15777 (#103) ##########################################
JOHN WEISS
15777
Palissy, at the end of twenty years spent in vain attempts to
create a white enamel for his pottery, found nothing left but
the house he lived in, and the fences around it.
JOHN WEISS
15777
Palissy, at the end of twenty years spent in vain attempts to
create a white enamel for his pottery, found nothing left but
the house he lived in, and the fences around it.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v27 - Wat to Zor
Tell my brothers
That I perceive death, now I am well awake,
Best gift is they can give or I can take.
I would fain put off my last woman's-fault:
I'd not be tedious to you.
First Executioner –
We are ready.
Duchess — Dispose my breath how please you; but my body
Bestow upon my women, will you ?
First Executioner –
Yes.
Duchess — Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength
Must pull down heaven upon me; —
Yet stay: heaven-gates are not so highly arched
As princes' palaces; they that enter there
## p. 15766 (#92) ###########################################
15766
JOHN WEBSTER
Must go upon their knees. [K'neels. ] Come, violent death,
Serve for mandragora to make me sleep! -
Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out,
They then may feed in quiet.
[The Executioners strangle the Duchess. ]
Bosola
Where's the waiting-woman?
Fetch her: some other strangle the children.
[Cariola and Children are brought in by the Executioners; who presently
strangle the Children. ]
Look you, there sleeps your mistress.
Cariola
Oh, you are damned
Perpetually for this! My turn is next-
Is't not so ordered ?
Bosola
Yes, and I am glad
You are so well prepared for't.
Cariola
You are deceived, sir:
I am not prepared for 't, I will not die;
I will first come to my answer, and know
How I have offended.
Bosola-
Come, dispatch her. -
You kept her counsel; now you shall keep ours.
Cariola I will not die, I must not; I am contracted
To a young gentleman.
First Executioner -
Here's your wedding-ring.
Cariola — Let me but speak with the duke: I'll discover
Treason to his person.
Bosola
Delays: throttle her.
First Executioner
She bites and scratches.
Cariola
If you kill me now,
I am damned: I have not been at confession
This two years.
[The Executioners strangle Cariola.
Bosola -
Bear her into the next room,
Let these lie still.
(Exeunt the Executioners with the body of Cariola. ]
## p. 15767 (#93) ###########################################
JOHN WEBSTER
15767
Enter Ferdinand
Ferdinand -
Bosola -
You'd have her.
Is she dead?
She is what
But here begin your pity:
[Shows the Children strangled. ]
Alas, how have these offended ?
Ferdinand -
The death
Of young wolves is never to be pitied.
Bosola — Fix your eye here.
Ferdinand -
Constantly.
Bosola –
Do you not weep ?
Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out:
The element of water moistens the earth,
But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens.
Ferdinand —
Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle; she dies young.
Bosola I think not so: her infelicity
Seems to have years too many.
Ferdinand -
She and I were twins;
And should I die this instant, I had lived
Her time to a minute.
Bosola
It seems she was born first:
You have bloodily approved the ancient truth,
That kindred commonly do worse agree
Than remote strangers.
Ferdinand
Let me see her face
Again. Why didst not thou pity her? what
An excellent honest man mightst thou have been,
If thou hadst borne her to some sanctuary!
Or, bold in a good cause, opposed thyself,
With thy advanced sword above thy head,
Between her innocence and my revenge!
I bade thee, when I was distracted of my wits,
Go kill my dearest friend, and thou hast done 't.
For let me but examine well the cause :
What was the meanness of her match to me?
Only I must confess I had a hope,
Had she continued widow, to have gained
An infinite mass of treasure by her death:
And what was the main cause ? her marriage,
That drew a stream of gall quite through my heart.
## p. 15768 (#94) ###########################################
15768
JOHN WEBSTER
For thee,- as we observe in tragedies
That a good actor many times is cursed
For playing a villain's part,- I hate thee for 't;
And for my sake, thou hast done much ill well.
DIRGE FROM (VITTORIA COROMBONA
CALI
ALL for the robin-redbreast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm;
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.
## p. 15769 (#95) ###########################################
15769
JOHN WEISS
(1818-1879)
OHN Weiss belonged to a class of writers, not uncommon
among the Transcendentalists of New England, whose works
are distinguished by epigrammatic brilliancy. He wrote of
great things in what might almost be called a clever way; some-
times hiding the bold, simple outlines of an idea under an elaborate
and striking tracery of words. Yet the genuineness of his endow-
ments is beyond question. He possessed the singularly strong and
daring intellect of that generation of New-Englanders which brought
forth Margaret Fuller and Theodore Parker. He possessed the
remarkable faculty of combining an almost mystical faith with
extreme devotion to science. His outlook seemed to be as broad as
heaven itself, yet his mind recorded only flash-light pictures of the
universe. He saw vividly; he wrote of what he saw, in an intense
epigrammatic manner.
He was born in Boston in 1818, was graduated from Harvard in
1837. Later he studied at Heidelberg, becoming subsequently a min-
ister of the Unitarian church. From 1859 to 1870 he was pastor of
the Unitarian church at Watertown, Massachusetts. At one time he
gave a series of brilliant lectures in New York on the Greek Myths;
he wrote for the Radical, for the Massachusetts Quarterly, for the
Atlantic Monthly. In 1842 appeared his first work, in which he had
performed the task of editor and translator. This was Henry of
Afterdingen,' by F. von Hardenberg. In 1845 he published a transla-
tion of the philosophical and æsthetic letters of Schiller; a year later
appeared an edition of the memoir of Fichte by William Smith; and
in 1864 one of his most noted works, Life and Correspondence of
Theodore Parker. Later he published a volume of essays bearing
the title American Religion, and a volume entitled, “Wit, Humor,
and Shakespeare. ' Besides these works, he was the author of a num-
ber of religious and political pamphlets. He died in 1879.
His creed forms a background to much that he has written. The
foremost of the radicals, he cared nothing for dogma, centring his
faith solely about the idea of God and the idea of immortality. For
these he contended with glittering weapons. But he was not a logi-
cian primarily: his thought was essentially poetical.
“When all my veins flow unobstructed, and lift to the level of
my eyes the daily gladness that finds a gate at every pore; when the
## p. 15770 (#96) ###########################################
15770
JOHN WEISS
roaming gifts come home from nature to turn the brain into a hive
of cells full of yellow sunshine, the spoil of all the chalices of the
earth beneath and the heaven above, — then I am the subject of a
Revival of Religion. ”
The style of Weiss is sometimes overladen with conceits and epi-
grams, is not always a sane and quiet style; but it expresses admira-
bly his peculiar type of mind, - a type which has perished perhaps
with the unusual circumstances producing it.
CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL
From American Religion. Copyright 1871, by John Weiss
HE phrase
Takple, who suspect "it of excusing some immediate incapacity,
like that which would recommend clouds to the selectmen
for a new style of pavement, or a balloon's aimless whirling
instead of some direct and planted way of locomotion. There
may be an upper westward current; but in the mean time the
rail gets over the ground by all the points of the compass. The
Ideal will possibly carry a person off by some aerial route to
Paris; but if he would return to Boston he must alight. This
shrewdness is furthered too by the feeling that the phrase is
chiefly the property of poets, who are exercised only in expres-
sion, and cannot be counted on for work. The influence which
imaginative expression exerts upon a people is undervalued be.
cause it does not enrich the instant, but passes into the tempera-
ment by slow absorption, and appears at length in quality. Men
cannot wait for that. There is work on hand that is to be done
with what quality exists, or not at all. A man of business can-
not see that the poem which he read over-night affected, unless
to perturb, his next day's operations. He will do better with his
leisure next time by getting well posted from the commercial
columns. He rises more buoyantly upon stocks; the pathos that
.
wrings his heart is when they fall, and his streamers are no
longer gayly afloat. The expression of music and art serves him
only for enjoyment; and he has this advantage over the idealist,
that nobody can calculate the subtile orbit of influence, nor show
how the song and symphony make blood. It is only by accident
if one or two men in a generation have their heart or stomach
so exposed that the physicians can observe its function. But
## p. 15771 (#97) ###########################################
JOHN WEISS
15771
if every brain were unroofed, there is no Asmodeus skilled to
detect tones and colors jostling its atoms into more spiritual
companionship. One must be a part of the violin's grain to
know how the vibrations of the strings record themselves in the
dead wood of the instrument, - not dead, indeed, if it is capable
of assimilating rhythm.
But there are two kinds of the Ideal: one tends toward
expression; the other animates all kinds of labor, and secures
results. When a practical man says that he can do without the
Ideal, he does not understand his own business. When a prosaic
moralist says the same, and takes a contract to reform or to
establish, he throws up the material that he must work in. It is
intangible, but has a pressure of so many pounds to the inch,
and he stands drenched in it while he pretends he does not
breathe.
There is some ideal stimulus in every kind of work, none the
less definite because the worker appears to be unconscious of it.
A gang of men with sledge-hammers go fastening ties westward
toward Golden Gate. There is expectation in every stroke:
not a man of them but proposes to arrive somewhere by that
track on which he is hammering. Family bread, affection, inde-
pendence, enlargement: these invisible yearnings give the gold-
glimmer to his Sacramento. He is an idealist while he is faithful
to his work. And the country which hires his labor, and affects
only to be wanting to reach the Pacific thereby, is stimulated by
more than all the spices of the Orient. There is no such ideality
on earth as that which compels a nation to expand all its powers
of intelligence, and to reach eventually the Rights of Man.
Something is to be overcome wherever the ideal road is
traveled. The effort may be stamped with the coarsest realism;
but the ideality is in the effort. We do not know the outlets of
everything that we perform, nor the subtile connection between
our simplest acts and our loftiest attainments. It sometimes
seems a great way from the body to the soul; but a very slight
deed may bridge over the abyss of that ocular deception. The
soul is waiting close at hand to receive the benefit of our least
integrity. So that very ordinary things may be the essentials
to secure our spiritual advance,- begrimed and sturdy engineers
who rapidly pontoon for us a formidable-looking current, and let
us transport our whole splendid equipment to the opposite shore.
The Indian knows that a buffalo trail will take him surest to
## p. 15772 (#98) ###########################################
15772
JOHN WEISS
.
water. The American condescends to follow the Indian, and his
cities rise opposite to ferries and at the confluences of streams.
Then at length the buffalo pilots thither the silent steps of Re-
ligion and Liberty.
When Frederick the Great said he always noticed that Provi-
dence favored the heaviest battalion, he only stated in a sarcasm
what God in history states religiously: that he is on the side of
valor, foresight, self-control, wheresoever and on whatsoever ob.
jects these great qualities of an overcoming man are exercised.
