3.Music is a complex agent.It acts at once on life, on the instinct, the forces, the organism. It has a psychological action. The negroes charm serpents by whistling to them; it is said that fawns are captivated by a melodious voice; the bear is aroused with the fife; canaries and sparrows enjoy the flageolet; in the Antilles, lizards are enticed from their retreats by the whistle; spiders have an affection for fiddlers; in Switzerland, the herdsmen attach to the necks of their handsomest cows a large bell, of which they are so proud, that, while they are allowed to wear it, they march at the head of the herd; in Andalusia, the mules lose their spirit and their power of endurance, if deprived of the numerous bells with which it is customary to deck these intelligent animals; in the mountains of Scotland and Switzerland, the herds pasture best to the sound of the bagpipe; and in the Oberland, cattle strayed from the herd are recalled by the notes of the trumpet.
Donizetti, a year before his death, had lost all his faculties, in consequence of a softening of the spinal marrow. Every means was resorted to for reviving a spark of that intellect once so vigorous; but all failed. In a single instance only he exhibited a gleam of intelligence; and that was on hearing one of his friends play the septette of his opera of "Lucia." "Poor Donizetti!" said he; "what a pity he should have died so soon!" And this was all.
In 1848, after the terrible insurrection which made of Paris a vast slaughter-house, to conceal my sadness and my disgust I went to the house of one of my friends, who was superintendent of the immense insane asylum in Clermont-sur-Oise. He had a small organ, and was a tolerably good singer. I composed a mass, to the first performance of which we invited a few artists from Paris and several of the most docile inmates of the asylum. I was struck with the bearing of the latter, and asked my friend to repeat the experiment, and extend the number of invitations. The result was so favorable, that we were soon able to form a choir from among the patients, of both sexes, who rehearsed on Saturdays the hymns and chants they were to sing on Sunday at mass. A raving lunatic, a priest, who was getting more and more intractable every day, and who often had to be put in a strait-jacket, noticed the periodical absence of some of the inmates, and exhibited curiosity to know what they were doing. The following Saturday, seeing some of his companions preparing to go to rehearsal, he expressed a desire to go with them. The doctor told him he might go on condition that he would allow himself to be shaved and decently dressed. This was a thorny point, for he would never attend to his person, and became furious when required to dress; but, to our great astonishment, he consented at once. This day he not only listened to the music quietly, but wasdetected several times joining his voice with that of the choir. When I left Clermont, my poor old priest was one of the most constant attendants at the rehearsals. He still had his violent periods, but they were less frequent; and when Saturday arrived, he always dressed himself with care, and waited impatiently for the hour to go to chapel.
To resume: Music being aphysical agent,—that is to say, acting on the individual without the aid of his intelligence; amoral agent,—that is to say, reviving his memory, exciting his imagination, developing his sentiment; and acomplex agent,—that is to say, having a physiological action on the instinct, the organism, the forces, of man,—I deduce from this that it is one of the most powerful means for ennobling the mind, elevating the morals, and, above all, refining the manners. This truth is now so well recognized in Europe that we see choral societies—Orpheons and others—multiplying as by enchantment, under the powerful impulse given them by the state. I speak not simply of Germany, which is a singing nation, whose laborious, peaceful, intelligent people have in all time associated choral music as well with their labors as with their pleasures; but I may cite particularly France, which counts to-day more than eight hundred Orpheon societies, composed of workingmen. How many of these, who formerly dissipated their leisure time at drinking-houses, now find an ennobling recreation in these associations, where the spirit of union and fraternity is engendered and developed! And if we could get at the statistics of crime, who can doubt that they would show it had diminished in proportion to the increase of these societies? In fact, men are better, the heart is in some sort purified, when impregnated with the noble harmonies of a fine chorus; and it is difficult not to treat as a brother one whose voice has mingled with your own, and whose heart has been united to yours in a community of pure and joyful emotions. If Orpheon societies ever become established in America, be assured that bar-rooms, the plague of the country, will cease, with revolvers and bowie-knives, to be popular institutions.
Music, when employed in the service of religion, has always been its most powerful auxiliary. The organ did more for Catholicism in the Middle Ages than all its preaching; and Palestrina and Marcello have reclaimed and still reclaim more infidels than all the doctors of the Church.
We enter a house of worship. Still under the empire of the external world, we carry there our worldly thoughts and occupations; a thousand distractions deter us from religious reflection and meditation. The word of the preacher reaches the ear indeed, but only as a vague sound. The sense of what is said is arrested at the surface, without penetrating the heart. But let the grand voice of the organ be heard, and our whole being is moved; the physical world disappears, the eyes of the soul open; we bow the head, we bend the knee, and our thoughts, disengaged from matter, soar to the eternal regions of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.
