Part 17

Wendell Phillips, in his lecture upon the Lost Arts, made some remarkable statements, to prove the superiority of the ancients in many things. "In every matter," he said, "that relates to invention--to use, or beauty, or form--we are borrowers. You may glance around the furniture of the palaces of Europe, and you may gather all these utensils of art or use, and when you have fixed the shape and forms in your mind, I will take you into the Museum of Naples, which gathers all remains of the domestic life of the Romans, and you shall not find a single one of these modern forms of art, or beauty, or use, that was not anticipated there. We have hardly added one single line or sweep of beauty to the antique.... I had heard that nothing had been observed in ancient times which could be called by the name of glass; that there had been merely attempts to imitate it. In Pompeii, a dozen miles south of Naples, which was covered with ashes eighteen hundred years ago, they broke into a room full of glass; there was ground glass, window glass, cut glass, and colored glass of every variety. It was undoubtedly a glass-makers factory.... Their imitations of gems deceived not only the lay people, but the connoisseurs were also cheated. Some of these imitations in later years have been discovered. The celebrated vase of the Geneva cathedral was considered a solid emerald. The Roman Catholic legend of it was that it was one of the treasures that the Queen of Sheba gave to Solomon, and that it was the identical cup out of which the Saviour ate the Last Supper. Columbus must have admired it. It was venerable in his day; it was death at that time for anybody to touch it but a Catholic priest. And when Napoleon besieged Genoa it was offered by the Jews to loan the senate three millions of dollars on that single article as security. Napoleon took it and carried it to France, and gave it to the Institute. In a fool's night, somewhat reluctantly, the scholars said, 'It is not a stone; we hardly know what it is.' Cicero said he had seen the entire Iliad, which is a poem as large as the New Testament, written on skin so that it could be rolled up in the compass of a nut-shell. Now this is imperceptible to the ordinary eye. You have seen the Declaration of Independence in the compass of a quarter of a dollar, written with the aid of glasses. I have a paper at home as long as half my hand, on which was photographed the whole contents of a London newspaper. It was put under a dove's wing and sent into Paris, where they enlarged it and read the news. That copy of the Iliad must have been made by some such process.... You may visit Dr. Abbott's Museum, where you will see the ring of Cheops. Bunsen puts him at five hundred years before Christ. The signet of the ring is about the size of a quarter of a dollar, and the engraving is invisible without the aid of glasses. No man was ever shown into the cabinet of gems in Italy without being furnished with a microscope to look at them. It would be idle for him to look at them without one. He couldn't appreciate the delicate lines and the expression of the faces. If you go to Parma, they will show you a gem once worn on the finger of Michel Angelo, of which the engraving is two thousand years old, on which there are the figures of seven women. You must have the aid of a glass in order to distinguish the forms at all. I have a friend who has a ring, perhaps three quarters of an inch in diameter, and on it is the naked figure of the god Hercules. By the aid of glasses you can distinguish the interlacing muscles, and count every separate hair on the eyebrows. Layard says he would be unable to read the engravings on Nineveh without strong spectacles, they are so extremely small. Rawlinson brought home a stone about twenty inches long and ten inches wide, containing an entire treatise on mathematics. It would be perfectly illegible without glasses. Now, if we are unable to read it without the aid of glasses, you may suppose the man who engraved it had pretty good spectacles. So the microscope, instead of dating from our time, finds its brothers in the Books of Moses--and these are infant brothers." Speaking of colors, he said, "The burned city of Pompeii was a city of stucco. All the houses are stucco outside, and it is stained with Tyrian purple--the royal color of antiquity. But you can never rely on the name of a color after a thousand years, so the Tyrian purple is almost a red. This is a city of all red. It had been buried seventeen hundred years, and, if you take a shovel now and clear away the ashes, this color flames up upon you a great deal richer than anything we can produce. You can go down into the narrow vault which Nero built him as a retreat from the great heat, and you will find the walls painted all over with fanciful designs in arabesque, which have been buried beneath the earth fifteen hundred years; but when the peasants light it up with their torches, the colors flash out before you as fresh as they were in the days of St. Paul. Page, the artist, spent twelve years in Venice, studying Titian's method of mixing his colors, and he thinks he has got it. Yet come down from Titian, whose colors are wonderfully and perfectly fresh, to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, although his colors are not yet a hundred years old, they are fading; the color on his lips is dying out, and the cheeks are losing their tints. He did not know how to mix well. And his mastery of color is as yet unequaled.... The French have a theory that there is a certain delicate shade of blue that Europeans cannot see. In one of his lectures to his students, Ruskin opened his Catholic mass-book and said, 'Gentlemen, we are the best chemists in the world. No Englishman ever could doubt that. But we cannot make such a scarlet as that, and even if we could, it would not last for twenty years. Yet this is five hundred years old.' The Frenchman says, 'I am the best dyer in Europe; nobody can equal me, and nobody can surpass Lyons.' Yet in Cashmere, where the girls make shawls worth thirty thousand dollars, they will show him three hundred distinct colors which he not only cannot make but cannot even distinguish.... Mr. Colton, of the Boston Journal, the first week he landed in Asia, found that his chronometer was out of order from the steel of the works having become rusted. The London Medical and Surgical Journal advises surgeons not to venture to carry any lancets to Calcutta; to have them gilded, because English steel could not bear the atmosphere of India. Yet the Damascus blades of the Crusades were not gilded, and they are as perfect as they were eight centuries ago.... If a London chronometer-maker wants the best steel to use in his chronometer, he does not send to Sheffield, the centre of all science, but to the Punjaub, the empire of the five rivers, where there is no science at all.... Scott, in his Crusaders, describes a meeting between Richard Coeur de Lion and Saladin. Saladin asks Richard to show him the wonderful strength for which he is famous, and the Norman monarch responds by severing a bar of iron which lies on the floor of the tent. Saladin says, 'I cannot do that;' but he takes an eider-down pillow from the sofa, and drawing his keen blade across it, it falls in two pieces. Richard says, 'This is the black art; it is magic; it is the devil; you cannot cut that which has no resistance;' and Saladin, to show him that such is not the case, takes a scarf from his shoulders, which is so light that it almost floats in the air, and, tossing it up, severs it before it can descend. George Thompson saw a man in Calcutta throw a handful of floss silk into the air, and a Hindoo sever it into pieces with his sabre.... Mr. Batterson, of Hartford, walking with Brunel, the architect of the Thames Tunnel, in Egypt, asked him what he thought of the mechanical power of the Egyptians, and he said, 'There is Pompey's Pillar; it is one hundred feet high, and the capital weighs two thousand pounds. It is something of a feat to hang two thousand pounds at that height in the air, and the few men that can do it would better discuss Egyptian mechanics.'... We have only just begun to understand ventilation properly for our houses, yet late experiments at the pyramids in Egypt show that those Egyptian tombs were ventilated in the most perfect and scientific manner. Again, cement is modern, for the ancients dressed and jointed their stones so closely that in buildings thousands of years old the thin blade of a penknife cannot be forced between them. The railroad dates back to Egypt. Arago has claimed that they had a knowledge of steam. Bramah acknowledges that he took the idea of his celebrated lock from an ancient Egyptian pattern. De Tocqueville says there was no social question that was not discussed to rags in Egypt."