God, having no human pride, does not regard the nature of the
object, but its intrinsic difficulties and its drift towards some
beauty. An ideal object is one, however material, that gives the
world a whole-souled man. And it is on this principle that nat-
ural forces seemn to have selected their men and nations through
the whole of history. It is the forecasting that molds and recon-
structs a raw popular material, till it is able to occupy, or to cre-
ate, some important position, to assert a truth, to breast a flood
of tyranny, to be caught in some way by the drift and amplitude
of the Divine order. If people have settled in spots toward
which the streams of the past converge in order to find the out-
let of civil and religious liberty, or if their ethical quality
slowly selects spots that invite either the friendship or hostility of
reigning ideas, and suggest rude engineering to arrange a battle-
field, they are certain to be subjected to the training which shall
best prepare them for their great effort. This training consists
in overcoming something, no matter how physical or how remote
in character from the future issue.
I know of nothing, for example, more striking than the way
in which the Dutch people were prepared to maintain liberty of
thought and worship. A poor Frisian race was selected and kept
for centuries up to its knees in the marshes through which the
Rhine emptied and lost itself. Here it lived in continual conflict
with the Northern Ocean, forced literally to hold the tide at
arm's length, while a few acres of dry land might yield a scanty
subsistence. Here circumstance kept them half submerged, till
instead of obeying a natural impulse to emigrate to solid and
more congenial land, they acquired a liking for their amphibious
position. The struggle piqued them into staying and seeing it
out. For centuries they appeared to be doing nothing but build-
ing and repairing dikes, when really they were constructing a
national will and persistency which was a dike for tyranny to
## p. 15773 (#99) ###########################################
JOHN WEISS
15773
lash in vain. By keeping out the water they trained themselves
to keep out the more insidious tide of bigotry and spiritual death.
What a homely and inglorious school for a great republic, that
taught her how to watch patiently by tending dikes and ditches;
how to close a breach against ruin by standing with succor in
the mid-tide when the sea-wall crumbled; how to convert almost
continual defeat into victory, by keeping hold of a drowned posi-
tion, cultivating acres that had just been drenched with salt, flow-
ing back again upon depopulated districts, and holding the old
line against the sea! All these stubborn traits appeared after-
ward clothed in noble forms of moral and mental life: still there
was the old breakwater running through the national temper,
and the will of the people was like one of the ancestral Frisians,
who could stand in a flood all day and not be chilled. The wis-
dom was vindicated which compelled them first to make a soil
for ideal liberty to flourish in. And as nations are prepared for
great destinies, so are men: the constitution must catch free and
vigorous movements in some mode of life fatal to indolence and
vulgarity, the will must be roused and learn how to handle the
helm, no matter how rude the objects of the voyage are.
The poets and men of expression have not then monopolized
the Ideal. We must be poetical enough to detect it in the moral
uses of the ordinary life we lead, that is so pathetic with the
struggles of constancy against physical and mental circumstances.
No matter how sensitive a young person's heart may be, like a
bare nerve in the weather, flattered by the soft touch of music
and colors, pared into gracious action by the chisel that builds
the statue's symmetry, twitched by the finger of tragedy till the
fount of tears is opened, - his ideal life does not begin till he
turns away from these to take up his own instrument of work,
to chip a conscience out of school-keeping, type-setting, engineer-
ing, cooking, and housework, to quarry some vital activity of
a free people. Because he himself is to become a poem, fairer
than any that was ever written, by overcoming indolence and a
bad disposition in favor of some immediate exigency. That is
the story of his siege of Troy, his wandering of Ulysses, his
Paradise Regained. The ideal of his constancy is the moral
sense, which some personal deficiency or poverty inflames till it
becomes his pillar of fire in the wilderness. It does not shape
him so much to remember the Odyssey, as it does to tie him-
self to his own mast and sail past the Sirens; or to go through
## p. 15774 (#100) ##########################################
15774
JOHN WEISS
Circe's den not only unsullied but a liberator of his comrades.
When we see the course of nature breeding in such schools its
human genius, we may know how closely allied are conscience
and superior talents. Underneath the slow grinding, suddenly a
facet flashes. It is true you may grind at a sea-shore pebble till
nothing comes of it but sand; but before you begin to grind, all
stones appear of similar texture. The real ideality is hid in
this persevering against the most humiliating and prosaic con-
ditions, such as the Creator maintained through chaos and his
scarcely less chaotic creatures of the early epochs. A million or
two years of coarse persistency vanquish matter, and Shakespeare
supplants the saurian. Why should he not in every man and
woman? for conscience can become Shakespearean underneath a
hod of mortar that mounts round by round to top the house.
Young people must learn that their creative and inspiring impulse
is not derived from high art, but from accommodation to low
requirements in a high vein to make them serve, to extort from
them such exquisite tones as the Russian did out of his bits of
wood cut from different trees, till he converted the forest into a
harmonicon; and that other obscure inventor, who coaxed a heap
of various stones to yield up its separate notes, and to fall into
place in perfect octaves.
We have all seen many persons who appear to us quite ruined.
Perhaps there is a better judge of that; but if it be true, the
fact is not so revolting to us as the shock is which it gives to
our natural preferences. The most deeply compromised person
will prefer to think that health has not become impossible for
him; he shares the instinct of nature which struggles desperately
to make its growth shapely under gnarled conditions. A man
clings to his share of a divine ideal of recuperation. No number
of damaged structures can vote down our feeling that supreme
Good aspires through man to become expressed and organized; it
shakes its signals of direction through the densest fog that we
can exhale. We see the light discolored, but do not mistake it
for darkness; we observe whence it comes, and trust to its hints
regarding our safety. On various principles of judgment, preach-
ers declare these men and those women to be abandoned. The
epithet remands God back to chaos. The poet grants us a bet-
ter glimpse of the hold on life than innocence possesses:
"I helped a man to die, some few weeks since,
Warped even from his go
art to one end-
## p. 15775 (#101) ##########################################
JOHN WEISS
15775
The living on princes' smiles, reflected from
A mighty herd of favorites. No mean trick
He left untried; and truly well-nigh wormed
All traces of God's finger out of him.
Then died, grown old: and just an hour before —
Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes —
He sate up suddenly, and with natural voice
Said that in spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June; and he knew well,
Without such telling, harebells grew in June;
And all that kings could ever give or take
Would not be precious as those blooms to him. ”
Does not that precious cherishing snatch a new June from
the collapse of the body, as a wrecker disentangles a still living
babe from the last freezing strain of a drowned mother? We can
only bid our imagination frame, in the interest of the universe,
at least a remonstrance against the destruction of the babe. For
we must always presume that the faintest pulse is a possible
chance for the heart to recover its full beat.
The world could transact nothing, and no race could ever de-
velop its special felicity, if the ideal of goodness ever deserted
its infelicitous men and women.
In our first unchartered moments, when we discover that
Nature can be a bit of a spendthrift, we have a companion better
than all with whom we sport, and the inner sense reaches for
its hand: as when a youth, blindfolded for a game, threads by
some glimmer of seeing or of mere attraction the whole romping
scene, and pursues the beauty who one day shall be his. Heaven
is never in despair: it has watched too many generations, and
profited by their prevailing goodness, not to perceive that if dis-
soluteness be out of order, so is cynicism and a skeptical temper
about ordinary people, if not more hostile to an ideal life. So
the young persons launch their divine gifts upon a stream that
is fretted with rapids near its head; some make the portages,
others try the shoot: the stream more tranquil always lies below.
There are eddies that carry them into indulgences of social and
material pleasure. The parents generally dissuade with a great
deal of wise shaking of the head, as much as to say, “We've
tried all that, and seen the folly of it. ” It is an ideal instinct
that prompts the children to reply, “Well, we would like to see
the folly of it too. ” How lucky it is that nobody can decant
(
## p. 15776 (#102) ##########################################
15776
JOHN WEISS
a
his old wine into the new bottles! So the youth gets his pro-
motion from the nursery to school, to occupation, to love and
marriage, to the successive disciplines; and his knowledge of one
period never makes him equal to the next one, which always has
some surprising element that tests him on
new side. We
have to go storming parallel after parallel. Up we run impetu-
ously, with glad acclaim, and plant our colors: before the wind
takes them, we perceive an inner line that we had not suspected.
Headlong we go at that too, only to find that the busy antagonist
has thrown up another; and that also has to be assailed. It is
plot and counterplot, mine and countermine: reality works, while
the Ideal catches a nap leaning upon its weapon; till as we sink,
and the colors falter on the last breach, we find that death is
only a resource and desperate ambush of a foe that is sullenly
retreating; and to-morrow the Ideal, light-armed, with marching
rations and the packs all left behind, will buoyantly pursue.
What a hint of personal immortality is this relative imperfec-
tion of our experiences! They suggest the absolute perfection
which is the plan of every soul; like the crumbled scale or bone
that taught the naturalist the structure, shape, and habits, of
an extinct fish whose fossil even no man had ever seen. One
day a fossil is found to justify, in the minutest particulars, the
infallibility of the scientific imagination. Our partial experiences
contain the history of souls not yet completed; and they are guar-
antees given to us directly by the divine imagination, the earnest
of the spirit, that the whole plan must include all the time and
opportunity needed to fill out the spiritual form. Eternity is in
pledge to our successive disappointments. Every morning we go
down to the edge of it like the fishermen of rock-bound coasts,
and put off upon it as they do, to fight for their little gains, and
satisfy the hunger that is as prompt to return as the morning.
All day we trawl and hunt by various devices for our shy suste-
nance; and the fruitful infinite stretches all around us, so deep
and coy that everything is hidden, so deep that everything is
contained. Our day sinks into its storm or calm. Over it our
day breaks with wants that never are appeased.
What do we care for the expense that this spendthrift, our
good-will for God, subjects us to? If anything is to be melted
for a beautiful casting, men keep the flame up, and throw in all
the fuel in the neighborhood. There is nothing too precious to
go towards making a soul limpid and symmetrical. Bernard
## p.
15777 (#103) ##########################################
JOHN WEISS
15777
Palissy, at the end of twenty years spent in vain attempts to
create a white enamel for his pottery, found nothing left but
the house he lived in, and the fences around it. Not a billet
of wood, for love or money, to keep up the furnace with. The
palings were ripped down and thrown in,—the enamel had not
melted. There was a crashing in the house: the children were
in dismay; the wife, assisted doubtless by such female friends as
had dropped in to comfort her, became loud in her reproaches.
Bernard was breaking up the tables and carrying them off, legs
and bodies, to the all-consuming fire. Still the enamel did not
melt! There was more crashing and hammering in the house:
Bernard was tearing up the foors to use the planks as fire-
wood. Frantic with despair, the wife rushes off to raise the town
against him. She was starved out by his pertinacity; he was fed
by his idea. And while she was gone, the anxieties and pov-
erty of twenty years flowed in the clear coating that became the
rage of kings and connoisseurs.
