Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17,
by
Various
Part 1 out of 5
LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE OF POPULAR LITERATURE AND SCIENCE
January, 1876.
Volume XVII, No. 97
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE CENTURY: ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.
I.--GENERAL PROGRESS.
UP THE THAMES
THIRD PAPER by EDWARD C. BRUCE.
LINES WRITTEN AT VENICE IN OCTOBER, 1865 by FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE.
SKETCHES OF INDIA.
I.
LADY ARTHUR EILDON'S DYING LETTER by THE AUTHOR OF "BLINDPITS."
THE HOUSE ON THE BEACH by REBECCA HARDING DAVIS.
A DEAD LOVE by F.A. HILLARD.
GENTILHOMME AND GENTLEMAN by G. COLMACHE.
SPECIAL PLEADING by SIDNEY LANIER.
THE ATONEMENT OF LEAM DUNDAS by MRS. E. LYNN LINTON
CHAPTER XVII. WHAT MUST COME.
CHAPTER XVIII. RECKONING WITH LEAM.
CHAPTER XIX. AT STEEL'S CORNER.
CHAPTER XX. IN HER MOTHER'S PLACE.
FAMISHING PORTUGAL.
AT THE OLD PLANTATION.
TWO PAPERS.--I. by ROBERT WILSON.
OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP. '76. by LATIENNE.
THE KREUZESSCHULE.
OBER-AMMERGAU, Bavaria, Oct. 4, 1875.
VARESE.
A STATE GOVERNOR IN THE ROLE OF ENOCH ARDEN
THE PALATINE LIGHT.
NOTES.
LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Books Received.
ILLUSTRATIONS
HAMPTON COURT--WEST FRONT.
HAMPTON COURT--LOOKING UP THE RIVER.
ENTRANCE TO WOLSEY'S HALL.
MIDDLE QUADRANGLE, HAMPTON COURT.
ARCHWAY IN HAMPTON COURT.
WOLSEY.
PORTICO LEADING TO GARDENS.
CENTRE AVENUE.
HAMPTON COURT--GARDEN FRONT.
GATE TO PRIVATE GARDEN.
BUSHY PARK.
GARRICK'S VILLA.
RIVER SCENE, THAMES DITTON.
WOLSEY'S TOWER, ESHER.
CLAREMONT.
CLIVE'S MONUMENT.
PRINCESS CHARLOTTE.
WALTON CHURCH.
KINGSTON CHURCH.
A DWELLING AT MAZAGON.
HINDU TEMPLE IN THE BLACK TOWN, BOMBAY.
JAIN TEMPLES AT SUNAGHUR.
THE VESTIBULE OF THE GRAND SHAITYA OK KARLI.
SCULPTURED FIGURES IN THE VESTIBULE OF THE GREAT SHAITYA OF KARLI.
[Illustration: The CENTURY: ITS FRUITS and its FESTIVAL.]
THE CENTURY: ITS FRUITS AND ITS FESTIVAL.
I.--GENERAL PROGRESS.
This of ours is a conceited century. In intense self-consciousness
it exceeds any of its late predecessors. Its activity in externally
directed thought is accompanied by an almost corresponding use of
introverted reflection. Its inheritance, and the additions it has
made, can make or will make thereto, supply an ever-present theme. It
delights to stand back from its work, like the painter from his easel,
to scan the effect of each new touch--to note what has been done and
to measure what remains. It is a great living and breathing entity,
informed with the concrete life of three generations of mankind
the most alert and the most restless of all that have existed.
This sensation of exceptional endowments is self-nourishing and
ever-growing; and our little nook of time is coming to view all the
paths of the past, broad or narrow, direct or interlacing, straight or
obscure, as so many roads laid out and graded for the one purpose of
leading straight to its gate. It sounds its own praises and celebrates
itself at all opportunities. But with all this there is a wholesome
recognition of responsibility. Nobility obliges, it is prompt to
confess, and to act accordingly. It sees flaws in its regal diamonds,
spots that still sully on its ermine; and is not slow to address
itself to the duty of their removal.
If the century understands itself, it may be said likewise to
understand the others better than they did themselves. It collects
their respective autobiographies and their mutual criticisms. The real
truths, half truths and delusions each has added to the accumulating
common stock it sifts and weighs, mercilessly piling a dustheap beyond
Mr. Boffin's wildest dreams, and rescuing, on the other hand, from
the old wastebasket many discarded scraps of real but till now
unacknowledged value. Busy in gathering stores of its own, it is able
to find time for digesting those bequeathed to it, and for executing
both tasks with a good deal of care. It brings skepticism to its aid
in both, and subjects new and old conclusions to almost equally close
analysis. Each new pebble it picks up upon the shore of the Newtonian
ocean it holds up square and askew to the light, and cross-examines
color, texture and form. Now and then, being but mortal after all, it
chuckles too hastily over a brilliant find, but the blunder is not apt
to wait long for correction. Just now it appears to be overhauling its
accounts in the item of science, taking stock of its discoveries in
that field, balancing bad against good, and determining profit and
loss. Some once-promising entries have to undergo a black mark, while
a few claims that were despaired of come to the fore. This proceeding
is only preparatory, however, to a new departure on a bolder scale.
Scientific progress knows only partial checks. Its movement is that of
a force _en echelon_: one line may get into trouble and recoil, while
the others and the general front continue to advance. Theory does not
profess to be certainty. It is only tentative, and subject necessarily
to frequent errors, for the elimination of which the severely
skeptical spirit of the laws to which it is now held furnishes the
best appliance. Modern science possesses an internal _vis
medicatrix_ which prevents its suffering seriously from excesses
or irregularities. When it ventures to touch the shield of the
Unknowable, it is only with the butt of its lance, and the inevitable
overthrow is accepted with the least modicum of humiliation.
In that science which assumes to marshal all the others, philosophic
and judicial history, ours ought to be the foremost age, if only
because it has the aid of all the others. It does more, however, than
they can be said to have contemplated. It widens the scope of history,
and more precisely formalizes its functions. It makes of the old
chroniclers so many moral statisticians, fully utilizing at the same
time their services as collectors of material facts. The deductions
thus arrived at it aims to test by the methods of the exact sciences.
It invites, in a certain degree, moral philosophy to don the trammels
of mathematics and decorate its shadowy shoulders with the substantial
yoke of the calculus. Such is the programme of a school too young as
yet to have matured its shape, but full of vigor and confidence, and
a very promising outgrowth from the elder and more stately academy
of abstract historical inquiry and generalization. The latter has
redeveloped and freshened up for us the pictures of the ancient
story-tellers, and has furthermore had them, so to speak, engraved and
scattered among the people, until we have come to live in the midst of
their times and enjoy an intimate knowledge of the actual condition
of human polity and intelligence at any given period. Through the long
gallery or the thick portfolio thus presented to our eye we may trace
the common thread of motive under the varying conditions of time and
circumstance. This thread able hands are aiding us to discover.
To what segment of time shall we assign the name of Nineteenth
Century? In A.D. 1800 there was dispute as to which was properly its
first year, the question being settled in favor of 1801. Having thus
struck out the first of the eighteen hundreds, we may take the liberty
of similarly ostracizing the last twenty-four or twenty-five, which
are yet to come, and start the nineteenth century as far back in the
eighteenth. If we look farther behind us, the centuries will be found
often to overlap in this way. Coming events cast their shadows before,
and the morning twilight of the new age is refracted deeply into the
sky of the old one. Of no case can this be more truly said than of
that in point. Not only America, but Christendom, may safely date
the century's commencement about 1775 or 1776. The narrowest isthmus
between the mains of past and present will cover those years.
England and France were then both at the outset of a new political
era, sharply divided from that preceding. The amiable and decorous
Louis XVI., with his lovely consort, had just ousted from Versailles
the Du Barrys and the Maupeons. George III., a sovereign similar in
youth and respectability of character, had a few years before in like
manner improved the tone of the English court, and, after the first
flush of welcome from his subjects, surprised and delighted to have an
Englishman and a gentleman once more upon the throne, was getting over
his early lessons in adversity from the birch of Wilkes and Junius,
and entering upon a second series from that of Washington, all
preparatory to the longest and most brilliant reign in British annals.
Frederick II. was an old man, occupied with assuring to the power he
had created the position it now holds as the first in Europe. Clive,
in the House of Lords, was nursing a still younger bantling, now
an empire twice as populous as Europe was at that period. Under the
equally rugged hand of the young princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, Russia
was having her Mongolian epidermis indued with the varnish Napoleon
so signally failed to scrape off, and was for the first time taking a
place among the great powers of the West. The curtain, in short, was
in the act of rising on the Europe of to-day. Anson had lately brought
the Pacific to light, and Cook was completing his work. The crust of
Spanish monopoly in the trade of four-fifths of the North and South
American coasts had been broken, and England was preparing to replace
it, at some points, by her own. This was, of itself, a New World,
geographical and commercial.
Under Linnaeus and Buffon, another world, wider still, was unfolding
its wonders and subjecting them to a classification which has since
been but little changed, vast as have been the subsequent accessions
of knowledge and attainments in methods of interpretation. Before
them, the study of the organic creation can scarcely be said to have
existed. The inorganic was as little reduced to system, and in its
broadest aspect was not even looked at. Buffon's acute but for the
most part empiric speculations on the structure of the globe were a
step in advance; but the science of geology he did not recognize, and
left to be shaped a very little later by Hutton. Priestley, Cavendish
and Lavoisier were dissecting the impalpable air and making the
gaseous form of substances as familiar and manageable as the solid.
Hence true analytic chemistry. Astronomy, an older science, had
derived new precision from the first observed transit of Venus,
imperfect as were the data obtained and the calculations made.
Contemporaneous with this sudden apparition of new fields of
scientific discovery and enlargement of the old was an intellectual
movement of a more general character than that necessarily involved
in the progress of natural philosophy. The French Encyclopaedists took
hold of social, moral and juridical questions with an unsparing vigor
that could not be gainsaid. The art of criticism was simultaneously
introduced, perfected and applied. Many of the wrongs and follies
that paralyzed thought and industry were dragged to light. Hoary
absurdities that smothered law and gospel under the foul mass of
privilege and superstition, and made them a curse instead of a
blessing, shrank before the storm of ridicule and denunciation. Those
which did not at once succumb were placed in a position of publicity
and exposure in which they could not long survive. The great upheaval
of which the French Revolution was a part was thus originated.
Sounder political ideas were brought within reach of the masses, till
then not recipient, it may almost be said, of any political ideas
at all. Statesmen and governments were similarly enlightened,
Adam Smith's declaration of commercial antedated by two years Mr.
Jefferson's of political independence. The atrocities of the English
criminal code, approaching those of Draco, were put in process of
correction, though, as usual in British reforms, it took half a
century to effect their complete removal; a woman having been, if we
recollect rightly, hanged for a trifling theft in the last years of
George IV. This same slowness of that conservative but persevering
people is calculated to blind us to the operation among them of
deep-seated and active influences. Hardly till 1815 can we discover
in England any fervor, much less efficiency, in the demand for an
extension of popular rights and relaxation of the grasp of privilege.
Irish manufactures continued to be distinctly and rigidly repelled
from competition with English by formal statute; Jewish and Catholic
disqualification was maintained; the game-laws and the rotten-borough
system, which conferred on the nobility and gentry arbitrary power
over the purse and person of the commonalty, were determinedly upheld;
counsel was only nominally allowed to the defendant in criminal cases;
chancery withheld or plundered without resistance or appeal; and there
can be no doubt that life and property were better protected by law
in France at the fall of the First Napoleon than in Great Britain.
Nevertheless, the movement had begun in the latter country forty years
before. A generation had passed since the battle of Culloden, and the
island was at length indissolubly and efficiently one. It shared fully
in the intellectual impulse of the day. Victorious in all its latest
struggles and freed from all sources of internal danger, it might
naturally have been expected to enter at once on a career of
improvement more marked than in the case of its neighbors. It is not
easy to assign reasons for failure in this respect, unless we seek
them in disgust at the subsequent dismemberment and disturbance of
the empire by the fruits of popular agitations in America, Ireland
and France. The reaction due to such causes was probably sufficient
to defeat all liberal efforts. The leading English writers of the
Revolutionary period were strong Tories. Such were Johnson, the Lake
poets after their brief swing to the opposite extreme, and Scott.
