It is fortunate for the lecturer that there is no necessity for variety. The oft-repeated lecture is new to each new audience, and, being thoroughly in hand, and entirely familiar, is delivered with better effect than if the speaker were frequently choosing from a well-furnished repertory. It is popularly supposed that a lecturer loses all interest in a performance which he repeats so many times. This supposition is correct, in certain aspects of the matter, but not in any sense which detracts from his power to make it interesting to others. It is the general experience of lecturers, that, until they have delivered a discourse from ten to twenty times, they are themselves unable to measure its power; so that a performance which is offered at first timidly and with many doubts comes at length to be delivered confidently, and with measurable certainty of acceptance and success. The grand interest of a lecturer is in his new audience, in his experiment on an assembly of fresh minds. The lecture itself is regarded only as an instrument by which a desirable and important result is to be achieved; and familiarity with it, and steady use in its elocutionary handling, are conditions of the best success. Having selected the subject which, at the time, and for the times, he considers freshest and most fruitful, and with thorough care written out all he has to say upon it, there is no call for recurrence to minor themes, either as regards the credit of the lecturer or the best interests of those whom he addresses.
What good has the popular lecture accomplished? Its most enthusiasticadvocates will not assert that it has added greatly to the stock of popular knowledge, in science or art, in history, philosophy, or literature; yet the most modest of them may claim that it has bestowed upon American society a permanent good of incalculable value. The relentless foe of all bigotry in politics and religion, the constant opponent of every form of bondage to party and sect, the practical teacher of the broadest toleration of individual opinion, it has had more to do with the steady melioration of the prejudices growing out of denominational interests in Church and State than any other agency whatever. The platform of the lecture-hall has been common ground for the representatives of all our social, political, and religious organizations. It is there that orthodox and heterodox, progressive and conservative, have won respect for themselves and toleration for their opinions by the demonstration of their own manhood, and the recognition of the common human brotherhood; for one has only to prove himself a true man, and to show a universal sympathy with men, to secure popular toleration for any opinion he may hold. Hardly a decade has passed away since, in nearly every Northern State, men suffered social depreciation in consequence of their political and religious opinions. Party and sectarian names have been freely used as reproachful and even as disgraceful epithets. To call a man by the name which he had chosen as the representative of his political or religious opinions was considered equivalent to calling him a knave or a fool; and if it happened that he was in the minority, his name alone was regarded as the stamp of social degradation. Now, thanks to the influence of the popular lecture mainly, men have made, and are rapidly making, room for each other. A man may be in the minority now without consequently being in personal disgrace. Men of liberal and even latitudinarian views are generously received in orthodox communities, and those of orthodox faith are gladly welcomed by men who subscribe to a shorter creed and bear a broader charter of life and liberty. There certainly has never been a time in the history of America when there was such generous and general toleration of all men and all opinions as now; and as the popular lecture has been universal, with a determined aim and a manifest influence toward this end, it is but fair to claim for it a prominent agency in the result.
Another good which may be counted among the fruits of the popular lecture is the education of the public taste in intellectual amusements. The end which the lecture-goer seeks is not always improvement, in any respect. Multitudes of men and women have attended the lecture to be interested, and to be interested intellectually is to be intellectually amused. Lecturers who have appealed simply to the emotional nature, without attempting to engage the intellect, have ceased to be popular favorites. So far as the popular lecture has taken hold of the affections of a community, and secured its constant support, it has destroyed the desire for all amusements of a lower grade; and it will be found, that, generally, those who attend the lecture rarely or never give their patronage and presence to the buffooneries of the day. They have found something better,—something with more of flavor in the eating, with more of nutriment in the digestion. How great a good this is those only can judge who realize that men will have amusements of some sort, and that, if they cannot obtain such as will elevate them, they will indulge in such as are frivolous and dissipating. The lecture does quite as much for elevated amusement out of the hall as in it. The quickening social influence of an excellent lecture, particularly in a community where life flows sluggishly and all are absorbed in manual labor, is as remarkable as it is beneficent. The lecture and the lecturer are the common topics of discussion for a week, and the conversation which is so apt to cling to health and the weather is raised above the level of commonplace.
