Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

The evening passed quickly and agreeably. I played chess with the reverend prisoner. The man of war read steadily folio history of Marlborough's campaigns, making occasional references to maps and plans. As the clock struck nine, an explosion on the lawn made the windows rattle again. I jumped to my feet, but, seeing that the rest of the company looked surprised at my vivacity, I sat down, guessing that the six-pounder and the coachman had something to do with it.

"Don't be alarmed, Sir," said the General, "it's only gun-fire. We retire about this time."

I took the hint, requested to be shown to my room, undressed, jumped into a camp bedstead, and tried to sleep. Impossible!--the novelty of my day's experiences, the beauty of the night, (for the full moon was shining into the windows,) or perhaps a cup of strong coffee I had swallowed without milk after dinner because the others took it, kept me awake. Finding sleep out of the question, I got up and dressed myself. My chamber was on the ground-floor, and opened upon the lawn. I stepped quietly out into the hazy moonlight, lighted a cigar, and walked towards the river. It was a remarkably fine evening, certainly, but a very damp one. Heavy dew dripped from the trees. I found, as my weed grew shorter, that my fondness for the romantic in Nature waned, and slowly retraced my steps to the house, muttering to myself some of Edgar Poe's ghostly lines:--

"I stand beneath the mystic moon;
An opiate vapor, dewey, dim
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain-top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley."

I was about entering, when a figure advanced suddenly from behind a pillar of the veranda, holding a something in its hand which glittered in the moonlight, and which rattled as it dropped from the perpendicular to the horizontal, pointing at me.

"Who goes there?" said the apparition, in a hoarse voice. "Stand, and give the countersign!"

I recognized the voice of the soldier-servant of the morning. There he was again, that indefatigable coachman, doing duty as sentinel with a musket in his hands. Not knowing what else to say, I replied,--

"It is I, a friend!"

My good grammar was thrown away upon the brute.

"The countersign," he repeated.

"Pooh, pooh!" said I, "I do not know anything about the countersign. I am Mr. Shyster, who came up this morning, when you and the General were doing light-artillery practice on the lawn. Please let me go to my room."

But the brute stood immovable. As I advanced, I heard him cock his musket.

"Good God!" thought I, "this is no joke, after all. This stupid stable-man may have loaded his musket. What if it should go off? If I retreat, I must camp out,--no joke at this season;--rheumatism and a loss of salary, to say the least. This will never do."

And I screamed,--

"General! General Van Bummel!"

"Silence! or I'll march you to the guard-house," thundered the sentinel.

Luckily the General lay, like Irene, "with casement open to the skies." He heard the noise. I recognized his martial tones. I hurriedly explained my situation. He gave me the word; it was Eugene; countersign, Marlborough. This satisfied the Coach-Cerberus, and I passed into bed without further mishap.

The first sound I heard the next morning was the rat-tat-too of a drum. "There goes that d----d coachman again," I said to myself, and turned over for another nap; but a shrill bugle-call brought me to my seat.

Running to the window, I saw two men on horseback in dragoon equipments. The horses were the artillery-nags of yesterday; the riders, the General and his man-at-all-arms. Hurrying on my clothes, I got out of doors in time to see them go at a gallop across the lawn, leap a low hedge at the end of the grass-plot, and disappear in the orchard. Thither I followed fast to see the sport. They reached the boundary-line of the Van-Bummel estate, wheeled, and turned back on a trot. When the General espied me, he waved his sabre and shouted, "Charge!" They galloped straight at me. I had barely time to dodge behind an apple-tree, when they passed like a whirlwind over the spot I had been standing on, and covered me with dirt from the heels of their horses. I walked back to the house, very much annoyed, as men are apt to be, when they think they have compromised their dignity a little by dodging to escape danger from another's mischief or folly. At breakfast, accordingly, I remonstrated with the chief; but he only laughed, and asked me why I did not form a hollow square and let the front rank kneel and fire.

"As soon as you have finished your coffee," he added, "I will take you into the trenches, and there you will be out of danger."

I could not refuse. The trenches were at the bottom of the garden, near the entrance-drive. I had seen them yesterday, and in my ignorance thought of celery; now, I knew better. This morning, a tent was pitched a few yards from a long low wall of sods; and between the tent and the sods there was a small trench, about large enough to hold draining-tiles. Pointing to the wall, the general said,--

"There is Sebastopol," (pronouncing it correctly, accent on the _to_,) "and here," turning to the tent, "are my head-quarters. My sappers have just established a mine under the Quarantine Battery. In a few moments I shall blow it up, and storm the breach, if we make a practicable one."

Here the Protean coachman made his appearance with a leather apron and a broad-axe. He signified that all was ready. A lucifer was rubbed upon a stone, the train ignited, bang went the mine, and over went we all three, prostrated by a shower of turf and mud. The mine had exploded backward, and had annihilated the storming party. Fortunately, the General had economised in powder. Gradually we picked ourselves up, considerably bewildered, but not much hurt. Van Bummel attempted to explain; but I had had enough of war's alarms, and yearned for the safety and peace of Nassau Street. So I bade the warrior good-morning, and took the first down-train, _multa mecum volvens_; "making a revolver of my mind," Van Bummel would have translated it. I knew that our soil produced more soldiers even than France, the fertile mother of red-legged heroes; but I did not expect, in the Nineteenth Century and in the State of New York, to have beheld an avatar of the God Mars.

* * * * *

THINE.

