Read Ebook: The Atlantic Monthly Volume 09 No. 55 May 1862 A Magazine of Literature Art and Politics by Various

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

MAN UNDER SEALED ORDERS.

A vessel of war leaves its port, but no one on board knows for what object, nor whither it is bound. It is a secret Government expedition. As it sets out, a number of documents, carefully sealed, are put in charge of the commander, in which all his instructions are contained. When far away from his sovereign, these are to be the authority which he must obey; as he sails on in the dark, these are to be the lights on the deep by which he must steer. They provide for every stage of the way. They direct what ports to approach and what ports to avoid, what to do in different seas, what variation to make in certain contingencies, and what acts to perform at certain opportunities. Each paper of the series forbids the opening of the next until its own directions have been fulfilled; so that no one can see beyond the immediate point for which he is making.

People are beginning to imagine that the career of the human race is something like this. There is a fast-growing conviction that man has been sent out, from the first, to fulfil some inexplicable purpose, and that he holds a Divine commission to perform a wonderful work on the earth. It would seem as if his marvellous brain were the bundle of mystic scrolls on which it is written, and within which its terms are hid,--and as if his imperishable soul were the great seal, bearing the Divine image and superscription, which attests its Almighty original.

This commission is yet obscure. It has so far only gradually opened to him, for he is sailing under sealed orders. He is still led on from point to point. But the farther he goes, and the more his past gathers behind him, the better is he able to imagine what must be before him. His chart is every day getting more full of amazing indications. He is beginning to feel about him the increasing press of some Providential design that has been permeating and moulding age after age, and to discover that be has been all along unconsciously prosecuting a secret mission. And so it comes at last that everything new takes that look; every evolution of mind, every addition to knowledge, every discovery of truth, every novel achievement appearing like the breaking of seals and opening of rolls, in the performance of an inexhaustible and mysterious trust that has been committed to his hands.

It is the purpose of this paper to collect together some of these facts and incidents of progress, in order to show that this is not a mere dream, but a stupendous reality. History shall be the inspiration of our prophecy.

There is a past to be recounted, a present to be described, and a future to be foretold. An immense review for a magazine article, and it will require some ingenuity to be brief and graphic at the same time. In the attempt to get as much as possible into the smallest space, many things will have to be omitted, and some most profound particulars merely glanced at; but enough will be furnished, perhaps, to make the point we have in view.

We may compare human progress to a tall tree which has reared itself, slowly and imperceptibly, through century after century, hardly more than a bare trunk, with here and there only the slight outshoot of some temporary exploit of genius, but which in this age gives the signs of that immense foliage and fruitage which shall in time embower the whole earth. We see but its spring-time of leaf,--for it is only within fifty years that this rich outburst of wonders began. We live in an era when progress is so new as to be a matter of amazement. A hundred years hence, perhaps it will have become so much a matter of course to develop, to expand, and to discover, that it will excite no comment. But it is yet novel, and we are yet fresh. Therefore we may gaze back at what has been, and gaze forward at what is promised to be, with more likelihood of being impressed than if we were a few centuries older.

If we look down at the roots out of which this tree has risen, and then up at its spreading branches,--omitting its intermediate trunk of ages, through which its processes have been secretly working,--perhaps we may realize in a briefer space the wonder of it all.

Once there were only the elementary discoveries of the lever, the wedge, the bended bow, the wheel; Tubal worked in iron and copper, and Naamah twisted threads. Since then what a jump the mechanical arts have made! These primitive elements are now so intricately combined that we can hardly recognize them; new forces have been added, new principles evolved; ponderous engines, like moving mountains of iron, shake the very earth; many-windowed factories, filled with complex machinery driven by water or its vapor, clatter night and day, weaving the plain garments of the poor man and the rich robes of the prince, the curtains of the cottage and the upholstery of the palace.

