Book: Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860




Now the principle of gradation throughout organic Nature may, of
course, be interpreted upon other assumptions than those of Darwin's
hypothesis,--certainly upon quite other than those of materialistic
philosophy, with which we ourselves have no sympathy. Still we conceive
it not only possible, but probable, that this gradation, as it has its
natural ground, may yet have its scientific explanation. In any case,
there is no need to deny that the general facts correspond well with an
hypothesis like Darwin's, which is built upon fine gradations.

We have contemplated quite long enough the general presumptions in
favor of an hypothesis of the derivation of species. We cannot forget,
however, while for the moment we overlook, the formidable difficulties
which all hypotheses of this class have to encounter, and the serious
implications which they seem to involve. We feel, moreover, that
Darwin's particular hypothesis is exposed to some special objections. It
requires no small strength of nerve steadily to conceive not only of
the variation, but of the formation of the organs of an animal through
cumulative variation and natural selection. Think of such an organ as
the eye, that most perfect of optical instruments, as so produced in the
lower animals and perfected in the higher! A friend of ours, who accepts
the new doctrine, confesses that for a long while a cold chill came over
him whenever he thought of the eye. He has at length got over that stage
of the complaint, and is now in the fever of belief, perchance to be
succeeded by the sweating stage, during which sundry peccant humors may
be eliminated from the system.

For ourselves, we dread the chill, and have some misgiving about the
consequences of the reaction. We find ourselves in the "singular
position" acknowledged by Pictet,--that is, confronted with a theory
which, although it can really explain much, seems inadequate to the
heavy task it so boldly assumes, but which, nevertheless, appears better
fitted than any other that has been broached to explain, if it be
possible to explain, somewhat of the manner in which organized beings
may have arisen and succeeded each other. In this dilemma we might take
advantage of Mr. Darwin's candid admission, that he by no means expects
to convince old and experienced people, whose minds are stocked with a
multitude of facts all viewed during a long course of years from the old
point of view. This is nearly our case. So, owning no call to a larger
faith than is expected of us, but not prepared to pronounce the whole
hypothesis untenable, under such construction as we should put upon it,
we naturally sought to attain a settled conviction through a perusal
of several proffered refutations of the theory. At least, this course
seemed to offer the readiest way of bringing to a head the various
objections to which the theory is exposed. On several accounts some
of these opposed reviews specially invite examination. We propose,
accordingly, to conclude our task with an article upon "Darwin and his
Reviewers."

* * * * *


REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.


_Modern Painters_. By J. RUSKIN. Vol. V. Smith, Elder, & Co. London.

The completion of a work of the importance of the "Modern Painters,"
which has occupied in its production the thought and a large portion of
the labor of fourteen years, is an event of more interest than it often
falls to the lot of a book to excite; but when, as in this case, the
result shows the development of an individual taste and critical ability
entirely without peer in the history of art-letters, the value of the
whole work is immensely enhanced by the time which its publication
covers.

The first volume of "Modern Painters" was, as everybody will remember,
one of the sensation-books of the time, and fell upon the public opinion
of the day like a thunderbolt from the clear sky. Denying, and in many
instances overthrowing, the received canons of criticism, and defying
all the accepted authorities in it, the author excited the liveliest
astonishment and the bitterest hostility of the professional critics in
general, and at once divided the world of art, so far as his influence
reached, into two parts: the one embracing most of the reverent and
conservative minds, and by far the larger; the other, most of the
enthusiastic, the radical, and earnest; but this, small in numbers
at first, was increased, and still increases, by the force of those
qualities of enthusiasm and earnestness, until now, in England, it
embraces nearly all of the true and living art of our time. But that
volume, professedly treating art with reference to its superficial
attributes and for a special purpose, the redemption of a great and
revered artist from unjust disparagement and undeserved neglect,
touched in scarcely the least degree the vital questions of taste or
art-production. It had no considerations of sentiment or discussion of
principles to offer: it dealt with facts, and touched the simple truths
of Nature with an enthusiastic fire and lucidness which were proof
positive of the knowledge and feeling of the author; and the public,
either conversant with those facts or capable of being satisfied of
them without much thought, abandoned itself to the fascination of his
eloquence and acquiesced in his teachings, or arrayed itself in utter
hostility to him and his new ideas.

