"THE OBSEQUIES OF CHEOPS:A LECTURE."
"THE OBSEQUIES OF CHEOPS:A LECTURE."
With that vivid rapidity with which varied and minute scenery is crowded into a moment of despair, I perceived the fatal blunder. Owlsdarck and I had changed manuscripts. Upon that entry-table where lay my poem, the hurry and bustle of departure had for a moment thrown his lecture. The cases being identical in appearance, he had taken up my unfortunate production, which, doubtless, at that very moment, he was opening before parents, trustees, and pupils connected with the Wrexford Academy. I will not deny, that, in the midst of my own perplexity, a ghastly sense of the ridiculous came over me, as I thought of the bewilderment of the Professor. For an instant of time I actually knew a grim enjoyment in the fact that circumstances had perpetrated a much better joke than any in my poem. But my heart stopped beating as an impatient rumble of applause testified that the desires of the audience were awaiting gratification.
I glared upon the expectant faces before me; but they seemed to melt and fuse into one another, or to dance about quite independently of the bodies with which they should have been connected. I strove to murmur an apology; but the words stuck in my throat.
More applause, in which a slight whistling flavor was apparent. A kicking, as of cow-hide boots of juvenile proportions, audible from the gallery. A suspicion of cat-calling in a monad state of development about the door. Of course my prospects were ruined. My knees seemed disposed to deposit their burden upon the floor. Hope was utterly extinguished in my breast. There I stood, weak and contemptible, before the wretched populace whose votes I had come to solicit. Then it was, the resolution, or rather therage, of despair inspired me. I determined to take a terrible vengeance upon my abandoned constituents. Quick as lightning the thought leaped to execution. I seized the insufferable composition before me, and began to fulminate its sentences at the democracy of Foxden.
"Fulminate" is expressive; but words like "roar" and "bellow" must be borrowed to give the reader an idea of the vocal power put into that performance. For it is a habit of our infirm natures to counteract embarrassment by some physical exaggeration, which, by absorbing our chief attention, leaves little to be occupied with the cause of distress. Persons of extreme diffidence are sometimes able to face society by behaving as if they were vulgarly at their ease, and men troubled with a morbid modesty oftenfind relief in acting a character of overweening pride. Thus it was only by absorbing attention in the effort to produce a very sensational order of declamation that I could perform the task undertaken. Owlsdarck's handwriting was luckily large and legible; and I was able to storm and gesticulate without hinderance.
I ploughed through the tough old homily, tossing up the biggest size of words as if they were not worth thinking of. I went at the lamented Cheops with a fearful enthusiasm. The air seemed heavy with a miasma of information. It was not my fault, if every individual in the audience did not feel personally sticky with the glutinous drugs I lavished upon the embalmment. I was as profuse with my myrrh, cassia, and aloes, as if those costly vegetable productions were as cheap as cabbages. I split up a sycamore-tree to make an external shell, as if it were as familiar a wood as birch or hemlock. At last, having got his case painted all over with appropriate emblems, and Cheops himself done up in his final wrapping, I struck a mighty blow upon the desk, which set the lamps ringing and flaring in majestic emphasis.
It was at this point that the presence of an audience was once more recalled to me. Enthusiastic applause, peal after peal, responded to my efforts. I ventured to look out into the hall before me. Dr. Dastick was thumping with energy upon the neighboring settee. The elders of Foxden were leading the approbation, and a wild tattoo was resonant from the gallery. The face of Colonel Prowley was aglow with satisfaction, and the dear old gentleman actually waved his handkerchief as he caught my eye. But my frightened, pale-faced Kate,—my first shudder returned again as I met her gaze. Again I felt the sinking, prickling sensation of being in for it. There was no resource but to charge at the Professor's manuscript as vigorously as ever.
I now went to pyramid-making with the same zeal with which I had acted as undertaker. Locks, parsley, and garlic, to the amount of one thousand and sixty talents, were lavished upon the workmen. Stuffed cats and sacred crocodiles were carried in procession to encourage them. Stones, thirty feet long, were heaved out of quarries, and hieroglyphics chopped into them with wonderful despatch. At last, after an hour and a half of laborious vociferation, I managed to get the pyramid done and Cheops put into it. A sort of dress-parade of authorities was finally called: Herodotus, Tacitus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Pliny, Solinus, and many others, were fired in concluding volleys among the audience. I was conscious of a salvo of clapping, pounding, and stamping that thundered in reply. The last sentence had been uttered. Again the audience blurred and danced before my eyes; I staggered back, and sank confused and breathless into the orator's chair.
"Good, good," whispered the President. "It was a capital idea; ha, ha, very funny! To hear you hammering away at Egyptian antiquities as if you'd never thought of anything else! The elocution and gestures, too, were perfectly tall;—the Young Men of our Society were delighted;—I could see they were."
"Permit me to congratulate you, Sir," said Dr. Dastick, who had elbowed his way to the platform. "I confess myself most agreeably disappointed in your performance. There was in it a solidity of information and a curiosity of important research for which I was totally unprepared. Let me hope that such powers of oratory as we have heard this evening may soon plead the cause of good learning in the legislature of our State."
"A good subject, my dear young friend, and admirably developed," exclaimed Colonel Prowley. "You have already won the palm of victory, if I rightly read the faces of some who were too quick to endow you with the common levity and indiscretion of youth."
"You have had success with young and old," said the Reverend Mr. Clifton, kindly holding out his hand. "We haverarely lecturers who seem to give such universal satisfaction."
After these congratulations, and others to the same purpose, the real state of the case could no longer be hidden. Instead of the mortification and defeat confidently expected, I had unwittingly made a ten-strike upon that erratic set of pins, the Foxden public. The Young Men, who knew me only as the γελωτοποιος, or laughter-maker, of their merry association, considered the sombre getting up and energetic delivery of the Cheops lecture the very best joke I had ever perpetrated. Some of the most influential citizens, as has been already seen, were personally gratified in the general dustiness of the subject; while others, perchance, were able to doze in the consciousness that the opinions of Cheops upon such disturbing topics as Temperance, Anti-Slavery, and Woman's Rights must necessarily be of a patriarchal and comforting character. But the glory of the unlooked-for triumph seemed strangely lessened by the reflection that I had no just claim to the funereal plumage with which I had so happily decked myself.
"Gentlemen," said I, "I ought to tell you that the address I have delivered this evening is—in fact—is not original."
"That's just why we like it," rejoined Dr. Dastick. "No young man should be original; it is a great impertinence, if he tries to be."
"I do not mean simply to acknowledge an indebtedness to the ancient authorities quoted in the lecture; but—but, the truth is, that the arrangement and composition cannot properly be called my own."
"Not the least consequence," said Colonel Prowler. "You showed a commendable modesty in seeking the aid of any discreet and learned person. You know I offered to give you what assistance was in my power; but you found—unexpectedly, at the last moment, perhaps—some wiser friend."
"Most unexpectedly,—at the very last moment," I murmured.