But to go on with a few more contrasts of the past with the present. Once men wrote only in symbols, like wedges and arrow-heads, on tiles and bricks, or in hieroglyphic pictures on obelisks and sepulchres,--afterward in crude, but current characters on stone, metal, wax, and papyrus. In a much later age appeared the farthest perfection of the invention: books engrossed on illuminated rolls of vellum, and wound on cylinders of boxwood, ivory, or gold,--and then put away like richest treasures of art. What a difference between perfection then and progress now! To-day the steam printing-press throws out its sheets in clouds, and fills the world with books. Vast libraries are the vaulted catacombs of modern times, in which the dead past is laid away, and the living present takes refuge. The glory of costly scrolls is dimmed by the illustrated and typographical wonders which make the bookstore a gorgeous dream. Knowledge, no longer rare, no longer lies in precarious accumulations within the cells of some poor monk's crumbling brain, but swells up like the ocean, universal and imperishable, pouring into the vacant recesses of all minds as the ocean pours into the hollows under its shore. To-day, newspapers multiplied by millions whiten the whole country every morning, like the hoar-frost; and books, numerous and brilliant as the stars, seem by a sort of astral influence to unseal the latent destinies of many an intellect, as by their illumination they stimulate thought and activity everywhere.

Once art seemed to have reached perfection in the pictures and sculptures of Greece and Rome. Yet now those master-pieces are not only equalled on canvas and in fresco, but reproduced by tens of thousands from graven sheets of copper, steel, and even blocks of wood,--or, if modelled in marble or bronze, are remodelled by hundreds, and set up in countless households as the household gods. It is the glory of to-day that the sun himself has come down to be the rival and teacher of artists, to work wonders and perform miracles in art. He is the celestial limner who shall preserve the authentic faces of every generation from now until the world is no more. He holds the mirror up to Nature, paralyzes the fleeting phantom, by chemical subtilty, on the burnished plate,--and there it is fixed forever. He prepares the optical illusion of the stereoscope, so that through tiny windows we may look as into fairy-land and find sections of this magnificent world modelled in miniature.

Once men imagined the earth to be a flat and limited tract. Now they realize that it is a ponderous ball floating in infinite ether. Once they thought the sky was a solid blue concave, studded with blazing points, an empire of fate, the gold-and-azure floor of the abode of gods and spirits. Now all that is dissolved away; the wandering planets become at will broad disks, like sisters of the moon; and countless millions of stars are now mirrored in the same retina with which the Magi saw the few thousands of the firmament that were visible from the plains of Chaldea.

Once men were aware of nothing in the earth beneath its hills and valleys and teeming soil. Now they walk consciously over the ruins of old worlds; they can decipher the strange characters and read the strange history graven on these gigantic tablets. The stony veil is rent, and they can look inimitable periods back, and see the curious animals which then moved up and down in the earth.

Once a glass bubble was a wonder for magnifying power. Now the lenses of the microscope bring an inverted universe to light. Men can look into a drop and discover an ocean crowded with millions of living creatures, monsters untypified in the visible world, playing about as in a great deep.

Once a Roman emperor prized a mysterious jewel because it brought the gladiators contending in the arena closer to the imperial canopy. Now observatories, with their revolving domes, crown the heights at every centre of civilization, and the mighty telescope, poised on exquisite mechanism, turns infinite space into a Coliseum, brings its invisible luminaries close to the astronomer's seat, and reveals the harmonies and splendors of those distant works of God.

Once the supposed elements were fire, and water, and earth, and air; once the amber was unique in its peculiar property, and the loadstone in its singular power. Now chemistry holds in solution the elements and secrets of creation; now electricity would seem to be the veil which hangs before the soul; now the magnetic needle, true to the loadstar, trembles on the sea, to make the mariner brave and the haven sure.

We have by no means exhausted the wonders that have accumulated upon man, in being accumulated by man. Their enumeration would be almost endless. But we leave all to mention one, with which there is nothing of old time to compare. It had no beginning then,--not even a germ. It is the peculiar leap and development of the age in which we live. Many things have combined to bring it to pass.

