Loe raamatut: «The Continental Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, June, 1862», lehekülg 15

PICAYUNE BUTLER

 
'General Butler was a barber,'
So the Pelicans were raving;
Now you've got him in your harbor,
Tell us how you like his shaving?
 

LITERARY NOTICES

LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. Delivered at the royal Institution of Great Britain in April, May, and June, 1861. By MAX MULLER, Fellow of All Souls College, etc. From the second London edition, revised. New-York: Charles Scribner, Boston: A.K. Loring. 1862.

Within the memory of man one could in England or America be 'very well educated,' as the word went, and yet remain grossly ignorant of the simplest elements of the history of language. In those days Latin was held by scholars to be derived from Greek—where the Greek came from nobody knew or cared, though it was thought, from Hebrew. German was a jargon, Provençal a 'patois,' and Sanscrit an obsolete tongue, held in reverence by Hindoo savages. The vast connections of language with history were generally ignored. Hebrew was assumed, as a matter of course, to have been the primeval language, and it was wicked to doubt it. Then came Sir William Jones, Carey, Wilkins, Forster, Colebrooke, and the other Anglo-Indian scholars, and the world learned what it ought to have learned from the Jesuits, that there was in the East a very ancient language—Sanscrit—'of wonderful structure, more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, more exquisitely refined than either; bearing to both a strong affinity,' and stranger still, containing a vast amount of words almost identical with many in all European and many Oriental tongues. This was an apocalypse of truth to many—but a source of grief to the orthodox believers that Greek and Latin were either aboriginal languages, or modifications of Hebrew. Hence the blind, and in some cases untruthful warfare made on the Sanscrit discoveries, as in the case of Dugald Stewart.

'Dugald Stewart was too wise not to see that the conclusions drawn from the facts about Sanscrit were inevitable. He therefore denied the reality of such a language as Sanscrit altogether, and wrote his famous essay to prove that Sanscrit had been put together, after the model of Greek and Latin, by those arch forgers and liars, the Brahmins, and that the whole of Sanscrit literature was an imposture.'

But it was all of no avail. In 1808 Frederick Schlegel's work, On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, first 'boldly faced the facts and conclusions of Sanscrit scholarship, and became,' with all its faults, the 'foundation for the science of language.' Its great result may be given in one sentence—it embraced at a glance the languages of India, Persia, Greece, Italy, and Northern Europe, and riveted them by the simple name 'Indo-Germanic.' Then in this school, begun by English industry and shaped by German genius, came Franz Bopp, with his great comparative grammar of the Indo-Germanic tongues, and the enormous labors of Lassen, Rosen, Burnouf, and W. von Humboldt—a man to whose incredible ability of every kind, as to his secret diplomatic influence, history has never done justice. Grimm, and Rask—the first great Zend scholar—were among these early explorers, who have been followed by so many scholars, until some knowledge not merely of Greek and Latin, but of the relations of all languages, has become essential to a truly good education.

Yet after all, Sanscrit, it was soon seen, was not the parent, but 'the elder sister' of the Indo-Germanic languages. Behind Greek, Latin, and Sanscrit, Celtic, Teutonic, and Slavonic tongues, lurks a lost language—the mysterious Aryan, which, reëchoed through the tones of those six remaining Pleiades, its sisters, speaks of a mighty race which once, it may be, ruled supreme over a hundred lands, or perchance sole in the Caucasus. It is strange to see philologists slowly reconstructing, here and there, fragments of the Aryan,

'And speak in a tongue which man speaks no more.'

Among the many excellent elementary and introductory works on philology which have appeared of late years, this of Müller's is on several accounts the best. It is clearly written, so as to be within the comprehension of any reader of ordinary intelligence, and we can hardly conceive that any such person would not find it an extremely entertaining book. Its author is a genial writer—he writes with a relish and with real power—he loves knowledge, and wishes others to share it with him. Language, he holds—though the idea is not new with him—springs from a very few hundred roots, which are the phonetic types produced by a power inherent in human nature. Every substance has its peculiar ring when struck—man, under the action of certain laws, must develop first onomato-poietic sounds, and finally language. With this we take leave of this excellent work, trusting that the public will extend to it the favor which it so amply deserves.

THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF WASHINGTON IRVING. By his Nephew, PIERRE M. IRVING. Vol. I. New-York: G.P. Putnam. Boston: A.K. Loring. 1862.

