Kitabı oku: «Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 1. No 1, June 1850», sayfa 17

SHORT CUTS ACROSS THE GLOBE

To a person who wishes to sail for California an inspection of the map of the world reveals a provoking peculiarity. The Atlantic Ocean – the highway of the globe – being separated from the Pacific by the great western continent, it is impossible to sail to the opposite coasts without going thousands of miles out of his way; for he must double Cape Horn. Yet a closer inspection of the map will discover that but for one little barrier of land, which is in size but as a grain of sand to the bed of an ocean, the passage would be direct. Were it not for that small neck of land, the Isthmus of Panama (which narrows in one place to twenty-eight miles) he might save a voyage of from six to eight thousand miles, and pass at once into the Pacific Ocean. Again, if his desires tend toward the East, he perceives that but for the Isthmus of Suez, he would not be obliged to double the Cape of Good Hope. The eastern difficulty has been partially obviated by the overland route opened up by the ill-rewarded Waghorn. The western barrier has yet to be broken through.

Now that we can shake hands with Brother Jonathan in twelve days by means of weekly steamers; travel from one end of Great Britain to another, or from the Hudson to the Ohio, as fast as the wind, and make our words dance to distant friends upon the magic tight wire a great deal faster – now that the European and Columbian Saxon is spreading his children more or less over all the known habitable world: it seems extraordinary that the simple expedient of opening a twenty-eight mile passage between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, to save a dangerous voyage of some eight thousand miles, has not been already achieved. In this age of enterprise that so simple a remedy for so great an evil should not have been applied appears astonishing. Nay, we ought to feel some shame when we reflect that evidences in the neighborhood of both isthmuses exist of such junction having existed, in what we are pleased to designate "barbarous" ages.

Does nature present insurmountable engineering difficulties to the Panama scheme? By no means: for after the Croton aqueduct, our own railway tunneling, and the Britannia tubular bridge, engineering difficulties have become obsolete. Are the levels of the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico, which should be joined, so different, that if one were admitted the fall would inundate the surrounding country? Not at all. Hear Humboldt on these points.

Forty years ago he declared it to be his firm opinion that "the Isthmus of Panama is suited to the formation of an oceanic canal – one with fewer sluices than the Caledonian Canal – capable of affording an unimpeded passage, at all seasons of the year, to vessels of that class which sail between New York and Liverpool, and between Chili and California." In the recent edition of his "Views of Nature," he "sees no reason to alter the views he has always entertained on this subject." Engineers, both British and American, have confirmed this opinion by actual survey. As, then, combination of British skill, capital, and energy, with that of the most "go-ahead" people upon earth, have been dormant, whence the secret of the delay? The answer at once allays astonishment: Till the present time, the speculation would not have "paid."

Large works of this nature, while they create an inconceivable development of commerce, must have a certain amount of a trading population to begin upon. A gold-beater can cover the effigy of a man on horseback with a sovereign; but he must have the sovereign first. It was not merely because the full power of the iron rail to facilitate the transition of heavy burdens had not been estimated, and because no Stephenson had constructed a "Rocket engine," that a railway with steam locomotives was not made from London to Liverpool before 1836. Until the intermediate traffic between these termini had swelled to a sufficient amount in quantity and value to bear reimbursement for establishing such a mode of conveyance, its execution would have been impossible, even though men had known how to set about it.

