Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX.

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In the European ocean of the Azoic epoch we find five islands of
considerable size. The largest of these is at the North. Scandinavia had
even then almost her present outlines; for Norway, Sweden, Finland, and
Lapland, all of which are chiefly granitic in character, were among the
first lands to be raised. Between Sweden and Norway, there is, however,
still a large tract of land under water, forming an extensive lake or a
large inland sea in the heart of the country. If the reader will take the
trouble to look on any geological map of Europe, he will see an extensive
patch of Silurian rock in the centre of Sweden and Norway. This represents
that sheet of water gradually to be filled by the accumulation of Silurian
deposits and afterwards raised by a later disturbance. There is another
mass of land far to the southeast of this Scandinavian island, which we
may designate as the Bohemian island, for it lies in the region now called
Bohemia, though it includes, also, a part of Saxony and Moravia. The
northwest corner of France, that promontory which we now call Bretagne,
with a part of Normandy adjoining it, formed another island; while to the
southeast of it lay the central plateau of France. Great Britain was not
forgotten in this early world; for a part of the Scotch hills, some of the
Welsh mountains, and a small elevation here and there in Ireland, already
formed a little archipelago in that region. By a most careful analysis of
the structure of the rocks in these ancient patches of land, tracing all
the dislocations of strata, all the indications of any disturbance of the
earth-crust whatsoever, Elie de Beaumont has detected and classified four
systems of upheavals, previous to the Silurian epoch, to which he refers
these islands in the Azoic sea. He has named them the systems of La
Vendee, of Finistere, of Longmynd, and of Morbihan. These names have, for
the present, only a local significance,--being derived, like so many of
the geological names, from the places where the investigations of the
phenomena were first undertaken,--but in course of time will, no doubt,
apply to all the contemporaneous upheavals, wherever they may be traced,
just as we now have Silurian, Devonian, Permian, and Jurassic deposits in
America as well as in Europe.

The Silurian and Devonian epochs seem to have been instrumental rather in
enlarging the tracts of land already raised than in adding new ones; yet
to these two epochs is traced the upheaval of a large and important island
to the northeast of France. We may call it the Belgian island, since it
covered the ground of modern Belgium; but it also extended considerably
beyond these limits, and included much of the Northern Rhine region. A
portion only of this tract, to which belongs the central mass of the
Vosges and the Black Forest, was lifted during the Silurian epoch,--which
also enlarged considerably Wales and Scotland, the Bohemian island, the
island of Bretagne, and Scandinavia. During this epoch the sheet of water
between Norway and Sweden became dry land; a considerable tract was added
to their northern extremity on the Arctic shore; while a broad band of
Silurian deposits, lying now between Finland and Russia, enlarged that
region. The Silurian epoch has been referred by Elie de Beaumont to the
system of upheaval called by him the system of Westmoreland and
Hundsrueck,--again merely in reference to the spots at which these
upheavals were first studied, the centres, as it were, from which the
investigations spread. But in their geological significance they indicate
all the oscillations and disturbances of the soil throughout the region
over which the Silurian deposits have been traced in Europe. The Devonian
epoch added greatly to the outlines of the Belgian island. To it belongs
the region of the Ardennes, lying between France and Belgium, the
Eifelgebirge, and a new disturbance of the Vosges, by which that region
was also extended. The island of Bretagne was greatly increased by the
Devonian deposits, and Bohemia also gained in dimensions, while the
central plateau of France remained much the same as before. The changes of
the Devonian epoch are traced by Elie de Beaumont to a system of upheavals
called the Ballons of the Vosges and of Normandy,--so called from the
rounded, balloon-like domes characteristic of the mountains of that time.
To the Carboniferous epoch belong the mountain-systems of Forey, (to the
west of Lyons,) of the North of England, and of the Netherlands. These
three systems of upheaval have also been traced by Elie de Beaumont; and
in the depressions formed between their elevations we find the coal-basins
of Central France, of England, and of Germany. During all these epochs, in
Europe as in America, every such dislocation of the surface was attended
by a change in the animal creation.

