My Diary, North and South

By W. H. RUSSELL. Boston: T. O. H. P. Burnham. pp. xxii., 602.

PLUTARCH, as a patriotic Bœotian, felt called on to write a tract concerning the malice of Herodotus in having told some unpleasant truths about the Thebans ; and many of our countrymen have shown themselves as Bœotian, at least, if not as patriotic, in their diatribes against Mr. Russell, who is certainly very far from being an Herodotus, least of all in that winning simplicity of style which made him so dangerous in the eyes of Plutarch. It was foolish to take Mr. Russell at his own valuation, to elevate a clever Irish reporter of the London “Times” into a representative of England ; but it was still more foolish, in attacking him, to mistake violence for force, and sensible people will be apt to think that there must have been some truth in criticisms which were resented with such unreasoning clamor. It is only too easy to force the growth of those national antipathies which ripen the seeds of danger and calamity to mankind ; for there are few minds that are not capacious enough for a prejudice, and it has sometimes seemed as if, in our hasty resentment of the littlenesses of Englishmen, we were in danger of forgetting the greatness of England. A nation risks nothing in being underrated; the real peril is in underrating and misunderstanding a rival who may at any moment become an antagonist, — who will almost certainly become such, if we do our best to help him in it. Especially in judging the qualities of a people, we should be careful to take our measure by the highest, and not the lowest, types it has shown itself capable of producing. In moments of alarm, danger, or suffering, a nation is apt to relapse into that intellectual and moral condition of Mob from which it has slowly struggled upward; and this is especially true in an age of newspapers, where Cleon finds his way to every breakfast-table. It is her mob side that England has been showing us lately; but this should not blind us to the fact that in the long run the character of a nation tends more and more to assimilate itself to that ideal typified in its wisest thinkers and best citizens. In the qualities which historians and poets love to attribute to their country, national tendencies and aspirations are more or less consciously represented; these qualities the nation will by-and-by learn to attribute to itself, until, becoming gradually traditional, they will at length realize themselves as active principles. The selfish clamor of Liverpool merchants, who see a rival in New York, and of London bankers who have dipped into Confederate stock, should not lead us to conclude, with M. Albert Blanc, that the foreign policy of England is nothing more or less than une haine de commerçants et d’industriels, haine implacable et inflexible comme les chiffres.¹

Mr. Russell’s book purports to be, and probably is in substance, the diary from which he made up his letters to the London "Times”; and it is rather amusing, as well as instructive, to see the somewhat muddy sources which, swelled by affluents of verbiage and invention, gather head enough to contribute their share to the sonorous shallowness of “ the leading journal of Europe.” When we learn, as we do from this “ Diary,” what a contributor to that eminent journal is, when left to his own devices,—that he does not know the difference between would and should, (which, to be sure, is excusable in an Irishman,) that he believes in petto to mean in miniature, uses protagonist with as vague a notion of its sense as Mrs. Malaprop had of her derangement of epitaphs, and then recall to mind the comparative correctness of Mr. Russell's correspondence in point of style, we conceive a hearty respect for the proof-reader in PrintingHouse Square. We should hardly have noticed these trifles, except that Mr, Russell has a weakness for displaying the cheap jewelry of what we may call lingo, and that he is rather fond of criticizing the dialect and accent of persons who were indiscreet enough to trust him with their confidences. There is one respect, however, in which the matter has more importance,— in its bearing on our estimate of Mr. Russell as a trustworthy reporter of what he saw and heard. Conscientious exactness is something predicable of the whole moral and intellectual nature, and not of any special faculty ; so that, when we find a man using words without any sense of their meaning, and assuming to be familiar with things of which he is wholly ignorant, we are justified in suspecting him of an habitual inaccuracy of mind, which to a greater or less degree disqualifies him both as observer and reporter. We say this with no intention of imputing any wilful misstatements to Mr. Russell, but as something to be borne in mind while reading his record of private conversations. A scrupulous fidelity is absolutely essential, where the whole meaning may depend on a tone of voice or the use of one word instead of another. Any one accustomed to the study of dialects will understand what we mean, if he compare Mr. Olmsted’s extracts from his diary with Mr. Russell’s. The latter represents himself as constantly hearing the word Britisher used seriously and in good faith, and remarks expressly on an odd pronunciation of Europe with the accent on the last syllable, which he noticed in Mr. Seward among others. Mr. Russell’s memory is at fault. What he heard was Európean; and Britisher is not, and never was, an Americanism.