What has been the condition of the countries under consideration? In 1839, the entire population of the tropical American isthmus, in the states of central America and New Grenada did not exceed three millions. The number of the inhabitants of pure European descent did not exceed one hundred thousand. It was only among this inconsiderable fraction that any thing like wealth, intelligence, and enterprise, akin to that of Europe, was to be found; the rest were poor and ignorant aboriginals and mixed races, in a state of scarcely demi-civilization. Throughout this thinly-peopled and poverty-stricken region, there was neither law nor government. In Stephens's "Central America," may be found an amusing account of a hunt after a government, by a luckless American diplomatist, who had been sent to seek for one in central America. A night wanderer running through bog and brake after a will-o'-the-wisp, could not have encountered more perils, or in search of a more impalpable phantom. In short, there was nobody to trade with. To the south of the isthmus, along the Pacific coast of America, there was only one station to which merchants could resort with any fair prospect of gain – Valparaiso. Except Chili, all the Pacific states of South America were retrograding from a very imperfect civilization, under a succession of petty and aimless revolutions. To the north of the isthmus matters were little, if any thing better. Mexico had gone backward from the time of its revolution; and, at the best, its commerce in the Pacific had been confined to a yearly ship between Acapulco and the Philippines. Throughout California and Oregon, with the exception of a few European and half-breed members, there were none but savage aboriginal tribes. The Russian settlements in the far north had nothing but a paltry trade in furs with Kamschatka, that barely defrayed its own expenses. Neither was there any encouragement to make a short cut to the innumerable islands of the Pacific. The whole of Polynesia lay outside of the pale of civilization. In Tahiti, the Sandwich group, and the northern peninsula of New Zealand, missionaries had barely sowed the first seeds of morals and enlightenment. The limited commerce of China and the Eastern Archipelago was engrossed by Europe, and took the route of the Cape of Good Hope, with the exception of a few annual vessels that traded from the sea-board states of the North American Union to Valparaiso and Canton. The wool of New South Wales was but coming into notice, and found its way to England alone round the Cape of Good Hope. An American fleet of whalers scoured the Pacific, and adventurers of the same nation carried on a desultory and inconsiderable traffic in hides with California, in tortoise-shell and mother of pearl with the Polynesian Islands.

What, then, would have been the use of cutting a canal, through which there would not have passed five ships in a twelvemonth? But twenty years have worked a wondrous revolution in the state and prospects of these regions.

The traffic of Chili has received a large development, and the stability of its institutions has been fairly tried. The resources of Costa Rica, the population of which is mainly of European race, is steadily advancing. American citizens have founded a state in Oregon. The Sandwich Islands have become for all practical purposes an American colony. The trade with China – to which the proposed canal would open a convenient avenue by a western instead of the present eastern route – is no longer restricted to the Canton river, but is open to all nations as far north as the Yang-tse-Kiang. The navigation of the Amur has been opened to the Russians by a treaty, and can not long remain closed against the English and American settlers between Mexico and the Russian settlements in America. Tahiti has become a kind of commercial emporium. The English settlements in Australia and New Zealand have opened a direct trade with the Indian Archipelago and China. The permanent settlements of intelligent and enterprising Anglo-Americans and English in Polynesia, and on the eastern and western shores of the Pacific, have proved so many dépôts for the adventurous traders with its innumerable islands, and for the spermaceti whalers. Then the last, but greatest addition of all, is California: a name in the world of commerce and enterprise to conjure with. There gold is to be had for fetching. Gold, the main-spring of commercial activity, the reward of toil – for which men are ready to risk life, to endure every sort of privation; sometimes, alas! to sacrifice every virtue; one most especially, and that is patience. They will away with her now.

Till the discovery of the new gold country how contentedly they dawdled round Cape Horn; creeping down one coast, and up another: but now such delay is not to be thought of. Already, indeed, Panama has become the seat of a great, increasing, and perennial transit trade. This can not fail to augment the settled population of the region, its wealth and intelligence. Upon these facts we rest the conviction that the time has arrived for realizing the project of a ship canal there or in the near neighborhood.

That a ship canal, and not a railway, is what is first wanted (for very soon there will be both), must be obvious to all acquainted with the practical details of commerce. The delay and expense to which merchants are subjected, when obliged to "break bulk" repeatedly between the port whence they sail and that of their destination, is extreme. The waste and spoiling of goods, the cost of the operation, are also heavy drawbacks, and to these they are subject by the stormy passage round Cape Horn.

Two points present themselves offering great facilities for the execution of a ship canal. The one is in the immediate vicinity of Panama, where the many imperfect observations which have hitherto been made, are yet sufficient to leave no doubt that, as the distance is comparatively short, the summit levels are inconsiderable, and the supply of water ample. The other is some distance to the northward. The isthmus is there broader, but is in part occupied by the large and deep fresh-water lakes of Nicaragua and Naragua. The lake of Nicaragua communicates with the Atlantic by a copious river, which may either be rendered navigable, or be made the source of supply for a side canal. The space between the two lakes is of inconsiderable extent, and presents no great engineering difficulties. The elevation of the lake of Naragua above the Pacific is inconsiderable; there is no hill range between it and the gulf of Canchagua; and Captain Sir Edward Belcher carried his surveying ship Sulphur sixty miles up the Estero Real, which rises near the lake, and falls into the gulf. The line of the Panama canal presents, as Humboldt remarks, facilities equal to those of the line of the Caledonian canal. The Nicaragua line is not more difficult than that of the canal of Languedoc, a work executed between 1660 and 1682, at a time when the commerce to be expedited by it did not exceed – it is equaled – that which will find its way across the Isthmus; when great part of the maritime country was as thinly inhabited by as poor a population as the Isthmus now is; and when the last subsiding storms of civil war, and the dragonnades of Louis XIV., unsettled men's minds, and made person and property insecure.

