International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1

LITERATURE IN AFRICA

The Bible has been translated into the principal language of eastern Africa, and the American Bible Society has lately received a copy of "EVANGELIO za avioondika LUCAS. The Gospel according to St. Luke, translated into Kinika, by the Rev. JOHN LEWIS KRAPF, Phil. Dr.; Bombay American Mission Press: T. Graham, printer; 1848." The Kinika language is spoken by the tribes living south of Abyssinia, toward Zanzibar. Dr. Krapf is a German missionary, in the service of the Church Missionary Society. He is now in Germany for the recovery of his health. The language resembles in some particulars the dialects used in Western Africa. The Independent copies, as a philological curiosity, the Lord's Prayer in Kinika:

"Babawehu urie mbinguni, Rizuke zinaro. Uzumbeo uze. Malondogo gabondeke hahikahi ya zi, za gafiohendeka mbinguni. Mukahewehu utosao, hu-ve suisui ziku kua ziku. Hu-ussire suisui maigehu; hakika suisui kahiri huna-mu-ussira kulla mutu akos saye zuluyehu. Si-hu-bumire suisui magesoni, ela hu-lafie suisui wiini."

The British Association for the Advancement of Science assembled this year at Edinburgh, and its first general meeting was held on Wednesday, the 31st of July, when Sir DAVID BREWSTER, upon taking the chair, delivered a very interesting address upon the history of the Association, and the progress of the Sciences. On Thursday, business began in all the sections, and in the evening Prof. Bennett delivered a lecture on the passage of the blood through the minute vesicles of animals, in connection with nutrition. On Friday, a party of about seventy started under the direction of Mr. R. Chambers, to examine into the groovings on the western face of Corstophine Hill, and the striæ on the sandstone near Ravelstone. They afterward visited Arthur's Seat and St. Margaret's, where they examined the striated rocks and stones. In the evening there was a conversazione and promenade. Saturday was devoted to excursions. On Monday afternoon upward of two hundred members dined together, Sir David Brewster presiding. In the evening, Dr. Mantell delivered a lecture on the extinct birds of New Zealand. On Tuesday evening there was a full-dress promenade and soirée. On Wednesday, the general committee assembled to sanction the grants that had passed the Committee of Recommendations: and in the afternoon of the same day the concluding general meeting of the Association, for the accustomed ceremonial proceedings, was held. The next annual meeting is to take place at Ipswich, and Mr. Airy, the Astronomer Royal, will preside. The meeting, altogether, was one of unusual interest; among the persons present were the chief lights of science, in the empire and from the continent, and our own country was represented by Prof. Hitchcock and several other scholars. The papers read in the various sections were numerous, and some of them are described as of very remarkable freshness and value. They will soon be accessible in the published Transactions, which will this year be more voluminous than ever.

The retiring President, Dr. Robinson, at the opening meeting, congratulated himself on being able to surrender his dominion to his successor in a more prosperous condition than he had received it, and spoke in glowing terms of the character and scientific achievements of that successor, of whose labors he gave a brief but glowing history. Sir David Brewster, who was one of the founders of the Association, is a native of Jedburgh, in Roxburgshire; where he was born December 11, 1781. He was educated for the Church of Scotland, of which he became a licentiate; and in 1800 he received the honorary degree of M. A. from the University of Edinburgh. While studying here he enjoyed the friendship of Robison, who then filled the Chair of Natural Philosophy; Playfair, of Mathematics; and Dugald Stewart that of Moral Philosophy. In 1808, he undertook the editorship of the "Edinburgh Encyclopaedia," which was only finished in 1830. In 1807 he received the honorary degree of LL. D. from the University of Aberdeen; and in 1808 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Between 1801 and 1812 he devoted his attention greatly to the study of Optics; and the results were published in a "Treatise on New Philosophical Instruments," in 1813. In 1815 he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society for one of his discoveries in optical science; and soon after was admitted a Fellow of that body. In 1816, the Institute of France adjudged to him half of the physical prize of 3000 francs, awarded for two of the most important discoveries made in Europe, in any branch of science, during the two preceding years; and in 1819, Dr. Brewster received from the Royal Society the Rumford gold and silver medals, for his discoveries on the Polarization of Light. In 1816 he invented the Kaleidoscope, the patent-right of which was evaded, so that the inventor gained little beyond fame, though the large sale of the instrument must have produced considerable profit. In 1819, in conjunction with Dr. Jameson, he established the "Edinburgh Philosophical Journal"; and subsequently he commenced the "Edinburgh Journal of Science," of which sixteen volumes appeared. In 1825, the Institute of France elected him a Corresponding Member; and he has received the same honor from the Royal Academies of Russia, Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark. In 1831, he received the Decoration of the Hanoverian Guelphic Order; and in the following year, the honor of Knighthood from William the Fourth.

