The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 46, August, 1861

Without the fort, across the moat, and across the bridge connecting this peninsula of sand with the nearest side of the mainland, are encamped three New York regiments. Each is in a wheat field, up to its eyes in dust. In order of precedence they come One, Two, and Five; in order of personal splendor of uniform they come Five, One, Two; in order of exploits they are all in the same negative position at present; and the Second has done rather the most robbing of hen-roosts.

The Fifth, Duryea's Zouaves, lighten up the woods brilliantly with their scarlet legs and scarlet head-pieces.

* * * * *

These last words were written upon the day that the attack in which Winthrop fell was arranged.

The disastrous day of the 10th of June, at Great Bethel, need not be described here. It is already written with tears and vain regrets in our history. It is useless to prolong the debate as to where the blame of the defeat, if blame there were, should rest. But there is an impression somewhat prevalent that Winthrop planned the expedition, which is incorrect. As military secretary of the commanding general, he made a memorandum of the outline of the plan as it had been finally settled. Precisely what that memorandum (which has been published) was he explains in the last letter he wrote, a few hours before leaving the fort. He says,—"If I come back safe, I will send you my notes of the plan of attack, part made up from the General's hints, part my own fancies." This defines exactly his responsibility. His position as aid and military secretary, his admirable qualities as adviser under the circumstances, and his personal friendship for the General, brought him intimately into the council of war. He embarked in the plan all the interest of a brave soldier contemplating his first battle. He probably made suggestions some of which were adopted. The expedition was the first move from Fort Monroe, to which the country had been long looking in expectation. These were the reasons why he felt so peculiar a responsibility for its success; and after the melancholy events of the earlier part of the day, he saw that its fortunes could be retrieved only by a dash of heroic enthusiasm. Fired himself, he sought to kindle others. For one moment that brave, inspiring form is plainly visible to his whole country, rapt and calm, standing upon the log nearest the enemy's battery, the mark of their sharpshooters, the admiration of their leaders, waving his sword, cheering his fellow-soldiers with his bugle voice of victory,—young, brave, beautiful, for one moment erect and glowing in the wild whirl of battle, the next falling forward toward the foe, dead, but triumphant.

On the 19th of April he left the armory-door of the Seventh, with his hand upon a howitzer; on the 21st of June his body lay upon the same howitzer at the same door, wrapped in the flag for which he gladly died, as the symbol of human freedom. And so, drawn by the hands of young men lately strangers to him, but of whose bravery and loyalty he had been the laureate, and who fitly mourned him who had honored them, with long, pealing dirges and muffled drums, he moved forward.

Yet such was the electric vitality of this friend of ours, that those of us who followed him could only think of him as approving the funeral pageant, not the object of it, but still the spectator and critic of every scene in which he was a part. We did not think of him as dead. We never shall. In the moist, warm midsummer morning, he was alert, alive, immortal.

DIRGE

FOR ONE WHO FELL IN BATTLE

Room for a Soldier! lay him in the clover;
He loved the fields, and they shall be his cover;
Make his mound with hers who called him once her lover:
Where the rain may rain upon it,
Where the sun may shine upon it,
Where the lamb hath lain upon it,
And the bee will dine upon it.

Bear him to no dismal tomb under city churches;
Take him to the fragrant fields, by the silver birches,
Where the whippoorwill shall mourn, where the oriole perches:
Make his mound with sunshine on it,
Where the bee will dine upon it,
Where the lamb hath lain upon it,
And the rain will rain upon it.

Busy as the busy bee, his rest should be the clover;
Gentle as the lamb was he, and the fern should be his cover;
Fern and rosemary shall grow my soldier's pillow over:
Where the rain may rain upon it,
Where the sun may shine upon it,
Where the lamb hath lain upon it,
And the bee will dine upon it.

Sunshine in his heart, the rain would come full often
Out of those tender eyes which evermore did soften;
He never could look cold, till we saw him in his coffin.
Make his mound with sunshine on it,
Where the wind may sigh upon it,
Where the moon may stream upon it,
And Memory shall dream upon it.

"Captain or Colonel,"—whatever invocation
Suit our hymn the best, no matter for thy station,—
On thy grave the rain shall fall from the eyes of a mighty nation!
Long as the sun doth shine upon it
Shall grow the goodly pine upon it,
Long as the stars do gleam upon it
Shall Memory come to dream upon it.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science. With other Addresses and Essays. By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. Boston; Ticknor & Fields. 12mo.