The second volume was more abstruse and deeper in feeling, and
comparatively few of Mr. Ruskin's followers through the first cared
to get entangled in the metaphysical mazes of the second, and it is
generally neglected, although containing some of the deepest and most
satisfactory studies on the fundamental principles of art and taste
which have ever been printed.

The third and fourth volumes, coming up again nearer the surface, made
an application of the principles investigated to the material for art
which Nature furnishes; and here again the author found in part his
audience diminished among those who had at first been carried away by
his enthusiasm or silenced and convinced by his unhesitating dogmatism.
A partial reaction took place, owing not only to the change in the tone
of the "Modern Painters," but to the springing up of a new school of
painting, the consequence, mainly and legitimately, of the teachings of
the work,--the pre-Raphaelite,--which, at once attacked virulently and
immeasurably by the old school of critics, and defended as earnestly by
Mr. Ruskin, became the subject of the war which was still waged between
him and them. Turner in the meanwhile had passed away and was admitted
to apotheosis, the malignant critics of yesterday becoming the ignorant
adulators of to-day: _his_ position was conceded, but the hostility to
Ruskin was sustained with unabated bitterness on the new field. He
was demolished anew, and proved, many useless times over and over, an
ignorant pretender; the public in the meanwhile, even his opponents,
taking up in turn his _proteges_, as he pointed them out to their
notice. The effect of his criticisms in enhancing the value of the works
they approved would be incredible, if one did not know how glad an
English public is to be led. As a single instance,--a drawing which was
sold from one of the water-color exhibitions at fifty guineas, sold
again, after Ruskin's notice, at two hundred and fifty; and in the lists
of pictures sold or to be sold at auction, one sees constantly, "Noticed
by Mr. Ruskin," "Approved by Mr. Ruskin," appended to the title.

The third volume, being devoted to the correction of the ideas of Style
and the Ideal, to Finish, and a review of the Past Landscape-Painting,
recurs to Turner in its closing chapter, "On his Teachers"; the fourth
was given to Mountain _Beauty_, following the parallel of the first,
which treated of the _Truth_ of Mountains, and bearing as its burden of
moral the expression of that Ideal by Turner; and the fifth now comes to
conclude the investigations on the Ideal by chapters: first, on "Leaf
Beauty," an exceedingly interesting investigation of the development
of the forms of trees and plants as concerned with the laws of beauty;
second, "Cloud Beauty"; and then of the "Ideas of Relation," in which
the author comes finally to the demonstration of the right of Turner to
his position amongst the thinking and poetic painters.

From the first division, "Leaf Beauty," we must make one extract.
The author has been speaking of the, influence of the Pine on Swiss
character.

"But the point which I desire the reader to note is, that the character
of the scene which, if any, appears to have been impressive to the
inhabitant is not that which we ourselves feel when we enter the
district. It was not from their lakes, nor their cliffs, nor their
glaciers, though these were all peculiarly their possession, that the
three venerable cantons or states received their name. They were not
called the States of the Rock, nor the States of the Lake, but the
States of the _Forest_. And the one of the three which contains the most
touching record of the spiritual power of Swiss religion, in the name of
the convent of the 'Hill of Angels,' has for its own none but the sweet,
childish name of 'Under the Woods.'

"And, indeed, you may pass under them, if, leaving the most sacred spot
in Swiss history, the Meadow of the Three Fountains, you bid the boatman
row southward a little way by the Bay of Uri. Steepest there, on its
western side, the walls of its rocks ascend to heaven. Far in the blue
of evening, like a great cathedral-pavement, lies the lake in its
darkness; and you may hear the whisper of innumerable falling waters
return from the hollows of the cliff like the voices of a multitude
praying under their breath. From time to time, the beat of a wave, slow
lifted, where the rocks lean over the black depth, dies heavily as the
last note of a requiem. Opposite, green with steep grass and set with
chalet villages, the Tron Alp rises in one solemn glow of pastoral light
and peace; and above, against the clouds of twilight, ghostly on the
gray precipice, stand, myriad by myriad, the shadowy armies of the
Unterwalden pine.

