Book: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860




Mr. Trowbridge, we think, fails in those elements of (we had almost said
creative) power in which Mr. Judd was specially rich. If the latter had
possessed the shaping spirit as fully as he certainly did the essential
properties of imagination, he would have done for the actual, prosaic
life of New England what Mr. Hawthorne has done for the ideal essence
that lies behind and beneath it. But, with all his marvellous fidelity
of dialect, costume, and landscape, and his firm clutch of certain
individual instincts and emotions, his characters are wanting in any
dramatic unity of relation to each other, and seem to be "moving about
in worlds not realized," each a vivid reality in itself, but a very
shadow in respect of any prevailing intention of the story. With the
innate sentiments of a kind of aboriginal human nature Mr. Judd was
at home; with the practical working of every-day motives he seemed
strangely unfamiliar. It is just here that Mr. Trowbridge's strength
and originality lie; but, with that not uncommon tendency to overvalue
qualities that we do not possess, and to attempt their display, to the
neglect, and sometimes at the cost, of others quite as valuable, but
which seem cheap, because their exercise is easy and habitual,--and
therefore, we may be sure, natural and pleasing,--he insists on being a
little metaphysical and over-fine. What he means for his more
elevated characters are tiresome with something of that melodramatic
sentimentality with which Mr. Dickens has infected so much of the
lighter literature of the day. Here and there the style suffers from
that overmuchness of unessential detail and that exaggeration of
particulars which Mr. Dickens brought into fashion and seems bent on
wearing out of it,--a style which is called graphic and poetical by
those only who do not see that it is the cheap substitute, in all
respects equal to real plate, (till you try to pawn it for lasting
fame,) introduced by writers against time, or who forget that to be
graphic is to tell most with fewest penstrokes, and to be poetical is
to suggest the particular in the universal. We earnestly hope, that,
instead of trying to do what no one can do well, Mr. Trowbridge will
wisely stick close to what he has shown that no one can do better.

"The Old Battle-Ground," whose name bears but an accidental relation to
the story, is an interesting and well-constructed tale, in which Mr.
Trowbridge has introduced what we believe is a new element in American
fiction, the French Canadian. The plot is simple and not too improbable,
and the characters well individualized. Here, also, Mr. Trowbridge
is most successful in his treatment of the less ambitiously designed
figures. The relation between the dwarf Hercules fiddler and the
heroine Marie seems to be a suggestion from Victor Hugo's Quasimodo and
Esmeralda, though the treatment is original and touching. Indeed, there
is a good deal of pathos in the book, marred here and there with the
sentimental extract of Dickens-flowers, unpleasant as _patchouli_.
Generally, however, it has the merit of unobtrusiveness,--a rare piece
of self-denial nowadays, when authors have found out, and the public has
not, how very easy it is to make the public cry, and how much the simple
creature likes it, as if it had not sorrows enough of its own. But it is
in his more ordinary characters that Mr. Trowbridge fairly shows himself
as an original and delightful author. His boys are always masterly.
Nothing could be truer to Nature, more nicely distinguished as to
idiosyncrasy, while alike in expression and in limited range of ideas,
or more truly comic, than the two that figure in this story. Nick
Whickson, too, the good-natured ne'er-do-well, who is in his own and
everybody's way till he finds his natural vocation as an aid to a dealer
in horses, is a capital sketch. The hypochondriac Squire Plumworthy
is very good, also, in his way, though he verges once or twice on the
"heavy father," with a genius for the damp handkerchief and long-lost
relative line.

We are safe in assigning to Mr. Trowbridge a rank quite above that of
our legion of washy novelists; he seems to have a definite purpose and
an ambition for literary as well as popular success, and we hope that
by study and observation he will be true to a very decided and peculiar
talent. We violate no confidence in saying that the graceful poem, "At
Sea," which first appeared in the "Atlantic," and which, under the name
of now one, now another author, has been deservedly popular, was written
by Mr. Trowbridge.




JULY REVIEWED BY SEPTEMBER.


