Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV.
We had occasion to quote a passage from Mr Mill, in which he remarks that the majority of scientific men seem not yet to have completely got over the difficulty of conceiving matter to act (contrary to the old maxim) where it is not; "for though," he says, "they have at last learned to conceive the sun attracting the earth without any intervening fluid, they cannot yet conceive the sun illuminating the earth without some such medium." But it is not only this difficulty (which doubtless, however, is felt) of conceiving the sun illuminating the earth without any medium by which to communicate its influence, which leads to the construction of the hypothesis, either of an undulating ether, or of emitted particles. The analogy of the other senses conducts us almost irresistibly to the imagination of some such medium. The nerves of sense are, apparently, in all cases that we can satisfactorily investigate, affected by contact, by impulse. The nerve of sight itself, we know, when touched or pressed upon, gives out the sensation of light. These reasons, in the first place, conduct us to the supposition of some medium, having immediate communication with the eye; which medium, though we are far from saying that its existence is established, is rendered probable by the explanation it affords of optical phenomena. At the same time it is evident that the hypothesis of an undulating ether, assumes a fluid or some medium, the existence of which cannot be directly ascertained. Thus stands the hypothesis of a luminiferous ether—in what must be allowed to be a very unsatisfactory condition. But a condition, we think, very superior to the astronomical speculation of Laplace, which Mr Mill, after scrutinizing the preceding hypothesis with the utmost strictness, is disposed to treat with singular indulgence.
"The speculation is," we may as well quote throughout Mr Mill's words, "that the atmosphere of the sun originally extended to the present limits of the solar system: from which, by the process of cooling, it has contracted to its present dimensions; and since, by the general principles of mechanics, the rotation of the sun and its accompanying atmosphere must increase as rapidly as its volume diminishes, the increased centrifugal force generated by the more rapid rotation, overbalancing the action of gravitation, would cause the sun to abandon successive rings of vaporous matter, which are supposed to have condensed by cooling, and to have become our planets.
"There is in this theory," Mr Mill proceeds, "no unknown substance introduced upon supposition, nor any unknown property or law ascribed to a known substance. The known laws of matter authorize us to suppose, that a body which is constantly giving out so large an amount of heat as the sun is, must be progressively cooling, and that by the process of cooling it must contract; if, therefore, we endeavour, from the present state of that luminary, to infer its state in a time long past, we must necessarily suppose that its atmosphere extended much further than at present, and we are entitled to suppose that it extended as far as we can trace those effects which it would naturally leave behind it on retiring; and such the planets are. These suppositions being made, it follows from known laws that successive zones of the solar atmosphere would be abandoned; that these would continue to revolve round the sun with the same velocity as when they formed part of his substance, and that they would cool down, long before the sun himself, to any given temperature, and consequently to that at which the greater part of the vaporous matter of which they consisted would become liquid or solid. The known law of gravitation would then cause them to agglomerate in masses, which would assume the shape our planets actually exhibit; would acquire, each round its own axis, a rotatory movement; and would in that state revolve, as the planets actually do, about the sun, in the same direction with the sun's rotation, but with less velocity, and each of them in the same periodic time which the sun's rotation occupied when his atmosphere extended to that point; and this also M. Comte has, by the necessary calculations, ascertained to be true, within certain small limits of error. There is thus in Laplace's theory nothing hypothetical; it is an example of legitimate reasoning from a present effect to its past cause, according to the known laws of that case; it assumes nothing more than that objects which really exist, obey the laws which are known to be obeyed by all terrestrial objects resembling them."—Vol. II. p. 27.
