LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
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 I'NITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR: 
 
 Motives of Life. 
 
 16rno, Price , . £1.00. 
 
 Truths for To-day; First Series, 
 
 Fifteen- Selected Sebmons. 
 
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 Truths for To-day ; Second Series, 
 
 Fifteen Selected Sermons. 
 
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 McClurg dr 3 Co., Publishers, Chicago. 
 
Club Essays. 
 
 BY 
 
 DAVID SWING. 
 
 
 /toyo 
 
 CHICAGO: 
 Jansen, McClurg, & Company. 
 
 1881. , 
 

 COPYRIGHT. 
 
 JANSBN, McCLURG & CO. 
 A. D. 1880. 
 
TO THE 
 
 CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB 
 
 THESE ES SAYS 
 
 ARE RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED, 
 
 BY THE AUTH O E. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE. 
 I. 
 
 AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER, . .11 
 
 II. 
 A ROMAN HOME, .... 45 
 
 III. 
 
 PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? . . .89 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE HISTORY OF LOVE, . . .127 
 
 V. 
 
 THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS, . 161 
 
 n 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER 
 
CLUB ESSAYS 
 
 AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 
 
 The medical profession has long wished 
 that the outer walls of some one human body 
 at least might be made transparent, that those 
 who attempt to cure ailments might be first 
 permitted to see how the harp is made which 
 they must keep in tune. Accidents have come 
 to answer some part of this prayer, for pieces 
 of the skull have been removed and the brain 
 made visible, and the tearing away of the con- 
 cealing veils have disclosed the throbbing heart 
 and the expanding lungs. In the mental de- 
 partment of man the operations are behind 
 heavy canopies and are largely unseen, and 
 the wish of the medical leaders has often come 
 to the students of spiritual modes, and mo- 
 
 (ii) 
 
12 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 tions and aims and ends. Burns thought 
 much good would result if a man could 
 see himself even as well as other people could 
 see him ; a Greek philosopher gratified a gen- 
 eral feeling when he sighed forth the advice, 
 " Know thyself," while Menander laughed at 
 the imperfection of the advice, and declared it 
 a more important attainment if one could 
 know other people. " Murder will out," but 
 this is not true of all the good and bad of 
 human nature. Each soul lives and dies 
 alone. It dwells in a dark room which no one 
 enters. Saint Augustine comes nearest of all 
 the great men of history to having lived and 
 died in a transparent tenement. His soul tore 
 down the heavy curtains and stood forth in 
 full view. He saw himself in a manner so 
 thorough that Burns himself must have felt 
 that in our earth there was one man for whom 
 his couplets were not composed. 
 
 Great as is the public aversion to an egotist, 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 13 
 
 each age is fortunate if it possesses one or two 
 of these self-exhibitors, provided always that 
 the man who thus loves to exhibit himself has 
 any mental goods worthy of being spread out 
 at an " opening." Even in so prosaic and 
 practical a matter as a county fair, a public 
 display of produce and stock and manufac- 
 tured articles implies the superior quality of 
 the things shown ; and when the exposition 
 is a National cne held at Paris or at Nov- 
 gorod, it is assumed that all the fabrics and 
 jewels and wonders are of a very high order 
 of merit. When an egotist comes along to 
 set forth his own deeds and thoughts and be- 
 liefs, to put his own exploits in a magic lantern, 
 and throw them out upon a canvass for our ben- 
 efit, he in the meanwhile making the accom- 
 panying remarks and turning out the music, 
 it is demanded simply that he has some ex- 
 ploits and scenes worthy of his time and our 
 own, and of the complicated machines for ex- 
 
M CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 hibiting. Fortunate the generation which has 
 grown for its own use one of these s;las3-clear 
 souls, having at once an experience rich and 
 full, and an anxiety to tell the whole story. 
 Montaigne is to-day a picture of a French 
 half century — a picture made up of interest- 
 ing details, which must have escaped the more 
 grave historian ; but more fortunate still was 
 the fourth Christian century in the possession 
 of such an open mind as Aurelius Augustine. 
 He alleges as an excuse for writing his 
 " Confessions " his desire to do good ; but it is 
 pretty well known that such a desire generally 
 springs up in hearts not averse to self-utter- 
 ance, and that the two desires of saving souls 
 and pleasing one's self are for the most part 
 combined in all these personal records. But 
 snd justified the means, for in this autobiog- 
 raphy the nineteenth century possesses a 
 truthful picture of the Christian landscape as 
 it lay fourteen hundred years ago. Doctrines 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 15 
 
 and customs, smiles and tears, mothers, wives 
 and mistresses, studies and prayers, truths 
 and falsehoods, chimeras and absurdities and 
 verities, are clothed with all the realism and 
 interest which attend the drama of actual per- 
 sonage. Augustine possesses the double virtue 
 of being the mirror of a whole generation, and 
 of a generation so far removed from our own 
 that each article displayed seems an antique 
 or a charming novelty. 
 
 It shows the religious quality of the early 
 Christian faith that Augustine's autobiograj)hy 
 is addressed to God. In those days the Deity 
 had not fallen into the hands of our Darwins 
 and Mills and Harriet Martineaus, but He 
 was a near friend — a companion of each soul. 
 God was as absolute a reality as was the city 
 of Eome or the Mediterranean sea, and the 
 early Christians enjoyed as many conferences 
 with God as they enjoyed with each other. 
 To this real but invisible One cases of con- 
 
16 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 science and of doubt were referred as to a mag- 
 istrate who could not err, and, in a word, the 
 Creator of the universe was the special friend 
 and confidant of all who passed over from the 
 |3agan to the Christian faith. When Augus- 
 tine had fallen into deep perplexity over a 
 question of duty, he resolved to oj)en the Bible 
 at random and then mark what verse the 
 Lord should first disclose to his eyes. Thus 
 was he led from his darkness out into the su- 
 preme light, and so effective was this form of 
 appeal that both Augustine and his bosom 
 friend Alypius were richly blessed by a pas- 
 sage which contained a peculiar teaching for 
 each one of the inseparable companions. 
 That is, the appeal to ' random' was so full of 
 success that the applicant had light to spare to 
 his neighbor. Living in such a period, good 
 Christians talked to God as they walked along 
 the roads or as they journeyed by boat or 
 litter, and when the subject of this sketch felt 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 
 
 that the human family should see his inmost 
 heart, he simply began to write down his talks 
 with his Maker. This evidently secures for 
 the book great sincerity and frankness, for there 
 is seldom a heart so depraved that it can ad- 
 dress a series of falsehoods to the Almighty, 
 The probability is that in these " Confessions " 
 we have a picture of a heart in the fourth 
 century, as it lived and loved and hated and 
 wept. It smiled but little. 
 
 Should any modern mind po?sess the child- 
 like simplicity that would tell all things to 
 the public, we should have a grotesque collec- 
 tion, for thoughts are largely involuntary, and 
 they come pell-mell, red, white and blue and 
 black and gray. Judgment selects from this 
 •awful mixture and chaos a few things that 
 seem worthy of utterance. Clergymen while 
 speaking in the pulpit have their own thoughts 
 about certain toilets and faces down in the 
 
 pews, and along with their argument, that 
 
 2 
 
IS CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 might seem to prove the existence of heaven 
 or hell, they cannot avoid the reflection that 
 Mrs. Oleander has gotten a new shawl, or 
 that Miss Columbine has returned from Eu- 
 rope or Long Branch ; but the rules of public 
 address demand that from this multiplicity of 
 ideas in the brain, a judicious selection should 
 be made by the speaker, and that in his as- 
 sumed discourse on some theological theme he 
 must suppress his views about Mrs. Oleander 
 and Miss Columbine. To Saint Augustine- it 
 generally seemed otherwise. He opens the 
 the windows of his heart and lets all things 
 escape. He mingles into one not displeasing 
 compound, God and ^Eneas and Dido, and 
 wonders that when so easily able to weep for 
 Dido slain he should have been so slow to 
 weep for himself or for his God. He asks the 
 •Almighty why he hated Homer and was fond 
 of Virgil ? He informs the Lord that when 
 a lad of fifteen he was wont to steal, and in 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 19 
 
 proof of the assertion he cites an instance in 
 which he had entered a garden to divest a 
 pear tree of its coming crop. " Nor cared I 
 to enjoy what I stole, bat I joyed in the theft 
 and sin itself. A pear tree there was near 
 our vineyard laden with fruit, tempting 
 neither for color nor taste. To shake and rob 
 this some leivd young fellows of us went late one 
 night (having according to our pestilent cus- 
 tom prolonged our sports in the streets till 
 then), and took huge loads, not for our eating, 
 but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted 
 them. And this we did only because we loved 
 to do that which ivas not lawful ! Behold my 
 heart, 0, God ! behold my heart, upon which 
 Thou hadst pity as it lay in the bottom of the 
 bottomless pity A statement this which places 
 before us the boys of the Roman world as they 
 were fifteen hundred years ago; how they made 
 the streets noisy with their games and mid- 
 night a witness of their dusky forms as they 
 
20 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 clambered over wall or fence; a statement 
 which informs us that ho 2:8 ran free and 
 hungry in the classic streets, and which recalls 
 to mind the fact that the cooks of the period 
 threw their kitchen-slops out of the front win- 
 dow saying, " Beware" to the passer-by. 
 
 In this wonderful pot pourri, there comes 
 more of the beautiful than of the grotesque 
 or ridiculous, and as a general rule the 
 thoughts of the Saint flow along, much as do 
 the meditations of a' Kempis and Richard Bax- 
 ter. Almost all the leading doctrines of the 
 Christian system, come under review, and the 
 virtues and vices of Christians of the period 
 are seen in the general parade. From the 
 fact that each Christian felt that his God or 
 his Saviour was always just at hand, the pre- 
 vailing tone of religion was personal and spir- 
 itual. It was not a philosophy, but an expe- 
 rience. In our day Christianity among the 
 educated is an intellectual platform of piety, 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 21 
 
 just as republicanism or democracy is a plat- 
 form of politics; but in the time of Saint Au- 
 gustine, it was an experience, just as love or 
 friendship is an experience of the soul. The 
 sins of this olden time were more the sins of 
 ignorance than of intention, and therefore the 
 heart which committed them was often all the 
 while a faithful friend of the Most High. 
 Modern Christians are few who would write 
 down such expressions as "too late have I 
 loved Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days! 
 yet ever new! too late have I loved Thee!" " Oh 
 Thou sweetness never failing; Thou blissful 
 and assured sweetness. " " When shall T see 
 Thee, Oh Thou most dear, most loving, most 
 benign, most precious, most longed for, most 
 lovable, most beautiful, than honey sweeter, 
 than snow or milk whiter, than nectar more 
 delicious ; more valuable than all gold or gems, 
 than all the riches and honors of the earth 
 dearer ! " Even could such meditations find 
 
22 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 their way into the modern mind, they would die 
 on the lips that should attempt to give them 
 audible utterance. Coming in the writings 
 of this old Saint, they tell us not only what a 
 passionate belief filled the soul of the writer 
 but also the souls of the public, for each writer 
 adapts his language to his age. We are thus 
 assured that in the fourth century, the pro- 
 fession of faith in Christ was a declaration of 
 love, and that for him language summoned its 
 best adjectives, and the heart poured out its 
 best tears. The kissing of the feet, and the 
 wiping of them with the long hair of woman, 
 as seen in Magdalen, is seen over again in these 
 pages, the actions of the beautiful woman be- 
 ing spiritualized in the literature of a gifted 
 man. 
 
 Explanatory of the emotion of both Mary 
 Magdalen and Saint Augustine, it must be ob- 
 served that our Anglo-Saxon civilization is, 
 perhaps, the coldest one the world has yet 
 
AUGUSTINE AND -HIS MOTHER. 23 
 
 known. No Southern or Eastern land has ever 
 equalled England and America in the ability 
 and disposition to suppress emotion. Our 
 greetings on the street and in social life are for- 
 mal and empty, compared with even those of 
 modern Germany and France and Italy, and 
 when compared with the customs of the early 
 centuries of our era, they fade as poor frost- 
 bitten flowers. Whether the difference is not 
 one of emotion so much as one of expression, is a 
 question of value, but it is with outward sym- 
 bols we are now dealing, and regarding these 
 it must be declared that the forms of reveal- 
 ing regard are in our land comparatively cold 
 and thin. German men who are friends or 
 relatives, often kiss each other and weep when 
 they separate for a long period, thus showing 
 us that there once flowed northward a wave of 
 demonstrativeness from the land of hot hearts, 
 and that that wave, now dying out on the 
 German shore, was high and full when Aug- 
 
24 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 ustine was living his intense years. His was 
 a time of full utterance. Language was taxed 
 to its uttermost, and gesture and rite and tears 
 came to supplement the resources of the Latin 
 and Greek tongues. Be the person loved a girl, 
 a wife, a mother, or the Savior or the Creator, 
 the mind always ransacked the prevailing lan- 
 guage for words that would come somewhere 
 near conveying an idea of the heart's attach- 
 ment. The demand added to the supply, and 
 those southeastern tongues all became power- 
 ful in their terms of praise and endearment 
 — a power which was inherited by the mod- 
 ern dialects of western Europe. 
 
 One of the forms of interest and utility 
 with which these "Confessions" abound, is the 
 conspicuous place occupied by the mother of 
 the remarkable son. Monica is a prominent 
 figure in this passion-play. While it is prob- 
 able that she does not represent the average 
 wife and mother of that world, yet it is desira- 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 25 
 
 ble to know what merit and maternal love and 
 wisdom were possible and occasional in a time 
 so far removed from our own. It is a blessed 
 sight to behold such a wife standing forth 
 upon the dark back-ground of classic and an- 
 cient customs, and to see a mother so loved by 
 a great son in a day when the father was the 
 chief personage in the house, and when the 
 mother was only a domestic slave. Divorce 
 was frequent and easy. The mother was liable 
 at any time to be banished from her home and 
 separated from her children. When mindful 
 of these cruelties of antiquity we shall read 
 the history of Monica as one of antiquity's 
 brightest pages. 
 
 Monica was a Numidian girl. Her country 
 corresponded to the modern Algiers. It was 
 adjacent to Carthage, and hence enjoyed the 
 influence of that illustrious city. For several 
 centuries Carthage and Alexandria had been 
 the successors of Greece and of intellectual 
 
26 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 Rome. The military and political power of 
 Rome were on the northern border of the 
 Mediterranean; on the southern border were 
 her literature and libraries. The new religion" 
 followed the intellectual parallels and made a 
 grand conquest of the Alexandrian and Afri- 
 can Romans. Tagaste, a town in Numidia, 
 the first home of Augustine, must have sus- 
 tained toward Carthage such relations as all 
 towns are wont to sustain toward this metrop- 
 olis ; so that Monica, a girl in Numidia, must 
 have enjoyed such an education and general 
 culture as she would have received had she 
 passed her girlhood in the larger city of 
 greater fame. Among other teachings she 
 drank in fully the cup of Christianity, as it 
 was handed along in that part of our era. 
 That she accepted of it as the true and only 
 message from God to man may be inferred from 
 the fact that her heart revealed an intense fear 
 her promising son might not find that 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 27 
 
 path of service and safety. Her zeal followed 
 this child with prayers and tears until she 
 saw her dear one, at the age of thirty, 
 pass oyer from paganism to the tenets of the 
 Gospels. She made long journeys to visit Au- 
 gustine and plead with him, and his record of 
 this faithful pursuing from city to city shows 
 that her visits were not meddlesome, and as is 
 often the case full of mortification for proud 
 youths who have outgrown the parental wis- 
 dom, but they were as the visits of a true love ; 
 and even when her arguments were not con- 
 vincing they were all welcome to the affec- 
 tionate son. It is well that in the lives of 
 three most illustrous personages — Christ and 
 Aurelius and Augustine — the nearest being to 
 each one was the mother! Not always in 
 our world does the crown of affection rest 
 upon the right forehead. 
 
 In Monica we may see the traces of the cus- 
 tomary bondage of the wife, which, next to the 
 
28 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 slavery of men, has disgraced the past of hu- 
 manity. What exact quality of a husband 
 this Numidian woman found is not told us, but 
 that he possessed the prevailing low ideas of 
 a wife is fully evinced by the inquiry which 
 her women-friends raised — how it happened 
 that, having been a wife so long, she had no 
 marks on her face and body of blows received 
 in the ordinary experience of married life ? 
 We can paint a picture here. A half-dozen 
 wives have met, perhaps, at a common resort 
 on the sea, and while sitting idly together in 
 the afternoon, their husbands being absent on 
 a fishing or tippling or theological excursion, 
 these wives fall into a free discourse about the 
 scars and wounds on their bodies. One has a 
 slightly broken nose ; one has lost a couple of 
 front teeth ; one has a long scar on her cheek ; 
 one has a mark over an eye ; but upon looking 
 toward Monica to note which of these marriage 
 certificates she may possess, they find none. 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 
 
 and then she explains to them that for years 
 she has made no answer to scoldings, and has 
 in such an adroit manner studied silence and 
 conciliation that she has escaped blows with 
 club or rod, and has received words only, and 
 they leave no scar. Other of the wives then 
 tell what it was that made their lordly husband 
 administer the blow under contemplation. No 
 one of these women sigh for sorrow at the re- 
 membrance of such violence, for such sighing 
 would imply that in their hearts was slumber- 
 ing some delicate ideal of domestic love. No 
 one of them, not even Monica, could recall a 
 time when a husband had put any flowers in 
 her hair, or had kissed her in presence of guests, 
 but easily can they remember that Paul has 
 said that wives must obey their husbands, and 
 that Xenophon has said that if a wife wants 
 exercise let her fold and arrange all the clothes. 
 And yet in a day when all customs tended to 
 dwarf the wife and the mother, Monica flour- 
 
30 CLUB ESSAYS, 
 
 isliecl and triumphed under the marriage-roof, 
 and attached her children to her in bonds of 
 love that would be thought very powerful, 
 even in our age. 
 
