The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 27, January, 1860

The communication of Lord Caernarvon stated in addition, that, in the case last supposed, the renewal of the exclusive license to trade in any part of the Indian territory—a renewal which could be justified to Parliament only as part of a general agreement adjusted on the principles of mutual concession—would become impossible.

These representations failed to influence the Company. The Deputy-Governor, Mr. H.H. Barens, responded, that, as, in 1850, the Company had assented to an inquiry before the Privy Council into the legality of certain powers claimed and exercised by them under their charter, but not questioning the validity of the charter itself, so, at this time, if the reference to the Privy Council were restricted to the question of the geographical extent of the territory claimed by the Company, in accordance with a proposition made in July, 1857, by Mr. Labouchere, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, the directors would recommend to their shareholders to concur in the course suggested; but must decline to do so, if the inquiry involved not merely the question of the geographical boundary of the territories claimed by them, but a challenge of the validity of the charter itself, and, as a consequence, of the rights and privileges which it professed to grant, and which the Company had exercised for a period of nearly two hundred years. Mr. Barens professed that the Company had at all times been willing to entertain any proposal that might be made to them for the surrender of any of their rights or of any portion of their territory; but he regarded it as one thing to consent for a consideration to be agreed upon to the surrender of admitted rights, and quite another to volunteer a consent to an inquiry which should call those rights in question.

A result of this correspondence has been the definite refusal of the Crown to renew the exclusive license to trade in Indian territory. The license had been twice granted to the Company, under an act of Parliament authorizing it, for periods of twenty-one years,—once in 1821, and again in 1838. It expired on the 30th of May, 1859. In consequence of this refusal, the Company must depend exclusively upon the terms of their charter for their special privileges in British America. The charter dates from 1670,—a grant by Charles II. to Prince Rupert and his associates, "adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay,"—and is claimed to give the right of exclusive trade and of territorial dominion to Hudson's Bay and tributary rivers. By the expiration of the exclusive license of Indian trade, and the termination in 1859 of the lease of Vancouver's Island from the British government, the sway and influence of the Company are greatly restricted, and the feasibility of some permanent adjustment is proportionately increased.

There is no necessity for repeating here the voluminous argument for and against the charter of the Hudson's Bay Company. The interest of British colonization in Northwest America far transcends any technical inquiry of the kind, and the Canadian statesmen are wise in declining to relieve the English cabinet from the obligation to act definitely and speedily upon the subject. The organization of the East India Company was no obstacle to a measure demanded by the honor of England and the welfare of India; and certainly the parchment of the Second Charles will not deter any deliberate expression by Parliament in regard to the colonization of Central British America. Indeed, the managers of the Hudson's Bay Company are always careful to recognize the probability of a compromise with the government. The late letter of Mr. Barens to Lord Caernarvon expressed a willingness, at any time, to entertain proposals for the surrender of franchises or territory; and in 1848, Sir J.H. Pelly, Governor of the Company, thus expressed himself in a letter to Lord Grey:—"As far as I am concerned, (and I think the Company will concur, if any great national benefit would be expected from it,) I would be willing to relinquish the whole of the territory held under the charter on similar terms to those which it is proposed the East India Company shall receive on the expiration of their charter,—namely, securing the proprietors an interest on their capital of ten per cent."

At the adjournment of the Canadian Parliament and the retirement of the Derby Ministry, in the early part of 1859, the position and prospects of English colonization in Northwest America were as follows:—

1. Vancouver's Island and British Columbia had passed from the occupation of the Hudson's Bay Company into an efficient colonial organization. The gold-fields of the interior had been ascertained to equal in productiveness, and greatly to exceed in extent, those of California. The prospect for agriculture was no less favorable,—while the commercial importance of Vancouver and the harbors of Puget's Sound is unquestionable.

2. The eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and the valleys of the Saskatchewan and Red River were shown by explorations, conducted under the auspices of the London Geographical Society and the Canadian authorities, to be a district of nearly four hundred thousand square miles, in which a fertile soil, favorable climate, useful and precious minerals, fur-bearing and food-yielding animals, in a word, the most lavish gifts of Nature, constituted highly satisfactory conditions for the organization and settlement of a prosperous community.