The tide will ebb at day's decline:
_Ich bin dein!_
Impatient for the open sea,
At anchor rocks the tossing ship,
The ship which only waits for thee;
Yet with no tremble of the lip
I say again, thy hand in mine,
_Ich bin dein!_

I shall not weep, or grieve, or pine.
_Ich bin dein!_
Go, lave once more thy restless hands
Afar within the azure sea,--
Traverse Arabia's scorching sands,--
Fly where no thought can follow thee,
O'er desert waste and billowy brine:
_Ich bin dein!_

Dream on the slopes of Apennine:
_Ich bin dein!_
Stand where the glaciers freeze and frown,
Where Alpine torrents flash and foam,
Or watch the loving sun go down
Behind the purple hills of Rome,
Leaving a twilight half divine:
_Ich bin dein!_

Thy steps may fall beside the Rhine:
_Ich bin dein!_
Slumber may kiss thy drooping lids
Amid the mazes of the Nile,
The shadow of the Pyramids
May cool thy feet,--yet all the while,
Though storms may beat, or stars may shine,
_Ich bin dein!_

Where smile the hills of Palestine,
_Ich bin dein!_
Where rise the mosques and minarets,--
Where every breath brings flowery balms,--
Where souls forget their dark regrets
Beneath the strange, mysterious palms,--
Where the banana builds her shrine,--
_Ich bin dein!_

Too many clusters break the vine:
_Ich bin dein!_
The tree whose strength and life outpour
In one exultant blossom-gush
Must flowerless be forevermore:
We walk _this_ way but once, friend;--hush!
Our feet have left no trodden line:
_Ich bin dein!_

Who heaps his goblet wastes his wine:
_Ich bin dein!_
The boat is moving from the land;--
I have no chiding and no tears;--
Now give me back my empty hand
To battle with the cruel years,--
Behold, the triumph shall be mine!
_Ich bin dein!_

* * * * *

THE REPRESENTATIVE ART.

No art is worth anything that does not embody an idea,--that is not representative: otherwise, it is like a body without a soul, or the image of some divinity that never had existence. Art needs, indeed, to be individualized, to betray the characteristics of the artist, to be himself infused into his work; but more than this, it needs to typify, to illustrate the character of the age,--to be of a piece with other expressions of the sentiment that animates other men at the time. It must be one note in the concert, and that not discordant,--neither behind time nor ahead of it,--neither in the wrong key nor the other mode: you don't want Verdi in one of Beethoven's symphonies; you don't want Mozart in Rossini's operas. No art ever has lived that was not the genuine product of the era in which it appeared; no art ever can live that is not such a product: it may, perchance, have a temporary or fictitious success, but it can neither really and truly exert an influence at the moment of its highest triumph, nor afterwards remain a power among men, unless it reflect the spirit of the epoch, unless it show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

All greatness consists in this: in being alive to what is going on around one; in living actually; in giving voice to the thought of humanity; in saying to one's fellows what they want to hear or need to hear at that moment; in being the concretion, the result, of the influences of the present world. In no other way can one affect the world than in responding thus to its needs, in embodying thus its ideas. You will see, in looking to history, that all great men have been a piece of their time; take them out and set them elsewhere, they will not fit so well; they were made for their day and generation. The literature which has left any mark, which has been worthy of the name, has always mirrored what was doing around it; not necessarily daguerreotyping the mere outside, but at least reflecting the inside,--the thoughts, if not the actions of men,--their feelings and sentiments, even if it treated of apparently far-off themes. You may discuss the Greek republics in the spirit of the modern one; you may sing idyls of King Arthur in the very mood of the nineteenth century. Art, too, will be seen always to have felt this necessity, to have submitted to this law. The great dramatists of Greece, like those of England, all flourished in a single period, blossomed in one soil; the sculptures of antiquity represented the classic spirit, and have never been equalled since, because they were the legitimate product of that classic spirit. You cannot have another Phidias till man again believes in Jupiter. The Gothic architecture, how meanly is it imitated now! What cathedrals built in this century rival those of Milan or Strasbourg or Notre Dame? Ah! there is no such Catholicism to inspire the builders; the very men who reared them would not be architects, if they lived to-day. And the Italian painters, the Angelos and Raphaels and Da Vincis and Titians, who were geniuses of such universal power that they builded and carved and went on embassies and worked in mathematics only with less splendid success than they painted,--they painted because the age demanded it; they painted as the age demanded; they were religious, yet sensuous, like their nation; they felt the influence of the Italian sun and soil. Their faith and their history were compressed into The Last Judgment and the Cartoons; their passion as well as their power may be recognized in The Last Supper and The Venus of the Bath.

There is always a necessity for this expression of the character of the age. This spirit of our age, this mixed materialistic and imaginative spirit,--this that abroad prompts Russian and Italian wars, and at home discovers California mines,--that realizes gorgeous dreams of hidden gold, and Napoleonic ideas of almost universal sway,--that bridges Niagara, and under-lays the sea with wire, and, forgetful of the Titan fate, essays to penetrate the clouds,--this spirit, so practical that those who choose to look on one side only of the shield can see only perjured monarchs trampling on deceived or decaying peoples, and backwoodsmen hewing forests, and begrimed laborers setting up telegraph-poles or working at printing-presses,--this spirit also so full of imagination,--which has produced an outburst of music (that most intangible and subtile and imaginative of arts) such as the earth never heard before,--which is developing in the splendid, showy life, in the reviving taste for pageantry that some supposed extinct, in the hurried, crowded incidents that will fill up the historic page that treats of the nineteenth century,--this spirit is sure to get expression in art.