Throw everything into the fire of the Ideal! - the incum.
brances of society and pleasure, the frivolous amusements, the
small-talk and idling, the clique feelings and constraints, the con-
veniences that make our life a curse, the ornaments that dress
us in a weight to crush us to the dust. Throw fruitless regrets
and memories, and all the things we are most vain about, into
the devouring flame. We are clay in the hands of the potter.
Let all our rubbish melt to make it impervious to the weather,
not subject to decay, much sought for by the King.
THE COURT FOOL
From (Wit, Humor, and Shakespeare)
THO
HOUGH Shakespeare empties all his own love for pure fun into
this clown (in “Twelfth Night'], he makes of him the only
cool and consistent character in the play, and thus convey's
to us his conviction of the superiority of an observer who has
wit, humor, repartee, burlesquing, and buffoonery at command;
for none but wise men can make such fools of themselves. Such
a fine composition is apt to be misunderstood by the single-gifted
and prosaic people: but this only piques the bells to their hap-
piest jingle; and a man is never more convinced of the divine
XXVII-987
## p. 15778 (#104) ##########################################
15778
JOHN WEISS
origin of his buffooning talent than when the didactic souls reject
it as heresy. All Shakespeare's clowns brandish this fine bauble:
their bells swing in a Sabbath air and summon us to a service
of wisdom. Feste has no passion to fondle, and no chances to
lie in wait for except those which can help his foolery to walk
over everybody like the sun. Even when he seems to be wheed.
ling money out of the Duke and Viola, he is only in sport with
the weakness which purse-holders have to fee, to conciliate, to
enjoy an aspect of grandeur. His perfectly dispassionate temper
is sagacity itself. It discerns the solemn fickleness of the princi-
pal personages. They are all treated with amusing impartiality;
and it is in the spirit of the Kosmos itself, which does not stand
in awe of anybody. It seems, indeed, as if the function of fool,
and the striking toleration which has always invested it, was
developed by Nature for protection of those of her creatures who
are exposed to flattery and liable to be damaged by it. Not for
shallow amusement have rich and titled persons harbored jesters,
who always play the part of the slave of Pyrrhus, at proper
intervals to remind them that they are mortal. All men secretly
prefer to know the truth; but the pampered people cannot bear
to sit in the full draught of it. Its benefit must, however, be in
some way conveyed to them. Bluff Kent is banished for saying
to Lear, in the plainest Saxon, what the fool kept insinuating
with impunity. Therefore, no genuine court has been complete
without its fool. The most truculent sceptre has only playfully
tapped his liberty. Timur the Terrible had a court fool, named
Ahmed Kermani. One day, in the bath with a crowd of wits,
the conversation fell upon the individual worth of men;
and
Timur asked Ahmed, “What price wouldst thou put on me if I
were for sale ? ” “About five-and-twenty aspers,” rejoined Ahmed.
“Why,” said Timur, “that is about the price of the sheet I have
“Well, of course, I meant the sheet. ” When the business
of kingship becomes decayed, the office of fool is obsolete.
»
(
on. "
## p. 15779 (#105) ##########################################
15779
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
(1807-1873)
P to the year 1814, when Norway obtained a constitution of
her own and a political separation from Denmark, her liter-
ature had been so merged in that of the latter country that
it may hardly be said to have had an identity of its own. Copen-
hagen had been, from the time of Holberg and before, the literary
centre of both Denmark and Norway; and nearly all the men of
conspicuous talent had at one time or another found their way to
the common capital of the two nations. But with the semi-independ-
ence achieved by Norway in 1814, the current of national sentiment
grew so strong that it was bound to find expression in a national
literature; and such a literature, surprising in its richness and vitality,
has grown up during the past three quarters of a century.
When we begin, then, to deal with Norwegian as distinct from
Danish literature, as we must do from the thirties onward, we are
at once confronted with the two significant names of Wergeland and
Welhaven. Henrik Wergeland, born in 1808, became at an early age
a profuse writer of somewhat shapeless verse, abounding in the faults
that characterize an impulsive and ill-regulated mind, yet seething
with patriotism of the emotional sort, and displaying at its best the
true lyrical impulse. His extraordinary lyrical drama, Skabelsen,
Mennesket, og Messias” (The Creation, Man, and Messiah), published
in 1830, offers the starting-point for a discussion of the subject of
the present article; for it was by a critical attack upon that work
that Welhaven first became known. Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer
Welhaven was born in Bergen in 1807, thus being one year Werge-
land's senior. He went to Christiania for study, and as a professor
in the national university remained afterwards identified with the
capital. An anonymous poem addressed to Wergeland, and soon
followed by a pamphlet Om Henrik Wergelands Digtekunst og
Polemik) (Upon Henrik Wergeland's Poetry and Polemics), opened a
critical warfare that raged for several years, and divided literary
circles into two hostile camps. Wergeland represented the impulsive
principle in poetry, the spontaneous lyric cry unfettered by rule or
historical tradition; Welhaven stood for the academic view, for reflec-
tion and the canons of æsthetics. The attack on Wergeland was so
unsparing in its exposure of the poet's weak spots and defects of
## p. 15780 (#106) ##########################################
15780
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
taste, and so scornful withal in its calm analysis, that it caused great
excitement in literary circles; and for a time poems and pamphlets
upon the matter in dispute flew thick and fast from the press. View-
ing the controversy from this distance, it is easy to see that the stars
in their courses fought with Welhaven; for it was his part to stand
as champion of the reflective reason as opposed to the sentimental
impressionism of his opponents. And time, while it has winnowed an
immense amount of chaff from the grain of Wergeland's voluminous
output, has preserved the body of Welhaven's work as of lasting
value, both on the critical and the creative side.
That work, which fills eight volumes in the standard edition, is
about equally divided between prose and poetry. The prose includes
the controversial matter already mentioned, an important critical
study of the eighteenth-century literature of Denmark, and a great
variety of public addresses, sketches of travel, memorial studies and
reviews. As a whole, these writings give to Welhaven the highest
place among Norwegian critics, and may still be read with profit.
Their polished style, their conservative tendencies, and their recog-
nition of the fact that criticism is a very different thing from the
expression of personal likes and dislikes, are the qualities that give
to any critical prose a lasting influence; and they are all highly char-
acteristic of Welhaven's writing. Like Heiberg and Brandes in Den-
mark, he brought to bear upon criticism a carefully conceived and
well-tested method, and his trained and penetrating mind revealed
whatever it dealt with in the dry objective light which should shine
upon the phenomena of literature and of life. It may be interesting
to view them in other kinds of light, but it is not safe; and those
critics do the best service who guard us against garish colors and
iridescent diffractions.
Welhaven's poetry consists wholly of short pieces,— lyrics, ballads,
and essays in occasional verse, - unless we regard as a single long
poem the cycle of sonnets which formed his first poetical publication
of importance. This work, entitled Norges Dæmring' (Norway's
Dawn), strikes the chord of a noble indignation when it deals with
the follies and the passions of the nation, and then in prophetic
strain sings of a spiritual dawn yet to come, and fairer far than the
dawn, already broken, of merely external political freedom. Serious-
ness is the prevailing note of Welhaven's poetry; although the sense
of humor is by no means lacking, and often finds expression in forms
that inevitably suggest the work of Heine. He has given to Nor-
wegian literature what is probably its most finished and exquisite
body of verse, excepting that which we owe to Björnson and Ibsen.
It is the verse of a scholarly and finely cultured mind, rather than
of a nature of decided lyrical endowment. In this respect, it often
## p. 15781 (#107) ##########################################
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
15781
suggests the poetry of Matthew Arnold; and makes, to the ears fitted
to hear it, an appeal altogether disproportionate to the degree of its
acceptance by the general public.
A SONNET FROM NORWAY'S DAWN)
H, LIKE a youth our race with courage bold
Shall yet wax strong behind its mountain rim;
While many an evil giant, fierce and grim,
Shall fall, and lie in death's embraces cold.
0"
And valorous deeds, like those men did of old,
Shall here once more be praised in song and hymn;
The life renewed of saga-ages dim,
In glowing words shall once again be told.
The word shall turn to act of high emprise;
The thought now hushed shall spring to burning speech
In hall of counsel and the sacred fane.
The noisy shout shall cease, the precept wise
Shall take its place, and, far as sight may reach,
The gleam shall grow into the light again.
Translation of William Morton Payne.
THE REVOLUTION OF 1848
THS
his tree of freedom we have made,
To which men thronging bring their suit, -
Whose branches cast no cooling shade,
And ashes in the mouth whose fruit, -
'Tis but the same old pole of yore,
With the old tinsel wreaths bedecked,
Around which men have danced before,
Until they knew its promise wrecked.
And if it stand on fertile soil,
No root it strikes, no bud doth bear;
'Tis but a log, smooth-shaped with toil,
And stuck end upward in the air.
The signs of blooming life it bears,
Adorning it with summer shows,
## p. 15782 (#108) ##########################################
15782
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
Are but the borrowed crown it wears
Of withered leaf and paper rose.
So when men say in ardent trust,
This is in truth the very palm
Whose foliage wide-spreading must
Bring to mankind its peace and calm,-
Why, then I test my sight anew;
But, do my best, I cannot see
The slightest cause to change my view
That but a May-pole is the tree.
Full many a pole like this shall yield
The hoary trunk of Ygdrasil,
Before the golden year revealed
With light and music earth may fill;
For men of Adam's race must God
Another earth and heaven make:
Then shall the palm spring from the sod,
And earth its thirst for freedom slake.
Translation of William Morton Payne.
GOLIATH
Hen little Goliath in stature was growing,
He was carefully fed by the Philistines knowing;
So Goliath grew up, both stout and tall,
And a weaver's beam was his lance withal,
W*
While the Philistines were to themselves confessing:
“How lucky we are in a giant possessing! ”
And viewing with pride his blustering gait,
The Philistines lived in his strength elate.
«The deuce take you all! ” thought Goliath defiant,
"I am not for my health in this business of giant;
Let them gape as they please, they dare not frown,
I will yet reign in Gaza, the wealthy town. ”
Now many a rich Judæan village
Did the braggart crew of the Philistines pillage,
Till the folk of Judæa took arms in hand,
And a tempest threatened the robber band.
## p. 15783 (#109) ##########################################
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
15783
The Philistines thought: “What a fright will soon seize
you,
When you see what a giant we have here to tease you! "
So they gave to Goliath both helmet and shield,
And the fellow he was stood then first revealed.
(c
And Goliath he thought: «These Philistines bore me,
But now I can see my reward lies before ine.