"As for originality," said the clergyman, pleasantly, "when you have come to my age, you will cease to trouble yourself much about it. No man can accomplish anything important without a large indebtedness to those who have lived, as well as to those who live. We know that the old fathers not only dared to lack originality, but even to consider times and peoples in their selection and treatment of topics.Non quod sentiunt, sed quod necesse est dicunt, may be said of them in no disparagement. For, not to mention others, I might quote Cyprian, Minutius, Lactantius, and Hilarius,"——
"Anything hilarious is as much out of place in a lecture as it would be in a sermon," interrupted Dr. Dastick, who had evidently missed the drift of his pastor's remarks. "And I rejoice that the success of our friend who has spoken this evening rebukes those vain and shallow witlings who have sometimes degraded the lyceum. I could send such fellows to make sport in the courts of luxurious princes, for they may well follow after jousts, tourneys, stage-plays, and like sugar-plums of Satan; as, indeed, we need them not in this Puritan commonwealth. But come, all of you, for an hour, to my house; for I am mistaken, if there be not in my cabinet many rare illustrations of the discourse we have just heard. I have several bones by me, which, if they belonged not to Cheops himself, may well be relics of his near relations. And as an offset to their dry and wasted estate, I have some luscious pears which are just now at full maturity."
Colonel Prowley and his party had small inclination to resist the Doctor's invitation, and it was speedily agreed that the lecturer (having, as we have seen, escaped consignment to European monarchs) should have the privilege of mingling in the social life of Foxden for the next hour or so.
"But you forget Professor Owlsdarck," I ventured to whisper to the Colonel. "I must see him the instant he returns. That is—I am very impatient to hear of his success. I cannot let him arriveat your house, if I am not there to meet him."
My host stared a little at this impetuosity of interest, and then informed me that the carryall from Wrexford must necessarily pass Dastick's house, and that he himself would run out and stop it and bring in the Professor.
"No," I exclaimed, with energy; "promise that I may go out and receive Owlsdarck alone, or I cannot go to Dr. Dastick's."
"I doubt if there would be any precedent for this," argued the Colonel, gravely.
"Then we must make one," I asserted. "For surely nothing is more appropriate than that a lecturer, returning from his exercise, whether in triumph or defeat, should be first encountered by some brother of the craft who can have adequate sympathy with his feelings."
After some demur, Colonel Prowley consented to adopt this view of the case; and we passed out of the hot lecture-room into the still, fresh night. Here Kate took my arm and we managed for an instant to lag behind the crowd.
"I am not mad yet," I said, "though when I began that extraordinary lecture you must have thought me so."
"For a few moments," replied my wife, "I was utterly bewildered; but soon, of course, I guessed the explanation. You appeared before the Foxden audience with Professor Owlsdarck's lecture."
"And he appeared with my poem before the audience in Wrexford."
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Kate, "I never thought of that part of it!"
"Yet that isthepart of it of which it behooves us to think just at present," I replied. "To my utter amazement, there has been something, either in the Professor's wisdom or in my rendering of it, that hastakenwith the audience. Not knowing what Owlsdarck has done, or may wish to do, I have not explained the humiliating and ridiculous blunder,—though I have stoutly denied myself any credit for the information or composition of the lecture."
"But the Professor couldn't have read your poem at Wrexford?"
"Two hours ago I should have thought it so impossible, that only one thing in the world would have seemed to me more so, and that was that I should have read his lecture in Foxden. But, luckily, I have permission to stop the carryall on its way back, and so meet Owlsdarck before he comes into the house. Let us keep the secret for the present, and wait further developments."
As others of the party had begun to look back, and to linger for us to come up, there was no opportunity for further conference. And so we made an effort, and talked of everything but what we were thinking of, till we reached Dr. Dastick's house.
I was conscious of a sweet memory, while passing along the broad, low-roofed piazza where I first met my wife. And I marvelled that fate had so arranged matters, that, again in the moonlight, near that very spot, I was to have an important interview with another person with whom my destiny had become strangely entangled.
One sense was painfully acute while the relics and pears were being passed about during the remainder of the evening. At any period I could have heard the creak of the venerable carryall above the swarm of information which buzzed about the Doctor's parlor. I responded to the waggish raillery of the young men, talkedboneswith their seniors, disclaimed all originality in my lecture, thanked people for what they said about my spirited declamation, and—through it all—listened intently for the solemn rumble upon the Wrexford road. Time really seemed to stop and go backward, as if in compliment to the ancient fragments of gums, wrappages, and scarabæi that were produced for our inspection. The carryall, I thought, must have broken down; Wrexford had, perchance, been suddenly destroyed, like the Cities of the Plain; the Professor had been tarred andfeathered by the enraged inhabitants, or, perhaps, had been murdered upon the road;—there was no limit to the doleful hypotheses which suggested themselves.
And, in fact, it was now getting late to everybody. The last pear had vanished, and people began to look at the clock. Colonel Frowley was audibly wondering what could have detained the Professor, and Dr. Dastick was expressing his regret at not having the pleasure of seeing him, when,—no,—yes, a jerking trundle was heard in the distance,—it was not the wind this time! I seized my hat, rushed from the house, and paused not till I had stopped the carryall with the emphasis of a highwayman.
"I have come to ask you to get out, Professor Owlsdarck," I exclaimed. "Tom can drive the horse home; we're all at Dr. Dastick's, and they've sent me to beg you to come in."
The occupant of the vehicle, upon hearing my voice, made haste to alight. Tom gave an expressive "Hud up," and rolled away into the moonlight.
"My dear Sir," said I, "no apology,—no allusion to how it happened; we have both suffered quite enough. Only tell me what you managed to do with my poem, and what the people of Wrexford have done to you."
"What did I do with your poem?" echoed the Professor,—there was an undertone of humorous satisfaction in his words that I had never before remarked,—"why, what could I do with it but read it to my audience? They thought it was capital, and——Well,Ithought so, too. And if you want to know what the trustees did to me, you will find it in print in a day or two. The fact is, they called a meeting, after I finished, and unanimously elected me Principal of their Academy."
I managed to get a few more particulars before entering the house, and these, with other circumstances afterwards ascertained, made the Professor's adventure to unravel itself thus: Owlsdarck had discovered the change of manuscript about five minutes before he was expected to speak. The audience had assembled, and (in view of the respect which should appertain to the office for which he was an aspirant) he saw the humiliation of disappointing the academic flock by a confession of his absurd position. He glanced at the first page of my verses, and, seeing that they commenced in a grave and solemn strain, determined to run for luck, and make the best of them. Accordingly he began by saying, that, instead of the usual literary address, he should read a new American poem, which he trusted would prove popular and to the purpose. It turned out to be very much to the purpose. The dismal Professor Owlsdarck. giving utterance to the Yankee quips and waggery which I had provided, took his audience by storm with amazement and delight. For the truth was, as Strype had intimated in the morning, a formidable opposition had arrayed itself against the Professor, which (while acknowledging the claims of his profound learning) contended that he lacked sympathy with the merry hearts of youth, a fatal defect in the character of a teacher. Of course the entertainment of the evening filled all such cavillers with shame and confusion. There was nothing to do but to own their mistake, and to support the many-sided Owlsdarck with all enthusiasm. Hence his unanimous election, and hence my infinite relief upon reëntering the Doctor's house.
We determined to keep our own counsel, and thereupon ratified our unintentional exchange of productions. I presented my poem to Professor Owlsdarck, and he resigned in my favor all right, title, and interest in Cheops and his Obsequies. We both felt easier after this had been done, and walked arm-in-arm into Dr. Dastick's parlor, conscious of a plethoric satisfaction strange to experience.
I need hardly allude to the indignation of the Foxden electors, when the "Regulator" appeared the next morning with a bittercritiqueof my performance in the Town Hall. There is notoriously a good deal of license allowed to opposition editorsupon election-day. But to ridicule a serious and erudite lecture as "a flimsy and buffooning poem,"—there was, really, in this, a blindness of passion, a display of impotent malice, an utter contempt for the common sense of subscribers, to which the history of editorial vagaries seemed to furnish no parallel. Of course, a libel so gross and atrocious not only failed of its object, but drove off in disgust all decent remnants of the opposing party which the lecture of the previous evening had failed to conciliate.