3. In regard to the Hudson's Bay Company, a disposition prevailed not to disturb its charter, on condition that its directory made no attempts to enforce an exclusive trade or to interfere with the progress of settlements. All parties anticipated Parliamentary action. Letters from London spoke with confidence of a bill, drafted and in circulation among members of Parliament, for the erection of a colony between Lakes Superior and Winnipeg and the eastern limits of British Columbia, with a northern boundary resting on the parallel of 55°; and which, although postponed by a change of ministry, was understood to represent the views of the Duke of Newcastle, the successor of Sir E.B. Lytton.

4. In Canada West, a system of communication from Fort William to Fort Garry, and thence to the Pacific, was intrusted to a company—the "Northwest Transit"—which was by no means inactive. A mail to Red River, over the same route, was also sustained from the Canadian treasury; and Parliament, among the acts of its previous session, had conceded a charter for a line of telegraph through the valleys of the Saskatchewan, with a view to an extension to the Pacific coast, and even to Asiatic Russia.

Simultaneously with these movements in England and Canada, the citizens of the State of Minnesota, after a winter of active discussion, announced a determination to introduce steam-navigation on the Red River of the North. Parties were induced to transport the machinery and cabins, with timber for the hull of a steamer, from the Upper Mississippi, near Crow Wing, to the mouth of the Cheyenne, on the Red River, where the boat was reconstructed. The first voyage of the steamer was from Fort Abercrombie, an American post two hundred miles northwest of Saint Paul, down north to Fort Garry, during the month of June. The reception of the stranger was attended by extraordinary demonstrations of enthusiasm at Selkirk. The bells of Saint Boniface rang greeting, and Fort Garry blasted powder, as if the Governor of the Company were approaching its portal. This unique, but interesting community, fully appreciated the fact that steam had brought their interests within the circle of the world's activities.

This incident was the legitimate sequel to events in Minnesota which had transpired during a period of ten years. Organized as a Territory in 1849, a single decade had brought the population, the resources, and the public recognition of an American State. A railroad system, connecting the lines of the Lake States and Provinces at La Crosse with the international frontier on the Red River at Pembina, was not only projected, but had secured in aid of its construction a grant by the Congress of the United States of three thousand eight hundred and forty acres a mile, and a loan of State credit to the amount of twenty thousand dollars a mile, not exceeding an aggregate of five million dollars. Different sections of this important extension of the Canadian and American railways were under contract and in process of construction. In addition, the land-surveys of the Federal government had reached the navigable channel of the Red River; and the line of frontier settlement, attended by a weekly mail, had advanced to the same point. Thus the government of the United States, no less than the people and authorities of Minnesota, were represented in this Northwest movement.

Still, its consummation rests with the people and Parliament of England. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton was prepared with a response to his own memorable query,—"What will he do with it?" Shall the Liberal party be less prompt and resolute in advancing the policy, announced from the throne in 1858, of an uninterrupted series of British colonies across the continent of North America? This will be determined by the Parliamentary record of 1860.

ART

PALMER'S "WHITE CAPTIVE."

Once on a time a maiden dwelt with her father,—they two, and no more,—in a rude log-cabin on the skirts of a grand old Western forest,—majestic mountains behind them, and the broad, free prairie in front.

Cut off from all Christian companionship and the informing influences of civilized arts, all their news was of red men and of game, their entertainments the ever-varying moods of Nature, their labors of the rudest, their dangers familiar, their solacements simple and solitary. Alone the sturdy hunter beat the woods all day, on the track of panthers, bears, and deer; alone, all day, his pretty daughter kept the house against perils without and despondency within,—the gun and the broom alike familiar to her hand.