 And yet this very wife who had managed 
 affairs so well, did not fully realize, in the ab- 
 stract, the sphere of wife or mother, for the 
 terms are mutually explanatory. Nor had 
 she or her husband or her son a moral sense 
 that would compare favorably with the highest 
 moral ideas of modern Christianity. These 
 two defects will appear in the fact that this 
 Christian woman rather opposed the marriage 
 of her son, and did not battle so bravely to 
 pursuade her gifted boy to give up his un- 
 lawful mistress as to give up his paganism. 
 Even so pious and devoted a mother could not 
 take in the whole circle of the new morality, 
 but splendid as she was, she had one foot back 
 upon the borders of the dark land. She was 
 anxious for her child to escape to Christ, not 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 31 
 
 dreaming that she had not herself fully come 
 to his moral hight. To all this truly noble 
 Christian group marriage appeared as the at- 
 tribute of man as an animal, and therefore 
 between mistress and wife the difference 
 did not seem remarkable. The long and great 
 struggle of Augustine to find some light in 
 this matter came largely from the power of 
 long customs and from the low general estimate 
 of woman. When at last thirty-three years 
 had brought him some reason and the power 
 to put away the temporary friend, he did not 
 make a wife of her, who had been all things 
 to him, faithfully for years, and was the moth- 
 er of the beautiful Adeodatus, but discarding 
 her, he begins to talk with God about matri- 
 mony, and prays for a wife that may bring 
 him some money, and may thus add to his 
 happiness without adding to the family ex- 
 pense. Thus throughout this domestic group 
 there is visible more of piety than of intelli- 
 
CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 gence. As a child can have emotions, but 
 only old age have wisdom, so the infancy of a 
 religion may possess faith and zeal, while the 
 delicate perception of right and wrong waits 
 the slow coming of thought and experience. 
 
 At last by her pleadings with her family 
 and at the throne of mercy, Monica led her 
 son and husband and some of the nearest rela- 
 tives and friends over from the old religion to 
 the new. This transformation took place at 
 Milan. Milan being then a rival of Rome in 
 material and intellectual greatness, being full 
 of the "pomp and circumstance of Kings/' 
 the wish sprang up in the hearts of these new 
 converts to return to Africa, and for a time en- 
 joy the meditation and spiritual luxury of 
 solitude. Along with all these early conver- 
 sions came a contempt of the world. The early 
 Christians loved a solitude because they 
 thought that the absence of man secured the 
 presence of God. Having found Christ the 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 33 
 
 heart sought a hidden room or a cave in the 
 rocks or a trackless forest, that it might see 
 only its Savior. 
 
 In obedience to this philosophy, Augustine 
 and his mother set forth for the coast. Loved 
 attendants followed. They came to the well 
 known port of Ostia, and as nobody was ever 
 in haste in that epoch, and as all these travel- 
 ers were weary from their overland trip, they 
 determined to spend a few days or perhaps 
 weeks at this old town by the sea. The Med- 
 iterranean tempered the winds which came 
 from the southern region, while the moun- 
 tains cooled those that came from the north. 
 On one of these peaceful days the son and the 
 mother were standing, and leaning out of a 
 large window which looked out upon a blos- 
 soming garden and a serene sky. The scene 
 and the rapture of their hearts brought these 
 strange lovers a theme of discourse. They be- 
 gan to wonder what would be the nature of 
 3 
 
CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 that world which should come beyond the 
 earthly flowers, and the blue sky of these days; 
 to wonder with what kind of sweetness that 
 life would begin, and with what rich employ- 
 ment proceed in its endlessness. Picture for 
 painter, this son aged thirty-three, and this 
 mother aged fifty-six, hand in hand like lov- 
 ers looking out of a window, and with upturned 
 faces attempting to see beyond the curtains of 
 eternity. The vision and thoughts were too 
 rich. They expelled from the mother's 
 bosom the beloved Africa, and made her soul 
 long for a holier rest than any along the 
 shores of the sea that now murmured at her 
 feet. "My son why should I stay longer in 
 this world? I have seen my household all 
 converted from darkness to light, and now why 
 might I not wish to go to the world where 
 my Lord dwells?" While Monica thus talked, 
 the change of worlds was coming silently. 
 In a few days after this conference, which 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 35 
 
 will remind the reader of the similar dis- 
 courses which Aurelius and his mother held 
 in pagan words, Augustine was summoned to 
 his mother's room. She had fainted away in 
 a fever. In our day there are fevers which 
 seem to touch the mind before they are per- 
 ceived in the body. The door-bell is heard to 
 ring, and persons are heard to call one's name, 
 when no one has rung and no one has spoken ; 
 tears of memory fill the eyes ; the present 
 seem absent or the absent seem to have come 
 home. The victim of these deceptions feels 
 bewildered, but often laughs at the cheats. In 
 a few days the rapid development of a fever 
 explains the strange action of the mind. It 
 may be that when in the far off times this 
 beautiful mother stood by that window, which 
 has long since decayed, and looked out over 
 the garden whose trees are now dead, a malar- 
 ial fever touched her mind with its chilling 
 shadow, and made her heart wish to fly away 
 
36 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 and be at rest. She heard music and voices 
 not of earth. She seemed to see a land 
 sweeter than the one held by the arms of the 
 Romans or by the literature of the Greeks. 
 In a few days the fever had made unconscious 
 the mind which had filled years with its 
 prayers and reasonings and love. But reason 
 returned long enough to j^rrnit this noble 
 woman to reveal one more color of her love- 
 liness — a deep humility — for she requested 
 her son not to move her body to her home, 
 but to bury her at Ostia and to hold a service 
 full of simplicity — beyond that he must re- 
 member her always before the altars of God. 
 The events which followed this dying scene, 
 cast some light upon the services of that period. 
 The neighbors began to pour into the house 
 where the dead woman lay, and some one began 
 to chant a psalm, and all the house-full began 
 to make responses, thus showing us that the 
 music and general service of the fourth cent- 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 37 
 
 ury was much like that of the Episcopal 
 Church of the present. The funeral was 
 without lamentations, not even tears being 
 thought proper, for the soul had gone to a better 
 land, and therefore, said Augustine, they at- 
 tempted to conceal or prevent expressions of 
 sorrow. The distinguished son himself, hav- 
 ing invited the company into a room removed 
 from the one where friends were preparing 
 the body for burial, delivered an address to 
 them " upon themes befitting the time," thus 
 incidentally teaching us that Christianity had 
 robbed the grave of victory, and death of its 
 sting, and had enabled a son to contemplate 
 peacefully a dead face, which, living, had been 
 his inexpressible joy. 
 
 A portion of the dying request of Monica 
 has led to some discussions among theologians. 
 She asked to be remembered at the Lord's al- 
 tar wherever the living son might be. Ro- 
 man Catholic writers cite this request and the 
 
38 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 obedience of Augustine, as proof that prayers 
 for the dead have the authority of the early 
 church. Dr. Shedd, of the Presbyterian de- 
 nomination, urges that no such inference can 
 be drawn from such an incident, but there is 
 no space here for either side of the debate. 
 In my opinion the dying mother asked her 
 son to pray for her always and, in my opinion, 
 the son was true to the request ; but the force 
 of such praying for the dead is all taken away 
 by the fact that both Augustine and his 
 mother did many things not worthy of imita- 
 tion by any subsequent generation. If all 
 things, the early Christians did may become a 
 basis of church law and practice, then nothing 
 is more useless than human habits of thought 
 and progress. Augustine thought that sing- 
 ing in church had a tendency to exalt music 
 above God. To confess the simple facts of 
 history and then deny their value as an ex- 
 ample, would seem more rational than to 
 
AUGUSTIXE AXD HIS MOTHEE. 39 
 
 resort to tire method of Dr. Shedd which, ap- 
 pears to be only a piece of theological trifling. 
 Monica asked to be remembered in the family 
 petitions, which should be offered up after she 
 had passed away ; Augustine went to the altar 
 and prayed for his dead parent and his prayer 
 is all written down. Such facts leave no room 
 for Protestant quibble, neither do they afford 
 any basis of the Roman doctrine and practice, 
 for the Romanists assume that what an old 
 Saint did, becomes church doctrine, and they 
 further assume that by prayers for the dead, 
 they can for money, lift a soul from purga- 
 tory. Augustine's prayer was not made for 
 money, nor under any assumption of power, 
 not by a third party having only official re- 
 lations to the departed soul ; but it was an 
 outpouring of love, a strewing of lilies upon 
 a tomb, a remembrance not official by a priest, 
 but solemn and private by a lonely bereaved 
 heart. If the Roman Catholic Church should 
 
40 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 teach, her men, young and old, who may lose 
 a wise and affectionate mother, to repair often 
 to her grave and there pray to Heaven to 
 make more and more blessed her stay among 
 the angels, and to help them obey the holy 
 words she had taught them, prayers for the 
 dead would be less objectionable, for they 
 would seem to be only the efforts of human 
 affection to carry on its loying intercourse 
 across the valley of death. It is possible that 
 the Protestant notion is as much too cold and 
 iron like as the Roman doctrine is too preten- 
 tious and mercenary. It may be that in the 
 cold North, cold by climate and cold by phil- 
 osophy, death is permitted to cause too abso- 
 lute a separation between husband and wife, 
 brother and sister, mother and child. It 
 might perhaps be permitted the weeping heart 
 standing on the earthly shore to cast out to- 
 ward the invisible realm, prayers for those 
 who have gone away, and to cherish the hope 
 
AUGUSTINE AND HIS MOTHER. 41 
 
 that those absent ones were also presenting in 
 their better land, petitions for the happiness 
 and salvation of the dear ones left in this life 
 of temptation and suffering. For such ration- 
 alizing, for such sifting of opinion, Augustine 
 and his mother did not wait. For thirty-three 
 years this mother and son had given and re- 
 ceived love ; had exchanged thoughts upon all 
 possible subjects; had held hands as though 
 two lovers or two little children, and when 
 death came to the parent, the friendship of 
 the son did not cease, but its words became 
 prayers and were flung out into the spiritual 
 world by an impassioned soul. 
 
A ROMAN HOME 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 
 
 A LETTER TO HIS FRIEND XIMINES, FROM TIRO, A SLAVE OF 
 CICERO. 
 
 Dear Ximines: 
 
 I am still near the spot where my master 
 was murdered. I am in his deserted library, 
 and from a place so full of sacred memory, I 
 must now write to you a long letter with the 
 long promised grave and light particulars 
 about this greatest of the Romans. As though 
 you were a woman, you beg to know all about 
 the house and the wife and the children, and 
 even the table and the entire private life of 
 this orator. The wish is well enough ; be- 
 cause you can thus compare Rome with 
 Athens. Your wish shall be gratified in part, 
 for the cruel death of my kind master only 
 last week renders sacred even the small things 
 that now come up to notice or to memory. 
 (45) 
 
46 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 Even this double inkstand, with black ink in 
 one side and red ink in the other, recalls the 
 dead, for it is the very one which my Cice- 
 ro shook up when he said he must write more 
 distinctly to his brother Quintus. 
 
 Does it seem so to you ? but I have indeed 
 been the secretary and librarian of this Bo- 
 man for twenty years. You remember that 
 when I was a mere lad in Athens and was being 
 taught the two great languages and all letters 
 that I might be a literary slave to some of the 
 Athenians, Cicero, who was then in our city to 
 study rhetoric with old Demetrius, formed 
 quite an attachment to me, and hoped to call 
 me some day to Rome. Twenty years have 
 now passed since he sent for me and paid my 
 former master a large sum for his literary 
 slave, Tiro. 
 
 That you may know how light my bondage 
 for these years has been, and how well quali- 
 fied lam to speak about hisdomestic life, I must 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 47 
 
 insert an extract here from the almost daily let- 
 ters which Cicero sent me when he was absent, 
 and when I was sick at Tusculum. 
 
 "I did not imagine, dear Tiro, that I should 
 have been so little able to bear your absence, 
 but indeed it is almost beyond endurance. 
 Should you embark immediately you would 
 overtake me at Leucas. But if you are in- 
 clined to defer your voyage till your recovery 
 shall be more confirmed, let me entreat you to 
 be careful in selecting a safe ship, and be 
 careful that you sail in good weather, and not 
 without a convoy. It is true I am extremely 
 desirous of your company, and as early as 
 possible, but the same affection which makes 
 me wish to see you soon, makes me wish to see 
 you well." 
 
 And I must add here, lest I forget it, that 
 my master never struck men or scolded me, nor 
 did he ever treat any of his slaves with any 
 cruelty. Some of the Romans do indeed abuse 
 
13 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 their servants, and one matron recently or- 
 dered one of her dressing maids put to death 
 because she arranged badly, or made some 
 error in the toilet of her mistress, but I never 
 saw any such inhumanity in the house of my 
 great master. I must insert here an extract 
 from another letter : 
 
 " I dispatched a letter to you from this place 
 yesterday, where I continued all day waiting 
 for my brother, and this I write just as we are 
 setting out, and before sunrise. If vou have 
 any regard for us, but particularly for me, 
 show it by your care to re-establish your 
 health. It is with great impatience I expect 
 to meet you at Leucas; but if that cannot be, 
 my next wish is that I may find Mario there 
 with a letter. We all, but more particularly 
 myself, long to see you ; however, we would 
 by no means, dear Tiro, indulge ourselves in 
 that pleasure unless it may be consistent with 
 your health. I can forego your assistance, 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 49 
 
 but your health, my dear Tiro, I would love 
 to see restored, partly for your own sake — 
 partly for mine. Farewell." 
 Alyzia Nov., 5 A. M. 703. 
 
 Such kind letters he continually wrote me, 
 and so many, that now I have quite a number 
 of them, and how valuable they are, since they 
 make me feel not that I passed long years of 
 painful servitude with such a man, but instead, 
 long years of elevating companionship. 
 
 When coming hither, so many years ago, on 
 reaching the harbor nearest the Formian Villa, 
 I found on the shore quite a crowd of people 
 and an assortment of conveyances, much like 
 those we have at home; there were carriages 
 for those who had furthest to go; there were 
 litters for those who lived only a few stadia 
 over the hills. I inquired for the house of Cic- 
 ero, and was pointed to a man as being 
 the good Roman himself. In a plain but ele- 
 4 
 
CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 gant litter sat my future master. In another ele- 
 gant one with embroidered curtains, sat his wife 
 Terentia Cicero, and the little daughter Tullia. 
 These litters were resting on their wooden 
 
 braces, while the sixteen slaves, whose business 
 it was to carry them, were lounging around in 
 the sun, almost every one of them having his 
 hand full of ripe figs at which he was munch- 
 ing cheerfully. Cicero had come partly to meet 
 me, but partly from the custom the rich fami- 
 lies have of going to the harbor, when they see 
 a vessel coming in. This great Roman De- 
 mosthenes seemed glad to meet me, and as 
 we went home, I walked along-side his litter, 
 and as the curtains were looped up, he talked 
 all the while in a most elegant manner. He 
 found me quite familiar with recent and old 
 books, and at each discovery that I could speak 
 both Latin and Greek correctly, his face bright- 
 ened. 
 
 I then thought him a very homely man. 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 51 
 
 He was thin and pale, and his neck was very 
 long. When he reached over the rail to look 
 forward or back, his neck seemed long as that 
 of a crane. But amid the beauty of his char- 
 acter, the plainness of his person passed away. 
 Terentia seemed cold and unbending and did 
 not so much as speak to me, but Tullia, the 
 little daughter, called out to me to ask if I 
 would not help her get out her lessons in Greek. 
 Did you know, Ximines, that the wealthy 
 Romans do not limit themselves to one country 
 place ? In addition to a costly city residence, 
 my master had fourteen villas for his summer 
 or winter pleasure. Wherever an island or a 
 harbor or a hill, especially pleased him, he 
 bought or built a house, and several places 
 were given him by wealthy friends, who were 
 or might be his clients in law, or who were 
 moved by simple friendship. Many large 
 sums were given to this lawyer in the wills of 
 those who had been near him in life. 
 
52 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 Happy summers we spent sailing or journey- 
 ing to and fro among these beautiful jDlaces of 
 rest. The Tusculum Villa was the favorite of 
 us all, and the chief of the group. It was in 
 the border of Rome. From it we could see all 
 the public buildings in the one direction and 
 all the beauty of hill and vale and water and 
 sky in another. Here were our library, our 
 pictures, our statuary, our best gardens and 
 fields, our fowls, geese, ducks, pheasants, pea- 
 cocks and pigeons. My master's city residence 
 was costly, and was wonderful in its orna- 
 ments and apartments, but we all loved more 
 the resort out at Tusculum. That city home, 
 Clodius, the consul, in the dej>tli of malice, or- 
 dered to be razed to the ground when he ban- 
 is! led Cicero. For days the mob and also the 
 better people could be seen carrying off frag- 
 ments or ornaments or founder from that over- 
 thrown palace. But a change of consuls soon 
 came and Rome recalled the exile and rebuilt 
 our city house. 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 53 
 
 Our Tusculum villa is built much like a gen- 
 eral's camp, the soul being in the centre, the 
 body, the impedimenta, being located all 
 around the valuable part. The main hall of 
 villa is the soul. Here is the conversation, 
 here the beauty, here the feast, here the art, 
 here the whole family. All around are 
 the shops and sleeping bunks of the servants. 
 This villa is approached through a long lane 
 of dwarf box. This accommodating shrub is 
 trimmed and bent into the shapes of animals 
 in a pretty or grotesque manner. Eampant 
 lions and the panther so much seen in the 
 games, the peacock and other birds are on 
 either hand as you approach the main entrance 
 of the house. The structure measures about 
 a hundred feet across the front and extends 
 back fully two hundred feet. The exterior is 
 set apart for rooms for the artisan slaves. 
 Our carpenter has one, our tailor one, our 
 groom one, our cook one, and thus on until the 
 
54 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 the family is in the midst of quite an army of 
 these domestic troops. Like almost all the 
 Koman houses it is built of brick, but some 
 parts of it are lined with marble. But Rome 
 is a brick city, the bricks being about one span 
 square. Entering this large square by a beau- 
 tiful gate, you are passed inward by the keep- 
 ers, and after a few steps you come into the 
 large hall, which is the home of the Cicero 
 family. Marble columns support the roof, 
 which is raised high above the head. Marble 
 is under foot. All around one stands stat- 
 uary, most of which come from Greek 
 towns. The side walls are made of stucco, 
 and these are exquisitely painted. To the 
 height of a man above the floor, the colors 
 are dark, and the figures are set ones, but 
 above that the colors are very brig] it and the 
 figures either perfect vines and flowers, or else 
 images of human and divine ideals. In 
 tliis immense room we ate and talked, and 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 55 
 
 played and laughed, and gave parties, and 
 danced and were happy, until death entered 
 the gate to break up this island of the blessed. 
 In some Eoman houses in the city there are 
 steps to lead up to a second story, but this is 
 rarely the case. The bed-chambers are re- 
 cesses from the great hall and sometimes there 
 is one sleeping berth above another, and the 
 one who sleeps above climbs up by two pins 
 inserted in the masonry. 
 
 At Tusculum, my master had a bed-room 
 made for himself in the rear of the building. 
 He had ordered deadened walls on all sides, 
 and a window that he could darken ; that 
 when he had been up late at night he might 
 not be disturbed by that clatter of all kinds 
 made by the slaves, nor be awakened by the 
 too obtrusive sunshine of the morning. 
 
