Chapter VIII: Part 8

One of the greatest features of interest to the scientific botanist, and even to the less instructed lover of nature, which Italy presents, consists in the circumstance that the northern and southern types of vegetation—to speak more closely, the northern-temperate and the sub-tropical—meet together, especially in its warmer regions, in stronger contrast than probably anywhere else. The same remark is true, no doubt, of the Mediterranean shores in general: but those of France and of Turkey approach more to the general northern aspect; those of Barbary to the tropical: in favoured Italy the two types seem sometimes to blend and sometimes to contrast in ever-changing and ever-striking variety. The same was doubtless, to some extent, the case in ancient times. But the northern character was probably far more prevalent than now. The early Greek settlers landed on a forest region, where the common deciduous trees of the north, now driven back to the scantily clothed gorges of the central Apennines, flourished in great abundance. Such a nature as this may still be observed in the few forest patches left in the higher Abruzzi, the Sila of Calabria, and so forth. “The beech-forest,” says Schouw, “is called the symbol of the Danish character. But I have wandered in Calabria through large and beautiful beech-woods, on the higher plateaux of the Apennines, where the vegetation as well as the bracing air constantly reminded me of my home.” Probably the wild shores of Corsica, or those of Dalmatia, with their shaggy growth of northern forest and their undergrowth of mixed northern and Mediterranean shrubs, present an aspect more resembling what the followers of Ulysses and Æneas beheld when they landed, than may elsewhere be found. We may notice historical traces of the continued existence of this ruder and fresher nature, not only in the agricultural writers of the Romans, who speak far more of deciduous trees than of the evergreen, now deemed so characteristic of Italy, but in the well-known pages of Virgil. There is not in general much of “local colour” in the ‘Eclogues’ and ‘Georgics:’ that is a poetical artifice of later day. But what there is, represents the physiognomy, not of the Lombard plains where he was born, but of the neighbourhood of Naples in which he lived. His sea-sand is “black,” not brown or yellow, like that of all other bards,—the volcanic sand of the bays of Baiæ and Naples—very coal-dust in appearance. When he recommends the farmer to place his hives near a tree, for the bees to swarm on, it is a “palm-tree, or huge oleaster”—advice which he might as well have tendered to a Scythian as to a _colonus_ of his native Mantua. Now, the general idea which the verses of Virgil convey of the region with which he is concerned, is that of a sylvan country—not, emphatically, the “land of the cypress and myrtle,” but of the oak, ash, linden, wych-elm, beech, citizens of the great Transalpine forests. Some of the trees of which he celebrates the grandeur are now not only become scarce in his country, but it is difficult to ascertain with accuracy their real character. The mighty æsculus, for example, the noblest denizen of Latian forests, which formed of itself great woods, “lata æsculeta,” is a mere puzzle for antiquarian botanists: no one knows what it was, and there may be some question whether it has not disappeared from the face of earth, or whether it survives only in some nearly extinct variety of oak.[5]

Man has doubtless done much towards the effecting of this change, the more valuable plants of the south having been gradually introduced, and the indigenous woods cleared for their reception; but Nature has done much of herself. In the remaining woodland districts of maritime Italy—such as the Maremme of Tuscany and the Latian Campagna—the evergreen species seem to be gradually supplanting the deciduous, the foreign the indigenous. We talk familiarly of the hardy vegetation of the North; but, where the two meet on conditions of climate endurable by both, the children of the tropical sun seem to show the greater hardihood, and to come out survivors in the great battle for existence. Their every aspect, their rough bark and leathery leaves, seem indicative of a stronger vitality than that which animates the more majestic but more delicate structure of the leafy giants of the northern temperate zone. A similar law—if the analogy does not appear too fanciful—seems to govern the migrations of trees and shrubs, and of the human family itself. The North produces the races of more commanding aspect: it sends them forth conquering and to conquer; they establish empires, they subjugate the so-called feebler races of the South; but, in the midst of their conquests, they sicken and perish, and become extinct. The children of the South gradually penetrate northwards, and by their own more prolific multiplication, as well as by crossing or intermixture, in which their more essentially vigorous nature attains predominance, they efface the type of the Northern race, and cause it ultimately to disappear. What has become of the descendants of those hordes which swarmed from the populous North, in the decline of the Roman Empire, over all the regions adjacent to the Mediterranean? They have vanished, or are scarcely recognised by antiquaries in a few problematical instances, where small insulated communities, thought to be of Teutonic or Gothic origin, maintain a precarious existence among the descendants of their former subjects. Where are the historical Gauls, with their tall figures, their fleshy frames, their golden hair, and eyes of truculent blue? A few of them, possibly, to be found in Flanders; but anything less like the Gaul of antiquity than the sinewy, nervous, agile, undersized, brown-skinned, and black-haired biped, who now inhabits some eighty out of the eighty-five departments of France, can hardly be imagined. What is become even of the purer Northern breed of Germany itself? Scarcely to be found, except on the shores of the Baltic: elsewhere the ordinary European type prevails, olive skin and _cheveux châtains_. “I sought for the fair population of classical Germany in vain,” says Niebuhr, “until I found it in Scandinavia.” On the other hand, the Greek in Provence, the Moor in Spain, Southrons, transplanted into those countries in no very great numbers, have impressed their type on the general population, and, as it were, changed the very breed. When dark and fair intermix, the odds seem to be greatly in favour of the dark complexion prevailing in the offspring. We heard lately of a society formed in France for the conservation of the “Xanthous,” or yellow-haired variety of the human race, which they regard as the true aristocracy of nature, and rightly conceive to be threatened with extinction: their object to be attained by portioning from time to time blonde maidens who might take to themselves husbands of the same complexion. Even so—to return to our trees—the meridional vegetation gradually drives back that of the North in the battlefield of species. If we figure to ourselves the appearance of the plains of England two thousand years ago, with their indigenous vegetable covering only—without the common elm, the linden, plane, sycamore, poplar, acacia, chestnut, fruit-trees of every kind, and cultivated plants in general—without, probably, a single species of pine or fir, or indeed any evergreen but box, yew, and holly—and remember that every foreign plant has displaced a native, we may gather some idea of the conquests which the South has effected even here, not indeed without the aid of human industry, but in part by sheer physical superiority. But on the Mediterranean coast these conquests have been much more marked. Take the following description of the change which two thousand years have made in the common flora of Greece, from the work of a German botanist (Fraas, Klima und Pflanzenwelt):—

