. Mr. Wilson does not attempt to be philosophical like Bancroft and Draper; nor are his pages as picturesque 316 as are those of Motley and Carlyle. He tells us a plain unvarnished tale, the interest of which is to be found in the statement of the facts exactly as they occurred. Considering that it is a story of events all of which he saw and a large part of which he was, there is a singular absence of prejudice. He is no man's enemy. He has passed through the fire, and there is no smell of smoke on his garments. An intelligent indignation against the crimes committed in defense of the system he describes pervades his narrative. His impartiality is not indifference, but an absence of personal rancor. Individuals and their conduct are criticised only so far as is necessary to make clear the course of events and the condition of public feeling. The defenders of slavery at the North and South are regarded not as bad men, but as the outcome of a bad system.

Mr. Wilson's book is a treasury of facts, and will never be superseded so far as this peculiar value is concerned. In this respect it somewhat resembles Hildreth's "History of the United States." Taking little space for speculation, comment, or picturesque coloring, there is all the more room left for the steady flow of the narrative.

With a few unimportant omissions, the two volumes now published contain a full history of slavery and antislavery from the Ordinance of 1787 and the compromises of the Constitution down to the election of Lincoln and the outbreak of the 317 civil war. As a work of reference they are invaluble, for each event in the long struggle for freedom is distinctly and accurately told, while the calm story advances through its various stages. Instead of following this narrative in detail, which our space will not allow, we prefer to call our readers' attention to some of the more striking incidents of this great revolution.

Our fathers, when they founded the nation, had little thought that slavery was ever to attain such vast extension. They supposed that it would gradually die out from the South, as it had disappeared from the North. Yet the whole danger to their work lay here. Slavery, if anything, was the wedge which was to split the Union asunder. When the Constitution was formed, in 1787, the slaveholders, by dint of great effort, succeeded in getting the little end of the wedge inserted. It was very narrow, a mere sharp line, and it went in only a very little way; so it seemed to be nothing at all. The slaveholders at that time did not contend that slavery was right or good. They admitted that it was a political evil. They confessed, many of them, that it was a moral evil. All the great Southern revolutionary bodies had accustomed themselves to believe in the rights of man, in the principles of humanity, in the blessings of liberty; and they could not defend slavery. Mason of Virginia, in the debates in the Federal Convention, denounced slavery and the slave-trade. 318 "The evil of slavery," said he, "affects the whole Union. Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when done by slaves. They prevent the immigration of whites, who really enrich a country. They produce the most pernicious effects on the manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country." Williamson of North Carolina declared himself in principle and practice opposed to slavery. Madison "thought it wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man." But the extreme Southern States, South Carolina and Georgia, insisted on the right of importing slaves, at least for a little while; and so they were allowed to import them for twenty years. They also insisted on having their slaves represented by themselves in Congress, and so they were allowed to count three fifths of the slaves in determining the ratio. This seemed a small thing, but it was the entering of the wedge. It was tolerating the principle of slavery; not admitting it, but tolerating it. At the same time that this Convention was forming, the Federal Constitution Congress was prohibiting slavery in all the territory northwest of the Ohio. This prohibition of slavery was adopted by the unanimous votes of the eight States present, including Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Two years later it was recognized and confirmed by the first Congress under the Constitution. Jefferson, 319 a commissioner to revise the statute law of Virginia, prepared a bill for gradual emancipation in that State. In 1790 a petition was presented to Congress, signed by Benjamin Franklin, the last public act of his life, declaring equal liberty to be the birthright of all, and asking Congress to "devise means for restoring liberty to the slaves, and so removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people." In 1804 the people of Virginia petitioned Congress to have the Ordinance of 1787 suspended, that they might hold slaves; but a committee of Congress, of which John Randolph of Virginia was chairman, reported that it would be "highly dangerous and inexpedient to impair a provision wisely calculated to promote the happiness and prosperity of the Northwest Territory."

But in 1820 the first heavy blow came on the wedge to drive it into the log. The Union is a tough log, and the wedge could be driven a good way in without splitting it; but the first blow which drove it in was the adopting the Missouri Compromise, allowing slavery to come North and take possession of Missouri.

The thirty years of prosperity which had followed the adoption of the Constitution had changed the feelings of men both North and South. The ideas of the Revolution had receded into the background; the thirst for wealth and power had taken their place. So the Southern States, which had 320 cordially agreed thirty years before to prohibit the extension of slavery, and had readily admitted it to be a political evil, now demanded as a right the privilege of carrying slaves into Missouri. They threatened to dissolve the Union, talked of a fire only to be extinguished by seas of blood, and proposed to hang a member from New Hampshire who spoke of liberty. Some of the Northern men were not frightened by these threats, and valued them at their real worth. But we know that the result was a compromise. Slavery was to take possession of Missouri, on condition that no other State as far north as Missouri should be slave-holding. Slavery was to be excluded from the rest of the territory forever. This bargain was applauded and justified by Southern politicians and newspapers as a great triumph on their part; and it was. That fatal compromise was a surrender of principle for the sake of peace, bartering conscience for quiet; and we were soon to reap the bitter fruits.

Face to face, in deadly opposition, each determined on the total destruction of his antagonist, stood this Goliath of the slave power and the little David of antislavery, at the beginning of the ten years which extended from 1830 to 1840. The giant was ultimately to fall from the wounds of his minute opponent, but not during this decade or the next. For many years each of the parties was growing stronger, and the fight was growing 321 fiercer. Organization on the one side was continually becoming more powerful; enthusiasm on the other continually built up a more determined opinion. The slave power won repeated victories; but every victory increased the number and ardor of its opponents.

The first attempt to destroy antislavery principles was by means of mobs. Mobs seldom take place in a community unless where the upper stratum of society and the lower are in sympathetic opposition to some struggling minority. Then the lower class takes its convictions from the higher, and regards itself as the hand executing what the head thinks ought to be done. Respectability denounces the victim, and the rabble hastens to take vengeance on him. Even a mob cannot act efficiently unless inspired by ideas; and these it must receive from some higher source. So it was when Priestley was mobbed at Birmingham; so it was when Wesley and his friends were mobbed in all parts of England. So it was also in America when the office of the "Philanthropist" was destroyed in Cincinnati; when halls and churches were burned in Philadelphia; when Miss Crandall was mobbed in Connecticut; when Lovejoy was killed at Alton. Antislavery meetings were so often invaded by rioters, that on one occasion Stephen S. Foster is reported to have declared that the speakers were not doing their duty, because the people listened so quietly. "If we were doing 322 our duty," said he, "they would be throwing brick-bats at us."

These demonstrations only roused and intensified the ardor of the Abolitionists, while bringing to their side those who loved fair play, and those in whom the element of battle was strong. Mobs also were an excellent advertisement for the Antislavery Society; and this is what every new cause needs most for its extension. Every time that one of their meetings was violently broken up, every time that any outrage or injury was offered to the Abolitionists, all the newspapers in the land gave them a gratuitous advertisement by conspicuous notices of the event. So the public mind was directed to the question, and curiosity was excited. The antislavery conventions were more crowded from day to day, their journals were more in demand, and their plans and opinions became the subject of conversation everywhere.

