Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art

“Like one playing at ball in a ring, she tosses about from one to another, and is at home with all. To one she nods, to another she winks; she makes love to one, clings to another… To one she gives a ring to look at, to another blows a kiss; with one she sings, with another corresponds by signs.”60

The man who first established Satire as an outspoken review of Roman life was essentially a slashing journalist. This was Lucilius, who lived in the latter years of the second century b. c. He attacked the high-born statesmen, who, as he put it, “thought that they could blunder with impunity, and keep criticism at a distance by their rank.” On the other hand, he did not spare plebeian offenders. As one of his successors says, “he bit deep into the town of his day, and broke his jawtooth on them.” Literature and society also came under his censures. He lashes the new affectation of Greek manners and speech, the passion for quibbling rhetoric, the extravagance of the gluttons and the avarice of the misers. Even the Roman ladies of the time do not wholly escape. He criticises the variations of their toilettes. “When she is with you, anything is good enough; when visitors are expected, all the resources of the wardrobe are taxed,” The writings of this trenchant publicist formed the great standing example of free speech for later Roman times. Horace eschews politics; indeed, when he wrote, political criticism had become as futile as it was perilous; but he is evidently anxious to impress on the Roman public that he is true to the old tradition of satire by fearlessly lashing folly and vice. Persius, who died at the age of twenty-eight in the reign of Nero, made Roman Satire a voice of public opinion in a brave and a pure sense. Horace had been an accomplished Epicurean, who found his public among easy-going, cultivated men of the world. Persius spoke chiefly to minds of a graver cast: he summoned Roman citizens to possess themselves of a moral and intellectual freedom which no Cæsar could crush, the freedom given by the Stoic philosophy, – that philosophy which had moulded the jurisprudence of the Republic, and was now the refuge of thoughtful minds under the despotism of the Empire. Then we have once more a slashing publicist in Juvenal, who is national and popular in a broader sense than Horace or Persius. His fierce indignation is turned against the alien intruders, the scum of Greece and Asia, who are making Rome a foreign city, and robbing Roman citizens of their bread. He denounces the imported vices which are effacing the old Roman character. He is the last of the Roman satirists, and in much he resembles the first.

It may be noted that each of the three satirists of the Empire – Horace, Persius, Juvenal – gives us a dialogue between himself and an imaginary friend, who remonstrates with him for his rashness in imitating Lucilius, the outspoken satirist of the Republic. Horace, replies, in effect, “Never mind, I’m not afraid – Augustus will stand by me as Scipio and Laelius stood by Lucilius;” but, in fact, Horace never strikes like Lucilius; he keeps us smiling while he probes our faults; “he gains his entrance, and plays about the heart;” his censures even when keen, show cautious tact. Persius replies: “You need not read me if you do not like: but the joke is too good; I must tell some one that Midas has the ears of an ass.” When Juvenal is warned, we catch quite a different tone in the answer. After painting the Rome of his day, he says (I venture to give a version of my own): —

“Nought worse remains: the men of coming timesCan but renew our lusts, repeat our crimes.Vice holds the dizzy summit: spread thy sail,Indignant Muse, and drive before the gale!But who shall find, or whence – I hear thee ask —An inspiration level with the task?Whence that frank courage of an elder Rome,When Satire, fearless, sent the arrow home?‘Whom am I bound,’ she then could cry, ‘to spare?If high-placed guilt forgive not, do I care?’Paint now the prompter of a Nero’s rage —The torments of a Christian were thy wage, —Pinned to the stake, in blazing pitch to stand,Or, on the hook that dragg’d thee, plough the sand…_________No danger will attend thee if thou tellHow to Aeneas warlike Turnus fell;No spite resents Achilles’ fateful day,Or Hylas, with his urn, the Naiads’ prey;But when Lucilius, all his soul afire,Bared his good sword and wreak’d his generous ire,Flush’d cheeks bewrayed the secrets lock’d within,And chill hearts shivered with their conscious sin.Hence wrath and tears. Ere trumpets sound, debate:Warriors, once armed, repent of war too late.‘Then shall plain speech be tried on those whose clayRests by the Latin or Flaminian Way.’”