We do not, however, mean to doubt the general truthfulness of Mr. Russell’s reports. We find nothing hi his book which leads us to modify the opinion we expressed of him more than a year ago.² We still think him “ a shrewd, practised, and, for a foreigner, singularly accurate observer.” We still believe that his “ strictures, if rightly taken, may do us infinite service.” But we must enter our earnest protest against a violation of hospitality and confidence, which, if it became common, would render all society impossible. Any lively man might write a readable and salable book by exploiting his acquaintances; but such a proceeding would be looked upon by all right-minded people as an offence similar in kind, if not in degree, to the publication of private letters. A shrewd French writer has remarked, that a clever man in a foreign country should always know two things,— what he is, and where he is. Mr. Russell seems habitually to have forgotten both. Even Montaigne, the most garrulous of writers, becomes discreet in speaking of other people. If we learn from him that the Duke of Florence mixed a great deal of water with his wine and the Duchess hardly any at all, we learn it, without any connivance of his, from his diary, and that a hundred and fifty years after his death.

One of the first reflections which occur to the reader, as he closes Mr. Russell’s book, with a half-guilty feeling of being an accomplice after the fact in his indiscretions, to use the mildest term, is a general one on the characteristic difference between the traveller as he is and as he was hardly a century ago. A man goes abroad now not so much to see countries and learn something front them, as to write a book that shall pay his travellingcharges. The object which men formerly proposed to themselves, in visiting foreign lands, seems to have been to find out something which might be of advantage to their own country, in the way either of trade, agriculture, or manufactures, — and they treated of manners, when they touched upon them at all, with the coolness and impartiality of naturalists. They did not conclude things to be necessarily worse because they were different. A modern Tom Coryat, instead of introducing the use of the fork among his countrymen, would find some excuse for thinking the Italians a nasty people because they used it. In our day it would appear that the chief aim of a traveller was to discover (or where that failed, to invent) all that he possibly can to the disadvantage of the country he visits; and he is so scrupulous a censor of individual manners that he has no eyes left for national characteristics. Another striking difference between the older traveller and his modern successor is that the observer and the object to he observed seem to have reversed their relations to each other, so that the man, with his sensations, prejudices, and annoyances, fills up the greater part of the book, while the foreign country becomes merely incidental, a sort of canvas, on which his own portrait is to be painted for the instruction of his readers. Pliny used to say that something was to he learned from the worst book; and accordingly let us be thankful to the voyagers of the last thirty years that they have taught us where we can get the toughest steak and the coldest coffee which this world offers to the diligent seeker after wisdom, and have made us intimately acquainted with the peculiarities of the fleas, if with those of none of the other dwellers in every corner of the globe. Such interesting particulars, to be sure, may claim a kind of classic authority in Horace’s journey to Brundusium ; but perhaps a gnat or a frog that kept Horace awake may fairly assume a greater historical importance than would be granted to similar tormentors of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. Were it not for Mr. Olmsted, we should conclude the ArthurYoung type of traveller to be extinct, and that people go abroad merely for an excuse to write about themselves,—it is so much easier to write a clever book than a solid one. The plan of Montaigne, who wrote his travels round himself without stirring beyond his library, was as much wiser and cheaper as the result was more entertaining.

But, apart from the self-consciousness and impertinence which detract so much from the value of most recent books of travel, it may be doubled whether, since the French Revolution gave birth to the Caliban of Democracy, there has been a tourist without political bias toward one side or the other; and now that the “ Special Correspondent” has been invented, whose business it is to be one-sided, if possible, and at all events entertaining, the last hope of rational information from anywhere would seem to be cut off. And of all travellers, the Englishman is apt to be the worst. What Fuller said of him two centuries ago is still in the main true,— that, “though some years abroad, he is never out of England.” He carries with him an ideal England, made up of all that is good, great, refined, and, above all, “in easy circumstances,” by which to measure the short-comings of other lessfavored nations, He may have dined contentedly for years at the “Cock” or the “ Mitre,” but he must go first to Paris or New York to be astonished at dirt or to miss napkins. He may have been the life-long victim of the London cabby, but he first becomes aware of extortion as he struggles with the porters of Avignon or the hackmen of Jersey City. We are not finding fault with this insularity as a feature of national character,—on the contrary, we rather like it, for the first business of an Englishman is to be an Englishman, and we wish that Americanism were as common among Americans,— but, since no man can see more than is in his own mind, it is a somewhat dangerous quality in a traveller. Moreover, the Englishman in America is at a double disadvantage ; for his understanding the language leads him to think that everything is easy to understand, while at the same time he cannot help looking on every divergence of manners or ideas from the present British standard in a nation speaking the same tongue, as a barbarism, if not as a personal insult to himself. Worse than all, he has perhaps less than anybody of that quality, we might almost say faculty, which Mirabeau called “political sociability,” and accordingly can form no conception of a democracy which levels upward, — of any democracy, indeed, except one expressly invented to endanger the stability of English institutions, certainly the most comfortable in the world for any one who belongs to the class which has only to enjoy and not to endure them. The travels of an average Englishman are generally little more than a “ Why, bless me, you don’t say so ! how very extraordinary! ” in two volumes octavo,