All these except the first belong as well to the time of successful
reform, and Johnson may be claimed by the eighteenth century; which
serves to illustrate the blight cast upon British literature by the
prolonged resistance of British statesmen to the prevailing current--a
resistance which took its keynote from the dying recantation and
protest of the Whig Chatham.
The opening of the epoch, then, was as marked in Great Britain as
elsewhere. Only in special fields she afterward fell behind, and lost
something like half the century. In others she kept abreast, or even
in advance.
Criticism was not content to exercise its new powers and apply its
newly-framed laws exclusively in the investigation of any branch of
philosophy. It brought them to bear upon the arts. The discovery of
the buried cities of Campania aided in attracting renewed attention to
the art-stores of Italy, ancient and modern. The principles of taste
and beauty which they illustrated were searchingly analyzed and
carefully explained. Painting and sculpture began slowly to emit their
rays through the eclipse of more than a century. The allied art shared
in this second and secondary renaissance. Haydn was in full fruit,
Mozart ripening, and Music watched, in the cradle of Beethoven, her
budding Shakespeare. A fourth Teuton was studying the symphonies of
the spheres; and within the first five years of the century, while
the "crowning mercy" of Yorktown was maturing, a planet that had never
before dawned on the eye of man took its place with the ancient six,
and "swam into the ken" of Herschel.
We have said enough to vindicate our assumed chronology and justify
our readjustment of the calendar. Europe may well be invited to
celebrate her own political, social and material centennial in 1876,
as truly as that of America. Her intellectual revival indisputably
contributed, through Franklin, Laurens, the Lees and others who were
immediately within its influence, to bring on the American movement;
and her thought, in turn, has since that juncture as certainly
gravitated, in many of its chief manifestations, toward that of the
New World. Hers is the jubilee not less than ours. The humblest cot
on her broad bosom is the brighter for '76. By no means the least
fortunate of the beneficiaries is Great Britain herself. Contrast her
present position as a government and a society with what it was when
Liberty Bell announced the dismemberment of her empire. Her rank among
the nations has notably improved. The population of England, Scotland
and Wales was then estimated below eight and a half millions--a
numerical approximation, by the way, to the three millions of the
colonies not sufficiently considered when we measure the stoutness
of her struggle against them with France and Holland combined. Of the
continental powers, the French numbered perhaps twenty-two millions,
Spain twelve, the Low Countries six, Germany thirty, Prussia seven,
and so on. From the ratio of one to nearly three, as compared with
France, she has, if we include pacified and assimilated Ireland--an
element now of strength instead of weakness--advanced to an equality.
She has equally gained on the others, except Prussia, with its
aggregation of new provinces. She may, furthermore, in the event of an
internecine conflict with a combination, count upon the unwillingness
of America to see her annihilated; not the least just of Tallyrand's
observations expressing his conviction that, though the two great
Anglo-Saxon powers might quarrel with each other, they would not push
such a dispute for the benefit of a third party. But, dismissing
the question of mere brute strength, Britain's sentiment of pride is
conciliated by the spectacle of an advance in the numbers speaking her
tongue from eleven or twelve to eighty millions within the century,
and that in considerable part at the expense of other languages;
millions of foreign immigrants, parents or children, having abandoned
their vernacular in favor of hers.
Let us now essay a light sketch of the stream at whose source we have
glanced. Light and superficial it must be, for to attempt more were
to confront the vast and many-sided theme of modern civilization.
The nineteenth century, the child of history, has the stature of
its progenitor. It would fill more libraries. Conditions, forces,
results,--all have been multiplied. But a few centuries ago the world,
as known and studied, was a corner of the Levant, with its slender and
simple apparatus of life, social, political and industrial. Later,
its boundaries were extended over the remaining shores of the same
landlocked sea. Again a step, but not an expansion, and it looked
helplessly west upon the Atlantic: its ancient domain of the East
almost forgotten. Then that long gaze was gratified, and Cathay
was seen. With that came actual expansion, which continued in both
directions of the globe's circuit until now. At length the world of
thought, of inquiry and of common interest is becoming coincident with
the sphere.
In the direction of international politics progress during the century
has not kept pace with the advance in other walks. We are accustomed
to speak of Europe as forming a republic of nations, but that cannot
be said with much more truth than it could have been in the middle
of the sixteenth century. A sense of the value to the peace of the
continent of a balance of power was then recognized; and the object
was attained in some measure as soon as the career of Charles V.,
which had inculcated the lesson, admitted at his abdication of an
application of it. Treaties were then framed, as they have been
constantly since, for this purpose, and the observation of them was
perhaps as faithful. The passions of nations, like those of men,
furnish reason with its slowest and latest conquests. The great wars
of the French Revolution, and the short and sharp ones which have,
after an indispensable breathing-spell, recently followed it, were as
causeless and as defiant of the compacts designed to prevent them as
those of the Reformation period or of the Thirty Years. They were so
many confessions that an efficient international code is one of the
inventions for which we must look to the future. It is something,
meanwhile, that, with the extinction of feudalism and the concretion
of the detached provinces with which it had macadamized Christendom,
the ceaseless fusillade of little wars, which played like a lambent
flame of mephitic gas over the surface of each country, has come to an
end. The petty sovereignties which made up Germany, France and Italy
have been within a few generations absorbed into three masses--so many
police districts which have proved tolerably effective in keeping
the peace within the large territories they cover. The nations, thus
massing themselves for exterior defence, and maintaining a healthy
system of graduated and distributed powers, original or conferred,
for the support of domestic order and activity, have cultivated
successfully the field of home politics.
In that the change for the better is certainly vast. It is difficult
for Americans, whose acquaintance with European history is usually
derived from compends, to realize what an incubus of complicated
and conflicting privileges, restrictions and forms has, within the
century, been lifted from the energies of the Old World. The sweeping
reforms in French law are but a small part of what has been done. All
the neighbors of France, from Derry to the Dardanelles, have shared
in the blessing. We may be assisted to an idea of it by turning to the
experience of our own country, whose condition in this regard was
so exceptionally good at the beginning of the period in point. The
constitutions of our States have been repeatedly altered, and they are
now very different in their details from the old colonial charters,
liberal and elastic as these for the most part were. Yet American
innovations are but child's play to those of Europe, which has not
reached the position we held at the beginning, and has a great
deal still to do. In France the people are not trained to local
self-government, but they have an excellent police, and the rights
of person and property are well protected. In Italy, which has only
within a few years ceased to be a mere geographical expression,
municipal rights and the independence of the commune are on a
stronger basis, but the police is bad, though far better than when
the Peninsula was divided among half a dozen powers. Both have but
commenced arming themselves with the chief safeguard of Germany,
popular education. The great fact with them all is, that, despite the
drawbacks of external pressure and large standing armies, they are
at liberty to pursue the path of domestic reform as far as they have
light enough to perceive it or purpose enough to require it.
All this is an immense gain. It reflects itself in the improved social
condition of the people--a result, of course, not wholly due to it.
Crime, though the newspapers make us familiar with more of it than
formerly, has notably diminished. The savage classes of the great
capitals, populous as some of the old kingdoms, are controlled like
a menagerie by its keepers. A residuum of the untamable will always
exist, inaccessible to education or "moral suasion," and amenable only
to force. This force seems sufficiently supplied by the baton of the
constable, and we may hope that even in volcanic Paris an eruption
of barricades will henceforth cease, unless simply as a somewhat
flamboyant expression of political sentiment, the gamin throwing up
paving-stones and omnibuses as the independent British voter throws
up his hat at the hustings. But it will not do to expect too much from
any ameliorating cause or chain of causes. Race-characteristics cannot
be annihilated. Man is an animal, and the Parisian turbulent. The
Commune has done its worst probably, and the Internationale, which
threatened at one time to loom up as a modern Vehmgericht, has
subsided. Whatever may hereafter come of such slumbering perils, the
beneficent forces which so largely repress and reduce them are none
the less real.
The marked advance of the masses in physical well-being is a
great--some would say the greatest--item in social profit and loss.
Food is everywhere better in quality and more regular in supply. The
English record of the corn-market for six centuries shows a remarkable
alteration in favor of steadiness in price. The uncertainties of
the seasons are discounted or neutralized by the average struck
by increased variety of products and multiplied sources of supply.
Famines become infrequent. That of 1847 in Ireland, bad as it was,
would have been worse a hundred years earlier. A given population is
more regularly and better fed than one-fifth of its number would at
that time have been. A city of four millions would then have been an
impossibility. Dress and lodging are better, and relatively cheaper.
Hygiene is more understood, imperfect as is its application. Some
diseases due to its disregard have disappeared or been localized. As a
result, men have gained in weight and size and in length of life.
In the character of their recreations--a thing largely governed by
national idiosyncrasy--the masses have advanced. And this we may say
without losing sight of the devastations of intemperance since the
distillation of grain was introduced, about a century and a half ago.
With an enhanced demand upon man's faculties civilization brings an
increased use of stimulants. There are many of these unknown to former
generations. In noting those which attack the health by storm we are
apt to overlook others which proceed more stealthily by sap. Of these
are coffee, tea, chocolate, the rich spices and more substantial
accessions to the modern table, all stimulating and inviting to
excess, but all, as truly, nutritious and apt to take the place of
other aliment, thus adapting the measure of their use, as a rule,
to the demands of the system. The consumption of opium, the one
dissipation of the Chinese till now unadded to the three or four of
the Caucasian, is said to be extending. If so, a _Counter-blast_ to it
from king or commonwealth will be as ineffectual as against its allied
narcotic. Prohibitory laws will be even more unavailing than in
the case of ardent spirits. It will run its course--a short one,
we trust--and be followed or joined by new drugs contributed by
conscienceless trade.
Intemperance--we use the word in its special but most common
signification--is debasing. Compensation, so far as it goes, is found
in the abandonment by those communities among whom it is most rife of
certain gross amusements, such as cock-fighting and the prize-ring.
Bull-and bear-baiting, too, so prominent among the _deliciae_ of
England's maiden queen, have died out. Isolated Spain, fenced off by
the Pyrenees from the breeze of benevolence wafted from the virtuous
and bibulous North, still utilizes the Manchegan or Estremaduran bull
as a means of conferring "happy despatch" on her superannuated horses
and absorbing the surplus belligerence of her "roughs." She seems,
however, disposed to tire of this feast of equine and taurine blood,
and the last relic of the arena will before many years follow its
cognate brutalities. For obvious reasons, bull-fighting can be the
sport, habitually, of but an infinitesimal fraction of the people.
They share with the other races of the Continent the simple pleasures
of dance and song. These enjoyments, as we go north and are driven
within doors from the pure and temperate air by a more unfriendly
climate, form an increasingly intimate alliance with strong drink,
until in the so-called gardens of Germany Calliope and Gambrinus are
inseparable friends. Farther still toward the Pole the voice of the
Muse gradually dies away upon the sodden atmosphere; and she, having
outlasted her successive Southern associates, wine and beer, in turn
gives place to brandy pure and simple--a beverage itself frost-proof
and only suited to frost-proof men.
The long nights and indoor days of the North are favorable to another
and more desirable trait of modern social progress--education. The
potency of such a meteorological cause in making popular a taste for
knowledge the instances of Iceland, Scotland, Scandinavia and North
Germany, to say nothing of New England, leave us no room to doubt.
