If any arguments suggest themselves to you, to show that the pa.s.sage above referred to cannot be fairly employed in the defence of the Church of England tenets, in favour of consecrating churches, and of reverence amounting almost to the worship of external objects devoted to religious purposes, you will oblige me by stating them.--I remain, Sir, Your obedient servant,
AN ABSENTEE.
The pa.s.sage of Scripture referred to by the "English Gentleman" here as scarcely reconcilable with the views promulgated in the _Witness_ of the 28th ult. runs as follows:--"And Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and found in the temple those that sold oxen, and sheep, and doves, and the changers of money, sitting; and when He had made a scourge of small cords, He drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep and the oxen; and poured out the changers" money, and overthrew the tables; and said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father"s house a house of merchandise."
It will perhaps be remembered by our readers, that in referring to the Scotch estimate of the sacredness of ecclesiastical edifices, we employed words to the following effect:--"We (the Scotch people) have been taught that the world, since it began, saw but two truly holy edifices; and that these, the Tabernacle and the _Temple_, were as direct revelations from G.o.d as the Scriptures themselves, and were as certain embodiments of His will, though they spoke in the obscure language of type and symbol." Now the pa.s.sage of Scripture here cited is in harmonious accordance with this view. It was from one of these truly holy edifices that our Saviour drove the sheep and oxen, and indignantly expelled the money-changers. Without, however, begging the whole question at issue--without taking for granted the very point to be proven, _i.e._ the intrinsic holiness of Christian places of worship--the text has no bearing whatever on the view taken by the "English Gentleman." If buildings such as York Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and St. Paul"s, be holy in the sense in which the temple was holy, then the pa.s.sage as certainly applies to them as it applied, in the times of our Saviour, to the sacred edifice which was so remarkable a revelation of Himself. But where is the evidence of an intrinsic holiness in these buildings? Where is the proof that the rite of consecration is a rite according to the mind of G.o.d? Where is the probability even that it is other than a piece of mere will-worship, originated in the dark ages; or that it confers one whit more sanct.i.ty on the edifice which it professes to render sacred, than the breaking a bottle of wine on the ship"s stem, when she is starting off the slips, confers sanct.i.ty on the ship?
Stands it on any surer ground than the baptism of bells, the sacrifice of the ma.s.s, or the five spurious sacraments? If it be a New Testament inst.i.tution, it must possess New Testament authority. Where is that authority?
Can it be possible, however, that the shrewd English really differ from us in our estimate? We think we have good grounds for holding they do not. On a late occasion we enjoyed the pleasure of visiting not only York Cathedral, but Westminster Abbey and St. Paul"s, and saw quite enough to make even the least mistrustful suspect that the professed Episcopalian belief in the sacredness of ecclesiastical edifices is but sheer make-belief after all. The "English Gentleman" refers to the example of our Saviour in thrusting forth the money-changers from the temple, as a sort of proof that ecclesiastical edifices are holy; and we show that it merely proves the temple to have been holy. The pa.s.sage has, however, a direct bearing on a somewhat different point: it const.i.tutes a test by which to try the reality of this ostensible belief of English Episcopalians in the sacredness of their churches and cathedrals. If the English, especially English Churchmen, act with regard to their ecclesiastical buildings in the way our Saviour acted with regard to the temple, then it is but fair to hold that their belief in their sacredness is real. But if, on the contrary, we find them acting, not as our Saviour acted, but as the money-changers or the cattle-sellers acted, then is it equally fair to conclude that their belief in their sacredness is not a real belief, but a piece of mere pretence. In the north transept of York Minster there may be seen a table like a tomb of black Purbec marble, supported by an iron trellis, and bearing atop the effigy of a wasted corpse wrapped in a winding-sheet. "This monument," says a little work descriptive of the edifice, "was erected to the memory of John Haxby, formerly treasurer to the church, who died in 1424; and in compliance with stipulations in some of the ancient church deeds and settlements, occasional payments of money are made on this tomb to the present day." Here, at least, is one money-changing table introduced into the consecrated area, and this not irregularly or surrept.i.tiously, like the money-changing tables which of old profaned the temple, but through the deliberately formed stipulations of ecclesiastical deeds and settlements. The state of things in St. Paul"s and Westminster, however, throws the money-table of York Minster far into the shade.
The holinesses of St. Paul"s we found converted into a twopenny, and those of Westminster into a sixpenny show. For the small sum of twopence one may be admitted, at an English provincial fair, to see the old puppet exhibition of Punch and Judy, and of Solomon in all his glory; and for the small sum of twopence were we admitted, in like manner, to see St. Paul"s, to see choir, communion-table, and grand altar, and everything else of peculiar sacredness within the edifice.
The holinesses of Westminster cost thrice as much, but were a good bargain notwithstanding. Would English Churchmen permit, far less originate and insist in doggedly maintaining, so palpable a profanation, did they really believe their cathedrals to be holy? The debased Jewish priesthood of the times of our Saviour suffered the money-changers to traffic unchallenged within the temple; but they did not convert the temple itself into a twopenny show: they did not make halfpence by exhibiting the table of shew-bread, the altar of incense, and the golden candlestick, nor lift up corners of the veil at the rate of a penny a peep. It is worse than nonsense to hold that a belief in the sacredness of ecclesiastical buildings can co-exist with clerical practices of the kind we describe: the thing is a too palpable improbability; the text quoted by the Englishman is conclusive on the point. Would any man in his senses now hold that the old Jewish priests really believed their temple to be holy, had they done, what they had decency enough not to do--converted it into a raree-show? And are we not justified in applying to English Churchmen the rule which would be at once applied to Jewish priests? The Presbyterians of Scotland do not deem their ecclesiastical edifices holy, but there are certain natural a.s.sociations that throw a degree of solemnity over places in which men a.s.semble to worship G.o.d; and in order that these may not be outraged, they never convert their churches into twopenny show-boxes. Practically, at least, the Scotch respect for decency goes a vast deal further than the English regard for what they profess, very insincerely it would seem, to hold sacred.
