”
Sudden from out the water sprung
A rounded arm, on which they saw
As high the lotus buds among
It rose, the bracelet white, with awe.
Sudden from out the water sprung
A rounded arm, on which they saw
As high the lotus buds among
It rose, the bracelet white, with awe.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v09 - Dra to Eme
His predilection for study
secured him an opportunity to enter the
College of Sainte-Barbe, whence he passed
to the Normal School.
When he was twenty-two he began teach-
ing history, first at Rheims, and then in
the College of Henry IV. in Paris. Here
JEAN VICTOR DURUY
he began his literary work, mostly upon
school-books, of which he wrote many, mainly historical and geo-
graphical. He received the degree of Doctor of Letters in 1853, and
became successively Inspector of the Academy of Paris, Master of
Conferences at the Normal School, Professor of History at the Poly-
technic School, and Inspector-General of Secondary Instruction. Dur-
ing the whole of this period he had been engaged with secondary
classes, and had become strongly impressed by the faulty condition
of the primary and secondary schools. In 1863 Louis Napoleon put
him at the head of the educational system of the empire as Minister
of Public Instruction. This appointment gave him the opportunity to
carry out numerous and important secularizing reforms which brought
him into sharp collision with the clerical party. He held his post as
minister for six years - six years of struggle with the parsimonious
## p. 5070 (#238) ###########################################
5070
JEAN VICTOR DURUY
disposition of the administration upon the one hand, and with the
hostile clericals upon the other.
The measures in which he was especially interested were the
reorganization of the Museum of Natural History, the extension of
scientific study, the introduction of the study of modern and contem-
porary history in the lyceums (a dreadful experiment, according to
his opponents), gratuitous and compulsory primary education, the
improvement of the night schools, and popular classes for adults.
He was to a large extent successful in all these, except in the
direction of compulsory education. The efforts which he made to
improve the instruction given to young girls brought upon him the
tempest. The bishops, with Monsignor Dupanloup of Orléans at their
head, raised a veritable crusade, and Pope Pio Nono himself at
length entered the hostile ranks. Probably in part because of this
conflict, he was superseded in 1869 and was made a member of the
Senate, from which he retired to private life, and the prosecution of
his literary labors on the fall of the empire, in the following year.
He died in 1894.
As an author his style is clear and direct. Among his numerous
works the most important are the two great histories, for which, as
for other achievements, honors were heaped upon him. In these he
laid particular stress upon the milieu — the conditions of place, time,
and race.
Consequently he has therein written the history of the
Greek and Roman peoples, and not merely the history of Greece and
Rome, - and has pictured them, so far as possible, as they looked
and felt and thought and acted. He exhibits, for example, the
growth of the magnificent power of Rome, and its decadence; and
shows the all-conquering empire subdued to the manners, the gods,
and the institutions of the conquered. And worse:–« They had be-
come enamored of the arts, the letters, and the philosophy of Greece,
and dying Greece had avenged itself by transmitting to them the
corruption which had dishonored its old age. ”
The drift of his argument appears in this paragraph, in which he
sums up his story of the Eternal City:--" In the earlier portion of its
history may be seen the happy effects of a progressively liberal pol-
icy; in the later the baneful consequences of absolute power, govern-
ing a servile society through a venal administration. ”
## p. 5071 (#239) ###########################################
JEAN VICTOR DURUY
5071
THE NATIONAL POLICY
From the History of Rome)
,
penetrate into
another universe, - that of the successors of
Alexander. The eternal glory of Rome, the immense bene-
faction by which she effaces the memory of so many unjust wars,
is to have reunited those two worlds that in all former ages
were divided in interest, and strangers to each other; is to have
mingled and fused the brilliant but corrupt civilization of the
East with the barbaric energy of the West. The Mediterranean
became a Roman lake, - mare nostrum, they said, - and the
same life circulated on all its shores, called for the first and
the last time to a common existence.
In this work were employed a century and a half of struggles
and diplomacy; for Rome, working for a patient aristocracy and
not for a man, was not compelled to attain her end at a bound.
Instead of rearing suddenly one of those colossal monarchies
formed like the statue of gold with feet of clay, she founded
slowly an empire which fell only under the weight of years and
of the Northern hordes. After Zama she could have attempted the
conquest of Africa, but she left Carthage and the Numidians to
enfeeble each other. After Cynoscephalæ and Magnesia, Greece
and Asia were all ready for the yoke, but she accorded them fifty
years more of liberty. This was because, along with the pride
of the Roman name and the necessity for dominion, she always
retained some of her ancient virtues. The Popiliuses were more
numerous than the Verreses. Now she preferred to rule the
world; later she will put it to pillage. Thus, wherever Rome saw
strength she sent her legions; all power was broken; the ties of
States and leagues were shattered; and when her soldiers were
recalled they left behind them only weakness and anarchy. But
the task of the legions accomplished, that of the Senate began.
After force came craft and diplomacy. Those senators, grown
old amidst the terrors of the second Punic war, seemed now to
have less pleasure in arms than in the game of politics,-the
first, in all ages, of Italian arts.
Several other causes dictated this policy of reserve. Against
the Gauls, the Samnites, Pyrrhus, and Hannibal,- in other
## p. 5072 (#240) ###########################################
5072
JEAN VICTOR DI'RUY
words, for the defense of Latium and of Italy,— Rome had em-
ployed all her strength; it was then a question of her existence:
whereas, in the wars with Greece and with Asia, her ambition
and her pride alone were interested; and wisdom demanded that
some relaxation be given to the plebeians and the allies. The
Senate had moreover too many affairs on its hands — the wars
with Spain, with Corsica, with Cisalpina, and with Istria - to
admit of its becoming deeply involved in the East. Therefore
two legions only will fight Philip and Antiochus -- that will suf-
fice to conquer, but would be too little to despoil them. Further-
more, the Senate believed that in penetrating into this Greek
world, where an old glory concealed so much weakness, they
could not accord too much to prudence. These pitiless enemies
of the Volscians and the Samnites will not proceed in their next
wars by exterminating their adversaries and wasting their coun-
try. "It was not with such a purpose," said they, that they
came to pour out their blood; they took in hand the cause of
oppressed Greece. ” And that language and that policy they will
not change after victory. The first act of Flamininus, on the day
after Cynoscephalæ, was to proclaim the liberty of the Greeks.
All who bore that respected name seemed to have the right to
Roman protection; and the little Greek cities of Caria, and of
the coasts of Asia and Thrace, received with astonishment their
liberty from a people that they hardly knew. All were capti-
vated by this apparent generosity. None perceived that in re-
storing independence to the cities and States, Rome wished
to break up the confederations that sought to reorganize and
would perhaps have given new force to Greece. In isolating them
and attaching them to herself by grateful ties, she placed them
almost insensibly under her influence. She made allies of them;
and every one knows what the allies of Rome became. Thus the
Senate was so well satisfied with this policy, which created di-
vision everywhere and awakened extinct rivalries, that for half
a century it followed no other.
## p. 5073 (#241) ###########################################
JEAN VICTOR DURUY
5073
RESULTS OF THE ROMAN DOMINION
From the History of Rome )
in
A civilized" all the Western world, for which the Greeks had
done nothing Her language, out of which sprang the
various languages of the Romance nations, is in case of need a
means of communication among scholars of all countries, and her!
books will always remain - a wise selection being made - the
best for the higher culture of the mind. They have merited
above all others the title of litteræ humaniores, the literature by
which men are made. A cardinal, reading the “Thoughts of Mar-
cus Aurelius' (written in Greek, it is true, but written by a
Roman), exclaimed, “My soul blushes redder than my scarlet at
sight of the virtues of this Gentile. "
Suppose Rome destroyed by Pyrrhus or Hannibal, before
Marius and Cæsar had driven the German tribes back from Gaul:
their invasion would have been effected five centuries sooner;
and since they would have found opposed to them only other
barbarians, what a long night would have settled down upon the
world!
It is true that when the Roman people had laid hands upon
the treasures of Alexander's successors, the scandal of their
orgies exceeded for a century anything that the East had ever
seen; that their amusements were sanguinary games or licentious
plays; that the Roman mind, after receiving a temporary benefit
from Greek philosophy, went astray in Oriental mysticism; and
that finally, after having loved liberty, Rome accepted despotism,
as if willing to astonish the world as much by her great corrup-
tion as she did by the greatness of her empire.
But can we say that no other age or nation has known servil-
ity of soul, licentiousness in public amusements, and the conspicu-
ous depravity in morals that is always to be seen where indolence
and wealth are united ?
To the legacies left by Rome which have now been enumer-
ated, we must add another, which ranks among the most pre-
cious. Notwithstanding the poetic piety of Virgil, and Livy's
official credulity, the dominant note of Latin literature is the in-
difference of Horace, when it is not the daring skepticism of
IX-318
## p. 5074 (#242) ###########################################
5074
JEAN VICTOR DURUY
Lucretius. To Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus, and the great juriscon-
sults, the prime necessity was the free possession of themselves,
that independence of philosophic thought which they owed to
Greece. This spirit, begotten of pure reason, was almost stifled
during the Middle Ages. It reappeared when antiquity was re-
covered. From that day the renascent world set forward again;
and in the new path France, heir of Athens and of Rome, was
long her guide --- for art in its most charming form, and for
thought, developed in the light.
Upon a medal of Constantine his son presents to him a globe
surmounted by a phenix, symbol of immortality. For once the
courtiers were not in the wrong.
The sacred bird which springs
from her own ashes is a fitting emblem of this old Rome, dead
fifteen centuries ago, yet alive to-day through her genius: Siamo
Romani.
## p. 5075 (#243) ###########################################
5075
TORU DUTT
(1856–1877)
etry of
N 1874 there appeared in the Bengal Magazine an essay upon
Leconte de Lisle, which showed not only an unusual knowl-
edge of French literature, but also decided literary quali-
ties. The essayist was Toru Dutt, a Hindu girl of eighteen, daughter
of Govin Chunder Dutt, for many years a justice of the peace at
Calcutta. The family belonged to the high-caste cultivated Hindus,
and Toru's education was conducted on broad lines. Her work fre-
quently discloses charming pictures of the home life that filled the
old garden house at Calcutta. Here it is easy to see the studious
child poring over French, German, and English lexicons. reading
every book she could lay hold of, hearing from her mother's lips those
old legends of her race which had been woven into the
native bards long before the civilization of modern Europe existed.
In her thirteenth year Toru and her younger sister were sent to
study for a few months in France, and thence to attend lectures at
Cambridge and to travel in England. A memory of this visit appears
in Toru's little poem, Near Hastings,' which shows the impression-
able nature of the Indian girl, so sensitive to the romance of an alien
race, and so appreciative of her friendly welcome to English soil.