It is, of course, not the only cause. Ability to read and write is as
universal in China and Japan, as in the countries we have named. In
the case of the Orientals it cannot be ascribed, either, wholly to
that conviction of the importance, as a conservative guarantee,
of elevating the popular mind and taste, which belongs to the
enlightenment of the day. Instinctive recognition of this need
manifests itself in a simultaneous move in the direction of universal
education at government expense throughout the two continents. All
the populations snatch up their satchels and hurry to school. Athens
revives the Academe and reinstates the Olympic games under a literary
avatar. Italy follows suit. Hornbooks open and shut with a suggestive
snap under the pope's nose, and Young Rome calculates its future with
slate and pencil. Gaul, fresh from one year's term in the severest of
all schools, adversity, joins the procession, close by John Bull, who,
_more suo_, pauses first to decide whether the youthful mind shall
take its pap with the spoon of orthodoxy or heterodoxy, or neither.
With him the question between Church schools and national schools
is complicated by one which is common to other nations--whether
attendance shall be compulsory or voluntary only. The tendency is
toward the former, which has long been in practice in some of the
States of the Union; and it seems not unlikely that Christendom will,
before many years, revert, in this important matter, to the Spartan
view that children are the property of the state.
Lavish beyond precedent are the provisions made by governments and
individuals everywhere for the promotion of this great object. Private
endowment of schools and colleges was never before so frequent and
liberal, and nothing so quickly disarms the caution of the average
taxpayer as an appeal for common schools. From California eastward to
Japan it is honored along the whole line, the unanimous "Yea" being
the most eloquent and hopeful word the modern world emits. Of the
slumbering power that till recently lay hidden in coal and water, and
which has so incalculably multiplied the material strength of man,
much has been said; but we fail to appreciate the unevoked fund
of intellect upon which he has additionally to draw. The highest
expectation of results to be witnessed and enjoyed by the approaching
generations involves no postulate of human perfectibility, It finds
ample warrant in what has been accomplished under our eyes. A century
ago only Scotland and two or three of the American colonies could
be said to possess a system of common schools. From those feeble and
smouldering sparks what a flame has spread! The space it has covered
and the fructifying light and warmth it has produced may in some
measure be gauged by the newspaper press and the vast bulk of
popularized information in book-form created since then. This shows
the increase in the numerical ratio of readers to the aggregate of
population.
A difficulty exists in the provision of officers for this great
army of pupils. They cannot always be raised from the ranks. The
thoroughness of a teacher's knowledge is not acquired by the requisite
proportion. Normal schools demand more and more attention. But here we
arrive at a field of detail that would lead us far beyond the limit
of these articles. We pass naturally from the subject of education
to what is, in the narrower but most generally accepted sense of the
word--mental training--- its leading object of pursuit.
If, in the broader and truer meaning of education--that which assumes
the impalpable part of man to be something more than a sponge for
facts--- the slender phalanx of _the men who know_ will ever
remain, proportionally, a small band, it is at least certain that in
acquaintance with natural phenomena and their relations the masses
of the nineteenth century stand out from their forefathers as eminent
philosophers. Our age may be almost said to have created rather than
extended science, so mighty is the bulk of what it has added by the
side of what it found.
In mathematics, the branch which most nearly approaches pure reason,
least advance has been made. There was least room for it. Newton,
when, at quite a mature period of his career, Euclid was first brought
to his attention, laid the book down after a cursory glance with
the remark that it was only fit for children, its propositions being
self-evident. Yet to those truisms Newton added very little. His work
lay in their development and application. Laplace and Biot belong to
our own day; but their task, too, consisted in the employment of old
rules. The most effective tools of the mathematician are framed from
the Arab algebra and Napier's logarithms. The science itself without
application is, like logic, a soul without a body.
The field most fruitful under its application is that of astronomy.
Here, progress has been great. A measuring-rod has been provided for
the depths of space by the ascertainment of the sun's distance within
a three-hundredth part of that body's diameter. The existence of
a cosmic ether, a resisting medium, has been established, and its
retarding influence calculated. Many of the nebulae have been reduced,
and others proved to be in a gaseous condition, like comets. The
latter bodies have been chained down to regular orbits, followed
far beyond those of the old planets, and brought into genealogical
relations with these through the links of bolides and asteroids. The
family circle of planets proper has been immensely increased, a new
visitant to the central fire appearing every few years or even months.
Newton connected the most distant points of the universe by the one
principle of gravitation: the spectroscope unites them by identity
of structure and composition. Improved instruments have detected the
parallax of a number of the fixed stars, and traced motion in both
solar and stellar systems as units. Coming homeward from the distant
heavens, the advances of astronomy diminish as we near what may be
called the old planets and our pale companion the moon. The existence
of a lunar atmosphere and the habitability of Mars are still debated;
with, we believe, the odds against both. But the star-gazers make
their craft useful in a novel way when it reaches the earth. Upon
the precession of the equinoxes they erect a fabric of retrograde
chronology, and set a clock to geologic time. Here Sir Isaac is
brought to grief. His excursions beyond the Deluge are proved blind
guides. He misleads us among the ages as sadly as Archbishop Usher.
The profoundest of laymen and the most learned of clerics are equally
at sea in locating creation. That successive phases of animate
existence were rising and fading with the oscillations of the earth's
inclination to its orbit never occurred to him to whom "all was
light." To probe the stars was to him a simpler process than to
anatomize the globe upon which he stood.
This is the less remarkable when we reflect what a hard fight geology
has had. A generation after Newton's death fossils were referred
for their origin to a certain "plastic power" in Nature--mere idle
whittlings of bone that had never known an outfit of flesh and
blood. Then came a long and motley procession of cosmogonies, every
speculator, from John Wesley down to Pye Smith, insisting warmly
on what seemed good in his own eyes. The last stand was made on the
antiquity of man, and it is only a dozen years since the ablest of
British--perhaps since Cuvier of modern--geologists, Sir Charles
Lyell, yielded to the preponderance of evidence, and confessed that
the era of man's appearance on earth had been made too recent. A few
determined skirmishers still linger behind the line of retreat, like
Ney at the bridge of Kowno, and fire some fruitless shots at the
advancing enemy. This is well. Tribulation and opposition are good
for any creed, scientific or other. It weeds out the weak ones and
strengthens those that are to stand.
The mapping out of extinct faunas and floras and assigning pedigree
to existing species are by no means the whole province of geologists.
Productive industry owes to them a vast saving of time and cost in
searching for useful minerals. They distinguish the same strata in
widely separated districts by means of the characteristic fossils,
and are thus enabled to guide the miner. A geological survey of its
territory is one of the first cares of an enlightened government, and
a geologist is the one scientific official the leading States of the
Union agree in maintaining. The science has moved forward steadily
from its original office of studying buried deposits and classifying
extinct organisms, until the hard and fast line between fossil and
recent has disappeared, the continuous action of ordinary causes in
past and present been established, and an unbroken domain assigned
to the laws of the visible creation. Deep-sea soundings have extended
inquiry, slight enough as yet, to that immensely preponderant portion
of the globe's crust that is covered by water. Penetrating the ocean
is like penetrating the rocks, inasmuch as it introduces us to some of
the same primal forms of life; but it presents them in an active and
sentient state. Neptune's ravished secrets vindicate the Neptunists,
while Pluto is relegated to the abode assigned him by classic myths,
where he and his comrade, Vulcan, keep their furnaces alight and
project their slag and smoke through many a roaring chimney.
Upon (as beneath) the deep, science is erecting for itself new homes.
It tracks the wandering wind, and moves at ease, calmly as a surveyor
with chain and compass, through the eddies of the cyclone. It maps for
the sailor the currents, aerial and subaqueous, of each spot on the
unmarked main, and sends him warning far ahead of the tempest. It
divides with the thermometer the mass of brine into horizontal zones,
and assigns to each its special population.
A hundred years ago, only the surface of the land was studied, and but
a small part of that. All beneath its surface was a mystery, and the
lore of the sea was untouched. Now, knowledge has penetrated to the
central fire, and of the sea it can be no longer said that man's
"control stops with its shores." The pathway of his messenger from
continent to continent he has laid deep in its chalky ooze, while over
it silt silently, flake by flake, as they have been falling since aeons
before his creation, the induviae of the earliest creatures.
And this his messenger at the bottom of the sea is back in its old
home. First hidden in the electron cast up by the waves of the Baltic,
it was left there, uncomprehended and barren, till our century. During
all that time it was calling from the clouds to man's dazzled eye and
deafened ear. It pervaded the air he breathed, the ground he trod and
the frame which constituted him. It bore his will from brain to hand,
and guarded his life, through the (so-called) spontaneously acting
muscles of the thorax, during the half or third of his life during
which his will slumbered. At length its call was hearkened to
intelligently. Franklin made it articulate. Its twin Champollions came
in Volta and Galvani. Its few first translated words have, under a
host of elucidators, swelled to volumes. They link into one language
the dialects of light, motion and heat. The indurated turpentine of
the Pomeranian beach speaks the tongue of the farthest star.
The sciences, like the nations and like bees, as they grow too large
for their hive are perpetually swarming and colonizing. Not that
colonization is followed, as in the case of the similitude, by
independence. Their mutual bonds become closer and closer. But
convenience and (so to speak) comfort require the nominal separation.
So electricity sets up for itself; and chemistry, the metropolis,
swells into other offshoots. So numerous and so great are these that
the old alchemists, unlimited range through the material, immaterial
and supernatural as they claimed for their art, would rub their eyes,
bleared over blowpipe and alembic, at sight of its present riches. The
half-hewn block handed down by these worthies--not by any means
Like that great Dawn which baffled Angelo
Left shapeless, grander for its mystery,
but blurred and scratched all over with childish and unmeaning
scrawls--has been wholly transformed. Chemistry no longer assumes to
read our future, but it does a great deal to brighten our present.
Laboring to supply the wants and enhance the pleasures and security
of daily life, it makes excursions with a sure foot in the opposite
direction of abstruse problems in natural philosophy. It analyzes all
substances, determines their relations, and tries to guide the artisan
in utilizing its acquisitions for the general good. To enumerate
these, or to give the merest sketch of chemical progress within the
century, would fill many pages. It has enriched and invigorated all
the arts by supplying new material and new processes. Illuminating
gas, photography, the anaesthetics, the artificial fertilizers,
quinine, etc. are a few of its more familiarly known contributions.
It has aided medical jurisprudence, and so far checked crime. Besides
enlarging the pharmacopoeia, it has promoted sanitary reform in many
ways, notably by ascertaining the media of contagion in disease and
providing for their detection and removal. Its triumphs are so closely
interwoven with the appliances of common life that we are prone to
lose sight of them. From the aniline dye that beautifies a picture or
a dress, to the explosive that lifts a reef or mines the Alps for a
highway, the gradations are infinite and multiform.
Heavy as is the draft of the material sciences upon the thought
and energy of the century, it has not monopolized them. No trifling
resources have been left for mere abstract investigation. If
meta-physics stands, despite the labors of Stewart, Hamilton, Hegel,
Comte, very much where it did when Socrates ran amuck among the
casuistical Quixotes of his day, and left the philosophic tilters of
Greece, the knights-errant in search of the supreme good, in the same
plight with the chivalry of Spain after Cervantes, the science of
mind, and particularly mental pathology, has made some steps forward
on crutches furnished by the medical profession. The treatment of
insanity is on a more rational and efficient footing. The statistician
collects, and invites the moral philosopher to collate, the records of
crime. The naturalist studies the life of the lower animals, and gives
the _coup de grace_ to the uncompromising distinction drawn by human
conceit between instinct and intelligence.
In the walks of comparative philology much has been accomplished.
