Chapter XII: The Apollinean Institute (1)

_With Extracts from the "Report of the Committee."_

The readers of this narrative will hardly expect any elaborate details of the educational management of the Apollinean Institute. They cannot be supposed to take the same interest in its affairs as was shown by the Annual Committees who reported upon its condition and prospects. As these Committees were, however, an important part of the mechanism of the establishment, some general account of their organization and a few extracts from the Report of the one last appointed may not be out of place.

Whether Mr. Silas Peckham had some contrivance for packing his Committees, whether they happened always to be made up of optimists by nature, whether they were cajoled into good-humor by polite attentions, or whether they were always really delighted with the wonderful acquirements of the pupils and the admirable order of the school, it is certain that their Annual Reports were couched in language which might warm the heart of the most cold-blooded and calculating father that ever had a family of daughters to educate. In fact, these Annual Reports were considered by Mr. Peckham as his most effective advertisements.

The first thing, therefore, was to see that the Committee was made up of persons known to the public. Some worn-out politician, in that leisurely and amiable transition-state which comes between official extinction and the paralysis which will finish him as soon as his brain gets a little softer, made an admirable Chairman for Mr. Peckham, when he had the luck to pick up such an article. Old reputations, like old fashions, are more prized in the grassy than in the stony districts. An effete celebrity, who would never be heard of again in the great places until the funeral sermon waked up his memory for one parting spasm, finds himself in full flavor of renown a little farther back from the changing winds of the sea-coast. If such a public character was not to be had, so that there was no chance of heading the Report with the name of the Honorable Mr. Somebody, the next best thing was to get the Reverend Dr. Somebody to take that conspicuous position. Then would follow two or three local worthies with Esquire after their names. If any stray literary personage from one of the great cities happened to be within reach, he was pounced upon by Mr. Silas Peckham. It was a hard case for the poor man, who had travelled a hundred miles or two to the outside suburbs after peace and unwatered milk, to be pumped for a speech in this unexpected way. It was harder still, if he had been induced to venture a few tremulous remarks, to be obliged to write them out for the "Rockland Weekly Universe," with the chance of seeing them used as an advertising certificate as long as he lived, if he lived as long as the late Dr. Waterhouse did after giving his certificate in favor of Whitwell's celebrated Cephalic Snuff.

The Report of the last Committee had been signed by the Honorable ----, late ---- of ----, as Chairman. (It is with reluctance that the name and titles are left in blank; but our public characters are so familiarly known to the whole community that this reserve becomes necessary.) The other members of the Committee were the Reverend Mr. Butters, of a neighboring town, who was to make the prayer before the Exercises of the Exhibition, and two or three notabilities of Rockiand, with geoponic eyes, and glabrous, bumpless foreheads. A few extracts from the Report are subjoined:--

"The Committee have great pleasure in recording their unanimous opinion, that the Institution was never in so flourishing a condition....

"The health of the pupils is excellent; the admirable quality of food supplied shows itself in their appearance; their blooming aspect excited the admiration of the Committee, and bears testimony to the assiduity of the excellent Matron.

"......moral and religious condition most encouraging, which they cannot but attribute to the personal efforts and instruction of the faithful Principal, who considers religious instruction a solemn duty which he cannot commit to other people.

".......great progress in their studies, under the intelligent superintendence of the accomplished Principal, assisted by Mr. Badger, [Mr. Langdon's predecessor,] Miss Darley, the lady who superintends the English branches, Miss Crabs, her assistant and teacher of Modern Languages, and Mr. Schneider, teacher of French, German, Latin, and Music.

"Education is the great business of the Institute. Amusements are objects of a secondary nature; but these are by no means neglected....

".........English compositions of great originality and beauty, creditable alike to the head and heart of their accomplished authors......several poems of a very high order of merit, which would do honor to the literature of any age or country.....life-like drawings, showing great proficiency.... Many converse fluently in various modern languages......perform the most difficult airs with the skill of professional musicians.....

".....advantages unsurpassed, if equalled, by those of any Institution in the country, and reflecting the highest honor on the distinguished Head of the Establishment, SILAS PECKHAM, Esquire, and his admirable Lady, the MATRON, with their worthy assistants....."

The perusal of this Report did Mr. Bernard more good than a week's vacation would have done. It gave him such a laugh as he had not had for a month. The way in which Silas Peckham had made his Committee say what he wanted them to--for he recognized a number of expressions in the Report as coming directly from the lips of his principal, and could not help thinking how cleverly he had _forced_ his phrases, as jugglers do the particular card they wish their dupe to take--struck him as particularly neat and pleasing.

He had passed through the sympathetic and emotional stages in his new experience, and had arrived at the philosophical and practical state, which takes things coolly, and goes to work to set them right. He had breadth enough of view to see that there was nothing so very exceptional in this educational trader's dealings with his subordinates, but he had also manly feeling enough to attack the particular individual instance of wrong before him. There are plenty of dealers in morals, as in ordinary traffic, who confine themselves to wholesale business. They leave the small necessity of their next-door neighbor to the retailers, who are poorer in statistics and general facts, but richer in the every-day charities. Mr. Bernard felt, at first, as one does who sees a gray rat steal out of a drain and begin gnawing at the bark of some tree loaded with fruit or blossoms, which he will soon girdle, if he is let alone. The first impulse is to murder him with the nearest ragged stone. Then one remembers that he is a rodent, acting after the law of his kind, and cools down and is contented to drive him off and guard the tree against his teeth for the future. As soon as this is done, one can watch his attempts at mischief with a certain amusement.