Now, it seems to us that there is quite as much of hypothesis in this speculation of Laplace as in the undulatory theory of light. This atmosphere of the sun extending to the utmost limits of our planetary system! What proof have we that it ever existed? what possible grounds have we for believing, what motive even for imagining such a thing, but the very same description of proof given and rejected for the existence of a luminiferous ether—namely, that it enables us to explain certain events supposed to result from it? Nor is the thing here imagined any the less a novelty, because it bears the old name of an atmosphere. An atmosphere containing in itself all the various materials which compose our earth, and whatever else may enter into the composition of the other planets, is as violent a supposition as an ether, not perceptible to the senses except by its influence on the nerves of sight. And this cooling down of the sun! What fact in our experience enables us to advance such a supposition? We might as well say that the sun was getting hotter every year, or harder or softer, or larger or smaller. Surely Mr Mill could not have been serious when he says, that "the known laws of matter authorize us to suppose, that a body which is constantly giving out so large an amount of heat as the sun is, must be progressively cooling"—knowing, as we do, as little how the sun occasions heat as how it produces light. Neither can it be contended that because no absolutely new substance, or new property of matter, is introduced, but a fantastic conception is framed out of known substances and known properties, that therefore there is less of rash conjecture in the supposition. In fine, it must be felt by every one who reads the account of this speculation of Laplace, that the only evidence which produces the least effect upon his mind, is the corroboration which it receives from the calculations of the mathematician—a species of proof which Mr Mill himself would not estimate very highly.
Many are the topics which are made to reflect a new light as Mr Mill passes along his lengthened course; we might quote as instances, his chapters on Analogy and the Calculation of Chances: and many are the grave and severe discussions that would await us were we to proceed to the close of his volumes, especially to that portion of his work where he applies the canons of science to investigations which relate to human nature and the characters of men. But enough for the present. We repeat, in concluding, the same sentiment that we expressed at the commencement, that such a work as this goes far to redeem the literature of our age from the charge of frivolity and superficiality. Those who have been trained in a different school of thinking, those who have adopted the metaphysics of the transcendental philosophy, will find much in these volumes to dissent from; but no man, be his pretensions or his tenets what they may, who has been accustomed to the study of philosophy, can fail to recognize and admire in this author that acute, patient, enlarged, and persevering thought, which gives to him who possesses it the claim and right to the title of philosopher. There are few men who—applying it to his own species of excellence—might more safely repeat the Io sono anche! of the celebrated Florentine.
MY COUNTRY NEIGHBOURS
People are fond of talking of the hereditary feuds of Italy—the factions of the Capulets and Montagues, the Orsini and Colonne—and, more especially, of the memorable Vendette of Corsica—as if hatred and revenge were solely endemic in the regions of
"The Pyrenean and the river Po!"
Mere prejudice! There is as good hating going on in England as elsewhere. Independent of the personal antipathies generated by politics, the envy, hatred, and malice arising out of every election contest, not a country neighbourhood but has its raging factions; and Browns and Smiths often cherish and maintain an antagonism every whit as bitter as that of the sanguinary progenitors of Romeo and Juliet.
I, for instance, who am but a country gentleman in a small way—an obscure bachelor, abiding from year's end to year's end on my insignificant farm—have witnessed things in my time, which, had they been said and done nearer the tropics, would have been cited far and near in evidence of the turbulence of human passions, and that "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." Seeing that they chanced in a homely parish in Cheshire, no one has been at the trouble to note their strangeness; though, to own the truth, none but the actors in the drama (besides myself, a solitary spectator) are cognizant of its incidents and catastrophe. I might boast, indeed, that I alone am thoroughly in the secret; for it is the spectator only who competently judges the effects of a scene; and merely changing the names, for reasons easily conceivable, I ask leave to relate in the simplest manner a few facts in evidence of my assertion, that England has its Capuletti e Montecchi as well as Verona.
In the first place, let me premise that I am neither of a condition of life, nor condition of mind, to mingle as a friend with those of whose affairs I am about to treat so familiarly, being far too crotchety a fellow not to prefer a saunter with my fishing-tackle on my back, or an evening tête-à-tête with my library of quaint old books, to all the good men's feasts ever eaten at the cost of a formal country visit. Nevertheless, I am not so cold of heart as to be utterly devoid of interest in the destinies of those whose turrets I see peering over the woods that encircle my corn-fields; and as the good old housekeeper, who for these thirty years past has presided over my household, happens to have grandchildren high in service in what are called the two great families in the neighbourhood, scarcely an event or incident passes within their walls that does not find an echo in mine. So much in attestation of my authority. But for such an introduction behind the scenes, much of the stage business of this curious drama would have escaped my notice, or remained incomprehensible.