And now I think it has been explained why I was chosen to represent Foxden, and how my vote came to be so nearly unanimous. Whether I made a good use of the lesson of that fifth of November it does not become me to say. But of the success of the Principal of the Wrexford Academy in the useful sphere of labor upon which he then entered I possess undoubted evidence.
"Old Owlsdarck's a pretty stiff man. in school," exclaimed a chubby little fellow in whom I have some interest, when he lately returned from Wrexford to pass the summer vacation,—"Old Owlsdarck's a pretty stiff man in school; but when he comes into the play-ground, you ought to hear him laugh and carry on with the boys!"
A few seasons ago the Professor consented to repeat his famous poem upon "The Whims of New England," and made the tour of the river-towns, and several hundred dollars. He wrote me that he had received tempting overtures for a Western excursion, which his numerous lyceum-engagements at home compelled him to decline.
I have since faced many audiences, and long conquered the maiden bashfulness of a first appearance. It is necessary to confess that my topics of discourse have generally been of too radical a character to maintain the unprecedented popularity of my first attempt. I don't mind mentioning, however, that the manuscript wherewith I delighted the people of Foxden is yet in my possession. And should there be among my readers members of the Inviting Committee of any neighboring Association, League, or Lyceum, they will please notice that I am open to offers for the repetition of a highly instructiveLecture: Subject, The Obsequies of Cheops.
A chapter on mountains will not be an inappropriate introduction to that part of the world's history on which we are now entering, when the great inequalities of the earth's surface began to make their appearance; and before giving any special account of the geological succession in Europe, I will say something of the formation of mountains in general, and of the men whose investigations first gave us the clue to the intricacies of their structure. It has been the work of the nineteenth century to decipher the history of the mountains, to smooth out these wrinkles in the crust of the earth, to show that there was a time when they did not exist, to decide at least comparatively upon their age, and to detect the forces which have produced them.
But while I speak of the reconstructive labors of the geologist with so much confidence, because to my mind they reveal an intelligible coherence in the whole physical history of the world, yet I am well aware that there are many and wide gaps in our knowledge to be filled up. All the attempts to represent the appearance of the earth in past periods by means of geological maps are, of course, but approximations of the truth, and will comparewith those of future times, when the phenomena are better understood, much as our present geographical maps, the result of repeated surveys and of the most accurate measurements, compare with those of the ancients.
Homer's world was a flat expanse, surrounded by ocean, of which Greece was the centre. Asia Minor, the Ægean Islands, Egypt, part of Italy and Sicily, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea filled out and completed his map.
Hecatæus, the Greek historian and geographer, who lived more than five hundred years before Christ, had not enlarged it much. He was, to be sure, a voyager on the Mediterranean, and had an idea of the extent of Italy. Acquaintance with Phœnician merchants also had enlarged his knowledge of the world; Sardinia, Corsica, and Spain were known to him; he was familiar with the Black and Red Seas; and though an indentation on his map in the neighborhood of the Caspian would seem to indicate that he was aware of the existence of this sea also, it is not otherwise marked.
Herodotus makes a considerable advance beyond his predecessors: the Caspian Sea has a place on his map; Asia is sketched out, including the Persian Gulf with the large rivers pouring into it; and the course of the Ganges is traced, though he makes it flow east and empty into the Pacific, instead of turning southward and emptying into the Indian Ocean.
Eratosthenes, two centuries before Christ, is the first geographer who makes some attempt to determine the trend of the land and water, presenting a suggestion that the earth is broader in one direction than in the other. In his map, he adds also the geographical results derived from the expeditions of Alexander the Great.
Ptolemy, who flourished in Alexandria in the reign of Hadrian, is the next geographer of eminence, and he shows us something of Africa; for, in his time, the Phœnicians, in their commercial expeditions, had sailed far to the south, had reached the termination of Africa, with ocean lying all around it, and had seen the sun to the north of them. This last assertion, however, Ptolemy does not credit, and he is as skeptical of the open ocean surrounding the extremity of Africa as modern geographers and explorers have been of the existence of Kane's open Arctic Sea. He believes that what the Phœnician traders took to be the broad ocean must be part of an inland sea, corresponding to the Mediterranean, with which he was so familiar. His map includes also England, Ireland, and Scotland; and his Ultima Thule is, no doubt, the Hebrides of our days.
Our present notions of the past periods of the world's history probably bear about the same relation to the truth that these ancient geographical maps bear to the modern ones. But this should not discourage us, for, after all, those maps were in the main true as far as they went; and as the ancient geographers were laying the foundation for all our modern knowledge of the present conformation of the globe, so are the geologists of the nineteenth century preparing the ground for future investigators, whose work will be as far in advance of theirs as are the delineations of Carl Ritter, the great master of physical geography in our age, in advance of the map drawn by the old Alexandrian geographer. We shall have our geological explorers and discoverers in the lands and seas of past times, as we have had in the present,—our Columbuses, our Captain Cooks, our Livingstones in geology, as we have had in geography. There are undiscovered continents and rivers and inland seas in the past world to exercise the ingenuity, courage, and perseverance of men, after they shall have solved all the problems, sounded all the depths, and scaled all the heights of the present surface of the earth.
What has been done thus far is chiefly to classify the inequalities of the earth's surface, and to detect the different causes which have produced them. Foldingsof the earth's crust, low hills, extensive plains, mountain-chains and narrow valleys, broad table-lands and wide valleys, local chimneys or volcanoes, river-beds, lake-basins, inland seas,—such are some of the phenomena which, disconnected as they seem at first glance, have nevertheless been brought under certain principles, and explained according to definite physical laws.
Formerly, men looked upon the earth as a unit in time, as the result of one creative act, with all its outlines established from the beginning. It has been the work of modern science to show that its inequalities are not contemporaneous or simultaneous, but successive, including a law of growth,—that heat and cold, and the consequent expansion and contraction of its crust, have produced wrinkles and folds upon the surface, while constant oscillations, changes of level which are even now going on, have modified its conformation, and moulded its general outline through successive ages.
In thinking of the formation of the globe, we must at once free ourselves from the erroneous impression that the crust of the earth is a solid, steadfast foundation. So far from being immovable, it has been constantly heaving and falling; and if we are not impressed by its oscillations, it is because they are not so regular or so evident to our senses as the rise and fall of the sea. The disturbances of the ocean, and the periodical advance and retreat of its tides, are known to our daily experience; we have seen it tossed into great billows by storms, or placid as a lake when undisturbed. But the crust of the earth also has had its storms, to which the tempests of the sea are as nothing,—which have thrown up mountain waves twenty thousand feet high, and fixed them where they stand, perpetual memorials of the convulsions that upheaved them. Conceive an ocean wave that should roll up for twenty thousand feet, and be petrified at its greatest height: the mountains are but the gigantic waves raised on the surface of the land by the geological tempests of past times. Besides these sudden storms of the earth's surface, there have been its gradual upheavals and depressions, going on now as steadily as ever, and which may be compared to the regular action of the tides. These, also, have had their share in determining the outlines of the continents, the height of the lands, and the depth of the seas.