 The library was a room with the walls on all 
 sides arranged for books. Each book had its 
 little cell, like the holes in which our pigeons 
 
56 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 live. It was not my place to take care of 
 the volumes, but to read them to my master and 
 to his family and friends ; and to be forever 
 seeking for new truths or ideas or beauties for 
 the great orator's happiness and use. He had 
 a slave who looked after the binding and dust- 
 ing and arranging of the works. Cicero 
 would not permit a dirty cover to remain on a 
 volume, nor a soiled label. All must be bright 
 and cheerful, much as the good man was himself. 
 One set of books he had such as I never saw 
 at Athens — books full of j>ortraits. He had 
 seven hundred portraits of distinguished Ro- 
 mans. As Brutus and Cresar had the same 
 pictures in their libraries, I concluded and 
 heard that there was some shoj) where one 
 picture could be multiplied until all could 
 have copies; but I have not yet found that 
 ingenious shop. 
 
 Our library is ornamented in fine manner 
 by paintings and statuary. Now I remember 
 
A ROMAN HOME, 57 
 
 how mad my master was, when, having or- 
 dered Atiicus to buy him some good pieces in 
 Greece, that erring friend shipped to us a lot 
 of cupids and nymphs. My master did not 
 want such stuff in his rooms. 
 
 Passing out of the library, one comes to the 
 flower-garden and fish-ponds and poultry-yard. 
 How much that great Cicero did love his 
 geese and peacocks and chickens and pigeons ! 
 Even when he knew he must make an im- 
 portant speech that day, and when he was full 
 of care about the oration, he would yet take 
 the time in the morning to go out and see how 
 the pigeons and pheasants were getting along. 
 I have known him to pay a large sum for tw T o 
 pigeon's eggs that he heard w r ould hatch out 
 some rare species. In the flower-garden and 
 among the fruit trees, the dinner and supper 
 were often served in the summer months. I 
 often read aloud while the family ate. I loved 
 thus to read, for the grass under foot secured 
 
53 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 for us such a sileuce that reading and hearing 
 were more delightful. 
 
 Permit me now to rest } t ou a little, dear Xirn- 
 ines, by leading you from the small to the 
 great, for you know, dear friend, the soul is 
 so constructed that it can find rest in going 
 from the little to the large, or from the large 
 to the little. Man can walk a circle with less 
 fatigue if at times he changes his direction. 
 Let me tell you about Cicero as a student and 
 an orator. He was wider in his taste than our 
 Demosthenes. You know our orator loved 
 only matters of State, but this Roman loved 
 all books and all things. He read everything 
 he could find. If I found a good passage I 
 went to him with it, perfectly assured that he 
 would enjoy it whether it was prose or poetry, 
 or law or religion or geography, or only a 
 piece for exciting laughter. In one way or 
 another, all he saw or heard or read, helped 
 him in either his public speeches or in his 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 59 
 
 conversations. All that went into his brain 
 came ont again in some better shape. He will 
 live in the world's fame as an orator, but I shall 
 remember with deepest pleasure his fun and 
 talk at home. Every evening friends came in. 
 There were Trebatius and Hortensius and 
 Atticus and Rufus and Brutus and Cato, and 
 by degrees my master would become aroused, 
 and all evening long he would pour forth 
 jokes and anecdotes or else would quote gems 
 from the poets. He was a mimic of manners 
 and would keep all delighted by mimicing all 
 the bad and eccentric speakers of the city and 
 the clowns of the day. Grave as my master 
 was in his public addresses, he filled some of 
 his letters to friends and sometimes the rooms 
 of justice and always our home, with sayings 
 that led to much laughter and much good 
 cheer. In all the letters he wrote to the young 
 lawyer, Trebatius, who had gone with Caesar 
 on his British expedition, there were seldom 
 
60 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 any words except those of pure humor. He 
 exj)ressed in one of them the opinion that his 
 friend had gone over the sea, that he might be 
 the greatest lawyer now living in Britain. 
 In another he opines that the reason why his 
 friend had remained carefully away from bat- 
 tle, could not be found in any cowardice, but 
 it must have been in the unwillingness of a 
 student of law to be guilty of making an as- 
 sault. In one of the rejdies of Trebatius, 
 there were signs that some former writing had 
 been erased to leave the page blank for the 
 letter to Cicero. In the next missile to this 
 absent friend, Cicero expressed a wonder 
 what could have been on that paper that 
 could have made it less valuable than the pro- 
 posed letter — lie concluded that what was 
 erased "must have been one of your own 
 (Tribatius') briefs." 
 
 "When Verres was upon trial for defrauding 
 the people of Sicily, for stealing statuary and 
 
A ROMAN HOME, 61 
 
 jewels and pictures, and for assessing and col- 
 lecting most unjust taxes, Hortensius defend- 
 ed, and Cicero prosecuted the accused. It was 
 known to my master that Verres had sent to 
 his attorney a valuable piece of marble — an 
 Egyptian Sphynx. In the course of the ex- 
 amination of witnesses, Hortensius became 
 angry at one of those on the side of the prose- 
 cution, and thundered out that he wanted no 
 riddles but a plain statement of facts. Cicero 
 said calmly, " Hortensius, you should be glad 
 to get a supply of riddles since you have at 
 home such a valuable sphynx/' This quite 
 upset the gravity of the crowd, and all laughed 
 over the predicament of the distinguished Hor- 
 tensius. 
 
 There was a form of literary sport which 
 was my master's great delight — a double use 
 of a word ; a use in which the hidden import 
 would suddenly spring up bringing always a 
 pleasure. These double-edged words he loved 
 
G2 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 to send off to this same fun-loving Trebatius. 
 He reminded him that the winters would be 
 cold up in Gaul, but that his regimentals , when 
 they should come, would keep out much cold; 
 and that Caesar would perhaps have some hot 
 work for him ; and that upon the whole he was 
 not so hopeless as a soldier as he was as a law- 
 yer. Trebatius having remained on the 
 peaceful side of a river while Caesar went over 
 to fight, Cicero congratulated the friend that 
 he had so far eliminated all ill-will from 
 his heart that he had become unwilling to 
 cross water ! ! ! 
 
 Indeed I shall not deny that to see the house- 
 tops covered with people and the streets 
 densely crowded with a multitude, all silent to 
 hear Cicero speak against the cruel Verres, or 
 the despot Antony, was a great spectacle and 
 one which it was my fortune often to witness, 
 but, for some reason, my own memory will 
 cherish most those evenings in the villas when 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 63 
 
 the jokes were so good and all were so per- 
 fectly happy. Julius Caesar at one time de- 
 termined to gather up in a little volume, all 
 the Cicero stories and witticisms he could find, 
 but I fear that the last fiye years of Caesar's 
 life were passed in so much war and turmoil 
 that he neyer prosecuted his intention. At 
 none of the bookstores do I find any such yol- 
 ume. I need no such yolume, but the laugh- 
 ing world will. 
 
 My master spoke much like the orators we 
 haye seen and heard in Athens. He imitated 
 and he acted as he spoke. He threw himself 
 about from place to place on the rostrum and 
 seemed to haye in him the souls of a whole 
 company of men. When he first began 
 speaking in public, he was so full of action 
 and passion that he injured his health and was 
 compelled to leaye Rome and seek peace 
 abroad. He spoke just as do the actors in 
 the theaters changing his face and voice to 
 
6 J: CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 suit each style of the changing thought and 
 argument, He had an extreme ambition and 
 seemed to know in you th that he was destined 
 to be great. When he entered the law some 
 wanted him to change his name, for Cicero 
 meant only a vegetable. They told him it 
 did not sound large enough. He said in re- 
 ply that he would keep his father's name and 
 make it sound honorable. He wore out his 
 health in a few years and sailed to Greece for 
 rest. On his return, he assumed a manner a 
 little more quiet but it was still very full of 
 action. But, my good friend, he was a won- 
 derful man. I always attended him when he 
 was to make a speech that when he came to 
 write it out fully afterward, I could aid 
 him if he had lost any particular thought or 
 the structure of a sentence. I have known 
 the lawyers opposed in a case to my master to 
 venture no reply but to abandon their cause 
 after Cicero bad made his opening speech. 
 
A B02IAX HOME. 
 
 A rather amusing event took place while 
 Caesar was dictator, onlv a few years a 2:0. A 
 case was before Csesar. The evidence having 
 been all taken, Csesar was about to give his 
 judgment and had declared that no speeches 
 need be made as his mind had been made up 
 fully that the person charged was guilty. 
 Cicero arose to make a brief voluntary plea. 
 Csesar said jokingly that he had not heard 
 Cicero for so long that it would be rather 
 pleasant to hear the good fellow speak once 
 again. He heard him; got amazed and 
 highly wrought up, and discharged the accused 
 as being the most innocent man of his ac- 
 quaintance. 
 
 Ah, my Ximines, let me tell you more now 
 of the home life of the dead orator and master, 
 more dear to me as a master than as an orator. 
 Let me tell you briefly about the social scenes 
 in our city house, and also in the Villa at 
 Tusculum. One of our largest reunions of 
 
06 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 friends was given when Cicero's only daugh- 
 ter Tullia had just begun to attract the atten- 
 tions of Roman lovers. As soon as night had 
 fully come the friends began to pour in. Some 
 came by carriages, some by the popular litter. 
 At last you could have seen gathered in the 
 hall Julius Cassar and his wife ; Decimus 
 Brutus and Marcus Brutus, Cato, Horten- 
 sius, Marcus Antony, Crassus, Quint us Cicero, 
 the brother of my Marcus, Pompey and Pub- 
 lius, Crassus Atticus, Casca, and a hundred 
 other such notable men. Not any less was the 
 number of the noble women and maidens. 
 Pomponia, the wife of Cicero's brother, came 
 early and had begun to chat with her sister-in- 
 law. Corelia, the daughter of Metellus Scipio, 
 was there dressed in plain, but rich costume, 
 for she was a woman of intellect rather than 
 of (1 less. She resembled the Cornelia of Grac- 
 chi fame. The Lrclia girls were present in all 
 their style of costume arid beauty of face. 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 67 
 
 In this throng were not a few of the Roman 
 u pretty men" homo hellus. There were three 
 Laelia girls and they might have stood for 
 three graces. The talk that Cicero thought 
 too highly of these daughters was all old time 
 gossip. The bellus homo is a man wholly de- 
 voted to fashion and dress and pleasure. The 
 number of these has greatly increased of late 
 years. The younger men in general seem to 
 be of this sleek and effeminate school. The 
 sons of the great Senators and orators are for 
 the most part idle, pretty men, who part their 
 hair with the utmost precision and smell of 
 all the perfumes of the South. They wear 
 snow-white robes, and powder like women to 
 make white their bare arms ; and in the wear- 
 ing of rings they equal any matron of this dy- 
 ing Republic. These youths gathered that 
 night in one corner of the great hall, and with 
 a few equally silly girls they hummed over 
 part of Nile love songs, and lounged in the 
 
68 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 large soft seats designed for the ladies of 
 rank. 
 
 Most of the love songs here locate their 
 scenes of romance and the actors in the scenes 
 over on the Nile ; not only because Cleopatra 
 has introduced there an era of sentiment, but 
 rather because the spirit of romance always finds 
 its ideal land away from home, there being no 
 witchery in things that are near. I remember 
 that we boys at Athens sang of Roman adven- 
 ture, but coming hither I found the Roman 
 young souls locating the exploits of successful 
 and unsuccessful love as far as possible away 
 from all existing realities. It must belong to 
 human nature to cover up with enchantment 
 hills and vales and peoples that are just beyond 
 the eye's field of vision. 
 
 At times T heard some elegant measures 
 from some thoughtful poet, but for the most 
 pari these brainless youths sang little versea 
 of which I may give you here a fair sample: 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 
 
 If you would live your life 
 In the light of woman's smile 
 And escape all toil and strife 
 Then away to the Nile! 
 
 There my barge may float all night 
 On the love- creating stream 
 Where the soft and amber light 
 Changes life into a dream. 
 
 My love is in the boat 
 And I am by her side; 
 Oh, let me ever float 
 On this love-producing tide. 
 
 In Rome at all hours of the night one can 
 hear some part of this shape of song rising up 
 from the streets, and so fully alive is the whole 
 city to the romance of love affairs, that even old 
 men whistle these tunes as they plod along to 
 work or to idleness, generally to idleness, for 
 none but slaves pursue any toilsome occupation. 
 
 Of this trifling class was Cicero's son Marcus. 
 At least while away in Greece at school, word 
 often came to us that he was living in a disi- 
 pated manner and was spending much more 
 money than had been allowed him. But not 
 of this foolish class was the daughter Tullia. 
 
70 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 She resembled her father in her love of learn- 
 ing and of wise conversation, and thus when 
 our parties were given this beautiful girl was 
 found talking with Caesar or Pollio or Archias, 
 rather than with the fops at the other end of 
 the corridor. Had I not been only a servant, 
 it would have been an immeasurable joy could 
 I have sought and gained her love. As things 
 were, I confess, my dear Ximines, my heart 
 beat quickly with happiness when she 
 would request me to bring her a certain vol- 
 ume and read for the company, at her com- 
 mand, some sentiment that had given her 
 delight. My partiality, perhaps, made me ad- 
 mire her dress more than the magnificent 
 toilet of Csesar's wife or the gay attire of the 
 Laelia daughters. On this particular evening 
 Tullia wore over her wine-colored dress a del- 
 icately tinted pink scarf which quite enfolded 
 her. It had a still brighter border. Her hair 
 was heaped up rather negligently on her head, 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 
 
 and was held in place by a gold arrow. As 
 she played on the harp and sang, she showed 
 a sandal with a rim of gold all around the sole, 
 and a perfect network of pearls covering the 
 instep of her almost sacred foot. Add to these 
 ornaments a golden ball which she would at 
 times toss to some, and from which would gush 
 forth a little cloud of perfumed dust, and you 
 can see this loved and now wept-for Tullia. 
 I used to wonder what the great father would 
 have said or done had I ever taken by the hand 
 that beautiful being, or had I ever addressed a 
 note of affection to her. Now that both are dead 
 I am glad that my insane love never ventured 
 forth in formal language. 
 
 On this evening we had for the feast all the 
 fish and fowls and fruits known to Roman or 
 Greek, and the most elegant wines. Cicero 
 loved glassware with quite a passion, and his 
 engraved goblets passed freely about, filled 
 with their nectar of Bacchus. Caesar, the 
 
72 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 most distinguished of our guests, ate but lit- 
 tle, but you should have seen him eat ouce at 
 our Formian house. He announced that he 
 was intending to have a full feast, and feast he 
 did, for he intended on rising from dinner to 
 take an emetic, and spare himself the pain of 
 digesting such a load of meat and fruit and 
 wine. You know the feast-goers often do this — 
 eat all they can, with the intention of taking, 
 after the meal, this "emetikan." The glut- 
 tons do it, not that they may escape distress, 
 but that they may return and eat a second 
 dinner the same night, They create a stom- 
 ach like that of the vulture, which can load 
 and unload almost at pleasure. For another 
 reason Caesar's visit to our Formin village was 
 remarkable, for he brought with him a thousand 
 men, soldiers and friends. Most of them en- 
 camped in the garden, but my master had to 
 feed all outside the environsand to entertain the 
 important men of the number within the walls, 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 
 
 and the}' ate and drank in a most hearty man- 
 ner. Next day, when the company had departed 
 to the last man, Cicero came up to me in the 
 library, and remarked, with a grave face : 
 " Caesar is indeed a very notable guest, but he 
 is not one of those fellows to whom, on going, 
 one says, ' Call again.' " 
 
 My master was no feasting man. There 
 were only a few simple things he could eat. 
 No fish or oyster could he digest, and even 
 after all the care he took of his health he suf- 
 fered all the years I was with him. He drank 
 wine, but seldom to excess. Only one night is 
 recalled now when he came home with his 
 intellect clouded by w T ine. He had been out 
 spending the evening with two fellow lawyers, 
 and coming home about midnight he did not 
 as usual come into the library, but he passed 
 straight to his room. In the morning he 
 mentioned, with regret, that he feared he had 
 drank so much the night before as to expel 
 
CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 his wits, for his companions had asked him for 
 an opinion of a law point and he now felt that 
 he had given a foolish reply. On consulting 
 the reports I found that my master had not 
 been very drunk after all. The question that 
 had been raised at the neighbors was, whether 
 an heir to an estate could bring action for 
 damages the estate had sustained before it 
 actually came into his possession, he being the 
 legal heir apparent? 
 
 My dear, Xemines, I must give you rest 
 from these small matters, by telling you now 
 in rapid succession of four large events; I 
 may call them the four dark days of all the long 
 years. In their books the Egyptians and the 
 Persians tell of days when the sun did not 
 shine, but showed a black, sullen face ; when 
 the wild bird flew to its nest, and the cattle 
 bellowed and groaned in the fields. Be these 
 stories true or not, dark days came to our 
 house. First came the divorce of the wife and 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 75 
 
 mother, Terentia. On a certain day, only five 
 years ago, this wife and mother bade Tullia 
 farewell, and left the home where she had been 
 through all the period of her girlhood and 
 middle life. I saw little reason for such a 
 crisis in the house. I am positive that the 
 event came so gradually that all the parties — 
 the husband and wife and daughter, were al- 
 ready reconciled to it when it came really to 
 pass. My master had had many great trials, 
 and under them was growing old. He needed 
 perfect peace in his home, and constant praise 
 from all. Terentia managed badly all the 
 money matters. She never praised in any 
 manner her famous husband ; but on the 
 opposite, set up an opposition of feeling, if I may 
 so speak. Cicero was himself so great that he 
 filled the house to such a degree that there was 
 no room for another. Tullia was full of 
 demonstration over all her father's speeches 
 and writings ; and as she drew ever nearer her 
 
CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 father the mother to that degree receded. By 
 degrees Terentia began to look away toward 
 
 the house of her own father as offering her an 
 
 asylum, and with the large dowry handed 
 back to her, which she had brought Cicero in 
 her youth, she went away from our villas for- 
 ever. It is a good quality of Roman law that 
 a man who puts aside his wife must first restore 
 to her the dowry she brought him in her days 
 of youth and beauty. She could not come 
 rich and go away poor. 
 
 Xo sooner had our home circle recovered 
 from this calamity than there came the great- 
 est one that could have assailed the tender 
 heart of my master. Tullia suddenly died. 
 In about her twentieth year, this daughter, 
 whom he had called the "honey sweet," took 
 away from earth her blessed face and lan- 
 guage. 
 