We have said there is quite as little New Testament authority for consecrating a place of worship as for baptizing a bell; and if in the wrong, can of course be easily set right. If the authority exists, it can be no difficult matter to produce it. We would fain ask the reader to remark the striking difference which obtains between the Mosaic and the New Testament dispensations in all that regards the materialisms of their respective places of worship. We find in the Pentateuch chapter after chapter occupied with the mechanism of the tabernacle. The pattern given in the mount is as minutely described as any portion of the ceremonial law, and for exactly the same reason: the one as certainly as the other was "a figure of things to come." How exceedingly minute, too, the description of the temple! How very particular the narrative of its dedication! The prayer of Solomon, Heaven-inspired for the occasion, forms an impressive chapter in the sacred record, that addresses itself to all time. But when the old state of things had pa.s.sed away,--when the material was relinquished for the spiritual, the shadow for the substance, the type for the ant.i.type,--we hear no more of places of worship to which an intrinsic holiness attached, or of imposing rites of dedication. Not in edifices deemed sacred was the gospel promulgated, so long as the gospel remained pure, but in "hired houses" and "upper rooms," or "river-sides, where prayer was wont to be made," in chambers on the "third loft," often in the streets, often in the market-place, in the fields and by solitary waysides, on shipboard and by the sea-sh.o.r.e, "in the midst of Mars Hill" at Athens, and, when persecution began to darken, amid the deep gloom of the sepulchral caverns of Rome. The time had evidently come, referred to by the Saviour, when neither in the temple at Jerusalem, nor on the mountain deemed sacred by the Samaritans, was the Father to be worshipped; but all over the world, "in spirit and in truth." Until Christianity had become corrupt, we do not hear even of ornate churches, far less of Christian altars, of an order of Christian priests, of the will-worship of consecration, or of the presumed holiness of insensate matter,--all unauthorized additions of man"s making to a religion fast sinking at the time under a load of human inventions,--additions which were in no degree the more sacred, because filched, amid the darkness of superst.i.tion and error, from the abrogated Mosaic dispensation. The following is, we believe, the first notice of _fine_ Christian churches which occurs in history;--we quote from the ecclesiastical work of Dr. Welsh, and deem the pa.s.sage a significant one:--"From the beginning of the reign of Gallienus till the nineteenth year of Diocletian," says the historian, "the external tranquillity of the Church suffered no general interruption. The Christians, with partial exceptions, were allowed the free exercise of their religion. Under Diocletian open profession of the new faith was made even in the imperial household; nor did it prove a barrier to the highest honours and employments.
In this state of affairs the condition of the Church seemed in the highest degree prosperous. Converts were multiplied throughout all the provinces of the empire; and the ancient churches proving insufficient for the accommodation of the increasing mult.i.tudes of worshippers, _splendid edifices were erected in every city_, which were filled with crowded congregations. But with this outward appearance of success, the purity of faith and worship became gradually corrupted; and, still more, the vital spirit of religion suffered a melancholy decline. Pride and ambition, emulation and strifes, hypocrisy and formality among the clergy, and superst.i.tions and factions among the people, brought reproach on the Christian cause. In these circ.u.mstances the judgments of the Lord were manifested, and the Church was visited with the severest persecution to which it ever yet had been subjected."
There are few more valuable chapters in Locke than the one in which he traces some of the gravest errors that infest human life to a false a.s.sociation of ideas. But of all his ill.u.s.trations, employed to exhibit in the true light this copious source of error, there is not one half so striking as that furnished by the false a.s.sociation which connects the holiness that can alone attach to the living and the immortal, with earth, mortar, and stone, pieces of mouldering serge, and bits of rotten wood. Nearly one half of the errors with which Popery has darkened and overlaid the religion of the Cross, have originated in this particular species of false a.s.sociation. The superst.i.tion of pilgrimages, with all its long catalogue of crime and suffering, inclusive of b.l.o.o.d.y wars, protracted for ages,---
"When men strayed far to seek In Golgotha Him dead who lives in heaven,"--
the idolatry of relics, so strangely revived on the Continent in our own times,--the allegorical will-worship embodied in stone and lime, which Puseyism is at present so busy in introducing into the Church of England, and which renders every ecclesiastical building a sort of apocryphal temple, full, like the apocryphal books, of all manner of error and nonsense,--a thousand other absurdities and heterodoxies besides,--have all originated in this cause. True, such a.s.sociation is most natural to man, and, when of a purely secular character, harmless; nay, there are cases in which it may be even laudably indulged. "When I find Tully confessing of himself," says Johnson, "that he could not forbear at Athens to visit the walks and houses which the old philosophers had frequented or inhabited, and recollect the reverence which every nation, civil and barbarous, has paid to the ground where merit has been buried, I am afraid to declare against the general voice of mankind, and am inclined to believe that this regard which we involuntarily pay to the meanest relique of a man great and ill.u.s.trious, is intended as an incitement to labour, and an encouragement to expect the same renown if it be sought by the same virtues." We find nearly the same sentiment eloquently expounded in the Doctor"s famous pa.s.sage on Iona. But there exists a grand distinction between natural feelings proper in their own place, and natural feelings permitted to enter the religious field, and vitiate the integrity of revelation. It is from the natural alone in such cases that danger is to be apprehended; seeing that what is not according to the mental const.i.tution of man, is of necessity at once unproductive and shortlived. Let due weight be given to the a.s.sociative feeling, in its proper sphere,--let it dispose us to invest with a quiet decency our places of worship,--let us, at all events, not convert them into secular counting-rooms or twopenny show-boxes; but let us also remember that natural a.s.sociation is not divine truth--that there attaches no holiness to slated roofs or stone walls--that under the New Testament dispensation men do not worship in temples, which, like the altar of old, sanctified the gift, but in mere places of shelter, that confer no sacredness on their services; and that the "hour has come, and now is, when they that worship the Father must worship Him in spirit and in truth."
