Chapter 20

For some days after the supper recorded above, she was too happy tormenting the very object of all these aspirations, to trouble her head about the awkward and ill-mannered protégé of her father, whom she hated with as much cordiality as the most jealous of rivals could desire. But of course she was extremely careful to let no glimpse of this unchristian feeling towards Count Ericson be perceptible to the person who would have rejoiced in it so much. In fact, she carried her philanthropy to such a pitch, that she never mentioned any of the bad qualities of her new admirer, and Adolphus very naturally concluded that she felt as she spoke on the interesting subject. So, all of a sudden, Adolphus, who was prouder than Christina, perhaps because he was poorer, would not condescend to be made a fool of, as he magnanimously thought it, any longer. He had the immense satisfaction of staying away from the house for nearly half a week, and then, when he did pay a visit, he was almost as cold as the formal piece of diplomacy in the bag-wig and ruffles whom he called his uncle; and a great deal stiffer than the beautiful piece of pique, in silk gown and white satin corset, whom he called his cousin. Christina was dismayed at the sudden change--Adolphus never spoke to her, seldom looked at her, and evidently left the coast clear--so she thought--for the rich and powerful rival her father had so strongly supported. After much thinking, some sulkiness, and a good many fits of crying, Christina resolved, as the best way of recovering her own peace of mind, and the love of her cousin Adolphus, to put an end in a very decided manner to the pretensions of the Count. One day, accordingly, she watched her opportunity, and followed with anxious eyes her father's retreat from the room, under pretence of some important despatches to be sent off. She found herself alone with the object of her dislike--and only waited for a beginning to the conversation, that she might astonish his weak mind with the severity of her invectives. In fact, she had determined, according to the vulgar phrase, to tell him a bit of her mind--and a very small bit of it, she was well aware, would be sufficient to satisfy Count Ericson of the condition of all the rest. But the lover was in a contemplative mood, and stood as silent as a milestone, and looking almost as animated and profound. She sighed, she coughed, she drops her handkerchief. All wouldn't do--the milestone took no notice--Christina at last grew angry, and could contain herself no longer.

"I dreamt of you last night," she said by way of a beginning. "I hope in future you will leave my sleep undisturbed by your presumptuous presence. It is bad enough to be forced to see you when one is awake."

"And I, also, had a dream," replied Ericson, starting from his reverie, confused and only having heard the first part of the somewhat fierce attack. "I dreamt that you looked at me with a smile, a long, long look, so sweet, so winning. It was a happy dream!"

"It was a false one," she said, with tremendous bitterness. "I know better where to direct my smiles, whether I am awake or asleep."

"And how did I appear to you?" asked the Count, presenting a splendid specimen in his astonished look of the state of mind called "the dumfoundered" by some learned philosophers, and by others "the flabbergasted."

"You appeared to me like the nightmare! frightful and unsupportable as you do to me now," was the answer, accompanied with the look and manner that showed she was a judge of nightmares, and thought him a very unfavourable specimen of the animal.

"Ill-natured little tyrant!" cried Ericson, rushing to her, "teach me how you would have me love you, and I will do everything you ask!" In a moment he had seized her in his arms, and imprinted a kiss of prodigious violence on her cheek, which was redder than fire with rage and surprise!

But the assault did not go unpunished. The might of Samson woke in that insulted bosom, and lent such incredible weight to the blow that fell on the aggressor's ear, that it took him a long time to believe that the thump proceeded from the beautiful little hand he had so often admired; or, in short, from any thing but a twenty-four pounder. He rubbed the wounded organ with astonishing assiduity for some time. At last he said, in a very calm and measured voice,

"Your father has deceived me, young lady. He led me to believe you did not receive my visits with indifference."

"My father knows nothing about things of that kind," replied Christina, still flaming with indignation, "or he never would have let such an ill-mannered monster into his house. But he was right in saying I did not receive your visits with indifference; your visits, Count Ericson, can never be indifferent to me, and"----

What more she would have said, it is impossible to discover, for she was interrupted by the sudden entrance of her cousin, who only heard her last words, and started back at what he considered so open a declaration of her attachment.

"Who are you, sir?" asked Ericson in an angry tone, and with such an assumption of superiority, that Christina's hand tingled to give him a mark of regard on his other ear.

"A soldier," answered Adolphus, drawing his sword from its sheath and instead of directing it against his rival, laying it haughtily on the table. "A soldier who has bled for his country, and would be happy," he added, "to die for it."

"Say you so?" said Ericson, "then we are friends." He held out his hand.

"We are rivals," replied Adolphus, drawing back.

"Christina loves you, then?" enquired the Count.

"She has told me so; and I was foolish enough to believe her. It is now your turn to trust to the truth of a heartless woman.--She has told you you are not an object of indifference to her, and I resign my pretensions in your favour."