Mr. Russell is only an Irishman with an English veneer, and, to borrow the Kalewala formula, is neither the best nor the worst of tourists. In range of mind and breadth of culture he is not to be compared with Mr. Dicey, who was in America at the same time, and whose letters we hope soon to see published in a collected form ; but he had Opportunities, especially in the Seceding States, such as did not fall, and indeed could not have fallen, to the lot of any other man. As the representative of an English journal, he was welcomed by the South, eager to show him its best side ; as a foreigner, his impressions were fresh and vivid; and his report of the condition of things there is the only even presumably trustworthy one we have had since the beginning of the Rebellion. The New England States, be tells us, he did not visit; but that does not prevent his speaking glibly of their “ bloody-minded and serious people,” and of the “frigid intellectuality ” of Boston, about both of which he knows as little as of Juvenal. This should serve to put us on our guard against some of his other generalizations, which may be based on premises as purely theoretic. But it is not in generalizations that Mr. Russell is strong, nor, to do him justice, does he often indulge in them, - always excepting, of course, the ex officio one which he owes his employers, and which he was sent out to find arguments for, that the Union is irrevocably split asunder. It is as a reporter that he has had his training, and it is as a reporter that he is valuable. Quick to catch impressions, and from among them to single out the taking parts, his sketches of what he saw and heard, if without any high artistic merit, have a coarse truth that will make them of worth to the future student of these times. They are all the better that Mr. Russell was unable, from the nature of the case, to elaborate and Timesify them.

The first half of the book is both the most interesting and the most valuable,— the second half being so largely made up of personal grievances (which, if Mr. Russell had not the dignity to despise them, he might at least have been wise enough to be silent about) as to be tedious in comparison. We regret that Mr. Russell should have been subjected to so many personal indignities for having written what we believe to have been as impartial an account of what he saw of the panic-rout which followed the Battle of Manassas as any one could have written under the same conditions, — though we doubt if the correspondent of a French newspaper would come off much better, under like circumstances, in England. It is not beyond the memory of man that the Duke of Wellington himself was pelted in London. But we are surprised that Mr. Russell should have so far misapprehended his position, should have so readily learned to look upon himself as an ambassador, (we believe the “ Times” is not yet recognized by our Government as anything more than a belligerent power,) as to consider it a hardship that he was not allowed to accompany General McClellan’s army to the Peninsula. He seems to have thought that everything happens in America, as La Rochefoucauld said of France. We are sorry that he was not permitted to go, for he would have helped us to some clearer understanding of a campaign about whose conduct and results there seems to be plenty of passionate misjudgment and very little real knowledge. But when should we hear the last of the vulgar presumption of an American reporter who should try to hitch himself in the same way to the staff of a British army ?

Mr. Russell’s testimony to the ill effects of slavery is as emphatic, if not so circumstantial, as that of Mr. Olmsted. It is of the more weight as coming from a man who saw the system under its least repulsive aspect. His report also of what he heard from some of the chief plotters in the Secession conspiracy as to their plans and theories is very instructive, and deserves special attention now that their allies in the Free States are beginning to raise their heads again. We have always believed, and our impression is strengthened by Mr. Russell’s testimony, that the Southern leaders originally intended nothing more than a coup d’état, which, by the help of their fellow-conspirators at the North, was to put them in possession of the Government. It is plain, also, from what Mr. Russell tells us, that the movers of the slaveholding treason reckoned confidently on aid from abroad, especially from England ; and this may help Englishmen to understand that the sensitiveness of Northern people and statesmen to the open sympathy which the Rebellion received from the leading journals and public men of Great Britain was not so unreasonable as they have been taught to regard it. Cousins of England, we feel inclined to say, remember that there is nothing so hard to bear as contempt; that there may he patriotism where there are no pedigrees ; that family-trees are not the best timber for a frame of government ; that truth is no less true because it is spoken through the nose; and that there may be devotion to great principles and national duties among men who have not the air of good society, — nay, that, in the long run, good society itself is found to consist, not of Grammonts and Chesterfields, but of the men who have been loyal to conviction and duty, and who have had more faith in ideas than in Vanity Fair. People on both sides of the water may learn something from Mr. Russell’s book, if they read it with open minds, especially the lesson above all others important to the statesman, that even being right is dangerous, if one be not right at the right time and in the right way.