The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862

'The Golden Hour is before us: there is in America enough wisdom and courage to coin it, ere it passes, into national honor and peace, if it is all put forth.

'Up, hearts!'

It is needless to say that we earnestly commend this book to all who are truly interested in the great questions of the time.

Tragedy of Success. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

Another of the extraordinary series bearing the motto, 'Aux plus desheritées le plus d'amour'—works as strongly marked by talent as by misapplied taste. The dramatic ability, the deep vein of poetry, the earnest thought, faith, and humanity of these dramas or drama, are beyond question—but very questionable to our mind is the extreme love of over-adorning truth which can induce a writer to represent plantation negroes as speaking elegant language and using lofty, tender, and poetic sentiments on almost all occasions, or at least to a degree which is exceptional and not regular. If we hope that the time may come when all of God's children will be raised to this high standard of thought and culture, so much the more reason is there why they should not now be exaggerated and placed in a false light. Yet, as we have said, the work abounds in noble thoughts and true poetry. It may be read with somewhat more than 'profit,' for it has within it a great and loving heart. True humanity is impressed on every page, and where that exists greatness and beauty are never absent.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame. By Victor Hugo. New-York: Dick and Fitzgerald. 1862.

Many years ago—say some thirty-odd—when French literature still walked in the old groves, and the classic form and style of the old revolution still swayed all the minor minds, there sprung up a reäction in the so-called romantic school of which Victor Hugo became the leader. The medieval renaissance, which fifty years before had penetrated Germany and England, and indeed all the North, was late in coming to France, but when it did come it stirred the Latin Quarter and Young France wonderfully. If its results were less remarkable in literature than in any other country, they were at least more admired in their day. Principal among these results was the novel now before us. And this book is really a tolerable imitation of Walter Scott. The feverish spirit of modern France craved, indeed, stronger ingredients than the Wizard of the North was wont to gather, and the Hunchback is accordingly 'sensational.' It has in fact been called extravagant—yes, forced and unnatural. Even ordinary readers were apt to say as much of it. We well remember meeting many years ago in a well-thumbed circulating-library copy of the Hunchback of Notre Dame the following doggerel on the last page:

'In Paris when to the Grève you go,
Pray do not grieve if Victor Hugo
Should there be hanging by a rope,
Without the blessing of the Pope,
Or that of any human creature
On him who libels human nature.'

Yet we counsel all who would be well-informed in literature—as well as the far greater number of those who read only for entertainment, to get this work. It is exciting—full of strange, quaint picturing of the Middle Ages, has vivid characters, and is full of life. Among the series of books with fewer faults, but, alas! with far fewer excellencies, which are daily printed, there is, after all, seldom one so well worth reading as The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

EDITOR'S TABLE

At last we are wide awake. At last the nation has found out its strength, and determined, despite doughface objections and impediments to every proposal of every kind, to push the war with energy, so that the foe shall be overwhelmed. Six hundred thousand men, as we write, will soon swell the ranks of the Federal army, and if six hundred thousand more are needed they can be had. For the North is arming in real earnest, thank God! and when it rises in all its force, who shall withstand it? It is a thing to remember with pride, that the proclamation calling for the second three hundred thousand by draft, was received with the same joy as though we had heard of a great victory.

Government has not gone to work one day too soon. From a rebellion, the present cause of strife has at length assumed the proportion of equal war. The South has cast its whole population, all its means, all its energy, heart and soul, life and future, on one desperate game; while we with every advantage have let out our strength little by little, so as to hurt the enemy as little as possible. Doughface democracy among us has squalled as if receiving deadly wounds at every proposal to crush or injure the foe. It opposed, heart and soul, the early On to Richmond movement, when the Republicans clamored for an overwhelming army, a grand rally, and a bold push. It rejoiced at heart over Bull Run—for the South was saved for a time. It upheld the wounded snake, 'anaconda' system, it opposed the using of contrabands in any way, it urged, heart and soul, the protection of the property of rebels, it warred on confiscation in any form, it was ready with a negative to every proposition to energetically push the war, and finally its press is now opposing the settling our soldiers on the cotton-lands of the South. Thus far the slow course of this war of ten millions against twenty millions is the history of the action of falsehood and treason benumbing the majority. They have lied against us, and against millions, that the negro was all we cared for, though it was the WHITE MAN, far, far above the black for whom we spoke and cared, or how else could that free labor in which the black is but a small unit have been our principal hope and thought?

But treason at home could not last forever, nor will lies always endure. The people have found out that the foe can not be gently whipped and amiably reinstated in their old place of honor. Moreover we have no time to lose. Another year will find us financially bankrupt, and the enemy in all probability, in that case, free and fairly afloat by foreign aid.

