the philosophical discovery, made by or communicated to the hermetic philosophers, that every material object in nature answers to or corresponds with a certain one or group of philosophical truths. Viewed in this light, the science of symbols or of correspondences ceases to be an arbitrary device, susceptible of alteration according to fancy, and avouches itself an essential and consistent relation between the things of the mind and the things of the senses. There is a complete mental creation, answering to the material creation, not continuously evolved from it, but on a different or detached plane. The sun,–to take an example,–the source of light and heat, and thereby of physical nature, is in these fables always the symbol of God, of love and wisdom, by which the spirit of man is created. Light, then, answers to wisdom, and heat to love. And since all physical substances are the result of the combined action of light and heat, we may easily perceive how these hermetic sages were enabled to use every physical object as a cloak of its corresponding philosophical truth,–with no other liability to error than might result from the imperfect condition of their knowledge of physical laws.
To return, however, to the children, I need scarcely remark that the cause of children’s taking so kindly to hermetic writing is that it is actually a living writing; it is alive in precisely the same way that nature, or man himself, is alive. Matter is dead; life organizes and animates it. And all writing is essentially dead which is a mere transcript of fact, and is not inwardly organized and vivified by a spiritual significance. Children do not know what it is that makes a human being smile, move, and talk; but they know that such a phenomenon is infinitely more interesting than a doll; and they prove it by themselves supplying the doll with speech and motions out of their own minds, so as to make it as much like a real person as possible. In the same way, they do not perceive the philosophical truth which is the cause of existence of the hermetic fable; but they find that fable far more juicy and substantial than the ordinary narrative of every-day facts, because, however fine the surface of the latter may be, it has, after all, nothing but its surface to recommend it. It has no soul; it is not alive; and, though they cannot explain why, they feel the difference between that thin, fixed grimace and the changing smile of the living countenance.
It would scarcely be practicable, however, to confine the children’s reading to hermetic literature; for not much of it is extant in its pure state. But it is hardly too much to say that all fairy stories, and derivations from these, trace their descent from an hermetic ancestry. They are often unaware of their genealogy; but the sparks of that primal vitality are in them. The fairy is itself a symbol for the expression of a more complex and abstract idea; but, once having come into existence, and being, not a pure symbol, but a hybrid between the symbol and that for which it stands, it presently began an independent career of its own. The mediaeval imagination went to work with it, found it singularly and delightfully plastic to its touch and requirements, and soon made it the centre of a new and charming world, in which a whole army of graceful and romantic fancies, which are always in quest of an arena in which to disport themselves before the mind, found abundant accommodation and nourishment. The fairy land of mediaeval Christianity seems to us the most satisfactory of all fairy lands, probably because it is more in accord with our genius and prejudices than those of the East; and it fitted in so aptly with the popular mediaeval ignorance on the subject of natural phenomena, that it became actually an article of belief with the mass of men, who trembled at it while they invented it, in the most delicious imaginable state of enchanted alarm. All this is prime reading for children; because, though it does not carry an orderly spiritual meaning within it, it is more spiritual than material, and is constructed entirely according to the dictates of an exuberant and richly colored, but, nevertheless, in its own sphere, legitimate imagination. Indeed, fairy land, though as it were accidentally created, has the same permanent right to be that Beauty has; it agrees with a genuine aspect of human nature, albeit one much discountenanced just at present. The sequel to it, in which romantic human personages are accredited with fairy-like attributes, as in the “Faerie Queene,” already alluded to, is a step in the wrong direction, but not a step long enough to carry us altogether outside of the charmed circle. The child’s instinct of selection being vast and cordial,–he will make a grain of true imagination suffuse and glorify a whole acre of twaddle,—we may with security leave him in that fantastic society. Moreover, some children being less imaginative than others, and all children being less imaginative in some moods and conditions than at other seasons, the elaborate compositions of Tasso, Cervantes, and the others, though on the boundary line between what is meat for babes and the other sort of meat, have also their abiding use.
The “Arabian Nights” introduced us to the domain of the Oriental imagination, and has done more than all the books of travel in the East to make us acquainted with the Asiatic character and its differences from our own. From what has already been said on the subject of spiritual intuition in relation to these races, one is prepared to find that all the Eastern literature that has any value is hermetic writing, and therefore, in so far, proper for children. But the incorrigible subtlety of the Oriental intellect has vitiated much of their symbology, and the sentiment of sheer wonder is stimulated rather than that of orderly imagination. To read the “Arabian Nights” or the “Bhagavad-Gita” is a sort of dissipation; upon the unhackneyed mind of the child it leaves a reactionary sense of depression. The life which it embodies is distorted, over-colored, and exciting; it has not the serene and balanced power of the Western productions. Moreover, these books were not written with the grave philosophic purpose that animated our own hermetic school; it is rather a sort of jugglery practised with the subject—an exercise of ingenuity and invention for their own sake. It indicates a lack of the feeling of responsibility on the writers’ part,–a result, doubtless, of the prevailing fatalism that underlies all their thought. It is not essentially wholesome, in short; but it is immeasurably superior to the best of the productions called forth by our modern notions of what should be given to children to read.
But I can do no more than touch upon this branch of the subject; nor will it be possible to linger long over the department of our own literature which came into being with “Robinson Crusoe.” No theory as to children’s books would be worth much attention which found itself obliged to exclude that memorable work. Although it submits in a certain measure to classification, it is almost _sui generis_; no book of its kind, approaching it in merit, has ever been written. In what, then, does its fascination consist? There is certainly nothing hermetic about it; it is the simplest and most studiously matter-of-fact narrative of events, comprehensible without the slightest effort, and having no meaning that is not apparent on the face of it. And yet children, and grown people also, read it again and again, and cannot find it uninteresting. I think the phenomenon may largely be due to the nature of the subject, which is really of primary and universal interest to mankind. It is the story of the struggle of man with wild and hostile nature,–in the larger sense an elementary theme,–his shifts, his failures, his perils, his fears, his hopes, his successes. The character of Robinson is so artfully generalized or universalized, and sympathy for him is so powerfully aroused and maintained, that the reader, especially the child reader, inevitably identifies himself with him, and feels his emotions and struggles as his own. The ingredient of suspense is never absent from the story, and the absence of any plot prevents us from perceiving its artificiality. It is, in fact, a type of the history of the human race, not on the higher plane, but on the physical one; the history of man’s contest with and final victory over physical nature. The very simplicity and obviousness of the details give them grandeur and comprehensiveness: no part of man’s character which his contact with nature can affect or develop is left untried in Robinson. He manifests in little all historical earthly experiences of the race; such is the scheme of the book; and its permanence in literature is due to the sobriety and veracity with which that scheme is carried out. To speak succinctly, it does for the body what the hermetic and cognate literature does for the soul; and for the healthy man, the body is not less important than the soul in its own place and degree. It is not the work of the Creator, but it is contingent upon creation.
But poor Robinson has been most unfortunate in his progeny, which at this day overrun the whole earth, and render it a worse wilderness than ever was the immortal Crusoe Island. Miss Edgeworth, indeed, might fairly pose as the most persistently malignant of all sources of error in the design of children’s literature; but it is to be feared that it was Defoe who first made her aware of the availability of her own venom. She foisted her prim and narrow moral code upon the commonplace adventures of a priggish little boy and his companions; and straightway the whole dreary and disastrous army of sectarians and dogmatists took up the cry, and have been ringing the lugubrious changes on it ever since. There is really no estimating the mortal wrong that has been done to childhood by Maria Edgeworth’s “Frank” and “The Parent’s Assistant”; and, for my part, I derive a melancholy joy in availing myself of this opportunity to express my sense of my personal share in the injury. I believe that my affection for the human race is as genuine as the average; but I am sure it would have been greater had Miss Edgeworth never been born; and were I to come across any philosophical system whereby I could persuade myself that she belonged to some other order of beings than the human, I should be strongly tempted to embrace that system on that ground alone.
After what has been advanced in the preceding pages, it does not need that I should state how earnestly I deprecate the kind of literary food which we are now furnishing to the coming generation in such sinister abundance. I am sure it is written and published with good and honorable motives; but at the very best it can only do no harm. Moreover, however well intentioned, it is bad as literature; it is poorly conceived and written, and, what is worse, it is saturated with affectation. For an impression prevails that one needs to talk down to children;–to keep them constantly reminded that they are innocent, ignorant little things, whose consuming wish it is to be good and go to Sunday-school, and who will be all gratitude and docility to whomsoever provides them with the latest fashion of moral sugarplums; whereas, so far as my experience and information goes, children are the most formidable literary critics in the world. Matthew Arnold himself has not so sure an instinct for what is sound and good in a book as any intelligent little boy or girl of eight years old. They judge absolutely; they are hampered by no comparisons or relative considerations. They cannot give chapter and verse for their opinion; but about the opinion itself there is no doubt. They have no theories; they judge in a white light. They have no prejudices nor traditions; they come straight from the simple source of life. But, on the other hand, they are readily hocussed and made morbid by improper drugs, and presently, no doubt, lose their appetite for what is wholesome. Now, we cannot hope that an army of hermetic philosophers or Mother-Gooses will arise at need and remedy all abuses; but at least we might refrain from moralizing and instruction, and, if we can do nothing more, confine ourselves to plain stories of adventure, say, with no ulterior object whatever. There still remains the genuine literature of the past to draw upon; but let us beware, as we would of forgery and perjury, of serving it up, as has been done too often, medicated and modified to suit the foolish dogmatism of the moment. Hans Christian Andersen was the last writer of children’s stories, properly so called; though, considering how well married to his muse he was, it is a wonder as well as a calamity that he left no descendants.
CHAPTER V.
THE MORAL AIM IN FICTION.
The producers of modern fiction, who have acquiesced more or less completely in the theory of art for art’s sake, are not, perhaps, aware that a large class of persons still exist who hold fiction to be unjustifiable, save in so far as the author has it at heart not only (or chiefly) to adorn the tale, but also (and first of all) to point the moral. The novelist, in other words, should so mould the characters and shape the plot of his imaginary drama as to vindicate the wisdom and integrity of the Decalogue: if he fail to do this, or if he do the opposite of this, he deserves not the countenance of virtuous and God- fearing persons.
Doubtless it should be evident to every sane and impartial mind, whether orthodox or agnostic, that an art which runs counter to the designs of God toward the human race, or to the growth of the sentiment of universal human brotherhood, must sooner or later topple down from its fantastic and hollow foundation. “Hitch your wagon to a star,” says Emerson; “do not lie and steal: no god will help.” And although, for the sake of his own private interests of the moment, a man will occasionally violate the moral law, yet, with mankind at large, the necessity of vindicating the superior advantages of right over wrong is acknowledged not only in the interests of civilized society, but because we feel that, however hostile “goodness” may seem to be to my or your personal and temporary aims, it still remains the only wholesome and handsome choice for the race at large: and therefore do we, as a race, refuse to tolerate–on no matter how plausible an artistic plea–any view of human life which either professes indifference to this universal sentiment, or perversely challenges it.
The true ground of dispute, then, does not lie here. The art which can stoop to be “procuress to the lords of hell,” is art no longer. But, on the other hand, it would be difficult to point to any great work of art, generally acknowledged to be such, which explicitly concerns itself with the vindication of any specific moral doctrine. The story in which the virtuous are rewarded for their virtue, and the evil punished for their wickedness, fails, somehow, to enlist our full sympathy; it falls flatly on the ear of the mind; it does not stimulate thought. It does not satisfy; we fancy that something still remains to be said, or, if this be all, then it was hardly worth saying. The real record of life–its terror, its beauty, its pathos, its depth–seems to have been missed. We may admit that the tale is in harmony with what we have been taught ought to happen; but the lessons of our private experience have not authenticated our moral formulas; we have seen the evil exalted and the good brought low; and we inevitably desire that our “fiction” shall tell us, not what ought to happen, but what, as a matter of fact, does happen. To put this a little differently: we feel that the God of the orthodox moralist is not the God of human nature. He is nothing but the moralist himself in a highly sublimated state, but betraying, in spite of that sublimation, a fatal savor of human personality. The conviction that any man–George Washington, let us say–is a morally unexceptionable man, does not in the least reconcile us to the idea of God being an indefinitely exalted counterpart of Washington. Such a God would be “most tolerable, and not to be endured”; and the more exalted he was, the less endurable would he be. In short, man instinctively refuses to regard the literal inculcation of the Decalogue as the final word of God to the human race, and much less to the individuals of that race; and when he finds a story-teller proceeding upon the contrary assumption, he is apt to put that story-teller down as either an ass or a humbug.
