Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860. No. XXXVI. - Various
Perhaps Dudley Venner had not gained so much in worldly wisdom as if
he had been more in society and less in his study. The indulgence with
which he treated his nephew was, no doubt, imprudent. A man more in
the habit of dealing with men would have been more guarded with a
person with Dick's questionable story and unquestionable physiognomy.
But he was singularly unsuspicious, and his natural kindness was an
additional motive to the wish for introducing some variety into the
routine of Elsie's life.
If Dudley Venner did not know just what he wanted at this period of
his life, there were a great many people in the town of Rockland who
thought they did know. He had been a widower long enough,--nigh twenty
year, wa'n't it? He'd been aout to Spraowles's party,--there wa'n't
anything to hender him why he shouldn't stir raound l'k other folks.
What was the reason he didn't go abaout to taown-meetin's, 'n'
Sahbath-meetin's, 'n' lyceums, 'n' school-'xaminations, 'n'
s'prise-parties, 'n' funerals,--and other entertainments where the
still-faced two-story folks were in the habit of looking round to see
if any of the mansion-house gentry were present?--Fac' was, he was
livin' too lonesome daown there at the mansion-haouse. Why shouldn't
he make up to the Jedge's daughter? She was genteel enough for him
and--let's see, haow old was she? Seven-'n'-twenty,--no,
six-'n'-twenty,--Born the same year we buried aour little Anny Mari.
There was no possible objection to this arrangement, if the parties
interested had seen fit to make it or even to think of it. But
"Portia," as some of the mansion-house people called her, did not
happen to awaken the elective affinities of the lonely widower. He met
her once in a while, and said to himself that she was a good specimen
of the grand style of woman; and then the image came back to him of a
woman not quite so large, not quite so imperial in her port, not quite
so incisive in her speech, not quite so judicial in her opinions, but
with two or three more joints in her frame and two or three soft
inflections in her voice which for some absurd reason or other drew
him to her side and so bewitched him that he told her half his secrets
and looked into her eyes all that, he could not tell, in less time
than it would have taken him to discuss the champion paper of the last
Quarterly with the admirable "Portia." _Heu, quanta minus!_ How much
more was that lost image to him than all it left on earth!
The study of love is very much like that of meteorology. We know that
just about so much rain will fall in a season; but on what particular
day it will shower is more than we can tell. We know that just about
so much love will be made every year in a given population; but who
will rain his young affections upon the heart of whom is not known
except to the astrologers and fortune-tellers. And why rain falls as
it does, and why love is made just as it is, are equally puzzling
questions.
The woman a man loves is always his own daughter, far more his
daughter than the female children born to him by the common law of
life. It is not the outside woman, who takes his name, that he loves:
before her image has reached the centre of his consciousness, it has
passed through fifty many-layered nerve-strainers, been churned over
by ten thousand pulse-beats, and reacted upon by millions of lateral
impulses which bandy it about through the mental spaces as a
reflection is sent back and forward in a saloon lined with mirrors.
With this altered image of the woman before him his preexisting ideal
becomes blended. The object of his love is half the offspring of her
legal parents and half of her lover's brain. The difference between
the real and the ideal objects of love must not exceed a fixed
maximum. The heart's vision cannot unite them stereoscopically into a
single image, if the divergence passes certain limits. A formidable
analogy, much in the nature of a proof, with very serious
consequences, which moralists and match-makers would do well to
remember! Double vision with the eyes of the heart is a dangerous
physiological state, and may lead to missteps and serious falls.
Whether Dudley Venner would ever find a breathing image near enough to
his ideal one, to fill the desolate chamber of his heart, or not, was
very doubtful. Some gracious and gentle woman, whose influence would
steal upon him as the first low words of prayer after that interval of
silent mental supplication known to one of our simpler forms of public
worship, gliding into his consciousness without hurting its old
griefs, herself knowing the chastening of sorrow, and subdued into
sweet acquiescence with the Divine will,--some such woman as this, if
Heaven should send him such, might call him back to the world of
happiness, from which he seemed forever exiled. He could never again
be the young lover who walked through the garden-alleys all red with
roses in the old dead and buried June of long ago. He could never
forget the bride of his youth, whose image, growing phantom-like with
the lapse of years, hovered over him like a dream while waking and
like a reality in dreams. But if it might be in God's good providence
that this desolate life should come under the influence of human
affections once more, what an ecstasy of renewed existence was in
store for him! His life had not all been buried under that narrow
ridge of turf with the white stone at its head. It seemed so for a
while; but it was not and could not and ought not to be so. His first
passion had been a true and pure one; there was no spot or stain upon
it. With all his grief there blended no cruel recollection of any word
or look he would have wished to forget. All those little differences,
such as young married people with any individual flavor in their
characters must have, if they are tolerably mated, had only added to
the music of existence, as the lesser discords admitted into some
perfect symphony, fitly resolved, add richness and strength to the
whole harmonious movement. It was a deep wound that Fate, had
inflicted on him; nay, it seemed like a mortal one; but the weapon was
clean, and its edge was smooth. Such wounds must heal with time in
healthy natures, whatever a false sentiment may say, by the wise and
beneficent law of our being. The recollection of a deep and true
affection, is rather a divine nourishment for a life to grow strong
upon than a poison to destroy it.