Notwithstanding the fact that a moiety, or a majority, of the popular lecturersare clergymen, the lecture has not always received the favor of the cloth. Indeed, there has often been private and sometimes public complaint on the part of preachers, that the finished productions of the lecturer, the results of long and patient elaboration, rendered doubly attractive by a style of delivery to be won only by frequent repetition of the same discourse, have brought the hastily prepared and plainly presented Sunday sermon into an unjust and damaging comparison. The complaint is a strange one, particularly as no one has ever claimed that the highest style of eloquence or the most remarkable models of rhetoric are to be found in the lecture-hall. There has, at least, been no general conviction that a standard of excellence in English and its utterance has been maintained there too high for the comfort and credit of the pulpit. It is possible, therefore, that the pulpit betrays its weak point, and needs the comparison which it deprecates. A man of brains will gratefully receive suggestions from any quarter. That impulses to a more familiar and direct style of sermonizing, a brighter and better elocution, and a bolder utterance of personal convictions, have come to the pulpit from the platform, there is no question. This feeling on the part of preachers is by no means universal, however; for some of them have long regarded the lecture with contempt, and have sometimes resented it as an impertinence. And it may be (for there shall be no quarrel in the matter) that lecturers are quacks, and that lectures, like homoeopathic remedies, are very contemptible things; but they have pleasantly modified the doses of the old practice, however slow the doctors are to confess it; and so much, at least, may be counted among the beneficent results of the system under discussion.
Last in the brief enumeration of the benefits of the popular lecture, it has been the devoted, consistent, never tiring champion of universal liberty. If the popular lecturer has not been a power in this nation for the overthrow of American Slavery,—for its overthrow in the conscientious convictions and the legal and conventional fastnesses of the nation,—then have the friends of oppression grossly lied; for none have received their malicious and angry objurgations more unsparingly than our plain-speaking gentleman who makes his yearly circuit among the lyceums. No champion of slavery, no advocate of privilege, no apologist for systematized and legalized wrong has ever been able to establish himself as a popular lecturer. The people may listen respectfully to such a man once; but, having heard him, they drop him forever. In truth, a man cannot be a popular lecturer who does not plant himself upon the eternal principles of justice. He must be a democrat, a believer in and an advocate of the equal rights of men. A slavery-loving, slavery-upholding lecturer would be just as much of an anomaly as a slavery-loving and slavery-singing poet. The taint so vitiates the whole æsthetic nature, so poisons the moral sense, so palsies the finer powers, so destroys all true sympathy with universal humanity, that the composition of an acceptable lecture becomes impossible to the man who bears it. The popular lecture, as it has been described in this article, has never existed at the South, and could not be tolerated there. Until within three years it has never found opportunity for utterance in the capital of the nation; but where liberty goes, it makes its way, and helps to break the way for liberty everywhere.
It is a noteworthy fact, that the popular lecturer, though the devoted advocate of freedom to the slave, has rarely been regarded as either a trustworthy or an important man in the party which has represented his principles in this country. He has always been too free to be a partisan, too radical and intractable for a party seeking power or striving to preserve it. No party of any considerable magnitude has ever regarded him as its expositor. A thousand times have party-speakers and party-organs, professing principles identical with his own, washed their hands of all responsibilityfor his utterances. Even now, when the sound of falling shackles is in the air, and the smoke of the torment of the oppressor fills the sky, old partisans of freedom cannot quite forget their stupid and hackneyed animosities, but still bemoan the baleful influence of this fiery itinerant. Representative of none but himself, disowned or hated by all parties, acknowledging responsibility to God and his own conscience only, he has done his work, and done it well,—done it amid careful questionings and careless curses,—done it, and been royally paid for it, when speakers who fairly represented the political and religious prejudices of the people could not have called around them a baker's dozen, with tickets at half-price or at no price at all.
When the cloud which now envelops the country shall gather up its sulphurous folds and roll away, tinted in its retiring by the smile of God beaming from a calm sky upon a nation redeemed to freedom and justice, and the historian, in the light of that smile, shall trace home to their fountains the streams of influence and power which will then join to form the river of the national life, he will find one, starting far inland among the mountains, longer than the rest and mightier than most, and will recognize it as the confluent outpouring of living, Christian speech, from ten thousand lecture-platforms, on which free men stood and vindicated the right of man to freedom.
Meridian moments! grandly givenTo cheer the warrior's soul from heaven!God's ancient boon, vouchsafed to thoseWho battle long with Freedom's foes,—Oh, what in life can claim the powerTo match with that divinest hour?I see the avenging angel waveHis banner o'er the embattled brave;I hear above Hate's trumpet-blareThe shout that rends the smoking air,And then I know at whose commandThe victor sweeps the Rebel land!Enduring Valor lifts his headTo count the flying and the dead;Returning Virtue still maintainsThe right to break unhallowed chains;While sacred Justice, born of God,Walks regnant o'er the bleeding sod.
Meridian moments! grandly givenTo cheer the warrior's soul from heaven!God's ancient boon, vouchsafed to thoseWho battle long with Freedom's foes,—Oh, what in life can claim the powerTo match with that divinest hour?
