Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858
by
Various

Part 1 out of 5







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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY,

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

* * * * *

VOL. I.--FEBRUARY, 1858.--NO. IV.

* * * * *


THE GREAT FAILURE.


The _crucial_ fact, in this epoch of commercial catastrophes, is not the
stoppage of Smith, Jones, and Robinson,--nor the suspension of specie
payments by a greater or less number of banks,--but the paralysis of the
trade of the civilized globe. We have had presented to us, within the
last quarter, the remarkable, though by no means novel, spectacle of
a sudden overthrow of business,--in the United States, in England, in
France, and over the greater part of the Continent.

At a period of profound and almost universal peace,--when there had been
no marked deficit in the productiveness of industry, when there had
been no extraordinary dissipation of its results by waste and
extravagance,--when no pestilence or famine or dark rumor of civil
revolution had benumbed its energies,--when the needs for its enterprise
were seemingly as active and stimulating as ever,--all its habitual
functions are arrested, and shocks of disaster run along the ground
from Chicago to Constantinople, toppling down innumerable well-built
structures, like the shock of some gigantic earthquake.

Everybody is of course struck by these phenomena, and everybody has
his own way of accounting for them; it will not, therefore, appear
presumptuous in us to offer a word on the common theme. Let it be
premised, however, that we do not undertake a scientific solution of
the problem, but only a suggestion or two as to what the problem itself
really is. In a difficult or complicated case, a great deal is often
accomplished when the terms of it are clearly stated.

It is not enough, in considering the effects before us, to say that
they are the results of a panic. No doubt there has been a panic, a
contagious consternation, spreading itself over the commercial world,
and strewing the earth with innumerable wrecks of fortune; but that
accounts for nothing, and simply describes a symptom. What is the cause
of the panic itself? These daring Yankees, who are in the habit of
braving the wildest tempests on every sea, these sturdy English, who
march into the mouths of devouring cannon without a throb, these gallant
Frenchmen, who laugh as they scale the Malakoff in the midst of belching
fires, are not the men to run like sheep before an imaginary terror.
When a whole nation of such drop their arms and scatter panic-stricken,
there must be something behind the panic; there must be something
formidable in it, some real and present danger threatening a very
positive evil, and not a mere sympathetic and groundless alarm.

Neither do we conceive it as sufficiently expressing or explaining the
whole facts of the case, to say that the currency has been deranged.
There has been unquestionably a great derangement of the currency; but
this may have been an effect rather than a cause of the more general
disturbance; or, again, it may have been only one cause out of many
causes. In an article in the first number of this magazine, the
financial fluctuations in this country are ascribed to the alternate
inflation and collapse of our factitious paper-money. Adopting the
prevalent theory, that the universal use of specie in the regulation
of the international trade of the world determines for each nation the
amount of its metallic treasure, it was there argued that any redundant
local circulation of paper must raise the level of local prices above
the legitimate specie over exports; which imports can be paid for only
in specie,--the very basis of the inordinate local circulation. Of
course, then, there is a rapid contraction in the issue of notes, and an
inevitable and wide-spread rupture of the usual relations of trade. But
although this view is true in principle, and particularly true in its
application to the United States, where trade floats almost exclusively
upon a paper ocean, it is yet an elementary and local view;--local, as
not comprising the state of facts in England and France; and elementary,
inasmuch as it omits all reference to the possibility of a great
fluctuation of prices being produced by other means than an excess or
deficiency of money.[A] In France, as we know, the currency is almost
entirely metallic, while in England it is metallic so far as the lesser
exchanges of commerce are concerned; there is an obvious impropriety,
therefore, in extending to the financial difficulties of those nations a
theory founded upon a peculiarity in the position of our own.

[Footnote A: A failure of one half the cotton or wheat crop, we suspect,
would play a considerable part among "the prices," whatever the state of
the note circulation.]

If, however, it be alleged that the disturbances there are only a
reaction from the disturbances here, we must say that that point is
not clear, and Brother Jonathan may be exaggerating his commercial
importance. The ties of all the maritime nations are growing more and
more intimate every year, and the trouble of one is getting to be more
and more the trouble of the others in consequence; but as yet any
unsettled balance of American trade, compared with the whole trade of
those nations, is but as the drop in the bucket. John Bull, with a
productive industry of five thousand millions of dollars a year, and
Johnny Crapaud, with an industry only less, are not both to be
thrown flat on their backs by the failure of a few millions of money
remittances from Jonathan. The houses immediately engaged in the
American trade will suffer, and others again immediately dependent upon
them; but the disturbing shock, as it spreads through the widening
circle of the national trade, will very soon be dissipated and lost in
its immensity. That is, it will be lost, if trade there is itself sound,
and not tottering under the same or similar conditions of weakness
which produced the original default in this country; in which event,
we submit, our troubles are to be considered as the mere accidental
occasion of the more general downfall,--while the real cause is to be
sought in the internal state of the foreign nations. Accordingly, let
any one read the late exposures of the methods in which business is
transacted among the Glasgow banks, the London discount-houses, and the
speculators of the French Bourse, and he will see at a glance that we
Americans have no right to assume and ought not to be charged with the
entire responsibility of this stupendous syncope. Our bankruptcy has
aggravated, as our restoration will relieve the general effects; but the
vicious currency on this side the water, whatever domestic sins it
may have to answer for, cannot properly be made the scapegoat for the
offences of the other side of the water. The disasters abroad have
occurred under conditions of currency differing in many respects from
our own, and we believe that if there had been no troubles in America,
there would still have been considerable troubles in England and France,
as, indeed, the financial writers of both these countries long ago
predicted from the local signs.

The same train of remark may be applied to those who impute the existing
embarrassments to our want of a protective tariff; for, granting that to
be an adequate explanation of our own difficulties, it is not therefore
an adequate explanation of those in Europe. The external characteristics
of the phenomena before us are everywhere pretty much the same,
namely,--a prosperous trade gradually slackening, an increasing demand
for money, depreciation and sacrifice of securities, numerous failures,
disappearance of gold, panic, and the complete stagnation of every
branch of labor; and it should seem that the cause or causes to be
assigned for them ought also to be everywhere pretty much the same. At
any rate, no local cause is in itself to be regarded as sufficient,
unless it can be shown that such local cause has a universal operation.
But who will undertake to contend that the absence of a protective
system here is enough to prostrate both Great Britain and France,--the
nations which the same theory supposes to have been chiefly benefited
by such deficiency? The scheme of free trade is often denounced by its
opponents as British free trade; but we respectfully suggest that if its
operations lead to so serious a destruction of British interests as
is now alleged, the phrase is at least a misnomer. No! as the
characteristics of the crisis are common to the United States, England,
and France, so the causes of that crisis are to be sought in something
which is also common to the United States, England, and France.

Now the one thing common to all these nations, and to all commercial
nations, is the universal use of Credit, in the transactions of
business. We conceive, therefore, that the existing condition of things
may be most correctly and comprehensively described as a suspension of
credit, and the consequent pressure for payment of immense masses of
outstanding debt. This, we say, is the central fact, common to all the
nations; and the solution of it, as a problem, is to be sought in some
vice or disturbing element common to the general system, and not in any
local incident or cause.

Credit has gained so enormous an extension within the last two
centuries, that it may almost be pronounced the distinctive feature
of modern times. It existed, undoubtedly, in ancient days,--for its
correlative, Debt, existed; and we know, that, among the Jews, Moses
enacted a sponging law, which was to be carried into effect every fifty
years; that Solon, among the Greeks, began his administration with the
_Seisachtheia_, or relief-laws, designed to rescue the poor borrowers
from their overbearing creditors; and that the usurers were a
numerous class at Rome, where also the Patrician houses were immense
debtor-prisons. But in ancient times, when the chief source of wealth
(aside from conquest and confiscation by the State) was the labor of
slaves, and the principal exchanges were effected either by direct
barter or the coined metals, the system of credit could not have been
very complicated or general. As for the lending of money on interest, it
appears to have been looked at askance by most of the ancients; and the
prejudice against it continued, under the fostering care of the Church,
far down into the Middle Ages. With the emancipation of the towns,
however, with the splendid development of the Italian republics, with
the noble commercial triumphs of the cities of the Hansa, credit was
recovered from the hands of the Jews, and began a career of rapid and
beneficent expansion. It was in an especial manner promoted by the
magnificent prospects unfolded to colonial and mining enterprise in the
discovery of the New World, by the stimulus and the facilities afforded
to industrial skill by the researches of natural science, and by the
emancipation won for all the activities of the human mind through the
free principles of the Reformation. Thus, by degrees, credit came to
intervene in nearly every operation of commerce and of social exchange,
from the small daily dealings of the mechanic at the shop, to the larger
wholesale transactions of merchant with merchant, and to the prodigious
expenditures and debts of imperial governments. Credit by note of hand,
credit by book account, credit by mortgages and hypothecations, credit
by bills of exchange, credit by certificates of stock, credit by
bank-notes and post-notes, credit by exchequer and treasury drafts,
credit, in short, in a thousand ways, enters into trade, filling up all
its channels, turning all its wheels, freighting all its ships, coming
down from the past, pervading the present, hovering over the future,
reaching every nook and affecting every man and woman in the civilized
world.

Such is the extent of credit; but let it be remarked in connection,
that, in all these innumerable and multifarious forms of it, in all the
stupendous interchanges of Mine and Thine, the ultimate reference is to
one sole standard of value, which is the value of the precious metals.
The civilized world has adopted these as the universal solvent of
its vast masses of obligation. It is assumed that some standard is
indispensable; it is asserted to be the imperative duty of governments,
if they would not make their exactions of taxes arbitrary, unequal, and
oppressive,--if they would render the dealings of individuals mutual and
just,--if they would preserve the property and labor of their subjects
from the merciless caprices of the powerful, and keep society from
reverting to a more or less barbarous state,--to supply a fixed and
equable money-measure; and the majority of the governments have selected
gold and silver as the best. As seemingly less changeable in quantity
and value than anything else, as imperishable, as portable, as
divisible, as both convenient and safe, the precious metals challenge
superiority over every other product; and accordingly every contract
and every debt is resolvable into gold and silver. From this fact, the
reader will see at once the prodigious significance of those materials
in the economy of trade, and the prime necessity that they should be
not only uniform in value, but so equally distributed that they may be
easily attainable when needed. Every change in their value is a virtual
change in the value of the vast variety of obligations which are
measured and liquidated by them; and every apprehension of their
scarcity or disappearance, by whatever cause excited, is an apprehension
of embarrassment on the part of all those who have debts to pay or to
receive.

But it happens that this standard is not an accurate standard. It does
not _stand_, while other things alone move, but moves itself; its value
is changeable,--fluctuating from time to time according to the relation
of supply and demand, and from place to place according to the
perturbations of the trade of the world. Moreover, its very preeminence
of function the universality and the durability of its worth--renders it
peculiarly sensitive to accidental influences, or to influences outside
of the usual workings of trade. A great war or revolution occurring
anywhere, the loss by tempests or frosts of an important staple, such
as wheat or cotton, the fall and reaction consequent upon some great
speculative excitement, are all likely to produce enormous drains or
sequestrations of this valuable material. When the revolt of 1848 broke
out in Italy, every particle of specie disappeared as effectually as if
it had been thrown into the Adriatic or the mouth of Vesuvius; when
the corn crop failed in England in 1846, the Bank of England lost ten
millions of dollars in gold in less than nine days, and the country five
times that in about a month; and in our own late experiences, with three
hundred millions of gold among the people, we have seen it so put away,
that no charm or bait could allure it from its hiding-places.

Need we go any farther, then, than these simple truths, to lay our
finger on the primal fact which underlies all financial embarrassments
and panics? The mass of the transactions in commerce rests upon credit;
the solvent of that credit is gold; and gold has not only a sliding
scale of value, but is apt to disappear when most wanted. While business
is moving on in the ordinary way, it is more than ample for every
purpose; but the moment any event arises, such as a rapidly falling
market, inducing hurried sales, or a drain of specie, disturbing the
general confidence, everybody gets apprehensive, everybody calls upon
everybody for payment, and everybody puts everybody off,--till a feeling
of _sauve qui peut_ becomes universal.