Dudley Venner's habitual sadness could not be laid wholly to his early
bereavement. It was partly the result of the long struggle between
natural affection and duty, on one side, and the involuntary
tendencies these had to overcome, on the other,--between hope and
fear, so long in conflict that despair itself would have been like an
anodyne, and he would have slept upon some final catastrophe with the
heavy sleep of a bankrupt after his failure is proclaimed. Alas! some
new affection might perhaps rekindle the fires of youth in his heart;
but what power could calm that haggard terror of the parent which rose
with every morning's sun and watched with every evening star,--what
power save alone that of him who comes bearing the inverted torch, and
leaving after him only the ashes printed with his footsteps?
* * * * *
THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER.
While all of us have been watching, with that admiring sympathy which
never fails to wait on courage and magnanimity, the career of the new
Timoleon in Sicily,--while we have been reckoning, with an interest
scarcely less than in some affair of personal concern, the chances and
changes that bear with furtherance or hindrance upon the fortune of
united Italy, we are approaching, with a quietness and composure which
more than anything else mark the essential difference between our own
form of democracy and any other yet known in history, a crisis in our
domestic policy more momentous than any that has arisen since we
became a nation. Indeed, considering the vital consequences for good
or evil that will follow from the popular decision in November, we
might be tempted to regard the remarkable moderation which has thus
far characterized the Presidential canvass as a guilty indifference to
the duty implied in the privilege of suffrage, or a stolid
unconsciousness of the result which may depend upon its exercise in
this particular election, did we not believe that it arose chiefly
from the general persuasion that the success of the Republican party
was a foregone conclusion.
In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private
thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a
peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual. Nothing can absolve
us from doing our best to look at all public questions as citizens,
and therefore in some sort as administrators and rulers. For, though
during its term of office the government be practically as independent
of the popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the
people are called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs.
Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an
argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing
it should be statesmen and thinkers. It is a proverb, that to turn a
radical into a conservative there needs only to put him into office,
because then the license of speculation or sentiment is limited by a
sense of responsibility,--then for the first time he becomes capable
of that comparative view which sees principles and measures, not in
the narrow abstract, but in the full breadth of their relations to
each other and to political consequences. The theory of democracy
presupposes something of these results of official position in the
individual voter, since in exercising his right he becomes for the
moment an integral part of the governing power.
How very far practice is from any likeness to theory a week's
experience of our politics suffices to convince us. The very
government itself seems an organized scramble, and Congress a boys'
debating-club, with the disadvantage of being reported. As our
party-creeds are commonly represented less by ideas than by persons,
(who are assumed, without too close a scrutiny, to be the exponents of
certain ideas,) our politics become personal and narrow to a degree
never paralleled, unless in ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. Our
Congress debates and our newspapers discuss, sometimes for day after
day, not questions of national interest, not what is wise and right,
but what the Honorable Lafayette Skreemer said on the stump, or bad
whiskey said for him, half a dozen years ago. If that personage,
outraged in all the finer sensibilities of our common nature, by
failing to get the contract for supplying the District Court-House at
Skreemeropolisville City with revolvers, was led to disparage the
union of these States, it is seized on as proof conclusive that the
party to which he belongs are so many Cat_a_lines,--for Congress is
unanimous only in misspelling the name of that oft-invoked
conspirator. The next Presidential Election looms always in advance,
so that we seem never to have an actual Chief Magistrate, but a
prospective one, looking to the chances of reelection, and mingling in
all the dirty intrigues of provincial politics with an unhappy talent
for making them dirtier. The cheating mirage of the White House lures
our public men away from present duties and obligations; and if
matters go on as they have gone, we shall need a Committee of Congress
to count the spoons in the public plate-closet, whenever a President
goes out of office,--with a policeman to watch every member of the
Committee. We are kept normally in that most unprofitable of
predicaments, a state of transition, and politicians measure their
words and deeds by a standard of immediate and temporary
expediency,--an expediency not as concerning the nation, but which, if
more than merely personal, is no wider than the interests of party.