Leaving aside the more general phenomena, let us look now at the formation of mountains especially. I have stated in a previous article that the relative position of the stratified and unstratified rocks gives us the key to their comparative age. To explain this I must enter into some details respecting the arrangement of stratified deposits on mountain-slopes and in mountain-chains, taking merely theoretical cases, however, to illustrate phenomena which we shall meet with repeatedly in actual facts, when studying special geological formations.
Fig. 1.Fig. 1.
We have, for instance, in Figure 1, a central granite mountain, with a succession of stratified beds sloping against its sides, while at its base are deposited a number of horizontal beds which have evidently never been disturbed from the position in which they were originally accumulated. The reader will at once perceive the method by which the geologist decides upon the age of such a mountain. He finds the strata upon its slopes in regular superposition, the uppermost belonging, we will suppose, to the Triassic period; at its base he finds undisturbed horizontal deposits, also in regular superposition, belonging to the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Therefore, he argues, this mountain must have been uplifted after the Triassic and all preceding deposits were formed, since it has broken its way through them, and forced them out of their natural position; and itmust have been previous to the Jurassic and Cretaceous deposits, since they have been accumulated peacefully at its base, and have undergone no such perturbations.
The task of the geologist would be an easy one, if all the problems he has to deal with were as simple as the case I have presented here; but the most cursory glance at the intricacies of mountain-structure will show us how difficult it is to trace the connection between the phenomena. We must not form an idea of ancient mountain-upheavals from existing active volcanoes, although the causes which produced them were, in a modified and limited sense, the same. Our present volcanic mountains are only chimneys, or narrow tunnels, as it were, pierced in the thickness of the earth's surface, through which the molten lava pours out, flowing over the edges and down the sides and hardening upon the slopes, so as to form conical elevations. The mountain-ranges upheaved by ancient eruptions, on the contrary, are folds of the earth's surface, produced by the cooling of a comparatively thin crust upon a hot mass. The first effect of this cooling process would be to cause contractions; the next, to produce corresponding protrusions,—for, wherever such a shrinking and subsidence of the crust occurred, the consequent pressure upon the melted materials beneath must displace them and force them upward. While the crust continued so thin that these results could go on without very violent dislocations,—the materials within easily finding an outlet, if displaced, or merely lifting the surface without breaking through it,—the effect would be moderate elevations divided by corresponding depressions. We have seen this kind of action, during the earlier geological epochs, in the upheaval of the low hills in the United States, leading to the formation of the coal-basins.
On our return to the study of the American continent, we shall find in the Alleghany chain, occurring at a later period, between the Carboniferous and Triassic epochs, a good illustration of the same kind of phenomena, though the action of the Plutonic agents was then much more powerful, owing to the greater thickness of the crust and the consequent increase of resistance. The folds forced upward in this chain by the subsidence of the surface are higher than any preceding elevations; but they are nevertheless a succession of parallel folds divided by corresponding depressions, nor does it seem that the displacement of the materials within the crust was so violent as to fracture it extensively.
Even so late as the formation of the Jura mountains, between the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, the character of the upheaval is the same, though there are more cracks at right angles with the general trend of the chain, and here and there the masses below have broken through. But the chain, as a whole consists of a succession of parallel folds, forming long domes or arches, divided by longitudinal valleys. The valleys represent the subsidences of the crust; the domes are the corresponding protrusions resulting from these subsidences. The lines of gentle undulation in this chain, so striking in contrast to the rugged and abrupt character of the Alps immediately opposite, are the result of this mode of formation.
After the crust of the earth had grown so thick, as it was, for instance, in the later Tertiary periods, when the Alps were uplifted, such an eruption could take place only by means of an immense force, and the extent of the fracture would be in proportion to the resistance opposed. It is hardly to be doubted, from the geological evidence already collected, that the whole mountain-range from Western Europe through the continent of Asia, including the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Himalayas, was raised at the same time. A convulsion that thus made a gigantic rent across two continents, giving egress to three such mountain-ranges, must have been accompanied by a thousand fractures and breaks in contrary directions. Such apressure along so extensive a tract could not be equal everywhere; the various thicknesses of the crust, the greater or less flexibility of the deposits, the direction of the pressure, would give rise to an infinite variety in the results; accordingly, instead of the long, even arches, such as characterize the earlier upheavals of the Alleghanies and the Jura, there are violent dislocations of the surface, cracks, rents, and fissures in all directions, transverse to the general trend of the upheaval, as well as parallel with it.
Leaving aside for the moment the more baffling and intricate problems of the later mountain-formations, I will first endeavor to explain the simpler phenomena of the earlier upheavals.
Fig. 2.Fig. 2.
Fig. 3.Fig. 3.
Suppose that the melted materials within the earth are forced up against a mass of stratified deposits, the direction of the pressure being perfectly vertical, as represented in Figure 2. Such a pressure, if not too violent, would simply lift the strata out of their horizontal position into an arch or dome, (as in Figure 3,) and if continued or repeated in immediate sequence, it would produce a number of such domes, like long billows following each other, such as we have in the Jura. But though this is the prevailing character of the range, there are many instances even here where an unequal pressure has caused a rent at right angles with the general direction of the upheaval; and one may trace the action of this unequal pressure, from the unbroken arch, where it has simply lifted the surface into a dome, to the granite crest, where the melted rock has forced its way out and crystallized between the broken beds that rest against its slopes.
Fig. 4.Fig. 4.
Fig. 5.Fig. 5.
In other instances, the upper beds alone may have been cracked, while the continuity of the lower ones remains unbroken. In this case we have a longitudinal valley on the top of a mountain-range, lying between the two sides of the broken arch (as in Figure 4). Suppose, now, that there are also transverse cracks across such a longitudinal split, we have then a longitudinal valley with transverse valleys opening into it. There are many instances of this in the Alleghanies and in the Jura. Sometimes such transverse valleys are cut straight across, so that their openings face each other; but often the cracks have taken place at different points on the opposite sides, so that, in travelling through such a transverse valley, you turn to the right or left, as the case may be, where it enters the longitudinal valley, and follow that till you come to another transverse valley opening into it from the opposite side, through which you make your way out, thus crossing the chain in a zigzag course (as in Figure 5). Such valleys are often much narrower at some points than at others. There are even places in the Jura wherea rent in the chain begins with a mere crack,—a slit but just wide enough to admit the blade of a knife; follow it for a while, and you may find it spreading gradually into a wider chasm, and finally expanding into a valley perhaps half a mile wide, or even wider.
By means of such cracks, rivers often pass through lofty mountain-chains, and when we come to the investigation of the glacial phenomena connected with the course of the Rhone, we shall find that river following the longitudinal valley which separates the northern and southern parts of the chain of the Alps till it comes to Martigny, where it takes a sharp turn to the right through a transverse crack, flowing northward between walls fourteen thousand feet high, till it enters the Lake of Geneva, through which it passes, issuing at the other end, where it takes a southern direction. For a long time mountains were supposed to be the limitations of rivers, and old maps represent them always as flowing along the valleys without ever passing through the mountain-chains that divide them; but geology is fast correcting the errors of geography, and a map which represents merely the external features of a country, without reference to their structural relations, is no longer of any scientific value.