_April 15, 1846._
{1} See _First Impressions of England and its People_, ch.
II.--ED.
THE LATE REV. ALEXANDER STEWART.
Our last conveyed to our readers the mournful intelligence of the illness and death of the Rev. Alexander Stewart of Cromarty,--a man less known, perhaps, than any other of nearly equal calibre, or of a resembling exquisitiveness of mental faculty, which his country has ever produced, but whose sudden removal has, we find, created an impression far beyond the circle of even his occasional hearers, that the spirit which has pa.s.sed away was one of the high cast which nature rarely produces, and that the consequent blank created in the existing phalanx of intellect is one which cannot be filled up. Comparatively little as the deceased was known beyond his own immediate walk of duty or circle of acquaintanceship, it is yet felt by thousands, of whom the greater part knew of him merely at second-hand by the abiding impression which he had left on the minds of the others, that, according to the poet,
"A mighty spirit is eclipsed; a power Hath pa.s.sed from day to darkness, to whose hour Of light no likeness is bequeathed--no name."
The subject is one with which we can scarce trust ourselves. There are no writings to which we can appeal, for Mr. Stewart has left none, or at least none suited to convey an adequate impression of his powers; and yet of nothing are we more thoroughly convinced, than that the originality and vigour of his thinking, and the singular vividness and force of his ill.u.s.trations, added to a command of the principles of a.n.a.logical reasoning, which even a Butler might have envied, ent.i.tled him to rank with the ablest and most extraordinary men of the age. Coleridge was not more thoroughly original, nor could he impart to his pictures more vividness of colouring, or more decided strength of outline. In glancing over our limited stock of idea, to note how we have come by it, we find that to two Scotchmen of the present century we stand more largely indebted than to any of their contemporaries, either at home or abroad. More of their thinking has got into our mind than that of any of the others; and their images and ill.u.s.trations recur to us more frequently. And one of these is Thomas Chalmers; the other, Alexander Stewart.
There is an order of intellect decidedly original in its cast, and of considerable power, to whom notwithstanding originality is dangerous.
Goldsmith, when he first entered on his literary career, found that all the good things on the side of truth had already been said; and that _his_ good things, if he really desired to produce any, would require all to be said on the side of paradox and error. "When I was a young man," he states, in a pa.s.sage which Johnson censured him for afterwards expunging, "being anxious to distinguish myself, I was perpetually starting new propositions. But I soon gave this over, for I found that generally what was new was false." Poor Edward Irving formed a melancholy ill.u.s.tration of this species of originality. His stock of striking things on the side of truth was soon expended; notoriety had meanwhile become as essential to his comfort as ardent spirits to that of the dram-drinker, or his pernicious drug to that of the inveterate opium-eater; and so, to procure the supply of the unwholesome pabulum, without which he could not continue to exist, he launched into a perilous ocean of heterodoxy and extravagance, and made shipwreck of his faith. His originality formed but the crooked wanderings of a journeyer who had forsaken the right way, and lost himself in the mazes of a doleful wilderness. Not such the originality of the higher order of minds; not such, for instance, the originality of a Newton, of whom it has been well said by a distinguished French critic, that "what province of thought soever he undertook, he was sure to change the ideas and opinions received by the rest of men."
One of the most striking characteristics of Mr. Stewart"s originality was the solidity of the truths which it always evolved. His was not the ability of opening up new vistas in which all was unfamiliar, simply because the direction in which they led was one in which men"s thought had no occasion to travel, and no business to perform. It was, on the contrary, the greatly higher ability of enlarging, widening, and lengthening the avenues long before opened upon important truths, and, in consequence, enabling men to see new and unwonted objects in old, familiar directions. That in which he excelled all men we ever knew, was the a.n.a.logical faculty--the power of detecting and demonstrating occult resemblances. He could read off as if by intuition--not by s.n.a.t.c.hes and fragments, but as a consecutive whole--that older revelation of type and symbol which G.o.d first gave to man; and when privileged to listen to him, we have recognised, in the evident integrity of the reading, and the profound and consistent wisdom of what the record conveyed, a demonstration of the divinity of its origin, not less powerful and convincing than that to be found in any department of the Christian evidences yet opened up. Compared with even the higher names in this department, we have felt under his ministry as if, when admitted to the company of some party of modern _savans_ employed in deciphering a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk of the desert, and here successful in discovering the meaning of an insulated sign, and there of a detached symbol, we had been suddenly joined by some sage of the olden time, to whom the mysterious inscription was but a piece of common language written in a familiar alphabet, and who could read off fluently and as a whole what the others could but darkly and painfully guess at in detached and broken parts.