I am wrong to say the two great "families;" I should have said the two great "houses." At the close of the last century, indeed, our parish of Lexley contained but one; one which had stood there since the days of the first James, nay, even earlier—a fine old manorial hall of grand dimensions and stately architecture, of the species of mixed Gothic so false in taste, but so ornamental in effect, which is considered as betraying the first symptoms of Italian innovation.
The gardens extending in the rear of the house were still more decidedly in the Italian taste, having clipped evergreens and avenues of pyramidal yews, which, combined with the intervening statues, imparted to them something of the air of a cemetery. There were fountains, too, which, in the memory of man, had been never known to play, the marble basins being, if possible, still greener than the grim visages of the fauns and dryads standing forlorn on their dilapidated pedestals amid the neglected alleys.
The first thing I can remember of Lexley Hall, was peeping as a child through the stately iron gratings of the garden, that skirted a by-road leading from my grandfather's farm. The desolateness of the place overawed my young heart. In summer time the parterres were overgrown into a wilderness. The plants threw up their straggling arms so high, that the sunshine could hardly find its way to the quaint old dial that stood there telling its tale of time, though no man regarded; and the cordial fragrance of the strawberry-beds, mingling with entangled masses of honeysuckle in their exuberance of midsummer blossom, seemed to mock me, as I loitered in the dusk near the old gateway, with the tantalizing illusions of a fairy-tale—the Barmecide's feast, or Prince Desire surveying his princess through the impermeable walls of her crystal palace.
But if the enjoyment of the melancholy old gardens of Lexley Hall were withheld from me, no one else seemed to find pleasure or profit therein. Sir Laurence Altham, the lord of the manor and manor-house, was seldom resident in the country. Though a man of mature years, (I speak of the close of the last century,) he was still a man of pleasure—the ruined hulk of the gallant vessel which, early in the reign of George III., had launched itself with unequalled brilliancy on the sparkling current of London life.
At that time, I have heard my grandfather say there was not a mortgage on the Lexley estate! The timber was notoriously the finest in the county. A whole navy was comprised in one of its coppices; and the arching avenues were imposing as the aisles of our Gothic minsters. Alas! it needed the lapse of only half a dozen years to lay bare to the eye of every casual traveller the ancient mansion, so long
"Bosom'd high in tufted trees,"
and only guessed at till you approached the confines of the court-yard.
It was hazard that effected this. The dice-box swept those noble avenues from the face of the estate. Soon after Sir Laurence's coming of age, almost before the church-bells had ceased to announce the joyous event of the attainment of his majority, he was off to the Continent—Paris—Italy—I know not where, and was thenceforward only occasionally heard of in Cheshire as the ornament of the Sardinian or Austrian courts. But these tidings were usually accompanied by a shaking of the head from the old family steward. The timber was to be thinned anew—the tenants to be again amerced. Sir Laurence evidently looked upon the Lexley property as a mere hotbed for his vices. At last the old steward turned surly to our enquiries, and would answer no further questions concerning his master. My grandfather's small farm was the only plot of ground in the parish that did not belong to the estate; and from him the faithful old servant was as careful to conceal the family disgraces, as to maintain the honour of Sir Laurence's name in the ears of his grumbling tenants.
The truth, however, could not long be withheld. Chaisefuls of suspicious-looking men in black arrived at the hall; loungers, surveyors, auctioneers—I know not what. There was talk in the parish about foreclosing a mortgage, no one exactly understood why, or by whom. But it was soon clear that Wightman, the old steward, was no longer the great man at Lexley. These strangers bade him come here and go there exactly as they chose, and, unhappily, they saw fit to make his comings and goings so frequent and so humiliating, that before the close of the summer the old servitor betook himself to his rest in a spot where all men cease from troubling. The leaves that dreary autumn fell upon his grave.