The Editors of the "Atlantic," of course, have universal knowledge
(with few exceptions) at their fingers' ends,--that is, they possess
an Encyclopaedia, gapped here and there by friends fond of portable
information and familiar with that hydrostatic paradox in which the
motion of solids up a spout is balanced by a very slender column of the
liquidating medium. The once goodly row of quartos looks now like a set
of mineral teeth that have essayed too closely to simulate Nature by
assaulting a Boston cracker; and the intervals of vacuity among the
books, as among the incisors, deprive the owner of his accustomed
glibness in pronouncing himself on certain topics. Among the missing
volumes is one of those in M, and accordingly our miss-information [A]
on all subjects from Mabinogion to Mustard is not to be entirely relied
upon. Under these painful circumstances, and with the chance of still
further abstractions from our common stock of potential learning, we
have engaged a staff of consulting engineers, who contract, for certain
considerations, to know every useless thing from A to Z, and every
obsolete one from Omega to Alpha. In these gentlemen we repose unlimited
confidence in proportion to their salaries; for a considerable
experience of mankind has taught us that omniscience is a much commoner
and easier thing than science, especially in this favored country and
under democratic institutions, which give to every man the inestimable
right of knowing as much as he pleases. Everything was going on well
when our Man of Science unaccountably disappeared, and our Aesthetic
Editor experienced in all its terrors the Scriptural doom of being left
to himself. This latter gentleman is tolerably _shady_ in scientific
matters, nay, to say sooth, light-proof, or only so far penetrable as
to make darkness visible. Between science and nescience the difference
seems to his mind little, if _n e_, and he would accept as perfectly
satisfactory a statement that "the ponderability of air in a vitreous
table-tipping medium (the abnormal variation being assumed as $ x-b
.0000001) is exactly proportioned to the squares of the circumambient
distances, provided the perihelia are equal, and the evolution of
nituretted carbogen in the boomerang be carefully avoided during
evaporation; the power of the parallax being represented, of
course, according to the well-known theorem of Rabelais, by H.U.M.
Hemsterhuysius seems to have been familiar with this pretty experiment."
The above sentence being shown to the Aesthetic Editor aforesaid, he
acknowledges that he sees nothing more absurd than common in it, and
that the theory seems to him as worthy of trial as Hedgecock's quadrant,
which he took with him once on a journey to New York, arriving safely
with a single observation of the height of the steamer's funnel.

[Footnote A: MISS-INFORMATION. A higgledy-piggledy want of intelligence
acquired by young misses at boarding-schools.--_Supplement to Johnson's
Dictionary._]

This premised, it naturally follows that the Aesthetic Editor (the July
number falling to his turn) must take advantage of the absence of
his Guardian Man of Science to publish an article on Meteorology. A
condition of things in which the _omne scibile_ was left entirely at his
disposal, to be knocked about as he pleased, appeared to him no small
omen of a near millennium; and what subject could be more suitable to
begin with than the weather, a topic of general interest, (since we have
no choice of weather or no,) in which exact knowledge is comfortably
impossible, and in which he felt himself at home from his repeated
experiments in raising the wind in order to lower the due-point? (See
_The Weathercock, an Essay on Rotation in Office, by Sir Airy Vane._)

Meanwhile, after the mischief was all done and a Provisional Government
of Chaos Redux comfortably established in Physics, the Man of Science
turns up suddenly in the following communication. [A council was called
on the spot, the Autocrat in the chair, and it was decided, with only
one dissenting voice, that the communication should be printed as a
lesson to the peccant Editor, who, for the future, was laid under a
strict interdict in respect of all and singular the onomies and ologies,
and directed to consider the weather a matter altogether unprophetable,
except to almanac-makers,--the said Editor to superintend such
publication, and to be kept on a diet of corn-cob for the body and
Sylvanus Cobb (or his own works, at his option) for the mind, till it
be done. The chairman added, that for a second offence he should do
penance, according to ancient usage, in a blank sheet of the Magazine,
(a contribution of his own being to that end suppressed,)--a form of
punishment likely to be as irksome to himself as grateful to the readers
of that incomparable miscellany.]

"_Abercwmdwddhwm Mine_, 28th July, 1860.

"WELL-MEANING, BUT MISGUIDED, FRIEND!

"An unexpected opportunity of personally investigating a highly nauseous
kind of mephitic vapor drew me and Jones suddenly hither without time
to say farewell or make explanations. I made the journey in--10' by
electric telegraph, and am delighted that I came, for anything more
unpleasant never met my nostrils, and I am almost sure of adding a new
element to the enjoyment of the scientific world.

