Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860

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And yet all these schools, with their provincial French and their
mechanical accomplishments, with their cheap parade of diplomas and
commencements and other public honors, have an ever fresh interest to all
who see the task they are performing in our new social order. These girls
are not being educated for governesses, or to be exported, with other
manufactured articles, to colonies where there happens to be a surplus of
males. Most of them will be wives, and every American-born husband is a
possible President of these United States. Any one of these girls may be a
four-years' queen. There is no sphere of human activity so exalted that she
may not be called upon to fill it.

But there is another consideration of far higher interest. The education of
our community to all that is beautiful is flowing in mainly through its
women, and that to a considerable extent by the aid of these large
establishments, the least perfect of which do something to stimulate the
higher tastes and partially instruct them. Sometimes there is, perhaps,
reason to fear that girls will be too highly educated for their own
happiness, if they are lifted by their culture out of the range of the
practical and every-day working youth by whom they are surrounded. But this
is a risk we must take. Our young men come into active life so early, that,
if our girls were not educated to something beyond mere practical duties,
our material prosperity would outstrip our culture; as it often does in
large places where money is made too rapidly. This is the meaning,
therefore, of that somewhat ambitious programme common to most of these
large institutions, at which we sometimes smile, perhaps unwisely or
uncharitably.

We shall take it for granted that the routine of instruction went on at the
Apollinean Institute much as it does in other schools of the same
class. People, young or old, are wonderfully different, if we contrast
extremes in pairs. They approach much nearer, if we take them in groups of
twenty. Take two separate hundreds as they come, without choosing, and you
get the gamut of human character in both so completely that you can strike
many chords in each which shall be in perfect unison with corresponding
ones in the other. If we go a step farther, and compare the population of
two villages of the same race and region, there is such a regularly
graduated distribution and parallelism of character, that it seems as if
Nature must turn out human beings in sets like chessmen.

It must be confessed that the position in which Mr. Bernard now found
himself had a pleasing danger about it which might well justify all the
fears entertained on his account by more experienced friends, when they
learned that he was engaged in a Young Ladies' Seminary. The school never
went on more smoothly than during the first period of his administration,
after he had arranged its duties, and taken his share, and even more than
his share, upon himself. But human nature does not wait for the diploma of
the Apollinean Institute to claim the exercise of its instincts and
faculties. There young girls saw but little of the youth of the
neighborhood. The mansion-house young men were off at college or in the
cities, or making love to each other's sisters, or at any rate unavailable
for some reason or other. There were a few "clerks,"--that is, young men
who attended shops, commonly called "stores,"--who were fond of walking by
the Institute, when they were off duty, for the sake of exchanging a word
or a glance with any one of the young ladies they might happen to know, if
any such were stirring abroad: crude young men, mostly, with a great many
"Sirs" and "Ma'ams" in their speech, and with that style of address
sometimes acquired in the retail business, as if the salesman were
recommending himself to a customer,--"First-rate family article, Ma'am;
warranted to wear a lifetime; just one yard and three quarters in this
pattern, Ma'am; sha'n't I have the pleasure?" and so forth. If there had
been ever so many of them, and if they had been ever so fascinating, the
quarantine of the Institute was too rigorous to allow any romantic
infection to be introduced from without.

Anybody might see what would happen, with a good-looking, well-dressed,
well-bred young man, who had the authority of a master, it is true, but the
manners of a friend and equal, moving about among these young girls day
after day, his eyes meeting theirs, his breath mingling with theirs, his
voice growing familiar to them, never in any harsh tones, often soothing,
encouraging, always sympathetic, with its male depth and breadth of sound
among the chorus of trebles, as if it were a river in which a hundred of
these little piping streamlets might lose themselves; anybody might see
what would happen. Young girls wrote home to their parents that they
enjoyed themselves much this term at the Institute, and thought they were
making rapid progress in their studies. There was a great enthusiasm for
the young master's reading-classes in English poetry. Some of the poor
little things began to adorn themselves with an extra ribbon, or a bit of
such jewelry as they had before kept for great occasions. Dear souls! they
only half knew what they were doing it for. Does the bird know why its
feathers grow more brilliant and its voice becomes musical in the pairing
season?

