The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 55, May, 1862 - Various

Various

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 55, May, 1862 / A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics

MAN UNDER SEALED ORDERS

A vessel of war leaves its port, but no one on board knows for what object, nor whither it is bound. It is a secret Government expedition. As it sets out, a number of documents, carefully sealed, are put in charge of the commander, in which all his instructions are contained. When far away from his sovereign, these are to be the authority which he must obey; as he sails on in the dark, these are to be the lights on the deep by which he must steer. They provide for every stage of the way. They direct what ports to approach and what ports to avoid, what to do in different seas, what variation to make in certain contingencies, and what acts to perform at certain opportunities. Each paper of the series forbids the opening of the next until its own directions have been fulfilled; so that no one can see beyond the immediate point for which he is making.

The wide ocean is before that ship, and a wider mystery. But in the passage of time, as the strange cruise proceeds, its course begins to tell upon the chart. The zigzag line, like obscure chirography, has an intelligible look, and seems to spell out intimations. As order after order is opened, those sibyl leaves of the cabin commence to prophesy, glimpses multiply, surmises come quick, and shortly the whole ship's company more than suspect, from the accumulating data behind them, what must be their destination, and the mission they have been sent to accomplish.

People are beginning to imagine that the career of the human race is something like this. There is a fast-growing conviction that man has been sent out, from the first, to fulfil some inexplicable purpose, and that he holds a Divine commission to perform a wonderful work on the earth. It would seem as if his marvellous brain were the bundle of mystic scrolls on which it is written, and within which its terms are hid,and as if his imperishable soul were the great seal, bearing the Divine image and superscription, which attests its Almighty original.

This commission is yet obscure. It has so far only gradually opened to him, for he is sailing under sealed orders. He is still led on from point to point. But the farther he goes, and the more his past gathers behind him, the better is he able to imagine what must be before him. His chart is every day getting more full of amazing indications. He is beginning to feel about him the increasing press of some Providential design that has been permeating and moulding age after age, and to discover that be has been all along unconsciously prosecuting a secret mission. And so it comes at last that everything new takes that look; every evolution of mind, every addition to knowledge, every discovery of truth, every novel achievement appearing like the breaking of seals and opening of rolls, in the performance of an inexhaustible and mysterious trust that has been committed to his hands.

It is the purpose of this paper to collect together some of these facts and incidents of progress, in order to show that this is not a mere dream, but a stupendous reality. History shall be the inspiration of our prophecy.

There is a past to be recounted, a present to be described, and a future to be foretold. An immense review for a magazine article, and it will require some ingenuity to be brief and graphic at the same time. In the attempt to get as much as possible into the smallest space, many things will have to be omitted, and some most profound particulars merely glanced at; but enough will be furnished, perhaps, to make the point we have in view.

We may compare human progress to a tall tree which has reared itself, slowly and imperceptibly, through century after century, hardly more than a bare trunk, with here and there only the slight outshoot of some temporary exploit of genius, but which in this age gives the signs of that immense foliage and fruitage which shall in time embower the whole earth. We see but its spring-time of leaf,for it is only within fifty years that this rich outburst of wonders began. We live in an era when progress is so new as to be a matter of amazement. A hundred years hence, perhaps it will have become so much a matter of course to develop, to expand, and to discover, that it will excite no comment. But it is yet novel, and we are yet fresh. Therefore we may gaze back at what has been, and gaze forward at what is promised to be, with more likelihood of being impressed than if we were a few centuries older.

If we look down at the roots out of which this tree has risen, and then up at its spreading branches,omitting its intermediate trunk of ages, through which its processes have been secretly working,perhaps we may realize in a briefer space the wonder of it all.

In the beginning of history, according to received authority, there was but a little tract of the earth occupied, and that by one family, speaking but one tongue, and worshipping but one God,all the rest of the world being an uninhabited wild. At this stage of history the whole globe is explored, covered with races of every color, a host of nations and languages, with every diversity of custom, development of character, and form of religion. The physical bound from that to this is equalled only by the leap which the world of mind has made.

Once upon a time a man hollowed a tree, and, launching it upon the water, found that it would bear him up. After this a few little floats, creeping cautiously near the land, were all on which men were wont to venture. Now there are sails fluttering on every sea, prodigious steamers throbbing like leviathans against wind and wave; harbors are built, and rocks and shoals removed; lighthouses gleam nightly from ten thousand stations on the shore; the great deep itself is sounded by plummet and diving-bell; the submarine world is disclosed; and man is gathering into his hands the laws of the very winds that toss its surface.