To this singular power of tracing a.n.a.logies there was added in Mr.
Stewart an ability of originating the most vivid ill.u.s.trations. In some instances a single stroke produced a figure that swept across the subject-matter of his discourse like the image of a lantern on a wall; in others, he dwelt upon the picture produced, finishing it with stroke after stroke, until it filled the whole imagination, and sank deep into the memory. We remember hearing him preach on one occasion on the return of the Jews, as a people, to Him whom they had rejected, and the effect which their sudden conversion could not fail to have on the unbelieving and Gentile world. Suddenly his language, from its high level of eloquent simplicity, became at once that of metaphor: "When _Joseph_," he said, "shall reveal himself to _his brethren_, the _whole house of Pharaoh_ shall _hear the weeping_." Could there be an allusion of more cla.s.sical beauty, or more finely charged with typical truth? And yet such was one of the common and briefer exercises of the ill.u.s.trative faculty in this gifted man. On another occasion we heard him dwell on that vast profundity characteristic of the scriptural representations of G.o.d, which ever deepens and broadens the longer and the more thoroughly it is explored, until at length the student--struck at first by its expansiveness, but conceiving of it as if it were a mere _measured_ expansiveness--finds that it partakes of the unlimited infinity of the divine nature itself. Naturally and simply, as if growing out of the subject, like a green berry-covered misletoe on the mossy trunk of a reverend oak, there sprang up one of his more lengthened ill.u.s.trations. A child bred up in the interior of the country has been brought for the first time to the sea-sh.o.r.e, and carried out to the middle of one of the n.o.ble friths that indent so deeply our line of coast; and on his return he informs his father, with all a child"s eagerness, of the wonderful expansiveness of the _ocean_ which he has seen. He went out, he tells, far amid the great waves and the rushing tides, till at length the huge hills seemed diminished into mere hummocks, and the wide land itself appeared along the waters but as a slim strip of blue. And then when in mid-sea the sailors heaved the lead; and it went down, and down, and down, and the long line slipped swiftly away over the boat-edge coil after coil, till, ere the plummet rested on the ouse below, all was well-nigh expended. And was it not the _great_ sea, asks the boy, that was so vastly broad, and so profoundly deep?
Ah! my child, exclaims the father, you have not yet seen aught of its greatness,--you have sailed over merely one of its little arms. Had it been out into the wide ocean that the seamen had carried you, you would have _seen_ no sh.o.r.e, and you would have _found_ no bottom. In one rare quality of the orator, Mr. Stewart stood alone among his contemporaries. Pope refers, in one of his satires, to a strange power of creating love and admiration by just "touching the brink of all we hate;" and Burke, in some of his n.o.bler pa.s.sages, happily exemplifies the thing. He intensified the effect of his burning eloquence by the employment of figures so homely, nay, almost so repulsive in themselves, that a man of lower powers who ventured their use would find them efficient merely in lowering his subject and ruining his cause. We may refer, in ill.u.s.tration, to Burke"s celebrated figure of the disembowelled bird, which occurs in his indignant denial that the character of the revolutionary French in aught resembled that of the English. "We have not," he says, "been _drawn_ and _trussed_, in order that we may be filled, _like stuffed birds in a museum_, with _chaff and rags_, and _paltry blurred shreds of paper_ about the rights of man." Into this perilous but singularly effective department, closed against even superior men, Mr. Stewart could enter safely and at will. We heard him, scarce a twelvemonth since, deliver a discourse of singular power, on the sin-offering of the Jewish economy, as minutely particularized by the divine penman in Leviticus. He described the slaughtered animal--foul with dust and blood--its throat gashed across--its entrails laid open--and steaming in its impurity to the sun, as it awaited the consuming fire, amid the uncleanness of ashes outside the camp,--a vile and horrid thing, which no one could see without experiencing emotions of disgust, nor touch without contracting defilement. The picture appeared too painfully vivid, its introduction too little in accordance with the rules of a just taste. It seemed a thing to be covered up, not exhibited.
But the master in this difficult walk well knew what he was doing.
"And that," he said, as if pointing to the strongly-coloured picture he had just completed, "and that is SIN." By one stroke the intended effect was produced, and the rising disgust and horror transferred from the revolting material image to the great moral evil.