The American people, cosmopolitan, concrete, the union, the result rather of a union of so many nationalities, ought surely to do its share towards this expression. The American people surely represents the century,--has much of its spirit: is full of unrest; is eminently practical, but practical only in embodying poetical or lofty ideas; is demonstrative and excitable; resembles the French much and in many things,--the French, who are at the head of modern and European civilization,--who think and feel deeply, but do not keep their feelings hidden. The Americans, too, like expression: when they admire a Kossuth or a Jenny Lind, a patriot exile or a foreign singer, all the world is sure to know of their admiration; when they are delighted at some great achievement in science, like the laying of an Atlantic Cable, they demonstrate their delight. They make their successful generals Presidents; they give dinners to Morphy and banquets to Cyrus Field. They are thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the age. Therefore they are artistic.

How amazed some will be at the proposition,--amazed that the age should be called an artistic one,--amazed that Americans should be considered an artistic nation! Yet art is only the expression in outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual grace,--the sacrament of the imagination. Art is an incarnation in colors or stone or music or words of some subtile essence which requires the embodiment. We all have delicate fancies, lofty imaginings, profound sentiments; the artist expresses them for us. If, then, this age be one that requires expression for its ideas, that is practical, that insists on accomplishing its designs, on creating its children, on producing its results, it is an artistic age. For art works; a poet is a maker, according to the Greeks: and all artists are poets; they all produce; they all do; they all make. They do just what all the practical men of this practical age are doing, what even the Gradgrinds are doing: they embody ideas; they put thoughts into facts. A quiet, contemplative age is not an artistic one; art has ever flourished in stirring times: Grecian wars and Guelphic strife have been its fostering influences. An artist is very far from being an idle dreamer; he works as hard as the merchant or the mechanic,--works, too, physically as well as mentally, with his hand as well as his head.

This is all statement: let us have some facts; let us embody our ideas. Do you not call Meyerbeer, with his years of study and effort and application, a worker? Do you not call Verdi, who has produced thirty operas, a worker? Do you not imagine that Turner labored on his splendid pictures? Do you not know how Crawford toiled and spun away his nerves and brain? Have you not heard of the incessant and tremendous attention that for many months Church bestowed on the canvas that of late attracted the admiration of English critics and their Queen? Was Rachel idle? Have these artists not spent the substance of themselves as truly as any of your politicians or your soldiers or your traders? Can you not trace in them the same energy, the same effort, the same determination as in Louis Napoleon, as in Zachary Taylor, as in Stephen Girard? Are not they also representative?

And their works,--for by these shall ye know them,--do they reflect in nothing this fitful, uneasy, yet splendid intensity of to-day? Can you not read in the colors on Turner's canvas, can you not see in the rush of Church's Niagara, can you not hear in the strains of the Traviata, can you not perceive in the tones and looks of Ristori, just what you find in the successful men in other spheres of life? Rothschild's fortune speaks no more plainly than the Robert le Diable; George Sand's novels and Carlyle's histories tell the same story as Kossuth's eloquence and Garibaldi's deeds. The artists are as alive to-day as any in the the world. For, again and again, art is not an outside thing; its professors, its lovers, are not placed outside the world; they are in it and of it as absolutely as the rest. You who think otherwise, remember that Verdi's name six months ago was the watchword of the Italian revolutionists; remember that certain operas are forbidden now to be played in Naples, lest they should arouse the countrymen of Masaniello; remember, or learn, if you did not know, how in New York, last June, all the singers in town offered their services for a benefit to the Italian cause, and all the _habitués_, late though the season was, crowded to their places to see an opera whose attractiveness had been worn out and whose novelty was nearly gone. You who think that art is an interest unworthy of men who live in the world, that it is a thing apart, what say you to the French, the most actual, the most practical, the most worldly of peoples, and yet the fondest of art in all its phases,--the French, who remembered the statues in the Tuileries amid the massacres of the First Revolution, and spared the architecture of antiquity when they bombarded the city of the Caesars?

Consider, too, the growing love for art in practical America; remark the crowds of newly rich who deck their houses with pictures and busts, even though they cannot always appreciate them; remember that nearly every prominent town in the country has its theatre; that the opera, the most refined luxury of European civilization, considered for long an affectation beyond every other, is relished here as decidedly as in Italy or France. In New York, Boston, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, there are buildings exclusively appropriated to this new form of art, this exotic, expensive amusement. These opera-houses, too, illustrate most aptly the progress of other arts. They are adorned with painting and gilding and carving; they are as sumptuous in accommodation as the palaces of European potentates; they are lighted with a brilliancy that Aladdin's garden never rivalled; they are thronged, with crowds as gayly dressed as those that fill the saloons of Parisian belles; and the singers and actors who interpret the thoughts of mighty foreign masters are the same who delight the Emperor of the French when he pays a visit to the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Orchestras of many instruments discourse most eloquent music, and involuted strains are criticized in learned style, in capitals thousands of miles from the seashore. And there is no appreciation of art in all this! there is no embodiment of the love of the age for material magnificence, there is no poetry incarnated into form, in this combination of splendors rivalling the opium-eater's visions! The Americans are a dull, stupid people, immersed in business; art has no effect upon them; it is despised among them; it can never prosper here!

