The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 17, March, 1859

Nor did these serious and solitary studies withdraw him from the pursuit of wisdom among men and in the active world. Year by year, he entered more fully into the affairs of state, and took a larger portion of their conduct upon himself.

His heart kept fresh by abiding recollections of love, his faith quickened by and intermingled with the tenderest hopes, his imagination uplifted by the affection which overleaped the boundaries of the invisible world, and his intellect disciplined by study of books and of men, his experience enlarged by constant occupation in affairs, his judgment matured by the quick succession of important events in which he was involved,—every part of his nature was thus prepared for the successful accomplishment of that great and sacred design which he set before himself now in his youth. Heaven had called and selected him for a work which even in his own eyes partook somewhat of the nature of a prophetic charge. His strength was to be tested and his capacity to be approved. Life was ordered for the fulfilment of his commission. The men to whom God intrusts a message for the world find the service to which they are appointed one in which they must be ready to sacrifice everything. Dante looked forward, even at the beginning, to the end, and saw what lay between.

The pages of the "New Life" fitly close with words of that life in which all things shall be made new, "and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away." The little book ends thus:—

"Soon after this, a wonderful vision appeared to me, in which I saw things which made me purpose to speak no more of this blessed one until I could more worthily treat of her. And to attain to this, I study to the utmost of my power, as she truly knoweth. So that, if it shall please Him through whom all things live, that my life be prolonged for some years, I hope to speak of her as never was spoken of any woman. And then may it please Him who is the Lord of Grace, that my soul may go to behold the glory of its lady, the blessed Beatrice, who in glory looks upon the face of Him, qui est per omnia saecula benedictus [who is Blessed forever]!"

In 1320, or perhaps not till 1321, the "Paradiso" was finished; in 1321, Dante died.

* * * * *

THE DOUBLE-HEADED SNAKE OF NEWBURY

"Concerning ye Amphisbaena, as soon as I received your commands, I made diligent inquiry: he assures me y't it had really two heads, one at each end, two mouths, two stings or tongues."

Rev. Christopher Toppan to Cotton Mather.  Far away in the twilight time  Of every people, in every clime,  Dragons and griffins and monsters dire,  Born of water, and air, and fire,  Or nursed, like the Python, in the mud  And ooze of the old Deucalion flood,  Crawl and wriggle and foam with rage,  Through dusk tradition and ballad age.  So from the childhood of Newbury town  And its time of fable the tale comes down  Of a terror which haunted bush and brake,  The Amphisbaena, the Double Snake!  Thou who makest the tale thy mirth,  Consider that strip of Christian earth  On the desolate shore of a sailless sea,  Full of terror and mystery,  Half-redeemed from the evil hold  Of the wood so dreary and dark and old,  Which drank with its lips of leaves the dew  When Time was young and the world was new,  And wove its shadows with sun and moon  Ere the stones of Cheops were squared and hewn;  Think of the sea's dread monotone,  Of the mournful wail from the pine-wood blown,  Of the strange, vast splendors that lit the North,  Of the troubled throes of the quaking earth,  And the dismal tales the Indian told,  Till the settler's heart at his hearth grew cold,  And he shrank from the tawny wizard's boasts,  And the hovering shadows seemed full of ghosts,  And above, below, and on every side,  The fear of his creed seemed verified;—  And think, if his lot were now thine own,  To grope with terrors nor named nor known,  How laxer muscle and weaker nerve  And a feebler faith thy need might serve;  And own to thyself the wonder more  That the snake had two heads and not a score!  Whether he lurked in the Oldtown fen,  Or the gray earth-flax of the Devil's Den,  Or swam in the wooded Artichoke,  Or coiled by the Northman's Written Rock,  Nothing on record is left to show;  Only the fact that he lived, we know,  And left the cast of a "double head"  In the scaly mask which he yearly shed.  For he carried a head where his tail should be,  And the two, of course, could never agree,  But wriggled about with main and might,  Now to the left and now to the right;  Pulling and twisting this way and that,  Neither knew what the other was at.  A snake with two heads, lurking so near!—  Judge of the wonder, guess at the fear!  Think what ancient gossips might say,  Shaking their heads in their dreary way,  Between the meetings on Sabbath-day!  How urchins, searching at day's decline  The Common Pasture for sheep or kine,  The terrible double-ganger heard  In leafy rustle or whirr of bird!  Think what a zest it gave to the sport  In berry-time of the younger sort,  As over pastures blackberry-twined  Reuben and Dorothy lagged behind,  And closer and closer, for fear of harm,  The maiden clung to her lover's arm;  And how the spark, who was forced to stay,  By his sweetheart's fears, till the break of day,  Thanked the snake for the fond delay!  Far and wide the tale was told,  Like a snowball growing while it rolled.  The nurse hushed with it the baby's cry;  And it served, in the worthy minister's eye,  To paint the primitive Serpent by.  Cotton Mather came posting down  All the way to Newbury town,  With his eyes agog and his ears set wide,  And his marvellous inkhorn at his side;  Stirring the while in the shallow pool  Of his brains for the lore he learned at school,  To garnish the story, with here a streak  Of Latin, and there another of Greek:  And the tales he heard and the notes he took,  Behold! are they not in his Wonder-Book?  Stories, like dragons, are hard to kill.  If the snake does not, the tale runs still  In Byfield Meadows, on Pipestone Hill.  And still, whenever husband and wife  Publish the shame of their daily strife,  And, with mad cross-purpose, tug and strain  At either end of the marriage-chain,  The gossips say, with a knowing shake  Of their gray heads, "Look at the Double Snake!  One in body and two in will,  The Amphisbaena is living still!"

