Kitabı oku: «Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850.», sayfa 12
GALILEO AND HIS DAUGHTER
BY J. B
I had been walking in a grove of lime-trees, arched above me, like the stately roofing of a cathedral. As I entered, the daylight was yet strong; but when I left my temporary retreat, the heavens were clustered over with stars, and one of them, high above the old gray tower of the ancient monastery of St. Augustine, almost cast a shadow across the landscape – it was the planet Jupiter: and I have never observed it – at least, thus eminent among its brethren – without being more or less reminded of,
"The starry Galileo, and his woes."
To this planet did the philosopher direct the then newly-invented telescope, the result being the discovery of four attendant moons: while the analogy derived from the motions of these little stars, performing their revolutions round the primary planet in perfect order and concord, afforded an argument that had a powerful influence in confirming Galileo's own views in favor of the Copernican system of the universe, and ultimately converting the scientific world to the same opinion.
Yet little more than two centuries since, on the 14th February, 1633, the astronomer, cited before the Inquisition, arrived at Rome, to answer the charge of heresy and blasphemy; while, a few months ago, in the brief but glorious day-burst of Roman liberty, that very Inquisition was invaded by an exultant populace, and among its archives, full memorials of martyred worth and of heroic endurance, most eagerly, but in vain, was sought the record of the process against the great philosopher.
Galileo, on a former occasion, in reference to some of his scientific discoveries, had heard rumors of papal persecution, and as a cautious friend whispered to him the unpleasing tidings, he had exclaimed, "Never will I barter the freedom of my intellect to one as liable to err as myself!"
The time quickly arrived to test his courage and his resolution.
For a little while, we are informed, he was allowed to remain secluded in the palace of his friend Nicolini. In a few months, however, he was removed to an apartment in the Exchequer of the Inquisition, still being permitted the attendance of his own servant, and many indulgences of which they had not decided to deprive him. On the twenty-first of June, of the same year, he appeared before the Holy Office. Through its gloomy halls and passages he passed to the tribunal. There was little here, as in the other ecclesiastical buildings of Rome, to captivate the senses. The dark walls were unadorned with the creations of art; state and ceremony were the gloomy ushers to the chamber of intolerance. In silence and in mystery commenced the preparations. The familiars of the office advanced to the astronomer, and arrayed him in the penitential garment; and as he approached, with a slow and measured step, the tribunal, cardinals, and prelates noiselessly assembled, and a dark circle of officers and priests closed in, while, as if conscious that the battle had commenced in earnest between mind and power, all the pomp and splendor of the hierarchy of Rome – that system which had hitherto possessed a sway unlimited over the fears and opinions of mankind – was summoned up to increase the solemnity and significance of the judgment about to be pronounced against him.
To the tedious succession of technical proceedings, mocking justice by their very assumption of formality, it would be needless to refer. Solemnly, however, and by an authority which it was fatal to resist, Galileo was called on to renounce a truth which his whole life had been consecrated to reveal and to maintain, "The motion through space of the Earth and Planets round the Sun."
Then, immediately, assuming he had nothing to allege, would attempt no resistance, and offer no defense, came the sentence of the tribunal, banning and anathematizing all who held the doctrine, that the sun is the centre of the system, as a tenet "philosophically false, and formally heretical."
And then they sentenced the old and infirm philosopher – this band of infallibles! – they bade him abjure and detest the said errors and heresies. They decreed his book to the flames, and they condemned him for life to the dungeons of the Inquisition, bidding him recite, "once a week, seven penitential psalms for the good of his soul!"
Did Galileo yield? Did he renounce that theory now affording such ample proof of the beauty and order of the universe; to whose very laws Kepler, the friend and contemporary of the philosopher, was even then, though unconsciously, bearing evidence, by his wonderful theorem of velocities and distances, a problem which Newton afterward confirmed and illustrated?
Did Galileo yield? He did. Broken by age and infirmity, importuned by friends more alarmed than himself, perhaps, at the terrors of that merciless tribunal, he signed his abjuration; yielded all his judges demanded; echoed their curse and ban, as their superstition or their hate required. There is a darker tale dimly hinted by those familiar with the technicalities of the Holy Office, that the terms, "Il rigoroso esame," during which Galileo is reported to have answered like a good Christian, officially announce the application of the torture.
