Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

ual cringingness vanishes; and the peculiar self-assertion, often verging on insolence, which replaces it, is intensely disagreeable. Independence springs up, and with independence self-will, which, if you live by giving orders and getting them obeyed, and are still the wiser or more sensible of the two parties, is far from attractive. And finally, courage revives. It is quite true that there are races in which courage seems to survive almost any extent of oppression; but, as a rule, courage requires the support of self-confidence, and under constant humiliation it dies almost entirely away. Hardly any hope will teach slaves to rebel, even when they are of the masters' color and race, the secret of the otherwise inexplicable security of the Roman system in provinces where German and Gaulish slaves must have outnumbered the freemen by five to one; and if color or race are different, they often will not rise at all. The courage is dead, to revive, when they have once realized their freedom, with a suddenness which to their former masters is not only amazing but terrible, and when color-pride comes in, almost unbearable. The occurrence of this change at the time when the Jacquerie broke out, when it is as certain as any fact provable by testimony can be that the French peasantry, naturally a brave race, had lost their hardihood and could not fight, has been repeatedly described, and in many districts something like it, though less in degree, accompanied the French Revolu. tion. The conquered races, in fact, become manly again, and gradually prepared for that stout battle with nature, with human greed, and with human perversity, through which Providence has apparently agreed that man shall be trained to a higher point. Servility ceases, cruelty is considered shameful, and a new and loftier energy is born, developing itself in all

directions. The intellect revives slowly, for, as we have said, conquest impairs originality, and the effect of foreign culture and of the tendency to use a foreign literary language, is to the last degree depressing; but character improves in great leaps. Truthfulness, no doubt, is reborn slowly, for the quality is excessively inconvenient to all who serve, and is hardly yet developed even in Europe; but it reappears, till it is once more possible, as a beginning, to base judicial decisions upon evidence. Sympathy is slow to arise, man being selfish by nature; but it does arise, especially among women, so that in the Indian Mutiny, when whole populations approved massacre, the ayahs invariably shielded their mistresses and the children. Submissiveness is replaced by a tenacity so rooted that the law courts are loaded with work, and statesmen fear to tax lest there should be insurrection; and finally, civil courage, the courage which will not yield to oppression, reappears, and often even embarrasses the government. The change is slow, like the change which adapts an animal to its surroundings; but in four or five genera tions it is visible to all who choose to see. The natives of India, who have been secure for a hundred years, are changing visibly, and those who know them best believe that if the Roman peace can be maintained steadily for another century, slavishness, and all that it implies, will have disappeared from among them. The five millions of Egyptians, if governed steadily for a century or two, would rise in character at least to the level of Ital ians, and would then differ from their former selves less than the Greeks of today differ from the Greeks whom pashas for five centuries tortured at will. Surely that gain is great, and cannot fairly be declared to be purely material.

THE COAL DEPOSITS OF ALABAMA. The | extensive deposits of coking and cannel coal in the Warrior coalfields of Alabama are beginning to attract wide attention. The opinion is ventured that this field, which is stated to be almost inexhaustible, will in the near future be a formidable competitor for the coal supply of the West, and on the seaboard will even come into serious competition with the present supply from the home fields of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Maryland, and with the present great foreign sources of supply, England and Australia. The deposits in the

Warrior basin, it is thought, will certainly drive all other coals out of Mobile and other Gulf ports. Fifteen years ago Maryland coal was worth $15 a ton in Mobile; now the native article is laid down at $3.75 a ton. This means that all the shipping and all the ports farther south will hereafter be supplied with Southern coal. It is stated that the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, in connection with the Columbus division of the Georgia Pacific, are making preparations for a large coal traffic to meet all Gulf demands.

Iron,

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

III. DICTIONARY-MAKING, PAST AND PRESENT,. British Quarterly Review,
IV. A REMARKABLE IRISH TRIAL,

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors][ocr errors]

Longman's Magazine,
Gentleman's Magazine,
Temple Bar,
Scottish Review,

[ocr errors]

131

[ocr errors]

138

[ocr errors][merged small]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]

Macmillan's Magazine,
Spectator,

[ocr errors]

Times,.

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small]

For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co.

Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

[blocks in formation]

From The Fortnightly Review.

LE STYLE C'EST L'HOMME.

A CAUSERIE,

BY THE EARL OF LYTTON.

parel; for ideas are privileged travellers whose equipage pays no toll at any cus tom-house, and in their service many a contraband word has safely crossed the I HOPE it may be understood fron. this most vigilantly guarded frontiers. Thus, selection of a French title for an English the dissolute German lansquenet has for essay that the essayist makes no preten- centuries been a naturalized Frenchman, sion to be regarded as an authority upon and the French caporal a trusty German style, since he thus acknowledges that on soldier. Even when the two nations quarthat subject his own language fails him at | relled with each other, their hostile camps the outset. Words are as easily ex-gave reciprocal hospitality to emigrants of changed as coins; but, like coins, they this sort. Throughout the last Franco.. bear a national stamp, and generally lose German war, Teutonic havresacs were some fraction of their value in the course carried upon Gallic backs; the French of the exchange. Twenty pieces of silver veguemestre occasionally shot his Germay be equivalent to one piece of gold, man cousin, the Wachmeister; the French but they are not the same thing; and, word marche set German regiments in rather than dissipate the individuality of movement, and the German word halte an original saying by divesting it of its was obeyed by French troops who reoriginal form, I am content to leave un-ceive it as a command from the lips of translated the definition of style which I their own officers. have borrowed from Buffon only as a text for some desultory observations on the truth it asserts and illustrates that style is untranslatable.

