than by the unlikeness of the reality of the description. A distinguished painter who visited Coleridge was chagrined to find his forehead, of which he had read ravings innumerable, of quite an ordinary size. We watched Emerson's face very narrowly, but could not, for our life, perceive any glow mounting up its pale and pensive lines. We had heard much of Dawson's eloquence, but found that while there was much fluency there was little fire, and no enthusiasm. Distance and dunces together had metamorphosed him, even as a nobler cause of deception sometimes changes a village steeple into a tower of rubies, and plates a copse with gold. To call this gentleman a Cockney Carlyle, a transcendental bagman, were to be too severe; to call him a combination of Cobbett and Carlyle were to be too complimentary. But while there is much in the matter which reminds you of Carlyle, as the reflection reminds you of the reality, there is much in his style and manner which recalls William Cobbett. Could we conceive Cobbett by any possibility forswearing his own nature, converted to Germanism, and proclaiming it in his own way, we should have had George Dawson anticipated and forestalled. The Saxon style, the homely illustrations, the conversational air, the frequent appeals to common sense, the broad Anglicanisms, and the perfect self-possession, are common to both, with some important differences, indeed; since Dawson is much terser and pointed-since his humor is dry, not rich-and since he is, as to substance, rather an echo than a native, though rude voice. To such qualities as we have now indirectly enumerated, we are to attribute the sway he has acquired over popular, and especially over English audiences. They are not, while hearing him, called profoundly either to think or feel. They are not painfully reminded that they have not read. Enthusiastic appeal never warms their blood. A noble self-contempt and forgetfulness is never inculcated. Of reverence for the ancient, the past, and the mysterious, there is little or none. They are never excited even to any fervor of destructive zeal. A strong, somewhat rough voice is heard pouring out an even, calm, yet swift torrent of mingled paradoxes and truisms, smart epigrammatic sentences, short, cold, hurrying sarcasms, deliberate vulgarisms of expression, quotations from "Sartor Resartus," and Scripture, and from no other book-never growing and never diminishing in interest-never suggesting an end as near, nor reminding us of a beginning as past-every one eager to listen, but no one sorry when it is done; the purpose of the whole being to shake, we think too much, respect for formulas, creeds, and constituted authorities-to inculcate, we think too strongly, a sense of independence and individualism—and to give to the future, we think, an undue preponderance over the past. Mr. George Dawson has read with considerable care and accuracy the signs of his time. He has watched the direction and the rate of the popular tide, and has cast himself on it with an air of martyrdom. His has been the desperate determination at all hazards to sail with the stream. He sees, what only the blind do not, that a new era is begun, in which, as Napoleon said, "there shall be no Alps," when they threatened to impede his march; our young mind has in like manner sworn there shall be no past, no history, no Bible, no God even, if such things venture to stand across our way, and curb our principle of progress, and is rushing on heroically with this daring multitude. One is amused at the of persecution which he raises on his way. The term, ory to us, in such cases as his, sounds supremely ludicrous. What, in general, does persecution for conscience-sake now mean? It means, if the subject be a clergyman, the trembling of his audience and the doubling of his income; if an author, the tenfold sale of his works; if a man in business, three customers instead of one-not to speak of the pleasures of notoriety, lecturing engagements, gold watches, and pieces of plate. Pleasant and profitable persecution! even when it is diversified by a little newspaper abuse-the powerless hatred of the deserted party-and some strictures in the magazines! What comparison between this species of persecution and the treatment which a Wordsworth or a Shelley received? or what comparison between it and the neglect, contempt, and poverty which now befall many a worthy and conscientious supporter of the Old? We knew an elderly neglected clergyman, who came to a brother minister and said, “I wish you would preach against me; it might bring me into notice.” Mr. Dawson has been preached, placarded, and prayed into notice a notice in which he has expanded and bour geoned like a peach-tree in the sunshine, and yet of which he thinks proper to complain as persecution! Pretty exchange ! an elegant pulpit for a barrel of burning coals-fifteen hundred admiring auditors for a thousand exulting foes-the "Church" instead of the "Cross" of the Saviour. We really cannot, in this world of woe, find in our hearts one particle of pity to spare for Mr. Dawson, nor for any such mellifluous martyrs. No eagle soaring and screaming in the teeth of the storm -no thunder-cloud moving up the wind, do we deem our hero; but, on the whole, a most complacent and beautiful peacock's feather, sailing adown the breeze, yet with an air as if it had created and could turn it if he chose; or shall we say, a fine large bubble descending with dignity, as if it were the cataract? or, shall we try it once more? a straw, imagining that because it shows the direction, it is directing the wind. If these figures do not give satisfaction, we have fifty more at the service of Mr. Dawson's admirers; after all, we must blame his admirers and his enemies more than himself. He has much about him that is