Chapter XI: Part II (7)

The Papacy has lost all moral basis, aim, sanction, and source of action at the present day. Its source of action in the past was derived from a conception of heaven since changed,--from a notion of life since proved imperfect,--from a conception of the moral law inferior to that of the new epoch in course of initiation,--from a solution of the eternal problem of the relation between man and God since rejected by the human heart, intellect, conscience, and tradition.

The dogma itself which the Church once represented is exhausted and consumed. It no longer inspires faith, no longer has power to unite or direct the human race.

The time of a new dogma is approaching, which will re-link earth with heaven in a vaster synthesis, fruitful of new and harmonious life.

It is for this that the Papacy expires. And it is our duty to declare this, without hypocritical reticence, or formulæ of speech, which, feigning to attack and venerate at one and the same time, do but parcel out, not solve the problem; because the future cannot be fully revealed until the past is entombed, and by weakly prolonging the delay we run the risk of introducing gangrene into the wound.

The formula of life and of the law of life from which the Papacy derived its existence and its mission was that of the _fall_ of man and his redemption. The logical and inevitable consequences of this formula were:--

The doctrine of the necessity of _mediation_ between man and God;

The belief in a _direct_, _immediate_, and _immutable_ revelation, and hence in a privileged class,--naturally destined to centralize in one individual,--the office of which was to preserve that revelation inviolate;

The inefficacy of man's own efforts to achieve his own redemption, and the consequent substitution of unlimited _faith_ in the _Mediator_, for works,--hence _grace_ and _predestination_ more or less explicitly substituted for _free-will_;

The separation of the human race into the _elect_ and the _non-elect_;

The _salvation_ of the one, and the eternal _damnation_ of the other; and, above all,

The duality between earth and heaven, between the _ideal_ and the _real_, between the _aim_ set before man and a world condemned to anathema by the _fall_, and incapable, through the imperfection of its finite elements, of affording him the means of realizing that aim.

In fact, the religious synthesis which succeeded Polytheism did not contemplate, nor did the historical succession of the epochs allow it to contemplate, any conception of life embracing more than the _individual_; it offered the individual a means of salvation _in despite of_ the egotism, tyranny, and corruption by which he is surrounded on earth, and which no individual effort could hope to overcome; it came to declare to him, _The world is adverse to thee; renounce the world and put thy faith in Christ; this will lead thee to heaven_.

The new formula of life and its law--unknown at that day, but revealed to us in our own day by our knowledge of the tradition of humanity, confirmed by the voice of individual conscience, by the intuition of genius and the grand results of scientific research--may be summed up in the single word _Progress_,[D] which we now know to be, by Divine decree, the inherent tendency of human nature,--whether manifested in the individual or the collective being,--and destined, more or less speedily, but inevitably, to be evolved in time and space.

The logical consequences of the new formula are:--

The substitution of the idea of a _law_ for the idea of a _Mediator_;--the idea of a _continuous_ educational revelation for that of an _immediate_ arbitrary revelation;

The apostolate of genius and virtue, and of the great collective intuitions of the peoples, when roused to enthusiastic action in the service of a truth, substituted for the _privilege_ of a priestly _class_;

The sanctity of tradition, as the depository of the progress already achieved; and the sanctity of individual conscience, alike the pledge and the means of all future progress;

_Works_, sanctified by faith, substituted for mere faith alone, as the criterion of merit and means of salvation.

The new formula of life cancels the dogma of _grace_, which is the negation of that capacity of perfectibility granted to _all_ men; as well as that of _predestination_, which is the negation of _free-will_, and that of eternity of punishment, which is the negation of the divine element existing in every human soul.

The new formula substitutes the conception of the slow, continuous progress of the human _Ego_ throughout an indefinite series of existences, for the idea of an impossible perfection to be achieved in the course of one brief existence; it presents an absolutely, new view of the mission of man upon earth, and puts an end to the antagonism between earth and heaven, by teaching us that this world is an abode given to man _wherein_ he is bound to merit salvation, by his own works, and hence enforces the necessity of endeavoring, by thought, by action, and by sacrifice, to transform the world,--the duty of realizing our ideal here below, as far as in us lies, for the benefit of future generations, and of reducing to an earthly _fact_ as much as may be of the _kingdom_--the conception--of God.

The religious synthesis which is slowly but infallibly taking the place of the synthesis of the past comprehends a new term,--the continuous _collective_ life of humanity; and this alone is sufficient to change the _aim_, the _method_, and the moral _law_ of our existence.

All links with heaven broken, and useless to the earth, which is ready to hail the proclamation of a new dogma, the Papacy has no longer any _raison d'être_. Once useful and holy, it is now a lie, a source only of corruption and immorality.

Once useful and holy, I say, because, had it not been for the unity of moral life in which we were held for more than eight centuries by the Papacy, we should not now have been prepared to realize the new unity to come; had it not been for the dogma of human equality in heaven, we should not now have been prepared to proclaim the dogma of human equality on earth. And, I declare it a lie and a source of immorality at the present day, because every great institution becomes such if it seeks to perpetuate its authority after its mission is fulfilled. The substitution of the enslavement for the slaughter of the conquered foe was a step towards progress, as was the substitution of servitude for slavery. The formation of the _Bourgeoise_ class was a progress from servitude. But he who at the present day should attempt to recede towards slavery and servitude, and presumptuously endeavor to perpetuate the exclusion of the proletarian from the rights and benefits of the social organization, would prove himself the enemy of all civilization, past and future, and a teacher of immorality.