Once the earth had a single rude, mud-built hamlet, in which human dwellings were first clustered together. Now it is studded with splendid cities, strewn thick with towns and villages, diversified by infinite varieties of architecture: sumptuous buildings, unlike in every clime, each as if sprung from its own soil and made out of its air.

Once there were only the elementary discoveries of the lever, the wedge, the bended bow, the wheel; Tubal worked in iron and copper, and Naamah twisted threads. Since then what a jump the mechanical arts have made! These primitive elements are now so intricately combined that we can hardly recognize them; new forces have been added, new principles evolved; ponderous engines, like moving mountains of iron, shake the very earth; many-windowed factories, filled with complex machinery driven by water or its vapor, clatter night and day, weaving the plain garments of the poor man and the rich robes of the prince, the curtains of the cottage and the upholstery of the palace.

Once there were but the spear and bow and shield, and hand-to-hand conflicts of brute strength. See now the whole enginery of war, the art of fortification, the terrific perfection of artillery, the mathematical transfer of all from the body to the mind, till the battlefield is but a chess-board, and the battle is really waged in the brains of the generals. How astonishing was that last European field of Solferino, ten miles in sweep,with the balloon floating above it for its spy and scout,with the thread-like wire trailing in the grass, and the lightning coursing back and forth, Napoleon's ubiquitous aide-de-camp,with railway-trains, bringing reinforcements into the midst of the melée, and their steam-whistle shrieking amid the thunders of battle! And what a picture of even greater magnificence, in some respects, is before us to-day! A field not of ten, but ten thousand miles in sweep! McClellan, standing on the eminence of present scientific achievement, is able to overlook half the breadth of a continent, and the widely scattered detachments of a host of six hundred thousand men. The rail connects city with city; the wire hangs between camp and camp, and reaches from army to army. Steam is hurling his legions from one point to another; electricity brings him intelligence, and carries his orders; the aëronaut in the sky is his field-glass searching the horizon. It is practically but one great battle that is raging beneath him, on the Potomac, in the mountains of Virginia, down the valley of the Mississippi, in the interiors of Kentucky and Tennessee, along the seaboard, and on the Gulf coast. The combatants are hidden from each other, but under the chieftain's eye the dozen armies are only the squadrons of a single host, their battles only the separate conflicts of a single field, the movements of the whole campaign only the evolutions of a prolonged engagement. The spectacle is a good illustration of the day. Under the magic of progress, war in its essence and vitality is really diminishing, even while increasing in materiel and grandeur. Neither time nor space will permit the old and tedious contests of history to be repeated. Military science has entered upon a new era, nearer than ever to the period when wars shall cease.

But to go on with a few more contrasts of the past with the present. Once men wrote only in symbols, like wedges and arrow-heads, on tiles and bricks, or in hieroglyphic pictures on obelisks and sepulchres,afterward in crude, but current characters on stone, metal, wax, and papyrus. In a much later age appeared the farthest perfection of the invention: books engrossed on illuminated rolls of vellum, and wound on cylinders of boxwood, ivory, or gold,and then put away like richest treasures of art. What a difference between perfection then and progress now! To-day the steam printing-press throws out its sheets in clouds, and fills the world with books. Vast libraries are the vaulted catacombs of modern times, in which the dead past is laid away, and the living present takes refuge. The glory of costly scrolls is dimmed by the illustrated and typographical wonders which make the bookstore a gorgeous dream. Knowledge, no longer rare, no longer lies in precarious accumulations within the cells of some poor monk's crumbling brain, but swells up like the ocean, universal and imperishable, pouring into the vacant recesses of all minds as the ocean pours into the hollows under its shore. To-day, newspapers multiplied by millions whiten the whole country every morning, like the hoar-frost; and books, numerous and brilliant as the stars, seem by a sort of astral influence to unseal the latent destinies of many an intellect, as by their illumination they stimulate thought and activity everywhere.

Once art seemed to have reached perfection in the pictures and sculptures of Greece and Rome. Yet now those master-pieces are not only equalled on canvas and in fresco, but reproduced by tens of thousands from graven sheets of copper, steel, and even blocks of wood,or, if modelled in marble or bronze, are remodelled by hundreds, and set up in countless households as the household gods. It is the glory of to-day that the sun himself has come down to be the rival and teacher of artists, to work wonders and perform miracles in art. He is the celestial limner who shall preserve the authentic faces of every generation from now until the world is no more. He holds the mirror up to Nature, paralyzes the fleeting phantom, by chemical subtilty, on the burnished plate,and there it is fixed forever. He prepares the optical illusion of the stereoscope, so that through tiny windows we may look as into fairy-land and find sections of this magnificent world modelled in miniature.

