Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

They filled our eyes, noses, mouths, and ears, and made the snow quite black. Mr. Whymper, however, prepared his instruments, and was at work during the whole time we were on the summit. He did not once sit down to rest from the time we left the tent in the morning until the time that we returned to it in the evening. He took the height of the mountain with his barometers, and told us that the observations he now made agreed very well with those which he made upon the first ascent of Chimborazo on January 4, 1880. At 2.30 P.M. we left the summit, and came down as fast as we could, only stopping a little from time to time to allow Mr. Whymper to collect rocks at various places. We arrived again at the tent at 5.10 P.M., and found it covered with the ashes from Cotopaxi, which were still falling, and filled the whole valleys with a thick cloud. On the 4th of July we continued the tour of the mountain and arrived at night close to Tortorillas; and on the 6th we returned to Riobamba, having had a most successful journey, without accident of

any sort whatever-not only having made the tour and the second ascent of Chimborazo, but also having made en route on the 29th of June, the first ascent of Carihuairazo.-FRANCISCO JR. CAMPANA, Guayaquil, July 19, 1880. Declared and subscribed at Guayaquil, this 20th day of July, 1880, before me, GEORGE CHAMBERS, H.B. M.'s Consul, Guayaquil."

The collections made on this journey are numerous and interesting. There is a series of five hundred pieces in pottery stone, and metal, illustrative of the arts of the ancient rulers of Peru-the Incas. Insects and plants have been collected at greater heights than any one has before obtained them in the two Americas. Beetles were several times found among the rocks on the very summits of the mountains, at heights greater than the summit of Mont Blanc. Butterflies were captured as high as 16,000 feet, and flies even higher. Birds were scarce at these great altitudes, and the condor, which is ranked among the highest of flyers, was generally conspicuous by its absence.-Leisure Hour.

THE TRACTARIANS.

BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A.

MY DEAR- -: I have told you that the Tractarians' object, so far as they understood themselves, was to raise up the Church to resist the revolutionary tendency which they conceived to have set in with the Reform Bill; that the effect of their work was to break the back of the resisting power which the Church already possessed and to feed the fire which they hoped to extinguish. I go on to explain in detail what I mean.

When I went into residence at Oxford my brother was no longer alive. He had been abroad almost entirely for three or four years before his death; and although the atmosphere at home was full of the new opinions, and I heard startling things from time to time on Transubstantiation and such-like, he had little to do with my direct education. I had read at my own discretion in my father's library. My own small judgment had been satisfied by Newton

that the Pope was the Man of Sin; and Davison, to whom I was sent for a correction, had not removed the impression.

I knew the Fairy Queen pretty well, and had understood who and what was meant by the False Duessa. I read Sharon Turner carefully, and also Gibbon, and had thus unconsciously been swallowing antidotes to Catholic doctrine. Of evangelical books properly so-called I had seen nothing. Dissent in all its forms was a crime in our house. My father was too solid a man to be carried off his feet by the Oxford enthusiasm, but he was a High Churchman of the old school. The Church itself he regarded as part of the constitution; and the Prayer-book as an Act of Parliament which only folly or disloyalty could quarrel with. My brother's notion of the evangelical clergy in the Establishment must have been taken from some unfortunate specimens. He used to

speak of them as "fellows who turned up the whites of their eyes, and said Lawd." We had no copy of the "Pilgrim's Progress" in the house. I never read it till after I had grown up, and I am sorry that I did not make earlier acquaintance with it. Speculations about the Church and the Sacraments went into my head, but never much into my heart; and 1 fancy, perhaps idly, that I might have escaped some trials and some misfortunes if my spiritual imagination had been allowed food which would have agreed with it.