A PLEA FOR THE FIJIANS;

OR, CAN NOTHING BE SAID IN FAVOR OF ROASTING ONE'S EQUALS?

It is with a feeling of no mean satisfaction, that, in this year of 1859, the philosopher can calmly propose the investigation of a subject, the mere mention of which would have created universal disgust, and even horror, at a period not long past. Thanks to the progress of liberal ideas and sound criticism, we are able, in the middle of the ever-memorable Nineteenth Century, serenely to examine anew those questions which for entire centuries stolid prejudice and narrow dogmatism considered settled, and adjudicated in the High Court of Humanity for all times to come. However signal the progress of our age may be in the useful arts and in aesthetics, especially in upholstery, in chemistry, in the government of large cities, and in the purity of commerce, in pottery, pills, and poetry, and in the dignity of politics, nothing, we may venture to say, will so distinctly and so broadly characterize the period in which we happily live, when the future historian shall sweep with his star-seeker over the past, as the joyful fact, that we, above all others, have divested ourselves of long-cherished errors, hugged by our forefathers as truths full of life and vigor, and have, indeed, so to speak, founded a Novum Organon in fact and reality, while the great Bacon proposed one in mind and theory. To our enlightened age it was reserved to return to polygamy, after nearly three thousand dragging years of dull adhesion of our race to tiresome monogamy, leaping back by one bound over the whole European Past into ancient and respectable Asia. Ex Oriente lux; ex Oriente gaudia seraglii! It is in our blessed epoch that atheism, by some, and pantheism, by others, are boldly taught and vindicated, as once they were by Greeks or Orientals, and with an earnestness and enthusiasm very different from the sneer with which Encyclopaedists of Voltaire's time attacked Christianity and Deism. To prove, however, the magnificent many-sidedness of our noble times, it is we that have returned once more to pictures of the Virgin Mary with winking and with weeping eyes, or to her apparitions talking patois, as that of La Valette, and to a hundred things in the Church, cautiously passed over sub silentio in the last century, but now joyously proclaimed and sustained with defiant erudition by English and German doctores graces, and by the Parisian "Univers," which, openly rejoicing in the English blood spilt by the Sepoys,—for it is but Protestant blood, and that of hateful freemen,—heralds the second or third advent of universal love and Papacy. It is in our age that representative, and indeed all institutional government, for the first time, is called effete parliamentarism, a theatrical delusion, for which, according to the requirements of advanced civilization, the beneficent, harmonious, and ever-glorious Caesarism, pur et simple, must be substituted, as it was once sublimely exhibited in the attractive Caesars of Rome, those favorites of History and very pets of Clio. In the time of Tiberius, as President Troplong beautifully and officially expressed it, "Democracy at last seated herself on the imperial throne, embodied in the Caesars,"—those worshipful incarnations of democracy, brought to our view in the tableaux of Suetonius and by the accounts of Tacitus. We have at last returned to Caesarism, or Asiatic absolutism, improved by modern light, and making the emperor a Second Providence, opening and shutting the mouths of the universal-suffrage people, for words or bread, as imperial divinity finds best. This is the progress of our age in Europe, while we, in this hemisphere, have taken, for the first time in history, a rational view of party strife, and with unclouded intelligence maintain that judges and presidents are, and ought to be, party exponents, doing away with those once romantic, but certainly superannuated ideas of Country, Justice, Truth, and Patriotism. All real progress tends toward simplification; and how simple are the idea of party and the associations clustering around this sacred word, compared with the confusing and embarrassing unreality of those ideas and juvenile feelings we have mentioned last!