"I have already secured several bottles-full, and shall exhibit it at the
next meeting of the Association: of course you shall have a sniff in
advance. I should have returned before this, but unhappily the chain by
which we descended gave way a few days ago near the top, in hoisting
out the first series of my observations, and as yet there has been no
opportunity of replacing it. Communication with the upper world is kept
up by means of a small cord, however, and in this way we are supplied
with food for body and mind. As good luck would have it, our butter came
down wrapped in a half-sheet of your last volume of poems, containing my
old favorites, 'Modern Greece,' and the 'Ode to a Deserted Churn.' These
I read aloud several times to the miners, and their longing to return
sooner to a world where they could get the rest of the volume became so
strong, that, as I was about to begin my fifth reading, they consented
to an expedient of escape which I had already proposed once or twice in
vain. This was to blow us out by means of the fire-damp. The result of
the experiment I cannot yet fully report, as some confusion ensued.
Jones has disappeared, having been, as I hope and believe, discharged
upward, and I have found the remains of only one miner, so that it seems
to have been a tolerable success, though I myself was blown inward,
owing to the premature explosion of the train. In one respect the result
was highly satisfactory to me personally. Jones had all along insisted
that the vapor was antiphlogistic. Whichever way he went, I think
(fair-minded as he is) he must be by this time convinced of his error,
and I shall accordingly enter him in my Report as discharged cured.
I may add, as an interesting scientific fact, that his ascent was
accompanied by such a sudden and violent fall of the barometer (which he
had in his lap) that the instrument was broken. This would seem to prove
a considerable decrease in the weight of the atmosphere at the moment
of explosion. The darkness was oppressive at first; but a happy thought
occurred to me. You know Jones's poodle, and how obese he is? Well, he
was shot into my lap, where he lay to all appearance dead. I had some
matches in my pocket and at once kindled the end of his tail, which
makes a very good candle, quite as good as average dips, _tales,
quales_. By the light of this I proceed to note down my first series
of comments as a tail-piece to your meteorological article in the July
'Atlantic,' of which we received a copy in due course, as the magazine
has a large circulation among our friars miner down here.

"METEOROLOGY 'MADE EASY.'

"In glancing at the article on 'Meteorology' in the July number of the
'Atlantic Monthly,' I was so struck by the dashing style in which the
writer presents what he calls the 'leading principles' of the science,
that, in spite of portentous errors, I was tempted to follow his
diversified flight to its very close. Reading pencil in hand, I gathered
up a long list of mistakes in fact and in philosophy, of which the
following specimens, although but the first fruits of a not very
critical examination, may serve to illustrate the carelessness--shall
I not say ignorance?--of the writer on the topics in regard to which he
proposes to enlighten the general reader.

"1. According to our essayist, the weight of the atmosphere is about
43/1000ths that of the globe,--in other words, 1/23d part. Now a simple
calculation, or a reference to one of the standard works on Physics,
should have taught him that the weight of the entire air is less than
one-millionth part of that of the earth,--that is, _fifty thousand times
less than he states it to be_."

[We are quite sure that our (tor-)Mentor is mistaken in assuming a
uniform weight for the atmosphere. It differs in different places.
During our lecturing-tours, we have frequently observed an involuntary
depression of the eyelids (producing _almost_ an appearance of sleep) in
a part of the audience, which we were at a loss to attribute to anything
but the weight of the atmosphere. Water varies in the same way. It is
hardly necessary to say that Lake Wetter derives its name from the
superior quality of its dampness.]

"2. Of the specific gravity of the air he seems to be amusingly
uncertain,--making it first 833 times and afterwards 770 times less than
that of water; and in the same connection he says, in chosen
phrase, that 'density, or _closeness_, is another quality of the
atmosphere,'--as if it were its characteristic, and not common to all
ponderable matter."

[A very neat way of arriving at specific gravity in its densest form is
to distil the "funny column" of a weekly newspaper. To arrive at the
desired result in the speediest way, let the operation be performed in
what is known among bucolic journalists as a "humorous retort." Density
and closeness should not be spoken of as equivalent terms. The former is
a common quality of the human skull, rendering it impervious; whereas a
man may be very close and yet capable of being stuck,--with bad paper,
for example.]