Sanskrit has been exhumed. Aryan and Semitic roots are traced back
to an almost synchronous antiquity. The decipherment of the Egyptian
inscriptions seems to bring us into communication with a still more
remote form of language. More recent periods derive new light from the
Etruscan tombs and the Assyrian bricks. Linguists deem themselves in
sight of something better than the "bow-wow" theory, and are no longer
content to let the calf, the lamb and the child bleat in one and the
same vocabulary of labials, and with no other rudiments than "ma" and
"pa" "speed the soft intercourse from pole to pole." As yet, that part
of mankind which knows not its right hand from its left is the only
one possessed of a worldwide lingo. The flux that is to weld all
tongues into one, and produce a common language like a common unit of
weight, measure and coinage, remains to be discovered. A Chinese pig,
transplanted to an Anglo-Saxon stye, has no difficulty in instituting
immediate converse with his new friend, but the gentleman who travels
in Europe needs to carry an assortment of dialects for use on opposite
sides of the same rivulet or the same hill. However, as the French
franc has been adopted by four other nations, and the French litre and
metre by a greater number, one and the same mail and postage made to
serve Europe and America, and passports been abolished, we may venture
to picture to ourselves the time when the German shall consent to
clear his throat, the Frenchman his nose, the Spaniard his tonsils and
the Englishman the tip of his tongue--when all shall become as little
children and be mutually comprehensible. Commerce at present is
doing more than the philosophers to that end. While the countrymen
of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Max Mueller persist in burying their
laboriously heaped treasures under a load of black-letter type and
words and sentences the most fearfully and wonderfully made, the
skipper scatters English words with English calico and American clocks
among all the isles. A picturesque fringe of pigeon English decorates
the coasts of Africa, Asia and Oceanica. It might be deeper, and
doubtless will be, for our mother-tongue will very certainly be
supreme in the world of trade for at least a couple of centuries to
come. If we were only half as sure of its being adopted by France as
by Fiji!
If almighty steam and sail must remain unequal to this task, wondrous
indeed are their other potencies. They have contracted the globe like
a dried apple, only in a far greater degree. In 1776 three years
was the usual allotment of the grand tour. Beginning at London, it
extended to Naples and occasionally Madrid. It often left out Vienna,
and more frequently Berlin. In the same period you may now put a
girdle round the earth ninefold thick. You may, given the means
and the faculties, set up business establishments at San Francisco,
Yokohama, Shanghai, Canton, Calcutta, Bombay, Alexandria, Rome, Paris,
London and New York, and visit each once a quarter. The goods to
supply them may travel, however bulky, on the same ship and nearly the
same train in point of speed with yourself. Nowhere farther than a few
weeks from home in person, nowhere are you more remote verbally than a
few hours. The Red Sea opens to your footsteps, as it did to those of
Moses; and the lightning that bears your words cleaves the pathway of
Alexander and the New World for which he wept.
It is really hard to mention these innovations on the old ways, so
vast and so sudden, without degenerating into rhetoric or bombast. The
spread-eagle style comes naturally to an epoch that soars on quick
new wing above all the others. We have it in all shapes--- equally
startling and true in figures of arithmetic or figures of speech. Any
school-boy can tell you, if you give him the dimensions of the Great
Pyramid and state thirty-three thousand pounds one foot high in a
minute as the conventional horse-power, how many hours it would take a
pony-team picked out of the hundreds of thousands of steam-engines on
the two continents to raise it. He will reduce to the same prosaic but
eloquent form a number of like problems illustrative of the command
obtained over some of the forces of Nature, and their employment
in multiplying and economizing manual strength and dexterity and
stimulating ingenuity. When we come to contemplate the whole edifice
of modern production, it seems to simplify itself into one new motor
applied to the old mechanical powers, which may perhaps in turn be
condensed into one--the inclined plane. This helps to the impression
that the structure is not only sure to be enlarged, as we see it
enlarging day by day, but to grow into novel and more striking
aspects. Additional motors will probably be discovered, or some we
already possess in embryo may be developed into greater availability.
These, operating on an ever-growing stock of material, will convince
our era that it is but introductory to a more magnificent and not far
distant future.
Magnificent the century is justified in styling its work. What matter
could do for mind and steam for the hand it has done. But is there
any gain in the eye and intellect which perceive, and the hand which
fixes, beauty and truth? Is there any addition to the simple lines, as
few and rudimental as the mechanical powers, which embody proportion
and harmony, or in the fibres of emotion, as scant but as infinite in
their range of tone as the strings of the primeval harp, which ask and
respond to no motor but the touch of genius? Have we surpassed the old
song, the old story, the old picture, the old temple?
Such questions must be answered in the negative. The age, recognizing
perforce the inherent capabilities of the race as a constant quantity,
contents itself so far with endeavoring to adapt and reproduce, or at
most imitate, such manifestations of the artistic sense as it finds
excellent in the past. The day for originality may come ere long,
and nothing can be lost in striving for it, but a capacity for the
beautiful at first hand cannot come without an appreciation of it at
second hand. With the number of cultivated minds so vastly increased
as compared with any previous period, the greater variety of objects
and conditions presented to them, the multiplicity of races to
which they belong, and consequently of distinct race-characteristics
imbedded in them and brought into play, and the impulse communicated
by greater general activity, the expectation is allowably sanguine
that the nineteenth century will plant an art as well as an industry
of its own. Wealth, culture and peace seldom fail to win this final
crown. They are busily gathering together the jewels of the past,
endless in diversity of charm. Museum, gallery, library swell as never
before. The earth is not mined for iron and coal alone. Statue, vase
and gem are disentombed. Pictures are rescued from the grime of years
and neglect. All are copied by sun or hand, and sent in more or less
elaboration into hall or cottage. In literature our possessions
could scarce be more complete, and they are even more universally
distributed. The nations compete with each other in adding to this
equipment for a new revival, which seems, on the surface, to have more
in its favor than had that of the cinque-cento.
UP THE THAMES
THIRD PAPER.
[Illustration: HAMPTON COURT--WEST FRONT.]
Today our movement shall be up the Thames by rail, starting on the
south side of the river to reach an objective point on the north bank.
So crooked is the stream, and so much more crooked are the different
systems of railways, with their competing branches crossing each other
and making the most audacious inroads on each other's territory, that
the direction in which we are traveling at any given moment, or the
station from which we start, is a very poor index to the quarter for
which we are bound. The railways, to say nothing of the river, that
wanders at its own sweet will, as water commonly does in a country
offering it no obstructions, are quite defiant of their geographical
names. The Great Western runs north, west and south-east; the
South-western strikes south, south-east and north-west; while
the Chatham and Dover distributes itself over most of the region
south-east of London, closing its circuit by a line along the coast
of the Channel that completes a triangle. We can go almost anywhere
by any road. It is necessary, however, in this as in other mundane
proceedings, to make a selection. We must have a will before we find
a way. Let our way, then, be to Waterloo Station on the Southwestern
rail.
[Illustration: HAMPTON COURT--LOOKING UP THE RIVER.]
Half an hour's run lands us at Hampton Court, with a number of
fellow-passengers to keep us company if we want them, and in fact
whether we want them or not. Those who travel into or out of a city of
four millions must lay their account with being ever in a crowd.
Our consolation is, that in the city the crowd is so constant and so
wholly strange to us as to defeat its effect, and create the feeling
of solitude we have so often been told of; while outside of it, at the
parks and show-places, the amplitude of space, density and variety of
plantations, and multiplicity of carefully designed turns, nooks and
retreats, are such that retirement of a more genuine character is
within easy reach. The crowd, we know, is about us, but it does
not elbow us, and we need hardly see it. The current of humanity,
springing from one or a dozen trains or steamboats, dribbles away,
soon after leaving its parent source, into a multitude of little
divergent channels, like irrigating water, and covers the surface
without interference.
It would be a curious statistical inquiry how many visitors Hampton
Court has lost since the Cartoons were removed in 1865 to the
South Kensington Museum. Actually, of course, the whole number has
increased, is increasing, and is not going to be diminished. The
query is, How many more there would be now were those eminent bits of
pasteboard--slit up for the guidance of piece-work at a Flemish loom,
tossed after the weavers had done with them into a lumber-room, then
after a century's neglect disinterred by the taste of Rubens and
Charles I., brought to England, their poor frayed and faded fragments
glued together and made the chief decoration of a royal palace--still
in the place assigned them by the munificence and judgment of Charles?
For our part--and we may speak for most Americans--when we heard,
thought or read of Hampton Court, we thought of the Cartoons.
Engravings of them were plenty--much more so than of the palace
itself. Numbers of domestic connoisseurs know Raphael principally as
the painter of the Cartoons.
A few who have not heard of them have heard of Wolsey. The pursy
old cardinal furnishes the surviving one of the two main props of
Hampton's glory. An oddly-assorted pair, indeed--the delicate Italian
painter, without a thought outside of his art, and the bluff English
placeman, avid of nothing but honors and wealth. And the association
of either of them with the spot is comparatively so slight. Wolsey
held the ground for a few years, only by lease, built a mere fraction
of the present edifice, and disappeared from the scene within half a
generation. What it boasts, or boasted, of the other belongs to
the least noted of his works--half a dozen sketches meant for
stuff-patterns, and never intended to be preserved as pictures.
Pictures they are, nevertheless, and all the more valuable and
surprising as manifesting such easy command of hand and faculty, such
a matter-of-course employment of the utmost resources of art on
a production designed to have no continuing existence except as
finished, rendered and given to the world by a "base mechanical," with
no sense of art at all.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO WOLSEY'S HALL.]
Royalty, and the great generally, availed themselves of their
opportunities to select the finest locations and stake out the best
claims along these shores. Of elevation there is small choice, a level
surface prevailing. What there is has been generally availed of for
park or palace, with manifest advantage to the landscape. The curves
of the river are similarly utilized. Kew and Hampton occupy peninsulas
so formed. The latter, with Bushy Park, an appendage, fills a
water-washed triangle of some two miles on each side. The southern
angle is opposite Thames Ditton, a noted resort for brethren of the
angle, with an ancient inn as popular, though not as stylish and
costly, as the Star and Garter at Richmond. The town and palace of
Hampton lie about halfway up the western side of the demesne. The
view up and down the river from Hampton Bridge is one of the crack
spectacles of the neighborhood. Satisfied with it, we pass through the
principal street, with the Green in view to our left and Bushy Park
beyond it, to the main entrance. This is part of the original palace
as built by the cardinal. It leads into the first court. This, with
the second or Middle Quadrangle, may all be ascribed to him, with some
changes made by Henry VIII. and Christopher Wren. The colonnade of
coupled Ionic pillars which runs across it on the south or right-hand
side as you enter was designed by Wren. It is out of keeping with its
Gothic surroundings. Standing beneath it, you see on the opposite side
of the square Wolsey's Hall. It looks like a church. The towers on
either side of the gateway between the courts bear some relics of the
old faith in the shape of terra-cotta medallions, portraits of the
Roman emperors. These decorations were a present to the cardinal
from Leo X. The oriel windows by their side bear contributions in
a different taste from Henry VIII. They are the escutcheons of
that monarch. The two popes, English and Italian, are well met.
Our engravings give a good idea of the style of these parts of the
edifice. The first or outer square is somewhat larger than the middle
one, which is a hundred and thirty-three feet across from north to
south, and ninety-one in the opposite direction, or in a line with the
longest side of the whole palace.
A stairway beneath the arch leads to the great hall, one hundred
and six feet by forty. This having been well furbished recently, its
aspect is probably little inferior in splendor to that which it wore
in its first days. The open-timber roof, gay banners, stained windows
and groups of armor bring mediaeval magnificence very freshly before
us. The ciphers and arms of Henry and his wife, Jane Seymour, are
emblazoned on one of the windows, indicating the date of 1536 or 1537.
Below them were graciously left Wolsey's imprint--his arms, with a
cardinal's hat on each side, and the inscription, "The Lord Thomas
Wolsey, Cardinal legat de Latere, archbishop of Yorke and chancellor
of Englande." The tapestry of the hall illustrates sundry passages in
the life of Abraham. A Flemish pupil of Raphael is credited with their
execution or design.
This hall witnessed, certainly in the reign of George I., and
according to tradition in that of Elizabeth, the mimic reproduction
of the great drama with which it is associated. It is even said that
Shakespeare took part here in his own play, _King Henry VIII., or the
Fall of Wolsey_. In 1558 the hall was resplendent with one thousand
lamps, Philip and Mary holding their Christmas feast. The princess
Elizabeth was a guest. The next morning she was compliant or politic
enough to hear matins in the queen's closet.
