MY
COMMONPLACE
BOOK
J. T. HACKETT
“Omne meum, nihil meum”
T. FISHER UNWIN LTD
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE
First publication in Great Britain, September, 1919.
Second English Edition, September, 1920.
Third English Edition, January, 1921.
DEDICATED
TO MY
DEAR FRIEND
RICHARD HODGSON
WHO HAS PASSED OVER
TO THE OTHER SIDE
A large proportion of the most interesting quotations in this book was collected between 1874 and 1886. During that period I was under the influence of Richard Hodgson, who was my close friend from childhood. To him directly and indirectly this book is largely indebted.
Hodgson (1855-1905) had a remarkably pure, noble, and lovable character, and was one of the most gifted men Australia has produced. He is known in philosophic circles from some early contributions to Mind and other journals, but is mainly known from his work in psychical research, to which he devoted the best years of his life. Apart from his great ability in other directions, he was endowed, even in youth, with fine taste and a clear and mature literary judgment. This will appear to some extent in the quotations over his name, and the note on p. 208 will give further particulars of his career. He was from two to three years older than myself, and guided me in my early reading. Therefore, indirectly, he has to do with most of the contents of this book.
But, more than this, about one-third of the main quotations (not including the notes which I have only now added) came direct from Hodgson. He left Australia in 1877, but we maintained a voluminous correspondence until 1886. This correspondence contained most of the quotations referred to, and the remainder[x] Hodgson gave me in London on the only occasion I met him after he left Australia. (After 1886 he became so immersed in psychical research, and I in legal work, that our correspondence ceased to be of a literary character.) Thus directly and indirectly Hodgson has much to do with the book—and, if it had been practicable, I would have placed his name on the title-page.
This book is simply one to be taken up at odd moments, like any other collection of quotations. But there are two reasons why it may have some special interest. One reason is that it includes passages from a number of authors who appear to have become forgotten, or, at any rate, to be passing Lethe-wards. We, who dwell in the underworld,[3] cannot, of course, have a complete knowledge of what is known or forgotten in the inner literary circles of England. We can depend only on the books and periodicals that happen to come to our hands, and perhaps should not rely too much on such sources of information. Yet I cannot but think that Robert Buchanan, for example, has become largely forgotten, and apparently this is the case also with a number of other authors from whom I quote. Because of this, I have retained all the passages I had from such authors.
It must be remembered that this book is not an anthology. A commonplace book is usually a collection of reminders made by a young man who cannot afford an extensive library. There is no system in such a collection. A book is borrowed and extracts made from it; another book by the same author is bought and no extract made from it. On the one hand a favourite verse, although well known, is written out for some reason or other; on the other hand hundreds of beautiful poems are omitted. So far from this being an anthology, I have, as a matter of course, omitted many poems that since the seventy-eighty period have become general favourites; and, as regards the most beautiful gems of our literature, they are almost all excluded. There are for example, only a few lines from Shakespeare.
Some exceptions have, however, been made. In a series of word-pictures, a few of the best-known passages will be found. A few others have been included for reasons that will readily appear; they either form part of a series or the reason is apparent from the notes. Apart from these I have retained Blanco White’s great sonnet and “The Night has a thousand eyes,” written by F. W. Bourdillon when an undergraduate at Worcester College, Oxford, because with regard to these I had an interesting and instructive experience. I accidentally discovered that of four well-read men (two at least of them more thorough students[xi] of poetry than myself) two were ignorant of the one poem and two of the other. Seeking an explanation, I turned to the anthologies. I could not find in any of them Bourdillon’s little gem until I came to the comparatively recent Oxford Book of Victorian Verse and The Spirit of Man. The Blanco White sonnet I could find nowhere except in collections of sonnets, which in my opinion are little read. It will be observed that in anthologies alone can Blanco White’s one and only poem be kept alive.
The second reason why this book may have a special interest is that it may serve as a reminder to my contemporaries of our stirring thoughts and experiences in the seventies and eighties. How interesting this period was it is difficult to show in a few lines. In pure literature, books of value simply poured from the press. In the closing year, 1889, “One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward” died on the day that his last book, Asolando, was published, leaving Tennyson, an old man of eighty, the sole survivor of the poets of a great period. At almost the same moment “Crossing the Bar” was published.
Apart from literature, the seventies and eighties were an eventful period in science and religion. Darwinism was still causing its tremendous upheaval, and the supposed conflict between religion and science exercised an enormous effect on the minds of men. Evolution had explained so much of the processes in the history of life, that the majority of thinkers at that time imagined that no room was left for the super-natural. Science was supposed to have given a death-blow to religion, and the greatest wave of materialism ever known in the history of the world swept over England and Europe. It is strange how many great thinkers missed what now appears so obvious a fact, that causality still stood behind all law, and that Darwin, like Newton, had merely helped to show the method by which the universe is governed. (It seems to me that James Martineau stood supreme at that time as a man of genius who saw clearly the inherent defect of the whole materialist movement.)
However, agnosticism, materialism, positivism flourished and triumphed. Science, whose dignity had been so long unrecognized, came into her own, and, in her turn, usurped the same dogmatic superior attitude she had resented in ecclesiasticism. On the one hand pessimistic literature and philosophy poured from the press; on the other hand new religions arose to take the place of the old. Theosophy and spiritualism were in evidence everywhere (leading in 1882 to the happy result that the Society for Psychical Research was founded). Harrison, Clifford, Swinburne and others preached the deification of man. There were discords within, as well as foes without the church. The severely orthodox fought against the revelations of Colenso and the higher[xii] criticism; Seeley’s Ecce Homo and a host of other works aroused fierce antagonism; Pius IX, who had in 1864 published his Syllabus which would have destroyed modern civilization, proclaimed the infallibility of the Pope in 1870—and in 1872 was deprived of temporal power. Such questions as the literal interpretation and inerrancy of the Bible were the subjects of intense conflict—and especially strange is it to remember the dire struggle of well-intentioned men to maintain the horrible doctrine of eternal punishment. I imagine that this book will assist to some extent in recalling the atmosphere and aroma of that remarkable period.
I have made very little attempt to arrange my quotations—and now wish I had done less in that direction. The book is intended for casual reading, and to arrange it under headings would tend to make it heavy. The element of surprise is more calculated to make the book attractive.
I began the notes that are appended to some of the quotations with the intention of giving only such short, necessary explanations as would be of assistance to the inexperienced reader. When, however, I began to write, I found my pen running away with me. Apart from the usual, ineffectual efforts of one’s youth, I had never before attempted literary work, and for the first time experienced the great pleasure there is in such writing. With the immense variety of subjects in a collection of quotations, one could continue to write over a series of years; but it was necessary to keep the book within reasonable bounds, and, therefore, I had arbitrarily to come to a stop. In these notes I do not claim that there is much, if any, originality,[4] they are mostly recollections of old reading. Still they may serve the important purpose of revivifying old truths (see p. 78).
I have been astonished at the great deal of work this book has involved—and also how much I have needed the assistance of my friends. There were some sixty or seventy quotations in respect to which I had neglected to give any reference to the authors (for the same reason as one did not put the names on photographs of old friends—it seemed impossible that the names could be forgotten). The difficulty of finding even one such quotation is enormous, and we have no British Museum in Adelaide, but only some limited public libraries. However, with the help of my friends I have succeeded in tracing the paternity of most of these “orphans.” In this and other directions I have had the kind assistance of many gentlemen. Of these first and[xiii] foremost comes Mr. G. F. Hassell, the publisher of the Adelaide edition, who, in his devotion to literature as well as to his own art of printing, is a worthy representative of the old Renaissance printers. He has given me every assistance, has gone through every line, and, as he is both an exceedingly well-read man and also of a younger generation than myself, I have left it to him to decide what should be omitted and what retained in this book. Professor Mitchell has also been so kind as to revise and make suggestions concerning a number of notes on philosophic and other subjects. Professor Darnley Naylor has been uniformly good in revising any notes of a classical nature—though he takes no responsibility whatever for the views I express. Dr. E. Harold Davies has also helped me with two notes on music, in one instance correcting a serious mistake I had made. Sir Langdon Bonython, my friend of many years, has assisted me with practical as well as literary suggestions, and has thrown open his library to me. Mr. Francis Edwards, of High Street, Marylebone, has assisted in my search for references to quotations. Mr. H. Rutherford Purnell, Public Librarian of Adelaide, and his staff have helped me throughout, and Mr. E. La Touche Armstrong, Public Librarian of Melbourne, has gone to great trouble on my account. Miss M. R. Walker has assisted me in various ways, and especially in preparing the very difficult Index of Subjects. Mr. Sydney Temple Thomas has lent me a number of important books I specially required. Others who have helped me in one way or another are two English friends, Mrs. Caroline Sidgwick and Mrs. Rachael Bray, Messrs. J. R. Fowler, H. W. Uffindell, S. Talbot Smith and Dr. J. W. Browne, of Adelaide, Professor Dettmann of New Zealand, Professor Hyslop of New York and Mr. F. C. Govers of the State War Council, Sydney.
For permission to include quotations from their works I thank the following authors: Rev. F. W. Boreham, Mr. F. W. Bourdillon, Mr. A. J. Edmunds, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. Thomas Hardy, O.M., Professor Hobhouse, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. E. F. Knight, Mr. R. Le Gallienne, Mr. W. S. Lilly, Mr. Robert Loveman, Sir Frederick Pollock, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Professor A. H. Sayce, Mrs. Cronwright Schreiner, Mr. J. C. Squire, Mr. Herbert Trench, Mr. Samuel Waddington, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Mr. F. A. Westbury, Mr. F. S. Williamson and Sir Francis Younghusband.
