Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 392, June, 1848

Having in this candid manner exposed the popular errors upon this subject, he substitutes in their stead this very luminous proposition, that "the utility of an invention depends upon our making use of it!"

"These very inventions had existed, the greatest of them for many centuries, in China, without producing any result. For why? Because the utility of an invention depends on our making use of it. There is no power, none at least for good [why this qualification?] in any instrument or weapon, except so far as there is power in him who wields it: nor does the sword guide or move the hand, but the hand the sword. Nay," he adds in a tone of triumphant discovery, "it is the hand that fashions the sword."

"Or," continues the writer, starting afresh, "we may look at the matter in another light. We may conceive that, whenever any of the great changes ordained by God's providence in the destinies of mankind are about to take place, the means requisite for the effecting of those changes are likewise prepared by the same Providence."

What is this but the general opinion of mankind? which, however, as entertained in the minds of others, is a vulgar materialism. What are all the world saying, but simply this, that the inventions of the printing press, of the compass, and of gunpowder, are great means ordained by God's providence for the advancement of human affairs?

The beauties of inanimate nature have their turn to be descanted on; and here our selecter spirits have a double task to perform: first, to throw contempt on those who do not feel them; and, secondly, on those who do. For, explain it how you will, they and their few friends are evidently the only people who have an accurate perception of beauty as well as of truth.

"It is an uncharitable error to ascribe the delight with which unpoetical persons often speak of a mountain-tour, to affectation. The delight is as real as mutton and beef, with which it has a closer connexion than the travellers themselves suspect; arising, in great measure, from the good effects of mountain air, regular exercise, and wholesome diet, upon the spirits. This is sensual, indeed, though not improperly so; but it is no concession to the materialist. I do not deny that my neighbour has a soul, by referring a particular pleasure in him to the body." (P. 35.)

So much for the unpoetic traveller with staff and knapsack, glorying, it may be, in his feats of pedestrianism. He is permitted, in spite of his grossness, to have a soul within his body. But the more poetic fraternity are not therefore to pass scatheless.

"The noisiest streams are the shallowest. It is an old saying, but never out of season, least of all in an age the fit symbol of which would not be, like the Ephesian personification of nature, multimamma– for it neither brings forth nor nourishes – but multilingua. Your amateur will talk by the ell, or, if you wish it, by the mile, about the inexpressible charms of nature; but I never heard that his love had caused him the slightest uneasiness.

"It is only," continues the writer, in a style which becomes suddenly overclouded with a strange metaphysical obscurity, – "it is only by the perception of some contrast that we become conscious of our feelings. The feelings, however, may exist for centuries, without the consciousness; and still, when they are mighty, they will overpower consciousness; when they are deep, it will be unable to fathom them. Love has been called 'loquacious as a vernal bird,' and with truth; but his loquacity comes on him mostly in the absence of his beloved. Here too the same illustration holds: the deep stream is not heard until some obstacle opposes it. But can anybody, when floating down the Rhine, believe that the builders and dwellers in those castles, with which every rock is crested, were blind to all the beauties around them? Is it quite impossible that they should have felt almost as much as the sentimental tourist, who returns to his parlour in some metropolis, and puffs out the fumes of his admiration through his quill? Has the moon no existence independent of the halo about her? [sic] or does the halo even flow from her? Is it not produced by the dimness and density of the atmosphere through which she has to shine? Give me the love of the bird that broods over her own nest, rather than of one who lays her eggs in the nest of another, albeit she warble about parental affection as loudly as Rousseau or Lord Byron." (P. 50.)

Nevertheless, we should not adopt the present writer, with all his two-fold fastidiousness, as our guide to enlighten us upon the highest sort of pleasure which scenery produces. He lays far more stress than to us seems due on the pictorial art as a means of cultivating a taste for the beauties of nature. It is quite true that a person familiar with the art of painting will see in an ordinary landscape points of interest which another would overlook. But as the sublimer objects in nature cannot be represented in pictures, so as to convey an impression of sublimity, it is not here that we can learn how to appreciate them. You paint a river and all the amenities of the landscape through which it flows; you cannot paint the sea and its grandeur. On no canvass can you transfer a mountain so as to bring with it the true impression of its sublimity.