If we take now a general view of the aspect of Europe at the close of the
Carboniferous epoch, we shall see that the large island of Scandinavia is
completed, while the islands of Bohemia and Belgium have approached each
other by their gradual increase till they are divided only by a
comparatively narrow channel. The island of Belgium, that of Bretagne, and
that of the central plateau of France, form together a triangle, of which
the plateau is the lowest point, while Belgium and Bretagne form the other
two corners. Between the plateau and Belgium flows a channel, which we may
call the Burgundian channel, since it covers old Burgundy; between the
plateau and Bretagne is another channel, which from its position we may
call the Bordeaux channel. The space inclosed between these three masses
of land is filled by open sea. To trace the gradual closing of these
channels and the filling up of the ocean by constantly increasing
accumulations, as well as by upheavals, will be the object of the next
article.

* * * * *

THE MUSICIAN.

He did not move the hills and the rocks with his music, because those days
are passed away,--the days when Orpheus had all Nature for his audience,
when the audience would not keep its seat. In those days trees and rocks
may have held less firm root in the soil: it was nearer the old
Chaos-times, and they had not lost the habit of the whirling dance. The
trees had not found their "continental" home, and the rocks were not yet
wedded to their places: so they could each enjoy one more bachelor-dance
before settling into their staid vegetable and mineral domestic happiness.

Our musician had no power, then, to move them from their place of ages: he
did not stir them as much as the morning and evening breezes among the
leaves, or the streams trickling down among the great rocks and wearing
their way over precipices. But he moved men and women, of all natures and
feelings. He could translate Bach and Beethoven, Mendelssohn and
Mozart,--all the great poet-musicians that are silent now, and must be
listened to through an interpreter. All the great people and all the
little people came to hear him. A princess fell in love with him. She
would have married him. She did everything but ask him to marry her.
Indeed, some of his friends declared she did this; but that cannot be
believed.

"You ought to be satisfied," said one of his friends to the musician, one
day; "all the world admires you; money drops from the keys of your
piano-forte; and a princess is in love with you."

"With me?" answered the musician; "with my music, perhaps. You talk
nonsense, when you talk of her falling in love with me, of her marrying a
poor musician. What then? To have one instrument more in her palace! Let
her marry her piano-forte,--or her violin, if she objects to a quadruped!"

"You are as blind as Homer," said his friend. "Can't you see that her love
is purely personal? Would she care to give a title to a pianist, if he
were any other than Arnold Wulff? If you had other eyes in your head, or
if there were another man inside even that same face of yours, the strains
might flow out under your fingers like streams from Paradise, in vain, so
far as her heart was concerned. Your voice is quite as persuasive as your
music, with her."

"If so, why must she put a title in front of my name, before I am worthy
of her?" asked Arnold. "She offers me some square miles of uninhabitable
forest, because, as owner of them, I can wear a Von before my name. I can
put it on as an actor on the stage wears a chapeau of the Quatorze time.
It is one of the properties of the establishment. You may call it a livery
of the palace, if you please. I may make love to her on the stage as 'My
Lord.' But my own little meagre part of Arnold,--thank you, I prefer it,
without my princess."

"And yet, if you have the palace, a princess is necessary. With your love
of harmony, you yourself would not be pleased to see a cotton dress
hanging across a damask couch, or rude manners interrupt a stately dinner.
The sound of the titles clangs well as you are ushered up through the
redoubled apartments. If the play is in the Quatorze time, let it be
played out. A princess deserves at least a lord for a husband."

"Very well, if the question is of marriage," answered Arnold; "but in
love, a woman loves a man, not a title; and if a woman marries as she
loves, she marries the man, not the lordship."

"But this is a true princess," said his friend Carl.

"And a true princess," answered Arnold, "feels the peas under ever so many
mattresses. She would not fall in love with a false lord, or degrade
herself by marrying her scullion. But if she is a true princess, she sees
what is lordly in her subject. If she loves him, already he is above her
in station,--she looks up to him as her ideal. Whatever we love is above
self. We pay unconscious homage to the object of our love. Already it
becomes our lord or princess."

"I don't see, then," said Carl, "but that you are putting unnecessary peas
in your shoes. It is this princeliness that your princess has discovered
in you; and the titles she would give you are the signs of it, that she
wishes you to wear before the world."

"And they never will make me lord or prince, since I am not born such,"
answered Arnold. "If I were born such, I would make the title grand and
holy, so that men should see I was indeed prince and lord as well as man.
As it is, I feel myself greater than either, and born to rule higher
things. It would cramp me to put on a dignity for which I was not created.
Already I am cramped by the circumstances out of which I was born. I
cannot express strains of music that I hear in my highest dreams, because
my powers are weak, and fail me as often the strings of my instrument fail
my fingers. To put on any of the conventionalities of life, any of its
honors, even the loves of life, would be to put on so many constraints the
more."