The stage, indeed, in its various forms, seems more fully to manifest and illustrate the artistic influence among Americans than any other art. It often addresses those whom more refined solicitations might never reach. Those who would turn from Church's or Page's pictures with indifference are frequently attracted by the representations in a theatre. The pictures there are more alive, more real, more intense, and fascinate many unable to appreciate the recondite charms of the canvas. The grace of attitude, the splendid expression, the intellectual art of Ristori or Rachel may impress those who fail to discover the same merits in colder stone, in Crawford's marble or the statues of Palmer; and they may sometimes learn to relish even the delicate beauties of Shakspeare's text, from hearing it fitly declaimed, who would never spell out its meaning by themselves. The drama is certainly superior to other arts while its reign lasts, because of its veriness, its actuality. He must be dull of imagination, indeed, who cannot give himself up for a while to its illusions; he must be stupid who cannot open his senses to its delights or waken his intellect to receive its influences.

Neither can a taste for the stage be declared one which only the ignorant or vulgar share. Though away in the wilds of California a theatre was often erected next after a hotel, the second building in a town, and the strolling player would summon the miners by his trumpet when not one was in sight, and instantly a swarm peeped forth from the earth, like the armed men who sprang from the furrows that Cadmus ploughed,--though the wildest and rudest of Western cities and the wildest and rudest inhabitants of Western towns are quick to acknowledge the charms of the stage,--yet also the most highly cultured and the most intellectual Americans pay the same tribute to this art. We have all seen, within a few years, one of the most profound scholars and most prominent divines in the country proclaiming his approbation of the drama. We may find, to-day, in any Eastern city, members of the liberal clergy at an opera, and sometimes at a play. The scholars and writers and artists and thinkers, as well as the people of leisure and of fashion, frequent places of amusement, not only for amusement, but to cultivate their tastes, to exercise their intellects, ay, and oftentimes to refine their hearts. The splendid homage paid in England not long ago to the drama, when the highest nobility and the first statesmen in the land were present at a banquet in honor of Charles Kean, is evidence enough that no puerile or uncultivated taste is this which relishes the theatre. Goethe presiding over the playhouse at Weimar, Euripides and Sophocles writing tragedies, the greatest genius of the English language acting in his own productions at the Globe Theatre, people like Siddons and Kean and Cushman and Macready illustrating this art with the resources of their fine intellects and great attainments,--surely these need scarcely be mentioned, to relieve the drama from the reproach that some would put upon it, of puerility.

New York is, perhaps, more of a representative city than any other in the land. It is an aggregation from all the other portions of the country; it is the result, the precipitate, of the whole. It has no distinctive, individual character of its own; it is a condensation of all the rest, a focus. Thither all the country goes at times. Restless, fitful, changing, yet still the same in its change; like the waves of the sea, that toss and roll and move away, and still the mighty mass is ever there. New York, in its various phases and developments, its crowded and cosmopolitan population, its out-door kaleidoscopic splendor, is indeed a representative of the entire country. It has not the purely literary life of Boston, nor so distinctive an intellectual character; it is not so stamped by the impress of olden times as Philadelphia; but it has an outside garb significant of the inward nature. It is like the face of a great actor, splendid in expression, full of character, changing with a thousand changing emotions, but betraying a great soul beneath them all. New York is artistic just as America is artistic, just as the age is artistic: not, perhaps, in the loftiest or most refined sense, but in the sense that art is an expression, in tangible form, of ideas. New York is a great thought uttered. It is like those fruits or seeds which germinate by turning themselves inside out; the soul is on the outside, crusted all over it, but none the less soul for all that.

And New York illustrates this idea of the drama being the representative art of to-day. The theatre there, including the opera, is a great established fact,--as important nearly as it was in the palmiest days of the Athenian republic, or on the road to be of as much consequence as it is in Paris, the representative city of the world. Fifty thousand people nightly crowd twenty different theatres in New York. From the splendid halls where Grisi and Gazzaniga and La Borde and La Grange have by turns translated into sound the ideas of Meyerbeer and Bellini and Donizetti and Mozart, to the little rooms where sixpenny tickets procure lager-beer as well as music for the purchaser, the drama is worshipped. And this not only by New-Yorkers: not only do those who lead the busy, excited life of the metropolis acquire a taste, as some might say, for a factitious excitement, but all strangers hasten to the theatres. The sober farmer, the citizens from plodding interior towns, the gay Southerners, accustomed almost exclusively to social amusements, the denizens of rival Bostons and Philadelphias all frequent the operas and playhouses of New York. When the richer portion of its inhabitants have left the hot and sultry town, or, in mid-winter, are immersed in the more exclusive pleasures of fashionable life, even then the theatres are thronged; and in September and October you shall find all parts of the country represented in their boxes and parquets,--proving that this is not an exclusively metropolitan taste, that it is shared by the whole nation, that in this also New York is truly representative.

Boston typifies a peculiar phase of American life; it is the illustration, the exponent, of the cultivated side of our nationality; its thought, its action, its character are taken abroad as symbols of the national thought and action and character, in whatever relates to literature or art. The Professor said truly, Boston does really in some sort stand for the brain of America. Well the brain of America appreciates the stage. It is but a few months since the culture and distinction of Boston nightly crowded a small and inferior theatre, to witness the personations of the young genius who is destined at no distant day to rival the proudest names of the drama. The most brilliant successes Edwin Booth has yet achieved have been achieved in Boston; scholars and wits and poets and professors crowd the boxes when he plays; women of talent write poems in his praise and publish them in the "Atlantic Monthly"; professors of Harvard College send him congratulatory letters; artists paint and carve his intellectual beauty; and fashion follows in the wake of intellect, alike acknowledging his merits. Boston recognized those merits, too, when they were first presented to its appreciation; and now that they verge nearer upon maturity, her appreciation is quickened and her applause redoubled. It cannot be said that the taste or culture of the nation is indifferent to histrionic excellence, when absolute excellence is found.