A spirit that had been hid, since the world began, in a coffer of metal and acid,--the genie of the lightning,--shut down, as by the seal of Solomon in the Arabian tale, was let loose but the other day, and commenced to do the bidding of man. Every one found that he could transport his thought to the ends of the earth in the twinkling of an eye. That spirit, with its electric wings, soon flew from city to city, and whithersoever the magnetic wire could be traced through the air, till the nations of all Europe stood as face to face, and the States of this great Union gazed one upon another. It made a continent like a household,--a cluster of peoples like members of a family,--each within hearing of the other's voice.

But one achievement remained to be performed before the whole world could become one. The ocean had hitherto hopelessly severed the globe into two hemispheres. Could man make it a single sphere? Could man, like Moses, smite the waves with his electric rod, and lead the legions of human thought across dry shod? He could,--and he did. We all remember it well. A range of submarine mountains was discovered, stretching from America to Europe. Their top formed a plateau, which, lying within two miles of the surface, offered an undulating shoal within human reach. A fleet of steamers, wary of storms, one day cautiously assembled midway over it. They caught the monster asleep, safely uncoiled the wire, and laid it from shore to shore. The treacherous, dreadful, omnipotent ocean was conquered and bound!

It was wonderful to see the Queen of England, on one side of that chasm of three thousand miles, wave a greeting to the President, and the President wave back a greeting to the Queen. But it was glorious to see that chord quiver with the music and the truth of the angelic song:--

"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, Good-will toward men!"

Soon, however, came a check to the excitement. For above a score of days was that mysterious highway kept open from Valentia to Trinity Bay. But then the spell was lost, the waves flowed back, old ocean rolled on as before, and the crossing messages perished, like the hosts of Pharaoh in the sea.

That the miracle is ended is no indication that it cannot be repeated. For the very reason that the now dead, inarticulate wire, like an infant, lisped and stammered once, it is certain that another will soon be born, which will live to trumpet forth like the angel of civilization, its minister of flaming fire! No one should abate a jot from the high hope excited then. No imagination should suffer a cloud on the picture it then painted. Governments and capitalists have not been idle, and will not be discouraged. Already Europe and Africa are connected by an electric tunnel under the sea, five hundred miles in length; already Malta and Alexandria speak to each other through a tube lying under thirteen hundred miles of Mediterranean waters; already Britain bound to Holland and Hanover and Denmark by a triple cord of sympathy which all the tempests of the German Ocean cannot sever. And if we come nearer home, we shall find a project matured which will carry a fiery cordon around the entire coast of our country, linking fortress to fortress, and providing that last, desperate resource of unity, an outer girdle and jointed chain of force, to bind together and save a nation whose inner bonds of peace and love are broken.

Such energy and such success are enough to revive the expectation and to guaranty the coming of the day when we shall behold the electric light playing round the world unquenched by the seas, illuminating the land, revealing nation to nation, and mingling language with language, as if the "cloven tongues like as of fire" had appeared again, and "sat upon each of them."

It will be a strange period, and yet we shall see it. The word spoken here under the sun of mid-day, when it speaks at the antipodes, will be heard under the stars of midnight. Of the world of commerce it may be written, "There shall be no night there!" and of the ancient clock of the sun and stars, "There shall be time no longer!"

When the electric wire shall stretch from Pekin, by successive India stations, to London, and from India, by leaps from island to island, to Australia, and from New York westward to San Francisco, and southward to Cape Horn, and across the Atlantic, or over the Strait to St. Petersburg,--when the endless circle is formed, and the magic net-work binds continent, and city, and village, and the isles of the sea, in one,--then who will know the world we live in, for the change that shall come upon it?

Time no more! Space no more! Mankind brought into one vast neighborhood!

Prophesy the greater union of all hearts in this interblending of all minds. Prophesy the boundless spread of civilization, when all barriers are swept away. Prophesy the catholicity of that religion in which as many phases of a common faith shall be endured as there are climes for the common human constitution and countries in a common world!