"That is because you have never loved," said Carl.

"That may be," said Arnold,--"because I have never loved anything but
music. Still that does not satisfy me,--it scarcely gives me joy; it gives
me only longing, and oftener despair. I listen to it alone, in secret,
until I am driven by a strange desire to express it to a great world.
Then, for a few moments, the praise and flattery of crowds delight and
exalt me,--but only to let me fall back into greater despair, into remorse
that I have allowed the glorious art of music to serve me as a cup of
self-exaltation."

"You, Arnold, so unmoved by applause?" said Carl.

"It is only an outside coldness," answered Arnold; "the applause heats me,
excites me, till a moment when I grow to hate it. The flatteries of a
princess and her imitating train turn my head, till an old choral strain,
or a clutch that my good angel gives me, a welling-up of my own genius in
my heart, comes to draw me back, to cool me, to taunt me as traitor, to
rend me with the thought that in self I have utterly forgotten myself, my
highest self."

"These are the frenzies with which one has to pay for the gift of genius,"
said Carl. "A cool temperament balances all that. If one enjoys coolly,
one suffers as coolly. Take these fits of despair as the reverse side of
your fate. She offers you by way of balance cups of joy and pleasure and
success, of which we commonplace mortals scarcely taste a drop. When my
peasant-maiden Rosa gives me a smile, I am at the summit of bliss; but my
bliss-mountain is not so high that I fear a fall from it. If it were the
princess that gladdened me so, I should expect a tumble into the ravine
now and then, and would not mind the hard scramble up again, to reach the
reward at the top."

"It would not be worth the pains," said Arnold; "a princess's smiles are
not worth more than a peasant-girl's. I am tired of it all. I am going to
find another world. I am going to England."

"You are foolish," answered Carl. "The world is no different there; there
is as little heart in England as in Germany,--no more or less. You are
just touching success here; do give it a good grasp."

"I am cloyed with it already," said Arnold.

"It is not that," said Carl. "You are a child crying for the moon. You
would have your cake and eat it too. You want some one who shall love you,
you alone,--who shall have no other thought but yours, no other dream than
of you. Yet you are jealous for your music. If that is not loved as
warmly, you begin to suspect your lover. It is the old proverb, 'Love me,
love my dog.' But if your dog is petted too much, if we dream in last
night's strains of music, forget you a moment in the world you have lifted
us into,--why, then your back is turned directly; you upbraid us with
following you for the sake of the music,--we have no personal love of
you,--you are the violin or the fiddlestick!"

"You are right, old Carl," said Arnold. "I am all out of tune myself. I
have not set my inward life into harmony with the world outside. It is
true, at times I impress a great audience, make its feelings sway with
mine; but, alas! it does not impress me in return. There is a little
foolish joy at what you call success; but it lasts such a few minutes! I
want to have the world move me; I do not care to move the world!"

"And will England move you more than Germany?" asked Carl; "will the
hearts of a new place touch you more than those of home? The closer you
draw to a man, the better you can read his heart, and learn that he has a
heart. It is not the number of friends that gives us pleasure, but the
warmth of the few."

"In music I find my real life," Arnold went on, "because in music I forget
myself. Is music, then, an unreal life? In real life must self always be
uppermost? It is so with me. In the world, with people, I am
self-conscious. It is only in music that I am lifted above myself. When I
am not living in that, I need activity, restlessness, change. This is why
I must go away. Here I can easily be persuaded to become a conceited fool,
a flattered hanger-on of a court."