Then occurred, perhaps scarcely an hour afterward, that remarkable episode in this man's history. As he arose from the ground on which, all kneeling, he had pronounced his abjuration, he gave a significant stamp, and whispered to a friend, "E pur si muove!" "Yet it does move" – ay, and in spite of Inquisitions, has gone round – nay, the whole world of thought itself has moved, and having received an impulse from such minds, will revolve for ages in a glorious cycle for mankind! But the most touching incident of Galileo's story is yet to come.
After several years of confinement at Arcetri, the great astronomer was permitted to retire to Florence, upon the conditions that he should neither quit his house, nor receive the visits of his friends. They removed him from a prison, to make a prison of his home. Alas! it was even worse than this.
Much as the greatest minds love fame, and struggle to obtain it, the proudest triumphs of genius and of science, the applause of the world itself, ever loud and obtrusive, is not to be compared to the low and gentle murmurs of pleasure and of pride from those we love. There was one being from whom Galileo had been accustomed to hear those consolations – his child his gentle Maria Galilei. He had been otherwise a solitary indeed, and now more than ever so, when he was cut off from the communion of the greatest minds. To his lovely girl, his daughter, his heart clung with more than fondness. No wife of Pliny, perhaps, ever wafted to her husband with sweeter devotion the echoes of the applauding world without, greeting him she loved, than she did – his Maria Galilei. As he returned from prison, the way seemed tedious, the fleetest traveling all too slow, till he should once more fold her to his heart; and she, too, she anticipated meeting her father with a pleasure greater than ever before enjoyed, since he had now become a victim, sainted in her eyes, by the persecution he had suffered.
Short, indeed, was this happiness, if enjoyed at all. Within the month, she died, and the home of Galileo was more than a prison – it was a desolate altar, on which the last and most precious of his household gods was shivered. And he died too, a few years afterward, that good old man!
But he had yielded – he was no martyr! Yes, indeed! But be it remembered, that if he possessed not the moral courage of a Huss, a Savonarola, or a Luther, he was not called to exercise it in so high a cause. The assertion and support of a religious truth is impressed with far deeper obligations than the advocacy of a scientific one, however well maintained by analogy, and confirmed by reason.
Still there was a deep devotional sentiment that pervaded the character of Galileo. Before he died, he became totally blind; yet he did not despair. Like Milton, he labored on for mankind – nay, pursued his scientific studies, inventing mechanical substitutes for his loss of vision, to enable him still to pursue his arduous researches.
It is true he was shut out, like the elder Herschel, from the view of that glorious company, toward which his spirit had so often soared. Well might his friend Castelli say, in allusion to his infirmity, "that the noblest eyes were darkened which nature had ever made – eyes so privileged, and gifted with such rare qualities, that they might be said to have seen more than all those who had gone before him, and to have opened the eyes of all who were to come." Galileo himself bore noble tribute to his friend, when he exclaimed,
"Never, never will I cease to use the senses which God has left me; and though this heaven, this earth, this universe, be henceforth shrunk for me into the narrow space which I myself fill, so it please God, it shall content me."
The malice of his enemies long survived his death. The partisans of Rome disputed his right to make a will. They denied him a monument for which large sums had been subscribed.
A hundred years afterward, when a splendid memorial was about to be erected to his memory, the President of the Florentine Academy descended into his grave, and desecrated his remains, by bearing off, as relics for a museum, the thumb of his right hand, and one of his vertebræ! So the victims of the religious fury of one age become the martyrs of science in another!
And what is the moral of what we have written concerning Galileo? Is there no teaching that may instruct our own times, especially when we see how, through scorn and persecution, and this world's contumely, and through the gloom and shadows of ignorance and fear, the form and substance of mighty Truth rises, slowly and dimly, perchance, at first, but grandly and majestically ere long? Little more than two hundred years have passed since the death of Galileo, but ample justice has been done to his memory. His name will be a watchword through all time, to urge men forward in the great cause of moral and intellectual progress; and the Tree of Knowledge, whose fruits were once on earth, plucked, perhaps, ere they were matured, has shot up with its golden branches into the skies, over which has radiated the smiles of a beneficent Providence to cheer man onward in the career of virtue and intelligence.
"There is something," as a profound writer has observed,20 "in the spirit of the present age, greater than the age itself. It is, the appearance of a new power in the world, the multitude of minds now pressing forward in the great task of the moral and intellectual regeneration of mankind."
And this cause must ultimately triumph. The energies and discoveries of men like Galileo, remote as their history becomes, have an undying influence.