And so, in the midst of this quiet inland town, where a mere accident had
placed Mr. Bernard Langdon, there was a concentration of explosive
materials which might at any time change its Arcadian and academic repose
into a scene of dangerous commotion. What said Helen Darley, when she saw
with her woman's glance that more than one girl, when she should be looking
at her book, was looking over it toward the master's desk? Was her own
heart warmed by any livelier feeling than gratitude, as its life began to
flow with fuller pulses, and the morning sky again looked bright and the
flowers recovered their lost fragrance? Was there any strange, mysterious
affinity between the master and the dark girl who sat by herself? Could she
call him at will by looking at him? Could it be that ----? It made her
shiver to think of it.--And who was that strange horseman who passed
Mr. Bernard at dusk the other evening, looking so like Mephistopheles
galloping hard to be in season at the witches' Sabbath-gathering? That must
be the cousin of Elsie's who wants to marry her, they say. A
dangerous-looking fellow for a rival, if one took a fancy to the dark girl!
And who is she, and what?--by what demon is she haunted, by what taint is
she blighted, by what curse is she followed, by what destiny is she marked,
that her strange beauty has such a terror in it, and that hardly one shall
dare to love her, and her eye glitters always, but warms for none?

Some of these questions are ours. Some were Helen Darley's. Some of them
mingled with the dreams of Bernard Langdon, as he slept the night after
meeting the strange horseman. In the morning he happened to be a little
late in entering the school-room. There was something between the leaves of
the Virgil that lay upon his desk. He opened it and saw a freshly gathered
mountain-flower. He looked at Elsie, instinctively, involuntarily. She had
another such flower on her breast.

A young girl's graceful compliment,--that is all,--no doubt,--no doubt. It
was odd that the flower should have happened to be laid between the leaves
of the Fourth Book of the "AEneid," and at this line,--

"Incipit effari, mediaque in voce resistit."

A remembrance of an ancient superstition flashed through the master's mind,
and he determined to try the _Sortes Virgilianae_. He shut the volume, and
opened it again at a venture.--The story of Laocooen!

He read, with a strange feeling of unwilling fascination, from "_Horresco
referens_" to "_Bis medium amplexi_," and flung the book from him, as if
its leaves had been steeped in the subtle poisons that princes die of.

* * * * *

THE SPHINX'S CHILDREN.

"Que la volonte soit le destin!"

Long had she sat, crouched upon her breast,--crouched, but not for slumber
or for spring. No slumber gloomed darkly in those broad, sad eyes; no dream
indefinably softened the lips, whose patient outline breathed only
wakefulness and expectation,--a long-deferred, yet constant expectation,--a
hope that would have been despair, save that it was just within hope's
limits,--a monotonous, reiterate, indestructible chord in the creature's
mystic existence, that, once struck by some mighty, shrouded Hand of Power,
still reverberated, and trailed its still renewing echoes through every
fibre of its secret habitation. Nor yet for spring;--a couchant leopard has
posed itself with horrid intent; murder glitters in its fixed golden eye,
quivers in the tense loins, creeps in the tawny glitter of the skin,
clutches the keen claws, that recoil, and grasp, and recoil again from the
velvet ball of that heavy foot; murder grins in the withdrawn lip, the
white, red-set teeth, the slavering crunch of the jaw: but nothing of all
these fired the quiet and the silence of the crouching Sphinx; nerve and
muscle in tranquil strength lay relaxed, though not unconscious. Year after
year the yellow Desert robed itself in burning mists, splendid and deadly;
year after year the hot simoom licked up its sands, and, whirling them
madly over the dead plain, dashed them against the silent Sphinx, and grain
by grain heaped her slow-growing grave; the Nile spread its waters across
the green valley, and lapped its brink with a watery thirst for land, and
then receded to its channel, and poured its ancient flood still downward to
the sea; worshipped, or desecrated; threaded by black Nubian boatmen, who
mocked its sacred name with such savage mirth as satyrs might have spirted
from their hairy lips; navigated by keen-eyed Arabs, lithe and dark and
treacherous as the river beneath them; Coptic shepherds, lingering on the
brink, drank the sweet waters, and led their flocks to drink at the
shallows, when the shepherd's star cleft that deepest sky with its crest,
and warned the simple people of their hour;--yet forever stood the Sphinx,
passionately patient, looking for sunrise, over desert, vale, and
river,--beyond man,--to her hour.--And the hour came.

