MEMOIR OF THE RIGHT HONOUrable James Wilson (1860). THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION AT THE PRESENT CRISIS. Causes of the Civil War in America. By J. Lothrop Motley Manwaring (from Na- 285932 BÉRANGER.1 THE invention of books has at least one great advantage. It has half-abolished one of the worst consequences of the diversity of languages. Literature enables nations to understand one another. Oral intercourse hardly does this. In English, a distinguished foreigner says not what he thinks, but what he can. There is a certain intimate essence of national meaning which is as untranslatable as good poetry. Dry thoughts are cosmopolitan; but the delicate associations of language which express character, the traits of speech which mark the man, differ in every tongue, so that there are not even cumbrous circumlocutions that are equivalent in another. National character is a deep thing-a shy thing; you cannot exhibit much of it to people who have a difficulty in understanding your language; you are in strange society, and you feel you will not be understood. "Let an English gentleman," writes Mr. Thackeray, "who has dwelt two, four, or ten years in Paris, say at the end of any given period how much he knows of French society, how many French houses he has entered, and how many French friends he has made. Intimacy there is none; we see but the outsides of the people. Year by year we live in France, and grow grey and see no more. We play écarté with Monsieur de Trêfle every night; but what do we know of the heart of the man-of the inward ways, thoughts, 1 Euvres complètes de C.-J. de Béranger. Nouvelle édition, revue par l'Auteur, contenant les Dix Chansons nouvelles, le facsimile d'une Lettre de Béranger; illustrée de cinquante-deux gravures sur acier, d'après Charlet, D'Aubigny, Johannot Grenier, De Lemud, Pauquet, Penguilly, Raffet, Sandoz, exécutées par les artistes les plus distingués, et d'un beau portrait d'après nature par Sandoz. 2 vols., 8vo, 1855. and customs of Trêfle? We have danced with Countess Flicflac, Tuesdays and Thursdays, ever since the peace; and how far are we advanced in her acquaintance since we first twirled her round a room? We know her velvet gown and her diamonds; we know her smiles and her simpers and her rouge; but the real, rougeless, intime Flicflac we know not."1 Even if our words did not stutter, as they do stutter on our tongue, she would not tell us what she is. Literature has half mended this. Books are exportable; the essence of national character lies flat on a printed page. Men of genius, with the impulses of solitude, produce works of art, whose words can be read and re-read and partially taken in by foreigners to whom they could never be uttered, the very thought of whose unsympathising faces would freeze them on the surface of the mind. Alexander Smith has accused poetical reviewers of beginning as far as possible from their subject. It may seem to some, though it is not so really, that we are exemplifying this saying in commencing as we have commenced an article on Béranger. There are two kinds of poetry-which one may call poems of this world, and poems not of this world. We see a certain society on the earth held together by certain relations, performing certain acts, exhibiting certain phenomena, calling forth certain emotions. The millions of human beings who compose it have their various thoughts, feelings, and desires. They hate, act, and live. The social bond presses them closely together; and from their proximity new sentiments arise which are half superficial and do not touch the inmost soul, but which nevertheless are unspeakably important in the actual constitution of human nature, and work out their effects for good and for evil on the characters of those who are subjected to their influence. These sentiments of the world, as one may speak, differ from the more primitive impulses and emotions of our inner nature as the superficial phenomena of the material universe from what we fancy is its real essence. Passing hues, transient changes have their 1 We have been obliged to abridge the above extract, and in so doing have left out the humour of it. (W. Bagehot.) [From the Paris Sketch Book; condensed from the section on some French fashionable novels.] (Forrest Morgan.) course before our eyes; a multiplex diorama is for ever displayed; underneath it all we fancy-such is the inevitable constitution of our thinking faculty-a primitive, immovable essence, which is modified into all the ever-changing phenomena we see, which is the grey granite whereon they lie, the primary substance whose débris they all are. Just so from the original and primitive emotions of man, society-the evolving capacity of combined action-brings out desires which seem new, in a sense are new, which have no existence out of the society itself, are coloured by its customs at the moment, change with the fashions of the age. Such a principle is what we may call social gaiety: the love of combined amusement which all men feel and variously express, and which is to the higher faculties of the soul what a gay running stream is to the everlasting mountain-a light, altering element which beautifies while it modifies. Poetry does not shrink from expressing such feelings; on the contrary, their renovating cheerfulness blends appropriately with her inspiriting delight. Each age and each form of the stimulating imagination has a fashion of its own. Walter sings in his modernised chivalry : "Waken, lords and ladies gay, On the mountain dawns the day; With hawk and horse and hunting-spear. Waken, lords and ladies gay. "Louder, louder chant the lay, Waken, lords and ladies gay; Tell them youth and mirth and glee Think of this, and rise with day, Gentle lords and ladies gay." 1 Sir 1A separate lyric first published in the Edinburgh Annual Register for 1808, and republished in the collected edition of Scott's Poetical Works in 1830, under the title of " Hunting Song," vol. viii. p. 370, |