We had fondly hoped that for a man so singularly gifted, and who had but reached the ripe maturity of middle life, there remained important work yet to do. He seemed peculiarly fitted, if but placed in a commanding sphere, for ministering to some of the intellectual wants, and for withstanding with singular efficiency some of the more perilous tendencies, of the religious world in the present day. That Athenian thirst for the new so generally abroad, and which many have so unhappily satisfied with the unwholesome and the pernicious, he could satisfy with provision at once sound and novel. And no man of the age had more thoroughly studied the prevailing theological errors of the time in their first insidious approaches, or could more skilfully indicate the exact point at which they diverge from the truth. But his work on earth is for ever over; and the sense of bereavement is deepened by the reflection that, save in the memory of a few, he has left behind him no adequate impress of the powers of his understanding or of the fineness of his genius. It is strange how much the lack of a single ingredient in a man"s moral const.i.tution--and that, too, an ingredient in itself of a low and vulgar cast--may affect one"s whole destiny. It was the grand defect of this gifted man, that that sentiment of self-esteem, which seems in many instances so absurd and ridiculous a thing, and which some, in their little wisdom, would so fain strike out from among the components of human character, was almost wholly awanting. As the minister of an attached provincial congregation, a sense of duty led him to study much and deeply; and he poured forth _viva voce_ his full-volumed and many-sparkling tide of eloquent idea as freely and richly as the nightingale, unconscious of a listener, pours forth her melody in the shade. But he could not be made to understand or believe, that what so impressed and delighted the privileged few who surrounded him was equally suited to impress and delight the many outside, or that he was fitted to speak through the press in tones which would compel the attention not merely of the religious, but also of the literary world.
And so his exquisitely-toned thinking perished like the music of the bygone years, has died with himself, or, we should perhaps rather say, has gone with him to that better land, where all those fruits of intellect that the human spirits of greatest calibre have in this world produced, must form but the comparatively meagre beginnings of infinite, never-ending acquirement.
Mr. Stewart was one of the eminently excellent and loveable, and his entire character of the most transparent, childlike simplicity. The great realities of eternity were never far distant from his thoughts.
Endowed with powers of humour at least equal to his other faculties, and a sense of the ludicrous singularly nice, he has often reminded us in his genial moments, when indulging most freely, of a happy child at play in the presence of its father. Never was there an equal amount of wit more harmlessly indulged, or from which one could pa.s.s more directly or with less distraction to the contemplation of the matters which pertain to eternity. And no one could be long in his company without having his thoughts turned towards that unseen world to which he has now pa.s.sed, or without receiving emphatic testimony regarding that Divine Person who is the wisdom and the power of G.o.d.
We have seen it stated that Mr. Stewart "was slow to join the non-intrusion party, and to acquiesce in the necessity of the secession." On this point we are qualified to speak. No one enjoyed more of his society during the first beginnings of the controversy, or was more largely honoured with his confidence, than the writer of these remarks; and the one point of difference between Mr. Stewart and him in their discussions in those days was, that while the writer was sanguine enough to antic.i.p.ate a successful termination to the Church"s struggle, _his_ soberer antic.i.p.ations were of a character which the Disruption in 1843 entirely verified. But with the actual result full in view, he was yet the first man in his parish--we believe, in his presbytery also--to take his stand, modestly and una.s.sumingly as became his character, but with a firmness which never once swerved or wavered. Nay, long ere the struggle began, founding on data with which we pretend not to be acquainted, he declared his conviction to not a few of his parishioners, that of the Establishment, as then const.i.tuted, he was to be the last minister in that parish. We know nothing, we repeat, of the data on which he founded; but he himself held that the conclusion was fairly deducible from those sacred oracles which no man more profoundly studied or more thoroughly knew.
Alas! what can it betoken our Church, that we should thus see such men, at once its strength and its ornament, so fast falling around us, like commanding officers picked down at the beginning of a battle, and that so few of resembling character, and none of at least equal power, should be rising to occupy the places made desolate by their fall!
_November 13, 1847._
THE CALOTYPE.
There are some two or three slight advantages which real merit has, that fict.i.tious merit has not; among the rest, an especial advantage, which, we think, should recommend it to at least the quieter members of society--the advantage of being un.o.btrusive and modest. It presses itself much less on public notice than its vagabond antagonist, and makes much less noise; it walks, for a time at least, as if slippered in felt, and leaves the lieges quite at freedom to take notice of it or no, as they may feel inclined. It is content, in its infancy, to thrive in silence. It does not squall in the nursery, to the disturbance of the whole house, like "the major roaring for his porridge." What, for instance, could be quieter or more modest, in its first stages, than the invention of James Watt? what more obtrusive or noisy, on the contrary, than the invention of Mr. Henson?
And we have ill.u.s.trations of the same truth in our Scottish metropolis at the present moment, that seem in no degree less striking.
