Part 8 (1/2)
Should such hopes be baffled, should such a church fall in the building, such a state find no realization except to the eye of the poet, G.o.d would still be in the world, and surely guide each bird, that can be patient, on the wing to its home at last. But expectations so n.o.ble, which find so broad a basis in the past, which link it so harmoniously with the future, cannot lightly be abandoned. The same Power leads by a pillar of cloud as by a pillar of fire--the Power that deemed even Moses worthy only of a distant view of the Promised Land.
And to those who cherish such expectations rational education, considered in various ways and bearings, must be the one great topic of interest; an enterprise in which the humblest service is precious and honorable to any who can inspire its soul. Our thoughts antic.i.p.ate with eager foresight the race that may grow up from this amalgamation of all races of the world which our situation induces. It was the pride and greatness of ancient nations to keep their blood unmixed; but it must be ours to be willing to mingle, to accept in a generous spirit what each clime and race has to offer us.
It is, indeed, the case that much diseased substance is offered to form this new body; and if there be not in ourselves a nucleus, a heart of force and purity to a.s.similate these strange and various materials into a very high form of organic life, they must needs induce one distorted, corrupt, and degraded beyond the example of other times and places.
There will be no medium about it. Our grand scene of action demands grandeur and purity; lacking these, one must suffer from so base failure in proportion to the success that should have been.
It would be the worthiest occupation of mind to ascertain the conditions propitious for this meeting of the nations in their new home, and to provide preventions for obvious dangers that attend it. It would be occupation for which the broadest and deepest knowledge of human nature in its mental, moral, and bodily relations, the n.o.blest freedom from prejudice, with the finest discrimination as to differences and relations, directed and enlightened by a prophetic sense as to what Man is designed by G.o.d to become, would all be needed to fit the thinker.
Yet some portion of these qualities, or of some of these qualities, if accompanied by earnestness and aspiration, may enable any one to offer useful suggestions. The ma.s.s of ignorance and selfishness is such, that no grain of leaven must be despised.
And as the men of all countries come hither to find a home, and become parts of a new life, so do the books of all countries gravitate towards this new centre. Copious infusions from all quarters mingle daily with the new thought which is to grow into American mind, and develop American literature.
As every s.h.i.+p brings us foreign teachers, a knowledge of living contemporary tongues must in the course of fifty years become the commonest attainment. There exists no doubt in the minds of those who can judge, that the German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese tongues might, by familiar instruction and _an intelligent method_, be taught with perfect ease during the years of childhood, so that the child would have as distinct a sense of their several natures, and nearly as much expertness in their use, as in his own. The higher uses of such knowledge can, of course, be expected only in a more advanced state of the faculties; but it is pity that the acquaintance with the medium of thought should be deferred to a period when the mind is sufficiently grown to bend its chief attention on the thoughts themselves. Much of the most precious part of short human lives is now wasted from an ignorance of what might easily be done for children, and without taking from them the time they need for common life, play, and bodily growth, more than at present.
Meanwhile the English begins to vie with the German and French literature in the number, though not in the goodness, of the translations from other languages. The indefatigable Germans can translate, and do other things too; so that geniuses often there apply themselves to the work as an amus.e.m.e.nt: even the all-employed Goethe has translated one of the books before us, (Memoirs of Cellini.) But in English we know but of one, Coleridge's Wallenstein, where the reader will feel the electric current undiminished by the medium through which it comes to him. And then the profligate abuse of the power of translation has been unparalleled, whether in the choice of books or the carelessness in disguising those that were good in a hideous mask. No falsehood can be worse than this of deforming the expression of a great man's thoughts, of corrupting that form which he has watched, and toiled and suffered to make beautiful and true. We know no falsehood that should call a more painful blush to the cheek of one engaged in it.