I see the avenging angel waveHis banner o'er the embattled brave;I hear above Hate's trumpet-blareThe shout that rends the smoking air,And then I know at whose commandThe victor sweeps the Rebel land!
Enduring Valor lifts his headTo count the flying and the dead;Returning Virtue still maintainsThe right to break unhallowed chains;While sacred Justice, born of God,Walks regnant o'er the bleeding sod.
The hostility of foreign governments to the United States is due as much at least to dread of their growing power as dislike of their democracy; and accordingly the theory of the Secessionists as to the character of our Union has been as acceptable to the understandings of our foreign enemies as the acts of the Rebels against its government have been pleasing to their sympathies. They well know that a union of States whose government recognized the right of Secession would be as weak as an ordinary league between independent sovereignties; and as the rapid growth of the States in population, wealth, and power is certain, they naturally desire, that, if united, these States shall be an aggregation of forces, neutralizing each other, rather than a fusion of forces, which, for general purposes, would make them a giant nationality. Accordingly, centralized France reads to us edifying homilies on the advantages of disintegration; and England, rich with the spoils of suppressed insurrections, adjures us most plaintively to respect the sacred rights of rebellion. The simple explanation of this hypocrisy or irony is, that both France and England are anxious that the strength of the United States shall not correspond to their bulk. The looser the tie of union, the greater the number of confederacies into which the nation should split, the safer they would feel. The doctrine of the inherent and undivided sovereignty of the States will therefore find resolute champions abroad as long as it has the most inconsiderable faction to support it at home.
The European nations are kept in order by what is called the Balance of Power, and this policy they would delight to see established on this continent. Should the different States of the American Union be occupied, like the European states, in checking each other, they could not act as a unit, and their terrific rate of growth in wealth and population, as compared with that of the nations across the Atlantic, would not excite in the latter such irritation and alarm. The magic which has changed English abolitionists into partisans of slaveholders, and French imperialists into champions of insurrection, came from the figures of the Census Reports. It is calculated that the United States, if the rate of growth which obtained between 1850 and 1860 is continued, will have, forty years hence, a hundred millions of inhabitants, and four hundred and twenty thousand millions of dollars of taxable wealth,—over three times the present population, and over ten times the present wealth, of the richest of European nations. It is probable that this concrete fact exerts more influence on the long-headed statesmen of Europe than any abstract dislike of democracy. The only union which they could bring against such a power would be a league, a confederacy, a continuous and subsisting treaty, between sovereign powers. Is it surprising that they should wish our union to be of the same character? Is it surprising that the contemplation of a government, whether despotic or democratic, which could act directly on a hundred millions of people, with the supreme right of taxing property to the amount of four hundred and twenty billions of dollars, should fill them with dismay?
The inherent weakness of a league, even when its general object is such as to influence the passions of the nations which compose it, is well known to all European statesmen. The various alliances against France show the insuperable difficulties in the way of giving to confederacies of sovereign states a unity and efficiency corresponding to their aggregate strength, and the necessity which the leaders of such alliances are always under of expending half their skill and energy in preventing the looselycompacted league from falling to pieces. The alliance under the lead of William III. barely sustained itself against Louis XIV., though William was the ablest statesman in Europe, and had been trained in the tactics of confederacies from his cradle. The alliance under the lead of Marlborough owed its measure of success to his infinite address and miraculous patience as much as to his consummate military genius; and the ignominious "secession" of England, in the treaty of Utrecht, ended in making it one of the most conspicuous examples of the weakness of such combinations. When the exceptional military genius, as in the case of Frederick and Napoleon, has been on the side of the single power assailed, the results have been all the more remarkable. The coalition against Frederick, the ruler of five millions of people, was composed of sovereigns who ruled a hundred millions; and at the end of seven years of war they had not succeeded in wringing permanently from his grasp a square mile of territory. The first coalitions against Napoleon resulted only in making him the master of Europe; and he was crushed at last merely by the dead weight of the nations which the senselessness of his political passions brought down upon his empire. Indeed, the trouble with all leagues is, that they are commanded, more or less, by debating-societies; and a debating-society is weak before a man. The Southern Confederacy is a confederacy only in name; for no despotism in Europe or Asia has more relentless unity of purpose, and in none does debate exercise less control over executive affairs. All the powers of the government are practically absorbed in Jefferson Davis, and a rebellion in the name of State Rights has ended in a military autocracy, in which all rights, personal and State, are suspended.
