From The Athenæum. A SUB-WAY IN CENTRAL AFRICA. to Korosko- the country was so peculiar that I asked him whether in his varied trav DR. LIVINGSTONE's last letters, pub-els he had ever seen anything like it. I lished 8th November, 1869, in the Proceed- will give a short description of what the ings of the Royal Geographical Society, country was. It rose in a succession of mention that "tribes live in underground ridges as regularly as the waves of the sea; houses in Rua. Some excavations are said the heights were of slate, and the valleys. to be thirty miles long, and have running of sand. In crossing these ridges, the camrills in them - a whole district can stand a els walked over the edges of the slate in siege in them. The writings' therein, I single file, for the path was narrow and very have been told by some of the people, are rugged. Once in the valleys we were surdrawings of animals, and not letters, other-rounded, as if within a fortress, by walls of wise I should have gone to see them. People very dark, well made, and outer angle of eyes slanting inwards." Also, in his letter to Sir Bartle Frere, Dr. Livingstone mentions"there is a large tribe of Troglodytes in Rua, with excavations thirty miles in length, and a running rill passing along the entire street. They ascribe these rock-dwellings to the hand of the Deity. The writings in them are drawings of animals; if they had been letters, I must have gone to see them. People very black, strong, and outer angles of eyes upwards." We are not told where Rua exactly stands, but that it is the most northerly point hitherto reached by the great explorer, and the point to which he had followed the waters from 10° and 12° south latitude. In a map, published in Capt. Speke's "What led to the Discovery of the Nile," the territory of Uruwa is marked down as about 100 miles to the west of the centre of Lake Tanganyika; this territory is half-way across the continent of Africa, and traders for ivory and copper have reached it from Zanzibar. I conclude that Capt. Speke's Uruwa and Dr. Livingstone's Rua are one and the same place; but if the latter is not able to bring us home an account of this great subway, it is so marvellous surpassing any subterraneous passage we know of in Nature, that I hope some traveller may be enterprising enough to go and report on its position and appearance in our day. In the mean time, I may describe how I came to hear of a similar, or the same, tunnel, said to be on the highway between Loowemba (Lobemba) and Ooroongoo (Marungu) near the Lake Tanganyika. Capt. Speke and I had amongst our followers a native named Manua, who had travelled most of the routes in Central Africa. He was intelligent, observant, and, besides being a good companion, he knew the names and uses of nearly all the plants we met with. He and I conversed a great deal on the objects around us, and while our party, all mounted on camels, were crossing the Nubian Desert - from Aboo Ahmed 66 slaty rock, say 400 feet high; no exit visible, and the horizon a jagged outline of peaks. Such then was the valley of Dullah, where I asked Manua if he had ever seen any country resembling it: his reply was, This country reminds me of what I saw in the country to the south of the Lake Tanganyika, when travelling with an Arab's caravan from Unjanyembeh. There is a river there called the Kaoma, running into the lake, the sides of which are similar in precipitousness to the rocks before us." I then asked, Do the people cross the river in boats ? "No, they have no boats; and even if they had, the people could not land, as the sides are too steep: they pass underneath the river by a natural tunnel, or subway. He and all his party went through it on their way from Toowemba to Ooroongoo, and returned by it. He described its length, as having taken them from sunrise till noon to pass through it, and so high, that if mounted upon camels they could not touch the top. Tall reeds, the thickness of a walking-stick, grew inside; the road was strewed with white pebbles, and so wide400 yards that they could see their way tolerably well while passing through it. The rocks looked as if they had been planed by artificial means. Water never came through from the river over-head; it was procured by digging wells. Manua added, that the people of Wambweh take shelter in this tunnel, and live there with their families and cattle, when molested by the Watuta, a warlike race, descended from the Zooloo Kafirs. The two accounts are similar in every respect except as to its length and the manner of procuring water. Dr. Livingstone's informant made the Subway thirty miles in extent; my informant marched through it in six hours, say fifteen miles, and saw no running rill within it; but a wet season would account for this. I, therefore, have not the slightest doubt that such a place exists, and that it is no excavation or anything formed by man. How, therefore, can such a place of such vast extent have originated? I infer from the stratifications of slate which I saw in the Dullah