It is not, however, by rents in mountain-chains alone, or by depressions between them, that valleys are produced; they are often due to the unequal hardness of the beds raised, and to their greater or less liability to be worn away and disintegrated by the action of the rains. This inequality in the hardness of the rocks forming a mountain-range not only adds very much to the picturesqueness of outline, but also renders the landscape more varied through the greater or less fertility of the soil. On the hard rocks, where little soil can gather, there are only pines, or a low, dwarfed growth; but on the rocks of softer materials, more easily acted upon by the rain, a richer soil gathers, and there, in the midst of mountain-scenery, may be found the most fertile growth, the richest pasturage, the brightest flowers. Where such a patch of arable soil has a southern exposure on a mountain-side, we may have a most fertile vegetation at a great height and surrounded by the dark pine-forests. Many of the pastures on the Alps, to which from height to height the shepherds ascend with their flocks in the summer,—seeking the higher ones as the lower become dry and exhausted,—are due to such alternations in the character of the rocks.
In consequence of the influence of time, weather, atmospheric action of all kinds, the apparent relation of beds has often become so completely reversed that it is exceedingly difficult to trace their original relation. Take, for instance, the following case. An eruption has upheaved the strata over a given surface in such a manner as to lift them into a mountain, cracking open the upper beds, but leaving the lower ones unbroken. We have then a valley on a mountain-summit between two crests resembling the one already shown in Figure 4. Such a narrow passage between two crests may be changed in the course of time to a wide expansive valley by the action of the rains, frosts, and other disintegrating agents, and the relative position of the strata forming its walls may seem to be entirely changed.
Fig. 6.Fig. 6.
Suppose, for example, that the two upper layers of the strata rent apart by the upheaval of the mountain are limestone and sandstone, while the third is clay and the fourth again limestone (as in Figure 6). Clay is soft, and yields very readily to the action of rain. In such a valley the edges of the strata forming its walls are of course exposed, and the clay formation will be the first to give way under the action of external influences.Gradually the rains wear away its substance till it is completely hollowed out. By the disintegration of the bed beneath them, the lime and sandstone layers above lose their support and crumble down, and this process goes on, the clay constantly wearing away, and the lime and sand above consequently falling in, till the upper beds have receded to a great distance, the valley has opened to a wide expanse instead of being inclosed between two walls, and the lowest limestone bed now occupies the highest position on the mountain. Figure 7 represents one of the crests shown in Figure 6, after such a levelling process has changed its outline.
Fig. 7.Fig. 7.
But the phenomena of eruptions in mountain-chains are far more difficult to trace than the effects thus gradually produced. Plutonic action has, indeed, played the most fantastic tricks with the crust of the earth, which seems as plastic in the grasp of the fiery power hidden within it as does clay in the hands of the sculptor.
We have seen that an equal vertical pressure from below produces a regular dome,—or that, if the dome be broken through, a granite crest is formed, with stratified materials resting against its slopes. But the pressure has often been oblique instead of vertical, and then the slope of the mountain is uneven, with a gradual ascent on one side and an abrupt wall on the other; or in some instances the pressure has been so lateral that the mountain is overturned and lies upon its side, and there are still other cases where one mountain has been tilted over and has fallen upon an adjoining one.
Sometimes, when beds have been torn asunder, one side of them has been forced up above the other; and there are even instances where one side of a mountain has been forced under the surface of the earth, while the other has remained above. Stratified beds of rock are even found which have been so completely capsized, that the layers, which were of course deposited horizontally, now stand on end, side by side, in vertical rows. I remember, after a lecture on some of these extravagances in mountain-formations, a friend said to me, not inaptly,—"One can hardly help thinking of these extraordinary contortions as a succession of frantic frolics: the mountains seem like a troop of rollicking boys, hunting one another in and out and up and down in a gigantic game of hide-and-seek."
The width of the arch of a mountain depends in a great degree on the thickness and flexibility of the beds of which it is composed. There is not only a great difference in the consistency of stratified material, but every variety in the thickness of the layers, from an inch, and even less, to those measuring from ten or twenty to one hundred feet and more in depth, without marked separation of the successive beds. This is accounted for by the frequent alternations of subsidence and upheaval; the continents having tilted sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another, so that in certain localities there has been much water and large deposits, while elsewhere the water was shallow and the deposits consequently less. Thin and flexible strata have been readily lifted into a sharp, abrupt arch with narrow base, while the thick and rigid beds have been forced up more slowly in a wider arch with broader base.
Table-lands are only long unbroken folds of the earth's surface, raised uniformly and in one direction. It is the same pressure from below, which, when acting with more intense force in one direction, makes a narrow and more abrupt fold, forming a mountain-ridge, but, when acting over a wider surface with equal force, produces an extensive uniform elevation. If the pressure be strong enough, it will cause cracks and dislocations at the edges of such a gigantic fold, and then we have table-lands between two mountain-chains, like theGobi in Asia between the Altai Mountains and the Himalayas, or the table-land inclosed between the Rocky Mountains and the coast-range on the Pacific shore.
We do not think of table-lands as mountainous elevations, because their broad, flat surfaces remind us of the level tracts of the earth; but some of the table-lands are nevertheless higher than many mountain-chains, as, for instance, the Gobi, which is higher than the Alleghanies, or the Jura, or the Scandinavian Alps. One of Humboldt's masterly generalizations was his estimate of the average thickness of the different continents, supposing their heights to be levelled and their depressions filled up, and he found that upon such an estimate Asia would be much higher than America, notwithstanding the great mountain-chains of the latter. The extensive table-land of Asia, with the mountains adjoining it, outweighed the Alleghanies, the Rocky Mountains, the Coast-Chain, and the Andes.
When we compare the present state of our knowledge of geological phenomena with that which prevailed fifty years ago, it seems difficult to believe that so great and important a change can have been brought about in so short a time. It was on German soil and by German students that the foundation was laid for the modern science of systematic geology.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century, extensive mining operations in Saxony gave rise to an elaborate investigation of the soil for practical purposes. It was found that the rocks consisted of a succession of materials following each other in regular sequence, some of which were utterly worthless for industrial purposes, while others were exceedingly valuable. TheMuschel-Kalkformation, so called from its innumerable remains of shells, and a number of strata underlying it, must be penetrated before the miners reached the rich veins ofKupferschiefer(copper slate), and below this came what was termed theTodtliegende(dead weight), so called because it contained no serviceable materials for the useful arts, and had to be removed before the valuable beds of coal lying beneath it, and making the base of the series, could be reached. But while the workmen wrought at these successive layers of rock to see what they would yield for practical purposes, a man was watching their operations who considered the crust of the earth from quite another point of view.
Abraham Gottlob Werner was born more than a century ago in Upper Lusatia. His very infancy seemed to shadow forth his future studies, for his playthings were the minerals he found in his father's forge. At a suitable age he was placed at the mining school of Freiberg in Saxony, and having, when only twenty-four years of age, attracted attention in the scientific world by the publication of an "Essay on the Characters of Minerals," he was soon after appointed to the professorship of mineralogy in Freiberg. His lot in life could not have fallen in a spot more advantageous for his special studies, and the enthusiasm with which he taught communicated itself to his pupils, many of whom became his devoted disciples, disseminating his views in their turn with a zeal which rivalled the master's ardor.
Werner took advantage of the mining operations going on in his neighborhood, the blasting, sinking of shafts, etc., to examine critically the composition of the rocks thus laid open, and the result of his analysis was the establishment of the Neptunic school of geology alluded to in a previous article, and so influential in science at the close of the eighteenth and the opening of the nineteenth century. From the general character of these rocks, as well as the number of marine shells contained in them, he convinced himself that the whole series, including the Coal, theTodtliegende, theKupferschiefer, theZechstein, the Red Sandstone, and theMuschel-Kalk, had been deposited under the agency of water, and were the work of the ocean.