If there were no currency anywhere but a metallic currency, this
liability to sudden revulsions would still hang over trade, provided
credit and paper tokens of credit continued to be the media of
exchanges; and the instinctive or experimental perception of this truth,
combined with other motives, is what has led men to their various
attempts to provide a money substitute for gold and silver. Lycurgus, in
Sparta, found it, as he supposed, in stamped leather; but modern wisdom
has preferred paper. The degree of success attained by Lycurgus we do
not know; but of the success of the moderns we do know, by some one
hundred and fifty years of recurring disaster. There are some steeds
that cannot be ridden; they are so fractious and intractable, that, put
whom you will upon their back, he is thrown, and invent what snaffle or
breaking-bit you may, they will not be held to an equable or moderate
pace. And of this sort, judging by the past attempts, is Paper Money.
All the ingenuity and efforts of the most skillful trainers of the Old
World, and of the most cunning jockeys of the New, have been tasked in
vain to devise an effective discipline and curb for this impatient colt.
Paper Money either refuses to be ridden, and runs rampant away, or, if
any one succeed in mounting him for a time, he performs a journey like
that which Don Quixote took on the back of the famous Cavalino, or
Winged Horse. In imagination he ascended to the enchanted regions,--but
in reality he was only dragged through alternate gusts of fire and of
cold winds, to find the horse himself, in the end, a mere depository of
squibs and crackers.

Paper money has been issued, for the most part, on the one or the other
of two conditions, namely: as irredeemable, when it has been made to
rest on the vague obligation of some government to pay it some time or
other in property; or as convertible into gold and silver on demand. But
under both conditions it seems to have been impossible to preserve it
from excess and consequent depreciation. Nothing would appear to be
safer and sounder, on the face of it, than a money-obligation backed by
all the responsibility and property of a government; and yet we do not
recall a single instance in which an irredeemable government-money has
been issued, where it did not sooner or later swamp the government
beyond all hope of its redemption. No virtue of statesmanship is proof
against the temptation of creating money at will. Even where there has
been a nominal convertibility on demand of the bills of government
banks, they have worked badly in practice. In 1637, for instance, the
monarch of Sweden established the Bank of Stockholm; yet in a little
while its issues amounted to forty-eight millions of roubles, and their
depreciation to ninety-six per cent. In 1736, Denmark created the Bank
of Copenhagen; but within, nine years from its foundation it suspended
redemptions altogether, and its notes were depreciated forty-six
per cent. We need not refer to the extraordinary issues of French
_assignats_, or of American continental money,--nor to the deluges
of paper which have fallen upon Russia and Austria. During all these
experiments, the sufferings of the people, according to the different
historians, were absolutely appalling. One of these experiments of
paper money, however, begun under the most promising auspices, and on a
professed basis of convertibility, was yet so stupendous and awful in
its effects, that it has taken its place as a Pharos in History, and is
never to be forgotten. We refer, of course, to the banking prodigalities
of the Regency of France, undertaken in connection with the scheme known
as Law's Mississippi Bubble,--although the Bank and the Bubble were not
essentially connected. We presume that our readers are acquainted with
the incidents, because all the modern historians have described them,
and because the more philosophical impute to them an active agency in
the origination of that moral corruption and lack of political principle
which hastened the advent of the great Revolution. Louis XIV. having
left behind him, as the price of his glory, a debt of about a thousand
millions of dollars, the French ministry, with a view to reduce it,
ordered a re-coinage of the louis-d'or. An edict was promulgated,
calling in the coin at sixteen livres, to be issued again at twenty; but
Law, an acute and enterprising Scotchman, suggested that the end might
be more happily accomplished by a project for a bank, which he carried
in his pocket. He proposed to buy up the old coin at a higher rate than
the mint allowed, and to pay for it in bank-notes. This project was so
successful that the Regent took it into his own hands, and then began
an issue of bills which literally intoxicated the whole of France.
No scenes of stock-jobbing, of gambling, of frenzied speculation, of
reckless excitement and licentiousness ever surpassed the scenes daily
enacted in the Rue Quincampoix; and when the bubble burst, the distress
was universal, heartrending, and frightful. With millions in their
pockets, says a contemporary memoir, many did not know where to get
a dinner; complaints and imprecations resounded on every side; some,
utterly ruined, killed themselves in despair; and mysterious rumors of
popular risings spread throughout Paris the terror of another expected
St. Bartholomew.

In this case the phenomena were the more striking because they were
gathered within a short compass of time, and took place among a people
proverbial for the versatility and extravagance of their impressions.
The French are an excitable race, who carry whatever they do or suffer
to the last extreme of theatrical effect; and for that reason it might
be supposed that the tremendous revulsions we have alluded to were owing
in part to national temperament. But similar effects have been wrought,
by similar causes, among the slower and cooler English, with whom
commercial disturbances have been as numerous and as disastrous as among
the French, only that they have been distributed over wider spaces of
time, and controlled by the more sluggish and conservative habits of the
nation. Some twenty years before Law made his approaches to the French
Regent, another Scotchman, William Patterson, had got the ear of
Macaulay's hero, William, and of his ministers, and laid the foundations
of the great Bank of England. It was chartered in 1694, on advances made
to the government; and gradually, under its auspices, the vast system of
English banking, which gives tone to that of the world, grew up. Let us
see with what results; they may be expressed in a few words: every ten
or fifteen years, a terrific commercial overturn, with intermediate
epochs of speculation, panic, and bankruptcy.

We cannot here go into a history of this bank, nor of the various causes
of its reverses; but we select from a brief chronological table, in its
own words, some of the principal events, which are also the events of
British trade and finance.

1694. The Bank went into operation.

1696. Bank suspended specie payments. Panic and failures.

1707. Threatened invasion of the Pretender. Run upon the Bank,--panic.
Government helped it through, by guarantying its bills at six per cent.

1714. The Pretender proclaimed in Scotland. Run upon the Bank,--panic.

1718-20. Time of the South-Sea Bubble. Reaction,--demand for
money,--Bank of England nearly swept away,--trade suspended,--nation
involved in suffering.

1744. Charles Edward sails for Scotland, and marches upon Derby. Panic.
Run upon the Bank,--is obliged to pay in sixpences, and to block its
doors, in order to gain time.

1772. Extensive failures and a monetary panic. The Bank maintains the
convertibility of its notes for several years, at an annual expense of
L850,000.

1793. War with France,--drain of gold,--Bank
contracts,--panic,--failures throughout the country,--universal
hoarding,--one hundred country banks stop,--notes as low as five pounds
first issued,--general fall of prices.

1796. An Order in Council suspends specie payment by the Bank.

1799. Numerous failures,--chiefly on the Continent. The pressure in
England relieved by an issue of Exchequer bills.

1807-9. Great speculations in flax, hemp, silk, wool, etc.

1810. Recoil of speculation,--extensive failures, and great demand for
money.

1811. Parliament adopts a resolution declaring a one-pound note and a
shilling legal tender for a guinea.

1814-16. Heavy losses and bankruptcies,--failure of two hundred and
forty country banks,--the distress and suffering of the people compared
to that in France after the bursting of the Mississippi Scheme.

1819. Law passed for the resumption of specie payments in 1823,--after a
suspension of twenty-seven years.

1822. Great commercial depression throughout Europe,--agricultural
distress,--famine in Ireland.

1824. Speculations in scrips and shares of foreign loans and new
companies, to a fabulous amount.

1825. Recoil of the speculations,--run upon the banks,--seventy banks
stop,--a drain of gold exhausts the bullion of the Bank.

1826. Depression of trade,--government advances Exchequer bills to the
Bank.

1832. A run for gold,--bullion in the Bank again alarmingly reduced.

1834-7. Jackson vs. Biddle in America produces considerable derangements
in England,--drain of gold,--great alternate contractions and
expansions,--severe mercantile distress.

1844. Renewal of the Bank Charter, limiting its issues,--great
speculations in railroad shares, to the amount of L500,000,000.

1845. Recoil of the speculations,--immense sacrifice of property.

1846. Drain of gold,--large importations of corn,--alarm.

1847. Drain of gold continues,--panic and universal mercantile
depression,--Bank refuses discounts,--forced sales of all kinds of
property,--the Bank Charter suspended.

1857. The experiences of 1847 repeated on a more injurious scale, with
another suspension of the Bank Charter Act.

Now this record does not show a brilliant success in banking; it does
not encourage the hopes of those who place great hopes in a national
institution; for the Bank of England is the highest result of the
financial sagacity and political wisdom of the first commercial nation
of the globe. A recognized ally of the government,--at the very centre
of the world's trade,--enjoying a large freedom of movement within its
sphere,--conducted by the most eminent merchants of the metropolis,
assisted by the advice of the most accomplished political
economists,--sanctioned and amended, from time to time, by the greatest
ministers, from Walpole to Peel,--it has had, from its position, its
power, and the talent at its command, every opportunity for doing
the best things that a bank could do; and yet behold this record of
periodical impotence! Its periodical mischiefs we leave out of the
account.

In the United States, we have suffered from similarly recurring attacks
of financial epilepsy; we have tried every expedient, and we have failed
in each one; we have had three national banks; we have had thousands
of chartered banks, under an infinity of regulations and restrictions
against excesses and frauds; and we have had, as the appropriate
commentary, three tremendous cataclysms, in which the whole continent
was submerged in commercial ruin, besides a dozen lesser epochs of
trying vicissitude. The history of our trade has been that of an
incessant round of inflations and collapses; and the amount of rascality
and fraud perpetrated in connection with the banks, in order to defeat
the restrictions upon them, has no parallel but in the sponging-houses.
A Belgian philosopher, from the study of statistics, has deduced a
certain order in disorder,--or a law of periodicity in the recurrence of
murders, suicides, crimes, and illegitimate births; and it appears that
a similar regularity of irregularity might be easily detected in our
cyclic bank explosions.

With the sad experiences of other nations before us,--with the rocks of
danger standing high out of the water, and covered all over with the
fragments of former wrecks, we have yet persisted in following the old
wretched way. What a humiliating confession! what a comment on the
alleged practical discernment of this practical people! what a text
for radicals, socialists, and all sorts of Utopian dreamers! If the
mischiefs of these monetary aberrations were confined to a mere loss
of wealth,[B] which is proverbial for its winged uncertainty, we might
regard them as a seeming admonition of Providence against putting
too much trust in riches; but they are to be considered as something
infinitely worse than mere reverses of fortune: the disorders they
generate shake the very foundations of morals; and while shattering
the industry, they undermine the economy and frugality and rend the
integrity of mankind. We doubt whether any of the great forms of evil
incident to our imperfect civilization--the slave-trade, debauchery,
pauperism--cause more individual anguish or more public detriment than
these incessant revolutions in the value and tenure of property. Those
afflict limited classes alone, but these every class; they relax and
pervert the whole moral regimen of society; and if, as it is sometimes
alleged, the present age is more profoundly steeped in materialism
than any before,--if its enterprise is not simply more bold, but more
reckless and prodigal,--if the monitions of conscience have lost their
force in practical affairs, and the dictates of religion and honor alike
their sanctity, it is because of the uncertain principle, the gambling
spirit, the feverish eagerness, and the insane extravagance, which beset
the ways of traffic. Living in a world in which days of golden and
delusive dreams are rapidly succeeded by nights of monstrous nightmares
and miseries, society loses its grasp upon the realities of life, and
goes staggering blindly on towards a fatal degeneracy and dissolution.

[Footnote B: Yet this is not to be lightly estimated. Seaman, in his
_Progress of Nations_ says the direct losses by paper money, within the
last century and a half, have equalled $2,000,000,000.]