For extracts from the writings of their relatives I am grateful to Lady Arnold, Sir Francis Darwin, Mr. Henry James, The Earl of Lytton, Dr. Greville McDonald, Miss Martineau, Miss Massey, Mr. W. M. Meredith, Mrs. F. W. H. Myers, the Rev. Conrad Noel, Mr. William M. Rossetti, Sir Herbert Stephen and Lord Tennyson. Mr. Piddington has also given much assistance.
I am indebted to the following for quotations from the works of the authors named: of Ruskin to the Ruskin Literary Trustees and their publishers, Messrs. George Allen and Unwin; of Brunton Stephens to Messrs. Angus and Robertson; of C. S. Calverley to Messrs. G. Bell and Sons; of George Eliot to Messrs. William Blackwood & Sons; of James Kenneth Stephen to Messrs. Bowes and Bowes; of Francis Thompson to Messrs. Burns and Oates; of R. L. Stevenson to Messrs. Chatto and Windus and to Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons; of Robert Buchanan to Messrs. Chatto and Windus and to Mr. W. E. Martyn; of James Thomson (B.V.) to Messrs. P. J. and A. E. Dobell; of D. G. Rossetti to Messrs. Ellis; of Swinburne to Mr. W. Heinemann; of Mr. Le Gallienne, H. D. Lowry, Stephen Phillips and J. B. Tabb to Mr. John Lane; of R. Loveman to the J. B. Lippincott Co.; of A. K. H. Boyd, R. Jeffries, W. E. H. Lecky and the Rev. James Martineau, to Messrs. Longmans Green & Co.; of Alfred Austin, T. E. Brown, Lewis Carroll, Edward Fitzgerald, F. W. H. Myers, Walter Pater, Lord Tennyson and Charles Tennyson Turner to Messrs. Macmillan & Co.; of V. O’Sullivan to Mr. Elkin Matthews; of Mrs. Elizabeth Waterhouse to Messrs. Methuen & Co.; of Robert Browning to Mr. John Murray; of Dr. Moncure Conway and Sir Alfred Lyall to Messrs. Paul (Kegan), Trench Trubner & Co.; of George Gissing to Mr. James B. Pinker; of John Payne to Mr. O. M. Pritchard, his executor, and to Mr. Thomas Wright; of Sir Edwin Arnold, P. J. Bailey (Festus) and Coventry Patmore to Messrs. George Routledge & Sons; of G. Whyte Melville to Messrs. Ward Lock & Co. (songs and verses); of George MacDonald to Messrs. A. P. Watt & Son; Mr. Rudyard Kipling’s “L’Envoi” is reprinted from Departmental Ditties, by kind permission of the author and Messrs. Methuen & Co.; “To the True Romance” is published by Messrs. Macmillan & Co., to whom I am deeply indebted, not only for this and the permissions mentioned above, but also for much assistance in tracing copyrights. Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co., Mr. John Murray and Messrs. A. P. Watt & Son have been most helpful in this direction, as have also been Messrs. T. B. Lippincott, the Oxford University Press and Messrs. Watts & Co. Messrs. Constable & Co. have generously granted permission for the quotations from George Meredith and, as the representatives in London of the Houghton Mifflin Co. of Boston, Mass., have secured the quotations from the works of American authors published by that Firm, viz., T. B. Aldrich, R. W. Gilder, W. V. Moody, S. M. B. Piatt, E. M. Thomas, C. D. Warner and the Classics of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier. Messrs. G. P. Putnam’s Sons have also given much help; the lines from Anna Reeve Aldrich and R. C. Rogers are published by their New York House. Mr. Martin Seeker joins in the consent given by Mr. Squire for the extract from his poems. I thank the Editor[xv] of the Contemporary Review for quotations from the writings of Professor A. Bain and the Rev. R. F. Littledale; and the Editor of the Nineteenth Century for some lines by W. M. Hardinge (Greek Anthology) and an article on Multiplex Personality. I thank also the Society for Psychical Research for an obituary article by F. W. H. Myers on Gladstone, printed in the Journal of that Society.
For any unintentional omissions, oversights, or failures to trace rights I beg to tender my apologies. The distance of Adelaide from the centre of publication may, in some measure, serve as an excuse for such shortcomings.
All profits derived from the sale of this book will be paid to the Red Cross Fund.
J. T. Hackett.
Adelaide.
In preparing this edition I have made a great number of more or less important corrections, alterations and additions. Most of these occupy only a few lines apiece and, although none call for special mention, they should together add to the interest and usefulness of this book. For a number of them I am indebted to Mr. Vernon Rendall, formerly editor of the Athenæum and Notes and Queries. With his wonderfully wide and exact knowledge of English and classical literature, he gave me much assistance and I am grateful to him.
The issue of a Second Edition enables me to thank my friend, Sir John Cockburn, for his truly remarkable kindness to me. When I sent this book home from Adelaide to be published, he undertook the heavy work of seeking the consent of the numerous copyright owners, negotiating with publishers, and seeing the book through the press. Only those who are experienced in such matters can realize the enormous amount of time and labour that all this involved. It is impossible for me to express adequately my obligations to my friend. He did not include any reference to himself in the original Preface, in spite of my insistence by letter and cable.
In associating his name with this book, I am bound to add that Sir John disagrees with and, therefore, disapproves of much that I have said in some notes on the Ancient Greeks.
J. T. Hackett.
London, September, 1920.
This has presumably to be called a new edition, rather than a new issue, seeing that there are revisions and alterations. But these are not numerous, and the only ones to which I need call special attention are the substituted verses on pp. 153-5.
I am indebted to Mr. Denys Bray for permission to include his daughter’s verses.
J. T. Hackett.
Mentone, December, 1920.
ENGLAND
This Ode was written in memory of the Harvard University men who had died in the Secession war. Our own brave men are also fighting in the cause of Truth, against the hideous falsity of German teaching and morals.
SACRIFICE
GREEKS OR GERMANS?
Do not imagine that you are fighting about a single issue, freedom or slavery. You have an empire to lose, and are exposed to danger by reason of the hatred which your imperial rule has inspired in other states. And you cannot resign your power, although some timid or unambitious spirits want you to act justly. For now your empire has become a despotism, a thing which in the opinion of mankind has been unjustly acquired yet cannot be safely relinquished. The men of whom I speak, if they could find followers, would soon ruin the state, and, if they were to found a state of their own, would just as soon ruin that.
(Speech by Pericles.)
I have observed again and again that a democracy cannot govern an empire; and never more clearly than now, when I see you regretting the sentence you pronounced on the Mityleneans. Having no fear or suspicion of one another, you deal with your allies on the same principle. You do not realize that, whenever you yield to them out of pity, or are prevailed on by their pleas, you are guilty of a weakness dangerous to yourselves and receive no gratitude from them. You need to bear in mind that your empire is a despotism exercised over unwilling subjects who are ever conspiring against you. They do not obey because of any kindness you show them: they obey just so far as you show yourselves their masters. They have no love for you, but are held down by force....
You must not be misled by pity, or eloquent pleading or by generosity. There are no three things more fatal to empire.
(Speech by Cleon) Thucydides, II, 63; III, 37, 40.
It will be seen that these odious sentiments are attributed by the impartial Thucydides to his hero Pericles as well as to the demagogue Cleon. The Greeks were fervent supporters of Democracy and Equality, but not when it came to dealing either with foreign states or with their own women or slaves. (See also Socrates and Aristotle, p. 367.)
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he, that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives anything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.
Thomas Paine (1776).
Outside the Bible and other books of religion, I think it would be difficult to find any single passage in the world’s literature that produced so wonderful a result as the above passage of Tom Paine’s. It was the opening paragraph of the first number of The Crisis, and was written by miserable, flaring candle-light, when Paine was a private in Washington’s ill-clad, worn-out army at Trenton. The soldiers, who were then despairing from hardship and defeat, were roused by these words to such enthusiasm that next day they rushed bravely in and won the first American victory, which turned the tide of the war of independence.
Previously to this, it was through Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, that the Americans first saw that separation was the only remedy for their grievances. Conway tells an amusing story about Common Sense and The Rights of Man. When the Bolton town crier was sent round to seize these prohibited books, he reported that he could not find any Rights of Man or Common Sense anywhere!
For trying to save the life of Louis XVI during the revolution, Paine was thrown into the Bastille, and only escaped death by a curious accident. It was customary for chalk-marks to be made on the cell-doors of those to be guillotined the following morning, and these doors opened outwards. When Paine’s door was marked, it happened to be open, and the mark was made on the inside, so that, when the door was shut, the mark was not visible. If Paine had not been a sceptic, this would have been described in those days as a wonderful interposition of Providence!
Conway lays a terrible indictment against Washington. When Paine, whose services to America, and to Washington himself, had been so magnificent, was thrown into the Bastille, Washington could have saved him by a word—but remained silent! This was no doubt the reason why Paine, after his liberation, was led to make an unjust attack on Washington’s military and Presidential work. It was due to this attack on Washington and the bigotry of the time against the author of The Age of Reason, that Paine fell utterly into disrepute.