In my first term at the university the controversial fires were beginning to blaze, but not as yet hotly. The authorities had not taken the alarm, but there was much talk and excitement, and neither the education nor the discipline of the place was benefited by it. The attention of the heads and tutors was called off from their proper business. The serious undergraduates divided into parties, and the measure with which they estimated one another's abilities was not knowledge or industry, but the opinions which they severally held. The neo-Catholic youths thought themselves especially clever and regarded Low Churchmen and Liberals as It was unfortunate, for the state of Oxford was crying out for reform of a different kind. The scheme of teaching for the higher class of men was essentially good; perhaps as good as it could be made, incomparably better than the universal knowledge methods which have taken its place. But the idle or dull man had no education at all. His three or four years were spent in forgetting what he had learned at school. The degree examination was got over by a memoria technica, and three months' cram with a private tutor. We did pretty much what we liked. There was much dissipation, and the whole manner of life was needlessly extravagant. We were turned loose at eighteen, pleasures tempting us on all sides, the expense of indulgence being the only obstacle; and the expense for the first year or two was kept out of sight by the eagerness of the tradesmen to give us credit. No dean or tutor ever volunteered to help our inexperience. The prices which we paid for everything was preposterous. The cost

of living might have been reduced to half what it was if the college authorities would have supplied the students on the co-operative system. But they would take no trouble, and their own charges were on the same extravagant scale. The wretched novice was an object of general plunder till he had learned how to take care of himself. I remember calculating that I could have lived at a boarding-house on contract, with every luxury which I had in college, at a reduction of fifty per cent. In all this there was room and to spare for reforming energy, and it may be said that the administration of the university was the immediate business of the leading members-a business, indeed a duty, much more immediate than the un-Protestantizing of the Church of England. But there was no leisure, there was not even a visible desire to meddle with concerns so vulgar. Famous as the Tractarian leaders were to become, their names are not connected with a single effort to improve the teaching at Oxford or to mend its manners. Behind the larger conflict which they raised, that duty was left untouched for many years; it was taken up ultimately by the despised Liberals, who have not done it well, but have at least accomplished something, and have won the credit which was left imprudently within their reach.

The state of things which I found on coming up was, thus, not favorable to the proper work of the place. In general there was far too little intercourse between the elder and the younger men. The difference of age was not really very great, but they seldom met, except in lecture-rooms. If an undergraduate now and then breakfasted with his tutor, the undergraduate was shy, and the tutor was obliged to maintain by distance and dignity of manner the superiority which he might have forfeited if he allowed himself to be easy and natural. I myself, for my brother's sake, was in some degree an exception. I saw something from the first of the men of whom the world was talking. I might have seen more, but I did not make the most of my opportunities. I wished to be a disciple. I thought I was a disciple. But somehow I could never feel in my heart that what they were about was of the importance of which it seemed to be, and

I was little more than a curious and interested spectator.

Nor, with two exceptions, were the chiefs of the movement personally impressive to me. Isaac Williams I had known as a boy. He was an early friend of my brother's, and spent a vacation or two at my father's house before I went to school. His black brilliant eyes, his genuine laugh, the skill and heartiness with which he threw himself into our childish amusements, the inexhaustible stock of stories with which he held us spell-bound for hours, had endeared him. to every one of us; and at Oxford to dine now and then with four or five others in Williams's rooms was still one of the greatest pleasures which I had. He was serious, but never painfully so; and though his thoughts ran almost entirely in theological channels, they rose out of the soil of his own mind, pure and sparkling as the water from a mountain spring. He was a poet, too, and now and then could rise into airy sweeps of really high imagination. There is an image in the "Baptistery" describing the relations between the actions of men here in this world and the eternity which lies before them, grander than the finest of Keble's, or even of Wordsworth's : "Ice-chained in its headlong tract Have I seen a cataract,

All throughout a wintry noon,
Hanging in the silent moon;
All throughout a sunbright even,
Like the sapphire gate of Heaven;
Spray and wave, and drippings froze,
For a hundred feet and more
Caught in air, there to remain
Bound in winter's crystal chain.
All above still silent sleeps,
While in the transparent deeps,
Far below the current creeps.
Thus, methought men's actions here,
In their headlong full career,
Were pasing into adamant;
Hopes and fears, love, hate, and want.
And the thoughts, like shining spray,
Which above their pathway play,
Standing in the eye of day,

In the changeless Heavenly noon, Things done here beneath the moon." Fault may be found with the execution in this passage, but the conception is poetry of the very highest order. But Williams was of quiet, unobtrusive spirit. He had neither the confidence nor the commanding nature which could have formed or led a party. The triumvirs who became a national force,

and gave its real character to the Oxford movement, were Keble, Pusey, and John Henry Newman. Newman him self was the moving power; the two others were powers also, but of inferior mental strength. Without the third they would have been known as men of genius and learning. But their personal influence would have been limited to and have ended with themselves. Pusey I knew but little, and need not do more than mention him. Of Keble I can only venture to say a few words.