This volume contains seven occasional addresses and essays, written at various periods between 1812 and 1860. The subjects of which it treats are "Homoeopathy, and its Kindred Delusions," "Puerperal Fever, as a Private Pestilence," "The Position and Prospects of the Medical Student," "The Duties of the Physician,"—a Valedictory Address to the Medical Graduates of Harvard University,—"The Mechanism of Vital Actions," "Some more Recent Views of Homoeopathy," and "Currents and Counter-Currents in Medical Science." They are characterized by extensive information, fertile thought, strong convictions, keen wit, sound sense, and unflinching intellectual courage and self-trust. They are valuable contributions to the literature of the medical profession, and at the same time have that peculiar fascination which distinguishes all the productions of Dr. Holmes's ingenious and opulent mind. The style is clear, crisp, sparkling, abounding in originalities of verbal combination and felicities of descriptive phrase. In its movement, it bears the marks of a kind of mental impatience of the processes of slower, more dogged, and more cautious intellects, natural to a keen, bright, and swift intelligence, desirous of flashing the results of its operation in the briefest and most brilliant expression. The argument, though founded on premises which have been gathered by careful observation and study, often disregards the forms of the logic whose spirit it obeys, and, by its frequent use of analogy and illustration, may sometimes dazzle and confuse the minds it seeks to convince. In regard to opponents, it is not content with mere dialectic victory, but insinuates the subtle sting of wit to vex and irritate the sore places of defeat and humiliation.

The reputation which Dr. Holmes enjoys, as one of the most popular poets and prose-writers of the day, has made the public overlook the fact that literature has been the recreation of a life of which medical science has been the business. By far the larger portion of his time, for the last thirty years, has been devoted to his profession. Perhaps the value and validity of the conclusions he records in this volume may be questioned from the very circumstance that he expresses them in the lucid and vigorous style of an accomplished man of letters. "People," says Macaulay, "are loath to admit that the same man can unite very different kinds of excellence. It is soothing to envy to believe that what is splendid cannot be solid, that what is clear cannot be profound. Very slowly was the public brought to acknowledge that Mansfield was a great jurist, and that Burke was a great master of political science. Montagu was a brilliant rhetorician, and therefore, though he had ten times Harley's capacity for the driest parts of business, was represented by detractors as a superficial, prating pretender." Indeed, that peculiar vital energy which is the characteristic of genius carries the man of genius cheerfully through masses of drudgery which would dismay and paralyze the vigor of industrious mediocrity. The present volume, bright as it is in expression, is full of evidences that the author has submitted to the austerest requirements of his laborious profession; and if his opinions generally coincide with those which have been somewhat reluctantly adopted by the most eminent physicians of the age, it is certain that he has not jumped to his conclusions, but has reached them by patient and independent thought, study, and observation.

The courage which Dr. Holmes displays throughout this volume is of a refreshing kind. His frank, bold utterance of his convictions not only subjects him to the adverse criticism of a numerous and powerful body of able men in his own profession, but brings him into direct hostility with many persons who, outside of his profession, are among the warmest lovers of his literary genius. Some of the most intelligent admirers and appreciators of "The Autocrat" and "The Professor" are adherents of Homoeopathy; and of Homoeopathy Dr. Holmes is not only a scientific, but a sarcastic opponent. He both acknowledges and satirizes the fact, that intellectual men, eminent in all professions but that of medicine, are champions of the system he derides; but he does not the less spare one bitter word or cutting fleer against the system itself. By thus daring, provoking, and defying opposition both to his professional and literary reputation, he seems to us to indicate a real, if somewhat impatient love of truth. He valorously invites and courts the malicious sharpness of the most unfriendly criticism. Some people may call by the name of conceit this honest and unwithholding devotion of his whole powers to what he deems the cause of truth; but, we must be allowed to object, conceit is commonly anxious for the safety of the individual, while Dr. Holmes intrepidly exposes his individuality to the fire of hostile cannon, which are prevented from being discharged against each other only by the lucky thought that they can do more execution by being converged upon him. Had he appeared as an intelligent, knowing, and efficient controversialist on the side of the traditions of his profession, his wholesale denunciation of quackery, vulgar or genteel, might be referred to conceit; had he turned state's evidence against the accredited deceptions of his own profession, and gone over entirely to the enthusiasts who think that medicine is not an experimental science, but a series of hap-hazard hits at the occult laws of disease, he might be accused of conceit; but we think the charge is ridiculously false as directed against a man who boldly puts his professional and literary fame at risk in order to advance the cause of reason, learning, and common sense. Nobody can justly appreciate Holmes who does not perceive an impersonal earnestness and insight beneath the play of his provoking personal wit. We admit that he makes enemies needlessly; but all fair minds must still concede that even his petulances of sarcasm are but eccentric utterances of a love of truth which has its source in the deepest and gravest sentiments of his nature.

