Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

my window at Cairo, and I took the surest means of convincing myself of their vastness, by going to the top of the largest; but this first view of them was the most moving, and I cannot think of it now without emotion."

It is remarkable that, after some thousand years of ancient inquiry, and at least a century of keen and even of toilsome research, by modern scholarship, the world knows little more of the Pyramids than it knew, when the priesthood kept all the secrets of Egypt. By whom they were built, for what, or when, have given birth to volumes of researches; but to those questions no answers have been given worth the paper they cost in answering. Whether they were built by Israelite slaves or by Asiatic invaders, for sacrifice or for sepulture, or for both, or for the glory of individual kings, or for the memory of dynasties, or for treasure-houses, or for astronomical purposes, or for the mere employment of the multitude-workhouses having probably found their origin in Egypt-or for the rough ostentation of royal power: allare points undetermined since the travels of Herodotus. But that they must have cost stupendous toil, there is full evidence the great Pyramid covering thirteen acres; exhibiting a mass of stone equal to six Plymouth breakwaters, and rising to a height of 479 feet, or 15 feet higher than St Peter's spire, and 119 higher than St Paul's.

But this style of monstrous building perplexes as much by its general diffusion, as by the magnitude of its several instances. We find it not only in Egypt, where the Pyramids spread for seventy miles along the western shore of the Nile, and once evidently clustered like Arab tents, but in Upper Egypt and Nubia: they are to be found also in Mesopotamia. The Birs Nimrod, (the temple of Belus,) and the Mujelibè, near Babylon, were evidently built on the pyramidal plan, if not actual pyramids. They have been found in India. They have been found even on the other side of the Atlantic; and the largest in the world is the pyramid of Cholula, in Mexico, covering an area of more than forty-seven acres, or above three times the base of the greatest Egyptian pyramid. All the

pyramids, in both Asia, Africa, and America, have the sides facing the cardinal points, excepting those of Nubia, an exception probably arising from the rudeness of the people. In many of those pyramids, remnants of the dead, and bones of the lower animals, have been found; but both may have been placed there for purposes of superstition. The resistance of the pyramidal form to the effects of climate has been surmised as the origin of the choice; but the equatorial countries of the East know little of the weather which, among us, destroys public constructions. It is at least possible, that a form so little adapted to dwelling, or to any of the common uses of life, or even to the direct purposes of sepulture, may have been chosen, from its resemblance to the shape of flame kindled on a large scale. The Egyptians chiefly buried their dead in catacombs. The pyramid was undoubtedly borrowed from the East; and, like the obelisk-also an Eastern memorial, whose general uselessness still perplexes inquirymay have been an emblem of that worship of fire, which ascends to so remote an antiquity, was the worship of the early East, and was, we are strongly inclined to believe, the general worship of the apostate antediluvian world.

There is no country on earth which more curiously substantiates the saying of the wisest of kings, that “there is nothing new under the sun," than Egypt. Every art of European life, and even of European luxury, finds its delineation among the tombs; every incident of society, whether serious or trifling, has its record on those subterranean walls; we find every occupation, every enjoyment, every national festivity, and every sport, from the nursery up to the assemblage of the wrestler, the runner, and the dancer. in short, the whole course of public and private existence, three thousand years ago, is revealed and revived for the intelligence and admiration of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. Why those miscellanies of life should be in tombs, where they must have been shut up from the living eye-why such labour of delineation, why such incongruity of subject to the place, why such cost lavished on designs in the grave, are all problems,

which must remain beyond human answer, but which render Egypt the most interesting of all dead nations to the living world. Are those wonders, those intimations of greater wonders, those achievements of the arts, fully explored? Certainly not. We quite agree with Miss Martineau, that the most fortunate boon for Europe would be some mighty van or ventilator, which will blow away all the sands of Egypt. What a scene would then be opened!

"One statue and sarcophagus, brought from Memphis, was buried 130 feet below the surface. Who knows but that the greater part of old Memphis, and of other glorious cities, lies almost unharmed beneath the sand? Who can say what armies of sphinxes might start up on the banks of the river, or come forth from the hill-sides of the interior, when the cloud of sand had been wafted away? The ruins which we now go to study might then occupy only eminences, while below might be miles of colonnade, temples intact, and gods and goddesses safe in their sanctuaries!"

