by Anthology
“All I have told you is naked truth, but need I remind a man so sagacious, that the faits of one age, seen apart from their causes, and out of their connexion, are always riddles to the men of another age. But I change my course at your request, and an easy transition from our last topic leads me to mention a marvellous invention and improvement—mark the word improvement—of modern times. I mean a mode of abbreviating the work of slaughter on a battle field, or of killing men by hundreds at a time, instead of tens. Imagine, then, two opposing hosts, no longer, as heretofore, hurling sticks and stones at each other like boys at play, but vomiting death—pouring forth bolts and fire, more fatal than the lenient thunder and lightning of heaven; yes, hurling hurricanes of sulphur and smoke, and hail-stones of lead and iron at each other, with a roar louder than a hundred cataracts, and sweeping down ranks of men, or thinning solid squadrons—think, I say, of heads and limbs flying in all directions, like the fruit and boughs of a tempest-torn orchard.”
“And do the nations practise war at this rate? Europe then has become a solitude; and this is why an extended empire may be so easily governed, because, in fact, kings rule over herds of deer, not men—over forests and swamps and deserts, not populous provinces;—confess the truth.”
“The truth then is that, spite of our wars, dealing in death wholesale, population has so swollen in most of the European kingdoms, and especially in England, that the tide of life has burst its dikes and rolled itself over, as a vast deluge, upon newly discovered continents; and the human inundation runs on, year after year, in a stream full and strong, from east to west; just as once it flowed from north to south.”
“New continents? a word to satisfy ray curiosity. How many? Twenty?”
“Two; or you may call them one, just as we call the panniers swung on a mule’s back two, or one.”
“Of what sort; and where?”
“The one, a rugged waste of dark forests, bluff mountains, trackless swamps, icy deserts, blast-troubled lakes; yet fertile enough in patches. The other, except in patches, fat, prolific, inexhaustible; its bowels teeming with cold, silver, diamonds.”
“Have these continents then fallen as inheritances to the nations of Europe? and if so, to which among them; but no doubt it is England that has snatched the realm of gold and diamonds:—Hence her extent of empire.”
“Nay, it is England that has snatched the rugged prize, leaving her neighbours to impoverish and enslave themselves with mountains of wealth. England’s sons, driven from her bosom, and seeking a home where they might find one, in an uuenvied wilderness, are now rearing an empire as great as her own. Do you not know that it is not the precious metals themselves, but the inducements to acquire them, that enrich a people?”
“I know it yet one is apt to be child enough to mistake gold for wealth. But where are these new worlds?”
“Where you might well have guessed them to be; when you told the ignorance of your times that this earth of ours is a ball, why did you not send some of your bold Saxon adventurers to seek what you might have been sure was somewhere to be found, and other continent?”
“Because the most simple and probable truth, advanced hypothetically, startles and shocks even those who have sagacity enough to descry it, while it horribly frightens and scandalizes the vulgar. Let us now call together the fraternity of this religious house, and, then, on some ridiculous evidence, I will assure them that the other side of the world is sprawled over by a red dragon, measuring five thousand miles from his snout to the tip of his tail; all but one or two, I wager you, will swallow the fable with open mouths—the red dragon will go down with them as glib as an oyster. But let me show solid reason for believing that our western ocean washes the snores of another continent, and Bede, if not so happy as to be consigned to his cloister for life, with & keeper, would be condemned, and, likely enough, burnt as a sorcerer or heretic.”
“Things go rather better with us now-a-days; the vulgar is still the vulgar; but it has learned to be guided a little by those who know better than itself. Reason, in our times, has won so many triumphs in the eyes of the people, that she has gained credit enough with them to make them know their place.”
“But how is it that these new continents of the western hemisphere are reached from our shores? Are they joined by a tongue of land?”
“They are reached as certainly, and one may say as easily, as Tyna’s mouth is reached by the fisherman’s boat that drops down with the ebb of tide. Each vessel is securely led on its way across the pathless ocean, and far remote from any land—a distance of two thousand five hundred miles, by—”
“By an angel?”
“By—a needle!”
“Oh, oh, then the people of Europe, how can I doubt it, and not least the English, if they have not lapsed into paganism, have horribly addicted themselves to the black art. What you speak of is sheer magic; a dealing with—”
“Well, say so if you please; and, in truth, if we are speaking of the English, and most especially of the people of this northern part of the island, I hardly know how they could wash themselves entirely clean of such an imputation. If you were just now to visit almost any of the great towns north of the Humber, I fear you would think that, among this busy and curious race, all the arts are black; and much you might see that is more amazing than any thing which magic has attempted or pretended.”
“Good friend, my spirit fails me; speak of things ordinary and intelligible. With all its strange doings, and dark dealings, is England wealthy?”
“Beyond example—almost beyond calculation—what would you say if I were to tell you that her own sons have lent her a sum, Out of their private pockets—out of their savings, so great that any one is laughed at as a fool, who talks of its ever being repaid—a sum large enough to have bought Europe—lands, houses, slave?, jewels, treasures, such as it was in your time, four times over; and yet, this loan, that can never be paid, frets nobody—not the borrower—not the lender.”