64

Of

He had left residence at the time I speak of, but the "Christian Year" had made him famous. He was often in Oxford as Professor of Poetry, and I was allowed to see him. Cardinal Newman has alluded in his Apologia" to the reverence which was felt for Keble. He is now an acknowledged Saint of the English Church, admired and respected even by those who disagree with his theology. A college has been founded in commemoration of him, which bears his name; and the "Christian Year" itself has passed through more than a hundred editions, and is a household word in every family of the Anglican Episcopal communion, both at home and in America. It seems presumptuous to raise a doubt about the fitness of a recognition so marked and so universal. But the question is not of Keble's piety or genuineness of character. Both are established beyond the reach of cavil, and it would be absurd and ungracious to depreciate them. The intellectual and literary quality of his work, however, is a fair subject of criticism; and I am heretical enough to believe that, although the "Christian Year' will always hold a high place in religious poetry, it owes its extraordinary popularity to temporary and accidental causes. Books which are immediately successful, are those which catch and reflect the passing tones of opinion -all-absorbing while they last, but from their nature subject to change. The mass of men know little of other times or other ways of thinking than their own. Their minds are formed by the conditions of the present hour. Their greatest man is he who for the moment expresses most completely their own sentiments, and represents human life to them from their own point of view.

The point of view shifts, conditions alter, fashions succeed fashions, and opinions opinions; and having ourselves lost the clue, we read the writings which delighted our great-grandfathers with wonder at their taste. Each generation produces its own prophets, and great contemporary fame, except in a few extraordinary instances, is revenged by an undeserved completeness of neglect.

Very different in general is the reception of the works of true genius. A few persons appreciate them from the first. To the many they seem flavorless and colorless, deficient in all the qualities which for the moment are most admired. They pass unnoticed amid the meteors by which they are surrounded and eclipsed. But the meteors pass and they remain, and are seen gradually to be no vanishing coruscations, but new fixed stars, sources of genuine light, shining serenely forever in the intellectual sky. They link the ages one to another in a common humanity. Virgil and Horace lived nearly two thousand years ago, and belonged to a society of which the outward form and fashion have utterly perished. But Virgil and Horace do not grow old, because while society changes men continue, and we recognize in reading them that the same heart beat under the toga which we feel in our own breasts. In the Roman Empire, too, there were contemporary popularities; men who were worshipped as gods, whose lightest word was treasured as a precious jewel-on whose breath millions hung expectant, who had temples built in their honor, who in their day were a power in the world. These are gone, while Horace remains-gone, dwindled into shadows. They were men, perhaps, of real worth, though of less than their admirers supposed, and they are now laughed at and moralized over in history as detected idols. As it was then, so it is now, and always will be. More copies of Pickwick were sold in five years than of Hamlet in two hundred. Yet Hamlet will last as long as the Iliad; Pickwick, delightful as it is to us, will be unreadable to our greatgrandchildren. The most genial caricature ceases to interest when the thing caricatured has ceased to be.