This was the kind of process Mr. Bernard had gone through. First, the indignant surprise of a generous nature, when it comes unexpectedly into relations with a mean one. Then the impulse of extermination,--a divine instinct, intended to keep down vermin of all classes to their working averages in the economy of Nature. Then a return of cheerful tolerance,--a feeling, that, if the Deity could bear with rats and sharpers, he could; with a confident trust, that, in the long run, terriers and honest men would have the upperhand, and a grateful consciousness that he had been sent just at the right time to come between a patient victim and the master who held her in peonage.

Having once made up his mind what to do, Mr. Bernard was as good-natured and hopeful as ever. He had the great advantage, from his professional training, of knowing how to recognize and deal with the nervous disturbances to which overtasked women are so liable. He saw well enough that Helen Darley would certainly kill herself or lose her wits, if he could not lighten her labors and lift off a large part of her weight of cares. The worst of it was, that she of those women who naturally overwork themselves, like those horses who will go at the top of their pace until they drop. Such women are dreadfully unmanageable. It is as hard reasoning with them as it would have been reasoning with lo, when she was flying over land and sea, driven by the sting of the never-sleeping gadfly.

This was a delicate, interesting game that he played. Under one innocent pretext or another, he invaded this or that special province she had made her own. He would collect the themes and have them all read and marked, answer all the puzzling questions in mathematics, make the other teachers come to him for directions, and in this way gradually took upon himself not only all the general superintendence that belonged to his office, but stole away so many of the special duties which might fairly have belonged to his assistant, that, before she knew it, she was looking better and feeling more cheerful than for many and many a month before.

When the nervous energy is depressed by any bodily cause, or exhausted by overworking, there follow effects which have often been misinterpreted by moralists, and especially by theologians. The conscience itself becomes neuralgic, sometimes actually inflamed, so that the least touch is agony. Of all liars and false accusers, a sick conscience is the most inventive and indefatigable. The devoted daughter, wife, mother, whose life has been given to unselfish labors, who has filled a place which it seems to others only and angel would make good, reproaches herself with incompetence and neglect of duty. The humble Christian, who has been a model to others, calls himself a worm of the dust on one page of his diary, and arraigns himself on the next for coming short of the perfection of an archangel.

Conscience itself requires a conscience, or nothing can be more unscrupulous. It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the Christians. It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to endless forms of self-torture. The cities of India are full of cripples it has made. The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the vermin they harbored. Our libraries are crammed with books written by spiritual hypochondriacs, who inspected all their moral secretions a dozen times a day. They are full of interest, but they should be transferred from the shelf of the theologian to that of the medical man who makes a study of insanity.

This was the state into which too much work and too much responsibility were bringing Helen Darley, when the new master came and lifted so much of the burden that was crushing her as must be removed before she could have a chance to recover her natural elasticity and buoyancy. Many of the noblest women, suffering like her, but less fortunate in being relieved at the right moment, die worried out of life by the perpetual teasing of this inflamed, neuralgic conscience. So subtile is the line which separates the true and almost angelic sensibility of a healthy, but exalted nature, from the soreness of a soul which is sympathizing with a morbid state of the body, that it is no wonder they are often confounded. And thus many good women are suffered to perish by that form of spontaneous combustion in which the victim goes on toiling day and night with the hidden fire consuming her, until all at once her cheek whitens, and, as we look upon her, she drops away, a heap of ashes. The more they over-work themselves, the more exacting becomes the sense of duty,--as the draught of the locomotive's furnace blows stronger and makes the fire burn more fiercely, the faster it spins along the track.

It is not very likely, as was said at the beginning of this chapter, that we shall trouble ourselves a great deal about the internal affairs of the Apollinean Institute. These schools are, in the nature of things, not so very unlike each other as to require a minute description for each particular one among them. They have all very much the same general features, pleasing and displeasing. All feeding-establishments have something odious about them,--from the wretched country-houses where paupers are farmed out to the lowest bidder, up to the commons-tables at colleges, and even the fashionable boarding-house. A person's appetite should be at war with no other purse than his own. Young people, especially, who have a bone-factory at work in them, and have to feed the living looms of innumerable growing tissues, should be provided for, if possible, by those that love them like their own flesh and blood. Elsewhere their appetites will be sure to make them enemies, or, what are almost as bad, friends whose interests are at variance with the claims of their exacting necessities and demands.

Besides, all commercial transactions in regard to the most sacred interests of life are hateful even to those who profit by them. The clergyman, the physician, the teacher, must be paid; but each of them, if his duty be performed in the true spirit, can hardly help a shiver of disgust when. money is counted out to him for administering the consolations of religion, for saving some precious life, for sowing the seeds of Christian civilization in young, ingenuous souls.

And yet all these schools, with their provincial French and their mechanical accomplishments, with their cheap parade of diplomas and commencements and other public honors, have an ever fresh interest to all who see the task they are performing in our new social order. These girls are not being educated for governesses, or to be exported, with other manufactured articles, to colonies where there happens to be a surplus of males. Most of them will be wives, and every American-born husband is a possible President of these United States. Any one of these girls may be a four-years' queen. There is no sphere of human activity so exalted that she may not be called upon to fill it.