And certainly there could be no more interesting place to visit than one of these meetings of the Antislavery Society. With untiring assiduity the Abolitionists brought to their platform everything which could excite and impress their audience. Their orators were of every kind,—rough men and shrill-voiced women, polished speakers from the universities, stammering fugitives from slavery, philosophers and fanatics, atheists and Christian ministers, wise men who had been made mad by oppression, and babes in intellect to whom God 323 had revealed some of the noblest truths. They murdered the King's English, they uttered glaring fallacies, the blows aimed at evildoers often glanced aside and hit good men. Invective was, perhaps, the too frequent staple of their argument, and any difference of opinion would be apt to turn their weapons against each other. This church-militant often became a church-termagant. Yet, after all such abatement for errors of judgment or bad taste, their meetings were a splendid arena on which was fought one of the greatest battles for mankind. The eloquence we heard there was not of the schools, and had nothing artificial about it. It followed the rule of Demosthenes, and was all directed to action. Every word was a blow. There was no respect for dignities or authorities. The Constitution of the United States, the object of such unfeigned idolatry to the average American, was denounced as "a covenant with hell." The great men of the nation, Webster, Clay, Jackson, were usually selected as the objects of the severest censure. The rule was to strike at the heads which rose above the crowd, as deserving the sternest condemnation. Presidents and governors, heads of universities, eminent divines, great churches and denominations, were convicted as traitors to the right, or held up to unsparing ridicule. No conventional proprieties were regarded in the terrible earnestness of this enraged speech. It was like the lava pouring from the depths of 324 the earth, and melting the very rocks which opposed its resistless course.

Of course this fierce attack roused as fierce a defense. One extreme generated the other. The cry for "immediate abolition" was answered by labored defenses of slavery itself. Formerly its advocates only excused it as a necessary evil; now they began to defend it as a positive good. Then was seen the lamentable sight of Christian ministers and respected divines hurrying to the support of the "sum of all villanies." The Episcopal bishop of a New England State defended with ardor the system of slavery as an institution supported by the Bible and commanded by God himself. The president of a New England college declared slavery to be a positive institution of revealed religion, and not inconsistent with the law of love. The minister of a Boston church, going to the South for his health, amused his leisure by writing a book on slavery, in which it is made to appear as a rose-colored and delightful institution, and its opposers are severely censured. One of the most learned professors in a Massachusetts theological school composed a treatise to refute the heresy of the higher law, and to maintain the duty of returning fugitive slaves to bondage. Under such guidance it was natural that the churches should generally stand aloof from the Abolitionists and condemn their course. It was equally natural that the Abolitionists should then 325 denounce the churches as the bulwark of slavery. Nevertheless, from the Christian body came most of those who devoted their lives to the extirpation of this great evil and iniquity. And Mr. Garrison, at least, always maintained that his converts were most likely to be made among those whose consciences had been educated by the Church and the Bible.

From public meetings in the North, the conflict of ideas next extended itself to the floor of Congress, where it continued to rage during nearly thirty years, until "the war of tongue and pen" changed to that of charging squadrons, the storm of shot and the roll of cannon. The question found its way into the debates of Congress in the form of petitions for the abolition of slavery and the slave-trade in the District of Columbia. If the slaveholders had allowed these petitions to be received and referred, taking no notice of them, it seems probable that no important results would have followed. But, blinded by rage and fear, they opposed their reception, thus denying a privilege belonging to all mankind,—that of asking the government to redress their grievances. Then came to the front a man already eminent by his descent, his great attainments, his long public service, his great position, and his commanding ability. John Quincy Adams, after having been President of the United States, accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and was one of the 326 most laborious and useful of its members. He was not then an Abolitionist, nor in favor even of abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. But he believed that the people had the right to petition the government for anything they desired, and that their respectful petitions should be respectfully received. Sixty-five years old in 1832, when he began this conflict, his warfare with the slave power ended only when, struck with death while in his seat, he saw the last of earth and was content. With what energy, what dauntless courage, what untiring industry, what matchless powers of argument, what inexhaustible resources of knowledge, he pursued his object, the future historian of the struggle who can fully paint what Mr. Wilson is only able to indicate, will take pleasure in describing. One scene will remain forever memorable as one of the most striking triumphs of human oratory; and this we must describe a little more fully.

February 6, 1837, being the day for presenting petitions, Mr. Adams had already presented several petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia (a measure to which he was himself then opposed), when he proceeded to state 49 that he had in his possession a paper upon which he wished the decision of the Speaker. The paper, he said, came from twenty persons declaring themselves to be slaves. He wished to know whether 327 the Speaker would consider this paper as coming under the rule of the House. 50 The Chair said he would take the advice of the House on that question. And thereupon began a storm of indignation which raged around Mr. Adams during four days. 51 Considering that the House had ordered, less than three weeks before, that all papers relating in any way to slavery should be laid on the table without any action being taken on them, this four days' discussion about such a paper, ending in the passing of several resolutions, was rather an amusing illustration of the irrepressible character of the antislavery movement. The Southern members seemed at first astonished at what they hastily assumed to be an attempt of Mr. Adams to introduce a petition from slaves. One moved that it be not received. Another, indignant at such a tame way of meeting the question, declared that any one attempting to introduce such a petition should be immediately punished; and if that was not done at once, all the members from the slave States should leave the House. Loud cries arose, "Expel him! expel him!" Mr. Alfred declared that the petition ought to be burned. Mr. Waddy Thompson of South Carolina, who soon received a castigation which he little anticipated, moved that John Quincy Adams, having committed a gross 328 disrespect to the House in attempting to introduce a petition from slaves, ought to be instantly brought to the bar of the House to receive the severe censure of the Speaker. Similar resolutions were offered by Mr. Haynes and Mr. Lewis, all assuming that Mr. Adams had attempted to introduce this petition. He at last took the floor, and said that he thought the time of the House was being consumed needlessly, since all these resolutions were founded on an error. He had not attempted to present the petition,—he had only asked the Speaker a question in regard to it. He also advised the member from Alabama to amend his resolution, which stated the petition to be for the abolition of slavery in the District, whereas it was the very reverse of that. It was a petition for something which would be very objectionable to himself, though it might be the very thing for which the gentleman from Alabama was contending. Then Mr. Adams sat down, leaving his opponents more angry than ever, but somewhat confused in their minds. They could not very well censure him for doing what he had not done, but they wished very much to censure him. So Mr. Waddy Thompson modified his resolution, making it state that Mr. Adams, "by creating the impression, and leaving the House under the impression, that the petition was for the abolition of slavery," had trifled with the House, and should receive its censure. After a multitude of other 329 speeches from the enraged Southern chivalry, the debate of the first day came to an end.