Valley that in the case of the Tanganyika tunnel the strata there have been so displaced as to form within a natural pointed arch or a channel underneath the stratification. Manua did not mention that there were any writings or figures upon the stone, but he described them as black or dark, and as if their surfaces had been made smooth and flat, thereby giving me the idea that they were most probably slate, if not basalt. The natives look on it as an m'zimo or sacred spot. J. A. GRANT. From The Saturday Review. THE PARSON OF THE NINETEENTH CEN TURY AS SHOWN IN FICTION. ally casting off the trammels of old prescriptions, the counteracting influence of French ideas told on literary society, and religion was unfashionable. Miss Edgeworth, severe moralist as she professed herself, and little disposed to enthusiasm, still shows the Church of her day on its repulsive side. At best, the clergy, in her eyes, are only respectable and humane dispensers of parish relief; they have no share in the thought of the day. When she speaks of professions she does not include the clerical. The clergy stand at the antipodes of progress and enlightenment. Buckhurst Falconer in her most characteristic novel, Patronage, has some good in him till he is forced by his necessities into the Church in hope of a fat living, which he loses, however, through too much wit, to the sycophant Sloak. Upon this reverse he is driven to So long as the ideal parson did not in- marry the inevitable old maid graced by terest the ladies he could occupy no leading the epithets "beldam" and "curmudgeon," place in romance. He was necessarily sub- and is promoted by her bishop brother to ordinate, or, to excuse giving him a more a deanery, where he presently accquires a prominent part, there must be in him an el-" stomach which knows canonical hours," ement of the grotesque, low, or ridiculous, and a shameless cupidity for the temporaliwhich is always less attractive to women ties of his office. The authoress allows to her than to men. A single change in either of model heroine "a just and becoming sense two opposite directions would suffice to alter of religion," but she is raised by divine phithis. Something of the reproach which losophy far above all illiberal prejudices. hung about the clerical office in George Caroline would certainly never lower these Herbert's time as a mean employment," high pretensions by asking questions as to which, as he said, made clergymen "meanly the denomination of her magnificent and valued," still clung to the rustic parson. perfect Count. Hannah More wrote a By sinking the external disabilities of his novel, and of course has an ideal rector, profession by means of such secularities as but he falls into the old deifying strain easy and polished manners, a coat of fash- towards his squire, which is familiar only in ionable cut, and a general air of knowing books, and apologizes for his loquacity the world, the parson might become inter- when set upon that theme; while she menesting as any other man; he might show tions curates only to keep them, or rather himself as much at home in the drawing- their wives, in their places. Mr. Jackson, room or ball-room as his predecessor did to be sure, is a humble, diligent assistant, with pipe and tankard in the tavern. Or but his wife has to be reminded that behe might appeal to woman's spiritual nature tween the higher and lower clergy there are as no other man could, and awaken her re- the same distinctions of ranks as with the ligious enthusiasm. But in the eighteenth laity, and is snubbed for her miserable amcentury enthusiasm had an ill name among bition that her daughter's music should excel orthodox divines; and with awkward or pe- that of the rector's daughters. dantic manners, and a garb distinct not only It was left to Miss Austen to invest the in colour but in form, rusty and snuffy when English clergyman with charm enough to be it was not smug, where even the wig had to a hero. Whatever low views she may be be clerical, the parson had no equivalent to charged with, however her delineations may offer to the feminine imagination for all the come short of that ideal priest, that embodipersonal attractions which her fancy missed ment of self-devotion, sweetness, and ausin him. Wesley and his followers, having terity which ladies have since achieved, the separated themselves from the Church, had meed which Mr. Ruskin accords with no effect on the society of that day. "Stay grudging fairness to Claude is due also to in the world," he said to a "professor "her. She set the sun in Heaven," she first who did not go his lengths, "there is your ventured to make the parson of fiction insphere; they will not admit such as me.' teresting to the young imagination of her And though time was working its usual own sex. We are not aware that man or transformations and the clergy were gradu- woman had done this before. Even she did 66 PARSON OF THE 19TH CENTURY AS SHOWN IN FICTION. 