As for art–if the reader happen to be competent to form an opinion on that phase of the matter–he will generally find that the art dwindles in direct proportion as the moralized deity expatiates; in fact, that they are incompatible. And he will also confess (if he have the courage of his opinions) that, as between moralized deity and true art, his choice is heartily and unreservedly for the latter.
I do not apprehend that the above remarks, fairly interpreted, will encounter serious opposition from either party to the discussion; and yet, so far as I am aware, neither party has as yet availed himself of the light which the conclusion throws upon the nature of art itself. It should be obvious, however, that upon a true definition of art the whole argument must ultimately hinge: for we can neither deny that art exists, nor affirm that it can exist inconsistently with a recognition of a divinely beneficent purpose in creation. It must, therefore, in some way be an expression or reflection of that purpose. But in what does the purpose in question essentially consist?
Broadly speaking–for it would be impossible within the present limits to attempt a full analysis of the subject–it may be considered as a gradual and progressive Purification, not of this or that particular individual in contradistinction to his fellows, but of human nature as an entirety. The evil into which all men are born, and of which the Decalogue, or conscience, makes us aware, is not an evil voluntarily contracted on our part, but is inevitable to us as the creation of a truly infinite love and wisdom. It is, in fact, our characteristic nature as animals: and it is only because we are not only animal, but also and above all human, that we are enabled to recognize it as evil instead of good. We absolve the cat, the dog, the wolf, and the lion from any moral responsibility for their deeds, because we feel them to be deficient in conscience, which, is our own divinely bestowed gift and privilege, and which has been defined as the spirit of God in the created nature, seeking to become the creature’s own spirit. Now, the power to correct this evil does not abide in us as individuals, nor will a literal adherence to the moral law avail to purify any mother’s son of us. Conscience always says “Do not,”–never “Do”; and obedience to it neither can give us a personal claim on God’s favor nor was it intended to do so: its true function is to keep us innocent, so that we may not individually obstruct the accomplishment of the divine ends toward us as a race. Our nature not being the private possession of any one of us, but the impersonal substratum of us all, it follows that it cannot be redeemed piecemeal, but only as a whole; and, manifestly, the only Being capable of effecting such redemption is not Peter, or Paul, or George Washington, or any other atomic exponent of that nature, be he who he may; but He alone whose infinitude is the complement of our finiteness, and whose gradual descent into human nature (figured in Scripture under the symbol of the Incarnation) is even now being accomplished–as any one may perceive who reads aright the progressive enlightenment of conscience and intellect which history, through many vicissitudes, displays. We find, therefore, that art is, essentially, the imaginative expression of a divine life in man. Art depends for its worth and veracity, not upon its adherence to literal fact, but upon its perception and portrayal of the underlying truth, of which fact is but the phenomenal and imperfect shadow. And it can have nothing to do with personal vice or virtue, in the way either of condemning the one or vindicating the other; it can only treat them as elements in its picture–as factors in human destiny. For the notion commonly entertained that the practice of virtue gives us a claim upon the Divine Exchequer (so to speak), and the habit of acting virtuously for the sake of maintaining our credit in society, and ensuring our prosperity in the next world,–in so thinking and acting we misapprehend the true inwardness of the matter. To cultivate virtue because its pays, no matter what the sort of coin in which payment is looked for, is to be the victims of a lamentable delusion. For such virtue makes each man jealous of his neighbor; whereas the aim of Providence is to bring about the broadest human fellowship. A man’s physical body separates him from other men; and this fact disposes him to the error that his nature is also a separate possession, and that he can only be “good” by denying himself. But the only goodness that is really good is a spontaneous and impersonal evolution, and this occurs, not where self- denial has been practised, but only where a man feels himself to be absolutely on the same level of desert or non-desert as are the mass of his fellow-creatures. There is no use in obeying the commandments, unless it be done, not to make one’s self more deserving than another of God’s approbation, but out of love for goodness and truth in themselves, apart from any personal considerations. The difference between true religion and formal religion is that the first leads us to abandon all personal claims to salvation, and to care only for the salvation of humanity as a whole; whereas the latter stimulates is to practise outward self-denial, in order that our real self may be exalted. Such self-denial results not in humility, but in spiritual pride.
In no other way than this, it seems to me, can art and morality be brought into harmony. Art bears witness to the presence in us of something purer and loftier than anything of which we can be individually conscious. Its complete expression we call inspiration; and he who is the subject of the inspiration can account no better than any one else for the result which art accomplishes through him. The perfect poem is found, not made; the mind which utters it did not invent it. Art takes all nature and all knowledge for her province; but she does not leave it as she found it; by the divine necessity that is upon her, she breathes a soul into her materials, and organizes chaos into form. But never, under any circumstances, does she deign to minister to our selfish personal hope or greed. She shows us how to love our neighbor, never ourselves. Shakspeare, Homer, Phidias, Raphael, were no Pharisees–at least in so far as they were artists; nor did any one ever find in their works any countenance for that inhuman assumption–“I am holier than thou!” In the world’s darkest hours, art has sometimes stood as the sole witness of the nobler life that was in eclipse. Civilizations arise and vanish; forms of religion hold sway and are forgotten; learning and science advance and gather strength; but true art was as great and as beautiful three thousand years ago as it is to-day. We are prone to confound the man with the artist, and to suppose that he is artistic by possession and inheritance, instead of exclusively by dint of what he does. No artist worthy the name ever dreams of putting himself into his work, but only what is infinitely distinct from and other than himself. It is not the poet who brings forth the poem, but the poem that begets the poet; it makes him, educates him, creates in him the poetic faculty. Those whom we call great men, the heroes of history, are but the organs of great crises and opportunities: as Emerson has said, they are the most indebted men. In themselves they are not great; there is no ratio between their achievements and them. Our judgment is misled; we do not discriminate between the divine purpose and the human instrument. When we listen to Napoleon fretting his soul away at Elba, or to Carlyle wrangling with his wife at Chelsea, we are shocked at the discrepancy between the lofty public performance and the petty domestic shortcoming. Yet we do wrong to blame them; the nature of which they are examples is the same nature that is shared also by the publican and the sinner.
Instead, therefore, of saying that art should be moral, we should rather say that all true morality is art–that art is the test of morality. To attempt to make this heavenly Pegasus draw the sordid plough of our selfish moralistic prejudices is a grotesque subversion of true order. Why should the novelist make believe that the wicked are punished and the good are rewarded in this world? Does he not know, on the contrary, that whatsoever is basest in our common life tends irresistibly to the highest places, and that the selfish element in our nature is on the side of public order? Evil is at present a more efficient instrument of order (because an interested one) than good; and the novelist who makes this appear will do a far greater and more lasting benefit to humanity than he who follows the cut-and-dried artificial programme of bestowing crowns on the saint and whips of scorpions on the sinner.
As a matter of fact, I repeat, the best influences of the best literature have never been didactic, and there is no reason to believe they ever will be. The only semblance of didacticism which can enter into literature is that which conveys such lessons as may be learned from sea and sky, mountain and valley, wood and stream, bird and beast; and from the broad human life of races, nations, and firesides; a lesson that is not obvious and superficial, but so profoundly hidden in the creative depths as to emerge only to an apprehension equally profound. For the chatter and affectation of sense disturb and offend that inward spiritual ear which, in the silent recesses of meditation, hears the prophetic murmur of the vast ocean of human nature that flows within us and around us all.
CHAPTER VI.
THE MAKER OF MANY BOOKS.
During the winter of 1879, when I was in London, it was my fortune to attend, a social meeting of literary men at the rooms of a certain eminent publisher. The rooms were full of tobacco-smoke and talk, amid which were discernible, on all sides, the figures and faces of men more or less renowned in the world of books. Most noticeable among these personages was a broad-shouldered, sturdy man, of middle height, with a ruddy countenance, and snow-white tempestuous beard and hair. He wore large, gold-rimmed spectacles, but his eyes were black and brilliant, and looked at his interlocutor with a certain genial fury of inspection. He seemed to be in a state of some excitement; he spoke volubly and almost boisterously, and his voice was full-toned and powerful, though pleasant to the ear. He turned himself, as he spoke, with a burly briskness, from one side to another, addressing himself first to this auditor and then to that, his words bursting forth from beneath his white moustache with such an impetus of hearty breath that it seemed as if all opposing arguments must be blown quite away. Meanwhile he flourished in the air an ebony walking-stick, with much vigor of gesticulation, and narrowly missing, as it appeared, the pates of his listeners. He was clad in evening dress, though the rest of the company was, for the most part, in mufti; and he was an exceedingly fine-looking old gentleman. At the first glance, you would have taken him to be some civilized and modernized Squire Western, nourished with beef and ale, and roughly hewn out of the most robust and least refined variety of human clay. Looking at him more narrowly, however, you would have reconsidered this judgment. Though his general contour and aspect were massive and sturdy, the lines of his features were delicately cut; his complexion was remarkably pure and fine, and his face was susceptible of very subtle and sensitive changes of expression. Here was a man of abundant physical strength and vigor, no doubt, but carrying within him a nature more than commonly alert and impressible. His organization, though thoroughly healthy, was both complex and high- wrought; his character was simple and straightforward to a fault, but he was abnormally conscientious, and keenly alive to others’ opinion concerning him. It might be thought that he was overburdened with self- esteem, and unduly opinionated; but, in fact, he was but overanxious to secure the good-will and agreement of all with whom he came in contact. There was some peculiarity in him–some element or bias in his composition that made him different from other men; but, on the other hand, there was an ardent solicitude to annul or reconcile this difference, and to prove himself to be, in fact, of absolutely the same cut and quality as all the rest of the world. Hence he was in a demonstrative, expository, or argumentative mood; he could not sit quiet in the face of a divergence between himself and his associates; he was incorrigibly strenuous to obliterate or harmonize the irreconcilable points between him and others; and since these points remained irreconcilable, he remained in a constant state of storm and stress on the subject.
It was impossible to help liking such a man at first sight; and I believe that no man in London society was more generally liked than Anthony Trollope. There was something pathetic in his attitude as above indicated; and a fresh and boyish quality always invested him. His artlessness was boyish, and so were his acuteness and his transparent but somewhat belated good-sense. He was one of those rare persons who not only have no reserves, but who can afford to dispense with them. After he had shown you all he had in him, you would have seen nothing that was not gentlemanly, honest, and clean. He was a quick-tempered man, and the ardor and hurry of his temperament made him seem more so than he really was; but he was never more angry than he was forgiving and generous. He was hurt by little things, and little things pleased him; he was suspicious and perverse, but in a manner that rather endeared him to you than otherwise. Altogether, to a casual acquaintance, who knew nothing of his personal history, he was something of a paradox–an entertaining contradiction. The publication of his autobiography explained many things in his character that were open to speculation; and, indeed, the book is not only the most interesting and amusing that its author has ever written, but it places its subject before the reader more completely and comprehensively than most autobiographies do. This, however, is due much less to any direct effort or intention on the writer’s part, than to the unconscious self-revelation which meets the reader on every page. No narrative could be simpler, less artificial; and yet, everywhere, we read between the lines, and, so to speak, discover Anthony Trollope in spite of his efforts to discover himself to us.
The truth appears to be that the youthful Trollope, like a more famous fellow-novelist, began the world with more kicks than half-pence. His boyhood, he affirms, was as unhappy as that of a young gentleman could well be, owing to a mixture of poverty and gentle standing on his father’s part, and, on his own, to “an utter lack of juvenile manhood”–whatever that may be. His father was a lawyer, who frightened away all his clients by his outrageous temper, and who encountered one mischance after another until he landed himself and his family in open bankruptcy; from which they were rescued, partly by death, which carried away four of them (including the old gentleman), and partly by Mrs. Trollope, who, at fifty years of age, brought out her famous book on America, and continued to make a fair income by literature (as she called it) until 1856, when, being seventy- six years old, and having produced one hundred and fourteen volumes, she permitted herself to retire. This extraordinary lady, in her youth, cherished what her son calls “an emotional dislike to tyrants”; but when her American experience had made her acquainted with some of the seamy aspects of democracy, and especially after the aristocracy of her own country had begun to patronize her, she confessed the error of her early way, “and thought that archduchesses were sweet.” But she was certainly a valiant and indefatigable woman,–“of all the people I have ever known,” says her son, “the most joyous, or, at any rate, the most capable of joy”; and he adds that her best novels were written in 1834-35, when her husband and four of her six children were dying upstairs of consumption, and she had to divide her time between nursing them and writing. Assuredly, no son of hers need apprehend the reproach–“_Tydides melior matre_”; though Anthony, and his brother Thomas Adolphus, must, together, have run her pretty hard. The former remarks, with that terrible complacency in an awful fact which is one of his most noticeable and astounding traits, that the three of them “wrote more books than were probably ever before produced by a single family.” The existence of a few more such families could be consistent only with a generous enlargement of the British Museum.
