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The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 by Various

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863




The book itself to which this essay introduces us is one of the few
monuments that remain to us, and by far the best monument that remains
to us, of the interior spiritual life of the better class of that
Graeco-Roman world of whose exterior life we know so much. Not to have
read it is not to know the deepest mind of the ancients. Two things in
it are prevailingly prominent: first, a noble nature; secondly, an
extreme civilization, already faltering, turned to decline, expecting
its fall. On every page lies the shadow of impending doom; on every page
shines forth the great, heroic soul equal to every fate. The work--if
work it can be called--is entirely aphoristic, with no apparent plan; in
fact, a note-book or diary of thoughts and fancies, set down as they
occurred from time to time, and as leisure favored the record. In its
structure, or rather want of structure, and in some of its suggestions,
it reminds one of the Book of Ecclesiastes. Yet the difference between
them is immense. The prevailing tone of Ecclesiastes is skepticism, that
of the "Thoughts" is faith. The one is morbid, the other sane; the one
relaxes, the other braces; the one is steeped in despondency and gloom,
the other is redolent of manly courage and cheerful trust. The Emperor,
like the Preacher, has much to say about death; but he views the subject
from a higher plane, and envisages the final event with a better hope.
He does not think that a living dog is better than a dead lion.

"What, then, is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing, and only
one, philosophy.[33] But this consists in keeping the daemon within a man
free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing
nothing without a purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy,... and
besides accepting all that happens, and all that is allotted, as coming
from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came, and finally
waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a
dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded.
But if there is no harm to the elements themselves, in each continually
changing into the other, why should a man have any apprehension about
the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to
Nature, and nothing is evil which is according to Nature."[34]

"Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou art come to shore;
get out. If, indeed, to another life, there is no want of gods, not even
there. But if to a state without sensation, thou wilt cease to be held
by pains and pleasures, and to be a slave to the vessel which is as much
inferior as that which serves it is superior; for the one is
intelligence and deity, the other is earth and corruption."[35]

"Man, thou hast been a citizen in this great state [the world]; what
difference does it make to thee whether for five years or three? for
that which is conformable to the laws is just for all. Where is the
hardship, then, if no tyrant or unjust judge sends thee away from the
state, but Nature who brought thee into it? The same as if a praetor who
has employed an actor dismisses him from the stage. 'But I have not
finished the five acts,--only three of them.' Thou sayest well; but in
life the three acts are the whole drama; for what shall be a complete
drama is determined by him who was once the cause of its composition,
and now of its dissolution; but thou art the cause of neither. Depart,
then, satisfied, for he who dismisses thee is satisfied."[36]

The book is one which scarcely admits of analysis, and of which it is
impossible to convey an idea by any discussion of its contents. In
characterizing the man we have characterized the "Thoughts" as the
commentary of personal experience on the virtues of fortitude, patience,
piety, love, and trust. They have a history, and have been the chosen
companion of many and very different men of note. Our own native Stoic,
the latest, and, since Fichte, the best representative of that school,
fed his youth at this fountain, and shows, in his earlier writings
especially, the influence of his imperial predecessor. Mr. Long reminds
us that this was one of the two books which Captain John Smith, the hero
of young Virginia, selected for his daily use. Unlike the generality of
John Smiths and of modern Virginians, the brave soldier found here a
kindred spirit.

The Christian world possesses in its Bible a record of Semitic piety
whose genuine utterances will never be surpassed; but when the Vulgate
of the Aryan races shall be published, these confessions of a noble soul
will claim a prominent place among its scriptures.


_Levana; or, The Doctrine of Education._ Translated from the German of
JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

We call to mind certain phrases wherein the critic may honestly express
satisfaction that a portion of the world's plastic stock of useful
knowledge has been skilfully manipulated into a volume. Truly, none of
them will do for this sweetest household blossom of a commanding
intellect. We have poetry too discursively brilliant for the trammels of
verse, eloquence which has drawn its materials from the purest sources,
and instructiveness running into sparkling effusions or soaring in
aerial fancies. It is hard to speak adequately of this delicious,
accidental "Levana." It is no schoolmaster's manual, no elaborated
system set to snap like a spring-trap upon the heads of incautious
meddlers,--it is only the very aroma of the married life of a wise and
tender poet.