On the next day (February 7), in reply to a question, Mr. Adams stated again that he had not attempted to present the petition, though his own feelings would have led him to do so, but had kept it in his possession, out of respect to the House. He had said nothing to lead the House to infer that this petition was for the abolition of slavery. He should consider before presenting a petition from slaves; though, in his opinion, slaves had a right to petition, and the mere fact of a petition being from slaves would not of itself prevent him from presenting it. If the petition were a proper one, he should present it. A petition was a prayer, a supplication to a superior being. Slaves might pray to God; was this House so superior that it could not condescend to hear a prayer from those to whom the Almighty listened? He ended by saying that, in asking the question of the Speaker, he had intended to show the greatest respect to the House, and had not the least purpose of trifling with it.

These brief remarks of Mr. Adams made it necessary for the slaveholders again to change their tactics. Mr. Dromgoole of Virginia now brought forward his famous resolution, which Mr. Adams afterwards made so ridiculous, accusing him of having "given color to an idea" that slaves had a right to petition, and that he should 330 be censured by the Speaker for this act. Another member proposed, rather late in the day, that a committee be appointed to inquire whether any attempt had been made, or not, to offer a petition from slaves. Another offered a series of resolutions, declaring that if any one "hereafter" should offer petitions from slaves he ought to be regarded as an enemy of the South, and of the Union; but that "as John Quincy Adams had stated that he meant no disrespect to the House, that all proceedings as to his conduct should now cease." And so, after many other speeches, the second day's debate came to an end.

The next day was set apart to count the votes for President, and so the debate was resumed February 9. It soon become more confused than ever. Motions were made to lay the resolutions on the table; they were withdrawn; they were renewed; they were voted down; and, finally, after much discussion, and when at last the final question was about being taken, Mr. Adams inquired whether he was to be allowed to be heard in his own defense before being condemned. So he obtained the floor, and immediately the whole aspect of the case was changed. During three days he had been the prisoner at the bar; suddenly he became the judge on the bench. Never, in the history of forensic eloquence, has a single speech effected a greater change in the purpose of a deliberative assembly. Often as the Horatian 331 description has been quoted of the just man, tenacious of his purpose, who fears not the rage of citizens clamoring for what is wrong, it has never found a fitter application than to the unshaken mind of John Quincy Adams, standing alone, in the midst of his antagonists, like a solid monument which the idle storms beat against in vain.

He began by saying that he had been waiting during these three days for an answer to the question which he had put to the Speaker, and which the Speaker had put to the House, but which the House had not yet answered, namely, whether the paper he held in his hand came under the rule of the House or not. They had discussed everything else, but had not answered that question. They had wasted the time of the House in considering how they could censure him for doing what he had not done. All he wished to know was, whether a petition from slaves should be received or not. He himself thought that it ought to be received; but if the House decided otherwise, he should not present it. Only one gentleman had undertaken to discuss that question, and his argument was, that if slavery was abolished by Congress in any State, the Constitution was violated; and, therefore , slaves ought not to be allowed to petition for anything. He, Mr. Adams, was unable to see the connection between the premises and the conclusion.

Hereupon poor Mr. French, the author of this 332 argument, tried to explain what he meant by it, but left his meaning as confused as before.

Then Mr. Adams added, that if you deprived any one in the community of the right of petition, which was only the right of offering a prayer, you would find it difficult to know where to stop; one gentleman had objected to the reception of one petition, because offered by women of a bad character. Mr. Patton of Virginia says he knows that one of the names is of a woman of a bad character. How does he know it?

Hereupon Mr. Patton explained that he did not himself know the woman, but had been told that her character was not good.

So, said Mr. Adams, you first deny the right of petition to slaves, then to free people of color, and then you inquire into the moral character of a petitioner before you receive his petition. The next step will be to inquire into the political belief of the petitioners before you receive your petition. Mr. Robertson of Virginia had said that no petitions ought to be received for an object which Congress had no power to grant. Mr. Adams replied, with much acuteness, that on most questions the right of granting the petition might be in doubt: a majority must decide that point; it would therefore follow, from Mr. Robertson's rule, that no one had a right to petition unless he belonged to the predominant party. Mr. Adams then turned to Mr. Dromgoole, who had charged him with the 333 remarkable crime of "giving color to an idea," and soon made that Representative of the Old Dominion appear very ridiculous.

Mr. Adams then proceeded to rebuke, with dignity but severity, the conduct of those who had proposed to censure him without any correct knowledge of the facts of the case. His criticisms had the effect of compelling these gentlemen to excuse themselves and to offer various explanations of their mistakes. These assailants suddenly found themselves in an attitude of self-defense. Mr. Adams graciously accepted their explanations, advising them in future to be careful when they undertook to offer resolutions of censure. He then informed Mr. Waddy Thompson of South Carolina that he had one or two questions to put to him. By this time it had become a pretty serious business to receive the attentions of Mr. Adams; and Mr. Waddy Thompson immediately rose to explain. But Mr. Adams asked him to wait until he had fully stated the question which Mr. Thompson was to answer. This Southern statesman had threatened the ex-President of the United States with an indictment by the grand jury of the District for words spoken in debate in the House of Representatives, and had added that, if the petition was presented, Mr. Adams would be sent to the penitentiary. "Sir," said Mr. Adams, "the only answer I make to such a threat from that gentleman is, to invite him, when he returns 334 to his constituents, to study a little the first principles of civil liberty." He then called on the gentlemen from the slave States to say how many of them indorsed that sentiment. " I do not," said Mr. Underwood of Kentucky. " I do not," said Mr. Wise of Virginia. Mr. Thompson was compelled to attempt another explanation, and said he meant that, in South Carolina , any member of the legislature who should present a petition from slaves could be indicted. "Then," replied Mr. Adams, and this produced a great sensation, "if it is the law of South Carolina that members of her Legislature may be indicted by juries for words spoken in debate, God Almighty receive my thanks that I am not a citizen of South Carolina."

Mr. Adams ended his speech by declaring that the honor of the House of Representatives was always regarded by him as a sacred sentiment, and that he should feel a censure from that House as the heaviest misfortune of a long life, checkered as it had been by many vicissitudes.

When Mr. Adams began his defense, not only was a large majority of the House opposed to his course, but they had brought themselves by a series of violent harangues into a condition of bitter excitement against him. When he ended, the effect of this extraordinary speech was such, that all the resolutions were rejected, and out of the whole House only twenty-two members could be found to pass a vote of even indirect censure. The 335 victory was won, and won by Mr. Adams almost single-handed. We count Horatius Cocles a hero for holding the Roman bridge against a host of enemies; but greater honors belong to him who successfully defends against overwhelming numbers the ancient safeguards of public liberty. For this reason we have repeated here at such length the story of three days, which the people of the United States ought always to remember. It took ten years to accomplish the actual repeal of these gag-laws. But the main work was done when the right of speech was obtained for the friends of freedom in Congress; and John Quincy Adams was the great leader in this warfare. He was joined on that arena by other noble champions,—Giddings, Mann, Palfrey, John P. Hale, Chase, Seward, Slade of Vermont, Julian of Indiana. Others no less devoted followed them, among whom came from Massachusetts Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson, the author of the present work. What he cannot properly say of himself should be said for him. Though an accomplished and eager politician, Henry Wilson has never sacrificed any great principle for the sake of political success. His services to the antislavery cause have been invaluable, his labors in that cause unremitting. Personal feelings and personal interests he has been ready to sacrifice for the sake of the cause. Loyal to his friends, he has not been bitter to his opponents; and if any man who 336 fought through that long struggle were to be its historian, no one will deny the claims of Mr. Wilson to that honor.