Here or hereafter? In the body here,Or in the soul hereafter do we writhe,Atoning for the malice of our lives?Of the uncounted millions that have died,Not one has slipped the napkin from his chinAnd loosed the jaw to tell us: even he,The intrepid Captain, who gave life to findA doubtful way through clanging worlds of ice,—A fine inquisitive spirit, you would think,One to cross-question Fate complacently,Less for his own sake than Science's,—Not even he, with his rich gathered lore,Returns from that dark journey down to death.Here or hereafter? Only this I know,That, whatsoever happen afterwards,Some men do penance on this side the grave.Thus Regnald Garnaut for his cruel heart.Owner and lord was he of Garnaut Hall,A relic of the Norman conquerors,—A quaint, rook-haunted pile of masonry,From whose top battlement, a windy height,Regnald could view his twenty prosperous farms;His creaking mill, that, perched upon a cliff,With outspread wings seemed ever taking flight;The red-roofed cottages, the high-walled park,The noisy aviary, and, nearer by,The snow-white Doric parsonage,—all his own.And all his own were chests of antique plate,Horses and hounds and falcons, curious books,Chain-armor, helmets, Gobelin tapestry,And half a mile of painted ancestors.Lord of these things, he wanted one thing more,Not having which, all else to him was dross.For Agnes Vail, the curate's only child,—A little Saxon wild-flower that had grownUnheeded into beauty day by day,And much too delicate for this rude world,—With that intuitive wisdom of the pure,Saw that he loved her beauty, not herself,And shrank from him, and when he came to speechParried his meaning with a woman's wit,Then sobbed an hour when she was all alone.And Regnald's mighty vanity was hurt."Why, then," snarled he, "if I had asked the QueenTo pick me some fair woman from the Court,'T were but the asking. A blind curate's girl,It seems, is somewhat difficult,—must have,To warm her feet, our coronet withal!"And Agnes evermore avoided him,Clinging more closely to the old man's side;And in the chapel never raised an eye,But knelt there like a medieval saint,Her holiness her buckler and her shield,—That, and the golden floss of her long hair.And Regnald felt that somehow he was foiled,—Foiled, but not beaten. He would have his way.Had not the Garnauts always had their willThese six or seven centuries, more or less?Meanwhile he chafed; but shortly after thisRegnald received the sorest hurt of all.For, one eve, lounging idly in the close,Watching the windows of the parsonage,He heard low voices in the alder-trees,Voices he knew, and one that sweetly said,"Thine!" and he paused with choking heart, and sawEustace, his brother, and fair Agnes VailIn the soft moonrise lingering with clasped hands.The two passed on, and Regnald hid himselfAmong the brushwood, where his vulpine eyesDilated in the darkness as they passed.There, in the dark, he lay a bitter hourGnawing his nails, and then arose unseenAnd crept away with murder in his soul.Eustace! curse on him, with his handsome eyes!Regnald had envied Eustace many a day,—Envied his fame, and that exceeding graceAnd courtliness which he had learned at CourtOf Sidney, Raleigh, Essex, and the rest:For when their father, lean Sir Egbert, died,Eustace, whose fortune dangled at his thigh,—A Damask blade,—had hastened to the CourtTo line his purse, perchance to build a name;And catching there the passion of the time,He, with a score of doughty Devon lads,Sailed with bold Drake into the Spanish seas;Returning whence, with several ugly scars,—Which made him lovelier in women's eyes,—And many a chest of ingots,—not the lessThese latter made him lovely,—sunned himself,Sometimes at Court, sometimes at Garnaut Hall,—At Court, by favor of the Virgin Queen,For great Elizabeth had smiled on him.So Regnald, who was neither good nor braveNor graceful, liked not Eustace from the start,And this night hated him. With angry brows,He sat in a bleak chamber of the Hall,His fingers toying with his poniard's pointAbstractedly. Three times the ancient clock,Bolt-upright like a mummy in its case,Doled out the hour: at length the round red moon,Rising above the ghostly poplar-tops,Looked in on Regnald nursing his dark thought,Looked in on the stiff portraits on the wall,And dead Sir Egbert's empty coat-of-mail.A quick step sounded on the gravel-walk,And then came Eustace, humming a sea-song,Of how the Grace of Devon, with ten guns,And Master Raleigh on the quarter-deck,Bore down and tackled the great galleon,Madre de Dios, raked her fore and aft,And took her bullion,—singing, light at heart,His first love's first kiss warm upon his lip.Straight onward came young Eustace to his death!For hidden behind the arras near the stairStood Regnald, like the Demon in the play,Grasping his rapier part-way down the bladeTo strike the foul blow with its heavy hilt.Straight on came Eustace,—blithely ran the song,"Old England's darlings are her hearts of oak."The lights were out, and not a soul astir,Or else the dead man's scabbard, as it clashedAgainst the marble pavement when he fell,Had brought a witness. Not a breath or sound,Only the sad wind wailing in the tower,Only the mastiff growling in his sleep,Outside the gate, and pawing at his dream.Now in a wing of that old gallery,Hung with the relics of forgotten feuds,A certain door, which none but Regnald knew,Was fashioned like the panels of the wall,And so concealed by carven grapes and flowersA man could search for it a dozen yearsAnd swear it was not, though his touch had beenUpon the very panel where it was.The secret spring that opened it unclosedAn inner door of iron-studded oak,Guarding a narrow chamber, where, perchance,Some bygone lord of Garnaut Hall had hidHis threatened treasure, or, most like, bestowedSome too adventurous antagonist.Sealed in the compass of that stifling room,A man might live, at best, but half an hour.Hither did Regnald bear his brother's corseAnd set it down. Perhaps he paused to gazeA moment on the quiet moon-lit face,The face yet beautiful with new-told love!Perhaps his heart misgave him,—or, perhaps——Now, whether 't was some dark avenging Hand,Or whether 't was some fatal freak of wind,We may not know, but suddenly the doorWithout slammed to, and there was Regnald shutBeyond escape, for on the inner sideWas neither spring nor bolt to set him free!Mother of Mercy! what were a whole lifeOf pain and penury and conscience-smartTo that half-hour of Regnald's with his Dead?