Various

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER I. (2)

CHAPTER II. (2)

CHAPTER III. (2)

GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.
1850.

GEO. R. GRAHAM, EDITOR.

Devereux, del.      Hogan and Thompson, pr.
Lake of Como.

GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.

Vol. XXXVII.      July, 1850.      No. 1.

Table of Contents

Fiction, Literature and Articles

Poetry, Music, and Fashion

Transcriber’s Notes can be found at the end of this eBook.

POETRY.

REVIEWS.

MUSIC.

ENGRAVINGS.

GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.

Vol. XXXVII.     PHILADELPHIA, JULY, 1850.     No. 1.

As this spiritual force is ever the characteristic of vital thought, such thought is both light and heat, kindles as well as informs, and acts potently on other minds by imparting life as well as knowledge. There are many books which contain more information than Paradise Lost, but Paradise Lost stimulates, dilates and enriches our minds by communicating to them the very substance of thought, while the other books may leave us as poor and weak as they found us, with the addition only of some names and forms of things which we did not know before. The great difference, therefore, between a vital and mechanical mind is this, that from one you obtain the realities of things, and from the other the mere appearances; one influences, the other only informs; one increases our power, the other does little more than increase our words. The action of a live mind upon other minds is chiefly an influence, and the true significance of influence is that it pierces through all the formal frippery of opinion and speculation lying on the surface of consciousness, and touches the tingling and throbbing nerve at its centre and soul; rousing the mind’s dormant activity, breathing into it a new motive and fresh vigor, and making it strong as well as wise. As regards the common affairs of the world, this influence is as the blast of an archangel’s trumpet, waking us from the death of sloth and custom. In the fire of our newly kindled energies the mean and petty interests in which our thoughts are ensnared wither and consume; and, discerning vitalities where before we only perceived semblances, a strangeness comes over the trite, a new meaning gleams through old appearances, and the forms of common objects are transfigured, as viewed in the vivid vision of that rapturous life. Then, and only then, do we realize how awful and how bright is the consciousness of a living soul; then immortality becomes a faith, and death a delusion; then magnanimous resolves in the heart send generous blood mantling in the cheek, and virtue, knowledge, genius, heroism, appear possibilities to the lazy coward who, an hour before, whined about his destiny in the hopeless imbecility of weakness. Although this still and deep ecstasy, this feeling of power and awe, is to most minds only a transient elevation, it is still a revelation of the vital within them, which should at least keep alive a sublime discontent with the sluggish apathy of their common existence. “Show me,” says Burke, “a contented slave and I will show you a degraded man,”—a sentence right from the hot heart of an illustrious man, whose own mind glowed with life and energy to the verge of the tomb, and who never knew the slavery of that sleep of mental death, which withers and dries up the very fountains of life in the soul.

The usual phrases by which criticism discriminates vital from mechanical minds, are impassioned imagination and logical understanding. This vocabulary, though open to objections, as not going to the root of the matter, is still available for our purpose. It draws a definite line between genius and talent. The man of impassioned imagination is vital in every part. The primitive spiritual energy at the centre of his personality permeates, as with warm life-blood, the whole of his being, vivifying, connecting, fusing into unity, all his faculties, so that his thought comes from him as an act, and is endowed with a penetrating and animating as well as enlightening power. The thoughts of Plato, Dante, Bacon, Shakspeare, Newton, Milton, Burke, not to mention others, are actors in the world—communicating life, forming character, revealing truth, generating energy in recipient minds. These men possess understanding as far as that term expresses an operation of the mind, but understanding with them is in living connection with imagination and emotion; they never use it as an exclusive power in themselves, they never address it as an exclusive power in others. To understand a thing in its external qualities and internal spirit, requires the joint operation of all the faculties; and no fact is ever thoroughly understood by the understanding, for it is the person that understands not the faculty, and the person understands only by the exercise of his whole force and insight. The man of understanding, so called, simply perceives the forms of things and their relations; the man of impassioned imagination perceiving forms and divining spirit, conceives the life of things and their relations. The antithesis runs through the whole realm of thought and fact. The man of understanding, when he rises out of sensations, simply reaches abstractions; and in the abstract there is no life. Ideas and principles belong as much to the concrete, to substantial existence, as the facts of sensation; the law of gravitation is a reality no less than the planet Jupiter; but to the man of mechanical understanding, ideas subside into mere opinions, and principles into generalities; and as by the very process of his thinking he disconnects, and deadens by disconnection, the powers by which he thinks, he cannot exercise, conceive or communicate life, cannot invent, discover, create, combine. This is evident from the nature of the mind, and it is proved by history. In art, religion, science, philosophy, politics, the minds that organize are organic minds, not mechanical understandings.