"I have seen that it is possible for the stranger to pass through this
great chapel, with its font of waters, and mountain pillars, and vaults
of cloud, without being touched by one noble thought or stirred by any
sacred passion; but for those who received from its waves the baptism
of their youth, and learned beneath its rocks the fidelity of their
manhood, and watched amidst its clouds the likeness of the dream of
life, with the eyes of age,--for these I will not believe that the
mountain-shrine was built or the calm of its forest-shadows guarded by
their God in vain."

But perhaps that conclusion of Ruskin's, in the new volume, which will
most interest his earnest readers, is that the Venetian school is _the
only religious school that has ever existed_. So much has Ruskin's
development seemed to contradict itself, that one is scarcely surprised
at one conclusion being apparently opposed to the former one; but a
change so great as this, from Giotto, Perugino, and Cima, to Tintoret,
Titian, and Veronese, as the religious ideals, will, indeed, amaze all
who read it. Yet this is but the logical consequence of his progression
hitherto. If he commenced with a belief that asceticism was religion, he
would recognize Perugino and Giotto as the true religious artists; but
if, as seems to be the case, he has learned at last that religion is a
thing of daily life, mingling in all that we do, caring for body as well
as soul, sense as well as spirit, and that a complete man must be a
man who _lives_ in every sense of the word, then the Venetians, as the
painters of the truth of life in _all_ its joy and sorrow, are the true
painters, and the only ones whose art was inhabited by a religion worth
following.

It is interesting to follow what are called Ruskin's contradictions and
see how perfectly they represent the whole system of artistic truth, as
seen from the different points of a young artist's or student's growth
up to mature and ripened judgment; so that there is no stage of artistic
development which has not some form of truth particularly adapted to it,
in the "Modern Painters." If it be urged that the book should have been
written only from the point of final development, it can only be said
that no true book will ever he so written, for no man can ever be
certain of his having attained final truth. "Modern Painters" has
value in this very showing of the critical development, which to an
intelligent student is greater than that a complete and infallible guide
could have.

The chapter on Invention is full of the most delightful artistic truth,
and shows completely, by copious illustrations, how well Turner deserved
the rank Ruskin gives him amongst great composers. The analyses of the
compositions of Turner are most curious and interesting, but, of course,
depend on the accompanying plates. Some most valuable mental philosophy
bearing on the production of art-works concludes Part VIII., which
is devoted to "Invention Formal," of which we quote the concluding
paragraphs:--

"Until the feelings can give strength enough to the will to enable it
to conquer them, they are not strong enough. If you cannot leave your
picture at any moment, cannot turn from it and go on with another while
the color is drying, cannot work at any part of it you choose with equal
contentment, you have not firm enough grasp of it.

"It follows, also, that no vain or selfish person can possibly paint,
in the noble sense of the word. Vanity and selfishness are troublous,
eager, anxious, petulant: painting can only be done in calm of mind.
Resolution is not enough to secure this; it must be secured by
disposition as well. You may resolve to think of your picture only; but,
if you have been fretted before beginning, no manly or clear grasp of
it will be possible for you. No forced calm is calm enough: only honest
calm, natural calm. You might as well try by external pressure to smooth
a lake till it could reflect the sky, as by violence of effort to secure
the peace through which only you can reach imagination. That peace must
come in its own time, as the waters settle themselves into clearness as
well as quietness: you can no more filter your mind into purity than you
can compress it into calmness; you must keep it pure, if you would have
it pure; and throw no stones into it, if you would have it quiet. Great
courage and self-command may to a certain extent give power of painting
without the true calmness underneath, but never of doing first-rate
work. There is sufficient evidence of this in even what we know of great
men, though of the greatest we nearly always know the least (and that
necessarily; they being very silent, and not much given to setting
themselves forth to questioners,--apt to be contemptuously reserved no
less than unselfishly). But in such writings and sayings as we possess
of theirs we may trace a quite curious gentleness and serene courtesy.
Rubens's letters are almost ludicrous in their unhurried politeness.
Reynolds, swiftest of painters, was gentlest of companions; so also
Velasquez, Titian, and Veronese.