When the Centenary of American independence was celebrated by an Exhibition at Philadelphia, a bust of Paine was offered to the city by his admirers, but was promptly declined! And yet Conway says that on the day, whose centenary was then being celebrated, Paine was idolized in America above all other men, Washington included.
The foregoing notes were made on reading an article on Paine by Moncure D. Conway in The Fortnightly, March, 1879. I think the fact mentioned in the last paragraph and the town-crier story do not appear in Conway’s subsequent Life of Paine.
Even at the present day bigotry seems to prevent any proper recognition of Paine’s fine character and important work. (The unpleasant flippancy[5] with which he dealt with serious religious questions is no doubt partly the cause of this.) I find very inadequate appreciation of him in The Americana and The Biographical Dictionary of America—and also in our own Dictionary of National Biography. The general impression among the public still probably is that Paine was an atheist; as a matter of fact, he was a Theist, and his will ends with the words, “I die in perfect composure and resignation to the will of my Creator, God.”
Carlyle’s reference to Paine is amusing: “Nor is our England without her missionaries. She has her Paine: rebellious staymaker; unkempt; who feels that he, a single needleman, did, by his Common-Sense Pamphlet, free America—that he can and will free all this World; perhaps even the other.” (French Revolution.)
Of the verses in this fine poem which speak for the various British Dominions I take only the one that represents my own country. At the time Kipling wrote, the inhabitants of our beloved mother-country did not seem to fully realize that we were their kindred—that our fern and clematis made English posies—but no doubt their feeling has altered since we have fought side by side in mutual defence. However, to us England was always “home,” and when Kipling wrote this poem he entered straight into our hearts.
FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY
My notes tell me nothing of Hardinge, except that he was the “Leslie” in Mallock’s New Republic. Another version of Plato’s beautiful epigram (which was addressed to “Aster,” or “Star”) is the following by Professor Darnley Naylor:
The Greek Anthology is a collection of about 4,500 short poems by about 300 Greek writers, extending over a period of one thousand seven hundred years, from, say, 700 B.C. to 1000 A.D. At first these poems were epigrams—using the word “epigram” in its original sense, as a verse intended to be inscribed on a tomb or tablet in memory of some dead person or important event. Later they included poems on any subject, so long as they contained one fine thought couched in concise language. Still later any short lyric was included.
This wonderful collection forms a great treasure-house of poetry, which gives much insight into the Greek life of the time, and it also largely influenced English and European literature. For instance, the first verse of Ben Jonson’s “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” is taken direct from the Anthology (Agathias, Anth. Pal., V., 261). I may add that the second verse, in which the poet sends the wreath, not as a compliment to the lady but as a kindness to the roses which could not wither if worn by her, is also borrowed from a Greek source. (Philostratus, Epistolai Erotikai.)
Numberless English and European scholars have attempted the difficult task of translating or paraphrasing these little poetic gems into correspondingly poetic and concise language, but the beauty of the original can never be fully retained.
PLATO TO STELLA
PTOLEMY
Although there cannot be absolute certainty, this Ptolemy is no doubt the great Greek astronomer; and the epigram would date from about 140 A.D.
HERACLEITUS.
This is a paraphrase of verses written by Callimachus on hearing of the death of his friend, the poet Heracleitus (not the philosopher of that name).
Francis Thompson (Sister Songs) hoped that his “nightingales” would continue to sing after his death, just as light would come from a star long after it had ceased to exist:
When I consider the shortness of my life, lost in an eternity before and behind, “passing away as the remembrance of a guest who tarrieth but a day,” the little space I fill or behold in the infinite immensity of spaces, of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me—when I reflect this, I am filled with terror, and wonder why I am here and not there, for there was no reason why it should be the one rather than the other; why now rather than then. Who set me here? By whose command and rule were this time and place appointed me? How many kingdoms know nothing of us! The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.
Pascal (Pensées).
See also Seneca (Hipp.), Curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent, “Light sorrows speak, but deeper ones are dumb.”
Star unto star speaks light.
P. J. Bailey (Festus, Scene 1, Heaven).
Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.
George Eliot (Romola).
Hugues of Saxe-Gotha is an imaginary name, but it probably indicates the great Sebastian Bach, who came from that part of Germany. The “masterpiece, hard number twelve,” referred to in the poem, may be (Dr. E. Harold Davies tells me) the great Organ Fugue in F Minor, which is in “five part” counter-point.
This very interesting poem is written in a half-humorous fashion, but its intention is quite serious. In a wonderfully imitative manner,[8] it describes the wrangling and disputing in a five-voiced fugue (where five persons appear to be taking part):
(For killing their husbands the fifty Danaïdes were doomed to pour water everlastingly into a sieve.)
“Where in all this is the music?” asks Browning. And, although he is writing humorously, yet, however rank the heresy, he finds that the fugue, with its elaborate counterpoint, is wanting in the essentials of true art. He prefers Palestrina’s simpler and more emotional mode of expression:
In the poem, where occurs the passage quoted, one can vividly follow the poet’s thought. Music is essentially the language of feeling, of emotion; the fugue is a triumph of invention, and, therefore, the result of intellect. Feeling is elemental, simple, and unanalysable. The subtleties of pure harmony are the expression of deepness and richness of feeling; the intricacies of the fugue are artificially constructed and, therefore, unsuited to the expression of pure emotion. They represent intellect as against feeling. And essentially in the moral world, but also in our general outlook upon truth and nature, the spiritual perception is derived from simple human emotion rather than intellect; “Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.” (The whole of Browning’s poetry teaches that love, not intellect, is the solution of all moral problems, and the goal of the universe.)
In the poem the organist has been playing on the organ in an old church; and Browning suddenly sees an illustration of his thought in the fine gilded ceiling covered by thick cobwebs. The cobwebs that obscure the gold of the ceiling are the intellectual wranglings that destroy music in the fugue—and both are symbolical of what occurs in our lives. Truth and Nature, “God’s gold”—the pure, simple truths of the higher life—are over us, bright and clear as the noon-day sun. But by doubts and disputations, warring philosophies and contending creeds, by strife over non-essentials, casuistries, self-deceptions, by questions of dogma (often as fine as any spider’s web), by endless “comments and glozes,” we lose sight of the elemental truths and clear principles that should guide our lives. The pure and simple-hearted reach the Mount of Vision: to them comes the clear sense of Love and Duty. Those of us who turn our intellects to a perverse use and exclude the spiritual perception of the soul are like the spiders[15] who cover up “stars and roses, Cherub and trophy and garland.” We obscure and forget all noble ideals, abolish God’s high “legislature,” and follow a lawless life of selfish passion and sordid ambitions. The Good and Beautiful and True have been obliterated and forgotten; “God’s gold” is tarnished, His harmonies lost in discord; and we become morally dead.
(Referring to the Gorham case) The future historian of opinion will write of us in this strain: “The people who spoke the language of Shakespeare were great in the constructive arts: the remains of their vast works evince an extraordinary power of combining and economizing labour: their colonies were spread over both hemispheres, and their industry penetrated to the remotest tribes: they knew how to subjugate nature and to govern men: but the weakness of their thought presented a strange contrast to the vigour of their arm; and though they were an earnest people, their conceptions of human life and its Divine Author seems to have been of the most puerile nature. Some orations have been handed down—apparently delivered before one of their most dignified tribunals—in which the question is discussed: ‘In what way the washing of new-born babes according to certain rules prevented God’s hating them.’ The curious feature is, that the discussion turns entirely upon the manner in which this wetting operated; and no doubt seems to have been entertained by disputants, judges, or audience, that, without it, a child or other person dying would fall into the hands of an angry Deity, and be kept alive for ever to be tortured in a burning cave. Now, all researches into the contemporary institutions of the island show that its religion found its chief support among the classes possessing no mean station or culture, and that the education for the priesthood was the highest which the country afforded. This strange belief must be taken, therefore, as the measure, not of popular ignorance, but of their most intellectual faith. A philosophy and worship embodying such a superstition can present nothing to reward the labour of research.”
James Martineau (Essay on “The Church of England”).
In the Gorham case, which went on appeal to the Privy Council, it was decided that Mr. Gorham’s beliefs, although unusual, were not repugnant to the doctrines of the Church of England. His views were that baptism is generally necessary to salvation, that it is a sign of grace by which God works in us, but only in those who worthily receive it. In others it is not effectual. Infants baptized who die before actual sin are certainly saved, but regeneration does not necessarily follow on baptism.
In such matters one question stands out very prominently. The priest is consecrated to the high office of teaching the eternal truths of Christ—Love and Duty and Moral Aspiration. How can he keep those truths in due perspective when his intellect is engaged in warfare over miserable casuistries.
And as the strife waxes fiercer among the priests of the Most High, they call in the aid of hired mercenaries. Think of the lawyers paid by one side or the other to argue questions of baptism and prevenient grace! It was precisely this introduction into religion of legal formalism and technicality, the arguing from texts and ancient commentaries, the verbal quibbling and hair-splitting, the “letter” that “killeth” as against the “spirit” that “giveth life,” which led to Christ’s bitter invectives against the “Scribes” or lawyers of His day.