I am not comparing the "Christian Year" to Pickwick, but there are

fashions in religion, as there are fashions in other things. The Puritans would have found in it the savor of the mystic Babylon. We cannot tell what English thought will be on these subjects in another century, but we may know if we are modest that it will not be identical with ours. Keble has made himself a name in history which will not be forgotten, and he will be remembered always as a person of singular piety, of inflexible integrity, and entire indifference to what is called fame or worldly advantages. He possessed besides, in an exceptional degree, the gift of expressing himself in the musical form which is called poetical. It is a form into which human thought naturally throws itself when it becomes emotional. It is the only form adequate to the expression of high intellectual passions. However powerful the intellect, however generous the heart, this particular faculty can alone convey to others what is passing in them, or give to spiritual beauty a body which is beautiful also. The poetic faculty thus secures to those who have it the admiration of every person; but it is to be remembered also that if the highest things can alone be fitly spoken of in poetry, all poetry is not necessarily of the highest things; and if it can rise to the grandest subjects, it can lend its beauty also to the most commonplace. The prima donna wields the spell of an enchantress, though the words which she utters are nonsense; and poetry can make diamonds out of glass, and gold out of ordinary metal. Keble was a representative of the devout mind of England. Religion as he grew to manhood was becoming self-conscious. It was passing out of its normal and healthy condition as the authoritative teacher of obedience to the commandments, into active anxiety about the speculative doctrines on which its graces were held to depend. Here, as in all other directions, the mental activity of the age was making itself felt. The Evangelical movement was one symptom of it. The revival of Sacramentalism was another, and found a voice in Keble. But this is all. We look in vain to him for any insight into the complicated problems of humanity, or for any sympathy with the passions which are the pulses of human

life. With the Prayer-book for his guide, he has provided us with a manual of religious sentiment corresponding to the Christian theory as taught by the Church of England Prayer-book, beautifully expressed in language which every one can understand and remember. High Churchmanship had been hitherto dry and formal; Keble carried into it the emotions of Evangelicalism, while he avoided angry collision with Evangelical opinions. Thus all parties could find much to admire in him, and little to suspect. English religious poetry was generally weak-was not, indeed, poetry at all. Here was something which in its kind was excellent; and every one who was really religious, or wished to be religious, or even outwardly and from habit professed himself and believed himself to be a Christian, found Keble's verses chime in his heart like church bells.

The "Christian Year," however, could be all this, and yet notwithstanding it could be poetry of a particular period, and not for all time. Human nature remains the same; but religion alters. Christianity has taken many forms. In the early church it had the hues of a hundred heresies. It developed in the successive councils. It has been Roman, it has been Greek, it has been Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, Arminian. It has adjusted itself to national characteristics; it has grown with the growth of general knowledge. Keble himself in his latest edition is found keeping pace with the progress of the times, and announcing that the hand as well as the heart receives the mystic presence in the Eucharist. He began to write for Church people as they were sixty years ago. The Church of England has travelled far since 1820. The Highest" rector then alive would have gone into convulsions if his curate had spoken to him about "celebrating" mass. The most advanced Biblical critic would have closed the Speaker's commentary with dismay or indignation. Changed opinions will bring change of feelings, and fresh poets to set the feelings to music. The "Christian Year" has reigned without a rival through two generations, but "the rhymes" are not of the powerful sort which will "outlive the Pyramids," and the qualities which

[ocr errors]

have given them their immediate influence will equally forbid their immortality.

The limitations of Keble's poetry were visible in a still higher degree in himself. He was not far-seeing, his mind moved in the groove of a single order of ideas. He could not place himself in the position of persons who disagreed with him, and thus he could never see the strong points of their arguments. Particular ways of thinking he dismissed as wicked, although in his summary condemnation he might be striking some of the ablest and most honest men in Europe. If he had not been Keble he would have been called (treason though it be to write the words) narrow-minded. Circumstances independent of himself could alone have raised him into a leader of a party. For the more delicate functions of such an office he was constitutionally unfit, and when appealed to for advice and assistance by disciples who were in difficulties his answers were beside the purpose. He could not give to others what he did not himself possess. Plato, in the Dialogue of the Io, describes an ingenious young Athenian searching desperately for some one who would teach him to be wise. Failing elsewhere he goes to the poets. Those he thought who could say such fine things in their verses would be able to tell him in prose what wisdom consisted in. Their conversation unfortunately proved as profitless as that of the philosophers; and the youth concluded that the poetry came from divine inspiration, and that when off the sacred tripod they were but common men. Disappointment could not chill the admiration which the inquirer would continue to feel for so venerable a teacher as Keble, but of practical light that would be useful to him he often gathered as little as the Athenian. Even as a poet Keble was subjective only. He had no variety of note, and nothing which was not in harmony with his own theological school had intellectual interest for him.

To his immediate friends he was genial, affectionate, and possibly instructive, but he had no faculty for winning the unconverted. If he was not bigoted he was intensely prejudiced. If you did not agree with him, there was some

« AnteriorContinuar »