After four years' travel in Europe the Dutts returned to India to
resume their student life, and Toru began to learn Sanskrit. She
showed great aptitude for the French language and a strong liking
for the French character, and she made a special study of French
romantic poetry. Her essays on Leconte de Lisle and Joséphin Sou-
lary, and a series of English translations of poetry, were the fruit of
her labor. The translations, including specimens from Béranger, Thé-
ophile Gautier, François Coppée, Sully-Prud'homme, and other popu-
lar writers, were collected in 1876 under the title "A Sheaf Gleaned
in French Fields. A few copies found their way into Europe, and
both French and English reviewers recognized the value of the har-
vest of this clear-sighted gleaner. One critic called these poems, in
which Toru so faithfully reproduced the spirit of one alien tongue in
the forms of another, transmutations rather than translations.
But marvelous as is the mastery shown over the subtleties of
thought and the difficulties of translation, the achievement remains
that of acquirement rather than of inspiration. But Toru's English
renditions of the native Indian legends, called Ancient Ballads of
## p. 5076 (#244) ###########################################
5076
TORU DUTT
seer
Hindustan,' give a sense of great original power. Selected from
much completed work left unpublished at her too early death, these
poems are revelations of the Eastern religious thought, which loves
to clothe itself in such forms of mystical beauty as haunt the memory
and charm the fancy. But in these translations it is touched by the
spirit of the new faith which Toru had adopted. The poems remain,
however, essentially Indian. The glimpses of lovely landscape, the
shining temples, the greening gloom of the jungle, the pink Aush of
the dreamy atmosphere, are all of the East, as is the philosophie
calm that breathes through the verses. The most beautiful of the
ballads is perhaps that of Savitri,' the king's daughter who by love
wins back her husband after he has passed the gates of death.
Another, “Sindher,' re-tells the old story of that king whose great
power is unavailing to avert the penalty which follows the breaking
of the Vedic law, even though it was broken in ignorance. Still
another, Prehlad,' reveals that insight into things spiritual which
characterizes the true or “called of God. ” Two charming
legends, Jogadhya Uma,' and (Buttoo,' full of the pastoral simplicity
of the early Aryan life, and a few miscellaneous poems, complete
this volume upon which Toru's fame will rest.
A posthumous novel written in French makes up the sum of her
contribution to letters. Le Journal de Mlle. D'Arvers) was found
completed among her posthumous papers. It is a romance of modern
French life, whose motive is the love of two brothers for the same
girl. The tragic element dominates the story, and the author has
managed the details with extraordinary ease without sacrificing either
dignity or dramatic effect. The story was edited by Mademoiselle
Bader, a correspondent of Toru, and her sole acquaintance among
European authors. In 1878, the year after the poet's death, appeared
a second edition of (A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields' containing
forty-three additional poems, with a brief biographical sketch written
by her father. The many translators of the (Sakoontala' and of
other Indian dramas show how difficult it is for the Western mind to
express the indefinable spirituality of temper that fills ancient Hindu
poetry. This remarkable quality Toru wove unconsciously into her
English verse, making it seem not exotic but complementary, an
echo of that far-off age when the genius of the two
aces
was one.
## p. 5077 (#245) ###########################################
TORU DUTT
5077
JOGADHYA UMA
"S"
HELL BRACELETS, ho! Shell bracelets, ho!
Fair maids and matrons, come and buy! )
Along the road, in morning's glow,
The peddler raised his wonted cry.
The road ran straight, a red, red line,
To Khigoram, for cream renowned,
Through pasture meadows where the kine,
In knee-deep grass, stood magic bound
And half awake, involved in mist
That floated in dun coils profound,
Till by the sudden sunbeams kist,
Rich rainbow hues broke all around.
«Shell bracelets, ho! Shell bracelets, ho! »
The roadside trees still dripped with dew
And hung their blossoms like a show.
Who heard the cry? 'Twas but a few;
A ragged herd-boy, here and there,
With his long stick and naked feet;
A plowman wending to his care,
The field from which he hopes the wheat;
An early traveler, hurrying fast
To the next town; an urchin slow
Bound for the school; these heard and passed,
Unheeding all, — “Shell bracelets, ho! ”
Pellucid spread a lake-like tank
Beside the road now lonelier still;
High on three sides arose the bank
Which fruit-trees shadowed at their will;
Upon the fourth side was the ghat,
With its broad stairs of marble white,
And at the entrance arch there sat,
Full face against the morning light,
A fair young woman with large eyes,
And dark hair falling to her zone;
She heard the peddler's cry arise,
And eager seemed his ware to own.
« Shell bracelets, ho! See, maiden, see!
The rich enamel, sunbeam-kist!
## p. 5078 (#246) ###########################################
5078
TORU DUTT
Happy, oh happy, shalt thou be,
Let them but clasp that slender wrist;
These bracelets are a mighty charm;
They keep a lover ever true,
And widowhood avert, and harm.
Buy them, and thou shalt never rue.
Just try them on! ” — She stretched her hand.
“Oh, what a nice and lovely fit!
No fairer hand in all the land,
And lo! the bracelet matches it. ”
Dazzled, the peddler on her gazed,
Till came the shadow of a fear,
While she the bracelet-arm upraised
Against the sun to view more clear.
Oh, she was lovely! but her look
Had something of a high command
That filled with awe. Aside she shook
Intruding curls, by breezes fanned,
And blown across her brows and face,
And asked the price; which when she heard
She nodded, and with quiet grace
For payment to her home referred.
“And where, O maiden, is thy house?
But no,- that wrist-ring has a tongue;
No maiden art thou, but a spouse,
Happy, and rich, and fair, and young. ”
«Far otherwise; my lord is poor,
And him at home thou shalt not find;
Ask for my father; at the door
Knock loudly; he is deaf, but kind.
Seest thou that lofty gilded spire,
Above these tufts of foliage green?
That is our place; its point of fire
Will guide thee o'er the tract between. ”
« That is the temple spire. ” _ « Yes, there
We live; my father is the priest;
The manse is near, a building fair,
But lowly to the temple's east.
When thou hast knocked, and seen him, say,
His daughter, at Dhamaser Ghat,
Shell bracelets bought from thee to-day,
And he must pay so much for that.
## p. 5079 (#247) ###########################################
TORU DUTT
5079
Be sure, he will not let thee pass
Without the value, and a meal.
If he demur, or cry alas!
No money hath he,- then reveal;
«Within the small box, marked with streaks
Of bright vermilion, by the shrine,
The key whereof has lain for weeks
Untouched, he'll find some coin,-'tis mine.
That will enable him to pay
The bracelet's price. Now fare thee well!
She spoke; the peddler went away,
Charmed with her voice as by some spell;
While she, left lonely there, prepared
To plunge into the water pure,
And like a rose, her beauty bared,
From all observance quite secure.
Not weak she seemed, nor delicate;
Strong was each limb of flexile grace,
And full the bust; the mien elate,
Like hers, the goddess of the chase
On Latmos hill,- and on the face
Framed in its cloud of floating hair!
No painter's hand might hope to trace
The beauty and the glory there!
Well might the peddler look with awe,
For though her eyes were soft, a ray
Lit them at times, which kings who saw
Would never dare to disobey.
Onward through groves the peddler sped,
Till full in front, the sunlit spire
Arose before him. Paths which led
To gardens trim, in gay attire,
Lay all around. And lo! the manse,
Humble but neat, with open door!
He paused, and blessed the lucky chance
That brought his bark to such a shore.
Huge straw-ricks, log huts full of grain,
Sleek cattle, flowers, a tinkling bell,
Spoke in a language sweet and plain,
“Here smiling Peace and Plenty dwell. ”
Unconsciously he raised his cry,
« Shell-bracelets, ho! » And at his voice
## p. 5080 (#248) ###########################################
5080
TORU DUTT
Looked out the priest, with eager eye,
And made his heart at once rejoice.
“Ho, Sankha peddler! Pass not by,
But step thou in, and share the food
Just offered on our altar high,
If thou art in a hungry mood.
Welcome are all to this repast!
The rich and poor, the high and low!
Come, wash thy feet, and break thy fast;
Then on thy journey strengthened go. ”
«Oh, thanks, good priest! Observance due
And greetings! May thy name be blest!
I came on business, but I knew,
Here might be had both food and rest
Without a charge; for all the poor
Ten miles around thy sacred shrine
Know that thou keepest open door,
And praise that generous hand of thine.
But let my errand first be told:
For bracelets sold to thine this day,
So much thou owest me in gold;
Hast thou the ready cash to pay ?
« The bracelets were enameled, - so
The price is high. ” — “How! Sold to mine?
Who bought them, I should like to know?
« Thy daughter, with the large black eyne,
Now bathing at the marble ghat. ”
Loud laughed the priest at this reply,
“I shall not put up, friend, with that;
No daughter in the world have I;
An only son is all my stay;
Some minx has played a trick, no doubt:
But cheer up, let thy heart be gay,
Be sure that I shall find her out. ”
"Nay, nay, good father! such a face
Could not deceive, I must aver;
At all events, she knows thy place,
(And if my father should demur
To pay thee,' — thus she said, -'or cry
He has no money, tell him straight
The box vermilion-streaked to try,
That's near the shrine. ) »_« Well, wait, friend, wait! »
## p. 5081 (#249) ###########################################
TORU DUTT
5081
The priest said, thoughtful; and he ran
And with the open box came back:-
«Here is the price exact, my man,
No surplus over, and no lack.
“How strange! how strange! Oh, blest art thou
To have beheld her, touched her hand,
Before whom Vishnu's self must bow,
And Brahma and his heavenly band !
Here have I worshiped her for years,
And never seen the vision bright;
Vigils and fasts and secret tears
Have almost quenched my outward sight;
And yet that dazzling form and face
I have not seen, and thou, dear friend,
To thee, unsought-for, comes the grace:
What may its purport be, and end ?
“How strange! How strange! Oh, happy thou'
And couldst thou ask no other boon
Than thy poor bracelet's price? That brow
Resplendent as the autumn moon
Must have bewildered thee, I trow,
And made thee lose thy senses all. ”
A dim light on the peddler now
Began to dawn; and he let fall
His bracelet-basket in his haste,
And backward ran, the way he came:
What meant the vision fair and chaste;
Whose eyes were they,- those eyes of flame?
Swift ran the peddler as a hind;
The old priest followed on his trace;
They reached the ghat, but could not find
The lady of the noble face.
The birds were silent in the wood;
The lotus flowers exhaled a smell,
Faint, over all the solitude;
A heron as a sentinel
Stood by the bank. They called, - in vain;
No answer came from hill or fell;
The landscape lay in slumber's chain;
E'en Echo slept within her shell.
Broad sunshine, yet a hush profound !
They turned with saddened hearts to go;
## p. 5082 (#250) ###########################################
5082
TORU DUTT
Then from afar there came a sound
Of silver bells; -- the priest said low,
“O Mother, Mother, deign to hear,
The worship-hour has rung; we wait
In meek humility and fear.
Must we return home desolate ?
Oh come, as late thou cam'st unsought,
Or was it but some idle dream ?