We have no narrowness in our view of the contents of such books. We are not afraid of new standards and new examples. Only give enough of them, variety enough, and from well-intentioned, generous minds. America can choose what she wants, if she has sufficient range of choice; and if there is any real reason, any deep root in the tastes and opinions she holds at present, she will not lightly yield them. Only give her what is good of its kind. Her hope is not in ignorance, but in knowledge. We are, indeed, very fond of range, and if there is check, there should be countercheck; and in this view we are delighted to see these great Italians domesticated here. We have had somewhat too much of the French and Germans of late. We value unchangeably our sparkling and rapid French friend; still more the searching, honest, and, in highest sense, visionary German genius. But there is not on earth, and, we dare to say it, will not be again, genius _like_ that of Italy, or that can compare with it, in its own way.
Italy and Greece were alike in this; those sunny skies ripened their fruits perfectly. The oil and honey of Greece, the wine of Italy, not only suggest, but satisfy. _There_ we find fulfilment, elsewhere great achievement only.
O, acute, cautious, calculating Yankee; O, graceful, witty, hot-blooded, flimsy Southron; and thou, man of the West, going ahead too fast to pick up a thought or leave a flower upon thy path,--look at these men with their great fiery pa.s.sions, but will and intellect still greater and stronger, perfectly sincere, from a contempt of falsehood. If they had acted wrong, they said and felt that they had, and that it was base and hateful in them. They were sagacious, as children are, not from calculation, but because the fine instincts of nature were unspoiled in them. I speak now of Alfieri and Cellini. Dante had all their instinctive greatness and deep-seated fire, with the reflective and creative faculties besides, to an extent of which they never dreamed.
He who reads these biographies may take them from several points of view. As pictures of manners, as sincere transcripts of the men and their times, they are not and could not be surpa.s.sed. That truth which Rousseau sought so painfully and vainly by self-brooding, subtle a.n.a.lysis, they attained without an effort. _Why_ they felt they cared little, but _what_ they felt they surely knew; and where a fly or worm has injured the peach, its pa.s.sage is exactly marked, so that you are sure the rest is fair and sound. Both as physiological and psychical histories, they are full of instruction. In Alfieri, especially, the nervous disease generated in the frame by any uncongenial tension of the brain, the periodical crises in his health, the manner in which his accesses of pa.s.sion came upon him, afford infinite suggestion to one who has an eye for the circ.u.mstances which fas.h.i.+on the destiny of man. Let the physician compare the furies of Alfieri with the silent rages of Byron, and give the mother and pedagogue the light in which they are now wholly wanting, showing how to treat such n.o.ble plants in the early stages of growth. We think the ”hated cap” would not be put a second time on the head so easily diseased.
The biography of Cellini, it is commonly said, is more interesting than any romance. It _is_ a romance, with the character of the hero fully brought out. Cellini lived in all the fulness of inward vigor, all the variety of outward adventure, and pa.s.sed through all the signs of the Zodiac, in his circling course, occasionally raising a little vapor from the art magic. He was really the Orlando Furioso turned Goldsmith, and Angelicas and all the Peers of France joined in the show. However, he never lived deeply; he had not time; the creative energy turned outward too easily, and took those forms that still enchant the mind of Europe.
Alfieri was very different in this. He was like the root of some splendid southern plant, buried beneath a heap of rubbish. Above him was a glorious sky, fit to develop his form and excite his colors; but he was compelled to a long and terrible struggle to get up where he could be free to receive its influence. Inst.i.tutions, language, family, modes of education,--all were unfit for him; and perhaps no man was ever called to such efforts, after he had reached manly age, to unmake and remake himself before he could become what his inward aspiration craved.
All this deepened his nature, and it _was_ deep. It is his great force of will and the compression of Nature within its iron grasp, where Nature was so powerful and impulsive, that const.i.tutes the charm of his writings. It is the man Alfieri who moves, nay, overpowers us, and not his writings, which have no flow nor plastic beauty. But we feel the vital dynamics, and imagine it all.