Those early years which held Richter in the grasp of their miseries and
perplexities had passed away. Bravely had he struggled through
temptations which at all times and in all places beset young men, added
to such as are peculiar to one of the highest inspirations steeped to
the lips in poverty. Through all perils he had borne the purity of his
youth, the freedom and simplicity of his deep soul. And so he is
privileged to bring to marriage and the delicate nurture of children the
fine insights of a man of genius who has been wholly true to the costly
gift he possessed. Of the domestic fragrance of a well-ordered family no
savor eludes him. The wife and children, the vigorous and rich life
which they offer to a good man,--those are touched with keenest analysis
and in festal spirit. Most thoroughly does the author possess that rare
combination of mind which seeks speculative truth no less than ideal
beauty; with him emotion is nothing, unless it leads to principle.

"Levana," as we have said, is no iron system for the education of
children; it is rather a most readable text-book for the education of
parents. It sustains a relation of spiritual fathership to common
fathers, and offers choicest counsel to those who would assume the
office of family-teacher honestly and in the fear of God. And it seems
to us that of these subtle influences of home-culture, whose gospel
Richter here declares, our American parents have been too neglectful.
The world knows that we are proud, and justly so, of our public
educational apparatus. But that our legislation in this direction
produces nothing but good, no observing man can admit. This elaborate
reading-and-writing machine of which the State turns the handle, while
it induces a certain average sharpness in the children, leaves rusting
some of the noblest privileges as well as the highest duties of the
parent. Yet citizens will cry that they feel their responsibilities for
educating, and, to their better fulfilment, work daily for dollars. This
is well; but let us not throw our dollars in a parabolic curve over the
house, on the chance of their making a happy descent in some distant
school-room. The bringing-up of children is something very different
from pickling cucumbers or salting fish,--it cannot be done by contract
and in the gross. But, ah, there is no time for anything else! Then
reduce your way of living to anything above the food-and-shelter point,
and so make time. Richter was always poor, always a man of great labor
and great performance, and here is what he says:--"I deny myself my
evening meal in my eagerness to work; but the interruptions by my
children I cannot deny myself."