"In whose favour?" cried Christina, trembling; while tears sprang to her eyes.

"The King's!" replied Adolphus, retiring sorrowfully.

Christina sank on a seat, and covered her face with her hands.

"Stay," cried Charles the Twelfth in a voice of thunder; "stay, I command you."

The young man obeyed; biting his lip to conceal his emotion, till the blood came.

"I have seen you," said the King, "but not in this house."

"It was shut against me by my uncle when you were expected," said Adolphus.

"And yet I have seen you somewhere. What is your name?"

"Adolphus Hesse; the son of a brave officer who died fighting for you, and leaving me his misfortunes and the tears of his widow."

"Who told you I was not Count Ericson?"

"My eyes. I know you well."

"And I recollect you also," said Charles, advancing to the young man with a manner very different from that which characterized him in his intercourse with the softer sex. "Where did you get that scar on the left temple?"

"At Nerva, sire, where we tamed the pride of the Russians."

"True, true!" cried Charles, his nostrils dilated as if he snuffed up the carnage of the battle. "You need but this as your passport," he continued, placing his finger on the wound, "to ask me any favour, ay, even to measure swords with you, as I daresay you would be delighted to do in so noble a quarrel as the present; for on the day of that glorious fight, I learned, like you, the duty of a soldier, and the true dignity of a brave man. By the balls that rattled about our heads so playfully, give me your hand, brother, for we were baptized together in fire!"

Charles appeared to Christina, at this time, quite a different man addressing his fellow soldier, from what he had done upsetting the chess-board. Curiosity had dried her eyes, and she lost not a word of the conversation. The King turned to her with a smile.

"By my sword, Christina! I am but a poor wooer; one movement of your hand," and he touched his ear playfully as he spoke, "has banished all the silly thoughts that in a most traitorous manner had taken my heart prisoner. Speak, then, as forcibly as you act. Do you love this brave soldier?"

"Yes, sire."

"Who hinders the marriage?"

"The courtship of Count Ericson, with which my father perpetually threatens me."

"O ho!" thought Charles, "I see how it is. The King must console himself with the kiss, and pass the blow on the ear to the minister. Christina," he added aloud, "your father refuses to give you to the man you love; but he'll do it now, for _it is my will_. You'll confess, I am sure that if I was your nightmare as a lover, I am not your enemy as king."

"I confess it on my knees;" replied the humble beauty, taking her place beside her cousin, who knelt to his sovereign. While Charles joined the hands of the youthful pair, he imprinted a kiss on the fair brow of Christina; the last he ever bestowed on woman.

"Your Majesty pardons me then?" enquired the trembling girl. "If I had known it was the King, I would not have hit so hard."

That same evening Count Gyllenborg signed a contract of marriage, to which the name of Count Ericson was not appended, though it was witnessed by Charles the Twelfth; and in a few days afterwards, the old politician presided at the wedding dinner, and, by royal command, did the honours so nobly, and appeared so well pleased on the occasion, that nobody suspected that he had ever had higher dreams of ambition than to see his daughter happy; and if such had been his object, all Sweden knew that in bestowing her on her cousin he was eminently successful.

PHYSICAL SCIENCE IN ENGLAND.

If Alexander and Archimedes, evoked from their long sleep, were to contemplate, with minds calmed by removal from contemporaneous interests, the state of mankind in the present year, with what different feelings would they regard the influence of their respective lives upon the existing human world of 1843! The Macedonian would find the empire which it was the labour of his life to aggrandize, frittered into parcels, modeled, remodeled, subjected to various dynasties; Turks, Greeks, Russians, still contending for portions of the territory which he had conjoined only to be dismembered; he would find in these little or no trace of his ever having existed; he would find that the unity of his vast political power had been severed before his body was yet entombed, and his prediction, that his funeral obsequies would be performed with bloody hands, verily fulfilled. In parts of the world which his living grasp had not seized, he would also see little to remind him of his past existence. Would not mortification darken the brow of the resuscitated conqueror on discovering, that when his name was mentioned in historic annals, it was less as a polar star to guide, than as a beacon to be avoided?

What would the Syracusan see in this present epoch to remind him of himself? Would he see the man of 212 B.C., at all connected with the men of 1843 A.D.? Yes. In Prussia, Austria, France, England, America, in every city of every civilized nation, he would find the lever, the pulley, the mirror, the specific gravimeter, the geometric demonstration; he would trace the influence of his mind in the power-loom, the steam-engine, in the building of the Royal Exchange, in the Great Britain steam-ship; he would find an application of his well-known invention, the subject of a patent, an important auxiliary to navigation. Alexander _was_ a hero; Archimedes _is_ one.