That which we call the love of nature must exist in very different forms in minds of different habits and culture. The professional artist notes the various forms, the various colours, how they blend and contrast; he likes to see the whole field of vision richly and harmoniously filled. The poet, after spending a whole day in rapture amongst the mountains, could scarcely give you the exact outline of a single peak; he cannot fill you a solitary canvass; he has grouped all that his memory retains by the law only of his own feelings; he can describe the scene only by the emotions it has called forth.

There is also, no doubt, a simpler love of natural objects that never seeks to express itself either with the pencil or the pen. And this may, as our writer suggests, form a component part of that love of their country for which mountaineers are particularly distinguished. Yet, having ourselves had occasion to notice how very destitute of what is called sentiment, the peasantry of the noblest country are found to be, we should rather attribute the passionate love of home that is remarkable in the Swiss or the Norwegian to this, – that the causes which make home dear to all men are aggravated in their case by the mountainous seclusion in which they live. One who has resided in the same valley all his life, knows every one in that valley, and knows no one beyond it. The whole of the inhabitants form, as it were, one family. And though the sublimity of the mountains around him affects his mind but little, yet their lofty summits present to him (merely as so much matter and form) great physical objects to which he gets familiarised and attached. Each time he raises his eyes, he sees them there eternal in the heavens he can go no where to escape them; and they enclose for him whatever he possesses in common with all other countrymen – his own field, its hedge, its stile, – the village church, – the bridge over the torrent stream on which he played when a boy, and stood and gossipped when a man.

"When I was in the lake of Zug," says our author, "which lies bosomed among such grand mountains, the boatman, after telling some stories about Suwarrow's march through the neighbourhood, asked me, —Is it true that he came from a country where there is not a mountain to be seen? Yes, I replied; you may go hundreds of miles without coming to a hillock. That must be beautiful! he exclaimed: das muss schön seyn… This very man, however, had he been transported to the plains he sighed for, – even though they had been as flat as Burnet's Paradise, or the tabula rasa which Locke supposed to be the paradisiacal state of the human mind– (why is this piece of folly introduced? or what wit or sense can there be in attributing this childish absurdity to Locke?) would probably have been seized with the homesickness which is so common among his countrymen, as it is also among the Swedes and Norwegians, but which I believe is hardly found, except in the natives of a mountainous and beautiful country."13

We have said that the prevailing characteristic of these semi-philosophers is the love of contradicting whatever to the majority of men seems a simple and intelligible truth. We will give two very short instances of this spirit of contradiction. We need not say that they are religious men, or that the want of piety in the world is their frequent subject of animadversion. "I was surprised just now," says one of the brothers, "to see a cobweb round a knocker: for it was not on the gate of heaven." You would suppose, therefore, that a man could not be too earnest in knocking at this gate that it might be opened to him. But this is what all the religious world is saying, and to float with the stream would be intolerable. It is discovered, therefore, that the religious world make of salvation, of the entrance into heaven, a matter of too much personal interest. "Catholic religion has wellnigh been split up into personal, so that the very idea of the former has almost been lost; and it is the avowed principle of what is called the Religious World that every body's paramount, engrossing duty is to take care his own soul." (P. 194.) What is called the Religious World world be a little surprised to hear itself censured by the archdeacon on such a ground as this.

Our next, which is very brief, is a still more striking instance of this contradictious and exclusive spirit. "The glories of their country," – he is speaking of the ancient Greeks, – "inspired them with enthusiastic patriotism; and an aristocratical religion – (which, until it was supplanted by a vulgar philosophy, was revered in spite of all its errors) – gave them," &c. It was a "vulgar philosophy" that doubted of the truth of Paganism! It is, at all events, a very commonplace philosophy at the present day which discredits the gods of Olympus, and is therefore to be spoken of with due contempt.

Instead of being intelligible and vulgar, how much better to wrap up our Christian philosophy in a style as rare and curious, and undecipherable, as the hieroglyphic cerements of an Egyptian mummy!