The cosmopolitan effects of such an undertaking, if prosecuted to a successful close, it is impossible even approximately to estimate. The acceleration it will communicate to the already rapid progress of civilization in the Pacific is obvious. And no less obvious are the beneficial effects it will have upon the mutual relations of civilized states, seeing that the recognition of the independence and neutrality in times of general war of the canal and the region through which it passes, is indispensable to its establishment.

We have dwelt principally on the commercial, the economical considerations of the enterprise, for they are what must render it possible. But the friends of Christian missions, and the advocates of universal peace among nations, have yet a deeper interest in it. In the words used by Prince Albert at the dinner at the Mansion House respecting the forthcoming great exhibition of arts and industry, "Nobody who has paid any attention to the particular features of our present era, will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end – to which, indeed, all history points – the realization of the unity of mankind. Not a unity which breaks down the limits and levels the peculiar characteristics of the different nations of the earth, but rather a unity the result and product of those very national varieties and antagonistic qualities. The distances which separated the different nations and parts of the globe are gradually vanishing before the achievements of modern invention, and we can traverse them with incredible speed; the languages of all nations are known, and their acquirements placed within the reach of every body; thought is communicated with the rapidity, and even by the power of lightning."

Every short cut across the globe brings man in closer communion with his distant brotherhood, and results in concord, prosperity, and peace.

Truth in Pleasure. – Men have been said to be sincere in their pleasures, but this is only that the tastes and habits of men are more easily discernible in pleasure than in business; the want of truth is as great a hindrance to the one as to the other. Indeed, there is so much insincerity and formality in the pleasurable department of human life, especially in social pleasures, that instead of a bloom there is a slime upon it, which deadens and corrupts the thing. One of the most comical sights to superior beings must be to see two human creatures with elaborate speech and gestures making each other exquisitely uncomfortable from civility; the one pressing what he is most anxious that the other should not accept, and the other accepting only from the fear of giving offense by refusal. There is an element of charity in all this too; and it will be the business of a just and refined nature to be sincere and considerate at the same time. This will be better done by enlarging our sympathy, so that more things and people are pleasant to us, than by increasing the civil and conventional part of our nature, so that we are able to do more seeming with greater skill and endurance. —Friends in Council.

[From the Dublin University Magazine.]

THE GERMAN MEISTERSINGERS – HANS SACHS

We once chanced to meet with a rare old German book which contains an accurate history of the foundation of the Meistersingers, a body which exercised so important an influence upon the literary history, not only of Germany, but of the whole European Continent, that the circumstances connected with its origin can not prove uninteresting to our readers.

The burghers of the provincial towns in Germany had gradually formed themselves into guilds or corporations, the members of which, when the business of the day was discussed, would amuse themselves by reading some of the ancient traditions of their own country, as related in the old Nordic poems. This stock of literature was soon exhausted, and the worthy burghers began to try their hands at original composition. From these rude snatches of song sprung to life the fire of poetic genius, and at Mentz was first established that celebrated guild, branches of which soon after extended themselves to most of the provincial towns. The fame of these social meetings soon became widely spread. It reached the ears of the emperor, Otho I., and, about the middle of the ninth century, the guild received a royal summons to attend at Pavia, then the emperor's residence. The history of this famous meeting remained for upward of six hundred years upon record among the archives of Mentz, but is supposed to have been taken away, among other plunder, about the period of the Smalkaldic war. From other sources of information we can, however, gratify the curiosity of the antiquarian, by giving the names of the twelve original members of this guild:

These gentlemen, having attended the royal summons in due form, were subjected to a severe public examination before the court by the wisest men of their times, and were pronounced masters of their art; enthusiastic encomiums were lavished upon them by the delighted audience, and they departed, having received from the emperor's hands a crown of pure gold, to be presented annually to him who should be selected by the voice of his fellows as laureate for the year.