It is therefore the duty of all those amongst us who have it at heart to win _the city of the future_ and the triumph of truth, to make war, not only upon the temporal power,--who should dare deny that to the admitted representative of God on earth?--but upon the Papacy itself. It is therefore our duty to go back to the dogma upon which the institution is founded, and to show that that dogma has become insufficient and unequal to the moral wants, aspirations, and dawning faith of humanity.

They who at the present day attack the _Prince_ of Rome, and yet profess to venerate the _Pope_, and to be sincere Catholics, are either guilty of flagrant contradiction, or are hypocrites.

They who profess to reduce the problem to the realization of _a free Church in a free State_ are either influenced by a fatal timidity, or destitute of every spark of moral conviction.

The separation of Church and State is good as a weapon of defence against the corruptions of a Church no longer worthy the name. It is--like all the programmes of mere liberty--an implicit declaration that the institution against which we are compelled to invoke either our individual or collective rights is corrupt, and destined to perish.

Individual or collective rights may be justly invoked against the authority of a religious institution as a remedial measure in a period of transition; just as it may occasionally be necessary to isolate a special locality for a given time, in order to protect others from infection. But the cause must be explicitly declared. By declaring it, you educate the country to look beyond the temporary measure,--to look forward to a return to a normal state of things, and to study the positive organic _principle_ destined to govern that normal state. By keeping silence, you accustom the mass to disjoin the _moral_ from the political, theory from practice, the ideal from the real, heaven from earth.

When once all belief in the past synthesis shall be extinct, and faith in the new synthesis established, the State itself will be elected into a Church; it will incarnate in itself a religious principle, and become the representative of the moral law in the various manifestations of life.

So long as it is separate from the State, the Church will always conspire to reconquer power over it in the interest of the past dogma. If separated from all collective and avowed faith by a negative policy, such as that adopted by the atheistic and indifferent French Parliament, the State will fall a prey to the anarchical doctrine of the sovereignty of the individual, and the worship of interest; it will sink into egotism and the adoration of the _accomplished fact_, and hence, inevitably, into despotism, as a remedy for the evils of anarchy.

For an example of this among modern nations, we have only to look at France.

III.

On the other hand, in opposition to the Papacy, but itself a source of no less corruption, stands _materialism_.

Materialism, the philosophy of all expiring epochs and peoples in decay, is, historically speaking, an old phenomenon, inseparable from the death of a religious dogma. It is the reaction of those superficial intellects which, incapable of taking a comprehensive view of the life of humanity, and tracing and deducing its essential characteristics from tradition, deny the religious ideal itself, instead of simply affirming the death of one of its incarnations.

Luther compared the human mind to a drunken peasant, who, falling from one side of his horse, and set straight on his seat by one desirous of helping him, instantly falls again on the other side. The simile--if limited to periods of transition--is most just. The youth of Italy, suddenly emancipated from the servile education of more than three centuries, and intoxicated with their moral liberty, find themselves in the presence of a Church destitute of all mission, virtue, love for the people, or adoration of truth or progress,--destitute even of faith in itself. They see that the existing dogma is in flagrant contradiction of the ruling idea that governs all the aspirations of the epoch, and that its conception of divinity is inferior to that revealed by science, human conscience, philosophy, and the improved conception of life acquired by the study of the tradition of humanity, unknown to man previously to the discovery of his Eastern origin. Therefore, in order--as they believe--to establish their moral freedom radically and forever, they reject alike all idea of a church, a dogma, and a God.

Philosophically speaking, the unreflecting exaggerations of men who have just risen up in rebellion do not portend any serious damage to human progress. These errors are a mere repetition of what has always taken place at the decay and death of every dogma, and will--as they always have done--sooner or later wear away. The day will come when our Italian youth will discover that, just as reasonably as they, not content with denying the Christian dogma, proceed to deny the existence of a God, and the religious life of humanity, their ancestors might have proceeded, from their denial and rejection of the feudal system, to the rejection of every form of social organization, or have declared art extinct forever during the transition period when the Greek form of art had ceased to correspond to those aspirations of the human mind which prepared the way for the cathedrals of the Middle Ages and the Christian school of art.

Art, society, religion,--all these are faculties inseparable from human life itself, progressive as life itself, and eternal as life itself. Every epoch of humanity has had and will have its own social, artistic, and religious _expression_. In every epoch man will ask of tradition and of conscience whence he came, and to what goal he is bound; he will ask through what paths that goal is to be reached, and seek to solve the problem suggested by the existence within him of a conception of the Infinite, and of an ideal impossible of realization in the finite conditions of his earthly existence. He will, from time to time, adopt a different solution, in proportion as the horizon of tradition is progressively enlarged, and the human conscience enlightened; but assuredly it will never be a mere negation.

Philosophically speaking, materialism is based upon a singular but constant confusion of two things radically distinct;--life, and its successive modes of manifestation; the _Ego_, and the organs by which it is revealed in a visible form to the external world, the non-_Ego_. The men who, having succeeded in analyzing the _instruments_ by means of which life is made manifest in a series of successive finite phenomena, imagine that they have acquired a proof of the _materiality_ of life itself, resemble the poor fool, who, having chemically analyzed the ink with which a poem was written, imagines he has penetrated the secret of the genius that composed it.