Is all this a result of the failure of democratic institutions? Rather
of the fact that those institutions have never yet had a fair trial,
and that for the last thirty years an abnormal element has been acting
adversely with continually increasing strength. Whatever be the effect
of slavery upon the States where it exists, there can be no doubt that
its moral influence upon the North has been most disastrous. It has
compelled our politicians into that first fatal compromise with their
moral instincts and hereditary principles which makes all consequent
ones easy; it has accustomed us to makeshifts instead of
statesmanship, to subterfuge instead of policy, to party-platforms for
opinions, and to a defiance of the public sentiment of the civilized
world for patriotism. We have been asked to admit, first, that it was
a necessary evil; then that it was a good both to master and slave;
then that it was the corner-stone of free institutions; then that it
was a system divinely instituted under the Old Law and sanctioned
under the New. With a representation, three-fifths of it based on the
assumption that negroes are men, the South turns upon us and insists
on our acknowledging that they are things. After compelling her
Northern allies to pronounce the "free and equal" clause of the
preamble to the Declaration of Independence (because it stood in the
way of enslaving men) a manifest absurdity, she has declared, through
the Supreme Court of the United States, that negroes are not men in
the ordinary meaning of the word. To eat dirt is bad enough, but to
find that we have eaten more than was necessary may chance to give us
an indigestion. The slaveholding interest has gone on step by step,
forcing concession after concession, till it needs but little to
secure it forever in the political supremacy of the country. Yield to
its latest demand,--let it mould the evil destiny of the
Territories,--and the thing is done past recall. The next Presidential
Election is to say _Yes_ or _No_.
But we should not regard the mere question of political preponderancy
as of vital consequence, did it not involve a continually increasing
moral degradation on the part of the Nonslaveholding States,--for Free
States they could not be called much longer. Sordid and materialistic
views of the true value and objects of society and government are
professed more and more openly by the leaders of popular outcry, if it
cannot be called public opinion. That side of human nature which it
has been the object of all lawgivers and moralists to repress and
subjugate is flattered and caressed; whatever is profitable is right;
and already the slave-trade, as yielding a greater return on the
capital invested than any other traffic, is lauded as the highest
achievement of human reason and justice. Mr. Hammond has proclaimed
the accession of King Cotton, but he seems to have forgotten that
history is not without examples of kings who have lost their crowns
through the folly and false security of their ministers. It is quite
true that there is a large class of reasoners who would weigh all
questions of right and wrong in the balance of trade; but--we cannot
bring ourselves to believe that it is a wise political economy which
makes cotton by unmaking men, or a far-seeing statesmanship which
looks on an immediate money-profit as a safe equivalent for a beggared
public sentiment. We think Mr. Hammond even a little premature in
proclaiming the new Pretender. The election of November may prove a
Culloden. Whatever its result, it is to settle, for many years to
come, the question whether the American idea is to govern this
continent, whether the Occidental or the Oriental theory of society is
to mould our future, whether we are to recede from principles which
eighteen Christian centuries have been slowly establishing at the cost
of so many saintly lives at the stake and so many heroic ones on the
scaffold and the battle-field, in favor of some fancied assimilation
to the household arrangements of Abraham, of which all that can be
said with certainty is that they did not add to his domestic
happiness.
We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history; for,
although there are four candidates, there are really, as everybody
knows, but two parties, and a single question that divides them. The
supporters of Messrs. Bell and Everett have adopted as their platform
the Constitution, the Union, and the enforcement of the Laws. This may
be very convenient, but it is surely not very explicit. The cardinal
question on which the whole policy of the country is to turn--a
question, too, which this very election must decide in one way or the
other--is the interpretation to be put upon certain clauses of the
Constitution. All the other parties equally assert their loyalty to
that instrument. Indeed, it is quite the fashion. The removers of all
the ancient landmarks of our policy, the violators of thrice-pledged
faith, the planners of new treachery to established compromise, all
take refuge in the Constitution,--
"Like thieves that in a hemp-plot lie,
Secure against the hue and cry."