The elder Trollope was a scholar, and to make scholars of his sons was one of his ruling ideas. Poor little Anthony endured no less than twelve mortal years of schooling–from the time he was seven until he was nineteen–and declares that, in all that time, he does not remember that he ever knew a lesson. “I have been flogged,” he says, “oftener than any other human being.” Nay, his troubles began before his school-days; for his father used to make him recite his infantile tasks to him while he was shaving, and obliged him to sit with his head inclined in such a manner “that he could pull my hair without stopping his razor or dropping his shaving-brush.” This is a depressing picture; and there are plenty more like it. Dr. Butler, the master of Harrow, meeting the poor little draggletail urchin in the yard, desired to know, in awful accents, how so dirty a boy dared to show himself near the school! “He must have known me, had he seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps,” adds his victim, “he did not recognize me by my face!” But it is comforting to learn, in another place, that justice overtook the oppressor. “Dr. Butler only lived to be Dean of Peterborough; but his successor (Dr. Longley) became Archbishop of Canterbury.” There is a great deal of Trollopian morality in the fate of these two men, the latter of whom “could not have said anything ill- natured if he had tried.”
Black care, however, continued to sit behind the horseman with harrowing persistence. A certain Dr. Drury (another schoolmaster) punished him on suspicion of “some nameless horror,” of which the unfortunate youngster happened to be innocent. When, afterward, the latter fact began to be obvious, “he whispered to me half a word that perhaps he had been wrong. But, with a boy’s stupid slowness, I said nothing, and he had not the courage to carry reparation farther.” The poverty of Anthony’s father deprived the boy of all the external advantages that might have enabled him to take rank with his fellows: and his native awkwardness and sensitiveness widened the breach. “I had no friend to whom I could pour out my sorrows. I was big, awkward and ugly, and, I have no doubt, skulked about in a most unattractive manner. Something of the disgrace of my school-days has clung to me all through life. When I have been claimed as school-fellow by some of those many hundreds who were with me either at Harrow or at Winchester, I have felt that I had no right to talk of things from most of which I was kept in estrangement. I was never a coward, but to make a stand against three hundred tyrants required a moral courage which I did not possess.” Once, however, they pushed him too far, and he was driven to rebellion. “And then came a great fight–at the end of which my opponent had to be taken home to be cured.” And then he utters the characteristic wish that some one, of the many who witnessed this combat, may still be left alive “who will be able to say that, in claiming this solitary glory of my school-days, I am making no false boast.” The lonely, lugubrious little champion! One would almost have been willing to have received from him a black eye and a bloody nose, only to comfort his sad heart. It is delightful to imagine the terrific earnestness of that solitary victory: and I would like to know what boy it was (if any) who lent the unpopular warrior a knee and wiped his face.
After he got through his school-days, his family being then abroad, he had an offer of a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment; and he might have been a major-general or field-marshal at this day had his schooling made him acquainted with the French and German languages. Being, however, entirely ignorant of these, he was obliged to study them in order to his admission; and while he was thus employed, he received news of a vacant clerkship in the General Post-Office, with the dazzling salary of L90 a year. Needless to say that he jumped at such an opening, seeing before him a vision of a splendid civil and social career, at something over twenty pounds a quarter. But London, even fifty years ago, was a more expensive place than Anthony imagined. Moreover, the boy was alone in the wilderness of the city, with no one to advise or guide him. The consequence was that these latter days of his youth were as bad or worse than the beginning. In reviewing his plight at this period, he observes: “I had passed my life where I had seen gay things, but had never enjoyed them. There was no house in which I could habitually see a lady’s face or hear a lady’s voice. At the Post-Office I got credit for nothing, and was reckless. I hated my work, and, more than all, I hated my idleness. Borrowings of money, sometimes absolute want, and almost constant misery, followed as a matter of course. I Had a full conviction that my life was taking me down to the lowest pits–a feeling that I had been looked upon as an evil, an encumbrance, a useless thing, a creature of whom those connected with me had to be ashamed. Even my few friends were half-ashamed of me. I acknowledge the weakness of a great desire to be loved–a strong wish to be popular. No one had ever been less so.” Under these circumstances, he remarks that, although, no doubt, if the mind be strong enough, the temptation will not prevail, yet he is fain to admit that the temptation prevailed with him. He did not sit at home, after his return from the office, in the evening, to drink tea and read, but tramped out in the streets, and tried to see life and be jolly on L90 a year. He borrowed four pounds of a money-lender, to augment his resources, and found, after a few years, that he had paid him two hundred pounds for the accommodation. He met with every variety of absurd and disastrous adventure. The mother of a young woman with whom he had had an innocent flirtation in the country appeared one day at his desk in the office, and called out before all the clerks, “Anthony Trollope, when are you going to marry my daughter?” On another occasion a sum of money was missing from the table of the director. Anthony was summoned. The director informed him of the loss–“and, by G–!” he continued, thundering his fist down on the table, “no one has been in the room but you and I.” “Then, by G–!” cried Anthony, thundering _his_ fist down upon something, “you have taken it!” This was very well; but the thing which Anthony had thumped happened to be, not a table, but a movable desk with an inkstand on it, and the ink flew up and deluged the face and shirt-front of the enraged director. Still another adventure was that of the Queen of Saxony and the Half- Crown; but the reader must investigate these matters for himself.
So far there has been nothing looking toward the novel-writer. But now we learn that from the age of fifteen to twenty-six Anthony kept a journal, which, he says, “convicted me of folly, ignorance, indiscretion, idleness, and conceit, but habituated me to the rapid use of pen and ink, and taught me how to express myself with facility.” In addition to this, and more to the purpose, he had formed an odd habit. Living, as he was forced to do, so much to himself, if not by himself, he had to play, not with other boys, but with himself; and his favorite play was to conceive a tale, or series of fictitious events, and to carry it on, day after day, for months together, in his mind. “Nothing impossible was ever introduced, or violently improbable. I was my own hero, but I never became a king or a duke, still less an Antinous, or six feet high. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful young women used to be very fond of me. I learned in this way to live in a world outside the world of my own material life.” This is pointedly, even touchingly, characteristic. Never, to the day of his death, did Mr. Trollope either see or imagine anything impossible, or violently improbable, in the world. This mortal plane of things never dissolved before his gaze and revealed the mysteries of absolute Being; his heavens were never rolled up as a scroll, and his earth had no bubbles as the water hath. He took things as he found them; and he never found them out. But if the light that never was on sea or land does not illuminate the writings of Mr. Trollope, there is generally plenty of that other kind of light with which, after all, the average reader is more familiar, and which not a few, perhaps, prefer to the transcendental lustre. There is no modern novelist who has more clearly than Trollope defined to his own apprehension his own literary capabilities and limitations. He is thoroughly acquainted with both his fortes and his foibles; and so sound is his good sense, that he is seldom beguiled into toiling with futile ambition after effects that are beyond him. His proper domain is a sufficiently wide one; he is inimitably at home here; and when he invites us there to visit him, we may be sure of getting good and wholesome entertainment. The writer’s familiarity with his characters communicates itself imperceptibly to the reader; there are no difficult or awkward introductions; the toning of the picture (to use the painter’s phrase) is unexceptionable; and if it be rather tinted than colored, the tints are handled in a workmanlike manner. Again, few English novelists seem to possess so sane a comprehension of the modes of life and thought of the British aristocracy as Trollope. He has not only made a study of them from the observer’s point of view, but he has reasoned them out intellectually. The figures are not vividly defined; the realism is applied to events rather than to personages: we have the scene described for us but we do not look upon it. We should not recognize his characters if we saw them; but if we were told who they were, we should know, from their author’s testimony, what were their characteristic traits and how they would act under given circumstances. The logical sequence of events is carefully maintained; nothing happens, either for good or for evil, other than might befall under the dispensations of a Providence no more unjust, and no more far-sighted, than Trollope himself. There is a good deal of the _a priori_ principle in his method; he has made up his mind as to certain fundamental data, and thence develops or explains whatever complication comes up for settlement. But to range about unhampered by any theories, concerned only to examine all phenomena, and to report thereupon, careless of any considerations save those of artistic propriety, would have been vanity and striving after wind to Trollope, and derivatively so, doubtless, to his readers.
Considered in the abstract, it is a curious question what makes his novels interesting. The reader knows, in a sense, just what is in store for him, –or, rather, what is not. There will be no astonishment, no curdling horror, no consuming suspense. There may be, perhaps, as many murders, forgeries, foundlings, abductions, and missing wills, in Trollope’s novels as in any others; but they are not told about in a manner to alarm us; we accept them philosophically; there are paragraphs in our morning paper that excite us more. And yet they are narrated with art, and with dramatic effect. They are interesting, but not uncourteously–not exasperatingly so; and the strangest part of it is that the introductory and intermediate passages are no less interesting, under Trollope’s treatment, than are the murders and forgeries. Not only does he never offend the modesty of nature,–he encourages her to be prudish, and trains her to such evenness and severity of demeanor that we never know when we have had enough of her. His touch is eminently civilizing; everything, from the episodes to the sentences, moves without hitch or creak: we never have to read a paragraph twice, and we are seldom sorry to have read it once.
Amusingly characteristic of Trollope is his treatment of his villains. His attitude toward them betrays no personal uncharitableness or animosity, but the villain has a bad time of it just the same. Trollope places upon him a large, benevolent, but unyielding forefinger, and says to us: “Remark, if you please, how this inferior reptile squirms when pressure is applied to him. I will now augment the pressure. You observe that the squirmings increase in energy and complexity. Now, if you please, I will bear down yet a little harder. Do not be alarmed, madam; the reptile undoubtedly suffers, but the spectacle may do us some good, and you may trust me not to let him do you any harm. There!–Yes, evisceration by means of pressure is beyond question painful; but every one must have observed the benevolence of my forefinger during the operation; and I fancy even the subject of the experiment (were he in a condition to express his sentiments) would have admitted as much. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I shall have the pleasure of meeting you again very shortly. John, another reptile, please!” Upon the whole, it is much to Trollope’s credit that he wrote somewhere about fifty long novels; and to the credit of the English people that they paid him three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for these novels–and read them!
But his success as a man of letters was still many years in the future. After seven years in the London office, he went to Ireland as assistant surveyor, and thenceforward he began to enjoy his business, and to get on in it. He was paid sixpence a mile, and he would ride forty miles a day. He rode to hounds, incidentally, whenever he got a chance, and he kept up the practice, with enthusiasm, to within a few years of his death. “It will, I think, be accorded to me,” he says, “that I have ridden hard. I know very little about hunting; I am blind, very heavy, and I am now old; but I ride with a boy’s energy, hating the roads, and despising young men who ride them; and I feel that life cannot give me anything better than when I have gone through a long run to the finish, keeping a place, not of glory, but of credit, among my juniors.” Riding, working, having a jolly time, and gradually increasing his income, he lived until 1842, when he became engaged; and he was married on June 11, 1844. “I ought to name that happy day,” he declares, “as the commencement of my better life.” It was at about this date, also, that he began and finished, not without delay and procrastination, his first novel. Curiously enough, he affirms that he did not doubt his own intellectual sufficiency to write a readable novel: “What I did doubt was my own industry, and the chances of a market.” Never, surely, was self-distrust more unfounded. As for the first novel, he sent it to his mother, to dispose of as best she could; and it never brought him anything, except a perception that it was considered by his friends to be “an unfortunate aggravation of the family disease.” During the ensuing ten years, this view seemed to be not unreasonable, for, in all that time, though he worked hard, he earned by literature no more than L55. But, between 1857 and 1860, he received for various novels, from L100 to L1000 each; and thereafter, L3000 or more was his regular price for a story in three volumes. As he maintained his connection with the post- office until 1867, he was in receipt of an income of L4500, “of which I spent two-thirds and put by one.” We should be doing an injustice to Mr. Trollope to omit these details, which he gives so frankly; for, as he early informs us, “my first object in taking to literature was to make an income on which I and those belonging to me might live in comfort.” Nor will he let us forget that novel-writing, to him, was not so much an art, or even a profession, as a trade, in which all that can be asked of a man is that he shall be honest and punctual, turning out good average work, and the more the better. “The great secret consists in”–in what?–why, “in acknowledging myself to be bound to rules of labor similar to those which an artisan or mechanic is forced to obey.” There may be, however, other incidental considerations. “I have ever thought of myself as a preacher of sermons, and my pulpit as one I could make both salutary and agreeable to my audience”; and he tells us that he has used some of his novels for the expression of his political and social convictions. Again– “The novelist must please, and he must teach; a good novel should be both realistic and sensational in the highest degree.” He says that he sees no reason why two or three good novels should not be written at the same time; and that, for his own part, he was accustomed to write two hundred and fifty words every fifteen minutes, by the watch, during his working hours. Nor does he mind letting us know that when he sits down to write a novel, he neither knows nor cares how it is to end. And finally, one is a little startled to hear him say, epigrammatically, that a writer should not have to tell a story, but should have a story to tell. Beyond a doubt, Anthony Trollope is something of a paradox.
