The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857
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Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857
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I spoke. The figure started, and looked up. In the sallow cheeks, untrimmed
beard, sunken and encircled eyes, I recognized Pendlam. A quick flush
spread over his haggard features, and he made a snatch at his tinsel crown.
"Do not be disturbed," I entreated.
He smiled, but with an air of embarrassment; and leaving the tinsel upon
his uncombed head, pointed to the wall.
"You see where I am," said Pendlam.
"I see, yet do _not_ see."
"I have reached the plane of symbols. You are aware that there is something
in symbols?"
"A great deal! a great deal!" I said, from a sorrowful heart, as I glanced
around me.
Pendlam, who had spoken doubtingly, seemed encouraged.
"Symbols are the highest expression of spiritual thought. Both words and
pictures are used. They are the language of the spirit, which only the same
spirit can understand. Look here, and you will see some symbols of a very
astonishing character."
"Astonishing," said I, "is a mild word!"
"And what is equally astonishing," added the eager reformer, "is the
manner in which they are produced. The hand is moved to write or draw them
spontaneously. The symbol comes first, the interpretation afterwards. Here
is a vulture soaring away with a lamb. It has a meaning."
"A deep meaning!" I added. "We have known such a vulture!"
"Here," he cried,--too excited to heed any words but his own,--"are swine
feeding upon golden fruit."
"Oh, the swine! Oh, the precious, wasted, golden fruit!"
"Here is one in words; it reads, _Beware of falling from a balloon_. It
requires a peculiar experience," added Pendlam, with a smile, "to enable
one to understand that beautiful symbol."
"Perhaps I have not had the requisite experience; but"--I laid my hand on
Pendlam's shoulder--"I know a man who has fallen from several balloons!"
"Here is one," said Pendlam, turning to the table, "which I have just
drawn. I was trying to get at its meaning when you came in." He showed me a
sketch consisting of a number of zigzag lines, joined one to another, and
tending towards a circle.
"My dear John Henry," said I, "any person who has watched your course for
the last four or five years will readily see the meaning of that symbol. It
is a map of your voyage of discoveries."
"Such tacking and shifting?" queried Pendlam, with a smile commiserating my
ignorance.
"Just such tacking and shifting. If you had possessed a good compass, it
would have shown you."
Pendlam caught at the word compass. "It is singular;--you must have some
spiritual perception;--it was written through my hand nine days ago,
_Purchase a compass_. Here is the writing; I placed it upon the wall as a
symbol; and I have intended buying a compass as soon as I could get the
means."
"Ah, John Henry," said I, "there is more in your symbols than you suppose.
You want no purchasable compass."
Pendlam rewarded my simplicity with another pitying smile.
"Here," said he, "you who know so much of symbols, explain this. _Avoid the
shores of Old Spain_. I have not yet penetrated its meaning."
"Leave it," I replied, "with the unexplained Pythagorean symbol touching
abstinence from beans. Perhaps future events will reveal it."
Pendlam smiled as before. But was I not right? Did not lamentable events in
the not far-off future give to the symbol a melancholy significance?
"Come," I said, "leave these abstruse studies; take off that symbolic coat,
that tinsel crown; wash, comb your hair, and walk with me."
"I should enjoy a walk," replied Pendlam; "but I am directed to retain
these symbols upon my person, and you would hardly wish me to appear in the
street with them."
"Directed!--by what authority?"
"By the Spirit. Some beautiful use is to be fulfilled. I see where you
are," added Pendlam;--"from your stand-point it must look absurd enough."
I sat down, and endeavoured to reason with him. But I found it impossible
for a person upon my plane to reach with any argument a person upon his. In
vain I recapitulated his successive trials and failures.
"It is true," he confessed, "I have been called to pass through some
strange experiences. But all were necessary steps; and I have now reached
a stand-point from which I can look back and see in its indisputable
place every grade of the progressive ascent. There has been only apparent
failure. Our attempted Association was a necessary foreshadowing of what
remains to be unfolded; a prophetic symbol. We have all been taught great
lessons."
"And the vulture and the lamb!" I said, sternly; "where are they?"
"I perceive," answered Pendlam, charitably, "you do not understand."
"It is you," I cried, "who have failed to understand your own symbols.
To use plain language, then, where is Susan? She is the lamb that was
entrusted to your keeping, and that you suffered the obscene bird to carry
away!"
"You are pleased to employ harsh terms," said Pendlam, meekly. "Susan has
done well; she has followed her attractions, and that is obedience to the
Spirit. Perfect freedom is essential to progression. Consequently, above
a certain plane, monogamy, which has undeniable primitive uses, ceases to
exist. The laws of chemical affinity teach this by analogy. When the mutual
impartations which result from the conjunction of positive and negative
have blended in a state of equilibrium, there is consequent repulsion, and
the law of harmonies ordains new combinations. You see where I am," said
Pendlam.
