The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

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And yet, notwithstanding the imaginary reproaches of our great literary
church-father, the most preciously endowed minds are still toiling in
letters. The sad and tortured devotion of genius still works itself out
in them. Writing is now a marvellous craft and industry. The books which
last, the books of a season, the quarterlies, monthlies, weeklies,
dailies, and even the hourlies, are among the institutions of its
fostering. Nor should that vehicle, partly of intelligence, but chiefly
of sentiment, the postal system, be unmentioned, which men and women
both patronize, each after their kind. Altogether, perhaps, in some way
or other, seven-eighths of the life of man is taken up by the Cadmean
Art. The whole fair domain of learning belongs to it; for nowhere now,
in garden, grove, or Stoical Porch, with only the living voices of man
and Nature, do students acquaint themselves with the joyous solemnities,
the mysterious certainties of thought. The mind lives in a universe of
type. There is no other art in which so desperate adventures are made.
Indeed, the normal mental state of the abundant writer is a marvellous
phenomenon. The literary faculty is born of the marriage of chronic
desperation with chronic trust. This may account in part for that
peculiar condition of mind which is both engendered and required by
abundant writing. A bold abandon, a desperate guidance, a thoughtless
ratiocination, a mechanical swaying of rhetoric, are the grounds of
dissertation. A pause for a few days, a visit to the country, anything
that would seem designed to restore the mind to its normal state,
destroys the faculty. The weary penman, who wishes his chaotic head
could be relieved by being transformed even as by Puck, knows that very
whirling chaos is the condition of his multitudinous periods. It seems
as if some special sluices of the soul must be opened to force the pen.
One man, on returning to his desk from a four weeks' vacation, took up
an unfinished article which he had left, and marvelled that such writing
should ever have proceeded from him. He could hardly understand it,
still less could he conceive of the mental process by which he had once
created it. That process was a sort of madness, and the discipline of
newspapers is inflicting it alike upon writers and readers.
Demoralization is the result of a life-long devotion to the maddening
rumors of the day. It takes many a day to recall that fierce caprice, as
of an Oriental despot, with which he watches the tiger-fights of ideas,
and strikes off periods, as the tyrant strikes off heads.

And while no other art commands so universal homage, no other is so
purely artificial, so absolutely unsymbolical. The untutored mind sees
nothing in a printed column. A library has no natural impressiveness. It
is not in the shape of anything in this world of infinite beauty. The
barbarians of Omri destroyed one without a qualm. They have occupied
apartments in seraglios, but the beauties have never feared them as
rivals. Of all human employments, writing is the farthest removed from
any touch of Nature. It is at most a symbolism twice dead and buried.
The poetry in it lies back of a double hypothesis. Supposing the
original sounds to have once been imitations of the voices of Nature,
those sounds have now run completely away from what they once
represented; and supposing that letters were once imitations of natural
signs, they have long since lost the resemblance, and have become
independent entities. Whatever else is done by human artifice has in it
some relic of Nature, some touch of life. Painting copies to the eye,
music charms the ear, and all the useful arts have something of the
aboriginal way of doing things about them. Even speech has a living
grace and power, by the play of the voice and eye, and by the billowy
flushes of the countenance. Mental energy culminates in its modulations,
while the finest physical features combine to make them a consummate
work of art. But all the musical, ocular, and facial beauties are absent
from writing. The savage knows, or could quickly guess, the use of the
brush or chisel, the shuttle or locomotive, but not of the pen. Writing
is the only dead art, the only institute of either gods or men so
artificial that the natural mind can discover nothing significant in it.

For instance, take one of the disputed statements of the Nicene Creed,
examine it by the nicest powers of the senses, study it upwards,
downwards, and crosswise, experiment to learn if it has any mysterious
chemical forces in it, consider its figures in relation to any
astrological positions, to any natural signs of whirlwinds, tempests,
plagues, famine, or earthquakes, try long to discover some hidden
symbolism in it, and confess finally that no man unregenerate to
letters, by any _a priori_ or empirical knowledge, could have at all
suspected that a bit of dirty parchment, with an ecclesiastical scrawl
upon it, would have power to drive the currents of history, inspire
great national passions, and impel the wars and direct the ideas of an
epoch. The conflicts of the iconoclasts can be understood even by a
child in its first meditations over a picture-book; hieroglyphics may
represent or suggest their objects by some natural association; but the
literary scrawl has a meaning only to the initiated. A book is the
prince of witch-work. Everything is contained in it; but even a superior
intelligence would have to go to school to get the key to its mysterious
treasures.