The world has long ago passed its judgment on his stories, but it is interesting, all the same, to note his own opinion of them; and though never arrogant, he is generally tolerant, if not genial. “A novel should be a picture of common life, enlivened by humor and sweetened by pathos. I have never fancied myself to be a man of genius,” he says; but again, with strange imperviousness, “A small daily task, if it be daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules.” Beat them, how? Why, in quantity. But how about quality? Is the travail of a work of art the same thing as the making of a pair of shoes? Emerson tells us that–
“Ever the words of the gods resound, But the porches of man’s ear
Seldom, in this low life’s round,
Are unsealed, that he may hear.”
No one disputes, however, that you may hear the tapping of the cobbler’s hammer at any time.
To the view of the present writer, how much good soever Mr. Trollope may have done as a preacher and moralist, he has done great harm to English fictitious literature by his novels; and it need only be added, in this connection, that his methods and results in novel-writing seem best to be explained by that peculiar mixture of separateness and commonplaceness which we began by remarking in him. The separateness has given him the standpoint whence he has been able to observe and describe the commonplaceness with which (in spite of his separateness) he is in vital sympathy.
But Trollope the man is the abundant and consoling compensation for Trollope the novelist; and one wishes that his books might have died, and he lived on indefinitely. It is charming to read of his life in London after his success in the _Cornhill Magazine_. “Up to that time I had lived very little among men. It was a festival to me to dine at the ‘Garrick.’ I think I became popular among those with whom I associated. I have ever wished to be liked by those around me–a wish that during the first half of my life was never gratified.” And, again, in summing up his life, he says: “I have betrayed no woman. Wine has brought to me no sorrow. It has been the companionship, rather than the habit of smoking that I loved. I have never desired to win money, and I have lost none. To enjoy the excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its vices and ill-effects–to have the sweet, and to leave the bitter untasted–that has been my study. I will not say that I have never scorched a finger; but I carry no ugly wounds.”
A man who, at the end of his career, could make such a profession as this –who felt the need of no further self-vindication than this–such a man, whatever may have been his accountability to the muse of Fiction, is a credit to England and to human nature, and deserves to be numbered among the darlings of mankind. It was an honor to be called his friend; and what his idea of friendship was, may be learned from the passage in which he speaks of his friend Millais–with the quotation of which this paper may fitly be concluded:–
“To see him has always been a pleasure; his voice has always been a sweet sound in my ears. Behind his back I have never heard him praised without joining the eulogist; I have never heard a word spoken against him without opposing the censurer. These words, should he ever see them, will come to him from the grave, and will tell him of my regard–as one living man never tells another.”
CHAPTER VII.
MR. MALLOCK’S MISSING SCIENCE.
Before criticising Mr. Mallock’s little essay, let us summarize its contents. The author begins with an analysis of the aims, the principles, and the “pseudo-science” of modern Democracy. Having established the evil and destructive character of these things, he sets himself to show by logical argument that the present state of social inequality, which Democrats wish to disturb, is a natural and wholesome state; that the continuance of civilization is dependent upon it; and that it could only be overturned by effecting a radical change–not in human institutions, but in human character. The desire for inequality is inherent in the human character; and in order to prove this statement, Mr. Mallock proceeds to affirm that there is such a thing as a science of human character; that of this science he is the discoverer; and that the application of this science to the question at issue will demonstrate the integrity of Mr. Mallock’s views, and the infirmity of all others. In the ensuing chapters the application is made, and at the end the truth of the proposition is declared established.
This is the outline; but let us note some of the details. Mr. Mallock asserts (Chap. I.) that the aim of modern Democracy is to overturn “all that has hitherto been connected with high-breeding or with personal culture”; and that “to call the Democrats a set of thieves and confiscators is merely to apply names to them which they have no wish to repudiate.” He maintains (Chap. II.) that the first and foremost of the Democratic principles is “that the perfection of society involves social equality”; and that “the luxury of one man means the deprivation of another.” He credits the Democrats with arguing that “the means of producing equality are a series of changes in existing institutions”; that “by changing the institutions of a society we are able to change its structure”; that “the cause of the distribution of wealth” is “laws and forms of government”; and that “the wealthy classes, as such, are connected with wealth in no other way but as the accidental appropriators of it.” In his third chapter he tells us that “the entire theory of modern Democracy … depends on the doctrine that the cause of wealth is labor”; that Democrats believe we “may count on a man to labor, just as surely as we may count on a man to eat”; that “the man who does not labor is supported by the man who does”; and that the pseudo-science of modern Democracy “starts with the conception of man as containing in himself a natural tendency to labor.” And here Mr. Mallock’s statement of his opponent’s position ends.
In the fourth chapter we are brought within sight of “The Missing Substitute.” “A man’s character,” we are told, “divides into his desires on the one hand, and his capacities on the other”; and it is observed that “various as are men’s desires and capacities, yet if talent and ambition commanded no more than idleness and stupidity, all men practically would be idle and stupid.” “Men’s capacities,” we are reminded, “are practically unequal, because they develop their own potential inequalities; they do this because they desire to place themselves in unequal external circumstances,–which result the condition of society renders possible.”
Coming now to the Science of Human Character itself, we find that it “asserts a permanent relationship to exist between human character and social inequality”; and the author then proceeds at some length to show how near Herbert Spencer, Buckle, and other social and economic philosophers, came to stumbling over his missing science, and yet avoided doing so. Nevertheless, argues Mr. Mallock, “if there be such a thing as a social science, or a science of history, there must be also a science of biography”; and this science, though it “cannot show us how any special man will act in the future,” yet, if “any special action be given us, it can show us that it was produced by a special motive; and conversely, that if the special motive be wanting, the special action is sure to be wanting also.” As an example how to distinguish between those traits of human character which are available for scientific purposes, and those which are not, Mr. Mallock instances a mob, which temporarily acts together for some given purpose: the individual differences of character then “cancel out,” and only points of agreement are left. Proceeding to the sixth chapter, he applies himself to setting to rest the scruples of those who find something cynical in the idea that the desire for Inequality is compatible with a respectable form of human character. It is true, he says, that man does not live by bread alone; but he denies that he means to say “that all human activity is motived by the desire for inequality”; he would assert that only “of all productive labor, except the lowest.” The only actions independent of the desire for inequality, however, are those performed in the name of art, science, philanthropy, and religion; and even in these cases, so far as the actions are not motived by a desire for inequality, they are not of productive use; and _vice versa_. In the remaining chapters, which we must dismiss briefly, we meet with such statements as “labor has been produced by an artificial creation of want of food, and by then supplying the want on certain conditions”; that “civilization has always been begun by an oppressive minority”; that “progress depends on certain gifted individuals,” and therefore social equality would destroy progress; that inequality influences production by existing as an object of desire and as a means of pressure; that the evils of poverty are caused by want, not by inequality; and that, finally, equality is not the goal of progress, but of retrogression; that inequality is not an accidental evil of civilization, but the cause of its development; the distance of the poor from the rich is not the cause of the former’s poverty as distinct from riches, but of their civilized competence as distinct from barbarism; and that the apparent changes in the direction of equality recorded in history, have been, in reality, none other than “a more efficient arrangement of inequalities.”
* * * * *
Now, let us inquire what all this ingenious prattle about Inequality and the Science of Human Character amounts to. What does Mr. Mallock expect? His book has been out six months, and still Democracy exists. But does any such Democracy as he combats exist, or could it conceivably exist? Have his investigations of the human character failed to inform him that one of the strongest natural instincts of man’s nature is immovably opposed to anything like an equal distribution of existing wealth?–because whoever owns anything, if it be only a coat, wishes to keep it; and that wish makes him aware that his fellow-man will wish to keep, and will keep at all hazards, whatever things belong to him. What Democrats really desire is to enable all men to have an equal chance to obtain wealth, instead of being, as is largely the case now, hampered and kept down by all manner of legal and arbitrary restrictions. As for the “desire for Inequality,” it seems to exist chiefly in Mr. Mallock’s imagination. Who does desire it? Does the man who “strikes” for higher wages desire it? Let us see. A strike, to be successful, must be not an individual act, but the act of a large body of men, all demanding the same thing–an increase in wages. If they gain their end, no difference has taken place in their mutual position; and their position in regard to their employers is altered only in that an approach has been made toward greater equality with the latter. And so in other departments of human effort: the aim, which the man who wishes to better his position sets before himself, is not to rise head and shoulders above his equals, but to equal his superiors. And as to the Socialist schemes for the reorganization of society, they imply, at most, a wish to see all men start fair in the race of life, the only advantages allowed being not those of rank or station, but solely of innate capacity. And the reason the Socialist desires this is, because he believes, rightly or wrongly, that many inefficient men are, at present, only artificially protected from betraying their inefficiency; and that many efficient men are only artificially prevented from showing their efficiency; and that the fair start he proposes would not result in keeping all men on a dead level, but would simply put those in command who had a genuine right to be there.
* * * * *
But this is taxing Mr. Mallock too seriously: he has not written in earnest. But, as his uncle, Mr. Froude, said, when reading “The New Republic,”–“The rogue is clever!” He has read a good deal, he has an active mind, a smooth redundancy of expression, a talent for caricature, a fondness for epigram and paradox, a useful shallowness, and an amusing impudence. He has no practical knowledge of mankind, no experience of life, no commanding point of view, and no depth of insight. He has no conception of the meaning and quality of the problems with whose exterior aspects he so prettily trifles. He has constructed a Science of Human Character without for one moment being aware that, for instance, human character and human nature are two distinct things; and that, furthermore, the one is everything that the other is not. As little is he conscious of the significance of the words “society” and “civilization”; nor can he explain whether, or why, either of them is desirable or undesirable, good or bad. He has never done, and (judging from his published works) we do not believe him capable of doing, any analytical or constructive thinking; at most, as in the present volume, he turns a few familiar objects upside down, and airily invites his audience to believe that he has thereby earned the name of Discoverer, if not of Creator.
CHAPTER VIII.
THEODORE WINTHROP’S WRITINGS.
On an accessible book-shelf in my library, stand side by side four volumes whose contents I once knew by heart, and which, after the lapse of twenty years, are yet tolerably distinct in my memory. These are stoutly bound in purple muslin, with a stamp, of Persian design apparently, on the centre of each cover. They are stained and worn, and the backs have faded to a brownish hue, from exposure to the light, and a leaf in one of the volumes has been torn across; but the paper and the sewing and the clear bold type are still as serviceable as ever. The books seem to have been made to last,–to stand a great deal of reading. Contrasted with the aesthetically designed covers one sees nowadays, they would be considered inexcusably ugly, and the least popular novelist of our time would protest against having his lucubrations presented to the public in such plain attire. Nevertheless, on turning to the title-pages, you may see imprinted, on the first, “Fourteenth Edition”; on the second, “Twelfth Edition”; and on the others, indications somewhat less magnificent, but still evidence of very exceptional circulation. The date they bear is that of the first years of our civil war; and the first published of them is prefaced by a biographical memoir of the author, written by his friend George William Curtis. This memoir was originally printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_, two or three months after the death of its subject, Theodore Winthrop.