According to my grandfather's account, however, few even of his village contemporaries grieved for old Wightman. They felt that Providence knew best; that the old man was happily spared the mortification of all that was likely to ensue. For before another year was out the ring fence, which had hitherto encircled the Lexley property, was divided within itself; a paltry distribution of about a hundred acres alone remaining attached to the old hall. The rest was gone! The rest was the property of the foreclosee of that hateful mortgage.
Within view of the battlements of the old manor-house, nearly a hundred workmen were soon employed in digging the foundations of a modern mansion of the noblest proportions. The new owner of the estate, though only a manufacturer from Congleton, chose to dwell in a palace; and by the time his splendid Doric temple was complete, under the name of Lexley Park, the vain-glorious proprietor, Mr Sparks, had taken his seat in Parliament for a neighbouring borough.
Little was known of him in the neighbourhood beyond his name and calling; yet already his new tenants were prepared to oppose and dislike him. Though they knew quite as little personally of the young baronet by whom they had been sold into bondage to the unpopular clothier—him, with the caprice of ignorance, they chose to prefer. They were proud of the old family—proud of the hereditary lords of the soil—proud of a name connecting itself with the glories of the reign of Elizabeth, and the loyalty shining, like a sepulchral lamp, through the gloomy records of the House of Stuart. The banners and escutcheons of the Althams were appended in their parish church. The family vault sounded hollow under their head whenever they approached its altar. Where was the burial-place of the manufacturer? In what obscure churchyard existed the mouldering heap that covered the remains of the sires of Mr Jonas Sparks? Certainly not at Lexley! Lexley knew not, and cared not to know, either him or his. It was no fault of the parish that its young baronet had proved a spendthrift and alienated the inheritance of his fathers; and, but that he had preserved the manor-house from desecration, they would perhaps have ostracized him altogether, as having lent his aid to disgrace their manor with so noble a structure as the porticoed façade of Lexley Park!
Meanwhile the shrewd Jonas was fully aware of his unpopularity and its origin; and, during a period of three years, he allowed his ill-advised subjects to chew, unmolested, the cud of their discontent. Having a comfortable residence at the further extremity of the county, he visited Lexley only to overlook the works, or notice the placing of the costly new furniture; and the grumblers began to fancy they were to profit as little by their new masters as by their old. The steward who replaced the trusty Wightman, and had been instructed to legislate among the cottages with a lighter hand, and distribute Christmas benefaction in a double proportion, was careful to circulate in the parish an impression that Mr Sparks and his family did not care to inhabit the new house till the gardens were in perfect order, the succession houses in full bearing, and the mansion thoroughly seasoned. But the Lexleyans guessed the truth, that he had no mind to confront the first outbreak of their ill-will.
Nearly four years elapsed before he took possession of the place; four years, during which Sir Laurence Altham had never set foot in the hall, and was heard of only through his follies and excesses; and when Mr Sparks at length made his appearance, with his handsome train of equipages, and surrounded by his still handsomer family, so far from meeting him with sullen silence, the tenantry began to regret that they had not erected a triumphal arch of evergreens for his entrance into the park, as had been proposed by the less eager of the Althamites.
After all, their former prejudice in favour of the young baronet was based on very shallow foundations. What had he ever done for them except raise their rents, and prosecute their trespasses? It was nothing that his forefathers had endowed almshouses for their support, or served up banquets for their delectation—Sir Laurence was an absentee—Sir Laurence was as the son of the stranger. The fine old kennel stood cold and empty, reminding them that to preserve their foxes was no longer an article of Lexley religion; and if any of the old October, brewed at the birth of the present baronet, still filled the oaken hogsheads in the cellars of the hall, what mattered it to them? No chance of their being broached, unless to grace the funeral feast of the lord of the manor.