The Withdrawing Room opens from the hall. It is remarkable for its
carved and illuminated ceiling of oak. Over the chimney is a portrait
of Wolsey in profile on wood, not the least interesting of a long list
of pictures which are a leading attraction of the place. These are
assembled, with few exceptions, in the third quadrangle, built in
1690. Into this we next pass. It takes the place of three of the
five original courts, said to have been fully equal to the two which
remain.
[Illustration: MIDDLE QUADRANGLE, HAMPTON COURT.]
The modern or Eastern Quadrangle is a hundred and ten by a hundred and
seventeen feet. It is encircled by a colonnade like that in the middle
square, and has nothing remarkable, architecturally, about it. In the
public rooms that surround us there are, according to the catalogue,
over a thousand pictures. Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Veronese, Titian,
Giulio Romano, Murillo and a host of lesser names of the Italian and
Spanish schools, with still more of the Flemish, are represented. To
most visitors, who may see elsewhere finer works by these masters, the
chief attraction of the walls is the series of original portraits by
Holbein, Vandyck, Lely and Kneller. The two full-lengths of Charles I.
by Vandyck, on foot and on horseback, both widely known by engravings,
are the gems of this department, as a Vandyck will always be of any
group of portraits.
[Illustration: ARCHWAY IN HAMPTON COURT.]
Days may be profitably and delightfully spent in studying this fine
collection. The first men and women of England for three centuries
handed down to us by the first artists she could command form a
spectacle in which Americans can take a sort of home interest. Nearly
all date before 1776, and we have a rightful share in them. Each
head and each picture is a study. We have art and history together.
Familiar as we may be with the events with which the persons
represented are associated, it is impossible to gaze upon their
lineaments, set in the accessories of their day by the ablest hands
guided by eyes that saw below the surface, and not feel that we have
new readings of British annals.
[Illustration: WOLSEY.]
Among the most ancient heads is a medallion of Henry VII. by
Torregiano, the peppery and gifted Florentine who executed the
marvelous chapel in Westminster Abbey and broke the nose of Michael
Angelo. English art--or rather art in England--may be said to date
from him. He could not create a school of artists in the island--the
material did not exist--but the few productions he left there stood
out so sharply from anything around them that the possessors of the
wealth that was then beginning to accumulate employed it in drawing
from the Continent additional treasures from the newly-found world
of beauty. The riches of England have grown apace, and her collectors
have used them liberally, if not always wisely, until her galleries,
in time, have come to be sought by the connoisseurs, and even the
artists, of the Continent.
[Illustration: PORTICO LEADING TO GARDENS.]
The last picture-gallery we traverse is the only one at Hampton Court
specially built for its purpose; and it is empty. This is the room
erected by Sir Christopher Wren for the reception of the Cartoons.
It leads us to the corridor that opens on the garden-front. We leave
behind us, in addition to the state apartments, a great many others
which are peopled by other inhabitants than the big spiders, said to
be found nowhere else, known as cardinals. The old palace is not kept
wholly for show, but is made useful in the political economy of
the kingdom by furnishing a retreat to impecunious members of the
oligarchy. Certain families of distressed aristocrats are harbored
here--clearly a more wholesome arrangement than letting them take
their chance in the world and bring discredit on their class.
[Illustration: CENTRE AVENUE.]
Emerging on the great gardens, forty four acres in extent, we find
ourselves on broad walks laid out with mathematical regularity, and
edged by noble masses of yew, holly, horse-chestnut, etc. almost as
rectangular and circular. We are here struck with the great advantage
derived in landscape gardening from the rich variety of large
evergreens possible in the climate of Britain. The holly, unknown as
an outdoor plant in this country north of Philadelphia, is at home in
the north of Scotland, eighteen degrees nearer the pole. We are more
fortunate with the Conifers, many of the finest of which family are
perfectly hardy here. But we miss the deodar cedar, the redwood and
Washingtonia of California, and the cedar of Lebanon. These, unless
perhaps the last, cannot be depended on much north of the latitude of
the _Magnolia grandiflora._ They thrive all over England, with others
almost as beautiful, and as delicate north of the Delaware. Of the
laurel tribe, also hardy in England, our Northern States have but a
few weakly representatives. So with the Rhododendra.
[Illustration: HAMPTON COURT--GARDEN FRONT.]
When, tired of even so charming a scene of arboreal luxury, we knock
at the Flower-Pot gate to the left of the palace, and are admitted
into the private garden, we make the acquaintance of another stately
stranger we have had the honor at home of meeting only under glass.
This is the great vine, ninety years or a hundred old, of the Black
Hamburg variety. It does not cover as much space as the Carolina
Scuppernong--the native variety that so surprised and delighted
Raleigh's Roanoke Island settlers in 1585--often does. But its
bunches, sometimes two or three thousand in number, are much larger
than the Scuppernong's little clumps of two or three. They weigh
something like a pound each, and are thought worthy of being reserved
for Victoria's dessert. Her own family vine has burgeoned so broadly
that three thousand pounds of grapes would not be a particularly large
dish for a Christmas dinner for the united Guelphs.
[Illustration: GATE TO PRIVATE GARDEN.]
We must not forget the Labyrinth, "a mighty maze, but not without a
plan," that has bewildered generations of young and old children since
the time of its creator, William of Orange. It is a feature of the
Dutch style of landscape gardening imprinted by him upon the Hampton
grounds. He failed to impress a like stamp upon that chaos of queer,
shapeless and contradictory means to beneficent ends, the British
constitution.
Hampton Court, notwithstanding the naming of the third quadrangle the
Fountain Court, and the prominence given to a fountain in the design
of the principal grounds, is not rich in waterworks. Nature has done a
good deal for it in that way, the Thames embracing it on two sides
and the lowness of the flat site placing water within easy reach
everywhere. This superabundance of the element did not content the
magnificent Wolsey. He was a man of great ideas, and to secure a head
for his jets he sought an elevated spring at Combe Wood, more than two
miles distant. To bring this supply he laid altogether not less than
eight miles of leaden pipe weighing twenty-four pounds to the foot,
and passing under the bed of the Thames. Reduced to our currency
of to-day, these conduits must have cost nearly half a million of
dollars. They do their work yet, the gnawing tooth of old _Edax rerum_
not having penetrated far below the surface of the earth. Better
hydraulic results would now be attained at a considerably reduced cost
by a steam-engine and stand-pipe. At the beginning of the sixteenth
century this motor was not even in embryo, unless we accept the story
of Blasco de Garay's steamer that manoeuvred under the eye of Charles
V. as fruitlessly as Fitch's and Fulton's before Napoleon. Coal, its
dusky pabulum, was also practically a stranger on the upper Thames.
The ancient fire-dogs that were wont to bear blazing billets hold
their places in the older part of the palace.
[Illustration: BUSHY PARK.]
Crossing the Kingston road, which runs across the peninsula and skirts
the northern boundary of Hampton Park, we get into its continuation,
Bushy Park. This is larger than the chief enclosure, but less
pretentious. We cease to be oppressed by the palace and its excess of
the artificial. The great avenues of horse-chestnut, five in number,
and running parallel with a length of rather more than a mile and an
aggregate breadth of nearly two hundred yards, are formal enough in
design, but the mass of foliage gives them the effect of a wood. They
lead nowhere in particular, and are flanked by glades and copses in
which the genuinely rural prevails. Cottages gleam through the trees.
The lowing of kine, the tinkling of the sheep-bell, the gabble
of poultry, lead you away from thoughts of prince and city. Deer
domesticated here since long before the introduction of the turkey
or the guinea-hen bear themselves with as quiet ease and freedom
from fear as though they were the lords of the manor and held the
black-letter title-deeds for the delicious stretch of sward over
which they troop. Less stately, but scarce more shy, indigenes are
the hares, lineal descendants of those which gave sport to Oliver
Cromwell. When that grim Puritan succeeded to the lordship of the
saintly cardinal, he was fain, when the Dutch, Scotch and Irish
indulged him with a brief chance to doff his buff coat, to take
relaxation in coursing. We loiter by the margin of the ponds he dug
in the hare-warren, and which were presented as nuisances by the grand
jury in 1662. The complaint was that by turning the water of the "New
River" into them the said Oliver had made the road from Hampton Wick
boggy and unsafe. Another misdemeanor of the deceased was at the same
time and in like manner denounced. This was the stopping up of the
pathway through the warren. The palings were abated, and the path is
open to all nineteenth-century comers, as it probably will be to those
of the twentieth, this being a land of precedent, averse to change.
We may stride triumphantly across the location of the Cromwellian
barricades, and not the less so, perhaps, for certain other barricades
which he helped to erect in the path of privilege.
Directing our steps to the left, or westward, we again reach the river
at the town of Hampton. It is possessed of pretty water-views, but of
little else of note except the memory and the house of Garrick.
Hither the great actor, after positively his last night on the stage,
retired, and settled the long contest for his favor between the Muses
of Tragedy and Comedy by inexorably turning his back on both. He
did not cease to be the delight of polished society, thanks to his
geniality and to literary and conversational powers capable of making
him the intimate of Johnson and Reynolds. More fortunate in his
temperament and temper than his modern successor, Macready, he never
fretted that his profession made him a vagabond by act of Parliament,
or that his adoption of it in place of the law had prevented his
becoming, by virtue of the same formal and supreme stamp, the equal
of the Sampson Brasses plentiful in his day as in ours among their
betters of that honorable vocation. His self-respect was of tougher if
not sounder grain. "Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow,"
was the motto supplied him by his friend and neighbor, Pope, but
obeyed long before he saw it in the poetic form.
[Illustration: GARRICK'S VILLA.]
Garrick's house is separated from its bit of "grounds," which run down
to the water's edge, by the highway. It communicates with them by a
tunnel, suggested by Johnson. It was not a very novel suggestion,
but the excavation deserves notice as probably the one engineering
achievement of old Ursus major. We may fancy the Titan of the pen and
the tea-table, in his snuffy habit as he lived and as photographed
by Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, Fanny Burney, and their epitomizer Macaulay,
diving under the turnpike and emerging among the osiers and water-rats
to offer his orisons at the shrine of Shakespeare. For, in the fashion
of the day, Garrick erected a little brick "temple," and placed
therein a statue of the man it was the study of his life to interpret.
The temple is there yet. The statue, a fine one by Roubillac, now
adorns the hall of the British Museum, a much better place for it.
Garrick, and not Shakespeare, is the _genius loci_.
[Illustration: RIVER SCENE, THAMES DITTON.]
This is but one, if the most striking, of a long row of villas that
overlook the river, each with its comfortable-looking and rotund trees
and trim plat in front, with sometimes a summer-house snuggling down
to the ripples. These riverside colonies, thrown out so rapidly by the
metropolis, have no colonial look. We cannot associate the idea of a
new settlement with rich turf, graveled walks and large trees devoid
of the gaunt and forlorn look suggestive of their fellows' having
been hewn away from their side. The houses have some of the pertness,
rawness and obtrusiveness of youth, but it is not the youth of the
backwoods.
Bob and sinker are in their glory hereabouts. Fishing-rods in the
season and good weather form an established part of the scenery. From
the banks of the stream, from the islands and from box-like boats
called punts in the middle of the water, their slender arches project.
It becomes a source of speculation how the breed of fish is kept up.
Seth Green has never operated on the Thames. Were he to take it under
his wing, a sum in the single rule of three points to the conclusion
that all London would take its seat under these willows and extract
ample sustenance from the invisible herds. If perch and dace can hold
their own against the existing pressure and escape extinction, how
would they multiply with the fostering aid of the spawning-box! We are
not deep in the mysteries of the angle, but we believe English waters
do not boast the catfish. They ought to acquire him. He is almost
as hard to extirpate as the perch, would be quite at home in these
sluggish pools under the lily-pads, and would harmonize admirably with
the eel in the pies and other gross preparations which delight the
British palate. He hath, moreover, a John Bull-like air in his
broad and burly shape, his smooth and unscaly superficies and the
_noli-me-tangere_ character of his dorsal fin. Pity he was unknown to
Izaak Walton!
