Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/161



N a world that seems to grow poorer rather than richer in the article of novelty the point of view is the thing that apparently promises most to the lover of novelty. Any mind dealing with a theme or problem new to it, sheds the light of its own interest upon it, brings to its interpretation the lessons of individual experience, and blends with it some color of character peculiar to the student. The student shares himself with the subject which he appropriates, and no witness of the result can wholly separate the two. If the subject was attractive before it was studied, it has become more attractive in the process, and the result is enriched with the importance which any man's history must have for all other men. If the student is a man of uncommon history, if his opinions are imaginably the outcome of his environment as well as his inner consciousness; if he is a man of culture standing in an almost unexampled relation of fealty to a political condition hitherto untouched by culture, then he presents himself and his thesis with such an extraordinary claim upon the curiosity of the witness, as we think we are about to instance. There may be incidents of greater psychological allurement, or of more striking dramatic picturesqueness than that of a New York politician, of the strict Tammany tradition, coming forward at the moment of his party's triumph, with a scholarly treatise on The Oligarchy of Venice in his hand, but we cannot think of any that match it or surpass it. If one were tempted to consider the spectacle lightly, or with reference merely to its mystifying effect upon the rank and file of those who have recently made Mr. George B. McClellan Mayor of the greatest American city, one would find one's sufficient rebuke in the honest make and excellent manner of the book which contributes its specific touch to his very striking attitude at a signal moment of his political career.

It is probably in an ignorance of which we have not yet been able to ascertain the bounds, that we fail to recall any study of the Venetian oligarchy besides Mr. McClellan's since the delightful James Howell wrote, in the middle of the seventeenth century, his "Survey of the Signorie of Venice, of Her admired policy, and method of Government, with a Cohortation to all Christian Princes to resent Her dangerous Condition at present," she being then in danger more than usually imminent of destruction by the Turk, to whose mercies Christendom was leaving her with more than usual indifference. The author's "cohortation" formed a constantly recurrent note of his discourse, such as Mr. McClellan, addressing the world more than a hundred years after Venice ceased to be, was not obliged to sound. He could therefore write of her from a much cooler mind than Howell was able to command; and there are also some differences of circumstance as well as of temperament in the two students of the subject which favor his more judicial view of the case. He had not, for instance, to address his appeal, as Howell had, to a Puritan Parliament which had imprisoned him for his royalist sympathies (Howell had mostly sympathies rather than principles) or to conjure his country by her community of maritime interests to have compassion on a sister sea-going commonwealth. Neither was there any urgent occasion, in the taste of his age, or the humor of his public, to preface his treatise with a sonnet on "Upon the Citty and Signorie of Venice." Once for all Howell had done that so effectually, that any reader who feels the need of such a sonnet may recur to it in his book, where he will learn that—

Could any State on Earth Immortall be, Venice by her rare Government is She Yet She retains her Virgin-waters pure, Nor any Forron mixture can endure; Though Syren-like on Shore and Sea, Her Face Enchants all those whom once She doth embrac ; Nor is ther any can Her bewty prize But he who hath behold Her with his Eyes. These following Leaves display if well observd