And as the art is thus removed from Nature, so its devotees withdraw
themselves from life. Of no other class so truly as of writers can it be
said that they sacrifice the real to the ideal, life to fame. They
conquer the world by renouncing it. Its fleeting pleasures, its
enchantment of business or listlessness, its social enjoyments, the
vexations and health-giving bliss of domestic life, and all wandering
tastes, must be forsaken. A power which pierces, and an ambition which
enjoys the future, accepts the martyrdom of the present. They feel
loneliness in their own age, while with universal survey viewing the
beacon-lights of history across the peaks of generations. Their seat of
life is the literary faculty, and they prune and torture themselves only
to maintain in this the highest intensity and capacity. They are in some
sort rebels battling against time, not the humble well-doer content
simply to live and bless God. Between them and living men there is the
difference which exists between analytical and geometrical mathematics:
the former has to do with signs, the latter with realities. The former
contains the laws of the physical world, but a man may know and use
them like an adept, and yet be ignorant of physics. He may know all
there is of algebra, without seeing that the universe is masked in it.
The signs would be not means, but ultimates to it. So a writer may never
penetrate through the veil of language to the realities behind,--may
know only the mechanism, and not the spirit of learning and literature.
His mind is then skeleton-like,--his thought is the shadow of a shade.

And yet is not life greater than art? Why transform real ideas and
sentiments into typographical fossils? Why have we forgotten the theory
of human life as a divine vegetation? Why not make our hearts the focus
of the lights which we strive to catch in books? Why should the wealthy
passivity of the Oriental genius be so little known among us? Why
conceive of success only as an outward fruit plucked by conscious
struggle? Banish books, banish reading, and how much time and strength
would be improvised in which to benefit each other! We might become
ourselves embodiments of all the truth and beauty and goodness now
stagnant in libraries, and might spread their aroma through the social
atmosphere. The dynamics would supplant the mechanics of the soul. In
the volume of life the literary man knows only the indexes; but he would
then be introduced to the radiant, fragrant, and buoyant contents, to
the beauty and the mystery, to the great passions and long
contemplations. The eternal spicy breeze would transform the leaden
atmosphere of his thought. An outlaw of the universe for his sins, he
would then be restored to the realities of the heart and mind. He would
then for the first time discover the difference between skill and
knowledge. Readers and writers would then be succeeded by human beings.
The golden ante-Cadmean age would come again. Literary sanctity having
become a tradition, there would be an end of its pretentious
counterfeits. The alphabet, decrepit with its long and vast labors,
would at last be released. The whole army of writers would take their
place among the curiosities of history. The Alexandrian thaumaturgists,
the Byzantine historians, the scholastic dialecticians, the serial
novelists, and the daily dissertationists, strung together, would make a
glittering chain of monomaniacs. Social life is a mutual joy; reading
may be rarely indulged without danger to sanity; but writing, unless the
man have genius, is but creating new rubbish, the nucleus of new deltas
of obstruction, till the river of life shall lose its way to the ocean,
and the Infinite be shut out altogether. The old bibliopole De Bury
flattered himself that he admired wisdom because it purchaseth such vast
delight. He had in mind the luxury of reading, and did not think that in
this world wisdom always hides its head or goes to the stake. Even if
literature were not to be abolished altogether, it is safe to think that
the world would be better off, if there were less writing. There should
be a division of labor; some should read and write, as some ordain laws,
create philosophies, tend shops, make chairs,--but why should everybody
dabble with literature?

In all hypotheses as to the more remote destiny of literature, we can
but be struck by the precariousness of its existence. It is art
imperishable and ever-changing material. A fire once extinguished
perhaps half the world's literature, and struck thousands from the list
of authors. The forgetfulness of mankind in the mysterious mediaeval age;
diminished by more than half the world of books. There are many books
which surely, and either rapidly or slowly, resolve themselves into the
elements, but the process cannot be seen. A whole army of books perishes
with every revolution of taste. And yet the amount of current writing
surpasses the strength of man's intellect or the length of his years.
Surely, the press is very much of a nuisance as well as a blessing. Its
products are getting very much in the way, and the impulse of the world
is too strong to allow itself to be clogged by them. Something must be
done.