At this particular point the piscatory effect is intensified by the
dam just above Hampton Bridge. Two parts of a river are especially
fine for fishing. One is the part above the dam, and the other the
part below. These two divisions may be said, indeed, in a large sense
to cover all the Thames. Moulsey Lock, while favorable to fish and
fishermen, is unfavorable to dry land. Yet there is said to be no
malaria. Hampton Court has proved a wholesome residence to every
occupant save its founder.
[Illustration: WOLSEY'S TOWER, ESHER.]
The angler's capital is Thames Ditton, and his capitol the Swan Inn.
Ditton is, like many other pretty English villages, little and old. It
is mentioned in _Domesday Boke_ as belonging to the bishop of Bayeux
in Normandy, famous for the historic piece of tapestry. Wadard,
a gentleman with a Saxon name, held it of him, probably for the
quit--rent of an annual eel-pie, although the consideration is not
stated. The clergy were, by reason of their frequent meagre days and
seasons, great consumers of fish. The phosphorescent character of that
diet may have contributed, if we accept certain modern theories of
animal chemistry as connected in some as yet unexplained way with
psychology, to the intellectual predominance of that class of the
population in the Middle Ages. That occasional fasting, whether
voluntary and systematic as in the cloisters, or involuntary and
altogether the reverse of systematic in Grub street, helps to clear
the wits, with or without the aid of phosphorus, is a fixed fact. The
stomach is apt to be a stumbling-block to the brain. We are not prone
to associate prolonged and productive mental effort with a fair round
belly with fat capon lined. It was not the jolly clerics we read of
in song, but the lean ascetic brethren who were numerous enough to
balance them, that garnered for us the treasures of ancient literature
and kept the mind of Christendom alive, if only in a state of
suspended animation. It was something that they prevented the mace of
chivalry from utterly braining humankind.
The Thames is hereabouts joined from the south by a somewhat
exceptional style of river, characterized by Milton as "the sullen
Mole, that runneth underneath," and by Pope, in dutiful imitation, as
"the sullen Mole that hides his diving flood." Both poets play on the
word. In our judgment, Milton's line is the better, since moles do not
dive and have no flood--two false figures in one line from the precise
and finical Pope! Thomson contributes the epithet of "silent," which
will do well enough as far as it goes, though devoid even of the
average force of Jamie. But, as we have intimated, it is a queer
river. Pouring into the Thames by several mouths that deviate over
quite a delta, its channel two or three miles above is destitute in
dry seasons of water. Its current disappears under an elevation called
White Hill, and does not come again to light for almost two miles,
resembling therein several streams in the United States, notably Lost
River in North-eastern Virginia, which has a subterranean course of
the same character and about the same length, but has not yet found
its Milton or Pope, far superior as it is to its English cousin in
natural beauty.
For this defect art and association amply atone. On the southern side
of the Mole, not far from the underground portion of its course--"the
Swallow" as it is called--stand the charming and storied seats of
Esher and Claremont.
Esher was an ancient residence of the bishops of Winchester. Wolsey
made it for a time his retreat after being ousted from Hampton Court.
A retreat it was to him in every sense. He dismissed his servants
and all state, and cultivated the deepest despondency. His inexorable
master, however, looked down on him, from his ravished towers hard by,
unmoved, and, as the sequel in a few years proved, unsatisfied in
his greed. Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, was called upon for a
contribution. He loyally surrendered to the king the whole estate of
Esher, a splendid mansion with all appurtenances and a park a mile
in diameter. Henry annexed Esher to Hampton Court, and continued his
research for new subjects of spoliation. His daughter Mary gave Esher
back to the see of Winchester. Elizabeth bought it and bestowed it on
Lord Howard of Effingham, who well earned it by his services against
the Armada. Of the families who subsequently owned the place, the
Pelhams are the most noted. Now it has passed from their hands. That
which has alone been preserved of the palace of Wolsey is an embattled
gatehouse that looks into the sluggish Mole, and joins it mayhap in
musing over "the days that we have seen."
[Illustration: CLAREMONT.]
Claremont, its next neighbor, unites, with equal or greater charms of
landscape, in preaching the old story of the decadence of the great.
Lord Clive, the Indian conqueror and speculator, built the house from
the designs of Capability Browne at a cost of over a hundred thousand
pounds. His dwelling and his monument remain to represent Clive. After
him, two or three occupants removed, came Leopold of Belgium, with
his bride, the Princess Charlotte, pet and hope of the British
nation. Their stay was more transient still--a year only, when death
dissipated their dream and cleared the way to the throne for Victoria.
Leopold continued to hold the property, and it became a generation
later the asylum of Louis Philippe. To an ordinary mind the miseries
of any one condemned to make this lovely spot his home are not apt to
present themselves as the acme of despair. A sensation of relief and
lulling repose would be more reasonably expected, especially after
so stormy a career as that of Louis. The change from restless and
capricious Paris to dewy shades and luxurious halls in the heart of
changeless and impregnable England ought, on common principles, to
have promoted the content and prolonged the life of the old king.
Possibly it did, but if so, the French had not many months' escape
from a second Orleans regency, for the exile's experience of Claremont
was brief. We may wander over his lawns, and reshape to ourselves his
reveries. Then we may forget the man who lost an empire as we look up
at the cenotaph of him who conquered one. Both brought grist to
Miller Bull, the fortunate and practical-minded owner of such vast
water-privileges. His water-power seems proof against all floods,
while the corn of all nations must come to his door. Standing under
these drooping elms, by this lazy stream, we hear none of the clatter
of the great mill, and we cease to dream of affixing a period to its
noiseless and effective work.
[Illustration: CLIVE'S MONUMENT.]
If we are not tired of parks for today, five minutes by rail will
carry us west to Oatlands Park, with its appended, and more or less
dependent, village of Walton-upon-Thames. But a surfeit even of
English country-houses and their pleasances is a possible thing;
and nowhere are they more abundant than within an hour's walk of our
present locality. So, taking Ashley Park, Burwood Park, Pains Hill
and many others, as well as the Coway Stakes--said by one school of
antiquarians to have been planted in the Thames by Caesar, and by
another to be the relics of a fish-weir--Walton Church and Bradshaw's
house, for granted, we shall turn to the east and finish the purlieus
of Hampton with a glance at the old Saxon town of Kingston-on-Thames.
Probably an ardent Kingstonian would indignantly disown the impression
our three words are apt to give of the place. It is a rapidly--growing
town, and "Egbert, the first king of all England," who held a council
at "Kyningestun, famosa ilia locus," in 838, would be at a loss to
find his way through its streets could he revisit it. It has the
population of a Saxon county. Viewed from the massive bridge, with
the church-tower rising above an expanse of sightly buildings, it
possesses the least possible resemblance to the cluster of wattled
huts that may be presumed to have sheltered Egbert and his peers.
[Illustration: PRINCESS CHARLOTTE.]
A more solid memento of the Saxons is preserved in the King's
Stone. This has been of late years set up in the centre of the town,
surrounded with an iron railing, and made visible to all comers,
skeptical or otherwise. Tradition credits it with having been that
upon which the kings of Wessex were crowned, as those of Scotland down
to Longshanks, and after him the English, were on the red sandstone
palladium of Scone. From the list of ante-Norman monarchs said to
have received the sceptre upon it the poetically inclined visitor will
select for chief interest Edwy, whose coronation was celebrated in
great state in his seventeenth year. How he fell in love with and
married secretly his cousin Elgiva; how Saint Dunstan and his equally
saintly though not regularly beatified ally, Odo, archbishop of
Canterbury, indignant at a step taken against their fulminations and
protests, and jealous of the fair queen, tore her from his arms, burnt
with hot iron the bloom out of her cheeks, and finally put her
to death with the most cruel tortures; and how her broken-hearted
boy-lord, dethroned and hunted, died before reaching twenty,--is a
standing dish of the pathetic. Unfortunately, the story, handed down
to us with much detail, appears to be true. We must not accept it,
however, as an average illustration of life in that age of England.
The five hundred years before the Conquest do not equal, in the bloody
character of their annals, the like period succeeding it. Barbarous
enough the Anglo-Saxons were, but wanton cruelty does not seem to have
been one of their traits. To produce it some access of religious fury
was usually requisite. It was on the church doors that the skins of
their Danish invaders were nailed.
[Illustration: WALTON CHURCH.]
[Illustration: KINGSTON CHURCH.]
Kingston has no more Dunstans. Alexandra would be perfectly safe in
its market-place. The rosy maidens who pervade its streets need not
envy her cheeks, and the saints and archbishops who are to officiate
at her husband's induction as head of the Anglican Church have their
anxieties at present directed to wholly different quarters. They have
foes within and foes without, but none in the palace.
Kingston bids fair to revert, after a sort, to the metropolitan
position it boasted once, but has lost for nine centuries. The capital
is coming to it, and will cover the four remaining miles within
a decade or two at the existing rate of progress. Kingston may be
assigned to the suburbs already. It is much nearer London, in point
of time, than Union Square in New York to the City Hall. A slip of
country not yet endowed with trottoirs and gas-lamps intervenes. Call
this park, as you do the square miles of such territory already deep
within the metropolis.
London's jurisdiction, as marked by the Boundary Stone, extends much
farther up the river than we have as yet gone. Nor are the swans her
only vicegerents. The myrmidons of Inspector Bucket, foot and horse,
supplement those natatory representatives. So do the municipalities
encroach upon and overspread the country, as it is eminently proper
they should, seeing that to the charters so long ago exacted, and so
long and so jealously guarded, by the towns, so much of the liberty
enjoyed by English-speaking peoples is due. Large cities may be under
some circumstances, according to an often-quoted saying, plague-spots
on the body politic, but their growth has generally been commensurate
with that of knowledge and order, and indicative of anything but a
diseased condition of the national organism.
But here we are, under the shadow of the departed Nine Elms and of
the official palace of the Odos, deep enough in Lunnon to satisfy the
proudest Cockney, in less time than we have taken in getting off that
last commonplace on political economy. Adam Smith and Jefferson never
undertook to meditate at thirty-five miles an hour.
EDWARD C. BRUCE.
LINES WRITTEN AT VENICE IN OCTOBER, 1865.
Sleep, Venice, sleep! the evening gun resounds
Over the waves that rock thee on their breast:
The bugle blare to kennel calls the hounds
Who sleepless watch thy waking and thy rest.
Sleep till the night-stars do the day-star meet,
And shuddering echoes o'er the water run,
Rippling through every glass-green, wavering street
The stern good-morrow of thy guardian Hun.
Still do thy stones, O Venice! bid rejoice,
With their old majesty, the gazer's eye,
In their consummate grace uttering a voice,
From every line, of blended harmony.
Still glows the splendor of the wondrous dreams
Vouchsafed thy painters o'er each sacred shrine,
And from the radiant visions downward streams
In visible light an influence divine.
Still through thy golden day and silver night
Sings his soft jargon the gay gondolier,
And o'er thy floors of liquid malachite
Slide the black-hooded barks to mystery dear.
Like Spanish beauty in its sable veil,
They rustle sideling through the watery way,
The wild, monotonous cry with which they hail
Each other's passing dying far away.
As each steel prow grazes the island strands
Still ring the sweet Venetian voices clear,
And wondering wanderers from far, free lands
Entranced look round, enchanted listen here.
From the far lands of liberty they come--
England's proud children and her younger race;
Those who possess the Past's most noble home,
And those who claim the Future's boundless space.
Pitying they stand. For thee who would not weep?
Well it beseems these men to weep for thee,
Whose flags (as erst they own) control the deep,
Whose conquering sails o'ershadow every sea.
Yet not in pity only, but in hope,
Spring the hot tears the brave for thee may shed:
Thy chain shall prove but a sand-woven rope;
But sleep thou still: the sky is not yet red.
Sleep till the mighty helmsman of the world,
By the Almighty set at Fortune's wheel,
Steers toward thy freedom, and, once more unfurled,
The banner of St. Mark the sun shall feel.