“Whence has flowed this deluge of riches, if the western mountains of gold are in the keeping of others?”
“I will tell you by a sample. We send our ships fourteen thousand miles for some pods of cotton: when we get them, we work them up into stuffs of various texture and dye. We return them whence they came—a fourteen thousand miles, and sell them to the very people who gathered the raw material, at so vile a price, that none can drive us from the market; and yet it is out of the profits of this trade that we get rich as princes.”
“At this rate then, and if it be so easy to cram your bags, you can have no poor left among you.”
“No, if you will first except a few millions of paupers, maintained at the public cost, and a few millions more left to starve, or near it. Yet do not think us hard-hearted. We build pat laces for our poor; ay, it would turn the head of the mightiest of your Saxons to be made the master of an edifice such as you may find scores of now-a» days, wherein our abjects find a refuge and remain:—until they learn that houseless want is more tolerable than such entertainment.”
“Who, then, grasps and enjoys the vast profits of your spinning, and weaving, and grinding?”
“Be sure that the looms and the wheels do not get more than just so much oil as keeps them from catching fire; and, unluckily, the weaver, and the spinner, and the grinder, have come to be looked upon, by our knowing folks, as nothing better than the cogs and cranks of the machinery, and therefore, it is deemed a folly and a waste to pour into their hands or hearts, a drop more of the oil of gladness than what is absolutely necessary to keep them agoing.”
“Why do you not make laws to enforce a more equitable division of profits?”
“We mean to do so, when we find that statutes prohibitory of east winds, blights, and cold summers, take effect, and better the seasons.”
“Here then are your governments, ruling, as you say, vast empires, as pleasantly as a dainty lass manages her well-bitted palfrey, and yet unable to secure the rights of nature, and a crust to th
e poor.”
“Our governments, it is true, can do little; nevertheless man, in modern times, has vastly extended his power over—”
“Over his passions and selfishness?—over invisible beings and evil demons?”
“Over neither; but over nature.”
“What then; you turn the course of the planets?”
“No; but yet we can bring them as near to the eye as if we could bend them some millions of miles from their spheres, or could ourselves walk the sides.”
“Can you command the winds?”
“No; but we often outrun them—on land; and on the ocean, force a passage in the very teeth of a hurricane.”
“Tell me plainly by what new-mastered giant force?”
“By the potency of a boiling kettle; you have the naked fact. Yes, and if you will be my companion this evening, I will show you, flitting athwart the bogs and moors of Cealclythe, a long caravan of people and merchandize—such a company as crawls across the deserts of Arabia; yes, flitting away, and leaving the western gales to lag behind; all, all, by the boiling of a kettle!”
“Friend, abuse not so largely my simplicity.”
“Venerable man, trust me no more if I fail to make good what I have affirmed. I will give you proof anon. But take from me, meanwhile, the general rule, that whatever in your wonted musings in this monastery garden, you may have thought of as likely to come about, that has not come about; while whatever, had it been roundly mentioned to you, you would have scouted as grossly absurd and incredible (as you are now fain to reject my report) this has actually realized itself, and is now reckoned among the most familiar and ordinary of ordinary things.”
“Is all this then the fruit of a new dispensation of miracles; or of the subjugation of etherial tribes to the will of man, or of the bestowment upon human nature of unthought of faculties?”
“Neither the first, the second, nor the third hypothesis meets the case. Man, individually, or abstractedly, is nothing more, or more potent now, than he was in the days ot Tubalcain. But he has learned to use his faculties in a better manner; or, shall I say, to attempt only what comes within the range of his powers; whereas, heretofore, men of intelligence have spumed what they knew, or might easily have known; while they spent their forces in the endeavour to know and to do, what is inscrutable, or unavailing, or impracticable. I should, however, add that we moderns have owed much to what we must call accidents, or discoveries of such a kind that we much rather wonder at the dulness of our predecessors in not having seen what is so obvious, than admire our own wit in seeing it now. And, while we thank God, who has at length granted this or that boon to man, we tremble and are perplexed equally by the thought of that mysterious Providence, which so long hid from the eyes of men things they might as well have descried before the world was five centuries old.”
“Thank God always, my son, for what he is pleased to afford us—unworthy of the least of his favours; nor question him ever concerning what he thinks fit to withhold. AH such questioning ends in asking, why a worm should not have been a man—a man a seraph—a seraph a god; and thence we come to the enigma, why there should be any thing in the universe but God himself. Let us return to our discursive talk.”
“Well, then, I just now saw you surrounded by franklins and lords of the soil; can they all write their names?”
“Scarcely one.”
“What do they then when they are parties to a grant or covenant?”
“Use a stamp, and most of them carry such set in rings on their fingers, as ornaments.”
“Those fingers then carry, in embryo, the principle or element of the greatest of all modern or ancient inventions—an invention which has already changed everything, as one may say, except the colours of the sky, and which is yet only beginning to show the extent of the powers it involves—nothing so simple in itself, if we think of it mechanically—nothing so wonderful in its energies, and yet the chief wonderment is—that it had not been thought of and practised centuries before. Comparing the two contrivances, one might have though); that the art of printing should have receded the construction of a loom, a thousand years.”