Humboldt, in his Cosmos, states that the Chinese had magnetic carriages with which to guide themselves across the great plains of Tartary, one thousand years before our era, on the principle of the compass. The Romans used movable types to mark their pottery and indorse their books. Layard found in Nineveh a magnifying lens of rock crystal, which Sir David Brewster considers a true optical lens, and the origin of the microscope. Experiments foreshadowing photography, giving remarkable results, began to be made more than three centuries ago, and more than two and a half centuries before Daguerre. The principle of the stereoscope, invented by Professor Wheatstone, was known to Euclid, described by Galen fifteen hundred years ago, and more fully long afterward in the works of Giambattista Porta. The Thames Tunnel, thought such a novelty, was anticipated by that under the Euphrates at Babylon.

"It is usually attributed to Aristotle, indeed, as his peculiar glory," says an authority on mental philosophy, "that he should at once have originated, and brought to perfection, a science which, for more than two thousand years, has received few alterations, found few minds capable of suggesting improvements. Recent labors of Orientalists have, however, brought to light the fact that in India, long before the palmy days of Grecian philosophy, logic was pursued with vigor as a study and science. The Nyaya of Gotama holds, in the Indian systems of philosophy, much the same place the Organon of Aristotle holds with us. The two, however, are quite independent of each other. Aristotle was no disciple of Gotama."

The so-called modern manifestations of spiritualism, as table-turning and direct spirit-writing, have been practiced in China from time immemorial; they have been known there at least from the days of Lao-tse, and he was an aged man when Confucius was a youth, between five and six centuries before the Christian era. Those who have read the travels in Thibet of the two Lazarite monks, Huc and Gabet, will recall many illustrations of spiritualism from their pages; and here, too, as in China, these practices date from a very remote time. M. Tscherpanoff published, in 1858, at St. Petersburg, the results of his investigations with the Lamas of Thibet. He attests (having been a witness in one or two cases) "that the Lamas, when applied to for the recovery of stolen or hidden things, take a little table, put one hand on it, and after nearly half an hour the table is lifted up by an invisible power, and is (with the hand of the Lama always on it) carried to the place where the thing in question is to be found, whether in or out of doors, where it drops, generally indicating exactly the spot where the article is to be found." Mesmerism is not new. Amongst Egyptian sculptures are people in the various attitudes which mesmerism in modern times induces. The Hebrews knew something of this science, for Baalam manifestly consulted a clairvoyant--a man in a "trance with his eyes open." The Greeks also had a knowledge of it. In Taylor's Plato it is said a man appeared before Aristotle in the Lyceum, who could read on one side of a brazen shield what was written on the other. The Romans were not ignorant of it, for Plautus, in one of his plays, asks, "What, and although I were by my continual slow touch to make him as if asleep?"