Once to all things comes their hour. The black column of basalt quivers to
its heart with one keen lightning thrill that vindicates its kin to the
electric flash without; the granite cliff loses one atom from its bald
front, and every other atom quails before the dumb shiver of gravitation
and shifts its place; the breathing, breathless marble, which a sculptor
has rescued from its primeval sleep, and, repeating after God, though with
stammering and insufficient lips, the great drama of Paradise, makes a man
out of dust,--once, once, in the dcadness of its beauty, that marble
thrills with magnetic life, drinks its maker's soul, repeats the Paradisaic
amen, and owns that it is good. Yea, greater miracle of transcendental
truth,--once,--perhaps twice,--the sodden, valueless heart of that old man,
whose gold has sucked out all that made him a man, beats with a pulse of
generous honor; even in the dust of stocks and the ashes of speculation,
amid the howling curses of the poor and the bitter weeping of his own
flesh, once he hears the Voice of God, and all eternity cleaves the earth
at his feet with a glare of truth. Once in her loathsome life, that woman,
brazen with sin and shame, flaunting on the pavement, the scorn and jest of
decency and indecency, the fearful index of corrupt society,--even she has
her hour of softness, when the tiny grass that creeps out from the stones
comes greenly into a spring sunshine, and as with a divine whisper recalls
to her the time before she fell, the unburdened heart, the pure childish
pleasures, the kind look of her dead mother's eye, the clasp of that
sister's arm who passed her but yesterday pallid with disgust and ashamed
to own their sacred birth-tie: then the tide rolls back: the hour is come!
She, too, called a woman, who leads society, and triumphs over caste and
custom with metallic ring and force,--she who forgets the decencies of age
in her shameless attire, and supplies its defects with subterfuges, falser
in heart even than in aspect,--she, about whom cluster men old and young,
applauding with brays of laughter and coarser jeers the rancor of her wit,
as it drops its laughing venom or its sneering sophisms of worldly
wisdom,--even she, when the lights are fled, when the music has ceased from
its own desecration, when the frenzy of wine and laughter mock her in their
dead dregs, when the men who flattered and the women who envied are all
gone,--she recalls one calm eye in the crowd, that stung her with its pure
contemptuous pity, a look not to be shut out with draperies as the stars
are; and even through her soul, harder than the soul of that unowned sister
walking the midnight street beneath the window, since it has ceased to know
the stab of sin or the choking agony of shame,--even through that
world-trodden heart flashes one conscious pang, one glimpse of a possible
heaven and an inevitable hell, one naked and open vision of herself.

Long had the Sphinx waited. Year after year the flocking pigeons flitted
and wheeled through the sweet skies of spring, built their nests and reared
their young; tiny lizards, the new birth of the season, coiled and
glittered on the hot sands like wandering jewels; every creature, dying out
of conscious life, left its perpetuated self behind it, and repeated its
own youth in its young, according to its kind: but the Sphinx lived
alone. Nor all-unconscious of her solitude: for he who formed that massive
shape, chiselled those calm, expectant lips, and wide eyes pensive as
setting moons, he had not failed to do what all true artists do in virtue
of their truth,--he had shared his own life with his own creation, and it
was his lonely yearning that stirred her pulseless heart. Little did he
think, toiling at that stupendous figure, ages gone by, that he transfused
into the stone at which he labored, like a patient ant at some stupendous
burden, no little share of that creative yearning that inspired him to his
task; as little as you think, dear poet, whether poet, painter, or
sculptor,--for all are one, and one is all,--that in those dreams which you
write, as unconscious of your power as the transcribing stylus of its
office, your own heart pulsates for a listening world, and the very linking
of words that so respire their own music makes those words self-sentient of
their breaking, thrilling melody, and wrings or exalts them, idea-garments
as they are, with the restless heaving of the thought that wears them.