frank, open, and amiable. A clever young man, endowed with a rare talent for talk, he began to talk in a manner that offended his party. Many, on the other hand, of no party, were struck with surprise at hearing such bold and liberal sentiments uttered from such a quarter. Pure unmixed Carlylism coming from a Baptist pulpit sounded in their ears sweet and strange, as a "voice from a loftier climate." The rest might have been expected. Between the dislike of his foes, the wild enthusiasm of his friends, the ill-calculated pounce of the Archbishop of York, the real, though borrowed merit of many of his sentiments, and the real native force of his speech-he found himself all at once on a giddy eminence which might have turned stronger heads; for here was the rarissima avis of a liberal Baptist-a Carlylistic clergyman-a juvenile sage, and a transcendentalist talking English-there was no bird in all Knowesley Park that could be named in comparison. Here, besides, was positively the first Dawson (except Peel's friend) that had, as an intellectual man, been known beyond his own doorway. Such circumstances, besides a felt want in the public mind, which he professed to supply, account for the rapid rise of one who had written and done nothing, except a few lectures and sermons, to the summit of notoriety. So far as Dawson is a faithful renderer or doer into English of Thomas Carlyle's sentiments, we have, we repeat, no quarrel with him. But in some points we dislike his mode of expounding and illustrating these, or if he be in all things an accurate expounder of his principal, why, then, we must just venture to question his principal's infallibility. We Mr. Dawson, for instance, sets himself with all his might to inculcate the uselessness of the clergy as teachers of truth, and the superiority of the lecturing class, or prophets, as he modestly calls them. Samuel, he told us, was a much greater personage than the priests of his day. We do not, in all points, "stand up for our order." We are far from thinking that the clergy, as a whole, are awake to the necessities of the age, or fully alive to all its tendencies. know that Dr. Tholuck, when in this country, was grieved at the want of learning he found in some of our greatest men, and especially at their ignorance of the state of matters in Germany. We know that he advised two eminent Doctors of different denominations to read Strauss's "Life of Christ;" and that, while one of them declined, in very strong language, the other, Dr. Chalmers (how like him!) said, "Well, I will read it, Dr. Tholuck; is't a big book?" Strauss, of course, he recommended, not from sympathy with its theory, but because it is a book as necessary to be read now by the defenders of Christianity as was Gibbon's "History" fifty years ago. But while granting much to Mr. Dawson, we are far from granting all. Ministers do not profess to be prophets, except in so far as they are declarers of the divine will, as exhibited in the Scriptures, or as they may be endowed with that deep vision of truth and beauty which is now, by courtesy, called prophetic sight. But who are prophets, pray, in any other sense? Who can now pretend to stand to ministers in the relation, in which that Samuel, who had, in his youth, been awakened by the voice of God, and who, in his manhood, had, by his call, aroused the slumbering thunder, and darkened the heavens by the waving of his hand, stood to the priesthood of Israel? Not surely George Dawson, Esq., A.M., nor yet Thomas Carlyle-no, nor Fichte and Goethe themselves. Alas! may we not now, all of us, take up the complaint of the Psalmist ?-- "Our signs we do not now behold, A Prophet more, nor any one That knows the time how long." It is, as it was at the close of Saul's guilty and inglorious reign, when God refused to answer by dreams, by Urim, or by prophets; and when, in defect of the true vision, he went to consult with wizards and quack salvers. We are, indeed, rather more favored-we have still among us wise and gifted men; but if we would find prophets, in the highest sense of the word, we must just go back and sit at the feet of those awful bards of Israel—those legislators of the future—whose words are full of eyes, and the depth of whose insight communicates with the omniscience of God. As poets, as seers, as teachers, as truthful and earnest men, not to speak merely of their august supernatural pretensions, they still tower alone unsurmounted and unapproached, the Himalayan mountains of mankind. It is easy for a popular lecturer, primed and ready with his three or his six polished and labored efforts, to sneer at the ministers of Jesus. But it is not so easy for one of this, now calumniated class, to keep up for long years a succession of effective appeals to the conscience and to the heart, in season and out of season-through good report and through bad report. And it is not particularly kind or graceful in a gentleman, who must have experienced the peculiar difficulties of the order to which he still belongs, to turn again and rend them; enjoying, as he does, even yet, some of the immunities of the class, it is mean in him to shirk its responsibilities, and, meaner still, to try to shake its credit in the estimation of his countrymen. He draws, to be sure, a distinction between a preacher and a man preaching—a distinction as obvious nearly as that between a fiddling man and a man fiddling, a barking puppy and a puppy barking. He is not a preaching man, but a man preaching. What a miserable quibble! Who means by a preacher any thing else than a man who has voluntarily assumed the task of declaring the truth of God to his fellows? Does one necessarily cease to be a man in becoming a preacher? Or does one necessarily become a man by ceasing to be, or wishing it to be thought that he has ceased |