The principle we have indicated, applies to all matters of human concern, the simplest as well as the most complicated. Let us first take a familiar instance from ordinary life. In the common intercourse of society we are all painfully conscious of the dominion of the mechanical, prescribing manner, proscribing nature. In the Siberian atmosphere of most social assemblies the soul congeals. The tendency to isolation of mind from mind, and heart from heart, is most apparent in the contrivances by which society brings its members bodily together—the formal politeness excluding the courtesy it mimics. Hypocrisy, artifice, non-expression of the reality in persons—these are apt to be the characteristics of that dreary solitude which passes under the exquisitely ironical appellation of “good society.” The universal destiny of men and women who engage in this game of fashion as the business of life, is frivolity or ennui. They either fritter to pieces or are bored to death. Nothing so completely wastes away the vitality of the mind, and converts a person into a puppet, as this substitution of the verb “to appear,” for the verb “to be.” Whatever is graceful in manner, carriage and conversation, is natural; but the art of politeness, as commonly practiced, is employed to deaden rather than develop nature, from its ambition to reduce the finer instincts to mechanical forms. In the very term of gentleman there is something exceedingly winning and beautiful, expressing as it does a fine union of intelligence and courtesy; but in genteel society the word too often means nothing more than foppish emptiness, and Sir Philip Sidney gives way to Beau Nash.

Even here, however, the moment a person with a genius for society appears, it is curious to see how quickly the different elements are fused together, by a few flashes of genuine social inspiration. Convention is at once abolished, each heart finds a tongue, giggling turns into merriment, conversation occurs and prattle ceases, and a party is really organized. A little sincerity of this sort in social intercourse would infinitely beautify life.

In one of the most important matters connected with the welfare of men, that of practical ethics, we have another example of the despotism of the mechanical and disregard of the vital, in human life. A true writer on morals should understand two things, morality and immorality; but a mechanical mind can do neither. He neither communicates the life of moral ideas, nor discerns the life of vicious ideas, but simply has opinions on morals, and opinions on vice. The consequence is that most of the “do-me-good” books are lifeless as regards effect—are contemptuously abandoned by men to children, and by children are learned only to be violated. At last it becomes the sign of green juvenility to quote an abstract truism against a concrete vice, and no person in active life considers himself at all bound to accommodate his conduct to axioms. Indeed, common writers on ethics have become unenviably notorious for expending the full force of their feebleness in statements of generalities, which are universally assented to, and almost as universally disregarded. Complacently perched on the chill summits of abstract principles, these gentlemen appear to experience a grim satisfaction in sending down into the warm and living concrete a storm of axiomatic snow and sleet. Having no practical grasp of things, they emphasize duties without possessing any clear insight of practices, and accordingly their indignant blast of truism whistles shrilly over the heads of the sinners it should lay prostrate. Wanting the power to pass into the substance and soul of existing objects and living men, they content themselves with applying external rules to external appearances, glory in the gift of invective as divorced from the secret of interpretation, and being thus shrews rather than seers, they do that worst of injuries to the cause of morality which results from denouncing the devil without understanding his deviltry. In the republic of delusion and democracy of transgression there are certain errors deserving the name of “popular,” errors which mislead three quarters of the human race; and the analysis and exhibition of these should be a leading object of practical morality. Thoroughly to comprehend one of these impish emissaries of Satan, and clearly to demonstrate that the rainbow bubbles he sports in the sun are begotten by froth on emptiness, might not be so grand a thing as to strut about in the worn-out frippery of moral commonplaces, but it would expose one fatal fallacy which assists in misguiding public sentiment, distorting human character, and impelling reasonable men into those expeditions after the unreal, which are every day wrecked on the rocks of nonsense or crime. But to do this requires a vital mind, and in matters of morals society is very well content not to be pricked and probed in conscience by the sharp benevolence of truth. The mechanical moralists disturb no robber or murderer, no cheat or miser, no spendthrift or profligate, no man who wishes to get what he is pleased to call a living by preying on his neighbors. They neither expose nor reform wickedness, but simply toss words at it, for a consideration. Yet from such moral machines it is supposed that, in the course of education, ingenuous youth can get moral life; and real surprise is often expressed by parents, when their children return from academies or colleges, that the only vital knowledge, in form and in essence, that the dear boys have mastered, relates to sin and the devil.