Now, as it is impossible for European governments to combine efficiently against such a colossal power as the United States promise within a few generations to be, provided the unity of the nation is preserved with its growth, they naturally favor every element of disintegration which will reduce the separate States to the condition of European states. Earl Russell's famous saying, that "the North is fighting for power, the South for independence," is to be interpreted in this sense. What he overlooked was the striking fact which distinguishes the States of the American Republic from the states of Europe. The latter are generally separated by race and nationality, or, where composed of heterogeneous materials, are held together by military power. The people of the United States are homogeneous, and rapidly assimilate into American citizens the foreigners they so cordially welcome. No man has lifted his hand against the government as an Irishman, a Frenchman, a German, an Italian, a Dane, but only as a slaveholder, or as a citizen of a State controlled by slaveholders. The insurrection was started in the interest of an institution, and not of a race. To compare such a rebellion with European rebellions is to confuse things essentially distinct. The American government is so constituted that nobody has an interest in overturning it, unless his interest is opposed to that of the mass of the citizens with whom he is place on an equality; and hence his treason is necessarily a revolt against the principle of equal rights. In Europe, it is needless to say, every rebellion with which an American can sympathise is a rebellion in favor of the principle against which the slaveholders' rebellion is an armed protest. An insurrection in Russia to restore serfdom, an insurrection in Italy to restore the dethroned despots, an insurrection in England to restore the Stuart system of kingly government, an insurrection anywhere to restore what the progress of civilization had made contemptible or accursed, would be the only fit parallel to the insurrection of the Southern Confederates. The North is fighting for power which is its due, because it is just and right; the South is fighting for independence, in order to remove all checks on its purpose to oppressand enslave. The fact that the power for which the North fights is a very different thing from the power which a European monarchy struggles to preserve and extend, the fact that it is the kind of power which oppressed nationalities seek in their efforts for independence, only makes our foreign critics more apprehensive of its effects. It is a dangerous power to them, because, founded in the consent of the people, there is no limit to its possible extension, except in the madness or guilt of that portion of the people who are restive under the restraints of justice and impatient under the rule of freedom.
It would be doing cruel wrong to Earl Russell's intelligence to suppose that he really believed what he said, when he drew a parallel between the American Revolution and the Rebellion of the Confederate States, and asserted that the right of the Southern States to secede from the American Union was identical with the right of the Colonies to sever their connection with Great Britain. We believe the Colonies were right in their revolt. But if the circumstances had been different,—if since the reign of William III. they had nominated or controlled almost every Prime Minister, had shaped the policy of the British Empire, had enjoyed not only a representation in Parliament, but in the basis of representation had been favored with a special discrimination in their favor against Kent and Yorkshire,—if both in the House of Lords and the House of Commons they had not only been dominant, but had treated the Bentincks, Cavendishes, and Russells, the Montagus, Walpoles, and Pitts, with overbearing insolence,—and if, after wielding power so long and so arrogantly, they had rebelled at the first turn in political affairs which seemed to indicate that they were to be reduced from a position of superiority to one of equality,—if our forefathers had acted after this wild fashion, we should not only think that the Revolution they achieved was altogether unjustifiable, but we should blush at the thought of being descended from such despot-demagogues. This is a very feeble statement of the case which would connect the Revolt of the American Colonies with the Revolt of the American Liberticides; and Earl Russell is too well-informed a statesman not to know that his parallel fails in every essential particular. He threw it out, as he threw out his sounding antithesis about "power" and "independence," to catch ears not specially blessed with brains between them.
But European statesmen, in order to promote the causes of American dissensions, are willing not only to hazard fallacies which do not impose on their own understandings, but to give aid and comfort to iniquities which in Europe have long been antiquated. They thus tolerate chattel slavery, not because they sympathize with it, but because it is an element of disturbance in the growth of American power. Though it has for centuries been outgrown by the nations of Western Europe, and is repugnant to all their ideas and sentiments, they are willing to give it their moral support, provided it will break up the union of the people of the States, or remain as a constantly operating cause of enmity between the sections of a reconstructed Union. They would tolerate Mormonism or Atheism or Diabolism, if they thought it would have a similar effect; but at the same time they would not themselves legalize polygamy, or deny the existence of God, or inaugurate the worship of the Devil. Indeed, while giving slavery a politic sanction, they despise in their hearts the people who are so barbarous as to maintain such an institution; and the Southern rebel or Northern demagogue who thinks his championship of slavery really earns him any European respect is under that kind of delusion which it is always for the interest of the plotter to cultivate in the tool. It was common, a few years ago, to represent the Abolitionist as the dupe or agent of the aristocracies of Europe. It certainly might be supposed that persons who made this foolish chargewere competent at least to see that the present enemy of the unity of the American people is the pro-slavery fanatic, and that it is on his knavery or stupidity that the ill-wishers to American unity now chiefly rely.
