The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

Herman; or, Young Knighthood. By E. Foxton. Boston: Lee & Shepard.

We are entirely uncertain whether this work will be recognized for what it is by our young country-folk; but we are very certain, if it is not, it will be our young country-folk's loss. It is, we suppose, a novel. Its author admits that it is a story; but it is not at all the kind of banquet to which novel-readers are usually invited. We can fancy the consternation which awaits the devourers of story-books,—those persons, we mean, whose reading is confined to novels, who lie in wait for Mrs. Wood and Miss Braddon, and stretch their sales into the double-figured thousands, through whose passive brains plot after plot travels in quick succession and leaves no sign, and whose name, we fear, is Legion. They will eagerly seize this new story with the romantic title, be launched auspiciously into gay ball-rooms, glide graciously among the familiar flounces, dances, and small talk, only to find themselves suddenly and without warning in some gulf of grave discussion opening out deceptively from the sparkling stream of the story, or stranded on some lofty sentiment never dreamt of in their philosophy. For the author's mind is, in the best sense of the word, a discursive one. It is full of positive thought, and strikes out right and left like a school-boy who must needs relieve his superabundant spirits by pinching his sister's ear, thrusting his fists in his brother's face, kicking aside the foot-cushion, and making a plunge at the cat, while he is performing the simple operation of walking across the room. This book is written out of a mind so full of wit and wisdom that it overflows at the gentlest touch. It has more sense and learning and power than go to the making up of a dozen ordinary novels. The very prodigality of its resources is a stumbling-block. Its great fault is its muchness, if we may borrow a term from Hawthorne's mint. It is like a young minister's first sermon, into which he frantically attempts to cram the whole body of divinity. Especially in the early part of the book, we are constantly drawn away front the story by delightful little essays, sometimes read to us by the author himself,—sometimes wrought into the conversations by playful anecdotes, by effective character-sketches, and vivid scene and scenery-paintings. They do not always materially help forward the story, nor do they always hinder it. They often give it an air of reality, and they always help to utilize the author's idea. If they do not avail his art, they avail his didactics. Where they are not good for the story, they are good for something. By many thoughtless, and by all mere novel-readers, they will probably be skipped; but for ourselves, we confess, that, though high art may regard them as blemishes, we should not know how to give the order for their removal. Considered in themselves, in their style and sentiment, the little digressions, the long conversations, the carefully wrought side-scenes are so rich in a certain tender religious wisdom, yet crisp and piquant withal, and so full of living thought on the great questions of the day, that we dwell in them with enjoyment, though with a compunctious half-consciousness that they ought not to be there.

But though we are tolerant of discursiveness where it affects only the flow of the story, we like it less where it disturbs the flow of the style. A paragraph ought never, by the mere form into which it is cast, to require to be read over and over in order to get at the meaning. Yet we are confident that nine readers out of ten would need to read the following sentence more than once in order to get at its true construction:—

"Oh, that I were able to conform myself to that further fictitious, not to say factitious, standard of taste, according to which, just as,—though a hemorrhage from the nose, howsoever ill-timed, distressing, or even dangerous to the patient, is comic,—one from the lungs is poetical and tragic; and an extravasation of blood about the heart is not inappropriate to the demise of the most romantic civil hero, (who would seem, indeed, capable of escaping an earthly immortality only by means of pulmonary disease or some accident, unless pounced upon by some convenient and imposing epidemic,) while a similar affection of the brain of an imaginary personage can be rendered affecting or excusable only by a weight of years and virtues in the patient; so certain moral diseases, alias sins, in actual life making the sinner by no means peculiarly engaging, have in fiction acquired a prescriptive right to our regard!"

But the true power and pathos of the book rise ever high and higher, and all minor defects are flooded out of sight. It is no small happiness that we have to do from the beginning with a family hitherto wellnigh unknown in American noveldom,—a family rich and not vulgar, beautiful and not frivolous, highly educated and fastidious, yet neither bitter nor disdainful,—refined, honorable, serene, affectionate. We are not merely told that they are so. We mingle with them, we see it for ourselves, and are refreshed and revived thereby. It is pleasant to miss for once the worldly mother, the empty daughter, the glare and glitter of shoddy, the low rivalry, the degrading strife, which can hardly be held up even to our reprobation without debasing us. Whether or not the best mode of inculcating virtue is that which gives us an example to imitate rather than a vice to shun, we are sure it is the most agreeable. It is infinitely sweeter to be attracted by the fragrance of Paradise than to be repelled by the sulphurous fumes of Pandemonium. The contemplation of such a home as this book opens to us is pleasant to the eyes and good for the heart's food, and to be desired to make one wise. A pure domestic love shines through it, tender, tranquil, and intense. Its inmates are daintily, delicately, yet distinctly drawn. They are courteous without being cold, playful without rudeness, serious, yet sensible, reticent or demonstrative as the case may be, yet in all things natural. It is not book, it is life. Each is a type of character matchless in its way, but each is also a living soul, whose outward elegance and grace are but the fit adjuncts of its inward purity and peace. Even if such a home never existed, we should still defend its portrayal, as the Vicar of Wakefield wrote his wife's epitaph during her life that she might have a chance to become worthy of its praise.