To Jonas Sparks, Esq. M.P., accordingly, they dedicated their allegiance. A few additional chaldrons of coals and pairs of blankets, the first frosty winter, bound them his slaves for ever. Food, physic, and wine, were liberally distributed to the sick and aged whenever they repaired for relief to the Doric portico; and, with the usual convenient memory of the vulgar, the Lexleyans soon began to remember of the Altham family only their recent backslidings and ancient feudal oppressions: while of the Sparkses they chose to know only what was evident to all eyes—viz., that their hands were open and faces comely.
Into their hearts—more especially into that of Jonas, the head of the house—they examined not at all; and were ill-qualified to surmise the intensity of bitterness with which, while contemplating the beauty and richness of his new domain, he beheld the turrets of the old hall rising like a statue of scorn above the intervening woods. There stood the everlasting monument of the ancient family—there the emblem of their pride, throwing its shadow, as it were, over his dawning prosperity! But for that force of contrast thus afforded, he would scarcely have perceived the newness of all the objects around him—the glare of the fresh freestone—the nakedness of the whited walls. A few stately old oaks and elms, apparently coeval with the ancient structure, which a sort of religious feeling had preserved from the axe, that they might afford congenial shade to the successor of its founder, seemed to impart meanness and vulgarity to the tapering verdure of his plantations, his modern trees—his pert poplars and mean larches—his sycamores and planes. Even the incongruity between his solid new paling and the decayed and sun-bleached wood of the venerable fence to which it adjoined, with its hoary beard of silvery lichen, was an eyesore to him. Every passer-by might note the limit and circumscription dividing the new place from the ancient seat of the lords of the manor.
Yet was the landscape of Lexley Park one of almost unequalled beauty. The Dee formed noble ornament to its sweeping valleys; while the noble acclivities were clothed with promising woods, opening by rich vistas to a wide extent of champaign country. A fine bridge of granite, erected by the late Sir Windsor Altham, formed a noble object from the windows of the new mansion; and but for the evidence of the venerable pile, that stood like an abdicated monarch surveying its lost dominions, there existed no external demonstration that Lexley Park had not from the beginning of time formed the estated seat of the Sparkses.
The neighbouring families, if "neighbouring" could be called certain of the nobility and gentry who resided at ten miles' distance, were courteously careful to inspire the new settler with a belief that they at least had forgotten any antecedent state of things at Lexley; for they had even reason to congratulate themselves on the change. Jonas had long been strenuously active in the House of Commons in promoting county improvements. Jonas was useful as a magistrate, and invaluable as a liberal contributor to the local charities. During the first five years of his occupancy, he did more for Lexley and its inhabitants than the half-dozen previous baronets of the House of Altham.
Of the man he had superseded, meanwhile, it was observed that Mr Sparks was judiciously careful to forbear all mention. It might have been supposed that he had purchased the estate of the Crown or the Court of Chancery, so utterly ignorant did he appear of the age, habits, and whereabout of his predecessor; and when informed by Sir John Wargrane, one of his wealthy neighbours, that young Altham was disgracing himself again—that at the public gaming-tables at Toplitz he had been a loser of thirty thousand pounds—the cunning parvenu listened with an air of as vague indifference as if he were not waiting with breathless anxiety the gradual dissipation of the funds, secured to the young spendthrift by the transfer of his estate, to grasp at the small remaining portion of his property. Unconsciously, when the tale of Sir Laurence's profligacy met his ear, he clenched his griping hand, as though it already recognized its hold upon the destined spoil, but not a word did he utter.
Meanwhile, the family of the new squire of Lexley were winning golden opinions on all sides. "The boys were brave—the girls were fair," the mother virtuous, pious, and unpretending. It would have been scandalous, indeed, to sneer to shame the modest cheerfulness of such people, because their ancestors had not fought at the Crusades. By degrees, they assumed an honourable and even eminent position in the county; and the first time Sir Laurence Altham condescended to visit the county-palatine, he heard nothing but commendations and admiration of the charming family at Lexley Park.
"Charming family!—a Jonas Sparks, and charming!" was his supercilious reply. "I rejoice to find that the fumier I have been forced to fling on my worn-out ancestral estate is fertilizing its barrenness. The village is probably the better for the change. But, as regards the society, I must be permitted to mistrust the attractions of the brood of a Congleton manufacturer."