—The joyous sun rose over the white cliffsOf Devon, sparkled through the poplar-tops,And broke the death-like slumber of the Hall.The keeper fetched their breakfast to the hounds;The smart, young ostler whistled in the stalls;The pretty housemaid tripped from room to room;And grave and grand behind his master's chair,But wroth within to have the partridge spoil,The senile butler waited for his lord.But neither Regnald nor young Eustace came.And when 't was found that neither slept at HallThat night, their couches being still unpressed,The servants stared. And as the day wore on,And evening came, and then another day,And yet another, till a week had gone,The wonder spread, and riders sent in hasteScoured the country, dragged the neighboring streams,Tracked wayward footprints to the great chalk bluffs,But found not Regnald, lord of Garnaut Hall.The place that knew him knew him never more.The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew.And Agnes Vail, the little Saxon rose,Waxed pale and paler, till the country-folkHalf guessed her fate was somehow intertwinedWith that dark house. When her pure soul had passed,—Just as a perfume floats from out the world,—Wild tales were told of how the brothers lovedThe self-same maid, whom neither one would wedBecause the other loved her as his life;And that the two, at midnight, in despair,From one sheer cliff plunged headlong in the sea.And when, at night, the hoarse east-wind rose high,Rattled the lintels, clamoring at the door,The children huddled closer round the hearthAnd whispered very softly with themselves,"That's Master Regnald looking for his Bride!"The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew.Decay and dolor settled on the Hall.The wind went howling in the dismal rooms,Rustling the arras; and the wainscot-mouseGnawed through the mighty Garnauts on the wall,And made a lodging for her glossy youngIn dead Sir Egbert's empty coat-of-mail;The griffon dropped from off the blazoned shield;The stables rotted; and a poisonous vineStretched its rank nets across the lonely lawn.For no one went there,—'t was a haunted spot.A legend killed it for a kindly home,—A grim estate, which every heir in turnLeft to the orgies of the wind and rain,The newt, the toad, the spider, and the mouse.The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew.And once, 't is said, the Queen reached out her handAnd let it rest on Cecil's velvet sleeve,And said, "I prithee, Cecil, tell us now,Was 't ever known what happened to those men,—Those Garnauts?—were they never, never found?"The weasel face had fain looked wise for her,But no one of that century ever knew.The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew.And in that year the good Prince Albert diedThe land changed owners, and the new-made lordSent down his workmen to revamp the HallAnd make the waste place blossom as the rose.By chance, a workman in the eastern wing,Fitting the cornice, stumbled on a door,Which creaked, and seemed to open of itself;And there within the chamber, on the flags,He saw two figures in outlandish guiseOf hose and doublet,—one stretched out full-length,And one half fallen forward on his breast,Holding the other's hand with vice-like grip:One face was calm, the other sad as death,With something in it of a pleading look,As might befall a man that dies at prayer.Amazed, the workman hallooed to his matesTo see the wonder; but ere they could come,The figures crumbled and were shapeless dust.
Here or hereafter? In the body here,Or in the soul hereafter do we writhe,Atoning for the malice of our lives?Of the uncounted millions that have died,Not one has slipped the napkin from his chinAnd loosed the jaw to tell us: even he,The intrepid Captain, who gave life to findA doubtful way through clanging worlds of ice,—A fine inquisitive spirit, you would think,One to cross-question Fate complacently,Less for his own sake than Science's,—Not even he, with his rich gathered lore,Returns from that dark journey down to death.Here or hereafter? Only this I know,That, whatsoever happen afterwards,Some men do penance on this side the grave.Thus Regnald Garnaut for his cruel heart.
Owner and lord was he of Garnaut Hall,A relic of the Norman conquerors,—A quaint, rook-haunted pile of masonry,From whose top battlement, a windy height,Regnald could view his twenty prosperous farms;His creaking mill, that, perched upon a cliff,With outspread wings seemed ever taking flight;The red-roofed cottages, the high-walled park,The noisy aviary, and, nearer by,The snow-white Doric parsonage,—all his own.And all his own were chests of antique plate,Horses and hounds and falcons, curious books,Chain-armor, helmets, Gobelin tapestry,And half a mile of painted ancestors.Lord of these things, he wanted one thing more,Not having which, all else to him was dross.
For Agnes Vail, the curate's only child,—A little Saxon wild-flower that had grownUnheeded into beauty day by day,And much too delicate for this rude world,—With that intuitive wisdom of the pure,Saw that he loved her beauty, not herself,And shrank from him, and when he came to speechParried his meaning with a woman's wit,Then sobbed an hour when she was all alone.And Regnald's mighty vanity was hurt."Why, then," snarled he, "if I had asked the QueenTo pick me some fair woman from the Court,'T were but the asking. A blind curate's girl,It seems, is somewhat difficult,—must have,To warm her feet, our coronet withal!"And Agnes evermore avoided him,Clinging more closely to the old man's side;And in the chapel never raised an eye,But knelt there like a medieval saint,Her holiness her buckler and her shield,—That, and the golden floss of her long hair.
And Regnald felt that somehow he was foiled,—Foiled, but not beaten. He would have his way.Had not the Garnauts always had their willThese six or seven centuries, more or less?Meanwhile he chafed; but shortly after thisRegnald received the sorest hurt of all.For, one eve, lounging idly in the close,Watching the windows of the parsonage,He heard low voices in the alder-trees,Voices he knew, and one that sweetly said,"Thine!" and he paused with choking heart, and sawEustace, his brother, and fair Agnes VailIn the soft moonrise lingering with clasped hands.The two passed on, and Regnald hid himselfAmong the brushwood, where his vulpine eyesDilated in the darkness as they passed.There, in the dark, he lay a bitter hourGnawing his nails, and then arose unseenAnd crept away with murder in his soul.
