Volume II Part 2 (1/2)

This commentary was obscure enough, and did no honour to the native good sense of Isaac Casaubon, usually so conspicuous. For, whilst proclaiming a settlement, in reality it settled nothing. Naturally, it made but a feeble impression upon the scholars of the day; and not long after the publication of the book, Casaubon received from Joseph Scaliger a friendly but gasconading letter, in which that great scholar brought forward a new reading--namely, [Greek: entakto], to which he a.s.signed a profound technical value as a musical term. No person even affected to understand Scaliger.

Casaubon himself, while treating so celebrated a man with kind and considerate deference, yet frankly owned that, in all his vast reading, he had never met with this strange Greek word. But, without entering into any dispute upon that verbal question, and conceding to Scaliger the word and his own interpretation of the word, no man could understand in what way this new resource was meant to affect the ultimate question at issue--namely, the extrication of the pa.s.sage from that thick darkness which overshadowed it.

'_As you were_' (to speak in the phraseology of military drill), was in effect the word of command. All things reverted to their original condition.

And two centuries of darkness again enveloped this famous perplexity of Roman literature. The darkness had for a few moments seemed to be unsettling itself in preparation for flight: but immediately it rolled back again; and through seven generations of men this darkness was heavier, because less hopeful than before.

Now then, I believe, all things are ready for the explosion of the catastrophe; 'which catastrophe,' I hear some malicious reader whispering, 'is doubtless destined to glorify himself' (meaning the unworthy writer of this little paper). I cannot deny it. A truth _is_ a truth. And, since no medal, nor riband, nor cross, of any known order, is disposable for the most brilliant successes in dealing with desperate (or what may be called _condemned_) pa.s.sages in Pagan literature, mere sloughs of despond that yawn across the pages of many a heathen dog, poet and orator, that I could mention, the more reasonable it is that a large allowance should be served out of boasting and self-glorification to all those whose merits upon this field national governments have neglected to proclaim. The Scaligers, both father and son, I believe, acted upon this doctrine; and drew largely by antic.i.p.ation upon that reversionary bank which they conceived to be answerable for such drafts. Joseph Scaliger, it strikes me, was drunk when he wrote his letter on the present occasion, and in that way failed to see (what Casaubon saw clearly enough) that he had commenced shouting before he was out of the wood. For my own part, if I go so far as to say that the result promises, in the Frenchman's phrase, to 'cover me with glory,' I beg the reader to remember that the idea of 'covering' is of most variable extent: the glory may envelope one in a voluminous robe--a princely mantle that may require a long suite of train-bearers, or may pinch and vice one's arms into that succinct garment (now superannuated) which some eighty years ago drew its name from the distinguished Whig family in England of Spencer.

Antic.i.p.ating, therefore, that I _shall_--nay, insisting, and mutinously, if needful, that I _will_--be covered with glory by the approaching result, I do not contemplate anything beyond that truncated tunic, once known as a 'spencer,' and which is understood to cover only the shoulders and the chest.

Now, then, all being ready, and the arena being cleared of compet.i.tors (for I suppose it is fully understood that everybody but myself has retired from the contest), thrice, in fact, has the trumpet sounded, 'Do you give it up?' Some preparations there are to be made in all cases of contest. Meantime, let it be clearly understood what it is that the contest turns upon. Supposing that one had been called, like OEdipus of old, to a turn-up with that venerable girl the Sphinx, most essential it would have been that the clerk of the course (or however you designate the judge, the umpire, &c.) should have read the riddle propounded to Greece: how else judge of the solution? At present the elements of the case to be decided stand thus:--

A Roman n.o.ble, a man, in fact, of senatorial rank, has been robbed, robbed with violence, and with cruel scorn, of a lovely young wife, to whom he was most tenderly attached. But by whom? the indignant reader demands. By a younger son[8] of the Roman emperor Vespasian.

