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false King disavowed and denounced by proclamation Raleigh's acts; he returned to London to be imprisoned again at the instance of Spain, and to die as one attainted of treason under the old charge of 1603,-intent to bring in a Spanish invasion. A multitude of painfully interesting and new details concerning the later incidents of his life, the debates at Madrid and at London, the critical relations of Great Britain, France, and Spain that hung upon his fate, and the particulars of his death, are given in the new biographies.

Of the political career of this wonderful man and the new lights here thrown upon its successive and changeful phases, we have left ourselves no room to speak. Like English and American political history in our own day, it is too full of personal struggles, of intrigues and plots and unprincipled dealing for the purpose of putting up one and putting down another, to have the highest interest for the reader. From the time of his entering Parliament at Queen Elizabeth's instance in 1585sitting for Devonshire, as his ancestors did before him in many Parliaments-to his execution at Westminster on the 29th of October, 1618, all the favorites of two reigns, from Hatton and Essex to Carr and Villiers; all the great statesmen of England, Burghley, Leicester, Salisbury, Bacon, and the rest; all the great captains and admirals of his time, Drake, Gorges, Frobisher, the Howards,-figure in the story. The expeditions against Cadiz and Fayal are richly worthy of illustrations from the new materials, and the whole course of domestic and foreign policy in England in the times of Elizabeth and James is made clearer thereby. But after all, the story is too much one of personal politics, and would lead us too far. It is the more ignoble portion of his great life. A more grateful theme—to which we may be tempted hereafter to turn-is the literary life of Raleigh, with its rare extant monuments, central among which stands that extraordinary production, the History of the World. On the side of his practical writings he influenced such men as Cromwell and Hampden, John Eliot and John Milton; on the side of belles-letters he touched such men as Spenser, Jonson, and Shakspeare. St. John somewhere intimates that, like all thoughtful men, he came in measure under

the mighty spell of metaphysics, and Edwards quotes the admission of Dugald Stewart that on one point the prisoner of genius in the Tower of London had forestalled him by two centuries. "In the region of abstract philosophy, as in that of the most intensely concrete problems of statecraft, Raleigh was able to anticipate some of the ripest conclusions of men who have given-two hundred years after his death-large sections of their lifetime to statesmanship apart, or to philosophy apart." There is wisdom enough and noble writing enough in his now neglected works to set up a score of modern authors. His prose style is confessed by all critics to be singularly natural, unaffected, robust, and choice; his poetry is worthy of associa tion with it; and both deserve a literary resurrection. If the new lives of this wonderful man shall have no other effect than to recall attention, in this country and in his own, to the literary remains of one of the most splendid actors and one of the greatest geniuses in English history, they will confer a boon of no little value upon the culture of the nineteenth century.

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A LECTURE BY THE LATE PROF. E. T. FITCH, D.D.

I AM to speak to you on the subject of music-a subject to which I have devoted many of the leisure moments of my life, and which has often proved a solace to me amid the exhausting cares of professional labor. The aspect in which I am to present it is that of a fine art. I shall treat of it as such, in respect to its history, its great productions, and the constituent elements of its beauty.

The fine arts originate in a desire, inherent in man, to represent, to himself or others, the conceptions of the imagination that give him pleasure. In the depths of his spiritual being he is ever conceiving of transient forms of natural or moral beauty. He loves, by means of art, to represent these to his external senses; to give them birth and being in some outward form, which will prolong their existence to himself, and present their beauties to other minds.

The fine arts, consequently, have their origin in the childhood of man, in the infancy of the world. Even the children of our proto-father Adam amused themselves, I fancy, with the rude tracery of outlines on the sand, the construction of little huts of turf, the whistling or humming of song; like other boys of later date, before and since the Christian era. But in the world at large, as in individuals, the imaginative arts require a long series of efforts for their cultivation and growth, before they attain maturity and present models of perfection. Yet in reaching that stage of advancement, none has been so long delayed as the art which I now bring to your notice. While sculpture, painting, architecture and poetry, attained their highest forms of beauty under the hand of artists who lived before the Christian era; music, for various reasons, deferred to so late

a period as the last century the era of her triumph-the development of her highest forms of beauty.

The sculptor and painter were employed on imitative arts. The ideas on which they labored were familiar. The objects of their conceptions, singly or in group, were often presented to view in the field of nature. The tools they employed, too, were simple, and their labors stood forth in real forms of marble, or in the colored representation of forms upon the panel, addressing their beauties at once to every eye. Nothing but the simplest mechanical inventions and most obvious chemical discoveries were necessary to the prosecution of those arts. And productions, whose beauty was recognized at once, stimulated the artist to excellence by the prospect of immediate responses of pleasure and reward. The architect, dealing in forms addressed to the eye and adapted to the constant wants of man, and depending on the simplest mechanical inventions for the prosecution of his art, could easily advance, in the beauty of his designs, with the progress of man toward wealth, civilization and taste; and, following him from the rude hut and tent of savage life to the wealth and compactness of the city, was sure to crown the art on the plains of Thebes and Palmyra, on the acropolis of Greece and the seven hills of Rome. The poet, too, ever furnished with the means of his art in living language, and with the materials of it in the living world that surrounded him, needed only the occurrence of subjects of great interest, the discipline of repeated production and study, the stimulus of a listening world, and sufficient leisure to attend to his art. These at an early age were afforded him, by the incidents attendant on human life and the founding of empires, by means of public rehearsals, by the invention of the art of writ ing, and by the patronage of the public or of the wealthy: and his art attained the culminating point of beauty and perfection, in works of a remote antiquity which now survive even the life of the languages in which they were written-the immortal epics of the man of Scio and the bard of Mantua, and lyric and dramatic compositions, which charmed, two thousand years ago, the inhabitants on the banks of the Ilyssus and the Tiber.

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But the musician labored under far greater difficulties in bringing his art to perfection. There were no specimens before him extant in the book of nature. None, that would represent to him the higher capacities of his art, as addressed to the ear, the intellect, the feelings of man. There were indeed fragmentary sketches of the natural language of sounds, in the ocean roar, the murmuring brook and waterfall, the forest winds, and the varied cries and songs of the animal creation, as well as in the varying intonations of human speech, which characterize the various passions of man, and constitute a natural language that is without national limits, the same amid all the diversity of human tongues. Whatever musical ideas might be suggested to him from these sources, they could not supply the demands of his art: which respected the full capacities of music in its application to man; which sought out of all possible qualities and combinations of musical sound those which would best adorn the utterance of his thoughts and feelings, which would most gratify his ear and best awaken the emotions of his heart.

Here was a new language for man, yet to be formed. The element out of which it was to be composed was known. The laws of its combination were indeed fixed: yet they were to be explored. How far man could advance in this new language, and to what extent he might apply it, was as yet problematical -the subject of future experiment and discovery. Mankind would indeed early indulge their voices in music: but the specimens from this source would not furnish the real artist-the man of nice ear and judgment-with so good models as he could produce from the trial of his own voice. For the line of discipline, improvement, discovery, must begin and proceed with the line of true artists. To advance in the art in the experimental way,-the only way in which he could judge of new combinations, he needed the means of representing to his ear the evanescent sounds of music at will, in order, by repeated production, to acquire familiarity with musical ideas.

Accordingly, as the history of the art shows, he had early recourse to other means than the voice, for producing the musical sounds of which he conceived-by the invention of passive instruments, which the Scriptures date back before the

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