495 not make this venture at once. In her first complished a whip as he was a partner. novel, Pride and Prejudice (written, won- How happy is Catherine in his curricle, derful to think, at one-and-twenty), she fol- drawing favourable comparisons between lowed a lead. Delightful as Mr. Collins is, him and the inimitable John Thorpe ! he has a touch of Richardson's Elias Brand, Henry was never tempted to transgress the and perhaps is nearer caricature than any decorum of his profession, "yet he drove other of her characters. She wrote for so well, so quietly, without making any disreaders who she knew did not care for par- turbance, without parading to her or swearsons. Even his coming was not interesting at them, and then his hat sat so well, ing to the more volatile of the sex. The and the innumerable capes of his great coat letter which announced him woke no curi- looked so becomingly important." The osity in Lydia or Kitty. "It was next to picture offends such readers as look in a impossible that he should come in a red novel for the support of their own views, coat, and it was long since they had received but in so far as Miss Austen raised the sopleasure from the society of a man in any cial clerical standing, she incidentally other colour." Charlotte Lucas, indeed, helped on the social weight of the parson in makes up to him, but in all but age she other things. From the ridiculous to the is the stock old maid viewing in him her sublime is a much longer journey than the only chance. But Miss Austen was essen- return route, but this was one step of the tially an observer. She wrote from what way. As years passed on she shows a much she knew, and the clergy whom she knew keener appreciation of the pastoral office. were different beings from any she found in As a girl she had taken all for granted, but fiction. In Sense and Sensibility she takes in Edmund Bertram we are shown a clergycourage and ventures, apologetically as it man sensitive of duty and setting his callwere, to make the profession attractive, at ing foremost, not as writers with this aim least to her sensible heroine. Edward Fer- would do now, but making it clear that it rars has not spirit for fashionable life. His was foremost. Miss Austen had no ideal temper is serious, his taste literary. He characters. Every portrait is a likeness, enters the Church because it favours these not of an individual, but of a class. To set tendencies and gives him something to do. up a model parson would have seemed to His brother Robert, one of Miss Austen's her an impossible presumption. To wish fine family of fools, represents the world's her to have done so is as great a mistake as sense of his brother's step. "He laughed to regret her declining the task of glorifying most immoderately. The idea of Edward's the House of Coburg. being a clergyman and living in a small parsonage-house diverted him beyond measure; and when to that was added the fanciful imagery of Edward reading prayers in a white surplice and publishing the banns of marriage between John Smith and Mary Brown, he could conceive nothing more ridiculous." She is here satirizing a very common joke of the period. In Northanger Abbey, which comes third, she takes a step in advance. Edward Ferrars has a sheepish air with him, but Henry Tilney is a wit, a man of fashion as well as sense, and, though good and amiable, embodies the authoress's own sense of folly and absurdity. She does not feel it to be in the novelist's province to show him in Miss Brontë, too, was a clergyman's his pastoral character: she combats a preju- daughter, finding in the order attractive dice; her object is to prove that a clegy- subjects for her pencil, though here the parman may be the readiest, best-mannered, allel stops. A life-long grudge against one most witty and distinguished man of the clergyman was clearly a main impulse with company, and the most agreeable partner her in attempting authorship at all. Jane in the world at a country dance. Nothing Eyre was probably planned to avenge - in can be more easy and graceful than his talk her portrait of Mr. Brocklehurst, the directwith Catherine in the ball-room, nothing ing genius of Lowood - the supposed more playfully satirical of ball-room man- wrongs of a sister. But in Shirley we find The reader may remember his in- her satire more lenient, and even genial. genious parallel between a country dance Helmore, the rector, is very much her favorand marriage. And he was manly as ac-lite. His Wellington physiognomy, his ners. Except as thus taking the initiative, we can scarcely class Miss Austen among the crowd of fair wielders of the pen who have since taken the clergy under their adoring patronage. The worship is unquestionably on the decline. The fall may be headlong, but feminine sentiment for many a year has found no more congenial theme and object than the high-minded and high-born curate or youthful rector, endowed with all the gifts of nature and fortune, and bent on sacrificing them all in the lowliest service-a sharp contrast of graces and base surroundings only to be figured by Miss Coutts's Columbia Market