The rich tabernacle I'll take for my share,
The rest they may have — for all that I care. )
But the Philistines thought: “A sure thing we have made
us,
The day that we have such a giant to aid us.
We'll put him before us, and watch the show,
While he lays about him with many a blow. ”
Then Goliath marched forth, all wrathful his bearing, -
The biggest he was of those Philistines daring;
But quickly a pebble his bare temple found,
And he suddenly stretched his full length on the ground.
And the Philistines asked, as they viewed him with won-
der,
How on earth could the fellow so quickly go under;
For thirteen feet, they were ready to swear,
Was Goliath's length as they measured him there.
Translation of William Morton Payne.
PROTESILAOS
MONG the Greeks for Troy their anchors weighing,
No other met such bitter fate as he
Who fell the first of all, that men might see
Fulfillment of the oracle's dark saying, -
A
The ominous words that still their memory followed,
From Delphian caves, and lingered on their lips:
« That hero who the first shall leave the ships
Shall first of all by Erebus be swallowed. ”
«Protesilaos! » every tongue was saying,
« Thy name concerns this oracle so dark. ”
But cheerfully he put to sea his bark,
And sailed from home, relentless fate obeying.
## p. 15784 (#110) ##########################################
15784
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
No craven fear his courage high displaces:
Farewell he's said to Tempe's lovely dale;
And to restrain him were of no avail
Laodamia's eager fond embraces.
But when the winds and waves at last were bringing
The hollow ships to the Dardanian shore,
The faltering warriors dared not to the fore,
Where Hector fierce his heavy lance was swinging.
He chosen by the gods the hearts to quicken
Of all who stood in the Achæan host,-
Protesilaos,- on that fatal coast
Was first to land, to fall in death down-stricken.
While weapons flashed, and men to war-cries hearkened,
Low in the dust the noble hero lay;
No booty to his tent might find its way,
And as the war dragged on, his fame grew darkened.
But afterwards men grateful learned to cherish
His mighty deed: in hymns his name was praised;
And pilgrims sought the temple to him raised
That memories of his valor might not perish.
And from the heroic age a voice deep-weighted
With earnest accent echoes on the ear:
“Who leads the way in strife, and knows no fear,
To conquer
to fight and die is fated. ”
Translation of William Morton Payne.
THE PARIS MORGUE
I
N its manifold depiction of human life, recent French literature
bears the stamp of a freshness and truth before unattained.
Nowhere else may we find experience and the study of life
raised so far above the unsafe methods of a priori construction.
After so many storms, life itself is freer here; and its every
shoot buds and blossoms in its true character, forced by neither the
espalier of a system nor the artificial temperature of a hot-house.
The public places, squares, and streets are here the academies for
the painter of souls; who might be taken for an indolent dandy,
did we not know him to be a philosopher, a modern peripatetic.
## p. 15785 (#111) ##########################################
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
15785
Many human relations elsewhere coyly or fearfully concealed,
many scenes that seem to belong to the fireside nook, come here
to public view, and make their impression of joy or of despair.
A crowd of people are viewing from the Pont Louis XIV. the ris-
ing flood of the Seine. A lady dressed in black pushes through
the crowd, and throws herself into the stream in full view of
everybody. This is but one of many examples of the French
exaltation that feeds upon showing its wounds to the public gaze,
and ending the play with a dazzling or startling exit.
Where life lies upon all sides so unveiled, many of the limita-
tions of art must give way. The tragic pathos of the old school
.
was as a whole merely declamatory, and only upon cothurns might
it display itself with propriety. Its sentimentality was as man-
nered and bloodless as the Arcadian shepherd race that thought
itself to hold tenancy of the Eden of poetry, when people still
believed that the bird of paradise had no feet and only hovered
in the blue. Things are different now: sentimentality has taken
hold of the flesh, and the bird of paradise perches on many
a roof. Tragedy goes about comfortably in socks; and this
merciless unbaring of the frightful, this natural and painstaking
depiction of circumstances that often stiffen the sympathies with
terror, affects us with doubled force, because it clings close to
conditions with which every beholder is acquainted.
Louis the Eighteenth once remarked of Châteaubriand's
René' that it bore a resemblance to Werther'; and when
asked if a parallel might indeed be drawn between those two
works, he replied: “Yes, without doubt; and I give the prefer-
ence to Werther,' on account of its simple naturalness. The
hero is placed amid quite ordinary circumstances, which is an im-
portant matter. These every-day details attract us all the more
to Werther's violent passion. On the other hand, we feel little or
no sympathy for René, who is a mere figure of romantic fiction. ”
This observation, which was remarkable for a prince trained in
the old dogmatic school, was looked upon for some score of years
as an example of tasteless criticism. But in the present period,
an enormous amount has been done to spread abroad the dis-
covery that the world of poetry is at bottom just the same as
that which is usually called “the prosaic world. " No Parisian
doubts this at the present time. Even in the abnormal growths
of French literature, in the monstrous sensational pieces where-
with many a theatre seeks to gain the attention of a restless
(
## p. 15786 (#112) ##########################################
15786
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
public, forcing it to listen, there are traces of this reformation.
These pictures have many lifelike details; and herein they resem-
ble the Greek fabulous combinations of plant and animal forms,
which are monstrous as wholes, but whose separate parts are
worked out with the most exact truth.
Whoever closely views the various pictures of life that throng
upon the observation in the French capital, will easily recognize
them as mirrored in the productions of art; either seen in their
full potency as in a concave mirror, or viewed as sparks and
colors through some many-sided prism. The strange figures and
bizarre delineations of a Balzac are to be found here in living
reality. We read in the newspapers the bare account of some
wonderful domestic drama which seems to belong to the dream
world; yet it has been enacted in palpable form at our very
door. We go to the Théâtre de la Porte St. Martin, and view
with repulsion and terror scenes from La Tour de Nesle,' that
harrowing painting with all its ice-cold corpses; and we reject
the idea that life could have furnished forth the composition
with matter and models. Yet the original lies close at hand:
it is the corpse-house on the Seine,- La Morgue! The poet of
the Tour de Nesle' has been there. He has gazed himself sick
upon these mystical shapes; the death smell has crept into all of
his pleasures; he has been forced to visit the morgue again and
again, and the shadows have haunted him until he freed him-
self from them with his work. La Morgue is the black crater
beneath the Parisian people's grapevines of joy; it is the cry of
woe in the midst of the triumph; it is the dark writing on Bel-
shazzar's wall. The joys of life have no such focus, for they
culminate in a thousand places at once.
La Morgue is a police institution: it supplements the bureau
of found articles. This frightful find of the suicides and the
slain must fall into the right hands. People go there to seek
out in the collection the bodies of friends or relatives.
doubts it to be a wise arrangement. A body is a small thing, of
less account than hay or dry brushwood. But we know that it
sometimes is inestimable as measured by affection, and sometimes
has a deep hieroglyphic significance. Consequently, for the con-
venience of observers, the morgue is situated in the centre of
the city. Were it perhaps better that it should stand apart in
some solitary place, shaded by the cypress and the weeping wil.
low? The forsaken one might then be alone with his unrest and
No one
## p. 15787 (#113) ##########################################
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
15787
his fear when he went to seek, and alone with his sorrow when
he had found. Alas! this is only a secondary consideration. La
Morgue is a public exhibition, a museum of the day's history.
These bodies still belong to the public; therefore their place is
in the midst of the crowd. The pit would see the tragic hero on
the boards, and pass judgment upon him before turning home-
wards.
How busily Parisian life stirs about this grewsome little
house! There is nothing sad in the neighborhood, except the wan
stream and the towers of Notre Dame. It is but a few steps to
the morgue from the flower-market. A light zephyr is enough
to waft the fragrance of roses over the low roof. Close by the
walls there is a busy traffic in fruits and vegetables. The her-
alds of life's stir, the restless omnibuses, rumble by over the
bridge. When the morgue is full of bodies, there are speculators
on hand, drawn by the throng,-mountebank tricksters, placards
announcing new inventions, harp-players and organ-grinders!
One might think that the sense of the people had become
blunted to the sights in the morgue. But this is not so: it has
offered too many heart-rending spectacles; they know that it is
a cave of Avernus, which may at any moment reveal the most
frightful things. The dusk of life hovers over that house, and it
throws a deep shadow. We often see some gloomy, motionless
figure in the midst of the noisy crowd; he casts a spell upon our
eyes, and we see him alone thereafter. His whole nature pre-
sents the picture of a dark and brooding soul, and we say to
ourselves: He is lost, — the shadow of the morgue is within him.
The arrangement of the morgue is very simple. The bodies
lie in a light-yellow hall, on dark inclined planes, and a stream
of cold water falls upon each of them. They are naked save for
a fig-leaf of dark leather. Over the couch hangs the clothing of
the corpse. Light falls from above. This hall is separated by a
grating from the anteroom, which is always open to the public.
Here we find placards displayed, describing persons who have
disappeared, and asking for information about them. At the
grating may be seen many indifferent, but also many feverishly
agitated faces.
Now and then an outcry is heard, as "C'est
affreux ! ” and “Pauvre homme ! »
How mysterious these bodies are! We stare at them, and
would read their history in their discomposed features: we pict-
ure them in the silent oppressive gambler's den, in the dark
## p. 15788 (#114) ##########################################
15788
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
squalid street where a dull gleam from the mansards is the only
light; we follow them to the Seine; we hear the awful spash of
the water: and before we know it, we have clothed these dumb
shapes with life, full of horror and despair.
I was once with a friend who lived close to the morgue. I
saw the crowd stream in, but I saw no one come out, and con-
cluded with a shudder that the corpse-house must be unusually
rich. I could not resist the powerful impulse that drove me
to view the image of terror close by. The house was full, and
most of the bodies were set forth in horrible display; one of
them had been hanged, and still had the rope about his neck.
High up lay an old colossal warrior. There was a great scar
on his forehead; his coat hung wet and muddy behind him, and
was decorated with the Legion of Honor. What proud memories
must not have dwelt in that broad breast! But they were shad-
owy ranks, and could bring no booty to his airy bivouac. This
warrior had been at Beresina. Perhaps with the fury of a tiger
he hewed a path for this body through the dense mass of men
on the breaking bridge, or fought for his life among the ice
floes of the wild stream. And now it was all a fairy tale. It
rushed into his head when he stood alone on the Pont-Neuf; but
the bridge would not break under him, and he had to cast him-
self into these quiet waters, which mirror the trophies of his
valor. The last body in this company was that of a young girl:
her hair was of glistening black and extraordinarily long; one
hand was clenched convulsively, the other limp and outspread.