If this is the language of enthusiasm, there can be no question that barbarism and time have covered a large portion of the old glories of Egypt from the eye of man; and that, while what remains for the view of the traveller is mutilated and worn away, the much finer portion may be reserved for the triumph of the investigator spade in hand.

One of the best features of the book is the dexterity with which those tomb-pictures are interpreted by Miss Martineau's narrative. Every one knows, that the majority of those pictures, though often brilliantly coloured, exhibit nothing but isolated or illplaced figures, of the rudest outline, and the most ungainly attitudes. They have a meaning; yet to ascertain that meaning, and combine their action, demands considerable imaginative skill. We have a clever instance of this art in the description of one of the tombs.

The writer sees, in one compartment, the master of a family. He is evidently opulent a man of large possessions a landlord; he has his people round him- ploughing, sowing, harrowing, reaping, thrashing, winnowing.

But the landlord is also a sportsman; he has round him game, geese, and fish. He is also a man of luxury; he has a barge on the river, and a pavilion built upon it. He is also a man of hospitality; there is a banquet, with the master and his wife in a great chair; every lady has a flower in her hand; a monkey is tied to the host's chair; and there are musicians with a harp and the double pipe. But there is also a final scene; the host dies, the banquets are no more, his mummy is in the consecrated boat, which is to carry him over the river of death, and which deposits him in the land unknown.

All this is ingenious and probable, and if Miss Martineau had confined herself to the picturesque, had sported her fancies in Egypt alone, and never ventured beyond the Red Sea, we might close the book, giving it all the praise due to an original and lively narrative. But when she plays the theologian, we must stop, as we wish that she had done.

On leaving Egypt, her party turn their faces towards the Wilderness; and here the pen of the rash writer rambles away into lucubrations, neither consistent with the facts of history, nor suitable to the feelings of the scene. She begins by manufacturing a romance for Moses. She first tells us that he was "of the priestly caste," a matter rendered utterly improbable by the declaration of Scripture, that "by faith, when he was come to years, he refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God." She then proceeds to tell us a great many things, of which Moses has told us nothing: for example, that in the desert, which she regards as a place peculiarly "fruitful of meditation," (we doubt whether it produces much of this fruit among the Bedouins,) Moses and "Mahomet after him"(valuable companionship!)learned from the Past how to prophesy of the future.

"There," says Miss Martineau, "as Moses sat under the shrubby palm, and its moist rock, did the Past come at the call of his instructed memory, and tell him how those mighty Egyptians had been slaves, as his Hebrew brethren now were," &c., and came to

the conclusion (by no means an unnatural one in any case of slavery,) "that the Hebrews must be removed and educated, before they could be established." We then arrive at the confidential part of the story.

"In following up this course of speculation, he was led to perceive a mighty truth, which appears to have been known to no man before him,the truth that all ideas are the common heritage of all men. (!)

As the images crossed him in his solitude, of the religious feasts of the Egyptians, the gross brute-worship into which they had sunk, &c., he conceived the brave purpose, the noblest enterprise, I believe, on record, of admitting every one of Jehovah's people to the fullest possible knowledge of them."

Of all these meditations not an iota is mentioned in the Scriptures. The story, however, goes on: Moses decided that the people must be removed. It does not tell us how. But it was done. Three millions of slaves were torn from the grasp of a king, at the head of an army of six hundred chariots and horsemen. But the grand difficulty arose-if they must be educated, where was to be the national school? who to be their tutors? Moses meditated again, and the difficulty vanished. He had known the Arabs of the Wilderness long. Miss Martineau tells us that he knew their honour, their virtues, their " comparative piety !" &c., &c.; and he determined to make them the teachers of his Egyptianised people. In this fortunate expedient, she forgot, and probably did not know, that those sons of desert simplicity, hospitality, piety, and so forth, were the Amalekites, one of the most ferocious tribes of earth, the savage borderers of Sinai; who no sooner saw the advance of the Israelites than, instead of teaching them the "virtues," they made a desperate foray on them, and would have butchered the whole population if they had not been beaten by a miracle.