Seeley, in Ecce Homo, points out that when Christ summoned the disciples to him, he required from them only Faith, and not belief in any specific doctrines. As it was not until later that they learnt He was to suffer death and rise again, they could at first have held no belief in the Atonement or the Resurrection. “Nor,” says Seeley, “do we find Him frequently examining His followers in their creed, and rejecting one as a sceptic and another as an infidel.... Assuredly those who represent Christ as presenting to man an abstruse theology, and saying to them peremptorily: ‘Believe or be damned,’ have the coarsest conception of the Saviour of the world.”
As I have read somewhere, “From all barren Orthodoxy, good Lord, deliver us.”[10]
This is George MacDonald’s translation (but never can a translation of poetry reproduce the original). MacDonald says of the poem: “This is true concerning every form in which truth is embodied, whether it be sight or sound, geometric diagram or scientific formula. Unintelligible, it may be dismal enough regarded from the outside; prismatic in its revelation of truth from within.” Among the arts this statement is most applicable to poetry, and hence the reason why notes are often required to assist many persons to “come inside,” to enter into the heart of a poem—to reach the point of vision.
DE TEA FABULA
This parody on Bret Harte’s “Plain Language from Truthful James” was written at the time when the Browning Society at Keble College, Oxford, came to an end—apparently, according to these verses, because its funds had been exhausted in afternoon teas!
τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι (pronounced toe tee ane einai). In Oxford special attention is paid to Aristotle; and Quiller-Couch, being an Oxford man, assumes that his readers are familiar with this phrase. It means “the essential nature of a thing,” or, literally, “the question what a thing really is.” Such a Society would be engaged in discovering the true meaning of Browning’s difficult poems, so that the phrase is as appropriate as it is amusing in its application.
The title “De Tea fabula” is a pun on Horace’s “Quid rides? Mutato nomine de te Fabula narratur” (Sat. 1, 69). “Wherefore do you laugh? Change but the name, of thee the tale is told.” Oxford, which Matthew Arnold called the home of lost causes, still refuses to pronounce Latin correctly, and makes te rhyme with fee, see, bee. It ought of course to rhyme with fay, say, bay. Or possibly Sir Arthur has reverted to the pronunciation of ea which prevailed until the end of the Eighteenth Century. See Pope’s “Rape of the Lock”:
Dr. Furnivall (1825-1910), an eminent philologist, was the founder of the society, the first society ever formed to study the works of a living poet. From the context he may have specially admired, as he certainly threw special light upon, Browning’s Pippa Passes.
Scout at Oxford is a (male) college servant.
The “cheekiest” line I know.
TO THE MOON
There is no short cut, no patent tramroad, to wisdom: after all the centuries of invention, the soul’s path lies through the thorny wilderness which must be still trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.
George Eliot (The Lifted Veil).
These exquisite verses appear to be forgotten.
It is the saddest of things that we lose our early enthusiasms.
I love and honour Epaminondas, but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. Nor can you excite me to the least uneasiness by saying, “He acted, and thou sittest still.” I see action to be good when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. One piece of the tree is cut for a weathercock, and one for the sleeper of a bridge; the virtue of the wood is apparent in both.
R. W. Emerson (Spiritual Laws).
You know what a sad and sombre decorum it is that outwardly reigns through the lands oppressed by Moslem sway. By a strange chance in these latter days, it happened that, alone of all the places in the land, this Bethlehem, the native village of our Lord, escaped the moral yoke of the Mussulmans, and heard again, after ages of dull oppression, the cheering clatter of social freedom, and the voices of laughing girls. When I was at Bethlehem, though long after the flight of the Mussulmans, the cloud of Moslem propriety had not yet come back to cast its cold shadow upon life. When you reach that gladsome village, pray heaven there still may be heard there the voice of free innocent girls. Distant at first, and then nearer and nearer the timid flock will gather round you with their large burning eyes[26] gravely fixed against yours, so that they see into your brain; and if you imagine evil against them they will know of your ill-thought before it is yet well born, and will fly and be gone in the moment. But presently if you will only look virtuous enough to prevent alarm, and vicious enough to avoid looking silly, the blithe maidens will draw nearer and nearer to you; and soon there will be one, the bravest of the sisters, who will venture right up to your side, and touch the hem of your coat in playful defiance of the danger; and then the rest will follow the daring of their youthful leader, and gather close round you, and hold a shrill controversy on the wondrous formation that you call a hat, and the cunning of the hands that clothed you with cloth so fine; and then, growing more profound in their researches, they will pass from the study of your mere dress to a serious contemplation of your stately height, and your nut-brown hair, and the ruddy glow of your English cheeks. And if they catch a glimpse of your ungloved fingers, then again will they make the air ring with their sweet screams of delight and amazement, as they compare the fairness of your hand with the hues of your sunburnt face, or with their own warmer tints. Instantly the ringleader of the gentle rioters imagines a new sin; with tremulous boldness she touches, then grasps your hand, and smoothes it gently betwixt her own, and pries curiously into its make and colour, as though it were silk of Damascus or shawl of Cashmere. And when they see you, even then still sage and gentle, the joyous girls will suddenly, and screamingly, and all at once, explain to each other that you are surely quite harmless and innocent—a lion that makes no spring—a bear that never hugs; and upon this faith, one after the other, they will take your passive hand, and strive to explain it, and make it a theme and a controversy. But the one—the fairest and the sweetest of all—is yet the most timid; she shrinks from the daring deeds of her playmates, and seeks shelter behind their sleeves, and strives to screen her glowing consciousness from the eyes that look upon her. But her laughing sisters will have none of this cowardice; they vow that the fair one shall be their complice—shall share their dangers—shall touch the hand of the stranger; they seize her small wrist and draw her forward by force, and at last, whilst yet she strives to turn away, and to cover up her whole soul under the folds of downcast eyelids, they vanquish her utmost strength, they vanquish her utmost modesty and marry her hand to yours. The quick pulse springs from her fingers and throbs like a whisper upon your listening palm. For an instant her large timid eyes are upon you—in an instant they are shrouded again, and there comes a blush so burning, that the frightened girls stay their shrill laughter as though they had played too perilously and harmed their gentle sister. A moment, and all with a sudden intelligence turn away and fly like deer; yet soon[27] again like deer they wheel round, and return, and stand, and gaze upon the danger, until they grow brave once more.
A. W. Kinglake (Eothen).
Let us hope that the present war will be a successful “Crusade” and that the Turks will disappear from the land which is sacred to the memory of our Lord.
Discedant nunc amores; maneat Amor.
(Loves, farewell; let Love, the sole, remain.)
Author not traced.
Compare Shakespeare’s sonnet LXXI:
UNTIL DEATH
These verses are by a South Australian writer. “Forget me when I die” is an unpleasing sentiment; yet in “When I am dead, my dearest,” Christina Rossetti says:
As regards the latter poem, the curious fact is that it is read as an exquisite piece of music, and not for any poetic thought it contains. If it has any coherent meaning, it is that the speaker is indifferent whether or not “her dearest” will remember her or she will remember him. Yet the haunting music of the lines has made it a favourite poem, and it finds a place in all the leading anthologies. Christina Rossetti is by no means a great poet. (Mr. Gosse’s estimate in the Britannica is exaggerated), but she had a wonderful gift of language and metre. Take, for example, the pretty lilt contained in the simplest words in “Maiden-Song”:
Written of the poet’s child Catherine, who died in 1812 at three years of age, and of whom Wordsworth had also written, “Loving she is, and tractable, though wild.” Forty years after the death of this child and her brother, who died about the same time, the poet spoke of them to Aubrey de Vere with the same acute sense of bereavement as if they had only recently died.
DEATH
His faith.—Wallenstein, the great German soldier and statesman (1583-1634) believed in astrology.
The “intelligible forms of ancient poets” and “fair humanities of old religion” are the gods and inferior divinities that please our fancy. Thus the Greeks peopled the heavens (not very distant heavens to them) with their gods who visited earth and mingled with men. There were also the lesser deities, as the Hours and the Graces; and also the Nymphs—the Nereïds, Naiads, Orcades and Dryads—who inhabited seas, springs, rivers, and trees respectively. The Nymphs would correspond somewhat to the elves, gnomes and fairies of Northern religions.
Coleridge’s translation of “Wallenstein” (of which “The Piccolomini” is a portion) is considered a masterpiece. Schiller was fortunate in having a finer poet than himself to translate his drama. In the above passage Coleridge greatly improved on the original; the seven splendid lines beginning “The intelligible forms of ancient poets” are his and not Schiller’s; and, therefore, this passage may fairly be ascribed to him as author.
The sea typifies the wider, nobler life of the soul.
Je prends mon bien où je le trouve.
(I take my property wherever I find it.)
Molière (1622-1673).
This famous saying is quoted in French literature as though Molière had said, “I admit plagiarism, but I so improve what I borrow from others that it becomes my own” (see Larousse, under “Bien”).
It is, however, an interesting question whether this was the true meaning intended by Molière.
The story is told by Grimarest, the first biographer of the great dramatist. In 1671 Molière produced Les Fourberies de Scapin, in which he had inserted two scenes taken from Le Pedant Joué, of Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655). (They are the amusing scenes where Geronte repeatedly says, Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère, “What the deuce was he doing in that Turkish galley?”) Grimarest says that Cyrano had used in these scenes what he had overheard from Molière, and that the latter, when taxed with the plagiarism, replied, “Je reprends mon bien où je le trouve” (“I take back my property, wherever I find it”). That is to say, he definitely denied the plagiarism.