But we have not done yet with the glory of our age. It is this, the decennium we are soon going to close, that has risen to that enviable eminence whence slavery is declared a precious good of itself, a hallowed agent of civilization, an indispensable element of conservatism, and a foundation of true socialism. From this lofty eminence the seer-statesman—rising far above the philosophical sagacity displayed by Aristotle and Varro, when they discussed the sacred topic—proclaims that Capital ought to own, and has a divine right to own, and always more or less does own, Labor; and that, since Labor constitutes the whole humanity of the laboring man, it clearly follows that he himself must be owned, if his labor be owned. Would you own the bird without its cage? Generous gospel of the rich! Blessed are the wealthy!

It is the destiny of the middle of the nineteenth century—well may we be forgiven, if we pronounce it with some pride—unhesitatingly to defend the African slave-trade, and to smile at what sickly philanthropists used to consider the unutterable woe, the unmeasured crime, and the diabolical hard-heartedness of that traffic. We have changed all this; and, to say the truth, it was high time to discover that the negro-trade forms a charming chapter in the history of Europe, and that the protracted efforts to put it down were unchristian and unstatesmanlike. Pitt, Roscoe, Wilberforce, Burke, Washington, Franklin, Madison, Adams, Lowndes,—puny names! short-sighted men! By the African slave-trade, creatures that are hardly deserving the name of men, on account of organic, intellectual, and moral incapacity, are forcibly carried into the regions of Christian religion and civilization, there to become civilized in spite of their unfitness for civilization. The mariners, usually occupied in risking life or health merely for the sake of base traffic and filthy lucre, are suddenly transformed into ministering agents of civilization and religion. It gives a priestly character to the captain of a slave-ship,—to him that is willing to break the laws of his country, even daring the gallows, for the benefit of the sable brother, and of his law-abiding conservative society. How different from those dark times when the poet could say, —Homo ignoto homini lupus est! The missionary only endeavors to carry the Church to Africa; the slave-trader carries Africa to the Church, to civilization, and to the auction-table.

There are but two more returns to truth and justice necessary,—the Inquisition and the Witch-Trials. These restored, we may safely congratulate ourselves on having regained the ground on which our race stood before the Reformation, that untoward event, whence all the mischief dates that has befallen man in the shape of human rights, liberty, and other deplorable things, as lately a grave writer—not a Catholic, nor a Jew either—gravely assured us. Gentle readers, let us not be impatient. Progress has been of late so rapid, that many of you, it is to be hoped, will yet have an opportunity of hailing the return of those two noble institutions, pro majore gloriâ Dei, for which they always existed, as long as chill and misty skepticism did not extinguish their glowing poetry. Ah! happy times! poetic age! when there existed not only "words that burn," but also laws that burned!

In the mean time, it may not be inappropriate to commence the consideration of a topic somewhat farther removed from us, but which, according to our humble opinion, ought not to remain wholly beyond the limits of a candid, liberal, and unprejudiced examination,—we mean the important question, Whether the choicest of all substances, the most delicate of all muscular texture, that substance of which kings, philosophers, policemen, and supporters of crinoline are fashioned by the plastic hand of Nature, ought forever to be excluded from the reproductive process of wasted energy and proportionably consumed nervous and cerebral fibre. Reader, do not shrink; grant us a patient ear. You do not know how rapidly you may change your own opinion and feelings. Do you not remember with what awe we first read in the "Almanach des Gourmands," that a certain sauce piquante was so fine that with it a man would eat his own mother? This was only twenty years ago; yet all of us, now, are helping a high-bred gentleman, trading, on a gigantic scale, in the bones of his great ancestor. What sublimity of peddling!