Life,--thought,--the initiative power of motion,--the conception of the Infinite, of the Eternal, of God, which is inborn in the human mind,--the aspiration towards an ideal impossible of realization in the brief stage of our earthly existence,--the instinct of free will,--all that constitutes the mysterious link within us to a world beyond the visible,--defy all analysis by a philosophy exclusively experimental, and impotent to overpass the sphere of the secondary laws of being.

If materialists choose to reject the teachings of tradition, the voice of human conscience and intuition, to limit themselves to the mechanism of analytical observation, and substitute their narrow, undirected physiology for biology and psychology,--if then, finding themselves unable by that imperfect method to comprehend the primary laws and origin of things, they childishly deny the existence of such laws, and declare all humanity before their time to have been deluded and incapable,--so be it. Nor should I, had Italy been a nation for half a century, have regarded their doctrines as fraught with any real danger. Humanity will not abandon its appointed path for them; and to hear them--in an age in which the discoveries of all great thinkers combine to demonstrate the existence of an intelligent preordained law of unity and progress--spouting materialism in the name of science, because they have skimmed a volume of Vogt, or attended a lecture by Moleschott, might rather move one to amusement than anger.

But Italy is not a nation; she is only in the way to become one. And the present is therefore a moment of grave importance; for, even as the first examples set before infancy, so the first lessons taught to a people emerging from a long past of error and corruption, and hesitating as to the choice of its future, may be of serious import. The doctrines of federalism, which, if preached in France at the present day, would be but an innocent Utopia, threatened the dissolution of the country during the first years of the Revolution. They laid bare the path for foreign conquest, and roused the _Mountain_ to bloody and terrible means of repression.

Such for us are the wretched doctrines of which I speak. Fate has set before us a great and holy mission, which, if we fail to accomplish it now, may be postponed for half a century. Every delay, every error, may be fatal. And the people through whom we have to work are uneducated, liable to accept any error which wears a semblance of war against the past, and in danger, from their long habit of slavery, of relapsing into egotism.

Now the tendency of the doctrines of materialism is to lead the mass to egotism through the path of interest. Therefore it grieves me to hear them preached by many worthy but inconsiderate young men amongst us; and I conjure them, by all they hold most sacred, to meditate deeply the moral consequences of the doctrines they preach, and especially to study their effect in the case of a neighboring nation, which carried negation to the extreme during the past century, and which we behold at the present day utterly corrupted by the worship of temporary and material interest, disinherited of all noble activity, and sunk in the degradation and infamy of slavery.

Every error is a crime in those whose duty it is to watch over the cradle of a nation.

Either we must admit the idea of a God,--of the moral law, which is an emanation from him,--and the idea of human duty, freely accepted by mankind, as the practical consequence of that law,--or we must admit the idea of a ruling force of things, and its practical consequence, the worship of individual force or success, the omnipotence of _fact_. From this dilemma there is no escape.

Either we must accept the sovereignty of an _aim_ prescribed by conscience, in which all the individuals composing a nation are bound to unite, and the pursuit of which constitutes the _nationality_ of a given people among the many of which humanity is composed,--an aim recognized by them all, and superior to them all, and therefore _religious_; or we must accept the sovereignty of the _right_, arbitrarily defined, of each nation, and its practical consequences,--the pursuit by each individual of his own interest and his own _well-being_, the satisfaction of his own desires,--and the impossibility of any sovereign _duty_, to which all the citizens, from those who govern down to the humblest of the governed, owe obedience and sacrifice.

Which of these doctrines will be most potent to lead our nation to high things? Let us not forget that, although the educated, intellectual, and virtuous may be willing to admit that the _well-being_ of the individual should be founded--even at the cost of sacrifice--upon the _well-being_ of the many, the majority will, as they always have done, understand their _well-being_ to mean their positive satisfaction or enjoyment; they will reject the notion of sacrifice as painful, and endeavor to realize their own happiness, even to the injury of others. They will seek it one day from liberty, the next from the deceitful promises of a despot; but the practical result of encouraging them to strive for the realization of their own happiness as a right, will inevitably be to lead them to the mere gratification of their own individual egotism.

If you reject all Supreme law, all Providential guidance, all aim, all obligation imposed by the belief in a mission towards humanity, you have no right to prescribe _your_ conception of _well-being_ to others, as worthier or better. You have no certain basis, no principle upon which to found a system of education; you have nothing left but force, if you are strong enough to impose it. Such was the method adopted by the French Revolutionists, and they, in their turn, succumbed to the force of others, without knowing in the name of what to protest. And you would have to do the same. Without God, you must either accept anarchy as the normal condition of things,--and this is impossible,--or you must seek your authority in the _force_ of this or that individual, and thus open the way to despotism and tyranny.

But what then becomes of the idea of progress?--what of the conception we have lately gained from historic science of the gradual but infallible education of humanity,--of the link of _solidary_ ascending life which unites succeeding generations,--of the duty of sacrificing, if need be, the present generation to the elevation and morality of the generations of the future,--of the pre-eminence of the fatherland over individuals, and the certainty that their devotion and martyrdom will, in the fulness of time, advance the honor, greatness, or virtue of their nation?