Voltaire, in a “Life of Molière,” makes a general assertion (not referring specially to this incident) that all Grimarest’s stories are false. This must, of course, be far too sweeping an assertion, and Grimarest is in fact quoted as an authority. Voltaire himself (1694-1778) uses the saying in the sense given by Grimarest (La Pucelle, Chant III.):
(“These breeches are mine, and I shall take what was mine wherever I find it.”) Agnès Sorel had been captured dressed as a man and wearing the garment in question, which had been previously stolen from the speaker.
It seems to me that Grimarest’s story must be accepted, that Molière claimed the scenes as originally his and denied plagiarism. There is no evidence to the contrary, and the saying is given its obvious meaning. (It is word for word as in the Digest, Ubi rem meam invenio, ibi vindico, “Where I find my own property, I appropriate it.”) But the question then arises, Why should so commonplace a statement have attained such notoriety?
The explanation seems simple. Molière had many jealous and bitter enemies, who laid every charge they could against him. He was well known to have borrowed ideas, characters and scenes in all directions—and his enemies constantly and persistently attacked him on this ground. Then came his most glaring plagiarism from a comparatively recent play, written by a man whose dare-devil exploits had made him a perfect hero of romance. Molière’s story that Cyrano had previously stolen the scenes from him would not been have accepted for a moment. Cyrano had never been known to plagiarize, nor would it have been natural for a man of his character to do anything clandestine. Also Molière would have had nothing to support his statement—and Cyrano was not alive to contradict him. The conclusion, therefore, seems to be that the dramatist’s statement was received in Paris with such incredulity, indignation, and ridicule that it became a byword.
But if this is so, why have the words been given an entirely fictitious meaning? The answer seems to lie in the fact that as Molière’s great genius became realized the desire arose to remove a blemish from his character. His is the greatest name in French literature, and almost anything would be excused in him. (We ourselves pass lightly over plagiarisms by Shakespeare.) Also, whether morally justified or not, Molière enriched the world’s literature by his borrowings. It was, therefore, no serious matter to Frenchmen that he should have borrowed from Cyrano, but it was a distinct blemish on his character that he should have denied the fact and also slandered a dead man. Ordinarily, in such a case, the story is ignored and forgotten, just as the one improper act of Sir Walter Scott, his borrowing from Coleridge of the “Christabel” metre, is usually ignored or slurred over. But the saying had become rooted in literature and this course was not practicable. However, there is little that enthusiasm cannot accomplish by some means or other, and the object in this instance has been achieved by reversing the meaning of Molière’s words. If this conjecture is correct, it is an illustration of what has occurred on a far greater scale in connection with the Greeks (see Index of Subjects).
As regards the meaning now given to the saying, Seneca claimed the same right to borrow at will. Quidquid bene dictum est ab ullo, meum est (Ep. XVI). After advising his reader to consider the Epistle carefully and see what value it had for him, he says, “You need not be surprised if I am still free with other people’s property. But why do I say ‘other people’s property’? Whatever has been well said by anyone belongs to me.”[13]
So also the late Samuel Butler said, “Appropriate things are meant to be appropriated.”
The disposition to judge every enterprise by its event, and believe in no wisdom that is not endorsed by success, is apt to grow upon us with years, till we sympathize with nothing for which we cannot take out a policy of assurance.
James Martineau (Hours of Thought I, 87).
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.
De Quincey (Murder, as one of the Fine Arts).
Mrs. Crupp had indignantly assured him that there wasn’t room to swing a cat there; but, as Mr. Dick justly observed to me, sitting down on the foot of the bed, nursing his leg, “You know, Trotwood, I don’t want to swing a cat. I never do swing a cat. Therefore, what does that signify to me!”
Dickens (David Copperfield).
(After looking at his watch) “Two days wrong!” sighed the Hatter. “I told you butter would not suit the works!” he added, looking angrily at the March Hare.
“It was the best butter,” the March Hare replied.
Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland).
“They were learning to draw,” the Dormouse went on, “and they drew all manner of things—everything that begins with an M—”
“Why with an M?” said Alice.
“Why not?” said the March Hare.
Alice was silent.
Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland).
Perhaps, as two negatives make one affirmative, it may be thought that two layers of moonshine might coalesce into one pancake; and two Barmecide banquets might be the square root of one poached egg.
Author not traced.
In a Dublin lunatic asylum, one of the inmates peremptorily ordered a visitor to take off his hat. Deferentially obeying the order, the visitor asked why he should remove his hat. The lunatic replied: “Do you not know, sir, that I am the Crown Prince of Prussia?” Having duly made his apologies, the visitor proceeded on his round; but, coming upon the same lunatic, was met with the same demand. Again obeying the order, he repeated the question: “May I ask why you wish me to take off my hat?” The lunatic replied: “Are you not aware, sir, that I am the Prince of Wales?” “But,” said the visitor, “you told me just now you were the Crown Prince of Prussia.” The lunatic, after scratching his head and deliberating for a moment, replied: “Ah, but that was by a different mother.”
(Another Irish lunatic always lost himself and insisted on looking for himself under the bed.)
Author not traced.
These are true stories but localized—another injustice to Ireland!
When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.
(Much Ado About Nothing.)
Pointz. Come, your reason, Jack,—your reason.
Falstaff. Give you a reason on compulsion! If reasons were as plenty as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I.
(1 Henry IV, ii, 4.)
Reason needs to be given its old pronunciation, “raison” (or raisin) in order to understand Falstaff’s pun.
Still I cannot believe in clairvoyance—because the thing is impossible.
Samuel Rogers, 1763-1855 (Table Talk).
Rogers mentions some remarkable facts about the clairvoyant, Alexis, and ends with this convincing argument. Apart from clairvoyance (of which I know nothing), Rogers would no doubt have made a similar reply if some prophet had foretold that men would one day communicate with each other by wireless telegraphy; and the same effective argument is to-day opposed by many to the evidence that the dead communicate with the living.
I might follow the eight preceding quotations (which illustrate “the art of reasoning”) with the well-known story of Charles Lamb, who, when blamed for coming late to the office, excused himself on the ground that he always left early. (He also said, “A man could not have too little to do and too much time to do it in.”) There is also the reply of Lord Rothschild, when the cabman told him that his son paid better fares than he did, “Yes, but He has a rich father, and I haven’t.”
TO THE TRUE ROMANCE
All attempts to define poetic imagination, to determine its scope or prescribe its limits, leave us cold and unsatisfied, for the simple reason that its variety and range are unlimited. The aesthetic, moral and spiritual faculties are all in essence identical, so that no definition of the aesthetic can exclude the spiritual, and art and poetry spring from the same root as religion. They all have what Wordsworth calls the “Spirit of Paradise.”[14] Imagination[15] in its larger sense includes all those higher faculties of man, all that lifts him above his material existence. The “True Romance” in this fine poem is imagination in this complete sense. By our lower perceptive faculties we see the world of Nature in its material form; by our higher powers we apprehend its aesthetic, moral and spiritual beauty. (Man with his consciousness, will, reason, and also his higher imaginative faculties, is as much part of Nature as any star or clod, crystal or gas, fly or flower.) Hence imagination gives us the vision of glory in earth and sky, the sense of wonder and worship, the emotions of sympathy and love; it teaches us duty and self sacrifice; it awakens in us a sense of the mystery of birth, life and death, directing our thoughts from the finite and material world to the infinite realm of the spiritual.
Verse 4, lines 5, 6. Our faculties develop, and we realize, for example, the beauty of Nature which was not apparent to the Greeks of Plato’s time (see p. 379; see also p. 283). Verse 9, l. 5, 6. Imagination teaches us heroism. In the italicized verses, “our war” is, of course, the strife of our material existence: we can face with courage the mischances of life, seeing that “My Lady Romance,” the soul which is our higher nature, must persist through life and after death. (“Barrière,” barrier.)
We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.
George Eliot (Middlemarch).
The stars make no noise.
Irish Proverb.
WHO FANCIED WHAT A PRETTY SIGHT
They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an external law. All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an inter-radiating connection and dependence of the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable than that which is already embodied. The blank, which is only a forgotten life lying behind the consciousness, and the misty splendour, which is an undeveloped life lying before it, may be full of mysterious revelations of other connections with the worlds around us than those of science and poetry. No shining belt or gleaming moon, no red and green glory in a self-encircling twin-star, but has a relation with the hidden things of a man’s soul, and, it may be, with the secret history of his body as well. They are portions of the living house within which he abides.
G. MacDonald (Phantastes).
To an Australian, a metaphor taken from alluvial gold-mining is interesting.
(Dr. Slop has been uttering terrible curses against Obadiah) I declare, quoth my Uncle Toby, my heart would not let me curse the devil himself with so much bitterness.—He is the father of curses, replied Dr. Slop.—So am not I, replied my uncle.—But he is cursed and damned already to all eternity, replied Dr. Slop.
I am sorry for it, quoth my Uncle Toby.
Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy).
“Shargar, what think ye? Gin the deil war to repent, wad God forgie him?”
“There’s no sayin’ what folk wad dae till ance they’re tried,” returned Shargar cautiously.
George MacDonald (Robert Falconer, ch. xii.)
There is a passage, I think in one of MacDonald’s novels, where the question is again put, “Gin the de’il war to repent?” The reply is to the effect, “Do not wish even him anything so dreadful. The agony of his repentance would be far worse than anything he can suffer in hell.”