Under the lead of John Quincy Adams, the power to discuss the whole subject of slavery in the National Legislature was won, and never again lost. This was the second triumph of the antislavery movement; its first was the power won by Garrison and his friends of discussing the subject before the people. The wolfish mob in the cities and in Congress might continue to howl, but it had lost its claws and teeth. But now came the first great triumph of the slave power, in the annexation of Texas. This was a cruel blow to the friends of freedom. It was more serious because the motive of annexation was openly announced, and the issue distinctly presented in the Presidential election. Mr. Upshur, Tyler's Secretary of State, in an official dispatch, declared that the annexation of Texas was necessary to secure the institution of slavery. The Democratic Convention which nominated Mr. Polk for the Presidency deliberately made the annexation of Texas the leading feature of its platform. Nor was the slave power in this movement opposed merely by the antislavery feeling of the country. Southern senators helped to defeat the measure when first presented in the form of a treaty by Mr. Tyler's administration. Nearly the whole Whig party was opposed to it. The candidate of the Whigs, 337 Henry Clay, had publicly declared that annexation would be a great evil to the nation. Twenty members of Congress, with John Quincy Adams at their head, had proclaimed in an address to their constituents that it would be equivalent to a dissolution of the Union. Dr. Channing, in 1838, had said that it would be better for the nation to perish than to commit such an outrageous wrong. Edward Everett, in 1837, spoke of annexation as "an enormous crime." Whig and Democratic legislatures had repeatedly denounced it. In 1843, when the Democrats had a majority in the Massachusetts legislature, they resolved that "under no circumstances whatever" could the people of Massachusetts approve of annexation. Martin Van Buren opposed it as unjust to Mexico. Senator Benton, though previously in favor of the measure, in a speech in Missouri declared that the object of those who were favoring the scheme was to dissolve the Union, though he afterward came again to its support. And yet when the Presidential campaign was in progress, a Democratic torchlight procession miles long was seen marching through the streets of Boston, and flaunting the lone star of Texas along its whole line. And when Polk was elected, and the decision of the nation virtually given for this scheme, it seemed almost hopeless to contend longer against such a triumph of slavery. If the people of the North could submit to this outrage, it appeared as if they could submit to anything.

338 Such, however, was not the case. On one side the slave power was greatly strengthened by the admission of Texas to the Union as a slave State; but, on the other hand, there came a large accession to the antislavery body. And this continued to be the case during many years. The slave power won a succession of political victories, each of which was a moral victory to its opponents. Many who were not converted to antislavery by the annexation of Texas in 1845 were brought over by the defeat of the Wilmot Proviso and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. Many who were not alarmed by these successes of slavery were convinced of the danger when they beheld the actual working of the Fugitive Slave Act. How many Boston gentlemen, before opposed to the Abolitionists, were brought suddenly to their side when they saw the Court House in chains, and were prevented by soldiers guarding Anthony Burns from going to their banks or insurance offices in State Street! All those bitter hours of defeat and disaster planted the seeds of a greater harvest for freedom. Others who remained insensible to the disgrace of the slave laws of 1850 were recruited to the ranks of freedom by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854. This last act, Mr. Wilson justly says, did more than any other to arouse the North, and convince it of the desperate encroachments of slavery. Men who tamely acquiesced in this great wrong were startled into moral 339 life by the murderous assault on Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks in 1856. Those who could submit to this were roused by the border ruffians from Missouri who invaded Kansas, and made the proslavery Constitution for that State. The Dred Scott decision in 1857, which declared slavery to be no local institution, limited to a single part of the land, but having a right to exist in the free States under the Constitution, alarmed even those who had been insensible to the previous aggressions of slavery. This series of political successes of the slave power was appalling. Every principle of liberty, every restraint on despotism, was overthrown in succession, until the whole power of the nation had fallen into the hands of an oligarchy of between three and four hundred thousand slaveholders. But every one of their political victories was a moral defeat; every access to their strength as an organization added an immense force to the public opinion opposed to them; and each of their successes was responded to by some advance of the antislavery movement. The annexation of Texas in 1845 was answered by the appearance of John P. Hale, in 1847, in the United States Senate,—the first man who was elected to that body on distinctly antislavery grounds and independent of either of the great parties. The response to the defeat of the Wilmot Proviso and passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 was the election of Charles Sumner to the Senate in April, 1851, and 340 the establishment of the underground railroad in all the free States. When the South abrogated the Missouri Compromise, the North replied by the initiation of the Republican party. The Kansas outrages gave to freedom John Brown of Osawatomie. And the answer to the Dred Scott decision was the nomination of Abraham Lincoln. Till that moment the forces of freedom and slavery had stood opposed, like two great armies, each receiving constant recruits and an acccession of new power. On one side, hitherto, had been all the political triumphs, and on the other all the moral. But with this first great political success of their opponents the slave power became wholly demoralized, gave up the conflict, threw away the results of all its former victories, and abandoned the field to its enemies, plunging into the dark abyss of secession and civil war.

And yet, what was the issue involved in that election? It was simply whether slavery should or should not be extended into new Territories. All that the Republican party demanded was that slavery should not be extended. It did not dream of abolishing slavery in the slave States. We remember how, long after the war began, we refused to do this. The Southerners had every guaranty they could desire that they should not be interfered with at home. If they had gracefully acquiesced in the decision of the majority, their institution might have flourished for another century. The 341 Fugitive Slave Law would have been repealed; or, at all events, trial by jury would have been given to the man claimed as a fugitive. But no attempt would have been made by the Republican party to interfere with slavery in the slave States, for that party did not believe it had the right so to do.