For the war has compelled these ill-wishers to modify their most cherished theory of democracy in the United States. They thought that the marvellous energy for military combination, developed by a democracy suddenly emancipated from oppression, such as was presented by the French people in the Revolution of 1789, was not the characteristic of a democracy which had grown up under democratic institutions. The first was anarchyplusthe dictator; the second was merely "anarchyplusthe constable." They had an obstinate prepossession, that, in a settled democracy like ours, the selfishness of the individual was so stimulated that he became incapable of self-sacrifice for the public good. The ease with which the government of the United States has raised men by the million and money by the billion has overturned this theory, and shown that a republic, of which individual liberty and general equality form the animating principles, can still rapidly avail itself of the property and personal service of all the individuals who compose it, and that self-seeking is not more characteristic of a democracy in time of peace than self-sacrifice is characteristic of the same democracy in time of war. The overwhelming and apparently unlimited power of a government thusofthe people andforthe people is what the war has demonstrated, and it very naturally excites the fear and jealousy of governments which are based on less firm foundations in the popular mind and heart and will.
It is doubtless true that many candid foreign thinkers favor the disintegration of the American Union because they believe that the consolidation of its power would make it the meddlesome tyrant of the world. They admit that the enterprise, skill, and labor of the people, applied to the unbounded undeveloped resources of the country, will enable them to create wealth very much faster than other nations, and that the population, fed by continual streams of immigration, will also increase with a corresponding rapidity. They admit, that, if kept united, a few generations will be sufficient to make them the richest, largest, and most powerful nation in the world. But they also fear that this nation will be an armed and aggressive democracy, deficient in public reason and public conscience, disposed to push unjust claims with insolent pertinacity, and impelled by a spirit of propagandism which will continually disturb the peace of Europe. It is curious that this impression is derived from the actions of the government while it was controlled by the traitors now in rebellion against it, and from the professions of those Northern demagogues who are most in sympathy with European opinion concerning the justice and policy of the war. Mr. Fernando Wood, the most resolute of all the Northern advocates of peace, recommended from his seat in Congress but a month ago, that a compromise be patched up with the Rebels on the principle of sacrificing the negro, and then that both sections unite to seize Canada, Cuba, and Mexico. The kind of "democracy" which Mr. Jefferson Davis and Mr. Fernando Wood represent is the kind of democracy which has always been the great disturber of our foreign relations, and it is a democracy which will be rendered powerless by the triumph of the national arms. The United States of 1900, with their population of a hundred millions, and their wealth of four hundred and twenty billions, will, we believe, be a power for good, and not for evil. They will be strong enough to make their rights respected everywhere; but they will not force their ideas on other nations at the point of the bayonet; they will not waste their energies in playing the part of the armed propagandist of democratic opinions in Europe; and the contagion of their principles will only be the natural resultof the example of peace, prosperity, freedom, and justice, which they will present to the world. In Europe, where power commonly exists only to be abused, this statement would be received with an incredulous smile; but we have no reason to doubt, that, among the earnest patriots who are urging on the present war for Liberty and Union to a victorious conclusion, it would be considered the most commonplace of truths.
The Seer, or Commonplaces Refreshed.ByLeigh Hunt. In Two Volumes. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
The Seer, or Commonplaces Refreshed.ByLeigh Hunt. In Two Volumes. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
Among the books most prized, in our modest private book-room, are some which bear the delicate and graceful autograph of Leigh Hunt, having floated from his deserted library to these American shores. There is the Apollonius from which came the text of his poem of "The Panther";—this is his mark against the legend, on page sixty-nine; and here is the old engraving of Apollonius, which he no doubt inserted as a frontispiece to the book. Here again is his copy of Rousseau's "Confessions," Holyoake's translation, annotated through and through with Hunt's humane and penetrating criticisms on nature with which his own had much in common, though purer and sweeter. This volume of Milton's "Minor Poems" was his also, with the rich and varied notes of Warton, the edition of whose literary charms he somewhere speaks with such delight. Here also is Forster's "Perennial Calendar," a book of rural gossip, such as Leigh Hunt thoroughly enjoyed; and this copy of Aubrey de Vere's Poems was a present from the author. Above all, perhaps, one dwells with interest on a volume of Hennell's "Christianity and Infidelity," riddled through and through by pen-and-ink underscorings, extending sometimes to every line upon a page. The book ends with a generous paragraph in assertion of the comfort and sufficiency of Natural Religion; and after it comes, written originally in pencil, then in ink again, always with the same firm and elegant handwriting, the indorsement, "Amen. So be it. L. H. July 14th, 1857." This was written in his seventy-third year, two years before his death, and this must have been about the time of Hawthorne's visit to him. Read the "Amen" in the light of that beautiful description of patient and frugal old age, and it is a touching and noble memorial.