There are _materialists_, illogical and carried away by the impulses of a heart superior to their doctrines, who do both feel and act upon this worship of the ideal; but _materialism_ denies it. Materialism, as a doctrine, only recognizes in the universe a finite and determinate quantity of matter, gifted with a definite number of properties, and susceptible of modification, but not of progress; in which certain productive forces act by the fortuitous agglomeration of circumstances not to be predicated or foreseen; or through the necessary succession of causes and effects,--of events inevitable and independent of all human action.

Materialism admits neither the intervention of any creative intelligence, Divine initiative, nor human free-will; by denying the law-giving Intellect, it denies all intelligent Providential law; and the philosophy of the squirrel in its cage, which men term _Pantheism_ at the present day, by confounding the _subject_ and the _object_ in one, cancels alike the _Ego_ and non-_Ego_, good and evil, God and man, and, consequently, all individual mission or free-will. The wretched doctrine, recognizing no higher historic formula than the necessary alternation of vicissitudes, condemns humanity to tread eternally the same circle, being incapable of comprehending the conception of the spiral path of indefinite progress upon which humanity traces its gradual ascent towards an ideal beyond.

Strange contradiction! Men whose aim it is to combat the practice of egotism instilled into the Italian people by tyranny, to inspire them with a sacred devotion to the fatherland, and make of them a great nation, the artificer of the progress of humanity, present as the first intellectual food of this people now awakening to new life, whose whole strength lies in their good instincts and virginity of intellect, a theory the ultimate consequences of which are to establish egotism upon a basis of right!

They call upon their people worthily to carry on the grand traditions of their past, when all around them--popes, princes, military leaders, _literati_, and the servile herd--have either insolently trampled liberty under foot, or deserted its cause in cowardly indifference; and they preach to them a doctrine which deprives them of every pledge of future progress, every stimulus to affection, every noble aspiration towards sacrifice,--they take from them the faith that inspires confidence in victory, and renders even the defeat of to-day fruitful of triumph on the morrow. The same men who urge upon them the duty of shedding their blood for an idea begin by declaring to them: _There is no hope of any future for you. Faith in immortality--the lesson transmitted to you by all past humanity--is a falsehood; a breath of air, or trifling want of equilibrium in the animal functions, destroys you wholly and forever. There is even no certainty that the results of your labors will endure; there is no Providential law or design, consequently no possible theory of the future; you are but building up to-day what any unforeseen fact, blind force, or fortuitous circumstance may overthrow to-morrow._

They teach these brothers of theirs, whom they desire to elevate and ennoble, that they are but dust,--a necessary, unconscious secretion of I know not what material substance; that the _thought_ of a Kepler or Dante is _dust_, or rather _phosphorus_; that genius, from Prometheus to Jesus, brought down no divine spark from heaven; that the _moral law_, free-will, merit, and the consequent progress of the _Ego_, are illusions; that events are successively our masters,--inexorable, irresponsible, and insuperable to human will.

And they see not that they thus confirm that servile submission to the _accomplished fact_, that doctrine of _opportunity_, that bastard Machiavellism, that worship of temporary interests, and that indifference to every great idea, which find expression in our country at the present day in the betrayal of national duty by our higher classes, and in the stupid resignation of our masses.

IV.

I invoke the rising--and I should die consoled, even in exile, could I see the first signs of its advent, but this I dare not hope--I invoke the rising of a truly Italian school;--a school which, comprehending the causes of the downfall of the Papacy, and the impotence of the merely negative doctrine which our Italian youth have borrowed from superficial French materialists and the German copyists, should elevate itself above both, and come forward to announce the approaching and inevitable religious transformation which will put an end to the existing divorce between thought and action, and to the crisis of egotism and immorality through which Europe is passing.

I invoke the rising of a school destined to prepare the way for the _initiative_ of Italy;--which shall, on the one side, undertake the examination of the dogma upon which Catholicism was founded, and prove it to be worn out, exhausted, and in contradiction to our new conception of life and its laws; and, on the other hand, the refutation of materialism under whatsoever form it may present itself, and prove that it also is in contradiction of that new conception,--that it is a stupid, fatal negation of all moral law, of human free-will, of our every sacred hope, and of the calm and constant virtue of sacrifice.

I invoke a school which shall philosophically develop all the consequences, the germ of which--neglected or ignored by superficial intellects--is contained in the word Progress considered as a new _term_ in the great historical synthesis, the expression of the ascending advance of humanity from epoch to epoch, from religion to religion, towards a vaster conception of its own _aim_ and its own law.

I invoke the rising of a school destined to demonstrate to the youth of Italy that _rationalism_ is but an _instrument_,--the instrument adopted in all periods of transition by the human intellect to aid its progress from a worn-out form of religion to one new and superior,--and science only an accumulation of materials to be arranged and organized in fruitful synthesis by a new moral conception;--a school that will recall philosophy from this puerile confusion of the _means_ with the _aim_, to bring it back to its sole true basis, the knowledge of life and comprehension of its law.

I invoke a school which will seek the truth of the epoch, not in mere analysis,--always barren and certain to mislead, if undirected by a ruling principle,--but in an earnest study of universal tradition, which is the manifestation of the collective life of humanity; and of conscience, which is the manifestation of the life of the individual.