"Levana" is peculiarly adapted to cause those who have to do with
children to feel all the emancipating and renovating power of their
trust. It cannot leave us satisfied with any conventional arrangement
which brings to plausible maturity a limited per cent. There are,
indeed, minds strong enough to pass through the bitter years of
unlearning what has been taught amiss, and then, bating no jot of heart
or courage, to begin education for themselves in middle life. But often
it is far otherwise. Too often, owing to the indolence or immaturity of
those who assume the responsibility of parents, the child is cast into a
terrible moral perplexity, which is at last moral corruption. Our duties
toward different children are as eclectic and irregular as Nature
herself. There is a need to study and respect the individual character,
which claims from parents the daily use of their mental powers,--and
this without a compelling external stimulus. Now it is easy and not
unpleasant to work in a routine. Schiller used to say that he found the
great happiness of life to consist in the discharge of some mechanical
duty. He was in the right. Nevertheless, for the worth and blessedness
of life we must look to the discharge of duties which are not
mechanical. Of mechanical teaching the highest result proposed is the
multiplication of photographs from the teacher's negative, or, in the
words of Richter, "to fill our streets with perpetual stiff, feeble
copies of the same pedagogue type." But the parent's office demands
courage,--courage not so much to originate as to accept the wisdom of
thinking men, some of whom have spoken more than a hundred years ago.
The folly of cramming a child with words representing no ideas, instead
of giving him ideas to find themselves words, is no new discovery.
Milton, in his letter to Master Hartlib, assails that "scholastic
grossness of barbarous ages" from which we nineteenth-century citizens
have by no means escaped. "We do amiss," exclaims the eloquent scholar,
"to spend seven or eight years in scraping together so much miserable
Latin and Greek as might otherwise be learned easily and pleasantly in
one year." He denounces this "misspending our prime youth at schools and
universities as we do, either in learning mere words, or such things
chiefly as were better unlearned." We quote the words of Milton rather
than those of other eminent men to the same effect, because the poet
cannot be accused of objecting to Latin and Greek taught at the right
time and in the right way. A man whose mighty English was always fast
anchored to classic bottoms had surely no sentimental preference for
modern sciences. Indeed, in this very essay he seems to demand what at
present we must consider as a too early initiation into the ancient
languages, no longer the exclusive keys to knowledge. But Milton
realized that there was a natural development to the imitative and
perceptive powers of man, and he knew that a mere tasking of the verbal
memory blighted the diviner faculties of comparison and judgment. We
hold that the ideal system of education, to which through coming
centuries men can only approximate, must present to the child the
precise step in knowledge which he waits for, and upon which he is able
to raise himself with that glow of pleasurable activity which God gives
to exertion directed to a comprehensible end. The feeblest mind is
capable of assimilating knowledge with a satisfaction the same in kind
as that which rewarded the maturest labors of Humboldt or Newton. There
are sequences of facts every one of which, imparted in its natural
order, brings an immediate interest. It is no nebulous scheme of
combining instruction with amusement which is to be sought. One might as
well look after the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of Life. Good
things are to be had upon no easier terms than privation and work. But
there is a wide difference between a man toiling to gain material
comforts for those who are dear to him, or laboring to enlighten and
reform his own spirit that he may give good gifts to his generation, and
a beast whipped round a treadmill to the din of its own everlasting
clatter. It is only work whose end shall, in some faint degree, be
intelligible, which is demanded for the child; and with this sort of
work we believe that it is very possible to furnish him. But our
philanthropies in this direction may not be wrought by deputy; they must
be aimed at the few, and not at once at the many.

The reader of "Levana" will find much incidental commendation of those
true relations of intellectual sympathy and confidence between parents
and children which in this country are far rarer than they should be.
Seldom do we hear the average American citizen speak of either parent in
that tone of tender and respectful companionship with which the average
Frenchman pronounces "_ma mere_" or "_mon pere_." Seldom do we see that
relation between an eminent man and his mother which, in the Old World,
has been exemplified from Augustine to Buckle. Some of the causes of
this have been admirably set forth in a recent essay in these pages. The
article by Gail Hamilton in the April number of the "Atlantic" contains
much _uncommon_ sense, which our lady-readers cannot ponder too often.
All honor to those mothers who, meeting extreme and unexpected poverty,
turn themselves into drudges that their children may be decently clothed
and wholesomely fed! But dishonor to those women who stunt their own
intellectual powers, which should educate and accompany the immortal
souls of their sons and daughters through this world and perhaps
another,--and this, in order that their bodies may be fed luxuriously,
or dressed in lace and ruffles to vie with the children of richer
neighbors! There can be no tolerance for the _indolence_--we emphasize
the word--which elects a mechanical routine instead of those harder
mental efforts through which a mother's highest duties may be
comprehended and performed. And what shall be said for the despicable
vanity which would barter opportunities of forming and directing a human
character for the sake of trimmings and fancy buttons? We cannot possess
the confidence and friendship of our children without taking pains to
deserve them. If the father chooses to be "the governor" of his family,
then the _ex-governor_, and nothing more, can he be to his grown-up
children,--an official once set over them by some Know-Nothing or other
fatality, at length happily shelved with the rubbish of the nursery.
Nowhere are the external sanctities of domestic life more respected than
in our Northern States, and here should its fairest promises be
bountifully fulfilled. Above all things, it is to be remembered that
whatever moral power a man would have his children possess, that must he
especially demand and exercise in himself. The Law of the household must
afford the luxury of a Conscience; for if ever the maxim "_Summum jus,
summa, injuria_" be worthy of remembrance, it is in the management of
children. Well for those who realize that education is no merely lineal
advancement, but a spreading and flowering in many directions! well for
those who cultivate all the capabilities of love and trust in their
children! "When I think," says Jean Paul, "that I never saw in my father
a trace of selfishness, I thank God!" There comes the time when young
men go forth to battle in the world, and the father prays bitterly for
the power to endow them with the results of his own experience. But only
to him who has borne himself truthfully and honorably before his family
can that good gift be given.