“Du armes Kind, was hat man Dir gethan ? " A soldier stood
at my side: he was a handsome man, and could not have been
over eighteen. The sweat pearled on his forehead, and he
pressed his face hard against the grating. I could not tire of
watching him, but he did not notice,- he stared incessantly at
the last body.
La Morgue is an instructive institution, and has brought many
misdeeds to light.
That I perceive death, now I am well awake,
Best gift is they can give or I can take.
I would fain put off my last woman's-fault:
I'd not be tedious to you.
First Executioner –
We are ready.
Duchess — Dispose my breath how please you; but my body
Bestow upon my women, will you ?
First Executioner –
Yes.
Duchess — Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength
Must pull down heaven upon me; —
Yet stay: heaven-gates are not so highly arched
As princes' palaces; they that enter there
## p. 15766 (#92) ###########################################
15766
JOHN WEBSTER
Must go upon their knees. [K'neels. ] Come, violent death,
Serve for mandragora to make me sleep! -
Go tell my brothers, when I am laid out,
They then may feed in quiet.
[The Executioners strangle the Duchess. ]
Bosola
Where's the waiting-woman?
Fetch her: some other strangle the children.
[Cariola and Children are brought in by the Executioners; who presently
strangle the Children. ]
Look you, there sleeps your mistress.
Cariola
Oh, you are damned
Perpetually for this! My turn is next-
Is't not so ordered ?
Bosola
Yes, and I am glad
You are so well prepared for't.
Cariola
You are deceived, sir:
I am not prepared for 't, I will not die;
I will first come to my answer, and know
How I have offended.
Bosola-
Come, dispatch her. -
You kept her counsel; now you shall keep ours.
Cariola I will not die, I must not; I am contracted
To a young gentleman.
First Executioner -
Here's your wedding-ring.
Cariola — Let me but speak with the duke: I'll discover
Treason to his person.
Bosola
Delays: throttle her.
First Executioner
She bites and scratches.
Cariola
If you kill me now,
I am damned: I have not been at confession
This two years.
[The Executioners strangle Cariola.
Bosola -
Bear her into the next room,
Let these lie still.
(Exeunt the Executioners with the body of Cariola. ]
## p. 15767 (#93) ###########################################
JOHN WEBSTER
15767
Enter Ferdinand
Ferdinand -
Bosola -
You'd have her.
Is she dead?
She is what
But here begin your pity:
[Shows the Children strangled. ]
Alas, how have these offended ?
Ferdinand -
The death
Of young wolves is never to be pitied.
Bosola — Fix your eye here.
Ferdinand -
Constantly.
Bosola –
Do you not weep ?
Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out:
The element of water moistens the earth,
But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens.
Ferdinand —
Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle; she dies young.
Bosola I think not so: her infelicity
Seems to have years too many.
Ferdinand -
She and I were twins;
And should I die this instant, I had lived
Her time to a minute.
Bosola
It seems she was born first:
You have bloodily approved the ancient truth,
That kindred commonly do worse agree
Than remote strangers.
Ferdinand
Let me see her face
Again. Why didst not thou pity her? what
An excellent honest man mightst thou have been,
If thou hadst borne her to some sanctuary!
Or, bold in a good cause, opposed thyself,
With thy advanced sword above thy head,
Between her innocence and my revenge!
I bade thee, when I was distracted of my wits,
Go kill my dearest friend, and thou hast done 't.
For let me but examine well the cause :
What was the meanness of her match to me?
Only I must confess I had a hope,
Had she continued widow, to have gained
An infinite mass of treasure by her death:
And what was the main cause ? her marriage,
That drew a stream of gall quite through my heart.
## p. 15768 (#94) ###########################################
15768
JOHN WEBSTER
For thee,- as we observe in tragedies
That a good actor many times is cursed
For playing a villain's part,- I hate thee for 't;
And for my sake, thou hast done much ill well.
DIRGE FROM (VITTORIA COROMBONA
CALI
ALL for the robin-redbreast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robbed) sustain no harm;
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.
## p. 15769 (#95) ###########################################
15769
JOHN WEISS
(1818-1879)
OHN Weiss belonged to a class of writers, not uncommon
among the Transcendentalists of New England, whose works
are distinguished by epigrammatic brilliancy. He wrote of
great things in what might almost be called a clever way; some-
times hiding the bold, simple outlines of an idea under an elaborate
and striking tracery of words. Yet the genuineness of his endow-
ments is beyond question. He possessed the singularly strong and
daring intellect of that generation of New-Englanders which brought
forth Margaret Fuller and Theodore Parker. He possessed the
remarkable faculty of combining an almost mystical faith with
extreme devotion to science. His outlook seemed to be as broad as
heaven itself, yet his mind recorded only flash-light pictures of the
universe. He saw vividly; he wrote of what he saw, in an intense
epigrammatic manner.
He was born in Boston in 1818, was graduated from Harvard in
1837. Later he studied at Heidelberg, becoming subsequently a min-
ister of the Unitarian church. From 1859 to 1870 he was pastor of
the Unitarian church at Watertown, Massachusetts. At one time he
gave a series of brilliant lectures in New York on the Greek Myths;
he wrote for the Radical, for the Massachusetts Quarterly, for the
Atlantic Monthly. In 1842 appeared his first work, in which he had
performed the task of editor and translator. This was Henry of
Afterdingen,' by F. von Hardenberg. In 1845 he published a transla-
tion of the philosophical and æsthetic letters of Schiller; a year later
appeared an edition of the memoir of Fichte by William Smith; and
in 1864 one of his most noted works, Life and Correspondence of
Theodore Parker. Later he published a volume of essays bearing
the title American Religion, and a volume entitled, “Wit, Humor,
and Shakespeare. ' Besides these works, he was the author of a num-
ber of religious and political pamphlets. He died in 1879.
His creed forms a background to much that he has written. The
foremost of the radicals, he cared nothing for dogma, centring his
faith solely about the idea of God and the idea of immortality. For
these he contended with glittering weapons. But he was not a logi-
cian primarily: his thought was essentially poetical.
“When all my veins flow unobstructed, and lift to the level of
my eyes the daily gladness that finds a gate at every pore; when the
## p. 15770 (#96) ###########################################
15770
JOHN WEISS
roaming gifts come home from nature to turn the brain into a hive
of cells full of yellow sunshine, the spoil of all the chalices of the
earth beneath and the heaven above, — then I am the subject of a
Revival of Religion. ”
The style of Weiss is sometimes overladen with conceits and epi-
grams, is not always a sane and quiet style; but it expresses admira-
bly his peculiar type of mind, - a type which has perished perhaps
with the unusual circumstances producing it.
CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL
From American Religion. Copyright 1871, by John Weiss
HE phrase
Takple, who suspect "it of excusing some immediate incapacity,
like that which would recommend clouds to the selectmen
for a new style of pavement, or a balloon's aimless whirling
instead of some direct and planted way of locomotion. There
may be an upper westward current; but in the mean time the
rail gets over the ground by all the points of the compass. The
Ideal will possibly carry a person off by some aerial route to
Paris; but if he would return to Boston he must alight. This
shrewdness is furthered too by the feeling that the phrase is
chiefly the property of poets, who are exercised only in expres-
sion, and cannot be counted on for work. The influence which
imaginative expression exerts upon a people is undervalued be.
cause it does not enrich the instant, but passes into the tempera-
ment by slow absorption, and appears at length in quality. Men
cannot wait for that. There is work on hand that is to be done
with what quality exists, or not at all. A man of business can-
not see that the poem which he read over-night affected, unless
to perturb, his next day's operations. He will do better with his
leisure next time by getting well posted from the commercial
columns. He rises more buoyantly upon stocks; the pathos that
.
wrings his heart is when they fall, and his streamers are no
longer gayly afloat. The expression of music and art serves him
only for enjoyment; and he has this advantage over the idealist,
that nobody can calculate the subtile orbit of influence, nor show
how the song and symphony make blood. It is only by accident
if one or two men in a generation have their heart or stomach
so exposed that the physicians can observe its function. But
## p. 15771 (#97) ###########################################
JOHN WEISS
15771
if every brain were unroofed, there is no Asmodeus skilled to
detect tones and colors jostling its atoms into more spiritual
companionship. One must be a part of the violin's grain to
know how the vibrations of the strings record themselves in the
dead wood of the instrument, - not dead, indeed, if it is capable
of assimilating rhythm.
But there are two kinds of the Ideal: one tends toward
expression; the other animates all kinds of labor, and secures
results. When a practical man says that he can do without the
Ideal, he does not understand his own business. When a prosaic
moralist says the same, and takes a contract to reform or to
establish, he throws up the material that he must work in. It is
intangible, but has a pressure of so many pounds to the inch,
and he stands drenched in it while he pretends he does not
breathe.
There is some ideal stimulus in every kind of work, none the
less definite because the worker appears to be unconscious of it.
A gang of men with sledge-hammers go fastening ties westward
toward Golden Gate. There is expectation in every stroke:
not a man of them but proposes to arrive somewhere by that
track on which he is hammering. Family bread, affection, inde-
pendence, enlargement: these invisible yearnings give the gold-
glimmer to his Sacramento. He is an idealist while he is faithful
to his work. And the country which hires his labor, and affects
only to be wanting to reach the Pacific thereby, is stimulated by
more than all the spices of the Orient. There is no such ideality
on earth as that which compels a nation to expand all its powers
of intelligence, and to reach eventually the Rights of Man.
Something is to be overcome wherever the ideal road is
traveled. The effort may be stamped with the coarsest realism;
but the ideality is in the effort. We do not know the outlets of
everything that we perform, nor the subtile connection between
our simplest acts and our loftiest attainments. It sometimes
seems a great way from the body to the soul; but a very slight
deed may bridge over the abyss of that ocular deception. The
soul is waiting close at hand to receive the benefit of our least
integrity. So that very ordinary things may be the essentials
to secure our spiritual advance,- begrimed and sturdy engineers
who rapidly pontoon for us a formidable-looking current, and let
us transport our whole splendid equipment to the opposite shore.
The Indian knows that a buffalo trail will take him surest to
## p. 15772 (#98) ###########################################
15772
JOHN WEISS
.
water. The American condescends to follow the Indian, and his
cities rise opposite to ferries and at the confluences of streams.
Then at length the buffalo pilots thither the silent steps of Re-
ligion and Liberty.
When Frederick the Great said he always noticed that Provi-
dence favored the heaviest battalion, he only stated in a sarcasm
what God in history states religiously: that he is on the side of
valor, foresight, self-control, wheresoever and on whatsoever ob.
jects these great qualities of an overcoming man are exercised.