Phreno-mesmerism and the calotype have been introduced to the Edinburgh public about much the same time; but how very differently have they fared hitherto! A real invention, which bids fair to produce some of the greatest revolutions in the fine arts of which they have ever been the subject, has as yet attracted comparatively little notice; an invention which serves but to demonstrate that the present age, with all its boasted enlightenment, may yet not be very unfitted for the reception of superst.i.tions the most irrational and gross, is largely occupying the attention of the community, and filling column after column in our public prints. We shall venture to take up the quieter invention of the two as the genuine one,--as the invention which will occupy most s.p.a.ce a century hence,--and direct the attention of our readers to some of the more striking phenomena which it ill.u.s.trates, and some of the purposes which it may be yet made to subserve. There are few lovers of art who have looked on the figures or landscapes of a camera obscura without forming the wish that, among the hidden secrets of matter, some means might be discovered for fixing and rendering them permanent. If nature could be made her own limner, if by some magic art the reflection could be fixed upon the mirror, could the picture be other than true? But the wish must have seemed an idle one,--a wish of nearly the same cast as those which all remember to have formed at one happy period of life, in connection with the famous cap and purse of the fairy tale. Could aught seem less probable than that the forms of the external world should be made to convert the pencils of light which they emit into real _bona fide_ pencils, and commence taking their own likenesses? Improbable as the thing may have seemed, however, there were powers in nature of potency enough to effect it, and the newly discovered art of the photographer is simply the art of employing these. The figures and landscapes of the camera obscura can now be fixed and rendered permanent,--not yet in all their various shades of colour, but in a style scarce less striking, and to which the limner, as if by antic.i.p.ation, has already had recourse. The connoisseur unacquainted with the results of the recent discovery, would decide, if shown a set of photographic impressions, that he had before him the carefully finished drawings in sepia of some great master. The stronger lights, as in sketches done in this colour, present merely the white ground of the paper; a tinge of soft warm brown indicates the lights of lower tone; a deeper and still deeper tinge succeeds, shading by scarce perceptible degrees through all the various gradations, until the darker shades concentrate into an opaque and dingy umber, that almost rivals black in its intensity. We have at the present moment before us--and very wonderful things they certainly are--drawings on which a human pencil was never employed. They are strangely suggestive of the capabilities of the art. Here, for instance, is a scene in George Street,--part of the pavement; and a line of buildings, from the stately erection at the corner of Hanover Street, with its proud Corinthian columns and rich cornice, to Melville"s Monument and the houses which form the eastern side of St. Andrew Square. St. Andrew"s Church rises in the middle distance. The drawing is truth itself; but there are cases in which mere truth might be no great merit: were the truth restricted here to the proportions of the architecture, there could be nothing gained by surveying the transcript, that could not be gained by surveying the originals. In this little brown drawing, however, the truth is truth according to the rules of lineal perspective, unerringly deduced; and from a set of similar drawings, this art of perspective, so important to the artist--which has been so variously taught, and in which so many masters have failed--could be more surely acquired than by any other means. Of all the many treatises yet written on the subject, one of the best was produced by the celebrated Ferguson the astronomer, the sole fruit derived to the fine arts by his twenty years" application to painting. There are, however, some of his rules arbitrary in their application, and the propriety of which he has not even attempted to demonstrate. Here, for the first time, on this square of paper, have we the data on which perspective may be rendered a certain science. We have but to apply our compa.s.ses and rules in order to discover the proportions in which, according to their distances, objects diminish.
Mark these columns, for instance. One line prolonged in the line of their architrave, and another line prolonged in the line of their bases, bisect one another in the point of sight fixed in the distant horizon; and in this one important point we find all the other parallel lines of the building converging. The fact, though unknown to the ancients, has been long familiar to the artists of comparatively modern times,--so familiar, indeed, that it forms one of the first lessons of the drawing-master. The rule is a fixed one; but there is another rule equally important, not yet fixed,--that rule of proportion by which to determine the breadth which a certain extent of frontage between these converging lines should occupy. The principle on which the horizontal lines converge is already known, but the principle on which the vertical lines cut these at certain determinate distances is not yet known. It is easy taking the _lat.i.tudes_ of the art, if we may so speak, but its _longitudes_ are still to discover. At length, however, have we the lines of discovery indicated: in the architectural drawings of the calotype the perspective is that of nature itself; and to arrive at just conclusions, we have but to measure and compare, and ascertain proportions. One result of the discovery of the calotype will be, we doubt not, the production of completer treatises on perspective than have yet been given to the world. Another very curious result will be, in all probability, a new mode of design for the purposes of the engraver, especially for all the ill.u.s.trations of books. For a large cla.s.s of works the labours of the artist bid fair to be restricted to the composition of _tableaux vivants_, which it will be the part of the photographer to fix, and then transfer to the engraver. To persons of artistical skill at a distance, the suggestion may appear somewhat wild. Such of our readers, however, as have seen the joint productions of Mr. Hill and Mr. Adamson in this department, will, we are convinced, not deem it wild in the least.
Compared with the mediocre prints of nine-tenths of the ill.u.s.trated works now issuing from the press, these productions serve admirably to show how immense the distance between nature and her less skilful imitators. There is a truth, breadth, and power about them which we find in only the highest walks of art, and not often even in these. We have placed a head of Dr. Chalmers taken in this way beside one of the most powerful prints of him yet given to the public, and find from the contrast that the latter, with all its power, is but a mere approximation. There is a _skinniness_ about the lips which is not true to nature; the chin is not brought strongly enough out; the shade beneath the under lip is too broad and too flat; the nose droops, and lacks the firm-set appearance so characteristic of the original; and while the breadth of the forehead is exaggerated, there is scarce justice done to its height. We decide at once in favour of the calotype--it is truth itself; and yet, while the design of the print--a mere approximation as it is--must have cost a man of genius much pains and study, the drawing in brown beside it was but the work of a few seconds: the eye of an accomplished artist determined the att.i.tude of the original, and the light reflected from the form and features accomplished the rest. Were that sketch in brown to be sent to a skilful engraver, he would render it the groundwork of by far the most faithful print which the public has yet seen. And how interesting to have bound up with the writings of this distinguished divine, not a mere print in which there might be deviations from the truth, but the calotype drawing itself! In some future book sale, copies of the _Astronomical Discourses_ with calotype heads of the author prefixed, may be found to bear very high prices indeed. An autograph of Shakespeare has been sold of late for considerably more than an hundred guineas. What price would some early edition of his works bear, with his likeness in calotype fronting the t.i.tle? Corporations and colleges, nay, courts and governments, would outbid one another in the purchase.