The power of a great mind is like the attraction of a sun. It appears in the infinite bounds of space, far, far away, as a grain among other gold dust at the feet of the Eternal, or, at most, but as a luminous spot; and yet we know that its influence controls, and is necessary for, the order and arrangement of the nearest, as well is the remotest system. So in the moral and intellectual universe, from world to world, from star to star, the influence of one great mind extends, and we are drawn toward it by an unseen, but all-pervading affinity. Thus has the cause of moral and intellectual progress a sure guarantee of success. It has become a necessity, interwoven with the spirit of the age – a necessity impressed by every revelation of social evil, as well as proclaimed by every scientific discovery – gaining increased energy and power from the manifestation of every new wonder and mystery of nature – nay, from the building of every steam-ship, the laying down of every new line of railway.
[From Dickens's "Household Words."]
EBENEZER ELLIOTT
The name of Ebenezer Elliott is associated with one of the greatest and most important political changes of modern times, with events not yet sufficiently removed from us, to allow of their being canvassed in this place with that freedom which would serve the more fully to illustrate his real merits. Elliott would have been a poet, in all that constitutes true poetry, had the corn laws never existed.
He was born on 25th March, 1781, at the New Foundry, Masborough, in the parish of Rotherham, where his father was a clerk in the employment of Messrs. Walker, with a salary of £60 or £70 per annum. His father was a man of strong political tendencies, possessed of humorous and satiric power, that might have qualified him for a comic actor. Such was the character he bore for political sagacity that he was popularly known as "Devil Elliott." The mother of the poet seems to have been a woman of an extreme nervous temperament, constantly suffering from ill health, and constitutionally awkward and diffident.
Ebenezer commenced his early training at a dame's school; but shy, awkward, and desultory, he made little progress; nor did he thrive much better at the school in which he was afterward placed. Here he employed his comrades to do his tasks for him, and of course laid no foundation for his future education. His parents, disheartened by the lad's apparent stolidity, sent him next to Dalton's school, two miles distant; and here he certainly acquired something, for he retained, to old age, the memory of some of the scenes through which he used to pass on his way to and from this school. For want of the necessary preliminary training, he could do little or nothing with letters: he rather preferred playing truant and roaming the meadows in listless idleness, wherever his fancy led him. This could not last. His father soon set him to work in the foundry; and with this advantage, that the lad stood on better terms with himself than he had been for a considerable period, for he discovered that he could compete with others in work – sheer hand-labor – if he could not in the school. One disadvantage, however, arose, as he tells us, from his foundry life; for he acquired a relish for vulgar pursuits, and the village alehouse divided his attentions with the woods and fields. Still a deep impression of the charms of nature had been made upon him by his boyish rambles, which the debasing influences and associations into which he was thrown could not wholly wipe out. He would still wander away in his accustomed haunts, and purify his soul from her alehouse defilements, by copious draughts of the fresh nectar of natural beauty imbibed from the sylvan scenery around him.
The childhood and youth of the future poet presented a strange medley of opposites and antitheses. Without the ordinary measure of adaptation for scholastic pursuits, he inhaled the vivid influences of external things, delighting intensely in natural objects, and yet feeling an infinite chagrin and remorse at his own idleness and ignorance. We find him highly imaginative; making miniature lakes by sinking an iron vessel filled with water in a heap of stones, and gazing therein with wondrous enjoyment at the reflection of the sun and skies overhead; and exhibiting a strange passion for looking on the faces of those who had died violent deaths, although these dead men's features would haunt his imagination for weeks afterward.