In those days men will carry a watch, not with a single face, as now, telling only the time of their own region, but a dial-plate subdivided into the disks of a dozen timepieces, announcing at a glance the hour of as many meridian stations on the globe. It will be the fair type of the man who wears it. When human skill shall find itself under this necessity, and mechanism shall reach this perfection, then the soul of that man will become also many-disked. He will be alive with the perpetual consciousness of many zeniths and horizons beside his own, of many nations far different from his own, of many customs, manners, and ideas, which he could not share, but is able to account for and respect.

We can peer as far as this into the future; for what we predict is only a reasonable deduction from certain given circumstances that are nearly around us now. We do not lay all the stress upon the telegraph, as if to attribute everything to it, but because that invention, and its recent crowning event, are the last great leap which the mind has made, and because in itself, and in its carrying out, it summoned all the previous discoveries and achievements of man to its aid. It is their last-born child,--the greater for its many parents. There is hardly a science, or an art, or an invention, which has not contributed to it, or which is not deriving sustenance or inspiration from it.

This latter fact makes it particularly suggestive. As it was begotten itself, and is in its turn begetting, so has it been with everything else in the world of progress. Every scientific or mechanical idea, every species of discovery, has been as naturally born of one or more antecedents of its own kind as men are born of men. There is a kith and kin among all these extraordinary creatures of the brain. They have their ancestors and descendants; not one is a Melchizedek, without father, without mother. Every one is a link in a regular order of generations. Some became extinct with their age, being superseded or no longer wanted; while others had the power of immense propagation, and produced an innumerable offspring, which have a family likeness to this day. The law of cause and effect has no better illustration than the history of inventions and discoveries. If there were among us an intellect sufficiently encyclopedic in knowledge and versatile in genius, it could take every one of these facts and trace its intricate lineage of principles and mechanisms, step by step, up to the original Adam of the first invention and the original Eve of the first necessity.

There is a period between us and these first parents of our present progress that is strangely obscure. It is a sort of antediluvian age, in which there were evidently stupendous mechanical powers of some kind, and an extensive acquaintance with some things. The ruins of Egypt alone would prove this. But a deluge of oblivion has washed over them, and left these colossal bones to tell what story they can. The only way to account for such an extinction is, that they were monstrous contrivances out of all proportion to their age, spasmodic successes in science, wonders born out of due time,--deriving no sustenance or support from a wide and various kindred, and therefore, like the giants which were of old, dying out with their day.

It is different with what has taken place since. Every work has come in its right time, just when best prepared for, and most required. There is not one but is sustained on every side, and fits into its place, as each new piece of colored stone in a mosaic is sustained by the progressive picture. Every one is conserved by its connections. Whatever has been done is sure,--and the past being secure, the future is guarantied. It is impossible that the present knowledge in the world should be extinguished. Nothing but a stroke of imbecility upon the race, nothing but the destruction of its libraries, nothing but the paralysis of the printing-press, and the annihilation of these means of intercommunication,--nothing but some such arbitrary intervention could accomplish it. The facts already in human possession, and the constitution of the mind, together insure what we have as imperishable, and what we are to obtain as illimitable.

One man is engrossed over an apple-parer; another snatches the needle from the weary fingers of the seamstress, and offers her in return the sewing-machine. That man yonder has turned himself into an armory, and he brings out the deadliest instrument he can produce, something perhaps that can shoot you at sight, even though you be a speck in the horizon. His next-door neighbor is an iron workshop, and is forging an armor of proof for a vessel of war, from which the mightiest balls shall bound as lightly as the arrows from an old-time breastplate. There is another searching for that new motive power which shall keep pace with the telegraph, and hurl the bodies of men through space as fast as their thoughts are hurled; there is another seeking that electro-magnetic battery which shall speak instantly and distinctly to the ends of the earth. The mind of that astronomer is a telescope, through whose increasing field new worlds float daily by; the mind of that geologist is a divining-rod, forever bending toward the waters of chaos, and pointing out new places where a shaft can be sunk into periods of almost infinite antiquity; the mind of that chemist is a subtile crucible, in which aboriginal secrets lie disclosed, and within whose depths the true philosopher's stone will be found; the mind of that mathematician is a maze of ethereal stair-ways, rising higher and higher toward the heaven of truth.