No other art is yet on such a footing among us. Neither is this because of our partially developed civilization. It is equally so abroad; where the nations are oldest and best established in culture, there, too, a similar state of things exists. No school in painting, no style of sculpture, no kind of architecture has made such an impression on the age as its music, as its dramatic music, its opera. This speaks to all nations, in all languages. No writer, though he write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or Lamartine, or Dudevant, can hope for such an audience as Verdi or Meyerbeer. No orator speaks to such crowds as Rossini; no Everett or Kossuth, or Gavazzi or Spurgeon, has so many listeners as Donizetti. For the stage is the art of to-day,--perhaps more especially, but still not, exclusively, the operatic stage; the theatre in its various forms represents the feeling of the time so as Grecian and Gothic architecture and Italian painting have in their time done for their time,--so as no pictures, no architecture, no statuary can now do. Painting and statuary, when they do anything towards representing this age, incarnate the dramatic spirit; the literature that has most influence today is journalism,--the effective, present, actual, short-lived, dramatic newspaper, where all the actors speak for themselves: other literature has its listeners, but it lags behind; other art has its appreciators, but it cannot keep pace with the march of armies, with the rush to California, with the swarm to Australia; there is no art on these outskirts but the dramatic. That travels with the advancing mass in every exodus; that went with Dr. Kane to the North Pole (he had private theatricals aboard the Resolute); that alone gave utterance immediately to the latest cry of humanity in the Italian War.

Neither can it be said that the theatre has no more consequence now than it has always enjoyed. At the time when Gothic architects and Italian painters expressed the meaning of their own ages, there was nothing like a real drama in existence, and the Roman theatre was never comparable with ours. The Greeks, indeed, had a stage which was an important element of their civilization, and which took the character of their time, giving and receiving influence; but their stage was essentially different from that of the moderns. Its success did not depend upon the individual performer; its pageantry was perhaps as splendid as what we now see; but the play of the countenance, that great intellectual opportunity offered an actor by our drama, was not known. In this see also a characteristic of the present age. Individuality is a distinctive peculiarity of the nineteenth century; it has been for centuries gradually becoming more possible; but every man now works his own way, acts himself, more completely than ever before. Therefore appropriate is it that the drama should give importance to the individual, and allow a great actor to incarnate and illustrate in his own form and face feelings and passions that formerly were only hinted at; for remember that the Greek players usually wore masks, while their amphitheatres were so large that in any event the expression of the features was lost.

With this individuality, this opportunity for each to develop his own identity and intensity, the nineteenth century strangely combines another peculiarity, that of association. All these units, these atoms, so marvellously distinct, are incorporated into one grand whole; though each be more, by and of himself, than ever before, yet the great power, the great motor, is the mass. The mass is made powerful by the added importance given to each individual. And you may trace without conceit a state of things behind the scenes very similar to this in front of the footlights. In the theatre, also, the many workers contribute to a grand result. The manager would be as powerless in his little empire, without important assistants, as a monarch without ministers and people. What makes the French army and the American so irresistible is the thought that each private is more than a machine, is an intellectual being, understands what his general wants, fights with his bayonet at Solferino or his musket at Monterey on his own account, yet subject to the supreme control. And the theatre, with all its actors and scene-painters and costumers and carpenters and musicians, is only an army on a different scale. The forces of the stage answer to the generals and colonels, the marshals and privates, all marching and working and fighting for the same end. Those splendid dramatic triumphs of Charles Kean were only illustrations of the principle of association,--only illustrations of the readiness of the stage to adapt itself to the times, to seize hold of whatever is suggested by the outside world, to appropriate the discoveries of Layard and the revelations of Science to its own uses,--illustrations, too, of the importance of the individual Kean, as well as of the crowd of clever subordinates.

That the theatre feels this reflex influence, that it appreciates all that is going on around it, that it is not asleep, that it is penetrated with the spirit of the century, whether that spirit be good or evil, the selection of plays now popular is another proof. In France, where the success of the histrionic art now culminates, a contemporaneous drama is flourishing, the absolute society of the day is represented. That society has faults, and the stage mirrors them. "La Dame aux Camélias," "Les Filles de Marbre," "Le Demi-Monde" reflect exactly the peculiarities of the life they aim to imitate. And these very plays, whose influence is so often condemned, would never have had the popularity they have attained in nearly every city of the civilized world, had there not been Marguerite Gautiers and Traviatas outside of Paris as well as in it. Another attempt, perhaps not an entirely successful one, but still a significant attempt, has been made in this country to produce a contemporaneous drama. "Jessie Brown" and "The Poor of New York," and other plays directly daguerreotyping ordinary incidents, at any rate show that the drama is an art that responds instantly to the pulses of the time.

But it ia not necessary for the stage to daguerreotype; it mirrors more truly when it embodies the spirit. And never before was there an age whose spirit was more theatrical, in the best sense of the term; full of outside expression, but also full of inside feeling; working, accomplishing, putting into actual form its ideas; incarnating its passions; intellectual, yet passionate; lofty in imagination, yet practical in exemplification; showy, but significantly showy,--theatrical. An art, then, that is all this, surely expresses as no other art does or can the character of the nineteenth century,--surely is the representative art.