* * * * *

We need scarcely tell of the musician's career in England. We are already
familiar with London fashionable life. We have had life-histories, three
volumes at a time, that have taken us into the very houses, told us of all
the domestic quarrels, some already healed, some still pending. It is easy
to imagine of whom the world was composed that crowded the concerts of the
celebrated musician. The Pendennises were there, and the Newcomes, Jane
Rochester with her blind husband, a young Lord St. Orville with one of the
Great-Grand-Children of the Abbey, Mr. Thornton and Margaret Thornton, a
number of semi-attached couples, Lady Lufton and her son, the De
Joinvilles visiting the Osbornes, from France, Miss Dudleigh and Sarona,
Alton Locke, on a visit home, Signor and Signora Mancini, sad-eyed Rachel
Leslie with her young brother, a stately descendant of Sir Charles
Grandison, the Royal Family, and all the nobility. When everybody
went,--every one fortunate enough to get a ticket and a seat in the
crowded hall,--it would be invidious to mention names. It was the fashion
to go; and so everybody went who was in the fashion. Then of course the
unfashionables went, that it might not be supposed they were of that
class; and with these, all those who truly loved music were obliged to
contend for a place. Fashion was on the side of music, till it got the
audience fairly into the hall and in their seats; and then music had to
struggle with fashion. It had to fix and melt the wandering eyes, to tug
at the worldly and the stony heart. And here it was that Arnold's music
won the victory. The ravishing bonnet of Madam This or That no longer
distracted the attention of its envying admirers, or of its owner; the
numerous flirtations that had been thought quite worth the price of the
ticket, and of the crushed flounces, died away for a few moments; the
dissatisfaction of the many who discovered themselves too late in
inconspicuous seats was drowned in the deeper and sadder unrest that the
music awakened. For the music spoke separately to each heart, roused up
the secrets hidden there, fanned dying hopes or silent longings. It made
the light-hearted lighter in heart, the light-minded heavy in soul. Where
there was a glimpse of heaven, it opened the heavens wider; where there
was already hell, it made the abysses gape deeper. For those few moments
each soul communed with itself, and met with a shuddering there, or an
exaltation, as the case might be.

After those few moments, outside life resumed its sway. Buzzing talk swept
out the memory of the music. One song from an opera brought thought back
to its usual level. Men and women looked at each other through their
opera-glasses, and, bringing distant outside life close to them, fancied
themselves in near communion with it. The intimacy of the opera-glass was
warm enough to suit them,--so very near at one moment, comfortably distant
at the next. It was an intimacy that could have no return, nor demanded
it. One could study the smile on the lip of one of these neighbors, even
the tear in her eye, with one's own face unmoved, an answer of sympathy
impossible, not required. Nevertheless, the music had stirred, had
excited; and the warmth it had awakened was often transferred to the man
who had kindled it. The true lovers of music could not express their joy
and were silent, while these others surrounded Arnold with their
flatteries and adoration.

He was soon wearied of this.

"I am going to America, to a new world," he said to his friend; "there
must be some variety there."

"Perhaps so," said Carl,--"something new, something that is neither man
nor woman, since they cannot satisfy you. Still I fancy you will find
nothing higher than men and women."

"A new land must develop men and women in a new way," answered Arnold.

"If you would only look at things in my microscopic way," said Carl, "and
examine into one man or one woman, you would not need all this travelling.
But I will go as far as New York with you."

* * * * *

At New York the name of the musician had already awakened the same
excitement as in other places; the concert-room was crowded; there was the
same rush for places; the prices paid for the tickets seemed here even
more fabulous. Arnold was more of a lion than ever. His life was filled
with receptions, dinners, and evening parties, or with parlor and evening
concerts. His dreamy, poetic face, his distant, abstracted manner, proved
as fascinating as his music.

Carl tired of the whirl, and the adoration, of which he had his share.

"I shall go back to Germany," he said. "I shall go to my Rosa, and leave
you your world."

"I am tired of my world. I shall go to the Far West," said Arnold, when
Carl left him.

One day he went to a _matinee_ at one of the finest and most fashionable
houses in the place. There were beautiful women elegantly dressed, very
exquisite men walking up and down the magnificently furnished
drawing-rooms. The air was subdued, the voices were low, the wit was
quiet, the motion was full of repose, the repose breathed grace. Arnold
seated himself at the Steinway, at the half-expressed request of the
hostess, and partly from the suggestions of his own mood. He began with
dreamy music; it was heavy with odors, at first, drugged with sense, then
spiritualizing into strange, delicate fancies. Then came strength with a
sonata of Beethoven's; then the strains died back again into a song
singing without words.

"You would like some dance-music now," said Arnold to the beautiful
Caroline, who stood by his side. "Shall I play some music that will make
everybody dance?"

"Like the music in the fairy-tale," said Caroline; "oh, I should like
that! I often hear such dance-music, that sets me stirring; it seems as if
it ought to move old and young."

"There are no old people here," said Arnold. "I have not seen any."

"It seems to me there are no young," answered Caroline.

