Sketches in Canada, and rambles among the red men Part 2

The road was the same as before, with one deviation however--it was found expedient to cross Burlington Bay on the ice, about seven miles over, the lake beneath being twenty, and five-and-twenty fathoms in depth. It was ten o'clock at night, and the only light was that reflected from the snow. The beaten track, from which it is not safe to deviate, was very narrow, and a man, in the worst, if not the last stage of intoxication, noisy and brutally reckless, was driving before us in a sleigh. All this, with the novelty of the situation, the tremendous cracking of the ice at every instant, gave me a sense of apprehension just sufficient to be exciting, rather than very unpleasant, though I will confess to a feeling of relief when we were once more on the solid earth.

It is a remarkable fact, with which you are probably acquainted, that when one growth of timber is cleared from the land, another of quite a different species springs up spontaneously in its place. Thus, the oak or the beech succeeds to the pine, and the pine to the oak or maple.

This is not accounted for, at least I have found no one yet who can give me a reason for it. We pa.s.sed by a forest lately consumed by fire, and I asked why, in clearing the woods, they did not leave groups of the finest trees, or even single trees, here and there, to embellish the country? But it seems that this is impossible--for the trees thus left standing, when deprived of the shelter and society to which they have been accustomed, uniformly perish--which, for mine own poor part, I thought very natural.

A Canadian settler _hates_ a tree, regards it as his natural enemy, as something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any means.

The idea of useful or ornamental is seldom a.s.sociated here even with the most magnificent timber trees, such as among the Druids had been consecrated, and among the Greeks would have sheltered oracles and votive temples. The beautiful faith which a.s.signed to every tree of the forest its guardian nymph, to every leafy grove its tutelary divinity, would find no votaries here. Alas! for the Dryads and Hamadryads of Canada!

There are two princ.i.p.al methods of killing trees in this country, besides the quick, unfailing destruction of the axe; the first by setting fire to them, which sometimes leaves the root uninjured to rot gradually and unseen, or be grubbed up at leisure, or, more generally, there remains a visible fragment of a charred and blackened stump, deformed and painful to look upon: the other method is slower, but even more effectual; a deep gash is cut through the bark into the stem, quite round the bole of the tree. This prevents the circulation of the vital juices, and by degrees the tree droops and dies. This is technically called _ringing_ timber. Is not this like the two ways in which a woman's heart may be killed in this world of ours--by pa.s.sion and by sorrow? But better far the swift fiery death than this "ringing," as they call it!

February 21.

The monotony of this my most monotonous existence was fearfully broken last night. I had gone early to my room, and had just rung for my maid, when I was aware of a strange light flashing through the atmosphere,--a fire was raging in the lower parts of the city. I looked out; there was the full moon, brighter than ever she shows her fair face in our dear cloudy England, looking down upon the snowy landscape, and the icy bay glittered like a sheet of silver; while on the other side of the heavens all was terror and tumult--clouds of smoke mingled with spires of flame rose into the sky. Far off the garrison was beating to arms--the bells tolling; yet all around there was not a living being to be seen, and the snow-waste was still as death.

Fires are not uncommon in Toronto, where the houses are mostly wood; they have generally an alarum once or twice a week, and six or eight houses burned in the course of the winter; but it was evident this was of more fearful extent than usual. Finding, on inquiry, that all the household had gone off to the scene of action, my own maid excepted, I prepared to follow, for it was impossible to remain here idly gazing on the flames, and listening to the distant shouts in ignorance and suspense. The fire was in the princ.i.p.al street (King Street), and five houses were burning together. I made my way through the snow-heaped, deserted streets, and into a kind of court or garden at the back of the blazing houses. There was a vast and motley pile of household stuff in the midst, and a poor woman keeping guard over it, nearly up to her knees in the snow. I stood on the top of a bedstead, leaning on her shoulder, and thus we remained till the whole row of buildings had fallen in. The Irishmen (G.o.d bless my countrymen! for in all good--all mischief--all frolic--all danger--they are sure to be the first) risked their lives most bravely; their dark figures moving to and fro amid the blazing rafters, their fine att.i.tudes, and the recklessness with which they flung themselves into the most horrible situations, became at last too fearfully exciting. I was myself so near, and the flames were so tremendous, that one side of my face was scorched and blistered.

