If, Yes and Perhaps Part 11

"WASHINGTON, January --, 1842.

"DEAR SIR:--We are in a little trouble about a little thing. There are now in this city no less than three gentlemen bearing credentials to government as Charges from the Republic of Oronoco.

They are, of course, accredited from three several home governments. The President signified, when the first arrived, that he would receive the Charge from that government, on the 2d proximo, but none of us know who the right Charge is. The newspapers tell nothing satisfactory about it. I suppose you know: can you write me word before the 2d?

"The gentlemen are: Dr. Estremadura, accredited from the 'Const.i.tutional Government,'--his credentials are dated the 2d of November; Don Paulo Vibeira, of the 'Friends of the People,' 5th of November; M. Antonio de Vesga, 'Const.i.tution of 1823,' October 27th. They attach great importance to our decision, each having scrip to sell. In haste, truly yours."

To this letter I returned the following reply:--

"SIR:--Our latest dates from Oronoco are to the 13th ultimo. The 'Const.i.tution of '23' was then in full power. If, however, the policy of our government be to recognize the gentlemen whose princ.i.p.als shall be in office on the 2d proximo, it is a very different affair.

"You may not be acquainted with the formulas for ascertaining the duration of any given modern revolution. I now use the following, which I find almost exactly correct.

"Multiply the age of the President by the number of statute miles from the equator, divide by the number of pages in the given Const.i.tution; the result will be the length of the outbreak, in days. This formula includes, as you will see, an allowance for the heat of the climate, the zeal of the leader, and the verbosity of the theorists. The Const.i.tution of 1823 was reproclaimed on the 25th of October last. If you will give the above formula into the hands of any of your clerks, the calculation from it will show that that government will go out of power on the 1st of February, at 25 minutes after 1, P. M. Your choice, on the 2d, must be therefore between Vibeira and Estremadura; here you will have no difficulty.

Bobadil (Vibeira's princ.i.p.al) was on the 13th ultimo confined under sentence of death, at such a distance from the capital that he cannot possibly escape and get into power before the 2d of February. The 'Friends of the People,' in Oronoco, have always moved slowly; they never got up an insurrection in less than nineteen days' canva.s.sing; that was in 1839. Generally they are even longer. Of course, Estremadura will be your man.

"Believe me, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant,

"GEORGE HACKMATACK."

The Cabinet had the good sense to act on my advice. My information proved nearly correct, the only error being one of seven minutes in the downfall of the 1823 Const.i.tution. This arose from my making no allowance for difference of longitude between Piaut, where their government was established, and Opee, where it was crushed. The difference of time between those places is six minutes and fifty-three seconds, as the reader may see on a globe.

Estremadura was, of course, presented to the President, and sold his scrip.

[7] Newspaper men of 1868 will be amused to think that half past one was late in 1836. At that time the "Great Western Mail" was due in Boston at 6 P. M., and there was no later news except "local," or an occasional horse express.

[8] The reader will observe the Arcadian habits of 1836, when the German was yet unknown.

THE OLD AND THE NEW, FACE TO FACE.

A THUMB-NAIL SKETCH.

[This essay was published in Sartain's Magazine, in 1852, as "A Thumb-nail Sketch," having received one of ten premiums which Mr.

Sartain offered to encourage young writers. It had been written a few years earlier, some time before the studies of St. Paul's life by Conybeare and Howson, now so well known, were made public. The chronology of my essay does not precisely agree with that of these distinguished scholars. But I make no attempt now either to recast the essay or to discuss the delicate and complicated questions which belong to the chronology of Paul's life or to that of Nero; for there is no question with regard to the leading facts. At the end of twenty years I may again express the wish that some master competent to the greatest themes might take the trial of Paul as the subject of a picture.]

In a Roman audience-chamber, the old civilization and the new civilization brought out, at the very birth of the new, their chosen champions.