He did indeed try the plainest of speech, not only on dead tyrants and their ministers, but on the society of his own time. The elder Disraeli remarks that Richard Steele meant the Tatler to deal with three provinces – manners, letters, and politics; and that, as to politics, “it remained for the chaster genius of Addison to banish this disagreeable topic from his elegant pages.” Horace was in this respect the Addison of Satire under the Empire. In Juvenal, the Italian medley once more exhibits, though with necessary modifications, the larger and more vigorous spirit of its early prime. The poetical epistle, which in Horace is so near to Satire, usually differed from it in having less of the chatty miscellaneous character, and in being rather applied to continuous didactic exposition. The prose epistle, which was often meant for publication even when formally private, also contributed not only to express, but to mould, public opinion. Epigrams and lampoons might happen to be vehicles of a general feeling; but they differ from the forms of literature here considered in being essentially personal, like the satirical poetry of early Greece.

There is yet another agency, common to Greece and Rome, at which we must glance – the Oracles. Often, of course, they had a most important part in directing public opinion at critical moments; but this was not all. There were occasions on which an oracle became, in a strict sense, the organ of a political party. Thus the noble Athenian family of the Alcmaeonidae bribed the Delphian priests to make the oracle an organ of public opinion in favor of freeing Athens from Peisistratus. Accordingly, whenever Spartans came to consult the god on any subject whatever, this topic was always worked into the response. Apollo, in short, kept up a series of most urgent leading articles; and at last the Spartans were roused to action. Then, when Cleomenes, one of the two Spartan kings, wished to have his colleague Demaratus deposed, he made friends with an influential man at Delphi; the influential man bribed the priestess; and the oracle declared that Demaratus was not of the blood royal. In this case, the fraud was found out; the priestess was deposed; and when Cleomenes died mad, men said that this was the hand of Apollo. When the Persians were about to invade Greece, the Delphic oracle took the line of advising the Greeks to submit. The Athenians sent to ask what they should do, and the oracle said, “Fly to the ends of the earth.” The Athenians protested that they would not leave the temple until they got a more comfortable answer. Hereupon an influential Delphian advised them to assume the garb of suppliants; and this time Apollo told them to trust to their wooden walls. Herodotus mentions between seventy and eighty oracles (I believe) of one sort or another, and less than half of these contain predictions. The predictions usually belong to one of two classes; first, those obviously founded on secret information or on a shrewd guess; and, secondly, those in which the oracle had absolutely no ideas on the subject, and took refuge in vagueness.

Any one who reads the column of Answers to Correspondents in a prudently conducted journal will recognize the principal types of oracle. In truth, the Delphic oracle bore a strong resemblance to a serious newspaper managed by a cautious editorial committee with no principles in particular. In editing an oracle, it was then, as it still is, of primary importance not to make bad mistakes. The Delphian editors were not infallible; but, when a blunder had been made, they often showed considerable resource. Thus, when Croesus had been utterly ruined, he begged his conqueror to grant him one luxury – to allow him to send to Delphi, and ask Apollo whether it was his usual practice to treat his benefactors in this way. Apollo replied that, in point of fact, he had done everything he could; he had personally requested the Fates to put off the affair for a generation; but they would only grant a delay of three years. Instead of showing annoyance, Croesus ought to be grateful for having been ruined three years later than he ought to have been. There are Irish landlords who would see a parable in these things. Sometimes we can see that Apollo himself is slightly irritated, as an editor might be by a wrong-headed or impertinent querist. Some African colonists had been pestering Apollo about their local troubles and his own former predictions; and the response from Delphi begins with the sarcastic remark, “I admire your wisdom if you know Africa better than I do,” The normal tendency of the Delphic oracle was to discourage rash enterprise, and to inculcate maxims of orthodox piety and moderation. The people of Cnidos wanted to make their peninsula an island by digging a canal, but found it very hard work; and the oracle told them that if Zeus had meant the peninsula to be an island, he would have made it an island – which reminds one of some of the arguments against the Channel Tunnel. In one special direction, however, Delphi gave a real impulse to Hellenic progress. It was a powerful promoter of colonization: for instance, the first Greek settlements in Corsica and on the coast of Africa were directly due to Delphic oracles. We even find the oracle designating individuals for work abroad; as when it nominated a man of Mantinea to reform the constitution of Cyrene. In Scotland we are wont to take a keen interest in everything that bears on colonial careers for young men; and one day a Greek class had been reading about the Delphic oracle telling some Thracians to choose as their king the first man who should ask them to dinner. Miltiades had this privilege, and forthwith got the Thracian appointment. “Do you think,” a thoughtful student asked, “that there could have been any collusion?”