The question, then, is, whether this melancholy march of things should
be allowed to proceed, or whether we should strive to do better. Our
good sense, our moral sense, our progressive instincts, conspire with
our interests in proclaiming that we ought to do better; but how shall
we do better? "Why," reply the great Democratic doctors,--Mr. Buchanan,
the President, and Mr. Benton, the Nestor of the people,--"suppress the
issue of small bank-notes!" Well, that nostrum is not to be despised;
there would be some advantages in such a measure; it would, to a certain
extent, operate as a check upon the issues of the banks; it would
enlarge the specie basis, by confining the note circulation to the
larger dealers, and so exempt the poorer and laboring classes from the
chances of bank failures and suspensions. But if these gentlemen suppose
that the extrusion of small notes would be in any degree a remedy for
overtrading, or moderate in any degree the disastrous fluctuations of
which everybody complains, they have read the history of commerce only
in the most superficial manner. Speculations, overtrading, panics, money
convulsions, occur in countries where small notes are not tolerated,
just as they do in countries where they are; and they occur in both
without our being able to trace them always to the state of the
currency. The truth is, indeed, that nearly all the great catastrophes
of trade have occurred in times and places when and where there were no
small notes. Every one has heard of the tulip-mania of Holland,--when
the Dutchmen, nobles, farmers, mechanics, sailors, maid-servants, and
even chimney-sweeps and old-clothes-women, dabbled in bulbs,--when
immense fortunes were staked upon the growth of a root, and the whole
nation went mad about it, although there was never a bank nor a paper
florin yet in existence.[C] Every one has heard of the great South-Sea
Bubble in England, in 1719, when the stock of a company chartered simply
to trade in the South Seas rose in the course of a few weeks to the
extraordinary height of _eight hundred and ninety per cent.,_ and filled
all England with an epidemic frenzy of gambling, so that the recoil
ruined thousands upon thousands of persons, who dragged down with them
vast companies and institutions.[D] Yet there was not a banknote in
England, at that time, for less than twenty pounds, or nearly a hundred
dollars.

[Footnote C: Mackay's _History of Popular Delusions._]

[Footnote D: Doubleday's _Financial History of England_, p. 93.]

More recent revulsions are still more to the point. In 1825, in England,
there were enormous speculations in joint-stock enterprises and foreign
loans. Some five hundred and thirty-two new companies were formed, with
a nominal capital of about $2,200,000,000, and Greek, Austrian, and
South American loans were negotiated, to the extent of $275,000,000.
Scarcely one of these companies or of these loans ever paid a dividend;
and the consequence was a general destruction of credit and property,
and a degree of distress which was compared to the terrible sufferings
inflicted by the Mississippi and the South-Sea Bubbles. Yet there
were no bank-notes in circulation in England under five pounds, or
twenty-five dollars. Again, our readers may recall the monstrous
overtrading in railroad shares in the years 1845-6. Projects involving
the investment of L500,000,000 were set on foot in a very little while;
the contagion of purchasing spread to all the provincial towns; the
traditionally staid and sober Englishman got as mad as a March hare
about them; Mr. Murdle reigned triumphant; and, in the end, the nation
had to pay for its delirium with another season of panic, misery, and
ruin. Yet during all this excitement there were not only no small notes
in circulation, but, what is most remarkable, there was no unusual
increase in the issues of the banks, of any kind.

Let us not hope too much, therefore, from the suppression of small
notes, should that scheme be carried into effect; let us not delude
ourselves with the expectation that it will prove a satisfactory remedy,
in any sense, for the periodical disease of the currency; for its
benefits, though probable, must be limited.[E] It is a remedy which
merely plays round the extremities of the disorder, without invading the
seat of it at all.

[Footnote E: It is very curious, that, while our leaders are in favor
of exorcising small notes, many of the French and English Liberals are
calling for an issue of them!]

We have endeavored, in the foregoing remarks, to point out (for our
limits do not allow us to expound) two things: first, that in the
universal modern use of credit as the medium of exchanges,--which credit
refers to a standard in itself fluctuating,--there is a liability to
certain critical derangements, when the machinery will be thrown out of
gear, if we may so speak, or when credit will dissolve in a vain longing
for cash; and, second, that in the paper-money substitutes which men
have devised as a provision against the consequences of this liability,
they have enormously aggravated, instead of counteracting or alleviating
the danger. But if these views be correct, the questions to be
determined by society are also two, namely: whether it be possible to
get rid of these aggravations; and whether credit itself may not be so
organized as to be self-sufficient and self-supporting, whatever the
vagaries of the standard. The suppression of small notes might have a
perceptible effect in lessening the aggravations of paper, but it would
not touch the more fundamental point, as to a stable organization
of credit. Yet it is in this direction, we are persuaded, that
all reformatory efforts must turn. Credit is the new principle of
trade,--the _nexus_ of modern society; but it has scarcely yet been
properly considered. While it has been shamefully _exploited_, as the
French say, it has never been scientifically constituted.

Neither will it be, under the influence of the old methods,--not until
legislators and politicians give over the business of tampering with the
currency,--till they give over the vain hope of "hedging the cuckoo," to
use Locke's figure,--and the principle of FREEDOM be allowed to adjust
this, as it has already adjusted equally important matters. Let the
governments adhere to their task of supplying a pure standard of the
precious metals, and of exacting it in the discharge of what is due
to them, if they please; but let them leave to the good sense, the
sagacity, and the self-interest of Commerce, under the guardianship of
just and equal laws, the task of using and regulating its own tokens
of credit. Our past experiments in the way of providing an artificial
currency are flagrant and undeniable failures; but as it is still
possible to deduce from them, as we believe, ample proof of the
principle, that the security, the economy, and the regularity of the
circulation have improved just in the degree in which the entire money
business has been opened to the healthful influences of unobstructed
trade,--so we infer that a still larger liberty would insure a still
more wholesome action of the system. The currency is rightly named _the
circulation_, and, like the great movements of blood in the human body,
depends upon a free inspiration of the air.

Under a larger freedom, we should expect Credit to be organized on a
basis of MUTUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND GUARANTY, which would afford a stable
and beautiful support to the great systolic and disastolic movements
of trade; that it would reduce all paper emissions to their legitimate
character as mere mercantile tokens, and liberate humanity from the
fearful debaucheries of a factitious money; and that Commerce, which
has been compelled hitherto to sit in the markets of the world, like
a courtesan at the gaming-table, with hot eye and panting chest and
painted cheeks, would be regenerated and improved, until it should
become, what it was meant to be, a beneficent goddess, pouring out to
all the nations from her horns of plenty the grateful harvests of the
earth.




THE BUSTS OF GOETHE AND SCHILLER.


This is GOETHE, with a forehead
Like the fabled front of Jove;
In its massive lines the tokens
More of majesty than love.

This is SCHILLER, in whose features,
With their passionate calm regard,
We behold the true ideal
Of the high heroic Bard,

Whom the inward world of feeling
And the outward world of sense
To the endless labor summon,
And the endless recompense.

These are they, sublime and silent,
From whose living lips have rung
Words to be remembered ever
In the noble German tongue:

Thoughts whose inspiration, kindling
Into loftiest speech or song,
Still through all the listening ages
Pours its torrent swift and strong.

As to-day in sculptured marble
Side by side the Poets stand,
So they stood in life's great struggle,
Side by side and hand to hand,

In the ancient German city,
Dowered with many a deathless name,
Where they dwelt and toiled together,
Sharing each the other's fame:

One till evening's lengthening shadows
Gently stilled his faltering lips,
But the other's sun at noonday
Shrouded in a swift eclipse.

There their names are household treasures,
And the simplest child you meet
Guides you where the house of Goethe
Fronts upon the quiet street;

And, hard by, the modest mansion
Where full many a heart has felt
Memories uncounted clustering
Round the words, "Here Schiller dwelt."

In the churchyard both are buried,
Straight beyond the narrow gate,
In the mausoleum sleeping
With Duke Charles in sculptured state.

For the Monarch loved the Poets,
Called them to him from afar,
Wooed them near his court to linger,
And the planets sought the star.

He, his larger gifts of fortune
With their larger fame to blend,
Living, counted it an honor
That they named him as their friend;

Dreading to be all-forgotten,
Still their greatness to divide,
Dying, prayed to have his Poets
Buried one on either side.

But this suited not the gold-laced
Ushers of the royal tomb,
Where the princely House of Weimar
Slumbered in majestic gloom.

So they ranged the coffins justly,
Each with fitting rank and stamp,
And with shows of court precedence
Mocked the grave's sepulchral damp.

Fitly now the clownish sexton
Narrow courtier-rules rebukes;
First he shows the grave of Goethe,
Schiller's next, and last--the Duke's.

Vainly 'midst these truthful shadows
Pride would daunt her painted wing;
Here the Monarch waits in silence,
And the Poet is the King!




THE LIBRARIAN'S STORY.


Librarians are a singular class of men,--or rather, a class of singular
men. I choose the latter phrase, because I think that the singularities
do not arise from the employment, but characterize the men who are most
likely to gravitate toward it. A great philosopher, whom nobody knows,
once stated the Problem of Humanity thus: "There are two kinds of
people,--round people, and three-cornered people; and two kinds
of holes,--round holes, and three-cornered holes. All mysterious
providences, misfortunes, dispensations, evils, and wrong things
generally, are attributable to this cause, namely, that round people
get into three-cornered holes, and three-cornered people get into
round holes." The librarian is not only a three-cornered person, but a
many-cornered one,--a human polyhedron. And he is in his right place,--a
many-cornered man in a many-cornered hole; especially if the hole be
like that which I am thinking of,--an Historical Library.

The only bibliothecarian peculiarity in point at present is, a gift
to root up, (country boys, speaking of pigs, say _rootle_; it is more
onomatopoeian,) to rootle up the most obscure and useless pieces of
information; not, like Mr. Nadgett, to work them into a chain of
connected evidence for some actual purpose, but merely to know them, to
possess a record of them, either as found in some printed or manuscript
document, or as recorded by the librarian himself; and to keep the
record pickled away in some plate where it will be as little likely as
possible to be found or read by anybody else.

So much concerning Librarians; a word now about Character.

Bad blood is hereditary. I don't mean scrofulous, but wicked blood.
Vicious tendencies pass down in a family, appearing in the most various
manifestations, until at last the evil of the race works its only
possible remedy, by resulting in its extinction. There is, in some
sense, an absolute unity amongst the successive generations of those of
one blood; at least, so much so that our feeling of poetical justice is
rather gratified than otherwise when the crimes of one are avenged, it
may be a century after, upon the person of another of the name. This was
the truth which underlay the vast gloomy fables of the ancient Fates,
and the stories of the inevitable destruction of the great ancient
houses of Greece. It is the same which the Indian feels when he revenges
upon one of the white race the wrongs inflicted by another. Succession
in time does not interfere with the stern promise of Jehovah to visit
the sins of the fathers upon the children.--The reader will see
presently how I have been led into this train of reflection.

My predecessor in office had a strong fancy for Numismatology. I have,
too; nobody would more enjoy a vast collection of coins; but, oddly
enough, I should prefer contemporary ones. He was simple and almost
penurious in personal expenditure; yet, besides a great collection of
books, he had, from his scanty income, got together, in the course of
a long life, a large and very valuable collection of coins and medals,
especially rich in gold. These coins lay--they do not now, for I assure
you I keep them pretty carefully out of sight latterly--luxuriously
imbedded in a neat case, among the great collection of antique objects,
weapons, ornaments, furniture, clothing, etc., which usually accumulate
within the precincts of an Historical Society's Library.

In the one under my charge there is an astonishing number of them; and
naturally, where the long series of the ancient Indian wars, and later
ones with civilized foes, form together so strong a strand in the thread
of our history, there is a very great number proportionally of warlike
weapons.

I like to read old books, both _ex officio_ and _ex natura_. But I need
not enlarge upon this liking. For my part, however, they please me most
when I am wholly alone, in that deep silence which by listening you can
seem to hear, and in a place well furnished,--especially in such a place
as the Historical Library is, with many full bookshelves, and a great
multitude of ancient portraits, grim curiosities, and weapons of war.