“The following species from the flora known to Theophrastus have either entirely disappeared from Greece, or have emigrated from the habitations which he assigns to them, and withdrawn into the moister climate of more northerly regions; the varieties commonly known to the ancients of the Linden; the Yew, that child of damp and shady hillsides, of which rare and dwarfed specimens only are now to be found on the highest mountains; the Hornbeam, the Beech, and Alder of Homer; and, with scanty exceptions, the ‘spear-furnishing’ Cornel and the tall Ash. Instead of these, another class of plants has conquered for itself greater space in the vegetable realm—thick-leaved, hard-leaved, down-covered, thorny and prickly bushes, evergreen for the most part, and adding, by their rich flowers, great beauty to the spring. This vegetation, analogous to that of the American savannas and Asiatic steppes, has now replaced the ancient flowery meadows, resembling those of middle Europe, with wastes of heath and pines, carob-trees and grey oleasters. Together with these we have the various kinds of arbutus, myrtle, oleander, philyreæ, pistachios, kermes-oaks, rosemary, thyme, and the flora of dry mountain regions in general.”

Let us now see how far the historical indications furnished by the Pompeian relics corroborate what has been already said respecting this “intrusion of the climate of the South,” as Fraas terms it, into the regions north of the Mediterranean.

In order to ascertain the plants known to the citizens of Pompeii, says Schouw, two records remain to us—namely, the pictures discovered in its ruins, and the remnants of plants themselves. But, he adds, the use of the first requires some care:—“Many representations of plants are naturally so little precise that their particular species cannot be ascertained, as would be the case in modern pictures of the same kind. And, if the plant be recognisable, it does not follow as certain that it was known at Pompeii, for the plants of foreign countries are also occasionally represented. Thus the Nile-nature is often delineated—marshy landscapes, with the lotus and the _nelumbium_, the hippopotamus, ichneumon, flocks of geese, and date-palms at the water’s edge; as, for instance, in the lower rim of the famous mosaic supposed to represent Alexander and Darius. Frequently, also, the representations are fanciful—for instance, a laurel growing out of a date-palm, and even appearing to rise out of it as a shoot from the same root—a physiological impossibility, unless, perhaps, it has reference to that strange practice of the ancients—the planting of different kinds so close to each other that they might appear to the eye connected.”

After making these allowances, we may safely arrive at the following conclusions. Among the trees which gave the Neapolitan landscape its character were then (as now) the stone-pine and the cypress. The former is frequently represented, with its peculiar branchless stems and cloud-like head—the product not only of close planting but of actual pruning in nurseries, as may now be noticed in the neighbourhood of Naples. This tree was cultivated for its edible nuts; and pine cones have been found among the charred objects in the shops of Pompeii. The beautiful cypress often occurs in the Pompeian frescoes, not unfrequently mingled with the pine, and gracefully combining with the outlines of the fanciful villas and temples represented. It is Gilpin, we think, who points out the peculiar adaptation, by contrast, of the spiral cypress and poplar to the long horizontal lines of southern buildings; while the square masses of the lime and elm combine well with the pointed Gothic. The “_Pinus halepensis_,” adds Schouw (the common maritime pine of Italy), is also found in these pictures. The vine, of course, occurs constantly—so does the olive. They were, no doubt, as universal then as now; and preferred respectively, as they do now, the volcanic and the calcareous hills in the vicinity of Naples. Preserved olives were found in Pompeii, which even retained something of their taste. The myrtle, and the beautiful oleander, or laurel-rose, as the French call it—common shrubs of to-day—also appear in the frescoes. Add to these the laurel and bay tribe, the ilex, fig, pomegranate, the “arundo donax” or gigantic reed—cultivated then as now for its various uses, and covering the marshy grounds with its dense brake, strange to the northern eye, are most of them recognisable also in these pictures. And we are enabled to say that the common vegetable forms on which the eye of the Pompeian citizen rested were, to this extent, similar to those on which his descendant gazes now.

But there were many species, now common, then rare or unknown, some of which are mentioned by Schouw in the little essay before us; others, we are able to add, from different sources. The aloe or agave, and the Indian fig (figue de Barbarie, as the French call it), are now among the familiar plants of maritime Italy. The former vigorously protrudes itself in every stony, solitary spot, from the old ramparts of Genoa to the lava-fields of Aeta; the latter is half-cultivated in a careless sort of way for its luscious bulb; and the two seem, in many places, to have almost extirpated the older vegetation. Both of these lusty children of the South are of quite modern origin in Italy, having come over from America. Some have fancied that the pineapple is represented in one Pompeian fresco. “But this,” says our Professor, “is undoubtedly the edible crown of a young dwarf palm, or _chamærops humilis_.”