All this time the poor woman on whose shoulder I was leaning stood silent and motionless, gazing with apparent tranquillity on her burning house. I remember saying to her with a shudder--"But this is dreadful!

to stand by and look on while one's home and property are destroyed!"

And she replied quietly, "Yes, ma'am; but I dare say some good will come of it. All is for the best, if one knew it; and now Jemmy's safe, I don't care for the rest." Now Jemmy was not her son, as I found, but a poor little orphan, of whom she took charge.

There had been at first a scarcity of water, but a hole being hewed through the ice on the lake, the supply was soon quick and plentiful.

All would have been well over, if the sudden fall of a stack of chimneys had not caused some horrible injuries. One poor boy was killed, and some others maimed--poor Mr. B. among the number. After this I returned home rather heart-sick; and nigh to the house a sleigh glanced by at full gallop, on which I could just perceive, in the moonlight, the extended form of a man with his hands clenched over his head--as in agony, or lifeless.

MUSIC.

March 1.

In the different branches of art, each artist thinks his own the highest, and is filled with the idea of all its value and all its capabilities which he understands best and has most largely studied and developed. "But," says Dr. Chalmers, "we must take the testimony of each man to the worth of that which he does know, and reject the testimony of each to the comparative worthlessness of that which he does not know."

For it is not, generally speaking, that he overrates his own particular walk of art from over enthusiasm, (no art, when considered separately, as a means of human delight and improvement, _can_ be over-rated,) but such a _one-sided_ artist, whose mind and powers have flowed in only one direction, underrates from ignorance the walks of others which diverge from his own.

Of all artists, musicians are most exclusive in devotion to their own art, and in the want of sympathy, if not absolute contempt, for other arts. A painter has more sympathies with a musician, than a musician with a painter. Vernet used to bring his easel into Pergolesi's room, to paint beside his harpsichord, and used to say that he owed some of his finest skies to the inspired harmonies of his friend. Pergolesi never felt, perhaps, any harmonies but those of his own delicious art.

"Aspasia, he who loves not music is a beast of one species, and he who overloves it is a beast of another, whose brain is smaller than a nightingale's, and his heart than that of a lizard!" I refer you for the rest to a striking pa.s.sage in Landor's "Pericles and Aspasia,"

containing a most severe philippic, not only against the professors, but the _profession_, of music, and which concludes very aptly, "Panenus said this: let us never believe a word of it!" It is too true that some excellent musicians have been ignorant, and sensual, and dissipated; but there are sufficient exceptions to the sweeping censure of Panenus to show that "imprudence, intemperance, and gluttony" do not always, or necessarily, "open their channels into the sacred stream of music."

Musicians are not selfish, careless, sensual, ignorant, because they are musicians, but because, from a defective education, they are nothing else. The German musicians are generally more moral and more intellectual men than English or Italian musicians, and hence their music has taken a higher flight, is more intellectual than the music of other countries. Music as an art has not degraded them, but they have elevated music.

The most accomplished and intellectual musician I ever met with is Felix Mendelssohn. I do not recollect if it were himself or some one else who told me of a letter which Carl von Weber had addressed to him, warning him that he never could attain the highest honours in his profession without cultivating the virtues and the decencies of life. "A great artist," said Weber, "ought to be a good man."

While I am "i' the vein," I must give you a few more musical reminiscences before my fingers are quite frozen.

I had once some conversation with Thalberg and Felix Mendelssohn, on the unmeaning names which musicians often give to their works, as "Concerto in F," "Concerto in B flat," "First Symphony," "Second Symphony," &c.

Mendelssohn said, that though in almost every case the composer might have a leading idea, it would be often difficult, or even impossible, to give any t.i.tle sufficiently comprehensive to convey the same idea or feeling to the mind of the hearer.

But music, except to musicians, can only give ideas, or rather raise images, by a.s.sociation; it can give the pleasure which the just accordance of musical sounds must give to sensitive ears, but the a.s.sociated ideas or images, if any, must be quite accidental. Haydn, we are told, when he sat down to compose, used first to invent a story in his own fancy--a regular succession of imaginary incidents and feelings--to which he framed or suited the successive movements (motivi) of his concerto. Would it not have been an advantage if Haydn could have given to his composition such a t.i.tle as would have pitched the imagination of the listener at once upon the same key? Mendelssohn himself has done this in the pieces which he has ent.i.tled "Overture to Melusina," "Overture to the Hebrides," "Meeres Stille und Gluckliche Fahrt," "The Brook," and others,--which is better surely than Sonata No.