Commissioned to illumine the murk wilderness around her with the glow of her Christian loveliness and faith, Nature had touched her with inspirations of refinement, with a culture as unconscious as the growing of the grass, and the clear intuitions of a spiritual life full of heaven-born inclinations. Nature, too, had endowed her with fine lines of beauty, attitudes of grace, movements of dignity and love, and all the charmfulness that had learned its shapes from flowers and its arts from birds. Nature's officers, the elements, had bestowed on her each his appropriate gift,—the Air its crispness, the Earth its variety, the Sun its brightness and its ruddy glow, the very Water from the well its freshness and its fluent forms; the stars repeated their friendliness in her eyes, the grass dimpled her pliant feet, the breeze tossed her brown hair in triumphs of the unstudied becoming, and from the wildness all about her she had her wit and her delightful ways; Morning lent her her cheerfulness, Evening her pensiveness, and Night her soul.

But Night, that had given her the Christian soul, true and wise, self-reliant and aspiring, brought also the surprise and the peril that should put it to the proof; for once, when the hunter was belated on his path, and sudden midnight had caught him beyond the mountain, far from the rest of his hearth and the song of his darling, came the red Pawnees, a treacherous crew,—doubly godless because ungrateful, who had broken the hunter's bread and slept on the hunter's blanket,—and laid waste his hearth, and stole away his very heart. For they dragged her many a fearful mile of darkness and distraction, through the black woods, and grim recesses of the rocks; and there they stripped her naked, and bound her to a stake, as the day was breaking. But the Christian heart was within her, and the Christian soul upheld her, and the Christian's God was by her side; and so she stood, and waited, and was brave.

And here still she stands, as the sculptor's soul sat down before her, in a vision of faith and tenderness, to receive her image,—stands and waits for the pity and the help of you and me, her brothers and her lovers. We long to rescue her and take her to our hearts; we are touched by her predicament, as Michelet tells us the heart of the beholder is moved by the bound Andromeda of Puget,—that great artist in whom dwelt the suffering soul of a depraved age, and who all his life long sculptured forlorn captives,—"Ah, would I had been there to rescue the darling!"

But we are told of the Andromeda, that, unconscious and almost dead, she knows not where she is, nor who has come to set her free; for, paralyzed by the chafing of her chains, and even more by fear, she cannot stand, and seems utterly exhausted.

Not so with our Andromeda. Horror possesses her, but indignation also; she is terrified, but brave; she shrinks, but she repels; and while all her beautiful body trembles and retreats, her countenance confronts her captors, and her steady gaze forbids them. "Touch me not!" she says, with every shuddering limb and every tensely-braced muscle, with lineaments all eloquent with imperious disgust,—"Touch me not!"

Her lips quiver, and tears are in her eyes, (we do not forget that it is of marble we are speaking,—there are tears in her eyes,) but they only linger there; she is not weeping now; her chin trembles, and one of her hands is convulsively clenched,—but it is with the anguish of her sore besetting, not the spasm of mortal fear. Though Heaven and Earth, indeed, might join to help her, we yet know that the soul of the maiden will help itself,—that her hope clings fast, and her courage is undaunted, and her faith complete.

Among her thronged emotions we look in vain for shame. Her nakedness is a coarse chance of her overwhelming situation, for which she is no more concerned than for her galled wrists or her dishevelled hair. What is it to such a queen as she, that the eyes of grinning brutes are blessed by her perfect beauties?

The qualities which constitute true greatness in a statue such as this are, if we apprehend them aright,—first, that sublime simplicity of Idea which omnipotently sways the beholder, and alike inspires his coarseness or his culture; next, that personality, that moving humanness of feeling, which holds him by his very heart-strings, and makes him forget its marble, to accept its flesh and blood; and, finally, that wondrous skill of nice manipulation, which, neglecting nothing in the myriad of anatomical and physiological details,—not even the faintest sigh or the dimmest tremor,—tells, fibre by fibre, a tale that all may read, and comes to us with a story "to hold children from play and old men from the chimney-corner."

Tried by this definition, we believe the "White Captive" proves its claim to genuine greatness, and that it will presently take its place, with the world's consent, in the front rank of modern statues,—good among the best, in the flesh-and-bloodness and the soul of it. It is original, it is faithful, it is American; our women may look upon it, and say, "She is one of us," with more satisfaction than the Greek women could have derived from the Venus de' Medici, with its insignificant head and its impossible spine.