God, having no human pride, does not regard the nature of the
object, but its intrinsic difficulties and its drift towards some
beauty. An ideal object is one, however material, that gives the
world a whole-souled man. And it is on this principle that nat-
ural forces seemn to have selected their men and nations through
the whole of history. It is the forecasting that molds and recon-
structs a raw popular material, till it is able to occupy, or to cre-
ate, some important position, to assert a truth, to breast a flood
of tyranny, to be caught in some way by the drift and amplitude
of the Divine order. If people have settled in spots toward
which the streams of the past converge in order to find the out-
let of civil and religious liberty, or if their ethical quality
slowly selects spots that invite either the friendship or hostility of
reigning ideas, and suggest rude engineering to arrange a battle-
field, they are certain to be subjected to the training which shall
best prepare them for their great effort. This training consists
in overcoming something, no matter how physical or how remote
in character from the future issue.
I know of nothing, for example, more striking than the way
in which the Dutch people were prepared to maintain liberty of
thought and worship. A poor Frisian race was selected and kept
for centuries up to its knees in the marshes through which the
Rhine emptied and lost itself. Here it lived in continual conflict
with the Northern Ocean, forced literally to hold the tide at
arm's length, while a few acres of dry land might yield a scanty
subsistence. Here circumstance kept them half submerged, till
instead of obeying a natural impulse to emigrate to solid and
more congenial land, they acquired a liking for their amphibious
position. The struggle piqued them into staying and seeing it
out. For centuries they appeared to be doing nothing but build-
ing and repairing dikes, when really they were constructing a
national will and persistency which was a dike for tyranny to
## p. 15773 (#99) ###########################################
JOHN WEISS
15773
lash in vain. By keeping out the water they trained themselves
to keep out the more insidious tide of bigotry and spiritual death.
What a homely and inglorious school for a great republic, that
taught her how to watch patiently by tending dikes and ditches;
how to close a breach against ruin by standing with succor in
the mid-tide when the sea-wall crumbled; how to convert almost
continual defeat into victory, by keeping hold of a drowned posi-
tion, cultivating acres that had just been drenched with salt, flow-
ing back again upon depopulated districts, and holding the old
line against the sea! All these stubborn traits appeared after-
ward clothed in noble forms of moral and mental life: still there
was the old breakwater running through the national temper,
and the will of the people was like one of the ancestral Frisians,
who could stand in a flood all day and not be chilled. The wis-
dom was vindicated which compelled them first to make a soil
for ideal liberty to flourish in. And as nations are prepared for
great destinies, so are men: the constitution must catch free and
vigorous movements in some mode of life fatal to indolence and
vulgarity, the will must be roused and learn how to handle the
helm, no matter how rude the objects of the voyage are.
The poets and men of expression have not then monopolized
the Ideal. We must be poetical enough to detect it in the moral
uses of the ordinary life we lead, that is so pathetic with the
struggles of constancy against physical and mental circumstances.
No matter how sensitive a young person's heart may be, like a
bare nerve in the weather, flattered by the soft touch of music
and colors, pared into gracious action by the chisel that builds
the statue's symmetry, twitched by the finger of tragedy till the
fount of tears is opened, - his ideal life does not begin till he
turns away from these to take up his own instrument of work,
to chip a conscience out of school-keeping, type-setting, engineer-
ing, cooking, and housework, to quarry some vital activity of
a free people. Because he himself is to become a poem, fairer
than any that was ever written, by overcoming indolence and a
bad disposition in favor of some immediate exigency. That is
the story of his siege of Troy, his wandering of Ulysses, his
Paradise Regained. The ideal of his constancy is the moral
sense, which some personal deficiency or poverty inflames till it
becomes his pillar of fire in the wilderness. It does not shape
him so much to remember the Odyssey, as it does to tie him-
self to his own mast and sail past the Sirens; or to go through
## p. 15774 (#100) ##########################################
15774
JOHN WEISS
Circe's den not only unsullied but a liberator of his comrades.
When we see the course of nature breeding in such schools its
human genius, we may know how closely allied are conscience
and superior talents. Underneath the slow grinding, suddenly a
facet flashes. It is true you may grind at a sea-shore pebble till
nothing comes of it but sand; but before you begin to grind, all
stones appear of similar texture. The real ideality is hid in
this persevering against the most humiliating and prosaic con-
ditions, such as the Creator maintained through chaos and his
scarcely less chaotic creatures of the early epochs. A million or
two years of coarse persistency vanquish matter, and Shakespeare
supplants the saurian. Why should he not in every man and
woman? for conscience can become Shakespearean underneath a
hod of mortar that mounts round by round to top the house.
Young people must learn that their creative and inspiring impulse
is not derived from high art, but from accommodation to low
requirements in a high vein to make them serve, to extort from
them such exquisite tones as the Russian did out of his bits of
wood cut from different trees, till he converted the forest into a
harmonicon; and that other obscure inventor, who coaxed a heap
of various stones to yield up its separate notes, and to fall into
place in perfect octaves.
We have all seen many persons who appear to us quite ruined.
Perhaps there is a better judge of that; but if it be true, the
fact is not so revolting to us as the shock is which it gives to
our natural preferences. The most deeply compromised person
will prefer to think that health has not become impossible for
him; he shares the instinct of nature which struggles desperately
to make its growth shapely under gnarled conditions. A man
clings to his share of a divine ideal of recuperation. No number
of damaged structures can vote down our feeling that supreme
Good aspires through man to become expressed and organized; it
shakes its signals of direction through the densest fog that we
can exhale. We see the light discolored, but do not mistake it
for darkness; we observe whence it comes, and trust to its hints
regarding our safety. On various principles of judgment, preach-
ers declare these men and those women to be abandoned. The
epithet remands God back to chaos. The poet grants us a bet-
ter glimpse of the hold on life than innocence possesses:
"I helped a man to die, some few weeks since,
Warped even from his go
art to one end-
## p. 15775 (#101) ##########################################
JOHN WEISS
15775
The living on princes' smiles, reflected from
A mighty herd of favorites. No mean trick
He left untried; and truly well-nigh wormed
All traces of God's finger out of him.
Then died, grown old: and just an hour before —
Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes —
He sate up suddenly, and with natural voice
Said that in spite of thick air and closed doors
God told him it was June; and he knew well,
Without such telling, harebells grew in June;
And all that kings could ever give or take
Would not be precious as those blooms to him. ”
Does not that precious cherishing snatch a new June from
the collapse of the body, as a wrecker disentangles a still living
babe from the last freezing strain of a drowned mother? We can
only bid our imagination frame, in the interest of the universe,
at least a remonstrance against the destruction of the babe. For
we must always presume that the faintest pulse is a possible
chance for the heart to recover its full beat.
The world could transact nothing, and no race could ever de-
velop its special felicity, if the ideal of goodness ever deserted
its infelicitous men and women.
In our first unchartered moments, when we discover that
Nature can be a bit of a spendthrift, we have a companion better
than all with whom we sport, and the inner sense reaches for
its hand: as when a youth, blindfolded for a game, threads by
some glimmer of seeing or of mere attraction the whole romping
scene, and pursues the beauty who one day shall be his. Heaven
is never in despair: it has watched too many generations, and
profited by their prevailing goodness, not to perceive that if dis-
soluteness be out of order, so is cynicism and a skeptical temper
about ordinary people, if not more hostile to an ideal life. So
the young persons launch their divine gifts upon a stream that
is fretted with rapids near its head; some make the portages,
others try the shoot: the stream more tranquil always lies below.
There are eddies that carry them into indulgences of social and
material pleasure. The parents generally dissuade with a great
deal of wise shaking of the head, as much as to say, “We've
tried all that, and seen the folly of it. ” It is an ideal instinct
that prompts the children to reply, “Well, we would like to see
the folly of it too. ” How lucky it is that nobody can decant
(
## p. 15776 (#102) ##########################################
15776
JOHN WEISS
a
his old wine into the new bottles! So the youth gets his pro-
motion from the nursery to school, to occupation, to love and
marriage, to the successive disciplines; and his knowledge of one
period never makes him equal to the next one, which always has
some surprising element that tests him on
new side. We
have to go storming parallel after parallel. Up we run impetu-
ously, with glad acclaim, and plant our colors: before the wind
takes them, we perceive an inner line that we had not suspected.
Headlong we go at that too, only to find that the busy antagonist
has thrown up another; and that also has to be assailed. It is
plot and counterplot, mine and countermine: reality works, while
the Ideal catches a nap leaning upon its weapon; till as we sink,
and the colors falter on the last breach, we find that death is
only a resource and desperate ambush of a foe that is sullenly
retreating; and to-morrow the Ideal, light-armed, with marching
rations and the packs all left behind, will buoyantly pursue.
What a hint of personal immortality is this relative imperfec-
tion of our experiences! They suggest the absolute perfection
which is the plan of every soul; like the crumbled scale or bone
that taught the naturalist the structure, shape, and habits, of
an extinct fish whose fossil even no man had ever seen. One
day a fossil is found to justify, in the minutest particulars, the
infallibility of the scientific imagination. Our partial experiences
contain the history of souls not yet completed; and they are guar-
antees given to us directly by the divine imagination, the earnest
of the spirit, that the whole plan must include all the time and
opportunity needed to fill out the spiritual form. Eternity is in
pledge to our successive disappointments. Every morning we go
down to the edge of it like the fishermen of rock-bound coasts,
and put off upon it as they do, to fight for their little gains, and
satisfy the hunger that is as prompt to return as the morning.
All day we trawl and hunt by various devices for our shy suste-
nance; and the fruitful infinite stretches all around us, so deep
and coy that everything is hidden, so deep that everything is
contained. Our day sinks into its storm or calm. Over it our
day breaks with wants that never are appeased.
What do we care for the expense that this spendthrift, our
good-will for God, subjects us to? If anything is to be melted
for a beautiful casting, men keep the flame up, and throw in all
the fuel in the neighborhood. There is nothing too precious to
go towards making a soul limpid and symmetrical. Bernard
## p.
15777 (#103) ##########################################
JOHN WEISS
15777
Palissy, at the end of twenty years spent in vain attempts to
create a white enamel for his pottery, found nothing left but
the house he lived in, and the fences around it. Not a billet
of wood, for love or money, to keep up the furnace with. The
palings were ripped down and thrown in,—the enamel had not
melted. There was a crashing in the house: the children were
in dismay; the wife, assisted doubtless by such female friends as
had dropped in to comfort her, became loud in her reproaches.
Bernard was breaking up the tables and carrying them off, legs
and bodies, to the all-consuming fire. Still the enamel did not
melt! There was more crashing and hammering in the house:
Bernard was tearing up the foors to use the planks as fire-
wood. Frantic with despair, the wife rushes off to raise the town
against him. She was starved out by his pertinacity; he was fed
by his idea. And while she was gone, the anxieties and pov-
erty of twenty years flowed in the clear coating that became the
rage of kings and connoisseurs.