Eustace! curse on him, with his handsome eyes!Regnald had envied Eustace many a day,—Envied his fame, and that exceeding graceAnd courtliness which he had learned at CourtOf Sidney, Raleigh, Essex, and the rest:For when their father, lean Sir Egbert, died,Eustace, whose fortune dangled at his thigh,—A Damask blade,—had hastened to the CourtTo line his purse, perchance to build a name;And catching there the passion of the time,He, with a score of doughty Devon lads,Sailed with bold Drake into the Spanish seas;Returning whence, with several ugly scars,—Which made him lovelier in women's eyes,—And many a chest of ingots,—not the lessThese latter made him lovely,—sunned himself,Sometimes at Court, sometimes at Garnaut Hall,—At Court, by favor of the Virgin Queen,For great Elizabeth had smiled on him.
So Regnald, who was neither good nor braveNor graceful, liked not Eustace from the start,And this night hated him. With angry brows,He sat in a bleak chamber of the Hall,His fingers toying with his poniard's pointAbstractedly. Three times the ancient clock,Bolt-upright like a mummy in its case,Doled out the hour: at length the round red moon,Rising above the ghostly poplar-tops,Looked in on Regnald nursing his dark thought,Looked in on the stiff portraits on the wall,And dead Sir Egbert's empty coat-of-mail.
A quick step sounded on the gravel-walk,And then came Eustace, humming a sea-song,Of how the Grace of Devon, with ten guns,And Master Raleigh on the quarter-deck,Bore down and tackled the great galleon,Madre de Dios, raked her fore and aft,And took her bullion,—singing, light at heart,His first love's first kiss warm upon his lip.Straight onward came young Eustace to his death!For hidden behind the arras near the stairStood Regnald, like the Demon in the play,Grasping his rapier part-way down the bladeTo strike the foul blow with its heavy hilt.Straight on came Eustace,—blithely ran the song,"Old England's darlings are her hearts of oak."The lights were out, and not a soul astir,Or else the dead man's scabbard, as it clashedAgainst the marble pavement when he fell,Had brought a witness. Not a breath or sound,Only the sad wind wailing in the tower,Only the mastiff growling in his sleep,Outside the gate, and pawing at his dream.
Now in a wing of that old gallery,Hung with the relics of forgotten feuds,A certain door, which none but Regnald knew,Was fashioned like the panels of the wall,And so concealed by carven grapes and flowersA man could search for it a dozen yearsAnd swear it was not, though his touch had beenUpon the very panel where it was.The secret spring that opened it unclosedAn inner door of iron-studded oak,Guarding a narrow chamber, where, perchance,Some bygone lord of Garnaut Hall had hidHis threatened treasure, or, most like, bestowedSome too adventurous antagonist.Sealed in the compass of that stifling room,A man might live, at best, but half an hour.
Hither did Regnald bear his brother's corseAnd set it down. Perhaps he paused to gazeA moment on the quiet moon-lit face,The face yet beautiful with new-told love!Perhaps his heart misgave him,—or, perhaps——Now, whether 't was some dark avenging Hand,Or whether 't was some fatal freak of wind,We may not know, but suddenly the doorWithout slammed to, and there was Regnald shutBeyond escape, for on the inner sideWas neither spring nor bolt to set him free!
Mother of Mercy! what were a whole lifeOf pain and penury and conscience-smartTo that half-hour of Regnald's with his Dead?
—The joyous sun rose over the white cliffsOf Devon, sparkled through the poplar-tops,And broke the death-like slumber of the Hall.The keeper fetched their breakfast to the hounds;The smart, young ostler whistled in the stalls;The pretty housemaid tripped from room to room;And grave and grand behind his master's chair,But wroth within to have the partridge spoil,The senile butler waited for his lord.But neither Regnald nor young Eustace came.And when 't was found that neither slept at HallThat night, their couches being still unpressed,The servants stared. And as the day wore on,And evening came, and then another day,And yet another, till a week had gone,The wonder spread, and riders sent in hasteScoured the country, dragged the neighboring streams,Tracked wayward footprints to the great chalk bluffs,But found not Regnald, lord of Garnaut Hall.The place that knew him knew him never more.
The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew.And Agnes Vail, the little Saxon rose,Waxed pale and paler, till the country-folkHalf guessed her fate was somehow intertwinedWith that dark house. When her pure soul had passed,—Just as a perfume floats from out the world,—Wild tales were told of how the brothers lovedThe self-same maid, whom neither one would wedBecause the other loved her as his life;And that the two, at midnight, in despair,From one sheer cliff plunged headlong in the sea.And when, at night, the hoarse east-wind rose high,Rattled the lintels, clamoring at the door,The children huddled closer round the hearthAnd whispered very softly with themselves,"That's Master Regnald looking for his Bride!"
The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew.Decay and dolor settled on the Hall.The wind went howling in the dismal rooms,Rustling the arras; and the wainscot-mouseGnawed through the mighty Garnauts on the wall,And made a lodging for her glossy youngIn dead Sir Egbert's empty coat-of-mail;The griffon dropped from off the blazoned shield;The stables rotted; and a poisonous vineStretched its rank nets across the lonely lawn.For no one went there,—'t was a haunted spot.A legend killed it for a kindly home,—A grim estate, which every heir in turnLeft to the orgies of the wind and rain,The newt, the toad, the spider, and the mouse.