It may be unfortunate to be sensitive, but I am. The few things that do
excite me excite me easily, and by virtue of the trooping together and
thronging on of the procession of my own imaginations, thus awakened, I
am prone to reveries of the most various complexion.

In one of the secret repositories where during his latter years
my venerable predecessor used with senile cunning to hide,
indiscriminately, the coins of the Romans and of the Yankees, rags,
bottles of rhubarb and magnesia, books, papers, and buttons, I had
found, one night, an ancient MS. I had been all the evening reading a
High-German Middle-Age volume, illustrated with wood-cuts, cut as with
a hatchet, and being, as per title-page, _Julius der erste Roemische
Kayser, von seinen Kriegen_,--"Julius the first Roman Emperor, of his
Wars."

Buried in the extraordinary adventures of the Kayser, not to be found
in any Roman historian, and full of quaint and ludicrous jumbles of the
ancient and the modern, I was suddenly stopped by finding that the last
folios were missing.

After a moment of ineffectual vexation, I bethought me of several
repositories in which I had seen portions of _debris_,--leaves, covers,
brazen bosses, and other _membra disjecta_; in one of these I might very
probably find the missing pages.

I fumbled through half a dozen; did not find what I sought, but did
find the aforesaid MS. I was interested at once by the close but clear
penmanship, and by the date, February 29, 1651/2; for this day, by
its numeral, would be in leap-year, according to old style, but not
according to new. How did they settle it? I asked; and what was to
determine for lovelorn maidens, whether they might or might not use the
privilege of the year?

I returned to my desk, and sat down to read; and, as I remember, the
heavy bell of the First Church, close by, just then struck eleven, and I
listened with pleasure to the long, mellow cadence of the reverberations
after each deliberate and solid stroke.

Beginning at the beginning, I read until past midnight. The contents,
after all, were not remarkable. It was a collection of copies of papers
relating to various matters of accounts and law, all pertaining to a
certain Beardsley family, of high and ancient fame in the Colony, and
afterwards in the State. Somewhat beyond the middle, however, I lighted
upon a document which attracted my more particular attention. It was a
transcript from the State Records, and, as the date showed, from a very
early volume of them, now missing from the office of the Secretary of
State. It immediately occurred to me that this volume was strongly
suspected to have been purloined by one Isaac Beardsley, an unscrupulous
man, of some influence, who used, for amusement, to potter about in
various antiquarian enterprises of no moment, but who had now been dead
for some fifteen years. I then also recollected that he had an only
child, a graceless gallows-bird of a son, who broke his father's heart,
then wasted his substance in riotous living, and, after being long a
disgrace and nuisance at home, had sunk out of sight amid the lowest
strata of vice and crime in New York.

The document was a complaint to the "Generall Court" against "Goodman
Joab Brice"--the complainant being designated by the honorable prefix of
"Mr."--"for y't hee, the s'd Goodman Brice, had sayd in y'e hearing of"
various persons mentioned, "and to the verry face of y'e s'd Mr. Isaac
Beardslie, y't y'e s'd Mr. Beardslie did grind y'e faces of the poor,
and had served him, the s'd Brice, worse than anie Turk w'd serve his
slaves; and this with fearfull and blasphemous curses, and prayres
that God would return evill upon the heads of this complaynant and his
children after him," etc.

The transcript was long, alleging various similar offences. Its perusal
recalled to my mind several hints and obscure allusion, and one or two
brief histories of the proceedings in this case, which may be found
in ancient books relating to the Colony. These proceedings between
Beardsley and Brice were famous in their day, and were thought little
creditable to the head of the Beardsley family. That he himself partook
of the general opinion is shown by the circumstance that the matter
was diligently hushed up in that day; and those most familiar with the
ancient records of the State averred, that upon the pages of the missing
volume was spread matter amply sufficient to account for its theft and
destruction by the late Col. Isaac Beardsley.

The details of this ancient quarrel have perished out of remembrance.
The chief substance of it was, however, a lawsuit which ended in the
rich man's obtaining possession of the poor man's land. Brice, a yeoman
of vindictive, obstinate, and fearless character, had insulted his
opponent, who was a magistrate, had threatened his life, and otherwise
so bore himself that his oppressor procured him to be whipped at the
cart's tail, and to be held to give large sureties for the peace, with
the alternative penalty of banishment. The bitter vehemence of Brice's
curses was remarkable even among the dry phrases of the complaint;
and tradition relates that his fearful imprecations even caused his
dignified opponent, the magistrate, to turn pale and tremble.

I was sure, too, that among the stores of the Library I had seen some
memorial of Brice as well as of Beardsley; but could not at the time
call up any remembrance more definite than an impression that this
memorial was something which had belonged to a descendant of Joab Brice,
who had been in his youth a soldier in the old French War, and later a
subaltern in the "State line" during the Revolution.

The Library room, in which I was reading, is a large, lofty hall, fitted
with dark bookcases, heavy and huge as if for giants, singularly perfect
in point of inconvenience and inaccessibility, and good only in that
they bore a certain architectural proportion to the great height and
expanse of the dark room. My desk was so placed that my back was toward
the entrance, which was the balustraded opening, in the Library floor,
of a wide staircase; and close at my side and before me were racks with
muskets and spears, cases of curiosities, and other appurtenances of the
room. It being now past the middle of the night, when sleep is heaviest,
the stillness was perfect. My two shaded lamps made a small sphere of
dusky yellow light, which I felt to be surrounded and, as it were,
compressed by the thick darkness, which I could easily fancy to be
something tangible and heavy, settling noiselessly down from beneath the
lofty arches of the roof. The ancient penmanship and curious contents
of the faded pages before me carried my thoughts backward into the old
Colonial times, with their rigid social distinctions, lofty manners,
and ill-concealed superstition; and I mused upon grim old magistrates,
wizened witches, stately dames, rugged Indian-fighters, and all
their strange doings and sayings in the ancient days, until, between
drowsiness and imagining, I fell into a tangled labyrinth of romance,
history, and reverie.

Then all at once I seemed half to awake, and fell into one of those fits
of foolish nervous apprehension to which many even of the coolest and
bravest are liable in deep solitude and darkness,--and if they, how much
more an excitable person like myself! My heart throbbed for no reason,
and, sitting with my head bowed down upon my hands, I fancied the most
impossible dangers,--of men taking aim at me with the antique firearms
out of the far dark corners, or casting heavy weights upon me through
the skylight overhead. How easily, I fancied, could it happen. Did not
the cellar-door open just now?

I half arose, almost frightened. I believe I should have taken an old
rapier and a light and gone to look, but for very shame. And besides,
there were two thick floors between me and the door, and that itself was
set in the heavy wall between the cellar of this wing of the building
and that under its main body; so that if it had been opened, I could not
have heard it. Accordingly I resumed my posture and my painful intense
musing. But now I could have almost sworn that I heard soft steps coming
up the staircase, and whispers floating upon the air of the great
solitary room:--_I did!_

But not soon enough. At the sound of a distinct, heavy footstep behind
me, I sprang up and turned about, but only to find myself pinioned by
one of the arms of a rough-looking, vicious-faced man, who pressed his
other hand tightly over my mouth. A confederate was busy at the case of
coins.

Although only a librarian, I have in my day been something of an
athlete; much more than the person who had rushed into so sudden an
intimacy reckoned upon. And I was pretty well strung up, too, with my
nonsensical fancies.

Being face to face with me, therefore, my assailant had mastered my
right arm, and was clasping my back with his left hand, while his right
was over my month. So driving back my left elbow, I struck him a sharp
and cruel blow in the right side, just above the hip-bone. It is a bad
place to strike; I would not hit there, unless unfairly attacked. The
sudden pain jerked a groan out of him, and surprised him into slackening
his hold; so that I wrenched myself loose, and gave him a straight,
heavy, right-hand hit in the nose, sending him reeling against the old
chest that came over in the Mayflower, which saved him from a fall.

At one and the same moment, both the thieves drew knives and made at me
together, and I, springing backwards, seized from the wooden rack of
weapons the first which my hand reached. It was a musket. Instinctively,
for there was no time to reason, I cocked, presented in a sort of
charge-bayonet attitude, the only one possible, and pulled trigger. The
old weapon went off with a deafening report, sending out a blinding
sheet of flame in the darkness. One thief fell headlong at my very feet;
the other, turning, fled blindly towards the staircase. I ought to have
caught him; but, in the unreflecting anger of the moment, coming up with
him at the stair-head, I struck at him with such good will and good
effect, that he fell down stairs faster than I cared to chase him in
the dark. Scrambling up at the bottom, he hurried out by the way he had
come, and fled; while I returned to my prisoner.

He was quite dead. The charge, a bullet, had passed in just above the
region of the heart, killing him instantly. I searched him, but found
only a knife, a little money, and some tobacco; nothing which could
identify him. He was well-made, middle-aged, and of a thoroughly vile
and repulsive countenance.

The necessary legal formalities were gone through as quickly and quietly
as possible, and the entrances by which the burglars had come in well
secured. They had evidently reconnoitred within and without the building
during the day, and selected a back way into the cellar, through which
they found no trouble in ascending to the Library.

Some days afterwards, I bethought me to examine the old musket. It was a
heavy, old-fashioned "queen's arm," with no unusual marks, as I thought;
but upon a silver plate, let into the hollow of the butt, I found,
coarsely and strongly engraved, "JOAB BRYCE, 1765."

Upon mentioning this circumstance to our Recording Secretary, and
wondering how the gun came to be loaded, he told me that the fault was
his. The weapon, he said, had been deposited in the Library by a son of
the old revolutionary soldier; and he added, that this son had informed
him that the old man, who seems to have inherited something of the
peculiar traits of his ancient race, having had this charge in his gun
at the conclusion of the siege of Yorktown, where he was present with
a New England regiment, had managed afterwards to avoid discharging or
drawing it, and had left it by will to his eldest son to be kept loaded
as it was; with the strange clause, that the charge "might sarve out a
Beardsley, if it couldn't a Britisher."

The depositor, the Secretary further told me, had religiously kept the
old gun, and, with a curious, simple strictness of adherence to the
spirit of his father's directions, had oiled the lock, picked the flint,
wired the touch-hole, and put in fresh priming, when he brought the
weapon to the Library.

"I meant to have unloaded it, of course," pursued the excellent
Secretary, "but it passed out of my mind."

A week or two afterwards, I found in one of those obscure columns of
"minion solid," in which the great New York papers embalm the memory of
their current metropolitan crime, the following notice:--

"We are informed that the burglar lately killed in an attempt to rob the
---- Historical Library has been found to be the notorious cracksman,
'Bill Young'; but that his real name was Isaac Beardsley."

* * * * *


DAYLIGHT AND MOONLIGHT.


In broad daylight, and at noon,
Yesterday I saw the moon
Sailing high, but faint and white,
As a school-boy's paper kite.

In broad daylight, yesterday,
I read a poet's mystic lay;
And it seemed to me at most
As a phantom, or a ghost.

But at length the feverish day
Like a passion died away,
And the night, serene and still,
Fell on village, vale, and hill.

Then the moon, in all her pride,
Like a spirit glorified,
Filled and overflowed the night
With revelations of her light.

And the poet's song again
Passed like music through my brain;
Night interpreted to me
All its grace and mystery.




SOMETHING ABOUT PICTURES.