Throw everything into the fire of the Ideal! - the incum.
brances of society and pleasure, the frivolous amusements, the
small-talk and idling, the clique feelings and constraints, the con-
veniences that make our life a curse, the ornaments that dress
us in a weight to crush us to the dust. Throw fruitless regrets
and memories, and all the things we are most vain about, into
the devouring flame. We are clay in the hands of the potter.
Let all our rubbish melt to make it impervious to the weather,
not subject to decay, much sought for by the King.
THE COURT FOOL
From (Wit, Humor, and Shakespeare)
THO
HOUGH Shakespeare empties all his own love for pure fun into
this clown (in “Twelfth Night'], he makes of him the only
cool and consistent character in the play, and thus convey's
to us his conviction of the superiority of an observer who has
wit, humor, repartee, burlesquing, and buffoonery at command;
for none but wise men can make such fools of themselves. Such
a fine composition is apt to be misunderstood by the single-gifted
and prosaic people: but this only piques the bells to their hap-
piest jingle; and a man is never more convinced of the divine
XXVII-987
## p. 15778 (#104) ##########################################
15778
JOHN WEISS
origin of his buffooning talent than when the didactic souls reject
it as heresy. All Shakespeare's clowns brandish this fine bauble:
their bells swing in a Sabbath air and summon us to a service
of wisdom. Feste has no passion to fondle, and no chances to
lie in wait for except those which can help his foolery to walk
over everybody like the sun. Even when he seems to be wheed.
ling money out of the Duke and Viola, he is only in sport with
the weakness which purse-holders have to fee, to conciliate, to
enjoy an aspect of grandeur. His perfectly dispassionate temper
is sagacity itself. It discerns the solemn fickleness of the princi-
pal personages. They are all treated with amusing impartiality;
and it is in the spirit of the Kosmos itself, which does not stand
in awe of anybody. It seems, indeed, as if the function of fool,
and the striking toleration which has always invested it, was
developed by Nature for protection of those of her creatures who
are exposed to flattery and liable to be damaged by it. Not for
shallow amusement have rich and titled persons harbored jesters,
who always play the part of the slave of Pyrrhus, at proper
intervals to remind them that they are mortal. All men secretly
prefer to know the truth; but the pampered people cannot bear
to sit in the full draught of it. Its benefit must, however, be in
some way conveyed to them. Bluff Kent is banished for saying
to Lear, in the plainest Saxon, what the fool kept insinuating
with impunity. Therefore, no genuine court has been complete
without its fool. The most truculent sceptre has only playfully
tapped his liberty. Timur the Terrible had a court fool, named
Ahmed Kermani. One day, in the bath with a crowd of wits,
the conversation fell upon the individual worth of men;
and
Timur asked Ahmed, “What price wouldst thou put on me if I
were for sale ? ” “About five-and-twenty aspers,” rejoined Ahmed.
“Why,” said Timur, “that is about the price of the sheet I have
“Well, of course, I meant the sheet. ” When the business
of kingship becomes decayed, the office of fool is obsolete.
»
(
on. "
## p. 15779 (#105) ##########################################
15779
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
(1807-1873)
P to the year 1814, when Norway obtained a constitution of
her own and a political separation from Denmark, her liter-
ature had been so merged in that of the latter country that
it may hardly be said to have had an identity of its own. Copen-
hagen had been, from the time of Holberg and before, the literary
centre of both Denmark and Norway; and nearly all the men of
conspicuous talent had at one time or another found their way to
the common capital of the two nations. But with the semi-independ-
ence achieved by Norway in 1814, the current of national sentiment
grew so strong that it was bound to find expression in a national
literature; and such a literature, surprising in its richness and vitality,
has grown up during the past three quarters of a century.
When we begin, then, to deal with Norwegian as distinct from
Danish literature, as we must do from the thirties onward, we are
at once confronted with the two significant names of Wergeland and
Welhaven. Henrik Wergeland, born in 1808, became at an early age
a profuse writer of somewhat shapeless verse, abounding in the faults
that characterize an impulsive and ill-regulated mind, yet seething
with patriotism of the emotional sort, and displaying at its best the
true lyrical impulse. His extraordinary lyrical drama, Skabelsen,
Mennesket, og Messias” (The Creation, Man, and Messiah), published
in 1830, offers the starting-point for a discussion of the subject of
the present article; for it was by a critical attack upon that work
that Welhaven first became known. Johan Sebastian Cammermeyer
Welhaven was born in Bergen in 1807, thus being one year Werge-
land's senior. He went to Christiania for study, and as a professor
in the national university remained afterwards identified with the
capital. An anonymous poem addressed to Wergeland, and soon
followed by a pamphlet Om Henrik Wergelands Digtekunst og
Polemik) (Upon Henrik Wergeland's Poetry and Polemics), opened a
critical warfare that raged for several years, and divided literary
circles into two hostile camps. Wergeland represented the impulsive
principle in poetry, the spontaneous lyric cry unfettered by rule or
historical tradition; Welhaven stood for the academic view, for reflec-
tion and the canons of æsthetics. The attack on Wergeland was so
unsparing in its exposure of the poet's weak spots and defects of
## p. 15780 (#106) ##########################################
15780
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
taste, and so scornful withal in its calm analysis, that it caused great
excitement in literary circles; and for a time poems and pamphlets
upon the matter in dispute flew thick and fast from the press. View-
ing the controversy from this distance, it is easy to see that the stars
in their courses fought with Welhaven; for it was his part to stand
as champion of the reflective reason as opposed to the sentimental
impressionism of his opponents. And time, while it has winnowed an
immense amount of chaff from the grain of Wergeland's voluminous
output, has preserved the body of Welhaven's work as of lasting
value, both on the critical and the creative side.
That work, which fills eight volumes in the standard edition, is
about equally divided between prose and poetry. The prose includes
the controversial matter already mentioned, an important critical
study of the eighteenth-century literature of Denmark, and a great
variety of public addresses, sketches of travel, memorial studies and
reviews. As a whole, these writings give to Welhaven the highest
place among Norwegian critics, and may still be read with profit.
Their polished style, their conservative tendencies, and their recog-
nition of the fact that criticism is a very different thing from the
expression of personal likes and dislikes, are the qualities that give
to any critical prose a lasting influence; and they are all highly char-
acteristic of Welhaven's writing. Like Heiberg and Brandes in Den-
mark, he brought to bear upon criticism a carefully conceived and
well-tested method, and his trained and penetrating mind revealed
whatever it dealt with in the dry objective light which should shine
upon the phenomena of literature and of life. It may be interesting
to view them in other kinds of light, but it is not safe; and those
critics do the best service who guard us against garish colors and
iridescent diffractions.
Welhaven's poetry consists wholly of short pieces,— lyrics, ballads,
and essays in occasional verse, - unless we regard as a single long
poem the cycle of sonnets which formed his first poetical publication
of importance. This work, entitled Norges Dæmring' (Norway's
Dawn), strikes the chord of a noble indignation when it deals with
the follies and the passions of the nation, and then in prophetic
strain sings of a spiritual dawn yet to come, and fairer far than the
dawn, already broken, of merely external political freedom. Serious-
ness is the prevailing note of Welhaven's poetry; although the sense
of humor is by no means lacking, and often finds expression in forms
that inevitably suggest the work of Heine. He has given to Nor-
wegian literature what is probably its most finished and exquisite
body of verse, excepting that which we owe to Björnson and Ibsen.
It is the verse of a scholarly and finely cultured mind, rather than
of a nature of decided lyrical endowment. In this respect, it often
## p. 15781 (#107) ##########################################
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
15781
suggests the poetry of Matthew Arnold; and makes, to the ears fitted
to hear it, an appeal altogether disproportionate to the degree of its
acceptance by the general public.
A SONNET FROM NORWAY'S DAWN)
H, LIKE a youth our race with courage bold
Shall yet wax strong behind its mountain rim;
While many an evil giant, fierce and grim,
Shall fall, and lie in death's embraces cold.
0"
And valorous deeds, like those men did of old,
Shall here once more be praised in song and hymn;
The life renewed of saga-ages dim,
In glowing words shall once again be told.
The word shall turn to act of high emprise;
The thought now hushed shall spring to burning speech
In hall of counsel and the sacred fane.
The noisy shout shall cease, the precept wise
Shall take its place, and, far as sight may reach,
The gleam shall grow into the light again.
Translation of William Morton Payne.
THE REVOLUTION OF 1848
THS
his tree of freedom we have made,
To which men thronging bring their suit, -
Whose branches cast no cooling shade,
And ashes in the mouth whose fruit, -
'Tis but the same old pole of yore,
With the old tinsel wreaths bedecked,
Around which men have danced before,
Until they knew its promise wrecked.
And if it stand on fertile soil,
No root it strikes, no bud doth bear;
'Tis but a log, smooth-shaped with toil,
And stuck end upward in the air.
The signs of blooming life it bears,
Adorning it with summer shows,
## p. 15782 (#108) ##########################################
15782
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
Are but the borrowed crown it wears
Of withered leaf and paper rose.
So when men say in ardent trust,
This is in truth the very palm
Whose foliage wide-spreading must
Bring to mankind its peace and calm,-
Why, then I test my sight anew;
But, do my best, I cannot see
The slightest cause to change my view
That but a May-pole is the tree.
Full many a pole like this shall yield
The hoary trunk of Ygdrasil,
Before the golden year revealed
With light and music earth may fill;
For men of Adam's race must God
Another earth and heaven make:
Then shall the palm spring from the sod,
And earth its thirst for freedom slake.
Translation of William Morton Payne.
GOLIATH
Hen little Goliath in stature was growing,
He was carefully fed by the Philistines knowing;
So Goliath grew up, both stout and tall,
And a weaver's beam was his lance withal,
W*
While the Philistines were to themselves confessing:
“How lucky we are in a giant possessing! ”
And viewing with pride his blustering gait,
The Philistines lived in his strength elate.
«The deuce take you all! ” thought Goliath defiant,
"I am not for my health in this business of giant;
Let them gape as they please, they dare not frown,
I will yet reign in Gaza, the wealthy town. ”
Now many a rich Judæan village
Did the braggart crew of the Philistines pillage,
Till the folk of Judæa took arms in hand,
And a tempest threatened the robber band.
## p. 15783 (#109) ##########################################
JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
15783
The Philistines thought: “What a fright will soon seize
you,
When you see what a giant we have here to tease you! "
So they gave to Goliath both helmet and shield,
And the fellow he was stood then first revealed.
(c
And Goliath he thought: «These Philistines bore me,
But now I can see my reward lies before ine.