in Shoreditch. courage, his power of getting his own way, recommend him to her liking in spite of his having been an indifferent husband to the wife who chose him, while still a curate, out of many admirers, "his office probably investing him with some of the illusion necessary to allure to the commission of matrimony." Miss Brontë was accustomed to see in the clergy, if not always the leading spirits, yet the most generally interesting members, of such society as she knew, and as such she gives them prominence while allowing her humour its freest scope. Her three curates performing their triangle of visits to one another, rushing backwards and forwards amongst themselves to and from their respective lodgings, and wrangling for ever on points of ecclesiastical discipline, are spared in none of their weaknesses; but she nevertheless makes them the eligible partis of the young ladies of their joint circle. Little Mr. Sweeting with a Miss Sykes on each side making much of him, with a dish of tarts before him, and crumpet and marmalade on his plate, was happy as any monarch. And though Malone tying his knees together in an inextricable tangle with his handkerchief in the endeavour to make himself agreeable to the heiress fails with her, we are not to suppose him often repulsed. Miss Brontë had little of the feminine sympathy and reverence for the office, but the clergy must necessarily play a conspicuous part in the fiction of women of genius of secluded lives, who have lived where their sway and social supremacy is acknowledged as it is in remote, or at least out-of-the-way, districts. It was not all through good will that they were driven to them. The later works of George Eliot might otherwise make us wonder why the clergy take so conspicuous a lead in her earlier fiction, why her first appearance before the world should have been in Scenes of Clerical Life. We may even suppose that the first touch, the impulse which awoke her genius, was given in the study of the clerical character, especially as offering the impulse of religious enthusiasm. In Janet's Repentance we have an illustration of the enthusiasm, half for the cause, half for the teacher, for which women have been ridiculed, and which the female novelist has all along pictured, condoned, indulged in, encouraged, caught as a congenial theme, treated with a sympathy which men have no turn for. In this most striking story is a very delicate, tenderly admiring, sympathetic portrait of the young, ardent, and sensitive evangelical clergyman in the early persecuting days, when women alone listened to his teaching and were his first converts, half through religious conviction, and half through admiration for their teacher and pity for his trials. The opening scene, where a party of women jealous of each other, and so far self-deceivers, widows, old maids (of the early and late autumn varieties), fair young converts, all assembled for pious purposes, sit watching for the arrival of the teacher who had effected such a change in thought and feeling in them all, gave us our first impression of the genius of the writer. While she satirized, there was yet full recognition of the fact that these poor women were under the spell of the best specimen of man that had yet fallen in their way. He was not only young, handsome, and interesting, but he was a revelation to them of nobler motives and a purer life than it had come in their way to dream of before. It was not an illusion; vanity and selfishness were conflicting powers against newly awakened aims and honest longings for better things. Current literature, as represented by its feminine contributors, still overflows, shall we say, with the clerical element, whether in sympathy or otherwise. We have the Brave Lady from one prolific pen, with her worthless, disgraceful clerical husband; we have a long catena of clergymen - curates, rectors, doubters, enthusiasts from the inexhaustible genius of Mrs. Oliphant, who finds a perpetual stimulus to her invention in the shifting religious problems of the day. Nothing is apparently more exciting to her fancy than the clash and conflict of religion and the world, of the new with the old, inquiry with authority, spiritual zeal with earthly love nothing she likes better to enlarge upon than the turmoil, the surging sway, of opposing passions in the youthful curate's bosom, his soul in perpetual seething effervescence, his pulse always at fever point; the eager heart for ever looking out of bewildered, questioning, earnest, far-seeing, eloquent eyes. The curate of the day can hardly know himself under these ardent impersonations, but yet he must get to think himself a very fine fellow if he furnishes such a never-ending theme for a pen of no average power. And, after all, the gravely religious didactic novelist remains, to whom the clerical office presents the only profession where there is absolute freedom of choice. Miss Sewell — wise, judicious, and safe as she is has an excellent mother, who announces early in the life of her son that if he