By us Americans, if ever such we really are to be, Alfieri should be held sacred as a G.o.dfather and holy light. He was a harbinger of what most gives this time its character and value. He was the friend of liberty, the friend of man, in the sense that Burns was--of the native n.o.bleness of man. Soiled and degraded men he hated. He was, indeed, a man of pitiless hatred as of boundless love, and he had bitter prejudices too, but they were from antipathies too strongly intertwined with his sympathies for any hand less powerful than that of Death to rend them away.
But our s.p.a.ce does not permit us to do any justice to such a life as Alfieri's. Let others read it, not from their habitual, but an eternal point of view, and they cannot mistake its purport. Some will be most touched by the storms of his youth, others by the exploits and conquests of his later years; but all will find him, in the words of his friend Casella, ”sculptured just as he was, lofty, strange, and extreme, not only in his natural characteristics, but in every work that did not seem to him unworthy of his generous affections. And where he went too far, it is easy to perceive his excesses always flowed from some praiseworthy sentiment.”
Among a crowd of thoughts suggested to the mind by reperusal of this book, to us a friend of many years standing, we hastily note the following:--
Alfieri knew how to be a friend, and had friends such as his masculine and uncompromising temper fitted him to endure and keep. He had even two or three of those n.o.ble friends. He was a perfect lover in delicacy of sentiment, in devotion, in a desire for constancy, in a high ideal, growing always higher, and he was, at last, happy in love. Many geniuses have spoken worthily of women in their works, but he speaks of woman as she wishes to be spoken of, and declares that he met the desire of his soul realized in life. This, almost alone, is an instance where a great nature was permanently satisfied, and the claims of man and woman equally met, where one of the parties had the impatient fire of genius.
His testimony on this subject is of so rare a sort, we must copy it:--
”My fourth and last pa.s.sion, fortunately for me, showed itself by symptoms entirely different from the three first. In the former, my intellect had felt little of the fires of pa.s.sion; but now my heart and my genius were both equally kindled, and if my pa.s.sion was less impetuous, it became more profound and lasting. Such was the flame which by degrees absorbed every affection and thought of my being, and it will never fade away except with my life. Two months satisfied me that I had now found the _true woman_; for, instead of encountering in her, as in all common women, an obstacle to literary glory, a hinderance to useful occupations, and a damper to thought, she proved a high stimulus, a pure solace, and an alluring example to every beautiful work. Prizing a treasure so rare, I gave myself away to her irrevocably. And I certainly erred not. More than twelve years have pa.s.sed, and while I am writing this chit-chat, having reached that calm season when pa.s.sion loses its blandishments, I cherish her more tenderly than ever; and I love her just in proportion as glide from her in the lapse of time those little-esteemed toll-gatherers of departing beauty. In her my soul is exalted, softened, and made better day by day; and I will dare to say and believe she has found in me support and consolation.”
We have spoken of the peculiarities in Alfieri's physical condition.
These naturally led him to seek solace in violent exercise; and as in the case of Beckford and Byron, horses were his best friends in the hour of danger. This sort of man is the modern Achilles, ”the tamer of horses.” In what degree the health of Alfieri was improved, and his sympathies awakened by the society and care of these n.o.ble animals, is very evident. Almost all persons, perhaps all that are in a natural state, need to stand in patriarchal relations with the animals most correspondent with their character. We have the highest respect for this instinct and sincere belief in the good it brings; if understood, it would be cherished, not ridiculed.
ITALY.--CARY'S DANTE.
Translating Dante is indeed a labor of love. It is one in which even a moderate degree of success is impossible. No great Poet can be well translated. The form of his thought is inseparable from his thought. The births of his genius are perfect beings: body and soul are in such perfect harmony that you cannot at all alter the one without veiling the other. The variation in cadence and modulation, even where the words are exactly rendered, takes not only from the form of the thought, but from the thought itself, its most delicate charm. Translations come to us as a message to the lover from the lady of his love through the lips of a confidante or menial--we are obliged to imagine what was most vital in the utterance.