Are we guilty of exaggeration in this contrast of the hero of War with him of Science? We think not. It may undoubtedly be argued that Alexander's life was productive of ultimate good, that he did much to open Asia to European civilization; but would that consideration serve to soothe the gloomy Shade? To what does it amount but to the assertion that out of evil cometh good? It was through no aim of his mind that this resulted, nor are mankind indebted to him personally for a collateral effect of his existence.

As an instance of men of a more modern era, let us take Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of France, and James Watt of Greenock, civil engineer.

The former applied the energies of a sagacious and comprehensive intellect to his own political aggrandizement; the latter devoted his more modest talents to the improvement of a mechanical engine. The former was and is, _par excellence_, a hero of history--we should scarcely find in the works of the most voluminous annalists the name of the latter. What has Napoleon done to entitle his name to occupy so prominent a position? He has been the cause, mediate or immediate, of sacrificing the lives of two millions of men.[17]

[17] From a rough calculation taken from the returns of those left dead on the fields of battle in which Napoleon commanded, from Montenotte to Waterloo, we make the amount 1,811,500; and if we add those who died subsequently of their wounds in the petty skirmishes, the losses in which are not reported, and in the naval fights, of which, though Napoleon was not present, he was the cause, the number given in the text will be far under the mark. A picture of the fathers, mothers, wives, children, and relatives of these victims, receiving the news of their death, would give a lively idea of the benefits conferred upon the world by Napoleon.

Has the obscure Watt done nothing to merit a page in the records of mankind? Walk ten miles in any manufacturing district, enter any coal-mine, examine the bank of England, travel by the Great Western railway, or navigate the Danube, the Mediterranean, the Indian or the Atlantic Ocean--in each and all of these, that giant slave, the steam-engine, will be seen, an ever-living testimony to the services rendered to mankind by its subjugator.

Attachment to a favourite pursuit is undoubtedly calculated to bias the judgment; but, however liable may be the obscure votary of science to override his hobby, Francis Bacon, Lord High Chancellor of England, in ascribing to scientific discoverers a higher merit than to legislators, emperors, or patriots, cannot be open to the charge of egoistic partiality. What, then, says this illustrious witness?--"The introduction of noble inventions seems to hold by far the most excellent place among all human actions. And this was the judgment of antiquity, which attributed divine honours to inventors, but conferred only heroical honours upon those who deserve well in civil affairs, such as the founders of empires, legislators, and deliverers of their country. And whoever rightly considers it, will find this a judicious custom in former ages, since the benefits of inventors may extend to all mankind, but civil benefits only to particular countries or seats of men; and these civil benefits seldom descend to more than a few ages, whereas inventions are perpetuated through the course of time. Besides, a state is seldom amended in its civil affairs without force and perturbation; whilst inventions spread their advantage without doing injury or causing disturbance."[18]

[18] Nov. Org. Aph. 29.

The opinion of a man who had reached the highest point to which a civilian could aspire, cannot, when he estimates the honours of the Chancellor as inferior to those of the natural philosopher, be ascribed to misjudging enthusiasm or personal disappointment. Without, however, seeking, for the sake of antithetic contrast, to underrate the importance of political services, civil or military, or to exaggerate those of the man of science, few, we think, will be disposed to deny that, although the one may be temporarily more urgent and necessary to the well-being of an existing race, yet that the benefits of the other are more lasting and universal. If, then, the influence on mankind of the secluded inventor be more extensive and durable than that of the active politician--if there be any truth in the opinion of Bacon, that the greatest political changes are wrought by the peaceful under-current of science; why is it that those who occupy the highest place as permanent benefactors of mankind, are, during their lifetime, neglected and comparatively unknown;--that they obtain neither the tangible advantages of pecuniary emolument, nor the more suitable, but less lucrative, honours of grateful homage? It is the common cry to exclaim against the neglect of science in the present day. Alas! history does not show us that our predecessors were more just to their scientific contemporaries. The evil is to a great extent remediless, the complaint to some extent irrational, and unworthy the dignity of the cause. The labourer in the field of science works not for the present, but for succeeding generations; he plants oaks for posterity, and must not look for the gratitude of contemporaries. Men will remunerate less, and be less grateful for, prospective than for present good--for benefits secured to their posterity than to themselves; the realization of the advantages is so distant, that the amount of discount is coextensive with the debt: it is only as the applications of science become more immediate, that the cultivators of science can reasonably expect an adequate reward or appreciation.