It is a happiness also to make the acquaintance of women who are brilliant and not bad, whose innocence does not run into insipidity, who are no less queens than vassals, worthily the one, royally the other. We meet in books many single-women, but they are usually embittered by disappointment or by hope deferred,—angular, envious, busybodies in other women's matters; or they are comically odd, self-ridiculing, and unrestful; or, worst of all, they have become morally attenuated by a thwarted love or a long course of dismal and absurd self-sacrifice and are so resigned, colorless, and impassive, that, like Naaman, we are tempted to go away in a rage. But where shall we find another Clara,—beautiful, attractive, radiant, serenely living her happy life, "aimless," but not "anxious," doing every day the duty that lies next her hand, scarcely knowing that it is duty, never fancying that she is out of her sphere or thinking whether she is in it, tranced in tranquil reveries that spiritualize instead of spoiling her, and, shining ever along her untroubled way,

"With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace"?

All the chief actors in the book are clever, rising often into the high latitudes of genius, yet without that perverse kink which is wont to mar all satisfaction. There is no taint of poison in the air they breathe. There is no passion hovering on the border-land of crime, or defiling its garments with the dust of earthliness. Love is what it ever should be, all noble and elevating,—worship as well as devotion,—annihilating only selfishness, sanctifying, not sacrificing, duty. There is no yielding to a depraved popular taste, no abdication of an inherited throne to stand on a level with the unthinking crowd and receive its worthless applauses. Rather the crowd is bidden higher, to enter upon its own rightful, royal possessions. This is the true missionary work. Manhood and womanhood in their best development are the theme of the book; and they are touched with so fine a grace, outlined with so true a pencil, tinted with so imperial a splendor, that the most discontented may be satisfied. Does this seem slight praise? In truth it can most rarely be bestowed. Why, it is matter for thanksgiving when we are not outraged!

On this Field of the Cloth of Gold rises a knight without fear and without reproach. Purely human and most heroic, as unpretending as spotless, womanly, gentle, yet of positive and aggressive strength, strength to do silently, to endure steadfastly, to die conquered, yet victorious, to live in the front, yet alone,—is it an ideal character? So much the more let it be studied, that our souls may absorb it and produce the reality: for it is ideal after no impossible sort. In his simple purity, in his fidelity to right, in his chivalry and his religion, he is only what all can be. It is an American boy, called to no loftier living, to no more "extraordinary seeking," than his country has a right to claim from all her sons,—called to no sterner sacrifice, to no severer suffering, than many a brave lad has faced and may yet face again. If we could read the silent history of these last years, should we not find in thousands of young hearts the story of a resolve no less firm, of a pain scarcely less deadly? The pent-up agony in the prison-house of Slavery before Northern cannon thundered at its doors is a tale that will never be told. God grant its horrors may never be surpassed,—never renewed! But we cannot say that Herman's woe is too highly wrought. We cannot console ourselves with thinking, that, however vividly delineated, it is mere fictitious suffering. We know that such things have happened,—yes, and things immeasurably worse. We know that Herman did only what any high and clear-souled man ten years ago might have owed to do, and that he suffered only the natural consequences of such doing. Ten years ago this country of ours was so that a man might legally and without redress be tortured to death for doing that which was not merely a plain obedience to the plainest precepts of the Bible, but what in any other Christian country than our own would have been instantly recognized as a deed of the highest heroism. And if we are not careful to do justly, all the new ropes wherewith we have bound this accursed Samson of Slavery will be broken like a thread, and our last state be worse than our first.

We know no work of fiction so full as this of beauty and wisdom, so free from folly, so resplendent with intellectual life, with moral purity, and Christian holiness, so apt to teach, so graceful in the teaching. We follow it with admiration and sympathy, from its gay beginning, through all the pain, the passion, and the peace, to the heartache of its closing pages,—that close, supremely sad, yet strangely beautiful. "She sang to him, and he slept; she spoke, and he did not awaken." It is the record of heavy struggle, of defeat that was triumph, and triumph that was Heaven.

We offer no congratulations to the new author; nor do we deprecate for him any harsh censure;—not only because praise and censure seem alike rugged and halting by the sweet strains we seek to celebrate, but because he who in his "saintly solitude" can create a world so fair is independent of these light afflictions. For him there is always sympathy, great companionship, and godlike work. From this Earth can nothing take away; than this she has nothing more to give.