For these books,–three novels, and one volume of records of travel,–came from his hand, though they did not see the light until after he had passed beyond the sphere of authors and publishers. At that time, the country was in an exalted and heroic mood, and the men who went to fight its battles were regarded with a personal affection by no means restricted to their personal acquaintances. Their names were on all lips, and those of them who fell were mourned by multitudes instead of by individuals. Winthrop’s historic name, and the influential position of some of his nearest friends, would have sufficed to bring into unusual prominence his brief career and his fate as a soldier, even had his intrinsic qualities and character been less honorable and winning than they were. But he was a type of a young American such as America is proud to own. He was high- minded, refined, gifted, handsome. I recollect a portrait of him published soon after his death,–a photograph, I think, from a crayon drawing; an eloquent, sensitive, rather melancholy, but manly and courageous face, with grave eyes, the mouth veiled by a long moustache. It was the kind of countenance one would wish our young heroes to have. When, after the catastrophe at Great Bethel, it became known that Winthrop had left writings behind him, it would have been strange indeed had not every one felt a desire to read them.
Moreover, he had already begun to be known as a writer. It was during 1860, I believe, that a story of his, in two instalments, entitled “Love on Skates,” appeared in the “Atlantic.” It was a brilliant and graphic celebration of the art of skating, engrafted on a love-tale as full of romance and movement as could be desired. Admirably told it was, as I recollect it; crisp with the healthy vigor of American wintry atmosphere, with bright touches of humor, and, here and there, passages of sentiment, half tender, half playful. It was something new in our literature, and gave promise of valuable work to come. But the writer was not destined to fulfil the promise. In the next year, from the camp of his regiment, he wrote one or two admirable descriptive sketches, touching upon the characteristic points of the campaigning life which had just begun; but, before the last of these had become familiar to the “Atlantic’s” readers, it was known that it would be the last. Theodore Winthrop had been killed.
He was only in his thirty-third year. He was born in New Haven, and had entered Yale College with the class of ’48. The Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity was, I believe, founded in the year of his admission, and he must, therefore, have been among its earliest members. He was distinguished as a scholar, and the traces of his classic and philosophical acquirements are everywhere visible in his books. During the five or six years following his graduation, he travelled abroad, and in the South and West; a wild frontier life had great attractions for him, as he who reads “John Brent” and “The Canoe and the Saddle” need not be told. He tried his hand at various things, but could settle himself to no profession,–an inability which would have excited no remark in England, which has had time to recognize the value of men of leisure, as such; but which seems to have perplexed some of his friends in this country. Be that as it may, no one had reason to complain of lack of energy and promptness on his part when patriotism revealed a path to Winthrop. He knew that the time for him had come; but he had also known that the world is not yet so large that all men, at all times, can lay their hands upon the work that is suitable for them to do.
Let us, however, return to the novels. They appear to have been written about 1856 and 1857, when their author was twenty-eight or nine years old. Of the order in which they were composed I have no record; but, judging from internal evidence, I should say that “Edwin Brothertoft” came first, then “Cecil Dreeme,” and then “John Brent.” The style, and the quality of thought, in the latter is more mature than in the others, and its tone is more fresh and wholesome. In the order of publication, “Cecil Dreeme” was first, and seems also to have been most widely read; then “John Brent,” and then “Edwin Brothertoft,” the scene of which was laid in the last century. I remember seeing, at the house of James T. Fields, their publisher, the manuscripts of these books, carefully bound and preserved. They were written on large ruled letter-paper, and the handwriting was very large, and had a considerable slope. There were scarcely any corrections or erasures; but it is possible that Winthrop made clean copies of his stories after composing them. Much of the dialogue, especially, bears evidence of having been revised, and of the author’s having perhaps sacrificed ease and naturalness, here and there, to the craving for conciseness which has been one of the chief stumbling-blocks in the way of our young writers. He wished to avoid heaviness and “padding,” and went to the other extreme. He wanted to cut loose from the old, stale traditions of composition, and to produce something which should be new, not only in character and significance, but in manner of presentation. He had the ambition of the young Hafiz, who professed a longing to “tear down this tiresome old sky.” But the old sky has good reasons for being what and where it is, and young radicals finally come to perceive that, regarded from the proper point of view, and in the right spirit, it is not so tiresome after all. Divine Revelation itself can be expressed in very moderate and commonplace language; and if one’s thoughts are worth thinking, they are worth clothing in adequate and serene attire.
But “culture,” and literature with it, have made such surprising advances of late, that we are apt to forget how really primitive and unenlightened the generation was in which Winthrop wrote. Imagine a time when Mr. Henry James, Jr., and Mr. W. D. Howells had not been heard of; when Bret Harte was still hidden below the horizon of the far West; when no one suspected that a poet named Aldrich would ever write a story called “Marjorie Daw”; when, in England, “Adam Bede” and his successors were unborn;–a time of antiquity so remote, in short, that the mere possibility of a discussion upon the relative merit of the ideal and the realistic methods of fiction was undreamt of! What had an unfortunate novelist of those days to fall back upon? Unless he wished to expatriate himself, and follow submissively in the well worn steps of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, the only models he could look to were Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Foe, James Fenimore Cooper, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. “Elsie Venner” had scarcely made its appearance at that date. Irving and Cooper were, on the other hand, somewhat antiquated. Poe and Hawthorne were men of very peculiar genius, and, however deep the impression they have produced on our literature, they have never had, because they never can have, imitators. As for the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she was a woman in the first place, and, in the second place, she sufficiently filled the field she had selected. A would-be novelist, therefore, possessed of ambition, and conscious of not being his own father or grandfather, saw an untrodden space before him, into which he must plunge without support and without guide. No wonder if, at the outset, he was a trifle awkward and ill-at-ease, and, like a raw recruit under fire, appeared affected from the very desire he felt to look unconcerned. It is much to his credit that he essayed the venture at all; and it is plain to be seen that, with each forward step he took, his self- possession and simplicity increased. If time had been given him, there is no reason to doubt that he might have been standing at the head of our champions of fiction to-day.
But time was not given him, and his work, like all other work, if it is to be judged at all, must be judged on its merits. He excelled most in passages descriptive of action; and the more vigorous and momentous the action, the better, invariably, was the description; he rose to the occasion, and was not defeated by it. Partly for this reason, “Cecil Dreeme,” the most popular of his books, seems to me the least meritorious of them all. The story has little movement; it stagnates round Chrysalis College. The love intrigue is morbid and unwholesome, and the characters (which are seldom Winthrop’s strong point) are more than usually artificial and unnatural. The _dramatis personae_ are, indeed, little more than moral or immoral principles incarnate. There is no growth in them, no human variableness or complexity; it is “Every Man in his Humor” over again, with the humor left out. Densdeth is an impossible rascal; Churm, a scarcely more possible Rhadamanthine saint. Cecil Dreeme herself never fully recovers from the ambiguity forced upon her by her masculine attire; and Emma Denman could never have been both what we are told she was, and what she is described as being. As for Robert Byng, the supposed narrator of the tale, his name seems to have been given him in order wantonly to increase the confusion caused by the contradictory traits with which he is accredited. The whole atmosphere of the story is unreal, fantastic, obscure. An attempt is made to endow our poor, raw New York with something of the stormy and ominous mystery of the immemorial cities of Europe. The best feature of the book (morbidness aside) is the construction of the plot, which shows ingenuity and an artistic perception of the value of mystery and moral compensation. It recalls, in some respects, the design of Hawthorne’s “Blithedale Romance,”–that is, had the latter never been written, the former would probably have been written differently. In spite of its faults, it is an interesting book, and, to the critical eye, there are in almost every chapter signs that indicate the possession of no ordinary gifts on the author’s part. But it may be doubted whether the special circumstances under which it was published had not something to do with its wide popularity. I imagine “John Brent” to have been really much more popular, in the better sense; it was read and liked by a higher class of readers. It is young ladies and school-girls who swell the numbers of an “edition,” and hence the difficulty in arguing from this as to the literary merit of the book itself.
“Edwin Brothertoft,” though somewhat disjointed in construction, and jerky in style, is yet a picturesque and striking story; and the gallop of the hero across country and through the night to rescue from the burning house the woman who had been false to him, is vigorously described, and gives us some foretaste of the thrill of suspense and excitement we feel in reading the story of the famous “Gallop of three” in “John Brent.” The writer’s acquaintance with the history of the period is adequate, and a romantic and chivalrous tone is preserved throughout the volume. It is worth noting that, in all three of Winthrop’s novels, a horse bears a part in the crisis of the tale. In “Cecil Dreeme” it is Churm’s pair of trotters that convey the party of rescuers to the private Insane Asylum in which Densdeth had confined the heroine. In “Edwin Brothertoft,” it is one of Edwin’s renowned breed of white horses that carries him through almost insuperable obstacles to his goal. In “John Brent,” the black stallion, Don Fulano, who is throughout the chief figure in the book, reaches his apogee in the tremendous race across the plains and down the rocky gorge of the mountains, to where the abductors of the heroine are just about to pitch their camp at the end of their day’s journey. The motive is fine and artistic, and, in each of the books, these incidents are as good as, or better then, anything else in the narrative.
“John Brent” is, in fact, full enough of merit to more than redeem its defects. The self-consciousness of the writer is less noticeable than in the other works, and the effort to be epigrammatic, short, sharp, and “telling” in style, is considerably modified. The interest is lively, continuous, and cumulative; and there is just enough tragedy in the story to make the happy ending all the happier. It was a novel and adventurous idea to make a horse the hero of a tale, and the manner in which the idea is carried out more than justifies the hazard. Winthrop, as we know, was an ideal horseman, and knows what he is writing about. He contrives to realize Don Fulano for us, in spite of the almost supernatural powers and intelligence that he ascribes to the gallant animal. One is willing to stretch a point of probability when such a dashing and inspiring end is in view. In the present day we are getting a little tired of being brought to account, at every turn, by Old Prob., who tyrannizes over literature quite as much as over the weather. Theodore Winthrop’s inspiration, in this instance at least, was strong and genuine enough to enable him to feel what he was telling as the truth, and therefore it produces an effect of truth upon the reader. How distinctly every incident of that ride remains stamped on the memory, even after so long an interval as has elapsed since it was written! And I recollect that one of the youthful devourers of this book, who was of an artistic turn, was moved to paint three little water- color pictures of the Gallop; the first showing the three horses,–the White, the Gray, and the Black, scouring across the prairie, towards the barrier of mountains behind which the sun was setting; the second depicting Don Fulano, with Dick Wade and John Brent on his back, plunging down the gorge upon the abductors, one of whom had just pulled the trigger of his rifle; while the third gives the scene in which the heroic horse receives his death-wound in carrying the fugitive across the creek away from his pursuers. At this distance of time, I am unable to bear any testimony as to the technical value of the little pictures; I am inclined to fancy that they would have to be taken _cum grano amoris_, as they certainly were executed _con amore_. But, however that may be, the instance (which was doubtless only one of many analogous to it) shows that Winthrop possessed the faculty of stimulating and electrifying the imagination of his readers, which all our recent improvements in the art and artifice of composition have not made too common, and for which, if for nothing else, we might well feel indebted to him.
CHAPTER IX.
EMERSON AS AN AMERICAN.