1, Sonata No. 2. Take the Melusina, for example; is there not in the sentiment of the music all the sentiment of the beautiful old fairy tale?--first, in the flowing, intermingling harmony, we have the soft elemental delicacy of the water nymph; then, the gushing of fountains, the undulating waves; then the martial prowess of the knightly lover, and the splendour of chivalry prevailing over the softer and more ethereal nature; and then, at last, the dissolution of the charm; the ebbing, fainting, and failing away into silence of the beautiful water spirit. You will say it might answer just as well for Ondine; but this signifies little, provided we have our fancy pitched to certain poetical a.s.sociations pre-existing in the composer's mind. Thus not only poems, but pictures and statues, might be set to music. I suggested to Thalberg as a subject the Aurora of Guido. It should begin with a slow, subdued, and solemn movement, to express the slumbrous softness of that dewy hour which precedes the coming of the day, and which in the picture broods over the distant landscape, still wrapt in darkness and sleep; then the stealing upwards of the gradual dawn; the brightening, the quickening of all life; the awakening of the birds, the burst of the sun-light, the rushing of the steeds of Hyperion through the sky, the aerial dance of the Hours, and the whole concluding with a magnificent choral song of triumph and rejoicing sent up from universal nature.

And then in the same spirit--no, in his own grander spirit--I would have Mendelssohn improviser the Laoc.o.o.n. There would be the pomp and procession of the sacrifice on the seash.o.r.e; the flowing in of the waves; the two serpents which come gliding on their foamy crests, wreathing, and rearing, and undulating; the horror, the lamentation, the clash of confusion, the death struggle, and, after a deep pause, the wail of lamentation, the funereal march;--the whole closing with a hymn to Apollo. Can you not just imagine such a piece of music, and composed by Mendelssohn? and can you not fancy the possibility of setting to music in the same manner Raffaelle's Cupid and Psyche, or his Galatea, or the group of the Niobe? Niobe would be a magnificent subject either for a concerto, or for a kind of mythological oratorio.

March 2.

Turning over Boswell to-day, I came upon this pa.s.sage: Johnson says, "I do not commend a society where there is an agreement that what would not otherwise be fair shall be fair; but I maintain that an individual of any society who practises what is allowed is not dishonest."

What say you to this reasoning of our great moralist? does it not reduce the whole moral law to something merely conventional?

In another place, Dr. Johnson asks, "What proportion does climate bear to the complex system of human life." I shiver while I answer, "A good deal, my dear Doctor, to some individuals, and yet more to whole races of men."

He says afterwards, "I deal more in _notions_ than in facts." And so do I, it seems.

He talks of "men being _held down_ in conversation by the presence of women"--_held up_ rather, where moral feeling is concerned; and if held down where intellect and social interests are concerned, then so much the worse for such a state of society.

Johnson knew absolutely nothing about women. Witness that one a.s.sertion, among others more insulting, that it is matter of indifference to a woman whether her husband be faithful or not. He says, in another place, "If we men require more perfection from women than from ourselves, it is doing them honour."

Indeed! If, in exacting from us more perfection, you do not allow us the higher and n.o.bler nature, you do us not honour but gross injustice; and if you do allow us the higher nature, and yet regard us as subject and inferior, then the injustice is the greater. There, Doctor, is a dilemma for you.

March 8.

This relentless winter seems to stiffen and contract every nerve, and the frost is of that fierceness and intensity, that it penetrates even to the marrow of one's bones. One of the workmen told me yesterday, that on taking hold of an iron bar it had taken the skin off his hand, as if he had grasped it red hot: it is a favourite trick with the children to persuade each other to touch with the tongue a piece of metal which has been exposed to the open air; adhesion takes place immediately: even the metal k.n.o.bs on the doors of the room I carefully avoid touching--the contact is worse than unpleasant.

Let but the spring come again, and I will take to myself wings and fly off to the west!--But will spring _ever_ come? When I look out upon the bleak, shrouded, changeless scene, there is something so awfully silent, fixed, and immutable in its aspect, that it is enough to disturb one's faith in the everlasting revolutions of the seasons. Green leaves and flowers, and streams that murmur as they flow, soft summer airs, to which we open the panting bosom--panting with too much life--shades grateful for their coolness,--can such things be, or do they exist only in poetry and Paradise?