As to social science, here is the germ of Fourierism, in the Confessions of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, fifteen hundred years before Fourier: "And many of us friends, conferring about and detesting the turbulent turmoil of human life, had debated and now almost resolved on living apart from business and the bustle of men; and this was to be thus obtained: we were to bring whatever we might severally possess, and make one household of all; so that through the truth of our friendship nothing should belong especially to any, but the whole, thus derived from all, should as a whole belong to each, and all to all. We thought there might be some ten persons in this society; some of us very rich, especially Romanianus, our townsman, from childhood a very familiar friend of mine, whom the grievous perplexities of his affairs had brought up to court. He was the most earnest for this project; and his voice was of great weight, because his ample estate far exceeded any of the rest. We had settled, also, that two annual officers, as it were, should provide all things necessary, the rest being undisturbed. But when we began to consider whether the wives, which some of us already had, and others hoped to have, would allow this, all that plan, which was being so well moulded, fell to pieces in our hands, and was utterly dashed and cast aside. Thence we betook us to sighs and groans, and to follow the broad and beaten ways of the world."

In this beautiful passage from the Gulistan, or Rose Garden, of Saadi, written more than seven centuries ago, will be found an incomparable recipe for a famous hot-weather drink, much affected by Americans. Heliogabalus would have given a slice of his empire for that one immortal cobbler. "I recollect," says the poet, "that in my youth, as I was passing through a street, I cast my eyes on a beautiful girl. It was in the autumn, when the heat dried up all moisture from the mouth, and the sultry wind made the marrow boil in the bones; so that, being unable to support the sun's powerful beams, I was obliged to take shelter under the shade of a wall in hopes that some one would relieve me from the distressing heat of summer, and quench my thirst with a draught of water. Suddenly from the shade of the portico of a house I beheld a female form, whose beauty it is impossible for the tongue of eloquence to describe; insomuch that it seemed as if the dawn was rising in the obscurity of night, or as if the water of immortality was issuing from the land of darkness. She held in her hand a cup of snow-water, into which she sprinkled sugar, and mixed it with the juice of the grape. I know not whether what I perceived was the fragrance of rose-water, or that she had infused into it a few drops from the blossom of her cheek. In short, I received the cup from her beauteous hand, and drinking the contents, found myself restored to new life. The thirst of my heart is not such that it can be allayed with a drop of pure water; the streams of whole rivers would not satisfy it. How happy is that fortunate person whose eyes every morning may behold such a countenance. He who is intoxicated with wine will be sober again in the course of the night; but he who is intoxicated by the cup-bearer will not recover his senses until the day of judgment."

Cicero maintained the doctrine of universal brotherhood as distinctly as it was afterward maintained by the Christian Church. "Men were born," he says, "for the sake of men, that each should assist the others.... Nature ordains that a man should wish the good of every man, whoever he may be, for this very reason, that he is a man.... Nature has inclined us to love men, and this is the foundation of the law." Marcus Aurelius crystallized the "idea" of free government in one remarkable passage: "The idea of a polity in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed." And here is the idea of forgiveness of injuries, by Epictetus: "Every man has two handles, one of which will bear taking hold of, the other not. If thy brother sin against thee, lay not hold of the matter by this, that he sins against thee: for by this handle the matter will not bear taking hold of. But rather lay hold of it by this, that he is thy brother, thy born mate; and thou wilt take hold of it by what will bear handling." Here, too, is the idea of the Golden Rule, by Confucius, five hundred years before our era: "To have enough empire over one's self, in order to judge of others by comparison with ourselves, and to act toward them as we would wish that one should act toward us--that is what we can call the doctrine of humanity. There is nothing beyond it." And this is the prayer claimed to have been in use by religious Jews for nearly four thousand years, found by our Lord, improved by Him, and adopted for the use of Christians in all time: "Our Father who art in Heaven, be gracious unto us! O Lord our God, hallowed be thy name, and let the remembrance of Thee be glorified in heaven above and in the earth here below! Let thy kingdom rule over us now and forever! Remit and forgive unto all men whatever they have done against me! And lead us not into the power (hands) of temptation, but deliver us from the evil. For thine is the kingdom, and thou shalt reign in glory forever and ever more." Now hear the saying of King Solomon--wiser than Confucius, or Cicero, or Marcus Aurelius, or Epictetus, or any rabbi: "The thing that hath been is that which shall be, and there is no new thing under the sun."