A brief mention is due to those Roman publications which, in form, came nearest to our newspapers – the official gazettes. Julius Caesar, when consul in 59 b. c., first caused the transactions of the Senate (Acta Senatus) to be regularly published; before his time, there had been only an occasional publication of its decrees. Augustus stopped the issue of this Senatorial Gazette, though the minutes continued to be regularly kept, at first by senators of the Emperor’s choice, afterwards by a secretary specially appointed. Further, Julius Caesar instituted a regular official gazette of general news, the Acta diurna, which continued under the Empire. There was an official editor; the gazette was exhibited daily in public, and copied by scribes, who sold it to their customers; the original copy was afterwards laid up in the public archives, where it could be consulted. This gazette contained announcements or decrees by the Government, notices relating to the magistrature and the law-courts, and other matters of public interest; also a register of births, marriages, and deaths, and occasionally other advertisements concerning private families. This gazette had a wide circulation. Tacitus, for example, says that a certain event could not be hidden from the army, because the legionaries throughout the provinces had read it in the gazette. But it was simply a bald record of facts; there was no comment. Cicero, writing from Asia, complains that a private correspondent at Rome has sent him only such news as appears in a gazette – about matches of gladiators and adjournment of courts – and has given him no political intelligence.

The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1740 contains a short and quaint paper by Dr. Johnson, in which he transcribes some supposed fragments of a Roman gazette for the year 168 b. c. These were first published in 1615, and in 1692 were defended by Dodwell, but are now recognized as fifteenth-century forgeries. We have no genuine fragments of the Roman gazettes. None the less, Johnson’s comparison of them with the English newspapers of 1740 may well suggest a reflection. The Roman gazette under the Empire did not give the transactions of the Senate, any more than it admitted political comment. In the newspapers of Johnson’s time, the parliamentary reports were still very irregular and imperfect; while criticism of public men was fain to take the disguise, however thin, of allegory. Thus the Gentleman’s Magazine regaled its readers, from month to month, with “Proceedings and Debates in the Senate of Lilliput.” It was when the House of Commons had ceased to represent the public opinion of the country, that this opinion became resolved to have an outlet in the press. Parliament having ceased to discharge its proper function, the press became the popular court of appeal. The battle for a free press, in the full modern sense, was fought out between 1764 and 1771 – beginning in 1764 with the persecution of Wilkes for attacking Bute in the North Briton, and ending with the successful resistance, in 1771, to the proclamation by which the Commons had forbidden the publication of their debates. Six printers, who had infringed it, were summoned to the bar of the House; five obeyed; and the messenger of the House was sent to arrest the sixth. The Lord Mayor of London sent the messenger to prison. The House of Commons sent the Lord Mayor to the Tower. But he was followed by cheering crowds. He was released at the next prorogation; and the day on which he left the Tower marked the end of the last attempt to silence the press. The next few years saw the beginning of the first English journals which exercised a great political and social power. The Times dates from 1788. Thus a period memorable for Americans has something of analogous significance for their kinsmen in England. For the English people, also, those years contained a Declaration of Independence; they brought us a title-deed of freedom greater, perhaps, than the barons of the thirteenth century extorted from John – the charter of a complete freedom in the daily utterance of public opinion.