Once men imagined the earth to be a flat and limited tract. Now they realize that it is a ponderous ball floating in infinite ether. Once they thought the sky was a solid blue concave, studded with blazing points, an empire of fate, the gold-and-azure floor of the abode of gods and spirits. Now all that is dissolved away; the wandering planets become at will broad disks, like sisters of the moon; and countless millions of stars are now mirrored in the same retina with which the Magi saw the few thousands of the firmament that were visible from the plains of Chaldea.

Once men were aware of nothing in the earth beneath its hills and valleys and teeming soil. Now they walk consciously over the ruins of old worlds; they can decipher the strange characters and read the strange history graven on these gigantic tablets. The stony veil is rent, and they can look inimitable periods back, and see the curious animals which then moved up and down in the earth.

Once a glass bubble was a wonder for magnifying power. Now the lenses of the microscope bring an inverted universe to light. Men can look into a drop and discover an ocean crowded with millions of living creatures, monsters untypified in the visible world, playing about as in a great deep.

Once a Roman emperor prized a mysterious jewel because it brought the gladiators contending in the arena closer to the imperial canopy. Now observatories, with their revolving domes, crown the heights at every centre of civilization, and the mighty telescope, poised on exquisite mechanism, turns infinite space into a Coliseum, brings its invisible luminaries close to the astronomer's seat, and reveals the harmonies and splendors of those distant works of God.

Once the supposed elements were fire, and water, and earth, and air; once the amber was unique in its peculiar property, and the loadstone in its singular power. Now chemistry holds in solution the elements and secrets of creation; now electricity would seem to be the veil which hangs before the soul; now the magnetic needle, true to the loadstar, trembles on the sea, to make the mariner brave and the haven sure.

We have by no means exhausted the wonders that have accumulated upon man, in being accumulated by man. Their enumeration would be almost endless. But we leave all to mention one, with which there is nothing of old time to compare. It had no beginning then,not even a germ. It is the peculiar leap and development of the age in which we live. Many things have combined to bring it to pass.

A spirit that had been hid, since the world began, in a coffer of metal and acid,the genie of the lightning,shut down, as by the seal of Solomon in the Arabian tale, was let loose but the other day, and commenced to do the bidding of man. Every one found that he could transport his thought to the ends of the earth in the twinkling of an eye. That spirit, with its electric wings, soon flew from city to city, and whithersoever the magnetic wire could be traced through the air, till the nations of all Europe stood as face to face, and the States of this great Union gazed one upon another. It made a continent like a household,a cluster of peoples like members of a family,each within hearing of the other's voice.

But one achievement remained to be performed before the whole world could become one. The ocean had hitherto hopelessly severed the globe into two hemispheres. Could man make it a single sphere? Could man, like Moses, smite the waves with his electric rod, and lead the legions of human thought across dry shod? He could,and he did. We all remember it well. A range of submarine mountains was discovered, stretching from America to Europe. Their top formed a plateau, which, lying within two miles of the surface, offered an undulating shoal within human reach. A fleet of steamers, wary of storms, one day cautiously assembled midway over it. They caught the monster asleep, safely uncoiled the wire, and laid it from shore to shore. The treacherous, dreadful, omnipotent ocean was conquered and bound!

How the heart of the two worlds leaped when the news came! Then, more than at any time before, were most of us startled into a conviction of how real progress was,how tremendous, and limitless, apparently, the power which God had put into man. Not that this, in itself, was greater than that which had preceded it, but it was the climax of all. The mechanical feat awoke more enthusiasm than even the scientific achievement which was its living soul,not because it was more wonderful, but because it dispelled our last doubt. We all began to form a more definite idea of something great to come, that was yet lying stored away in the brain,laid there from the beginning. Like the Magian on the heights of Moab, as he saw the tents of Israel and the tabernacle of God in the distance, we grew big with an involuntary vision, and were surprised into prophecies.

It was wonderful to see the Queen of England, on one side of that chasm of three thousand miles, wave a greeting to the President, and the President wave back a greeting to the Queen. But it was glorious to see that chord quiver with the music and the truth of the angelic song:

Soon, however, came a check to the excitement. For above a score of days was that mysterious highway kept open from Valentia to Trinity Bay. But then the spell was lost, the waves flowed back, old ocean rolled on as before, and the crossing messages perished, like the hosts of Pharaoh in the sea.