"It is gratuitous to add that no shallow or petty person can paint. Mere
cleverness or special gift never made an artist. It is only perfectness
of mind, unity, depth, decision, the highest qualities, in fine, of the
intellect, which will form the imagination.

"And, lastly, no false person can paint. A person false at heart may,
when it suits his purposes, seize a stray truth here or there; but the
relations of truth, its perfectness, that which makes it wholesome
truth, he can never perceive. As wholeness and wholesomeness go
together, so also sight with sincerity; it is only the constant desire
of and submissiveness to truth, which can measure its strange angles
and mark its infinite aspects, and fit them and knit them into sacred
invention.

"Sacred I call it deliberately; for it is thus in the most accurate
senses, humble as well as helpful,--meek in its receiving as magnificent
in its disposing; the name it bears being rightly given even to
invention formal, not because it forms, but because it finds. For you
cannot find a lie; you must make it for yourself. False things may be
imagined, and false things composed; but only truth can be invented."

One of those cardinal doctrines by which we may learn the bearings of a
writer's system of truth is that of Ruskin's of the intimate connection
between landscape art and humanity.

"Fragrant tissue of flowers, golden circlet of clouds, are only fair
when they meet the fondness of human thoughts and glorify human visions
of heaven.

"It is the leaning on this truth which more than any other has been the
distinctive character of all my own past work. And in closing a series
of art-studies, prolonged during so many years, it may be perhaps
permitted me to point out this specialty,--the rather that it has been,
of all their characters, the one most denied. I constantly see that the
same thing takes place in the estimation formed by the modern public of
the work of almost any true person, living or dead. It is not needful
to state here the causes of such error; but the fact is indeed so, that
precisely the distinctive root and leading force of any true man's work
and way are the things denied him.

"And in these books of mine, their distinctive character, as essays on
art, is their bringing everything to a root in human passion or human
hope. Arising first not in any desire to explain the principles of art,
but in the endeavor to defend an individual painter from injustice, they
have been colored throughout, nay, continually altered in shape, and
even warped and broken, by digressions respecting social questions,
which had for me an interest tenfold greater than the work I had been
forced into undertaking. Every principle of painting which I have
stated is traced to some vital or spiritual fact; and in my works on
architecture the preference accorded finally to one school over another
is founded on a comparison of their influences on the life of the
workman,--a question by all other writers on the subject of architecture
wholly forgotten or despised.

"The essential connection of the power of landscape with human emotion
is not less certain because in many impressive pictures the link is
slight or local. That the connection should exist at a single point is
all that we need.... That difference, and more, exists between the power
of Nature through which humanity is seen, and her power in the desert.
Desert,--whether of leaf or sand,--true desertness, is not in the want
of leaves, but of life. Where humanity is not and was not, the best
natural beauty is more than vain. It is even terrible; not as the
dress cast aside from the body, but as an embroidered shroud hiding a
skeleton."

The volume, as a whole, will be found less dogmatic, calmer, more
convincing, and more directly applicable to artistic judgment, than any
of the others. There is the same love of mysticism and undermeanings,
but freighted with deeper and more central truths: a charming conclusion
to a fourteen-years' diary of such study of Art and Nature, so severe,
so unremitting, as never critic gave before.


_Syntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek Verb._ By W.W. GOODWIN,
Ph.D. Cambridge: Sever and Francis.

Grammarians had once a simple way of disposing of the subject on which
Professor Goodwin has given us this elaborate treatise of three hundred
pages.