[8] But holding what rank, and what precise station, at the time of the outrage? At this point I acknowledge a difficulty. The criminal was in this case Domitian, the younger son of Vespasian, the tenth Caesar, younger Brother of t.i.tus, the eleventh Caesar, and himself, under the name of Domitian, the twelfth of the Caesars, consequently the closing prince in that series of the initial twelve Caesars whom Suetonius had undertaken to record. Now the difficulty lies here, which yet I have never seen noticed in any book: was this violence perpetrated before or after Domitian's a.s.sumption of the purple? If _after_, how, then, could the injured husband have received that advice from t.i.tus (as to repairing his loss by a second marriage), which forms part of an anecdote and a _bon-mot_ between t.i.tus and Lamia? Yet again, if not after but before, how was it Lamia had not invoked the protection of Vespasian, or of t.i.tus--the latter of whom enjoyed a theatrically fine reputation for equity and moderation?

For some years the wrong has been borne in silence: the sufferer knew himself to be powerless as against such an oppressor; and that to show symptoms of impotent hatred was but to call down thunderbolts upon his own head. Generally, therefore, prudence had guided him. _Patience_ had been the word; _silence_, and below all the deep, deep word--_wait_; and if by accident he were a Christian, not only that same word _wait_ would have been heard, but this beside, look under the altars for others that also wait. But poor suffering patience, sense of indignity that is hopeless, must (in order to endure) have saintly resources. Infinite might be the endurance, if sustained only by a finite hope. But the black despairing darkness that revealed a tossing sea self-tormented and fighting with chaos, showing neither torch that glimmered in the foreground, nor star that kept alive a promise in the distance, violently refused to be comforted. It is beside an awful aggravation of such afflictions, that the lady herself might have co-operated in the later stages of the tragedy with the purposes of the imperial ruffian.

Lamia had been suffered to live, because as a living man he yielded up into the hands of his tormentor his whole capacity of suffering; no part of it escaped the h.e.l.lish range of his enemy's eye. But this advantage for the torturer had also its weak and doubtful side. Use and monotony might secretly be wearing away the edge of the organs on and through which the corrosion of the inner heart proceeded. On the whole, therefore, putting together the facts of the case, it seems to have been resolved that he should die. But previously that he should drink off a final cup of anguish, the bitterest that had yet been offered. The lady herself, again--that wife so known historically, so notorious, yet so total a stranger to man and his generations--had she also suffered in sympathy with her martyred husband? That must have been known to a certainty in the outset of the case, by him that knew too profoundly on what terms of love they had lived. But at length, seeking for crowning torments, it may have been that the dreadful Caesar might have found the 'raw' in his poor victim, that offered its fellows.h.i.+p in exalting the furnace of misery. The lady herself--may we not suppose her at the last to have given way before the strengthening storm. Possibly to resist indefinitely might have menaced herself with ruin, whilst offering no benefit to her husband. And, again, though killing to the natural interests which accompany such a case, might not the lady herself be worn out, if no otherwise, by the killing nature of the contest? There is besides this dreadful fact, placed ten thousand times on record, that the very goodness of the human heart in such a case ministers fuel to the moral degradation of a female combatant. Any woman, and exactly in proportion to the moral sensibility of her nature, finds it painful to live in the same house with a man not odiously repulsive in manners or in person on terms of eternal hostility. In a community so n.o.bly released as was Rome from all base Oriental bondage of women, this followed--that compliances of a nature oftentimes to belie the native n.o.bility of woman become painfully liable to misinterpretation. Possibly under the blinding delusion of secret promises, unknown, nay, inaccessible, to those outside (all contemporaries being as ridiculously impotent to penetrate within the curtain as all posterity), the wife of Lamia, once so pure, may have been over-persuaded to make such _public_ manifestations of affection for Domitian as had hitherto, upon one motive or another, been loftily withheld. Things, that to a lover carry along with them irreversible ruin, carry with them final desolation of heart, are to the vast current of ordinary men, who regard society exclusively from a political centre, less than nothing. Do they deny the existence of other and n.o.bler agencies in human affairs? Not at all.