“And what is this mystery, the art of printing?”
“An art which makes it so easy a thing to multiply books, that they have become the vilest of commodities, and thus reach the hands of many who often cannot muster pence for a dinner.”
“Then, no doubt all men of your times have become knowing?”
“Many more than have become wise; and yet the absolutely ignorant among us are many more in absolute number than the entire population of the heptarchy.”
“Stop friend; before you relate any more wonders, please to give me the upshot of the matter; are you and your contemporaries of the nineteenth century, happier and better men than we of the eighth? or are you wiser to any good purpose?”
“Your question admits not of a round and categorical answer; but must be replied to disjunctively. I say, then, without a doubt, that many of my time are incomparably more knowing, and to better purpose, than were any of yours. Many also, I think I may say, among us, are better than any, saving a very few among you, and multitudes—thousands of the nineteenth century, are more firmly and ordinarily happy, than any but a small class of the eighth; and yet, nor can I cloak the fact—the wretched, the ignorant, and the vicious, are absolutely twenty times as many in my age as in yours.”
“Where then is the gain of your astounding improvements?”
“Instead of attempting an answer to your question, I will merely put you in mind of the fact, which is a law. of the human system, that, although nations may remain thousands of years in the same state of barbarism, or semi-barbarism, ye.t when once the development of reason actually commences, on it goes, and must go, whether the consequences be good or ill; nothing stops the process, which we must call improvement; nothing but the national overthrow or social destruction of the people among whom it is going on. The cut bono question, therefore, may be met by a cut bono, as to the inquiry itself. To what good purpose shall we ask concerning the ultimate benefit of the improvements which follow the development of mind, seeing that the process is inevitable, the yeast, once mixed in the lump, will work.”
“Shall I look out for a host of Scandinavians, a northern besom, by whose aid your modern arts may be swept away, and mankind be restored to a happy ignorance?”
“You may do so, if you please. But beside that we are pretty well prepared to meet them on our shores, the remedy would not be efficacious—the arts have more than one sanctuary in the world. Sink the British islands id the sea—overrun or overturn Europe—the arts still live. The press too, of which I have spoken, immortalizes the philosophy, literature, and arts of modern nations.”
“Is there room to hope, then, that such other improvements may yet take place, as will render your philosophy and your arts really beneficial to the mass of mankind; and such as shall secure a moderate portion of comfort and enjoyment to the many?”
“Yes, I think so—only let—But what is this hubbub without?”
Before I could get a reply, the gate of the monastery garden burst open and a dozen or more of the fraternity, pressing one over the other, and bawling in cracked voices, spread themselves over the garden. Missing their revered master from his place in the refectory, at the usual hour, and fearing that harm had come to him, all were in movement in quest of him. I started up, and hardly knowing how I might be handled among these scared good fellows, several of whom I saw had bludgeons in their hands, I looked wildly about me for some other exit than the garden gate. I rushed forward, I knew not whither, and reaching the wall, with a convulsed effort, scaled it; and instantly beheld, not the wild scene that had lately been before my eyes, but the high Durham road, shrouded in dust, through which I dimly descried, just beyond call, the Leeds Mercury, whisking away, and leaving me much of my fare, and in doubt whether to take the chances of the road, or to make my way back, and ashamed, to the Swan in Newcastle.
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br /> AN UNCOMMON SORT OF SPECTRE
Edward Page Mitchell
I
The ancient castle of Weinstein, on the upper Rhine, was, as everybody knows, inhabited in the autumn of 1352 by the powerful Baron Kalbsbraten, better known in those parts as Old Twenty Flasks, a sobriquet derived from his reputed daily capacity for the product of the vineyard. The baron had many other admirable qualities. He was a genial, whole-souled, public-spirited gentleman, and robbed, murdered, burned, pillaged, and drove up the steep sides of the Weinstein his neighbors’ cattle, wives, and sisters, with a hearty bonhomie that won for him the unaffected esteem of his contemporaries.
One evening the good baron sat alone in the great hall of Weinstein, in a particularly happy mood. He had dined well, as was his habit, and twenty empty bottles stood before him in a row upon the table, like a train of delightful memories of the recent past. But the baron had another reason to be satisfied with himself and with the world. The consciousness that he had that day become a parent lit up his countenance with a tender glow that mere wine cannot impart.
“What ho! Without! Hi! Seneschal!” he presently shouted, in a tone that made the twenty empty bottles ring as if they were musical glasses, while a score of suits of his ancestors’ armor hanging around the walls gave out in accompaniment a deep metallic bass. The seneschal was speedily at his side.
“Seneschal,” said Old Twenty Flasks, “you gave me to understand that the baroness was doing finely?”
“I am told,” replied the seneschal, “that her ladyship is doing as well as could be expected.”
The baron mused in silence for a moment, absently regarding the empty bottles. “You also gave me to understand,” he continued, “that there were—”
“Four,” said the seneschal, gravely. “I am credibly informed that there are four, all boys.”