Give us some sign, if it was not;
A word, a breath, or passing gleam.
”
Sudden from out the water sprung
A rounded arm, on which they saw
As high the lotus buds among
It rose, the bracelet white, with awe.
Then a wide ripple'tost and swung
The blossoms on that liquid plain,
And lo! the arm so fair and young
Sank in the waters down again.
They bowed before the mystic Power,
And as they home returned in thought,
Each took from thence a lotus flower
In memory of the day and spot.
Years, centuries, have passed away,
And still before the temple shrine
Descendants of the peddler pay
Shell-bracelets of the old design
As annual tribute. Much they own
In lands and gold, — but they confess
From that eventful day alone
Dawned on their industry, success.
Absurd may be the tale I tell,
Ill-suited to the marching times;
I loved the lips from which it fell,
So let it stand among my rhymes.
OUR CASUARINA-TREE
L
IKE a huge python, winding round and round
The rugged trunk, indented deep with scars
Up to its very summit near the stars,
A creeper climbs, in whose embraces bound
No other tree could live. But gallantly
## p. 5083 (#251) ###########################################
TORU DUTT
5083
The giant wears the scarf, and flowers are hung
In crimson clusters all the boughs among,
Whereon all day are gathered bird and bee;
And oft at night the garden overflows
With one sweet song that seems to have no close,
Sung darkling from our tree, while men repose.
Unknown, yet well known to the eye of faith!
Ah, I have heard that wail far, far away
In distant lands, by many a sheltered bay,
When slumbered in his cave the water wraith,
And the waves gently kissed the classic shore
Of France or Italy, beneath the moon,
When earth lay trancèd in a dreamless swoon;
And every time the music rose, before
Mine inner vision rose a form sublime,
Thy form, O tree! as in my happy prime
I saw thee in my own loved native clime.
But not because of its magnificence
Dear is the Casuarina to my soul:
Beneath it we have played: though years may roll,
O sweet companions, loved with love intense,
For your sakes shall the tree be ever dear!
Blent with your images, it shall arise
In memory, till the hot tears blind mine eyes.
What is that dirge-like murmur that I hear
Like the sea breaking on a shingle beach ?
It is the tree's lament, an eerie speech,
That haply to the Unknown Land may reach.
When first my casement is wide open thrown
At dawn, my eyes delighted on it rest;
Sometimes,- and most in winter, - on its crest
A gray baboon sits statue-like alone,
Watching the sunrise; while on lower boughs
His puny offspring leap about and play;
And far and near kokilas hail the day;
And to their pastures wend our sleepy cows:
And in the shadow, on the broad tank cast
By that hoar tree, so beautiful and vast,
The water-lilies spring, like snow enmassed.
## p. 5084 (#252) ###########################################
5084
JOHN S. DWIGHT
(1813-1893)
J
a
JOHN SULLIVAN DWIGHT was born in Boston, Massachusetts,
May 13th, 1813. After graduation at Harvard in 1832, he
studied at the Divinity School, and for two years was pastor
of a Unitarian church in Northampton, Massachusetts. He then be-
came interested in founding the famous Brook Farm community,
which furnished Hawthorne with the background for “The Blithedale
Romance'; and he is mentioned in the preface to this book with
Ripley, Dana, Channing, Parker, etc.
This was
community
scheme, undertaken by joint ownership in a farm in West Roxbury
near Boston; associated with the names of Hawthorne, Emerson,
George William Curtis, and C. A. Dana, a scheme which Emerson
called a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an age of
reason in a patty-pan. ” This community existed seven years, and to
quote again from Emerson, — “In Brook Farm was this peculiarity,
that there was no head. In every family is the father; in every fac-
tory a foreman; in a shop a master; in a boat the skipper: but in
this Farm no authority; each was master or mistress of their actions;
happy, hapless anarchists. »
Here Mr. Dwight edited The Harbinger, a periodical published by
that community; taught languages and music, besides doing his share
of the manual labor. In 1848 he returned to Boston and engaged in
literature and musical criticism; and in 1852 he established Dwight's
Journal of Music, which he edited for thirty years. Many of his best
essays appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and he contributed to
various periodicals.
He was one of the pioneers of scholarly, intelligent, original, and
literary musical criticism in America, and he possessed fine general
attainments and a distinct style. It is because of his clear perception
of the indispensableness of the arts- and especially of the art of
music — to life, and because of his clear statement of their vital rela-
tionship, that his work belongs to literature.
## p. 5085 (#253) ###########################################
JOHN S. DWIGHT
5085
MUSIC AS A MEANS OF CULTURE
From the Atlantic Monthly, 1870, by permission of Houghton, Mifflin
and Company
W*
TE As a democratic people, a great mixed people of all races,
overrunning a vast continent, need music even more than
others. We need some ever-present, ever-welcome influ-
ence that shall insensibly tone down our self-asserting and ag-
gressive manners, round off the sharp, offensive angularity of
character, subdue and harmonize the free and ceaseless conflict
of opinions, warm out the genial individual humanity of each
and every unit of society, lest he become a mere member of a
party, or a sharer of business or fashion. This rampant liberty
will rush to its own ruin, unless there shall be found some gen-
tler, harmonizing, humanizing culture, such as may pervade
whole masses with a fine enthusiasm, a sweet sense of reverence
for something far above us, beautiful and pure; awakening some
ideality in every soul, and often lifting us out of the hard hope-
less prose of daily life. We need this beautiful corrective of our
crudities. Our radicalism will pull itself up by the roots, if it
do not cultivate the instinct of reverence. The first impulse of
freedom is centrifugal,- to fly off the handle, - unless it be re-
strained by a no less free impassioned love of order. We need
to be so enamored of the divine idea of unity, that that alone
the enriching of that — shall be the real motive for assertion of
our individuality. What shall so temper and tone down our
« fierce democracy” ? It must be something better, lovelier,
more congenial to human nature than mere stern prohibition,
cold Puritanic «Thou shalt not! ” What can so quickly magnet-
ize a people into this harmonic mood as music ? Have we not
seen it, felt it?
The hard-working, jaded millions need expansion, need the
rejuvenating, the ennobling experience of joy. Their toil, their
church, their creed perhaps, their party livery, and very vote,
are narrowing; they need to taste, to breathe a larger, freer life.
Has it not come to thousands, while they have listened to or
joined their voices in some thrilling chorus that made the heav-
ens seem to open and come down ? The governments of the
Old World do much to make the people cheerful and contented;
here it is all laissez-faire, each for himself, in an ever keener
strife of competition. We must look very much to music to do
## p. 5086 (#254) ###########################################
5086
JOHN S. DWIGHT
this good work for us; we are open to that appeal; we can forget
ourselves in that; we blend in joyous fellowship when we can
sing together; perhaps quite as much so when we can listen to-
gether to a noble orchestra of instruments interpreting the high-
est inspirations of a master. The higher and purer the character
and kind of music, the more of real genius there is in it, the
deeper will this influence be.
Judge of what can be done, by what already, within our own
experience, has been done and daily is done. Think what the
children in our schools are getting, through the little that they
learn of vocal music, - elasticity of spirit, joy in harmonious
co-operation, in the blending of each happy life in others; a
rhythmical instinct of order and of measure in all movement; a
quickening of ear and sense, whereby they will grow up suscep-
tible to music, as well as with some use of their own voices, so
that they may take part in it; for from these spacious nurseries
(loveliest flower gardens, apple orchards in full bloom, say, on
their annual fête days) shall our future choirs and oratorio chio-
ruses be replenished with good sound material.
We esteem ourselves the freest people on this planet; yet per-
haps we have as little real freedom as any other, for we are the
slaves of our own feverish enterprise, and of a barren theory of
discipline, which would fain make us virtuous to a fault through
abstinence from very life. We are afraid to give ourselves up
to the free and happy instincts of our nature. All that is not
pursuit of advancement in some good, conventional, approved
way of business, or politics, or fashion, or intellectual reputation,
or professed religion, we count waste. We lack geniality; nor do
we as a people understand the meaning of the word. We ought
to learn it practically of our Germans. It comes of the same
root with the word genius. Genius is the spontaneous principle;
it is free and happy in its work; it is artist and not drudge; its
whole activity is reconciliation of the heartiest pleasure with the
purest loyalty to conscience, with the most holy, universal, and
disinterested ends. Genius, as Beethoven gloriously illustrates in
his Choral Symphony (indeed, in all his symphonies), finds the
keynote and solution of the problem of the highest state in
"Joy, taking his text from Schiller's Hymn. Now, all may not
be geniuses in the sense that we call Shakespeare, Mozart,
Raphael, men of genius. But all should be partakers of this
spontaneous, free, and happy method of genius; all should live
## p. 5087 (#255) ###########################################
JOHN S. DWIGHT
5087
childlike, genial lives, and not wear all the time the consequen-
tial livery of their unrelaxing business, nor the badge of party
and profession, in every line and feature of their faces. This
genial, childlike faculty of social enjoyment, this happy art of life,
is just what our countrymen may learn from the social “Lieder-
tafel” and the summer singing-festivals of which the Germans
are so fond. There is no element of national character which we
so much need; and there is no class of citizens whom we should
be more glad to adopt and own than those who set us such ex-
amples. So far as it is a matter of culture, it is through art
chiefly that the desiderated genial era must be ushered in. The
Germans have the sentiment of art, the feeling of the beautiful
in art, and consequently in nature, more developed than we have.
Above all, music offers itself as the most available, most popular,
most influential of the fine arts,— music, which is the art and lan-
guage of the feelings, the sentiments, the spiritual instincts of the
soul; and so becomes a universal language, tending to unite and
blend and harmonize all who may come within its sphere.
Such civilizing, educating power has music for society at
large. Now, in the finer sense of culture, such as we look for in
more private and select “society,” as it is called, music in the
salon, in the small chamber concert, where congenial spirits are
assembled in its name good music of course— does it not create
a finer sphere of social sympathy and courtesy? Does it not
better mold the tone and manners from within than any imita-
tive “fashion” from without ? What society, upon the whole, is
quite so sweet, so satisfactory, so refined, as the best musical
society, if only Mozart, Mendelssohn, Franz, Chopin, set the
tone! The finer the kind of music heard or made together, the
better the society. This bond of union only reaches the few;
coarser, meaner, more prosaic natures are not drawn to it.
Wealth and fashion may not dictate who shall be of it. Here
congenial spirits meet in a way at once free, happy, and instruct-
ive, meet with an object which insures “society”; whereas so-
called society, as such, is often aimless, vague, modifying and
fatiguing, for the want of any subject-matter. Here one gets
ideas of beauty which are not mere arbitrary fashions, ugly often
to the eye of taste. Here you may escape vulgarity by a way
not vulgar in itself, like that of fashion, which makes wealth
and family and means of dress its passports. Here you can be
as exclusive as you please, by the soul's light, not wronging any
## p. 5088 (#256) ###########################################
5088
JOHN S. DWIGHT
one; here learn gentle manners, and the quiet ease and courtesy
with which cultivated people move, without in the same process
learning insincerity.