In the Greek Grammar of the Messieurs de Port Royal, which Gibbon
praises so highly in his charming autobiography, and which has passed
through several editions in England within the present century, we
are taught, that, "though the moods [in Greek] are not to be rejected
entirely, yet their signification is sometimes so very arbitrary, that
they are put for one another through all tenses." Lancelot himself
seems to have had a glimmering of the essential incredibility of this
statement; for, though he attempts to substantiate it by citing from
Greek authors a number of passages in which the Greek idiom happens to
differ from the Latin,--passages, however, which Mr. Goodwin would have
been glad to use, had they fallen in his way, to illustrate the regular
constructions of the language,--he feels it necessary to appeal to
the authority of the learned Budaeus, the greatest of the early Greek
scholars. Strange as it seems that really accomplished Greek scholars
should have charged Plato and Demosthenes, speaking the most perfect of
tongues, with arbitrary interchanges of moods and tenses, yet the same
views continued to be presented in grammatical works down to the close
of the last century. The transition to the new school of grammarians was
made in 1792, by the publication of a Greek Grammar by Philip Buttmann,
which, in the greatly improved form which it afterwards received from
his hands, is familiar to all Greek scholars. In our frequent boasts of
the great strides that knowledge has taken in the present century, we
commonly have in mind the physical sciences; but we doubt whether in any
department of physical science the manuals in use seventy-five years
ago are so utterly inferior to those of the present day as are, for
instance, the remarks of Viger, and his commentators before Hermann, on
the syntax of the Greek verb, to the philosophical treatment of the same
points by Professor Goodwin.

This work is entitled, we think, to rank with the best grammars of the
Greek language that have appeared in German or English, in all the
points that constitute grammatical excellence; while its monographic
character justified and required an exhaustive treatment of its
particular topic, not to be found even in the huge grammars of Matthiae
and Kuehner. Indeed, not the least of its merits is this, that, in
addition to the excellent matter which is original with Professor
Goodwin, it furnishes to the student, American or English,--for we hope
to see its merits recognized on the other side of the Atlantic,--a
digest, as it were, of all that is most valuable on the subject of the
syntax of the Greek verb in the best German grammars, from Buttmann
to Madvig, enhanced, too, in value by being recast and worked into a
homogeneous system by an acute scholar and experienced teacher. One
excellence of the book we would by no means pass over, an excellence
which we are sure will be particularly appreciated by all who have used
translations of German grammars,--the precision both of thought and
expression by which it is characterized, which releases the student from
the labor of constructing the meaning of a rule from the data of the
appended examples. Not that Mr. Goodwin is chary of examples; on the
contrary, one of the most attractive and not least profitable features
of the book is the copiousness and freshness of the illustrative
quotations from Greek authors. These are as welcome as the brightness of
newly minted coin to the eye which, in consulting grammar after grammar,
has been condemned to meet under corresponding rules always the same
examples, till they begin to produce that effect upon the nerves which
all have experienced at the mention of the deadly upas-tree, or the
imminence of the dissolution of the Union.

We must not omit to speak of the typographical merit of the work,--and
especially of what constitutes the first and the last merit of books of
this class, the excellent table of contents, and the indexes, Greek and
English, which leave nothing to be desired in the way of facility of
reference, except, perhaps, an index to the quotations.


_The Law of the Territories_. Philadelphia: C. Sherman & Son.

The author of the two able essays contained in this volume will be
remembered by many of our readers under his assumed name of "Cecil."
The second, as he himself tells us, on "Popular Sovereignty in the
Territories," was published, as one of a series of essays on Southern
politics, in the Philadelphia _North American and United States
Gazette_. The first, we believe, has never been published before.

Our author, whom we may designate, without violating any confidence, as
Mr. George Sidney Fisher, devotes an elaborate preface, which is itself
a third essay, to discussing the invasion of Virginia by John Brown and
the Southern threats of secession, drawing from the foray of Harper's
Ferry a conclusion very different from that of the disunionists. In his
own words,--

"Disunion is a word of fear. Is it not
strange that it should have been as yet pronounced
only by the South? The danger of
insurrection and servile war belongs to the
nature of slavery. It is, perhaps, not too much
to assert that the safety and tranquillity of
Southern society depend on the fact that the
Northern people are close at hand to aid in
case of need,--that the power of the General
Government is ever ready for the same purpose.
Four millions of barbarians, growing
with tropical vigor, and soon to be eight millions,
with tropical passions boiling in their
blood, endowed with native courage, with
sinews strong by toil, and stimulated by the
hope of liberty and unbounded license, are
not to be trifled with. Take away from them
the idea of an irresistible power in the North,
ready at any moment to be invoked by their
masters, or let them expect in the North, not
enemies, but friends and supporters, which
even now they are told every day by these
masters they may expect,--and how soon
might a flame be lighted which no power in
the South could extinguish!"

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