"3. In mentioning the _constituents of the atmosphere_, he adopts
without explanation the loose statement of some of the books, placing
carburetted hydrogen on the same footing as to constancy and amount with
carbonic acid, and making no allusion to nitric acid. Yet chemistry has
shown, that, except in special localities, carburetted hydrogen occurs
only as a slight trace, the existence of which in most cases is rather
inferred than actually demonstrated, and that it has no important
office to perform,--while nitric acid shares with ammonia in the grand
function of the nourishment of plants. In a later paragraph the error is
aggravated by the assertion, that 'no chemical combination of oxygen and
nitrogen has ever been detected in the atmosphere, and it is presumed
none will be,'--as if every flash of lightning did not produce a notable
quantity of this compound, which, washed down by the rain, may be
detected in almost every specimen of rain-water we meet. What would
Johnstone, Boussingault, Liebig, and the other agricultural chemists say
to this?"

[For complete proof on this head, be struck by lightning. For
ourselves, we are convinced, and would rather have some other head
taken for an experiment by way of illustration. But any of our
readers who is unsatisfied has only to place himself in front of a
lightning-express-train with an ordinary conductor. To insure being
struck, let the experimenter provide himself amply with patent
safety-rods. At least, this result is pretty sure in houses, and is
worth trying out of doors.]

"In the same connection he characterizes nitrogen as a substance 'not
condensible under fifty atmospheres,' leaving the reader to infer
that the preceding ingredient on the list, oxygen, is condensible
(liquefiable) within that limit of pressure, and that nitrogen becomes
liquid at or above it; whereas neither oxygen nor nitrogen has ever yet
been compressed into a liquid, although a force of more than _fifty
times fifty_ atmospheres has been brought to act upon them."

[We consider an experiment requiring twenty-five hundred atmospheres,
when the thermometer marks 93 deg. in the shade, indictable at common law.
To desire more than one, under such circumstances, is unreasonable, and
even wicked.]

"4. In referring to the Thermo-barometer as a means of measuring
heights, the writer confounds the late Professor Edward Forbes with
Professor James D. Forbes, recently of Edinburgh, but now Provost of
the University of St. Andrews. The former was a great Zooelogist and
Botanist, and did not occupy himself with investigations in Physics;
the latter is an eminent Physicist, the author of the viscous theory of
Glaciers; and it is he who made the observations here ascribed to the
'Professor Forbes, whose untimely death the friends of science have
had so much reason to deplore.' The author adds the further mistake
of supposing that the numerical constant, 549 feet for each degree,
determined by James Forbes for Scotland, is equally correct for all
latitudes."

[This hardly needed confutation. No university requires any numerical
constant of height as qualification for a degree; and if they did, 549
feet would be excessive, unless, perhaps, at Warsaw, where everybody is
tall enough to end in _ski_.]

"5. Our essayist discloses but an imperfect inkling of knowledge on the
subject of capillarity in barometers, when he speaks of this complex
action as equivalent to _the attraction between the mercury and the
glass tube_; and he commits a yet graver mistake, practically speaking,
in reiterating the long exploded error, that 'the weight of the
atmosphere at the level of the sea is the same all over the world.' No
fact in Meteorology is better established than that the mean pressure at
the sea-level is different for different latitudes. In the vicinity of
Cape Horn the barometer is three-fourths of an inch lower than at the
Equator, and according to Schouw the pressure increases from the Equator
up to a certain latitude (38 deg.) in both hemispheres, and diminishes
thence towards the Poles."

[The connection between capillarity and the fat of the common bear is
well known to all manufacturers of trycoverus compounds, and they are
probably right in advertising that grease of this description restores
tone to the hair,--of course a fine beary tone. As the weight of the
bear depends on his fat, the inference to a bear-ometer is obvious. It
is a familiar fact that the bear supports life during hibernation by
sucking his paws; but it may not be so generally known that the waste
thus induced in the anterior extremities is restored by the moral
consciousness of the animal that the fat he is so carefully hoarding is
to confer a posthumous blessing on mankind. This is a touching example
of the adaptation of means to end, and Shakspeare, the great natural
philosopher, has made use of it for one of his most striking metaphors,
where he says, "that the thought of something after death must give us
paws."]