 She had been married, but yet her father's 
 home was almost all the time cheered by her 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 77 
 
 presence ; and when the word came from her 
 sickroom that the disease had become suddenly 
 alarming, the grief of the illustrious father 
 was most extreme. Death came very sudden- 
 ly. All the deep philosophy of my master 
 failed him. Letters from all the great men 
 of the land came to him, bearing all forms of 
 consolations, and some full of reproof that 
 such a statesman should be so broken down by 
 the death of only a daughter. But letters 
 brought no softening of the affliction. We 
 withdrew to our villa of Astura, because, be- 
 ing upon an island it offered the broken heart 
 two blessings — security against the intrusion of 
 man, and the presence of all the sweetness of 
 nature. Here, in this lonely place, my mas- 
 ter did not even desire my presence any long- 
 er, but alone, every morning, he would walk 
 away to the woods, and would not, perhaps, 
 until evening emerge from their sympathetic 
 shadows. He was also alone much in his 
 
CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 library, and, entering it in his absence, I 
 would find on his table outlines of monuments 
 and forms of epitaphs. His heart, unable 
 any longer to look forward, was thus looking 
 back. Life has been awfully injured when it 
 looks only back. 
 
 The tragic fate of Csesar soon followed to 
 conceal the tomb of the " honey sweet daugh- 
 ter." All the patriots, and all the rivals of 
 Caesar, too, had feared that the Ides of March 
 would see him declared King. The friends of 
 this royal movement had pretended to find 
 oracular dictates that only a King could con- 
 quer the Parthians. As the Ides drew near, 
 the city became restless and suspicious in all 
 ways at once. On the morning of the Ides 
 we all went to the Senate. By noon Cicero 
 and I, his servant, were in our places, anx- 
 ious, but uncertain. My master knew of no 
 conspiracy. All began to wonder that Caesar 
 did not come to preside, for there seemed to 
 
A BOMAN HOME. 79 
 
 be business awaiting transaction. I learned 
 that night that Caesar had resolved, as by 
 mere accident, to stay at home until the much 
 talked of Ides should have passed by. That 
 morning his wife had told him that she had 
 dreamed that he had come flying to her in the 
 night, saying, "Save me!" This helped de- 
 tain Csesar. He had also gone out in the gar- 
 den in the morning to note how his doves and 
 pheasants would fly when he should feed them 
 or call them. They came up on his left hand. 
 This also helped him in his resolution to let 
 that day pass by in the most possible of retire- 
 ment. The conspirators, finding the day pass- 
 ing and that their victim would perhaps not 
 come to the forum, made out a pressing de- 
 mand for the imaginary King, and sent down 
 a messenger to Cassar's house, telling him that 
 a case of importance was being argued, and 
 that the Senate would be gratified if he would 
 come and preside. He at once dismissed his 
 
80 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 secret forebodings, and ordering out his litter, 
 entered and was borne along to the assembly. 
 To a watchman on the street he remarked 
 pleasantly : "Ah, friend, the Ides of March 
 have come, and have brought no trouble." 
 "Conie, but not gone," was the reply. 
 
 Seated upon his Chair of State in the Curia 
 Pompeii, Caesar asked that the case be at once 
 presented. Tullius Cimber then said that he 
 had a brother in exile whom he would now 
 petition the Senate to recall; and while plead- 
 ing for this brother he grew more and more 
 earnest, and at the end of each sentence took a 
 step forward as though he would lay his affec- 
 tionate pleadings upon the very breast of 
 Julius. Other Senators, too, began to speak 
 as though the case were one of tremendous 
 importance; and as they spoke they, too, 
 moved gently forward. It is my own impres- 
 sion, dear Xi mines, that they overdid their 
 earnestness, and that Caesar's heart suddenly 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 81 
 
 divined that the eloquence was full of some- 
 thing more terrible than the exile of Cimber's 
 brother. Caesar arose from his seat, but in 
 an instant the dagger of Casca gleamed and 
 came down. I heard the dead sound of the 
 blow. In his fearful tremulousness, Casca 
 had struck his grand victim only in the 
 shoulder blade. Ca?sar grasped the dagger, 
 and screamed forth in a bud voice, " Casca, 
 you villian, what means this?" While we all 
 gazed, horror-stricken, suddenly other daggers 
 gleamed and struck, and the great man, mut- 
 tering some pathetic words which I could not 
 catch, fell heavily upon the floor. Some relate 
 that he said, "And thou, Brutus!" Others 
 told me next day that when he saw Brutus 
 raise his dagger, he said, ' c And my son! 
 Brutus!" It had long been rumored that 
 Brutus was a son of Caesar. 
 
 In a few days after this thrilling event, my 
 master began to say that it was a great over- 
 
82 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 sight in the Republicans not to have slain 
 Antony; that he was more willing to be a 
 despot than Julius had been, and that had the 
 conspirators invited him (Cicero) to their lib- 
 erty feast, there was one dish that would not 
 have been carried away un carved. My mas- 
 ter despised and feared Mark Antony. I must 
 close this letter, dear Xi mines, by telling you 
 how this enmity soon hurried my Cicero out 
 of life. When Antony and Octavius and 
 Lepidus formed the second Triumvirate, and 
 deceived the people by giving them three ty- 
 rants instead of one, each two of the Trium- 
 virs conceded to the other the privilege of 
 putting to death his greatest enemy. Lepidus 
 demanded Lucius Caesar; Octavius demanded 
 Paulus; Antony asked the life of Cicero. 
 
 We were at the Tusculum villa. A messen- 
 ger came in fearful haste, his horse almost 
 falling from fatigue. Cicero and his brother 
 went out to meet him, and in a few moments 
 
A ROMAN HOME. 83 
 
 came back into the great hall. Cicero said to 
 me, calmly: "Antony lias condemned me to 
 death." My heart sunk. I was in a moment 
 glad that Tuliia had passed to the grave, which 
 has no fresh sorrow. A group of servants 
 were called, both boatmen and porters, and, 
 having gotten ready the most essential things, 
 we hurried to Astura, one of my master's 
 villas, a few stadia away. Should we reach 
 that point, from there we should sail for Mace- 
 donia. But there was little hope of a final 
 escape from the wide domain of Rome. The 
 road was literally sprinkled with our tears. 
 "When we halted, each stood with an arm 
 around his friend, and Cicero and his brother 
 embraced each other many times, and bade 
 many farewells ; for, in my master, friendship 
 was as vast a thing as learning or eloquence. 
 We sailed from Astura, but, after a day out 
 in rough weather, Cicero grew sick, and at the 
 same time he felt a great longing to risk his 
 
81 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 native land, or die upon its soil. He made 
 our seamen sail into a harbor where we had a 
 villa, and there we all disembarked. The 
 porters took up the litter and bore him to our 
 beautiful Formian house. Here we had known 
 happy times in the past. When we had got- 
 ten into the ample hall, he said, "Let me die 
 here, in the country I have attempted so often 
 to save." He lay down to sleep. It was the 
 7th of December. In only a few moments, 
 servants came in from remote parts of the 
 farm, saying that horsemen were coming 
 toward the house. The porters did not wait 
 for the order or even the permission of Cicero, 
 but, affectionately taking him up, they laid 
 him in the litter, and told him they must go back 
 to the ship. We had advanced only a hun- 
 dred paces, when the assassins closed up around 
 the baffled group. The slaves set down the 
 litter. Cicero parted the curtains, and reach- 
 ing out his head, gray with age and trouble, 
 
A SOMAN HOME. 85 
 
 he addressed one of the pursuers by name, 
 and said: " Strike me, if you think it is 
 right." The bloody men halted an instant. 
 The face before them was calm and noble. 
 The hearts conscious of guilt faltered, but 
 only for an instant. Herrennius, who had 
 dismounted, stepped forward, and, with a half 
 dozen ill-aimed and cruel blows, he severed 
 the head from the body. The body remained 
 in the litter; the head rolled oyer on the earth 
 beneath. The hands, too, were cut off and 
 were borne to Antony, who ordered them to be 
 fastened up in the Forum, where the lips and 
 hands, too, had been so eloquent against kings. 
 My dear Ximines, I heard this match- 
 less speaker deliver more than thirty great 
 orations, and I have read all his books and 
 letters, and am thus familiar with the utter- 
 ances, public and private, of his great soul, but, 
 to my memory, no words of his come now with 
 more significance or beauty than those uttered 
 
86 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 in the last clays of his life: "I try to make 
 my enmities transient, and my friendships 
 eternal." 
 
 Your friend, 
 
 Tiro. 
 Tusculttm Villa, Dec, 19. 
 [A. U. C. 710.] 
 
PARLEZ VOUS FRAN9AIS? 
 
PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? 
 
 The studies of youth, and, indeed, of all the 
 life of man, have more than one object. It 
 would be a sufficient warrant for hours of daily 
 reading and methodical observation should we 
 think only of the high pleasure such labor 
 brings. But long before such pleasure is 
 thought of by the pupil or the instructor, books 
 are placed before the mind from a sense of the 
 absolute utility of reading and writing and 
 arithmetic. To this most general and obvious 
 reason for school days must be added one more 
 immense reason for this long sojourn among 
 the languages and the sciences — the mental 
 powers which result from such sojourn. Edu- 
 cation, as a word, involves this idea, for it im- 
 plies neither pleasure nor stores of informa- 
 tion, but a developing of the mental germs 
 ' (89) 
 
90 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 and tendencies. The mind is created full of 
 tendencies or aptitudes, and under the influ- 
 ence of daily use these tendencies develope 
 into great forces. The soul of the Indian girl 
 contains a tendency toward a love of the beau- 
 tiful. She will prefer a wild flower to a stone 
 or a stick, and will enjoy a local love song to 
 quite a high degree. This aptitude in the 
 natural wild girl can be enlarged in successive 
 generations until we have, instead of this In- 
 dian maid, a De Stael, or a Charlotte Bronte, 
 or a Mrs. Browning. By this jDroeess of en- 
 larging by use, a muttering red man becomes 
 a Cicero or a Tacitus, or a flowing writer 
 or an exquisite artist. In pursuing, for thou- 
 sands of years, this work of evoking mental 
 forces, two inquiries have attended the advanc- 
 ing race — what studies do most strengthen the 
 mind ? and what kind of information is of most 
 absolute value? It is perfectly safe to say that 
 no answer has yet come to these questions. It is 
 
PARLEZ VOUS FRANCA1S? 91 
 
 perhaps equally safe to say that none ever will 
 come, it being probably true that there are 
 many studies of equal merit, just as there are 
 thousands of landscapes of equal sweetness, 
 and thousands of faces and forms of equal 
 beauty. 
 
 For many centuries it has been assumed, 
 that the study of the dead languages, that is, 
 the dead great languages — Latin and Greek, 
 and of the higher mathematics, is the labor 
 which gives best results, the exercise which 
 turns a plowboy into an orator or a statesman 
 or a philosopher. College courses have been 
 run amid these three shapes of toil and infor- 
 mation, and it came to pass long ago, that a 
 mind not reared upon this strong food was 
 deemed still an infant, having known only the 
 weakness that comes from a diet of diluted milk. 
 That power of prejudice, the power of what has 
 long been, over the frail form of wdiat might 
 be, which we see in old medicine, or old relig- 
 
92 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 ion, or old politics, re-appears in old education, 
 and a scholar or a thinker without the help of 
 Latin and Greek was as impossible as a state 
 without a king, or a salvation without a cler- 
 gyman. The feeling in favor of the classic 
 course has not been all a prejudice, for that was 
 and is a noble course of mental progress, but 
 it was a prejudice so far as it denied the value 
 of all other forms of mental industry, and 
 failed to perceive that what the human mind 
 needs is exercise and not necessarily Greek 
 exercise or Latin exercise. A special must 
 not thus dethrone a universal. A king may 
 be a good governor, but his courtiers and sons 
 and daughters must not overrate the crowned 
 man and predict the utter failure of any na- 
 tion that may ever dare attempt to live with- 
 out the help of a throne and royal children. 
 Evidently the greatest, widest truth, is that the 
 mind is made more powerful by exercise, and 
 it will always be a secondary consideration 
 
PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? 93 
 
 whether this exercise shall come by loading the 
 memory with the words and forms found in 
 several languages, by compelling the judgment 
 to work continually amid the many possibilities 
 of syntax and translation, or shall come by a 
 direct study of facts and causes and laws, as 
 found in science and history and literature. 
 
 It favors the classic course amazingly that 
 no other course of mental development has 
 ever been attempted in what is called 
 the great era — the Christian era; but it might 
 well shake our opinion, the thought that the 
 Greeks and Latins became great without being 
 fed exclusively upon a diet of grammars and 
 dictionaries and mathematics. Biehter asks, 
 "Whither do those sunflowers turn which 
 grow upon the sun ? " So may we ask, what 
 made mighty those children that were born into 
 the classic tongues? What made the man Per- 
 icles and the man Plato? and the women 
 Sappho and Aspasia? What seven years' course 
 
94: CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 had they in dead languages? There can be 
 but one answer, and that must be that the 
 mind is made powerful and great by all far- 
 reaching after the truths and fancies around 
 it — by a constant and loving effort to enlarge 
 its powers and accumulations. Pericles and 
 Plato and Cicero and Humboldt and Mill and 
 Webster and Clay were educated by intellect- 
 ual toil and hope and zeal in their adjacent 
 worlds, whatever those worlds may have been. 
 The class-rooms of Oxford and Cambridge 
 are, indeed, good worlds for the forming mind 
 to master, but not many of the eagles of genius 
 have, comparatively speaking, taken in such 
 linguistic schools their first lessons in lofty 
 flight. All the ages are school-houses, and the 
 great men have been those who never played 
 truant nor shirked, but who loved the school- 
 house, whether it was by the Nile, under 
 Rameses, or at Athens, under Pericles, or at 
 Oxford, under Elizabeth or Victoria. 
 
PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? 95 
 
 The Latin and Greek tongues once pos- 
 sessed an inestimable worth, because there was 
 little of broad and powerful thought outside 
 of those two literatures, and within them there 
 were a power and beauty not yet perhaps sur- 
 passed. Soon after the opening of the Chris- 
 tian drama, the human mind became enslaved 
 by a politico-religious government, which dis- 
 couraged all thought, except that which tended 
 to establish a throne and mark out an expen- 
 sive way to a strange heaven, or a still more 
 strange hell. Mind grew narrower and weaker 
 as the centuries passed by. Scholars were con- 
 tent to write the life of some ascetic monk, and 
 to fill up with miracles a life that had been 
 empty of both usefulness and food. Far along 
 in the clouded periods, when some of the 
 monks happened upon Latin and Greek books, 
 it was as though the deaf had begun to hear, 
 the blind to see, and the dumb to speak. Com- 
 pared with a biography of some whining 
 
96 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 zealot, whose glory lay in the scarcity of his 
 food, and in the abundance of his personal 
 dirt, the poems of Homer and Virgil, and the 
 orations of Cicero and the meditations of Plato, 
 were full of almost divine beauty, and thus 
 exalted by a value both intrinsic and relative, 
 Latin and Greek ascended the throne in the 
 great kingdom of mind and sentiment. No 
 broader or freer literature than the old classic 
 thought has ever existed. From Homer to 
 Tacitus there was freedom of the mind. No 
 church or state told the thinkers what to think 
 or express. Indeed each ruler was himself a 
 scholar of his period, and, republic or empire, 
 the state was always literary in its tastes and 
 works. The rulers and statesmen were all 
 poets or orators and philosophers, with full 
 permission to select any theme, and to say upon 
 it whatever pleased the hand that held the 
 pen. Through the Latin and Greek gates 
 there rushed out upon the dark Christian ages 
 
PARLE Z VOUS FRANCAIS? 97 
 
 a stream of intellectual liberty and power. 
 Out of stones so noble, the colleges and uni- 
 versities, winch, now reckon their ages by cen- 
 turies, built up their greatness of merit and 
 fame, and our age will never be able to express 
 too much gratitude toward thoseold states which 
 furnished the new epoch with such founda- 
 tions of mental and spiritual development. 
 
 We come now to a universal phenomenon — 
 that of the pupil excelling the master. Moses 
 was surpassed by Daniel and Isaiah. Watts 1 ' 
 engine is superseded. The man who taught 
 music to Beethoven is forgotten in the splen- 
 dor of his humble student. Modern Europe 
 has moved far beyond old Greece, and in the 
 modern languages and literature and sciences, 
 all said and thought of on the coast of the old 
 Mediterranean finds its amazing equivalent. 
 Once the roll of human greatness read thus : 
 Homer, Hesiod, iEschylus, Euripides, Peri- 
 cles, Plato, Virgil, Cicero, Caesar, Tacitus, and 
 7 
 
9S CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 the splendor of the catalogue none will have 
 the rashness to deny ; but in the later cen- 
 turies the book so long sealed has been 
 opened, and there have been added Dante and 
 Milton and Shakspeare and Goethe and Schil- 
 ler, and such thinkers as Bacon and Newton, 
 and such students as Cuvier and Humboldt 
 and Muller and Darwin and Huxley and 
 Agassiz. By these enormous additions the 
 equilibrium of the old earth has been disturbed, 
 and a side, which once lay in perpetual shad- 
 ow, enjoys now a long summer-time. The 
 buried palms and ferns of the Arctic latitude 
 tell us that what is now the North Pole, and 
 the region of almost lifeless frost, was once a 
 land upon which the warm sun shone, and 
 over which hot thunder-storms passed. Some 
 external force came to make the planet re- 
 volve upon some new inclination of its axis, 
 and to remand to night and ice a continent 
 which had once enjoyed the seasons, which 
 
PARLEZ VOUS FRANC AIS? 99 
 
 now bless America or France. Into the in- 
 tellectual world came a wonderful company of 
 modern princes — a Newton, equalling a Plato, 
 and a Shakspeare balancing all antiquity; 
 and, under the heavy footsteps of all these 
 moderns, the earth has been whirled about, 
 and a longer and deeper shadow falls upon 
 the land, where Demosthenes once thundered, 
 and Sappho once sang. With this tipping 
 over of the earth, the Greek and Roman lands 
 lost their exclusiveness of empire, and were 
 invited to become only brotherly states in a 
 world-wide republic. The reasons for the 
 long, patient study of those old tongues have, 
 in part, thus passed away, since they are no 
 longer the languages, which contain the most 
 or the best of human learning and thought. 
 As acquisitions and as mental exercises, those 
 languages will always be valuable, but this 
 will take place henceforth, in a world where 
 other studies, equally valuable in all respects, 
 
100 CLUB ESSAYS, 
 
 will present their claims to the student, old or 
 young, abounding in wealth or pinched by 
 poverty. As language is made up of em- 
 balmed ideas, the modern tongues must be 
 confe?sed to be powerful rivals of Greek and 
 Latin, for the world having grown larger 
 since Homer and Virgil, the modern tongues 
 contain more ideas than were held by all the 
 ancient kingdoms and republics. 
 