Especially true to the American type, as compared in statues with the familiar Greek, the head of the "White Captive" is large; but that it is too large, or in excess of the least of a thousand female heads that have been gathered around it since it was first exposed to the public scrutiny, we have failed to discover in repeated and careful examinations; and we are constrained to commend such as may be exercised on that point to the critical flippancies of the jaunty gentlemen who find the hips at once too broad and too narrow, the bosom too full and too young, the arms too meagre and too stout.

FOREST PHOTOGRAPHS

We call the attention of our readers to a series of twelve photographic views of forest and lake scenery published by Mr. J.W. Black, Boston, from negatives taken by Mr. Stillman in the Adirondack country. The points of view are chosen with the fine feeling of an artist, and the tangled profusion and grace of the forest, with the moment's whim of sunfleck and shadow, are given with exquisite delicacy. Whatever the all-beholding sun could see in those woodland depths we have here,—sketches of the shaggy Pan snatched at unawares in sleep. One may study these pictures till he becomes as familiar as a squirrel with fern and tree-bark and moose-wood and lichen, till he knows every trunk and twig and leaf as intimately as a sunbeam.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Plutarch's Lives. The Translation called Dryden's. Corrected from the Greek, and Revised, by A.H. CLOUGH, sometime Fellow and Tutor of Oriel College, Oxford, and late Professor of the English Language and Literature at University College, London. Boston: Little, Brown, & Company. 1859. Five vols. 8vo.

In these five handsome volumes, we have, at length, a really good edition in English of Plutarch's Lives. One of the most delightful books in the world, one of the few universal classics, appears for the first time in our language in a translation worthy of its merits.

Mr. Clough, whose name is well known, not only by scholars, but also by the lovers of poetry, has performed the work of editor with admirable diligence, fidelity, and taste. The labor of revision has been neither slight nor easy. It has, indeed, amounted to not much less than would have been required for the making of a new translation. The versions in the translation that bears Dryden's name, made, as they were, by various hands, and apparently not submitted to the revision of any competent scholar, were unequal in execution, and were disfigured by many mistakes, as well as by much that was slovenly in style. At the time they were made, scholarship in England was not at a high point. Bentley had not yet lifted it out of mediocrity, and the translators were not stimulated by the fear either of severe criticism or of comparison of their labors with any superior work. The numerous defects of this translation are spoken of by the Langhornes, in the Preface to their own, with a somewhat jealous severity, which gives unusual vigor to their sentences. "The diversities of style," say they, "were not the greatest fault of this strange translation. It was full of the grossest errors. Ignorance on the one hand, and hastiness or negligence on the other, had filled it with absurdities in every Life, and inaccuracies on almost every page." This is a hard, perhaps an extreme judgment; but it serves to show the difficulties that would attend a revision of such a work. These difficulties Mr. Clough has fairly met and overcome. We do not mean to say that he has reduced the whole book to a perfect uniformity, or even to entire elegance and exactness of style; but he has corrected inaccuracies, he has removed the chief marks of negligence or haste; and, after a careful comparison of a considerable portion of the work as it now appears with the Greek text, we have no hesitation in saying that this translation answers not merely to the demands of modern scholarship, but forms a book at once essentially accurate and delightful for common reading.4 We think, moreover, that Mr. Clough was right in choosing the so-called Dryden's translation as the basis of his work. Its style is not old enough to have become antiquated, while yet it possesses much of the savor and raciness of age. The book is interesting from Dryden's connection with it, but still more so—considering how slight that connection was, his only contribution to it being the Life of Plutarch—from the fact, that the translations of some of the Lives were made by famous men, as that of Alcibiades by Lord Chancellor Somers, and that of Alexander by the excellent John Evelyn; while others were made by men who, if not famous, are at least well remembered by the lovers of the literature of the time,—as that of Numa by Sir Paul Rycaut, the Turkey merchant, and the continuer of Dr. Johnson's favorite history of the Turks,—that of Otho by Pope's friend, the medical poet, Dr. Garth,—that of Solon by Creech, the translator of Lucretius,—that of Lysander by the Honorable Charles Boyle, whose name is preserved in the alcohol of Bentley's classical satire,—and that of Themistocles by Edward, the son of Sir Thomas Browne.