Americans often fancied that they noticed something American in Leigh Hunt'sphysiqueand manners, without knowing how near he came to owning a Cisatlantic birth. His mother was a Philadelphian; and his father, a West-Indian, resided in this country until within a few years of his death. It is fitting, therefore, that our publishers should keep his writings in the market, and this is well done in this handsome edition of "The Seer." These charming essays will bear preservation; none are more saturated with cultivated taste and literary allusion, and in none are more graceful pictures painted on a slighter canvas. If there is an occasional impression of fragility and superficiality, it is yet wholly in character, and seems not to interfere with the peculiar charm. Hunt, for instance, writes a delightful paper on the theme of "Cricket," without ten allusions to the game, or one indication of ever having stopped to watch it. He discourses deliciously upon Anacreon's "Tettix,"—the modern Cicada,—and then calls it a beetle. There is apt, indeed, to be a pervading trace of that kind of conscious effort which is technically called "book-making," and one certainly finds the entertainment a little frothy, at times, compared with the elder essayists. Nevertheless, Leigh Hunt's roses always bloom, his breezes are always "redolent of joy and youth," and his sunny spirit pervades even a rainy day. Chaucer and Keats never yet have found a more delicate or discriminating critic; and his paper on Wordsworth, beside the fine touches, has solider qualities that command one's admiration. The personal memorials of the author's literary friends have a peculiar charm to us in this land and generation, for whom Hazlitt andKeats are names almost as shadowy and romantic as Amadis or Lancelot; but best of all is his noble tribute to Shelley. After speaking (Vol. II. p. 38) of the deep philanthropy which lay beneath the apparent cynicism of Hazlitt, he thus continues:—"But only imagine a man who should feel this interest too, and be deeply amiable, and have great sufferings, bodily and mental, and know his own errors, and waive the claim of his own virtues, and manifest an unceasing considerateness of the comforts of those about him, in the very least as well as greatest things,—surviving, in the pure life of his heart, all mistake, all misconception, all exasperation, and ever having a soft word in his extremity, not only for those who consoled, but for those who distressed him; and imagine how we must have lovedhim. It was Mr. Shelley."
Such an epitaph writes the character not only of him who receives the tribute, but of him who pays it. And if there ever lived a literary man who might fitly claim for his funeral stone the inscription, "Lord, keep my memory green," it was the sweet-tempered, flower-loving Leigh Hunt.
Christ and his Salvation.In sermons variously related thereto. ByHorace Bushnell. New York: Charles Scribner.
These sermons are distinguished from the ordinary discourses of the pulpit by being the product not merely of religious faith and feeling, but of religious genius. They embody the thought and experience of a life, and the ideas they inculcate are not so much the dogmas of a sect as the divinations of an individual. "This is Christianity as it has been verified in my consciousness," might be taken as the motto of the volume. The result is, that the collection is an addition to religious literature, and will be read with satisfaction for its stimulating effect on the religious sense by hundreds who may disagree with its direct teachings.
The two most striking and characteristic sermons in the volume are the first and the last, respectively entitled, "Christ waiting to find Room," a masterly analysis of the worldliness of the so-called Christian world, and "Heaven Opened," a plea equally masterly for the existence in man of a supernatural sense to discern supernatural things. Between these come the sermons entitled, "The Gentleness of God," "The Insight of Love," "Salvation for the Lost Condition," "The Bad Mind makes a Bad Element," and "The Wrath of the Lamb," which illustrate so well the union in Dr. Bushnell's mind of practical sagacity and force of thought with keenness and reach of spiritual vision, that we select them from the rest as particularly worthy of the reader's attention. Indeed, to have written these discourses is to have done the work of a ministry.
The peculiarity of the whole volume, and a singular peculiarity in a collection of sermons, is the absence of commonplace. The writer's method is to bring his mind into close contact with things instead of phrases,—to think round his subject, and think into his subject, and, if possible, think through his subject to the law on which it depends; and thus, when his thinking results in no novelty of view, it is still the indorsement of an accepted truth by a fresh perception of it. Truths in such a process never put on the character of truisms, but are as vital to the last observer as to the first. There is hardly a page in the volume which is not original, in the sense of recording original impressions of objects, individually seen, grasped, and examined. There are numerous originalities of a different kind, which may not be so pleasing to some classes of Christians,—as when he aims to show that an accredited spiritual form does not express a corresponding spiritual fact, or as when he splits some shell of creed which imprisons rather than embodies the kernel of faith, and lets the oppressed truth go free.