The rich tabernacle I'll take for my share,
The rest they may have — for all that I care. )
But the Philistines thought: “A sure thing we have made
us,
The day that we have such a giant to aid us.
We'll put him before us, and watch the show,
While he lays about him with many a blow. ”
Then Goliath marched forth, all wrathful his bearing, -
The biggest he was of those Philistines daring;
But quickly a pebble his bare temple found,
And he suddenly stretched his full length on the ground.
And the Philistines asked, as they viewed him with won-
der,
How on earth could the fellow so quickly go under;
For thirteen feet, they were ready to swear,
Was Goliath's length as they measured him there.
Translation of William Morton Payne.
PROTESILAOS
MONG the Greeks for Troy their anchors weighing,
No other met such bitter fate as he
Who fell the first of all, that men might see
Fulfillment of the oracle's dark saying, -
A
The ominous words that still their memory followed,
From Delphian caves, and lingered on their lips:
« That hero who the first shall leave the ships
Shall first of all by Erebus be swallowed. ”
«Protesilaos! » every tongue was saying,
« Thy name concerns this oracle so dark. ”
But cheerfully he put to sea his bark,
And sailed from home, relentless fate obeying.
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No craven fear his courage high displaces:
Farewell he's said to Tempe's lovely dale;
And to restrain him were of no avail
Laodamia's eager fond embraces.
But when the winds and waves at last were bringing
The hollow ships to the Dardanian shore,
The faltering warriors dared not to the fore,
Where Hector fierce his heavy lance was swinging.
He chosen by the gods the hearts to quicken
Of all who stood in the Achæan host,-
Protesilaos,- on that fatal coast
Was first to land, to fall in death down-stricken.
While weapons flashed, and men to war-cries hearkened,
Low in the dust the noble hero lay;
No booty to his tent might find its way,
And as the war dragged on, his fame grew darkened.
But afterwards men grateful learned to cherish
His mighty deed: in hymns his name was praised;
And pilgrims sought the temple to him raised
That memories of his valor might not perish.
And from the heroic age a voice deep-weighted
With earnest accent echoes on the ear:
“Who leads the way in strife, and knows no fear,
To conquer
to fight and die is fated. ”
Translation of William Morton Payne.
THE PARIS MORGUE
I
N its manifold depiction of human life, recent French literature
bears the stamp of a freshness and truth before unattained.
Nowhere else may we find experience and the study of life
raised so far above the unsafe methods of a priori construction.
After so many storms, life itself is freer here; and its every
shoot buds and blossoms in its true character, forced by neither the
espalier of a system nor the artificial temperature of a hot-house.
The public places, squares, and streets are here the academies for
the painter of souls; who might be taken for an indolent dandy,
did we not know him to be a philosopher, a modern peripatetic.
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Many human relations elsewhere coyly or fearfully concealed,
many scenes that seem to belong to the fireside nook, come here
to public view, and make their impression of joy or of despair.
A crowd of people are viewing from the Pont Louis XIV. the ris-
ing flood of the Seine. A lady dressed in black pushes through
the crowd, and throws herself into the stream in full view of
everybody. This is but one of many examples of the French
exaltation that feeds upon showing its wounds to the public gaze,
and ending the play with a dazzling or startling exit.
Where life lies upon all sides so unveiled, many of the limita-
tions of art must give way. The tragic pathos of the old school
.
was as a whole merely declamatory, and only upon cothurns might
it display itself with propriety. Its sentimentality was as man-
nered and bloodless as the Arcadian shepherd race that thought
itself to hold tenancy of the Eden of poetry, when people still
believed that the bird of paradise had no feet and only hovered
in the blue. Things are different now: sentimentality has taken
hold of the flesh, and the bird of paradise perches on many
a roof. Tragedy goes about comfortably in socks; and this
merciless unbaring of the frightful, this natural and painstaking
depiction of circumstances that often stiffen the sympathies with
terror, affects us with doubled force, because it clings close to
conditions with which every beholder is acquainted.
Louis the Eighteenth once remarked of Châteaubriand's
René' that it bore a resemblance to Werther'; and when
asked if a parallel might indeed be drawn between those two
works, he replied: “Yes, without doubt; and I give the prefer-
ence to Werther,' on account of its simple naturalness. The
hero is placed amid quite ordinary circumstances, which is an im-
portant matter. These every-day details attract us all the more
to Werther's violent passion. On the other hand, we feel little or
no sympathy for René, who is a mere figure of romantic fiction. ”
This observation, which was remarkable for a prince trained in
the old dogmatic school, was looked upon for some score of years
as an example of tasteless criticism. But in the present period,
an enormous amount has been done to spread abroad the dis-
covery that the world of poetry is at bottom just the same as
that which is usually called “the prosaic world. " No Parisian
doubts this at the present time. Even in the abnormal growths
of French literature, in the monstrous sensational pieces where-
with many a theatre seeks to gain the attention of a restless
(
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JOHAN SEBASTIAN CAMMERMEYER WELHAVEN
public, forcing it to listen, there are traces of this reformation.
These pictures have many lifelike details; and herein they resem-
ble the Greek fabulous combinations of plant and animal forms,
which are monstrous as wholes, but whose separate parts are
worked out with the most exact truth.
Whoever closely views the various pictures of life that throng
upon the observation in the French capital, will easily recognize
them as mirrored in the productions of art; either seen in their
full potency as in a concave mirror, or viewed as sparks and
colors through some many-sided prism. The strange figures and
bizarre delineations of a Balzac are to be found here in living
reality. We read in the newspapers the bare account of some
wonderful domestic drama which seems to belong to the dream
world; yet it has been enacted in palpable form at our very
door. We go to the Théâtre de la Porte St. Martin, and view
with repulsion and terror scenes from La Tour de Nesle,' that
harrowing painting with all its ice-cold corpses; and we reject
the idea that life could have furnished forth the composition
with matter and models. Yet the original lies close at hand:
it is the corpse-house on the Seine,- La Morgue! The poet of
the Tour de Nesle' has been there. He has gazed himself sick
upon these mystical shapes; the death smell has crept into all of
his pleasures; he has been forced to visit the morgue again and
again, and the shadows have haunted him until he freed him-
self from them with his work. La Morgue is the black crater
beneath the Parisian people's grapevines of joy; it is the cry of
woe in the midst of the triumph; it is the dark writing on Bel-
shazzar's wall. The joys of life have no such focus, for they
culminate in a thousand places at once.
La Morgue is a police institution: it supplements the bureau
of found articles. This frightful find of the suicides and the
slain must fall into the right hands. People go there to seek
out in the collection the bodies of friends or relatives.
doubts it to be a wise arrangement. A body is a small thing, of
less account than hay or dry brushwood. But we know that it
sometimes is inestimable as measured by affection, and sometimes
has a deep hieroglyphic significance. Consequently, for the con-
venience of observers, the morgue is situated in the centre of
the city. Were it perhaps better that it should stand apart in
some solitary place, shaded by the cypress and the weeping wil.
low? The forsaken one might then be alone with his unrest and
No one
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his fear when he went to seek, and alone with his sorrow when
he had found. Alas! this is only a secondary consideration. La
Morgue is a public exhibition, a museum of the day's history.
These bodies still belong to the public; therefore their place is
in the midst of the crowd. The pit would see the tragic hero on
the boards, and pass judgment upon him before turning home-
wards.
How busily Parisian life stirs about this grewsome little
house! There is nothing sad in the neighborhood, except the wan
stream and the towers of Notre Dame. It is but a few steps to
the morgue from the flower-market. A light zephyr is enough
to waft the fragrance of roses over the low roof. Close by the
walls there is a busy traffic in fruits and vegetables. The her-
alds of life's stir, the restless omnibuses, rumble by over the
bridge. When the morgue is full of bodies, there are speculators
on hand, drawn by the throng,-mountebank tricksters, placards
announcing new inventions, harp-players and organ-grinders!
One might think that the sense of the people had become
blunted to the sights in the morgue. But this is not so: it has
offered too many heart-rending spectacles; they know that it is
a cave of Avernus, which may at any moment reveal the most
frightful things. The dusk of life hovers over that house, and it
throws a deep shadow. We often see some gloomy, motionless
figure in the midst of the noisy crowd; he casts a spell upon our
eyes, and we see him alone thereafter. His whole nature pre-
sents the picture of a dark and brooding soul, and we say to
ourselves: He is lost, — the shadow of the morgue is within him.
The arrangement of the morgue is very simple. The bodies
lie in a light-yellow hall, on dark inclined planes, and a stream
of cold water falls upon each of them. They are naked save for
a fig-leaf of dark leather. Over the couch hangs the clothing of
the corpse. Light falls from above. This hall is separated by a
grating from the anteroom, which is always open to the public.
Here we find placards displayed, describing persons who have
disappeared, and asking for information about them. At the
grating may be seen many indifferent, but also many feverishly
agitated faces.
Now and then an outcry is heard, as "C'est
affreux ! ” and “Pauvre homme ! »
How mysterious these bodies are! We stare at them, and
would read their history in their discomposed features: we pict-
ure them in the silent oppressive gambler's den, in the dark
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squalid street where a dull gleam from the mansards is the only
light; we follow them to the Seine; we hear the awful spash of
the water: and before we know it, we have clothed these dumb
shapes with life, full of horror and despair.
I was once with a friend who lived close to the morgue. I
saw the crowd stream in, but I saw no one come out, and con-
cluded with a shudder that the corpse-house must be unusually
rich. I could not resist the powerful impulse that drove me
to view the image of terror close by. The house was full, and
most of the bodies were set forth in horrible display; one of
them had been hanged, and still had the rope about his neck.
High up lay an old colossal warrior. There was a great scar
on his forehead; his coat hung wet and muddy behind him, and
was decorated with the Legion of Honor. What proud memories
must not have dwelt in that broad breast! But they were shad-
owy ranks, and could bring no booty to his airy bivouac. This
warrior had been at Beresina. Perhaps with the fury of a tiger
he hewed a path for this body through the dense mass of men
on the breaking bridge, or fought for his life among the ice
floes of the wild stream. And now it was all a fairy tale. It
rushed into his head when he stood alone on the Pont-Neuf; but
the bridge would not break under him, and he had to cast him-
self into these quiet waters, which mirror the trophies of his
valor. The last body in this company was that of a young girl:
her hair was of glistening black and extraordinarily long; one
hand was clenched convulsively, the other limp and outspread.
“Du armes Kind, was hat man Dir gethan ? " A soldier stood
at my side: he was a handsome man, and could not have been
over eighteen. The sweat pearled on his forehead, and he
pressed his face hard against the grating. I could not tire of
watching him, but he did not notice,- he stared incessantly at
the last body.
La Morgue is an instructive institution, and has brought many
misdeeds to light.