But there is another consideration of far higher interest. The education of our community to all that is beautiful is flowing in mainly through its women, and that to a considerable extent by the aid of these large establishments, the least perfect of which do something to stimulate the higher tastes and partially instruct them. Sometimes there is, perhaps, reason to fear that girls will be too highly educated for their own happiness, if they are lifted by their culture out of the range of the practical and every-day working youth by whom they are surrounded. But this is a risk we must take. Our young men come into active life so early, that, if our girls were not educated to something beyond mere practical duties, our material prosperity would outstrip our culture; as it often does in large places where money is made too rapidly. This is the meaning, therefore, of that somewhat ambitious programme common to most of these large institutions, at which we sometimes smile, perhaps unwisely or uncharitably.

We shall take it for granted that the routine of instruction went on at the Apollinean Institute much as it does in other schools of the same class. People, young or old, are wonderfully different, if we contrast extremes in pairs. They approach much nearer, if we take them in groups of twenty. Take two separate hundreds as they come, without choosing, and you get the gamut of human character in both so completely that you can strike many chords in each which shall be in perfect unison with corresponding ones in the other. If we go a step farther, and compare the population of two villages of the same race and region, there is such a regularly graduated distribution and parallelism of character, that it seems as if Nature must turn out human beings in sets like chessmen.

It must be confessed that the position in which Mr. Bernard now found himself had a pleasing danger about it which might well justify all the fears entertained on his account by more experienced friends, when they learned that he was engaged in a Young Ladies' Seminary. The school never went on more smoothly than during the first period of his administration, after he had arranged its duties, and taken his share, and even more than his share, upon himself. But human nature does not wait for the diploma of the Apollinean Institute to claim the exercise of its instincts and faculties. There young girls saw but little of the youth of the neighborhood. The mansion-house young men were off at college or in the cities, or making love to each other's sisters, or at any rate unavailable for some reason or other. There were a few "clerks,"--that is, young men who attended shops, commonly called "stores,"--who were fond of walking by the Institute, when they were off duty, for the sake of exchanging a word or a glance with any one of the young ladies they might happen to know, if any such were stirring abroad: crude young men, mostly, with a great many "Sirs" and "Ma'ams" in their speech, and with that style of address sometimes acquired in the retail business, as if the salesman were recommending himself to a customer,--"First-rate family article, Ma'am; warranted to wear a lifetime; just one yard and three quarters in this pattern, Ma'am; sha'n't I have the pleasure?" and so forth. If there had been ever so many of them, and if they had been ever so fascinating, the quarantine of the Institute was too rigorous to allow any romantic infection to be introduced from without.

Anybody might see what would happen, with a good-looking, well-dressed, well-bred young man, who had the authority of a master, it is true, but the manners of a friend and equal, moving about among these young girls day after day, his eyes meeting theirs, his breath mingling with theirs, his voice growing familiar to them, never in any harsh tones, often soothing, encouraging, always sympathetic, with its male depth and breadth of sound among the chorus of trebles, as if it were a river in which a hundred of these little piping streamlets might lose themselves; anybody might see what would happen. Young girls wrote home to their parents that they enjoyed themselves much this term at the Institute, and thought they were making rapid progress in their studies. There was a great enthusiasm for the young master's reading-classes in English poetry. Some of the poor little things began to adorn themselves with an extra ribbon, or a bit of such jewelry as they had before kept for great occasions. Dear souls! they only half knew what they were doing it for. Does the bird know why its feathers grow more brilliant and its voice becomes musical in the pairing season?

And so, in the midst of this quiet inland town, where a mere accident had placed Mr. Bernard Langdon, there was a concentration of explosive materials which might at any time change its Arcadian and academic repose into a scene of dangerous commotion. What said Helen Darley, when she saw with her woman's glance that more than one girl, when she should be looking at her book, was looking over it toward the master's desk? Was her own heart warmed by any livelier feeling than gratitude, as its life began to flow with fuller pulses, and the morning sky again looked bright and the flowers recovered their lost fragrance? Was there any strange, mysterious affinity between the master and the dark girl who sat by herself? Could she call him at will by looking at him? Could it be that ----? It made her shiver to think of it.--And who was that strange horseman who passed Mr. Bernard at dusk the other evening, looking so like Mephistopheles galloping hard to be in season at the witches' Sabbath-gathering? That must be the cousin of Elsie's who wants to marry her, they say. A dangerous-looking fellow for a rival, if one took a fancy to the dark girl! And who is she, and what?--by what demon is she haunted, by what taint is she blighted, by what curse is she followed, by what destiny is she marked, that her strange beauty has such a terror in it, and that hardly one shall dare to love her, and her eye glitters always, but warms for none?

Some of these questions are ours. Some were Helen Darley's. Some of them mingled with the dreams of Bernard Langdon, as he slept the night after meeting the strange horseman. In the morning he happened to be a little late in entering the school-room. There was something between the leaves of the Virgil that lay upon his desk. He opened it and saw a freshly gathered mountain-flower. He looked at Elsie, instinctively, involuntarily. She had another such flower on her breast.

A young girl's graceful compliment,--that is all,--no doubt,--no doubt. It was odd that the flower should have happened to be laid between the leaves of the Fourth Book of the "Æneid," and at this line,--

"Incipit effari, mediâque in voce resistit."