Among possibilities, let the following be suggested. The world may
perhaps return from unsymbolical to symbolical writing. There is a
science older than anything but shadowy traditions, and immemorially
linked with religion, poetry, and art. It is the almost forgotten
science of symbolism. Symbols, as compared with letters, are a higher
and more potent style of expression. They are the earthly shadows of
eternal truth. It is the language of the fine arts, of painting,
sculpture, the stage,--it will be the language of life, when, rising in
the scale of being, we shall return from the dead sea of literature to
the more energetic algebra of symbolical meanings. In these, the forms
of the reason and of Nature come into visible harmony; the hopes of man
find their shadows in the struggles of the universe, and the lights of
the spirit cluster myriad-fold around the objects of Nature. Let
Phoenician language be vivified into the universal poetry of
symbolism, and thought would then become life, instead of the ghost of
life. Current literature would give way to a new and true mythology;
authors and editors would suffer a transformation similar to that of
type-setters into artists, and of newsboys into connoisseurs; and the
figures of a noble humanity would fill the public mind, no longer
confused and degraded by the perpetual vision of leaden and unsuggestive
letters. From that time prose would be extinct, and poetry would be all
in all. History would renew its youth,--would find, after the struggles,
attainments, and developments of its manhood, that there is after all
nothing wiser in thought, no truer law, than the instincts of childhood.

Or, again: improvements have already been made which promise as an
ultimate result to transform the largest library into a miniature for
the pocket. Stenography may yet reach to a degree that it will be able
to write folios on the thumb-nail, and dispose all the literature of the
world comfortably in a gentleman's pocket, before he sets out on his
summer excursion. The contents of vast tomes, bodies of history and of
science, may be so reduced that the eye can cover them at a glance, and
the process of reading be as rapid as that of thought The mind, instead
of wearying of slow perusal, would have to spur its lightning to keep
pace with the eye. Many books are born of mere vagueness and cloudiness
of thought. All such, when thus compressed into their reality, would go
out in eternal night. There is something overpowering in the conception
of the high pressure to which life in all its departments may some time
be brought. The mechanism of reading and writing would be slight. The
mental labor of comprehending would be immense. The mind, instead of
being subdued, would be spurred, by what it works in. We are now cramped
and checked by the overwhelming amount of linguistic red-tape in which
we have to operate; but then men, freed from these bonds, the husks of
thought almost all thrown away, would be purer, live faster, do greater,
die younger. What magnificent physical improvements, we may suppose,
will then aid the powers of the soul! The old world would then be
subdued, nevermore to strike a blow at its lithe conqueror, man. The
department of the newspaper, with inconceivable photographic and
telegraphic resources, may then be extended to the solar or the stellar
systems, and the turmoils of all creation would be reported at our
breakfast-tables. Men would rise every morning to take an intelligible
account of the aspects and the prospects of the universe.