But, in truth, the course of the Southern leaders illustrated in a striking way the distinction between a politician and a statesman. They were very acute politicians, trained in all the tactics of their art; but they were poor statesmen, incapable of any large strategic plan of action. As statesmen, they should have made arrangements for the gradual abolition of slavery, as an institution incapable of sustaining itself in civilized countries in the nineteenth century. Or, if they wished to maintain it as long as possible, they ought to have seen that this could only be accomplished by preserving the support of the interests and the public opinion of the North. Alliance with the Northern States was their only security; and, therefore, they ought to have kept the Northern conscience on their side by a loyal adherence to all compacts and covenants. Instead of this, they contrived to outrage, one by one, every feeling of honor, every sentiment of duty, and every vested right of the free States, until, at last, it became plain to all that it was an "irrepressible conflict," and must be settled definitely either for slavery or for freedom. When this point was reached by the American people, 342 they saw also that it could not be settled in favor of slavery, for no concession would satisfy the slaveholders, and no contract these might make could be depended on. The North gave them, in 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law for the sake of peace. Did it gain peace? No. It relinquished, for the sake of peace, the Wilmot Proviso. Was the South satisfied? No. In 1853 Mr. Douglas offered it the Nebraska Bill. Was it contented? By no means. Mr. Pierce and Mr. Buchanan did their best to give it Kansas. Did they content the South by their efforts? No. Mr. Douglas, Mr. Pierce, and Mr. Buchanan were all set aside by the South. The Lecompton Bill was not enough. The Dred Scott decision was not enough. The slaveholders demanded that slavery should be established by a positive act of Congress in all the Territories of the Union. Even Judge Douglas shrank aghast from the enterprise of giving them such a law as that; and so Judge Douglas was immediately thrown aside. Thus, by the folly of the Southern leaders themselves, more than by the efforts of their opponents, the majority was obtained by the Republicans in the election of 1860.

But during this conflict came many very dark days for freedom. One of these was after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. That law was one of a series of compromises, intended to make a final settlement of the question and to silence all antislavery agitation. Although defended 343 by great lawyers, who thought it necessary to save the Union, there is little doubt that it was as unconstitutional as it was cruel. The Constitution declares that "no person shall be deprived of his liberty without due process of law," and also that "in suits at common law, when the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved." Anthony Burns was in full possession of his liberty; he was a self-supporting, tax-paying citizen of Massachusetts; and in ten days, by the action of the Fugitive Slave Law, he was turned into a slave under the decision of a United States commissioner, without seeing a judge or a jury. The passage of this law, and its actual enforcement, caused great excitement among the free colored people at the North, as well as among the fugitives from slavery. No one was safe. It was evident that it was meant to be enforced,—it was not meant to be idle thunder. But instead of discouraging the friends of freedom, it roused them to greater activity. More fugitives than ever came from the slave States, and the underground railroad was in fuller activity than before. The methods employed by fugitives to escape were very various and ingenious. One man was brought away in a packing-box. Another clung to the lower side of the guard of a steamer, washed by water at every roll of the vessel. One well-known case was that of Ellen Crafts, who came from Georgia disguised as a young Southern 344 gentleman, attended by her husband as body-servant. She rode in the cars, sitting near Southerners who knew her, but did not recognize her in this costume, and at last arrived safe in Philadelphia. In one instance a slave escaped from Kentucky, with all his family, walking some distance on stilts, in order to leave no scent for the pursuing blood-hounds. When these poor people reached the North, and told their stories on the antislavery platform, they excited great sympathy, which was not confined to professed antislavery people. A United States commissioner, who might be called on to return fugitives to bondage, frequently had them concealed in his own house, by the action of his wife, whose generous heart never wearied in this work, and who was the means of saving many from bondage. A Democratic United States marshal, in Boston, whose duty it was to arrest fugitive slaves, was in the habit of telling the slave-owner who called on him for assistance that he "did not know anything about niggers, but he would find out where the man was from those who did." Whereupon he would go directly to Mr. Garrison's office and tell him he wanted to arrest such or such a man, a fugitive from slavery. "But," said he, "curiously enough, the next thing I heard would be, that the fellow was in Canada." And when a colored man was actually sent back to slavery, as in the case of Burns, the event excited so much sympathy with the fugitive, and so much horror of 345 the law, that its effects were disastrous to the slave power. Thomas M. Simms was arrested in Boston as a fugitive from slavery, April 3, 1851, and was sent to slavery by the decision of George Ticknor Curtis, a United States commissioner. The answer to this act, by Massachusetts, was the election of Charles Sumner, twenty-one days after, to the United States Senate. Anthony Burns was returned to slavery by order of Edward G. Loring, in May, 1854; and Massachusetts responded by removing him from his office as Judge of Probate, and refusing his confirmation as a professor in Harvard University.

The passage of what were called the compromise measures of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Law, had, it was fondly believed, put an end to the whole antislavery agitation. The two great parties, Whig and Democrat, had agreed that such should be the case. The great leaders, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, Cass and Buchanan, were active in calling on the people to subdue their prejudices in favor of freedom. Southern fire-eaters, like Toombs and Alexander Stephens, joined these Union-savers, and became apostles of peace. Agitation was the only evil, and agitation must now come to an end. Public meetings were held in the large cities,—one in Castle Garden in New York, another in Faneuil Hall in Boston. In these meetings the lion and the lamb lay down together. Rufus Choate and Benjamin Hallet joined in demanding 346 that all antislavery agitation should now cease. The church was called upon to assist in the work of Union-saving, and many leading divines lent their aid in this attempt to silence those who desired that the oppressed should go free, and who wished to break every yoke. Many seemed to suppose that all antislavery agitation was definitely suppressed. President Fillmore called the compromise measures "a final adjustment." All the powers which control human opinion—the two great political parties, the secular and the religious newspapers, the large churches and popular divines, the merchants and lawyers—had agreed that the antislavery agitation should now cease. 52

But just at that moment, when the darkness was 347 the deepest, and all the great powers in the church and state had decreed that there should be no more said concerning American slavery, the voice of a woman broke the silence, and American slavery became the one subject of discussion throughout the world. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was written by Mrs. Stowe for the "National Era," Dr. Bailey's paper in Washington. It was intended to be a short story, running through two or three numbers of the journal, and she was to receive a hundred dollars for writing it. But, as she wrote, the fire burned in her soul, a great inspiration came over her, and, not knowing what she was about to do, she moved the hearts of two continents to their very depths. After her story had appeared in the newspaper, she offered it as a novel to several publishers, who refused it. Accepted at last, it had a circulation unprecedented in the annals of literature. In eight weeks its sale had reached one hundred thousand copies in the United States, while in England a million copies were sold within the year. On the European Continent the sale was immense. A single publisher in Paris issued five editions in a few weeks, and before the end of 1852 it was translated into Italian, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Flemish, German, Polish, and Magyar. To these were afterward added translations into Portuguese, Welsh, Russian, Arabic, and many other languages. For a time, it stopped the publication and sale of all other works; and within 348 a year or two from the day when the politicians had decided that no more should be said concerning American slavery, it had become the subject of conversation and discussion among millions.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published in 1852. Those were very dark hours in the great struggle for freedom. Who that shared them can ever forget the bitterness caused by the defection of Daniel Webster, and his 7th of March speech in 1850; by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, which made the whole area of the free States a hunting-ground for the slaveholders; and by the rejection of the Wilmot Proviso, which abandoned all the new territory to slavery? This was followed by the election of Franklin Pierce as President in 1852, on a platform in which the Democratic party pledged itself to resist all agitation of the subject of slavery in Congress or outside of it. And in December, 1853, Stephen A. Douglas introduced his Nebraska Bill, which repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and opened all the territory heretofore secured to freedom to slaveholders and their slaves. This offer on the part of Mr. Douglas was a voluntary bid for the support of the slaveholders in the next Presidential election. And in spite of all protests from the North, all resistance by Democrats as well as their opponents, all arguments and appeals, this solemn agreement between the North and the South was violated, and every restriction on slavery removed. Nebraska and 349 Kansas were organized as Territories, and the question of slavery left to local tribunals, or what was called "squatter sovereignty."