Disheartened and sorrowful, I set out to go. At the door I turned back.
"Can I do anything for you, John Henry?"
"Not unless"--Pendlam hesitated a moment--"if you have a dollar to spare?"
I gave him a bank-bill. As he leaned forward to receive it, he struck his
head against the suspended key.
"Another symbol," I said. _"Break not your brains upon the key of brass."_
He scratched his head, rearranged his tinsel, and smiling, advanced to show
me the stairs. I looked back once: there crowned he stood, in his symbolic
coat, with the green crescent and blue door on the shoulders; and as a gust
from the stairway blew open the garment, I beheld a great yellow heart on
his breast. That picture remained impressed upon my vision. In the street,
I recalled the room, the drawings, the inscriptions,--all so tragical and
saddening! I had not proceeded far, when, moved by greater compassion, I
turned and retraced my steps. At the door of the house, I saw the servant
girl who had admitted me coming out with a bottle, and thought it the same
I had seen lying empty under Pendlam's table. I followed her into a grocery
on the corner. She called for gin, and paid for it out of my bank-bill.
I now changed my mind, and went to consult Horatio. It was concluded that
Pendlam's old habits of thought and associations ought to be entirely
broken up. Deserted, destitute, dependent, he condescended, after long
holding out against us, to listen to what we proposed. Hearing of a vacancy
in a newspaper office in a western city, we had procured for him the
situation. Not without a struggle, he consented to accept it, abandoned his
darling reformatory projects, and set out for his new sphere.
His position was that of subordinate writer; and for a time he maintained
it with considerable ability. But he grew restless under restraint; and at
length, taking advantage of the managing editor's absence, he published
articles on prohibited subjects, which lost the paper half its subscribers,
and him his situation. When next heard of, he was gaining a meagre
subsistence by writing theatrical puffs,--employment for which he was
indebted to the kindness of a certain influential actress named Kellerton.
In the mean time Susan returned from her unhappy wanderings; and her
mother's family, seizing upon her like wolves, hid her from the world in
their den. And I was pleased not long after to read that an individual
named Clodman, a noted swindler, had recently been shot in a street-fight
in St. Louis, by a husband whose domestic peace he had disturbed.
The last word of all, that ends this strange, eventful, and, alas! too true
history, remains to be said.
For some months, we had heard nothing of Pendlam. But last week I received
a bundle of Roman Catholic publications, one of which contained an article
proclaiming a miraculous conversion of the distinguished reformer, and
thereby greatly glorifying Catholicism.
The same mail brought me a letter from the convert.
"At last," he wrote, "I have found peace in the bosom of the Holy Catholic
Church. All my previous experiences were necessary to lead me where I am.
This is the divine association I was so long seeking elsewhere in vain;
I find in its forms the true symbols of a universal religion; and I now
perceive that the seeming errors, in which I was for a time permitted to
stray, were wisely designed to convince me of the sublime truth, that
celibacy is the single condition befitting a holy apostolic teacher."
Amid the flood of reflections that rushed upon me, arose prominent the
image of poor Pendlam's unexplained symbol: "_Avoid the shores of old
Spain._" Had it not now received its interpretation? The tossed voyager,
failing to make the continent of truth, but beating hither and thither amid
the reefs and breakers of dangerous coasts, mistaking many islands for the
main, and drifting on unknown seas, had at last steered straight to the old
Catholic shores, from which the great discoverers had sailed so many years
before.
BRITISH INDIA.
The year 1757 was one of the gloomiest ever known to England. At home, the
government was in a state of utter confusion, though the country was at war
with France, and France was in alliance with Austria; these two nations
having departed from their policy of two centuries and a half, in order
that they might crush Frederic of Prussia, England's ally. Frederic was
defeated at Kolin, by the Austrians, on the 18th of June, and a Russian
army was in possession of East Prussia. A German army in British pay,
and commanded by the "Butcher" hero of Culloden, was beaten in July, and
capitulated in September. In America, the pusillanimity of the English
commanders led to terrible disasters, among which the loss of Fort William
Henry, and the massacre of its garrison, were conspicuous events. In India,
the English were engaged in a doubtful contest with the viceroy of Bengal,
who was supported by the French. Even the navy of England appeared at
that time to have lost its sense of superiority; for not only had Admiral
Byng just been shot for not behaving with proper spirit, but a combined
expedition against the coast of France ended in signal failure, and Admiral
Holburne declined to attack a French fleet off Louisburg. No wonder that
the British people readily believed an author who then published a work to
establish the agreeable proposition, "that they were a race of cowards and
scoundrels; that nothing could save them; that they were on the point of
being enslaved by their enemies, and that they richly deserved their fate."