To those who say, It is unnatural to eat our friends, we would answer, that it is the office of civilization to remove us farther and farther from Nature. Analyze the present magnitude called Lady, and you can arithmetically state it, how little of it is nature-woman, and how much is hoop-civilization. To those, again, who object, that it is too primitive, we would reply, that the highest civilization is always a return to Nature, which is likewise exemplified by many of our ladies in the ball-room,—we mean by their upper portion.

But revenons à nos moutons. The Rev. Messrs. Williams and Calvert, missionaries, for many long years, among the Fijians, state, in their recently published work, that those unsophisticated children of Nature eat "long pig,"—as they call, with graceful humor, roast-man, in contradistinction to "short-pig," by which they designate our squealing fellow-roasters,—from three different motives.—When a chief has a gala-day, or desires to signal his arrival by a right royal feast, it is considered befitting to slaughter some men, to let the blood run in the path of royalty, and to have on the table some roast-homme. Our Captain Wilkins told us, years ago, that, for this roast-homme, a plump Fijiana, of some twelve or thirteen years, is preferred. They know very well what is good!—The second motive is hatred. When a Fijian mortally hates a person, he endeavors to kill him; and having killed the enemy, why should the victim not be eaten?—Lastly, it would seem that affectionate regard, especially for a favorite wife, sometimes rises to a mordant passion and an unconquerable longing for material assimilation,—so much so, that the loving husband roasts his Penelope, and neighbors are invited to participate in his better fourth or fifth, as the polygamic case may be. Perhaps, years after, when with less demonstrative nations the memory of the beloved one would have passed away, the Fijian Fidelio may smack his lips, and exclaim, with Petrarch's fervor,—

            "Perchè Morte fura  Prima i migliori, e lascia star i rei:  Questa aspettata al regno degli Dei  Cosa bella mortal passa e non dura."

Now we are very anxious not to be misunderstood by our readers. In writing this paper, we do not mean to urge the reintroduction of Cannibalism among us at once. The public mind may not yet be ripe for it; but we desire to assist in placing the subject in its proper light, and in showing that an enlightened impartiality can find very much in defence of the Fijians,—more, indeed, than the Rev. Mr. Froude has been able to accumulate in favor of his wife-devouring hero,—or than Mr. Spratt can say in favor of humanization in general, and the breaking-up of the Union in particular, by the reopening of the African slave-trade,—or than our venerable chief-justice has contrived to say in favor of reintroducing slavery in conquered territory, where positive law had abolished or excluded it, by the abstract Constitution itself, proprio vigore, (not quite unlike a wagoner, it seems to us, that carries the soil of distant parts, ipsâ adhesione, as it sticks to his boots, into the tavern-room,) without special law, which even the ancient civilians very stupidly declared to be necessary. First, you will remember, it was passionately maintained that the Constitution of the United States does not know the Common Law; and now it is insisted that Common Law (so far as slavery is concerned) is as inherent in the Constitution as the black pigment is in the negro. You cannot wash it out; it inheres physiologically in the Constitution. I tell you, reader, we are fast people indeed; we travel fast in our opinions, with now and then a somerset for the delectation of the philosopher.

Let us sit down, and have a philosophical conversation; above all, let us discard sentiment, feeling,—what you call heart, and all that sort of thing. You know how much mischief Las Casas has done by allowing his feelings to interfere when the Spaniards roasted Indians, from what he chose to call diabolical lust of gold, and sheer, abstract cruelty. Poor Bishop! He belonged to the softs. Let us be philosophers, economists, and, above all, Constitutionalists. Some philosophers, indeed, have said that all idea of Right and Wrong, and the idea that there is a difference between the two, must needs, first of all, start from sentiment; but leave, I implore you, such philosophic fogyism behind you.