I invoke a school which shall redeem from the neglect cast upon it by theories deduced from one of our human faculties alone that _intuition_ which is the concentration of all the faculties upon a given subject;--a school which, even while declaring it exhausted, will respect the _past_, without which the _future_ would be impossible,--which will protest against those intellectual barbarians for whom every religion is falsehood, every form of civilization now extinct a folly, every great pope, king, or warrior now in the course of things surpassed a criminal or a hypocrite, and revoke the condemnation, thus uttered by presumption in the present, of the past labors and intellect of entire humanity;--a school which may condemn, but will not defame,--will judge, but never, through frenzy of rebellion, falsify history;--a school which will declare the death that _is_, without denying the life that _was_,--which will call upon Italy to emancipate herself for the achievement of new glories, but strip not a single leaf from her wreath of glories past.

Such a school would regain for Italy her European initiative, her primacy.

Italy--as I have said--is a religion.

Some have affirmed this of France. They were mistaken. France--if we except the single moment when the Revolution and Napoleon summed up the achievements of the epoch of _individuality_--has never had any external mission, other than, occasionally, as an arm of the Church, the _instrument_ of an idea emanating from Papal Rome.

But the mission of Italy in the world was at all times religious, and the essential character of Italian genius was at all times religious.

The essence of every religion lies in a power, unknown to mere science, of compelling man to reduce thought to action, and harmonize his practical life with his moral conception. The genius of our nation, whenever it has been spontaneously revealed, and exercised independently of all foreign inspiration, has always evinced the religious character, the unifying power to which I allude. Every conception of the Italian mind sought its incarnation in action,--strove to assume a form in the political sphere. The ideal and the real, elsewhere divided, have always tended to be united in our land. Sabines and Etruscans alike derived their civil organization and way of life from their conception of Heaven. The Pythagoreans founded their philosophy, religious associations, and political institutions at one and the same time. The source of the vitality and power of Rome lay in a religious sense of a collective mission, of an _aim_ to be achieved, in the contemplation of which the individual was submerged. Our democratic republics were all religious. Our early philosophical thinkers were all tormented by the idea of translating their ideal conceptions into practical rules of government.

And as to our external mission.

We alone have twice given _moral_ unity to Europe, to the known world. The voice that issued from Rome in the past was addressed to and reverenced by humanity,--"Urbs Orbi."

Italy is a religion. And when, in my earliest years, I believed that the _initiative_ of the third life of Europe would spring from the heart, the action, the enthusiasm and sacrifice of our people, I heard within me the grand voice of Rome sounding once again, hailed and accepted with loving reverence by the peoples, and telling of moral unity and fraternity in a faith common to all humanity. It was not the unity of the past,--which, though sacred and conducive to civilization for many centuries, did but emancipate _individual_ man, and reveal to him an ideal of liberty and equality only to be realized in Heaven: it was a new unity, emancipating _collective_ humanity, and revealing the formula of Association, through which liberty and equality are destined to be realized here on earth; sanctifying the earth and rendering it what God wills it should be,--a stage upon the path of perfection, a means given to man wherewith to deserve a higher and nobler existence hereafter.

And I saw Rome, in the name of God and Republican Italy, substituting a declaration of PRINCIPLES for the barren declaration of rights,--principles the logical consequences of the parent idea, PROGRESS,--and revealing to the nations a common aim, and the basis of a new religion. And I saw Europe, weary of scepticism, egotism, and moral anarchy, receive the new faith with acclamations. I saw a new pact founded upon that faith,--a pact of united action in the work of human perfectibility, involving none of the evils or dangers of the former pact, because among the first consequences of a faith founded upon the dogma of progress would be the justification of _heresy_, as either a promise or endeavor after progress in the future.

The vision which brightened my first dream of country has vanished, so far as concerns my own life. Even if that vision be ever fulfilled,--as I believe it will be,--I shall be in the tomb. May the young, as yet uncorrupted by scepticism, prepare the way for its realization; and may they, in the name of our national tradition and the future, unceasingly protest against all who seek to immobilize human life in the name of a dogma extinct, or to degrade it by diverting it from the eternal worship of the Ideal.

The religious question is pre-eminent over every other at the present day, and the moral question is indissolubly linked with it. We are bound either to solve these, or renounce all idea of an Italian mission in the world.

JOSEPH MAZZINI.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote D: This sacred word, which sums up the dogma of the future, has been uttered by every school, but misunderstood by the majority. Materialists have usurped the use of it, to express man's ever-increasing power over the productive forces of the earth; and men of science, to indicate that accumulation of _facts_ discovered and submitted to analysis which has led us to a better knowledge of secondary causes. Few understand it as the expression of a providential conception or design, inseparable from our human life and foundation of our moral law.]

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

_Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty._ By J. W. DE FORREST. New York: Harper and Brothers.

The light, strong way in which our author goes forward in this story from the first, and does not leave difficulty to his readers, is pleasing to those accustomed to find an American novel a good deal like the now extinct American stage-coach whose passengers not only walked over bad pieces of road, but carried fence-rails on their shoulders to pry the vehicle out of the sloughs and miry places. It was partly the fault of the imperfect roads, no doubt, and it may be that our social ways have only just now settled into such a state as makes smooth going for the novelist; nevertheless, the old stage-coach was hard to travel in, and what with drafts upon one's good nature for assistance, it must be confessed that our novelists have been rather trying to their readers. It is well enough with us all while the road is good,--a study of individual character, a bit of landscape, a stretch of well-worn plot, gentle slopes of incident; but somewhere on the way the passengers are pretty sure to be asked to step out,--the ladies to walk on ahead, and the gentlemen to fetch fence-rails.