Such a succession of disasters might well discourage a people, some of whom
could recollect the long list of victories which commenced with Blenheim
and closed with Malplaquet, and by which the arrogance of the Grand
Monarque had been punished.
Yet it is from this very year of misfortune that the power of modern
England must take its date. "Adversity," said El Hakim to the Knight of the
Leopard, "is like the period of the former and of the latter rain,--cold,
comfortless, unfriendly to man and to animal; yet from that season
have their birth the flower and the fruit, the date, the rose, and the
pomegranate." In the summer of 1757 was formed that ministry which
succeeded in carrying England's power and glory to heights which they
did not reach even under the Protectorship of Cromwell or the rule of
Godolphin. Then were commenced those measures which ended in the expulsion
of the French from North America, and gave to England a territory here
which may perpetuate her institutions for ages after they shall have ceased
to be known in the mother-land. Then was America conquered in Germany, and
not only was Frederic so assisted as to be able to contend successfully
against the three great houses of Bourbon, Habsburg, and Romanoff, and a
horde of lesser dynasties, but British armies, at Minden and Creveldt,
renewed on the fields of the continent recollections of the island skill
and the island courage. Then was a new spirit breathed into the British
marine, by which it has ever since been animated, and which has seldom
stopped to count odds. Then began that dashing course of enterprise which
gave almost everything to England that was assailable, from Goree to Cuba,
and from Cuba to the Philippines. Then was laid the foundation of that
Oriental dominion of England which has been the object of so much wonder,
and of not a little envy; for on the 23d of June, 1757, was fought the
battle of Plassey, the first of those many Indian victories that illustrate
the names of Clive, Coote, Wellesley, Gough, Napier, and numerous other
heroes. It seems odd, that the interest in Indian affairs should have been
suddenly and strangely revived in the hundredth year after the victory that
laid Bengal at the feet of an English adventurer. Had the insurgent Sepoys
delayed action but a few weeks, they might have inaugurated their movement
on the very centennial anniversary of the birth of British India.
There is nothing like the rule of the English in India to be found in
history. It has been compared to the dominion which Rome held over so large
a portion of the world; but the comparison has not the merit of aptness.
The population of the Roman Empire, in the age of the Antonines, has been
estimated at 120,000,000, including that of Italy. The population of
India is not less than 150,000,000, without counting any portion of the
conquering race. Rome was favorably situated for the maintenance of her
supremacy, as she had been for the work of conquest. Her dominion lay
around the Mediterranean, which Italy pierced, looking to the East and the
West, and forming, as it were, a great place of arms, whence to subdue or
to overawe the nations. Cicero called the Hellenic states and colonies a
fringe on the skirts of Barbarism, and the description applies also to the
Roman dominion; for though Gaul and Spain were conquered from sea to sea,
and the legions were encamped on the Euphrates, and the valley of the Nile
was as submissive to the Caesars as it had been to the Lagidse, yet the
Mediterranean was the basis of Roman power, and a short journey in almost
any direction from it would have taken the traveller completely from
under the protection of the eagles. Not so is it with British India. From
no European country is India so remote as from England. The two regions
are separated by the ocean, by seas, by deserts, and by some of the most
powerful nations. Their sole means of union are found in the leading cause
of their separation. England owes her Indian empire to her empire of the
sea. India will be hers just so long, and no longer, as she shall be able
to maintain her naval supremacy. Those who predict her downfall in the
East, either as a consequence of the natives throwing off her rule, or
through a Russian invasion, forget that she entered India from the sea,
and that until she shall have been subdued on that element it would be
idle to think of dispossessing her of her Oriental supremacy. Were the
long-cherished dream of Russia to be realized,--a dream that is said to
have troubled the sleep of Peter, and which certainly haunted the mind of
Catharine,--and Russian proconsuls ruling on the Ganges, India could no
more be to Russia what she has been to England, than the Crimea, had he
kept it, could have been to Louis Napoleon what it is to the Czar. The
condition of Indian dominion is ocean dominion.
In one respect the Indian empire of England resembles the Roman empire.