Επεα πτερόεντα ! What wonder that words have been called winged? For they flit from land to land, and build their nests now here, now there, yet everywhere make Free thought is regarded as a precious themselves at home in spite of their forboon, even by those who are incapable of eign feathers. The swallow is not an thinking. But the freest thinker cannot English bird; there is no English bird emancipate thought from the restrictions that resembles him; and yet not one of of language; and, in the pursuit of its fal- our English birds is more at home in En. lacious freedom, thought stumbles at gland. We do not treat him as an alien, every turn, like a blind man, against bar- not even as a distinguished guest, but as riers unperceived by it till they have hin a countryman of our own who happens to dered its way or forcibly altered its direc- be fond of travel. In the same way we tion. What then becomes of its freedom? | treat, without reference to its national As soon as it has felt these barriers its origin, any foreign word that has long self-confidence deserts it, and it moves frequented our language. But with the between them with awkward gait and hesi- | tating step. The soaring spirit of Faust aspired to be a ruler of spirits; yet his mind faltered and fell into confusion at the first sentence, when he tried to translate the Fourth Gospel into his own language. The ideal world, no doubt, is unconfined by geographical boundaries, and to thought no sentinel cries "Who goes there?" but ideas cannot go about naked. When long settled in a foreign country they sometimes adopt its fashions of speech, but on the whole they are tenacious of their national costume, which is certainly the one that best becomes them. Generally, therefore, they carry with them, wherever they go, the whole of their ap-only receive a truth without mistrust when

individual origin of universal sayings the case is rather different, because it is mainly to their individual character that such sayings owe their universal currency. What we relish in them is not so much their veracity, which is general, as their expression of a certain personal quality which is particular; a quality which renders their veracity more startling, or more persuasive, than it would otherwise be, and without which many of these sayings would probably be platitudes. The world, therefore, is interested in the authenticity of any saying that embodies a common truth in an uncommon form; for truth itself stands in need of attestation. We

it is offered us by some one whose char- caressingly at a nicely calculated tangenti

as one billiard ball adroitly struck by a skilful player touches another so as to make the second ball unresistingly co-operate with the player's intention as it follows the inclination imparted to it by the first.

acter already commands our confidence; and were a multitude of rogues to assure us that it is more blessed to give than to receive, we should not believe it on their testimony. Such a saying as L'état c'est moi derives its chief significance from our knowledge that it is the saying of Louis What a man's physiognomy is to the Quatorze, who, when he said it, was ex-man, an author's style is to the author. ceptionally well qualified to know what he It is that part of him which regulates his was saying. And so was Buffon when he intercourse with others, and whereby he said, Le style c'est l'homme; a saying in- is best known to those he addresses. vested with a special personal authority But the whole man it can hardly be. For by the personal dignity which specially in his style, and by means of his style, an characterizes the style of its author. Its author decently conceals what it does not original form, therefore, should not be lost suit him to display. We do not say, sight of, although it is not precisely in "The dress-coat is the man," although we that form that it has become proverbial. know that the cut of the coat is determined by the figure of its wearer, and from his way of wearing it we draw conclusions. Such conclusions, moreover, are particularly just when they apply to an intellectual individuality whose literary clothing is a gift of nature which may perhaps be improved, but cannot be produced, by art.

Buffon was not only a great naturalist, he was also a great writer; and this celebrated sentence belongs to the address which, in both capacities, he delivered to the French Academy on the occasion of its reception of him. He was speaking about books, and his argument was that those which are well written are the only ones it is worth while to preserve in the interest of posterity. For there is a common care of common property, and all communicable knowledge becomes common property as soon as it has been communicated; so that, if the matter of a book be useful to the world, its preservation is ensured by the world's use of it, even though the book itself may perish; but there can be no such common property in the manner of a book, which belongs only to its author. "Facts and inventions,' said Buffon, "can be appropriated and utilized by others, but style is the man himself, Le style c'est l'homme même."

[ocr errors]

Regarded as a definition, the saying is not quite accurate. What definition is? "All transitory things are similes," sings the Chorus Mysticus in "Faust," and "all phenomena," saith philosophy, "are forms." To us transitory beings, who live in a world of phenomena, absolute truth is so inaccessible that even absolute authority must make shift to do without it. But this is at least one of those happy sayings which, instead of rudely flinging in our faces the little particle of truth that gives them impetus, touch us therewith

There is, however, an important distinction to be observed between the style of a writer, which is always individual, and the manner of writing, which is sometimes common to a school, a system, or a literary association. Literature nowa. days produces many groups of good writers who co-operate, in a common circle of ideas, round a common literary centre; as in the case of reviews or journals devoted to the propagation of particular opinions or the promotion of particular intellectual tendencies. Such periodicals have a curious collective individuality of their own, which imparts to the productions of their several writers a certain manner more or less common to the whole group. These writers do not lose their own individuality, which we often detect without difficulty under the anonymous veil that impartially covers them all; but they acquire, in addition to it, the manner of the school that unites them, and write as members of the same family talk- not all exactly alike, but all with a more or less noticeable family likeness. Bertin the elder (of the Journal des Debats) and Beloz (of the Revue des Deux Mondes) were remarkable instances of men who have in their way

[ocr errors]
« VorigeDoorgaan »