He did not, indeed, at this period, possess the elements of an ordinary education. A very simple circumstance sufficed to apply the spark which fired his latent energies, and nascent poetical tendencies: and he henceforward became a different being, elevated far above his former self. He called one evening, after a drinking bout on the previous night, on a maiden aunt, named Robinson, a widow possessed of about £30 a year, by whom he was shown a number of "Sowerby's English Botany," which her son was then purchasing in monthly parts. The plates made a considerable impression on the awkward youth, and he assayed to copy them by holding them to the light with a thin piece of paper before them. When he found he could trace their forms by these means his delight was unbounded, and every spare hour was devoted to the agreeable task. Here commenced that intimate acquaintance with flowers, which seems to pervade all his works. This aunt of Ebenezer's, (good soul! would that every shy, gawky Ebenezer had such an aunt!) bent on completing the charm she had so happily begun, displayed to him still further her son's book of dried specimens; and this elated him beyond measure. He forthwith commenced a similar collection for himself, for which purpose he would roam the fields still more than ever, on Sundays as well as week days, to the interruption of his attendances at chapel. This book he called his "Dry Flora," (Hortus Siccus) and none so proud as he when neighbors noticed his plants and pictures. He was not a little pleased to feel himself a sort of wonder, as he passed through the village with his plants; and, greedy of praise, he allowed his acquaintance to believe that his drawings were at first hand, and made by himself from nature. "Thomson's Seasons," read to him about this time by his brother Giles, gave him a glimpse of the union of poetry with natural beauty; and lit up in his mind an ambition which finally transformed the illiterate, rugged, half-tutored youth into the man who wrote "The Village Patriarch," and the "Corn Law Rhymes."
From this time he set himself resolutely to the work of self-education. His knowledge of the English language was meagre in the extreme; and he succeeded at last only by making for himself a kind of grammar by reading and observation. He then tried French, but his native indolence prevailed, and he gave it up in despair. He read with avidity whatever books came in his way; and a small legacy of books to his father came in just at the right time. He says he could never read through a second-rate book, and he therefore read masterpieces only; "after Milton, then Shakspeare; then Ossian; then Junius; Paine's 'Common Sense;' Swift's 'Tale of a Tub;' 'Joan of Arc;' Schiller's 'Robbers;' Burger's 'Lenora;' Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall;' and long afterward, Tasso, Dante, De Staël, Schlegel, Hazlitt, and the 'Westminster Review.'" Reading of this character might have been expected to lead to something; and was well calculated to make an extraordinary impression on such a mind as Elliott's; and we have the fruit of this course of study in the poetry which from this time he began to throw off.
He remained with his father from his sixteenth to his twenty-third year, working laboriously without wages, except an occasional shilling or two for pocket-money. He afterward tried business on his own account. He made two efforts at Sheffield; the last commencing at the age of forty, and with a borrowed capital of £150. He describes in his nervous language the trials and difficulties he had to contend with; and all these his imagination embodied for him in one grim and terrible form, which he christened "Bread Tax." With this demon he grappled in desperate energy, and assailed it vigorously with his caustic rhyme This training, these mortifications, these misfortunes, and the demon "Bread Tax" above all, made Elliott successively despised, hated, feared, and admired, as public opinion changed toward him.
Mr. Howitt describes his warehouse as a dingy, and not very extensive place, heaped with iron of all sorts, sizes, and forms, with barely a passage through the chaos of rusty bars into the inner sanctum, at once, study, counting-house, library, and general receptacle of odds and ends connected with his calling. Here and there, to complete the jumble, were plaster casts of Shakspeare, Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon, suggestive of the presidency of literature over the materialism of commerce which marked the career of this singular being. By dint of great industry he began to flourish in business, and, at one time, could make a profit of £20 a-day without moving from his seat. During this prosperous period he built a handsome villa-residence in the suburbs. He now had leisure to brood over the full force and effect of the Corn Laws. The subject was earnestly discussed then in all manufacturing circles of that district. Reverses now arrived. In 1837, he lost fully one-third of all his savings, getting out of the storm at last with about £6,000, which he wrote to Mr. Tait of Edinburgh, he intended, if possible, to retain. The palmy days of £20 profits had gone by for Sheffield, and instead, all was commercial disaster and distrust. Elliott did well to retire with what little he had remaining. In his retreat he was still vividly haunted by the demon "Bread Tax." This, then, was the period of the Corn-Law Rhymes, and these bitter experiences lent to them that tone of sincerity and earnestness – that fire and frenzy which they breathed, and which sent them, hot, burning words of denunciation and wrath, into the bosoms of the working classes – the toiling millions from whom Elliott sprang. "Bread Tax," indeed, to him was a thing of terrible import and bitter experience: hence he uses no gentle terms or honeyed phrases when dealing with the obnoxious impost. Sometimes coarse invective and angry assertion take the place of convincing reason and calm philosophy. At others, there is a true vein of poetry and pathos running through the rather unpoetic theme, which touches us with its Wordsworthian feeling and gentleness. Then he would be found calling down thunders upon the devoted heads of the monopolists, with all a fanatic's hearty zeal, and in his fury he would even pursue them, not merely through the world, but beyond its dim frontiers and across the threshold of another state. Take them, however, as they stand – and more vigorous, effective, and startling political poetry has not graced the literature of the age.