Or, once more: shall we venture into the speculative domain of the
philosophy of history, and give the rationale of our times? What is the
divine mission of the great marvel of our age, namely, its periodical
and fugitive literature? The intellectual and moral world of mankind
reforms itself at the outset of new civilizations, as Nature reforms
itself at every new geological epoch. The first step toward a reform, as
toward a crystallization, is a solution. There was a solvent period
between the unknown Orient and the greatness of Greece, between the
Classic and the Middle Ages,--and now humanity is again solvent, in the
transition from the traditions which issued out of feudalism to the
novelty of democratic crystallization. But as the youth of all animals
is prolonged in proportion to their dignity in the scale of being, so is
it with the children of history. Destiny is the longest-lived of all
things. We are not going to accomplish it all at once. We have got to
fight for it, to endure the newspapers in behalf of it. We are in a
place where gravitation changing goes the other way. For the first time,
all reigning ideas now find their focus in the popular mind. The giant
touches the earth to recover his strength. History returns to the
people. After two thousand years, popular intelligence is again to be
revived. And under what new conditions? We live in a telescopic,
microscopic, telegraphic universe, all the elements of which are brought
together under the combined operation of fire and water, as erst, in
primitive Nature, vulcanic and plutonic forces struggled together in the
face of heaven and hell to form the earth. The long ranges of history
have left with us one definite idea: it is that of progress, the
intellectual passion of our time. All our science demonstrates it, all
our poetry sings it. Democracy is the last term of political progress.
Popular intelligence and virtue are the conditions of democracy. To
produce these is the mission of periodical literature. The vast
complexities of the world, all knowledge and all purpose, are being
reduced in the crucible of the popular mind to a common product.
Knowledge lives neither in libraries nor in rare minds, but in the
general heart. Great men are already mythical, and great ideas are
admitted only so far as we, the people, can see something in them. By no
great books or long treatises, but by a ceaseless flow of brevities and
repetitions, is the pulverized thought of the world wrought into the
soul. It is amazing how many significant passages in history and in
literature are reproduced in the essays of magazines and the leaders of
newspapers by allusion and illustration, and by constant iteration
beaten into the heads of the people. The popular mind is now feeding
upon and deriving tone from the best things that literary commerce can
produce from the whole world, past and present. There is no finer
example of the popularization of science than Agassiz addressing the
American people through the columns of a monthly magazine. Of the
popular heart which used to rumble only about once in a century the
newspapers are now the daily organs. They are creating an organic
general mind, the soil for future grand ideas and institutes. As the
soul reaches a higher stage in its destiny than ever before, the
scaffolding by which it has risen is to be thrown aside. The quality of
libraries is to be transferred to the soul. Spiritual life is now to
exert its influence directly, without the mechanism of letters,--is
going to exert itself through the social atmosphere,--and all history
and thought are to be perpetuated and to grow, not in books, but in
minds.

And yet, though we thus justify contemporary writing, we can but think,
that, after long ages of piecemeal and _bon-mot_ literature, we shall at
length return to serious studies, vast syntheses, great works. The
nebulous world of letters shall be again concentred into stars. The
epoch of the printing-press has run itself nearly through; but a new
epoch and a new art shall arise, by which the achievements and the
succession of genius shall be perpetuated.

THE BRIDGE OF CLOUD.

Burn, O evening hearth, and waken
Pleasant visions, as of old!
Though the house by winds be shaken,
Safe I keep this room of gold!

Ah, no longer wizard Fancy
Builds its castles in the air,
Luring me by necromancy
Up the never-ending stair!

But, instead, it builds me bridges
Over many a dark ravine,
Where beneath the gusty ridges
Cataracts dash and roar unseen.

And I cross them, little heeding
Blast of wind or torrent's roar,
As I follow the receding
Footsteps that have gone before.

Nought avails the imploring gesture,
Nought avails the cry of pain!
When I touch the flying vesture,
'Tis the gray robe of the rain.

Baffled I return, and, leaning
O'er the parapets of cloud,
Watch the mist that intervening
Wraps the valley in its shroud.

And the sounds of life ascending
Faintly, vaguely, meet the ear,
Murmur of bells and voices blending
With the rush of waters near.

Well I know what there lies hidden,
Every tower and town and farm,
And again the land forbidden
Reassumes its vanished charm.

Well I know the secret places,
And the nests in hedge and tree;
At what doors are friendly faces,
In what hearts a thought of me.

Through the mist and darkness sinking,
Blown by wind and beaten by shower,
Down I fling the thought I'm thinking,
Down I toss this Alpine flower.

THE ELECTRIC GIRL OF LA PERRIERE.

Eighteen years ago there occurred in one of the provinces of
France a case of an abnormal character, marked by extraordinary
phenomena,--interesting to the scientific, and especially to the medical
world. The authentic documents in this case are rare; and though the
case itself is often alluded to, its details have never, so far as I
know, been reproduced from these documents in an English dress, or
presented in trustworthy form to the American public. It occurred in the
Commune of La Perriere, situated in the Department of Orne, in January,
1846.