Scotus Erigena, a very able Irish theologian and philosopher of the 9th century, believed that Satan himself must ultimately be reclaimed, since otherwise God could not in the end conquer and extinguish sin. He cites Origen and others in support of his contention. These old and very serious discussions seem more remote than Plato, but the belief in a personal devil was not uncommon even in my young days.
AN EXCELENTE BALADE OF CHARITIE
The sun would conventionally be said to be in Virgo in August.
It is sad and strange to think of the amazing story of this child-genius, who lived in a world of romance but was driven by destitution to commit suicide at seventeen years of age. The above was one of the “Rowley forgeries,” but, for the antique words which Chatterton used (often incorrectly) to imitate the language of the Fifteenth Century, modern words have been substituted where possible.
This is the first of the chain of sonnets, which Mrs. Browning called “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” They tell her own love-story, and were written in secret and without thought of publication. Robert Browning learnt of them only the year after the marriage, and then insisted on their being published. They include some of the finest sonnets in our language.
To appreciate this and the other sonnets, it is necessary to know the beautiful story of the two poets. Mrs. Browning was six years older than her husband and a life-long invalid, expecting, as she says in this sonnet, Death rather than Love. Their marriage was supremely happy, and the great poet, when in England, used to visit the church in which they were married to express his thankfulness. He tells the love-story in the next quotation.
In these sonnets Mrs. Browning laid bare her innermost feelings.
Robert Browning, however, in several poems says the privacy of a poet’s life and feelings should not be bared to the public. Wordsworth had written in 1827:
Browning in 1876 (thirty years after the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” were written) wrote in his poem called House:
Swinburne comments on these lines: “No whit the less like Shakespeare, but undoubtedly the less like Browning.”
The last verse, describing Mrs. Browning, makes it clear that the poet is speaking of his own love-story, although the scene is imaginary. The last two verses are to be read literally, as an expression of the poet’s firm belief, and not as poetical exaggeration.
You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to nature. You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody knows. Wise men are afraid to say that there is anything contrary to nature, except what is contrary to mathematical truth, as that two and two cannot make five. There are dozens and hundreds of things in the world which we should[48] certainly have said were contrary to nature, if we did not see them going on under our eyes all day long. If people had never seen little seeds grow into great plants and trees, of quite different shapes from themselves, and these trees again produce fresh seeds, they would have said, “The thing cannot be”.... Suppose that no human being had ever seen or heard of an elephant. And suppose that you described him to people, and said, “This is the shape, and plan, and anatomy of the beast ... and this is the section of his skull, more like a mushroom than a reasonable skull of a reasonable or unreasonable beast; yet he is the wisest of all beasts, and can do everything save read, write, and cast accounts.” People would surely have said, “Nonsense; your elephant is contrary to nature,” and have thought you were telling stories—as the French thought of Le Vaillant when he came back to Paris and said that he had shot a giraffe; and as the King of the Cannibal Islands thought of the English sailor, when he said that in his country water turned to marble, and rain fell as feathers. The truth is that folks’ fancy that such and such things cannot be, simply because they have not seen them, is worth no more than a savage’s fancy that there cannot be such a thing as a locomotive, because he never saw one running wild in the forest.
Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) (Water-Babies).
This passage interested us greatly in the old days, and also another passage drawing a not very satisfactory analogy between the transformation of insects and our probable transformation at death. I do not know whether the elephant’s brain warrants Kingsley’s deduction.
This book, published in 1863,[16] had a considerable effect in doing away with the barbarous employment of young children in mines, factories, brickfields, etc. It called attention particularly to the chimney-sweep boys of four or five years of age who had to climb up the narrow chimneys, and who were simply slaves, neglected and ill-treated by their drunken masters. We are apt to forget how recently we emerged from barbarism in many directions, and that we are only now becoming civilized in other respects, as, for instance, with regard to the poor, suffering, and ignorant.
THE DARK GLASS
The gods are on the side of the strongest.
Tacitus (Hist. 4, 17).
De Rabutin, Comte de Bussy, said in 1677, “God is on the side of the heaviest battalions.” Voltaire again said, in 1770, that there are far more fools than wise men, “and they say that God always favours the heaviest battalions” (Letter to Le Riche). Gibbon wrote, “The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators” (Ch. LXVIII). (I owe part of this note to King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations.)
THE OCTOPUS
By ALGERNON SINBURN
This extraordinarily clever parody of Swinburne’s “Dolores” was written by Arthur Clement Hilton, when he was an undergraduate at St. John’s, Cambridge. It appeared in The Light Green, a clever but short-lived magazine published in Cambridge in the early seventies as a rival to The Dark Blue, published in London by Oxford men. Hilton was the main contributor to The Light Green. He died when only twenty-six years of age. This brilliant young author is not included in The Dictionary of National Biography.
“The Octopus” is one of the best of English parodies. I had not seen it for forty years, until I recently found it in Adam and White’s Parodies and Imitations (1912). In that book, although the authors presumably had The Light Green to print from, the punctuation is inferior to that in my copy, and the word “Dispose” instead of “Dispense” in the third last line must be a misprint.
He seemed to me to be one of those men who have not very extended minds, but who know what they know very well—shallow streams, and clear because they are shallow.
S. T. Coleridge (Table Talk).
To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
R. L. Stevenson (Virginibus Puerisque).
Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.
(To know all is forgive all.)
French Proverb.
This proverb is said to have originated from a sentence in Mme. de Staël’s Corinne, Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent, “Understanding everything makes one very forgiving.”
The true life of the human community is planted deep in the private affections of its members; in the greatness of its individual minds; in the pure severities of its domestic conscience; in the noble and transforming thoughts that fertilize its sacred nooks. Who can observe, without astonishment, the durable action of men truly great on the history of the world, and the evanescence of vast military revolutions, once threatening all things with destruction? How often is it the fate of the former to be invisible for an age, and then live for ever; of the latter, to sweep a generation from the earth, and then vanish with slight trace?
James Martineau (The Outer and the Inner Temple).
Wars seem to leave little trace except where they result in the immigration and settlement of a tribe or nation. Otherwise they appear to cancel one another. The present war will probably destroy the only trace of the Franco-Prussian war, and, with respect to Turkey, Poland, and other countries, will no doubt cancel the effects of many tremendous conflicts of past centuries.
A century ago men were following, with bated breath, the march of Napoleon, and waiting with feverish impatience for the latest news of the wars. And all the while, in their own homes, babies were being born. But who could think about babies? Everybody was thinking about battles. In one year, lying midway between Trafalgar and Waterloo, there stole into the world a host of heroes! During that one year, 1809, Mr. Gladstone was born in Liverpool; Alfred Tennyson was born at the Somersby rectory and Oliver Wendell Holmes made his first appearance in Massachusetts. On the very self-same day of that self-same year Charles Darwin made his debut at Shrewsbury, and Abraham Lincoln drew his first breath in old Kentucky. Music was enriched by the advent of Frederic Chopin at Warsaw, and of Felix Mendelssohn at Hamburg. Within the same year, too, Samuel Morley was born in Homerton, Edward Fitzgerald in Woodbridge, Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Durham, and Frances Kemble in London. But nobody thought of babies. Everybody was thinking of battles. Yet, viewing that age in the truer perspective which the distance of a hundred years enables us to command, we may well ask ourselves, “Which of the battles of 1809 mattered more than the babies of 1809?” ...
We fancy that God can only manage His world by big battalions abroad, when all the while He is doing it by beautiful babies at home. When a wrong wants righting, or a truth wants preaching, or a continent wants opening, God sends a baby into the world to do it. That is why, long, long ago, a babe was born in Bethlehem.
Frank W. Boreham (Mountains in the Mist).
REINFORCEMENTS
THE WIND
WHAT OF THE DARKNESS?
These lines were written of the blind, but become even more beautiful and true if applied to a different subject, the dead.
Continuing the work of creation, i.e., co-operating as instruments of Providence in bringing order out of disorder ... is only a part of the mission of mankind, and the time will come again when its due rank will be assigned to contemplation and the calm culture of reverence and love. Then poetry will resume her equality with prose.... But that time is not yet, and the crowning glory of Wordsworth is that he has borne witness to it and kept alive its traditions in an age, which, but for him, would have lost sight of it entirely.
J. S. Mill.
In that utilitarian period the figure of the great poet stands out in sheer sublimity. Apart from the depressing atmosphere of the time, one needs to remember how serenely he continued to deliver his high message in spite of the most deadly want of appreciation. At thirty he received £10 from his poems and nothing more until he was sixty-five! The quotation is from a letter in Caroline Fox’s Journals.
My sarcastic friend says, with the utmost gravity, that no man with less than a thousand pounds a year can afford to have private opinions upon certain important subjects. He admits that he has known it done upon eight hundred a year; but only by very prudent people with small families.
Sir A. Helps (Companions of my Solitude).
’Tis an old theme, this Divine Love, and it cannot be exhausted. Men have not outlived it, angels cannot outlearn it. It swayed the ancient world by many a fair god and goddess; its light has been cast over ages of Christian controversy and warfare; it is still the guiding Star of the Sea to each voyager after the nobler[55] faith. The youth leaves the old shore of belief, only because love has left it. His starved affections will no longer accept stone, though pulverized flour-like and artfully kneaded, for bread. Their white sails fill the purple and the sombre seas, and they hail each other to ask for the summer-land, where faith climbs to beauty, and the lost bowers of childhood’s trust may be found again.
Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907).
This fine writer was a Unitarian minister, but afterwards became a “Free-thinker.”
THE DARK COMPANION
The “Dark Companion” is no doubt the star known as the “Companion of Sirius.” Certain peculiarities in the motion of Sirius led Bessel in 1844 to the belief that it had an obscure companion, with which it was in revolution. The position of the companion having been ascertained by calculation, it was at last found in 1862. It is equal in mass to our sun but is obscured by the brilliancy of Sirius, which is the brightest of the fixed stars. Brunton Stephens’ poem was published in Melbourne in 1873.
SEQUEL TO “MY QUEEN”
The devil has made the stuff of our life and God makes the hem.
Victor Hugo (By the King’s Command).
I think, I said, I can make it plain that there are at least six personalities distinctly to be recognized as taking part in a dialogue between John and Thomas.
Three Johns: The real John—known only to his Maker. John’s ideal John—never the real one, and often very unlike him. Thomas’s ideal John—never the real John, nor John’s John, but often very unlike either.
Three Thomases: The real Thomas. Thomas’s ideal Thomas. John’s ideal Thomas.
Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only one can be weighed on a platform balance; but the other two are just as important in the conversation. Let us suppose the real John to be old, dull, and ill-looking. But as the Higher Powers have not conferred on men the gift of seeing themselves in the true light, John very possibly conceives himself to be youthful, witty, and fascinating, and talks from the point of view of this ideal. Thomas, again, believes him to be an artful rogue, we will say; therefore he is, so far as Thomas’s attitude in the conversation is concerned, an artful rogue, though really simple and stupid. The same conditions apply to the three Thomases. It follows that, until a man can be found who knows himself as his Maker knows him, or who sees himself as others see him, there must be at least six persons engaged in every dialogue between two. Of these the least important, philosophically speaking, is the one that we have called the real person. No wonder two disputants often get angry, when there are six of them talking and listening all at the same time.
(A very unphilosophical application of the above remarks was made by a young fellow, answering to the name of John, who sits near me at table. A certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable little known to boarding-houses, was on its way to me via this unlettered Johannes. He appropriated the three that remained in the basket, remarking that there was just one apiece for him. I convinced him that his practical inference was hasty and illogical, but in the meantime he had eaten the peaches.)
O. W. Holmes (Autocrat of the Breakfast Table).
A HYMN TO GOD THE FATHER.
In line (1) the reference is to the old doctrine that the guilt of Adam and Eve’s “original sin” tainted all generations of man; (3) “run,” ran; (8) his sin—the example he has set—is the door which opened to others the way of sin.
In this fine poem there are puns. In the last verse one pun is on the words “Son” and “Sun,” Christ being the “Sun of righteousness who arises with healing in his wings” (Malachi iv, 2). Also in the fifth, eleventh, and seventeenth lines, the play is on the last word “done” and the poet’s name Donne, which was pronounced dun.[17] (It was occasionally written Dun, Dunne, or Done: see Grierson’s Poems of John Donne, Vol. II, pp. lvii, lxxvii, lxxxvii, 8 and 12. Contrariwise, the adjective “dun,” dull-brown, was spelt donne in the poet’s time.) We are accustomed only to the jocular use of puns, but here there is a serious intention to give two meanings to one expression. Such a use of puns was one of the “quaint conceits” of that period of our literature, and it is found also in serious Persian poetry.
Very likely female pelicans like so to bleed under the selfish little beaks of their young ones: it is certain that women do. There must be some sort of pleasure, which we men don’t understand, which accompanies the pain of being scarified.
Thackeray (Pendennis).
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
George Eliot (Felix Holt).
LET IT BE THERE.
Every man hath his gift, one a cup of wine, another heart’s blood.
Hafiz.
Some poets sing of wine or sensuous enjoyment, but Hafiz pours out his heart’s blood in song. Presumably wine and blood are contrasted because of their similar appearance.
The devil could drive woman out of Paradise; but the devil himself cannot drive the Paradise out of a woman.
G. MacDonald (Robert Falconer).
THE PULLEY
“The Pulley” because by the desire for rest after toil and tribulation God draws man up to Himself.
(Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in November, 1859.) At the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860 Huxley had on Thursday, June 28, directly contradicted Professor Owen’s statement that a gorilla’s brain differed more from a man’s than it did from the brain of the lowest of the Quadrumana (apes, monkeys, and lemurs). He was thus marked out as the champion of evolution. On the Saturday, although the public were not admitted, the members crowded the room to suffocation, anxious to hear the brilliant controversialist, Bishop Wilberforce, take part in the debate. An unimportant paper was read bearing upon Darwinism, and a discussion followed. The Bishop, inspired by Owen, began his speech. He spoke in dulcet tones, persuasive manner, and with well-turned periods, but ridiculing Darwin badly and Huxley savagely. “In a light, scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution: rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to Huxley, with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey.”
As he said this, Huxley turned to his neighbour and said, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands!” On rising to speak, he first gave a forcible and eloquent reply to the scientific part of the Bishop’s argument. Then “he stood before us and spoke those tremendous words—words, which no one seems sure of now, nor, I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. “He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor: but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.” No one[65] doubted his meaning, and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out; I, for one, jumped out of my seat.” (Macmillan’s, 1898.) There is no verbatim report of this incident, but the varying accounts agree in outline.
(Extracted from Life of Huxley.)
One object of this book is to bring back the memories of the seventy-eighties—and of overwhelming interest at the time was the alleged conflict between religion and science. Through Darwin’s great discovery and Herbert Spencer’s world-wide extension of the evolution theory, so much was found covered by law that men were blinded to the fact that the essential question of causality, lying behind all law, was still untouched.
The important and thrilling incident referred to above took place in 1860, when I was two years old, but it was still an absorbing topic thirteen or fourteen years later, and is one of my most vivid recollections.
Wilberforce (1805-1873) was a great Churchman and, indeed, has been said to be the greatest prelate of his age, although his nickname “Soapy Sam” led to a popular depreciation of his merits. (This epithet originally meant that he was evasive on certain questions, but it took a further meaning from his persuasive eloquence.) In this instance he meddled with a subject of which he was ignorant. Owen, who instigated him to make this attack on Darwin and Huxley had at first welcomed the theory of evolution, but quailed before the orthodox indignation against the necessary extension of that theory to the origin of man. Huxley (1825-1895) was thirty-five years of age when he thus showed himself a strong debater and a power in the scientific world.
On tracing the line of life backwards, we see it approaching more and more to what we call the purely physical condition. We come at length to those organisms which I have compared to drops of oil suspended in a mixture of alcohol and water. We reach the protogenes of Haeckel, in which we have “a type distinguishable from a fragment of albumen only by its finely granular character.” Can we pause here? We break a magnet and find two poles in each of its fragments. We continue the process of breaking; but however small the parts, each carries with it, though enfeebled, the polarity of the whole. And when we can break no longer, we prolong the intellectual vision to the polar molecules. Are we not urged to do something similar in the case of life?... Believing, as I do, in the continuity of nature, I cannot stop abruptly where our microscopes cease to be of use. Here the vision of the mind authoritatively supplements the vision of the eye. By a necessity engendered and justified by science I cross the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that Matter which we, in our ignorance of its latent powers, and notwithstanding our professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with opprobrium, the promise and potency of all terrestrial Life.
(Referring to the question of inquiring into the mystery of our origin). Here, however, I touch a theme too great for me to handle, but which will assuredly be handled by the loftiest minds, when you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past.
John Tyndall.
The italics are mine.
As in the preceding quotation the subject is the alleged conflict between religion and science, which occupied so large a space in our life and thought in the seventies and eighties. The above are the two passages from Tyndall’s presidential address at the Belfast meeting of the British Association in 1874, which caused an immense sensation. The Belfast Address, like Huxley’s smashing reply to Bishop Wilberforce, was useful in showing that all scientific questions must be considered with an open mind, free of theological bias, and also in adding testimony to the importance and value of Darwin’s investigation. Although fifteen years had passed since The Origin of Species was published, this was still necessary. (At that very time Professor McCoy, afterwards Sir Frederick McCoy, F.R.S., when lecturing at the Melbourne University to his students, of whom I was one, was still making inane jokes about evolution and our monkey cousins.)
But, while the world was in ferment over the question of man’s alleged kinship with the monkey, there came the further startling fact that the President of the British Association also proclaimed his belief in materialism and, inferentially, that there was no life after death. Englishmen had not before realized how widely materialism had spread through England and Europe. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that a majority at least of the leading thinkers had become materialists.
In travelling outside science into metaphysics, Tyndall betrayed a lamentable ignorance of the latter—a parallel case to that of Bishop Wilberforce when he attempted to meddle with science. Martineau, referring to the first quotation above, wrote: “There is no magic in the superlatively little to draw from the universe its last secret. Size is but relative, magnified or dwindled by a glass, variable with the organ of perception: to one being, the speck which only the microscope can show us may be a universe; to another, the solar system but a molecule; and in the passing from the latter to the former you reach no end of search or beginning of things. You merely substitute a miniature of nature for its life-size without at all showing whence the features arise.”