The ambition is everywhere,--in every breast; the power is everywhere,--in every brain. The giant and the pigmy are alike active in seeking out and finding out many inventions. And in this very universality of effort and result we discover another guaranty of the great future. The river of Progress multiplies its tributaries the farther it flows, and even now, unknown ages from its mouth, we already see that magnificent widening of its channel, in which, like the Amazon, it long anticipates the sea.

Man, the great achiever! the marvellous magician! Look at him! A head hardly six feet above the ground out of which he was taken. His "dome of thought and palace of the soul" scarce twenty-two inches in circumference; and within it, a little, gray, oval mass of "convoluted albumen and fibre, of some four pounds' weight," and there sits the intelligence which has worked all these wonders! An intelligence, say, six thousand years old next century. How many thousand years more will it think, and think, and wave the wand, and raise new spirits out of Nature, open her sealed-up mysteries, scale the stars, and uncover a universe at home? How long will it be before this inherent power, laid in it at the beginning by the Almighty, shall be exhausted, and reach its limit? Yes, how long? We cannot begin to know. We cannot imagine where the stopping-place could be. Perhaps there is none.

To take up the nautical figure which has furnished our title,--we are in the midst of an infinite sea, sailing on to a destination we know not of, but of which the vague and splendid fancies we have formed hang before our prow like illusions in the sky. We are meeting on every hand great opportunities which must not be lost, new achievements which must be wrought, and strange adventures which must be undertaken: every day wondering more to what our commission shall bring us at last, full of magnificent hopes and a growing faith,--the inscrutable bundle of orders not nearly exhausted: whole continents of knowledge yet to be discovered and explored; the gates of yet distant sciences to be sought and unlocked; the fortresses of yet undreamed necessities to be taken; Arcadias of beauty to be visited and their treasures garnered by the imagination; an intricate course to be followed amid all future nations and governments, and their winding histories, as if threading the devious channels of endless archipelagoes; the spoils of all ages to be gathered, and treaties of commerce with all generations to be made, before the mysterious voyage is done.

And now, before we leave this fascinating theme, or suffer another dream, let us stop where we are, in order to see where we are. Let us take our bearings. What says our chart? What do we find in the horizon of the present, which may give us the wherewithal to hope, to doubt, or to fear?

So far we speak of the upper air of the day. But there is no denying the prevalence of a lower and baser spirit. We are uncomfortably aware that there is another extreme to the freaks of the imagination. There are superstitions of the reason and of realism,--the grotesque fancies, mysticisms, and vagaries which prevail, and the diseased gusto for something ultra and outlandish which affects many raw and undisciplined minds. Yet even these are, in their way, indications of the pervading disposition,--the unhealthy exhalations to be expected from hitherto stagnant regions, stirred up by the active and regenerating thought of the time. There is promise even in them, and they serve to distinguish the more that purer and higher spirit of honesty and reality, which clarifies the intellect, and invigorates the faculties that apprehend and grasp the noble and the true.

We glory in this triumph of the reason over the imagination, and in this predominance of the real over the ideal. We prefer that common sense should lead the van, and that mere fancy, like the tinselled conjurer behind his hollow table and hollow apparatus, should be taken for what it is, and that its tricks and surprises should cease to bamboozle, however much they may amuse mankind. Nothing, in the course of Providence, conveys so much encouragement as this recent and growing development of reality in thought and pursuit. In its presence the future of the world looks substantial and sure. We dream of an immense change in the tone of the human spirit, and in the character of the civilization which shall in time embower the earth.

But, as it has always been, the greater the good, the nearer the evil; Satan is next-door neighbor to the saint; Eden had a lurking-hole for the serpent. Just here the voyaging is most dangerous; just here we drop the plummet and strike upon a shoal; we lift up our eyes, and discover a lee-shore.

In the midst of this splendid era there is a fast-increasing class who are disposed to make the earth the absolute All,--to deny any outlet from it,--to deny any capacity in man for another sphere,--to deny any attribute in God which interests Him in man,--to shut out, therefore, all faith, all that is mysterious, all that is spiritual, all that is immortal, all that is Divine.