Readily they confess these agencies: but, as movements obeying laws not known, or imperfectly known to _them_, these they ignore. What it was circ.u.mstantially that pa.s.sed, long since has been overtaken and swallowed up by the vast oblivions of time. This only survives--namely, that what he said gave signal offence in the highest quarter, and that his death followed. But what was it that he _did_ say? That is precisely the question, and the whole question which we have to answer. At present we know, and we do _not_ know, what it was that he said. We have bequeathed to us by history two words--involving eight letters--which in their present form, with submission to certain grandees of cla.s.sic literature, mean exactly nothing. These two words must be regarded as the raw material upon which we have to work: and out of these we are required to turn out a rational saying for Aelius Lamia, under the following five conditions:--First, it must allude to his wife, as one that is lost to him irrecoverably; secondly, it must glance at a gloomy tyrant who bars him from rejoining her; thirdly, it must reply to the compliment which had been paid to the sweetness of his own voice; fourthly, it should in strictness contain some allusion calculated not only to irritate, but even to alarm or threaten his jealous and vigilant enemy; fifthly, doing all these things, it ought also to absorb, as its own main elements, the eight letters contained in the present senseless words--'_Heu taceo._'

Here is a monstrous quant.i.ty of work to throw upon any two words in any possible language. Even Shakspere's clown,[9] when challenged to furnish a catholic answer applicable to all conceivable occasions, cannot do it in less than nine letters--namely, _Oh lord, sir_. I, for my part, satisfied that the existing form of _Heu taceo_ was mere indictable and punishable nonsense, but yet that this nonsense must enter as chief element into the stinging sense of Lamia, gazed for I cannot tell how many weeks at these impregnable letters, viewing them sometimes as a fortress that I was called upon to escalade, sometimes as an anagram that I was called upon to re-organise into the life which it had lost through some dislocation of arrangement. Finally the result in which I landed, and which fulfilled all the conditions laid down was this:--Let me premise, however, what _at any rate_ the existing darkness attests, that some disturbance of the text must in some way have arisen; whether from the gnawing of a rat, or the spilling of some obliterating fluid at this point of some critical or unique MS. It is sufficient for us that the vital word has survived. I suppose, therefore, that Lamia had replied to the friend who praised the sweetness of his voice, 'Sweet is it? Ah, would to Heaven it might prove Orpheutic.' Ominous in this case would be the word Orpheutic to the ears of Domitian: for every school-boy knows that this means a _wife-revoking voice_. But first let me remark that there is such a legitimate word as _Orpheutaceam_: and in that case the Latin repartee of Lamia would stand thus--_Suavem dixisti?

Quam vellem et Orpheutaceam_. But, perhaps, reader, you fail to recognise in this form our old friend _Heu taceo_. But here he is to a certainty, in spite of the rat: and in a different form of letters the compositor will show him, up to you as--_vellem et Orp_. [HEU TACEAM].

Possibly, being in good humour, you will be disposed to wink at the seemingly surrept.i.tious AM, though believing the real word to be _taceo_. Let me say, therefore, that one reading, I believe, gives _taceam_. Here, then, s.h.i.+nes out at once--(1) Eurydice the lovely wife; (2) detained by the gloomy tyrant Pluto; (3) who, however, is forced into surrendering her to her husband, whose voice (the sweetest ever known) drew stocks and stones to follow him, and finally his wife; (4) the word Orpheutic involves an alarming threat, showing that the hope of recovering the lady still survived; (5) we have involved in the restoration all the eight, or perhaps nine, letters of the erroneous form.

[9] In _All's Well that Ends Well_.