Of course the same remarks apply to similar sincere reunions
in the name of any other art, or of poetry. But music is the
most social of them all, even if each listener find nothing set
down to his part (or even hers! ) but tacet.
We have fancied ourselves entertaining a musical house to-
gether, but we must leave it with no time to make report or
picture out the scene. Now, could we only enter the chamber,
the inner sanctum, the private inner life of a thoroughly musical
person, one who is wont to live in music! Could we know him
in his solitude! (You can only know him in yourself, unless he
be a poet and creator in his art, and bequeath himself in that
form in his works for any who know how to read. ) If the best
of all society is musical society, we go further and say: The
sweetest of all solitude is when one is alone with music. One
gets the best of music, the sincerest part, when he is alone.
Our poet-philosopher has told us to secure solitude at any cost;
there's nothing which we can so ill afford to do without. It is
a great vice of our society, that it provides for and disposes to
so little solitude, ignoring the fact that there is more loneliness
in company than out of it. Now, to a musical person, in the
mood of it, in the sweet hours by himself, comes music as the
nearest friend, nearer and dearer than ever before; and he soon
finds that he never was in such good company.
I doubt if sym-
phony of Beethoven, opera of Mozart, Passion Music of Bach,
was ever so enjoyed or felt in grandest public rendering, as one
may feel it while he recalls its outline by himself at his piano
(even if he be a slow and bungling reader and may get it out
by piecemeal). I doubt if such an one can carry home from the
performance, in presence of the applauding crowd, nearly so
much as he may take to it from such inward, private preparation.
Are you alone? What spirits can you summon up to fill the
vacancy, and people it with life and love and beauty! Take
down the volume of sonatas, the arrangement of the great Sym-
phony, the recorded reveries of Chopin, the songs of Schubert,
Schumann, Franz, or even the chorals, with the harmony of
Bach, in which the four parts blend their several individual
melodies together in such loving service of the whole, that the
plain people's tune becomes a germ unfolding into endless wealth
## p. 5089 (#257) ###########################################
JOHN S. DWIGHT
5089
and beauty of meaning; and you have the very essence of all
prayer, and praise, and gratitude, as if you were a worshiper in
the ideal church. Nothing like music, then, to banish the
benumbing ghost of ennui. It lends secret sympathy, relief,
expression, to all one's moods, loves, longings, sorrows; comes
nearer to the soul or to the secret wound than
any
friend or
healing sunshine from without. It nourishes and feeds the hid-
den springs of hope and love and faith; renews the old convic-
tion of life's springtime, – that the world is ruled by love, that
God is good, that beauty is a divine end of life, and not a snare
and an illusion. It floods out of sight the unsightly, muddy
grounds of life's petty, anxious, doubting moments, and makes
immortality a present fact, lived in and realized. It locks the
door against the outer world of discords, contradictions, impor-
tunities, beneath the notice of a soul so richly occupied: lets
“Fate knock at the door” (as Beethoven said in explanation of
his symphony),-- Fate and the pursuing Furies,--and even wel-
comes them, and turns them into gracious goddesses,- Eumen-
ides! Music, in this way, is a marvelous elixir to keep off old
age. Youth returns in solitary hours with Beethoven and Mozart.
Touching the chords of the Moonlight Sonata,' the old man is
once more a lover; with the andante of the Pastoral Symphony'
he loiters by the shady brookside, hand in hand with his fresh
heart's first angel. You are past the sentimental age, yet you
can weep alone in music, — not weep exactly, but find outlet
more expressive and more worthy of your manly faith.
A great grief comes, an inconsolable bereavement, a humil-
iating, paralyzing reverse, a blow of Fate, giving the lie to your
best plans and bringing your best powers into discredit with
yourself; then you are best prepared and best entitled to receive
the secret visitations of these tuneful goddesses and muses.
« Who never ate his bread in tears,
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers! ”
So sings the German poet. It is the want of inward, deep ex-
perience, it is innocence of sorrow and of trial, more than the
lack of any special cultivation of musical taste and knowledge,
that debars many people — naturally most young people, and all
who are what we call shallow natures - from the feeling and
enjoyment of many of the truest, deepest, and most heavenly
of all the works of music. Take the Passion Music of Bach, for
IX-319
## p. 5090 (#258) ###########################################
5090
JOHN S. DWIGHT
instance; if you can sit down alone at your piano and decipher
strains and pieces of it when you need such music, you shall find
that in its quiet quaintness, its sincerity and tenderness, its absti-
nence from all striving for effect, it speaks to you and entwines
itself about your heart, like the sweetest, deepest verses in the
Bible; when the soul muses till the fire burns. ”
Such a panacea is this art for loneliness. But sometimes too
it may intensify the sense of loneliness, only for more heavenly
relief at last. Think of the deep composer, of lonely, sad Beetho-
ven, wreaking his pain upon expression in those impatient chords
and modulations, putting his sorrows into sonatas, and wringing
triumph always out of all! Look at him as he was then,- mo-
rose, they say, and lonely and tormented; look where he is now,
as the whole world knows him, feels him, seeks him for its joy
and inspiration -- and who can doubt of immortality?
Now, in such private solace, in such solitary joys, is there not
culture ? Can one rise from such communings with the good
spirits of the tone-world and go out, without new peace, new
faith, new hope, and good-will in his soul? He goes forth in the
spirit of reconciliation and of patience, however much he may
hate the wrong he sees about him, or however little he accept
authorities and creeds that make war on his freedom. The man
who has tasted such life, and courted it till he has become accli-
mated in it, whether he be of this party or that, or none at all;
whether he be believer or "heretic,” conservative or radical, fol.
lower of Christ by name or “Free Religionist," — belongs to the
harmonic and anointed body-guard of peace, fraternity, good-will;
his instincts have all caught the rhythm of that holy march; the
good genius leads, he has but to follow cheerfully and humbly.
For somehow the minutest fibres, the infinitesimal atoms of his
being, have got magnetized as it were into a loyal, positive direc-
tion towards the pole-star of unity; he has grown attuned to a
believing, loving mood, just as the body of a violin, the walls of
a music hall, by much music-making become gradually seasoned
into smooth vibration.
## p. 5090 (#259) ###########################################
## p. 5090 (#260) ###########################################
GEORG
EBERS.
## p. 5090 (#261) ###########################################
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## p. 5090 (#262) ###########################################
## p. 5091 (#263) ###########################################
5091
GEORG MORITZ EBERS
(1837-)
EORG EBERS, distinguished as an Egyptian archæologist and as
a historical novelist, was born in Berlin in 1837. At ten
years of age he was sent to school in Keilhau, where under
the direction of Froebel he was taught the delights of nature and the
pleasure of study. His university career at Göttingen was interrupted
by a long and serious illness. During his convalescence he pursued
with avidity his study of Egyptian archæology, and with neither dic-
tionary nor grammar to help him in the mastery of hieroglyphics, he
acquired to some degree this ancient language. Later, under the
learneu Lepsius, he became a thorough and brilliant scholar in the
science which is his specialty. It was at this epoch that he wrote
An Egyptian Princess,' for the purpose of realizing to himself a
period which he was studying. Thirteen years later his second work,
Uarda,' was published. When restored to health, he launched him-
self with enthusiasm on the life of a university professor. He taught
for a time at Jena, and in 1870 removed to Leipsic. He has made
several journeys into Egypt, sharing his experiences with the public.
“The Egyptian Princess) is Ebers's most representative romance.
It is perhaps the subtle quality of popularity, rather than exceptional
merit, which has insured its success. The scene of the story is laid
at the time when Egypt drew its last free breath, unconscious that
at the very height of its intellectual vigor its national life was to be
cut off; the time when Amasis held the throne of the Pharaohs, and
Cambyses was king of Persia. (Uarda' gives a picture of Egypt
under one of the Rameses. Homo Sum,' a tale of the desert ancho-
rites in the fourth century, is filled with the spirit of the early Christ-
ians. In the story of Die Schwestern? (The Sisters) Ebers takes the
reader to Memphis, the temple of Serapis, and the palace of the
Ptolemies. The ethical element enters largely into the novel Der
Kaiser' (The Emperor), of Christianity in the time of Hadrian.
In the Frau Bürgermeisterin' (The Burgomaster's Wife), Ebers
leaves behind him the world of antiquity, and deals with the heroic
struggle against the Spanish rule made in 1547 by the city of Ley-
den. Gred,' a long and quiet novel, most carefully executed, is a
minute picture of middle-class Nürnberg, some centuries ago. (Ein
Wort' (A Word: Only a Word) also stands apart from the historical
It is a psychological and ethical story, working out the
roinances.
## p. 5092 (#264) ###########################################
5032
GEORG MORITZ EBERS
development of inconspicuous character. Both in Serapis' and
(The Bride of the Nile,' the victory of Christianity over heathenism
is celebrated. Not less interesting than his fiction is his book of
travels called Durch Gosen zum Sinai? (Through Goshen to Sinai).
In 1889, on account of his health, Ebers resigned his professorship.
He now passes his winters in Munich, where his life is that of a
scholar and a writer.
THE ARRIVAL AT BABYLON
From An Egyptian Princess)
S
(
EVEN weeks later, a long line of chariots and riders of every
description wound along the great highway that led from
the west to Babylon, the gigantic city which could be seen
from a long distance.
Nitetis, the Egyptian princess, sat in a gilt four-wheeled
chariot, called a Harmamaxa. ” The cushions were covered with
gold brocade; the roof was supported by wooden columns; its
sides could be closed by means of curtains.
Her companions, the Persian nobles, the dethroned King of
Lydia and his son, rode by the side of her chariot. Fifty car-
riages and six hundred sumpter-horses followed, and a regiment
of Persian soldiers on splendid horses preceded the procession.
The road lay along the Euphrates, through luxuriant fields of
wheat, barley, and sesame, which yielded two or even three hun-
dredfold. Slender date-palms, with heavy clusters of fruit, stood
in the fields, which were intersected in all directions by canals
and conduits. Although it was winter, the sun shone warm and
clear in the cloudless sky. The mighty river was crowded with
barges and boats, which brought the produce of the Armenian
highlands to the Mesopotamian plain, and forwarded to Babylon
the greater part of the wares which were brought to Thapsacus
from Greece.
Engines, pumps, and water-wheels poured refreshing moisture
on the fields and plantations along the banks, which were dotted
with numerous villages. Everything indicated that the capital of
a civilized and well-governed country was close at hand.
The carriage and suite of Nitetis stopped before a long
building of brick covered with bitumen, by the side of which
grew numerous plane-trees. Cresus was helped from his horse,
## p. 5093 (#265) ###########################################
GEORG MORITZ EBERS
5093
approached the carriage of the Egyptian princess, and cried to
her:-“We have reached the last station-house. The high tower
that stands out against the horizon is the famous tower of Bel,
like your Pyramids one of the greatest achievements of mortal
hands.
secured him an opportunity to enter the
College of Sainte-Barbe, whence he passed
to the Normal School.