A still more important want of classical ages was that of the whole tribe of Agrumi, as the Italians call them—the orange, lemon, citron, and so forth. “Italy was not then,” says our Professor, “the land

Wo die Citronen blühn,
Im dunkeln Laub die gold-orangen glühn;”

and was consequently without one of the favourite features with which æsthetic Northerns adorn their notions of Italy. They are of course absent from the frescoes. They were known to Pliny as foreign plants only. The “Median Apple” (citron) was cultivated in Italy no earlier than the third century after Christ; lemons came from the Saracens; oranges, last of all, were brought by the Portuguese from the East.

The white, or silk-worm mulberry, now the commonest of all trees in the richer parts of Italy, was also unknown to the Pompeians. Its cultivation on the peninsula began, according to Schouw, in the sixth century. Silken fabrics were scarce and expensive, and imported by the Romans from the East. Voltaire somewhere makes the great superiority of a _femme de chambre_ of Madame de Pompadour over the Empress Livia consist in the unlimited enjoyment of silk stockings. It may, however, be questioned whether the Empress would have appreciated such a luxury, or whether, as the audacious French traveller, Monsieur Nodier, asserted respecting the Glasgow ladies not many years ago, she would not have got rid of such incumbrances whenever free from the restraints of company. The picturesque Carouba tree (_Ceratonia siliqua_), which now forms groves along many parts of the Italian coast, is also probably of modern introduction. We may add another more important plant which the Professor has omitted—the chestnut. Not, of course, that this magnificent native of Thessaly was unknown to Roman antiquity. It was, on the contrary, extensively cultivated in ancient Italy for its fruit. Naples was particularly famous for the excellence of its chestnuts—

“Quas docta Neapolis creavit,
Lento castaneas vapore tostas”—

such as Martial appetisingly describes, and such as that _flâneur_ of a poet had doubtless often purchased, scalding hot, from the tripod of some hag-granddaughter of Canidia or Sagana, in the alleys of the learned city. But it was probably as yet a fruit-tree only. Introduced but two centuries before Christ,[6] it had not had time to form forests; to become, as it now is, the characteristic tree of the lower Apennines, supplanting its ancient but thriftless relative the beech, and driving the latter back to the narrow domain which it still occupies on the top of Monte Sant’ Angelo. The gnarled and twisted chestnut trunks, with their pointed foliage, under which Salvator Rosa studied his art when sojourning among the brigands at the back of Amalfi, have no counterpart in the drawings of Pompeii any more than in the poetry of Virgil.

Of cultivated crops, wheat and barley are represented in the Pompeian frescoes, and grains of them have been discovered in the houses. In one pretty sketch a quail is picking at an ear of barley; in another at a kind of millet. Other less known cereals seem to have been familiar to the ancients. But two of the most important, both in an economic and picturesque point of view, are missing from these sketches,—maize and rice. Both are of modern introduction. The “polenta” of the classical peasant was of barley. Cotton, it need scarcely be added, is of very modern introduction; it now covers extensive fields at the southern foot of Vesuvius.

After this long list of acquisitions, we must turn to some few instances of vegetable forms familiar to the ancient eye, and which the modern misses. The absolute extinction of a species is indeed a rare thing. Decandolle, in his ‘Geographie Botanique,’ likens the changes in vegetation to those which take place in a language: the appearance of a new word, or a new species, attracts observation at once; the disappearance of an old one is very gradual, and seldom total. We have already spoken of the comparative scarcity at present of deciduous trees, and of one—the æsculus—which modern botanists have been unable to define. But one or two ornamental foreigners, introduced in old times, have also disappeared, or nearly so. The most remarkable of these is the oriental Plane. Every Latin scholar is well aware of the modish passion for these trees which prevailed among the wealthy Romans, a preference not wholly æsthetic; it was partly a fashion, borrowed like other fashions from the despotic East, in days when republican millionaires at Rome, like those of Washington, had begun to discover that everything really meritorious came from lands possessing a “strong government.” The Platanus had been from hoary antiquity the object of veneration of Persian monarchs and Grecian heroes. No tree had anything like the same amount of historic and fabulous tradition attached to it. Marsyas was hanged on one, when duly skinned, by Apollo: Agamemnon and Menelaus planted a couple, each of which, a monstrous relic, was shown to Pausanias in his travels. Xerxes had caused his whole host to halt before a noble specimen in Lycia. “He was so enamoured of it,” says old Evelyn, “that for some days neither the concernment of his expedition, nor interest of honour, nor the necessary motion of his portentous army, could persuade him from it. He styled it his mistress, his minion, his goddess: and when he was forced to part from it, he caused a picture of it to be stamped on a model of gold, which he continually wore about him.” As it is now the glory of Ispahan and Shiraz, so it was of the Greek cities of yore. The groves of the Academe and Lyceum were composed of it. “By the Plane Tree” was the favourite oath of Socrates: the more shame to him, said his accuser Melitus, that he should blaspheme so fine a tree. The famous Plane of Buyukdéré on the Bosphorus is popularly said to serve even now as a tent for the Seraskier when he encamps there. The Romans took to it, as we have said, with that extravagant enthusiasm which characterised their follies; “the only tree,” says Pliny, in his sententious stoical way, “which ever was transplanted for the sake of its shade alone.” Julius Cæsar himself planted the first specimen in Spain, at Corduba; it was a noble tree in Martial’s time, and flourished, as he says, by being irrigated with wine.