First, then, as to the principle of Right. It is a fact, that most tribes and races, probably all nations in their earliest days, have killed old and useless parents, and have eaten enemies, once slain,—perhaps friends, too. Some nations carried the eating of human flesh far down into their civilized periods and into recent times. The Spaniards found the civilized Aztecs enjoying their petits soupers of babes à la Tartare, or gorgeous dinners on fattened heroes aux truffes. Have you forgotten that from that fine Introduction to Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico" a flavor of roast "long pig" steams into our nostrils as from a royal kitchen? Eating our equals, therefore, is sound Common Law of all mankind, even more so than slavery, for it exists before slavery can be introduced. Slavery is introduced when the prisoner of war may be made to work,—when the tilling of the soil has commenced; though then not always; for we now know that slavery was introduced among the Greeks at a comparatively late period: but killing parents and eating enemies exists in the hunter's state, and at those periods when people find it hard work to obtain food, each one for himself, to keep even a starved body and a little bit of soul together. Chewing our neighbor is even better, for it is older Common Law, than the universal buying of a wife and consequent selling of daughters which exists even now over far the greater portion of the globe. We take it that our species began with eating itself without paying for the fare. Partaking of our neighbor precedes all lex scripta, all statute law, all constitutions. As to ourselves in particular, whose law is the English law, we know that the Druids sacrificed human beings to their gods; and every one knows full well, that man, when in gastronomic contact with the gods, always appropriates the most savory morsels and the largest portions of the sacrifice to himself, leaving to the ethereal taste of Jove or Tezcatlipoca the smell of some burnt bones or inwards. Yet there is no law on record abolishing human sacrifices. We know, indeed, that some Teutonic tribes, when they adopted Christianity, positively prohibited the eating of horse-flesh, but no law ever forbade to honor our fathers and mothers by making them parts of our feasts; so that no lawyer of the true sort will deny, that, to this day, the right of sacrificing fellow-men, and the reasonable concomitant of eating the better portion of the sacrifice, still exists. Greeks and Romans have sacrificed men; why should not we? That men have their individual rights is no valid objection. Rights depend exclusively upon the law; and the law, we have shown, does not grant equal rights (at least, not equal destinations) to the Eater and the Eatee; for it seems to be one thing to eat, and another to be eaten. It was a very silly maxim of the ancient Civil Law, That the law, the regula, is derived from the right (jus), not the jus from the law. Has not a Supreme Court in one of our States lately denied to a negro even the right to choose between liberty and slavery,—the choice being left to him by his deceased master,—because the creature (which, when doing wrong, is responsible and has a will imputed to him) has no will to choose, because it cannot have any, says the Supreme Court of that State?

However, it will doubtless be objected by some, that it is simply disgusting to eat our fellow-creatures of the same species,—that it is unnatural and against our religion,—and that so remarkable a diversity of taste can be explained only on the ground of our belonging to different races. We do not believe that the Fijians belong to a different race. Fijian, or Fijician, results, by a slight change of letters, from the word Phoenician; and there can be no doubt that the Fijians are descendants of those Phoenicians who, according to Herodotus, sailed, in the reign of the Egyptian King Necho, from the Persian Gulf round the Cape of Good Hope, and entered the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Hercules. How they came to be wafted to the opposite hemisphere is not for us to explain, nor do we know it. Suffice it to say, that Fijician and Phoenician are the same word. Possibly old Admiral Hanno preceded Captain Cook. Who can prove the contrary?

As to the first of these objections, we admit that some people may feel a degree of aversion to roast-homme; but so does the Mahometan abominate roast "short pig"; and a Brahmin, taken to Cincinnati and its environs, at the sanguinary hog-murder time, would die outright, of horror. We almost died, ourselves, at the sickening sight of that porcian massacre. De gustibus non est disputantibus, as our colonel used to say. Disgust, is the result of a special treaty of amity and reciprocity between the stomach and the imagination, differing according to difference in the contracting parties. We have known many persons who would not touch mutton, and others who would rather starve than eat oysters; while we ourselves revolt at sourkrout, which, nevertheless, millions of Germans, French, and Americans consider delicious. Disgust is arbitrary; it does not furnish us with a philosophical ground for argumentation. The Fijian does not feel disgust at the flavor of a well-roasted white sailor; and as long as he does not insist upon our relishing his fare, what right have we to ask him to feel disgusted? When the panther-tailed Aztec priest fattened his prisoner, or carried along the children decked with wreaths, soon to be smothered in their own juice, he cannot have felt disgust, any more than the Malay, of whom Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles tells us, that, with epicurean refinement, he cut the choicest bits from his living prisoner, in order to baste them to a turn and season them with choice pepper.