* * * * *

ROBA DI ROMA.

THE EVIL EYE AND OTHER SUPERSTITIONS.

I have already, in a former article, spoken of some of the superstitions belonging to the Church which are prevalent in Italy; but there are other, and, so to speak, _lay_ superstitions, which also claim a place,--and to them this chapter shall be dedicated.

It is dangerous ground, a twilight marsh, where the will-o'-wisps light us, over which I propose to lead you; and had I not armed myself with all sorts of amulets, I should shrink from the enterprise. But the famous weapon with which Luther drove away the Evil One is at my side, potent as evil, I hope, so long as a pen can be put into it,--and Saint Dunstan's friend is in the corner, ready, at a pinch, for service; and having shut out all those spirits which so sorely tempted Saint Anthony, and locked my door to dark eyes and blue eyes and dark hair and blonde hair, I may hope to get through my dangerous chapter, and--

Strange fatality!--one of Saint Anthony's spirits tempts me from the other room, even at the moment I boast; but I resist,--manfully dipping my pen into Luther's stronghold,--and it vanishes, and leaves me face to face with--the Evil Eye. Yes! it is the Evil Eye, the _Jettatura_ of Italy, that we are boldly to face for an hour.

This is one of the oldest and most interesting superstitions that have come down to us from the past; and as it still lives and flourishes in Italy with a singular vitality and freshness, it may be worth while to trace it back to some of its early sources. Its birth-place was the East, where it existed in dillomnt forms amongst almost every people. Thence it was imported into Greece, where it was called _Baskania_, and was adopted by the Romans under the name of _Fascinum_. Solomon himself alludes to it in the Book of Wisdom. Isigonus relates that among the Triballi and Illyrii there were men who by a glance fascinated and killed those whom they looked upon with angry eyes; and Nymphodorus asserts that there were fascinators whose voices had the power to destroy flocks, to blast trees, and to kill infants. In Scythia, also, according to Apollonides, there were women of this class, "_quoe vocantur Bithyoe_"; and Phylarchus says that in Pontus there was a tribe, called the Thibii, and many others, of the same nature and having the same powers. The testimony of Algazeli is to the same effect; and he adds, that these fascinators have a peculiar power over women. We have also the testimony of Aristotle, Pliny, and Plutarch, who all speak as believers, while Solinus enumerates certain families of fascinators who exerted their influence _voce et linguâ_, and Philostratus makes special mention of Apolloius Thyaneus as having been possessed of these wonderful powers. Indeed, nearly all the old writers agree in recognizing the existence of the faculty of fascination; and among the Romans it was so universally admitted, that in the "Decemvirales Tabulae" there was a law prohibiting the exercise of it under a capital penalty:--"_Ne pelliciunto alienas segeles, excantando, ne incantando; ne agrum defraudanto._" Some jurisconsults skilled in the ancient law say that boys are sometimes fascinated by the burning eyes of these infected men so as to lose all their health and strength. Pliny relates that one Caius Furius Cresinus, a freedman, having been very successful in cultivating his farms, became an object of envy, and was publicly accused of poisoning by arts of fascination his neighbors' fruits; whereupon he brought into the Forum his daughter, ploughs, tools, and oxen, and, pointing to them, said,--"These which I have brought, and my labor, sweat, watching, and care, (which I cannot bring,) are all my arts." Let those who consider the moving of tables as wonderful listen to the surprising statement of Pliny as to an occurrence in his own time, when a whole olive-orchard belonging to a certain Vectius Marcellus, a Roman knight, crossed over the public way, and took its place, ground and all, on the other side. [Footnote: Plinii _Nat. Hist._ Lib. xvii. cap. 38.] This same fact is also alluded to by Virgil in his Eighth Eclogue, on _Pharmaceutria_ (all of which, by the way, he stole from Theocritus):--

"Atque satas aliò vidi traducere messes."

"Now," says the worthy Vairus, who has written an elaborate treatise on this subject in Latin, well worthy to be examined, "let no man laugh at these stories as old wives' tales, (_aniles nugas_,) nor, because the reason passes our knowledge, let us turn them into ridicule, for infinite are the things which we cannot understand, (_infinita enim prope sunt quorum rationem adipisci nequimus_); but rather than turn all miracles out of Nature because we cannot understand them, let us make that fact the beginning and reason of investigation. For does not Solomon in his Book of Wisdom say, '_Fascinatio malignitatis obscurat bona'?_ and does not Dominus Paulus cry out to the Galatians, '_O insensati Galatoe, quis vos fascinavit'?_ which the best interpreters admit to refer to those whose burning eyes (_oculos urentes_) with a single look blast all persons, and especially boys."

It seems to have been a peculiarity in the superstitions as to the _fascinum_, that boys and women were specially susceptible to its influence; and in this respect, as well as in some of the symptoms of fascination, it bears a curious resemblance to the effects of modern witchcraft as practised in New England. Dionysius Carthusianus, speaking of the nomad tribes of the Biarmii and Amaxobii, who, according to him, were most skilful fascinators, says that they so affected persons with their curse that they lost their freedom of will and became insane and idiotic, and often wasted away in extreme leanness and corruption, and so perished: "_ut liberi non sint nec mentis compotes, soepe ad extremam maciem deveniant, et tabescendo dispereant._" Olaus Magnus agrees with him in these symptoms; and Hieronymus says, that, when infants suddenly grow lean, waste away, twist about as if in pain, and sometimes scream out and cry in a wonderful way, you may be certain that they have been fascinated. This, to be sure, looks mightily like a diagnosis for worms; but we would not measure our wits with the grave Hieronymus. Still, as an amulet against such fascination, "Jaynes's Vermifuge" might be suggested as efficient, or at least a grain or two of _Santonina_.