This work has a strong, we might say an extraordinary claim to the interest of the most general reader, in its very first paragraph, since in it we are told that Washington Irving, on committing to his nephew Pierre the vast mass of papers requisite to his biography, remarked: 'Somebody will be writing my life when I am gone, and I wish you to do it. You must promise me that you will.' So with unusual wealth of material, gathered together for the purpose by the subject of the biography himself, the work has been begun, by the person whom Irving judged best fitted for it.

And a delightful work it is, not a page without something of special relish, as might be anticipated in the chronicle of a life which is thickly studded with personal association or correspondence with almost every intellectual eminence either of Europe or America during the past half-century. But apart from this, there is a racy Irving-y flavor from the very beginning, long before the wide world had incorporated Irving into its fraternity of great men, in the details of life, of home travel and of homely incident, as set forth in extracts from his letters, which is irresistibly charming. Full as this portion of the life is, we can not resist the hope that it will be greatly enlarged in subsequent editions, and that more copious extracts will be given from those letters, to the humblest of which the writer invariably communicates an indefinable fascination. In them, as in his regular 'writings,' we find the simplest incident narrated always without exaggeration—always as briefly as possible, yet told so quaintly and humorously withal, that we wonder at the piquancy which it assumes. It is the trouble with great men that they are, for lack of authentic anecdotes and details of their daily life, apt to retire into myths. Such will not be the case with Irving. The reality, the life-likeness of these letters, and of the ana drawn from them, will keep him, Washington Irving the New-Yorker, alive and breathing before the world to all time. In these chapters a vail seems lifted from what was growing obscure in our knowledge of social life in the youth of our fathers. Our only wish, in reading, is for more of it. But the life gathers interest as it proceeds. From America it extends to Europe, and we meet the names of Humboldt, De Staël, Allston, Vanderlyn, Mrs. Siddons, as among his associates even in early youth. So through Home Again and in Europe Again there is a constant succession of personal experience and wide opportunity to know the world. Did our limits permit, we would gladly cite largely from these pages, for it is long since the press has given to the world a book so richly quotable. But the best service we can render the reader is to refer him to the work itself, which is as well worth reading as any thing that its illustrious subject ever wrote, since in it we have most admirably reflected Irving himself; the best loved of our writers, and the man who did more, so far as intellectual effort is concerned, to honor our country than any American who ever lived.

BEAUTIES SELECTED FROM THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS DE QUINCKY. With a Portrait. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

We are not sure that this is not the very first book of other than pictorial beauties which we ever regarded with patience. Books of literary 'beauties' are like musical matinées—the first act of one opera—the grand dying-scene from another—all very pretty, but not on the whole satisfactory, or entitling one to claim from it alone any real knowledge of the original whole. Yet this volume we have found fascinating, have flitted from page to page, backwards and forwards, [it is a great advantage in a book of 'unconnections' that one may conscientiously skip about,] and concluded by thanking in our heart the judicious Eclectic, whoever he may be—who mosaicked these bits into an enduring picture of De Quincey-ism. For really in it, by virtue of selection, collection, and recollection, we have given an authentic cabinet of specimens more directly suggestive of the course and soul-idioms of the author than many minds would gather from reading all that he ever wrote. Only one thing seems needed—the great original commentary or essay on De Quincey, which these Beauties would most happily illustrate. It seems to rise shadowy before us—a sort of dead-letter ghost of a glorious book which craves life and has it not. We trust that our suggestion may induce some admirer of the Opium-Eater to have prepared an interleaved copy of these Beauties, and perfect the suggestion.

THE CHURCH IN THE ARMY; OR THE FOUR CENTURIONS. By Rev. WM. A. SCOTT, D.D., of San Francisco. New-York: Carleton, No. 413 Broadway. Boston: Crosby and Nichols. 1862.