Or you, whose sun-steeped brush brings to life on canvas the golden trances
of August noons, the high, still splendor of its mountain-tops, which the
sun caresses with fiery languor, the unrippled slumber of its warm streams,
the broad glory of its woods and meadows fused with light and heat into the
resplendent haze that earth exhales in her day of prime, till he who sees
the picture hears the cricket's chirping in its moveless grasses, and
scents the rich aromatic breath of its summer-passion and its rapturous
noon,--do you dream, when at last the perfect work repeats your thought,
and you rest in the tropie atmosphere you have created, that in very truth
the picture itself is full of inward heat and breathless languor? For you
have poured out the colors that light makes out of heat, and in them the
still inevitable light shall ever stir the recreating heat that clothes
itself in color, and bring your thought, no more a dead abstraction, but a
living power, into the very substance whereby you have expressed it. And
even so far as you were creative, so shall your work be informed by you,
and not mere dead pigment and dried oil and dull canvas be your autograph,
but the vivid and inspiring blazon of an inspired idea shall glow life-like
on some friendly wall, and in its turn inspire some other soul, whose light
within needs but the breath from without to burst upward in clear flame.

Or you, who unveil from its marble tomb that figure of a chained and
stainless woman, whose atmosphere is as a nun's veil, whose sad divinity is
a crown,--do you dare imagine that the holy despair you have imaged, the
pause of a saint's resignation and a martyr's courage, is but the outline
and the faultless contour of a stone? Come back, Pygmalion, from your
mythic sleep! return, Art's divinest mystery, germ of all its power, from
the deep dust of ages! and teach these modern men that his story whose
passion fired a statue's breast was but an immortal fable, a similitude of
the truth you feel, but do not see,--that even as our Creator shared His
life with His creatures, so do you pour, in far less measure, but obedient
to that precedent which is law, your own life and the magnetic instincts of
that life, into what you create!

Keep your hearts pure and your hands clean, therefore; for these things
that you sell for dead shall one day livingly confront you, and tell their
own story of your life and your nature with terrible honesty to men and
angels.

But whoever, in those mystic ages that have ceased to be historic and have
become mythic, whoever made the Sphinx,--whether it were some Titaness
sequestered from all her kind by genie-spells, forced to live amid these
desert solitudes, fed from the abundant hands of Nature, and taught by
dreams inspired and twilight visions,--

"A daughter of the gods, divinely tall,
And most divinely fair";

her only image of human beauty the reflex of her white, symmetric limbs,
her wide, dark eyes, her full lips and soft Egyptian features, wherewith
the river greeted her from its blue placidity; her only sense of love the
unspoken yearning within, when the soft, tumultuous stress of the west-wind
kissed her, who should have been clasped in tender arms and caressed by
loving lips; whose dumb, creative instincts, becoming genius instead of
maternity, struggled outward from their home in heart and brain to
culminate in this world's-wonder, and so build a monument namelessly
splendid to the grand nature that found its bread of life was a stone and
perished: or whether this creature were the fashioning of some
demigod,--"for there were giants in those days,"--who, in the fulness of
his strength, despairing of a mortal mate, wandered away from men and
wrought his patience and his longing into the rock,--as lesser men have
carved their memorials on hard Fate,--and then died between its paws, sated
with labor and glad to sleep: or whether, indeed, the captive spirits,
sealed in Caucasus with the seal of Solomon, did penance for their
rebellion in mortal work on mere dull matter, and with anguished essence
toiled for ages to mimic in her own clay the dumb pathos of waiting
Earth:--whichever of these dreams be nearest truth, one thing is
true,--that the maker of the Sphinx infused into his work, in as much
greater measure as his nature was greater than that of other men, that
yearning of pathetic solitude that most wrings a woman's heart; and the
outward semblance, working in, wrought upon the heavy stone with incessant
and accumulative power, till through that sluggish sandstone crept a
confused thrill of consciousness, and the great creature felt the
loneliness that she looked. Far away below her the Nile-valley teemed with
life; the antelopes coursed beside their young to feed on the green pasture
fresh from its long overflow; red foxes sported with their cubs on the
tawny sand; the birds taught their infant offspring their own sweet arts of
flight and song on every bough; and even the ostrich, lonely Desert-runner,
heaped her treasure of white eggs in the sand, or guided her callow young
far from the sight and fear of man;--but the Sphinx sat alone.

Mightier and mightier grew the yearning within her, as the full moon
floated upward from the east and cast her dewy dreams over land and
sea. The hour was come; the whole impulse and persistence of her nature
went out in vivid life, and, filling the very stones which the winds had
gathered and piled against her breast, cleft them with its sentient spell,
clothed them with lean flesh and wiry sinews, shaped them after the fashion
of the Desert men, and sent them out alive with intellect and will, but
with hearts of flint, into the wide world,--the Sphinx's children!