Then wake, then rise, then hurl away thy yoke,
Then dye with crimson that pale livery,
Whose ghastly white has been the jailer's cloak
For years flung o'er thy shame and misery!
Rise with a shout that down thy Giants' Stair
Shall thy old giants bring with thundering tread--
The blind crusader standing stony there,
And him, the latest of thy mighty dead.
Whose patriot heart broke at the Austrian's foot,
Whose ashes under the black marble lie,
From whose dry dust, stirred by the voice, shall shoot
The glorious growth of living liberty.
FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE.
SKETCHES OF INDIA.
I.
"Come," says my Hindu friend, "let us do Bombay."
The name of my Hindu friend is Bhima Gandharva. At the same time, his
name is _not_ Bhima Gandharva. But--for what is life worth if one may
not have one's little riddle?--in respect that he is _not_ so
named let him be so called, for thus will a pretty contradiction
be accomplished, thus shall I secure at once his privacy and his
publicity, and reveal and conceal him in a breath.
It is eight o'clock in the morning. We have met--Bhima Gandharva and
I--in "The Fort." The Fort is to Bombay much as the Levee, with
its adjacent quarters, is to New Orleans; only it is--one may say
_Hibernice_--a great deal more so. It is on the inner or harbor side
of the island of Bombay. Instead of the low-banked Mississippi, the
waters of a tranquil and charming haven smile welcome out yonder from
between wooded island-peaks. Here Bombay has its counting-houses, its
warehouses, its exchange, its "Cotton Green," its docks. But not its
dwellings. This part of the Fort where we have met is, one may say,
only inhabited for six hours in the day--from ten in the morning until
four in the afternoon. At the former hour Bombay is to be found
here engaged at trade: at the latter it rushes back into the various
quarters outside the Fort which go to make up this many-citied city.
So that at this particular hour of eight in the morning one must
expect to find little here that is alive, except either a philosopher,
a stranger, a policeman or a rat.
"Well, then," I said as Bhima Gandharva finished communicating this
information to me, "we are all here."
"How?"
"There stand you, a philosopher; here I, a stranger; yonder, the
policeman; and, heavens and earth! what a rat!" I accompanied this
exclamation by shooing a big musky fellow from behind a bale of cotton
whither I had just seen him run.
Bhima Gandharva smiled in a large, tranquil way he has, which is like
an Indian plain full of ripe corn. "I find it curious," he said, "to
compare the process which goes on here in the daily humdrum of trade
about this place with that which one would see if one were far up
yonder at the northward, in the appalling solitudes of the mountains,
where trade has never been and will never be. Have you visited the
Himalaya?"
I shook my head.
"Among those prodigious planes of snow," continued the Hindu, "which
when level nevertheless frighten you as if they were horizontal
precipices, and which when perpendicular nevertheless lull you with a
smooth deadly half-sense of confusion as to whether you should refer
your ideas of space to the slope or the plain, there reigns at this
moment a quietude more profound than the Fort's. But presently, as
the sun beats with more fervor, rivulets begin to trickle from exposed
points; these grow to cataracts and roar down the precipices; masses
of undermined snow plunge into the abysses; the great winds of the
Himalaya rise and howl, and every silence of the morning becomes
a noise at noon. A little longer, and the sun again decreases; the
cataracts draw their heads back into the ice as tortoises into their
shells; the winds creep into their hollows, and the snows rest. So
here. At ten the tumult of trade will begin: at four it will quickly
freeze again into stillness. One might even carry this parallelism
into more fanciful extremes. For, as the vapors which lie on the
Himalaya in the form of snow have in time come from all parts of the
earth, so the tide of men that will presently pour in here is made up
of people from the four quarters of the globe. The Hindu, the African,
the Arabian, the Chinese, the Tartar, the European, the American, the
Parsee, will in a little while be trading or working here."
[Illustration: A DWELLING AT MAZAGON.]
"What a complete _bouleversement_," I said, seating myself on a
bale of cotton and looking toward the fleets of steamers and vessels
collected off the great cotton-presses awaiting their cargoes, "this
particular scene effects in the mind of a traveler just from America!
India has been to me, as the average American, a dream of terraced
ghauts, of banyans and bungalows, of Taj Mahals and tigers, of sacred
rivers and subterranean temples, and--and that sort of thing. I
come here and land in a big cotton-yard. I ask myself, 'Have I left
Jonesville--dear Jonesville!--on the other side of the world, in order
to sit on an antipodal cotton-bale?'"
"There is some more of India," said Bhima Gandharva gently. "Let us
look at it a little."
One may construct a good-enough outline map of this wonderful land in
one's mind by referring its main features to the first letter of the
alphabet. Take a capital A; turn it up side down; imagine that the
inverted triangle forming the lower half of the letter is the
Deccan, the left side representing the Western Ghauts, the right side
representing the Eastern Ghauts, and the cross-stroke standing for
the Vindhya Mountains; imagine further that a line from right to left
across the upper ends of the letter, trending upward as it is drawn,
represents the Himalaya, and that enclosed between them and the
Vindhyas is Hindustan proper. Behind--i.e. to the north of--the
centre of this last line rises the Indus, flowing first north-westward
through the Vale of Cashmere, then cutting sharply to the south and
flowing by the way of the Punjab and Scinde to where it empties at
Kurrachee. Near the same spot where the Indus originates rises also
the Brahmaputra, but the latter empties its waters far from the
former, flowing first south-eastward, then cutting southward and
emptying into the Gulf of Bengal. Fixing, now, in the mind the sacred
Ganges and Jumna, coming down out of the Gangetic and Jumnatic peaks
in a general south-easterly direction, uniting at Allahabad and
emptying into the Bay of Bengal, and the Nerbudda River flowing over
from the east to the west, along the southern bases of the Vindhyas,
until it empties at the important city of Brooch, a short distance
north of Bombay, one will have thus located a number of convenient
points and lines sufficient for general references.
This A of ours is a very capital A indeed, being some nineteen hundred
miles in length and fifteen hundred in width. Lying on the western
edge of this peninsula is Bombay Island. It is crossed by the line
of 19 deg. north latitude, and is, roughly speaking, halfway between the
Punjab on the north and Ceylon on the south. Its shape is that of a
lobster, with his claws extended southward and his body trending
a little to the west of north. The larger island of Salsette lies
immediately north, and the two, connected by a causeway, enclose the
noble harbor of Bombay. Salsette approaches near to the mainland at
its northern end, and is connected with it by the railway structure.
These causeways act as break-waters and complete the protection of the
port. The outer claw, next to the Indian Ocean, of the lobster-shaped
Bombay Island is the famous Malabar Hill; the inner claw is the
promontory of Calaba; in the curved space between the two is the body
of shallow water known as the Back Bay, along whose strand so many
strange things are done daily. As one turns into the harbor around
the promontory of Calaba--which is one of the European quarters of the
manifold city of Bombay, and is occupied by magnificent residences
and flower-gardens--one finds just north of it the great docks and
commercial establishments of the Fort; then an enormous esplanade
farther north; across which, a distance of about a mile, going still
northward, is the great Indian city called Black Town, with its motley
peoples and strange bazars; and still farther north is the Portuguese
quarter, known as Mazagon.
As we crossed the great esplanade to the north of the Fort--Bhima
Gandharva and I--and strolled along the noisy streets, I began to
withdraw my complaint. It was not like Jonesville. It was not like any
one place or thing, but like a hundred, and all the hundred _outre_
to the last degree. Hindu beggars, so dirty that they seemed to have
returned to dust before death; three fakirs, armed with round-bladed
daggers with which they were wounding themselves apparently in the
most reckless manner, so as to send streams of blood flowing to the
ground, and redly tattooing the ashes with which their naked bodies
were covered; Parsees with their long noses curving over their
moustaches, clothed in white, sending one's thoughts back to Ormuz,
to Persia, to Zoroaster, to fire-worship and to the strangeness of the
fate which drove them out of Persia more than a thousand years ago,
and which has turned them into the most industrious traders and
most influential citizens of a land in which they are still exiles;
Chinese, Afghans--the Highlanders of the East--Arabs, Africans,
Mahrattas, Malays, Persians, Portuguese half-bloods; men that called
upon Mohammed, men that called upon Confucius, upon Krishna, upon
Christ, upon Gotama the Buddha, upon Rama and Sita, upon Brahma, upon
Zoroaster; strange carriages shaded by red domes that compressed
a whole dream of the East in small, and drawn by humped oxen,
alternating with palanquins, with stylish turnouts of the latest mode,
with cavaliers upon Arabian horses; half-naked workmen, crouched
in uncomfortable workshops and ornamenting sandal-wood boxes; dusky
curb-stone shopkeepers, rushing at me with strenuous offerings of
their wares; lines of low shop-counters along the street, backed by
houses rising in many stories, whose black pillared verandahs
were curiously carved and painted: cries, chafferings, bickerings,
Mussulman prayers, Arab oaths extending from "Praise God that you
exist" to "Praise God _although_ you exist;"--all these things
appealed to the confused senses.
The tall spire of a Hindu temple revealed itself.
[Illustration: HINDU TEMPLE IN THE BLACK TOWN, BOMBAY.]
"It seems to me," I said to Bhima Gandharva, "that your steeples--as
we would call them in Jonesville--represent, in a sort of way, your
cardinal doctrine: they seem to be composed of a multitude of little
steeples, all like the big one, just as you might figure your Supreme
Being in the act of absorbing a large number of the faithful who had
just arrived from the dismal existence below. And then, again, your
steeple looks as if it might be the central figure of your theistic
scheme, surrounded by the three hundred millions of your lesser
deities. How do you get on, Bhima Gandharva, with so many claims on
your worshiping faculties? I should think you would be well lost in
such a jungle of gods?"
"My friend," said Bhima Gandharva, "a short time ago a play was
performed in this city which purported to be a translation into the
Mahratta language of the _Romeo and Juliet_ which Shakespeare wrote.
It was indeed a very great departure from that miraculous work, which
I know well, but among its many deviations from the original was one
which for the mournful and yet humorous truth of it was really worthy
of the Master. Somehow, the translator had managed to get a modern
Englishman into the play, who, every time that one of my countrymen
happened to be found in leg-reach, would give him a lusty kick and cry
out 'Damn fool!' Why is the whole world like this Englishman?--upon
what does it found its opinion that the Hindu is a fool? Is it upon
our religion? Listen! I will recite you some matters out of our
scriptures: Once upon a time Arjuna stood in his chariot betwixt
his army and the army of his foes. These foes were his kinsmen.
Krishna--even that great god Krishna--moved by pity for Arjuna, had
voluntarily placed himself in Arjuna's chariot and made himself the
charioteer thereof. Then--so saith Sanjaya--in order to encourage him,
the ardent old ancestor of the Kurus blew his conch-shell, sounding
loud as the roar of a lion. Then on a sudden trumpets, cymbals, drums
and horns were sounded. That noise grew to an uproar. And, standing on
a huge car drawn by white horses, the slayer of Madhu and the son
of Pandu blew their celestial trumpets. Krishna blew his horn called
Panchajanya; the Despiser of Wealth blew his horn called the Gift
of the Gods; he of dreadful deeds and wolfish entrails blew a great
trumpet called Paundra; King Yudishthira, the son of Kunti, blew the
Eternal Victory; Nakula and Sahadeva blew the Sweet-toned and the
Blooming-with-Jewels. The king of Kashi, renowned for the excellence
of his bow, and Shikandin in his huge chariot, Dhrishtyadumna, and
Virata, and Satyaki, unconquered by his foes, and Drupada and the sons
of Drupadi all together, and the strong-armed son of Subhadra, each
severally blew their trumpets. That noise lacerated the hearts of the
sons of Dhartarashtra, and uproar resounded both through heaven and
earth. Now when Arjuna beheld the Dhartarashtras drawn up, and that
the flying of arrows had commenced, he raised his bow, and then
addressed these words to Krishna:
"'Now that I have beheld this kindred standing here near together for
the purpose of fighting, my limbs give way and my face is bloodless,
and tremor is produced throughout my body, and my hair stands on end.