Admission to these guilds became, in process of time, the highest literary distinction; it was eagerly sought for by numberless aspirants, but the ordeal through which the candidate had to pass became so difficult that very few were found qualified for the honor. The compositions of the candidates were measured with a degree of critical accuracy of which candidates for literary fame in these days can form but little idea. The ordeal must have been more damping to the fire of young genius than the most slashing article ever penned by the most caustic reviewer. Every composition had of necessity to belong to a certain class; each class was distinguished by a limited amount of rhymes and syllables, and the candidate had to count each stanza, as he read it, upon his fingers. The redundancy or the deficiency of a single syllable was fatal to his claims, and was visited in addition by a pecuniary fine, which went to the support of the corporation.

Of that branch of this learned body which held its meetings at Nuremberg, Hans Sachs became, in due time, a distinguished member. His origin was obscure – the son of a tailor, and a shoemaker by trade. The occupations of his early life afforded but little scope for the cultivation of those refined pursuits which afterward made him remarkable. The years of his boyhood were spent in the industrious pursuit of his lowly calling; but when he had arrived at the age of eighteen, a famous minstrel, Numenbach by name, chancing to pass his dwelling, the young cobbler was attracted by his dulcet strains, and followed him. Numenbach gave him gratuitous instruction in his tuneful art, and Hans Sachs forthwith entered upon the course of probationary wandering, which was an essential qualification for his degree. The principal towns of Germany by turns received the itinerant minstrel, who supported himself by the alternate manufacture of verses and of shoes. After a protracted pilgrimage of several years, he returned to Nuremberg, his native city, where, having taken unto himself a wife, he spent the remainder of his existence; not unprofitably, indeed, as his voluminous works still extant can testify. We had once the pleasure of seeing an edition of them in the library at Nuremberg, containing two hundred and twelve pieces of poetry, one hundred and sixteen sacred allegories, and one hundred and ninety-seven dramas – a fertility of production truly wonderful, and almost incredible, if we reflect that the author had to support a numerous family by the exercise of his lowly trade.

The writings of this humble artisan proved an era, however, in the literary history of Germany. To him may be ascribed the honor of being the founder of her school of tragedy as well as comedy; and the illustrious Goethe has, upon more than one occasion, in his works, expressed how deeply he is indebted to this poet of the people for the outline of his immortal tragedy of "Faust." Indeed, if we recollect aright, there are in his works several pieces which he states are after the manner of Hans Sachs.

The Lord of Vogelweid, whose name we find occupying so conspicuous a position in the roll of the original Meistersingers, made rather a curious will – a circumstance which we find charmingly narrated in the following exquisite ballad:

"WALTER VON DER VOGELWEID."

 
"Vogelweid, the Minnesinger,
When he left this world of ours,
Laid his body in the cloister,
Under Wurtzburg's minster towers.
 
 
"And he gave the monks his treasure,
Gave them all with this bequest —
They should feed the birds at noontide,
Daily, on his place of rest.
 
 
"Saying, 'From these wandering minstrels
I have learned the art of song;
Let me now repay the lessons
They have taught so well and long.
 
 
"Thus the bard of lore departed,
And, fulfilling his desire,
On his tomb the birds were feasted,
By the children of the choir.
 
 
"Day by day, o'er tower and turret,
In foul weather and in fair —
Day by day, in vaster numbers,
Flocked the poets of the air.
 
 
"On the tree whose heavy branches
Overshadowed all the place —
On the pavement; on the tomb-stone,
On the poet's sculptured face:
 
 
"There they sang their merry carols,
Sang their lauds on every side;
And the name their voices uttered,
Was the name of Vogelweid.
 
 
"'Till at length the portly abbot
Murmured, 'Why this waste of food,
Be it changed to loaves henceforward.
For our fasting brotherhood.'
 
 
"Then in vain o'er tower and turret,
From the walls and woodland nests.
When the minster bell rang noontide,
Gathered the unwelcome guests.
 
 
"Then in vain, with cries discordant,
Clamorous round the gothic spire.
Screamed the feathered Minnesingers
For the children of the choir.
 
 
"Time has long effaced the inscription
On the cloister's funeral stones;
And tradition only tells us
Where repose the poet's bones.
 
 
"But around the vast cathedral,
By sweet echoes multiplied,
Still the birds repeat the legend,
And the name of Vogelweid."
 

Education. – The striving of modern fashionable education is to make the character impressive; while the result of good education, though not the aim, would be to make it expressive.

There is a tendency in modern education to cover the fingers with rings, and at the same time to cut the sinews at the wrist.

The worst education, which teaches self denial, is better than the best which teaches every thing else, and not that. —Tales and Essays by John Sterling.

[From Household Words.]