It was critically observed, at the time, by Dr. Verger, an intelligent
physician of Bellesme, a neighboring town. He details the result of his
observations in two letters addressed to the "Journal du
Magnetisme,"--one dated January 29, the other February 2, 1846.[1] The
editor of that journal, M. Hebert, (de Garny,) himself repaired to the
spot, made the most minute researches into the matter, and gives us the
result of his observations and inquiries in a report, also published in
the "Journal du Magnetisme."[2] A neighboring proprietor, M. Jules de
Faremont, followed up the case with care, from its very commencement,
and has left on record a detailed report of his observations.[3]
Finally, after the girl's arrival in Paris, Dr. Tanchon carefully
studied the phenomena, and has given the results in a pamphlet published
at the time.[4] He it was, also, who addressed to M. Arago a note on the
subject, which was laid before the Academy by that distinguished man, at
their session of February 16, 1846.[5] Arago himself had then seen the
girl only a few minutes, but even in that brief time had verified a
portion of the phenomena.

Dr. Tanchon's pamphlet contains fourteen letters, chiefly from medical
men and persons holding official positions in Bellesme, Mortagne, and
other neighboring towns, given at length and signed by the writers, all
of whom examined the girl, while yet in the country. Their testimony is
so circumstantial, so strictly concurrent in regard to all the main
phenomena, and so clearly indicative of the care and discrimination with
which the various observations were made, that there seems no good
reason, unless we find such in the nature of the phenomena themselves,
for refusing to give it credence. Several of the writers expressly
affirm the accuracy of M. Hebert's narrative, and all of them, by the
details they furnish, corroborate it. Mainly from that narrative, aided
by some of the observations of M. de Faremont, I compile the following
brief statement of the chief facts in this remarkable case.

Angelique Cottin, a peasant-girl fourteen years of age, robust and in
good health, but very imperfectly educated and of limited intelligence,
lived with her aunt, the widow Loisnard, in a cottage with an earthen
floor, close to the Chateau of Monti-Mer, inhabited by its proprietor,
already mentioned, M. de Faremont.

The weather, for eight days previous to the fifteenth of January, 1846,
had been heavy and tempestuous, with constantly recurring storms of
thunder and lightning. The atmosphere was charged with electricity.

On the evening of that fifteenth of January, at eight o'clock, while
Angelique, in company with three other young girls, was at work, as
usual, in her aunt's cottage, weaving ladies' silk-net gloves, the
frame, made of rough oak and weighing about twenty-five pounds, to
which was attached the end of the warp, was upset, and the candlestick
on it thrown to the ground. The girls, blaming each other as having
caused the accident, replaced the frame, relighted the candle, and went
to work again. A second time the frame was thrown down. Thereupon the
children ran away, afraid of a thing so strange, and, with the
superstition common to their class, dreaming of witchcraft. The
neighbors, attracted by their cries, refused to credit their story. So,
returning, but with fear and trembling, two of them at first, afterwards
a third, resumed their occupation, without the recurrence of the
alarming phenomenon. But as soon as the girl Cottin, imitating her
companions, had touched her warp, the frame was agitated again, moved
about, was upset, and then thrown violently back. The girl was drawn
irresistibly after it; but as soon as she touched it, it moved still
farther away.

Upon this the aunt, thinking, like the children, that there must be
sorcery in the case, took her niece to the parsonage of La Perriere,
demanding exorcism. The curate, an enlightened man, at first laughed at
her story; but the girl had brought her glove with her, and fixing it to
a kitchen-chair, the chair, like the frame, was repulsed and upset,
without being touched by Angelique. The curate then sat down on the
chair; but both chair and he were thrown to the ground in like manner.
Thus practically convinced of the reality of a phenomenon which he could
not explain, the good man reassured the terrified aunt by telling her it
was some bodily disease, and, very sensibly, referred the matter to the
physicians.

The next day the aunt related the above particulars to M. de Faremont;
but for the time the effects had ceased. Three days later, at nine
o'clock, that gentleman was summoned to the cottage, where he verified
the fact that the frame was at intervals thrown back from Angelique with
such force, that, when exerting his utmost strength and holding it with
both hands, he was unable to prevent its motion. He observed that the
motion was partly rotary, from left to right. He particularly noticed
that the girl's feet did not touch the frame, and that, when it was
repulsed, she seemed drawn irresistibly after it, stretching out her
hands, as if instinctively, towards it. It was afterwards remarked,
that, when a piece of furniture or other object, thus acted upon by
Angelique, was too heavy to be moved, she herself was thrown back, as if
by the reaction of the force upon her person.

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