It is not surprising that pictures, with all their attraction for eye
and mind, are, to many honest and intelligent people, too much of a
riddle to be altogether pleasant. What with the oracular dicta of
self-constituted arbiters of taste, the discrepancies of popular writers
on Art, the jargon of connoisseurship, the vagaries of fashion, the
endless theories about color, style, chiaro 'scuro, composition, design,
imitation, nature, schools, etc., painting has become rather a subject
for the gratification of vanity and the exercise of pedantic dogmatism,
than a genuine source of enjoyment and culture, of sympathy and
satisfaction,--like music, literature, scenery, and other recognized
intellectual recreations. In these latter spheres it is not thought
presumptuous to assert and enjoy individual taste; the least independent
talkers will bravely advocate their favorite composer, describe the
landscape which has charmed or the book which has interested them; but
when a picture is the subject of discussion, few have the moral
courage to say what they think; there is a self-distrust of one's own
impressions and even convictions in regard to what is represented on
canvas, that never intervenes between thought and expression, where
ideas or sentiments are embodied in writing or in melody. Nor is this to
be ascribed wholly to the technicalities of pictorial art, in which so
few are deeply versed, but in a great measure to the incongruous and
irrelevant associations which have gradually overlaid and mystified a
subject in itself as open to the perception of a candid mind and healthy
senses as any other department of human knowledge. Half the want of
appreciation of pictures arises from ignorance, not of the principles
of Art, but of the elements of Nature. Good observers are rare. The
peasant's criticism upon Moreland's "Farm-yard"--that three pigs never
eat together without one foot at least in the trough--was a strict
inference from personal knowledge of the habits of the animal; so the
surgeon found a head of the Baptist untrue, because the skin was not
withdrawn somewhat from the line of decollation. These and similar
instances show that some knowledge of or interest in the thing
represented is essential to the appreciation of pictures. Sailors and
their wives crowded around Wilkie's "Chelsea Pensioners," when first
exhibited; French soldiers enjoy the minutiae of Vernet's battle-pieces;
a lover can judge of his betrothed's miniature; and the most unrefined
sportsman will point out the niceties of breed in one of Landseer's
dogs. To the want of correspondence so frequent between the subject of a
picture and the observer's experience may, therefore, be attributed no
small degree of the prevalent want of sympathy and confident judgment.
"Gang into an Exhibition," says the Ettrick Shepherd, "and only look at
a crowd o' cockneys, some with specs, and some wi' quizzing-glasses, and
faces without ae grain o' meaning in them o' ony kind whatsomever, a'
glowering, perhaps, at a picture o' ane o' Nature's maist fearfu' or
magnificent warks! What, I ask, could a Prince's-Street maister or
missy ken o' sic a wark mair than a red deer wad ken o' the inside o'
George's-Street Assembly-Rooms?"

The incidental associations of pictures link them to history, tradition,
and human character, in a manner which indefinitely enhances their
suggestiveness. Horace Walpole wove a standard collection of anecdotes
from the lives and works of painters. The frescoes of St. Mark's, at
Florence, have a peculiar significance to the spectator familiar with
Fra Angelico's life. One of the most pathetic and beautiful tragedies
in modern literature is that which a Danish poet elaborated from
Correggio's artist career. Lamb's great treasure was a print from Da
Vinci, which he called "My Beauty," and its exhibition to a literal
Scotchman gave rise to one of the richest jokes in Elia's record. The
pen-drawing Andre made of himself the night before his execution,--the
curtain painted in the space where Faliero's portrait should have been,
in the ducal palace at Venice,--and the head of Dante, discovered by Mr.
Kirkup, on the wall of the Bargello, at Florence,--convey impressions
far beyond the mere lines and hues they exhibit; each is a drama, a
destiny. And the hard but true lineaments of Holbein, the aerial grace
of Malbone's "Hours," Albert Durer's mediaeval sanctities, Overbeck's
conservative self-devotion, a market-place by Ostade, Reynolds's
"Strawberry Girl," one of Copley's colonial grandees in a New England
farmer's parlor, a cabinet gem by Greuze, a dog or sheep of Landseer's,
the misty depths of Turner's "Carthage," Domenichino's "Sibyl," Claude's
sunset, or Allston's "Rosalie,"--how much of eras in Art, events
in history, national tastes, and varieties of genius do they each
foreshadow and embalm! Even when no special beauty or skill is manifest,
the character of features transmitted by pictorial art, their antiquity
or historical significance, often lends a mystery and meaning to the
effigies of humanity. In the carved faces of old German church choirs
and altars, the existent facial peculiarities of race are curiously
evident; a Grecian life breathes from many a profile in the Elgin
marbles, and a sacred marvel invests the exhumed giants of Nineveh; in
the cartoons of Raphael, and the old Gobelin tapestries, are hints
of what is essential in the progress and the triumphs of painting.
Considered as a language, how definitely is the style of painters
associated with special forms of character and spheres of life! It is
this variety of human experience typified and illustrated on canvas,
that forms our chief obligations to the artist; through him our
perception of and acquaintance with our race, its individuality and
career, its phases and aspects, is indefinitely enlarged. "The greatest
benefit," says a late writer, "we owe to the artist, whether painter,
poet, or novelist, is the _extension of our sympathies_. Art is the
nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying our experience and
extending our contact with our fellow-creatures beyond the bounds of our
personal lot."

The effect of a picture is increased by isolation and surprise. I never
realized the physiognomical traits of Madame de Maintenon, until
her portrait was encountered in a solitary country-house, of whose
drawing-room it was the sole ornament; and the romance of a miniature by
Malbone first came home to me, when an ancient dame, in the costume of
the last century, with trembling fingers drew one of her husband from
an antique cabinet, and descanted on the manly beauty of the deceased
original, and the graceful genius of the young and lamented artist.
Hazlitt wrote an ingenious essay on "A Portrait by Vandyck," which gives
us an adequate idea of what such a masterpiece is to the eye and mind
of genuine artistic perception and sympathy. Few sensations, or rather
sentiments, are more inextricably made up of pleasure and sadness than
that with which we contemplate (as is not infrequent in some old gallery
of Europe) a portrait which deeply interests or powerfully attracts
us, and whose history is irrevocably lost. A better homily on the
evanescence of human love and fame can scarcely be imagined: a face
alive with moral personality and human charms, such as win and warm
our stranger eyes, yet the name, subject, artist, owner, all lost in
oblivion! To pause before an interesting but "unknown portrait" is to
read an elegy as pathetic as Gray's.

The mechanical processes by which Nature is so closely imitated, and
the increase of which during the last few years is one of the most
remarkable facts in science, may at the first glance appear to have
lessened the marvellous in Art, by making available to all the exact
representation of still-life. But, when duly considered, the effect is
precisely the reverse; for exactly in proportion as we become familiar
with the mechanical production of the similitudes of natural and
artificial objects, do we instinctively demand higher powers of
conception, greater spiritual expression in the artist. The discovery
of Daguerre and its numerous improvements, and the unrivalled precision
attained by Photography, render exact imitation no longer a miracle of
crayon or palette; these must now create as well as reflect, invent and
harmonize as well as copy, bring out the soul of the individual and of
the landscape, or their achievements will be neglected in favor of
the fac-similes obtainable through sunshine and chemistry. The best
photographs of architecture, statuary, ruins, and, in some cases, of
celebrated pictures, are satisfactory to a degree which has banished
mediocre sketches, and even minutely finished but literal pictures.
Specimens of what is called "Nature-printing," which gives an impression
directly from the veined stone, the branching fern, or the sea-moss,
are so true to the details as to answer a scientific purpose; natural
objects are thus lithographed without the intervention of pencil or ink.
And these several discoveries have placed the results of mere imitative
art within reach of the mass; in other words, her prose language, that
which mechanical science can utter, is so universal, that her poetry,
that which must be conceived and expressed through individual genius,
the emanation of the soul, is more distinctly recognized and absolutely
demanded from the artist, in order to vindicate his claim to that title,
than ever before.

Perhaps, indeed, the scope which Painting offers to experimental,
individual, and prescriptive taste, the loyalty it invokes from the
conservative, the "infinite possibilities" it offers to the imaginative,
the intimacy it promotes with Nature and character, are the cause of
so much originality and attractiveness in its votaries. The Lives
of Painters abound in the characteristic, the adventurous, and the
romantic. Open Vasari, Walpole, or Cunningham, at random, and one is
sure to light upon something odd, genial, or exciting. One of the most
popular novelists of our day assured me, that, in his opinion, the
richest unworked vein for his craft, available in these days of
civilized uniformity, is artist-life at Rome, to one thoroughly
cognizant of its humors and aspirations, its interiors and vagrancies,
its self-denials and its resources. I have sometimes imagined what a
story the old white dog who so long frequented the Lepri and the Caffe
Greco, and attached himself so capriciously to the brother artists of
his deceased master, could have told, if blest with memory and language.
He had tasted the freedom and the zest of artist-life in Rome, and
scorned to follow trader or king. He preferred the odor of canvas and
oil to that of conservatories, and had more frolic and dainty morsels at
an _al fresco_ of the painters, in the Campagna, than the kitchen of an
Italian prince could furnish. His very name betokened good cheer, and
was pronounced after the manner of the pert waiters who complacently
enunciate a few words of English. _Bif-steck_ was a privileged dog; and
though occasionally made the subject of a practical joke, taught absurd
tricks, sent on fools' errands, and his white coat painted like a zebra,
these were but casual troubles; he was a sensible dog to despise them,
when he could enjoy such quaint companionship, behold such experiments
in color and drawing, serve as a model himself, and go on delicious
sketching excursions to Albano and Tivoli, besides inhaling
tobacco-smoke and hearing stale jests and love soliloquies _ad
infinitum_. I am of _Bif-steck's_ opinion. There is no such true,
earnest, humorous, and individual life, in these days of high
civilization, as that of your genuine painter; impoverished as it often
is, baffled in its aspirations, unregarded by the material and the
worldly, it often rears and keeps pure bright, genial natures whose
contact brings back the dreams of youth. It is pleasant, too, to
realize, in a great commercial city, that man "does not live by bread
alone," that fun is better than furniture, and a private resource of
nature more prolific of enjoyment than financial investments. It is rare
comfort, here, in the land of bustle and sunshine, to sit in a tempered
light and hear a man sing or improvise stories over his work, to behold
once more vagaries of costume, to let the eye rest upon pictorial
fragments of Italy,--the "old familiar faces" of Roman models, the
endeared outlines of Apennine hills, the _contadina_ bodice and the
brigand hat, until these objects revive to the heart all the romance of
travel.

The technicalities of Art, its refinements of style, its absolute
significance, are, indeed, as dependent for appreciation on a
special endowment as are mathematics; but the general and incidental
associations, in which is involved a world of poetry, may be enjoyed to
the full extent by those whose perception of form, sense of color,
and knowledge of the principles of sculpture, painting, music, and
architecture are notably deficient. It is a law of life and nature, that
truth and beauty, adequately represented, create and diffuse a limitless
element of wisdom and pleasure. Such memorials are talisimanic, and
their influence is felt in all the higher and more permanent spheres of
thought and emotion; they are the gracious landmarks that guide humanity
above the commonplace and the material, along the "line of infinite
desires." Art, in its broad and permanent meaning, is a language,--the
language of sentiment, of character, of national impulse, of individual
genius; and for this reason it bears a lesson, a charm, or a sanction
to all,--even those least versed in its rules and least alive to its
special triumphs. Sir Walter Scott was no amateur, yet, through his
reverence for ancestry and his local attachments, portraiture and
architecture had for him a romantic interest. Sydney Smith was impatient
of galleries when he could talk with men and women, and made a practical
joke of buying pictures; yet Newton and Leslie elicited his best humor.
Talfourd cared little and knew less of the treasures of the Louvre, but
lingered there because it had been his friend Hazlitt's Elysium. Indeed,
there are constantly blended associations in the history of English
authors and artists; Reynolds is identified with Johnson and Goldsmith,
Smibert with Berkeley, Barry with Burke, Constable and Wilkie with Sir
George Beaumont, Haydon with Wordsworth, and Leslie with Irving; the
painters depict their friends of the pen, the latter celebrate in
verse or prose the artist's triumphs, and both intermingle thought and
sympathy; and from this contact of select intelligences of diverse
vocation has resulted the choicest wit and the most genial
companionship. If from special we turn to general associations, from
biography to history, the same prolific affinities are evident, whereby
the artist becomes an interpreter of life, and casts the halo of
romance over the stern features of reality. Hampton Court is the almost
breathing society of Charles the Second's reign; the Bodleian Gallery is
vivid with Britain's past intellectual life; the history of France is
pictured on the walls of Versailles; the luxury of color bred by the
sunsets of the Euganean hills, the waters of the Adriatic, the marbles
of San Marco, and the skies and atmosphere of Venice, are radiant on
the canvas of Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese; Michel Angelo has
embodied the soul of his era and the loftiest spirit of his country;
Salvator typified the half-savage picturesqueness, Neapolitan Claude the
atmospheric enchantments, Carlo Dolce the effeminate grace, Titian the
voluptuous energy, Guido the placid self-possession, and Raphael and
Correggio the religious sentiment of Italy; Watteau put on canvas the
_fete champetre_; the peasant-life of Spain is pictured by Murillo,
her asceticism by the old religious limners; what English rustics were
before steam and railroads Gainsborough and Moreland reveal, Wilkie has
permanently symbolized Scotch shrewdness and domesticity, and Lawrence
framed and fixed the elegant shapes of a London drawing-room; and each
of these is a normal type and suggestive exemplar to the imagination,
a chapter of romance, a sequestration and initial token of the
characteristic and the historical, either of what has become traditional
or what is forever true.