This power of penetrating thought, so determined as at times to wear a look of doggedness,—this analysis which shrinks from no problems, which is provoked by obstacles into intenser effort, and which is almost fanatical in its desire to get at the idea and reason of everything it probes,—is relieved by a richly sympathetic and imaginative nature,—indeed, is so welded with it, that insight and analysis serve each other, and cool reason gives solidity to ecstatic experience. Perhaps as a seer Dr. Bushnell may be more certain of recognition than as a reasoner. Whatever may be thought of the orthodoxy of the doctrines he has rationalized, there can be no doubt as to the reality of the spiritual states he has described. His intellectual method may be wrong or incomplete, but it in some way enables him to reach the substance of Christian life and light and love and joy.There are passages in the volume which are all aglow with the sacred fire of that rapture which rewards only those souls that soar into the regions where the objects that kindle it abide; and this elevation which touches ecstasy, this effluence from the spiritual mood of the writer, is not limited to special bursts of eloquence, but gleams along the lines of many a clinching argument, and flashes out from many an uncadenced period.
The style of the book is what might be expected from the character of the author and the processes of his thinking. The mental state dictates the form of the sentence and the selection of the words. Thought and expression, so to speak, breed in and in. There is a certain roughness in the strength of the man, which is ever asserting itself through his cultured vigor; and in the diction, rustic plainness of speech alternates with the nomenclature of metaphysics, rugged sense with lifting raptures, and curt, blunt, homely expression with vivid, whatever may be his form of words, he always loads them with meaning, and with his own meaning. He is not a fluent writer, but his resources of expression ever correspond to his richness of thought. And if his style cannot be said to bend gracefully to the variations of his subject, it still bends and does not break. In felicity and originality of epithet, the usual sign of a writer's genuineness of perception, he is excelled by no theologian of the time. He also has that power of pithy and pointed language which so condenses a statement of a fact or principle that it gives forth the diamond sparkle of epigram. The effect of wit is produced while the purpose is the gravest possible: as when he tells some brother religionists, who base their creeds on the hyperboles of Scripture, that they mistake interjections for propositions,—or as when he reproves those pretenders to grace who count it apparently "a kind of merit that they live loosely enough to make salvation by merit impossible."
The animating spirit of the volume is a desire to bring men's minds into contact with what is vital in religion, and this leads to many a sharp comment both on the dogmatism of sects and the rationalism of critics. Dr. Bushnell always seeks that in religion which not merely illumines the mind, but invigorates the will. It is not the form of a doctrine, but the force in the believer, which engages his attention. In pursuing this method he displays alternately the qualities of an interpreter and of an iconoclast; but his object is the same, whether he evolves unexpected meanings from an accredited dogma, or assails the sense in which it is generally received. And so tenacious is his hold on the life of Christianity, and so vivid his mode of presenting it, that both dogmatist and rationalist must feel, in reading his volume, that he has given its proper prominence to much in Christianity which their methods tempt them to overlook.
The Morrisons, a Story of Domestic Life.ByMrs. Margaret Hosmer. New York: John Bradburn.
The Morrisons, a Story of Domestic Life.ByMrs. Margaret Hosmer. New York: John Bradburn.
Full of improbabilities, and becoming lurid with domestic tragedies at the end, this story has yet a sincerity and earnestness of style that may entitle it to be called respectable, among the mass of American stories. Novels are being sold by the five thousand which have far less ability in characterization or in grouping. The persons remain in one's memory as real individuals, which is saying a good deal; the dialogue, though excessive in quantity, is neither tame nor flippant; and there is an attractive compactness in the plot, which is all comprised within one house in an unknown city. But this plot soon gets beyond the author's grasp, nevertheless; she creates individualities, and can do nothing with them but kill them. The defects, however, are those of inexperience, the merits are the author's own. The value of her next book will probably be in inverse ratio to the success of this: should this fail, she may come to something; should this succeed, there is small hope for her.
Studies for Stories.ByJean Ingelow. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
Studies for Stories.ByJean Ingelow. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
These narratives are probably called "Studies for Stories," as the catalogue of the Boston Public Library is called an "Index to a Catalogue": this being a profession of humility, implying that a proper story, like a regular catalogue, should be a much more elaborate affair. Nevertheless, a story, even if christened a study, must be criticized by the laws of stories and no other.