“Crevit et affuso lætior umbra mero.”

It became so common in the Roman pleasances, that groves of planes, as well as laurels, are spoken of by the same poet as the ornaments of every citizen’s place of ordinary pretensions.

“Daphnones, platanones, et aëriæ cyparissi.”

Undoubtedly, in fashionable Campania, it must have been so common as to form a familiar feature in the landscape. But it perished with the remainder of that luxurious civilisation. In a convent garden at Naples—so a traveller tells us—there remains one enormous specimen, of an antiquity which can only be conjectured: the grandchild, it may be, of some forlorn ornament of a ruined villa, which had seen the Goths march into Italy. We have heard of no others of the genuine race. Of late years, indeed, the plane has begun to resume its popularity as an ornamental tree, and for the same reasons—its delightful shade, namely, and its adaptation to the atmosphere of great cities; being able to throw off the noxious residuum of coal smoke by the peeling of its bark. Planes are now the common trees of the market place in Southern Europe, as they are in our London squares. But, unhappily, the variety almost always seen is of new importation, not of the old stock; not the princely oriental, but its plebeian cousin the occidental, or button-wood of the United States; faster in growth, taller,—stronger perhaps—but incomparably uglier: a melancholy instance of the encroachments of modern democracy.

To the Oriental plane we must add the date-palm: not indeed as strange now to the Italian eye, nor as very abundant in classical times; but as certainly more abundant then than now; an exception to the general law which we have indicated of the increasing prevalence of Southern forms of vegetation. The date-palm in Italy is, after all, but an occasional exotic. Mayer, the painstaking German author of a book on ‘Naples and the Neapolitans,’ says there are scarcely a dozen or two of them in the gardens of that city and its suburbs. There are eight or ten only in Rome, says M. Ampère. It does not ripen its fruit. It dwells uncomfortably, in the uncongenial neighbourhood of the pine; for in America and other unsophisticated regions, the natural limit of the palm ends where that of the pine begins. Picturesque as its solitary form often is, in the villa garden, or behind the convent wall, we cannot look at it without thinking of some poor captive Saracen maiden, shivering at the door of a Northern crusading baron. Even on the coast of the Riviera, where it appears to thrive the most, it affords a melancholy sight when writhing under the icy Mistral, which ever and anon turns the flank of the precarious barrier of the Maritime Alps, and whirls its blasts of snow-dust against the broad leaves. It appears in many of the Pompeian frescoes. Schouw suggests that this does not prove it a native, as the scenes represented may be foreign or symbolical. But the caution is unnecessary. The date-palm was certainly common of yore in maritime Italy, though no doubt in single specimens.[7] “Vulgo in Italiâ, sed steriles,” says Pliny: who accurately distinguishes it from the dwarf-palm or chamærops, then, as now, more characteristic of Sicily. We have already noticed the use for which Virgil recommends it in the ‘Georgics.’ Varro, ‘De Re Rusticâ,’ is still more to the point, when he classes the fibres of the palm along with flax, hemp, and reeds, among materials grown on the farm, which may be turned to account for making cordage.

“Thus we perceive,” concludes our naturalist, “that the vegetable world, and in particular the list of cultivated vegetables, has undergone many changes since the age when Pompeii flourished; and that, while the ancient Pompeians enjoyed a great superiority over the moderns in respect of many enjoyments of life, particularly those arising from the arts, they lacked nevertheless some very valuable plants which increased geographical knowledge and extended commerce have procured for their descendants.”

But however this may be, no one can well contemplate in earnest these relics of a most curious and refined civilisation—in some respects perhaps the most curious and refined which the world has ever seen—and return with satisfaction to the coarse generalisation of the disciples of universal progress in the affairs of humanity, with whose speculations we have been lately surfeited. The feelings which such inquiries excite are assuredly more akin to those with which they inspired the proud and melancholy Leopardi, when he turned from them and from the wealth of conception and nobleness of sentiment with which the ancient world abounded, to that long degradation of subsequent ages, out of which humanity is in truth only now emerging. Very grand, though profoundly sorrowful, are those lines of his, entitled ‘Bruto minore,’ in which he portrays the expiring patriot, not as bewailing his present catastrophe, nor calling on the gods for present revenge, but as brooding, in utter hopelessness of spirit, over “the dark _forward_ and abysm of time”—the Erebus-like blackness of that prospect of coming degeneracy and decay: the trance of ages, into which the human soul was about to fall.

“In peggio
Precipitano i tempi: e mal s’affida
Ai putridi nipoti
L’onor d’egregie menti, e la suprema
De’ miseri vendetta.”

For the duration of that era of decline was indeed such as we are sufficiently accustomed to measure backwards, in historical reflection; but such as, when contemplated as a future, the conception shrinks from with a painful sense of incapacity. Thirteen centuries were to elapse ere the first Italian could stretch his hand across the chasm to the last Roman. As the paradise of cultivation, in which those Campanian cities nestled, was separated from the fertile aspect of the same region in modern times by a formidable blank of centuries of duration, so was the ancient civilisation from the modern by a similar space of intellectual desert; and in each instance alike, the succeeding age can scarcely appreciate its predecessor as a reality.