A remembrance of an ancient superstition flashed through the master's mind, and he determined to try the _Sortes Virgilianæ_. He shut the volume, and opened it again at a venture.--The story of Laocoön!

He read, with a strange feeling of unwilling fascination, from "_Horresco referens_" to "_Bis medium amplexi_," and flung the book from him, as if its leaves had been steeped in the subtle poisons that princes die of.

* * * * *

THE SPHINX'S CHILDREN.

"Que la volonté soit le destin!"

Long had she sat, crouched upon her breast,--crouched, but not for slumber or for spring. No slumber gloomed darkly in those broad, sad eyes; no dream indefinably softened the lips, whose patient outline breathed only wakefulness and expectation,--a long-deferred, yet constant expectation,--a hope that would have been despair, save that it was just within hope's limits,--a monotonous, reiterate, indestructible chord in the creature's mystic existence, that, once struck by some mighty, shrouded Hand of Power, still reverberated, and trailed its still renewing echoes through every fibre of its secret habitation. Nor yet for spring;--a couchant leopard has posed itself with horrid intent; murder glitters in its fixed golden eye, quivers in the tense loins, creeps in the tawny glitter of the skin, clutches the keen claws, that recoil, and grasp, and recoil again from the velvet ball of that heavy foot; murder grins in the withdrawn lip, the white, red-set teeth, the slavering crunch of the jaw: but nothing of all these fired the quiet and the silence of the crouching Sphinx; nerve and muscle in tranquil strength lay relaxed, though not unconscious. Year after year the yellow Desert robed itself in burning mists, splendid and deadly; year after year the hot simoom licked up its sands, and, whirling them madly over the dead plain, dashed them against the silent Sphinx, and grain by grain heaped her slow-growing grave; the Nile spread its waters across the green valley, and lapped its brink with a watery thirst for land, and then receded to its channel, and poured its ancient flood still downward to the sea; worshipped, or desecrated; threaded by black Nubian boatmen, who mocked its sacred name with such savage mirth as satyrs might have spirted from their hairy lips; navigated by keen-eyed Arabs, lithe and dark and treacherous as the river beneath them; Coptic shepherds, lingering on the brink, drank the sweet waters, and led their flocks to drink at the shallows, when the shepherd's star cleft that deepest sky with its crest, and warned the simple people of their hour;--yet forever stood the Sphinx, passionately patient, looking for sunrise, over desert, vale, and river,--beyond man,--to her hour.--And the hour came.

Once to all things comes their hour. The black column of basalt quivers to its heart with one keen lightning thrill that vindicates its kin to the electric flash without; the granite cliff loses one atom from its bald front, and every other atom quails before the dumb shiver of gravitation and shifts its place; the breathing, breathless marble, which a sculptor has rescued from its primeval sleep, and, repeating after God, though with stammering and insufficient lips, the great drama of Paradise, makes a man out of dust,--once, once, in the dcadness of its beauty, that marble thrills with magnetic life, drinks its maker's soul, repeats the Paradisaic amen, and owns that it is good. Yea, greater miracle of transcendental truth,--once,--perhaps twice,--the sodden, valueless heart of that old man, whose gold has sucked out all that made him a man, beats with a pulse of generous honor; even in the dust of stocks and the ashes of speculation, amid the howling curses of the poor and the bitter weeping of his own flesh, once he hears the Voice of God, and all eternity cleaves the earth at his feet with a glare of truth. Once in her loathsome life, that woman, brazen with sin and shame, flaunting on the pavement, the scorn and jest of decency and indecency, the fearful index of corrupt society,--even she has her hour of softness, when the tiny grass that creeps out from the stones comes greenly into a spring sunshine, and as with a divine whisper recalls to her the time before she fell, the unburdened heart, the pure childish pleasures, the kind look of her dead mother's eye, the clasp of that sister's arm who passed her but yesterday pallid with disgust and ashamed to own their sacred birth-tie: then the tide rolls back: the hour is come! She, too, called a woman, who leads society, and triumphs over caste and custom with metallic ring and force,--she who forgets the decencies of age in her shameless attire, and supplies its defects with subterfuges, falser in heart even than in aspect,--she, about whom cluster men old and young, applauding with brays of laughter and coarser jeers the rancor of her wit, as it drops its laughing venom or its sneering sophisms of worldly wisdom,--even she, when the lights are fled, when the music has ceased from its own desecration, when the frenzy of wine and laughter mock her in their dead dregs, when the men who flattered and the women who envied are all gone,--she recalls one calm eye in the crowd, that stung her with its pure contemptuous pity, a look not to be shut out with draperies as the stars are; and even through her soul, harder than the soul of that unowned sister walking the midnight street beneath the window, since it has ceased to know the stab of sin or the choking agony of shame,--even through that world-trodden heart flashes one conscious pang, one glimpse of a possible heaven and an inevitable hell, one naked and open vision of herself.