Our author imagines a Southern loyalist and his daughter sojourning in New Boston, Barataria, during the first months of the war. Dr. Ravenel has escaped from New Orleans just before the Rebellion began, and has brought away with him the most sarcastic and humorous contempt and abhorrence of his late fellow-citizens, while his daughter, an ardent and charming little blonde Rebel, remembers Louisiana with longing and blind admiration. The Doctor, born in South Carolina, and living all his days among slaveholders and slavery, has not learned to love either; but Lillie differs from him so widely as to scream with joy when she hears of Bull Run. Naturally she cannot fall in love with Mr. Colburne, the young New Boston lawyer, who goes into the war conscientiously for his country's sake, and resolved for his own to make himself worthy and lovable in Lillie's blue eyes by destroying and desolating all that she holds dear. It requires her marriage with Colonel Carter--a Virginia gentleman, a good-natured drunkard and _roué_ and soldier of fortune on our side--to make her see Colburne's worth, as it requires some comparative study of New Orleans and New Boston, on her return to her own city, to make her love the North. Bereft of her husband by his own wicked weakness, and then widowed, she can at last wisely love and marry Colburne; and, cured of Secession by experiencing on her father's account the treatment received by Unionists in New Orleans, her conversion to loyalty is a question of time duly settled before the story ends.

We sketch the plot without compunction, for these people of Mr. De Forrest's are so unlike characters in novels as to be like people in life, and none will wish the less to see them because he knows the outline of their history. Not only is the plot good and very well managed, but there is scarcely a feebly painted character or scene in the book. As to the style, it is so praiseworthy that we will not specifically censure occasional defects,--for the most part, slight turgidities notable chiefly from their contrast to the prevailing simplicity of the narrative.

Our war has not only left us the burden of a tremendous national debt, but has laid upon our literature a charge under which it has hitherto staggered very lamely. Every author who deals in fiction feels it to be his duty to contribute towards the payment of the accumulated interest in the events of the war, by relating his work to them; and the heroes of young-lady writers in the magazines have been everywhere fighting the late campaigns over again, as young ladies would have fought them. We do not say that this is not well, but we suspect that Mr. De Forrest is the first to treat the war really and artistically. His campaigns do not try the reader's constitution, his battles are not bores. His soldiers are the soldiers we actually know,--the green wood of the volunteers, the warped stuff of men torn from civilization and cast suddenly into the barbarism of camps, the hard, dry, tough, true fibre of the veterans that came out of the struggle. There could hardly be a better type of the conscientious and patriotic soldier than Captain Colburne; and if Colonel Carter must not stand as type of the officers of the old army, he mast be acknowledged as true to the semi-civilization of the South. On the whole he is more entertaining than Colburne, as immoral people are apt to be to those who suffer nothing from them. "His contrasts of slanginess and gentility, his mingled audacity and _insouciance_ of character, and all the picturesque ins and outs of his moral architecture, so different from the severe plainness of the spiritual temples common in New Boston," do take the eye of peace-bred Northerners, though never their sympathy. Throughout, we admire, as the author intends, Carter's thorough and enthusiastic soldiership, and we perceive the ruins of a generous nature in his aristocratic Virginian pride, his Virginian profusion, his imperfect Virginian sense of honor. When he comes to be shot, fighting bravely at the head of his column, after having swindled his government, and half unwillingly done his worst to break his wife's heart, we feel that our side has lost a good soldier, but that the world is on the whole something better for our loss. The reader must go to the novel itself for a perfect conception of this character, and preferably to those dialogues in which Colonel Carter so freely takes part; for in his development of Carter, at least, Mr. De Forrest is mainly dramatic. Indeed, all the talk in the book is free and natural, and, even without the hard swearing which distinguishes the speech of some, it would be difficult to mistake one speaker for another, as often happens in novels.

The character of Dr. Ravenel, though so simple, is treated in a manner invariably delightful and engaging. His native purity, amiability, and generosity, which a life-long contact with slavery could not taint; his cordial scorn of Southern ideas; his fine and flawless instinct of honor; his warm-hearted courtesy and gentleness, and his gayety and wit; his love of his daughter and of mineralogy; his courage, modesty, and humanity,--these are the traits which recur in the differing situations with constant pleasure to the reader.

Miss Lillie Ravenel is as charming as her adored papa, and is never less nor more than a bright, lovable, good, constant, inconsequent woman. It is to her that the book owes its few scenes of tenderness and sentiment; but she is by no means the most prominent character in the novel, as the infelicitous title would imply, and she serves chiefly to bring into stronger relief the traits of Colonel Carter and Doctor Ravenel. The author seems not even to make so much study of her as of Mrs. Larue, a lady whose peculiar character is skilfully drawn, and who will be quite probable and explicable to any who have studied the traits of the noble Latin race, and a little puzzling to those acquainted only with people of Northern civilization. Yet in Mrs. Larue the author comes near making his failure. There is a little too much of her,--it is as if the wily enchantress had cast her glamour upon the author himself,--and there is too much anxiety that the nature of her intrigue with Carter shall not be misunderstood. Nevertheless, she bears that stamp of verity which marks all Mr. De Forrest's creations, and which commends to our forbearance rather more of the highly colored and strongly-flavored parlance of the camps than could otherwise have demanded reproduction in literature. The bold strokes with which such an amusing and heroic reprobate as Van Zandt and such a pitiful poltroon as Gazaway are painted, are no less admirable than the nice touches which portray the Governor of Barataria, and some phases of the aristocratic, conscientious, truthful, angular, professorial society of New Boston, with its young college beaux and old college belles, and its life pure, colorless, and cold to the eye as celery, yet full of rich and wholesome juices. It is the goodness of New Boston, and of New England, which, however unbeautiful, has elevated and saved our whole national character; and in his book there is sufficient evidence of our author's appreciation of this fact, as well as of sympathy only and always with what is brave and true in life.