If the mechanical moralists are to be judged by their effects—by their capacity to do the thing they attempt—and thus judged, have terrible sins of omission resting on their work, what shall we say of the mechanical theologians?—There is against each of three liberal professions a time-honored jest, adopted by “gentle dullness,” all over the world, and from its universality almost worthy of a place in Dugald Stewart’s “fundamental principles of human belief.” The point of these venerable facetiÆ consists in associating law with chicane, medicine with homicide, and preaching with Dr. Young’s “tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep.” A joke which seems to be thus endorsed by the human race carries with it some authority, and it would be presumptuous to touch never so gently the subject of theology, without a preliminary remark on this question of dullness. Sin is sarcastic, sin is impassioned, sin is sentimental, sin is fascinating, sin swaggers in rhetoric’s most gorgeous trappings and revels in fancy’s most enticing images, and why should piety alone have the reputation of being feeble and dull? The charge itself, while it closes to the general reader Jeremy Taylor’s wilderness of sweets equally with Dr. Owen’s “continent of mud,” is not without its benumbing effect upon the preacher, for bodies of men commonly understand the art of adapting their conduct to the public impression of their character, and are not apt to provide stimulants when readers only expect soporifics. The truth is that sermons are never dull as sermons, but because the sermonizer is weak in soul. No man with a vision of the interior beauty and power of spiritual truths, no man whom those truths kindle and animate, no man who is truly alive in heart and brain, and speaks of what he has vitally conceived, can ever be dull in the expression of what is the very substance and doctrine of life. The difficulty is that clergymen are apt to fall into mechanical habits of thinking; then ideas gradually fade into opinions; truths dwindle into truisms; a fine dust is subtly insinuated into the vitalities of their being; the holy passion with which their thoughts once gushed out subsides, and “good common sense” succeeds to rapture; and thus many an inspiring teacher, originally a conductor of heaven’s lightning, and exulting in the consciousness of the immortal life beating and burning within him, has lapsed into a theological drudge, dull in his sermons because dull in his conceptions, neither alive himself nor imparting life to others. This decay often occurs in conscientious and religious men, who sufficiently bewail the torpor of soul which compels them to substitute phrases for realities, and to whom this mental death, as they feel it stealing over them, is at once a spell and a torment. The clergyman, who does not keep his mind bright and keen by constant communion with religious ideas, is sure to die of utter weariness of existence. He has once caught a view of the promised land from the Pisgah height of contemplation—wo unto him if it “fades into the light of common day.”

But leaving such perilous topics as ethics and divinity to wiser heads, and passing on to the subjects of philosophy and science, it may be asked—does not the mechanical understanding hold undisputed sway in these? Has impassioned imagination any thing to do with metaphysics, mathematics, natural philosophy, with the observation and the reasoning of the philosopher who deals with facts and laws? The answer to this question is an emphatic yes. That roused, energetic and energizing state of mind which we have designated as impassioned imagination, is as much the characteristic of Newton as of Homer. The facts, direction and object are different, but the faculty is the same. A man of science without a scientific imagination, vital and creative like the poetical imagination, belongs to the second or third class of scientific men, the Hayleys and Haynes Baileys of science. Men of mechanical understandings never discover laws and principles, but simply repeat and apply the discoveries of their betters. Nothing but the fresh and vigorous inspiration which comes from the grasp of ideas, could carry such men as Kepler and Newton through the prodigious mass of drudgery, through which ran the path which led to their objects; for genius alone is really victorious over drudgery, and refuses to submit to the weariness and deferred hope which attend upon vast designs. Indeed, in following the processes of scientific reasoning, whether inductive or deductive, we are always conscious of an element of beauty in the impression left on the mind, an element which we never experience in following the steps of the merely formal logician. Take the discussion, for instance, between Butler and Clarke on the À priori argument for the existence of God, and no reader who attends to the progress of the reasoning can fail to feel the same inner sense touched which is more palpably addressed by the poet. All the great thinkers, indeed, in all the branches of speculative and physical science, are vital thinkers, and their thoughts are never abstract generalities, but always concrete conceptions, endowed with the power to work on other minds, and to generate new thought. Bacon, the greatest name in the philosophy of science, was so jealous of the benumbing and deadening effect of all formal and mechanical arrangement of scientific truth, that he repeatedly opposes all systematization of science, and in his Natural Philosophy followed his own precepts. In the Advancement of Learning he says: “As young men, when they knit and shape perfectly do seldom grow to a further stature, so knowledge, while it is in aphorisms and observations, it is in growth; but when it is once comprehended in exact methods, it may perchance be further polished and illustrated, and accommodated for use and practice; but it increases no more in bulk and substance.” And again he remarks: “The worst and most absurd sort of triflers are those who have pent the whole art in strict methods and narrow systems, which men commonly cry up for their regularity and style.” In illustration of this we may adduce Whewell’s celebrated works, The History and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. Here are great learning, logical arrangement, a complete superficial comprehension of the whole subject; but life is wanting. Most of the great discoveries and inventions with which such a book would naturally deal have been made since the publication of Bacon’s Novum Organon; but more mental nutriment and inspiration, more to advance the cause of science, can be found in one page of the Novum Organon than in Whewell’s whole five volumes. Such is the difference between a vital and mechanical mind in the history and philosophy of science; and the difference is more observable still when we come to consider the deep and constant enthusiasm, the persisting, penetrating genius of the practical discoverer, as contrasted with the cold and uncreative memory-monger and reasoning machine, who too often passes himself off as the real savant. The only great man of science who has detailed his processes in connection with his emotions is Kepler, and everybody has heard of the “sacred fury” with which he assaulted the fortresses in which nature long concealed her laws. His page flames with images and exclamations. His operations to conquer the mystery in the motions of the planet Mars are military. His object is as, he says, “to triumph over Mars, and to prepare for him, as one altogether vanquished, tabular prisons and equated eccentric fetters.” When “the enemy left at home a despised captive, had burst all the chains of the equations, and broken forth of the prisons of the tables,” and it was “buzzed here and there that the victory is vain,” the war rages “anew as violently as before,” and he “suddenly brings into the field a new reserve of physical reasonings on the rout and dispersion of the veterans.” A poet can thus vitalize mathematics, and “create a soul under the ribs” of physical death.