 Xot only is it questionable whether the 
 dead languages should any longer outrank, as 
 studies, the great modern dialects, but it is 
 also a matter of grave doubt whether an argu- 
 ment can be framed in support of the educa- 
 tional theory which devotes years, early and 
 late, to the study of any of the forms of speech, 
 ancient or modern. It may seem a form of 
 mortal sin — a sin beyond the reach of masses 
 and holy water — to confess that there exists, 
 under Heaven, any such doubt, and yet some- 
 thing must be said on this linguistic mania, 
 
PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? 101 
 
 even though the utterance should prove most 
 amazing and unwelcome. Language in es- 
 sence is a catalogue of names. Words are the 
 names of things and of actions. If iEschyius 
 spoke of kumaton anarithmaton gelasma, he 
 saw and embalmed in sound the beautiful 
 truth of nature, and the merit lies not in the 
 sounds of the vowels and consonants, but in 
 the genius that saw, in the morning ripple of 
 the sea, " the numberless smiles of the waves." 
 What the human soul needed was some one 
 able to lay upon the broad ocean that 
 sweetness of expression which had been 
 sought for and found only upon the lips and 
 face of woman. If a smile is a sudden flash 
 of light and kindness, then what an interper- 
 ter of the ocean is he who first tells us to look 
 out upon its wide-spread and delicate smilings! 
 But it is not the language that is so great; it 
 is the sudden spiritualizing of the ocean. 
 Language is only a name for the strange 
 
102 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 beauty of the water, and, hence, it is of no con- 
 sequence whether the name be " kumaton 
 anarithmaton gelasma" or the " sea's innum- 
 erable smile," or the " many twinkling smile of 
 the waves," or whether the Frenchman, or Ger- 
 man, or Spaniard bedecks the simile with his 
 raiment of words and syntax. The expression 
 uttered by the Greek poet becomes the world's 
 single fact and property, and the possession 
 of a hundred languages by any one individual 
 will not add anything whatever to that 
 morning and evening radiance of the Atlantic 
 or Pacific. When we who had spent seven 
 years over Greek, first stood upon the sea-shore, 
 our hearts asked the old dead tongue to help 
 us estimate that infinite scintillation of the 
 flood ; and did we not, all of us, bless God 
 that He had permitted us to study Greek? 
 Did we not feel that all who had not read the 
 "Prometheus" in the orioinal were cut off 
 from nature, as though born blind? What a 
 
PARLEZ VOUS FBAXCAIS? 103 
 
 mistake of a name for a substance! for now 
 when all we ex-denizens, far away at last from 
 college Avails, happen upon the beach, and 
 look out upon the blue, we ask for no more 
 blessed expression of the scene than our own 
 tongue can bring us in its powerful sounds, 
 "the numberless smiles of the waves." Goethe 
 expressed the same thought in the German, 
 Lamartine in the French; and thus let the 
 speech change a thousand times, there is only 
 the one thought hidden away in the varied 
 accents. 
 
 In any one of the great modern tongues 
 there is now stored away all the facts of the 
 earth up to this date. If Virgil asked us to 
 note the beauty of the moon at midnight, when 
 it passes in and out amid fleec} 7 clouds, we so 
 do, and our heart is happy or sad, as was his, 
 it being of no importance that he called the 
 planet "luna" while we call it "moon" and 
 that he called "nubila" those masses which 
 
104 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 we call "clouds." Compared with the gran- 
 deur of the scene, all these variations of the 
 vowels and intonations are things of childish 
 importance. It might, therefore, easily come 
 to pass that the student, young or old, may, in 
 the study of many tongues, be giving years of 
 time to accidental matters, instead of to those 
 facts of being and action which are the per- 
 manent and valuable estate of man. A cer- 
 tain Roman orator we call Cicero. In his own 
 day he may have been called Tullius. Inti- 
 mate friends may have called him Marcus. 
 We do not now know how his family pro- 
 nounced the "c" or the "u." But let it be 
 true that this lawyer had three names, and that 
 there are many possible ways of uttering those 
 names, the one fact only remains valuable — the 
 man himself. As such he has entered into 
 the world's intellectual and moral riches, and 
 we have him, be we German or French or 
 English, in our lip and tongue service. Com- 
 
PARLEZ VOUS FBANCAIS? 105 
 
 pared with this gold of possession, all else is 
 dust. To compare the thoughts of this lofty 
 Roman with the thoughts of Burke and Pitt 
 and Sumner, in the arena of political study; 
 to pass over to morals, and compare him with 
 Puffendorf and Spencer ; to pass to religion, 
 and compare him with Wesley or Stuart Mill 
 or Jefferson ; to pass to rhetoric, and compare 
 his mode of argument with that of Fox or 
 Webster or Clay — would be to be engaged 
 in pursuits greater than a mastery of these 
 tongues, in which all these widely separ- 
 ated minds may have done their sincere 
 thinking in the sight of man and God. Their 
 words, like their clothing or their food, were 
 local and incidental. Indeed, of less im- 
 portance than the food these chieftains ate, 
 for that food might be good for us to imitate 
 or avoid, whereas it is of little value to us that 
 Cicero called that being Deus whom we call 
 God, and that quality "pietas" which we call 
 
106 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 "piety." It is the unchanging contents of the 
 earth man must chiefly seek, and so brief is 
 life that its lamp burns out before ^e have 
 read the great volume of events and experi- 
 ences, and no time is left for the study of those 
 strange marks and sounds in which Egyptian 
 or Persian or Athenian or Koman may have 
 made record of his life or vrisdom or sen- 
 timent, A hundred languages have passed 
 away, in all of which the golden rule was 
 putting forth its slow leaves, and men care 
 not with what gutturals or labials or aspi- 
 rates the first moralists began to express 
 the worth to society of brotherly love. As 
 man himself has come alono; over lands which 
 have become deserts, passing in and out 
 of temples and homes which have become 
 dust, and falling into tombs which have no 
 stone and by which no flower blooms, and yet 
 he is here to-day in divine splendor; so truths, 
 like the law of love, have come along, ^t(p|>in^ 
 
PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? 107 
 
 from language to language, and then leaving 
 to decay or neglect the stairway of their long 
 ascent. So subordinate is language to idea 
 that the Christian world, which, rests its hope 
 upon the beatitudes of Jesus, does not know 
 in what speech He first said, " Blessed are the 
 pure in heart." As the sea changes its shore 
 line, and leaves far inland temples which once 
 stood where the solemnity of the waves joined 
 in the worship, and yet it is the same sea, flow- 
 ing and re-flowing in tide and storm, so hu- 
 manity leaves as dead and abandoned its old 
 shores of speech, and along some new coast of 
 forms and sounds flows and re-flows with a 
 tide of wisdom and emotion rising higher as 
 the ages pass. Each great language, English, 
 French, German, is the present shore of the 
 living sea, and if born into one of these 
 tongues, that tongue is for you or me a measure- 
 less main. It is the aggregate of the past six 
 thousand years. 
 
108 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 Do I speak French? Xot yet have I 
 learned the universe hidden away in the lan- 
 guage of my birth and soul. When you have 
 caught up with the world's facts, then, if time 
 remains, you might ask what the Frenchman 
 would call those facts. After having studied 
 the life, the tendencies, the loves of the sun- 
 worshipers and the Egyptians ; after having 
 seen the Queen of Sheba journeying to behold 
 the greatness of Solomon ; after having com- 
 mitted to memory the sublime chants of Job; 
 after an inquiry into old liberty and old bond- 
 age, and into old science and art, it might be 
 of interest to know what letters and sounds a 
 Frenchman would use in expressing the 
 world's history, but to know all about the 
 wanderings of Ulysses and his son is the thing 
 to be desired more than the information that 
 the French called the father Ulysse and the 
 -•'ii Telemaque, 
 
 Let it be conceded that persons who are to 
 
PARLEZ VOUS FRAXCA1S? 109 
 
 devote all their life to intellectual pursuits 
 have time for mastering several of the great 
 dialects, ancient and existing; it yet remains 
 a fair inquiry, what quantity of this linguistic 
 work may enter into those courses of study, 
 over which the multitude must pass. Must 
 young persons who have only one idea learn 
 ten ways of expressing it? Or must this per- 
 son, often a beautiful girl, find ten ideas in 
 the grand language of her native land? 
 What made a Rubenstein was not a score of 
 pianos, but it was genius and labor, practicing 
 upon one adequate instrument. It is well 
 known that, when some years ago certain 
 thousands of families, men and women, were 
 flying before a great conflagration, one citizen 
 was seen to remove from his library nine vio- 
 lins of all ages and pedigrees — a scene made 
 laughable, even at such a gloomy time, by the 
 equally well known fact that this lover of the 
 fiddle could not, from any or all of the strings, 
 
110 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 elicit more than the one-ninth part of a tune. 
 As the cart-load of instruments moved on- 
 ward toward a place of safety, even the best 
 friends of the amateur could not help wishing 
 that the noble gentleman had less of fiddle 
 and more of music. In the department of 
 fashionable education a similar event may be 
 detected in the fact that many young persons 
 are learning more ways of expressing thought 
 than they have thoughts to express, and in- 
 stead of having ten ideas of value, they give 
 promise of reaching, at last, ten methods of 
 stating one idea, and perhaps a small one at 
 that. For suppose your beautiful daughter 
 of seventeen years has, by much toil and ex- 
 pense, learned to say in five tongues, "He 
 has the pretty yellow dog;" in Greek: Ehei 
 kalon chloon leuna; in Latin : Ilabet helium 
 canem gilvum; in French: II a unjoli chien 
 dejaune; in German: Er hat der schon gelb 
 hund; and could she by industry find the 
 
PARLEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? Ill 
 
 Chinese and Zulu vowel sounds, used by those 
 remote peoples, to convey that idea of proper- 
 ty in an animal, it would be well for the girl 
 and parent to remember that, amid all this 
 variety of speech, there is only the same yel- 
 low dog all the time. Under some other the- 
 ory of education, the mind might have mas- 
 tered the whole science of Cuvier, and have 
 moved away from the yellow dog to study the 
 whole animal kingdom, from the elephants of 
 India to the garden-making birds of the trop- 
 ics, and the bank-swallow of America. The 
 poor man, in the cold of mid-winter, does not 
 need ten shovels with which to put one ton of 
 coal into the scuttle, but what he craves is ten 
 tons of coal and one good shovel. It might be 
 of interest to him to know the shape of a Russian 
 or Hindoo scoop, to gaze at the kind of instru- 
 ment by which the Hebrews put wheat into a 
 sack, or apples into an ox-cart, but the high- 
 est happiness of the multitude will always 
 
112 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 come more from the coal they may possess in 
 December, than from any collection they 
 might covet of old and modern utensils of 
 lifting and moving fuel from vault to grate. 
 If the remark will not give any offense, it 
 may be let fall here, that there are thou- 
 sands of boys and girls, older and younger, 
 whose ability to express thought has quite out- 
 grown the thought they have on hand await- 
 ing expression, and, having mastered a great 
 many styles of saying things, they are finding 
 themselves in the position of having nothing 
 to say. When the lovely young lady, who 
 had mastered her French and Italian and 
 Spanish, was led by some machine-loving 
 gentleman to gaze for a moment at the great 
 engines, in the hydraulic works of Chicago, 
 asked him, in her delight, whether the big- 
 wheel was turned by men or by a horse, it 
 gave him no peace that she could have put 
 the inquiry into any one of the modern tongues. 
 
PARLE Z VO US FRANC AIS ? 113 
 
 The question placed him, for a time, beyond 
 the consolation of philosophy and religion. 
 
 The prevailing idea among the upper Amer- 
 ican classes that even their little children 
 must learn French, and to that end must 
 speak it at the table, is highly blamable, for 
 reasons more than one. It is based upon en- 
 tire ignorance of the fact that it will require 
 the life-time of each mortal to master the 
 language of his birth and country. All the 
 young years given by Americans to the study 
 of French, are years turned away from the 
 greatest language yet known to man. All 
 the acquisitions of the human race, all the 
 sciences, and arts, and histories, and senti- 
 ments of humanity have passed into the Eng- 
 lish tongue. Each word stands for an idea, 
 and in each great modern dialect all ideas re- 
 appear. He that has perfectly mastered his own 
 language has a store of information immense 
 in bulk and rich in value. To excavate many 
 
m CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 channels for a river is to lessen the unity and 
 power of the stream otherwise majestic. It 
 will always be proof of some blunder of judg- 
 ment, or of some stubborn vanity, when Amer- 
 icans will be found using a little French, and 
 German, and Italian, who have not mastered 
 the English of William Wirt, or of Tennyson, 
 or of the eloquent Ruskin. It is not languages 
 man needs, but language. It is not a room 
 full of violins, but the power to make music. 
 It is therefore simply painful to hear a fash- 
 ionable girl or woman or man, combining sev- 
 eral languages in conversation when the listen- 
 er knows well that this bright talker could 
 not by any possibility compose an essay in the 
 English of Washington Irving, or Charles 
 Sumner, or the poet Whittier. While they 
 have trifled with grammars and lexicons, or 
 have said elegantly this or that compliment 
 of the season, their own grand English has 
 moved away from their mind and heart just 
 
PAELEZ VOUS FBANCAIS? 115 
 
 as husband and home at last disappear from 
 the world of the artful beauty, leaving in her 
 possession the old faded bouquets and the old 
 yellow cards of invitation to dinner or to dance 
 — invitations sent and accepted long ago, when 
 the forehead was smooth and the lips red. 
 
 A modern language is a prodigious affair. 
 All will admit that as a system of sounds for 
 expressing truths the Greek language has no 
 equal, but it comes short in just this particu- 
 lar — that the Greeks had not as much to ex- 
 press as the Germans and French and English 
 now have in their keeping. An island has 
 become a continent, a river has widened into 
 a sea. Each of these three modern tongues 
 holds in its embrace a universe, while Greek 
 held only a star. To master one of these new 
 forms of speech is the task of a life, and happy 
 the American who shall ever reach in his own 
 tongue the ease and skill reached in their own 
 tongue by Chateaubriand and Lamartine, and 
 
116 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 by Castelar in his dialect, or by Schiller in the 
 rich German. Such a result cannot be reached 
 by attempts to study the words of Lamar tine 
 and Goethe, but by studying the same universe 
 as that which enveloped them, and by com- 
 pelling our own English harp to play for us 
 all our sincere and passionate music. It must 
 be that the popularity of French comes from 
 a forgetfulness of the absolute immensity of 
 the English language — an immenseness which 
 asks for many years of early and late study, 
 and which should so captivate each one born 
 into its confines that, like the contented soul, 
 one should never care to wander away from 
 home. 
 
 The chase after French must come from the 
 want of thought as to the greatness of our own 
 speech, and hence must be one of the popular 
 delusions of the age, but there lies against this 
 worship of French a separate objection. In 
 our generation that nation is not coming to us 
 
PARLEZ VOUS FBAXCAIS? 117 
 
 as Greece came, laden with deep and inspiring 
 thoughts. Greek speech was once the speech 
 of the world's greatest minds. We recall 
 Plato and Aristotle and Thueydides, and that 
 type of manhood. These were the men who 
 projected Greek into the old courses of study. 
 But that old type of manhood is now standing 
 in England and Germany and America, and 
 the French verbs and nouns and adjectives 
 are coming to us only in the name of fashion 
 and Paris. " Parlez vous Francais" simply 
 means, "Have you seen Paris ?" Have 
 you some of her dresses, her dramas, her wall- 
 paper, her furniture, her luxury? A lan- 
 guage which sets us ail wild for elegant cloth- 
 ing and for handsomer furniture and for new 
 shapes of wedding cards, and which so de- 
 lights us at the drama, can never come in the 
 dignity of those old classic verbs which never 
 mentioned anything except the great emotions 
 and exploits of the soul. The Greek showed 
 
118 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 man human life in its wars and travels and 
 rhetoric and logic and liberty and aesthetic 
 yearnings, but the French of our boarding- 
 schools does little for the average student, ex- 
 cept enable hini or her to read the bill of fare 
 at a fashionable hotel, and to call by the charm- 
 ing name of buffet what once was a sideboard, 
 and to buy and enjoy as an escritoire what had 
 once been known as a writing-desk, and to feel 
 wise over that progress which removes from 
 a lady her work-table, and places before her a 
 chiffoniere. So far as the study of this mod- 
 ern dialect inflames the young heart in the 
 direction of bills of fare and novelties for the 
 parlor or dining-room, it can hardly compare 
 favorably with the study of those classic forms 
 which ignored the hotel-keeper and the cook, 
 and introduced the student to Homer and 
 Cicero. 
 
 The world's facts and experiences being 
 gathered up in language, there must needs be 
 
PAELEZ VOL'S FRAXCAIS? 119 
 
 men skilled in different languages, that the 
 goods of one land may be transported to an- 
 other country. Thus Champollion became a 
 transfer boat to ship Egyptian history and 
 learning from hieroglyph to French. Others 
 came to forward the goods from French to 
 English. Immense is this carrying trade — 
 Carlyle carried Goethe across the channel; 
 Longfellow has brought Dante across the sea. 
 But not all the educated need embark in this 
 form of importation, for what we all need is 
 not the key to the hieroglyphics on the old 
 rocks, but the English of the things thus re- 
 corded. The Sermon on the Mount is jour- 
 neying around the world in two hundred 
 tongues, but it is not an acquaintance with 
 these forms the young or old soul needs, but 
 the Sermon on the Mount in the native tongue 
 of him who must live and die among its sub- 
 lime lessons. Diamonds may be re-set, and 
 having passed a generation upon a queen's 
 
120 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 hand, they may be seen on the neck of 
 her daughter, and at last be transferred to a 
 coronet; but the essential value is in the 
 glittering stones themselves, be they on fore- 
 head or finger. It is not otherwise with the 
 truths which man has evolved from his obser- 
 vation and experience. They are all one, 
 whether they are whispered to his ear by Eng- 
 lish or Greek or Arabian lips, and blessed is 
 he to whom some one of these great voices 
 has come with its infinite utterances about 
 time and the world called timeless. When, 
 therefore, a distinguished clergyman declared 
 that when a minister of the Gospel was not 
 keeping well up in Greek he was losing the 
 use of his right arm, he simply blundered 
 along, for the right arm of an orator or states- 
 man or thinker or preacher, can never be 
 in any manner the power to read a foreign 
 tvxt, but it must always be the power to ex- 
 amine or establish a theme which does not 
 
PAELEZ VOUS FRANCAIS? 121 
 
 depend in the least upon the vowels and con- 
 sonants of a time or place. Not a single 
 great idea in the Bible is awaiting any new 
 light from the linguist. The Greek and He- 
 brew lexicons can do nothing toward answer- 
 ing a single one of the problems of mankind ; 
 can shed no light upon the existence of a God, 
 or a life beyond, or upon the path of duty, 
 and hence a long dwelling over those old forms 
 cannot be the right arm of a clergyman. His 
 inspiration must come from ideas mighty as 
 the human race, and not from any wonder- 
 ment what some particle may have implied 
 when Moses was a lad, or when John was 
 baptizing in the wilderness. 
 