And if the South goes, all may possibly go. In every city exist desperate and unprincipled men—the Fernando Woods of the dangerous classes—who to rule would do all in their power to break our remaining union into hundreds of small independencies. The South would flood us with smuggled European goods—for, be it remembered, this iniquitous device to beat down our manufacture has always been prominent on their programme—our industry would be paralyzed, exchanges ruined, and the Eastern and Middle States become paltry shadows of what they once were.

The people have at last seen this terrible ghost stare them full in the face. They have found out that it is 'rule or ruin' in earnest. No time now to have every decisive and expedient measure yelled down as 'unconstitutional' or undemocratic or unprecedented. No days these to fight a maddened foe with conservative kid-gloves and frighten the fell tiger back with democratic rose-water. We must do all and every thing, even as the foe have done. We have been generous, we have been merciful—we have protected property, we have returned slaves, we have let our wounded lie in the open air and die rather than offend the fiendish-hearted women of Secessia—and what have we got by it? Lies and lies, again and yet again. For refusing to touch the black, Mr. Lincoln is termed by the Southern press 'a dirty negro-stealer,' and our troops, for not taking the slaves and thereby giving the South all its present crop and for otherwise aiding them, are simply held up as hell-hounds and brigands. Much we have made by forbearance!

The miserable position held by Free State secessionists, Breckinridge Democrats, rose-water conservatives, and other varieties of the great Northern branch of Southern treason, is fully exemplified by the following extract from Breckinridge's special organ, the Louisville Courier, printed while Nashville was still under rebel rule, an article which has been of late more than once closely reëchoed and imitated by the Richmond Whig.

'This,' says the Courier, 'has been called a fratricidal war by some, by others an irrepressible conflict between freedom and slavery. We respectfully take issue with the authors of both these ideas. We are not the brothers of the Yankees, and the slavery question is merely the pretext, not the cause of the war. The true irrepressible conflict lies fundamentally in the hereditary hostility, the sacred animosity, the eternal antagonism, between the two races engaged.

'The Norman cavalier can not brook the vulgar familiarity of the Saxon Yankee, while the latter is continually devising some plan to bring down his aristocratic neighbor to his own detested level. Thus was the contest waged in the old United States. So long as Dickinson dough-faces were to be bought, and Cochrane cowards to be frightened, so long was the Union tolerable to Southern men; but when, owing to divisions in our ranks, the Yankee hirelings placed one of their own spawn over us, political connection became unendurable, and separation necessary to preserve our self-respect.

'As our Norman friends in England, always a minority, have ruled their Saxon countrymen in political vassalage up to the present day, so have we, the slave oligarchs, governed the Yankees till within a twelve-month. We framed the Constitution, for seventy years molded the policy of the Government, and placed our own men, or 'Northern men with Southern principles,' in power.'

Cool—and in part true. They did rule us in political vassalage, they did place their own men, or 'Northern men with Southern principles,' in power, and there are scores of such abandoned traitors even now crying out 'pro-slavery' and abusing Emancipation among us, in the hope that if some turn of Fortune's wheel should separate the South, they may again rise to power as its agents and representatives! GOD help them! It is hard to conceive of men sunk so low! Nobody wants them now—but a time may come. They are in New-York—there is a peculiarly contemptible clique of them in Boston, and the Philadelphia Bulletin informs us that there is exactly such another precious party in the city of Brotherly Love, who are 'in a very awkward position just now, inasmuch as there is no market for them. They are in the position of Johnson and Don Juan in the slave-market at Constantinople, and ready to exclaim:

'I wish to G—d that some body would buy us!''

The first draft for the army was a death-blow to the slow-poison democracy, and it has been frightened accordingly. Like a slug on whom salt has just begun to fall, the crawling mass is indeed manifesting symptoms of frightened activity—but it is the activity of death. For the North is awake in real earnest; it is out with banner and bayonet; there is to be no more playing at war or wasting of lives—the foe is to be rooted out—delanda est Dixie. And in the hour of triumph where will the pro-slavery traitors be then? Where? Where they always strive to be—on the winning side. They will 'back water' as they have done on progressive measure which they once opposed, since the war begun; they will eat their words and fawn and wheedle those in power until the opportunity again occurs for building up on some sham principle a party of rum and faro-banks, low demagogue-ism, ignorance, reaction, and vulgarity. Then from his present toad-like swelling and whispering, we shall hear the full-expanded fiend roar out into a real life. It is the old story of history—the corrupt and venal arraigning itself against truth and terming the latter 'visionary' and 'fanatical.'

Those who visit the sick soldiers and do good in the hospitals occasionally get a gleam of fun among all the sad scenes—for any wag who has been to the wars seldom loses his humor, although he may have lost all else save that and honor. Witness a sketch from life:

A LITTLE HEAVY

C–, good soul, after taking all the little comforts he could afford to give to the wounded soldiers, went into the hospital for the fortieth time the other day, with his mite, consisting of several papers of fine-cut chewing-tobacco, Solace for the wounded, as he called it. He came to one bed, where a poor fellow lay cheerfully humming a tune, and studying out faces on the papered wall.