In Abyssinia, it is supposed that men who work in iron or pottery are peculiarly endowed with this fatal power of fascination, and in consequence of this prejudice they are expelled from society and even from the privilege of partaking of the holy sacrament. They are known by the name of _Buda_, and, though excluded from the more sacred rites of the Church, profess great respect for religion, and are surpassed by none in the strictness of their fasts. All convulsions and hysterical disorders are attributed to these unfortunate artificers; and they are also supposed to have the power of changing themselves into hyenas and other ravenous beasts. Nathaniel Pearce, the African traveller, relates that the Abyssinians are so fully convinced that these unhappy men are in the habit of rifling graves in their character of hyenas, that no one will venture to eat _quareter_ or dried meat in their houses, nor any flesh, unless it be raw, or unless they have seen it killed. These Budas usually wear earrings of a peculiar shape, and Pearce states that he has frequently seen them in the ears of hyenas that have been caught or trapped, and confesses, that, although he had taken considerable pains to investigate the subject, he had never been able to discover how these ornaments came there; and Mr. Coffin, his friend, relates a story of one of these transformations which took place under his own eyes. [Footnote: Herodotus makes the same statement as to the Buda. "They are said to be evil-minded and enchanters," he says, "that for a day every year change themselves into wolves. This the Scythians and Greeks who dwell there affirm with great oaths. But they do not persuade me of it."--Herod. Lib. iii. cap. 7.

See on this subject _Life and Adventures of Nathaniel Pearce_, and _Nubia and Abyssinia_, by Rev. Michael Russell. Petronius's story of a Versipelles is well known.]

This is the old superstition of the were-wolf, which existed also among the Greeks and Romans. Those endowed with this power of transforming themselves into beasts were called _Versipelles_. Pliny makes mention of them, and cites from a Greek author the case of a man "who lived nine years in the shape of a wolf"; but, credulous as he is, he says that the superstition "is a fabulous opinion, not worthy of credit." For myself, I can say that I have known many men who were wolves; and we all remember what Queen Labe used to do with her lovers.

Fascination was of two kinds, moral and natural. Those in whom the power was moral could exert it only by the exercise of their will; but those in whom it was natural could but keep exercising it unconsciously. And these latter were the most terrible. It is generally explained by ancient writers as being a power of the spirit or imagination, (as they termed it.) exhibited in persons of a peculiar organization, and diffusing _radios salutares vel perniciosos_. Though the terms employed by them, as well as their notions of its origin, are very unphilosophical and vague, it is plain that they considered it as a species of mesmeric or biologic power, operating by nervous impression. The fascinator generally endeavored to provoke in his victims an excited and pleased attention, for in this condition they were peculiarly predisposed to his influence. And inasmuch as persons are thrown off their guard of reserve and attracted by praise, those who flattered excessively were looked upon with suspicion; and it was a universally recognized rule of good manners and morals, that every one in praising another should be careful not to do so immoderately, lest he should fascinate even against his will. Hieronymus Fracastorius, in his treatise "On Sympathy and Antipathy," thus states the fact and the philosophy,--and who shall dare gainsay the conclusions of one so learned in science, medicine, and astrology as this distinguished man?--"We read," he says, "that there were certain families in Crete who fascinated by praising, and this is doubtless quite possible. For as there exists in the nature of some persons a poison which is ejaculated through their eyes by evil spirits, there is no reason why infants and even grown persons should not be peculiarly injured by this fascination of praise. For praise creates a peculiar pleasure, and pleasure in turn, as we have already said, first dilates and opens the heart and then the spirit, and then the whole face and especially the eyes,--so that all these doors are opened to receive the poison which is ejaculated by the fascinator. Wherefore it is most proper, whenever we intend to praise a person, that we should warn him, and use some form to avert the ill effects of our words, as by saying, 'May it be of no injury to you!' There are, indeed, some, who, when they are praised, avert their faces, not to indicate that praise in itself is unpleasant, but to avoid fascination; it being thought that fascination is often effected by means of praise";[1] or in other words, the poison being given in the honey of flattery. Now in order to close up this _dilatationem_ or opening of the system, a _corona baccaris_ was worn, which, by its odoriferous and constipating qualities, produced this effect, as Dioscorides assures us.[2] Virgil, in his Seventh Eclogue, alludes to the same, antidote:--

"Aut si ultra placitum laudant, baccare frontem Cingite, ne vati noceat mala lingua futuro."

[Footnote 1: Hier. Fracastorius, _De Sympathiâ et Antipathiâ_, Lib. i. cap. 23. See also Vincentius Alsarius, _De Invid. et Fasc. Vet._, in Graevius, _Thes. Rom. Antiq._ Vol. xii. p. 890.]

[Footnote 2: Lib. iii. cap. 46, confirmed also by Athenaeus, _Deipnos_. Lib. iii.]

Tertullian, in his work "De Virginibus Velandis," states the same fact as Fracastorius, and says that among the heathens there are persons who are possessed of a terrible somewhat which they call _Fascinum_, effected by excessive praise: _"Nam est aliquod etiam apud Ethnicos metuendum, quod Fascinum vocant, infeliciorem laudis et gloriae enormioris eventum_."