 Even when a whole life is given to one's 
 native English or native French, so inadequate 
 still is that language to express the soul that 
 it seems a form of wickedness to divide the 
 heart between many masters, and to have no 
 supreme friend. Chateaubriand, the greatest 
 
122 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 master of the French tongue, when he stood 
 near the Niagara Falls almost a hundred 
 years ago, and saw evening coming down from 
 the sky upon all the sublime scene; saw the 
 woods growing gloomy in the deep shadows, 
 and heard the sound of the waters increasing 
 its solemnity as the little voices died away in 
 the night's repose, said ■ "It is not within the 
 power of human words to express this grand- 
 eur of nature." Skilled as he was in a most 
 rich and sensitive form of speech, that sj)eech 
 all of whose resources he knew so well, now 
 failed him, and his spirit had to remain im- 
 prisoned, there being no gateway by which 
 its sentiments could escape to the heart of his 
 countrymen. What are you and I to do, then, 
 if we have not loved early, and late, and deep- 
 ly our own English — that English which is 
 now the leader in literature and all learning; 
 if we have not mastered its words, its ele- 
 gancies, its power of logic, and humor, and 
 
PARLE Z VOUS FRAXCAIS? 123 
 
 pathos, and rythm; and have not permitted our 
 minds to become rich in its associations; if 
 we have for years gone along with a heart 
 divided in its love, or with a mind that has 
 studied words more than it has thought and 
 prayed and laughed and wept amid the sub- 
 lime scenes of nature, or the more impressive 
 mysteries of mankind? "Parlez vous fran- 
 cais?" Not well; not at all: would to 
 Heaven we could even learn to speak English. 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 
 
 The great writers of all times have held 
 themselves well away from grave and formal 
 discussion of the sentiment of love. Human- 
 ity, charity, benevolence, friendship, have been 
 subjected to abundant literary treatment, but 
 the moralist and the general students of na- 
 ture have for reasons, known and unknown, 
 passed by in silence that tumult of the heart, 
 which in youth writes love letters, sends gifts 
 of flowers, quotes much poetry, grows sad and 
 happy, thinks alternately of paradise and 
 prison, and which sings and swears and laughs 
 and sighs until the end is reached in a suicide 
 or a wedding. Michelet has indeed furnished 
 a treatise upon L' Amour, but his thoughts will 
 be found grouped around only one single stage 
 of this ailment, and around that stage only as 
 (127) 
 
123 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 seen in an idle French woman in her early mar- 
 ried life. His book is the history of a day, and 
 not of an epoch, and the picture of some one 
 person, and not of the human heart. It will 
 be the task, delightful and useful, of some 
 Lecky or Draper to compose a history of this 
 powerful passion, just as it was the task of 
 Alger to compose a life of the notion of im- 
 mortality, and as it was the work of Taylor to 
 record a history of enthusiasm. Love is, in- 
 deed, an enthusiasm, and also an immortality. 
 Such a treatise has, no doubt, been kept 
 back by a reluctance upon the part of profound 
 thinkers to treat with dignity and soberness a 
 sentiment so marred, as they imagine, by asso- 
 ciation with guitars and perfumed envelopes 
 and bouquets, and with adjectives and adverbs, 
 but it is probable that our profound thinkers are 
 as much over-dressed in their robes of dignity 
 as our lovers are over-bedecked by their cloth- 
 ing and their adjectives. The philosopher 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 129 
 
 • 
 
 may be guilty of two errors — lie may, per- 
 haps, underrate the average quality of the love 
 affair, and he may, to a similar degree, over- 
 rate the virtues of himself. If there is not 
 much in the average human heart, it is prob- 
 able that in the head of the philosopher there 
 may be an equal scarcity of things of real 
 worth. Indeed, no supreme court has yet 
 handed in its opinion that the human race, in 
 its temple of religion or porch of intellectual 
 research, is any greater than the same race in 
 its wide and amazing subjection to this senti- 
 ment of love. It is tacitly assumed that there 
 is something very childish and silly in such 
 seven-year courtships as those conducted by 
 that character in the Bible, and by all similar 
 waitings and longings, be they long or short, 
 but there are no visible grounds for such as- 
 sumptions, and hence the whole question of 
 the fact and value and beauty of this one pas- 
 sion lies before our times an open question. 
 
130 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 Let us hope, therefore, that our era, which is 
 more fond of tracing the natural history of an 
 idea than the path of some captain or some 
 king, will sooner or later furnish our libraries 
 with a biography of that strange affection of 
 the heart which has attacked, with more or 
 less violence, all the mortals who have ap- 
 peared upon this earthly scene. 
 
 The career of this disturbance, which is 
 both a convalescence and a decline, a blush of 
 health and a pallor, a giant and an invalid, 
 repeats the general theory of the new philoso- 
 phy of development, for, in the barbaric races, 
 love is as narrow and as humble as are the 
 languages and the arts. In the savage tribes 
 love exists only in a most elementary form. 
 And, indeed, by barbaric, not only the Indian 
 or the ncsto is meant, but also all that ex- 
 panse of territory covered even by the songs 
 of TTomer or of Solomon. Attachments be- 
 tween man and woman were weak and epheme- 
 
TEE HISTORY OF LOVE. 131 
 
 ral. The cruelty charged upon a Hebrew 
 psalm-weaver on account of his having taken 
 possession of the beautiful wife of one of his 
 captains, is fully equalled by the willingness 
 with which the wife passed over from the first 
 fireside to the second. The tears shed over 
 that affair did not fall in the Hebrew age; 
 they have fallen in those later periods, which 
 have reached a new appreciation of the word 
 home, and the relations under its roof. Hel- 
 en in Homer did not seem to care much in 
 what tent she hung up her embroidered gar- 
 ments. From the immortal song we learn 
 that this same Helen was an ideal woman of 
 that early Greek period. She was so exceed- 
 ingly beautiful that about a score of chiefs 
 began to quarrel over her when she was only 
 ten years of age ; and when she was a little 
 older, the great men of the land began to 
 enlist armies that they might possess this ex- 
 quisite jewel of a girl. All the female charms 
 
132 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 and virtues known to Greece in that clay met 
 in this one name, and therefore she stands as 
 a mark to show us how high the sentiment of 
 love ever rose in that epoch; and when we 
 recall the apparent facility with which this 
 representative woman attached herself to 
 Theseus and Pirithous and Menelaus and 
 Paris and Deiphobus, we must conclude that 
 in her day, the sentiment of love must have 
 been only a few removes from the parallel 
 appetite in the kingdom of brutes. Compared 
 with the modern Evangeline and Lucille, 
 Helen was a poor specimen of high woman- 
 hood. But she was on the same general level 
 with the beauties which graced the low ha- 
 rems of David and Solomon. 
 
 Beyond doubt, dreams of something better 
 came at times to those old periods. In Penel- 
 ope, Homer seems to have had a prophetic 
 vision of an ideal attachment, but Penelope 
 was chained to the absent Ulysses more by 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 133 
 
 politics than by romance, and, indeed, the 
 wanderer would return, not so much to see her 
 as his old love, as to save the little kingdom 
 and the annual income. Penelope represented 
 considerable property. Such chieftains as 
 Ulysses held their petty kingdoms only by the 
 law of might. The suitors who made night 
 hideous in the palace were not pure worship- 
 ers of beauty, but they were adventurers, on the 
 look out for what the Queen was attempting 
 to hold in the shape of money and lands. 
 The fights in and around the palace, the efforts 
 of Telemachus to expel the suitors, his subse- 
 quent journey in search of his father, the re- 
 turn of the lost hero, and his assault upon the 
 men who were waiting for the hour for a suc- 
 cessful coup d'etat, assure us that Penelope 
 was standing guard, not simply over an old 
 love affair, but over the property, real and per- 
 sonal, of herself and Telemachus. In this 
 story of the faithful Queen, we can detect, 
 
134: CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 therefore, only faint traces of such a friend- 
 ship as was to be seen between man and woman 
 in some subsequent date in Christian history. 
 One of the early Greeks, coming just after 
 the Homeric age, objects to marriage, on the 
 ground that when a man takes such a partner 
 he will be annoyed hj her wish to eat with 
 him at his table. It was thus a form of calam- 
 ity to haye at the same board what modern 
 times would call the kind eyes and bright face 
 of the wife. It must be avoided, and the true, 
 philosophic mind must be slow to form a friend- 
 ship which might make a companion of some 
 beauty, who should be in the kitchen or in 
 the garden while the noble husband should be 
 breaking his bread and sipping his wine. If 
 Lord Byron made the remark that he could 
 not bear to see a woman eat, that fact would 
 relegate him back to the low period just alluded 
 to, for that desire for isolation from the society 
 of noble womanhood is pretty well known to 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 135 
 
 come from a quality of soul which does not 
 love to look its victim in the face. It indi- 
 cates that passions of a low order have risen 
 in power above all the finer forms of thought 
 and emotion, that words and the general ex- 
 change of ideas are unable to bring any pleas- 
 ure, and that woman, to be anything, must be 
 only a party to a flirtation or a darker intrigue. 
 What was exceptional in Lord Byron was a 
 common sentiment in early Greece. The poet 
 Simonicies, in a poem describing the different- 
 kinds of women that had filed along before 
 his point of review, tells us indirectly that in 
 most of the classic homes there were domestic 
 broils of a very extreme character — that the 
 words, "Take thee for better or worse, &c, to 
 love and cherish," had not yet come into the 
 marriage relations of his generation. He men- 
 tions the ugly woman as being one at whom 
 men hoot and laugh in the street, thus plainly 
 showing that the sentiment of love had not yet 
 
136 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 learned to make any high, estimate of spiritual 
 and mental qualities, and that Greece had no 
 such chivalry and romance as may now be 
 found in England and America, where woman 
 is not laughed at on the street, and where a 
 bright mind and a cheerful heart will rival 
 the highest beauty in the art of entrapping a 
 husband. 
 
 When the Greeks had made a laughing- 
 stock of all the homely women, they found 
 another class equally worthy of ridicule — the 
 class that was fond of personal decoration. 
 This awful creature took baths daily, and made 
 use of perfumed oils. She was such a barba- 
 rian that she did her hair up in tresses, and 
 was even so self-conceited as to put flowers into 
 that well-combed hair. Such a woman, says 
 the poet, will make her husband " familiar 
 with poverty." In an ago when such senti- 
 ments appeared in popular poetry, marriage 
 I have been very much like the purchase 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 137 
 
 of an ox or a horse — a careful study of the 
 work to be done on the premises of the pur- 
 chaser. But when Shnonides comes to con- 
 template the tattling woman, the endless talker, 
 he lets in a flood of light upon the relation of 
 the husband to the so-called "partner of his 
 joys." "Nor," says the poet, "can the hus- 
 band stop her with threats, though in a rage 
 he should knock out her teeth with a stone." 
 How many blushing brides could have been 
 found in old Greece with their front teeth thus 
 wanting we have no way of learning, but we 
 must confess that when a honeymoon is liable 
 in the first families of the land to be followed 
 by a loss of articles so useful and beautiful, 
 and that, too, in an age which had no dental 
 art of restoration, then, indeed, is the passion 
 of love only ephemeral and brutal. Much as 
 the nineteenth century may secretly wish that 
 ladies sjiven to interminable clatter misdit in 
 some way be deprived of those ivories which 
 
138 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 help make the articulate sounds in question, 
 yet so kind and romantic is the age that the 
 man who would displace those talkative teeth 
 with a rock cannot be found in our best so- 
 ciety. 
 
 Thus, if we may believe an old observer of 
 old times, there were three groups of ladies 
 that received from Greek gentlemen sneers 
 and jeers, and not a few most violent blows 
 with hand or club — the ugly woman, the dressy 
 woman, and the tattling woman. What woman, 
 then, was lovable in that far-off land? Very 
 kindly the poet tells us, the real good woman 
 is "like the busy bee ; under her care his liv- 
 ing prospers and increases." The early Greek 
 wife, then, w r as a classic squaw. From the 
 condition of a bride she passed quickly to the 
 drudgery of a slave or humble domestic. Just 
 before marriage, the noble young man of the 
 period perhaps smiled at the girl of his choice. 
 She was happy to take off the military cap 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 139 
 
 of her lover and put it on her own head, 
 and walk all around the uncovered hero, and 
 perhaps she said to him, "Am not I a pretty 
 soldier ?" In answer, he would place his hand 
 under her chin, and turn up the face until the 
 eyelids fell down, covering the beautiful eyes 
 with beautiful lashes, thus starting the prob- 
 lem whether the eye of woman is handsomer 
 when open or when shut. But after a few 
 days of this lingering upon the borders of the 
 earthly paradise the pair turned away, the 
 husband to resume the character of domestic 
 tyrant, and the wife to enter upon dreary 
 years, full of all the possible sorrows of woman. 
 Love was in those ages only a rudiment of a 
 coming noble sentiment. It was Darwin's ape, 
 from which a humanity was to come by slow 
 steps. It was a wild olive, too bitter for human 
 lips, but waiting for the cultivation of reason 
 to make it rich and sweet for all who should 
 come with the reason and the cultivation. 
 
MO CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 It is confessed by all students of the classic 
 world that there prevailed through the thou- 
 sand years of that kingdom a general pro- 
 gress of all political and moral ideas and prac- 
 tices. In such a wide progress this great 
 friendship between man and woman actively 
 participated, cases of deep and true love came 
 into being, and noble ■ sentiments upon this 
 subject began to sparkle in literature. In 
 Sappho, love begins to speak in its native and 
 powerful tongue, and all the better because it 
 speaks not by masculine lips, but through 
 these other lips which are most wont to spirit- 
 ualize the words they utter. It is not fully 
 known just who this Sappho was, nor just all 
 that she said, but judging from the only evi- 
 dence we possess, cither for or against the girl, 
 we seem shut up to the conclusion that this 
 poetess had begun to seethe sentiment of love 
 in that higher light in which it is seen by our 
 own Tennysons, and Longfellows, and Brown- 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 141 
 
 ings. Not that she or her era reached in 
 reality the life-long union of heart to heart, 
 but that she and a few others saw, as in pro- 
 phetic vision, a friendship — a companionship 
 between man and woman which had not been 
 formulated by Moses, or David, or Solomon, 
 or Homer, or Simonides. 
 
 In this woman from -Mitylene, in the sixth 
 century before our era, the passion of love shows 
 signs of becoming a poetic and romantic senti- 
 ment — a branch of the eternal beauty. To 
 the virtue of animal love is added the charm 
 of a certain divine friendship, just as though an 
 age was coming when a bride could hope to 
 be the loved one of years, instead of the toy 
 of a day. It is almost certain that Sappho 
 was a woman of unrivaled mental power and 
 personal attractiveness. She had the grasp 
 and courage of Madame De Slael, and the ten- 
 derness of Mrs. Browning. It is inferred that 
 she soon gathered arouud her feet a group of 
 
142 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 gifted folk, old and young, and that she 
 and they flung out upon the world more ten- 
 der literature than has escaped oblivion, and 
 that the high ideals of friendship, certain 
 glorias over undying attachments, formed the 
 burden of this combined song. "What helps 
 make Sappho stand at the gate of a new dis- 
 pensation is the fact that, in her, woman began 
 to sing upon a subject which had been treated 
 by only the masculine branch of humanity. 
 When the primitive man sings of love, then 
 be on the lookout for coarseness. It was the 
 primitive man, remember, who was wont to 
 knock out the front teeth of the woman he 
 had sworn to love and protect; it was the 
 primitive man who feared his wife might de- 
 sire to eat at his table; it was this masculine 
 creature who reached the conclusion that an 
 ugly woman might be laughed at in the street, 
 and who anticipated the verdict of Thucydi- 
 des that she is the best woman "Regarding 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 143 
 
 whom the world knows nothing either good 
 or bad," and it was a masculine judge of these 
 matters who, in a land not Greek nor Roman, 
 retailed to the public such low animalisms as 
 those found by some mistake in a holy book, 
 and called the Song of Solomon by men and 
 women who would dislike to sing its peculiar 
 images in good society. It has been the dis- 
 position and inmost genius of woman to make 
 her attachments spiritual and eternal. Virgil 
 says: " Variable and mutable always is wom- 
 an," but the probability that Virgil indulged 
 here in a poetic license is very great, for, in 
 the long page of history, w r e see man busy 
 changing his mistresses and laying plans in 
 politics or religion, by which he can bring the 
 number of his female companions up to seven 
 or eight hundred. Solomon's heart changed 
 about eight hundred times, while the modern 
 Mormon Chieftain called upon about fifty dif- 
 ferent wives to show us what a great slander 
 
1W: CLUB ESSAYS 
 
 had fallen from the lips of Virgil. Between 
 the Mormon and the Hebrew lies a larsre area 
 of time and territory, quite thickly settled by 
 eminent men who could not, -without a blush, 
 intimate that woman's love was ephemeral. 
 
 Not only do the nature and taste of woman 
 make her the natural advocate of a perpetual 
 friendship with one person, but her interests 
 come to reinforce her nature and taste. She can- 
 not accumulate husbands bylaw or religion; she 
 cannot, even by persuasion, entrap and retain a 
 multitude of these precious articles. If she 
 is able to captivate a single one, she is deemed 
 fortunate. In the philosophy of losing this 
 one in a month or a year she can take no part. 
 If she haj caught an ugly one, she dares not 
 laugh at him ; if she has caught a garrulous 
 one, she dares not knock out his front teeth. 
 Not every day can she have a new choice out in 
 the wide field. Thus it was, from the earliest pe- 
 riod of history, much to the personal interest of 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 145 
 
 every bride to say to lier husband, " You shall 
 be mine forever." In the poetess Sappho love 
 therefore found the first powerful champion, 
 and in her verse began to push out those wings 
 which were to be emblems of immortality. 
 Clay is, indeed, to be found in her thoughts, 
 but there is more gold than clay, showing a 
 great change from those dreary centuries when 
 passion had more clay than gold. 
 