In politics and government, the most practical objects of human interest, the men who organize institutions and wisely conduct affairs, are men of vital minds; while the whole brood of ignorant and scampish politicians, whose vulgar tact is but a caricature of insight, and who are as great proficients in ruining nations as statesmen are in advancing them, are men of mechanical minds. In politics, perhaps, more practical injury has resulted from the dominion of formal dunces, than in any other department of human affairs—politics being the great field of action for all speculators in public nonsense, for all men whose incompetency to handle things would be quickly discovered in any other profession. But a great statesman, no less than a great poet, discerns the life of things in virtue of having himself a live mind, and, not content with observing men and events, divines events in their principles, and thus reads the future. When he proposes a scheme of legislation, all its results exist in his mind as possibilities, and if an effect is produced not calculated in the conception, he is so far to be accounted a blunderer, not a statesman. Perhaps of all the statesmen that ever lived, Edmund Burke had this power of reading events in principles in the greatest perfection; and certainly there are few English poets who can be said to equal him in impassioned imagination. This imagination was not, as is commonly asserted, a companion and illustrator of his understanding, appending pretty images to strong arguments, but it included understanding in itself, and was both impetus and insight to his grandly comprehensive and grandly energetic mind. Fox, Pitt, and all the politicians of his time, were, in comparison with him, men of mechanical intellects, constantly misconceiving events; mere experimenters, surprised at results which they should have predicted. There is something mortifying in the reflection that, in free countries, the people have not yet arrived at the truth, that great criminality as well as great impudence are involved in the exercise of political power without political capacity. A politician in high station, without insight and foresight, and thus blind in both eyes, is an impostor of the worst kind, and should be dealt with as such.

In art and literature the doctrine of vital powers lies at the base of all criticism which is not mere gibberish. It is now commonly understood that the creative precedes the critical; that critical laws were originally generalized from poetic works; and that a poem is to be judged by the living law or central idea by which it is organized, which law or idea is as the acorn to the oak, and determines the form of the poem. The power and reach of the poet’s mind is measured by his conception of organic ideas, of ideas which, when once grasped, are principles whence poems necessarily grow, and are eventually realized in works. The universality of Shakspeare is but a power of vital conception, not limited to one or two ideas, but ranging victoriously over the world of ideas. These celestial seeds, once planted in a poetic nature, germinate and grow into forms of individual being, whose loveliness and power shame our actual men and actual society by a revelation of the real and the permanent. Chaucer, Shakspeare, Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, in virtue of their power to realize and localize the ideal, give us “poor humans” a kind of spiritual world on earth.

The schoolmasters of letters, those gentlemen who frame laws of taste, and manufacture cultivated men, commonly display a notable oversight instead of insight of the distinction between vital and mechanical minds, between authors who impart power and authors who impart information. They judge the value of a book by its external form instead of internal substance, and altogether overlook the only important office of reading and study, which plainly is the acceleration of our faculties through an increase of mind. Mind is increased by receiving the mental life of a book, and assimilating it with our own nature, not by hoarding up information in the memory. Books thus read enrich and enlarge the mind, stimulating, inflaming, concentrating its activity; and though without this reception of external life a man may be odd, he cannot be original. The greatest genius is he who consumes the most knowledge, and converts it into mind. But a mechanical intellect merely attaches the husks of things to his memory, and eats nothing. It is for this reason that heavy heads, laden with unfertilizing opinions and dead facts which never pass down into the vitalities of their being, are such terrific bores. Considering literature not as food but as luggage, they cram their brains to starve their intelligence—and wo to the youth whom they pretend to instruct and inform! A true teacher should penetrate to whatever is vital in his pupil, and develop that by the light and heat of his own intelligence—like the inspiring master described by Barry Cornwall’s enthusiast:—