Since every one is doing their 'little utmost' for the army, Mr. Scott hath contributed his mite in a work on the four captains of hundreds mentioned in the Bible—the first whereof was he of Capernaum; the second, the one commanding at the crucifixion; the third, that of Cesarea; and the fourth, Julius, the centurion who had Paul in charge during his voyage to Rome. We are glad to learn, from the close researches and critical acumen of Rev. Mr. Scott, that there is very good ground for concluding that all of these centurions were so impressed by the thrilling scenes which they witnessed, and the society with which they mingled, as to have eventually been converted and saved, a consummation which may possibly have escaped the observation of most readers, who, absorbed in their contemplation of the great dramatis personæ, seldom give thought as to what the effect on the minor characters must have been. It is worth observing that our author is thoroughly earnest in his exhortations—at times almost naively so. If he be often rather over-inclined to threaten grim damnation to an alarming majority, and describe with a relish the eternal horrors which hang around the second death, in good old-fashioned style, still we must remember that he sincerely means what he says, and is a Puritan of the ancient stamp.

EDITOR'S TABLE

There is something intensely American in such phrases as 'manifest destiny,' 'mission,' and 'call,' and we may add, something very vigorous may be found in the character of him who uses them. They are expressions which admit no alternative, no second possibility. The man of a 'mission,' or of a 'manifest destiny,' may be a fanatic, but he will be no flincher; he will strive to the bitter end, and fall dead in the traces; but he will succeed.

We are glad to learn that there is growing up in the army, and of course from it in all the homes of the whole country, a fixed impression that the South is inevitably destined to be 'Northed' or 'free-labored,' as the result of this war. The intelligent farmer in the ranks, who has learned his superiority to 'Secesh,' as a soldier, and who knows himself to be superior to any Southern in all matters of information and practical creative power, looks with scorn at the worn-out fields, wasteful agriculture, and general shiftlessness of the natives, and says, with a contemptuous laugh: 'We will get better crops out of the land, and manage it in another fashion, when we settle down here.' Not less scornfully does the mechanic look down on the clumsy, labor-wasting contrivances of the negro or negro-stupified white man, and agree with his mate that 'these people will never be of much account until we take them in hand.'

Master-mechanic, master-farmer, you are right. These people are your inferiors; with all their boasts and brags of 'culture,' you could teach them, by your shrewder intelligence, at a glance, the short cut to almost any thing at which their intellects might be employed; and you indulge in a very natural feeling, when, as conquerors, in glancing over their Canaan, you involuntarily plan what you will do some day, if a farm should by chance be your share of the bounty-money, when the war is over. For it is absurd to suppose that such a country will continue forever a prey to the wasting and exhaustive disease of the plantation-system, or that the black will always, as at present, inefficiently and awkwardly fulfill those mechanic labors which a keen white workman can better manage. Wherever the hand of the Northman touches, in these times, it shows a superior touch, whether in improvising a six-action cotton-gin, in repairing locomotives, or in sarcastically seizing a 'Secesh' newspaper and reëditing it with a storm of fun and piquancy such as its doleful columns never witnessed of old. In this and in a thousand ways, the Northern soldier realizes that he is in a land of inferiors, and a very rich land at that. At this point, his speculations on manifest destiny may very appropriately begin. There is no harm in suffering this idea to take firm hold. Like ultimate emancipation, it may be assumed as a fact, all to be determined in due time, according to the progress of events, as wisely laid down by President Lincoln, without hurry, without feverish haste, simply guided by the firm determination that eventually it must be.

We can not insist too strongly on this great truth, that when a nation makes up its mind that a certain event must take place, and acts calmly in the spirit of perfect persuasion, very little is really needed to hasten the wished-for consummation. Events suddenly spring up to aid, and in due time all is accomplished. Those who strive to hurry it retard it, those who work to drag it back hasten it. Never yet on earth was a real conviction crushed or prematurely realized. So it is, so it will be with this 'Northing' of the South. Let the country simply familiarize itself with the idea, and the idea will advance as rapidly as need be. In it lies the only solution of the great problem of reconciling the South and the North; the sooner we make up our minds to the fact, the better; and, on the other hand, the more deliberately and calmly we proceed to the work, the more certain will its accomplishment be. Events are now working to aid us with tremendous power and rapidity—faith, a judicious guiding of the current as it runs, is all that is at present required to insure a happy fulfillment.