In that little scene, as in one of Rembrandt's thumbnail studies for a great picture, the lights and shades are as distinct as they will ever be in the largest scene of history. The champions were perfect representatives of the parties. And any man, with the soul of a man, looking on, could have prophesied the issue of the great battle from the issue of that contest.

The old civilization of the Roman Empire, just at that time, had reached a point which, in all those outward forms which strike the eye, would regard our times as mean indeed. It had palaces of marble, where even modern kings would build of brick with a marble front to catch the eye; it counted its armies by thousands, where we count ours by hundreds; it surmounted long colonnades with its exquisite statues, for which modern labor digs deep in ruined cities, because it cannot equal them from its own genius; it had roads, which are almost eternal, and which, for their purposes, show a luxury of wealth and labor that our boasted locomotion cannot rival. These are its works of a larger scale. And if you enter the palaces, you find pictures of matchless worth, rich dresses which modern looms cannot rival, and sumptuous furniture at which modern times can only wonder. The outside of the ancient civilization is unequalled by the outside of ours, and for centuries will be unequalled by it. We have not surpa.s.sed it there. And we see how it attained this distinction, such as it was. It came by the constant concentration of power. Power in few hands is the secret of its display and glory. And thus that form of civilization attained its very climax in the moment of the greatest unity of the Roman Empire. When the Empire nestled into rest; after the convulsions in which it was born; when a generation had pa.s.sed away of those who had been Roman citizens; when a generation arose, which, excepting one man, the emperor, was a nation of Roman subjects,--then the Empire was at its height of power, its centralization was complete, the system of its civilization was at the zenith of its success.

At that moment it was that there dawned at Rome the first gray morning-light of the new civilization.

At that moment it was that that short scene, in that one chamber, contrasted the two as clearly as they can be contrasted even in long centuries.

There is one man, the emperor, who is a precise type, an exact representative, of the old. That man is brought face to face with another who is a precise type, an exact representative, of the new.

Only look at them as they stand there! The man who best ill.u.s.trates the old civilization owes to it the most careful nurture. From his childhood he has been its petted darling. Its princ.i.p.al is concentration under one head. He is that head. When he is a child, men know he will be emperor of the world. The wise men of the world teach him; the poets of the world flatter him; the princes of the world bow to him. He is trained in all elegant accomplishments; he is led forward through a graceful, luxurious society. His bearing is that of an emperor; his face is the face of fine physical beauty. Imagine for yourself the sensual countenance of a young Bacchus, beautiful as Milton's devils; imagine him clad in splendor before which even English luxury is mean; arrayed in jewels, to which even Eastern pomp is tinsel; imagine an expression of tired hate, of low, brutal l.u.s.t, hanging on those exquisite licentious features, and you have before you the type of Roman civilization. It is the boy just budding into manhood, whom later times will name as the lowest embodiment of meanness and cruelty! You are looking upon Nero!

Not only is this man an exact type of the ancient civilization, its central power, its outside beauty, but the precise time of this sketch of ours is the exact climax of the _moral_ results of the ancient civilization. We are to look at Nero just when he has returned to Rome from a Southern journey.[9] That journey had one object, which succeeded. To his after-life it gives one memory, which never dies. He has travelled to his beautiful country palace, that he might kill his mother!

We can picture to ourselves Agrippina, by knowing that she was Nero's mother, and our picture will not fail in one feature. She has all the beauty of sense, all the attraction of pa.s.sion. Indeed, she is the Empress of Rome, because she is queen of beauty--and of l.u.s.t. She is most beautiful among the beautiful of Rome; but what is that beauty of feature in a state of whose matrons not one is virtuous, of whose daughters not one is chaste? It is the beauty of sense alone, fit adornment of that external grandeur, of that old society.

In the infancy of her son, this beautiful Agrippina consulted a troop of fortune-tellers as to his fate; and they told her that he would live to be Emperor of Rome, and to kill his mother. With all the ecstasy of a mother's pride fused so strangely with all the excess of an ambitious woman's love of power, she cried in answer, "He may kill me, if only he rules Rome!"[10]

She spoke her own fate in these words.