HOW TO WRITE ENGLISH.[10]

Among world-wide objects of speculation, objects rising to the dignity of a mundane or cosmopolitish value, which challenge at this time more than ever a growing intellectual interest, is the English language. Why particularly at this time? Simply, because the interest in that language rests upon two separate foundations: there are two separate principles concerned in its pretensions; and by accident in part, but in part also through the silent and inevitable march of human progress, there has been steadily gathering for many years an interest of something like sceptical and hostile curiosity about each of these principles, considered as problems open to variable solutions, as problems already viewed from different national centres, and as problems also that press forward to some solution or other with more and more of a clamorous emphasis, in proportion as they tend to consequences no longer merely speculative and scholastic, but which more and more reveal features largely practical and political. The two principles upon which the English language rests the burden of its paramount interest, are these:--first, its powers, the range of its endowments; secondly, its apparent destiny. Some subtle judges in this field of criticism are of opinion, and ever had that opinion, that amongst the modern languages which originally had compa.s.s enough of strength and opulence in their structure, or had received culture sufficient to qualify them plausibly for entering the arena of such a compet.i.tion, the English had certain peculiar and inappreciable apt.i.tudes for the highest offices of interpretation. Twenty-five centuries ago, this beautiful little planet on which we live might be said to have a.s.sembled and opened her first parliament for representing the grandeur of the human intellect. That particular a.s.sembly, I mean, for celebrating the Olympic Games about four centuries and a half before the era of Christ, when Herodotus opened the gates of morning for the undying career of history, by reading to the congregated children of h.e.l.las, to the whole representative family of civilisation, that loveliest of earthly narratives, which, in nine musical cantos, unfolded the whole luxury of human romance as at the bar of some austere historic Areopagus, and, inversely again, which crowded the total abstract of human records, sealed[11] as with the seal of Delphi in the luxurious pavilions of human romance.

[10] This fragment appeared in _The Instructor_ for July, 1853. The subject was not continued in any form.--H.

[11] '_Sealed_,' &c.:--I do not believe that, in the sense of holy conscientious loyalty to his own innermost convictions, any writer of history in any period of time can have surpa.s.sed Herodotus. And the reader must remember (or, if unlearned, he must be informed) that this judgment has _now_ become the unanimous judgment of all the most competent authorities--that is, of all those who, having first of all the requisite erudition as to Greek, as to cla.s.sical archaeology, &c., then subsequently applied this appropriate learning to the searching investigation of the several narratives authorised by Herodotus. In the middle of the last century, nothing could rank lower than the historic credibility of this writer. And to parody his t.i.tle to be regarded as the 'Father of History,' by calling him the 'Father of Lies,' was an unworthy insult offered to his admirable simplicity and candour by more critics than one. But two points startle the honourable reader, who is loathe to believe of any laborious provider for a great intellectual interest that he _can_ deliberately have meant to deceive: the first point, and, separately by itself, an all-sufficient demur, is this--that, not in proportion to the learning and profundity brought to bear upon Herodotus, did the doubts and scruples upon his fidelity strengthen or multiply. Precisely in the opposite current was the movement of human opinion, as it applied itself to this patriarch of history. Exactly as critics and investigators arose like Larcher--just, reasonable, thoughtful, patient, and combining--or geographers as comprehensive and as accurate as Major Rennel, regularly in that ratio did the reports and the judgments of Herodotus command more and more respect. The other point is this; and, when it is closely considered, it furnishes a most reasonable ground of demur to the ordinary criticisms upon Herodotus. These criticisms build the principle of their objection generally upon the marvellous or romantic element which intermingles with the current of the narrative. But when a writer treats (as to Herodotus it happened that repeatedly he treated) tracts of history far removed in s.p.a.ce and in time from the domestic interests of his native land, naturally he misses as any available guide the ordinary utilitarian relations which would else connect persons and events with great outstanding interests of his own contemporary system. The very abstraction which has silently been performed by the mere effect of vast distances, wildernesses that swallow up armies, and mighty rivers that are unbridged, together with the indefinite chronological remoteness, do already of themselves translate such sequestered and insulated chambers of history into the character of moral apologues, where the sole surviving interest lies in the quality of the particular moral ill.u.s.trated, or in the sudden and tragic change of fortune recorded.