Even when practically applied, we too frequently see that the original discoveries of the physical philosopher are but little valued by those who make a daily, a most extensive, and a most lucrative use of their results. Men _talk_ of "a million;" how few have ever _counted_ one! Men walk along the Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill; how few think of the multiplied passions and powers which flit by them on their way--of the separate world which surrounds each passer-by--of the separate history, external and internal, of each--each possessing feelings, motives of action, characters, differing from the others, as the stamp of nature on his brow differs from his fellows! Thus, also, men's ears ring with the advancement of science, men's beards wag with repetition of the novel powers which have been educed from material nature; and if, in our daily traffic, we traverse without attention countless sands of thought, how much more, in our hackneyed talk of science, do we neglect the debt we owe to thought--thought, not the mere normal impulse of humanity, but the carefully elaborated lucubration of minds, of which the term _thinking_ is emphatically predicable! Names which are met with but once in the annals of science, and there, dimly seen as a star of the least magnitude, have perhaps earned that remote and obscure corner by painful self-denial, by unwearied toil! And yet not only these, but others who have added to diligence high mental acumen or profundity, whose wells of thought are, compared with those of the general mass, unfathomable, earn but a careless, occasional notice--are known but to few of those who daily reap the harvest which they have sown, and who even boast of seeing further than they did, as the dwarf on the shoulders of a giant can see further than the giant. The first step of the unthinking is to deny the possibility of a given discovery, the next is to assert that any one could have foreseen such discovery.

There are, however, points of higher import than gain or glory to which the philosopher must ever look, and the absence of which must be a source of bitter disappointment and ground of just complaint. The most important of these is, that, by national neglect, the _cause_ of science is injured, her progress retarded. Not only is she not honoured, she is dishonoured; and in no civilized nation is this contempt of physical science carried to a greater extent than in England, the country of commerce and of manufactures.

In this country, should a father observe in his gifted son a tendency to physical philosophy, he anxiously endeavours to dissuade him from this career, knowing that not only will it tend to no worldly aggrandizement, but that it will have the inevitable effect of lowering his position in what is called, and justly called, good society--the society of the most highly educated classes. At one of our universities, physical science is utterly neglected; at the other, only certain branches of it are cultivated. There are, it is true, university professors of each branch of physics, some of whom are able to collect a moderate number of pupils; others are obliged to carry with them an assistant, to whom alone they lecture, as Dean Swift preached to his clerk. But what part of the regular academic education does the study of Natural Philosophy occupy? It forms no necessary part of the examinations for degrees; no credit is attached to those who excel in its pursuit; no prizes, no fellowships, no university distinction, conferred upon its most successful votaries. On the contrary, physical, or at all events experimental, science is tabooed; it is written down "snobbish," and its being so considered has much influence in making it so: the necessity of manipulation is a sad drawback to the gentlemanliness of a pursuit. Bacon rebuked this fastidiousness, but in vain. "We will, moreover, show those who, in love with contemplation, regard our frequent mention of experiments as something harsh, unworthy, and mechanical, how they oppose the attainment of their own wishes, since abstract contemplation, and the construction and invention of experiments, rest upon the same principles, and are brought to perfection in a similar manner."[19]

[19] Impetus Philosophici, p. 681.

Unfortunately, the fact of experimental science being rejected by the educated classes and thrown in a great measure upon the artizans of a country, has conducted, among other evils, to one of a most detrimental character; viz. the want of accuracy in scientific language, and consequently the want of accuracy in ideas. Perfection in language, as in every thing else, is not to be attained, and doubtless there are few of the most highly educated who would not, in many cases, assign different meanings to the same word; but if some confusion on this subject is unavoidable, how much is that confusion increased, as regards scientific subjects, by the mass of memoirs written by parties, who, however acute their mental perceptions may be, yet, from want of early education, do not assign to words that accuracy of signification, and do not possess that perspicuity of style, which is absolutely necessary for the communication of ideas! Those, therefore, who, with different notions of language, read the writings of such as we are alluding to, either fail to attach to them any definite meaning, or attach one different from that which the authors intended to convey; whence arises a want of reciprocal intelligence, a want of unity of thought and purpose. Another defect arising from the circumstance that persons of a high order of education have not been generally the cultivators of experimental science in this country, is, that the path is thereby rendered more accessible to empiricism. Science, beautiful in herself, has thence a class of deformed disciples, who succeed in entangling their false pretensions with the claims of true merit. So much dust is puffed into the eyes of the public, that it can hardly distinguish between works of durable importance and the ephemeral productions of empirics; and those who would otherwise disdain the notoriety acquired by advertisement, end in adopting the system as the only means to avoid the mortification of seeing their own ideas appropriated and uttered in another form and in another's name.[20]

[20] In any thing we have above said, we trust it is unnecessary to disclaim the slightest intention of discouraging those whose want of conventional advantages only renders their merit more conspicuous; we find fault not with the uneducated for cultivating science, but with the educated for neglecting it.