The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew.And once, 't is said, the Queen reached out her handAnd let it rest on Cecil's velvet sleeve,And said, "I prithee, Cecil, tell us now,Was 't ever known what happened to those men,—Those Garnauts?—were they never, never found?"The weasel face had fain looked wise for her,But no one of that century ever knew.
The red leaf withered and the green leaf grew.And in that year the good Prince Albert diedThe land changed owners, and the new-made lordSent down his workmen to revamp the HallAnd make the waste place blossom as the rose.By chance, a workman in the eastern wing,Fitting the cornice, stumbled on a door,Which creaked, and seemed to open of itself;And there within the chamber, on the flags,He saw two figures in outlandish guiseOf hose and doublet,—one stretched out full-length,And one half fallen forward on his breast,Holding the other's hand with vice-like grip:One face was calm, the other sad as death,With something in it of a pleading look,As might befall a man that dies at prayer.Amazed, the workman hallooed to his matesTo see the wonder; but ere they could come,The figures crumbled and were shapeless dust.
In that remote period of history which is especially visited upon us in our school-days, in expiation of the sins of our forefathers, there nourished seven poets at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Royal favor and amiable dispositions united them in a club: public applause and self-appreciation led them to call it The Pleiades. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Pierre Ronsard, emulous of Greek fame, took to him six other poets more wretched than himself, and made up a second Pleiades for France. The third rising of this rhythmical constellation was seen in Connecticut a long time ago.
Connecticut is pleasant, with wooded hills and a beautiful river; plenteous with tobacco and cheese; fruitful of merchants, missionaries, sailors, peddlers, and singlewomen;—but there are no poets known to exist there, unless it be that well-paid band who write the rhymed puffs of cheap garments and cosmetics. The brisk little democratic State has turned its brains upon its machinery. Not a snug valley, with a few drops of water at the bottom of it, but rattles with the manufacture of notions, great and small,—axes and pistols, carriages and clocks, tin pans and toys, hats, garters, combs, buttons, and pins. You see that the enterprising natives can turn out any article on which a profit may be made,—except poetry. That product, you would say, was out of the question. Nevertheless, the species poet, although extinct, did once exist on that soil. The evidence is conclusive that palaeozoic verse-makers wandered over those hills in bygone ages. Their moss-grown remains, still visible here and there, are as unmistakable as the footprints of the huge wading birds in the red sandstone of Middletown and Chatham.Où la poésie va-t'elle se nicher?How came the Muses to settle in Connecticut?
Dr. Samuel Peters, in his trustworthy history of the Colony, gives no answer to this question; but among the oldest inhabitants of remote Barkhamstead, for whom it is said General Washington and the worthies of his date still have a being in the flesh, there lingers a mythological tradition which may explain this aberration of Connecticut character. The legend runs thus.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, English readers were entertained with elaborate allegories, in which the passions, the vices, and even the habits of mankind were personified. Lighter ethical topics were served up in letters from Philotryphus, Septimius, or others ending inus, and in communications from Flirtilla, Jack Modish, and Co. Eastern tales and apologues, meditations on human life, essays on morality, inquiries as to whether the arts and sciences were serviceable or prejudicial to the human race, dissertations on the wisdom and virtue of the Chinese, were all the fashion in literature. The Genius of authorship, or the Demon, if you prefer it, was so precise, refined, exquisite in manner, and so transcendentally moral in ethics, that he had become almost insufferable to his master, Apollo. The God was a little tired, if the truth were known, with the monotonous chant of Pope, in spite of his wit. He began to think that something more was required, to satisfy the soul than polished periods and abstract didactic morality,—and was not much surprised when he observed that Prior, after dining with Addison and Co., liked to finish the evening with a common soldier and his wife, and refresh his mind over a pipe and a pot of beer. But Pope was dead, and so was Thomson, and Goldsmith not yet heard from. There was a famine of literary invention in England. Out of work and wages for himself and histroupe, "disgusted at the age and clime, barren of every glorious theme," Phoebus Apollo determined to emigrate. Berkeley had reported favorably of the new Western Continent: it was a land of poetical promise to the Bishop.
"There shall be sung another golden age,The rise of empire and of arts;The good and great inspiring epic rage,The wisest heads and noblest hearts."
"There shall be sung another golden age,The rise of empire and of arts;The good and great inspiring epic rage,The wisest heads and noblest hearts."