“Credetne virûm ventura propago,
Cum segetes iterum, cum jam hæc deserta virebunt,
Infra urbes populosque premi.”

And yet there are those who persist in cramming us with that dry formula of Positivism, that each generation enjoys the “accumulated knowledge” of preceding ones! Ask those countless millions of Chinese who vegetate, generation after generation, in the vast interior of their empire apart from all foreign influence, how much of “accumulated knowledge” their community has gathered since the days of Confucius; ask the black nations of the interior of Africa what amount of “progress” distinguishes them from their ancestors known to Herodotus or to Leo Africanus; ask the wretched remnants of tribes which wander over the American wilderness, whether their progenitors, the sons of those who came thither over the ocean, were fewer and feebler and more ignorant than they? For those who seek truth and not phrases, “progress,” as the term is used in social science, is an attribute not of mankind, but of the European family alone; and of that family only since the discovery of printing. What that incomparably greatest of all merely human events may have done towards fixing the elements of social improvement, and converting into a permanent advance that which was before only a precarious, oscillatory movement, we need not now consider. It may be that the so-called triumphal march of humanity is now secured from repulse, and that, as some of our latest speculators seem to hold, the powers of nature which we employ will begin of themselves to decay before our capability of employing them abates. But all this, if so, does not annul the melancholy record of previous periods of loss and retreat. It is extremely difficult, no doubt, for us to realise those periods. In our healthy exuberance of life we can hardly conceive a state of chronic political ebb or decline—a state, that is, in which each generation, instead of profiting by the “accumulated knowledge” of its predecessors, lets something of the results of that knowledge drop from its enfeebled grasp; is reduced in numbers, less provided with the external comforts of life, weaker against aggression, poorer in substance, feebler in spirit, inferior in mental acquirements; nevertheless, such periods have been beyond all doubt. The history of the Byzantine empire furnishes one well known to all: and many such have rolled drearily away in the dimmer ages of early time, since the subjects of Nimrod were dispersed on the plain of Shinar. But let us take the most familiar, and at the same time the truest, instance of what we mean, and which happens also to be most germane to the matter in hand. Could a modern really do what many a visitor to Pompeii has striven to do in intense eagerness of fancy; could he restore those truncated columns and repeople those desolate streets, and actually converse with some cultivated contemporary of Pliny and Juvenal, or Cicero and Horace; one can fancy that the feeling on both sides, after the first strangeness of the meeting had been got over, would be one of surprise, that two specimens of humanity of such distant origin could have so much in common. In moral and social philosophy; in political speculation; in appreciation of eloquence, literature, art, they would really find themselves—some exceptions apart which would give zest to the conversation—almost on the same ground. In respect of matters of still more intimate interest—the inner clothing, as it were, of civilised existence—in their estimate of physical and mental pursuits, tendencies, weaknesses, pleasures, and pains, and their relation to each other—each would feel that he understood his companion; each would be conscious, as it were, of possessing a key to many of the other’s inmost feelings. This would be partly owing, no doubt, to the circumstance that the ancients have been our tutors, and that much of our mental furniture is derived directly from them. But also, in great measure, to mere similarity of circumstances, which engenders similarity of ideas. Civilisations so nearly resembling each other, even in many points of minuteness, as those of modern Europe and of the Rome of Cicero or the Athens of Demosthenes, must, from the necessity of the case, have strongly corresponding spiritual and mental emotions, and corresponding language wherein to express them.

Now let us alter the picture: let the man of the nineteenth century wake up under the shadow of Winchester or Canterbury Cathedral, such as the Saxons had reared them, and, to give him the best company of the day, let him consort with a baron or an abbot of the time of the Norman conquest. Except the subject of religion, of which we would not now speak, what single topic could they have in common? Would they not be separated from each other by a barrier as high and strong as any which divides contemporary civilised from savage man? What object (except possibly horses and dogs), could they appreciate together? What points of morals or science or politics, small talk, sentiment, or humour, would suit them both? How could they argue on premises which one would assume as certain and the other would treat with contempt? The medieval wight would certainly rate the modern at a very different value from his own estimate of himself; and if the modern escaped with a whole skin from the interview, which is greatly to be doubted of, he would find his romantic respect for the baron, or veneration for the ecclesiastic, very little increased. They would be denizens of alien spheres, and would converse in utterly dissonant tongues.

And yet the Norman was our countryman; was nearer to us by many an age than the Roman; and possessed the “accumulated knowledge” (had such a thing really existed before the invention of printing), of many an intervening generation. But these were in truth generations of decline, not of advance; a decline often hardly sensible, or arrested for a time, but on the whole prodigious. And if the enthusiastic disciple of progress chooses to count these ebbs as insignificant exceptions to his general theory of flow, let us remember that a space of a thousand years, however unimportant to a geologist, is a considerable fraction of the historical existence of man.

And this, as many have said, though not many truly feel it, is one of the most real advantages of classical study, and one of the charms which make us turn back to it with recurring affection, after resultless wanderings in company with the “Positivists.” He who has imbibed its lessons deeply can hardly find his judgment much affected by those metaphors turned into arguments which pass commonly current, likening the youth, manhood, and old age of the world to those of an individual; nor will he readily adopt the formulas of a recent clever writer of the Positive school, that “we may expect to find, in the history of man, each successive age incorporating into itself the substance of the preceding,” and that “this power, whereby the present ever gathers into itself the results of the past, transforms the human race into a colossal man, whose life reaches from the creation to the day of judgment.” Classical study made men pedants, after a fashion, two centuries ago; at present its effect is to preserve them from an equally tasteless and less innocent pedantry. By bringing clearly before our view that magnificent phantasma of great communities entombed, and great conceptions buried with them, it weakens the ordinary temptation to overvalue ourselves and our age. It displays to us the vast ocean of moral and intellectual being such as it really is, subject to æons of rise and fall, and not a steady onward current continually gaining ground; and, by so doing, administers a reasonable check to that “Excelsior” tendency which elevates but often misleads us—an indiscriminating confidence in the destiny and powers of our species.