To avert this evil influence, every well-mannered person among the ancients said, "_Proefiscine_," before wishing well to another,--as clearly appears from the following passage cited by Charisius [Footnote: _Inst. Gram._ Lib. iv.] from Titinius in "Setina." One person exclaims, "_Paula mea, amabo----_" Whereupon a friend who stands by says, "He was going to praise Paula!" "_Ecce qui loquitur, Paulam puellam laudare parabat!_" And another friend present cries out, "By Pollux! you should better say, '_Proefiscini_,' or you may fascinate her": "_Pol! tu in laudem addito Proefiscini, ne puella fascinaretur_." [Footnote: See also Turnebi _Comm. in Orat. Sec. contra P.S. Rullum de Leg. Agrar._ M.T. Ciceronis.] This same custom exists at the present day among the Turks, who always accompany a compliment to you or to anything belonging to you with the phrase, _"Mashallah!"_ (God be praised!)--thus referring the good gifts you possess to the Higher Spirit. To omit this is a breach of courtesy, and in such case the other person instantly adds it in order to avert fascination; for the superstition is, that, if this phrase be omitted, we may seem to refer all good gifts to our own merit instead of God's grace, and so provoke the divine wrath. The same custom also exists in Italy; and the common reply to any salutation in which your looks or health may be complimented is, "_Grazia a Dio!_" In some parts of Italy, if you praise a pretty child in the street, or even if you look earnestly at it, the nurse will be sure to say, "_Dio la benedica!_" so as to cut off all ill-luck; and if you happen to be walking with a child and catch any person watching it, such person will invariably employ some such phrase to show you that he does not mean to do it injury, or to cast a spell of _jettatura_ upon it. The modern Greeks are even more jealous of praise, and if you compliment a child of theirs, you are expected to spit three times at him and say, [Greek: Na maen baskanthaes], ("May no evil come to you!") or mutter [Greek: Skordo], ("Garlic,") which has a special power as a counter-charm. So, too, in Corsica, the peasants are strict believers in the _jettatura_ of praise, which they call _l'annocchiatura_,--supposing, that, if any evil influence attend you, your good wishes will turn into curses. They are therefore very careful in praising, and sometimes express themselves in language the very reverse of what they intend,--as, "'_Va, coquine!'_ says Bandalaccio, in M. Merimée's pleasant story of "Colomba," '_sois excommuniée, sois maudite, friponne!' Car Bandalaccio, superstitieux comme tous les bandits, craignait de fasciner les enfans en les addressant les bénédictions et les éloges. On sait que les puissances mystérieuses qui président à l'annocchiatura ont la mauvaise habitude d'exécuter le contraire de nos souhaits._" Perhaps our familiar habit of calling our children "scamp" and "rascal," when we are caressing them, may be founded on a worn-out superstition of the same kind.

But it is not only praise administered by others which may inflict evil upon us,--we must also be specially careful not to have too "gude a conceit of ourselves," lest we thereby draw down upon us the fate of a certain Eutelidas, who, having regarded his image in the water with peculiar self-satisfaction and laudation, immediately lost his health, and from that time forward was afflicted with sore diseases. During a supper at the house of Metrius Florus, where, among others, Plutarch, Soclarus, and Caius, the son-in-law of Florus, were guests, a curious and interesting conversation took place on the subject of the _Fascinum_, which is reported by Plutarch in one of his Symposia. The existence of the power of fascination was admitted by all, and a philosophical explanation of its phenomena was attempted. In reply to some suggestions of Plutarch, Soclarus says there is no doubt that their ancestors fully believed in this power, and then cites the case of Eutelidas as being well known to his auditors, and celebrated by some poet in these lines:--

"Eutelidas was once a beauteous youth,
But, luckless, in the wave his face beholding,
Himself he fascinates, and pines away." [1]

[Footnote 1: Plutarchi _Symp_. V. Prob. VII.]

Fascination was excited by touch, voice, and look. The fascination by touch was simply mesmerism, or rather the biology of the present day, in an undeveloped stage. There were said to be four qualities of touch,--_calidus, humidus, frigidus, et siccus_, or hot, cold, moist, and dry,--according to which persons were active or passive in the exercise of the fascinum. Its function was double, by raising or by lowering the arm,--"_modo per arteriæ elevationem, modo per ejusdem submissionem_" says the worthy Vairits; "for," he continues, "when the artery is thrown out and is open, the spirits are emitted with wonderful celerity, and in some imperceptible manner are carried to the thing to fascinate it. And because the artery has its origin in the heart, the spirits issuing thence retain its infected and vitiated nature, and according to its depravity fascinate and destroy."

This power of touch is recognized in all history and in all climes. All who saw Christ desired to touch his garment, and so receive some healing virtue; and his miracles of cure he almost always performed by his hand. When the woman who had the issue of blood came behind him and touched him, Jesus asked who touched him, and said,--"Somebody hath touched me; for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me." It has always been a popular superstition that the scrofula could be cured by the touch of a king or of the seventh son of a seventh son. The old belief that the body of a murdered man would distill blood, if his murderer's hand were placed on him, is also of the same class.

Descending to the sphere of animals, we find some curious facts having relation to this power. The electrical eel, for instance, has the faculty of overcoming and numbing his prey by this means. And among the Arabs, according to Gerard, the French lion-killer, whoever inhales the breath of the lion goes mad.