The attempt here has been to indicate some of the partial equivalents for such an utterance which may be traced in classical literature. A student of antiquity must always in one sense, resemble the wistful Florentine who, with Virgil for his guide, explored the threefold realm beyond the grave. His converse is with the few, the spirits signal for good or for evil in their time; the shades of the great soldiers pass before him, – he can scan them closely, and imagine how each bore himself in the hour of defeat or victory on earth; he can know the counsels of statesmen, and even share the meditations of their leisure; the poets and the philosophers are present: but around and beyond these are the nameless nations of the dead, the multitudes who passed through the ancient world and left no memorial. With these dim populations he can hold no direct communion; it is much as if at times the great movements which agitated them are descried by him as the surging of a shadowy crowd, or if the accents of their anguish or triumph are borne from afar as the sound of many waters. So much the more, those few clear voices which still come from the past are never more significant than when they interpret the popular mind of their generation. The modern development of representative institutions has invested the collective sentiment of communities with power of a kind to which antiquity can furnish no proper parallel. But this fact cannot dispense the student of history from listening for the echoes of the market-place. And such attention cannot fail to quicken our sense of the inestimable gain which has accrued to modern life through journalism. It is easy to forget the magnitude of a benefit when its operation has become regular and familiar. The influence of the press may sometimes be abused; its tone may sometimes be objectionable. But take these three things – quickness in seeking and supplying information, – continual vigilance of comment, – electric sympathy of social feeling: where in the ancient world do we find these things as national characteristics, except in so far as they were gifts of nature to the small community of ancient Athens – gifts to which her best literature owes so much of its incomparable freshness and of its imperishable charm? It is mainly due to the agency of the press that these things are now found throughout the world, – these, which, in all lands where man has risen above barbarism, are the surest safeguards of civilization and the ultimate pledges of constitutional freedom. —Fortnightly Review.

THREE GLIMPSES OF A NEW ENGLAND VILLAGE

Does the reader chance to know that bit of England round about Haslemere, but an hour and a half’s journey from the heart of London, where three counties meet, and the traveller may see at a glance, from many a hill-top, the most rich and beautiful parts of Sussex, the wildest and most picturesque of Surrey and Hampshire? At his feet lies spread the weald of Sussex, whilst the dark wooded promontories and long purple ridges of Blackdown, Marley, and Ironhill curve round or jut out into this broad sea of fertility, and the distant South Downs close the view with wavy outline and fluted sides, bare of everything save fine turf, nibbling sheep, and the shadows of the clouds. Turning round, Surrey culminates, as it were, in Hind Head, with triple summit – no mere hill, but a miniature mountain in bold individuality of form. And when he climbs this vantage-ground, Hampshire lies unfolded before him as well as Surrey; Wolmer Forest – forest no longer, but brown moorland; ranges of chalk hills, conspicuous among them one with a white scar on its dark flank, which hides Selborne amid its trees; solemn distances seen against the sunset sky, clothed with a deep purple bloom, which haunt the memory like a strain of noble music.

No less beautiful and strikingly similar in general character is that part of Western Massachusetts wherein stands our New England village – Northampton – village in size and rural aspect, though the capital of Hampshire county. But the New England valley has one advantage over the weald of Sussex in its broad and beautiful river, with Indian name, Connecticut – Quonnektacut, the long river – which winds through it. Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom, the Sugar Loaf and the Pelham range are its Blackdown, Marley, Hind Head, and South Downs. These hills are a couple of hundred feet or so higher than their English prototypes, ranging from 1000 to 1300 feet above the sea, and their old ribs are of harder and more ancient stuff than the chalk and greensand of the South Downs and Surrey hills; witness the granite or rather gneiss boulders scattered broadcast over the land, sometimes in rugged upright masses, looking like some grey ruin, sometimes in small rounded fragments, bestrewing the uplands like a flock of sheep, and more rarely the black and still harder blocks of trap. In the museum at Amherst, just over the river, are preserved slabs with the famous bird-tracks – colossal footprints two feet long, found in the trias of this part of the Connecticut valley – all tending to prove that the sun shone down upon dry land here for some ages whilst the mother-country was still mostly a waste of waters; and that, geologically speaking, and so far as these parts at any rate are concerned, New England is old, and old England new, by comparison. Broad, fertile, level meadows border the river, and the hills are richly clothed with chestnut, birch, hemlock (somewhat like the yew in aspect), hickory (a kind of walnut), beech, oak, etc. It is hard to say whether the likeness or the unlikeness to an English landscape strikes the traveller more. There is the all-pervading difference of a dry and brilliant atmosphere, which modifies both form and color, substituting the sharp-edged and definite for the vague and rounded in distant objects, and brilliancy and distinctness of hue for depth and softness. Apart, too, from the brilliant and searching light, the leaves are absolutely of a lighter green, and grow in a less dense and solid mass; the foliage looks more feathery, the tree more spiral. Especially is this so with the American oak, which has neither the dome-like head, the sturdiness of bough, nor the dark bluish-green foliage of the English oak. If it be spring-time, no gorse is to be seen with golden blossom set among matted thorns, perfuming the sunshine; but everywhere abounding masses of the delicate pink-clustered, odorless, warlike kalmia, called there laurel, and growing to the full size of our laurels; and more shyly hidden, the lovely azalea or swamp-pink, as the country people call it. Instead of the daisy, the delicate little Housatonia, like Venus’ looking-glass but growing singly, stars the ground; and for fragrance we must stoop down and seek the pale pink clusters of the trailing arbutus or May-flower, which richly reward the seeker. In July we miss the splendid purpling of the hills with heather blossom; but the pink spikes of the hardhack abound; gay lilies, lady’s earrings, blue-fringed gentians, glowing cardinal flowers (Lobelia cardinalis), with slender petals of a deeper crimson than the salvia, and a host more new friends, or old friends with new ways grown democratic as befits them, scatter their beauty freely by the wayside and the margins of the brooks, instead of setting up as exclusives of the garden.