We are also entirely left in the dark, in this theory, as to the means by which the nation were subsisted for forty years in the Wilderness, where the thousandth part of their number could never since have subsisted for as many days; how they

swept before their undisciplined crowd the armies of Palestine, stormed their fortresses, and took possession of their land; how they acquired the most perfect system of legislation in the ancient world; how they formed a religion unrivalled in purity, truth, and sanctity; how they conceived a ceremonial which was almost wholly a prophecy, the revelation of a mightier than Moses to come, the pledge of a more comprehensive religion, and the dawn of that triumph of truth over falsehood, which was to be the hope, the consolation, and ultimately the glory of mankind.

Need we remind the Christian, that the Scriptures account for all those mighty things by the power and the mercy of the God of Israel alone; that Moses was simply an instrument in the hand of Providence; that so far from meditating in the desert, plans of Jewish liberation, he was even a reluctant instrument. Every part of his character and condition repelled the very idea of his acting from himself. He was eighty years old; he had been forty years without seeing the face of his countrymen; his bold spirit had been so much changed by time, as to render him the "meekest" of men; and even when the miracle of the Divine presence was before him, he pleaded his unfitness for the task, and at length yielded only to the repeated command of Jehovah.

Willingly acquitting the writer of these volumes of all evil intention, we regret that she should have touched on Palestine at all. Whatever weakness there may be in her lucubrations on Moses, it is fully matched by her lucubrations on what she calls "Bibliolatry." But we shall not follow her rambles through subjects on which no mind ought to look but with a sense of the narrowness of human faculties, and with an humble and necessary solicitation for that loftier enlightenment which is given only to the humble heart. The knowledge of Scripture is to be attained only by the sincere search after truth, by natural homage in the presence of Infinite Wisdom, and by the intelligent exertion of mind, and the faithful gratitude, which alike rejoice in obeying the revealed will of Heaven.

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND TWELVE.

A RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW.

In the spring of the year 1815, a youth of sixteen, Lewis Rellstab by name, whom death had recently deprived of his father, left the Berlin academy, where he was pursuing, with much success, the study of music, to enter the Prussian army as a volunteer. Napoleon's return from Elba had just called Germany to arms; and the rising generation, emulous of their elder brethren, whose scars and decorations recalled the glorious campaign of 1813, flocked to the Prussian banner. But young Rellstab's moral courage and patriotic zeal exceeded his physical capabilities. Recruiting officers shook their heads at his delicate frame, and inspecting surgeons refused to pass him as able-bodied. Rejected, he still persevered, entered a military school, and in due time became officer of artillery. Leaving the service in 1821, he fixed himself at Berlin, and applied diligently to literary pursuits. He was already known as the author of songs of fair average merit, some of which are popular in Germany to the present day; but now he took up literature as a profession, stimulated to industry by loss of fortune in an unlucky speculation. Of great perseverance and active mind, he essayed his talents in various departments of the belles-lettres, in journalism, polemies, and criticism. As a musical critic, he ranks amongst the best. One of his early works, a satirical tale entitled "Henrietta, or the Beautiful Singer," was disapproved by the authorities, and procured him several months' imprisonment in the fortress of Spandau. At a later period, his systematic and incessant opposition to Spontini the composer, from whose appointment as director of the Berlin opera he foretold the ruin of the German school of music, procured him other six weeks of similar punishment. He has managed several newspapers in succession, and, in the intervals of his editorial labours, has produced a number of tales and novels, three sketchy volumes entitled "Paris and Algiers," and a tragedy called "Eu

gene Aram." Simultaneously with these various occupations, he has found time to form some excellent singers for the German stage, and to advocate, with unwearying and successful zeal, the adoption of railroads in Germany. With such accumulated avocations, it is not surprising if his writings sometimes exhibit that lengthiness and verbal superfluity, the usual consequence of hurried composition and imperfect revision. Some of his best-conceived and most original tales lose power from prolixity: his good materials, too, often lack arrangement, and are encumbered with inferior matter. Still, he is one of the few living German novelists whose works rise high above the present dull, stagnant level of the light literature of his country. It is not now our intention minutely to analyse Mr Rellstab's general literary abilities, or to criticise the twenty compendious volumes forming the latest edition of his complete works. We propose confining ourselves to one novel, which we consider his masterpiece, as it also is his longest and most important work, and the one most popular in Germany. Notwithstanding the faults we have glanced at, we hold "1812" the best novel of its class that for a long time has appeared in the German language. Its historical and military chapters would, by their fidelity and spirit, give it high rank in whatever tongue it had been written. And the blemishes observable in its more imaginative and romantic portions are chargeable less upon the author than upon the foibles of the school and country to which he belongs.