Sir David Brewster has edited and written various works, besides contributing largely to the Edinburgh Review, the Transactions of the British Association, and other scientific societies, and the North British Review. Among his more popular works are "A Treatise on the Kaleidoscope;" an original Treatise on Optics for the Cabinet Cyclopaedia; and Letters on Natural Magic and a Life of Sir Isaac Newton for the "Family Library." The latter work has been translated into German.

Sir David Brewster is likewise one of the editors of the London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine.

The discoveries of Sir David Brewster range from the kaleidoscope to the law of the angle of polarization, the physical laws of metallic reflection, and the optical properties of crystals; and the venerable philosopher is the author of an immense number of facts and practical applications in every branch of optics.

The AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC ASSOCIATION assembled this year at New Haven, and Was presided over by Alex. D. Bache, LL. D. of the Coast Survey. It was attended by many of the most eminent men of science in this country, among whom were President Woolsey, Professor Denison Olmsted, the elder and the younger Silliman, E. C. Herrick, and E. Loomis, of Yale College; Professors Louis Agassiz, E. N. Hosford and Benjamin Pierce of Harvard University; Lieutenant Charles H. Davis, U. S. N.; Professor O. M. Mitchell, Superintendent of the Cincinnati Observatory; Dr. A. L. Elwyn of Philadelphia; Professor Walter R. Johnson of Washington; Professor Joseph Henry, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; William C. Redfield of New York; and an unusual number of amateur scholars from various parts of the Union. There were several papers of remarkable value, among which that of Mr. Squier, our Charge d'Affaires for Central America, was perhaps at this period of the most general interest. Others were puerile, and as unfit in subject as in ability for presentation in such an assembly. It is to be regretted that the Association does not adopt the only protection against such discreditable annoyances, by insisting upon the submission of everything offered for its consideration to a competent private committee.

A GREAT NATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, is said to have been discussed recently at the meetings of inferior societies, and we have read a circular upon the subject, which contemplates a convention of scholars and men of letters, at Washington, some time in the coming winter. The American Philosophical Society, founded by Franklin, and made respectable by the labors of many eminent men, is no longer in authority, and its proceedings command little attention. The various societies for the cultivation of the natural sciences, in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, are undoubtedly accomplishing much good, but the spheres and degrees of their influence would be greatly enlarged under a central organization. In such a design, the initiative should be taken by men of nerve as well as men of abilities, so that the dead weights of mediocrity so constantly obtruding into and making ridiculous the present societies, should be altogether excluded.

Hitherto, in this city, the most reputable and dignified association connected with the advancement of learning, has been the Ethnological Society. It is to be feared that with the death of Mr. Gallatin, its president, and the dispersion of so many of its active members in the diplomatic service, its action hereafter will deserve less consideration than has thus far been awarded to it.

LAMARTINE'S APOLOGY FOR HIS CONFIDENCES

Lamartine has just commenced the publication of a second part of his Confidences, in the feuilleton of La Presse, and precedes it by the following letter to the editor of that paper, which we translate for The International from La Presse of July 30. It relates to the way in which he came to publish the work, and gives a deeply interesting account of the pecuniary embarrassments under which he had for some time been laboring, and then eloquently defends the publication of what is real, and glowing in private life and experience.

To M. de Girardin:

In addressing to you, my dear Girardin, this third volume of private notes, to which the public have given the name of Confidences, I cannot repress an emotion of pain. What I foresaw but too well has happened. I have opened my life, and it has evaporated. This journal of my impressions has found grace, indulgence, interest even, with some readers, if I may judge from the anonymous friends who have written me. But the unsparing critics, men who mingle even our tears with their ink, in order to give more bitterness to their sarcasms, have not pardoned those outbursts of a soul of twenty. They have believed, or have pretended to believe, that I was seeking a miserable celebrity in the ashes of my own heart: they have said, that by an anticipation of vanity, I desired to gather and enjoy in advance, while yet living, the sad Flowers which might one day grow after me upon my tomb. They have cried out at the profanation of the inner feeling; at the effrontery of a soul shown naked; at the scandal of recollections made public; at the venality of sacred things; at the simony of the poet selling his own fibers to save the roof and the tree that overshadowed his cradle. I have read and heard in silence all their malign interpretations of an act, the true nature of which had been revealed to you long before it was to the public. I have answered nothing. What could I say? The appearances were against me. You alone knew that these notes had long existed, shut up in my casket of rosewood, along with the ten volumes of the notes of my mother; that they were intended never to be taken thence; that I rejected the first suggestion of publishing them, with all possible warmth of resolution; that I refused the ransom of a king for those leaves of no real value; and that finally, one day—a day for which I reproach myself-constrained fatally to choose between the necessity of selling my poor Charmettes—Charmettes, as dear and more holy than the Charmettes of the Confessions—and the necessity of publishing these pages, I preferred myself to suffer rather than cause suffering to good old servants, by selling their roofs and their vines to strangers. With one hand I received the price of the Confidences, and with the other I gave it to others in order to purchase time.

Behold here all the crime that I am expiating.

And let the critics rejoice till their vengeance is satiated. This sacrifice was in vain. It is in vain that I have cast upon the wind these leaves, torn from the book of my most pious memories. The time that their price procured has not proved sufficient to conduct me to the threshold of that abode where we cease to regret anything. My Charmettes have been sold. Let them be content. I have had the shame of publishing these Confidences, but not the joy of having saved my garden. Steps of strangers will efface there the steps of my father and mother. God is God, and sometimes he commands the wind to uproot the oak of a hundred years, and man to uproot his own heart. The oak and the heart are his, we must yield them to him, and yield him therewith justice, glory, and benedictions!

And now that my acceptance of these critics is complete, and that I confess myself guilty, and still more, afflicted—am I as guilty as they say, and is there no excuse, which, in the eyes of indulgent and impartial readers, can extenuate my crime?

In order to judge as to this, I have but one question to ask you, and the public, which deigns with distracted finger to turn these pages. My question is this:

Is it to myself, or to others, that the published pages of these Confidences can have done injury in the view of those who have read them? Is there a single man now living, is there a single memory of one of the dead, on whom these recollections have cast an odious or even unfavorable light, whether on his name, his family, his life, or his grave? Have they brought sadness to the soul of our mother in the heaven where she resides? Has the manly face of our father been lessened in the respect of his descendants? Has Graziella, that precocious and withered flower of my early manhood, received aught beyond a few tears of young girls shed on a tomb at Portici? Has Julia, the worship of my young enthusiasm, lost in the imagination of those who know the name, that purity which she has preserved in my heart? And my masters, those pious Jesuits, whose name I love not, but whose virtue I venerate; my friends, dearest and first harvested, Virieu Vignet, the Abbe Dumont, could they complain, returning here below, that I have disfigured their beautiful natures, discolored their noble images, or soiled one place in their lives? I appeal to all who have read. Would a single shade command me to efface a single line? Many of whom I have spoken are still living, or their sisters, or their sons, or their friends: have I humiliated them? They would have told me.

No! I have embalmed only pure recollections. My shroud was poor, but it was spotless. The modest name I have wrapped there for myself will neither be adorned nor dishonored by it. No tenderness will reproach me; no family will accuse me of profanation in naming it. A remembrance is an inviolable thing because it is voiceless, and must be approached with piety. I could never console myself if I had allowed to fall from this life into that other life, whence no one can answer, one word which could wound those absent immortals whom we call the dead. I desire that not a single word, thoughtfully uttered, should remain after me against one of the men who will one day be my survivors. Posterity is not the sewer of our passions—it is the urn of our memories, and should preserve nothing but perfumes.

These Confidences have then done injury or caused pain to no one, among the living or among the dead. I mistake, they have done injury to me, but to me alone. I have depicted myself such as I was: one of those natures, alas! so common among the children of women, wrought not of one clay only, not of that purified and exceptional substance which forms heroes, saints, and sages, but moulded of every earth which enters into the formation of the weak and passionate man; of lofty aspirations, and narrow wings; of great desires, and short hands to reach whither they are extended; sublime in ideal, vulgar in reality; with fire in the heart, illusion in the mind, and tears in the eyes; human statues, which attest by the diversity of the elements that compose them, the mysterious failings of our poor nature; in which, as in the metal of Corinth, we find after the fire the traces of all the melted metals which were mingled and confounded in it, a little gold and much lead. But, I repeat, whom have I injured but myself?