Thus far he was right, with the exception that he did not include the local action of fresh water in depositing materials, afterwards traced by Cuvier and Brogniart in the Tertiary deposits about Paris. But from these data he went a step too far, and assumed that all rocks, except the modern lavas, must have been accumulated by the sea,—believing even the granites, porphyries, and basalts to have been deposited in the ocean and crystallized from the substances it contained in solution.
But, in the mean time, James Hutton, a Scotch geologist, was looking at phenomena of a like character from a very different point of view. In the neighborhood of Edinburgh, where he lived, was an extensive region of trap-rock,—that is, of igneous rock, which had forced itself through the stratified deposits, sometimes spreading in a continuous sheet over large tracts, or splitting them open and tilling all the interstices and cracks so formed. Thus he saw igneous rocks not only covering or underlying stratified deposits, but penetrating deep into their structure, forming dikes at right angles with them, and presenting, in short, all the phenomena belonging to volcanic rocks in contact with stratified materials. He again pushed his theory too far, and, inferring from the phenomena immediately about him that heat had been the chief agent in the formation of the earth's crust, he was inclined to believe that the stratified materials also were in part at least due to this cause. I have alluded in a former number to the hot disputes and long-contested battles of geologists upon this point. It was a pupil of Werner's who at last set at rest this much vexed question.
At the age of sixteen, in the year 1790, Leopold von Buch was placed under Werner's care at the mining school of Freiberg. Werner found him a pupil after his own heart. Warmly adopting his teacher's theory, he pursued his geological studies with the greatest ardor, and continued for some time under the immediate influence and guidance of the Freiberg professor. His university-studies over, however, he began to pursue his investigations independently, and his geological excursions led him into Italy, where his confidence in the truth of Werner's theory began to be shaken. A subsequent visit to the region of extinct volcanoes in Auvergne, in the South of France, convinced him that the aqueous theory was at least partially wrong, and that fire had been an active agent in the rock-formations of past times. This result did not change the convictions of his master, Werner, who was too old or too prejudiced to accept the later views, which were nevertheless the result of the stimulus he himself had given to geological investigations.
But Von Buch was indefatigable. For years he lived the life of an itinerant geologist. With a shirt and a pair of stockings in his pocket and a geological hammer in his hand he travelled all over Europe on foot. The results of his foot-journey to Scandinavia were among his most important contributions to geology. He went also to the Canary Islands; and it is in his extensive work on the geological formations of these islands that he showed conclusively not only the Plutonic character of all unstratified rocks, but also that to their action upon the stratified deposits the inequalities of the earth's surface are chiefly due. He first demonstrated that the melted masses within the earth had upheaved the materials deposited in layers upon its surface, and had thus formed the mountains.
No geologist has ever collected a larger amount of facts than Von Buch, and to him we owe a great reform not only in geological principles, but in methods of study also. An amusing anecdote is told of him, as illustrating his untiring devotion to his scientific pursuits. In studying the rocks, he had become engaged also in the investigation of the fossils contained in them. He was at one time especially interested in theTerebratulæ(fossil shells), and one evening in Berlin, where he was engaged in the study of these remains, he came across a noticein a Swedish work of a particular species of that family which he could not readily identify without seeing the original specimens. The next morning Von Buch was missing, and as he had invited guests to dine with him, some anxiety was felt on account of his non-appearance. On inquiry, it was found that he was already far on his way to Sweden: he had started by daylight on a pilgrimage after the new, or rather the old,Terebratula. I tell the story as I heard it from one of the disappointed guests.
All great natural phenomena impressed him deeply. On one occasion it was my good fortune to make one of a party from the "Helvetic Association for the Advancement of Science" on an excursion to the eastern extremity of the Lake of Geneva. I well remember the expressive gesture of Von Buch, as he faced the deep gorge through which the Rhone issues from the interior of the Alps. While others were chatting and laughing about him, he stood for a moment absorbed in silent contemplation of the grandeur of the scene, then lifted his hat and bowed reverently before the mountains.
Next to Von Buch, no man has done more for modern geology than Elie de Beaumont, the great French geologist. Perhaps the most important of his generalizations is that by which he has given us the clue to the limitation of the different epochs in past times by connecting them with the great revolutions in the world's history. He has shown us that the great changes in the aspect of the globe, as well as in its successive sets of animals, coincide with the mountain-upheavals.
I might add a long list of names, American as well as European, which will be forever honored in the history of science for their contributions to geology in the last half-century. But I have intended only to close this chapter on mountains with a few words respecting the men who first investigated their intimate structural organization, and established methods of study in reference to them now generally adopted throughout the scientific world. In my next article I shall proceed to give some account of special geological formations in Europe, and the gradual growth of that continent.
I, who labor under the suspicion of not knowing the difference between "Old Hundred" and "Old Dan Tucker,"—I, whose every attempt at music, though only the humming of a simple household melody, has, from my earliest childhood, been regarded as a premonitory symptom of epilepsy, or, at the very least, hysterics, to be treated with cold water, the bellows, and an unmerciful beating between my shoulders,—I, who can but with much difficulty and many a retrogression make my way among the olden mazes of tenor, alto, treble, bass, and who stand "clean daft" in the resounding confusion of andante, soprano, falsetto, palmetto, pianissimo, akimbo, l'allegro, and il penseroso,—Iwas bidden to Camilla's concert, and, like a sheep to the slaughter, I went.
He bears a great loss and sorrow who has "no ear for music." Into one great garden of delights he may not go. There needs no flaming sword to bar the way, since for him there is no gate called Beautiful which he should seek to enter. Blunted and stolid he stumps through life for whom its harp-strings vainly quiver. Yet, on the other hand, what does he not gain? He loses the concord of sweet sounds, but he is spared the discord of harsh noises. For thesurges of bewildering harmony and the depths of dissonant disgust, he stands on the levels of perpetual peace. You are distressed, because in yonder well-trained orchestra a single voice is pitched one-sixteenth of a note too high. For me, I lean out of my window on summer nights enraptured over the organ-man who turns poor lost Lilian Dale round and round with his inexorable crank. It does not disturb me that his organ wheezes and sputters and grunts. Indeed, there is for me absolutely no wheeze, no sputter, no grunt. I only see dark eyes of Italy, her olive face, and her gemmed and lustrous hair. You mutter maledictions on the infernal noise and caterwauling. I hear no caterwauling, but the river-god of Arno ripples sort songs in the summer-tide to the lilies that bend above him. It is the guitar of the cantatrice that murmurs through the scented, dewy air,—the cantatrice with the laurel yet green on her brow, gliding over the molten moonlit water-ways of Venice, and dreamily chiming her well-pleased lute with the plash of the oars of the gondolier. It is the chant of the flower-girl with large eyes shining under the palm-branches in the market-place of Milan; and with the distant echoing notes come the sweet breath of her violets and the unquenchable odors of her crushed geraniums borne on many a white sail from the glorified Adriatic. Bronzed cheek and swart brow under my window, I shall by-and-by-throw you a paltry nickel cent for your tropical dreams; meanwhile tell me, did the sun of Dante's Florence give your blood its fierce flow and the tawny hue to your bared and brawny breast? Is it the rage of Tasso's madness that burns in your uplifted eyes? Do you take shelter from the fervid noon under the cypresses of Monte Mario? Will you meet queenly Marguerite with myrtle wreath and myrtle fragrance, as she wanders through the chestnut vales? Will you sleep to-night between the colonnades under the golden moon of Napoli? Go back, O child of the Midland Sea! Go out from this cold shore, that yields but crabbed harvests for your threefold vintages of Italy. Go, suck the sunshine from Seville oranges under the elms of Posilippo. Go, watch the shadows of the vines swaying in the mulberry-trees from Epomeo's gales. Bind the ivy in a triple crown above Bianca's comely hair, and pipe not so wailingly to the Vikings of this frigid Norseland.