_A Journey to Ashango-Land: and further Penetration into Equatorial Africa._ By PAUL B. DU CHAILLU. With Maps and Illustrations. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

Somewhere in the heart of the African continent, Mr. Du Chaillu, laying his head upon a rock, after a day of uncommon hardship, finds reason to lament the ungratefulness of the traveller's fate, which brings him, through perilous adventure and great suffering, to the incredulity and coldness of a public unable to receive his story with perfect faith. It is such a meditation as ought to reproach very keenly the sceptics who doubted Mr. Du Chaillu's first book; it certainly renews in the reader of the present work the satisfaction felt in the comparative reasonableness of the things narrated, and his consequent ability to put an unmurmuring trust in the author. Here, indeed, is very little of the gorilla whom we formerly knew: his ferocity is greatly abated; he only once beats his breast and roars; he does not twist gun-barrels; his domestic habits are much simplified; his appearance here is relatively as unimportant as Mr. Pendennis's in the "Newcomes"; he is a deposed hero; and Mr. Du Chaillu pushes on to Ashango-Land without him. Otherwise, moreover, the narrative is quite credible, and, so far, unattractive, though there is still enough of incident to hold the idle, and enough of information in the appendices concerning the characteristics of the African skulls collected by Du Chaillu, the geographical and astronomical observations made _en route_, and the linguistic peculiarities noted, to interest the scientific. The book is perhaps not a fortunate one for those who occupy a place between these classes of readers, and who are tempted to ask of Mr. Du Chaillu, Have you really four hundred and thirty-seven royal octavo pages of news to tell us of Equatorial Africa?

Our traveller landed in West Africa in the autumn of 1863, and, after a short excursion in the coast country in search of the gorilla, he ascended the Fernand Vaz in a steamer seventy miles, to Goumbi, whence he proceeded by canoe to Obindji. Here, provided with a retinue of one hundred men of the Commi nation, his overland journey began, and led him through the hilly country of the Bakalai southeastwardly to the village of Olenda. From this point, before continuing his route, he visited the falls of the Samba Nagoshi, some fifty miles to the northward, and Adingo Village, twenty miles below Olenda. Starting anew after these excursions, he penetrated the continent, on a line deflecting a little south of east, as far as Mouaou Kombo, which is something more than two hundred miles from the sea.

In first landing from his ship, Mr. Du Chaillu lost his astronomical instruments, and was obliged to wait in the coast country until a new supply could be obtained from England. Midway on his journey to Mouaou Kombo, his photographic apparatus was stolen, and the chemicals were, as he supposes, swallowed by the robbers, to some of whom their dishonest experiments in photography proved fatal. The traveller's means of usefulness were limited to observation of the general character of the country, some investigation of its vegetable and animal life, and study of the customs of its human inhabitants,--in none of which does he develop much variety or novelty.

Nearly the whole route lay through hilly or mountainous country, for the most part thickly wooded and sparsely peopled. There was a very notable absence of all the larger African animals, and those encountered seemed to be as peaceful in their characters as their neighbors, the tribes of wild men. The nations through which Du Chaillu passed after leaving the Commi were the Ashira, the Ishogo, the Apono, and the Ashango, and none appears to have differed greatly from the others except in name. In habits they are all extremely alike, uniting a primitive simplicity of costume and architecture to highly sophisticated traits of lying and stealing. They are not warlike, and not very cruel, except in cases of witchcraft, which are extremely dealt with,--as, indeed, they used to be in New England. Fetichism is the only religion of these tribes, and they seem to believe firmly in no superior powers but those of evil. They are docile, however, and susceptible of control. Du Chaillu had the misfortune to spread the small-pox among them from some infected members of his train; and although all their superstitious fears were excited against him, the people were held in check by their principal men; and Du Chaillu met with no serious molestation until he reached Mouaou Kombo. Here he found the inhabitants comparatively hostile and distrustful, and in firing off a salute,--with the double purpose of intimidating them and restoring them to confidence,--one of his retinue accidentally shot two of the villagers. All hopes of friendly intercourse and of further progress were now at an end, and Du Chaillu began a rapid retreat, his men casting away in their flight his photographs, journals, and note-books, and hopelessly impairing the value of the possible narrative which he might survive to write.

Such narrative as he has actually written, we have briefly sketched. Its fault is want of condensation and of graphic power, so that, although you must follow the traveller through his difficulties and dangers, it is quite as much by effort of sympathy as by reason of interest that you do so. For the paucity of result from all the labor and hardship undergone, the author--considering the losses of material he sustained--cannot be justly criticised; but certainly the bulk of his volume makes its meagre substance somewhat too apparent.