When he was twenty-two he began teach-
ing history, first at Rheims, and then in
the College of Henry IV. in Paris. Here
JEAN VICTOR DURUY
he began his literary work, mostly upon
school-books, of which he wrote many, mainly historical and geo-
graphical. He received the degree of Doctor of Letters in 1853, and
became successively Inspector of the Academy of Paris, Master of
Conferences at the Normal School, Professor of History at the Poly-
technic School, and Inspector-General of Secondary Instruction. Dur-
ing the whole of this period he had been engaged with secondary
classes, and had become strongly impressed by the faulty condition
of the primary and secondary schools. In 1863 Louis Napoleon put
him at the head of the educational system of the empire as Minister
of Public Instruction. This appointment gave him the opportunity to
carry out numerous and important secularizing reforms which brought
him into sharp collision with the clerical party. He held his post as
minister for six years - six years of struggle with the parsimonious
## p. 5070 (#238) ###########################################
5070
JEAN VICTOR DURUY
disposition of the administration upon the one hand, and with the
hostile clericals upon the other.
The measures in which he was especially interested were the
reorganization of the Museum of Natural History, the extension of
scientific study, the introduction of the study of modern and contem-
porary history in the lyceums (a dreadful experiment, according to
his opponents), gratuitous and compulsory primary education, the
improvement of the night schools, and popular classes for adults.
He was to a large extent successful in all these, except in the
direction of compulsory education. The efforts which he made to
improve the instruction given to young girls brought upon him the
tempest. The bishops, with Monsignor Dupanloup of Orléans at their
head, raised a veritable crusade, and Pope Pio Nono himself at
length entered the hostile ranks. Probably in part because of this
conflict, he was superseded in 1869 and was made a member of the
Senate, from which he retired to private life, and the prosecution of
his literary labors on the fall of the empire, in the following year.
He died in 1894.
As an author his style is clear and direct. Among his numerous
works the most important are the two great histories, for which, as
for other achievements, honors were heaped upon him. In these he
laid particular stress upon the milieu — the conditions of place, time,
and race.
Consequently he has therein written the history of the
Greek and Roman peoples, and not merely the history of Greece and
Rome, - and has pictured them, so far as possible, as they looked
and felt and thought and acted. He exhibits, for example, the
growth of the magnificent power of Rome, and its decadence; and
shows the all-conquering empire subdued to the manners, the gods,
and the institutions of the conquered. And worse:–« They had be-
come enamored of the arts, the letters, and the philosophy of Greece,
and dying Greece had avenged itself by transmitting to them the
corruption which had dishonored its old age. ”
The drift of his argument appears in this paragraph, in which he
sums up his story of the Eternal City:--" In the earlier portion of its
history may be seen the happy effects of a progressively liberal pol-
icy; in the later the baneful consequences of absolute power, govern-
ing a servile society through a venal administration. ”
## p. 5071 (#239) ###########################################
JEAN VICTOR DURUY
5071
THE NATIONAL POLICY
From the History of Rome)
,
penetrate into
another universe, - that of the successors of
Alexander. The eternal glory of Rome, the immense bene-
faction by which she effaces the memory of so many unjust wars,
is to have reunited those two worlds that in all former ages
were divided in interest, and strangers to each other; is to have
mingled and fused the brilliant but corrupt civilization of the
East with the barbaric energy of the West. The Mediterranean
became a Roman lake, - mare nostrum, they said, - and the
same life circulated on all its shores, called for the first and
the last time to a common existence.
In this work were employed a century and a half of struggles
and diplomacy; for Rome, working for a patient aristocracy and
not for a man, was not compelled to attain her end at a bound.
Instead of rearing suddenly one of those colossal monarchies
formed like the statue of gold with feet of clay, she founded
slowly an empire which fell only under the weight of years and
of the Northern hordes. After Zama she could have attempted the
conquest of Africa, but she left Carthage and the Numidians to
enfeeble each other. After Cynoscephalæ and Magnesia, Greece
and Asia were all ready for the yoke, but she accorded them fifty
years more of liberty. This was because, along with the pride
of the Roman name and the necessity for dominion, she always
retained some of her ancient virtues. The Popiliuses were more
numerous than the Verreses. Now she preferred to rule the
world; later she will put it to pillage. Thus, wherever Rome saw
strength she sent her legions; all power was broken; the ties of
States and leagues were shattered; and when her soldiers were
recalled they left behind them only weakness and anarchy. But
the task of the legions accomplished, that of the Senate began.
After force came craft and diplomacy. Those senators, grown
old amidst the terrors of the second Punic war, seemed now to
have less pleasure in arms than in the game of politics,-the
first, in all ages, of Italian arts.
Several other causes dictated this policy of reserve. Against
the Gauls, the Samnites, Pyrrhus, and Hannibal,- in other
## p. 5072 (#240) ###########################################
5072
JEAN VICTOR DI'RUY
words, for the defense of Latium and of Italy,— Rome had em-
ployed all her strength; it was then a question of her existence:
whereas, in the wars with Greece and with Asia, her ambition
and her pride alone were interested; and wisdom demanded that
some relaxation be given to the plebeians and the allies. The
Senate had moreover too many affairs on its hands — the wars
with Spain, with Corsica, with Cisalpina, and with Istria - to
admit of its becoming deeply involved in the East. Therefore
two legions only will fight Philip and Antiochus -- that will suf-
fice to conquer, but would be too little to despoil them. Further-
more, the Senate believed that in penetrating into this Greek
world, where an old glory concealed so much weakness, they
could not accord too much to prudence. These pitiless enemies
of the Volscians and the Samnites will not proceed in their next
wars by exterminating their adversaries and wasting their coun-
try. "It was not with such a purpose," said they, that they
came to pour out their blood; they took in hand the cause of
oppressed Greece. ” And that language and that policy they will
not change after victory. The first act of Flamininus, on the day
after Cynoscephalæ, was to proclaim the liberty of the Greeks.
All who bore that respected name seemed to have the right to
Roman protection; and the little Greek cities of Caria, and of
the coasts of Asia and Thrace, received with astonishment their
liberty from a people that they hardly knew. All were capti-
vated by this apparent generosity. None perceived that in re-
storing independence to the cities and States, Rome wished
to break up the confederations that sought to reorganize and
would perhaps have given new force to Greece. In isolating them
and attaching them to herself by grateful ties, she placed them
almost insensibly under her influence. She made allies of them;
and every one knows what the allies of Rome became. Thus the
Senate was so well satisfied with this policy, which created di-
vision everywhere and awakened extinct rivalries, that for half
a century it followed no other.
## p. 5073 (#241) ###########################################
JEAN VICTOR DURUY
5073
RESULTS OF THE ROMAN DOMINION
From the History of Rome )
in
A civilized" all the Western world, for which the Greeks had
done nothing Her language, out of which sprang the
various languages of the Romance nations, is in case of need a
means of communication among scholars of all countries, and her!
books will always remain - a wise selection being made - the
best for the higher culture of the mind. They have merited
above all others the title of litteræ humaniores, the literature by
which men are made. A cardinal, reading the “Thoughts of Mar-
cus Aurelius' (written in Greek, it is true, but written by a
Roman), exclaimed, “My soul blushes redder than my scarlet at
sight of the virtues of this Gentile. "
Suppose Rome destroyed by Pyrrhus or Hannibal, before
Marius and Cæsar had driven the German tribes back from Gaul:
their invasion would have been effected five centuries sooner;
and since they would have found opposed to them only other
barbarians, what a long night would have settled down upon the
world!
It is true that when the Roman people had laid hands upon
the treasures of Alexander's successors, the scandal of their
orgies exceeded for a century anything that the East had ever
seen; that their amusements were sanguinary games or licentious
plays; that the Roman mind, after receiving a temporary benefit
from Greek philosophy, went astray in Oriental mysticism; and
that finally, after having loved liberty, Rome accepted despotism,
as if willing to astonish the world as much by her great corrup-
tion as she did by the greatness of her empire.
But can we say that no other age or nation has known servil-
ity of soul, licentiousness in public amusements, and the conspicu-
ous depravity in morals that is always to be seen where indolence
and wealth are united ?
To the legacies left by Rome which have now been enumer-
ated, we must add another, which ranks among the most pre-
cious. Notwithstanding the poetic piety of Virgil, and Livy's
official credulity, the dominant note of Latin literature is the in-
difference of Horace, when it is not the daring skepticism of
IX-318
## p. 5074 (#242) ###########################################
5074
JEAN VICTOR DURUY
Lucretius. To Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus, and the great juriscon-
sults, the prime necessity was the free possession of themselves,
that independence of philosophic thought which they owed to
Greece. This spirit, begotten of pure reason, was almost stifled
during the Middle Ages. It reappeared when antiquity was re-
covered. From that day the renascent world set forward again;
and in the new path France, heir of Athens and of Rome, was
long her guide --- for art in its most charming form, and for
thought, developed in the light.
Upon a medal of Constantine his son presents to him a globe
surmounted by a phenix, symbol of immortality. For once the
courtiers were not in the wrong.
The sacred bird which springs
from her own ashes is a fitting emblem of this old Rome, dead
fifteen centuries ago, yet alive to-day through her genius: Siamo
Romani.
## p. 5075 (#243) ###########################################
5075
TORU DUTT
(1856–1877)
etry of
N 1874 there appeared in the Bengal Magazine an essay upon
Leconte de Lisle, which showed not only an unusual knowl-
edge of French literature, but also decided literary quali-
ties. The essayist was Toru Dutt, a Hindu girl of eighteen, daughter
of Govin Chunder Dutt, for many years a justice of the peace at
Calcutta. The family belonged to the high-caste cultivated Hindus,
and Toru's education was conducted on broad lines. Her work fre-
quently discloses charming pictures of the home life that filled the
old garden house at Calcutta. Here it is easy to see the studious
child poring over French, German, and English lexicons. reading
every book she could lay hold of, hearing from her mother's lips those
old legends of her race which had been woven into the
native bards long before the civilization of modern Europe existed.
In her thirteenth year Toru and her younger sister were sent to
study for a few months in France, and thence to attend lectures at
Cambridge and to travel in England. A memory of this visit appears
in Toru's little poem, Near Hastings,' which shows the impression-
able nature of the Indian girl, so sensitive to the romance of an alien
race, and so appreciative of her friendly welcome to English soil.
