The Continental Monthly, Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 | Page 7

in the twilight of time have been boldly
declared to be the prototypes of others, now themselves changing into
new forms, and we, unconsciously, like the old Hebrew in Heine's Italy,
repeat curses over the ancient graves of long-departed foes--ignorant

that those curses were long since fulfilled by the unconquerable and
terrible laws which ever hurry us onward and upward, from everlasting
to everlasting, from the first Darkness to the infinite word of Light.
The assumption that mankind always has been and will be the same,
involves the conclusion that the elements of slavery and scoundrelism,
of suffering and of disorder, are immutable in essence and in proportion,
and that human exertion wastes itself in vain when it aspires to
anything save a rank in the upper ten millions. As for the mass,--'tis a
great pity,--mais, que voulez vous? It is the fortune of life's war; and
then who knows? Perhaps they are as happy in their sphere as anybody.
Only see how they dance! And then they drink--gracious goodness,
how they swig it off! the gay creatures! Oh,'tis a very fine world,
gentlemen, especially if you whitewash it well, and keep up a plenty of
Potemkin card cottages along the road which winds through the
wilderness. But above all--never forget that they--drink.
It was well enough for a stormy past, but it may not be so well for the
future, that man is prone to hero-worship. Under circumstances,
varying, however, immensely, be it observed, humanity has produced
Menus, Confuciuses, Platos, Ciceros, Sidneys, Spinozas, scholars and
gentlemen, and the ordinary student, seeing them all through a Claude
Lorraine glass of modern tinting, thinks them on the whole wonderfully
like himself. Horace chaffs with Cæsar and Mæcenas, Martial quizzes
the world and the reader very much as modern club-men and poets
would do. It is very convenient to forget how much they have been
imitated; still more so to ignore that in both are stores of recondite
mode and feeling as yet unpenetrated by any scholar of these days. You
think, my brave Artium Baccalaureus, that you feel all that Hafiz
felt,--surely he toped and bussed like a good fellow of all times,--and
yet for seven centuries the most embracing of scholars have folioed and
disputed over the real meaning of that Song of Solomon which is now
first beginning to be understood from Hafiz. Man, I tell you that in the
old morning of history there were races whose life-blood glowed hotter
than ever yours did, with a burning faith, such as you never felt, that all
which you now believe to be most execrably infamous was intensely
holy. Your wisest scholars lose themselves in trying to unthread the

mazes and mysteries of those incomprehensible depths of diabolical
worship and intertwined beauty and honor, now known only from
trebly diminished mythologic reflection. Perhaps some of those
undecipherable hieroglyphs of the East are not so unintelligible to you
now as they would be if translated. Do you, for that matter, fully
understand why a Hindu yoghi torments himself for thirty years? I
observe that the great majority of our good, kind missionaries have no
glimmering of an idea why it is done. Brother Zeal, of the first part,
says it is superstition. Father Squeal, of the second part, says it is the
devil. Very good indeed--so far as it goes.
But look to later ages, and see whether man has been so strikingly
similar to us of the present day. There are manias and mysteries of the
Middle Ages whose history is smothered in darkness; lost to us out of
sheer incapacity to be understood from any modern standpoint of sense
or feeling whatever. What do you make out of that crusade of scores of
thousands of unarmed, delirious Christians, who started eastward to
redeem the holy sepulchre; all their faith and hope of safety being in a
goose and a pig which they bore with them? And they all died, those
earnest Goose-and-Pigites; died in untold misery and murder--unhappy
'superstition again.' That bolt is soon shot; but I have my misgivings
whether it reaches the mark.
Or what do you make of untold and unutterable horrors, or crimes, as
they were deemed, which to us seem bewildering nonsense? What of
were-wolf manias, of districts made horrible by nightmare and
vampyreism, urged to literal and incredible reality; of abominations
which no modern wickedness dare hint at, but which raged like
epidemics? Or what of the Sieur de Gilles, with his thousand or two of
girl children elaborately tortured to death--and he a type and not a
sporad?
'But,' we are told, 'men would do all this over again, if they dared. The
vice is all here, safely housed away snug as ever, only waiting its time.'
I grant it--just as I grant that