AMERICAN STATE PAPERS.[8]

It is not probable that many of our readers will meet with the volumes, lately published in Washington, containing the correspondence of American diplomatists during the period of the civil war; but, after perusing some of the specimens we shall offer, they will no doubt agree with us in thinking it a pity that these productions should not be generally known. Under any circumstances, most people would find something comical in a set of elderly gentlemen, engaged in important business, exchanging by letter moral sentiments suited to a schoolboy’s theme. But when the compositions thus embellished are of the kind known to the world as State Papers, and when the writers, who thus aim, like the interlocutors in a religious novel, at the instruction of the universe through the medium of dialogue, are American politicians, the effect produced is such as few professed humorists could hope to rival. For most people are aware nowadays that the atmosphere through which those politicians must pass before they can attain to that eminence, one condition of which is the writing of state papers, is much more likely to develop in them the wisdom of the serpent than the guilelessness of the dove. Remembering the pushing and scrambling, the elbowing of vile competitors, the truckling and corruption, the wire-pulling and log-rolling, the acquaintance with all the small and dirty ramifications of tickets and platforms, which success in politics demands in the States, the very last vein of composition we should expect to find these gentlemen especially cultivating would be that in which the sage Imlac addresses Rasselas, or in which the good godmother improves every occasion in a children’s story. A difficulty to believe in the existence of craft or guile or self-interest as motives of political conduct, yielding at last to a surprised and mournful conviction of the sad truth, and a touching and simple style of moralising over human delinquency, are the characteristics, on paper, of the diplomatists who have particularly distinguished themselves in the pleasing and pastoral pursuits we have attempted to enumerate. Everybody who has read American speeches must have noticed in them a tendency to flowery sentiment and to ancient and fish-like metaphors, such as the audiences of the Old World would reject. Why the not very immaculate or poetical classes who constitute a New York mob should especially relish this style of oratory, we cannot explain; but it is the fact that it seems to succeed in America whether the audience be a constituency, or a house of assembly, or the population of a Boston lecture-room, or the entertainers of an American celebrity, or a jury in a criminal case—and all the scribes of their newspapers indulge in the same vein. That it does succeed may appear to be a sufficiently good reason why the parliamentary and stump orators of America should habitually launch at their audiences such sentences as are, on this side of the water, never addressed to any but the galleries at a Surrey melodrama. But directly the speakers are placed in relation to foreign Governments, they think it necessary to engraft on the florid Rosa-Matilda style which deals with “star-spangled banners,” “great, glorious, and free people,” and “the best Government the world ever saw,” the virtuous didactic style we have attempted to describe, and which we suppose they imagine to be particularly likely to influence the counsels of such guileless and simple-minded statesmen as Gortchakoff, Rechberg, Russell, Palmerston, and the Emperor Napoleon.

The principal agent in the pious attempt to inoculate mankind, through their Governments, with virtuous principles, is Mr William Henry Seward. The circumstances under which the benevolent sage perseveres in his philanthropic efforts are not such as are favourable to placid meditation or composition. His lucubrations must have been disturbed not unfrequently by the booming of Confederate cannon. The sudden irruption on his privacy of a distracted Finance Minister, a desperate War Secretary, or a bewildered President, must have been extremely unfavourable to the prosecution of the task. Yet that he struggled successfully with those hostile influences is proved by the enormous volume of his essays, which must, we estimate, be equal in bulk, for one year, to about four volumes of the original edition of ‘The Rambler’—under which title, indeed, they might not inappropriately have been published. Seated at his desk, with the copybooks of his boyhood at hand for quotation, in a glow of philanthropy that cannot fail to warm what he would himself call the “moral atmosphere” of barbaric Europe, he can shut his eyes to passing events, and find sermons in civil wars, and good in everything. Immediately on his accession to office, he begins a circular to all the Ministers at foreign courts in the following style: “Sir,—The advocates of benevolence, and the believers in human progress, encouraged by the slow though marked meliorations of the barbarities of war which have obtained in modern times, have been, as you are well aware, recently engaged,” &c.

Since that was written, the advocates of benevolence and the believers in human progress have been further encouraged by the “meliorations” of stone fleets, of corps of licensed plunderers, of the submersion of great tracts of cultivated land, of the devastation of half a State, of the incitement to servile insurrection, and of the rule of Benjamin F. Butler at New Orleans—illustrations of his remark, which the eminent essayist probably did not at that time expect.