The young baronet, who now, though still entitled to be called young, was disfigured by the premature defeatures of a vicious life, mistrusted it all the more, when, on visiting the old hall, he was forced to recognize the improvements effected in the neighbouring property (that he should be forced to call it "neighbouring!") by the judicious administration of the new owner. It was impossible to deny that Mr Sparks had doubled its value, while enhancing its beauties. The low grounds were drained, the high lands planted, the river widened, the forestry systematically organized. The estate appeared to have attained new strength and vigour when dissevered from the old manor-house; whose shadow might be supposed to have exercised a baleful influence on the lands wherever it presided.
But it was not his recognition of this that was likely to animate the esteem of Sir Laurence Altham for Mr Jonas Sparks. On the contrary, he felt every accession of value to the Lexley property as so much subtracted from his belongings; and his detestation of the upstarts, whose fine mansion was perceptible from his lordly towers—like a blot upon the fairness of the landscape—increased with the increase of their prosperity.
Without having expected to take delight in a sojourn at Lexley Hall—a spot where he had only resided for a few weeks now and then, from the period of his early boyhood—he was not prepared for the excess of irritation that arose in his heart on witnessing the total estrangement of the retainers of his family. For the mortification of seeing a fine new house, with gorgeous furniture, and a pompous establishment, he came armed to the teeth. But no presentiments had forewarned him, that at Lexley the living Althams were already as much forgotten as those who were sleeping in the family vault. The sudden glow that pervaded his whole frame when he chanced to encounter on the highroad the rich equipage of the Sparkses; or the imprecation that burst from his lips, when, on going to the window of a morning to examine the state of the weather for the day, the first objects that struck him was the fair mansion in the plain below, laughing as it were in the sunshine, the deer grouped under its fine old trees, and the river rippling past its lawns as if delighting in their verdure–Yes! there was decided animosity betwixt the hill and the valley.
Every successive season served to quicken the pulses of this growing hatred. Whether on the spot or at a distance, a thousand aggravations sprang up betwixt the parties: disputes between gamekeepers, quarrels between labourers, encroachments by tenants. Every thing and nothing was made the groundwork of ill-will. To Sir Laurence Altham's embittered feelings, the very rooks of Lexley Park seemed evermore to infringe upon the privileges of the rookery at Lexley Hall; and when, in the parish church, the new squire (or rather his workmen, for he was absent at the time attending his duties in Parliament) inadvertently broke off the foot of a marble cherub, weeping its alabaster tears, at the angle of a monument to the memory of a certain Sir Wilfred Altham, of the time of James II., in raising the woodwork of a pew occupied by Mr Sparks's family, the rage of Sir Laurence was so excessive as to be almost deserving of a strait-waistcoat.
The enmity of the baronet was all the more painful to himself that he felt it to be harmless against its object. In every way, Lexley Park had the best of it. Jonas Sparks was not only rich in a noble income, but in a charming wife and promising family. Every thing prospered with him; and, as to mere inferiority of precedence, it was well known that he had refused a baronetcy; and many people even surmised that, so soon as he was able to purchase another borough, and give a seat in Parliament to his second son, as well as resign his own to the eldest, he would be promoted to the Upper House.
The only means of vengeance, therefore, possessed by the vindictive man whose follies and vices had been the means of creating this perpetual scourge to his pride, was withholding from him the purchase of the remaining lands indispensable to the completion of his estate, more especially as regarded the water-courses, which, at Lexley Park, were commanded by the sluices of the higher grounds of the Hall; and mighty was the oath sworn by Sir Laurence, that come what might, however great his exigencies or threatening his poverty, nothing should induce him to dispose of another acre to Jonas Sparks. He was even at the trouble of executing a will, in order to introduce a clause imposing the same reservation upon the man to whom he devised his small remaining property—the heir-at-law, to whom, had he died intestate, it would have descended without conditions.