History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. By W. E. H. Lecky, M. A. Two Vols. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

Mr. Lecky has given us a book replete with interesting matter; and yet, owing to some lack of intellectual mastery in him over his materials, it leaves a singularly vague and dispiriting impression on the mind in reading it. The author has a plethora of knowledge in regard to the surface changes in history, but no insight whatever apparently into the meaning of history itself, into the philosophic causes which these changes attest and obey. He is a man of uncommon bulk, but deficient muscle. His mental furniture enfeebles his intellectual faculty. His body obstructs his soul. Sumptus fructum superat. His book costs the author more than it comes to. He is so absorbed in the contemplation of the accidents of history as to forget that history itself is but a narrow river, conducting to the broad, illimitable ocean of human brotherhood or equality,—and that to stand upon the bank, therefore, and watch its successive waves, instead of manfully leaping in and committing one's life and fortunes to it, is scarcely the part of a wise man. Mr. Lecky's essay would seem to have originated more in a desire to try his hand at theorizing than in any necessity to ventilate some previous drifts from the beginning to the end of his book. You never feel yourself in a compact, water-tight boat, obedient to rudder and sail, but at most on a raft, drifting at the absolute gré of the tides, in a certain general direction, no doubt, but with no foresight of the specific intellectual port at which you are to bring up. Occasionally the mist condenses, the rain patters down, you catch a glimpse of far-off mountaintops, and suppose the entire landscape will soon be bathed in sunshine. But no, a new inrush of illustrative facts takes place, and all is fog again. There is a great deal of good writing in the book, and it leaves nothing to be desired in the way of advanced sentiment. But we fail to perceive its bearing upon the progress of ideas. It may flatter a superficial scientific optimism, but it will obstruct rather than promote the interests of philosophic thought, for this reason, that it inclines the reader to suspend his convictions upon some fated progress of events which will of itself do the world's thinking for it, and turn both heart and mind at last into cheerful, complacent pensioners of science.

The object of Mr. Lecky is to trace the history of the spirit of Rationalism,—the spirit which disposes men to reject all belief founded upon authority, and to make the causes of phenomena intrinsic and not extrinsic to the phenomena themselves. Rationalism, if we rightly apprehend Mr. Lecky, is not any precise doctrine or system of doctrine, but only a diffused bias or tendency of the mind to regard the power which is operative in Nature and history as a rigidly creative or constitutive power, rather than a redemptive or formative one. Doubtless Mr. Lecky, if he should ever consider the subject, would be free to admit that the creative action implies a necessary reaction on the part of the creature. But he has manifestly no sympathy with the early or imaginative faiths of the world, which represent creation as a physical rather than a rational exhibition of the Divine power. His entire book is written in the service of the opposite conception. To be sure, he does not discuss the new faith as a theologian, but only as an historian. It is not an affair of the heart with him, but only of the head. He takes no pains to commend it as an advance in point of truth upon the old faith, and does not once even avow his own intellectual identification with it. In short, he is not the retained attorney of the new faith, but its disinterested annalist, treating it simply as an historic change wrought in the texture of men's thought, promoted by such and such causes, attested by such and such effects, but independent of all partisan judgment and clamor either favorable or adverse. Still there is no doubt of the historian's own private bias. He applauds ex animo the change he records; and his book would have gained greatly in interest, if he could only have written it a little more from the heart and a little less from the head. For then, apart from the incidental advantage which would accrue to it, to the reader's imagination, as being a revelation of the author's living personality, we think the author himself could hardly fail to have seen, before he had finished his task, that there is no essential contradiction between the world's earlier and later faiths; that these faiths differ not as good and evil or true and false differ, but only and at most as root and stem and flower differ in the plant, or birth, growth, and maturity in the animal.

The lesson which Mr. Lecky inculcates upon his reader is this: that civilization and miracle are fatally opposed; that the former waxes or wanes precisely as the latter is discredited or accredited. History shows civilization to have thriven precisely as men have outgrown their belief in miracle, or the possibility of any outward Divine intervention in Nature, and have learned to insist upon strictly natural causes for all natural effects. The fruits of Mr. Lecky's research on this subject are varied and interesting, and we cordially commend his volumes to the reader as an inviting storehouse of materials for reflection; but we very much doubt whether the school of thought he represents has, on the whole, mastered the problem of civilization any more thoroughly than its rival. The difference between the two schools is, indeed, one of principle more than of words; but we cannot help thinking, nevertheless, that the controversy is needlessly protracted on both sides, for want of a sufficiently definite and comprehensive statement of the point in dispute. Let us see whether we cannot make at least an approximation to such a statement.