Or what would we not give to be permitted to look even on a copy of the _Paradise Lost_ with a calotype portrait of the poet in front--serenely placid in blindness and adversity, solacing himself, with upturned though sightless eyes, amid the sublime visions of the ideal world?
How deep the interest which would attach to a copy of Clarendon"s _History of the Civil War_, with calotypes of all the more remarkable personages who figured in that very remarkable time--Charles, Cromwell, Laud, Henderson, Hampden, Strafford, Falkland, and Selden,--and with these the Wallers and Miltons and Cowleys, their contemporaries and coadjutors! The history of the Reform Bill could still be ill.u.s.trated after this manner; so also could the history of Roman Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation in Ireland, and the history of our Church Question in Scotland. Even in this department--the department of historic ill.u.s.trations--we antic.i.p.ate much and interesting employment for the photographer.
We have two well-marked drawings before us, in which we recognise the capabilities of the art for producing pictures of composition.
They are _tableaux vivants_ transferred by the calotype. In the one[Footnote: See Frontispiece] a bonneted mechanic rests over his mallet on a tombstone--his one arm bared above his elbow; the other wrapped up in the well-indicated shirt folds, and resting on a piece of grotesque sculpture. There is a powerful sun; the somewhat rigid folds in the dress of coa.r.s.e stuff are well marked; one half the face is in deep shade, the other in strong light; the churchyard wall throws a broad shadow behind, while in the foreground there is a gracefully chequered breadth of intermingled dark and light in the form of a ma.s.s of rank gra.s.s and foliage. Had an old thin man of striking figure and features been selected, and some study-worn scholar introduced in front of him, the result would have been a design ready for the engraver when employed in ill.u.s.trating the _Old Mortality_ of Sir Walter. The other drawing presents a _tableau vivant_ on a larger scale, and of a much deeper interest.
It forms one of the groups taken under the eye of Mr. Hill, as materials for the composition of his historic picture. In the centre Dr. Chalmers sits on the Moderator"s chair, and there are grouped round him, as on the platform, some eighteen or twenty of the better known members of the Church, clerical and lay. Nothing can be more admirable than the truthfulness and ease of the figures.
Wilkie, in his representations of a crowd, excelled in introducing heads, and hands, and faces, and parts of faces into the interstices behind,--one of the greatest difficulties with which the artist can grapple. Here, however, is the difficulty surmounted--surmounted, too, as if to bear testimony to the genius of the departed--in the style of Wilkie. We may add further, that the great ma.s.siveness of the head of Chalmers, compared with the many fine heads around him, is admirably brought out in this drawing.
In glancing over these photographic sketches, one cannot avoid being struck by the silent but impressive eulogium which nature p.r.o.nounces, through their agency, on the works of the more eminent masters. There is much in seeing nature truthfully, and in registering what are in reality her prominent markings. Artists of a lower order are continually falling into mere mannerisms--peculiarities of style that belong not to nature, but to themselves, just because, contented with acquirement, they cease seeing nature. In order to avoid these mannerisms, there is an eye of fresh observation required--that ability of continuous attention to surrounding phenomena which only superior men possess; and doubtless to this eye of fresh observation, this ability of continuous attention, the masters owed much of their truth and their power. How very truthfully and perseveringly some of them saw, is well ill.u.s.trated by these photographic drawings. Here, for instance, is a portrait exactly after the manner of Raeburn.
There is the same broad freedom of touch; no nice miniature stipplings, as if laid in by the point of a needle--no sharp-edged strokes: all is solid, ma.s.sy, broad; more distinct at a distance than when viewed near at hand. The arrangement of the lights and shadows seems rather the result of a happy haste, in which half the effect was produced by design, half by accident, than of great labour and care; and yet how exquisitely true the general aspect! Every stroke tells, and serves, as in the portraits of Raeburn, to do more than relieve the features: it serves also to indicate the prevailing mood and predominant power to the mind. And here is another portrait, quiet, deeply-toned, gentlemanly,--a transcript apparently of one of the more characteristic portraits of Sir Thomas Lawrence. Perhaps, however, of all our British artists, the artist whose published works most nearly resemble a set of these drawings is Sir Joshua Reynolds.
We have a folio volume of engravings from his pictures before us; and when, placing side by side with the prints the sketches in brown, we remark the striking similarity of style that prevails between them, we feel more strongly than at perhaps any former period, that the friend of Johnson and of Burke must have been a consummate master of his art.
The engraver, however, cannot have done full justice to the originals.
There is a want of depth and prominence which the near neighbourhood of the photographic drawings renders very apparent: the shades in the subordinate parts of the picture are more careless and much less true; nor have the lights the same vivid and sunshiny effect. There is one particular kind of resemblance between the two which strikes as remarkable, because of a kind which could scarce be antic.i.p.ated. In the volume of prints there are three several likenesses of the artist himself, all very admirable as pieces of art, and all, no doubt, sufficiently like, but yet all dissimilar in some points from each other. And this dissimilarity in the degree which it obtains, one might naturally deem a defect--the result of some slight inaccuracy in the drawing. Should not portraits of the same individual, if all perfect likenesses of him, be all perfectly like one another? No; not at all. A man at one moment of time, and seen from one particular point of view, may be very unlike himself when seen at another moment of time, and from another point of view. We have at present before us the photographic likenesses of four several individuals--three likenesses of each--and no two in any of the four sets are quite alike. They differ in expression, according to the mood which prevailed in the mind of the original at the moment in which they were imprinted upon the paper. In some respects the physiognomy seems different; and the features appear more or less ma.s.sy in the degree in which the lights and shadows were more or less strong, or in which the particular angle they were taken in brought them out in higher or lower relief.