Long had the Sphinx waited. Year after year the flocking pigeons flitted and wheeled through the sweet skies of spring, built their nests and reared their young; tiny lizards, the new birth of the season, coiled and glittered on the hot sands like wandering jewels; every creature, dying out of conscious life, left its perpetuated self behind it, and repeated its own youth in its young, according to its kind: but the Sphinx lived alone. Nor all-unconscious of her solitude: for he who formed that massive shape, chiselled those calm, expectant lips, and wide eyes pensive as setting moons, he had not failed to do what all true artists do in virtue of their truth,--he had shared his own life with his own creation, and it was his lonely yearning that stirred her pulseless heart. Little did he think, toiling at that stupendous figure, ages gone by, that he transfused into the stone at which he labored, like a patient ant at some stupendous burden, no little share of that creative yearning that inspired him to his task; as little as you think, dear poet, whether poet, painter, or sculptor,--for all are one, and one is all,--that in those dreams which you write, as unconscious of your power as the transcribing stylus of its office, your own heart pulsates for a listening world, and the very linking of words that so respire their own music makes those words self-sentient of their breaking, thrilling melody, and wrings or exalts them, idea-garments as they are, with the restless heaving of the thought that wears them.

Or you, whose sun-steeped brush brings to life on canvas the golden trances of August noons, the high, still splendor of its mountain-tops, which the sun caresses with fiery languor, the unrippled slumber of its warm streams, the broad glory of its woods and meadows fused with light and heat into the resplendent haze that earth exhales in her day of prime, till he who sees the picture hears the cricket's chirping in its moveless grasses, and scents the rich aromatic breath of its summer-passion and its rapturous noon,--do you dream, when at last the perfect work repeats your thought, and you rest in the tropie atmosphere you have created, that in very truth the picture itself is full of inward heat and breathless languor? For you have poured out the colors that light makes out of heat, and in them the still inevitable light shall ever stir the recreating heat that clothes itself in color, and bring your thought, no more a dead abstraction, but a living power, into the very substance whereby you have expressed it. And even so far as you were creative, so shall your work be informed by you, and not mere dead pigment and dried oil and dull canvas be your autograph, but the vivid and inspiring blazon of an inspired idea shall glow life-like on some friendly wall, and in its turn inspire some other soul, whose light within needs but the breath from without to burst upward in clear flame.

Or you, who unveil from its marble tomb that figure of a chained and stainless woman, whose atmosphere is as a nun's veil, whose sad divinity is a crown,--do you dare imagine that the holy despair you have imaged, the pause of a saint's resignation and a martyr's courage, is but the outline and the faultless contour of a stone? Come back, Pygmalion, from your mythic sleep! return, Art's divinest mystery, germ of all its power, from the deep dust of ages! and teach these modern men that his story whose passion fired a statue's breast was but an immortal fable, a similitude of the truth you feel, but do not see,--that even as our Creator shared His life with His creatures, so do you pour, in far less measure, but obedient to that precedent which is law, your own life and the magnetic instincts of that life, into what you create!

Keep your hearts pure and your hands clean, therefore; for these things that you sell for dead shall one day livingly confront you, and tell their own story of your life and your nature with terrible honesty to men and angels.

But whoever, in those mystic ages that have ceased to be historic and have become mythic, whoever made the Sphinx,--whether it were some Titaness sequestered from all her kind by genie-spells, forced to live amid these desert solitudes, fed from the abundant hands of Nature, and taught by dreams inspired and twilight visions,--

"A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,
And most divinely fair";

her only image of human beauty the reflex of her white, symmetric limbs, her wide, dark eyes, her full lips and soft Egyptian features, wherewith the river greeted her from its blue placidity; her only sense of love the unspoken yearning within, when the soft, tumultuous stress of the west-wind kissed her, who should have been clasped in tender arms and caressed by loving lips; whose dumb, creative instincts, becoming genius instead of maternity, struggled outward from their home in heart and brain to culminate in this world's-wonder, and so build a monument namelessly splendid to the grand nature that found its bread of life was a stone and perished: or whether this creature were the fashioning of some demigod,--"for there were giants in those days,"--who, in the fulness of his strength, despairing of a mortal mate, wandered away from men and wrought his patience and his longing into the rock,--as lesser men have carved their memorials on hard Fate,--and then died between its paws, sated with labor and glad to sleep: or whether, indeed, the captive spirits, sealed in Caucasus with the seal of Solomon, did penance for their rebellion in mortal work on mere dull matter, and with anguished essence toiled for ages to mimic in her own clay the dumb pathos of waiting Earth:--whichever of these dreams be nearest truth, one thing is true,--that the maker of the Sphinx infused into his work, in as much greater measure as his nature was greater than that of other men, that yearning of pathetic solitude that most wrings a woman's heart; and the outward semblance, working in, wrought upon the heavy stone with incessant and accumulative power, till through that sluggish sandstone crept a confused thrill of consciousness, and the great creature felt the loneliness that she looked. Far away below her the Nile-valley teemed with life; the antelopes coursed beside their young to feed on the green pasture fresh from its long overflow; red foxes sported with their cubs on the tawny sand; the birds taught their infant offspring their own sweet arts of flight and song on every bough; and even the ostrich, lonely Desert-runner, heaped her treasure of white eggs in the sand, or guided her callow young far from the sight and fear of man;--but the Sphinx sat alone.

Mightier and mightier grew the yearning within her, as the full moon floated upward from the east and cast her dewy dreams over land and sea. The hour was come; the whole impulse and persistence of her nature went out in vivid life, and, filling the very stones which the winds had gathered and piled against her breast, cleft them with its sentient spell, clothed them with lean flesh and wiry sinews, shaped them after the fashion of the Desert men, and sent them out alive with intellect and will, but with hearts of flint, into the wide world,--the Sphinx's children!