In the early part of his correspondence, Mr Seward’s opinions of the policy to be pursued towards the South are much more indulgent than at a later period. “The Union,” he says, on March 22, 1861, “was formed upon popular consent, and must always practically stand on the same basis.” He says, on April 10, that Secession is “a bad enterprise,” and that the Secessionists are “a misguided portion of our fellow-citizens.” But he goes on to say that the President “would not be disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of theirs (the citizens of the Southern States), namely, that the Federal Government could not reduce the seceding States to obedience by conquest, even although he were disposed to question that proposition. _But, in fact, the President willingly accepts it as true. Only an imperial or despotic government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary members of the State._ This Federal republican system of ours is, of all forms of government, the very one which is most unfitted for such a labour.” And he goes on to suggest the following paternal method of bringing back the prodigal South, and providing a fatted calf for it:—

“The system has within itself adequate peaceful, conservative, and
recuperative forces. Firmness on the part of the Government in
maintaining and preserving the public institutions and property, and
in executing the laws where authority can be exercised without waging
war, combined with such measures of justice, moderation, and
forbearance as will disarm reasoning opposition, will be sufficient to
secure the public safety until returning reflection, concurring with
the fearful experience of social evils, the inevitable fruits of
faction, shall bring the recusant members cheerfully back into the
family, which, after all, must prove their best and happiest, as it
undeniably is their most natural, home. The constitution of the United
States provides for that return by authorising Congress, on
application to be made by a certain majority of the States, to
assemble a national convention, in which the organic law can, if it be
needful, be revised so as to remove all real obstacles to a reunion,
so suitable to the habits of the people, and so eminently conducive to
the common safety and welfare.”

These be brave words and high sentiments; but their value as an expression of conciliatory policy is a little diminished by the fact that, as the seceding States were then seven out of thirty-four, the concession spoken of, being dependent on the “application to be made by a certain majority of the States” (two-thirds), was an impossibility. And in fact one of the best arguments in favour of Secession is, that the constitution provides no means whereby a minority, or indeed anything but a large majority, of States can obtain a remedy for their grievances, should the interests of the remainder render them adverse.

On the 19th of June, however, a change has come over the spirit of the Secretary’s dream, leading him to retract even this visionary compromise.

“What is now seen in this country,” he tells Mr Adams, “is the
occurrence, by no means peculiar, but frequent in all countries, more
frequent even in Great Britain than here, of an armed insurrection
engaged in attempting to overthrow the regularly constituted and
established Government. _There is, of course, the employment of force
by the Government to suppress the insurrection_, as every other
Government necessarily employs force in such cases. But these
incidents by no means constitute a state of war impairing the
sovereignty of the Government, creating belligerent sections, and
entitling foreign States to intervene or to act as neutrals between
them, or in any other way to cast off their lawful obligations to the
nation thus for the moment disturbed. Any other principle than this
would be to resolve government everywhere into a thing of accident and
caprice, and ultimately all human society into a state of perpetual
war.”

Here the facts of the Union, founded on consent, and of the President’s acceptance of the dogma, together with the unfitness of the Federal system for the task of subjugation—a task proper to imperial or despotic governments—are suddenly lost sight of along with the benevolent scheme for calling on the misguided citizens to abandon their “bad enterprise,” and return within the fold of the Union; and this great, glorious, and free Government is driven to confess that its only alternative is the rude and barbarous one hitherto repudiated, of force, such as the most abject monarchy might adopt. To such complexion must even the most beneficent institutions come under the pressure of necessity. And this change of Mr Seward’s tone is contemporaneous with his observation of the sudden appearance of inflexible and enthusiastic resolve on the part of the people of the North to put down the Secession by military power.

At this time two objects are diligently prosecuted by the high-minded Seward, always on the highest grounds. The one is the task of convincing the British Government that it has fallen into a grave error in acknowledging the South as a belligerent, and warning it against receiving the “missionaries of the insurgents,” as he terms the commissioners of the Southern Confederacy. “The cause of the North,” he says, “involves the independence of nations and the right of human nature.” “We feel free to assume that it is the general conviction of men, not only here, but in all other countries, that this Federal Union affords a better system than any other that could be contrived to assure the safety, the peace, the prosperity, the welfare, and the happiness of all the States of which it is composed.” “It is a war,” he says elsewhere, “against human nature;” and again, “The wit of man fails to suggest, not merely a better political system, having the same objects as the present Union, but even any possible substitute for it.” And on the 21st July, “I cannot leave the subject without endeavouring once more, as I have so often done before, to induce the British Government to realise the conviction which I have more than once expressed in this correspondence, that the policy of the Government is one that is based on interests of the greatest importance and sentiments of the highest virtue, and therefore is in no case likely to be changed, whatever may be the varying fortunes of the war at home, or the action of foreign nations on this subject, while the policy of foreign States rests on ephemeral interests of commerce or ambition.” “Sure we are that the transaction now going on in our country involves the progress of civilisation and humanity, and equally sure that our attitude in it is right, and no less sure that our press and our statesmen are equal in ability and influence to any in Europe.”

Manifestly, to countenance any power hostile to so beneficent a system would be almost as bad as to acknowledge Satan and the rebel angels as belligerents. But lest “the cupidity and caprice of Great Britain,” to which, he says, the disunionists will appeal, should render her blind to such high considerations, he takes a lower ground with her, and delivers, May 21, 1861, the following ominous and prophetic warning:—

“Great Britain has but to wait _a few months_, and all her present
inconveniences will cease with our own troubles. If she take a
different course, she will calculate for herself the ultimate as well
as the immediate consequences, and will consider what position she
will hold when she shall have for ever lost the sympathies and
affections of the only nation on whose sympathies and affections she
has a natural claim.”