But Italy, remember, my frigid Norseland has a heart of fire in her bosom beneath its overlying snows, before which yours dies like the white sick hearth-flame before the noonday sun. Passion, but not compassion, is here "cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth." We lure our choristers with honeyed words and gentle ways: you lay your sweetest songsters on the gridiron. Our orchards ring with the full-throated happiness of a thousand birds: your pomegranate groves are silent, and your miserable cannibal kitchens would tell the reason why, if outraged spits could speak. Go away, therefore, from my window, Giuseppe; the air is growing damp and chilly, and I do not sleep in the shadows of broken temples.
Yet I love music: not as you love it, my friend, with intelligence, discrimination, and delicacy, but in a dull, woodeny way, as the "gouty oaks" loved it, when they felt in their fibrous frames the stir of Amphion's lyre, and "floundered into hornpipes"; as the gray, stupid rocks loved it, when they came rolling heavily to his feet to listen; in a great, coarse, clumsy, ichthyosaurian way, as the rivers loved sad Orpheus's wailing tones, stopping in their mighty courses, and the thick-hided hippopotamus dragged himself up from the unheeded pause of the waves, dimly thrilled with a vague ecstasy. The confession is sad, yet only in such beastly fashion come sweetest voices to me,—not in the fulness of all their vibrations, but sounding dimly through many an earthy layer. Music I do not so much hear as feel. All the exquisite nerves that bearto your soul these tidings of heaven in me lie torpid or dead. No beatitude travels to my heart over that road. But as sometimes an invalid, unable through mortal sickness to swallow his needed nutriment, is yet kept alive many days by being immersed in a bath of wine and milk, which somehow, through unwonted courses, penetrates to the sources of vitality,—so I, though the natural avenues of sweet sounds have been hermetically sealed, do yet receive the fine flow of the musical ether. I feel the flood of harmony pouring around me. An inward, palpable, measured tremulousness of the subtile, secret essence of life attests the presence of some sweet disturbing cause, and, borne on unseen wings, I mount to loftier heights and diviner airs.
So I was comforted for my waxed ears and Camilla's concert.
There is one other advantage in being possessed with a deaf-and-dumb devil, which, now that I am on the subject of compensation, I may as well mention. You are left out of the arena of fierce discussion and debate. You do not enter upon the lists wherefrom you would be sure to come off discomfited. Of all reputations, a musical reputation seems to me the most shifting and uncertain; and of all rivalries, musical rivalries are the most prolific of heart-burnings and discomfort. Now, if I should sing or play, I should wish to sing and play well. But what is well? Nancie in the village "singing-seats" stands head and shoulders above the rest, and wears her honors tranquilly, an authority at all rehearsals and serenades. But Anabella comes up from the town to spend Thanksgiving, and, without the least mitigation or remorse of voice, absolutely drowns out poor Nancie, who goes under, giving many signs. Yet she dies not unavenged, for Harriette sweeps down from the city, and immediately suspends the victorious Anabella from her aduncate nose, and carries all before her. Mysterious is the arrangement of the world. The last round of the ladder is not yet reached. To Madame Morlot, Harriette is a savage,une bête, without cultivation. "Oh, the dismal little fright! a thousand years of study would be useless; go, scour the floors; she has positively no voice." No voice, Madame Morlot? Harriette, no voice,—who burst every ear-drum in the room last night with her howling and hooting, and made the stoutest heart tremble with fearful forebodings of what might come next? But Madame Morlot is not infallible, for Herr Driesbach sits shivering at the dreadful noises which Madame Morlot extorts from his sensitive and suffering piano, and at the necessity which lies upon him to go and congratulate her upon her performance. Ah! if his tortured conscience might but congratulate her and himself upon its close! And so the scale ascends. Hills on hills and Alps on Alps arise, and who shall mount the ultimate peak till all the world shall say, "Here reigns the Excellence"? I listen with pleasure to untutored Nancie till Anabella takes all the wind from her sails. I think the force of music can no farther go than Madame Morlot, and, behold, Herr Driesbach has knocked out her underpinning. I am bewildered, and I say, helplessly, "What shall I admire and beà la mode?" But if it is so disheartening to me, who am only a passive listener, what must be the agonies of thedramatis personæ? "Hang it!" says Charles Lamb, "how I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!" And do Nancie, Harriette, and Herr Driesbach like it any less? What shall avenge them for theirspretæ injuria formæ? What can repay the hapless performer, who has performed her very best, for learning by terrible, indisputable indirections that her cherished and boasted Cremona is but a very second fiddle?
So, standing on the high ground of certain immunity from criticism and hostile judgment, I do not so much console myself as I do not stand in need of consolation. I rather give thanks for my mute and necessarily unoffending lips, and I shall go in great good-humor to Camilla's concert.
There are many different ways of goingto a concert. You can be one of a party of fashionable people to whom music is a diversion, a pastime, an agreeable change from the assembly or the theatre. They applaud, they condemn, they criticise with perfectau-faitism. (No one need say there is no such word. I know there was not yesterday, and perhaps will not be to-morrow; but that there is such a one to-day, you have but to open your eyes and see.) Into such company as this, even I, whose poor old head is always fretting itself wedged in where it has no business to be, have chanced to be thrown. This is torture. My cue is to turn into the Irishman's echo, which always returned for his "How d' ye do?" a "Pretty well, thank you." I cling to the skirts of that member of the party who is agreed to have the best taste and echo his responses an octave higher. If he sighs at the end of a song, I bring out my pocket-handkerchief. If he says "charming," I murmur "delicious." If he thinks it "exquisite," I pronounce it "enchanting." Where he is rapt in admiration, I go into a trance, and so shamble through the performances, miserable impostor that I am, and ten to one nobody finds out that I am a dunce, fit for treason, stratagem, and spoils. It is a great strain upon the mental powers, but it is wonderful to see how much may be accomplished and what skill may be attained by long practice.
It is not ingenuous? I am afraid not quite. The guilt rest with those who make me incur it! You cannot even read a book with any degree of pleasure, if you know an opinion is expected of you at the finis. You leave the popular novel till people have forgotten to ask, "How do you like it?" How can you enjoy anything, if you are not at liberty to give yourself wholly to it, but must be all the while making up a speech to deliver when it is over? Nothing is better than to be a passive listener, but nothing is worse than to be obliged to turn yourself into a sounding-board: and must I have both the suffering and the guilt?
Also one may go to a concert as a conductor with a single musical friend. By conductor I do not mean escort, but a magnetic conductor, rapture conductor, a fit medium through which to convey away his delight, so that he shall not become surcharged and explode. He does not take you for your pleasure, nor for his own, but for use. He desires some one to whom he can from time to time express his opinions and his enthusiasms, sure of an attentive listener,—since nothing is so pleasant as to see one's views welcomed. Now you cannot pretend that in such a case your listening is thoroughly honest. You are receptive of theories, criticisms, and reminiscences; but you would not like to be obliged to pass an examination on them afterwards. You do, it must be confessed, sometimes, in the midst of eloquent dissertations, strike out into little flowery by-paths of your own, quite foreign to the grand paved-ways along which your friend supposes he is so kind as to be leading you. But however digressive your mind may be, do not suffer your eyes to digress. Whatever may be the intensity of yourennui, endeavor to preserve an animated expression, and your success is complete. This is all that is necessary. You will never be called upon for notes or comments. Your little escapades will never be detected. It is not your opinions that were sought, nor your education that was to be furthered. You were only an escape-pipe, and your mission ceased when the soul of song fled and the gas was turned off. This, too, is all that can justly be demanded. Minister, lecturer, singer, no one has any right to ask of his audience anything more than opportunity,—the externals of attention. All the rest is his own look-out. If you prepossess your mind with a theme, you do not give him an even chance. You must offer him in the beginning atabula rasa,—a fair field,—and then it is his business to go in and win your attention; and if he cannot, let him pay the costs, for the fault is his own.