Such changes, it is urged, are of rare occurrence; and, recurring too often, they impress a character of suspicious accuracy upon the narrative. Doubtless they do so, and reasonably, where the writer is pursuing the torpid current of circ.u.mstantial domestic annals. But, in the rapid abstract of Herodotus, where a century yields but a page or two, and considering that two slender octavos, on the particular scale adopted by Herodotus, embody the total records of the human race down to his own epoch, really it would furnish no legitimate ground of scruple or jealousy, though every paragraph should present us with a character that seems exaggerated, or with an incident approaching to the marvellous, or a catastrophe that is revolting. A writer is bound--he has created it into a duty, having once a.s.sumed the office of a national historiographer--to select from the rolls of a nation such events as are the most striking. And a selection conducted on this principle through several centuries, or pursuing the fortunes of a dynasty reigning over vast populations, _must_ end in acc.u.mulating a harvest of results such as would startle the sobriety of ordinary historic faith. If a medical writer should elect for himself, of his own free choice, to record such cases only in his hospital experience as terminated fatally, it would be absurd to object the gloomy tenor of his reports as an argument for suspecting their accuracy, since he himself, by introducing this as a condition into the very terms of his original undertaking with the public, has created against himself the painful necessity of continually distressing the sensibilities of his reader. To complain of Herodotus, or any public historian, as drawing too continually upon his reader's profounder sensibilities, is, in reality, to forget that this belongs as an original element to the very task which he has undertaken. To undertake the exhibition of human life under those aspects which confessedly bring it into unusual conflict with chance and change, is, by a mere self-created necessity, to prepare beforehand the summons to a continued series of agitations: it is to seek the tragic and the wondrous wilfully, and then to complain of it as violating the laws of probability founded on life within the ordinary conditions of experience.

That most memorable of Panh.e.l.lenic festivals it was, which first made known to each other the two houses of Grecian blood that typified its ultimate and polar capacities, the most and the least of exorbitations, the utmost that were possible from its equatorial centre; viz., on the one side, the Asiatic Ionian, who spoke the sweet musical dialect of Homer, and, on the other side, the austere Dorian, whom ten centuries could not teach that human life brought with it any pleasure, or any business, or any holiness of duty, other or loftier than that of war. If it were possible that, under the amenities of a Grecian sky, too fierce a memento could whisper itself of torrid zones, under the stern discipline of the Doric Spartan it was that you looked for it; or, on the other hand, if the lute might, at intervals, be heard or fancied warbling too effeminately for the martial European key of the Grecian muses, amidst the sweet blandishments it was of Ionian groves that you arrested the initial elements of such a relaxing modulation. Twenty-five centuries ago, when Europe and Asia met for brotherly partic.i.p.ation in the n.o.blest, perhaps,[12] of all recorded solemnities, viz., the inauguration of History in its very earliest and prelusive page, the coronation (as with propriety we may call it) of the earliest (perhaps even yet the greatest?) historic artist, what was the language employed as the instrument of so great a federal act? It was that divine Grecian language to which, on the model of the old differential compromise in favour of Themistocles, all rival languages would cordially have conceded the second honour. If now, which is not impossible, any occasion should arise for a modern congress of the leading nations that represent civilisation, not probably in the Isthmus of Corinth, but on that of Darien, it would be a matter of mere necessity, and so far hardly implying any expression of homage, that the English language should take the station formerly accorded to the Grecian. But I come back to the thesis which I announced, viz., to the twofold _onus_ which the English language is called upon to sustain:--first, to the responsibility attached to its _powers_; secondly, to the responsibility and weight of expectation attached to its destiny. To the questions growing out of the first, I will presently return. But for the moment, I will address myself to the nature of that DESTINY, which is often a.s.signed to the English language: what is it? and how far is it in a fair way of fulfilling this destiny?

[12] Perhaps, seriously, the most of a _cosmopolitical_ act that has ever been attempted. Next to it, in point of dignity, I should feel disposed to cla.s.s the inauguration of the Crusades.