After four years' travel in Europe the Dutts returned to India to
resume their student life, and Toru began to learn Sanskrit. She
showed great aptitude for the French language and a strong liking
for the French character, and she made a special study of French
romantic poetry. Her essays on Leconte de Lisle and Joséphin Sou-
lary, and a series of English translations of poetry, were the fruit of
her labor. The translations, including specimens from Béranger, Thé-
ophile Gautier, François Coppée, Sully-Prud'homme, and other popu-
lar writers, were collected in 1876 under the title "A Sheaf Gleaned
in French Fields. A few copies found their way into Europe, and
both French and English reviewers recognized the value of the har-
vest of this clear-sighted gleaner. One critic called these poems, in
which Toru so faithfully reproduced the spirit of one alien tongue in
the forms of another, transmutations rather than translations.
But marvelous as is the mastery shown over the subtleties of
thought and the difficulties of translation, the achievement remains
that of acquirement rather than of inspiration. But Toru's English
renditions of the native Indian legends, called Ancient Ballads of
## p. 5076 (#244) ###########################################
5076
TORU DUTT
seer
Hindustan,' give a sense of great original power. Selected from
much completed work left unpublished at her too early death, these
poems are revelations of the Eastern religious thought, which loves
to clothe itself in such forms of mystical beauty as haunt the memory
and charm the fancy. But in these translations it is touched by the
spirit of the new faith which Toru had adopted. The poems remain,
however, essentially Indian. The glimpses of lovely landscape, the
shining temples, the greening gloom of the jungle, the pink Aush of
the dreamy atmosphere, are all of the East, as is the philosophie
calm that breathes through the verses. The most beautiful of the
ballads is perhaps that of Savitri,' the king's daughter who by love
wins back her husband after he has passed the gates of death.
Another, “Sindher,' re-tells the old story of that king whose great
power is unavailing to avert the penalty which follows the breaking
of the Vedic law, even though it was broken in ignorance. Still
another, Prehlad,' reveals that insight into things spiritual which
characterizes the true or “called of God. ” Two charming
legends, Jogadhya Uma,' and (Buttoo,' full of the pastoral simplicity
of the early Aryan life, and a few miscellaneous poems, complete
this volume upon which Toru's fame will rest.
A posthumous novel written in French makes up the sum of her
contribution to letters. Le Journal de Mlle. D'Arvers) was found
completed among her posthumous papers. It is a romance of modern
French life, whose motive is the love of two brothers for the same
girl. The tragic element dominates the story, and the author has
managed the details with extraordinary ease without sacrificing either
dignity or dramatic effect. The story was edited by Mademoiselle
Bader, a correspondent of Toru, and her sole acquaintance among
European authors. In 1878, the year after the poet's death, appeared
a second edition of (A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields' containing
forty-three additional poems, with a brief biographical sketch written
by her father. The many translators of the (Sakoontala' and of
other Indian dramas show how difficult it is for the Western mind to
express the indefinable spirituality of temper that fills ancient Hindu
poetry. This remarkable quality Toru wove unconsciously into her
English verse, making it seem not exotic but complementary, an
echo of that far-off age when the genius of the two
aces
was one.
## p. 5077 (#245) ###########################################
TORU DUTT
5077
JOGADHYA UMA
"S"
HELL BRACELETS, ho! Shell bracelets, ho!
Fair maids and matrons, come and buy! )
Along the road, in morning's glow,
The peddler raised his wonted cry.
The road ran straight, a red, red line,
To Khigoram, for cream renowned,
Through pasture meadows where the kine,
In knee-deep grass, stood magic bound
And half awake, involved in mist
That floated in dun coils profound,
Till by the sudden sunbeams kist,
Rich rainbow hues broke all around.
«Shell bracelets, ho! Shell bracelets, ho! »
The roadside trees still dripped with dew
And hung their blossoms like a show.
Who heard the cry? 'Twas but a few;
A ragged herd-boy, here and there,
With his long stick and naked feet;
A plowman wending to his care,
The field from which he hopes the wheat;
An early traveler, hurrying fast
To the next town; an urchin slow
Bound for the school; these heard and passed,
Unheeding all, — “Shell bracelets, ho! ”
Pellucid spread a lake-like tank
Beside the road now lonelier still;
High on three sides arose the bank
Which fruit-trees shadowed at their will;
Upon the fourth side was the ghat,
With its broad stairs of marble white,
And at the entrance arch there sat,
Full face against the morning light,
A fair young woman with large eyes,
And dark hair falling to her zone;
She heard the peddler's cry arise,
And eager seemed his ware to own.
« Shell bracelets, ho! See, maiden, see!
The rich enamel, sunbeam-kist!
## p. 5078 (#246) ###########################################
5078
TORU DUTT
Happy, oh happy, shalt thou be,
Let them but clasp that slender wrist;
These bracelets are a mighty charm;
They keep a lover ever true,
And widowhood avert, and harm.
Buy them, and thou shalt never rue.
Just try them on! ” — She stretched her hand.
“Oh, what a nice and lovely fit!
No fairer hand in all the land,
And lo! the bracelet matches it. ”
Dazzled, the peddler on her gazed,
Till came the shadow of a fear,
While she the bracelet-arm upraised
Against the sun to view more clear.
Oh, she was lovely! but her look
Had something of a high command
That filled with awe. Aside she shook
Intruding curls, by breezes fanned,
And blown across her brows and face,
And asked the price; which when she heard
She nodded, and with quiet grace
For payment to her home referred.
“And where, O maiden, is thy house?
But no,- that wrist-ring has a tongue;
No maiden art thou, but a spouse,
Happy, and rich, and fair, and young. ”
«Far otherwise; my lord is poor,
And him at home thou shalt not find;
Ask for my father; at the door
Knock loudly; he is deaf, but kind.
Seest thou that lofty gilded spire,
Above these tufts of foliage green?
That is our place; its point of fire
Will guide thee o'er the tract between. ”
« That is the temple spire. ” _ « Yes, there
We live; my father is the priest;
The manse is near, a building fair,
But lowly to the temple's east.
When thou hast knocked, and seen him, say,
His daughter, at Dhamaser Ghat,
Shell bracelets bought from thee to-day,
And he must pay so much for that.
## p. 5079 (#247) ###########################################
TORU DUTT
5079
Be sure, he will not let thee pass
Without the value, and a meal.
If he demur, or cry alas!
No money hath he,- then reveal;
«Within the small box, marked with streaks
Of bright vermilion, by the shrine,
The key whereof has lain for weeks
Untouched, he'll find some coin,-'tis mine.
That will enable him to pay
The bracelet's price. Now fare thee well!
She spoke; the peddler went away,
Charmed with her voice as by some spell;
While she, left lonely there, prepared
To plunge into the water pure,
And like a rose, her beauty bared,
From all observance quite secure.
Not weak she seemed, nor delicate;
Strong was each limb of flexile grace,
And full the bust; the mien elate,
Like hers, the goddess of the chase
On Latmos hill,- and on the face
Framed in its cloud of floating hair!
No painter's hand might hope to trace
The beauty and the glory there!
Well might the peddler look with awe,
For though her eyes were soft, a ray
Lit them at times, which kings who saw
Would never dare to disobey.
Onward through groves the peddler sped,
Till full in front, the sunlit spire
Arose before him. Paths which led
To gardens trim, in gay attire,
Lay all around. And lo! the manse,
Humble but neat, with open door!
He paused, and blessed the lucky chance
That brought his bark to such a shore.
Huge straw-ricks, log huts full of grain,
Sleek cattle, flowers, a tinkling bell,
Spoke in a language sweet and plain,
“Here smiling Peace and Plenty dwell. ”
Unconsciously he raised his cry,
« Shell-bracelets, ho! » And at his voice
## p. 5080 (#248) ###########################################
5080
TORU DUTT
Looked out the priest, with eager eye,
And made his heart at once rejoice.
“Ho, Sankha peddler! Pass not by,
But step thou in, and share the food
Just offered on our altar high,
If thou art in a hungry mood.
Welcome are all to this repast!
The rich and poor, the high and low!
Come, wash thy feet, and break thy fast;
Then on thy journey strengthened go. ”
«Oh, thanks, good priest! Observance due
And greetings! May thy name be blest!
I came on business, but I knew,
Here might be had both food and rest
Without a charge; for all the poor
Ten miles around thy sacred shrine
Know that thou keepest open door,
And praise that generous hand of thine.
But let my errand first be told:
For bracelets sold to thine this day,
So much thou owest me in gold;
Hast thou the ready cash to pay ?
« The bracelets were enameled, - so
The price is high. ” — “How! Sold to mine?
Who bought them, I should like to know?
« Thy daughter, with the large black eyne,
Now bathing at the marble ghat. ”
Loud laughed the priest at this reply,
“I shall not put up, friend, with that;
No daughter in the world have I;
An only son is all my stay;
Some minx has played a trick, no doubt:
But cheer up, let thy heart be gay,
Be sure that I shall find her out. ”
"Nay, nay, good father! such a face
Could not deceive, I must aver;
At all events, she knows thy place,
(And if my father should demur
To pay thee,' — thus she said, -'or cry
He has no money, tell him straight
The box vermilion-streaked to try,
That's near the shrine. ) »_« Well, wait, friend, wait! »
## p. 5081 (#249) ###########################################
TORU DUTT
5081
The priest said, thoughtful; and he ran
And with the open box came back:-
«Here is the price exact, my man,
No surplus over, and no lack.
“How strange! how strange! Oh, blest art thou
To have beheld her, touched her hand,
Before whom Vishnu's self must bow,
And Brahma and his heavenly band !
Here have I worshiped her for years,
And never seen the vision bright;
Vigils and fasts and secret tears
Have almost quenched my outward sight;
And yet that dazzling form and face
I have not seen, and thou, dear friend,
To thee, unsought-for, comes the grace:
What may its purport be, and end ?
“How strange! How strange! Oh, happy thou'
And couldst thou ask no other boon
Than thy poor bracelet's price? That brow
Resplendent as the autumn moon
Must have bewildered thee, I trow,
And made thee lose thy senses all. ”
A dim light on the peddler now
Began to dawn; and he let fall
His bracelet-basket in his haste,
And backward ran, the way he came:
What meant the vision fair and chaste;
Whose eyes were they,- those eyes of flame?
Swift ran the peddler as a hind;
The old priest followed on his trace;
They reached the ghat, but could not find
The lady of the noble face.
The birds were silent in the wood;
The lotus flowers exhaled a smell,
Faint, over all the solitude;
A heron as a sentinel
Stood by the bank. They called, - in vain;
No answer came from hill or fell;
The landscape lay in slumber's chain;
E'en Echo slept within her shell.
Broad sunshine, yet a hush profound !
They turned with saddened hearts to go;
## p. 5082 (#250) ###########################################
5082
TORU DUTT
Then from afar there came a sound
Of silver bells; -- the priest said low,
“O Mother, Mother, deign to hear,
The worship-hour has rung; we wait
In meek humility and fear.
Must we return home desolate ?
Oh come, as late thou cam'st unsought,
Or was it but some idle dream ?
Give us some sign, if it was not;
A word, a breath, or passing gleam.
”
Sudden from out the water sprung
A rounded arm, on which they saw
As high the lotus buds among
It rose, the bracelet white, with awe.