Trusting in the judgment of a man who had every virtue under heaven, the God of Song shipped with the tuneful Nine for America. Owing, perhaps, to insufficiency of transportation, the Graces were left behind. The vessel sailed past Rhode Island in a fog, and disembarked its precious freight at New Haven, in the Colony of Connecticut. In the pleasant summer weather, the distinguished foreigners travelled northward as far as Litchfield Hill, and thence to Hartford, on the banks of the beautiful river. They found the land well wooded and well watered; the natives good-natured, industrious, and intelligent: but the scenery was monotonous to the Pierian colonists, and the people distasteful. The clipped hair and penitential scowl of the men made heavy the hearts of the Muses; their daughters and wives had a sharp, harsh, pert "tang" in their speech, that grated upon the ears of Apollo, who held with King Lear as to the excellence of a low, soft voice in woman. Each native seemed to the strangers sadly alike in looks, dress, manners, and pursuits, to every other native. Of Art they were absolutely ignorant. They built their temples on the same model as their barns. Poetry meant Psalms sung through their noses to the accompaniment of a bass-viol. Of other musical instruments, they knew only the Jews-harp for home delectation, and the drum and fife for training-days. Doctrinal religion furnished them with a mental relaxation which supplied the place of amusement. Sandemanians, Adamites, Peterites, Bowlists, Davisonians, and Rogereens, though agreeing mainly in essentials, found vast gratification in playing against each other at theological dialectics. On one cardinal point of discipline only—the necessity of administering creature comfort to the sinful body—did all sects zealously unite. They offered copious, though coarse, libations to Bacchus, in the spirit-stirring rum of their native land.[B]
After careful observation, the nine ladies conferred together, and decided that in this part of the world their sphere of usefulness was limited and their mission a failure. Polymnia, Urania, and Clio might get into good society, but Thalia and Terpsichore were sure to be set in the stocks; and what was poor Erato to expect, but a whipping, in a commonwealth that forbade its women to uncover their necks or to expose their arms above the wrists? They made up their minds not to "locate"; packed up barbiton and phorminx, mask and cothurn, took the first ship bound to Europe, and quietly sailed away. Their stay was short, but they left their mark. To this day Phoebes are numerous in Connecticut, and nine women to one man has become the customary proportion of the sexes. As Greece had Parnassus, Helicon, and Pindus, Connecticut had New Haven, Hartford, and Litchfield Hill,—halting-places of the illustrious travellers. There they scattered the seeds of poetry,—seeds which fell upon stony places, but, warmed by the genial influence of the Sun-God, sprang up and brought forth such fruit as we shall see.
John Trumbull was born in Watertown,a.d.1750; two years later, in Northampton, came Timothy Dwight: both of the best New England breed: Dwight, a grandson of Jonathan Edwards; Trumbull, cousin to kind old Governor Trumbull, (whose pompous manner in transacting the most trifling public business amused Chastellux and the Hussar officers at Windham,) and consequently second cousin to the sonof the Governor, Colonel John Trumbull, whose paintings might possibly have added to the amusement of the gay Frenchmen, had they stayed in America long enough to see them. Cowley, Milton, and Pope lisped in numbers; but the precocity of Trumbull was even more surprising. He passed his college examination at the age of eight, in the lap of a Dr. Emmons; but was remanded to the nursery to give his stature time to catch up with his acquirements. Dwight, too, was ready for college at eight, and was actually entered at thirteen.
About this time there were symptoms of an æsthetical thaw in Connecticut. There had been no such word as play in the dictionary of the New-Englanders. They worked hard on their stony soil, and read hard in their stony books of doctrine. That stimulant to the mind, outside of daily routine, which the human race must have under all circumstances, (we call it excitement nowadays,) was found by the better sort in theological quarrels, by the baser in New England rum,—the two things most cheering to the spirit of man, if Byron is to be believed. Education meant solid learning,—that is to say, studies bearing upon divinity, law, medicine, or merchandise; and to peruse works of the imagination was considered an idle waste of time,—indeed, as partaking somewhat of the nature of sin. But the growing taste of Connecticut was no longer satisfied with Dr. Watts's moral lyrics, whose jingle is still so instructive and pleasant to extreme youth. Milton and Dryden, Thomson and Pope, were read and admired; "The Spectator" was quoted as the standard of style and of good manners; and daring spirits even ventured upon Richardson's novels and "Tristram Shandy."
While in this literary revival all Yale was anxious, young Dwight and Trumbull were indulging in hope. Smitten with the love of verse, Dwight announced his rising genius (these are the words of the "Connecticut Magazine and New Haven Gazette") by versions of two odes of Horace, and by "America," a poem after the manner of Pope's "Windsor Forest." At the age of nineteen he invoked the venerable Muse who has been called in as the "Poet's Lucina," since Homer established her professional reputation, and dashed boldly at the epic,—"the greatest work human nature is capable of." His great work was "The Conquest of Canaan." Trumbull, more modest, wrote "The Progress of Dulness," in three cantos. To these young men of genius came later two other nurslings of the Muses,—David Humphreys from Derby, and Joel Barlow from Reading. They caught the poetical distemper. Barlow, fired by Dwight's example, began "The Vision of Columbus." The four friends, young and hopeful, encouraging and praising each other, gained some local reputation by fugitive pieces in imitation of English models, published "Spectator" essays in the New Haven papers, and forestalled all cavillers by damning the critics after the method used by Dryden and Pope against Settle and Cibber.
Trumbull chose the law as a profession, and went to Boston to finish his studies in 1773. A clerk in the office of John Adams, who lodged with Gushing, Speaker of the Massachusetts House, could have read but little law in the midst of that political whirlwind which was driving men of every trade and profession into revolution. Boston stubbornly persevered in the resolution not to consume British goods, notwithstanding the efforts of the Addressers and Protesters and Tories generally, who preached their antiquated doctrines of passive obedience and divine right, and painted in their darkest colors the privation and suffering caused by the blockade. Trumbull joined the Whigs, pen in hand, and laid stoutly about him both in prose and verse. Then came the skirmish at Lexington, and all New England sprang to arms. Dwight joined the army as chaplain. Humphreys volunteered on Putnam's staff. Barlow served in the ranks at the Battle of White Plains; and then, after devoting his mind to theology for six weeks, acceptedthe position of chaplain in a Massachusetts regiment. The little knot of poets was broken up. One of them asked in mournful numbers,—
"Amid the roar of drums and guns,When meet again the Muses' sons?"