VII.

INCONGRUITY.

"How contradictory it seems," remarked Washington Irving, writing of Oliver Goldsmith, "that one of the most delightful pictures of home and homefelt happiness should be drawn by a homeless man; that the most amiable picture of domestic virtue and all the endearments of the married state should be drawn by a bachelor who had been severed from domestic life almost from boyhood; that one of the most tender, touching, and affecting appeals on behalf of female loveliness should have been made by a man whose deficiencies in all the graces of person and manner seemed to mark him out for a cynical disparager of the sex." Byron thought it contradictory that the ancients, in their mythology, should have represented Wisdom by a woman, and Love by a boy. "Don't you know," urged Sydney Smith, "as the French say, there are three sexes--men, women, and clergymen?" In the old church at Hatfield, in England, amongst the antiquities, there is a recumbent statue, which every one believed was a woman, till Flaxman, the sculptor, examined it, and satisfied himself that it was a priest. Madame De Stael's Delphine was thought to contain a representation of Talleyrand in the character of an old woman. On her pressing for his opinion of that work, he said, "That is the work--is it not?--in which you and I are exhibited in the disguise of females?" Bulwer seemed to Harriet Martineau "a woman of genius, inclosed by misadventure in a man's form." A lady, speaking of the works of the poet Thomson, observed that she could gather from his writings three parts of his character: that he was an ardent lover, a great swimmer, and rigorously abstinent. Savage, to whom the remark was addressed, assured her that, in regard to the first, she was altogether mistaken; for the second, his friend was perhaps never in cold water in his life; and as to the third, he indulged in every luxury that came within his reach. Holmes states, in the preface to Elsie Venner, that while the story was in progress, he received the most startling confirmation of the possibility of the existence of a character like that he had drawn as a purely imaginary conception. Mrs. Hawthorne said that men who had committed great crimes, or whose memories held tragic secrets, would sometimes write to her husband, or even come great distances to see him, and unburden their souls. This was after the publication of The Scarlet Letter, which made them regard him as the father confessor for all hidden sins. The Swedenborgians informed Poe that they had discovered all that he said in a magazine article, entitled Mesmeric Revelations, to be absolutely true, although at first they were very strongly inclined to doubt his veracity,--a thing which, in that particular instance, he never dreamed of not doubting himself. Lord Lansdowne and Sydney Smith, with a companion or two, went incognito to Deville, the phrenologist in the Strand, to have their characters read from their skulls, and were most perversely interpreted. Lord Lansdowne was pronounced to be so absorbed in generalization as to fail in all practical matters, and Sydney Smith to be a great naturalist--"never so happy as when arranging his birds and fishes." "Sir," said the divine, with a stare of comical stupidity, "I don't know a fish from a bird;" and the chancellor of the exchequer was conscious that "all the fiddle-faddle of the cabinet" was committed to him on account of his love of what he called practical business. Crabb Robinson, on one of his visits to the British Gallery, where a collection of English portraits was exhibited, was displeased to see the name of the hated Jeffreys put to a "dignified and sweet countenance, that might have conferred new grace on some delightful character." Consistently enough with the delineation of the portrait, Evelyn recorded in his Memoirs that he "saw the Chief Justice Jeffreys in a large company the night before, and that he thought he laughed, drank, and danced too much for a man who had that day condemned Algernon Sidney to the block." An eminent gentleman who inspected the portraits of Luther and Melancthon, as they appear on their monuments in Wittenberg, describes the countenance of the latter as "acute and sarcastic." "Had subtlety and craft been his qualities, I should have thought the portrait expressed them." It is related of one of the philanthropists of France, who at one time held no insignificant place in the government, that when a distracted wife, who had pleaded to him in vain for her husband's life, in retiring from his presence, chanced to tread on his favorite spaniel's tail, he exclaimed, "Good heavens, madame, have you, then, no humanity?" In the palace Doria, said Willis, there is a portrait of "a celebrated widow" (so called in the catalogue) by Vandyck,--a "had-been beautiful woman, in a staid cap, with hands wonderfully painted." The custodian told the visitor that it was "a portrait of the wife of Vandyck, painted as an old woman to mortify her excessive vanity, when she was but twenty-three. He kept the picture until she was older, and, at the time of his death, it had become a flattering likeness, and was carefully treasured by the widow." Lavater, in his Physiognomy, says that Lord Anson, from his countenance, must have been a very wise man. Horace Walpole, who knew Lord Anson well, said he was the most stupid man he ever knew. Until a few years ago, it is stated, a portrait at Holland House was prescriptively reverenced as a speaking likeness of Addison, and a bust was designed after it by a distinguished sculptor. It turns out to be the copy of a portrait of a quite different person from the "great Mr. Addison."