Upon the subject of religious education "Levana" is finely suggestive.
All cobweb-makeshifts which obscure the beautiful substance of a holy
life are swept aside. To the young, not what others say, but what they
do, is right. Children, like their elders, will resist all mere
reasoning upon the disadvantages, whether temporal or spiritual, of
actions to which they are tempted. But they are ever ready to absorb the
faith of the household, and to be nourished by it. "For those who wish
to give anything," exclaims our author, "the first rule is, that they
shall have it to give; no one can teach religion who does not himself
possess it; hypocrisy and mouth-religion will bring forth only their
like." The hardly noticeable habits of unrestrained intercourse, the
indulgence of petty selfishness not acknowledged to ourselves,--these
are seeds of evil quick to germinate in a virgin soil. No iteration of
pedagogical maxims can annul the influence of some little mean or
graceless act. Let every parent take heed lest, through his own weakness
and folly, he lose the divine privilege of obedience through confidence.
In the world, obedience through discipline must indeed come; but let it
be unknown in the family as long as it may. And of "mouth-religion" what
fatal abundance! To a child, it is no more than the creaking and
rattling of a vehicle, which is of a certain worth, doubtless, to the
weary, sinful adult,--but to one who feels his life in every limb,
incomprehensible, and an offence. Of the vulgar superstition which would
confuse the nursery with creeds and vain prayer-repetitions of the
heathen there is far too much. We have known parents, reputed pious and
church-going, who delighted to pour crushing enigmas into infant ears,
and then to make a sorry household jest of the feeble one's grotesque
attempts to extend or limit the Unspeakable. As the highest concerns of
man can be known only by the spirit, so they can be taught only by the
spirit. It is not the words we repeat, but the temper in which we daily
live, that moulds the family to honor or dishonor. It is the spirit of
the father and mother which produces results mistaken for intuitions by
the superficial. And, truly, youth, thus warmly rooted in generosity and
nobility, will, in its own good time, stretch tender leaves up to the
Higher Light. And when Nature is ready for worship, mark how wisely
Richter directs it:--"The sublime is a step to the temple of religion,
as the stars are to that of infinity. Let the name of God be heard by
the child in connection with all that is great in Nature,--the storm,
the thunder, the starry heavens, and death,--a great misfortune,--a
great piece of good-fortune,--a great crime,--a greatly noble action:
these are the sites on which to build the wandering church of
childhood."

In conclusion, we can only repeat, that the greatest charm of "Levana"
is its suggestion of a possible household, from what the reader feels
was once an actual household. The cheap sentimentalism of parental
relations has often been a favorite property with men of imaginative
genius. Rousseau and Byron knew how to use it as a fictitious background
before which they might posture with effect. But, until the world's
literature shall mercifully forget them, the "Enfants Trouves" and the
Venetian bagnio strip these writers of their fine words, and hold them
before the generations in scandal and disgrace. No reader of "Levana"
can miss the refutation of that poisonous lie, that men of genius,
because of their mental endowments, have a natural inaptitude for
domestic relations, or are unhappy therein from any other cause than
their own foolishness or guilt. We hear the tender strains of a deep
poet, privileged by acquired worthiness to return to those divine
instincts which were vivid in the simplest condition of the family. To
all who can bring the writings of Richter within their range we commend
this book. Those who have learned to enjoy his strong-darting language,
his complex constructions, his kindly humor, will find these working
together with noblest aim. In these times of our country's peril, there
is some sanative virtue outside of treatises upon strategy or Union
pamphlets. It is well to print and circulate the literature of war. But
it is also a sweet and a timely mission to impart a new inspiration into
that life of the family to-day which shall become the life of the nation
to-morrow.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: See Atlantic Monthly, May Number.]

