William Roscoe Thayer

“ That Prussian system takes a turnip-fed peasant, and in a few months makes of him a military weapon, the length of whose stride is prescribed in centimetres—a machine which presents arms to a passing lieutenant with as much gravity and precision as if the fate of Prussia hinged on that special act. It takes the average tradesman’s son, puts him into the educational mill, and brings him out a professor,—equipped even to the spectacles,—a nonpareil of knowledge, who fastens on some subject, great or small, timely or remote, with the dispassionate persistence of a leech ”

“ Or was Bruno unaware of his contradictions? Of how many of your opinions concerning the ultimate mysteries of life do you, reader, feel so sure that, were you suddenly seized, imprisoned, brought face to face with a pitiless tribunal, and confronted by torture and burning, you—one man against the world—would boldly, without hesitation, publish and maintain them? Galileo, one of mankind’s noblest, could not endure this ordeal, although the evidence of his senses and the testimony of his reason contradicted the denial which pain and dread wrung from him. ”

“ With the materials at hand he fashioned an empire; it is futile to speculate whether another, by using different tools, could have achieved the same result. Bismarck knew that though his countrymen might talk eloquently about liberty, they loved to be governed; he knew that their genius was mechanical, and he triumphed by directing them along the line of their genius. He would have failed had he appealed to the love of liberty, by appealing to which Cavour freed Italy; or to the love of glory, by appealing to which Napoleon was able to convert half of Europe into a French province. ”

“ With the year 1825, when that Diet met, began the modern struggle of Hungary to recover that home rule which one after another of her Hapsburg kings had solemnly sworn to respect, and had as perfidiously disregarded. Thus the seed of the Magyar revolution was sown, like that of so many others, in a demand for the restoration of acknowledged rights, and not in a demand for innovation. Home rule,—Hungary to govern herself, instead of being bullied by foreigners who happened to be also subjects of her Emperor-King,—that seemed an object as simple and definite as it was just. ”

“ They paid the penalty of their former arrogance in every coin known to the vanquished,—in military ruin, in an enormous indemnity, in the occupation of their land by the victorious Prussians, and in the cession of two rich provinces. Nor was that enough: they had to submit to a humiliation which, to the imagination at least, seems the worst of all,—the proclamation of the Prussian King William as German Emperor in their palace at Versailles, the shrine of French pomp, where two centuries before Louis XIV had embodied the ambition, the glory, and the pride of France. ”

“ Not less appropriate was it that the genius of Tintoret and of Venetian art should culminate in the representation of Paradise. Of all commonwealths, Venice had enjoyed the longest prosperity; of all peoples, hers had been the most sensitive to the joy of life. Even at the end of the sixteenth century, when her power abroad had been curtailed, and when luxury at home was slowly enervating the integrity of her citizens, she was still outwardly imposing, magnificent. No pope had ever succeeded, either by guile or by force, in ravishing her independence. ”

“ At a time when he held the fate of Montevideo in his hand, he had not money to buy candles to light the poor room where he and his family were dwelling.
Thus, giving his utmost for liberty and the welfare of strangers, he saw the years pass without bringing the one thing he desired most of all,—the chance to consecrate himself to the redemption of Italy. That desire, the ruling passion of his life, had followed him everywhere. I marvel that any materialists exist; for where, in the material world, shall we find anything comparable to the tenacity of ideas? ”

“ To decide an election by a show of hands14 seems not a whit less absurd than to decide it by the aggregate weight or the color of the hair of the voters. We speak of the will of the majority as if it were infallibly right. The vast majority of men to-day would vote that the sun revolves round the earth: should this belief of a million ignoramuses countervail the knowledge of one astronomer? Shall knowledge be the test of fitness in all concerns except government, the most critical, the most far-reaching and responsible of all? ”

“ Thus she proved to Europe that Italians could govern themselves by as good a political system as then existed; to all the other Italians, groaning under Austrian, or Bourbon, or Papal tyranny, she proved that they might look to her to lead the Italian cause.
This marvelous attainment was due primarily to Count Cavour, the statesman who, since 1850, had been almost continuously prime minister of Piedmont; and, in the second place, to Victor Emanuel, the shrewd, honest, chivalrous King, worthy to be the visible symbol of Italy’s patriotism. ”

“ Shall we not ask, “To what attributes of general human nature had his individuality the key?” That conquest of Sicily was but an episode; long anterior to it was built up the temperament which might have liberated twenty Sicilies, and which found a multitude ready to respond to its least signal.
More than half of our nature is emotion. Men may lie sluggish, they may seem sodden in selfishness, or they may fritter their force away on petty things. But let the hero come,—the Garibaldi,159 the embodied emotion,—and they will know him as light knows light, or lover his beloved. ”

“ To make every citizen a soldier, and to make every soldier a most effective fighting machine by the scientific application of diet, drill, discipline, and leadership, was Prussia’s achievement, whereby she prepared for Bismarck an irresistible weapon. In this application of science to control with greater exactness than ever before the movements of large masses of men in war, and to regulate their actions in peace, consists Prussia’s contribution to government; in knowing how to use the engine thus constructed lies Bismarck’s fame. ”

“ Like every consummate genius, he drew his inspiration directly from within. “Conform! conform! or be written down a fool!” has always been the greeting of the world to the self-centred, spirit-guided few. “Right or wrong, I cannot otherwise,” has been their invariable reply.
By the time that Tintoret made his first essays in painting, the Venetian school was the foremost in the world. The great Leonardo had died in France, leaving behind him in Lombardy a company of pupils who were rapidly enslaved by a graceless mannerism. ”