Here is the account of it by Tacitus. Nero had made all the preparations; had arranged a barge, that of a sudden its deck might fall heavily upon those in the cabin, and crush them in an instant. He meant thus to give to the murder which he planned the aspect of an accident.

To this fatal vessel he led Agrippina. He talked with her affectionately and gravely on the way; "and when they parted at the lakeside, with his old boyish familiarity he pressed her closely to his heart, either to conceal his purpose, or because the last sight of a mother, on the eve of death, touched even his cruel nature, and then bade her farewell."

Just at the point upon the lake where he had directed, as the Empress sat in her cabin talking with her attendants, the treacherous deck was let fall upon them all. But the plot failed. She saw dead at her feet one of her favorites, crushed by the sudden blow. But she had escaped it. She saw that death awaited them all upon the vessel. The men around sprang forward, ready to do their master's bidding in a less clumsy and more certain way. But the Empress, with one of her attendants, sprang from the treacherous vessel into the less treacherous waves. And there, this faithful friend of hers, with a woman's wit and a woman's devotion, drew on her own head the blows and stabs of the murderers above, by crying, as if in drowning, "Save me, I am Nero's mother!" Uttering those words of self-devotion, she was killed by the murderers above, while the Empress, in safer silence, buoyed up by fragments of the wreck, floated to the sh.o.r.e.

Nero had failed thus in secret crime, and yet he knew that he could not stop here. And the next day after his mother's deliverance, he sent a soldier to her palace, with a guard; and there, where she was deserted even by her last attendant, without pretence of secrecy, they put to death the daughter and the mother of a Caesar. And Nero only waits to look with a laugh upon the beauty of the corpse, before he returns to resume his government at Rome.

That moment was the culminating moment of the ancient civilization. It is complete in its centralizing power; it is complete in its external beauty; it is complete in its crime. Beautiful as Eden to the eye, with luxury, with comfort, with easy indolence to all; but dust and ashes beneath the surface! It is corrupted at the head! It is corrupted at the heart! There is nothing firm!

This is the moment which I take for our little picture. At this very moment there is announced the first germ of the new civilization. In the very midst of this falsehood, there sounds one voice of truth; in the very arms of this giant, there plays the baby boy who is to cleave him to the ground. This Nero slowly returns to the city. He meets the congratulations of a senate, which thank him and the G.o.ds that he has murdered his own mother. With the agony of an undying conscience torturing him, he strives to avert care by amus.e.m.e.nt. He hopes to turn the mob from despising him by the grandeur of their public entertainments. He enlarges for them the circus. He calls unheard-of beasts to be baited and killed for their enjoyment. The finest actors rant, the sweetest musicians sing, that Nero may forget his mother, and that his people may forget him.

At that period, the statesmen who direct the machinery of affairs inform him that his personal attention is required one morning for a state trial, to be argued before the Emperor in person. Must the Emperor be there? May he not waste the hours in the blandishments of lying courtiers, or the honeyed falsehoods of a mistress? If he chooses thus to postpone the audience, be it so; Seneca, Burrhus, and his other counsellors will obey. But the time will come when the worn-out boy will be pleased some morning with the almost forgotten majesty of state. The time comes one day. Worn out by the dissipation of the week, fretted by some blunder of his flatterers, he sends for his wiser counsellers, and bids them lead him to the audience-chamber, where he will attend to these cases which need an Emperor's decision. It is at that moment that we are to look upon him.

He sits there, upon that unequalled throne, his face sickly pale with boyish debauchery; his young forehead worn with the premature sensual wrinkles of l.u.s.t; and his eyes bloodshot with last night's intemperance.

He sits there, the Emperor-boy, vainly trying to excite himself, and forget her, in the blazonry of that pomp, and bids them call in the prisoner.

A soldier enters, at whose side the prisoner has been chained for years.