But Mr. Clough's labors have not been merely those of reviser and corrector. He has added greatly to the value of the work by occasional concise foot-notes, as well as by notes contained in an appendix to each volume. So excellent, indeed, are these notes, so full of learning and information, conveyed in an agreeable way, that we cannot but feel a regret (not often excited by commentators) that their number is not greater. In addition to these, the fifth volume contains a very carefully prepared and full Index of Proper Names, which is followed by a list for reference as to their pronunciation.

When this version, to which Dryden gave his name, was made, there was no other in English but that of Sir Thomas North, which had been made, not from the Greek, but from the French of Amyot, and was first published in 1579. It was a good work for its time, and worthy of being dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, although, as the knight declares, "she could better understand it in Greek than any man can make it English." Its style is rather robust than elegant, partaking of the manly vigor of the language of its time, and now and then exhibiting something of that charm of quaint simplicity which belongs to its original, Montaigne's favorite Amyot. "Of all our French writers," says the incomparable essayist, "I give, with justice, I think, the palm to Jacques Amyot";5 and thereupon he goes on to praise the purity of his style, as well as the depth of his learning and judgment. But, although Amyot had "a true imagination" of his author, he was not always exact in giving his meaning. The learned Dr. Guy Patin says: "On dit que M. de Meziriac avoit corrigé dans son Amyot huit mille fautes, et qu'Amyot n'avoit pas de bons exemplaires, ou qu'il n'avoit pas bien entendu le Grec de Plutarque."6

Amyot's eight thousand errors were not diminished in passing into Sir Thomas North's English; but their number mattered little to the readers of those days, who found in the thick folio enough of interest to spare them from making inquiry as to the exactness of its rendering of the meaning of Plutarch. From the time of its first publication, for more than a hundred years, it was one of the most popular books of the period, as was proved by the appearance of six successive editions in folio.7 Some of these clumsy volumes may, no doubt, have been put to uses as ignoble as that which Chrysale, in "Les Femmes Savantes," suggests for his sister's similar copy of Amyot:—

"Vos livres éternels ne me contentent pas;Et, hors un gros Plutarque à mettre mes rabats,Vous devriez bruler tout ce meuble inutile";—

but duller books of the same size, of which there were many in those days of patient readers, would have had an equal value for such economical purposes as this, and "The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans by that Grave Learned Philosopher & Historiographer Plutarch" were too entertaining to young and old to be left for any length of time quietly upon the shelf. They were the familiar reading of boys who were to become the actors in the great drama of the Rebellion and the Commonwealth, or who a little later were to frequent the dissolute court of Charles, presenting in their own lives, whether in camp or court, as patriots or as traitors, parallels to those which they had read in the weighty pages of the old biographer.

Nor in more recent times has North's version failed of admirers. Godwin declared, that, till this book fell into his hands, he had no genuine feeling of Plutarch's merits, or knowledge of what sort of a writer he was. But the chief interest of this translation at the present day, except what it possesses as a storehouse of good mother-English, comes from the fact that it was one of the books of Shakespeare's moderate library, and one which he had thoroughly read, as is manifest from the use that he made of it in his own works, especially in "Coriolanus," "Julius Caesar," and "Antony and Cleopatra." It was from the worthy knight's folio that he got much of his little Latin and less Greek. He helped himself freely to what was to his purpose; and a comparison of the passages which he borrowed from with the scenes founded upon them is interesting, as showing his use of the very words of the author before him, and as exhibiting the new appearances which those words take on under his plastic hand. We have no space for long extracts; but a short illustration will serve to show that Shakespeare is the best translator of Plutarch into English that we have had. Compare these two passages:—