GOETHE.

"When I look back," said Goethe, "on my early and middle life, and now in my old age reflect how few of those remain who were young with me, life seems to me like a summer residence in a watering-place. When we first arrive, we form friendships with those who have already spent some time there, and must be gone the next week. The loss is painful, but we connect ourselves with the second generation of visitors, with whom we spend some time and become dearly intimate; but these also depart, and we are left alone with a third set, who arrive just as we are preparing for our departure, in whom we feel little or no interest."

Goethe thought that a knowledge of the universe must be _innate_ with some poets. (It seems to have been so with Shakspeare.) He says he wrote "Gotz von Berlichingen" when he was a young inexperienced man of two-and-twenty. "Ten years later," he adds, "I stood astonished at the truth of my own delineation; I had never beheld or experienced the like, therefore the knowledge of these multifarious aspects of human nature I must have possessed through a kind of antic.i.p.ation."

Yes; the "kind of antic.i.p.ation" through which Joanna Baillie conceived and wrote her n.o.ble tragedies. Where did she, whose life was pure and "retired as noontide dew," find the dark, stern, terrible elements, out of which she framed the delineations of character and pa.s.sion in De Montfort, Ethwald, Basil, Constantine?--where but in her own prophetic heart and genius?--in that intuitive, almost unconscious revelation of the universal nature, which makes the poet, and not experience or knowledge. Joanna Baillie, whose most tender and refined, and womanly and christian spirit never, I believe, admitted an ungentle thought of any living being, created De Montfort, and gave us the physiology of Hatred; and might well, like Goethe, stand astonished at the truth of her own delineation.

LITERARY WOMEN.

Rehbein once observed to Goethe "that the women who had distinguished themselves in literature, poetry especially, were almost universally women who had been disappointed in their best affections, and sought in this direction of the intellect a sort of compensation. When women are married, and have children to take care of, they do not often think of writing poetry."

This is not very politely or delicately expressed; but we must not therefore shrink from it, for it involves some important considerations.

It is most certain that among the women who have been distinguished in literature, three-fourths have been either by nature, or fate, or the law of society, placed in a painful or a false position; it is also most certain that in these days when society is becoming every day more artificial and more complex, and marriage, as the gentlemen a.s.sure us, more and more expensive, hazardous, and inexpedient, women _must_ find means to fill up the void of existence. Men, our natural protectors, our lawgivers, our masters, throw us upon our own resources; the qualities which they pretend to admire in us,--the overflowing, the clinging affections of a warm heart--the household devotion,--the submissive wish to please, that feels "every vanity in fondness lost,"--the tender shrinking sensitiveness which Adam thought so charming in his Eve,--to cultivate these, to make them, by artificial means, the staple of the womanly character, is it not to cultivate a taste for sunshine and roses, in those we send to pa.s.s their lives in the arctic zone? We have gone away from nature, and we must--if we can--subst.i.tute another nature. Art, literature, and science remain to us. Religion, which formerly opened the doors of nunneries and convents to forlorn women, now mingling her beautiful and soothing influence with resources which the prejudices of the world have yet left open to us, teaches us another lesson, that only in utility, such as is left to us,--only in the a.s.siduous employment of such faculties as we are permitted to exercise, can we find health and peace, and compensation for the wasted or repressed impulses and energies more proper to our s.e.x--more natural--perhaps more pleasing to G.o.d; but trusting in His mercy, and using the means He has given, we must do the best we can for ourselves and for our sisterhood. The cruel prejudices which would have shut us out from n.o.bler consolation and occupations have ceased in great part, and will soon be remembered only as the rude, coa.r.s.e barbarism of a by-gone age. Let us then have no more caricatures of methodistical, card-playing, and acrimonious old maids. Let us hear no more of scandal, parrots, cats, and lap-dogs--or worse!--these never-failing subjects of derision with the vulgar and the frivolous, but the source of a thousand compa.s.sionate and melancholy feelings in those who can reflect! In the name of humanity and womanhood, let us have no more of them! Coleridge, who has said and written the most beautiful, the most tender, the most reverential things of women--who understands better than any man, any poet, what I will call the metaphysics of love--Coleridge has a.s.serted that the perfection of a woman's character is to be _characterless_.