The object of Dr. Holmes's volume is to bring physicians and the people over whom they hold dominion into sensible relations with each other. A beautiful scorn of deception and humbug shines through his clear exposition of the facts and laws of disease. A high sense of the duties and dignity of the medical profession animates every precept he enforces on the attention of those who are to deal with disease. Like all the advanced thinkers of his profession, he relies, in the art of curing, more on Nature than on drugs; but in thus assisting to dispel the notion that the prescriptions either of the regular doctor or the irregular empiric possess the power to heal, he injures the quack only to aid the good physician. The strength of the quack consists in the two-fold ignorance of the sick,—in their ignorance of the superficial character of their common ailments, and in their ignorance of the deadly nature of their exceptional diseases. Panaceas, seeming to cure the former, are eagerly taken for the latter; but it is well known that they do not cure in either case. Physicians are tempted into quackery by the desire to dislodge ignorant pretenders from bedsides which it is their proper function to attend, and in ministering to sick imaginations they are too apt to pour a needless amount of nauseous medicine into sick bodies. If people, while in health, would heed the honest advice which Dr. Holmes gives in this volume, they would force physicians to be less hypocritical in their management of them when they are ill, and they would destroy the wide-spread evil of quackery under which the world now groans.

History of Civilization in England. By HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE. Vol. II. From the Second London Edition. To which is added an Alphabetical Index. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 8vo.

The present volume of Mr. Buckle's history consists of a deductive application to the history of Spain and Scotland of certain leading propositions, which, in his previous volume, he claims to have inductively established. These are four; "1st, That the progress of mankind depends on the success with which the laws of phenomena are investigated, and on the extent to which a knowledge of those laws is diffused; 2d, That, before investigation can begin, a spirit of skepticism must arise, which, at first aiding the investigation, is afterwards aided by it; 3d, That the discoveries thus made increase the influence of intellectual truths, and diminish, relatively, not absolutely, the influence of moral truths,—moral truths being more stationary than intellectual truths, and receiving fewer additions; 4th, That the great enemy of this movement, and therefore the great enemy of civilization, is the protective spirit, or the notion that the good of society depends on its concerns being watched over and protected by a State that teaches men what to do, and a Church which teaches them what to believe."

Mr. Buckle, with great abundance of learning and fulness of thought, attempts to prove that the history of Spain and Scotland verifies these propositions. The general causes which, according to him, have sunk Spain so low in the scale of civilization are loyalty and superstition. The Church and State have been supreme, and the consequence has been that the people are profoundly ignorant. Under able rulers, like Ferdinand, Charles V., and Philip II., the loyal nation attained a great height of power and glory; under their incompetent successors, the loyal nation, obedient to crowned sloth and stupidity as to crowned energy and genius, descended with frightful rapidity from its high estate, thus proving that the progress which depends on the character of individual monarchs or statesmen is necessarily unstable. Circumstances similar to those which made Spain loyal made it superstitious; and loyalty and superstition early formed an alliance by which all independent energy of conduct and thought was suppressed. According to Mr. Buckle, the prosperity of nations, in modern times, "depends on principles to which the clergy, as a body, are invariably opposed." This proposition is, to him, true of Protestant as well as Catholic clergymen; and a nation like Spain, looking to the Government for what it should do, and to the Church for what it should believe, has necessarily become inefficient and ignorant.

Spain has few friends among English readers, and Mr. Buckle's contemptuous opinion of its civilization may not, therefore, rouse much opposition that he will be compelled to heed. But it is not so in respect to Scotland, a caustic survey of whose civilization occupies three-quarters of the present volume. The position is taken, that Scotland, of all the countries of Protestant Europe, has been and is the most superstitious and priest-ridden. The only thing that saved the people from the fate of Spain was the fact, that their insubordination to temporal authority was as marked as their slavery to spiritual authority. They had the good fortune to be rebels as well as fanatics; but the reforming clergy having, after 1580, allied themselves heartily with the people against the king and nobles, increased as patriots the influence they exerted as priests. The love of country being thus associated with love of the Church, the people were enslaved by the very religious leaders who aided them in the fight against those forms of arbitrary power they mutually detested. The tyranny of the Presbyterian minister was lovingly accepted by the same population by which the tyranny of bishop and king was abhorred.