_Liffith Lank, or Lunacy._ By C. H. WEBB. New York: Carleton.

_St. Twel'mo, or the Cuneiform Cyclopedist of Chattanooga._ By C. H. WEBB. New York: C. H. Webb.

In the first of these clever and successful burlesques, Mr. Webb has travestied rather the ideas than the manner of Mr. Reade; and one who turned to "Liffith Lank" from the wonderful parodies in "Punch's Prize Novelists," or those exquisitely finished pieces of mimicry, the "Condensed Novelists" of the Californian Harte, would feel its want of fidelity to the method and style of the author burlesqued. Yet the essential absurdities of "Griffith Gaunt" are most amusingly brought out in "Liffith Lank"; and as the little work makes the reader laugh at the great one, he has no right, perhaps, to ask more of it, or to complain that it trusts too much to the facile pun for its effects, which are oftener broad than poignant.

Nevertheless, in spite of our logical content with "Liffith Lank," we are very glad to find "St. Twel'mo" much better, and we only doubt whether the game is worth the candle; but as the candle is Mr. Webb's, he can burn it, we suppose, upon whatever occasion he likes. He has here made a closer parody than in his first effort, and has lost nothing of the peculiar power with which he there satirized ideas. That quality of the Bronté sisters, of which Miss Evans of Mobile is one of the many American dilutions,--that quality by which any sort of masculine wickedness and brutality short of refusing ladies seats in horse-cars is made lovely and attractive to the well-read and well-bred of the sex,--is very pleasantly derided, while the tropical luxuriance of general information characteristic of "St. Elmo" is unsparingly ridiculed, with the help of frequent extracts from the novel itself.

Mr. Webb appears in "St. Twel'mo" as both publisher and author, and, with a good feeling significant of very great changes in the literary world since a poet toasted Napoleon because he hanged a bookseller, dedicates his little work "To his best friend and nearest relative, the publisher."

_The Literary Life of James K. Paulding._ Compiled by his Son, WILLIAM I. PAULDING. New York: Charles Scribner and Company.

James K. Paulding was born in 1778 at Great-Nine Partners, in Dutchess County, New York, and nineteen years later came to the city of New York to fill a clerkship in a public office. His family was related to that of Washington Irving by marriage; he was himself united to Irving by literary sympathy and ambition, and the two young men now formed a friendship which endured through life. They published the Salmagundi papers together, and they always corresponded; but with Irving literature became all in all, and with Paulding a favorite relaxation from political life and a merely collateral pursuit. He wrote partisan satires and philippics, waxing ever more bitter against the party to which Irving belonged, and against England, where Irving was tasting the sweets of appreciation and success. He came to be Navy Agent at New York in 1823, and in 1838 President Van Buren made him his Secretary of the Navy. Three years later he retired from public life, and spent his remaining days in the tranquil and uneventful indulgence of his literary tastes.

Dying in 1859, he had survived nearly all his readers, and the present memoir was required to remind many, and to inform more, of the existence of such works as "The Backwoodsman," a poem; the Salmagundi papers in a second series; "Koningsmarke, the Long Finne, a story of the New World," in two volumes; "The Merry Tales of the Three Wise Men of Gotham," satirizing Owen's theories of society, law, and science; "The New Mirror for Travellers, and Guide to the Springs," a satire of fashionable life in the days before ladies with seventy-five trunks were born; "Tales of the Good Woman," a collection of short stories; "A Life of Washington"; "American Comedies"; "The Old Continental," and "The Puritan and his Daughter," historical novels; and innumerable political papers of a serious or a satirical sort. As it has been the purpose of the author of this memoir to let Paulding's life in great part develop itself from his letters, so it has also been his plan to spare comment on his father's literary labors, and to allow their character to be estimated by extracts from his poems, romances, and satires. From these we gather the idea of greater quantity than quality; of a poetical taste rather than poetic faculty; of a whimsical rather than a humorous or witty man. There is a very marked resemblance to Washington Irving's manner in the prose, which is inevitably, of course, less polished than that of the more purely literary man, and which is apt to be insipid and strained in greater degree in the same direction. It would not be just to say that Paulding's style was formed upon that of Irving; but both had given their days and nights to the virtuous poverty of the essayists of the last century; and while one grew into something fresher and more original by dint of long and constant literary effort, the other, writing only occasionally, remained an old-fashioned mannerist to the last. When he died, he passed out of a world in which Macaulay, Dickens, Thackeray, and Hawthorne had never lived. The last delicacy of touch is wanting in all his work, whether verse or prose; yet the reader, though unsatisfied, does not turn from it without respect. If it is second-rate, it is not tricksy; its dulness is not antic, but decorous and quiet; its dignity, while it bores, enforces a sort of reverence which we do not pay to the ineffectual fire-works of our own more pyrotechnic literary time.

Of Paulding himself one thinks, after reading the present memoir, with much regard and some regret. He was a sturdy patriot and cordial democrat, but he seems not to have thought human slavery so very bad a thing. He is perceptibly opinionated, and would have carried things with a high hand, whether as one of the government or one of the governed. He was not swift to adopt new ideas, but he was thoroughly honest in his opposition to them. His somewhat exaggerated estimate of his own importance in the world of letters and of politics was one of those venial errors which time readily repairs.