"The precepts of Christianity are holy and imperative; its mysteries vast, undiscoverable, unimaginable; and, what is still worthier of consideration, these two limbs of our religion are not severed, or even laxly joined, but, after the workmanship of the God of nature, so 'lock in with and over-wrap one another' that they cannot be torn asunder without rude force. Every mystery is the germ of a duty: every duty has its motive in a mystery. So that if I may speak of these things in the symbolical language of ancient wisdom, every thing divine being circular, every right thing human straight – the life of the Christian may be compared to a chord, each end of which is supported by the arc it proceeds from and terminates in." (P. 214.)

Literary criticism occupies a portion of these pages. Here also there is a singular air of pretension, but nothing done. A vague indefinite claim is made to very superior taste, and an exclusive appreciation of the great poets, but nothing is ever attempted to support this claim. The solitary criticism on a passage in Milton, where the poet says of the great palace of Pandemonium, that it "rose like an exhalation," is the only instance we remember where these authors have put forth any positive criticism; and this example does not appear to evince any very delicate or refined appreciation of poetic imagery. A comparison is drawn (where there is very little room for one) between this passage and the expression νυκτι εοικως, which Homer uses in describing the coming of Apollo, – and the ηυτ' ομιχλη, which he employs when speaking of Thetis rising from the sea. "How inferior," says the writer, "in grandeur, in simplicity, in beauty and grace, to the Homeric! which moreover has better caught the spirit and sentiment of the natural appearances. For Apollo does come with the power and majesty, and with the terrors of night; and the soft waviness of an exhalation is a much fitter image for the rising of the goddess, than for the massiness and hard stiff outline of a building." It is the hard stiff outline which the very image of Milton conceals from us, as the angel-built structure rises gradually, continuously, like an exhalation from the earth.

Of Shakspeare we are, of course, told that neither we, nor any other Englishmen, understand him.

"How many Englishmen admire Shakspeare? Doubtless all who understand him, and, it is to be hoped, a few more; for how many Englishmen understand Shakspeare? Were Diogenes to set out on his search through the land, I trust he would bring home many hundreds, not to say thousands, for every one I should put up. To judge from what has been written about him, the Englishmen who understand Shakspeare are little more numerous than those who understand the language spoken in Paradise. You will now and then meet with ingenious remarks on particular passages, and even in particular characters, or rather in particular features in them. But these remarks are mostly as incomplete and unsatisfactory as the description of a hand or foot would be, unless received with reference to the whole body. He who wishes to trace the march and to scan the operations of this most marvellous genius, and to discern the mysterious organisation of his wonderful works, will find little help but what comes from beyond the German Ocean." (P. 267.)

We are very much disposed to think that the age which follows ours, though still admiring Shakspeare as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of poets, will look upon this present age as eminently distinguished for having talked a marvellous deal of nonsense about that great man – whether with or without help from beyond the German Ocean. There is, however, confessedly some light to be got from another quarter, though still a very remote one. We are rather affectedly told in the preceding page: —

"Were nothing else to be learnt from the rhetoric and ethics of Aristotle, they should be studied by every educated Englishman as the best of commentaries on Shakspeare."

To Coleridge, indeed, whose snatches of literary criticism are admirable, (when he is not evidently led away by some capricious paradoxical spirit,) we have a debt to acknowledge on this subject. He first taught us, if we mistake not, to appreciate the structure of Shakspeare's plays, and vindicated them from that charge of rudeness and irregularity which had been so frequently made that it had passed for an admitted truth. He showed that there was a harmony in his intricate plots of a far higher order than the disciples of the unities had ever dreamed of.

Whatever may be their critical appreciation of the poetic language of others, these writers display very little taste themselves in the use of imagery, or illustration, or metaphor. What is intended for wit or pleasantry proves to be a cumbrous allegory or unwieldy simile; we feel that we are to smile, but we do not smile. Instances of this may be found at page 111, in a sort of fable about "leather" and "stockings;" and at page 133 about "four-sided and five-sided fields." The examples are too long to quote. At page 260, great men are compared to mountains. The simile is not new, but the manner of dealing with it has more of novelty than of grace. – "Mountains never shake hands," &c. – like great men, they stand alone. "But if mountains do not shake hands, neither do they kick each other." And here, at page 259, is an instance, not too long to quote entire, which shows how little tact and delicacy these writers have in dealing with metaphorical language.