 Led along by a new and immense quantity 
 of love-song, made popular by Sappho and 
 Corinna, and inflamed by a constant study of 
 the beautiful in form, the Greeks, in the day 
 of their glory, fell into a strange excess or 
 fanaticism of passion, and wrote a chapter of 
 history of which the civilized world is ashamed. 
 It became the stupid dream of some of the 
 greatest and best of the classics that all beauty 
 of form and of motion was the pearl of great 
 worth, and that, hence, an illustrious hero or 
 scholar or statesman might select from the 
 10 
 
14:6 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 streets or from the slave market some graceful 
 boy and make a Dulcinea for a few years of 
 Lis form and face. It does credit to the heart 
 of Grote, in his wonderful volumes on Plato, 
 that he has spread over this habit of Athens 
 that mantle of charity found in the words: "It 
 was all a simple worship of the beautiful." 
 One might wish that so great a name as that 
 of Grote might put all doubt to sleep, but in 
 that classic world there was so much vice, and 
 what we should now call vulgarity, such abun- 
 dant remains of the horrible and infamous, 
 that not even the eloquence of Grote can make 
 that age of pet boys other than a cloud upon 
 Greek memory. After having caused to pass 
 before our mind all that delight which, the 
 Greek soul drew from all contact with the 
 perfect in symmetry and feature, having re- 
 called the fact that children having any blem- 
 ish in limb or feature were not thought worthy 
 of life, and that old persons were despised in 
 Homeric and later days because they had lost 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 147 
 
 their physical charms, haying recalled the 
 truth that Greece was the Mother of the fine 
 arts, and lost her state because she loyed too 
 much her statuary and pictures and temples, 
 and died because she had exchanged statesmen 
 for artists, the feeling still remains that in that 
 same glorious land this form of friendship, 
 under review, was one of those dark vices 
 which so mar all the nations of antiquity. 
 Xenophon made no aesthetic defense of these 
 boy companions, but in enumerating the crimes 
 and vices of Menon, the general, he designates 
 as infamous that form of friendship for which 
 Mr. Grote apologizes as being a method of lov- 
 ing the beautiful; and as Xenophon stood 
 nearer than any English student to the facts, it 
 seems necessary for us to conclude that some- 
 times the classic devotion to the beautiful was 
 like that religious zeal which has often wor- 
 shiped God by means of vulgarity and cruelty, 
 and even murder. But let us dismiss from 
 
148 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 thought this subject, uncongenial to modern 
 taste. 
 
 Aspasia came to Athens to render woman 
 more than ever an object of reverence, and thus 
 her friendship more of a prize. Her picture 
 must not be painted in the colors of the nine- 
 teenth century, but in the full light of that 
 period in human history, when the wife was a 
 silent, patient slave, and when the true love was 
 the toy of a spring and a summer. It was 
 necessary that woman should assert herself, and 
 take possession of what empire she might, as 
 a queen. If she had been formed by the Cre- 
 ator as a companion of man — a companion in 
 thought and reason and sentiment, at the ta- 
 ble and on the journey, and by the fireside, it 
 was time some attention were called to such 
 original significance of all affairs of the heart. 
 At intervals great queens appeared, not to 
 fight battles like the Amazons, but to lift love 
 upward from passion to a high friendship, and 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 149 
 
 make it a communion of kindred, but dissim- 
 ilar, spirits, for whose united life all the years 
 of earth were only too brief. By some freak 
 of nature, or decree of Providence, there was 
 born, at Miletus, a child which received the 
 name Aspasia. In Miletus two streams of 
 thought and learning met — Greek lore came 
 to it from the West, Asiatic lore from the 
 East. There Cadmus and Hecatacus and 
 Anaximander and the great Thales were 
 born, and, as a result, each gifted child born 
 in that city was cradled in an awakening air. 
 The young Aspasia was so beautiful that she 
 became in girlhood the favored of all the dis- 
 tinguished "Milesians;" and, as learning was, 
 in that day and city, as essential as beauty, the 
 favored girl was compelled to make her stud- 
 ies bear some relation to the matchless ex- 
 pression of her face. No reception, no sym- 
 posium, no "coming with a few friends," was 
 complete without the presence of this youthful 
 
150 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 queen. Having reached early womanhood, her 
 ambition grew with her growing mind, and her 
 eye and heart turned toward that Athens which, 
 lying across an arm of the Mediterranean, 
 seemed brilliant in spiritual light, the light of 
 philosophy, poetry and art. And just then the 
 greatest of minds was ruling the most illus- 
 trious of States. It was only natural for one 
 who must have felt conscious of being the 
 greatest of women, to desire to live in a city 
 ruled by Pericles, whose eloquence and learn- 
 ing and taste were making up for Greece its 
 golden age. Perhaps it might be the happy 
 destiny of this Milesian girl to see, to meet, 
 perhaps even to speak to this Athenian states- 
 man. 
 
 In carrying out the idea that there was 
 nothing valuable on earth except the Greek 
 stamp were on the goods, Athens passed a 
 law that only marriage with a Greek woman 
 was lawful — that only purely Greek children 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE, 151 
 
 were legitimate. Aspasia, then, could not 
 marry in the narrow Athens. But great, 
 powerful minds must have deeply felt the 
 meanness of the law, and this girl from Miletus 
 must have sailed from home with her mind 
 more absorbed by the charms of learning and 
 art and elevated society than by perplexity 
 over the situation of foreign women in the 
 domestic matters of this world. How long it 
 was after the remarkable personage reached 
 Athens before she had the happiness of meet- 
 ing Pericles, and before Pericles had the par- 
 allel honor of meeting Aspasia, the chronicles 
 do not tell us, but enough is known in the 
 simple fact that their hearts became one for 
 life and death. The unlawful, but absolute, 
 wife assisted the statesman in study, in com- 
 position, in devising laws, in planning public 
 buildings, and became a remarkable emblazon- 
 ment on the sky of the divine idea that woman 
 was created to be the full companion and 
 
152 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 equal partner of her husband, and if this les- 
 son was read to the Athenian libertines and 
 wife-beaters by a woman who walked over a 
 law perhaps already dead, it was only so much 
 the worse for the law. Aspasia helped show 
 the old world, and helped teach the nations 
 now existing that love is a friendship between 
 one man and one woman, which is theoretical- 
 ly to inspire two lives, and is to double the 
 happiness and power of each member of the 
 deep and imperishable contract. At times 
 the Athenians derided the orator who, for so 
 many years, idolized the one woman, and who 
 made an equal of a supposed inferior, but the 
 generations coming into the world long after 
 the Athenian mob had ceased to mock, feel 
 that Pericles uttered a significant thought 
 when he said, in dying, "Athens entrusted 
 her greatness, and Aspasia her happiness to 
 me" — true to public duty and private love. 
 With painful slowness did the human fam- 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 153 
 
 ily learn its lessons of affection. Whether 
 we think of the bonds that should attach parent 
 to child or adult children to aged parents, or 
 husband and wife to each other, we see in each 
 direction that mankind has studied with great 
 reluctance and with great negligence the rela- 
 tions of heart to heart. 
 
 The coming historian in this department of 
 human experience will, if he writes justly, de- 
 vote a long chapter to the influence of Chris- 
 tianity upon the quality of this sentiment. 
 Christianity proper — that is, considered apart 
 from Judaism and from accidental facts seen 
 along its path, must be confessed to have done 
 much toward spiritualizing the attachment be- 
 tween man and woman, much toward incul- 
 cating the idea of a relation of a high charac- 
 ter between two souls, and toward establishing 
 the principle that this friendship must last as 
 long as life lasts. One of the most divine of 
 Christ's teachings is his estimate of love. No 
 
154: CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 one so removed it from the lowness and coarse- 
 ness of the street, and no one up to his day 
 pointed out better the delicate shadings of its 
 color. Had he spoken in the language of our 
 time, or in such details as we find in the essay- 
 ist and the novelist of the high school, what 
 hot words he would have spoken against those 
 who occupy street corners and crossings, and 
 even stand at the gates of churches and thea- 
 ters, that they may make a libertine's feast out 
 of the beauty of the noble wives and daugh- 
 ters who may be passing and re-passing at such 
 public doors ! But Christ could utter only 
 general truths, but truths they were which 
 helped sweep away the degradation of woman 
 and the less honorable thoughts and alliances 
 of man. Awakened by a soul so pure, and 
 aided by such an organizer as the church, 
 which decreed the permanency of marriage, 
 love began to put on its rich garments and to 
 walk a queen. Homance and poetry and the 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 155 
 
 drama took up the general theory that the 
 heart can love but once, and that in the ad- 
 vance of that attachment there is a paradise — 
 beyond its tomb all is a desert. Even the 
 songs of Burns rise above his actual life and 
 sing the new theory in the verses to Mary in 
 Heaven. The practice of an age is always in- 
 ferior to its ideal, and hence individuals here 
 and there enter into second and third and 
 fourth marriages when death has come to ter- 
 minate an association ; but the high standard 
 society has reached in its fundamental thought 
 may be learned from every drama and poem 
 and song of the heart. Even Byron felt the 
 power and elegance of this public ideal, when, 
 in his deep contempt for transient beauties, he 
 had to sigh out the longing for one fair spirit 
 for a minister, 
 
 "That he might all forget the human race, 
 And hating no one, love but only her." 
 
 From Dante to Tennyson this highest form 
 
156 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 of human attachment has been pictured as ex- 
 isting between two only, and as undying. 
 Beatrice in her purity, and Francesca in her 
 error and disgrace, join with the later Juliet 
 and Ophelia in a beautiful advocacy of the 
 dream that these partnerships of the soul are 
 made in heaven, and involve mortals like the 
 toils of a sweet, resistless fate. In modern 
 romantic literature, the ideal lover, male or 
 female, is the one who, amid the severest trials, 
 stands most unshaken, and who comes from 
 the furnace only a purer metal. Even such 
 sentimental songs as those of Tom Moore 
 carry the reader's best judgment whenever the 
 verses convey the idea that 
 
 "Through the furnace unflinching, thy way I'll pursue, 
 And guard thee, and save thee, or perish there, too." 
 
 The recent progress in the education of 
 woman is destined to mark a great progress in 
 the career of the matrimonial idea. This 
 higher intellectual culture makes woman a 
 
THE HISTORY OF LOVE. 157 
 
 companion for man, however eminent he may 
 become by his study and his profession; and 
 this equality of greatness will compel a devo- 
 tion, which was once ephemeral and largely 
 physical, to become a sympathy as well of 
 mind with mind. The pathetic attachment 
 of John Stuart Mill to his wife, and of the 
 Brownings to each other, are only visible 
 proofs that the men and women of the present 
 age are carrying on a business in courtships and 
 marriages far more honorable and far happier 
 than were affairs of the heart, when the earth 
 was peopled by Greeks and Eomans and Medes 
 and Persians. And out of the study of this 
 coming history of a reformed sentiment and 
 practice, there may come to the next genera- 
 tion of young persons a wisdom which will 
 lay in deep reason the foundations of mar- 
 riage, which will shun the rocks of a thought- 
 less fancy, and the yet more dangerous risks 
 of a mere temporary passion which, in a few 
 
15S CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 months, dies, as pass away the attachments of 
 brutes. The ideal day will approach when 
 the young man's love of some equal in wis- 
 dom, but superior in beauty of mind and 
 body, and in all the forms of taste and tender- 
 ness, will be for many years an inspiration of 
 each morning and evening, as it may come in 
 gladness or in depression. The love of money 
 and of fame will be humble impulses com- 
 pared with the desire to make happy the one 
 companion of the heart, who has left home, 
 even the infinite devotion of her mother, to 
 find, under another's roof, the care which will 
 rival the mother's solicitude, and to hear from 
 other lips words of praise and esteem, which 
 the tomb will prevent the mother from speak- 
 ing always to her idolized child. 
 
THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 
 
THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 
 
 As the .greatest quality of man is not his 
 form nor his swiftness nor his strength nor his 
 power to accumulate property, but is his ideas 
 and sentiments, so that will be the greatest 
 art which shall express the most of this great- 
 ness of man. To measure the fine arts one 
 must ask which one can best express the 
 most thoughts and feelings, and the greatest 
 thoughts and feelings? And the answer will 
 determine upon what forehead the laurels 
 must be placed. In the German story of 
 "Love Without Words," by Musseus, the 
 value of that gateway of the soul, which is 
 called language, becomes painfully evident, 
 for the lovers, daring only to see each other, 
 and at long distance, and forbidden to resort 
 to that precious go-between and mediator 
 11 (161) 
 
162 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 called a love-letter, could make no progress, 
 except a progress of melancholy, by all the 
 other arts known to human genius. Music 
 failed, flowers failed, sighs failed, architecture 
 and sculpture failed, and, doubtless, both lov- 
 ers would have died of suppressed poetry and 
 affection, had not Franz found the altar where 
 Meta was accustomed to say her prayers, and 
 had he not hung there a card with these 
 words: "A. young man, going into a far 
 country to make a fortune, asks you to pray 
 for his success and return." These words 
 swept over Meta's heart as no music or paint- 
 ing or sculpture could have touched it, for they 
 contained a rich group of ideas — love, sacred 
 love, house-building love; love so deep that it 
 prayed, and a love that was bound to come 
 back to the presence of Meta. All the other 
 fine arts were eclipsed the moment words be- 
 gan their eloquence. 
 
 But what kind of words are those which 
 
THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 163 
 
 make up this fine art? The air of earth is 
 constantly disturbed by human voices. There 
 is no scarcity of noisy prattlers in car and 
 omnibus; no dearth of preaching men and 
 women in pulpit ; no dearth of sand-lot ora- 
 tors ; no poverty of campaign speakers and 
 law-makers; no famine of theological and 
 biological, and chemical, and etymological, 
 and paleographic, and medical talk; but, are 
 these organized vowels and consonants when 
 printed in a volume, the whole or parts of that 
 uttered soul that is honored by being called 
 Art? Evidently they are not the whole nor a 
 part. While many, indeed most, of the great 
 terms in use refuse to be closely defined, while 
 no one can tell us what is poetry, what is elo- 
 quence, what is virtue, what is religion or 
 what beauty may be, yet there can be made 
 approximative analyses which will serve for 
 everyday use amid a multitude which never 
 hopes for a perfect comprehension of even its 
 
164: CLUB ESSAYS, 
 
 dearest truths. A world which cannot define 
 its God, or its life or death or heaven or hell, 
 may well yield gracefully when anyone asks 
 it, What is literature? or, What is poetry? 
 Coleridge himself did not close up the debate 
 over the term poetry. He passed over a wide 
 field of labor and research, and taught man- 
 kind that such word-work as that of Job and 
 Isaiah is not poetry, but it is the poetic; it is 
 the raw material out of which poetry might be 
 made. As a cotton boll is not muslin, nor 
 calico, but stands as the prime cause, and as 
 the field of flax is not a j^ece of linen, as the 
 cotton-boll and the stock of flax wait for the 
 manufacturer to come along, so the thoughts 
 of Job and St. John and Ossian and Hugo 
 are not poetry, but they are the material of 
 the fabric in waiting for a manufacturer; and 
 only he is the full and true poet who, in one 
 soul, both grows the blue blossomed flax and 
 spins and weaves the linen. In such defini- 
 
THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 165 
 
 tion the after ages would have found rest and 
 faith had not such disturbers of sleep as John 
 Ruskin come along to show that all the follow- 
 ers of Coleridge were exchanging the substance 
 for the accident; were finding Minerva not in 
 her heart and soul, but in her sandals, and 
 scarf, and shield. 
 
 No one has defined eloquence. It is not 
 very probable that the word "literature" will 
 ever become so bounded and measured and 
 mapped that at last all will say that they per- 
 ceive the thing in its essence. The bounda- 
 ries in the intellectual world are all dim. As 
 no one can determine just when a domestic art 
 becomes a fine art, just when a house-builder 
 becomes an architect, just when a carpenter 
 may be called an artist in wood-work, so in 
 this matter of written truth or thought it is 
 difficult to mark the place where a writer in 
 his closet ceases to be a scribe and becomes a 
 man of letters — an heir of this higher immor- 
 
166 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 tality. The transition period is as obscure as 
 that line the Calvinists used to sing of as 
 running 
 
 "Between God's mercy and His wrath." 
 
 But, standing before a bough of apple 
 blossoms, we can make general remarks about 
 the coloring, although unable to tell where 
 the pink or white absolutely comes or utterly 
 goes away. We are perfectly composed in the 
 belief that those blossoms are not black or 
 green, or at all like unto the hue of the sun- 
 flower or the flag. In many worlds beside 
 the one seen by Darwin, we must confess to 
 the fact of "missing links." Between mau 
 and the ape there is a void; between literature 
 and the common book there is a similar "ach- 
 ing void." 
 
 One will utter all the truth one has, and as 
 much as the world deserves, should one say 
 that literature is that part of thought that is 
 wrought out in the name of the beautiful. A 
 
THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 107 
 
 Blue-Book, an encyclopedia, a scientific trea- 
 tise, a text book, a sectarian tract in religion 
 or politics, is issued in the name of utility or 
 fact or self interest; but a poem, like that of 
 Homer, or an essay upon Milton or Dante or 
 Caesar from a Macaulay, a Taine or a Froude, 
 is created in the name of beauty, and is a 
 fragment in literature, just as a Corinthian 
 capital is a fragment in art. When truth, in 
 its forward flow, joins beauty, the two rivers 
 make a new flood called " Letters." Tt is an 
 Amazon of broad bosom, resembling the sea. 
 But beauty is a sentiment, a feeling, and hence 
 all literature is sentimental. Knowledge, sci- 
 ence, religious dicta, are cold; literature is 
 warm. It is the tropical zone — all else is 
 arctic. Knowledge, in all its forms, is the 
 marble in the quarry, or dragged upon sledges 
 a little way from the primeval mud. Litera- 
 ture is the subsequent statue, full of all grace 
 and snow-white in purity. Truth is the rude 
 
168 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 tusk of the mammoth — letters the polished 
 ivory, the decus, which Virgil says labor adds 
 to the ivory : 
 
 Quale inarms addunt ebori decus, aut ubi flavo 
 Argenturn Pariusve lapis circumdatur auro. 
 
 Not necessarily, perhaps, but as an existing 
 fact, almost all the decoration which is seen in 
 this temple under contemplation is made up 
 of emotion. In all the long journey from 
 Homer to Shakspeare, those passing along that 
 path must all the while laugh or smile or sigh 
 or weep. The common book-maker can sup- 
 ply man with facts; the high, immortal word- 
 weavers do not deal in facts, but in all the sad 
 and happy experiences of the soul. Reading 
 in the realm of this high art, we are like the 
 travelers in the Canterbury Talcs, we must be 
 in the emotional business of riding along in a 
 magnificent company, having set forth from a 
 Tabard Inn, and having our faces set toward 
 Borne a Becket tomb, or merry or holy place; 
 
THE GREATEST OF TEE FINE ARTS. 169 
 
 and, higher than the larks above the head, 
 whose song is up in the sky, must be the 
 heart-beats in our bosoms as we go. 
 