The latter comprised many and widely different countries and races, and
so is it with the former. We are so accustomed to speak of India as if it
constituted one country, and were inhabited by a homogeneous people, that
it is difficult to understand that not even in Europe are nations to be
found more unlike to one another than in British India. In Hindostan and
the Deccan there are ten different civilized nations, resembling each other
no more than Danes resemble Italians, or Spaniards Poles. They differ in
moral, physical, and intellectual conditions,--in modes of thought and in
modes of life. This is one of the chief causes of England's supremacy,
just as a similar state of things not only promoted the conquests of Rome,
but facilitated her rule after they had been made. The Emperors ruled over
Syrians, Greeks, Egyptians, and other Eastern peoples, with ease, because
they had little in common, and could not combine against their conquerors.
They did the same in the West, because the inhabitants of that quarter, if
left to themselves, would have passed their time in endless quarrels. The
old world abounded in great cities, all of which owned the supremacy of
Rome, from Gades to Thapsacus; and in modern India the most venerable
places are compelled to bow before the upstart Calcutta.
The peculiar condition of India a hundred years since enabled the English
to lay the foundations of their power in that country so broadly and so
deep that nothing short of a moral convulsion can uproot them, though the
edifice erected upon them may be rudely shaken by internal revolts, or by
the consequences of external wars. Fifty years sooner or forty years later,
the English could have made no impression on India as conquerors. Seventy
years before the conquest of Bengal the English traders had been plundered
by a viceroy who anticipated the tyranny of Surajah Doulah. They determined
not to submit to such exactions. They resolved upon war. But the great
Aurungzebe was then on the throne of Delhi; and though the Moghul empire
had declined somewhat from the standard set up by Akbar and maintained by
Shah Jehan, the fighting merchants were soon taught that they were but as
children in the hands of its chief. They were driven out of Bengal, and
Aurungzebe thought of expelling them from his whole empire. The punishment
of death was visited upon some of the East India Company's officers and
servants by the Moghul. This severe lesson made a deep impression on the
English. They resumed their humble position as traders on sufferance. They
never thought of conquest again. It was not until every man who had been
concerned in that business had long been in his grave, that the English
dared so much as to think of making another war. Though the Moghuls
rapidly became powerless after the death of Aurungzebe, the blows struck
by anticipation in their behalf protected them for forty years against the
ambition of the intrusive Occidentals, and even for some time after Nadir
Shah's Persian invasion had demonstrated that their dynasty was as weak
as that of Lodi had been found when Baber came into the land. Whether the
English have been right or wrong in making themselves masters of India, it
is certain that they were forced upon the work against their own wishes and
inclinations, and in self-defence. The very expedition which Clive made use
of to effect the subjugation of Bengal had been undertaken on defensive
grounds; and so fearful was even that great man of the consequences of a
union of the forces of the Moghul with those at the command of the French
in the East, that he was at first desirous of making peace with Surajah
Doulah himself. When the arrival of reinforcements had induced him to
take a bolder course, and the destruction of that fierce viceroy had been
resolved upon, it was not until after much doubt and hesitation, and
against his original judgment, that that course of action was entered upon
which ended in the victory of Plassey. He knew the risk that was run in
fighting a pitched battle against a force nearly twenty times larger than
his own; and had the viceroy been either a respectable ruler or a good
soldier, the English, humanly speaking, must have then failed as signally
as their predecessors of 1687; but as he was as destitute of humanity as of
courage and skill, and could neither animate his followers by affection nor
command them by force of character, he was utterly routed. Not six hundred
men fell in the battle of Plassey, on both sides, and most of these were on
the side of the vanquished. Seldom has it happened that so mighty a change
has been effected with so little slaughter. One is reminded of the battles
fought by the few Romans under Lucullus against the entire array of the
Armenian monarchy.
Had circumstances not led to the display of British power at the time when
great prizes were sure to follow even from minor exertions, England never
could have become mistress of India. Had the English remained traders
forty years longer,--or even for half that time, perhaps,--they would have
encountered very different foes from those which they overthrew so easily
when forced to fight for property and life. India was breaking up in 1757,
and the process of reformation was about to begin. Had not the English been
brought into the vast arena, either a number of powerful monarchies would
have been formed, or the whole country would have passed under some new
dynasty, which would have revived the power of the state with that rapidity
which is so often exhibited in the East, when new and able men assume the
reins of government. Hyder Ali might have made himself the master of all
India, had it been his lot to contend only with native rulers and native
races. Had this been the course of events, and had circumstances brought
him into collision with the East India Company when he had made himself the
Moghul's successor, can it be believed that he would have experienced any
more difficulty in dealing with them than was found by Aurungzebe? We know
that the English found in Hyder a very able foe, with but limited means
at his disposal, and when they were masters of half the country, and had
been almost uniformly victorious. Can it be supposed that they could have
effected anything against all India, ruled by so consummate a statesman as
Hyder Ali? There seems to have been something providential in the events
that caused them to pass from traders to conquerors, at the only time when
such a transition could be made either with safety or success. That their
career of conquest has been occasionally marked by injustice and crime
proves nothing against the position that they may have been appointed by
a higher Power to work out a revolution in the East. "The dark mystery
of the moral world," in this as in a thousand other instances, remains
impenetrable. Heaven selects its own agents, and all that it becomes us to
say concerning such relations is, that they do not appear in all cases to
be made from among men specially entitled to the honors of canonisation.