It is a strong argument, were any needed, in favour of the superiority of the English literature of the day over that of Germany, that twenty English novels are translated into German for every German one that appears in English. To say nothing of high class books, which are dished up in the Deutsch with incredible rapidity, (of Mr Warren's last work, three translations appeared within a few

days after it was possible the original could have reached Germany,) all our more prolific and popular English novelists receive the honours of Germanisation. Not a catalogue of a German library or bookseller but exhibits the names of Messrs Marryat, Dickens, James, Ainsworth, Lever, &c., occupying the high places exalted at the tops of columns, in all the glory of Roman capitals; and truly not without reason, when compared with most of the gentry that succeed and precede them. Their works appear in every possible form,-detached, in "complete editions," in "choice collections of foreign literature," even in monthly parts, when so published in England. Authors who have written less, or anonymously, or who are less known, must often be content to forego the immortalisation of a Leipsic catalogue, although their books will not the less be found there, sometimes with the bare notification that they are from English sources; at others, unceremoniously appropriated by the translator as results of his own unaided genius. Equal liberties are taken with the romantic literature of France and Sweden. Very different is the state of things in England. A translation from the German, unless it be of a short tale in a periodical, is a thing almost unknown-certainly of rare occurrence. Miss Bremer's poultry-yard romances, and Christian Andersen's novels, reached us through a German medium, but are originally Scandinavian. The only other recent translations of novels, in amount and volume worth the naming, are those from the French of Sue, Dumas, and Co., amusing gentlemen enough; but the circulation of whose works had, perhaps, just as well been confined to those capable of reading them in the original. The German literature of the last twenty years has yielded little to the English translator, or rather has been little made use of; for, without entertaining a very exalted opinion of its value and merit, it were absurd to suppose that some good things might not be selected from the hundreds of novels, tales, and romances, that each successive year brings forth in a country where any man who can hold a pen, and is acquainted with orthography,

deems himself qualified for an author, and where an astonishingly large proportion of the population act upon this conviction. Mr Rellstab's "1812" is one of the few ears of wheat worthy of extraction from the wilderness of tares and stubble. Its great length, which might, however, have been advantageously curtailed, has, perhaps, proved an obstacle to its translation. Moreover, it is but partially known, even amongst the very limited number of English persons (chiefly ladies) addicted to German reading. Of one thing we are convinced,-that a book of equal merit appearing in England is certain of prompt and reiterated reproduction in Germany; not only in the language of that country, but in those piratical reprints which give in an eighteen-penny duodecimo the contents of three half-guinea post-octa

vos.

His

It is quite natural that Mr Rellstab, whose youthful predilections were so strongly military, who himself wore the uniform during his first six years of manhood, and who was cotemporary, at the age when impressions are strongest, of the gigantic wars waged by Napoleon in Spain, Germany, and Russia, should recall with peculiar pleasure, at a later period of his life, the martial deeds with which in his boyhood all men's mouths were filled; that he should select them as a subject for his pen, dwell willingly upon their details, and bestow the utmost pains upon their illustration. original plan of an historical romance was far more comprehensive than the one to which he finally adhered. He proposed employing as a stage for his actors all the European countries then the theatre of war. This bold plan gave great scope for contrast, allowing him to exhibit his personages, chiefly military men, engaged alternately with the Cossack and the Guerilla-alternately broiling under the sun of Castile, and frozen in Muscovy's snows. But the project was more easily formed than executed; and Mr Rellstab soon found (to use his own words) that he had taken Hercules' club for a plaything. The mass was too ponderous to wield; to interweave the entire military history of so busy a period with the plot of a romance, entailed an army of charac

« AnteriorContinuar »