With a sigh that shook the shores of Egypt and smote the Sicilian midnight with sickening vibrations of earthquake, the Sphinx beheld this culmination of her great desire; in the very hour of fruition, hope fled; and as this grim certainty sped away from before her, taking with it all her borrowed life, she dropped that majestic head lower upon her bosom, uplifted it again for one last look at her offspring, and so stiffened,--once more a stone.

Age after age rolled by; storm and tempest hurled their thunders at her head; wave after wave of bright insidious sand curled about her feet and heaped its sliding grains against her side; men came and went in fleeting generations, and seasons fled like hours through the whirling wheel of Time; but the Sphinx longed and suffered no more. Her hour had come and gone; her dull instinct had burnt out, her comely outline began to disintegrate, her face grew blank and stony, her features crumbled away, altars and inscriptions defaced her breast and hieroglyphed her ponderous sides, men worshipped and wondered there, and travellers from lands beyond the sun pitched their tents before her face and defiled her feet with barbaric orgies; but she knew it no more,--her children were gone out into the world. And the world had need of them. Its rank and miasmatic civilization,--its hotbeds of sin and misery,--its civil corruptions and its social lies,--its reeling, rotten principalities,--its sickly atmosphere of effeminate luxury, wherein neither justice nor judgment lived, and the solitary virtues left mere effete shadows of philanthropy and cowardly impulses called love and mercy,--needed a new race, stony and strong, unshrinking in conquest and reformation, full of zeal, and incapable of pity, to rend away the fogs that smothered truth and decency, to disperse the low-lying clouds of weak passion and maudlin luxury, to blow a reveille clear and keen as the trumpet of the northwest wind, when it sweeps down from its mountain-tops in stern exultation, and shouts its Puritanic battle-psalm across the reeking, steaming meadows of sultry August, fever-smitten and pestilent.

Such were the Sphinx's children: had they but died out with their need! Here and there a monk, fresh from his Desert-Laura, hurtles through the eclipse-light of history like the stone from a catapult,--rules a church with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and emperors with the grand audacity of a commission presumedly divine, while Greeks cringe, and Jews blaspheme, and heathen flee into, or away from, conversion; and the Church itself canonizes this spiritual father, this Sphinx-son of an instinct and a stone!

Or an Emperor exalted himself above the legions and the populace of Rome, banqueted his enemies and beheaded them at table, drank in the sight of blood and the sound of human shrieks as if they were his natural light and air, tormented God's creatures and cursed his kind, kindled a fire among the miserable myriads of his own city, and, exulting in a safe height, mixed the leaping, frantic discords of his own music with the horrid sounds of the hell's tragedy below him; seething in crime, steeped in murder, black with blasphemy, the horror and the hate of men, death gaped for his coming, and he went! Men revile him through all posterior ages; women shudder at the legend of his deeds; but the Sphinx stands unconscious in the Desert,--she knew not her child!

Or a Reformer springs up. High above his birthplace the snowy Alps paint themselves against the sky, an aerial dream of beauty, softened by the tender hues of dawn and sunset, serenely fair through the rift of the tempest; even their white death takes a nameless grace from distance and atmosphere, clothing itself in beauty as a spirit in clay, and tempting wanderers to their graves: but no such beauty clothes the man whose daily vision beholds them; hard, clamorous, disputatious, with one hand he rends the rotten splendors of Rome from its tottering Image, and with the other plunges baby-souls to inevitable damnation; strong and fiercely rigid, full of burning and slaughter for the idolatries and harlotries of Popery, fired with lurid zeal, and bestriding one stringent idea, he rides on over dead and living, preaches predestination and hell as if the Gospel dwelt only upon destiny and despair, casts no tender look at the loving piety that underlay shrines and woman-worship and bead-counting wherever a true heart sought its God through the sole formulas it knew, but spurs forward to the end, a mighty power to destroy, to do away with old corruptions and break down idols on their altars,--saint and iconoclast! Did the heart of stone within him know its ancestry,--track its hard, loveless descent from the Sphinx's children?

Then a Queen;--a solitary woman, proud of her solitude, isolated in her regnant splendor, a dead planet like the moon, sung and pictured and adored, but keeping on her majestic path in awful beauty, deaf to human entreaty, cold to human love; a great statesman in a queen's robes; a keen, subtle politician, coifed and farthingaled; a revengeful sovereign; a deadly enemy; a woman who forgave nothing to a woman, and retaliated everything upon a man; she who brought unshrinkingly to death a sister queen discrowned and captive, a sister whose grace and loveliness and kindly aspect might have moved the lions of the arena to fawn upon her, but nowise disarmed the tigress who lapped her blood; she who banished and slew the man she would not stoop to love, because he dared to love another; and when death stared her in the face, and open-eyed judgment shook her soul, rose from that death-pallet to grapple and abuse a false woman, penitent for and confessing her falseness; a virgin-monarch, pitiless, relentless, cruel as jealousy; an anomalous woman, were she not a stone-born child of the Sphinx!