It is not with Americans as with other peoples. Our position is more vague and difficult, because it is not primarily related to the senses. I can easily find out where England or Prussia is, and recognize an Englishman or German when we meet; but we Americans are not, to the same extent as these, limited by geographical and physical boundaries. The origin of America was not like that of the European nations; the latter were born after the flesh, but we after the spirit. It is of the first consequence to them that their frontiers should be defended, and their nationality kept distinct. But, though I esteem highly all our innumerable square miles of East and West, North and South, and our Pacific and Atlantic coasts, I cannot help deeming them quite a secondary consideration. If America is not a great deal more than these United States, then the United States are no better than a penal colony. It is convenient, no doubt, for a great idea to find a great embodiment–a suitable incarnation and stage; but the idea does not depend upon these things. It is an accidental–or, I would rather say, a Providential–matter that the Puritans came to New England, or that Columbus discovered the continent in time for them; but it has always happened that when a soul is born it finds a body ready fitted to it. The body, however, is an instrument merely; it enables the spirit to take hold of its mortal life, just as the hilt enables us to grasp the sword. If the Puritans had not come to New England, still the spirit that animated them would have lived, and made itself a place somehow. And, in fact, how many Puritans, for how many ages previous, had been trying to find standing-room in the world, and failed! They called themselves by many names; their voices were heard in many countries; the time had not yet come for them to be born–to touch their earthly inheritance; but, meantime, the latent impetus was accumulating, and the Mayflower was driven across the Atlantic by it at last. Nor is this all– the Mayflower is sailing still between the old world and the new. Every day it brings new settlers, if not to our material harbors–to our Boston Bay, our Castle Garden, our Golden Gate–at any rate, to our mental ports and wharves. We cannot take up a European newspaper without finding an American idea in it. It is said that a great many of our countrymen take the steamer to England every summer. But they come back again; and they bring with them many who come to stay. I do not refer specially to the occupants of the steerage–the literal emigrants. One cannot say much about them–they may be Americans or not, as it turns out. But England and the continent are full of Americans who were born there, and many of whom will die there. Sometimes they are better Americans than the New Yorker or the Bostonian who lives in Beacon Street or the Bowery and votes in the elections. They may be born and reside where they please, but they belong to us, and, in the better sense, they are among us. Broadway and Washington Street, Vermont and Colorado extend all over Europe. Russia is covered with them; she tries to shove them away to Siberia, but in vain. We call mountains and prairies solid facts; but the geography of the mind is infinitely more stubborn. I dare say there are a great many oblique- eyed, pig-tailed New Englanders in the Celestial Empire. They may never have visited these shores, or even heard of them; but what of that? They think our thought–they have apprehended our idea, and, by and by, they or their heirs will cause it to prevail.
It is useless for us to hide our heads in the grass and refuse to rise to the height of our occasion. We are here as the realization of a truth–the fulfilment of a prophecy; we must attest a new departure in the moral and intellectual development of the human race; for whichever of us does not, must suffer annihilation. If I deny my birthright as an American, I shall disappear and not be missed, for an American will take my place. It is not altogether a luxurious position to find yourself in. You cannot sit still and hold your hands. All manner of hard and unpleasant things are expected of you, which you neglect at your peril. It is like the old fable of the mermaid. She loved a mortal youth, and, in order that she might win his affection, she prayed that she might have the limbs and feet of a human maiden. Her prayer was answered, and she met her prince; but every step she took was as if she trod on razors. It is a fine thing to sit in your chair and reflect on being an American; but when you have to rise up and do an American’s duty before the world–how sharp the razors are!
Of course, we do not always endure the test; the flesh and blood on this side of the planet is not, so far as I have observed, of a quality essentially different from that on the other. Possibly our population is too many for us. Out of fifty million people it would be strange if here and there one appeared who was not at all points a hero. Indeed, I am sometimes tempted to think that that little band of original Mayflower Pilgrims has not greatly multiplied since their disembarkation. However it may be with their bodily offspring, their spiritual progeny are not invariably found in the chair of the Governor or on the floor of the Senate. What are these Irish fellow-creatures doing here? Well, Bridget serves us in the kitchen; but Patrick is more helpful yet; he goes to the legislature, and is the servant of the people at large. It is very obliging of him; but turn and turn about is fair play; and it would be no more than justice were we, once in a while, to take off our coat and serve Patrick in the same way.
When we get into a tight place we are apt to try to slip out of it under some plea of a European precedent. But it used to be supposed that it was precisely European precedents that we came over here to avoid. I am not profoundly versed in political economy, nor is this the time or place to discuss its principles; but, as regards protection, for example, I can conceive that there may be arguments against it as well as for it. Emerson used to say that the way to conquer the foreign artisan was not to kill him but to beat his work. He also pointed out that the money we made out of the European wars, at the beginning of this century, had the result of bringing the impoverished population of those countries down upon us in the shape of emigrants. They shared our crops and went on the poor-rates, and so we did not gain so much after all. One cannot help wishing that America would assume the loftiest possible ground in her political and commercial relations. With all due respect to the sagacity and ability of our ruling demagogues, I should not wish them to be quoted as typical Americans. The domination of such persons has an effect which is by no means measurable by their personal acts. What they can do is of infinitesimal importance. But the mischief is that they incline every one of us to believe, as Emerson puts it, in two gods. They make the morality of Wall Street and the White House seem to be a different thing from that of our parlors and nurseries. “He may be a little shady on ‘change,” we say, “but he is a capital fellow when you know him.” But if he is a capital fellow when I know him, then I shall never find much fault with his professional operations, and shall end, perhaps, by allowing him to make some investments for me. Why should not I be a capital fellow too– and a fellow of capital, to boot! I can endure public opprobrium with tolerable equanimity so long as it remains public. It is the private cold looks that trouble me.
In short, we may speak of America in two senses–either meaning the America that actually meets us at the street corners and in the newspapers, or the ideal America–America as it ought to be. They are not the same thing; and, at present, there seems to be a good deal more of the former than of the latter. And yet, there is a connection between them; the latter has made the former possible. We sometimes see a great crowd drawn together by proclamation, for some noble purpose–to decide upon a righteous war, or to pass a just decree. But the people on the outskirts of the crowd, finding themselves unable to hear the orators, and their time hanging idle on their hands, take to throwing stones, knocking off hats, or, perhaps, picking pockets. They may have come to the meeting with as patriotic or virtuous intentions as the promoters themselves; nay, under more favorable circumstances, they might themselves have become promoters. Virtue and patriotism are not private property; at certain times any one may possess them. And, on the other hand, we have seen examples enough, of late, of persons of the highest respectability and trust turning out, all at once, to be very sorry scoundrels. A man changes according to the person with whom he converses; and though the outlook is rather sordid to-day, we have not forgotten that during the Civil War the air seemed full of heroism. So that these two Americas–the real and the ideal–far apart though they may be in one sense, may, in another sense, be as near together as our right hand to our left. In a greater or less degree, they exist side by side in each one of us. But civil wars do not come every day; nor can we wish them to, even to show us once more that we are worthy of our destiny. We must find some less expensive and quieter method of reminding ourselves of that. And of such methods, none, perhaps, is better than to review the lives of Americans who were truly great; to ask what their country meant to them; what they wished her to become; what virtues and what vices they detected in her. Passion may be generous, but passion cannot last; and when it is over, we are cold and indifferent again. But reason and example reach us when we are calm and passive; and what they inculcate is more likely to abide. At least, it will be only evil passion that can cast it out.
I have said that many a true American is doubtless born, and lives, abroad; but that does not prevent Emerson from having been born here. So far as the outward accidents of generation and descent go, he could not have been more American than he was. Of course, one prefers that it should be so. A rare gem should be fitly set. A noble poem should be printed with the fairest type of the Riverside Press, and upon fine paper with wide margins. It helps us to believe in ourselves to be told that Emerson’s ancestry was not only Puritan, but clerical; that the central and vital thread of the idea that created us, ran through his heart. The nation, and even New England, Massachusetts, Boston, have many traits that are not found in him; but there is nothing in him that is not a refinement, a sublimation and concentration of what is good in them; and the selection and grouping of the elements are such that he is a typical figure. Indeed, he is all type; which is the same as saying that there is nobody like him. And, mentally, he produces the impression of being all force; in his writings, his mind seems to have acted immediately, without natural impediment or friction; as if a machine should be run that was not hindered by the contact of its parts. As he was physically lean and narrow of figure, and his face nothing but so many features welded together, so there was no adipose tissue in his thought. It is pure, clear, and accurate, and has the fault of dryness; but often moves in forms of exquisite beauty. It is not adhesive; it sticks to nothing, nor anything to it; after ranging through all the various philosophies of the world, it comes out as clean and characteristic as ever. It has numberless affinities, but no adhesion; it does not even adhere to itself. There are many separate statements in any one of his essays which present no logical continuity; but although this fact has caused great anxiety to many disciples of Emerson, it never troubled him. It was the inevitable result of his method of thought. Wandering at will in the flower-garden of religious and moral philosophy, it was his part to pluck such blossoms as he saw were beautiful; not to find out their botanical interconnection. He would afterward arrange them, for art or harmony’s sake, according to their color or their fragrance; but it was not his affair to go any farther in their classification.
This intuitive method of his, however little it may satisfy those who wish to have all their thinking done for them, who desire not only to have given to them all the cities of the earth, but also to have straight roads built for them from one to the other, carries with it its own justification. “There is but one reason,” is Emerson’s saying; and again and again does he prove without proving it. We confess, over and over, that the truth which he asserts is indeed a truth. Even his own variations from the truth, when he is betrayed into them, serve to confirm the rule. For these are seldom or never intuitions at first hand–pure intuitions; but, as it were, intuitions from previous intuitions–deductions. The form of statement is the same, but the source is different; they are from Emerson, instead of from the Absolute; tinted, not colorless. They show a mental bias, very slight, but redeeming him back to humanity. We love him the more for them, because they indicate that for him, too, there was a choice of ways, and that he must struggle and watch to choose the right.
We are so much wedded to systems, and so accustomed to connect a system with a man, that the absence of system, either explicit or implicit, in Emerson, strikes us as a defect. And yet truth has no system, nor the human mind. This philosopher maintains one, that another thesis. Both are true essentially, and yet there seems a contradiction between them. We cannot bear to be illogical, and so we enlist some under this banner, some under that. By so doing we sacrifice to consistency at least the half of truth. Thence we come to examine our intuitions, and ask them, not whether they are true in themselves, but what are their tendencies. If it turn out that they will lead us to stultify some past conclusion to which we stand committed, we drop them like hot coals. To Emerson, this behavior appeared the nakedest personal vanity. Recognizing that he was finite, he could not desire to be consistent. If he saw to-day that one thing was true, and to- morrow that its opposite was true, was it for him to elect which of the two truths should have his preference? No; to reject either would be to reject all; it belonged to God alone to reconcile these contradictious. Between infinite and finite can be no ratio; and the consistency of the Creator implies the inconsistency of the creature.
Emerson’s Americanism, therefore, was Americanism in its last and purest analysis, which is giving him high praise, and to America great hope. But I do not mean to pay him, who was so full of modesty and humility, the ungrateful compliment of holding him up as the permanent American ideal. It is his tendencies, his quality, that are valuable, and only in a minor, incipient degree his actual results. All human results must be strictly limited, and according to the epoch and outlook. Emerson does not solve for all time the problem of the universe; he solves nothing; but he does what is far more useful–he gives a direction and an impetus to lofty human endeavor. He does not anticipate the lessons and the discipline of the ages, but he shows us how to deal with circumstances in such a manner as to secure the good instead of the evil influence. New conditions, fresh discoveries, unexpected horizons opening before us, will, no doubt, soon carry us beyond the scope of Emerson’s surmise; but we shall not so easily improve upon his aim and attitude. In the spaces beyond the stars there may be marvels such as it has not entered into the mind of man to conceive; but there, as here, the right way to look will still be upward, and the right aspiration be still toward humbleness and charity. I have just spoken of Emerson’s absence of system; but his writings have nevertheless a singular coherence, by virtue of the single-hearted motive that has inspired them. Many will, doubtless, have noticed, as I have done, how the whole of Emerson illustrates every aspect of him.
Whether your discourse be of his religion, of his ethics, of his relation to society, or what not, the picture that you draw will have gained color and form from every page that he has written. He does not lie in strata; all that he is permeates all that he has done. His books cannot be indexed, unless you would refer every subject to each paragraph. And so he cannot treat, no matter what subject, without incorporating in his statement the germs at least of all that he has thought and believed. In this respect he is like light–the presence of the general at the particular. And, to confess the truth, I find myself somewhat loath to diffract this pure ray to the arbitrary end of my special topic. Why should I speak of him as an American? That is not his definition. He was an American because he was himself. America, however, gives less limitation than any other nationality to a generous and serene personality.
I am sometimes disposed to think that Emerson’s “English Traits” reveal his American traits more than anything else he has written. We are described by our own criticisms of others, and especially by our criticisms of another nation; the exceptions we take are the mould of our own figures. So we have valuable glimpses of Emerson’s contours throughout this volume. And it is in all respects a fortunate work; as remarkable a one almost for him to write as a volume of his essays for any one else. Comparatively to his other books, it is as flesh and blood to spirit; Emersonian flesh and blood, it is true, and semi-translucent; but still it completes the man for us: he would have remained too problematical without it. Those who have never personally known him may finish and solidify their impressions of him here. He likes England and the English, too; and that sympathy is beyond our expectation of the mind that evolved “Nature” and “The Over-Soul.” The grasp of his hand, I remember, was firm and stout, and we perceive those qualities in the descriptions and cordiality of “English Traits.” Then, it is an objective book; the eye looks outward, not inward; these pages afford a basis not elsewhere obtainable of comparing his general human faculty with that of other men. Here he descends from the airy heights he treads so easily and, standing foot to foot with his peers, measures himself against them. He intends only to report their stature, and to leave himself out of the story; but their answers to his questions show what the questions were, and what the questioner. And we cannot help suspecting, though he did not, that the Englishmen were not a little put to it to keep pace with their clear- faced, penetrating, attentive visitor.