chooses any other calling than the clerical she shall die, and when he follows bad courses and declines to take orders she is stricken down, not so much, as it seems, because of the bad courses as because her dedication of him is frustrated. The authoress of this school, however, from mere reverence, often forbears any close delineation, or crowds together so many perfections that the model clergyman is rather a catalogue than a character. A negligent or easy parson is too bad for her canvas; he can only be hinted at as a misfortune in himself, and the cause of that state of disorder and Church decadence which it is the object of the tale to restore to decency or beauty. We do not quarrel with this, but only assign it as the reason why no striking clergyman, none instinct with the characteristic powers of the writers, occurs to us. This is a large theme. To do justice to the priority of women in this field we have been forced to give her precedence, and even a slight and most inadequate survey of her long labour of love has engrossed all our space. If we enter into the treatment of the parson by man as novelist it must be in a separate paper. From The Pall Mall Gazette, 16 April. retirement of other members of the Government besides M. Daru and M. Buffet; but, whether or no, that is of no consequence. The Administration has ceased to exist, to all intents and purposes whatsoever. M. Ollivier may remain, but he is not in office - he is in service. M. Ollivier counts for nothing, in fact; and he being set aside, the withdrawal of MM. Daru and Buffet' brings the existence of the Government to an end. M. Ollivier may now retire tooit is of no consequence. Or may remain, and serve with M. de la Gueronniere. He may do anything or nothing; but all the same the Government is broken up, and there seems little probability that any such Administration will ever be formed again in the lifetime of the Emperor. By which we mean, any such Administration as it was supposed to be, and as it might have been had the Emperor been as loyal as he tried hard to seem. It is a fair assumption, perhaps, that these causes were not unconnected with the Emperor's resolution to maintain his ascendancy over law, legislature, and constitution to assert openly and to hold in the sight of all men, a constitutional right to make revolutions whenever it seems good to him. That he would persistently ACCORDING to the last account from retain such an ascendancy we have always France, M. Ollivier made the other day a had and have frequently expressed a confivery complete and very daring misrepre- dent expectation. Months ago, when all sentation of the facts of the present crisis the world was rejoicing in the Emperor's when he announced that M. Buffet having sincere and hearty abnegation of power, withdrawn his discordant presence from the and the wisdom that had guided him to a councils of his august Sovereign, an harmo- conclusion which did indeed "crown the nious Government would at once proceed edifice" of liberties granted to his nation, to carry out that Sovereign's wise and lib- we declared our conviction that in effect he eral designs. M. Ollivier must have known would never resign that power; and that at that moment that the very existence of the Ministry which was to make of him a the Government was in danger, and that respectable constitutional sovereign, sitting its fate was determinable at any moment by on a throne that was the tomb of his greatthe decision of two opposed men, both of ness, was not likely to be permitted to enwhom were quite out of his control. While dure long without disturbance from above. M. Ollivier was talking, he was full of this This was two months ago; since when the humiliating knowledge: that the Emperor chorus of admiration and gratitude for the and M. Daru were meanwhile settling the Emperor's goodness, and especially his matter between them in their own way. sincerity, has been so loud that we have The way in which it has been settled is maintained a nearly unbroken silence as to deplorable. Naturally, we ourselves are him and his Government. Now that the not surprised at a result that we foretold illusion has been destroyed and the imposlong ago, but we regret it nevertheless. ture betrayed, we may have some chance It is an enormous misfortune for France of a hearing once more. Not that we have that this experiment in constitutional gov- anything to say on the general subject of ernment should be so brief and so hollow. all discussion in this matter- the EmperFor there can scarcely be a doubt, we sup-or's "sincerity." He has always been, as pose, that the play is over. A little while he now is, and as he ever will be, a sincere ago M. Daru declared in the Corps Légis- Imperialist, and a sincere believer in the latif that the Cabinet would stand or fall autocratic government of Napoleon the together. We do not yet know how far Third. The only insincerity with which we this saying has been made good by the ourselves are disposed to charge him is one VOL. XVII. 762 LIVING AGE. |