'Got a fever?' asked C–.

'No,' answered the soldier.

'Got a cold?'

'Yes, cold—lead—like the d–l!'

'Where?'

'Well, to tell you the truth, it's pretty well scattered. First, there's a bullet in my right arm, they han't dug that out yet. Then there's one near my thigh—it's sticking in yet: one in my leg—hit the bone—that fellow hurts! one through my left hand—that fell out. And I tell you what, friend, with all this lead in me, I feel, ginrally speaking, a little heavy all over!'

C– lightened his woes with a double quantity of Solace.

C– was a good fellow, and the soldier deserved his 'Solace.' Many of them among us are poor indeed. 'Boys!' exclaimed a wounded volunteer to two comrades, as they paused the other day before a tobacconist's and examined with the eyes of connoisseurs the brier or bruyére-wood pipes in his window, 'Boys! I'd give fifty dollars, if I had it, for four shillins to buy one of them pipes with!'

In a late number of an English magazine, Harriet Martineau gives some account of her conversations, when in America in 1835, with Chief-Justice Marshall and Mr. Madison. These men then represented the old ideas of the Republic and of Virginia as it had been. The following extract fully declares their opinions:

'When I knew Chief-Justice Marshall he was eighty-three—as bright-eyed and warm-hearted as ever, while as dignified a judge as ever filled the highest seat in the highest court of any country. He said he had seen Virginia the leading State for half his life; he had seen her become the second, and sink to be (I think) the fifth.

'Worse than this, there was no arresting her decline if her citizens did not put an end to slavery; and he saw no signs of any intention to do so, east of the mountains, at least. He had seen whole groups of estates, populous in his time, lapse into waste. He had seen agriculture exchanged for human stock-breeding; and he keenly felt the degradation.

'The forest was returning over the fine old estates, and the wild creatures which had not been seen for generations were reäppearing, numbers and wealth were declining, and education and manners were degenerating. It would not have surprised him to be told that on that soil would the main battles be fought when the critical day should come which he foresaw.

'To Mr. Madison despair was not easy. He had a cheerful and sanguine temper, and if there was one thing rather than another which he had learned to consider secure, it was the Constitution which he had so large a share in making. Yet he told me that he was nearly in despair, and that he had been quite so till the Colonization Society arose.

'Rather than admit to himself that the South must be laid waste by a servile war, or the whole country by a civil war, he strove to believe that millions of negroes could be carried to Africa, and so got rid of. I need not speak of the weakness of such a hope. What concerns us now is that he saw and described to me, when I was his guest, the dangers and horrors of the state of society in which he was living.

'He talked more of slavery than of all other subjects together, returning to it morning, noon, and night. He said that the clergy perverted the Bible because it was altogether against slavery; that the colored population was increasing faster than the white; and that the state of morals was such as barely permitted society to exist.

'Of the issue of the conflict, whenever it should occur, there could, he said, be no doubt. A society burdened with a slave system could make no permanent resistance to an unencumbered enemy; and he was astonished at the fanaticism which blinded some Southern men to so clear a certainty.

'Such was Mr. Madison's opinion in 1855.'

But the trial has come at last, and it is for the country to decide whether the South is to be allowed to secede, or to remain strengthened by their slaves, planting and warring against us until our own resources becoming exhausted, Europe can at an opportune moment intervene. But will that be the end? Will not Russia revenge the Crimea by aiding us—will not Austria be dismembered, France on fire, Southern Europe in arms, and one storm of anarchy sweep over the world? It is all possible, should we persevere in fighting the enemy with one hand and feeding him with the other.

There is such a thing as silly theatrical sentiment, and much of it is shown in the vulgar, melodramatic acting out of popular songs, as shown by the subjoined brace of anecdotes:

Dear Sir: I have had, in my time, not a little experience of jailer, warden, and, of late, camp life, and would like to say a word about silly, misplaced sympathy, of which I have witnessed enough in all conscience.

At one time, while officering it in a prison not one thousand miles—as the penny papers say—from the State of New-York, we received into our hands about as degraded a specimen of the genus 'murderer,' as it was ever my lot to see. He had killed a woman in a most cowardly and cruel manner, and was, to my way of thinking, (and I was used to such fellows,) about as brutal-looking a human beast as one need look at. However, we had hardly got him into a cell, before a carriage drove up to the door, and a splendidly-dressed lady, with a basket of oranges and a five-dollar camellia bouquet, asked to see the prisoner.

'Do let me see him!' she cried, 'I read of him in the newspaper, and, guilty as he is, I would fain contribute my mite to soothe him.'

'He is a rough customer, marm,' said my assistant.