“ To Science a large part of the best intelligence of our age has been devoted,—a sign of the breaking away of the best minds from the cretinizing quibbles of theology into fields where knowledge can be ascertained. It is a truism that Science has advanced farther in our century than in all preceding time. By what paradox, then, should Carlyle slight its splendid achievements? Was it not because he revolted from the materialistic tendency which he believed to be inseparable from Science, a tendency which predominated a generation ago more than it does to-day? ”

“ With the hauling down of the red-white-and-green flag from the citadel of Comorn vanished the last symbol of that revolution which, bursting forth at Palermo in January, 1848, had spread through Europe, shaking the thrones of monarchs, and kindling in down-trodden people the belief that a new epoch, a Golden Age of Liberty, had come. Hopes as splendid as men ever cherished had now been shattered, and in their stead only the bitterest memories remained ”

“ Their grave, refined faces, their stately carriage, the sobriety as often as the sumptuousness of their dress, bear witness to the glory and power of Venice; that glory and power which had begun to decline in the sixteenth century, though the Venetians perceived it not. They misread the signs. They could not believe that Venice, which had continually grown in wealth during ten centuries, could decline or perish. Esto perpetua!—may she live forever!—was the last prayer of her historian, Sarpi, the abiding dream of all her citizens. ”

“ Here, then, we have the corner-stone of Carlyle’s influence. Our world is a moral world; conscience and righteousness are eternal realities, independent of the vicissitudes of any church. If we seek for a definite statement of Carlyle’s creed, we shall be disappointed; he never formulated any. After breaking loose from one prison, he would have scoffed at the idea of voluntarily locking himself up in another. He held that to possess a moral sense is to possess its justification; that conscience is a fact transcending logic just as consciousness or life itself does. ”

“ We who live under the régime of journalists who conceive it to be the mission of newspapers to deposit at every doorstep from eight to eighty pages of the moral and political garbage of the world every morning,—we may well magnify Bryant, whose long editorial career bore witness that being a journalist should not absolve a man from the common obligations of moral cleanliness, of veracity, of scandal-hating, of delicacy, of honor.
Finally, Bryant was a great citizen,—that last product which it is the business of our education and our political and social life to bring forth. ”

“ Slavs, sending forth four different shoots, Slovaks in the North, Croats in the Southwest, Serbs in the South, and Wallachs in the East; imagine this motley population holding various creeds,—Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran, and Unitarian: imagine not merely each race, but each people, cherishing its own language, its own customs, its own ambitions, which inevitably clashed with those of its neighbors: and having imagined all this, you have not yet come to the end of Hungary’s complex organism. ”

“ We are loth to believe that Titian, whose reputation was established, could have been moved by jealousy of a mere novice: we must remember, nevertheless, that even when Tintoret had come to maturity, and was reckoned among the leading painters of Venice, Titian treated him coldly, and apparently thwarted and disparaged him. Few artists, indeed, have risen quite above the marsh-mists of jealousy. Their ambition regards fame as a fixed quantity, and, like Goldsmith, they look upon any one who acquires a part of this treasure as having diminished the amount they can appropriate for themselves. ”

“ After Sédan it was the fashion to regard Louis Napoleon as the only culprit in the gilded shame of the Second Empire; we shall see, however, that the great majority of Frenchmen longed for his coming, applauded his victories, and by frequent vote sanctioned his deeds. A free people keeps no worse ruler than it deserves.
The Napoleonic legend, by which Louis Napoleon rose to power, was not his creation, but that of the French: he was simply shrewd, and used it. What was this legend?
When allied Europe finally crushed the great Napoleon at Waterloo, France breathed a sigh of relief. ”

“ Bruno, as we have seen in his deposition, proclaims that God is one and indivisible, the Soul of the universe; that his attributes are power, wisdom, and love; that he is in all things, yet above all things, not to be understood, ineffable, and whether personal or impersonal, man cannot say; that Nature is his footprint, God being the nature of Nature; that since every material atom is part of him, by virtue of his immanence in Nature, it is eternal, and so are human souls immortal, being emanations from his immortal spirit ”

“ Here, patriarchs have the vigor of Titans; saints are as robust as athletes; Christ himself might be a majestically stern Apollo. Not without reason may we call these effigies of restless, writhing human beings wonderful diagrams of anatomy and concrete illustrations of dynamics. Even the saved, who occupy the higher regions, are not tranquil. In striving to comprehend these whirlwinds of action, the mind is wearied and baffled. Unit by unit you examine this multitude, and you are amazed in turn by sublimity, or horror, or power. ”

“ It taught that despots cannot be permanently abolished so long as a large majority of a nation require despotic government, and the proof that they require it is the fact that they submit to it; whence it follows that real democracy cannot conquer until a people be educated up to the capacity of governing themselves. It taught that without unity among the heads and obedience among the members no reform can succeed. It taught, finally, that no society which has once attained a certain level of civilization can exist in a state of anarchy ”

“ Venice was indeed the abode of Joy; and Tintoret, at the close of a long career, in which he had witnessed all the aspects and pondered all the possibilities of human life, was filled, like Dante, with hope, and felt Joy and Love to be the supreme realities, the everlasting fulfilments, of mankind’s desires.
If the Last Judgment is an “unimaginable” theme, as Mr. Ruskin remarks, how much more so is Paradise! Men have always found it easier to represent grief than happiness, villainy than virtue, shadows than sunshine ”