Then a wide ripple'tost and swung
The blossoms on that liquid plain,
And lo! the arm so fair and young
Sank in the waters down again.
They bowed before the mystic Power,
And as they home returned in thought,
Each took from thence a lotus flower
In memory of the day and spot.
Years, centuries, have passed away,
And still before the temple shrine
Descendants of the peddler pay
Shell-bracelets of the old design
As annual tribute. Much they own
In lands and gold, — but they confess
From that eventful day alone
Dawned on their industry, success.
Absurd may be the tale I tell,
Ill-suited to the marching times;
I loved the lips from which it fell,
So let it stand among my rhymes.
OUR CASUARINA-TREE
L
IKE a huge python, winding round and round
The rugged trunk, indented deep with scars
Up to its very summit near the stars,
A creeper climbs, in whose embraces bound
No other tree could live. But gallantly
## p. 5083 (#251) ###########################################
TORU DUTT
5083
The giant wears the scarf, and flowers are hung
In crimson clusters all the boughs among,
Whereon all day are gathered bird and bee;
And oft at night the garden overflows
With one sweet song that seems to have no close,
Sung darkling from our tree, while men repose.
Unknown, yet well known to the eye of faith!
Ah, I have heard that wail far, far away
In distant lands, by many a sheltered bay,
When slumbered in his cave the water wraith,
And the waves gently kissed the classic shore
Of France or Italy, beneath the moon,
When earth lay trancèd in a dreamless swoon;
And every time the music rose, before
Mine inner vision rose a form sublime,
Thy form, O tree! as in my happy prime
I saw thee in my own loved native clime.
But not because of its magnificence
Dear is the Casuarina to my soul:
Beneath it we have played: though years may roll,
O sweet companions, loved with love intense,
For your sakes shall the tree be ever dear!
Blent with your images, it shall arise
In memory, till the hot tears blind mine eyes.
What is that dirge-like murmur that I hear
Like the sea breaking on a shingle beach ?
It is the tree's lament, an eerie speech,
That haply to the Unknown Land may reach.
When first my casement is wide open thrown
At dawn, my eyes delighted on it rest;
Sometimes,- and most in winter, - on its crest
A gray baboon sits statue-like alone,
Watching the sunrise; while on lower boughs
His puny offspring leap about and play;
And far and near kokilas hail the day;
And to their pastures wend our sleepy cows:
And in the shadow, on the broad tank cast
By that hoar tree, so beautiful and vast,
The water-lilies spring, like snow enmassed.
## p. 5084 (#252) ###########################################
5084
JOHN S. DWIGHT
(1813-1893)
J
a
JOHN SULLIVAN DWIGHT was born in Boston, Massachusetts,
May 13th, 1813. After graduation at Harvard in 1832, he
studied at the Divinity School, and for two years was pastor
of a Unitarian church in Northampton, Massachusetts. He then be-
came interested in founding the famous Brook Farm community,
which furnished Hawthorne with the background for “The Blithedale
Romance'; and he is mentioned in the preface to this book with
Ripley, Dana, Channing, Parker, etc.
This was
community
scheme, undertaken by joint ownership in a farm in West Roxbury
near Boston; associated with the names of Hawthorne, Emerson,
George William Curtis, and C. A. Dana, a scheme which Emerson
called a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an age of
reason in a patty-pan. ” This community existed seven years, and to
quote again from Emerson, — “In Brook Farm was this peculiarity,
that there was no head. In every family is the father; in every fac-
tory a foreman; in a shop a master; in a boat the skipper: but in
this Farm no authority; each was master or mistress of their actions;
happy, hapless anarchists. »
Here Mr. Dwight edited The Harbinger, a periodical published by
that community; taught languages and music, besides doing his share
of the manual labor. In 1848 he returned to Boston and engaged in
literature and musical criticism; and in 1852 he established Dwight's
Journal of Music, which he edited for thirty years. Many of his best
essays appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and he contributed to
various periodicals.
He was one of the pioneers of scholarly, intelligent, original, and
literary musical criticism in America, and he possessed fine general
attainments and a distinct style. It is because of his clear perception
of the indispensableness of the arts- and especially of the art of
music — to life, and because of his clear statement of their vital rela-
tionship, that his work belongs to literature.
## p. 5085 (#253) ###########################################
JOHN S. DWIGHT
5085
MUSIC AS A MEANS OF CULTURE
From the Atlantic Monthly, 1870, by permission of Houghton, Mifflin
and Company
W*
TE As a democratic people, a great mixed people of all races,
overrunning a vast continent, need music even more than
others. We need some ever-present, ever-welcome influ-
ence that shall insensibly tone down our self-asserting and ag-
gressive manners, round off the sharp, offensive angularity of
character, subdue and harmonize the free and ceaseless conflict
of opinions, warm out the genial individual humanity of each
and every unit of society, lest he become a mere member of a
party, or a sharer of business or fashion. This rampant liberty
will rush to its own ruin, unless there shall be found some gen-
tler, harmonizing, humanizing culture, such as may pervade
whole masses with a fine enthusiasm, a sweet sense of reverence
for something far above us, beautiful and pure; awakening some
ideality in every soul, and often lifting us out of the hard hope-
less prose of daily life. We need this beautiful corrective of our
crudities. Our radicalism will pull itself up by the roots, if it
do not cultivate the instinct of reverence. The first impulse of
freedom is centrifugal,- to fly off the handle, - unless it be re-
strained by a no less free impassioned love of order. We need
to be so enamored of the divine idea of unity, that that alone
the enriching of that — shall be the real motive for assertion of
our individuality. What shall so temper and tone down our
« fierce democracy” ? It must be something better, lovelier,
more congenial to human nature than mere stern prohibition,
cold Puritanic «Thou shalt not! ” What can so quickly magnet-
ize a people into this harmonic mood as music ? Have we not
seen it, felt it?
The hard-working, jaded millions need expansion, need the
rejuvenating, the ennobling experience of joy. Their toil, their
church, their creed perhaps, their party livery, and very vote,
are narrowing; they need to taste, to breathe a larger, freer life.
Has it not come to thousands, while they have listened to or
joined their voices in some thrilling chorus that made the heav-
ens seem to open and come down ? The governments of the
Old World do much to make the people cheerful and contented;
here it is all laissez-faire, each for himself, in an ever keener
strife of competition. We must look very much to music to do
## p. 5086 (#254) ###########################################
5086
JOHN S. DWIGHT
this good work for us; we are open to that appeal; we can forget
ourselves in that; we blend in joyous fellowship when we can
sing together; perhaps quite as much so when we can listen to-
gether to a noble orchestra of instruments interpreting the high-
est inspirations of a master. The higher and purer the character
and kind of music, the more of real genius there is in it, the
deeper will this influence be.
Judge of what can be done, by what already, within our own
experience, has been done and daily is done. Think what the
children in our schools are getting, through the little that they
learn of vocal music, - elasticity of spirit, joy in harmonious
co-operation, in the blending of each happy life in others; a
rhythmical instinct of order and of measure in all movement; a
quickening of ear and sense, whereby they will grow up suscep-
tible to music, as well as with some use of their own voices, so
that they may take part in it; for from these spacious nurseries
(loveliest flower gardens, apple orchards in full bloom, say, on
their annual fête days) shall our future choirs and oratorio chio-
ruses be replenished with good sound material.
We esteem ourselves the freest people on this planet; yet per-
haps we have as little real freedom as any other, for we are the
slaves of our own feverish enterprise, and of a barren theory of
discipline, which would fain make us virtuous to a fault through
abstinence from very life. We are afraid to give ourselves up
to the free and happy instincts of our nature. All that is not
pursuit of advancement in some good, conventional, approved
way of business, or politics, or fashion, or intellectual reputation,
or professed religion, we count waste. We lack geniality; nor do
we as a people understand the meaning of the word. We ought
to learn it practically of our Germans. It comes of the same
root with the word genius. Genius is the spontaneous principle;
it is free and happy in its work; it is artist and not drudge; its
whole activity is reconciliation of the heartiest pleasure with the
purest loyalty to conscience, with the most holy, universal, and
disinterested ends. Genius, as Beethoven gloriously illustrates in
his Choral Symphony (indeed, in all his symphonies), finds the
keynote and solution of the problem of the highest state in
"Joy, taking his text from Schiller's Hymn. Now, all may not
be geniuses in the sense that we call Shakespeare, Mozart,
Raphael, men of genius. But all should be partakers of this
spontaneous, free, and happy method of genius; all should live
## p. 5087 (#255) ###########################################
JOHN S. DWIGHT
5087
childlike, genial lives, and not wear all the time the consequen-
tial livery of their unrelaxing business, nor the badge of party
and profession, in every line and feature of their faces. This
genial, childlike faculty of social enjoyment, this happy art of life,
is just what our countrymen may learn from the social “Lieder-
tafel” and the summer singing-festivals of which the Germans
are so fond. There is no element of national character which we
so much need; and there is no class of citizens whom we should
be more glad to adopt and own than those who set us such ex-
amples. So far as it is a matter of culture, it is through art
chiefly that the desiderated genial era must be ushered in. The
Germans have the sentiment of art, the feeling of the beautiful
in art, and consequently in nature, more developed than we have.
Above all, music offers itself as the most available, most popular,
most influential of the fine arts,— music, which is the art and lan-
guage of the feelings, the sentiments, the spiritual instincts of the
soul; and so becomes a universal language, tending to unite and
blend and harmonize all who may come within its sphere.
Such civilizing, educating power has music for society at
large. Now, in the finer sense of culture, such as we look for in
more private and select “society,” as it is called, music in the
salon, in the small chamber concert, where congenial spirits are
assembled in its name good music of course— does it not create
a finer sphere of social sympathy and courtesy? Does it not
better mold the tone and manners from within than any imita-
tive “fashion” from without ? What society, upon the whole, is
quite so sweet, so satisfactory, so refined, as the best musical
society, if only Mozart, Mendelssohn, Franz, Chopin, set the
tone! The finer the kind of music heard or made together, the
better the society. This bond of union only reaches the few;
coarser, meaner, more prosaic natures are not drawn to it.
Wealth and fashion may not dictate who shall be of it. Here
congenial spirits meet in a way at once free, happy, and instruct-
ive, meet with an object which insures “society”; whereas so-
called society, as such, is often aimless, vague, modifying and
fatiguing, for the want of any subject-matter. Here one gets
ideas of beauty which are not mere arbitrary fashions, ugly often
to the eye of taste. Here you may escape vulgarity by a way
not vulgar in itself, like that of fashion, which makes wealth
and family and means of dress its passports. Here you can be
as exclusive as you please, by the soul's light, not wronging any
## p. 5088 (#256) ###########################################
5088
JOHN S. DWIGHT
one; here learn gentle manners, and the quiet ease and courtesy
with which cultivated people move, without in the same process
learning insincerity.