In the same way the first Bonaparte renewed his profession of faith in
the Revolution at every convenient opportunity; and the second follows
the precedent of his uncle, though the uninitiated fail to see any
logical sequence from 1789 to 1815 or 1860. If Mr. Bell loves the
Constitution, Mr. Breckinridge is equally fond; that Egeria of our
statesmen could be "happy with either, were t'other dear charmer
away." Mr. Douglas confides the secret of his passion to the
unloquacious clams of Rhode Island, and the chief complaint made
against Mr. Lincoln by his opponents is that he is _too_
Constitutional.
Meanwhile the only point in which voters are interested is,--What do
they mean by the Constitution? Mr. Breckinridge means the superiority
of a certain exceptional species of property over all others, nay,
over man himself. Mr. Douglas, with a different formula for expressing
it, means practically the same thing. Both of them mean that Labor has
no rights which Capital is bound to respect,--that there is no higher
law than human interest and cupidity. Both of them represent not
merely the narrow principles of a section, but the still narrower and
more selfish ones of a caste. Both of them, to be sure, have
convenient phrases to be juggled with before election, and which mean
one thing or another, or neither one thing nor another, as a
particular exigency may seem to require; but since both claim the
regular Democratic nomination, we have little difficulty in divining
what their course would be after the fourth of March, if they should
chance to be elected. We know too well what regular Democracy is, to
like either of the two faces which each shows by turns under the same
hood. Everybody remembers Baron Grimm's story of the Parisian showman,
who in 1789 exhibited the _royal_ Bengal tiger under the new character
of _national_, as more in harmony with the changed order of things.
Could the animal have lived till 1848, he would probably have found
himself offered to the discriminating public as the _democratic_ and
_social_ ornament of the jungle. The Pro-slavery party of this country
seeks the popular favor under even more frequent and incongruous
_aliases_; it is now _national_, now _conservative_, now
_constitutional_; here it represents Squatter-Sovereignty, and there
the power of Congress over the Territories; but, under whatever name,
its nature remains unchanged, and its instincts are none the less
predatory and destructive. Mr. Lincoln's position is set forth with
sufficient precision in the platform adopted by the Chicago
Convention; but what are we to make of Messrs. Bell and Everett? Heirs
of the stock in trade of two defunct parties, the Whig and
Know-Nothing, do they hope to resuscitate them? or are they only like
the inconsolable widows of Pere la Chaise, who, with an eye to former
customers, make use of the late Andsoforth's gravestone to advertise
that they still carry on the business at the old stand? Mr. Everett,
in his letter accepting the nomination, gave us only a string of
reasons why he should not have accepted it at all; and Mr. Bell
preserves a silence singularly at variance with his patronymic. The
only public demonstration of principle that we have seen is an
emblematic bell drawn upon a wagon by a single horse, with a man to
lead him, and a boy to make a nuisance of the tinkling symbol as it
moves along. Are all the figures in this melancholy procession equally
emblematic? If so, which of the two candidates is typified in the
unfortunate who leads the horse?--for we believe the only hope of the
party is to get one of them elected by some hocus-pocus in the House
of Representatives. The little boy, we suppose, is intended to
represent the party, which promises to be so conveniently small that
there will be an office for every member of it, if its candidate
should win. Did not the bell convey a plain allusion to the leading
name on the ticket, we should conceive it an excellent type of the
hollowness of those fears for the safety of the Union, in case of Mr.
Lincoln's election, whose changes are so loudly rung,--its noise
having once or twice given rise to false alarms of fire, till people
found out what it really was. Whatever profound moral it be intended
to convey, we find in it a similitude that is not without significance
as regards the professed creed of the party. The industrious youth who
operates upon it has evidently some notion of the measured and regular
motion that befits the tongues of well-disciplined and conservative
bells. He does his best to make theory and practice coincide; but with
every jolt on the road an involuntary variation is produced, and the
sonorous pulsation becomes rapid or slow accordingly. We have observed
that the Constitution was liable to similar derangements, and we very
much doubt whether Mr. Bell himself (since, after all, the
Constitution would practically be nothing else than his interpretation
of it) would keep the same measured tones that are so easy on the
smooth path of candidacy, when it came to conducting the car of State
over some of the rough places in the highway of Manifest Destiny, and
some of those passages in our politics which, after the fashion of new
countries, are rather _corduroy_ in character.