The passage of this measure showed the vast political advance of the slave power in the country, and how greatly it had corrupted the political conscience of the nation. It also showed, to those who had eyes, that slavery was the wedge which was to split the Union asunder. But there were in the North many persons who still thought that danger to the Union came rather from the discussion of slavery than from slavery itself. They supposed that if all opposition to slavery should cease, then there would be no more danger. The Abolitionists were the cause of all the peril; and the way to save the Union was to silence the Abolitionists. That, however, had been tried ineffectually when they were few and weak; and now it was too late, as these Union-savers ought to have seen.

Mr. Douglas and his supporters defended their cause by maintaining that the Missouri Compromise was not a contract, but a simple act of legislation, and they tauntingly asked, "Why, since antislavery men had always thought that Compromise a bad thing, should they now object to its being repealed?" Even this sophism had its effect with some, who did not notice that Douglas's resolutions only repealed that half of the Compromise which was favorable to freedom, while letting the other half remain. One part of the 350 Act of 1820 was that Missouri should be admitted as a slave State; the other part was that all the rest of the Territory should be forever free. Only the last part was now repealed. Missouri was left in the Union as a slave State.

The political advance now made by slavery will appear from the following facts:—

In 1797 the slave power asked for only life; it did not wish to extend itself; it united with the North in prohibiting its own extension into the Northwest Territory.

In 1820 it did wish to extend itself; it refused to be shut out of Missouri, but was willing that the rest of the Territory should be always free.

In 1845 it insisted on extending itself by annexing Texas, but it admitted that it had no right to go into any Territory as far north as Missouri.

In 1850 it refused to be shut out of any of the new territory, and resisted the Wilmot Proviso; but still confessed that it had no right to go into Kansas or Nebraska.

Five years after, by the efforts of Stephen A. Douglas and Franklin Pierce, it refused to be shut out of Kansas, and repealed the part of the Missouri Compromise which excluded it from that region. But, in order to accomplish this repeal, it took the plausible name of "popular sovereignty," and claimed that the people should themselves decide whether they would have a slave State or a free State.

351 One additional step came. The people decided or were about to decide for freedom; and then the slave power set aside its own doctrine of popular sovereignty and invaded the Territory with an army of Missourians, chose a legislature for the people of Kansas composed of Missourians, who passed laws establishing slavery and punishing with fine and imprisonment any who should even speak against it.

The people of Kansas refused to obey these laws. They would have been slaves already if they had obeyed them. Then their own governor, appointed by our President, led an army of Missourians to destroy their towns and plunder and murder their people. Nothing was left them but to resist. They did resist manfully but prudently, and by a remarkable combination of courage and caution the people of the little Free-State town of Lawrence succeeded in saving themselves from this danger without shedding a drop of blood. Men, women, and children were animated by the same heroic spirit. The women worked by the side of the men. The men were placed on the outposts as sentinels and ordered by their general not to fire as long as they could possibly avoid it. And these men stood on their posts, and allowed themselves to be shot at by the invaders, and did not return the fire. One man received two bullets through his hat, and was ready to fire if the enemy came nearer, but neither fired nor quitted his post. 352 The men were brave and obedient to orders; the women were resolute, sagacious, and prudent. So they escaped their first great danger.

But slavery does not give up its point so easily after one defeat. Preparations were made along the Missouri frontier for another invasion, conducted in a more military manner and by troops under better discipline. The Free-State people of Kansas were to be exterminated. From week to week they were expecting an attack, and had to watch continually against it. After having worked all day the men were obliged to do military duty and stand guard all night. Men who lived four and five miles out from Lawrence got wood and water for their wives in the morning, left them a revolver with which to defend themselves, and went to Lawrence to do military duty, returning at night again.

If we had a writer gifted with the genius of Macaulay to describe the resistance of Kansas to the Federal authorities on one side and the Missouri invaders on the other, it would show as heroic courage and endurance as are related in the brilliant pages which tell of the defense of Londonderry. The invaders were unscrupulous, knowing that they had nothing to fear from the government at Washington. Senator Atchison, formerly the presiding officer of the United States Senate, openly advised the people of Missouri to go and vote in Kansas. General Stringfellow told them 353 to take their bowie-knives and exterminate every scoundrel who was tainted with Free-soilism or Abolitionism. The orders were obeyed. The first legislature was elected by armed invaders from Missouri, and Buford with a regiment of Southern soldiers entered the Territory in 1856, and surrounded Lawrence. These troops, under Atchison, Buford, and Stringfellow, burned houses and hotels, and stole much property. Osawatomie was sacked and burned, Leavenworth invaded and plundered, and Free-State men were killed. A proslavery constitution formed by Missouri slaveholders was forced through Congress, but rejected by the people of Kansas, who at last gained possession of their own State by indomitable courage and patience. Four territorial governors, appointed by the President, selected from the Democratic party and favorable to the extension of slavery, were all converted to the cause of freedom by the sight of the outrages committed by the Missouri invaders.

Amid this scene of tumult arose a warrior on the side of freedom destined to take his place with William Wallace and William Tell among the few names of patriots which are never forgotten. John Brown of Osawatomie was one of those who, in these later days, have reproduced for us the almost forgotten type of the Jewish hero and prophet. He was a man who believed in a God of justice, who believed in fighting fire with fire. He was one who came in the spirit and power of Elijah, 354 an austere man, a man absorbed in his ideas, fixed as fate in pursuing them. Yet his heart was full of tenderness, he had no feeling of revenge toward any, and he really lost his own life rather than risk the lives of others. While in Kansas he become a leader of men, a captain, equal to every exigency. The ruffians from Missouri found to their surprise that, before they could conquer Kansas, they had some real fighting to do, and must face Sharpe's rifles; and as soon as they understood this, their zeal for their cause was very much abated. In this struggle John Brown was being educated for the last scene of his life, which has lifted up his name, and placed it in that body which Daniel O'Connell used to call "The order of Liberators." 53