This soldier is a tried veteran of the Praetorian cohorts. He was selected, that from him this criminal could not escape; and for that purpose they have been inseparably bound. But, as he leads that other through the hall, he looks at him with a regard and earnestness which say he is no criminal to him. Long since, the criminal has been the guardian of his keeper. Long since, the keeper has cared for the prisoner with all the ardor of a new-found son's affection.

They lead that gray-haired captive forward, and with his eagle eye he glances keenly round the hall. That flashing eye has ere now bade monarchs quail; and those thin lips have uttered words which shall make the world ring till the last moment of the world shall come. The stately Eastern captive moves unawed through the a.s.sembly, till he makes a subject's salutation to the Emperor-judge who is to hear him. And when, then, the gray-haired sage kneels before the sensual boy, you see the prophet of the new civilization kneel before the monarch of the old! You see Paul make a subject's formal reverence to Nero![11]

Let me do justice to the court which is to try him. In that judgment-hall there are not only the pomp of Rome, and its crime; we have also the best of its wisdom. By the dissolute boy, Nero, there stands the prime minister Seneca, the chief of the philosophers of his time; "Seneca the saint," cry the Christians of the next century. We will own him to be Seneca the wise, Seneca almost the good. To this sage had been given the education of the monster who was to rule the world.

This sage had introduced him into power, had restrained his madness when he could, and with his colleague had conducted the general administration of the Empire with the greatest honor, while the boy was wearing out his life in debauchery in the palace. Seneca dared say more to Nero, to venture more with him, than did any other man. For the young tiger was afraid of his old master long after he had tasted blood. Yet Seneca's system was a cowardly system. It was the best of Roman morality and Greek philosophy, and still it was mean. His daring was the bravest of the men of the old civilization. He is the type of their excellences, as is Nero the model of their power and their adornments. And yet all that Seneca's daring could venture was to seduce the baby-tyrant into the least injurious of tyrannies. From the plunder of a province he would divert him by the carnage of the circus. From the murder of a senator he could lure him by some new l.u.s.t at home. From the ruin of the Empire, he could seduce him by diverting him with the ruin of a n.o.ble family. And Seneca did this with the best of motives. He said he used all the power in his hands, and he thought he did. He was one of those men of whom all times have their share. The bravest of his time, he satisfied himself with alluring the beardless Emperor by petty crime from public wrong; he could flatter him to the expedient. He dared not order him to the right.

But Seneca knew what was right. Seneca also had a well-trained conscience, which told him of right and of wrong. Seneca's brother, Gallio, had saved Paul's life when a Jewish mob would have dragged him to pieces in Corinth; and the legend is that Seneca and Paul had corresponded with each other before they stood together in Nero's presence, the one as counsellor, the other as the criminal.[12] When Paul arose from that formal salutation, when the apostle of the new civilization spoke to the tottering monarch of the old, if there had been one man in that a.s.semblage, could he have failed to see that that was a turning-point in the world's history? Before him in that little hall, in that little hour, was pa.s.sing the scene which for centuries would be acted out upon the larger stage.

Faith on the one side, before expediency and cruelty on the other! Paul before Seneca and Nero! He was ready to address Nero, with the eloquence and vehemence which for years had been demanding utterance.

He stood at length before the baby Caesar, to whose tribunal he had appealed from the provincial court of a doubting Festus and a trembling Agrippa.

And who shall ask what words the vigorous Christian spoke to the dastard boy! Who that knows the eloquence which rung out on the ears of astonished Stoics at Athens, which commanded the incense and the hecatombs of wandering peasants in Asia, which stilled the gabbling clamor of a wild mob at Jerusalem,--who will doubt the tone in which Paul spoke to Nero! The boy quailed for the moment before the man! The gilded dotard shrunk back from the home truths of the new, young, vigorous faith: the ruler of a hundred legions was nothing before the G.o.d-commissioned prisoner.

No; though at this audience all men forsook Paul, as he tells us; though not one of the timid converts were there, but the soldier chained at his side,--still he triumphed over Nero and Nero's minister.