My bow Gandiva slips from my hand, and my skin burns. Nor am I able
to remain upright, and my mind is as it were whirling round. Nor do I
perceive anything better even when I shall have slain these relations
in battle, I seek not victory, Krishna, nor a kingdom, nor pleasures.
What should we do with a kingdom, Govinda? What with enjoyments, or
with life itself? Those very men on whose account we might desire a
kingdom, enjoyments or pleasures are assembled for battle. Teachers,
fathers, and even sons, and grandfathers, uncles, fathers-in-law,
grandsons, brothers-in-law, with connections also,--these I would not
wish to slay, though I were slain myself, O Killer of Madhu! not even
for the sake of the sovereignty of the triple world--how much less
for that of this earth! When we had killed the Dhartarashtras, what
pleasure should we have, O thou who art prayed to by mortals? How
could we be happy after killing our own kindred, O Slayer of Madhu?
Even if they whose reason is obscured by covetousness do not perceive
the crime committed in destroying their own tribe, should we not
know how to recoil from such a sin? In the destruction of a tribe
the eternal institutions of the tribe are destroyed. These laws being
destroyed, lawlessness prevails. From the existence of lawlessness the
women of the tribe become corrupted; and when the women are corrupted,
O son of Vrishni! confusion of caste takes place. Confusion of caste
is a gate to hell. Alas! we have determined to commit a great crime,
since from the desire of sovereignty and pleasures we are prepared to
slay our own kin. Better were it for me if the Dhartarashtras, being
armed, would slay me, harmless and unresisting in the fight.'
[Illustration: JAIN TEMPLES AT SUNAGHUR.]
"Having thus spoken in the midst of the battle, Arjuna, whose heart
was troubled with grief, let fall his bow and arrow and sat down on
the bench of the chariot."
"Well," I asked after a short pause, during which the Hindu kept his
eyes fixed in contemplation on the spire of the temple, "what did
Krishna have to say to that?"
"He instructed Arjuna, and said many wise things. I will tell you
some of them, here and there, as they are scattered through the
holy _Bhagavad-Gita_: Then between the two armies, Krishna, smiling,
addressed these words to him, thus downcast:
"'Thou hast grieved for those who need not be grieved for, yet thou
utterest words of wisdom. The wise grieve not for dead or living. But
never at any period did I or thou or these kings of men not exist, nor
shall any of us at any time henceforward cease to exist. There is no
existence for what does not exist, nor is there any non-existence for
what exists.... These finite bodies have been said to belong to an
eternal, indestructible and infinite spirit.... He who believes that
this spirit can kill, and he who thinks that it can be killed--both of
these are mistaken. It neither kills nor is killed. It is born, and
it does not die.... Unborn, changeless, eternal both as to future and
past time, it is not slain when the body is killed.... As the soul
in this body undergoes the changes of childhood, prime and age, so it
obtains a new body hereafter.... As a man abandons worn-out clothes
and take other new ones, so does the soul quit worn-out bodies and
enter other new ones. Weapons cannot cleave it, fire cannot burn
it, nor can water wet it, nor can wind dry it. It is impenetrable,
incombustible, incapable of moistening and of drying. It is constant;
it can go everywhere; it is firm, immovable and eternal. And even
if thou deem it born with the body and dying with the body, still,
O great-armed one! thou art not right to grieve for it. For to
everything generated death is certain: to everything dead regeneration
is certain.... One looks on the soul as a miracle; another speaks of
it as a miracle; another hears of it as a miracle; but even when he
has heard of it, not one comprehends it.... When a man's heart is
disposed in accordance with his roaming senses, it snatches away his
spiritual knowledge as the wind does a ship on the waves.... He who
does not practice devotion has neither intelligence nor reflection.
And he who does not practice reflection has no calm. How can a man
without calm obtain happiness? The self-governed man is awake in that
which is night to all other beings: that in which other beings are
awake is night to the self-governed. He into whom all desires enter in
the same manner as rivers enter the ocean, which is always full, yet
does not change its bed, can obtain tranquillity.... Love or hate
exists toward the object of each sense. One should not fall into the
power of these two passions, for they are one's adversaries.... Know
that passion is hostile to man in this world. As fire is surrounded
by smoke, and a mirror by rust, and a child by the womb, so is this
universe surrounded by passion.... They say that the senses are great.
The heart is greater than the senses. But the intellect is greater
than the heart, and passion is greater than the intellect....
[Illustration: THE VESTIBULE OF THE GRAND SHAITYA OK KARLI.]
"'I and thou, O Arjuna! have passed through many transmigrations. I
know all these. Thou dost not know them.... For whenever there is a
relaxation of duty, O son of Bharata! and an increase of impiety,
I then reproduce myself for the protection of the good and the
destruction of evil-doers. I am produced in every age for the purpose
of establishing duty.... Some sacrifice the sense of hearing and the
other senses in the fire of restraint. Others, by abstaining from
food, sacrifice life in their life. (But) the sacrifice of spiritual
knowledge is better than a material sacrifice.... By this knowledge
thou wilt recognize all things whatever in thyself, and then in me. He
who possesses faith acquires spiritual knowledge. He who is devoid of
faith and of doubtful mind perishes. The man of doubtful mind enjoys
neither this world nor the other, nor final beatitude. Therefore,
sever this doubt which exists in thy heart, and springs from
ignorance, with thy sword of knowledge: turn to devotion and arise, O
son of Bharata!...
"'Learn my superior nature, O hero! by means of which this world is
sustained. I am the cause of the production and dissolution of the
whole universe. There exists no other thing superior to me. On me are
all the worlds suspended, as numbers of pearls on a string. I am the
savor of waters, and the principle of light in the moon and sun, the
mystic syllable _Om_ in the Vedas, the sound in the ether, the essence
of man in men, the sweet smell in the earth; and I am the brightness
in flame, the vitality in all beings, and the power of mortification
in ascetics. Know, O son of Pritha! that I am the eternal seed of all
things which exist. I am the intellect of those who have intellect:
I am the strength of the strong.... And know that all dispositions,
whether good, bad or indifferent, proceed also from me. I do not exist
in them, but they in me.... I am dear to the spiritually wise beyond
possessions, and he is dear to me. A great-minded man who is convinced
that _Vasudevu_ (Krishna) _is everything_ is difficult to find....
If one worships any inferior personage with faith, I make his faith
constant. Gifted with such faith, he seeks the propitiation of this
personage, and from him receives the pleasant objects of his desires,
which (however) were sent by me alone. But the reward of these
little-minded men is finite. They who sacrifice to the gods go to the
gods: they who worship me come to me. I am the immolation. I am the
whole sacrificial rite. I am the libation to ancestors. I am the
drug. I am the incantation. I am the fire. I am the incense. I am
the father, the mother, the sustainer, the grandfather of this
universe--the path, the supporter, the master, the witness, the
habitation, the refuge, the friend, the origin, the dissolution, the
place, the receptacle, the inexhaustible seed. I heat. I withhold
and give the rain. I am ambrosia and death, the existing and the
non-existing. Even those who devoutly worship other gods with the gift
of faith worship me, but only improperly. I am the same to all beings.
I have neither foe nor friend. I am the beginning and the middle and
the end of existing things. Among bodies I am the beaming sun. Among
senses I am the heart. Among waters I am the ocean. Among mountains I
am Himalaya. Among trees I am the banyan; among men, the king; among
weapons, the thunderbolt; among things which count, time; among
animals, the lion; among purifiers, the wind. I am Death who seizes
all: I am the birth of those who are to be. I am Fame, Fortune,
Speech, Memory, Meditation, Perseverance and Patience among feminine
words. I am the game of dice among things which deceive: I am splendor
among things which are shining. Among tamers I am the rod; among means
of victory I am polity; among mysteries I am silence, the knowledge of
the wise....
"'They who know me to be the God of this universe, the God of gods and
the God of worship--they who know me to be the God of this universe,
the God of gods and the God of worship--yea, they who know me to be
these things in the hour of death, they know me indeed.'"
[Illustration: SCULPTURED FIGURES IN THE VESTIBULE OF THE GREAT
SHAITYA OF KARLI.]
When my friend finished these words there did not seem to be anything
particular left in heaven or earth to talk about. At any rate, there
was a dead pause for several minutes. Finally, I asked--and I protest
that in contrast with the large matters wherof Bhima Gandharva had
discoursed my voice (which is American and slightly nasal) sounded
like nothing in the world so much as the squeak of a sick rat--"When
were these things written?"
"At least nineteen hundred and seventy-five years ago, we feel sure.
How much earlier we do not know."
We now directed our course toward the hospital for sick and disabled
animals which has been established here in the most crowded portion of
Black Town by that singular sect called the Jains, and which is only
one of a number of such institutions to be found in the large cities
of India. This sect is now important more by influence than by numbers
in India, many of the richest merchants of the great Indian cities
being among its adherents, though by the last census of British India
there appears to be but a little over nine millions of Jains and
Buddhists together, out of the one hundred and ninety millions of
Hindus in British India. The tenets of the Jains are too complicated
for description here, but it may be said that much doubt exists as
to whether it is an old religion of which Brahmanism and Buddhism are
varieties, or whether it is itself a variety of Buddhism. Indeed,
it does not seem well settled whether the pure Jain doctrine
was atheistical or theistical. At any rate, it is sufficiently
differentiated from Brahmanism by its opposite notion of castes, and
from Buddhism by its cultus of nakedness, which the Buddhists abhor.
The Jains are split into two sects--the _Digambaras_, or nude Jains,
and the _Svetambaras_, or clothed Jains, which latter sect seem to
be Buddhists, who, besides the Tirthankars (i.e. mortals who have
acquired the rank of gods by devout lives, in whom all the Jains
believe), worship also the various divinities of the Vishnu system.
The Jains themselves declare this system to date from a period ten
thousand years before Christ, and they practically support this
traditional antiquity by persistently regarding and treating the
Buddhists as heretics from their system. At any event, their
religion is an old one. They seem to be the gymnosophists, or naked
philosophers, described by Clitarchos as living in India at the time
of the expedition of Alexander, and their history crops out in various
accounts--that of Clement of Alexandria, then of the Chinese Fu-Hian
in the fourth and fifth centuries, and of the celebrated Chinese
Hiouen-Tsang in the seventh century, at which last period they appear
to have been the prevailing sect in India, and to have increased
in favor until in the twelfth century the Rajpoots, who had become
converts to Jainism, were schismatized into Brahmanism and deprived
the naked philosophers of their prestige.
The great distinguishing feature of the Jains is the extreme to which
they push the characteristic tenderness felt by the Hindus for animals
of all descriptions. Jaina is, distinctly, _the purified_. The priests
eat no animal food; indeed, they are said not to eat at all after
noon, lest the insects then abounding should fly into their mouths
and be crushed unwittingly. They go with a piece of muslin bound over
their mouths, in order to avoid the same catastrophe, and carry a soft
brush wherewith to remove carefully from any spot upon which they are
about to sit such insects as might be killed thereby.
"Ah, how my countryman Bergh would luxuriate in this scene!" I said as
we stood looking upon the various dumb exhibitions of so many phases
of sickness, of decrepitude and of mishap--quaint, grotesque, yet
pathetic withal--in the precincts of the Jain hospital. Here were
quadrupeds and bipeds, feathered creatures and hairy creatures, large
animals and small, shy and tame, friendly and predatory--horses,
horned cattle, rats, cats, dogs, jackals, crows, chickens; what not.
An attendant was tenderly bandaging the blinking lids of a sore-eyed
duck: another was feeding a blind crow, who, it must be confessed,
looked here very much like some fat member of the New York Ring
cunningly availing himself of the more toothsome rations in the sick
ward of the penitentiary. My friend pointed out to me a heron with a
wooden leg. "Suppose a gnat should break his shoulder-blade," I said,
"would they put his wing in a sling?"
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