With a sigh that shook the shores of Egypt and smote the Sicilian midnight
with sickening vibrations of earthquake, the Sphinx beheld this culmination
of her great desire; in the very hour of fruition, hope fled; and as this
grim certainty sped away from before her, taking with it all her borrowed
life, she dropped that majestic head lower upon her bosom, uplifted it
again for one last look at her offspring, and so stiffened,--once more a
stone.

Age after age rolled by; storm and tempest hurled their thunders at her
head; wave after wave of bright insidious sand curled about her feet and
heaped its sliding grains against her side; men came and went in fleeting
generations, and seasons fled like hours through the whirling wheel of
Time; but the Sphinx longed and suffered no more. Her hour had come and
gone; her dull instinct had burnt out, her comely outline began to
disintegrate, her face grew blank and stony, her features crumbled away,
altars and inscriptions defaced her breast and hieroglyphed her ponderous
sides, men worshipped and wondered there, and travellers from lands beyond
the sun pitched their tents before her face and defiled her feet with
barbaric orgies; but she knew it no more,--her children were gone out into
the world. And the world had need of them. Its rank and miasmatic
civilization,--its hotbeds of sin and misery,--its civil corruptions and
its social lies,--its reeling, rotten principalities,--its sickly
atmosphere of effeminate luxury, wherein neither justice nor judgment
lived, and the solitary virtues left mere effete shadows of philanthropy
and cowardly impulses called love and mercy,--needed a new race, stony and
strong, unshrinking in conquest and reformation, full of zeal, and
incapable of pity, to rend away the fogs that smothered truth and decency,
to disperse the low-lying clouds of weak passion and maudlin luxury, to
blow a reveille clear and keen as the trumpet of the northwest wind, when
it sweeps down from its mountain-tops in stern exultation, and shouts its
Puritanic battle-psalm across the reeking, steaming meadows of sultry
August, fever-smitten and pestilent.

Such were the Sphinx's children: had they but died out with their need!
Here and there a monk, fresh from his Desert-Laura, hurtles through the
eclipse-light of history like the stone from a catapult,--rules a church
with iron rods, organizes, denounces, intrigues, executes, keeps an unarmed
soldiery to do his behests, and hurls ecclesiastic thunders at kings and
emperors with the grand audacity of a commission presumedly divine, while
Greeks cringe, and Jews blaspheme, and heathen flee into, or away from,
conversion; and the Church itself canonizes this spiritual father, this
Sphinx-son of an instinct and a stone!

Or an Emperor exalted himself above the legions and the populace of Rome,
banqueted his enemies and beheaded them at table, drank in the sight of
blood and the sound of human shrieks as if they were his natural light and
air, tormented God's creatures and cursed his kind, kindled a fire among
the miserable myriads of his own city, and, exulting in a safe height,
mixed the leaping, frantic discords of his own music with the horrid sounds
of the hell's tragedy below him; seething in crime, steeped in murder,
black with blasphemy, the horror and the hate of men, death gaped for his
coming, and he went! Men revile him through all posterior ages; women
shudder at the legend of his deeds; but the Sphinx stands unconscious in
the Desert,--she knew not her child!

Or a Reformer springs up. High above his birthplace the snowy Alps paint
themselves against the sky, an aerial dream of beauty, softened by the
tender hues of dawn and sunset, serenely fair through the rift of the
tempest; even their white death takes a nameless grace from distance and
atmosphere, clothing itself in beauty as a spirit in clay, and tempting
wanderers to their graves: but no such beauty clothes the man whose daily
vision beholds them; hard, clamorous, disputatious, with one hand he rends
the rotten splendors of Rome from its tottering Image, and with the other
plunges baby-souls to inevitable damnation; strong and fiercely rigid, full
of burning and slaughter for the idolatries and harlotries of Popery, fired
with lurid zeal, and bestriding one stringent idea, he rides on over dead
and living, preaches predestination and hell as if the Gospel dwelt only
upon destiny and despair, casts no tender look at the loving piety that
underlay shrines and woman-worship and bead-counting wherever a true heart
sought its God through the sole formulas it knew, but spurs forward to the
end, a mighty power to destroy, to do away with old corruptions and break
down idols on their altars,--saint and iconoclast! Did the heart of stone
within him know its ancestry,--track its hard, loveless descent from the
Sphinx's children?

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