The indirect service good artists have rendered by educating observation
has yet to be acknowledged. The Venetian painters cannot be even
superficially regarded, without developing the sense of color; nor the
Roman, without enlarging our cognizance of expression; nor the English,
without refining our perception of the evanescent effects in scenery.
Raphael has made infantile grace obvious to unmaternal eyes; Turner
opened to many a preoccupied vision the wonders of atmosphere; Constable
guided our perception of the casual phenomena of wind; Landseer, that
of the natural language of the brute creation; Lely, of the coiffure;
Michel Angelo, of physical grandeur; Rolfe, of fish; Gerard Dow, of
water; Cuyp, of meadows; Cooper, of cattle; Stanfield, of the sea; and
so on through every department of pictorial art. Insensibly these quiet
but persuasive teachers have made every phase and object of the material
world interesting, environed them with more or less of romance, by
such revelations of their latent beauty and meaning; so that, thus
instructed, the sunset and the pastoral landscape, the moss-grown arch
and the craggy seaside, the twilight grove and the swaying cornfield, an
old mill, a peasant, light and shade, form and feature, perspective
and anatomy, a smile, a gesture, a cloud, a waterfall, weather-stains,
leaves, deer,--every object in Nature, and every impress of the
elements, speaks more distinctly to the eye and more effectively to the
imagination.

The vicissitudes which sometimes attend a picture or statue furnish no
inadequate materials for narrative interest. Amateur collectors can
unfold a tale in reference to their best acquisitions which outvies
fiction. Beckford's table-talk abounded in such reminiscences. An
American artist, who had resided long in Italy and made a study of old
pictures, caught sight at a shop-window in New Orleans of an "Ecce
Homo" so pathetic in expression as to arrest his steps and engross his
attention. Upon inquiry, he learned that it had been purchased of a
soldier fresh from Mexico, after the late war between that country and
the United States; he bought it for a trifle, carried it to Europe, and
soon authenticated it as an original Guercino, painted for the royal
chapel in Madrid, and sent thence by the government to a church in
Mexico, whence, after centuries, it had found its way, through the
accidents of war, to a pawnbroker's shop in Louisiana. A lady in one
of our eastern cities, wishing to possess, as a memorial, some article
which had belonged to a deceased neighbor, and not having the means,
at the public sale of her effects, to bid for an expensive piece of
furniture, contented herself with buying for a few shillings a familiar
chimney-screen. One day she discovered a glistening surface under the
flowered paper which covered it, and when this was torn away, there
stood revealed a picture of Jacob and Rebecca at the Well, by Paul
Veronese; doubtless thus concealed with a view to its secret removal
during the first French Revolution. The missing Charles First of
Velasquez was lately exhibited in this country, and the account its
possessor gives of the mode of its discovery and the obstacles which
attended the establishment of its legal ownership in England is a
remarkable illustration both of the tact of the connoisseur and the
mysteries of jurisprudence.

There is scarcely, indeed, an artist or a patron of art, of any
eminence, who has not his own "story of a picture." Like all things
of beauty and of fame, the very desire of possession which a painting
excites, and the interest it awakens, give rise to some costly
sacrifice, or incidental circumstance, which associates the prize with
human fortune and sentiment. I remember an anecdote of this kind told me
by a friend in Western New York.

"Waiting," said he, "in the little front-parlor of a house in the town
of C----, to transact some business with its occupant, I was attracted
by a clean sketch in oil that hung above the fireplace. It might have
escaped notice elsewhere, but traces of real skill in Art were too
uncommon in this region to be disregarded by any lover of her fruits.
The readiness to seize upon any casual source of interest, common
with those who "stand and wait" in a place where they are strangers,
doubtless had something to do with the careful attention I bestowed upon
this production. It was a very modest attempt,--a bit of landscape, with
two horses grazing and a man at work in the foreground. Quiet in tone,
and half-concealed by the shaded casement, it was only by degrees, and
to ward off the _ennui_ of a listless half-hour, that I gradually became
absorbed in its examination. There were some masterly lines, clever
arrangement, a true feeling, and a peculiar delicacy of treatment, that
implied the hand of a trained artist.

"My pleasant communion with the unknown was at last interrupted by the
entrance of my tardy man-of-business, but the instant our affair was
transacted I inquired about the sketch. It proved to be the work of
a young Englishman then residing in the neighborhood. I obtained his
address and sought his dwelling. He was scraping an old palette as we
entered, and advanced with it in one hand, while he saluted me with the
air of a gentleman and the simplicity of an honest man. He wore a linen
blouse, his collar was open, his hair long and dark, his complexion
pale, his eye thoughtful, and a settled expression of sweetness and
candor about the mouth made me feel, at a glance, that I had rightly
interpreted the sketch. I mentioned it as an apology for my intrusion,
and added, that a natural fondness for Art, and rare opportunities for
gratifying the taste, induced me to improve occasions like this with
alacrity. He seemed delighted to welcome such a visitor, as his life,
for several weeks, had been quite isolated. The retirement and agreeable
scenery of this inland town harmonized with his feelings; he was
unambitious, happy in his domestic relations, and had managed, from time
to time, to execute a portrait or dispose of a sketch, and thus subsist
in comfort; so that an accidental and temporary visit to this secluded
region had unconsciously lengthened into a whole summer's residence,--
partly to be ascribed to the kindness and easy terms of his good old
host, a thrifty farmer, whose wife, having no children of her own, doted
upon the painter's boy, and grieved at the mention of their departure. I
doubt if my new friend would have had the enterprise to migrate at all,
but for my urgency; but I soon discovered, that, with the improvidence
of his tribe, he had laid nothing by, and that he stood in need of
medical advice, and, after a long conversation, upon my engaging to
secure him an economical home and plenty of work in Utica, he promised
to remove thither in a month; and then becoming more cheerful, he
exhibited, one by one, the trophies of Art in his possession.

"Among them were a Moreland and a Gainsborough, some fine engravings
after Reynolds, prints, cartoons, and crayon heads by famous artists,
and two or three Hogarth proof-impressions; but the treasure which
riveted my gaze was a masterly head of such vigorous outline and
effective tints, that I immediately recognized the strong, free, bold
handling of Gilbert Stuart 'That was given me,' said the gratified
painter, 'by the son of an Edinburgh physician, who, when a young
practitioner, had the good-fortune to call one day upon Stuart when he
was suffering from the effects of a fall. He had been thrown from a
vehicle and had broken his arm, which was so unskilfully set that
it became inflamed and swollen, and the clumsy surgeon talked of
amputation. Imagine the feeling of such an artist at the idea of losing
his right arm! The doctor's visit was not professional, but, seeing the
despondent mood of the invalid artist, be could not refrain the offer
of service. It was accepted, and proved successful, and the patient's
gratitude was unbounded. As the doctor refused pecuniary compensation,
Stuart insisted upon painting a likeness of his benefactor; and as
he worked under no common impulse, the result, as you see, was a
masterpiece.'

"A few weeks after this pleasant interview, I had established my
_protege_ at Utica, and obtained him several commissions. But his
medical attendant pronounced his disease incurable; he lingered a
few months, conversing to the last, during the intervals of pain and
feebleness, with a resignation and intelligence quite endearing. When he
died, I advised his widow to preserve as long as possible the valuable
collection he had left, and with it she repaired to one of her kindred
in affluent circumstances, living fifty miles away. She endeavored to
force upon my acceptance one, at least, of her husband's cherished
pictures; but, knowing her poverty, I declined, only stipulating that if
ever she parted with the Stuart, I should have the privilege of taking
it at her own price.

"A year passed, and I was informed that many of her best things had
become the property of her relative, who, however, knew not how to
appreciate them. I commissioned a friend, who knew him, to purchase at
any cost the one I craved. He discovered that a native artist, who
had been employed to delineate the family, had obtained this work in
payment, and had it carefully enshrined in his studio at Syracuse. This
was Charles Elliot; and the possession of so excellent an original
by one of the best of our artists in this department explains his
subsequent triumphs in portraiture. He made a study of this trophy; it
inspired his pencil; from its contemplation he caught the secret of
color, the breadth and strength of execution, which have since placed
him among the first of American portrait-painters, especially for old
and characteristic heads. Thus, in the centre of Western New York, he
found his Academy, his Royal College, his Gallery and life-school, in
one adequate effort of Stuart's masterly hand; the offering of gratitude
became the model and the impulse whereby a farmer's son on the banks
of the Mohawk rose to the highest skill and eminence. But this was a
gradual process; and meantime it is easy to imagine what a treasure the
picture became in his estimation. It was only by degrees that his merit
gained upon public regard. His first visit to New York was a failure;
and after waiting many weeks in vain for a sitter, he was obliged to
pay his indulgent landlord with a note of hand, and return to the more
economical latitude of Syracuse. There he learned that a wealthy trader,
desirous of the _eclat_ of a connoisseur, was resolved to possess the
cherished portrait. Although poor, he was resolved never to part with
it; but the sagacious son of Mammon was too keen for him; discovering
his indebtedness, he bought the artist's note of the inn-keeper, and
levied an execution upon his effects. But genius is often more than a
match for worldly-wisdom. Elliot soon heard of the plot, and determined
to defeat it. He worked hard and secretly, until he had made so good a
copy that the most practised eye alone could detect the counterfeit; and
then concealing the original at his lodgings, he quietly awaited the
legal attachment. It was duly levied, the sale took place, and the
would-be amateur bought the familiar picture hanging in its accustomed
position, and then boasted in the market-place of the success of his
base scheme. Ere long one of Elliot's friends revealed the clever trick.
The enraged purchaser commenced a suit, and, although the painter
eventually retained the picture, the case was carried to the Supreme
Court, and he was condemned to pay costs. Ten years elapsed. The artist
became an acknowledged master, and prosperity followed his labors. No
one can mistake the rich tints and vigorous expression, the character
and color, which distinguish Elliot's portraits; but few imagine how
much he is indebted to the long possession and study of so invaluable an
original for these traits, moulded by his genius into so many admirable
representations of the loved, the venerable, and the honored, both
living and dead."

Another friend of mine, in exploring the more humble class of
boarding-houses in one of our large commercial towns, in search of an
unfortunate relation, found himself, while expecting the landlady,
absorbed in a portrait on the walls of a dingy back-parlor. The
furniture was of the most common description. A few smutched and faded
annuals, half-covered with dust, lay on the centre-table, beside an
old-fashioned astral lamp, a cracked porcelain vase of wax-flowers, a
yellow satin pincushion embroidered with tarnished gold-lace, and an
album of venerable hue filled with hyperbolic apostrophes to the charms
of some ancient beauty; which, with the dilapidated window-curtains, the
obsolete sideboard, the wooden effigy of a red-faced man with a spyglass
under his arm, and the cracked alabaster clock-case on the mantel, all
bespoke an impoverished establishment, so devoid of taste that the
beautiful and artistic portrait seemed to have found its way there by a
miracle. It represented a young and _spirituelle_ woman, in the
costume, so elegant in material and formal in mode, which Copley has
immortalized; in this instance, however, there was a French look about
the coiffure and robe. The eyes were bright with intelligence chastened
by sentiment, the features at once delicate and spirited, and altogether
the picture was one of those visions of blended youth, grace, sweetness,
and intellect, from which the fancy instinctively infers a tale of love,
genius, or sorrow, according to the mood of the spectator. Subdued by
his melancholy errand and discouraged by a long and vain search, my
friend, whose imagination was quite as excitable as his taste was
correct, soon wove a romance around the picture. It was evidently not
the work of a novice; it was as much out of place in this obscure
and inelegant domicil, as a diamond set in filigree, or a rose among
pigweed. How came it there? who was the original? what her history and
her fate? Her parentage and her nurture must have been refined; she must
have inspired love in the chivalric; perchance this was the last relic
of an illustrious exile, the last memorial of a princely house.