"It is a mistake to suppose the poet does not know truth by sight quite as well as the philosopher. He must; for he is ever seeing her in the mirror of nature. The difference between them is, that the poet is satisfied with worshipping her reflected image, while the philosopher traces her out, and follows her to her remote abode between cause and consequence, and there impregnates her."

Frequently the illustration, standing alone, brief and obscure, becomes a mere riddle, a conundrum, to which you can either attach no meaning, or any meaning you please.

"Instead of watching the bird as it flies above our heads, we chase the shadow along the ground, and finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing.

"I hate to see trees pollarded – or nations.

"What way of circumventing a man can be so easy and suitable as a period? The name should be enough to put us on our guard; the experience of every age is not."

The oracular wisdom which these and the like sentences contain, we must confess ourselves unable to expound. We would not undertake to act as interpreter of such aphorisms; and we feel persuaded that if three of the most friendly commentators were to sit down before them, they would each give a different explanation.

In quitting our somewhat ungracious task, we would not leave the impression behind that there is absolutely nothing in this volume to reward perusal. There are some sparkling sayings, and some sound reflections, which, if the book had now appeared for the first time, we should think it our duty to hunt out and bring together. But the work has been long before the public, and our present object was merely to point out some of the weaknesses of a very dogmatical class of writers. The following guess, for instance, is very significant, and extremely apposite, moreover, to our own times. That we may leave our readers something to meditate upon, we will conclude by quoting it: —

"When the pit seats itself in the boxes, the gallery will soon drive out both, and occupy the whole of the house." – A.

LIFE IN THE "FAR WEST."

PART I. – CHAP. I

Away to the head waters of the Platte, where several small streams run into the south fork of that river, and head in the broken ridges of the "Divide" which separates the valleys of the Platte and Arkansa, were camped a band of trappers on a creek called Bijou. It was the month of October, when the early frosts of the coming winter had crisped and dyed with sober brown the leaves of the cherry and quaking asp, which belted the little brook; and the ridges and peaks of the Rocky Mountains were already covered with a glittering mantle of snow, which sparkled in the still powerful rays of the autumn sun.

The camp had all the appearance of being a permanent one; for not only did one or two unusually comfortable shanties form a very conspicuous object, but the numerous stages on which huge strips of buffalo meat were hanging in process of cure, showed that the party had settled themselves here in order to lay in a store of provisions, or, as it is termed in the language of the mountains, "make meat." Round the camp were feeding some twelve or fifteen mules and horses, having their fore-legs confined by hobbles of raw hide, and, guarding these animals, two men paced backwards and forwards, driving in the stragglers; and ever and anon ascending the bluffs which overhung the river, and, leaning on their long rifles, would sweep with their eyes the surrounding prairie. Three or four fires were burning in the encampment, on some of which Indian women were carefully tending sundry steaming pots; whilst round one, which was in the centre of it, four or five stalwart hunters, clad in buckskin, sat cross-legged, pipe in mouth.

They were a trapping party from the north fork of Platte, on their way to wintering-ground in the more southern valley of the Arkansa; some, indeed, meditating a more extended trip, even to the distant settlements of New Mexico, the paradise of mountaineers. The elder of the company was a tall gaunt man, with a face browned by a twenty years' exposure to the extreme climate of the mountains; his long black hair, as yet scarcely tinged with gray, hung almost to his shoulders, but his cheeks and chin were cleanly shaved, after the fashion of the mountain men. His dress was the usual hunting-frock of buckskin, with long fringes down the seams, with pantaloons similarly ornamented, and mocassins of Indian make. As his companions puffed their pipes in silence, he was narrating a few of his former experiences of western life; and whilst the buffalo "hump-ribs" and "tender loin" are singing away in the pot, preparing for the hunters' supper, we will note down the yarn as it spins from his lips, giving it in the language spoken in the "far west: " —