Nor are the differences less marked in the aspect of the cultivated land. The fertile valley has perhaps a look of greater breadth from not being intersected with hedges and having few fences of any kind, one crop growing beside another, and one owner’s beside another’s, like different beds in a nursery-garden. But the effect of these large undivided fields is to dwarf the appearance of the crops themselves. The patches of tall tasselled Indian corn, the white-blossomed buckwheat, and large-leaved tobacco, look diminutive. No haystacks, no wheat-ricks are to be seen; only here and there a lonely, prison-like tobacco barn or drying-house, full of narrow loopholes to let in air without light. Everything else is housed in the big barn that adjoins the farmhouse, which stands, not amid its own fields, but on the outskirts of the nearest town or village. Of wheat little is grown; of root-crops still less, for sheep-farming is not in favor. Tobacco, with its large, glossy dark leaves, like those of the mangel-wurzel, thrives well on the rich alluvial soil of the Connecticut valley; but, fluctuating as it is in value, exhaustive of the soil, and easily damaged by weather, the great gains of one year are often more than counterbalanced by the losses of the next. The Indian corn remains long upon the ground in autumn after it is cut, to ripen in stooks, much as beans do with us; and then come to light the pumpkins which were sown amongst it, and now lie basking and glowing in the sun like giant oranges. Glowing, too, in the splendid sunshine, are the apple-orchards, laden with fruit half as large and quite as red as full-blown peonies. Never, even in the vale of Evesham or Herefordshire, have I seen any so beautiful.

As to the living creatures – feathered, four legged, or no-legged – there are some conspicuous differences which it does not take a naturalist to discover. Ten to one, indeed, if we come upon a rattlesnake; but a few are still left in snug corners of Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom, as anxious to avoid us as we them. The lively little chipmunk, diminutive first cousin to the squirrel, with black stripe along the back, is sure to make our acquaintance, for his kind seems as multitudinous as the rabbit with us, and is a worse foe to the farmer, because he has more audacity and a taste for the kernels of things, instead of merely the leaves. Strange new sounds greet the ear from katydid “working her chromatic reed”; from bull-frog with deep low, almost a roar; from grasshoppers and locusts, whose loud brassy whirr resounds all through the sunny hours with such persistency it seems at last a very part of the hot sunshine. The chirp of our grasshoppers is the mere ghost of a sound in comparison. At night fireflies glance in and out of the darkness; and, if we remain under the trees, mosquitoes soon make us unpleasantly aware of their existence. As to the birds, the flame-colored oriole, the delicately shaped blue-bird, flit by now and then as flashes of surprise and delight from the south; the rose-breasted grossbeak has a sweet note; the robin, not round as a ball and fierce and saucy, but grown tall, and slim, and mild – his breast not so red, his song not so sweet, his eye not so bright – is there. He is indeed a robin only in name, – really a species of thrush. A cheerful twittering, chirping, whistling, the tuning of the orchestra, a short sweet snatch or two of song I heard; but the steady, long-sustained outpour of rich melody from throats never weary, the chorus trilling joyously, with which our woods and hedgerows resound in spring and early summer, I listened for in vain. Perhaps the pathlessness of the woods and hills prevented my penetrating to the secluded haunts of the sweetest singers, such as the hermit-thrush, and I speak only of New England. Remembering what John Burroughs has said on the subject, I will not venture to generalize the comparison.