It is a sad picture thus presented to us of the British Pythias abandoned by the American Damon, and left alone and friendless in the world. Yet with that direful consequence we are threatened unless we accept the idea of neutrality entertained in common by Mr Seward and Mr Bright, who regard it not as a “cold and unfriendly,” but as a highly enthusiastic, condition.

But, as we said, this was not the only point to which the high-minded Secretary at this period directed his efforts. At the Congress of Paris in 1856 the maritime Powers of Europe had come to an agreement in order to mitigate the severities of war, by which, among other stipulations, privateering was abolished so far as the parties to the compact were concerned. In this agreement America had refused to join, unless an article, specially favourable to herself, should be introduced. But the flame of philanthropy which glowed so ardently in Mr Seward’s breast, now lit up the question which had been buried in obscurity since 1857, and he proposed, of course from the most elevated motives, that America should now join the convention. As provision had originally been made for the admission of parties wishing subsequently to accede to it, no difficulty appeared, and everything seemed to work smoothly—Ministers arranging and conceding, conventions made ready for signature, and all going merry as a marriage-bell.

But it had occurred to the suspicious mind of Lord Russell, whose political morals had been debauched by long diplomatic intercourse with the barbaric Cabinets of Europe, and who was incredulous of public virtue even in the immaculate statesmen of America, that a great advantage would accrue to the Northern Government by joining in the Declaration at this juncture, because the abolition of privateering would exclude the South from all the ports of Europe, which would of course still be open to the regular navy of the North. Not that the proposals of Mr Seward were likely to inspire the suspicion; for, taking the lofty grounds of benefit to the human race, his papers on the subject contained but two slight incidental allusions to the minor point. The Provisional Government of the Confederates had, he said, “taken the bad resolution to invite privateers to prey upon the peaceful commerce of the United States.” And on the 21st May he says to Mr Adams, “You already have our authority to propose to her our accession to that Declaration. If she refuse it, it can only be because she is willing to become the patron of privateering when aimed at our devastation.” These are the only hints on the subject given to the American Ministers. Towards foreign Governments the elevated tone of public virtue was never for a moment jarred by the discordant note of immediate advantage.

But the crafty Russell, led by the low cunning of the European diplomatic mind, had, while appearing to accede with perfect frankness to the American proposal, made this seemingly casual remark, “I need scarcely add that, on the part of Great Britain, the engagement will be prospective, and will not invalidate anything already done”—meaning, of course, We shall be happy to receive your adhesion to the compact, but the prohibition of privateering must not apply to the Confederates, whom we have already acknowledged as belligerents.

The manner in which the virtuous statesmen of the Republic viewed this passage or “implied reservation” was highly characteristic. Incapable of guile themselves, they could not suspect that they could be the objects of suspicion. It was impossible to say what might be hidden behind the mysterious words. Mr Seward professed himself totally in the dark, and demanded explanation. Whereupon Lord John declares “that her Majesty does not intend thereby to undertake any engagement which shall have any bearing, direct or indirect, on the internal differences now prevailing in the United States.”

If the high-minded Secretary was startled by the original passage, he was deeply wounded by the explanation. To suppose that the American Government were aiming at any petty advantage over the Confederates in the matter was a point beneath notice. The Minister appointed to conclude the convention says, indeed—

“The natural effect of such an accompaniment would seem to be to imply
that the Government of the United States might be desirous at this
time to take a part in the Declaration, not from any high purpose or
durable policy, but with the view of securing some small temporary
object in the unhappy struggle which is going on at home. Such an
inference would spoil all the value that might be attached to the act
itself.”

It might be supposed that the best way to restore the full value to the act would have been to reject the petty despised advantage by accepting the convention with the reservation. But so deeply have the virtuous statesmen been wounded by the unworthy suspicion, that they have no heart to proceed in the business. They have done their best for humanity, and failed. The reservation was so unusual, so informal, and it so complicated the matter, that the negotiation must be suspended, said the American Secretary—hoping, however, with habitual pathos, that it might be resumed “in some happier time.”

Britannia having thus, by the refusal of the American Government to proceed with the negotiation, clearly constituted herself the patron of privateering, and having also declined to accept Mr Seward’s interpretation of neutrality, must henceforth expect him to regard her as a Puritan conscious of being in a state of grace would regard some wretched backslider still in the bonds of iniquity. But in the midst of his homilies an event had occurred which had forced from him a very natural expression of alarm, the effect of which in the state papers is very much as if Mr Spurgeon, in the delivery of an eloquent sermon, should howl with anguish on feeling a sharp twinge of the gout. Mr Seward’s howl being a short one, we give it entire:—

“[_Confidential._]

DEPARTMENT OF STATE,
WASHINGTON, _July 26, 1861_.

“SIR,—My despatch, No. 42, dated July 21, was delayed beyond the
proper mail-day by circumstances entirely beyond my control. I trust,
however, that it will still be in time.

“Our army of the Potomac on Sunday last met a reverse equally severe
and unexpected. For a day or two the panic which had produced the
result was followed by a panic that seemed to threaten to demoralise
the country. But that evil has ceased already. The result is already
seen in a vigorous reconstruction upon a scale of greater magnitude
and increased enthusiasm.

“It is not likely that anything will now be done here hastily or
inconsiderately affecting our foreign relations.

“I am, sir, respectfully, your obedient servant,

WILLIAM H. SEWARD.

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, Esq.,
&c. &c. &c.”

An interval of three days sufficed, however, in a considerable degree, to restore the elastic spirits of the buoyant Secretary, for on 29th July he says:—