He has never said of his own countrymen the comfortable things that he tells of the English; but we need not grumble at that. The father who is severe with his own children will freely admire those of others, for whom he is not responsible. Emerson is stern toward what we are, and arduous indeed in his estimate of what we ought to be. He intimates that we are not quite worthy of our continent; that we have not as yet lived up to our blue china. “In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not.” And he adds that even our more presentable public acts are due to a money- making spirit: “The benefaction derived in Illinois and the great West from railroads is inestimable, and vastly exceeding any intentional philanthropy on record.” He does not think very respectfully of the designs or the doings of the people who went to California in 1849, though he admits that “California gets civilized in this immoral way,” and is fain to suppose that, “as there is use in the world for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues,” and that, in respect of America, “the huge animals nourish huge parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests the strength of the constitution.” He ridicules our unsuspecting provincialism: “Have you seen the dozen great men of New York and Boston? Then you may as well die!” He does not spare our tendency to spread- eagleism and declamation, and having quoted a shrewd foreigner as saying of Americans that, “Whatever they say has a little the air of a speech,” he proceeds to speculate whether “the American forest has refreshed some weeds of old Pictish barbarism just ready to die out?” He finds the foible especially of American youth to be–pretension; and remarks, suggestively, that we talk much about the key of the age, but “the key to all ages is imbecility!” He cannot reconcile himself to the mania for going abroad. “There is a restlessness in our people that argues want of character…. Can we never extract this tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen?” He finds, however, this involuntary compensation in the practice–that, practically “we go to Europe to be Americanized,” and has faith that “one day we shall cast out the passion for Europe by the passion for America.” As to our political doings, he can never regard them with complacency. “Politics is an afterword,” he declares–“a poor patching. We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education.” He sympathizes with Lovelace’s theory as to iron bars and stone walls, and holds that freedom and slavery are inward, not outward conditions. Slavery is not in circumstance, but in feeling; you cannot eradicate the irons by external restrictions; and the truest way to emancipate the slave would be to educate him to a comprehension of his inviolable dignity and freedom as a human being. Amelioration of outward circumstances will be the effect, but can never be the means of mental and moral improvement. “Nothing is more disgusting,” he affirms, generalizing the theme, “than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a ‘Declaration of Independence’ or the statute right to vote.” But, “Our America has a bad name for superficialness. Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terrors of life, and have nerved themselves to face it.” He will not be deceived by the clamor of blatant reformers. “If an angry bigot assumes the bountiful cause of abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him: ‘Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace, and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off!'”
He does not shrink from questioning the validity of some of our pet institutions, as, for instance, universal suffrage. He reminds us that in old Egypt the vote of a prophet was reckoned equal to one hundred hands, and records his opinion that it was much underestimated. “Shall we, then,” he asks, “judge a country by the majority or by the minority? By the minority, surely! ‘Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.” The majority are unripe, and do not yet know their own opinion. He would not, however, counsel an organic alteration in this respect, believing that, with the progress of enlightenment, such coarse constructions of human rights will adjust themselves. He concedes the sagacity of the Fultons and Watts of politics, who, noticing that the opinion of the million was the terror of the world, grouped it on a level, instead of piling it into a mountain, and so contrived to make of this terror the most harmless and energetic form of a State. But, again, he would not have us regard the State as a finality, or as relieving any man of his individual responsibility for his actions and purposes. We are to confide in God–and not in our money, and in the State because it is guard of it. The Union itself has no basis but the good pleasure of the majority to be united. The wise and just men impart strength to the State, not receive it; and, if all went down, they and their like would soon combine in a new and better constitution. Yet he will not have us forget that only by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing so weak as an egotist. We are mighty only as vehicles of a truth before which State and individual are alike ephemeral. In this sense we, like other nations, shall have our kings and nobles–the leading and inspiration of the best; and he who would become a member of that nobility must obey his heart.
Government, he observes, has been a fossil–it should be a plant; statute law should express, not impede, the mind of mankind. In tracing the course of human political institutions, he finds feudalism succeeding monarchy, and this again followed by trade, the good and evil of which is that it would put everything in the market, talent, beauty, virtue, and man himself. By this means it has done its work; it has faults and will end as the others. Its aristocracy need not be feared, for it can have no permanence, it is not entailed. In the time to come, he hopes to see us less anxious to be governed, in the technical sense; each man shall govern himself in the interests of all; government without any governor will be, for the first time, adamantine. Is not every man sometimes a radical in politics? Men are conservatives when they are least vigorous, or when they are most luxurious; conservatism stands on man’s limitations, reform on his infinitude. The age of the quadruped is to go out; the age of the brain and the heart is to come in. We are too pettifogging and imitative in our legislative conceptions; the Legislature of this country should become more catholic and cosmopolitan than any other. Let us be brave and strong enough to trust in humanity; strong natures are inevitable patriots. The time, the age, what is that, but a few prominent persons and a few active persons who epitomize the times? There is a bribe possible for any finite will; but the pure sympathy with universal ends is an infinite force, and cannot be bribed or bent. The world wants saviors and religions; society is servile from want of will; but there is a Destiny by which the human race is guided, the race never dying, the individual never spared; its law is, you shall have everything as a member, nothing to yourself. Referring to the communities of various kinds, which were so much in vogue some years ago, he holds such to be valuable, not for what they have done, but for the indication they give of the revolution that is on the way. They place great faith in mutual support, but it is only as a man puts off from himself all external support and stands alone, that he is strong and will prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. A man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an oak, or a mountain. He must not shun whatever comes to him in the way of duty; the only path of escape is–performance. He must rely on Providence, but not in a timid or ecclesiastical spirit; it is no use to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neckcloth of a student of divinity. We shall come out well, whatever personal or political disasters may intervene. For here in America is the home of man. After deducting our pitiful politics–shall John or Jonathan sit in the chair and hold the purse?–and making due allowance for our frivolities and insanities, there still remains an organic simplicity and liberty, which, when it loses its balance, redresses itself presently, and which offers to the human mind opportunities not known elsewhere.
Whenever he touches upon the fundamental elements of social and rational life, it is always to enlarge and illuminate our conception of them. We are not wont to question the propriety of the sentiment of patriotism, for instance. We are to swear by our own _lares_ and _penates_, and stand up for the American eagle, right or wrong. But Emerson instantly goes beneath this interpretation and exposes its crudity. The true sense of patriotism, according to him, is almost the reverse of its popular sense. He has no sympathy with that boyish egotism, hoarse with cheering for our side, for our State, for our town; the right patriotism consists in the delight which springs from contributing our peculiar and legitimate advantages to the benefit of humanity. Every foot of soil has its proper quality; the grape on two sides of the fence has new flavors; and so every acre on the globe, every family of men, every point of climate, has its distinguishing virtues. This being admitted, however, Emerson will yield in patriotism to no one; his only concern is that the advantages we contribute shall be the most instead of the least possible. “This country,” he says, “does not lie here in the sun causeless, and though it may not be easy to define its influence, men feel already its emancipating quality in the careless self- reliance of the manners, in the freedom of thought, in the direct roads by which grievances are reached and redressed, and even in the reckless and sinister politics, not less than in purer expressions. Bad as it is, this freedom leads onward and upward to a Columbia of thought and art, which is the last and endless end of Columbus’s adventure.” Nor is this poet of virtue and philosophy ever more truly patriotic, from his spiritual standpoint, than when he throws scorn and indignation upon his country’s sins and frailties. “But who is he that prates of the culture of mankind, of better arts and life? Go, blind worm, go–behold the famous States harrying Mexico with rifle and with knife! Or who, with accent bolder, dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer? I found by thee, O rushing Contoocook! and in thy valleys, Agiochook! the jackals of the negro- holder…. What boots thy zeal, O glowing friend, that would indignant rend the northland from the South? Wherefore? To what good end? Boston Bay and Bunker Hill would serve things still–things are of the snake. The horseman serves the horse, the neat-herd serves the neat, the merchant serves the purse, the eater serves his meat; ’tis the day of the chattel, web to weave, and corn to grind; things are in the saddle, and ride mankind!”
But I must not begin to quote Emerson’s poetry; only it is worth noting that he, whose verse is uniformly so abstractly and intellectually beautiful, kindles to passion whenever his theme is of America. The loftiest patriotism never found more ardent and eloquent expression than in the hymn sung at the completion of the Concord monument, on the 19th of April, 1836. There is no rancor in it; no taunt of triumph; “the foe long since in silence slept”; but throughout there resounds a note of pure and deep rejoicing at the victory of justice over oppression, which Concord fight so aptly symbolized. In “Hamatreya” and “The Earth Song,” another chord is struck, of calm, laconic irony. Shall we too, he asks, we Yankee farmers, descendants of the men who gave up all for freedom, go back to the creed outworn of medieval feudalism and aristocracy, and say, of the land that yields us its produce, “‘Tis mine, my children’s, and my name’s”? Earth laughs in flowers at our boyish boastfulness, and asks “How am I theirs if they cannot hold me, but I hold them?” “When I heard ‘The Earth Song,’ I was no longer brave; my avarice cooled, like lust in the child of the grave” Or read “Monadnoc,” and mark the insight and the power with which the significance and worth of the great facts of nature are interpreted and stated. “Complement of human kind, having us at vantage still, our sumptuous indigence, oh, barren mound, thy plenties fill! We fool and prate; thou art silent and sedate. To myriad kinds and times one sense the constant mountain doth dispense; shedding on all its snows and leaves, one joy it joys, one grief it grieves. Thou seest, oh, watchman tall, our towns and races grow and fall, and imagest the stable good for which we all our lifetime grope; and though the substance us elude, we in thee the shadow find.” … “Thou dost supply the shortness of our days, and promise, on thy Founder’s truth, long morrow to this mortal youth!” I have ignored the versified form in these extracts, in order to bring them into more direct contrast with the writer’s prose, and show that the poetry is inherent. No other poet, with whom I am acquainted, has caused the very spirit of a land, the mother of men, to express itself so adequately as Emerson has done in these pieces. Whitman falls short of them, it seems to me, though his effort is greater.
Emerson is continually urging us to give heed to this grand voice of hills and streams, and to mould ourselves upon its suggestions. The difficulty and the anomaly are that we are not native; that England is our mother, quite as much as Monadnoc; that we are heirs of memories and traditions reaching far beyond the times and the confines of the Republic. We cannot assume the splendid childlikeness of the great primitive races, and exhibit the hairy strength and unconscious genius that the poet longs to find in us. He remarks somewhere that the culminating period of good in nature and the world is in just that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acidity is got out by ethics and humanity.
It was at such a period that Greece attained her apogee; but our experience, it seems to me, must needs be different. Our story is not of birth, but of regeneration, a far more subtle and less obvious transaction. The Homeric California of which Bret Harte is the reporter does not seem to me in the closest sense American. It is a comparatively superficial matter–this savage freedom and raw poetry; it belongs to all pioneering life, where every man must stand for himself, and Judge Lynch strings up the defaulter to the nearest tree. But we are only incidentally pioneers in this sense; and the characteristics thus impressed upon us will leave no traces in the completed American. “A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont,” says Emerson, “who in turn tries all the professions–who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet–is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not studying a ‘profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.” That is stirringly said: but, as a matter of fact, most of the Americans whom we recognize as great did not have such a history; nor, if they had it, would they be on that account more American. On the other hand, the careers of men like Jim Fiske and Commodore Vanderbilt might serve very well as illustrations of the above sketch. If we must wait for our character until our geographical advantages and the absence of social distinctions manufacture it for us, we are likely to remain a long while in suspense. When our foreign visitors begin to evince a more poignant interest in Concord and Fifth Avenue than in the Mississippi and the Yellowstone, it may be an indication to us that we are assuming our proper position relative to our physical environment. “The _land_,” says Emerson, “is a sanative and Americanizing influence which promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come.” Well, when we are virtuous, we may, perhaps, spare our own blushes by allowing our topography, symbolically, to celebrate us, and when our admirers would worship the purity of our intentions, refer them to Walden Pond; or to Mount Shasta, when they would expatiate upon our lofty generosity. It is, perhaps, true, meanwhile, that the chances of a man’s leading a decent life are greater in a palace than in a pigsty.