This also is torture, but its name is Zoar, a little one.
There is yet another way. You maygo with one or many who believe and practise the doctrine oflaissez-faireity. Do not now proceed to dash your brains out against that word. I have just done it myself, and one such head as mine is ample sacrifice for any verbal crime. They go to the concert for love of music,—negatively for its rest and refreshment, positively for its embodied delights. They take you for your enjoyment, which they permit you to compass after your own fashion. They force from you no comment. They demand no criticism. They do not require censure as your certificate of taste. They do not trouble themselves with your demeanor. If you choose to talk in the pauses, they are receptive and cordial. If you choose to be silent, it is just as well. If you go to sleep, they will not mind,—unless, under the spell of the genius of the place, your sleep becomes vocal, and you involuntarily join the concert in the undesirablerôleof De Trop. If you go into raptures, it is all the same; you are not watched and made a note of. They leave you at the top of your bent. Whether you shall be amused, delighted, or disgusted, they respect your decisions and allow you to remain free.
How did I go to my concert? Can I tell for the eyes that made "a sunshine in the shady place"? Was I not veiled with the beautiful hair, and blinded with the lily's white splendor? So went I with the Fairy Queen in her golden coach drawn by six white mice, and, behold, I was in Camilla's concert-room.
It is to be a fiddle affair. Now I am free to say, if there is anything I hate, it is a fiddle. Hide it away under as many Italian coatings as you choose,—viol, violin, viola, violone, violoncello, violoncellettissimo, at bottom it is all one, a fiddle; in its best estate, a diddle, diddle, frivolous, rattling, Yankee-Doodle, country-tavern-ball whirligig, without dignity, sentiment, or power; and at worst a rubbing, rasping, squeaking, woolleny, noisy nuisance, that it sets my teeth on edge to think of. I shudder at the mere memory of the reluctant bow dragging its slow length across the whining strings. And here I am, in my sober senses, come to hear a fiddle!
But it is Camilla's. Do you remember—I don't, but I should, if I had known it—a little girl who, a few years ago, became famous for her wonderful performance on the violin? At six years of age she went to a great concert, and of all the fine instruments there, the unseen spirit within her made choice, "Papa, I should like to learn the violin." So she learned it and loved it, and when ten years old delighted foreign and American audiences with her marvellous genius. It was the little Camilla who now, after ten years of silence, tuned her beloved instrument once more.
As she walks softly and quietly in, I am conscious of a disappointment. I had unwittingly framed for her an aesthetic violin, with the essential strings and bridge and bow indeed, but submerged and forgot in such Orient splendors as befit her glorious genius. Barbaric pearl and gold, finest carved work, flashing gems from Indian water-courses, the delicatest pink sea-shell, a bubble-prism caught and crystallized,—of all rare and curious substances wrought with dainty device, fantastic as a dream, and resplendent as the light, should her instrument be fashioned. Only in "something rich and strange" should the mystic soul lie sleeping for whom her lips shall break the spell of slumber, and her young fingers unbar the sacred gates. And, oh, me! it is, after all, the very same old red fiddle! Dee, dee!
But she neither glides nor trips nor treads, as heroines invariably do, but walks in like a good Christian woman. She steps upon the stage and faces the audience that gives her hearty greeting and waits the prelude. There is time for cool survey. I am angry still about the red fiddle, and I look scrutinizingly at her dress and think how ugly are hoops. The skirt is white silk,—a brocade, I believe,—at any rate, stiff, and, though probably full to overflowing in the hands of the seamstress, who must compress itwithin prescribed limits about the waist, looks scanty and straight, because, like all other skirts in the world at this present writing, it is stretched over a barrel. Why could she not, she who comes before us to-night, not as a fashion, but an inspiration,—why could she not discard the mode, and assume that immortal classic drapery whose graceful falls and folds the sculptor vainly tries to imitate, the painter vainly seeks to limn? When Corinne tuned her lyre at the Capitol, when she knelt to be crowned with her laurel crown at the hands of a Roman senator, is it possible to conceive her swollen out with crinoline? And yet I remember, that, thoughsa robe était blanche, et son costume était très pittoresque, it wassans s'écarter cependant assez des usages reçus pour que l'on pût y trouver de l'affectation; and I suppose, if one should now suddenly collapse from conventional rotundity to antique statuesqueness, the great "on" would very readily "y trouver de l'affectation." Nevertheless, though one must dress in Rome as Romans do, and though the Roman way of dressing is, taking all things into the account, as good as any, and, if not more graceful, a thousand times more convenient, wholesome, comfortable, and manageable than Helen's, still it does seem, that, when one steps out of the ordinary area of Roman life and assumes an abnormal position, one might, without violence, assume temporarily an abnormal dress, and refresh our dilated eyes once more with flowing, wavy outlines. Music is one of the eternities: why should not its accessories be? Why should a discord disturb the eye, when only concords delight the ear?
But I lift my eyes from Camilla's unpliant drapery to the red red rose in her hair, and thence, naturally, to her silent face, and in that instant ugly dress and red red rose fade out of my sight. What is it that I see, with tearful tenderness and a nameless pain at the heart? A young face deepened and drawn with suffering; dark, large eyes, whose natural laughing light has been quenched in tears, yet shining still with a distant gleam caught from the eternal fires. O still, pathetic face! A sterner form than Time has passed and left his vestige there. Happy little girl, playing among the flickering shadows of the Rhine-land, who could not foresee the darker shadows that should settle and never lift nor flicker from her heavy heart! Large, lambent eyes, that might have been sweet, but now are only steadfast,—that may yet be sweet, when they look to-night into a baby's cradle, but gazing now upon a waiting audience, are only steadfast. Ah! so it is. Life has such hard conditions, that every dear and precious gift, every rare virtue, every pleasant facility, every genial endowment, love, hope, joy, wit, sprightliness, benevolence, must sometimes be cast into the crucible to distil the one elixir, patience. Large, lambent eyes, in which days and nights of tears are petrified, steadfast eyes that are neither mournful nor hopeful nor anxious, but with such unvoiced sadness in their depths that the hot tears well up in my heart, what do you see in the waiting audience? Not censure, nor pity, nor forgiveness, for you do not need them,—but surely a warm human sympathy, since heart can speak to heart, though the thin, fixed lips have sealed their secret well. Sad mother, whose rose of life was crushed before it had budded, tender young lips that had drunk the cup of sorrow to the dregs, while their cup of bliss should hardly yet be brimmed for life's sweet spring-time, your crumbling fanes and broken arches and prostrate columns lie not among the ruins of Time. Be comforted of that. They bear witness of a more pitiless Destroyer, and by this token I know there shall dawn a brighter day. The God of the fatherless and the widow, of the worse than widowed and fatherless, the Avenger of the Slaughter of the Innocents, be with you, and shield and shelter and bless!