"'Twas about 'calf-time,' maybe a little later, and not a hunderd year ago, by a long chalk, that the biggest kind of rendezvous was held 'to' Independence, a mighty handsome little location away up on old Missoura. A pretty smart lot of boys was camp'd thar, about a quarter from the town, and the way the whisky flowed that time was 'some' now, I can tell you. Thar was old Sam Owins – him as got 'rubbed out'14 by the Spaniards at Sacramenty, or Chihuahuy, this hos doesn't know which, but he 'went under' any how. Well, Sam had his train along, ready to hitch up for the Mexican country – twenty thunderin big Pittsburg waggons; and the way his Santa Fé boys took in the liquor beat all – eh, Bill?"

"Well, it did."

"Bill Bent – his boys camped the other side the trail, and they was all mountain men, wagh! – and Bill Williams, and Bill Tharpe (the Pawnees took his hair on Pawnee Fork last spring:) three Bills, and them three's all 'gone under.' Surely Hatcher went out that time; and wasn't Bill Garey along, too? Didn't him and Chabonard sit in camp for twenty hours at a deck of Euker? Them was Bent's Indian traders up on Arkansa. Poor Bill Bent! them Spaniards made meat of him. He lost his topknot to Taos. A 'clever' man was Bill Bent as I ever know'd trade a robe or 'throw' a bufler in his tracks. Old St Vrain could knock the hind-sight off him though, when it come to shootin, and old silver heels spoke true, she did: 'plum-center' she was, eh?"

"Well, she was'nt nothin else.'"

"The Greasers15 payed for Bent's scalp, they tell me. Old St Vrain went out of Santa Fé with a company of mountain men, and the way they made 'em sing out was 'slick as shootin'. He 'counted a coup' did St Vrain. He throwed a Pueblo as had on poor Bent's shirt. I guess he tickled that niggur's hump-ribs. Fort William16 aint the lodge it was, an' never will be agin, now he's gone under; but St Vrain's 'pretty much of a gentleman,' too; if he aint, I'll be dog-gone, eh, Bill?"

"He is so-o."

"Chavez had his waggons along. He was only a Spaniard any how, and some of his teamsters put a ball into him his next trip, and made a raise of his dollars, wagh! Uncle Sam hung 'em for it, I heard, but can't b'lieve it, no-how. If them Spaniards wasn't born for shootin', why was beaver made? You was with us that spree, Jemmy?"

"No sirre-e; I went out when Spiers lost his animals on Cimmaron: a hunderd and forty mules and oxen was froze that night, wagh!"

"Surely Black Harris was thar; and the darndest liar was Black Harris – for lies tumbled out of his mouth like boudins out of a bufler's stomach. He was the child as saw the putrefied forest in the Black Hills. Black Harris come in from Laramie; he'd been trapping three year an' more on Platte and the 'other side;' and, when he got into Liberty, he fixed himself right off like a Saint Louiy dandy. Well, he sat to dinner one day in the tavern, and a lady says to him: —

"'Well, Mister Harris, I hear you're a great travler.'

"'Travler, marm,' says Black Harris, 'this niggur's no travler; I ar' a trapper, marm, a mountain-man, wagh!"

"'Well, Mister Harris, trappers are great travlers, and you goes over a sight of ground in your perishinations, I'll be bound to say.'

"'A sight, marm, this coon's gone over, if that's the way your 'stick floats.'17 I've trapped beaver on Platte and Arkansa, and away up on Missoura and Yaller Stone; I've trapped on Columbia, on Lewis Fork, and Green River; I've trapped, marm, on Grand River and the Heely (Gila.) I've fout the 'Blackfoot' (and d – d bad Injuns they ar;) I've 'raised the hair'18 of more than one Apach, and made a Rapaho 'come' afore now; I've trapped in heav'n, in airth, and h – , and scalp my old head, marm, but I've seen a putrefied forest.'