The English have frequently been denounced, not only for their errors in
governing India, but for their conquest of that country. The French have
been especially fervent in these denunciations. It is a fact, however, that
the French saw nothing wrong in subduing India until all their own plans
to that end had utterly failed. The device originated with them, but the
English applied it. Dupleix planned for France what Clive executed for
England. The French adhered to their plans for years, and it was not until
a very recent period that the last remnants of their influence disappeared
from India. They saw not the evil involved in the overthrowing of virtuous
nabobs and venerable viceroys, until time and a whole train of events had
proved that England alone was competent to the full performance of the
work. The English in India have not, on all occasions, been saints; but we
are unable to see what moral right the French have to reproach them with
the enumeration of their errors. In the East, France was "overcrowed" by
England; and that is the sole and the very simple cause of the vast amount
of "sympathy" which the French have bestowed upon suffering Indian princes,
whose condition in no sense would have been improved, had fortune favored
the Gallic race, instead of the Saxon, in their struggle for supremacy in
Hindostan.
The prejudice that exists in many minds against England, concerning her
Indian empire, is in no small degree owing to something of which she is
justly proud; to the talent that characterized the prosecution--his friends
called it the persecution--of Warren Hastings. No man, not even Strafford,
when borne down by the whole weight of the country party in the first
session of the Long Parliament, ever encountered so able a host as that
which set itself to effect the ruin of the great British proconsul. He
was acquitted by his judges, but he stands blackened forever on the most
magnificent pages of his country's eloquence. Burke's speeches are yet read
everywhere; and to Burke, Hastings was the principle of Evil incarnate.
The two great divisions of civilized mankind hold Burke in lasting
remembrance,--the liberals for his labors in the early part of his life,
and the conservatives for his writings against the French Revolution; and
it is impossible to admire him without condemning Hastings. It is equally
impossible to condemn Hastings without condemning the nation for which he
performed deeds so vicious and cruel, and which formally acquitted him of
each and every charge preferred by Burke and his immortal associates, in
the name of the Commons of England. Even those charges were the result, not
of conscientious conviction on the part of the Commons, but of Mr. Pitt's
determination to crush one who promised to become a formidable political
rival. The arguments and eloquence of such men as Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and
Grey, constitute a splendid armory, from which the enemies of England can
forever draw admirable weapons with which to assail her Indian policy; and
they have not been backward in making use of this mighty advantage. No one,
who has ever sought to defend England's course in the East, but has had
experience of the difficulties which those great men have placed in the
way of a successful vindication of their country's cause. Either they were
honest, or they were not. If honest, what shall be said of the nation which
would not listen to them? If dishonest, what are we to think of men, the
first statesmen of their age, who, for mere party ends, had persecuted to
his ruin one who was in no respect their inferior, and who had saved India
for England? Our own opinion is that Burke and his associates were honest,
and that the only dishonest men in the prosecuting party were William Pitt
and Henry Dundas,--the first being chief minister, and the other second
only to the premier himself in the government. Pitt talked much of his
conscience, after having absolved Hastings on the very worst of the charges
that had been preferred against him, and then condemned him on lighter
charges. When Roger Wildrake heard the landlord at Windsor talk much of
his conscience, he was led to observe that his measures were less and his
charges larger than they had been in those earlier times when sin was
allowed to take its natural course. It was so with Pitt, who was guilty
of gross injustice, according to his own arguments, and then threw his
conscience into the scale against the accused party, when he saw that
that party's acquittal would probably lead to his being converted into a
successful political rival. Hastings deserved severe censure, and no light
punishment, for some of his deeds; but not even Burke would have condemned
him to the slow torture to which he was sentenced by one who believed
him to be innocent, and the object of party persecution. But the nice
distinctions which Englishmen and Americans can make in the cause and
course of this famous state trial, because they live in the very atmosphere
of party politics, are utterly unknown to the men of continental Europe;
and until the end of time, England will be condemned out of the mouths of
her most brilliant sons, whenever her foes--and she is too great not to
have many and bitter foes--shall discuss the history of her Indian empire.
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