Out of these persecutions of Free-State men in Kansas came the assault on Charles Sumner, for words spoken in debate. Charles Sumner was elected to the United States Senate in 1851. He found in Congress some strong champions of freedom. John Quincy Adams was gone; but Seward was there, and Chase, and John P. Hale, in the Senate; and Horace Mann, Giddings, and other true men in the House. Henry Wilson himself, always a loyal friend to Sumner, did not come till 1855. These men all differed from one another, and each possessed special gifts for his arduous 355 work. They stood face to face with an imperious majority, accustomed to rule. They had only imperfect support at home,—people and press at the North had been demoralized by slavery. They must watch their words, be careful of what they said, control their emotions, maintain an equal temper. Something of the results of this discipline we think we perceive in the calm tone of Mr. Wilson's volumes, and the absence of passion in his narration. These men must give no occasion to the enemy to blaspheme, but be careful of their lips and their lives. Their gifts, we have said, were various. Seward was a politician, trained in all the intricate ways of New York party struggles; but he was also a thinker of no small power of penetration. He could see principles, but was too much disposed to sacrifice or postpone them to some supposed exigency of the hour. In his orations, when he spoke for mankind, his views were large; but in his politics he sometimes gave up to party his best-considered convictions. Thought and action, he seemed to believe, belonged to two spheres; in his thought he was often broader in his range than any other senator, but in action he was frequently tempted to temporize. Mr. Chase was a man of a different sort. He had no disposition to concede any of his views. A cautious man, he moved slowly; but when he had taken his position, he was not disposed to leave it. John P. Hale was admirable in reply. His retorts were 356 rapid and keen, and yet were uttered so good-naturedly, and with so much wit, that it was difficult for his opponents to take offense. But Charles Sumner was "the noblest Roman of them all." With a more various culture, a higher tone of moral sentiment, he was also a learned student and a man of implacable opinions. He never could comprehend Mr. Seward's diplomacy, and probably Mr. Seward could never understand Sumner's inability to compromise. He was deficient in imagination and in tact; therefore he could not enter into the minds of others, and imperfectly understood them. But the purity of his soul and life, the childlike simplicity of his purposes, and the sweetness of his disposition, were very charming to those who knew him well. Add to this the resources of a mind stored with every kind of knowledge, and a memory which never forgot anything, and his very presence in Washington gave an added value to the place. He had seen men and cities, and was intimate with European celebrities, but yet was an Israelite indeed in whom was no guile. Fond of the good opinions of others, and well pleased with their approbation, he never sacrificed a conviction to win their praise or to avoid their censure. Certainly, he was one of the purest men who ever took part in American politics.

It was such a man as this, so gifted and adorned, so spotless and upright, who by the wise providence 357 of God was permitted to be the victim of a brutal assassin. It was this noble head, the instrument of laborious thought for the public welfare, which was beaten and bruised by the club of a ruffian, on May 22, 1856. Loud was the triumph through the South, great the joy of the slave power. They had disabled, with cruel blows, their chief enemy. Little did they foresee—bad men never do foresee—that Charles Sumner was to return to his seat, and become a great power in the land, long after their system had been crushed, and their proud States trampled into ruin by the tread of Northern armies. They did not foresee that he was to be the trusted counselor of Lincoln during those years of war; and that, after they had been conquered, he would become one of their best friends in their great calamity, and repay their evil with good.

This murderous assault on Mr. Sumner cannot be considered as having strengthened the political position of the slave power. It was a great mistake in itself, and it was a greater mistake in being indorsed by such multitudes in the slave States. In thus taking the responsibility of the act, they fully admitted that brutality, violence, and cowardly attempts at assassination are natural characteristics of slavery. A thrill of horror went through the civilized world on this occasion. All the free States felt themselves outraged. That an attempt should be made to kill in his seat a 358 Northern man, for words spoken in debate, was a gross insult and wrong to the nation, and deepened everywhere the detestation felt for the system.

But madness must have its perfect work. One more step remained to be taken by the slave power, and that was to claim the right, under the Constitution, and protected by the general government, to carry slaves and slavery into all the Territories. It was not enough that they were not prohibited by acts of Congress. They must not allow the people of the Territories to decide for themselves whether slavery should exist among them or not. It had a right to exist there, in spite of the people. A single man from South Carolina, going with his slaves into Nebraska, should have the power of making that a slave State, though all the rest of its inhabitants wished it to be free. And if he were troubled by his neighbors, he had a right to call on the military power of the United States to protect him against them. Such was the doctrine of the Dred Scott case, such the doctrine accepted by the majority of the United States Senate under the lead of Jefferson Davis in the spring of 1859. Such was the doctrine demanded by the Southern members of the Democratic Convention in Charleston, S. C., in May, 1860, and, failing to carry it, they broke up that convention. And it was because they were defeated in this purpose of carrying slavery into the Territories that they seceded 359 from the Union, and formed the Southern Confederacy.

They had gained a long succession of political triumphs, which we have briefly traced in this article. They had annexed Texas, and made another slave State of that Territory. They had established the principle that slavery was not to be excluded by law from any of the Territories of the nation. They had repealed the Missouri Compromise, passed the Fugitive Slave Law, obtained the Dred Scott decision from the Supreme Court. In all this they had been aided by the Democratic party, and were sure of the continued help of that party. With these allies, they were certain to govern the country for a long period of years. The President, the Senate, the Supreme Court, were all on their side. As regarded slavery in the States, there was nothing to threaten its existence there. The Republicans proposed only to restrict it to the region where it actually existed, but could not and would not meddle with it therein. If the slave power had been satisfied with this, it seems probable that it might have retained its ascendency in the country for a long period. An immense region was still open to its colonies. Cotton was still king, and the slaveholders possessed all the available cotton-growing regions. They were wealthy, they were powerful, they governed the nation. They threw all this power away by seceding from the Union. Why did they do this?

360 The frequent answer to this question is contained in the proverb, "Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." No doubt this act was one of madness, and no doubt it was providential. But Providence works not by direct interference, but by maintaining the laws of cause and effect. Why did they become so mad? Why this supreme folly of relinquishing actual enormous power, in order to set their lives and fortunes on the hazard of a die?

It seems to be the doom of all vaulting ambition to overleap itself, and to fall on the other side. When Macbeth had gained all his ends, when he had become Thane of Cawdor and Glamis, and king, he had no peace, because the succession had been promised to Banquo:—

When Napoleon the First was master of nearly all Europe, he could not be satisfied while England resisted his power, and Russia had not submitted to it. So he also said,—

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He also threw away all his immense power because he could not arrest his own course or limit his own demands on fate. Such ambitions cannot stop, so long as there is anything unconquered or unpossessed. "All this avails me nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king's gate." The madness which seizes those greedy of power is like the passion of the gamester, who is unable to limit his desire of gain. By this law of insatiable ambition Providence equalizes destinies, and power is prevented from being consolidated in a few hands.

The motive which actuates these ambitions, and makes them think that nothing is gained so long as anything remains to be gained, seems to be a secret fear that they are in danger of losing all unless they can obtain more.

This inward dread appears to have possessed the hearts of the Southern slaveholders. Since slavery has been abolished, many of them admit that they have more content in their present poverty than they formerly had in their large possessions. They were then sensitive to every suggestion which touched their institution. Hence their persecution of Abolitionists, hence their cruelty to the slaves themselves,—for cruelty is often the child of fear. Hence the atrocity of the slave laws. Hence the desire to secure more and larger guaranties from the United States for their institution. Every rumor in the air troubled 362 them. The fact that antislavery opinion existed at the North, that it was continually increasing, that a great political party was growing up which was opposed to their system, that such men as Garrison and Wendell Phillips existed in Boston, that Seward and Sumner were in the Senate,—all this was intolerable. The only way of accounting for Southern irritability, for Southern aggressions, for its perpetual demand for more power, is to be found in this latent terror. They doubted whether the foundations of their whole system were not rotten; they feared that it rested on falsehood and lies; they secretly felt that it was contrary to the will of God; an instinct in their souls told them that it was opposed to the spirit of the age and the laws of progress; and this fear made them frantic.