Of course the same remarks apply to similar sincere reunions
in the name of any other art, or of poetry. But music is the
most social of them all, even if each listener find nothing set
down to his part (or even hers! ) but tacet.
We have fancied ourselves entertaining a musical house to-
gether, but we must leave it with no time to make report or
picture out the scene. Now, could we only enter the chamber,
the inner sanctum, the private inner life of a thoroughly musical
person, one who is wont to live in music! Could we know him
in his solitude! (You can only know him in yourself, unless he
be a poet and creator in his art, and bequeath himself in that
form in his works for any who know how to read. ) If the best
of all society is musical society, we go further and say: The
sweetest of all solitude is when one is alone with music. One
gets the best of music, the sincerest part, when he is alone.
Our poet-philosopher has told us to secure solitude at any cost;
there's nothing which we can so ill afford to do without. It is
a great vice of our society, that it provides for and disposes to
so little solitude, ignoring the fact that there is more loneliness
in company than out of it. Now, to a musical person, in the
mood of it, in the sweet hours by himself, comes music as the
nearest friend, nearer and dearer than ever before; and he soon
finds that he never was in such good company.
I doubt if sym-
phony of Beethoven, opera of Mozart, Passion Music of Bach,
was ever so enjoyed or felt in grandest public rendering, as one
may feel it while he recalls its outline by himself at his piano
(even if he be a slow and bungling reader and may get it out
by piecemeal). I doubt if such an one can carry home from the
performance, in presence of the applauding crowd, nearly so
much as he may take to it from such inward, private preparation.
Are you alone? What spirits can you summon up to fill the
vacancy, and people it with life and love and beauty! Take
down the volume of sonatas, the arrangement of the great Sym-
phony, the recorded reveries of Chopin, the songs of Schubert,
Schumann, Franz, or even the chorals, with the harmony of
Bach, in which the four parts blend their several individual
melodies together in such loving service of the whole, that the
plain people's tune becomes a germ unfolding into endless wealth
## p. 5089 (#257) ###########################################
JOHN S. DWIGHT
5089
and beauty of meaning; and you have the very essence of all
prayer, and praise, and gratitude, as if you were a worshiper in
the ideal church. Nothing like music, then, to banish the
benumbing ghost of ennui. It lends secret sympathy, relief,
expression, to all one's moods, loves, longings, sorrows; comes
nearer to the soul or to the secret wound than
any
friend or
healing sunshine from without. It nourishes and feeds the hid-
den springs of hope and love and faith; renews the old convic-
tion of life's springtime, – that the world is ruled by love, that
God is good, that beauty is a divine end of life, and not a snare
and an illusion. It floods out of sight the unsightly, muddy
grounds of life's petty, anxious, doubting moments, and makes
immortality a present fact, lived in and realized. It locks the
door against the outer world of discords, contradictions, impor-
tunities, beneath the notice of a soul so richly occupied: lets
“Fate knock at the door” (as Beethoven said in explanation of
his symphony),-- Fate and the pursuing Furies,--and even wel-
comes them, and turns them into gracious goddesses,- Eumen-
ides! Music, in this way, is a marvelous elixir to keep off old
age. Youth returns in solitary hours with Beethoven and Mozart.
Touching the chords of the Moonlight Sonata,' the old man is
once more a lover; with the andante of the Pastoral Symphony'
he loiters by the shady brookside, hand in hand with his fresh
heart's first angel. You are past the sentimental age, yet you
can weep alone in music, — not weep exactly, but find outlet
more expressive and more worthy of your manly faith.
A great grief comes, an inconsolable bereavement, a humil-
iating, paralyzing reverse, a blow of Fate, giving the lie to your
best plans and bringing your best powers into discredit with
yourself; then you are best prepared and best entitled to receive
the secret visitations of these tuneful goddesses and muses.
« Who never ate his bread in tears,
He knows you not, ye heavenly powers! ”
So sings the German poet. It is the want of inward, deep ex-
perience, it is innocence of sorrow and of trial, more than the
lack of any special cultivation of musical taste and knowledge,
that debars many people — naturally most young people, and all
who are what we call shallow natures - from the feeling and
enjoyment of many of the truest, deepest, and most heavenly
of all the works of music. Take the Passion Music of Bach, for
IX-319
## p. 5090 (#258) ###########################################
5090
JOHN S. DWIGHT
instance; if you can sit down alone at your piano and decipher
strains and pieces of it when you need such music, you shall find
that in its quiet quaintness, its sincerity and tenderness, its absti-
nence from all striving for effect, it speaks to you and entwines
itself about your heart, like the sweetest, deepest verses in the
Bible; when the soul muses till the fire burns. ”
Such a panacea is this art for loneliness. But sometimes too
it may intensify the sense of loneliness, only for more heavenly
relief at last. Think of the deep composer, of lonely, sad Beetho-
ven, wreaking his pain upon expression in those impatient chords
and modulations, putting his sorrows into sonatas, and wringing
triumph always out of all! Look at him as he was then,- mo-
rose, they say, and lonely and tormented; look where he is now,
as the whole world knows him, feels him, seeks him for its joy
and inspiration -- and who can doubt of immortality?
Now, in such private solace, in such solitary joys, is there not
culture ? Can one rise from such communings with the good
spirits of the tone-world and go out, without new peace, new
faith, new hope, and good-will in his soul? He goes forth in the
spirit of reconciliation and of patience, however much he may
hate the wrong he sees about him, or however little he accept
authorities and creeds that make war on his freedom. The man
who has tasted such life, and courted it till he has become accli-
mated in it, whether he be of this party or that, or none at all;
whether he be believer or "heretic,” conservative or radical, fol.
lower of Christ by name or “Free Religionist," — belongs to the
harmonic and anointed body-guard of peace, fraternity, good-will;
his instincts have all caught the rhythm of that holy march; the
good genius leads, he has but to follow cheerfully and humbly.
For somehow the minutest fibres, the infinitesimal atoms of his
being, have got magnetized as it were into a loyal, positive direc-
tion towards the pole-star of unity; he has grown attuned to a
believing, loving mood, just as the body of a violin, the walls of
a music hall, by much music-making become gradually seasoned
into smooth vibration.
## p. 5090 (#259) ###########################################
## p. 5090 (#260) ###########################################
GEORG
EBERS.
## p. 5090 (#261) ###########################################
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## p. 5090 (#262) ###########################################
## p. 5091 (#263) ###########################################
5091
GEORG MORITZ EBERS
(1837-)
EORG EBERS, distinguished as an Egyptian archæologist and as
a historical novelist, was born in Berlin in 1837. At ten
years of age he was sent to school in Keilhau, where under
the direction of Froebel he was taught the delights of nature and the
pleasure of study. His university career at Göttingen was interrupted
by a long and serious illness. During his convalescence he pursued
with avidity his study of Egyptian archæology, and with neither dic-
tionary nor grammar to help him in the mastery of hieroglyphics, he
acquired to some degree this ancient language. Later, under the
learneu Lepsius, he became a thorough and brilliant scholar in the
science which is his specialty. It was at this epoch that he wrote
An Egyptian Princess,' for the purpose of realizing to himself a
period which he was studying. Thirteen years later his second work,
Uarda,' was published. When restored to health, he launched him-
self with enthusiasm on the life of a university professor. He taught
for a time at Jena, and in 1870 removed to Leipsic. He has made
several journeys into Egypt, sharing his experiences with the public.
“The Egyptian Princess) is Ebers's most representative romance.
It is perhaps the subtle quality of popularity, rather than exceptional
merit, which has insured its success. The scene of the story is laid
at the time when Egypt drew its last free breath, unconscious that
at the very height of its intellectual vigor its national life was to be
cut off; the time when Amasis held the throne of the Pharaohs, and
Cambyses was king of Persia. (Uarda' gives a picture of Egypt
under one of the Rameses. Homo Sum,' a tale of the desert ancho-
rites in the fourth century, is filled with the spirit of the early Christ-
ians. In the story of Die Schwestern? (The Sisters) Ebers takes the
reader to Memphis, the temple of Serapis, and the palace of the
Ptolemies. The ethical element enters largely into the novel Der
Kaiser' (The Emperor), of Christianity in the time of Hadrian.
In the Frau Bürgermeisterin' (The Burgomaster's Wife), Ebers
leaves behind him the world of antiquity, and deals with the heroic
struggle against the Spanish rule made in 1547 by the city of Ley-
den. Gred,' a long and quiet novel, most carefully executed, is a
minute picture of middle-class Nürnberg, some centuries ago. (Ein
Wort' (A Word: Only a Word) also stands apart from the historical
It is a psychological and ethical story, working out the
roinances.
## p. 5092 (#264) ###########################################
5032
GEORG MORITZ EBERS
development of inconspicuous character. Both in Serapis' and
(The Bride of the Nile,' the victory of Christianity over heathenism
is celebrated. Not less interesting than his fiction is his book of
travels called Durch Gosen zum Sinai? (Through Goshen to Sinai).
In 1889, on account of his health, Ebers resigned his professorship.
He now passes his winters in Munich, where his life is that of a
scholar and a writer.
THE ARRIVAL AT BABYLON
From An Egyptian Princess)
S
(
EVEN weeks later, a long line of chariots and riders of every
description wound along the great highway that led from
the west to Babylon, the gigantic city which could be seen
from a long distance.
Nitetis, the Egyptian princess, sat in a gilt four-wheeled
chariot, called a Harmamaxa. ” The cushions were covered with
gold brocade; the roof was supported by wooden columns; its
sides could be closed by means of curtains.
Her companions, the Persian nobles, the dethroned King of
Lydia and his son, rode by the side of her chariot. Fifty car-
riages and six hundred sumpter-horses followed, and a regiment
of Persian soldiers on splendid horses preceded the procession.
The road lay along the Euphrates, through luxuriant fields of
wheat, barley, and sesame, which yielded two or even three hun-
dredfold. Slender date-palms, with heavy clusters of fruit, stood
in the fields, which were intersected in all directions by canals
and conduits. Although it was winter, the sun shone warm and
clear in the cloudless sky. The mighty river was crowded with
barges and boats, which brought the produce of the Armenian
highlands to the Mesopotamian plain, and forwarded to Babylon
the greater part of the wares which were brought to Thapsacus
from Greece.
Engines, pumps, and water-wheels poured refreshing moisture
on the fields and plantations along the banks, which were dotted
with numerous villages. Everything indicated that the capital of
a civilized and well-governed country was close at hand.
The carriage and suite of Nitetis stopped before a long
building of brick covered with bitumen, by the side of which
grew numerous plane-trees. Cresus was helped from his horse,
## p. 5093 (#265) ###########################################
GEORG MORITZ EBERS
5093
approached the carriage of the Egyptian princess, and cried to
her:-“We have reached the last station-house. The high tower
that stands out against the horizon is the famous tower of Bel,
like your Pyramids one of the greatest achievements of mortal
hands.
