The International Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, September, 1851Various
History
The International Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, September, 1851
Various
Art, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- History -- Periodicals
3d. Nor is the connection between words and peoples confined to a law
of analogy running through them both, but they have reacted upon and
moulded each other in a manner curious to relate, and races and
letters have mutually made and unmade each other.
4th. The Indo-Germanic people have left monuments of their sinewy
energy in the psycho-physical characteristics of affiliated races and
tongues, and individual family likenesses may be readily traced
between groups of thinkers and dreamers on the banks of the Ganges, in
the Academy, and at Weimar. Again the mystical semitic world, groaning
beneath the weight of an overwrought ideal, and lacking the ballast of
science and patient thought, has ever and anon given birth to
prodigies and monsters of cabalistic or Gnostic extravagance.
5th. To follow the currents of peoples and tongues, the great
subdivisions of the Teutonic and Romance tribes and literatures, their
virtues and vices have stamped its present physical and moral
character on the face of modern Europe. The Teutonic, representing
strength and depth in word and work, has been the stronghold of
emancipation in life and thought, yet tinctured with the savageness
and chaos of unpolished and disordered nature. The Romance, fettered
by the rhythm of Latinity, has yet possessed that voluptuous wealth of
the ideal and that graceful tracery of thought and wit which have been
denied to the other. The antagonism of the Catholic and Protestant
mind is the result of this contrast, which has, moreover, been
pictured in the tertian fevers of French revolution and in the
mystical skepticism of modern Germany.
As certain races, so also certain families of writers, have in thought
transcended the bounds of the existing and actual, and thrown out from
their brain an ideal past, present, or future, beyond the horizon, and
free from the flaws of their experience. Thus, whilst the followers of
Tao-tse were in China seeking for the drug of immortality, the Greek
and Roman poets and historians were dreaming of a golden age that cast
its radiance over the past, or of that fabled Atlantis and those sweet
Islands of the Blest in the far west--dreams and fables that have been
somewhat justified by modern discovery. Again sacred voices mingled
with these aspirations, and the semitic bards and seers pronounced in
their oracles an Eden for the past and a millenium for the future of
man.
Nor were these views confined to the old world, for the followers of
Columbus found, among the cannibals of the gulf, the traditions of a
fountain of eternal youth, and later travellers were regaled with
gorgeous stories of El Dorado and his empire--traditions and stories
that seemed to point, however obscurely, to the Sitzbath and
Californian riches.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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