When men's minds are in this state, they are like the glass toy called a Rupert's bubble. A single scratch on the surface causes it to fly in pieces. The scratch on the surface of the slave system which caused it to rush into secession and civil war was the attempt of John Brown on Harper's Ferry. It seemed a trifle, but it indicated a great deal. It was the first drop of a coming storm. When one man was able to lay down his life, in a conflict with their system, with such courage and nobleness, in a cause not his own, a shudder ran through the whole South. To what might this grow? And so they said, "Let us cut 363 ourselves wholly off from these dreadful fanaticisms, from these terrible dangers. Let us make a community of our own, and shut out from it entirely all antislavery opinion, and live only with those who think as we do." And so came the end.

In reviewing Mr. Wilson's work, we have thus seen how it describes the gradual and simultaneous growth in the United States of two hostile powers,—one political, the other moral. The one continued to accumulate the outward forces which belong to the organization; the other, the inward forces which are associated with enthusiasm. The one added continually to its external strength by the passage of new laws, the addition of new territory, the more absolute control of parties, government, courts, the press, and the street. The other increased its power by accumulating an intenser conviction, a clearer knowledge, a firmer faith, and a more devoted consecration to its cause. The weapons of the one were force, adroitness, and worldly interest; those of the other, faith in God, in man, and in truth.

Great truths draw to their side noble auxiliaries. So it was with the antislavery movement. The heroism, the romance, the eloquence, the best literature, the grandest forms of religion, the most generous and purest characters,—all were brought to it by a sure affinity. As Wordsworth said to Toussaint l'Ouverture, so it might be declared here:—

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The best poets of America, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, were in full sympathy with this cause, and their best poetry was their songs for freedom. Shall we ever forget the caustic humor of "Hosea Biglow" and "Birdofredum Sawin"? And how lofty a flight of inspiration did the same bard take, when he chanted in verses nobler, as it seems to us, than anything since Wordsworth's "Ode to Immortality," the Return of the Heroes who had wrought salvation for the dear land "bright beyond compare" among the nations! What heroism, what tenderness, what stern rebuke, what noble satire, have attended every event in this long struggle, from the lyre of Whittier! Nothing in Campbell excels the ring of some of his trumpet-calls, nothing in Cowper the pathos of his elegies over the martyrs of freedom. The best men and the best women were always to be found at the meetings of the Antislavery Society. There were to be seen such upright lawyers as Ellis Gray Loring and Samuel E. Sewall and John A. Andrew, such eminent writers as Emerson, such great preachers as Theodore Parker and Beecher, such editors as Bryant and Greeley. To this cause did William Ellery Channing devote his last years and best thoughts. If the churches as organizations stood aloof, being only "timidly 365 good," as organizations are apt to be, the purest of their body were sure to be found in this great company of latter-day saints.

Antislavery men had their faults. They were often unjust to their opponents, though unintentionally so. They were sometimes narrow and bitter; and with them, as with all very earnest people, any difference of opinion as to methods seemed to involve moral obliquity. But they were doing the great work of the age,—the most necessary work of all,—and much might be pardoned to their passionate love of justice and humanity. In their meetings could be heard many of the ablest speakers of the time, and one, the best of all. He held the silver bow of Apollo, and dreadful was its clangor when he launched its shafts against spiritual wickedness in high places. Those deadly arrows were sometimes misdirected, and occasionally they struck the good men who were meaning to do their duty. Such errors, we suppose, are incident to all who are speaking and acting in such terrible earnest; in the great day of accounts many mistakes will have to be rectified. But surely among the goodly company of apostles and prophets, and in the noble army of martyrs there assembled, few will be found more free from the sins of selfish interest and personal ambition than those who in Congress, in the pulpit, on the platform, or with the pen, fought the great battle of American freedom.

366 One great moral must be drawn from this story before we close. It demonstrates, by a great historical proof, that no evil however mighty, no abuse however deeply rooted, can resist the power of truth faithfully uttered and steadily applied. If this great institution of slavery, resting on such a foundation of enormous pecuniary interest, buttressed by such powerful supports, fell in the life of a single generation before the unaided power of truth, why should we ever despair? Henceforth, whenever a mighty evil is to be assailed, or a cruel despotism overthrown, men will look to this history of the greatness and decadence of slavery; and, so encouraged, will believe that God is on the side of justice, and that truth will always prevail against error.

But to this we must add, that it is only where free institutions exist that truth has full power in such a conflict. We need free speech, a free press, free schools, and free churches, in order that truth may have a free course. The great advantage of a republic like ours is, that it gives to truth a fair chance in its conflict with error. The Southern States would long ago have abolished slavery if it had possessed such institutions. But, though republican in form, the Southern States were in reality an oligarchy, in which five millions of whites and three millions of slaves were governed by the absolute and irresponsible power of less than half a million of slaveholders. Freedom 367 was permitted by them except when this institution was concerned, then it was absolutely forbidden. No book written against their peculiar institution could be printed on any Southern press or sold in any Southern bookstore. No newspaper attacking slavery was allowed to be circulated through Southern mails. No public meeting could be held to discuss the right and wrong of slavery. No minister could preach against the system. No man could express, even in conversation, his hostility to it, without risk of personal injury. An espionage as sharp, and an inquisition as relentless as those of Venice or Spain, governed society, at least in the cotton and sugar States of the Union. But at the North opinion was free, and therefore slavery fell. Fisher Ames compressed in an epigram the evil and good of republican institutions. "In a monarchy," said he, "we are in a ship, very comfortable while things go well; but strike a rock, and we go to the bottom. In a republic, we are on a raft; our feet are wet, and it is not always agreeable, but we are safe." It is a lasting proof of the conservative power of free institutions, that they were able to uproot such a system as slavery by creating a moral force capable of putting it down; that they could carry us through a civil war, still leaving the press and speech free: that they stood the strain of a presidential election without taking from the voters a single right; and so, at last, conquered a rebellion on so vast a scale 368 that every European monarchy, with its immense standing army, would have been powerless in its presence. Let those Americans who are disposed to disparage their own institutions bear this history in mind. We have evils here, and great ones; but they come at once to the surface, and therefore can be met and overcome by the power of intelligent opinion. So it has always been in the past; so it will be, God aiding us, in the future. We are about to meet the Centennial Anniversary of our national life; and on that day we can look back to our fathers, the founders of the Republic, and say to them,—"You gave us the inestimable blessing of free institutions; we have used those institutions to destroy the only great evil which you transmitted to us untouched. We now can send down the Republic to our children, pure from this stain, and capable of enduring IN SECULA SECULORUM ."

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