This reverie of conjecture was interrupted by the entrance of the
landlady. My friend had almost forgotten the object of his visit; and
when his anxious inquiries proved vain, he drew the loquacious hostess
into general conversation, in order to elicit the mystery of the
beautiful portrait. She was a robust, gray-haired woman, with whose
constitutional good-nature care had waged a long and partially
successful war. That indescribable air which speaks of better days was
visible at a glance; the remnants of bygone gentility were obvious in
her dress; she had the peculiar manner of one who had enjoyed social
consideration; and her language indicated familiarity with cultivated
society; yet the anxious expression habitual to her countenance, and
the bustling air of her vocation which quickly succeeded conversational
repose, hinted but too plainly straitened circumstances and daily toil.
But what struck her present curious visitor more than these casual
traits were the remains of great beauty in the still lovely contour of
the face, the refined lines of her mouth, and the depth and varied play
of the eyes. He was both sympathetic and ingenious, and ere long gained
the confidence of his auditor. The unfeigned interest and the true
perception he manifested in speaking of the portrait rendered him, in
its owner's estimation, worthy to know the story his own intuition had
so nearly divined. The original was Theodosia, the daughter of Aaron
Burr. His affection for her was the redeeming fact of his career and
character. Both were anomalous in our history. In an era remarkable for
patriotic self-sacrifice, he became infamous for treasonable ambition;
among a phalanx of statesmen illustrious for directness and integrity,
he pursued the tortuous path of perfidious intrigue; in a community
where the sanctities of domestic life were unusually revered, he bore
the stigma of unscrupulous libertinism. With the blood of his gallant
adversary and his country's idol on his hands, the penalties of debt and
treason hanging over him, the fertility of an acute intellect wasted on
vain expedients,--an outlaw, an adventurer, a plausible reasoner
with one sex and fascinating betrayer of the other, poor, bereaved,
contemned,--one holy, loyal sentiment lingered in his perverted
soul,--love for the fair, gifted, gentle being who called him father.
The only disinterested sympathy his letters breathe is for her; and the
feeling and sense of duty they manifest offer a remarkable contrast to
the parallel record of a life of unprincipled schemes, misused talents,
and heartless amours. As if to complete the tragic antithesis of
destiny, the beloved and gifted woman who thus shed an angelic ray upon
that dark career was soon after her father's return from Europe lost in
a storm at sea while on her way to visit him, thus meeting a fate which,
even at the distance of time, is remembered with pity. Her wretched
father bore with him, in all his wanderings and through all his
remorseful exile, her picture--emblem of filial love, of all that is
beautiful in the ministry of woman, and all that is terrible in human
fate. At length he lay dangerously ill in a garret. He had parted with
one after another of his articles of raiment, books, and trinket,
to defray the expenses of a long illness; Theodosia's picture alone
remained; it hung beside him,--the one talisman of irreproachable
memory, of spotless love, and of undying sorrow; he resolved to die with
this sweet relic of the loved and lost in his possession; there his
sacrifices ended. Life seemed slowly ebbing; the underpaid physician
lagged in his visits; the importunate landlord threatened to send this
once dreaded partisan, favored guest, and successful lover to the
almshouse; when, as if the spell of woman's affection were spiritually
magnetic, one of the deserted old man's early victims--no other than
she who spoke--accidentally heard of his extremity, and, forgetting her
wrongs, urged by compassion and her remembrance of the past, sought
her betrayer, provided for his wants, and rescued him from impending
dissolution. In grateful recognition of her Christian kindness, he gave
her all he had to bestow,--Theodosia's portrait.

* * * * *


CRETINS AND IDIOTS:

WHAT HAS BEEN AND WHAT CAN BE DONE FOR THEM.


Among the numerous philanthropic movements which have characterized the
nineteenth century, none, perhaps, are more deserving of praise than
those which have had for their object the improvement of the cretin and
the idiot, classes until recently considered as beyond the reach of
curative treatment.

The traveller, whom inclination or science may have led into the Canton
Valais, or Pays-de-Vaud, in Switzerland, or into the less frequented
regions of Savoy, Aosta, or Styria, impressed as he may be with the
beauty and grandeur of the scenery through which he passes, finds
himself startled also at the frightful deformity and degradation of the
inhabitants. By the roadside, basking in the sun, he beholds beings
whose appearance seems such a caricature upon humanity, that he is at a
loss to know whether to assign them a place among the human or the brute
creation. Unable to walk,--usually deaf and dumb,--with bleared eyes,
and head of disproportionate size,--brown, flabby, and leprous skin,--a
huge goitre descending from the throat and resting upon the breast,--an
abdomen enormously distended,--the lower limbs crooked, weak, and
ill-shaped,--without the power of utterance, or thoughts to utter,--and
generally incapable of seeing, not from defect of the visual organs, but
from want of capacity to fix the eye upon any object,--the cretin seems
beyond the reach of human sympathy or aid. In intelligence he is far
below the horse, the dog, the monkey, or even the swine; the only
instincts of his nature are hunger and lust, and even these are fitful
and irregular.

The number of these unfortunate beings in the mountainous districts of
Europe, and especially of Central and Southern Europe, is very great. In
several of the Swiss cantons they form from four to five per cent of
the population. In Rhenish Prussia, and in the Danubian provinces of
Austria, the number is still greater; in Styria, many villages of four
or five thousand inhabitants not having a single man capable of bearing
arms. In Wuertemberg and Bavaria, in Savoy, Sardinia, the Alpine regions
of France, and the mountainous districts of Spain, the disease is very
prevalent.

The causes of so fearful a degeneration of body and mind are not
satisfactorily ascertained. Extreme poverty, impure air, filthiness of
person and dwelling, unwholesome diet, the use of water impregnated with
some of the magnesian salts, intemperance, (particularly in the use of
the cheap and vile brandy of Switzerland,) and the intermarriage of near
relatives and of those affected with goitre, have all been assigned, and
with apparently good reason; yet there are cases which are attributable
to none of these causes.

The disease is not, however, confined to Europe. It is prevalent also
in China and Chinese Tartary, in Thibet, along the base of the Himalaya
range in India, in Sumatra, in the vicinity of the Andes in South
America, in Mexico; and sporadic cases are found along the line of the
Alleghanies. It is said not to occur in Europe at a higher elevation
than four thousand feet above the sea level.

The derivation of the name is involved in some mystery; most writers
regarding it as a corruption of the French _Chretien_, as indicative
of the incapacity of these unfortunate beings to commit sin. A
more probable theory, however, is that which deduces it from the
Grison-Romance _Cretira_, "creature."

The existence of this disease has long been known; references are made
to it by Pliny, as well as by some of the Roman writers in the second
century of the Christian era; and in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries its prevalence and causes were frequently discussed. Most of
the writers on the subject, however, considered the case of the poor
cretin as utterly hopeless; and the few who deemed a partial improvement
of his health, though not of his intellect, possible, merely suggested
some measures for that purpose, without making any effort to reduce them
to practice. It was reserved for a young physician of Zurich, Doctor
Louis Guggenbuehl, whose practical benevolence was active enough to
overcome any repugnance he might feel to labors in behalf of a class so
degraded and apparently unpromising, to be the pioneer in an effort to
improve their physical, mental, and moral condition.

It is now twenty-one years since this noble philanthropist, then just
entering upon the duties of his profession, was first led by some
incidents occurring during a tour in the Bernese Alps to investigate the
condition of the cretin. For three years he devoted himself to the study
of the disease and the method of treating it. Two years of this period
were spent in the small village of Seruf, in the Canton Glarus, where he
was successful in restoring several to the use of their limbs. It was at
the end of this period, that, with a moral courage and devotion of which
history affords but few examples, Doctor Guggenbuehl resolved to dedicate
his life to the elevation of the cretins from their degraded condition.
Consecrating his own property to the work, he asked assistance from the
Canton Bern in the purchase of land for a hospital, and received a
grant of six hundred francs ($120) for the work. His investigations had
satisfied him that an elevated and dry locality was desirable, and that
it was only the young who could be benefited. He accordingly purchased,
in 1840, a tract of about forty acres of land, comprising a portion of
the hill called the Abendberg, in the Canton Bern, above Interlachen.
The site of his Hospital buildings is about four thousand feet above the
sea, and one or two hundred feet below the summit of the hill; it is
well protected from the cold winds, and the soil is tolerably fertile.

There are few spots, even among the Alps, which can compare with the
Abendberg in beauty and grandeur of scenery. Doctor Guggenbuehl was
led to select it as much for this reason as for its salubrity, in the
belief, which his subsequent experience has fully justified, that the
striking nobleness of the landscape would awaken, even in the torpid
mind of the cretin, that sense of the beautiful in Nature which would
materially aid in his intellectual culture.

On the southern slope of the Abendberg he erected his Hospital
buildings, plain, wooden structures, without ornament, but comfortable,
and well adapted to his purpose. Here he gathered about thirty cretin
children, mostly under ten years of age, and began his work.

To understand fully what was to be accomplished, in order to transform
the young cretin into an active, healthy child, it is necessary that we
should glance at his physical and mental condition, when placed under
treatment.

Cretinism seems to be a combination of two diseases, the one physical,
the other mental. The physical disorder is akin to _Rachitis_, or
rickets, while the mental is substantially idiocy. The osseous
structure, deficient in the phosphate of lime, is unable to sustain the
weight of the body, and the cretin is thus incapacitated for active
motion; the muscles are soft and wasted; the skin dingy, cold, and
unhealthy; the appetite voracious; spasmodic and convulsed action
frequent; and the digestion imperfect and greatly disordered. The mind
seems to exist only in a germinal state; observation, memory, thought,
the power of combination, are all wanting. The external senses are so
torpid, that, for months perhaps, it is in vain to address either eye
or ear; nor is the sense of touch much more active. The cretin is
insensible to pain or annoyance, and seems to have as little sensation
as an oyster.

It was to the work of restoring these diseased and enfeebled bodies
to health, and of developing these germs of intellect, that Doctor
Guggenbuehl addressed himself. For this purpose, pure air, enforced
exercise, the use of cold, warm, and vapor baths, of spirituous lotions
and frictions, a simple yet eminently nutritive diet, regular habits,
and the administration of those medicinal alternatives which would
give tone to the system, activity to the absorbents, and vigor to
the muscles, were the remedial measures adopted. As their strength
increased, they were led to practise the simpler gymnastic
exercises,--running, jumping, climbing, marching, the use of the
dumb-bells, etc.

The body thus partially invigorated, the culture of the mind was next to
be attempted,--a far more difficult task. The first step was, to teach
the child to speak; and as this implied the ability to hear, the ear,
hitherto dead to all sounds, must be impressed. For this purpose, sound
was communicated by speaking trumpets or other instruments, which should
force and fix the attention. The lips and vocal organs were then moulded
to imitate these sounds. The process was long and wearisome, often
occupying months, and even years; but in the end it was successful.
The eye was trained by the attraction of bright and varied colors,
and little by little simple ideas were communicated to the feeble
intellect,--great care being necessary, however, to proceed very slowly,
as the cretin is easily discouraged, and when once overtasked, will make
no further attempts to learn.