But this is holding our author too strictly to the letter of his message. And, at any rate, the Americanism of Emerson is better than anything that he has said in vindication of it. He is the champion of this commonwealth; he is our future, living in our present, and showing the world, by anticipation, as it were, what sort of excellence we are capable of attaining. A nation that has produced Emerson, and can recognize in him bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh–and, still more, spirit of her spirit–that nation may look toward the coming age with security. But he has done more than thus to prophesy of his country; he is electric and stimulates us to fulfil our destiny. To use a phrase of his own, we “cannot hear of personal vigor of any kind, great power of performance, without fresh resolution.” Emerson, helps us most in provoking us to help ourselves. The pleasantest revenge is that which we can sometimes take upon our great men in quoting of themselves what they have said of others.
It is easy to be so revenged upon Emerson, because he, more than most persons of such eminence, has been generous and cordial in his appreciation of all human worth. “If there should appear in the company,” he observes, “some gentle soul who knows little of persons and parties, of Carolina or Cuba, but who announces a law that disposes these particulars, and so certifies me of the equity which checkmates every false player, bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of my independence on any conditions of country, or time, or human body, that man liberates me…. I am made immortal by apprehending my possession of incorruptible goods.” Who can state the mission and effect of Emerson more tersely and aptly than those words do it?
But, once more, he does not desire eulogiums, and it seems half ungenerous to force them upon him now that he can no longer defend himself. I prefer to conclude by repeating a passage characteristic of him both as a man and as an American, and which, perhaps, conveys a sounder and healthier criticism, both for us and for him, than any mere abject and nerveless admiration; for great men are great only in so far as they liberate us, and we undo their work in courting their tyranny. The passage runs thus:–
“Let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts to me are sacred; none are profane. I simply experiment–an endless seeker, with no Past at my back!”
CHAPTER X.
MODERN MAGIC.
Human nature enjoys nothing better than to wonder–to be mystified; and it thanks and remembers those who have the skill to gratify this craving. The magicians of old knew that truth and conducted themselves accordingly. But our modern wonder-workers fail of their due influence, because, not content to perform their marvels, they go on to explain them. Merlin and Roger Bacon were greater public benefactors than Morse and Edison. Man is –and he always has been and will be–something else besides a pure intelligence: and science, in order to become really popular, must contrive to touch man somewhere else besides on the purely intellectual side: it must remember that man is all heart, all hope, all fear, and all foolishness, quite as much as he is all brains. Otherwise, science can never expect to take the place of superstition, much less of religion, in mankind’s affection. In order to be a really successful man of science, it is first of all indispensable to make one’s self master of everything in nature and in human nature that science is not.
What must one do, in short, in order to become a magician? I use the term, here, in its weightiest sense. How to make myself visible and invisible at will? How to present myself in two or more places at once? How answer your question before you ask it, and describe to you your most secret thoughts and actions? How shall I call spirits from the vasty deep, and make you see and hear and feel them? How paralyze your strength with a look, heal your wound with a touch, or cause your bullet to rebound harmless from my unprotected flesh? How shall I walk on the air, sink through the earth, pass through stone walls, or walk, dry-shod, on the floor of the ocean? How shall I visit the other side of the moon, jump through the ring of Saturn, and gather sunflowers in Sirius? There are persons now living who profess to do no less remarkable feats, and to regard them as incidental merely to achievements far more important. A school of hierophants or adepts is said to exist in Tibet, who, as a matter of daily routine, quite transcend everything that we have been accustomed to consider natural possibility. What is the course of study, what are the ways and means whereby such persons accomplish such results?
The conventional attitude towards such matters is, of course, that of unconditional scepticism. But it is pleasant, occasionally, to take an airing beyond the bounds of incredulity. For my own part, it is true, I must confess my inability to believe in anything positively supernatural. The supernatural and the illusory are to my mind convertible terms: they cannot really exist or take place. Let us be sure, however, that we are agreed as to what supernatural means. If a magician, before my eyes, transformed an old man into a little girl, I should call that supernatural; and nothing should convince me that my senses had not been grossly deceived. But were the magician to leave the room by passing through the solid wall, or “go out” like an exploding soap-bubble,–I might think what I please, but I should not venture to dogmatically pronounce the thing supernatural; because the phenomenon known as “matter” is scientifically unknown, and therefore no one can tell what modifications it may not be susceptible of:–no one, that is to say, except the person who, like the magician of our illustration, professes to possess, and (for aught I can affirm to the contrary) may actually possess a knowledge unshared by the bulk of mankind. The transformation of an old man into a little girl, on the other hand, would be a transaction involving the immaterial soul as well as the material body; and if I do not know that that cannot take place, I am forever incapable of knowing anything. These are extreme examples, but they serve to emphasize an important distinction.
The whole domain of magic, in short, occupies that anomalous neutral ground that intervenes between the facts of our senses and the truths of our intuitions. Fact and truth are not convertible terms; they abide in two distinct planes, like thought and speech, or soul and body; one may imply or involve the other, but can never demonstrate it. Experience and intuition together comprehend the entire realm of actual and conceivable knowledge. Whatever contradicts both experience and intuition may, therefore, be pronounced illusion. But this neutral ground is the home of phenomena which intuition does not deny, and which experience has not confirmed. It is still a wide zone, though not so wide as it was a hundred years ago, or fifty, or even ten. It narrows every day, as science, or the classification of experience, expands. Are we, then, to look for a time when the zone shall have dwindled to a mathematical line, and magic confess itself to have been nothing but the science of an advanced school of investigators? Will the human intellect acquire a power before which all mysteries shall become transparent? Let us dwell upon this question a little longer.
A mystery that is a mystery can never, humanly speaking, become anything else. Instances of such mysteries can readily be adduced. The universe itself is built upon them and is the greatest of them. They lie before the threshold and at the basis of all existence. For example:–here is a lump of compact, whitish, cheese-like substance, about as much as would go into a thimble. From this I profess to be able to produce a gigantic, intricate structure, sixty feet in height and diameter, hard, solid, and enduring, which shall furthermore possess the power of extending and multiplying itself until it covers the whole earth, and even all the earths in the universe, if it could reach them. Is such a profession as this credible? It is entirely credible, as soon as I paraphrase it by saying that I propose to plant an acorn. And yet all magic has no mystery which is so wonderful as this universal mystery of growth: and the only reason we are not lost in amazement at it is that it goes quietly on all the time, and perfects itself under uniform conditions. But let me eliminate from the phenomenon the one element of time–which is logically the least essential factor in the product, unreal and arbitrary, based on the revolution of the earth, and conceivably variable to any extent–grant me this, and the world would come to see me do the miracle. But, with time or without it, the mystery is just as mysterious.
Natural mysteries, then,–the mysteries of life, death, creation, growth, –do not fall under our present consideration: they are beyond the legitimate domain of magic: and no intellectual development to which we may hereafter attain will bring us a step nearer their solution. But with the problems proper to magic, the case is different. Magic is distinctively not Divine, but human: a finite conundrum, not an Infinite enigma. If there has ever been a magician since the world began, then all mankind may become magicians, if they will give the necessary time and trouble. And yet, magic is not simply an advanced region of the path which science is pursuing. Science is concerned with results,–with material phenomena; whereas magic is, primarily, the study of causes, or of spiritual phenomena; or, to use another definition,–of phenomena which the senses perceive, not in themselves, but only in their results. So long as we restrict ourselves to results, our activity is confined to analysis; but when we begin to investigate causes, we are on the road not only to comprehend results, but (within limits) to modify or produce them.
Science, however, blocks our advance in this direction by denying, or at least refusing to admit, the existence of the spiritual world, or world of causes: because, being spiritual, it is not sensible, or cognizable in sense. Science admits only material causes, or the changes wrought in matter by itself. If we ask what is the cause of a material cause, we are answered that it is a supposed entity called Force, concerning which there is nothing further to be known.
At this point, then, argument (on the material plane) comes to an end, and speculation or assumption begins. Science answers its own questions, but neither can nor will answer any others. And upon what pretence do we ask any others? We ask them upon two grounds. The first is that some people,– we might even say, most people,–would be glad to believe in supersensuous existence, and are always on the alert to examine any plausible hypothesis pointing in that direction: and secondly, there exists a vast amount of testimony (we need not call it evidence) tending to show that the supersensuous world has been discovered, and that it endows its discoverers with sundry notable advantages. Of course, we are not obliged to credit this testimony, unless we want to: and–for some reason, never fully explained–a great many people who accept natural mysteries quite amiably become indignant when requested to examine mysteries of a much milder order. But it is not my intention to discuss the limits of the probable; but to swallow as much as possible first, and endeavor to account for it afterwards.
There is, as every reader knows, a class of phenomena–such as hypnotism, trance, animal magnetism, and so forth–the occurrence of which science has conceded, though failing as yet to offer any intelligent explanation of them. It is suggested that they are peculiar states of the brain and nerve-centres, physical in their nature and origin, though evading our present physical tests. Be that as it may, they afford a capital introduction to the study of magic; if, indeed, they, and a few allied phenomena, do not comprise the germs of the whole matter. Apropos of this subject, a society has lately been organized in London, with branches on the Continent and in this country, composed of scientific men, Fellows of the Royal Society, members of Parliament, professors, and literary men, calling themselves the “Psychical Research Society,” and making it their business to test and investigate these very marvels, under the most stringent scientific conditions. But the capacity to be deceived of the bodily senses is almost unlimited; in fact, we know that they are incapable of telling us the ultimate truth on any subject; and we are able to get along with them only because we have found their misinformation to be sufficiently uniform for most practical purposes. But once admit that the origin of these phenomena is not on the physical plane, and then, if we are to give any weight at all to them, it can be only from a spiritual standpoint. In other words, unless we can approach such questions by an _a priori_ route, we might as well let them alone. We can reason from spirit to body–from mind to matter–but we can never reverse that process, and from matter evolve mind. The reason is that matter is not found to contain mind, but is only acted upon by it, as inferior by superior; and we cannot get out of the bag more than has been put into it. The acorn (to use our former figure) can never explain the oak; but the oak readily accounts for the acorn. It may be doubted, therefore, whether the Psychical Research Society can succeed in doing more than to give a respectable endorsement to a perplexing possibility,–so long as they adhere to the inductive method. Should they, however, abandon the inductive method for the deductive, they will forfeit the allegiance of all consistently scientific minds; and they may, perhaps, make some curious contributions to philosophy. At present, they appear to be astride the fence between philosophy and science, as if they hoped in some way to make the former satisfy the latter’s demands. But the difference between the evidence that demonstrates a fact and the evidence that confirms a truth is, once more, a difference less of degree than of kind. We can never obtain sensible verification of a proposition that transcends sense. We must accept it without material proof, or not at all. We may believe, for instance, that Creation is the work of an intelligent Divine Being; or we may disbelieve it; but we can never prove it. If we do believe it, innumerable confirmations of it meet us at every turn: but no such confirmations, and no multiplication of them, can persuade a disbeliever. For belief is ever incommunicable from without; it can be generated only from within. The term “belief” cannot be applied to our recognition of a physical fact: we do not believe in that–we are only sensible of it.
In this connection, a few words will be in order concerning what is called Spiritism,–a subject which has of late years been exciting a good deal of remark. Its disciples claim for it the dignity of a new and positive revelation,–a revelation to sense of spiritual being. Now, the entire universe may be described as a revelation to sense of spiritual being–for those who happen to believe _a priori_, or from spontaneous inward conviction, in spiritual being. We may believe a man’s body, for example, to be the effect of which his soul is the cause; but no one can reach that conviction by the most refined dissection of the bodily tissues. How, then, does the spiritists’ Positive Revelation help the matter? Their answer is that the physical universe is a permanent and orderly phenomenon which (setting aside the problem of its First Cause) fully accounts for itself; whereas the phenomena of Spiritism, such as rapping, table- tipping, materializing, and so forth, are, if not supernatural, at any rate extra-natural. They occur in consequence of a conscious effort to