Or a great General, before whose iron will horse and horseman quailed and fled, like dry stubble before flame; who wielded the sword of Gideon, and cut off the armies of his kindred people and his anointed king as a mower fells the glittering grass on a summer dawn, heedless that he, too, shall be cut down from his flourishing. On his track fire and blood spread their banners, and the raven scented his trophies afar off; age and youth alike were crushed under the tread of his war-horse; honor and valor and life's best prime opposed him as summer opposes the Arctic hail-fury, and lay beaten into mire at his feet. Hated, feared, followed to the death; victorious or vanquished, the same strong, imperturbable, sullen nature; persistent rather than patient in effort, vigorously direct in action; a minister of unconscious good, of half-conscious evil; stern and gloomy to the sacrilegious climax of his well-battled life, even in the regicidal act going as one driven to his deeds by Fate that forgot God;--was he to be wondered at, whose life, in ages far gone, began among the stony Sphinx children?

Nor alone in these great landmarks of their dwelling have the Sphinx's children haunted Earth. Poets have sung them under myriad names; History has chronicled them in groups; Painting and Sculpture have handed down their aspect to a gazing world. From them sprung the Eumenides, pursuers and destroyers of men. They wore the garb of Roman legionaries, when Ramah wept for her children dashed against the walls of the Holy City, and not one stone stood upon another in Zion. They crowded the offices of the Inquisition, and tested the endurance of its victims, with steady finger on the flickering pulse, and calm eye on the death-sweating brow and bitten lip. They put on the Druid's robe and wreath, and held the human sacrifice closer to its altar. In the Asiatic jungle, lurking behind the palm-trunk, they waited, lithe and swarthy Thugs, treacherously to slay whatever victim passed by alone; or in the fair Pacific islands kept horrid jubilee above their feasts of human flesh, and streaked themselves with kindred blood in their carousals. Holland tells its fearful story of their Spanish rule. Russian serfs record their despotism, cowering at the memory of the knout. France cringes yet at the names of the black few who guided her roaring Revolution as one might guide the ravages of a tiger with curb of adamant and rein of linked steel.

Africa stretches out her hands to testify of their presence. Too well those golden shores recall the wail of women and the yelling curses of men, driven, beast-fashion, to their pen, and floated from home to hell, or,--happier fate!--dragged up, in terror of pursuit, and thrown overboard, a brief agony for a long one. They know them, too, whose continual cry of separation, starvation, insult, agony, and death rises from the heart of freedom like the steam of a great pestilence,--Pity them, hearts of flesh! pity also the captors,--the Sphinx children, the flint-hearts! pity those who cannot feel, far beyond those who can,--though it be but to suffer!

New England knew them, in band and steeple-hat, hanging and pressing to death helpless women, bewitched with witchcraft. Acadia knew them, when its depopulated shores lay barren before the sun, and its homes sent up no smoke to heaven.

Greece quivers at the phantasm of their Turkish turbans and gleaming sabres, their skill at massacre and their fiendish tortures; Italy, fair and sad, "woman-country," droops shuddering at sight of their Austrian uniforms; and the Brahmin sees them in scarlet, blood-dyed, hurling from the cannon's mouth helpless captives,--killing, not converting.

Wherever, all the wide world over, a nation shrinks from its oppressors, or a slave from his master,--wherever a child flees from the face of a parent who knows neither justice nor mercy, or a wife goes mad under the secret tyranny of her inevitable fate,--wherever pity and mercy and love veil their faces and wring their hands outside the threshold,--there abide the Sphinx's children.

For this she longed and hoped and waited in the Desert! for this she envied the red fox and the ostrich! for this her dumb lips parted, in their struggle after speech, to ask of earth and air some solace to her solitude! for this, for these, she poured out her dim life in one strong, wilful aspiration!

Happy Sphinx, to be left even of that dull existence! blessedly unconscious of that granted desire! mouldering away in the curling sand-hills, the prey of hostile elements, the mysterious symbol of a secret yearning and a vain desire! Not for thee the bitterness of success! not for thee the conscious agony of penitence,--the falling temple of the will crushing its idolater! No wild voices in the wind reproach the wilder pulses of a slow-breaking heart; no keen words of taunt sting thee into madness; Memory hurls at thee no flying javelins; broken-winged Hope flutters about thee no more! Thy day is over, thine hour is past!

_"Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead, more than the living which are yet alive!"_

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Dies Irae:_ in Thirteen Original Versions. By Abraham Coles, M.D. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1859. pp. xxxiv., 70.

It is pleasant to see how many wiles Nature employs to draw off into side channels the enthusiasm which is always secreting itself and gathering in the human brain. She knows what a dangerous clement it may become, if the individual rills of it run together, and, with united forces, take for a time a single direction. So she taps it at its sources, and leads it away to various ends, useful because they are harmless. Bibliomania, tulipomania, potichomania, squaring the circle, perpetual motion, a religious epic, the northwest passage,--anything will serve the purpose. _Divide et impera_ is her motto. The hobby is the safeguard of society. Once mounted, every enthusiast ambles quietly off on some errand of his own, caring little what direction he takes, provided only it be _the other_. The Fifth-Monarchy men might have been troublesome, but for the Beast in Revelation;--each insisted on a Beast to himself. Protestantism might have become Democracy, had either Luther or Calvin been willing to ride behind. The five points of the Charter are blunted to a Lancashire weaver who is fattening a prize-gooseberry.