Mr. Buckle, with the malicious delight which only a philosopher in search of facts to fit his theory can know, has delved in a stratum of theological literature now covered from the common eye by more important deposits, in order to prove that in the seventeenth century the people of Scotland were ruled by a set of petty theological tyrants, as ignorant and as inhuman as ever disgraced a civilized society, and that their ignorance and inhumanity were all the more influential from being called by the name and acting by the authority of religion.

The author then proceeds to consider the philosophical and scientific reaction against this ecclesiastical despotism, which occurred in the eighteenth century. Why did it not emancipate the Scottish intellect?

Because, says Mr. Buckle, the method of the philosophers, like the method of the theologians, was deductive, and not inductive; and this, he thinks, characterizes the operation of the intellect of Scotland in all departments. Now the deductive method, or reasoning from principles to facts, does not strike the senses with the force of the inductive, or reasoning from facts to principles, and it is accordingly less accessible to the average understanding. The result was, that the writings of Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Hume had little effect on the popular intellect of Scotland, and its people are now the most bigoted and intolerant of those of any country in Europe, except Spain. This portion of Mr. Buckle's volume, containing an analytical estimate, not only of Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith, but of Black, Leslie, Hutton, Cullen, and John Hunter, is full of original thought and valuable information, however questionable may be some of its statements.

Whatever may be thought of the general ideas which Mr. Buckle enforces, few will be inclined to dispute the extent of his learning, the breadth of his understanding, the suggestiveness of his generalizations, the earnestness of his purpose, the mental honesty with which he seeks truth, the mental hardihood with which he assails what he considers error. He has not only no intellectual timidity, but no intellectual reserve, and is indifferent to the opprobrium which may proceed from the collision of his speculations with the strongest of prejudices and the most immovable of convictions. But this intrepid sincerity is not without the alloy of arrogance. He belongs to that school of able, but dogmatic positivists, who are apt to consider their minds the measure of the human mind, who are intolerant of those human sentiments and qualities in which they are deficient, and who, occupying the serene heights of a purely scientific wisdom, look down with pitying contempt on all intellects, however powerful, which are not emancipated from the dominion of theological ideas. Individually, he lacks both the sympathy and the imaginative insight by which a man pierces to the heart of a nation, and appreciates its life as distinguished from its opinions. All readers of those portions of the literature of Spain and Scotland in which genius exhibits the vital manners and representative character of those nations will feel how partial and inadequate is Mr. Buckle's historic sketch. The fundamental idea of his system, that human progress depends on the success with which the laws of phenomena are investigated and the extent to which a knowledge of them is diffused, overlooks the essential element of movement, which is not abstract knowledge, but vital force. Men and nations move in virtue of their passionate, moral, and spiritual forces, and these determine the character of their intellectual development and expression. A nation which knew all the laws of phenomena, but which was utterly lacking in moral force, would not only not be civilized, but would hardly be alive. Mr. Buckle insists that moral truths being relatively stationary, while intellectual truths are constantly advancing and multiplying, civilization cannot depend upon them. But even admitting that moral truths are stationary, still moral life, the conversion of these truths into character, is capable of indefinite advancement. There are moral truths more universal than any scientific truths, and it is owing to the fact that these truths have so imperfectly passed from abstractions into conduct, that civilization is yet so imperfect, and the achievements of the intellect still so limited. Out of the heart, and not out of the head, are the issues of life; and how a mere knowledge of "the laws of phenomena" can regenerate men from selfishness, ferocity, and malignity, can purify and invigorate the will, can even of itself stimulate the intellect to a further investigation of those laws, Mr. Buckle has not shown. Even the theological abuses of which he gives so exaggerated a representation are expressions of the passions and character of the people to which the theology was accommodated, and not of the sense and spirit of the New Testament, which the theology violated, so far as it was false in its ideas or inhuman in its teachings.

notes

1

I cannot forbear quoting Mr. Norton's beautiful translation of this sonnet in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1859:—

"So gentle and so modest doth appear
My lady when she giveth her salute,
That every tongue becometh trembling mute,
Nor do the eyes to look upon her dare,
And though she hears her praises, she doth, go
Benignly clothed with humility,
And like a thing come down she seems to be