The degree to which a vindictive and malignant opposition to every thing for the sake of 'the party' can be carried, has been well illustrated in the amount and variety of slander which has been heaped by the Southern-rights, sympathizing Democratic press on the efforts of those noble-hearted women who have endeavored to do something to alleviate the condition of the thousands of contrabands, who are many without clothes, employment, or the slightest idea of what they are to do. It would be hard to imagine any thing more harmless or more perfectly free from any thing like sinister or selfish motives than have been the conduct and motives of the noble women who have assumed this mission. Florence Nightingale undertook nothing nobler; and the world will some day recognize the deserts of those who strove against every obstacle to relieve the sufferings and enlighten the ignorance of the blacks—among whom were thousands of women and little children. Such being the literal truth, what does the reader think of such a paragraph as the following, which we find going the rounds of the Boston Courier and other journals of the same political faith?

'On dit, that some of the schoolmarms who went to South-Carolina several weeks ago, are not so intent upon teaching the young ideas how to shoot,' as upon flirting with the officers, in a manner not entirely consistent with morality. General Hunter is going to send some of the misbehaving misses home.'

If there is a loathsome, cowardly, infamous phrase, it is that of on dit, 'they say,' 'it is said,' when used to assail the virtue of women—above all, of women engaged in such a cause as that in question. We believe in our heart, this whole story to be a slander of the meanest description possible—a piece of as dirty innuendo as ever disgraced a Democratic paper. The spirit of the viper is apparent in every line of it. Yet it is in perfect keeping with the storm of abuse and falsehood which has been heaped on these 'contraband' missionaries, teachers, and nurses, since they went their way. They have been accused of pilfering, of lying, of doing nothing, of corrupting the blacks, of going out only to speculate, and, as might have been expected, we have at last the unfailing resort of the lying coward—a dirty hint as to breaking the seventh commandment—all according to the devilish old Jesuit precept of, 'Calumniare fortiter aliquis kœrebit'—'Slander boldly, something will be sure to stick.' And to such a depth of degradation—to the hinting away the characters of young ladies because they try to teach the poor contrabands—can men descend 'for the sake of the party'!

Of late years, those soundest of philanthropists, the men of common-sense who labor unweariedly to facilitate exchanges between civilized nations, have endeavored to promote in every possible manner the adoption of the same system of currency, weights and measures among civilized nations. It has been accepted as a rule beyond all debate, that if such mediums of business could be adopted—nay, if a common language even were in use, industry would receive an incalculable impulse, and the production of capital be enormously increased.

Not so, however, thinks John M. Vernon, of New-Orleans, who, stimulated by the purest secession sentiments, and urged by the most legitimate secession and 'State rights' logic, has developed a new principle of exclusiveness by devising a new system of decimal currency, which he thus recommends to the rebel Congress:

'We are a separate and distinct people, influenced by different interests and sentiments from the vandals who would subjugate us. Our manners and customs are different; our tastes and talents are different; our geographical position is different; and in conformity with natural laws, nature and instinct, our currency,—weights and measures, should be different. 'The basis of integral limit of value proposed for our currency, is the star, which is to be divided into one hundred equal parts, each part to be called a centime, namely: 10 centimes—1 tropic; 10 tropics—1 star; 10 stars—1 sol. 'These denominations for our currency have been selected for three reasons: first, they are appropriate to ourselves as a people; second, they are emblems of cheerfulness, honor, honesty of purpose, solidity, and stability; and third, the words used are simple, easily remembered, and are common to several languages. I will, in addition, observe that similar characteristics distinguish the proposed tables of weights and measures.'

'Stars'—'centimes'—'tropics,' and 'sols.' Why these words should be more significant of cheerfulness, honor, honesty, and solidity, than dollars and dimes, cents and mills, is not, as yet, apparent. As set forth in this recommendation, it would really appear that the root of all evil would have its evil properties extracted by giving the radical a different name. To be sure, the wages of sin thus far in the world's history, have generally been found equivalent to death, whether they are termed guineas, francs, thalers, cobangs, pesos, sequins, ducats, or dollars. But in Dixie—happy Dixie!—they only need another name, and lo! a miracle is to be wrought at once.

There is something in this whole proposition which accurately embodies the whole Southern policy. While the rest of the world is working to assimilate into civilization, they are laboring to get away and apart—to be different from everybody else—to remain provincial and 'peculiar.' It is the working of the same spirit which inspires the desire to substitute 'State rights' or individual will, or, in plain terms, lawlessness and barbarism for enlightenment and common rights. It is a craving for darkness instead of light, for antiquated feudal falsehood instead of republican truth; and it will meet with the destiny which awaits every struggle against the great and holy cause of humanity.