It was only by gaining the love of these poor creatures that they could
be led to make any progress; and at an early stage of their training,
Doctor Guggenbuehl deemed it wise to infuse into their dawning minds the
knowledge and the love of a higher Being, to teach them something of the
power and goodness of God. The result, he assures us, has been highly
satisfactory; the mind, too feeble for earthly lore, too weak to grasp
the simplest facts of science, has yet comprehended something of the
love of the All-father, and lifted up to him its imperfect but plaintive
supplication. That the enthusiasm of this good man may have led him
to exaggerate somewhat the extent of the religious attainments of his
pupils is possible; but the experience of every teacher of the cretin or
the idiot has satisfactorily demonstrated that simple religious truths
are acquired by those who seem incapable of understanding the plainest
problems in arithmetic or the most elementary facts of science. God has
so willed it, that the mightiest intellect which strives unavailingly
to comprehend the wisdom and glory of his creation, and the feeblest
intelligence which knows only and instinctively his love, shall alike
find in that love their highest solace and delight.

The phenomena of Nature were next made the objects of instruction;
and to this the well-chosen position of the establishment largely
contributed. Sunshine and storm, the light clouds which mottled the sky
and the black heaps which foreboded the tempest, the lightning and the
rainbow, all in turn served to awaken the slumbering faculties, and to
rouse the torpid intellect to greater activity.

The next step was, to teach the cretin some knowledge of objects around
him, animate and inanimate, and of his relations to them. The exercise
of the senses followed, and gayly colored pictures were presented to the
eye, charming music to the ear, fragrant odors to the smell, and the
varieties of sweet, bitter, sour, and pungent substances to the taste.

When the perceptive faculties were thus trained, books were made to take
the place of object lessons; reading and writing were taught by long and
patient endeavor; the elements of arithmetic, of Scripture history, and
of geography were communicated; and mechanical instruction was imparted
at the same time.

Under this general routine of instruction, Dr. Guggenbuehl has conducted
his establishment for seventeen years, often with limited means, and at
times struggling with debt, from which, more than once, kind English
friends, who have visited the Hospital, or become interested in the man,
during his occasional hasty visits to Great Britain, have relieved him.
His personal appearance is thus described by a friend who was on
terms of intimacy with him; the place is at one of Lord Rosse's
_conversazioni_. "Imagine in the crowd which swept through his
Lordship's suite of rooms a small, foreign-looking man, with features of
a Grecian cast, and long, shoulder-covering, black hair; look at
that man's face; there is a gentleness, an amiability combined with
intelligence, which wins you to him. His dress is peculiar in that crowd
of white cravats and acres of cambric shirt-fronts; black,
well-worn black, is his suit; but his waistcoat is of black
satin,--double-breasted, and buttoned closely up to the throat. It is
Dr. Guggenbuehl, the mildest, the gentlest of men, but one of those calm,
reflecting minds that push on after a worthy object, undismayed by
difficulties, undeterred by ridicule or rebuff."

In his labors in behalf of the unfortunate class to whom he has devoted
himself, Dr. Guggenbuehl has been assisted very greatly by the Protestant
Sisters of Charity, who, like the Catholic sisterhood, dedicate their
lives to offices of charity and love to the sick, the unfortunate, and
the erring.

Dr. Guggenbuehl claims to have effected a perfect cure in about one third
of the cases which have been under his charge, by a treatment of from
three to six years' duration. The attainment of so large a measure of
success has been questioned by some who have visited the Hospital on the
Abendberg; and while a part of these critics were undoubtedly actuated
by a jealous and fault-finding disposition, it is not impossible that
the enthusiasm of the philanthropist may have led him to regard the
acquirements of his pupils as beyond what they really were.

A greater source of fallacy, however, is in the want of fixed standards
for estimating the comparative capacity of children affected with
cretinism, when placed under treatment, and the degree of intellectual
and physical development which constitutes a "perfect cure," in the
opinion of such men as Dr. Guggenbuehl. It is a fact, which all who have
long had charge of either cretins or idiots well understand, that a
great degree of physical deformity and disorder, a strongly marked
rachitic condition of the body, complicated even with loss of hearing
and speech, may exist, while the intellectual powers are but slightly
affected; in other words, that a child may be in external appearance
a cretin, and even one of low grade, yet with a higher degree of
intellectual capacity than most cretins possess. On the other hand, the
bodily weakness and deformity may be slight, while the mental condition
is very low. In the former case, we might reasonably expect, on the
successful treatment of the rachitic symptoms, a rapid intellectual
development; the child would soon be able to pursue its studies in an
ordinary school, and a "perfect cure" would be effected. In the latter
case, though far more promising, apparently, at first, a longer course
of training would be requisite, and the most strenuous efforts on the
part of the teacher would not, in all probability, bring the pupil up to
the level of a respectable mediocrity.

From a great number of cases, narrated in the different Reports of Dr.
Guggenbuehl before us, we select one as the type of a large class, in
which the development of the intellect seems to have been retarded by
the physical disorder, but proceeded regularly on the return of health.

"C. was four years old when she entered, with every symptom of confirmed
rachitic cretinism. Her nervous system was completely out of order, so
that the strongest electric shocks produced scarcely any effect on her
for some months. Aromatic baths, frictions, moderate exercise, a regimen
of meat and milk, were the means of restoring her. Her bones and muscles
grew so strong, that, in the course of a year, she could run and jump.
Her mind appeared to advance in proportion to her body, for she learned
to talk in French as well as in German. The life and spirits of her age
at length burst forth, and she was as gay and happy as she had before
been cross and disagreeable. She was particularly open-hearted, active,
kind, and cleanly. She learned to read, write, and cipher, to sew and
knit, and above all she loved to sing. It is now two years since she
left, and she continues quite well, and goes to school."

We think our readers will perceive that this was not a case of confirmed
intellectual degradation, but only of retarded mental development, the
result of diseased bodily condition. These diseases are distressing to
parents and friends, and he who succeeds in restoring them to health,
intelligence, and the enjoyment of life, accomplishes a great and good
work; but it does not necessarily follow that the cases where the mental
degeneration is as complete as the physical would as readily yield to
treatment; and we are driven to the conviction that the enthusiasm and
zeal of Dr. Guggenbuehl have led him to exaggerate the measure of success
attained in these cases of low grade, and thus to excite hopes which
could never be fulfilled.[A]

[Footnote A: Dr. F. Kern, Superintendent of the Idiot School at
Gohlis, near Leipzig, in an article In the _Allgemeine Zeitschrift fuer
Psychiatrie_, published the present year, (1857,) states that he
examined a boy in the Abendberg Hospital in 1653, of whom Dr. Guggenbuehl
had said, in his work _Upon the Cure of Cretinism_, published a few
months previously, that, "after the painstaking examination of Dr.
Naville, he was held to be capable of entering a training school for
teachers, in order to qualify himself for a teacher": Dr. Kern found
that he knew neither the day of the week or the mouth, nor his birthday,
nor his age.]

There are four other institutions in Germany devoted wholly or in part
to the treatment of cretins; they are located at Bendorf, Mariaberg,
Winterbach, and Hubertsburg. There are also two in Sardinia. All
together they may contain three hundred children. The success of these
institutions has not been equal to that of the Abendberg, although the
teachers seem to have been faithful and patient. The statistics of the
latest census of the countries of Central and Southern Europe render
it certain that those countries contain from seventy-five to eighty
thousand cretins, and as the cretin seldom passes his thirtieth year,
the number under ten years of age must exceed thirty thousand. The
provision for their training is, of course, entirely inadequate to their
needs.

The limited experience of the few institutions already established
warrants, we think, the conclusion, that too high expectations have been
raised in regard to the complete cure of cretinism; that only a
small proportion (cases in which the bodily disease is the principal
difficulty, and the mental deterioration slight) can be perfectly cured;
but that these institutions, regarded as hospitals for the treatment and
training of cretins, are in the highest degree important and beneficial;
and that, under proper care and medication, the physical symptoms of the
disease may be greatly diminished and in many cases entirely eradicated,
and the mental condition so far improved, that the patient shall be
able, under proper direction, to support himself wholly or in part by
his own labor. The hideous and repulsive condition of the body can
be cured; the mental deformity will yield less readily; yet in some
instances this, too, may disappear, and the cretin take his place with
his fellow-men.

Let us now turn our attention to another class, in whom, as a people, we
have a deeper interest; for though cretinism does undoubtedly exist in
the United States, yet the cases are but few; while idiocy is fearfully
prevalent throughout the country.

The possibility of improving the condition of the idiot is one of those
discoveries which will make the nineteenth century remarkable in the
annals of the future for its philanthropic spirit. Idiots have existed
in all ages, and have commonly vegetated through life in utter
wretchedness and degrading filth, concealed from public view.

During the early part of the present century, a few attempts were made
to instruct them; the earliest known being at the American Asylum for
the Deaf and Dumb, in Hartford, in 1818. In 1824, Dr. Belhomme, of
Paris, published an essay on the possibility of improving the condition
of idiots; and in 1828, a few were instructed for a short time at the
Bicetre, one of the large insane hospitals of Paris. In 1831, M. Falret
attempted the same work at the Salpetriere, another of the hospitals for
the insane in the same city. Neither of these efforts was continued long
in existence. In 1833, Dr. Voisin, a distinguished French physiologist
and phrenologist, attempted the organization of a school for idiots in
Paris. In 1839, aided by Dr. Leuret, he revived the School for Idiots in
the Bicetre, subsequently under the charge of M. Vallee. The "Apostle to
the Idiots," however, to use a French expression, was Dr. Edward
Seguin. The friend and pupil of Itard, the celebrated surgeon and
philanthropist, he had in early youth entered into the views of his
master respecting the practicability of their instruction; and when,
during his last illness, Itard, with a philanthropy which triumphed over
the terrible pangs of disease, reminded him of the work which he had
himself longed to undertake, and urged him to devote his abilities to
it, the young physician accepted the sacred trust, and thenceforth
consecrated his life to the work of endeavoring to elevate the helpless
idiot in the scale of humanity.

Previous teachers of the imbecile had not attempted to master the
philosophy of idiocy. They had gone to work at hap-hazard, striking at
random, hoping somehow, they knew not exactly how, to get some ideas
into the mind of the patient, and, by exciting the faculty of imitation,
perhaps improve his condition. They succeeded in making him more
cleanly, and in inducing him to perform certain acts and exercises, as a
well-trained dog, monkey, or parrot might perform them.

Seguin adopted an entirely different course. By a long and careful
investigation he satisfied himself as to what idiocy consisted in,
and then adopted such measures as he deemed most judicious, for the
development of the intellect, and the elevation of the social, mental,
moral, and physical character of the idiot.

In his view idiocy is only a prolonged infancy, in which the infantile
grace and intelligence having passed away, there remains only the feeble
muscular development and mental weakness of that earliest stage of
growth. He proposes to follow Nature in his processes of treatment; to
invigorate the muscles by bathing and exercise, using some compulsion,
if necessary, to effect this; to fix the attention by bright colors,
strong contrasts, military manoeuvres, etc.; to strengthen and develope
the will, the imagination, the senses, and the imitative powers, by a
great variety of exercises; and at each step, to impress the mind with
moral principles. The mere acquisition of a few facts, more or less, and
the capacity to repeat these, parrot-like, he regards as an attainment
of very little consequence; the great object should be to make the child
do his own thinking, and this once attained, he will acquire facts as he
needs them.

Dr. Seguin met with a high degree of success in the instruction of
idiotic and imbecile children, and in 1846 published a treatise on the
treatment of idiocy, which will, for years to come, be the manual of
every teacher of this unfortunate class.

While Seguin was demonstrating the truth of his theory of instruction
at Paris, Herr Saegert, a teacher of deaf mutes at Berlin, having
attempted, unsuccessfully, the instruction of a deaf and dumb idiot, was
led to inquire into the reasons of his failure. Without any knowledge of
Seguin's labors, he arrived substantially at the same conclusions,
and devoted his leisure to medical study, in order to grapple more
successfully with the problem of the instruction of idiots. In 1840 he


 


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