What is agitated, then, between the two rival schools of thought is the Divine power: not the existence of such power, for there is no noticeable difference on that point, but only its quality or mode of operation. The Orthodox attribute to God a strictly moral, which is a specific method of action, addressed to purely personal or subjective issues; their opponents, a strictly physical, which is a universal method, addressed to purely impersonal and objective issues. The one party assigns to God a finite personality, or one limited by Nature; the other, an indefinite personality, as identified with natural law. The Orthodox, of course, maintain that God's creative action was universal, inasmuch as it contemplated only cosmical issues; but as that mode of action was exhausted by its own universality, His subsequent relation to His creatures must be purely administrative, as expressing His personal pleasure or displeasure in their various functioning. The other side do not dogmatize about the Divine power, or its method of action, in the abstract. They only insist, as against their antagonists, that the Divine administration of Nature is not, within the limits of our science, personal; that it is not a power exerted upon Nature, or from without, and in contravention of her ordinary processes; that, so far as our knowledge goes, on the contrary, whatever may be our faith, it is a power invariably exerted through Nature, or from within, and therefore in habitual consistency with her ordinary effects. In other words, they insist, that, so far as the Divine power is cognizable to us, it falls exclusively within and never without the routine of Nature; and as universality is the characteristic of that routine, they do not hesitate, on behalf of science, to affirm that the Divine action is never addressed to specific or differential results, but always to universal or identical ones. In short, they logically refuse to the Divine power as exhibited in Nature all personal or moral quality, as inferring on the part of Deity any possible unequal or inequitable relations to the creatures He has made; and assign to all such reputed partial exhibitions of it a purely educative, and therefore universal, bearing upon the mind of the race.

Such, in brief, is the question agitated between the old and new faiths; whether God acts outwardly upon Nature, or inwardly through Nature,—that is to say, whether His action is specific as addressed to private ends, or strictly universal as addressed only to public ends. If the former hypothesis be true, then sense rightfully controls reason, and everything is exactly what it appears. If the latter hypothesis be true, then sense rightfully serves reason, and nothing is as it appears to be, namely, absolute and independent of everything else, but simply phenomenal and relative to everything else. It is evident to a glance that a controversy so eminently scientific could never have gone to the unwholesome lengths which it has reached in our day, unless there were something in it more than meets the eye: unless, for example, the interests of morality, which is the only recognized bond of our existing societies, were at stake. For if one and the same law binds all Nature, then plant and animal and man have one and the same destiny, so far as their nature goes. If, for example, the plant as one form of natural existence, and the animal as another form, are what they severally are, by no means absolutely, or in themselves, but only by relation to all other plants and animals, then man, who is only a higher, that is, a moral, or evil absolutely or in himself, but only relatively to all other men. And if we allow morality only this relative force,—if the good man is not good absolutely or in himself, nor the evil man evil absolutely or in himself,—why, then our existing civilization, which is built upon such absoluteness, has a fictitious basis, and must fall to the ground.

Hinc ilia lachrymæ. This is why a question apparently of pure science turns out practically so full of inward heartburning and mutual reviling. Neither theology nor science is competent to the philosophic recognition of man's associated destiny, and hence have neither of them the secret of those perturbations which ever and anon gloom our political atmosphere and shut out to the eye of sensuous thought the entire future of the race. Philosophy alone possesses this secret, because it alone perceives that all our political, civil, and even domestic broils grow out of this identical warfare between men's religions and scientific convictions,—have no other source than that persistent insubmission which the interests of force, as represented by priesthoods and governments, are under to the interests of freedom, represented by society. Philosophy mediates between the religious and secular thought of mankind, by making the sphere of God's universal action identical with that of man's organic necessities, and the sphere of His specific action identical with that of man's moral freedom: so harmonizing the two in one subject. Philosophy alone, in short, is competent to the future of human destiny, because it alone adjusts the relation of morals to physics, alone adjusts the specific interests avouched by religion with the universal interests avouched by science. And its competence is owing to this fact exclusively, that it alone apprehends or appreciates the distinctively social destiny of man, a destiny in which the interests of the most intense and exquisite freedom or individuality are bound up with the interests of the most imperious necessity or community,—or, what is the same thing, which presents every man no longer in subjective or moral, but only in objective or æsthetic, contrast with his kind, that so the general harmony may be inflamed by the widest partial diversity. Thus philosophy bids society recognise itself at once as God's perfect work on earth,—bids it rise to instant self-consciousness as the real Divine substance which Church and State have only feebly typified, and put on all Divine strength and peace as its rightful breastplate and ornament. For if all these fleeting phenomenal discords among men, upon which our existing civilization proceeds, claim no longer an absolute, but only a relative Divine sanction, a sanction in relation to the interests of human society exclusively, what remains for society to do but to organize itself afresh upon an eternal basis, that is, upon the acknowledgment of a force in man infinitely transcending his moral force, because it forever unites instead of disjoining him with God, being the force of spontaneous or productive action?

An Address on the Limits of Education, read before the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 16th, 1865. By Jacob Bigelow, M. D. Boston: E. P. Dutton & Co.