As early as the middle of the last century, and by people with as little enthusiasm as David Hume, it had become the subject of plain prudential speculations, in forecasting the choice of a subject, or of the language in which it should reasonably be treated, that the area of expectation for an English writer was prodigiously expanding under the development of our national grandeur, by whatever names of 'colonial' or 'national'

it might be varied or disguised. The issue of the American War, and the sudden expansion of the American Union into a mighty nation on a scale corresponding to that of the four great European potentates--Russia, Austria, England, and France--was not in those days suspected. But the tendencies could not be mistaken. And the same issue was fully antic.i.p.ated, though undoubtedly through the steps of a very much slower process. Whilst disputing about the items on the tess apettiele, the disputed facts were overtaking us, and flying past us, on the most gigantic scale. All things were changing: and the very terms of the problem were themselves changing, and putting on new aspects, in the process and at the moment of enunciation. For instance, it had been sufficiently seen that another Christendom, far more colossal than the old Christendom of Europe, _might_, and undoubtedly _would_, form itself rapidly in America. Against the tens of millions in Europe would rise up, like the earth-born children of Deucalion and Pyrrha (or of the Theban Cadmus and Hermione) American millions counted by hundreds. But from what _radix_? Originally, it would have been regarded as madness to take Ireland, in her Celtic element, as counting for anything. But of late--whether rationally, however, I will inquire for a brief moment or so--the counters have all changed in these estimates. The late Mr O'Connell was the parent of these hyperbolical antic.i.p.ations. To count his ridiculous 'monster-meetings' by hundreds of thousands, and then at last by millions, cost n.o.body so much as a blush; and considering the open laughter and merriment with which all O'Connell estimates were accepted and looked at, I must think that the _London Standard_ was more deeply to blame than any other political party, in giving currency and acceptation to the nursery exaggerations of Mr O'Connell. Meantime those follies came to an end. Mr O'Connell died; all was finished: and a new form of mendacity was transferred to America. There has always existed in the United States one remarkable phenomenon of Irish politics applied to the deception of both English, Americans, and Irish. All people who have given any attention to partisans.h.i.+p and American politics, are aware of a rancorous malice burning sullenly amongst a small knot of Irishmen, and applying itself chiefly to the feeding of an interminable feud against England and all things English. This, as it chiefly expresses itself in American journals, naturally pa.s.ses for the product of American violence; which in reality it is not. And hence it happens, and for many years it _has_ happened, that both Englishmen and Americans are perplexed at intervals by a malice and an _acharnement_ of hatred to England, which reads very much like that atrocious and viperous malignity imputed to the father of Hannibal against the Romans.

It is noticeable, both as keeping open a peculiar exasperation of Irish patriotism absurdly directed against England; as doing a very serious injustice to Americans, who are thus misrepresented as the organs of this violence, so exclusively Irish; and, finally, as the origin of the monstrous delusion which I now go on to mention. The pretence of late put forward is, that the preponderant element in the American population is indeed derived from the British Islands, but by a vast overbalance from Ireland, and from the Celtic part of the Irish population. This monstrous delusion has recently received an extravagant sanction from the London _Quarterly Review_. Half a dozen other concurrent papers, in journals political and literary, hold the same language. And the upshot of the whole is--that, whilst the whole English element (including the earliest colonisation of the New England states at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and including the whole stream of British emigration since the French Revolution) is accredited for no more than three and a half millions out of pretty nearly twenty millions of _white_ American citizens, on the other hand, against this English element, is set up an Irish (meaning a purely Hiberno-_Celtic_) element, amounting--oh, genius of blus.h.i.+ng, whither hast thou fled?--to a total of eight millions. Anglo-Saxon blood, it seems, is in a miserable minority in the United States; whilst the German blood composes, we are told, a respectable nation of five millions; and the Irish-Celtic young n.o.blemen, though somewhat at a loss for shoes, already count as high as eight millions!