The Continental Monthly, Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 | Page 8

spice-powder of the old alchemist Mutio di Frangipani has risen from the recipes of the Middle Ages into modern fashion, rest assured that it will never work wonder more, save in connection with bright eyes, rustling fans, and Valenciennes-edged pocket-handkerchiefs.
To the student to whom all battles of the past are not like the dishes of certain Southern hotels,--all served in the same gravy, possessing the same agrarian, muttony flavor,--and to whom Zoroaster and Spurgeon are not merely clergymen, differing only in dress and language, it must appear plain enough that as there are now on earth races physically differing from one another almost as much as from other mammalia, just so in the course of ages have been developed in the same single descent even greater mental and moral differences. In fact, when we remember that the same lust, avarice, ambition and warfare have mingled with our blood at all times, it becomes wonderful when we reflect how marvelously the mind has been molded to such myriad varieties. It has in full consciousness of its power sacrificed all earthly happiness, toiled and died for rulers, for ideas of which it had no idea, for vague war-cries--it has existed only for sensuality, or beauty, or food--for religion or for ostentation, according to different climate or age or soil--it has groveled for ages in misery or roamed free and proud--and between the degraded slave and the proud free-man there is, as I think, a very terrible difference indeed. But, quitting the vast variety of mental developments, faiths, and feelings, let us cast a glance on the general change which history has witnessed in man's physical condition.
First let us premise with certain general laws, that intelligence, physical well-being and freedom have a decided affinity, and are most copiously unfolded in manufacturing countries. That as labor is developed and elaborated, it becomes allied to science and art, and, in a word, 'respectable.' That as these advance it becomes constantly more evident that he who strives to accomplish his labor in the most perfect manner is continually becoming a man of science and an artist, and rising to a well deserved intellectual equality with the 'higher classes.' That, in fine, the tendency of industry--which in this age is only a synonym for the action of capital--is towards Republicanism.
I have already remarked to the effect that so far as the welfare of man in the future is concerned, it is to be regretted that hero-worship should still influence men so largely. When Mr. Smith runs over his scanty historical knowledge, things do not seem so bad on the whole with anybody. Mark Antony and Coriolanus and Francis the First, the plumed barons of the feudal days, and their embroidered and belaced ladies, with the whole merrie companie of pages, fools, troubadours and heralds, seem on the whole to have had fine times of it. 'Bloweth seed and groweth mead'--assuredly the sun shone then as now, people wassailed or wailed--oh, 'twas pretty much the same in all ages. But when we come to the most unmistakable facts, all this sheen of gilded armor and egret-plumes, of gemmed goblet and altar-lace, lute, mandolin, and lay, is cloth of gold over the ghastly, shrunken limbs of a leper. Pass over the glory of knight and dame and see how it was then with the multitude--with the millions. Almost at the first glance, in fact, your knight and dame turn out unwashed, scantily linened, living amid scents and sounds which no modern private soldier would endure. The venison pasty of high festival becomes the daily pork and mustard of home life, with such an array of scrofula and cutaneous disorders as are horrible to think on. The household books of expenditure of the noblest families in England in the fourteenth century scarcely show as much linen used annually among a hundred people as would serve now for one mechanic. People of the highest rank slept naked to save night-clothes. If in Flanders or in Italy we find during their high prosperity some exceptions to this knightly and chivalric piggishness and penury, it is none the less true that they outbalanced it by sundry and peculiar vices. And yet, bad as life then was, it is impossible for us to guess at, or realize, all its foulness. We know it mostly from poets, and the poet and historian, like the artist, have in every age lived quite out of the actual, and with all the tact of repulsion avoided common facts.
But it is with the multitude that truth and common sense and humanity have to deal. And here, whether in Greece or in England, in Italy or in France, lies in the past an abyss of horror whose greatest wonder is, that we, who are only some three centuries distant, know