"6. Discoursing on the elasticity of the air, the writer styles it
'the most compressible of bodies,'--as if it had any advantage in this
respect over the numerous other species of gaseous matter. As to the
illustration which he gives, namely, that 'a glass vessel full of air,
placed under a receiver and then exhausted by the air-pump, will burst
into atoms,' we can only say, what every schoolboy knows, that the
_bursting_ would be _inwards_, unless, indeed, our meteorologist means
that the external receiver was to be exhausted, and in that case he
should so have expressed himself."

[The theory of exhausted receivers is, in our opinion, worthy only of
the childhood of science, when chemistry and astronomy were alchemy and
astrology, and people would believe anything. In this enlightened age of
the universal subscription-paper, exhausted givers are familiar objects,
but a receiver who finds the labors of his calling excessive is as
non-existent as the harpy, his mythological prototype.]

"7. In regard to the extent to which the compression of air has been
actually carried, he tells us that 'Brockhaus says that air has as yet
been compressed only into _one-eighth of its original bulk_.' Is
it possible that a writer on Meteorology is unacquainted with the
well-known experiments of Dulong and Arago, and the more recent ones
of Regnault, in which the compression was three times the amount here
stated, or that he requires to be referred to those of Natterer, who, by
a powerful condensing apparatus, has lately compressed _seven hundred
and twenty-six volumes of air into a single volume_?"

[Any man who has succeeded in condensing seven hundred and twenty-six
volumes into one deserves the applause of the reading public. We
trust M. Natterer will extend his benevolent labors to all the great
libraries. With the most perfect apparatus of compression, however, we
doubt if contemporary literature will yield anything like so high an
average as 1 in 726.]

"8. In the paragraphs devoted to the optical relations of the
atmosphere, our author has shown a happy faculty for making his subject
obscure. After suggesting that the refraction of the rays in the
atmosphere may be due to what he calls its 'lenticular outline,' he
defines refraction to be 'the bending of a ray passing obliquely from a
rarer into a denser medium,'--a good enough popular definition, but for
its sad defectiveness. Is he not aware that the light is also bent in
penetrating obliquely from a denser into a rarer medium, as in passing
from the surface of a low plain to the eye of a spectator on a
neighboring mountain, and that the bending is just as great in this
direction of its motion as in the other? And does he not know that it
changes its course whenever it passes from a vacuum into any ponderable
medium or in the opposite direction? In future attempts to make
science easy, let him remember that these are all equally instances of
refraction, and should be included in its definition.

"Under the same head, we are led to infer that it is only in 'the warm
and moist nights of summer,' that 'the moon, as she rises above the
horizon, appears much larger than when at the zenith'; and we are
taught, in connection with the origin of the mirage and the spectre
of the Bracken, that 'rainbows are due to this condition of the
atmosphere.' If, instead of rainbows, we may be allowed to read _halos_,
we can understand the writer, who, instead of thinking of summer
showers, appears to have had a _haze_ in his mind while penning this and
other paragraphs."

[The _dictum_ of our correspondent in regard to light passing from
a ponderable medium into a vacuum requires some qualification. An
exception should be made of "Spiritual Mediums," who, being flesh and
blood, are of course ponderable. Now, if we represent the Medium by A,
and the head of any one consulting her by B, there can be no doubt that
the latter is an absolute vacuum; but it is demonstrable that nothing
like light ever passed from the former to the latter. There is a
closer analogy between refracted light and a Brocken spectre than our
scientific friend seems willing to admit. For what follows we refer our
readers to the remarkable essay of Alderman Moon, "On the Identity of
Halocination and Lunacy."]

"9. As our author advances in this branch of his subject, he grows far
too profound for our scientific apprehension. Giving him all credit for
_wishing to be clear_, we confess to a sad mystification as to what he
calls the 'Polarity of Light,' where a beam is described as 'revolving
around poles peculiar to itself' and as producing 'beautiful
_spectres_,' and we want new illumination from him as to his theory of
colors. We agree to the statement that 'each object has a particular
reflecting surface of its own,' as we cannot see how _its_ particular
surface could be the property of another,--but why this should make the
surface 'throw back light at its own angle' we do not exactly fathom,
and we are puzzled to know _which is the owner of the said angle_,
the light or the surface. No one doubts that 'the modest blush which
crimsons the cheek of beauty,' to use the author's words, is caused by a
rush of blood to the skin; but how this produces 'a corresponding change
in its angle of reflection,' and what such a change has to do with the
result, are problems too transcendental for the _exact_ sciences."

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