In order to indicate this more vividly, let us suppose that there is no other condition necessary to the glory of human nature and the world,--let us suppose that no other provision has been made, and that the age is to go on developing only in this one direction,--what a dreary grandeur would soon surround us! As icebergs floating in an Arctic sea are splendid, so would be these ponderous and glistering works. As the gilded and crimsoned cliffs of snow beautify the Polar day, so would these achievements beautify the present day. But expect no life, no joy, no soul, amid such ice-bound circumstances as these. The tropical heart must congeal and die; its luxuriant fruits can never spring up. The earth must lie sepulchred under its own magnificence; and the divinest feelings of the spirit, floating upward in the instinct of a higher life, but benumbed by the frigid air, and rebuked by the leaden sky, must fall back like clouds of frozen vapor upon the soul: and "so shall its thoughts perish."

It would be a gloomy picture to paint, if one could for a moment imagine that intellectual power and material success were all that enter into the development of the race. For if there is no other capacity, and no other field in which at least an equal commission to achieve is given, and for which equal arrangements have been made by the Providence that orders all, then the soul must soon be smothered, society dismembered, and human nature ruined.

But this very fact, which we purposely put in these strong colors, proves that there must be another and greater element, another and higher faculty, another and wider department, likewise under express and secret conditions of success. It shall come to pass, as the development goes on, that this other will become the foremost and all-important, --the relation between them will be reversed,--this must increase, that decrease,--the Material, although the first in time, the first in the world's interest, and the first in the world's effort, will be found to be only an ordained forerunner, preparing the way for Something Else, the latchet of whose shoes it is not worthy to unloose.

There is that in man--also wrapt up and sealed within his inscrutable brain--which provides for his inner as well as outer life; which insures his highest development; which shall protect, cherish, warm, and fertilize his nature now, and perpetuate and exalt his soul forever. It is a commission which begins, but does not end, in time. It is a commission which makes him the agent and builder of an immense moral work on the earth. Under its instructions he shall add improvement to improvement in that social fabric which is already his shelter and habitation. He has found it of brick,--he shall leave it of marble. He shall seek out every contrivance, and perfect every plan, and exhaust every scheme, which will bring a greater prosperity and a nobler happiness to mankind. He shall quarry out each human spirit, and carve it into the beauty and symmetry of a living stone that shall be worthy to take its place in the rising structure. This is the work which is given him to do. He must develop those conditions of virtue, and peace, and faith, and truth, and love, by which the race shall be lifted nearer its Creator, and the individual ascend into a more conscious neighborhood and stronger affinity to the world which shall receive him at last. All this must that other department be, and this other capacity achieve or there is a fatal disproportion in the progress of man.

The beauty of this as a dream perhaps all men will admit; but they question its possibility. "It is the old Utopia," they say, "the impracticable enterprise that has always baffled the world." Some will doubt whether the Spiritual has an existence at all. Others will doubt, if it does exist, whether man can accomplish anything in it. It is invisible, impalpable, unknown. It cannot be substantial, it cannot be real,--at least to man as at present constituted. Its elements and conditions cannot be controlled by his spirit. That spirit cannot control itself,--how much less go forth and work solid wonders in that phantom realm! There can be no success in this that will be coequal with the other; nor a coequal grandeur. There is no such thing as keeping pace with it. The heart cannot grow better, society cannot be built higher, mankind cannot become happier, God will not draw nearer, the hidden truth of all that universe will never be more ascertained than it is,--can never be accumulated and stored away among other human acquisitions. It is utterly, gloomily impracticable. In this respect we shall forever remain as we are, and where we are. So they think.

And now we venture to contradict it all, and to assert that there is, there must be, just such a corresponding field, and just such a corresponding progress, or else God's ways are not equal. So great is our faith. Like Columbus, therefore, we dream of the golden Indies, and of that "unknown residue" which must yet be found, and be taken possession of by mankind.

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