Tried by this standard, we must admitthat Miss Ingelow's prose, though possessing many merits, has not quite the charm of her verses. With a good deal of skill in depicting character, and with a style that is not unpleasing, though rather formal and old-fashioned, she has no serious drawback except a very prominent and unpleasant moral tendency, which is, indeed, made so conspicuous that one rather resents it, and feels a slight reaction in favor of vice. One is disposed to apply to so oppressively didactic an author the cautious criticism of Talleyrand on his female friend,—"She is insufferable, but that is her only fault." For this demonstrativeness of ethics renders it necessary for her to paint her typical sinners in colors of total blackness, and one seldom finds, even among mature offenders, such unmitigated scoundrels as she exhibits in their teens. They do not move or talk like human beings, but like lay figures into which certain specified sins have been poured. This is an artistic as well as ethical error. As Porson finely said to Rogers, "In drawing a villain, we should always furnish him with something that may seem to justify him to himself"; and Schiller, in his æsthetic writings, lays down the same rule. Yet this censurable habit does not seem to proceed from anything cynical in the author's own nature, but rather from inexperience, and from a personal directness which moves only in straight lines. It seems as if she were so single-minded in her good intents as to assume all bad people equally single-minded in evil; but they are not.
Thus, in "The Cumberers," the fault to be assailed is selfishness, and, in honest zeal to show it in its most formidable light, she builds up her typical "Cumberer" into such a complicated monster, so stupendous in her self-absorption, as to be infinitely less beneficial to the reader than a merely ordinary inconsistent human being would have been. The most selfish younger sister reading this story would become a Pharisee, and thank God, that, whatever her peccadilloes, she was not so bad as this Amelia. "My Great-Aunt's Picture" does the same for the vice of envy; "Dr. Deane's Governess" for discontent, and so on; only that this last story is so oddly mixed up with English class-distinctions and conventionalisms that one hardly knows when the young lady is supposed to be doing right and when doing wrong. The same puzzle occurs in the closing story, "Emily's Ambition," where the censurable point of the aspiration consists in being dissatisfied with the humbler vocation of school-teaching, and in pining after the loftier career of milliner, which in this community would seem like turning social gradations upside-down.
By far the ablest of the five "studies," at least in its opening, is the school-story of "The Stolen Treasure," which, with a high-flown name, and a most melodramatic and commonplace ending, shows yet great power in the delineation and grouping of characters. The young school-girls are as real as those of Charlotte Bronté; and although the typical maidenly desperado is present,—lying and cheating with such hopeless obviousness that it seems as if they must all have had to look very hard the other way to avoid finding her out,—yet there is certainly much promise and power in the narrative. Let us hope that the modesty of the title of this volume really indicates a lofty purpose in its author, and that she will learn to avoid exaggeration of character as she avoids exaggeration of style.
Collection De Vries.German Series. Vols. I.-X. Boston: De Vries, Ibarra, & Co.
Collection De Vries.German Series. Vols. I.-X. Boston: De Vries, Ibarra, & Co.
The present high price of imported books, which is stimulating our publishers to rival their English compeers in typographical triumphs, is also creating an important class of German reprints, to which attention should certainly be called. Until lately the chief business in this line has been done by Philadelphia houses, but we now have editions from Boston publishers which surpass all predecessors in accuracy and beauty. Indeed, the average issues of the German press abroad do not equal these in execution; and though the books issued are thus far small, yet the taste shown in the selection gives them a peculiar value.
First comes Hans Andersen's ever-charming "Picture-Book without Pictures,"—tales told by the Moon, as she looks in at the window of a poor student. There is also a separate edition of this little work, issued by the same house, with English notes for students, by Professor Simonson of Trinity College.
Next comes "Prinzessin Ilse," a graceful little story by Von Ploennies, almost as charming as "Undine,"—with its scene laid in the Hartz Forest, by the legend-haunted Ilsenstein. Then follows a similar wreath of fancies, called "Was sich der Wald erzählt," by Gustav zu Putlitz, in which fir-trees and foxgloves tell theirtales, and there are sermons in stones and all the rest of it. Why is it that no language but the German can possibly construct aMährchen, so that Englishmen and Americans grow dull, and Frenchmen insufferable, whenever they attempt that delicious mingling of the ideal and the real?
Then we have two of the most popular novelettes of Paul Heyse, "Die Einsamen" and "Anfang und Ende,"—two first-class æsthetic essays by Hermann Grimm, on the Venus of Milo and on Raphael and Michel Angelo,—and two comedies by Gustav zu Putlitz. There is also Von Eichendorff's best novel, which in Berlin went through four editions in a year, "Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts," or "Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing,"—and, finally, Tieck's well-known story of "The Elves," and his "Tragedy of Little Red Riding-Hood."
Among these various attractions every reader of German books will certainly find something to enjoy; and these editions should be extensively used by teachers, as the separate volumes can be easily obtained by mail, and the average cost of each is but about half a dollar. We hope yet to see editions equally good of the complete works of the standard German authors, printed in this country and for American readers. Under present circumstances, they can be more cheaply produced than imported.