We shall venture just one remark more on these very interesting drawings. The subject is so suggestive of thought at the present stage, that it would be no easy matter to exhaust it; and it will, we have no doubt, be still more suggestive of thought by and by; but we are encroaching on our limits, and must restrain ourselves, therefore, to the indication of just one of the trains of thought which it has served to originate. Many of our readers must be acquainted with Dr.
Thomas Brown"s theory of attention,--"a state of mind," says the philosopher, "which has been understood to imply the exercise of a peculiar intellectual power, but which, in the case of attention to objects of sense, appears to be nothing more than the co-existence of desire with the perception of the object to which we are said to attend." He proceeds to instance how, in a landscape in which the incurious gaze may _see_ many objects without _looking_ at or knowing them, a mere desire to know brings out into distinctness every object in succession on which the desire fixes. "Instantly, or almost instantly," continues the metaphysician, "without our consciousness of any new or peculiar state of mind intervening in the process, the landscape becomes to our vision altogether different. Certain parts only--those parts which we wished to know particularly--are seen by us; the remaining parts seem almost to have vanished. It is as if everything before had been but the doubtful colouring of enchantment, which had disappeared, and left us the few prominent realities on which we gaze; or rather as if some instant enchantment, obedient to our wishes, had dissolved every reality beside, and brought closer to our sight the few objects which we desired to see." Now, in the transcript of the larger _tableau vivant_ before us--that which represents Dr. Chalmers seated among his friends on the Moderator"s chair--we find an exemplification sufficiently striking of the laws on which this seemingly mysterious power depends. They are purely structural laws, and relate not to the mind, but to the eye,--not to the province of the metaphysician, but to that of the professor of optics. The lens of the camera obscura transmits the figures to the prepared paper, on quite the same principle on which in vision the crystalline lens conveys them to the retina. In the centre of the field in both cases there is much distinctness, while all around its circ.u.mference the images are indistinct and dim. We have but to fix the eye on some object directly in front of us, and then attempt, without removing it, to ascertain the forms of objects at some distance on both sides, in order to convince ourselves that the field of distinct vision is a very limited field indeed. And in this transcript of the larger _tableau vivant_ we find exactly the same phenomena. The central figures come all within the distinct field. Not so, however, the figures on both sides. They are dim and indistinct; the shades dilute into the lights, and the outlines are obscure. How striking a comment on the theory of Brown! We see his mysterious power resolved in that drawing into a simple matter of light and shade, arranged in accordance with certain optical laws. The clear central s.p.a.ce in which the figures are so distinct, corresponds to the central s.p.a.ce in the retina; it is the attention-point of the picture, if we may so speak. In the eye this attention-point is brought to bear, through a simple effort of the will, on the object to be examined; and the rest of the process, so pleasingly, but at the same time so darkly, described by the philosopher, is the work of the eye itself.
THE TENANT"S TRUE QUARREL.
It has been remarked by Sir James Mackintosh, that there are four great works, in four distinct departments of knowledge, which have more visibly and extensively influenced opinion than any other productions of the human intellect. The first of these is the _Treatise on the Law of War and Peace_, by Grotius. It appeared about two centuries ago; and from that period downwards, international law became a solid fact, which all civilised countries have recognised, and which even the French Convention, during the Reign of Terror, dared, in its madness, to outrage but for a moment. The second is the _Essay on the Human Understanding_, by Locke. It struck down, as with the blow of a hatchet, the wretched mental philosophy of the dark ages,--that philosophy which Puseyism, in its work of diffusing over the present the barbarism and ignorance of the past, would so fain revive and restore, and which has been ever engaged, as its proper employment, in imparting plausibility to error and absurdity, and in furnishing apology for crime. The third was the _Spirit of Laws_, by Montesquieu. It placed legislation on the basis of philosophy; and straightway law began to spring up among the nations out of a new soil. The fourth and last great work--_An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_, by Adam Smith--was by far the most influential of them all. "It is," says Sir James, "perhaps the only book which produced an immediate, general, and irrevocable change in some of the most important parts of the legislation of all civilised states. Touching those matters which may be numbered, and measured, and weighed, it bore visible and palpable fruit. In a few years it began to alter laws and treaties, and has made its way throughout the convulsions of revolution and conquest to a due ascendant over the minds of men, with far less than the average obstructions of prejudice and clamour, which check the channels through which truth flows into practice."
And yet, though many of the seeds which this great work served to scatter sprung up thus rapidly, and produced luxuriant crops, there were others, not less instinct with the vital principles, of which the germination has been slow. The nurseryman expects, in sowing beds of the stone-fruit-bearing trees, such as the plum or the hawthorn, to see the plants spring up very irregularly. One seed bursts the enveloping case, and gets up in three weeks; another barely achieves the same work in three years. And it has been thus with the harder-coated germens of the _Wealth of Nations_. It is now exactly eighty years since the philosopher set himself to elaborate the thinking of his great work in his mother"s house in Kirkcaldy, and exactly seventy years since he gave it to the world.