It was not to be supposed but that this trumpet-blast of defiance, and shrill scream of "war to the knife," should bring down upon him much obloquy, much vituperation: but all this fell harmlessly upon him; he rather liked it. When people began to bear with the turbid humor and angry utterances of the "Corn Law Rhymer," and grew familiar with the stormy march of his verse, it was discovered that he was something more than a mere political party song-writer. He was a true poet, whose credentials, signed and sealed in the court of nature, attested the genuineness of his brotherhood with those children of song who make the world holier and happier by the mellifluous strains they bring to us, like fragments of a forgotten melody, from the far-off world of beauty and of love.
Elliott will not soon cease to be distinctively known as the "Corn Law Rhymer;" but it will be by his non-political poems that he will be chiefly remembered by posterity as the Poet of the People; for his name will still be, as it has long been, a "Household Word," in the homes of all such as love the pure influences of simple, sensuous, and natural poetry. As an author he did not make his way fast: he had written poetry for twenty years ere he had attracted much notice. A genial critique by Southey in the "Quarterly," another by Carlyle in the "Edinburgh," and favorable notices in the "Athenæum" and "New Monthly," brought him into notice; and he gradually made his way until a new and cheap edition of his works, in 1840, stamped him as a popular poet. His poetry is just such as, knowing his history, we might have expected; and such as, not knowing it, might have bodied forth to us the identical man as we find him.
As we have said, Nature was his school; but flowers were the especial vocation of his muse. A small ironmonger – a keen and successful tradesman – we should scarcely have given him credit for such an exquisite love of the beautiful in Nature, as we find in some of those lines written by him in the crowded counting-room of that dingy warehouse. The incident of the floral miscellany; the subsequent study of "The Seasons;" the long rambles in meadows and on hill-sides, specimen-hunting for his Hortus Siccus, sufficiently account for the exquisite sketches of scenery, and those vivid descriptions of natural phenomena, which showed that the coinage of his brain had been stamped in Nature's mint. The most casual reader would at once discover that, with Thomson, he has ever been the devoted lover and worshiper of Nature – at wanderer by babbling streams – a dreamer in the leafy wilderness – a worshiper of morning upon the golden hill-tops. He gives us pictures of rural scenery warm as the pencil of a Claude, and glowing as the sunsets of Italy.
A few sentences will complete our sketch, and bring us to the close of the poet's pilgrimage. He had come out of the general collapse of commercial affairs in 1837, with a small portion of the wealth he had realized by diligent and continuous labor. He took a walk, on one occasion, into the country, of about eighteen miles: reached Argilt Hill, liked the place, returned, and resolved to buy it. He laid out in house and land about one thousand guineas. His family consisted of Mrs. Elliott and two daughters; a servant-maid; an occasional helper; a Welch pony and small gig; "a dog almost as big as the mare, and much wiser than his master; a pony-cart; a wheel-barrow; and a grindstone – and," says he, "turn up your nose if you like!"
From his own papers we learn that he had one son a clergyman, at Lothedale, near Skipton; another in the steel trade, on Elliott's old premises at Sheffield; two others unmarried, living on their means; another "druggisting at Sheffield, in a sort of chimney called a shop;" and another, a clergyman, living in the West Indies. Of his thirteen children, five were dead, and of whom he says. "They left behind them no memorial – but they are safe in the bosom of Mercy, and not quite forgotten even here!"
In this retirement he occasionally lectured and spoke at public meetings; but he began to suffer from a spasmodic affection of the nerves, which obliged him wholly to forego public speaking. This disease grew worse; and in December, 1839, he was warned that he could not continue to speak in public, except at the risk of sudden death. This disorder lingered about him for about six years; he then fell ill of a more serious disease, which threatened speedy termination. This was in May, 1849. In September, he writes, "I have been very, very ill." On the first of December, 1849, the event, which had so long been impending, occurred, and Elliott peacefully departed in the sixty-ninth year of his age.
Thus, then, the sun set on one whose life was one continued heroic struggle with opposing influences – with ignorance first, then trade, then the corn laws, then literary fame, and, last of all, disease: and thus the world saw its last of the material breathing form of the rugged but kindly being who made himself loved, feared, hated, and famous, as the "Corn Law Rhymer."