"There are neither young nor old," said Arnold; "that is the trouble."

But he began to play a soft, dreamy waltz. It was full of bewitching
invitation. No one could resist it. It passed into a wild, stirring polka,
into a maddening galop, back again to a dreamy waltz. Now it was dizzying,
whirling; now it was languishing, full of repose. Now it was the burst and
clangor of a full orchestra; now it was the bewitching appeal of a single
voice that invited to dance. Up and down the long room, across the broad
room, the dancers moved. The room, that had been so full of quiet, was
swaying with motion.

Caroline seized hold of the back of a chair to stay herself.

"It whirls me on; how dizzying it is! And you, would you not like to join
in the dance? I would be your partner."

"The piano is my partner," answered Arnold. "Do you not see how it whirls
with me?"

"Yes, everything moves," said Caroline. "Are Cupid and Psyche coming to
join us? Will my great-grand-aunt come down to the waltz in her brocade?
My sober cousin, and Marie, who gave up dancing long ago,--they are all
carried away. It seems to me like the strange dance of a Walpurgis
night,--as though I saw ghosts, and demons too, whirling over the Brocken,
across wild forests. It is no longer our gilded drawing-room, with its
tapestries, its _bijouterie_, its sound and light both muffled: we are out
in the wild tempest; there are sighing pines, dashing waterfalls. Do you
know that is where your music carries me always? Whether it is grave or
gay, it takes me out into whirling winds, and tosses me in tempests. They
call society gay here, and dizzying,--dance and music, show, excess,
following each other; but it is all sleep, Lethe, in comparison with the
mad world into which your music whirls me. Oh, stop a moment, Arnold! will
you not stop? It is too wild and maddening!"

The strains crashed into discord, crashed into harmony, and then there was
a wonderful silence. The dancers were suddenly stilled,--looked at each
other with flushed cheek,--would have greeted each other, as if they had
just met in a foreign land; but they recovered themselves in time. Nothing
unconventional was said or done.

"Did I dance?" Marie asked herself,--"or was I only looking on?"

One of the dancers scarcely dared to look round, lest it should prove to
be the great-grand-aunt's brocade that she heard rustle behind her; while
another thanked her partner for a chair, with eyes cast down, lest it
might be Cupid that offered it. But the room was the same; there was an
elegant calm over everything. Tea-poys, light chairs, fragile vases have
been undisturbed by crinoline even.

"Are you quite sure this Chinese joss was on this table, when the music
began?" asked Marie's companion of her, whisperingly.

"Oh, hush, you don't think _that_ danced, do you?" said Marie, with a
shudder.

"I hardly know. I think the musician was on this side of the room a little
while ago, piano and all."

"Don't talk so," replied Marie. "They are all going now. I am glad of it.
You will be at the opera to-night? I must say I like opera-music better
than this wild German stuff that sets one's brain whirling!"

"Heels, too, I should say," said her companion; and they took their leave
with the rest.

The next afternoon Arnold was sitting in his room with the windows open.
It was an early spring day, when the outer air was breathing of summer. He
was thinking of how the beautiful, cold Caroline had spoken to him the day
before,--of that wild, appealing tone with which she had called him
Arnold. Before, always, she had given him no more than the greeting of an
acquaintance. Now, the tone in which she had spoken took a significance.
As he was questioning it, recalling it, he suddenly heard his own name
called most earnestly and appealingly. There was a softness, and an agony
too, in its piercing tone, as if it came straight from the heart. "Arnold!
come, come back!" He hurried to the window, wondering if he were under the
influence of some dream. He looked down, and found himself a witness to a
scene that he could not interrupt, because he could not help, and a sudden
word might create danger. It passed very quickly, though it would take
many words to describe it. A piazza led across the windows of the story
below, to a projecting part of the building, the sloping roof of which it
touched. At the other end of the sloping roof, where it met an alley-way
that opened upon a street beyond, there was a little child leaning over to
look at some soldiers that were passing through the street across the
alley. He was supporting himself, by an iron wire that served as a
lightning-rod. Already it was bending beneath his weight; and in his
eagerness he was forgetting his slippery footing, and the dizzy height of
thirty feet, over which he was hanging. He was a little three year-old
fellow, too, and probably never knew anything about danger. His mother had
always screamed as loudly when he fell from a footstool as when she had
seen him leaning from a three-story window.

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