"Amid the roar of drums and guns,When meet again the Muses' sons?"
They met again after the thunder and lightning were over, but in another place. New Haven saw the rising of the constellation; its meridian brilliancy shone upon Hartford. At the close of the war, the four poetical luminaries, as they were called by the "Connecticut Magazine and New Haven Gazette," hung up the sword in Hartford and grasped the lyre. The epidemic of verse broke out again. The four added to their number Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, a physician, Richard Alsop, a gentleman of much cultivation, and Theodore Dwight, a younger brother of Timothy. There were now seven stars of the first magnitude. Many other aspirants to a place in the heavens were necessarily excluded; among them, two are worthy of notice,—Noah Webster, who was already then and there meditating his method for teaching the American people tomispel, and Oliver Wolcott, afterward Secretary of the Treasury. Bound by the sweet influences of the Pleiades, Wolcott wrote a poem,—"The Judgment of Paris." His biographer, who has read it, has given his critical opinion that "it would be much worse than Barlow's epic, were it not much shorter."
The year 1783 brought peace with England, but it found matters in a dangerous and unsettled state at home. After seven years of revolution it takes some time to bring a people down to the safe and sober jog-trot of every-day life. The lower classes were demoralized by the license and tumult of war, and by poverty; they were surly and turbulent, and showed a disposition to shake off yokes domestic as well as foreign,—the yoke of taxation in particular: for every man of them believed that he had already done more, suffered more, and paid more, than his fair share. The calamity of a worthless paper legal-tender currency added to the general discontent. Hence any public measure involving further disbursements met with angry opposition. Large arrears of pay were due to soldiers, and bounties had been promised to induce them to disband peacefully, and to compensate them for the depreciation of the currency. Congress had also granted five years' extra pay to officers, in lieu of the half-pay for life which was first voted. The army, in consequence, became very unpopular. A great clamor was raised against the Cincinnati Society, and factious patriots pretended to see in it the foundation of an hereditary aristocracy. The public irritability, excited by pretexts like these, broke out into violence. In Connecticut, mobs collected to prevent the army officers from receiving the certificates for the five years' pay, and a convention was assembled to elect men pledged to non-payment. Shay and Shattuck headed an insurrection in Massachusetts. There were riots at Exeter, in New Hampshire. When Shay's band was defeated and driven out of the State, Rhode Island—then sometimes called Rogue's Island, from her paper-money operations—refused to give up the refugee rebels. The times looked gloomy. The nation, relieved from the foreign pressure which had bound the Colonies together, seemed tumbling to pieces; each State was an independent sovereignty, free to go to ruin in its own way. The necessity for a strong central government to replace English rule became evident to all judicious men; for, as one Pelatiah Webster remarked, "Thirteen staves, and ne'er a hoop, cannot make a barrel." The Hartford Wits had fought out the war against King George; they now took up the pen against King Mob, and placed themselves in rank with the friends of order, good government, and union. Hence the "Anarchiad." An ancient epic on "the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Blight" was dug up in the ruins of an old Indian fort, where Madoc, the mythical Welsh Columbus, or some of his descendants, had buried it. Colonel Humphreys, whohad read the "Rolliad" in England, suggested the plan; Barlow, Hopkins, and Trumbull joined with him in carrying it out. Extracts from the "Anarchiad" were prepared when wanted, and the verses applied fresh to the enfeebled body politic. They chanted the dangers and difficulties of the old Federation and the advantages of the new Constitution. Union was the burden of their song; and they took a prophetic view of the stormy future, if thirteen independent States should divide this territory between them.
"Shall lordly Hudson part contending powers,And broad Potomac lave two hostile shores?Must Alleghany's sacred summits bearThe impious bulwarks of perpetual war?His hundred streams receive your heroes slain,And bear your sons inglorious to the main?"
"Shall lordly Hudson part contending powers,And broad Potomac lave two hostile shores?Must Alleghany's sacred summits bearThe impious bulwarks of perpetual war?His hundred streams receive your heroes slain,And bear your sons inglorious to the main?"
We,miserrimi, have lived to see it, and to see modern Shayites vote to establish such a state of things forever.
When the new government was firmly settled and found to work well, the same class of men who had opposed the Union formed the Anti-Federal, Democratic, or French party. The Hartford school were Federalists, of course. Theodore Dwight and Alsop, assisted by Dr. Hopkins, published in the local papers "The Political Greenhouse" and "The Echo,"—an imitation of "The Anti-Jacobin,"—"to check the progress of false taste in writing, and to stem the torrent of Jacobinism in America and the hideous morality of revolutionary madness." It was a place and time when, in the Hartford vocabulary,
"Patriot stood synonymous with rogue";
"Patriot stood synonymous with rogue";
and their versified squibs were let off at men rather than at measures. As a specimen of their mode of treatment, let us take Matthew Lyon, first an Irish redemptioner bought by a farmer in Derby, then an Anti-Federal champion and member of Congress from Vermont; once famous for publishing Barlow's letter to Senator Baldwin,—for his trial under the Alien and Sedition Act,—for the personal difficulty when
"He seized the tongsTo avenge his wrongs,And Griswold thus engaged."
"He seized the tongsTo avenge his wrongs,And Griswold thus engaged."
The Hartford poets notice him thus:—
"This beast within a few short yearsWas purchased for a yoke of steers;But now the wise Vermonters sayHe's worth six hundred cents a day."