 " Befelle that in that season on a day 
 In Southwork, at the Tabard as I lay, 
 Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage 
 At night was come into that hostelrie 
 Wei nine and twenty in a compaynie 
 Of Sundry folk. " 
 
 Thus our English literature set out, not 
 from an Alexandrian library, but from a 
 goodly company of sundry folk; not from intel- 
 lectual analysis and discrimination, but from 
 the loving and laughing and weeping heart. 
 Out of such clear mountain rills, all the 
 streams of letters have made up their sweep- 
 ing floods. Homer's "goodly company" did 
 not assemble in a hotel but in a camp; and, 
 instead of laughing along country roads, they 
 sailed in ships, or marched in heavy columns, 
 and by plume and shield and spear and char- 
 iot and by heroic struggle, made up the verse 
 
170 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 we call Homer — a flowing stream of love and 
 hate, joy or bitterness. But human history 
 is all one page. All that high art called 
 " letters" rises in sentiment, and, arrayed in 
 such vesture, it dies if stripped of its array, 
 as the oak dies if stripped of its foliage. 
 
 Look at the evidence of facts. Passing 
 over the centuries which came and went before 
 the Greeks, pause in that peninsula where 
 there flashed forth a light which in our 19th 
 century beams on quite undimmed. Select 
 the first great work. Who wrote it ? Did 
 it issue from a mind full of learning and spec- 
 ulation and analysis? On the opposite, a poor 
 blind man sang it along the streets. The 
 book, Homer, is the exploits of the heart. 
 Here Achilles and Agamemnon fought, but 
 not over a question in science or politics, but 
 over a piece of female beauty. Here Andro- 
 mache and Hector kissed each other and their 
 child, and parted. The infant boy 
 
TEE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 171 
 
 'Smiled silently, Andromache all bathed 
 In tears, stood by, and clinging to his hand 
 
 Addressed him * * * ' Hast thou no pity then, 
 For this, thine infant son and wretched me ? ' " 
 
 This Hector is soon dragged around the 
 outer walls, fastened by leathern thongs to the 
 chariot of Achilles. In the Odyssey, Ulysses 
 wanders in magic seas for twenty years; his 
 son seeks him, his queen weeps. 
 
 What volume is this ? We have come to 
 Pindar — to harps and chariot races, and 
 choruses and odes. All the splendor of the 
 Olympic and Pythian games is lying in Pin- 
 dar, just as the Summer Night's Dream lies 
 in the English dramatist. The nearest 
 humanity will ever come to beholding those 
 games which once entranced Greece will be 
 when the eye shall read this poet, and in his 
 rapid measure and rapid thought, find again 
 the rolling chariot and see the dust-cloud and 
 hear the shout. 
 
 iEschylus follows, with that form of passion 
 
172 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 called Prometheus. Sophocles follows, leading 
 by the hand the first ideal sister — a woman 
 never before seen in art, a woman not even in 
 the Bible — the almost sublime Antigone. Eu- 
 ripides follows, with that Medea, which still 
 comes and goes on the stage as often as a 
 Rachel is born with the genius that can grap- 
 ple with such a creation, Sappho comes only 
 to add to this torrent of passion. Being 
 neither a statesman, nor a scholar, nor a sci- 
 entist, but only a girl, she has been borne 
 along twenty-five hundred years by the winds 
 of sentiment. What this girl's own estimate 
 of literary qualification really was, we may 
 learn from her own verses, for in one of her 
 poems it is seen at once that she makes educa- 
 tion consist in a refined sensibility. In her 
 highly-strung girlhood, she had, upon a cer- 
 tain day, been fated to walk with an untaught 
 woman, and the dcadncss of the woman's 
 mind and heart drove the poetess to her pen, 
 
THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 173 
 
 that she might unload her soul of its mingled 
 hate and pity: 
 
 TO AN ILLITERATE WOMAN. 
 
 Unknown, unheeded shalt thou die, 
 
 And no memorial shall proclaim 
 That once beneath the upper sky 
 
 Thou hadst a being or a name. 
 
 Doomed o'er that dreary realm alone, 
 
 Shunned by all gentle shades to go, 
 No friend shall soothe, nor parent own 
 
 Thee! child of sloth! the Muses' foe! 
 
 For never to the Muses' bowers 
 
 Did'st thou with glowing heart repair, 
 Nor ever intertwine the flowers 
 
 That Fancy strews unnumbered there. 
 
 Thus, through Sappho are we taught that 
 literature is an art, because its urns are all 
 full of sentiment. She reveals the supreme 
 power of emotion. Her own genius is that of 
 sensibility, for in her eulogy upon the rose 
 she is seen as with eyes full of tears, standing 
 in her garden in Mitylene. Toward lover and 
 
174: CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 rose her feelings moved in the impetuosity of a 
 storm. 
 
 Plato, that confessed princa of old thinkers, 
 served as a poet long before he served as a 
 philosopher. It looks as though his reflection 
 had been shot into the world by the arrows of 
 fancy, as Apollo comes in the beams of the 
 sun. Much of his greatness took its rise in 
 Mt. Helicon. Passion aroused the soul which 
 afterward thought so deeply, and the reader 
 has still his doubtful choice between the prose 
 and the poetry of this greatest of the ancients. 
 Great in music, and painting, and verse, and 
 philosophy, the fathers called him a Christian, 
 because his meaning was so hidden behind 
 images that he was all things to all times. 
 Like the mother of iEneas, he advanced in a 
 concealing cloud. 
 
 The Latins repeat this phenomenon of their 
 Attic companions, for the Latin authors which 
 must charm the world are those who speak 
 
THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 175 
 
 from the manifold affections — Virgil and 
 Horace and Ovid and Terence and Lucre- 
 tius — all the most powerful of Roman names, 
 but all they composed was written down at 
 the command of loye and hate, happiness and 
 sorrow. It is a singular attribute of human 
 nature that it would rather hear of the "wide- 
 spreading beech" of Virgil than read the 
 tables of the Roman law, and would rather 
 cry out, "Eureka! eureka!" over a bunch of 
 wild flowers than over the idea that the square 
 of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle is 
 equivalent to the sum of the squares of the other 
 two sides. "We all believe the utterances of 
 geometry. We do not entertain any doubt over 
 the assertion that if two straight lines intersect 
 each other the angles which have their heads 
 together will be equal. Upon the whole, men 
 are glad that Pythagorus and Euclid discovered 
 the equality of such quantities so located, but 
 the same men prefer to see iEneas and Dido 
 
176 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 in their tete a tete at Carthage, and prefer the 
 fourth book of Virgil to any fourth book of 
 geometric lore. 
 
 Having observed that ancient Rome was 
 moved more by men of sentiment than by men 
 of erudition, and that Virgil is more im- 
 mortal in his verses than Xuma Pompilius 
 in his law, or Julius in his circle of the months, 
 we may note that more recent Rome and Flor- 
 ence appealed again to that beauty which lays 
 the foundation of all art. Perhaps that hu- 
 man nature which changes so readily its gov- 
 ernment and religion and language and cos- 
 tume will be found at last demanding changes 
 in the essence of its literature. The past bav- 
 ins: made such a Ions: and large offering of 
 tears and smiles and pensiveness and wit and 
 beauty, why should not the public reverse its 
 order and Bay: "Give us the facts; give us 
 information." Let us see. In the thirteenth 
 century, when the intellectual world was lying 
 
THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. ITT 
 
 dead, stretching out like a black forest, where 
 now and then a group of ascetic monks could 
 be seen moving along in poverty, like a pack 
 of hungry wolves crossing at midnight a field 
 of ice — there, where language lay shattered 
 and was neither the Latin of the past nor the 
 Italian of the future, a beautiful girl lifted up 
 her divine form slowly, and around her white 
 forehead a lover came and wove a new lan- 
 guage. Literature was raised from the dead 
 by two lovers. No other kind of mortal had 
 life to spare, nor the beauty that could endow 
 an art. Dante and Beatrice warmed up a 
 language and epoch by the glow of their 
 own passion. Dante was the most fully 
 awakened mind of his century, but his 
 awakening was not that of only learning, but 
 also of romance. Here the world's thought 
 began to roll back to it, not, however, by the 
 gate of information, but by the gate of senti- 
 ment. Intellectual life had been absent for a 
 12 
 
178 :lub essays. 
 
 thousand years. A night had reached out 
 from the fourth century to the thirteenth, and 
 now, when light begins to dawn, its nimbus is 
 first seen about the brows of only two — two 
 Florentine children. "Where were the philos- 
 ophers and the statesmen? Indeed, they were 
 waiting for a fine art to come and wake their 
 sluggish souls. As Homer arose in advance 
 of the seven wise men and was compelled to 
 sing and dance by their couches, and beat hi s 
 castanets and sweep his whole hand over his 
 harp before Wisdom and Learning would so 
 much as turn their heavy heads on their pil- 
 lows, so Dante and his maiden were com- 
 pelled to pass through the long halls of the old 
 intellectual caravanserai and tap with love- 
 fingers on the doors before the <riants of brain 
 would know that the sun was up and was her- 
 alding a large day for the world. And after all 
 that noise in the hall, the first men to awake 
 were not the men of science and religion, but 
 
TEE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 179 
 
 the BafFaelles and the Angelos of art. This his- 
 tory all repeats itself in the more modern times. 
 In English thought first came Chaucer. The 
 romance which founded the Greek and Italian 
 languages founded our great tongue. Chaucer 
 came in the name of the beautiful — in the name 
 of the beautiful alone. Man changes his gov- 
 ernment and his language and his fashions, but 
 he always comes back to the fields and flowers 
 and song, and to the adventures of the heart. 
 Shakspeare followed with a continuation of 
 human emotion. The world desiring to have 
 a collection of great national books, said: "My 
 gifted children, bring sentiment. Let others 
 bring facts and make Blue Books and Statis- 
 tics; you must bring pictures and music in 
 words. 'Manibus date lilia plenis.' Your 
 thought and utterances must 
 
 " ' Come o'er my ear like the Sweet South 
 That breathes upon a bank of violets 
 Stealing and giving odor.' " 
 
 What a line of sentimentalists have followed 
 
180 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 this Shakspeare! They reach out like Aurora- 
 beams from Chaucer to Tennyson, while in the 
 German plains we see Goethe and Schiller par- 
 allel rivers of dignified sensation. 
 
 Out of this infinite power of the heart it has 
 come to pass that souls without great acquisi- 
 tion have risen to endless fame, and have com- 
 posed works so amazing that men of books, 
 inflamed by the aphorism that " knowledge is 
 power/' have attempted to find in a Lord 
 Bacon an adequate source of Hamlet and 
 Juliet. A recent writer says: "Are we to 
 suppose that those plays sprang from the brain 
 of one who was only a playwright? One who 
 had only held horses and had poached for 
 deer?" Of a truth we are, for much good has 
 come from car} liters and playwrights and 
 shepherds and railsplitters, and all that form 
 of humanity, and much of this good has been 
 of such a quality that the touch of a Lord 
 Bacon would have taken away all the velvet 
 
THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 181 
 
 finish of the whole fabric. That Shakspeare 
 stole many skeletons of plays is certain, but he 
 did that in an age when authorship was not 
 so glorious as the dramatic action. The ques- 
 tion was not who could compose a play, but who 
 could present it to the public. Shakspeare 
 seized upon the common property of the stage, 
 and when a drama did not suit his powerful 
 judgment he re-fashioned it, and fortunately 
 each amendment was a progress. There are 
 no masses of knowledge visible in these plays, 
 such that the giants of learning must be 
 thought to have heaped up the Pelion and 
 Ossa, for the real truth is that a common plow- 
 man of that period held all the law and gospel 
 one may find in all these comedies and trage- 
 dies, for it is perfectly plain that in making 
 up the religious element in such writers as 
 Byron and Scott and Shakspeare, a little 
 Scripture will go a long way. When, how- 
 ever, it comes to all that eloquence of the heart, 
 
182 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 which we find in Romeo and Juliet and the 
 Merchant of Venice, that William needed 
 Lord Bacon no more than Burns needed help 
 from Burke and Pitt while he was composing 
 his Highland Mary. The thoughts springing 
 up from the Misses Davidson and the Misses 
 Carey, even the love songs of Sappho and the 
 Infelicia of the humble Adah Menken, teach 
 beyond doubt that the human mind enjoys 
 two forms of greatness — the one acquisition, 
 the other creation — and that while some men 
 are made, others are born. 
 
 A fine art being therefore an industry which 
 works in the beautiful, literature is a fine art, 
 because it culls out and properly arranges and 
 forms into certain wholes the attractive in 
 thought. What painting attempts to express 
 by color, what music would achieve with 
 sound, it does by help of vowels and conso- 
 nants; but it far surpasses its companions, 
 because it can utter the mind and soul most 
 
THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 183 
 
 fully. But tliis virtue should not make it too 
 vast to be an art. Instances have already 
 been brought forward to show that very much 
 of what the world calls literature, is made up 
 of the record of sentiment. These books are 
 all galleries of pictures, and the Sistine 
 Chapel and Dante are similar human works, 
 only the decorator of the chapel used literal 
 paint; the decorator of the Divine Comedia 
 used those better colors called verse and im- 
 agination and fancy. Macaulay was an ar- 
 tist; his essays and his histories are the works 
 which remain from his chisel, or brush. Our 
 best statue of John Bunyan is from the stu- 
 dio of Macaulay. In this art, we must there- 
 fore always expect that truth will be highly 
 colored. We are never deeply impressed with 
 the exact fact. The mind is a convex glass 
 which magnifies each object. As Angelo 
 made his Moses colossal, so the men and 
 women in letters are either transformed or 
 
1S4 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 belittled, until the mind becomes fully im- 
 pressed with the virtues or vices which may 
 attach to the personages. In the recent 
 "Caesar" of Mr. Froude, you perceive in the 
 outset that the Roman is destined to become 
 higher and broader than his age. Unless this 
 Julius of Mr. Froude is to be larger than all 
 former estimates of him, what reason exists 
 why the world should add to its libraries that 
 additional piece of biography? Angelo, when 
 he conceived the idea of producing a "Moses," 
 sought a block of marble having a height of 
 eighteen feet. In planning his work, Mr. 
 Froude must have said: "My Caesar shall 
 stand eighteen feet high in his sandals." We 
 are not thus deceived and victimized by these 
 books. Man is naturally so stupid, that lie 
 must be amazed before he will wake up and 
 sec anything. It is only when the Macau- 
 lays and the Lamartines and the Dantes and 
 Elomers come along, that the human family 
 
THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 185 
 
 will really confess that there is anything of 
 value or of beauty taking place in the world. 
 
 As Froude's Csesar is a recent, as well as a 
 good illustration of literature, as an art we 
 may as well mark in it the traces of the artist. 
 You survey there the Roman world of Caesar's 
 epoch. Those circumstances which would 
 seem to call for a man of genius and will are 
 set top ilier in such a manner that if a Julius 
 does not come up out of them, it would seem 
 an oversight on the part of that Providence 
 who governs all large combinations of chemi- 
 cal and spiritual forces. The tumultuous bar- 
 barian hordes liable in any year to assail that 
 citadel of civilization where Virgil and Horace 
 desire to sing in peace — the j)irates which were 
 swarming all over the Mediterranean in such 
 numbers that merchant-ships were compelled 
 to sail in fleets or rot in the docks, the revolu- 
 tionists who were producing too many Cata- 
 lines, the rival maritime states — all are so set 
 
186 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 forth in the " Sketch " of Mr. Fronde, that 
 the reader of ordinary sensibility finds him- 
 self wishing that Caesar would hasten to rush 
 in upon that scene. To some extent the wish 
 is unjust. Pompey could have met the emer- 
 gency. Brutus could have transacted the pub- 
 lic business. But the painting is true in its 
 great outlines, and while Caesar was not the 
 only man of the period, he was a profoundly 
 great man, and that book is of worth which 
 thus arouses the reader until he sees with great 
 distinctness many great facts in a great age. 
 The book awakens one like a band of music 
 or the firing of heavy guns. 
 
 Mr. Froude does, however, permit his pas- 
 sion as an artist to carry him too far. There 
 is a limit to this eloquence of favoritism. It 
 may be very difficult to find this limit, but 
 when a historian, in his desire to show well 
 his special subject, belittles the cotemporaries 
 of his hero, he has stepped down from his 
 
THE GREATEST OF THE FIXE ARTS. 187 
 
 high, art, to wear for a time the soiled robes of 
 a partisan. Some of the old painters were 
 wont to resort to contrast, and when they 
 painted a Madonna or a Cecilia, they placed 
 some imp or devil in the background, evi- 
 dently to enhance the Madonna or Cecilia by 
 comparison. This comparative devil the great- 
 est artist omitted, and hence Angelo does not 
 attempt to make Moses greater by giving us 
 some Aaron, with an injured nose and eyes 
 asquint. In the midst of his collection of 
 striking pictures, Mr. Fronde places Cicero as 
 the background by which to bring out the one 
 Caesar in fine relief. When common adjec- 
 tives fail, the distinguished writer seems to 
 say: "I will belittle Cicero for a time and that 
 will make my subject seem a Colossus." The 
 vanity of Cicero is made too very visible — 
 the state of mind which could say: "Fear 
 not, you carry Caesar;" "The wife of Caesar 
 must be above suspicion" — that towering self- 
 
188 CLUB ESSAYS. 
 
 conceit which could claim a direct descent 
 from Venus and Anchises, is made to disap- 
 pear, and the open-hearted boasting of a re- 
 fined civilian is made to be a deformity of the 
 period which the great Julius escaped. 
 
 Mr. Froude passes beyond the lawful exag- 
 geration of an art, also, when he attempts to 
 make Caesar bear some religious resemblance 
 to certain great Englishmen, now living on 
 the island. Buckle and Huxley and Spencer 
 and their schools do, indeed, compose a coterie 
 of great minds. Were they to lead armies to 
 battle, they would probably not trouble Heaven 
 with any prayers for victory. But no literary 
 art can initiate Julius into such a rational- 
 istic, self-poised order. The man who labored 
 hard to be made high priest of Borne ; the 
 mind which saw a ball of fire descend to light 
 him to victory ; the Roman who watched upon 
 what hand his pigeons would fly on the morn- 
 ing of the Ides of March ; the husband that 
 
THE GREATEST OF THE FINE ARTS. 189 
 
 felt troubled over his wife's bad dream — is not 
 the man to be crowned with the calm intellect 
 and heroic submission of a Stuart Mill. Aside 
 from these two or more instances, in which his 
 art has passed beyond legitimate bounds, Mr. 
 Froude's Caesar is one of the most artistic and 
 powerful books of our powerful age. It joins 
 with the literary creations of all times in pro- 
 claiming the fact that all the other fine arts, 
 separate or combined, are feeble of speech 
 compared with literature. It can express all 
 the sentiments and thoughts of man. Paint- 
 ing or sculpture or music is only a window, 
 through which some few beams of light pour 
 in upon the imprisoned mind, or by which the 
 imprisoned mind looks out; but literature is 
 the removal of all the walls that confine. It 
 is the leading forth of the soul into a great 
 June day in a great world, with the attending 
 benediction: u Go where you will, all truth 
 and sentiment are before your footstep." 
 
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