But they say, these unvailed exposures of sentiments and of life offend that virginal modesty of soul, of which outward modesty is but an imperfect emblem? You show ourself unvailed, and you do not blush! Who then are you?

Alas! I am what you see, a poor writer; a writer, that is to say, a thinker, in public. I am, less their genius and virtue, what were St. Augustine, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Montaigne, all those men Who have silently interrogated their souls and replied aloud, so that their dialogue with themselves might also be a useful conversation with the century in which they lived, or with the future. The human heart is an instrument which has neither the same number nor quality of chords in every bosom, and on which new notes may eternally be discovered and added to the infinite scale of sentiments and melodies in the universe. This is our part, poets and writers in spite of ourselves, rhapsodists of the endless poem that nature chants to men and God! Why accuse me, if you excuse yourselves? Are we not of the same family of the Homeridae, who from door to door recount histories, of which they are by turns the historians and the heroes? Is it, then, in the nature of thought to become a crime in becoming public? A thought, vulgar, critical, skeptical, dogmatic, may, according to you, be unvailed innocently: a sentiment, commonplace, cold, not intimate, awaking no palpitation within you, no response in others, may be revealed without violation of modesty; but a thought that is pious, ardent, lighted at the fire of the heart or of heaven, a sentiment burning, cast forth by an explosion of the volcano of the soul; a cry of the inmost nature, awaking by its accent of truth young and sympathetic voices in the present age or the future: and above all, a tear! a tear not painted like those which flow upon your shrouds of parade, a tear of water and salt, falling from the eyes, instead of a drop of ink, falling from the pen! This is crime! this is shame! this is immodesty, for you! That is to say, that whatever is cold and artificial is innocent in the artist, but what is warm and natural is unpardonable in the man. That is to say, modesty in a writer consists in exposing what is false, immodesty in setting forth what is true. If you have talent, show it, but not your soul, carrying mine away! Oh, shame! What logic!

But after all, you are right at bottom, only you do not know how to express it. It is perfectly true that there are mysteries, nudities, parts of the soul not shameful but sensitive, depths, personalities, last foldings of thought and feeling, which would cost horribly to uncover, and which an honorable and natural scruple would never permit us to lay bare, without the remorse of violated modesty. There is, I agree with you, such a thing as indiscretion of heart. I felt this cruelly myself, the first time when, having written certain poetic dreams of my soul certain too real utterances of my sentiments, I read them to my most intimate friends. My face was covered with blushes, and I could not finish. I said to them: "No, I cannot go farther; you shall read it." "And how is it," answered my friends, "that you cannot read to us what you are about to give to all Europe to read?" "No," I said, "I cannot tell why, but I feel no shame in letting the public read it, though I experience an invincible repugnance to reading it myself, face to face to only two or three of my friends."

They did not understand me—I did not understand myself. We together exclaimed at the inconsistency of the human heart. Since then I have felt the same instinctive repugnance at reading to a single person what cost me not a single effort of violated modesty to give to the public: and after having long reflected on it, I find that this apparent inconsistency is at bottom only the perfect logic of our nature.

And why is this? The reason is, that a friend is somebody and the public nobody; a friend has a face, the public has not; a friend is a being, present, hearing, looking, a real being—the public is an invisible being, a being of the reason, an abstraction; a friend has a name, and the public is anonymous; a friend is a confidant, and the public is a fiction. I blush before the one, because he is a man; I do not blush before the other, because it is an idea. When I write or speak before the public, I feel myself as free, as exempt from the susceptibilities of one man to another, as if I were speaking or writing before God and in the desert; the crowd is a solitude; you see it, you know that it exists, but you know it only as a mass. As an individual it does not exist. Now this modesty of which you speak, being the respect of one's self before some other person, when there is no person distinct on account of the multitude, becomes without a motive. Psyche blushed under a lamp because the hand of a single god passed over her, but when the sun gazed at her with his thousand rays from the height of Olympus, that personification of the modest soul did not blush before the whole heaven. Here is the exact image of the modesty of a writer before a single auditor, and of the freedom of his utterance before all the world. Do you accuse me of violating mysteries before you? You have not the right: I do not know you, I have confided nothing to you personally. You are guilty of impropriety in reading what is not addressed to you. You are somebody, you are not the public. What do you want with me? I have not spoken to you: you have nothing to say to me, and I nothing to reply.