"This beast within a few short yearsWas purchased for a yoke of steers;But now the wise Vermonters sayHe's worth six hundred cents a day."
Other leaders of the Anti-Federal party fare no better. Mr. Jefferson's literary and scientific whims came in for a share of ridicule.
"Great sire of stories past belief;Historian of the Mingo chief;Philosopher of Indians' hair;Inventor of a rocking-chair;The correspondent of Mazzei,And Banneker, less black than he,"et seq.
"Great sire of stories past belief;Historian of the Mingo chief;Philosopher of Indians' hair;Inventor of a rocking-chair;The correspondent of Mazzei,And Banneker, less black than he,"et seq.
The paper containing this paragraph had the felicity of being quoted in Congress by the Honorable John Nicholas, of Virginia, to prove that Connecticut wished to lead the United States into a war with France. The honorable gentleman read on until he came to the passage,—
"Each Jacobin began to stir,And sat as though on chestnut-burr,"
"Each Jacobin began to stir,And sat as though on chestnut-burr,"
when he stopped short. Mr. Dana of Connecticut took up the quotation and finished it, to the great amusement of the House.
The last number was published in 1805. As we look over the "Echo," and find nothing in it but doggerel,—generally very dull doggerel,—we might wonder at the applause it obtained, if we did not recollect how fiercely the two great parties engaged each other. In a riot, any stick, stone, or ignoble fragment of household pottery is valuable as a missile weapon.
While the constellation was shining resplendent over Connecticut, each bright star had its own particular twinkle. Trumbull had his "Progress of Dulness," in three cantos,—an imitation, in manner, of Goldsmith's "Double Transformation." The title is happy. The decline of Miss Harriet Simper from bellehood to an autumnal marriage, in Canto III., is more tiresome than the progress of Tom Brainless from the plough-tail to the pulpit, in Canto I. The Reverend Mr. Brainless, when called and settled,—
"On Sunday in his best arrayDeals forth the dulness of the day."
"On Sunday in his best arrayDeals forth the dulness of the day."
These two lines, descriptive, unfortunately, of too many ministrations, are all that have survived of the three cantos. Trumbull'schef d'œuvreis "McFingal," begun before the war and finished soon after the peace. The poem covers the whole Revolutionary period, from the Boston tea-party to the final humiliation of Great Britain: Lord North and General Gage, Hutchinson, Judge Oliver, and Treasurer Gray; Doctors Sam. Peters and Seabury; passive obedience and divine right; no taxation without representation; Rivington the printer, Massachusettensis, and Samuel Adams; Yankee Doodle; who began the war? town-meetings, liberty-poles, mobs, tarring, feathering, and smoking Tories; Tryon, Galloway, Burgoyne, Prescott, Guy Carleton; paper-money, regulation, and tender; in short, all the men and topics which preserve our polyphilosophohistorical societies from lethargic extinction. "McFingal" hit the taste of the times; it was very successful. But although thirty editions were sold in shops or hawked about by peddlers, there was no copyright law in the land, and Trumbull took more praise than solid pudding by his poetry. It was reprinted in England, and found its way to France. The Marquis de Chastellux, an author himself, took an especial interest in American literature. He wrote to congratulate Trumbull upon his excellent poem, and took the opportunity to lay down "the conditions prescribed for burlesque poetry." "These, Sir, you have happily seized and perfectly complied with.... I believe that you have rifled every flower which that kind of poetry could offer.... Nor do I hesitate to assure you that I prefer it to every work of the kind,—even to Hudibras." Notwithstanding the opinion of the pompous Marquis, nobody reads "McFingal." Time has blotted out most of the four cantos. There are left a few lines, often quoted by gentlemen of the press, and invariably ascribed to "Hudibras":—
"For any man with half an eyeWhat stands before him can espy;But optics sharp it needs, I ween,To see what is not to be seen.""But as some muskets so contrive itAs oft to miss the mark they drive at,And though well aimed at duck or plover,Bear wide and kick their owners over.""No man e'er felt the halter drawWith good opinion of the law."
"For any man with half an eyeWhat stands before him can espy;But optics sharp it needs, I ween,To see what is not to be seen."
"But as some muskets so contrive itAs oft to miss the mark they drive at,And though well aimed at duck or plover,Bear wide and kick their owners over."
"No man e'er felt the halter drawWith good opinion of the law."
The last two verses have passed into immortality as a proverb. Perhaps a few other grains of corn might be picked out of these hundred and seventy pages of chaff.
Dr. Dwight staked his fame on "The Conquest of Canaan," an attempt to make an Iliad out of the Old Testament. Eleven books; nine thousand six hundred and seventy-two dreary verses, full of battles and thunderstorms; peopled with Irad, Jabin, Hanniel, Hezron, Zimri, and others like them, more colorless and shadowy than the brave Gyas and the brave Cloanthus. Not a line of this epic has survived. Shorter and much better is "Greenfield Hill," a didactic poem, composed, the author said, to amuse and to instruct in economical, political, and moral sentiments. Greenfield was, for a time, the scene of the Doctor's professional labors. His descriptions of New England character, of the prosperity and comfort of New England life, are accurate, but not vivid. The book is full of good sense, but there is little poetry in it. True to the literary instincts of the Pleiads, he shines with reflected light, and works after Thomson and Goldsmith so closely that in many passages imitation passes into parody.
Like Timotheus of Greece, Timothy of Connecticut