[Footnote 2: "Clearly a fictitious appellation; for, if we admit the
latter of these names to be in a manner English, what is _Leigh_?
Christian nomenclature knows no such."]

[Footnote 3: "It is clearly of transatlantic origin."]

[Footnote 4:

"'Imperfectus adhuc infans genetricis ab alvo
Eripitur, patrioque tener (si credere dignum)
Insuitur femori ...
Tutaque bis geniti sunt incunabula Bacchi.'

_Metamorph_. Lib. 3."]

[Footnote 5: It was Philip II. who gave to the Havana a coat of arms, in
which was a golden key, to signify that it was the key of the Indies.
The house being lost, the key has, oddly enough, become more valuable
than ever to Spain.]

[Footnote 6: The "Annual Register" states that but 2,500 of the
conquerors were fit for duty when the Havana surrendered. The Boston
"Gazette" says 3,000, and that the arrival of reinforcements was
critical. Even disease could not break down armies in those days. The
Spaniards had 6,000 sick.]

[Footnote 7: The writer is known to the publishers of the "Atlantic
Monthly": he is one whose word is not and cannot be called in question;
and he pledges his word that the above is exact and _proven_ fact.
Horace Mann, years ago, made public some similar cases.]

[Footnote 8: _Constitutional History of England_, Vol. II. p. 340.]

[Footnote 9: Carlyle's _Life of Cromwell_, Part IX. Vol. II. p. 168.]

[Footnote 10: Ludlow's _Memoirs_, p. 559.]

[Footnote 11: Ibid. p. 580.]

[Footnote 12: Ibid. p. 582.]

[Footnote 13: Kent's _Commentaries_, Vol. I. p. 292, note b.]

[Footnote 14: Elliott's _Debates_, Vol. III, p. 22.]

[Footnote 15: Elliott's _Debates_, Vol. III. p. 44.]

[Footnote 16: _Ibid._ p. 29.]

[Footnote 17: Rushworth's _Historical Collections_, Vol. I. p. 609.]

[Footnote 18: See Cushing, _Parliamentary Law_, p. 284.]

[Footnote 19: Phillimore's _International Law_, Vol. I. p. 147.]

[Footnote 20: Burke's _Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs_.]

[Footnote 21: Macaulay's _History of England_, Vol. II. p. 623.]

[Footnote 22: Macaulay's _History of England_, Vol. II. p. 624.]

[Footnote 23: John Adams's _Works_, Vol. II. p. 490.]

[Footnote 24: _Ibid_. Vol. III. pp. 17, 19, 45, 46.]

[Footnote 25: Webster's _Works_, Vol. VI. pp. 225, 226, 227, 228, 231.]

[Footnote 26: The _Gorgias_ of Plato.]

[Footnote 27: _American Insurance Company_ v. _Carter_, 1 Peters, p.
542.]

[Footnote 28: _Democracy in America_, Vol. II. ch. 25, p. 343.]

[Footnote 29: Thirty-Seventh Congress, Second Session, 2d May, 1862,
Part III. p. 1923.]

[Footnote 30: Act of Congress, July 2, 1862, ch. 123.]

[Footnote 31: Jewish tradition, in spite of German criticism, still
ascribes the Book of Ecclesiastes to Solomon.]

[Footnote 32: _The Caesars_, p. 170, Boston edition.]

[Footnote 33: This word, as Marcus uses it, is equivalent to religion.]

[Footnote 34: p. 25.]

[Footnote 35: p. 29.]

[Footnote 36: p. 217.]

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