But, fortunately, we are not left wholly in the dark as to the aims of
the self-styled Constitutional party. One of its most distinguished
members, Governor Hunt of New York, has given us to understand that
its prime object is the defeat at all hazards of the Republican
candidate. To achieve so desirable an end, its leaders are ready to
coalesce, here with the Douglas, and there with the Breckinridge
faction of that very Democratic party of whose violations of the
Constitution, corruption, and dangerous limberness of principle they
have been the lifelong denouncers. In point of fact, then, it is
perfectly plain that we have only two parties in the field: those who
favor the extension of slavery, and those who oppose it,--in other
words, a Destructive and a Conservative party.
We know very well that the partisans of Mr. Bell, Mr. Douglas, and Mr.
Breckinridge all equally claim the title of conservative: and the fact
is a very curious one, well worthy the consideration of those foreign
critics who argue that the inevitable tendency of democracy is to
compel larger and larger concessions to a certain assumed communistic
propensity and hostility to the rights of property on the part of the
working classes. But the truth is, that revolutionary ideas are
promoted, not by any unthinking hostility to the _rights_ of property,
but by a well-founded jealousy of its usurpations; and it is
Privilege, and not Property, that is perplexed with fear of change.
The conservative effect of ownership operates with as much force on
the man with a hundred dollars in an old stocking as on his neighbor
with a million in the funds. During the Roman Revolution of '48, the
beggars who had funded their gains were among the stanchest
reactionaries, and left Rome with the nobility. No question of the
abstract right of property has ever entered directly into our
politics, or ever will,--the point at issue being, whether a certain
exceptional kind of property, already privileged beyond all others,
shall be entitled to still further privileges at the expense of every
other kind. The extension of slavery over new territory means just
this,--that this one kind of property, not recognized as such by the
Constitution, or it would never have been allowed to enter into the
basis of representation, shall control the foreign and domestic policy
of the Republic.
A great deal is said, to be sure, about the rights of the South; but
has any such right been infringed? When a man invests money in any
species of property, he assumes the risks to which it is liable. If he
buy a house, it may be burned; if a ship, it may be wrecked; if a
horse or an ox, it may die. Now the disadvantage of the Southern kind
of property is,--how shall we say it so as not to violate our
Constitutional obligations?--that it is exceptional. When it leaves
Virginia, it is a thing; when it arrives in Boston, it becomes a man,
speaks human language, appeals to the justice of the same God whom we
all acknowledge, weeps at the memory of wife and children left
behind,--in short, hath the same organs and dimensions that a
Christian hath, and is not distinguishable from ordinary Christians,
except, perhaps, by a simpler and more earnest faith. There are people
at the North who believe, that, beside _meum_ and _tuum_, there is
also such a thing as _suum_,--who are old-fashioned enough, or weak
enough, to have their feelings touched by these things, to think that
human nature is older and more sacred than any claim of property
whatever, and that it has rights at least as much to be respected as
any hypothetical one of our Southern brethren. This, no doubt, makes
it harder to recover a fugitive chattel; but the existence of human
nature in a man here and there is surely one of those accidents to be
counted on at least as often as fire, shipwreck, or the
cattle-disease; and the man who chooses to put his money into these
images of his Maker cut in ebony should be content to take the
incident risks along with the advantages. We should be very sorry to
deem this risk capable of diminution; for we think that the claims of
a common manhood upon us should be at least as strong as those of
Freemasonry, and that those whom the law of man turns away should find
in the larger charity of the law of God and Nature a readier welcome
and surer sanctuary. We shall continue to think the negro a man, and
on Southern evidence, too, as long as he is counted in the population
represented on the floor of Congress,--for three-fifths of perfect
manhood would be a high average even among white men; as long as he is
hanged or worse, as an example and terror to others,--for we do not
punish one animal for the moral improvement of the rest; as long as he
is considered capable of religious instruction,--for we fancy the
gorillas would make short work with a missionary; as long as there are
fears of insurrection,--for we never heard of a combined effort at
revolt in a menagerie. Accordingly, we do not see how the particular
right of whose infringement we hear so much is to be made safer by the
election of Mr. Bell, Mr. Breckinridge, or Mr. Douglas,--there being
quite as little chance that any of them would abolish human nature as
that Mr. Lincoln would abolish slavery. The same generous instinct
that leads some among us to sympathize with the sorrows of the
bereaved master will always, we fear, influence others to take part
with the rescued man.