We sympathize heartily with such gentle enthusiasms as this of Dr. Coles. It is the interest of all Grub Street that men should be encouraged whose amiable weakness it is to fall in love with pieces of poetry. In this case, to be sure, the verses are Latin, and the author more nameless even than Junius; but who knows but some one's turn shall come next whose verses were at least meant to be English, and whose name is--Legion? If some translator, charged from the other pole of Dr. Coles's enthusiasm, should favor us with thirteen Latin versions of some modern English poems, it would give them a chance of being more generally intelligible to the laity. Nay, even if such a baker's-dozen of mediæval-Latin renderings of Mrs. Browning's last poem--and by this term we mean, of course, the rather shady Latin of middle-aged men--should be shuffled together, we are not sure that it would not be a help to the understanding of the Coptic original. But this, perhaps, is hoping too much.

In the case of Dr. Coles, how lucky the direction of the superfluous energy! how wise the humane precaution of Nature! For there is no destructive agency like a doctor with a hygienic hobby. If your constitution be a salt or sugar one, he will melt you away with damp sheets and duckings; if you are as exsanguine as a turnip, his scientific delight in getting blood out of you will be only heightened. For such erratic enthusiasms as this of Dr. Coles we want a milder term than monomania. Something like _monowhimsia_ would do. It is seldom that an oddity takes so pleasant a turn. He has published a dainty little volume, with a well-written introduction, giving the history of the "Dies Iræ," and an account of the various versions of it; this is followed by his own thirteen translations; and an appendix tells us what is meant by a Sequence, has a page or two on the origin of rhyming Latin, and concludes with the music of the hymn itself. The book is illustrated by delicate photographs from the Last Judgments of Michel Angelo, Rubens, and Cornelius, and from the "Christus Remunerator" of Ary Scheffer. It is exquisitely printed at the Riverside Press, which is doing such good service to everybody but the spectacle-makers.

We hold the translation of any first-rate poem, nay, even of any second-rate one which has any peculiar charm of rhythm or tone, to be an impossibility. The translation of rhyming Latin verses presents peculiar difficulties. The rhythm is always simple and strongly accented, it is true; but the ear-filling sonority, the variety of female rhymes, and the simple directness of expression cannot be echoed by our muffling consonants, our endings in _ing_ and _ed_, and _a_-s, _the_-s, and _of the_-s. For example, the stanza,

"Tuba, mirum spargens sonum Per sepulchra regionum, Coget omnes ante thronum,"

is very inadequately represented by

"Trumpet, scattering sounds of wonder Rending sepulchres asunder, Shall resistless summons thunder,"

in which, to speak of nothing else, there are thirteen _s_-s to five in the original. Even Crashaw, whose translation of Strada's "Music's Duel" is a masterpiece for litheness of phrase and sinuous suppleness of rhythm, quails before the "Dies Iræ," and contents himself with a largely watered paraphrase. No one has ever yet succeeded more than tolerably with the opening stanza,--

"Dies Iræ, dies illa, Solvet sæclum in favillâ, Teste David cum Sibyllâ."

The difficulty is increased where the Latin word has some special force of theological or other meaning which has no single equivalent in English.

Doctor Coles has made, we think, the most successful attempt at an English translation of the hymn that we have ever seen. He has done all that could be done, where complete success was out of the question. Out of his first two versions, which seem to us the best, a very satisfactory rendering of the original can be made up by choosing the better stanzas from each. In his first trial he misses the pathetic force of the

"Rex tremendæ majestatis, Qui salvandos salvas gratis, Salva me, fons pietatis!"

where the petition is piercingly individualized by the accentual stress thrown on the _me_. He gives it thus:--

"King Almighty and All-knowing, Grace to sinners freely showing, Save me, Fount of Good o'erflowing!" His second attempt is better:--

"Awful King, who nothing cravest, Since Thyself full ransom gavest, Save thou me, who freely savest!"

Here the emphatic _me_ is preserved, but in neither version is the true meaning of _salvandos_ even hinted at, and in both we miss the tenderness of the _fons pietatis_, with which the _tremenda majestas_ is balanced and softened.

There are three or four of these Latin hymns that for simple force and pathos have never been matched in their kind, and never approached, except by a few of the more fortunate poems of Herbert, Vaughan, and Quarles. We know not why it is that what is called religious poetry is commonly so bad. The thing gives the lie to both the adjective and the noun of its title. Anything more flat and flavorless, whether in sentiment or language, is beyond the conception even of an editor with the nightmare. Men have been hanged for more venial murders than some have been praised for who have choked out the immortal soul of the Psalms of David. We have, however, the consolation of thinking that the Devil's Psalter of convivial songs is quite as bad.

Dr. Coles has done so well that we hope he will try his hand on some of the other Latin hymns. He cannot expect to satisfy those who have been penetrated by the almost inexplicable charm of the originals; but by rendering them in their own metres, and with so large a transfusion of their spirit as characterizes his present attempt, he will be doing a real service to the lovers of that kind of religious poetry in which neither the religion nor the poetry is left out. As we said before, to translate rhyming Latin without losing its peculiar _tang_ is wellnigh impossible. Even Father Prout himself would be staggered by Walter Mapes's "Mihi est propositum" or "Testamentum Goliae"; but perhaps the spirit of the hymns is more easily caught, and Dr. Coles has shown that he knows the worth of faithfulness.

_Mademoiselle Mori_; A Tale of Modern Rome. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1860. Author's Edition. 16mo. pp. 526.