THE NEW GOSPEL
As in the two preceding quotations, the subject is the supposed conflict of religion and science. Haeckel (born 1834, recently dead) was the most ruthless of all the biologists in accounting for evolution and all progress by a struggle for existence. Renan (1823-1892), the French writer, whose love of Christianity survived his belief in it, speaks of the passing away of the old faith as “the golden glory of the dying day,” and says that in its death it will be more beautiful than in its life, when it led to passion, persecution and war. The penultimate verse refers to the time when temporal power was removed from the church, and she reverted to the humility, and also the beauty, of primitive Christianity when it came in its morning glory from the East.
The fact that these fine verses are by the great philologist and archæologist, Professor Sayce, who has not publicly appeared in the rôle of a poet, adds greatly to their interest. The few verses he has published have mostly appeared over the initials “A.H.S.” in the old Academy (the present periodical is a different concern), and he was not known to the public as the author.
Anything about Professor Sayce must be interesting to the reader, and I, therefore, need not apologize for mentioning the following incidents, which, I imagine, are known only among his friends. In 1870, during the Franco-German War, Mr. Sayce was ordered to be shot at Nantes as a German spy, and only escaped “by the skin of his teeth.” It was just before Gambetta had flown in his balloon out of Paris, and there was no recognized Government in the country. Nantes was full of fugitives, and bands of Uhlans were in the neighbourhood. Mr. Sayce was arrested when walking round the old citadel examining its walls—not realizing that it was occupied by French troops. Fortunately, some ladies of the garrison came in during his examination to see the interesting young prisoner and, after Mr. Sayce[69] had been placed against the wall and a soldier told off to shoot him, they prevailed upon the Commandant to give him a second examination, which ended in his acquittal.
Mr. Sayce was also among the Carlists in the Carlist war of 1873, and was present at some of the so-called battles which, he says, were dangerous only to the onlookers. He also once had a pitched battle with Bedouins in Syria.
Professor Sayce (he became Professor in 1876) has also the proud distinction of being the only person known to have survived the bite of the Egyptian cerastes asp, which is supposed to have killed Cleopatra. He accidentally trod on the reptile in the desert some three or four miles north of Assouan and was bitten in the leg. Luckily, he happened to be just outside the dahabieh in which he was travelling with three Oxford friends, one of them the late Master of Balliol. The cook had a small pair of red-hot tongs, with which he had been preparing lunch, and Professor Sayce was able to burn the bitten leg down to the bone within two minutes after the accident; thus saving his life at the expense of a few weeks’ lameness.
These are the two last verses of a parody on Byron. In each of the last three lines there is a literary reference. The first, of course, is to the happy-go-lucky Dick Swiveller of Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop.
The next reference is to the amusing story about Sir Walter Scott that became known about the time Calverley was writing (1862). Scott, in his description of Melrose Abbey by moonlight (“Lay of the Last Minstrel”) says:
Yet there can be no doubt that he himself had never seen the Abbey by moonlight! He further tells his readers that they can
They, having seen it, can “soothly” (i.e., truthfully) swear to its beauty, which was more than he himself could!
Calverley’s last line is from Sydney Smith’s “Recipe for a Salad”:
This again is an adaptation of Dryden’s “Imitation of Horace” (Book III, Ode 29):
A young handsome priest, who had led a gay life, was moved by pure motives to rescue a beautiful young wife from a dreadful husband, and he travelled with her for three days to Rome. The husband was following with an armed band, the priest was risking disgrace, and the girl was risking death. The mutual danger would in itself tend to draw the fugitives too closely together; but also the girl had shown herself doubly lovable, for the strain and stress had revealed in her a very beautiful nature—just as a midnight thunder-storm opens and draws rich scent from
Coleridge has a similar illustration, “Quarrels of anger ending in tears are favourable to love in its spring tide, as plants are found to grow very rapidly after a thunderstorm with rain”—(Allsop’s Letters, etc., of Coleridge). Coleridge died in 1834, and “The Ring and the Book” was published in 1868-9: it is curious that both poets should have been impressed with a fact that appears to have been only recently recognized. In the seventies Lemström proved that plants thrive under electricity; but I think it is only a few years ago that in some agricultural experiments in Germany it was found that electricity was of no benefit to the crops without rain or other moisture.
The quotation is from the fine judgment which the Pope delivers.
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sun-beams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers.
Swift (Gulliver’s Travels).
A child of our grandmother Eve, a female, or, for thy more sweet understanding, a woman.
(Love’s Labour Lost, I, 1.)
The whole World was made for man, but the twelfth part of man for woman: Man is the whole World, and the Breath of God; Woman the rib and crooked piece of man.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) (Religio Medici).
A woman is the most inconsistent compound of obstinacy and self-sacrifice that I am acquainted with.
J. P. F. Richter (Flower, Fruit and Thorn Pieces).
God made the world in six days, and then he rested. He then made man and rested again. He then made woman and, since then, neither man, woman, nor anything else has rested.
Author not traced.
As sculptors chisel away the marble that hides the statue within, so let “crosses” or afflictions remove the impurities which hide the Christ in us, so that we shall become His image, or not His image, but Himself.
What is experience? A little cottage made with the débris of those palaces of gold and marble which we call our illusions.
Author not traced.
This verse is engraved on Shelley’s own monument in the Priory Church at Christchurch, Hampshire.
A loose, slack, not well-dressed youth met Mr. Green and myself in a lane near Highgate. Green knew him and spoke. It was Keats. He was introduced to me, and stayed a minute or so. After he had left us a little way, he came back and said, “Let me carry away the memory, Coleridge, of having pressed your hand!” “There is death in that hand,” I said to Green, when Keats was gone; yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly.
S. T. Coleridge (Table Talk).
This was about 1819. It is pathetic, this meeting of two great poets, Keats who was to die two years afterwards at the early age of twenty-six, and Coleridge, whose few brilliant years of poetic life had long previously ended in slavery to the opium-habit.
THE BALLAD OF JUDAS ISCARIOT
See reference to Buchanan in the Preface.
I learn from the New Statesman reviewer of the first English Edition that these lines were by Hester, a gifted sister of Mary Cholmondeley. She died at 22.
The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new.
Alexander Smith (On the Writing of Essays).
It is the calling of great men, not so much to preach new truths, as to rescue from oblivion those old truths which it is our wisdom to remember and our weakness to forget.
Sydney Smith.
In philosophy equally as in poetry it is the highest and most useful prerogative of genius to produce the strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues admitted truths from the neglect caused by the very circumstances of their universal admission. Extremes meet. Truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the power of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.
S. T. Coleridge (Aids to Reflection).
I’m not denying the women are foolish: God Almighty made ’em to match the men.
George Eliot (Adam Bede).
The Baptist might be in the Wilderness shouting to the poor, who were listening with all their might and faith to the preacher’s awful accents and denunciations of wrath or woe or salvation; and our friend the Sadducee would turn his sleek mule with a shrug and a smile from the crowd, and go home to the shade of his terrace, and muse, over preacher and audience, and turn to his roll of Plato, or his pleasant Greek song-book babbling of honey and Hybla, and nymphs and fountains and love. To what, we say, does this scepticism lead? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness and selfishness, so to speak—the more shameful, because it is so good-humoured and conscienceless and serene. Conscience! What is conscience? Why accept remorse? What is public or private faith? Myths alike enveloped in enormous tradition. If seeing and acknowledging the lies of the world, Arthur, as see them you can with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them without any protest farther than a laugh: if, plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you allow the whole wretched world to pass groaning by you unmoved: if the fight for the truth is taking place, and all men of honour are on the ground armed on the one side or the other, and you alone are to lie on your balcony and smoke your pipe out of the noise and the danger, you had better have died, or never have been at all, than such a sensual coward.
W. M. Thackeray (Pendennis, XXIII).
What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;—and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his[82] neighbour, to his God; an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop.
R. L. Stevenson (Pulvis et Umbra).
A CHARGE.
Human nature, trained in the School of Christianity, throws away as false the delineation of piety in the disguise of Hebe, and declares that there is something higher than happiness—that thought which is ever full of care and truth is better far—that all true and disinterested affection, which often is called to mourn, is better still—that the devoted allegiance of conscience to duty and to God—which ever has in it more of penitence than of joy—is noblest of all.
James Martineau (Endeavours after the Christian Life, p. 42).
There is in man a Higher than Love of Happiness; he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not to preach forth this same Higher that sages and martyrs, the poet and the priest, in all times have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the Godlike that is in Man, and how in the Godlike only has he Strength and Freedom? Which God-inspired Doctrine art thou also honoured to be taught; O Heavens! and broken with manifold merciful Afflictions, even till thou become contrite and learn it! O thank thy Destiny for these; thankfully bear what yet remain; thou hadst need of them; the Self in thee needed to be annihilated.... Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him.... To the Worship of Sorrow, ascribe what origin and genesis thou pleasest, has not that Worship originated, and been generated? Is it not here? Feel it in thy heart, and then say whether it is of God! This is Belief; all else is Opinion.... Do the Duty which liest nearest thee, which thou knowest to be a Duty. The Situation that has not its Duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. The Ideal is in thyself.
Thomas Carlyle (Sartor Resartus).
The belief that the sense of duty and moral aspiration arise from within ourselves, and are the cause rather than the result of sociological evolution is far more widespread to-day than in what Carlyle calls his “atheistical century.” The “Everlasting Yea” is opposed to the “Everlasting No” of nescience.
For the subject of the verse see title of poem.
David Gray was a young poet and a great friend of Buchanan’s. Another verse in the poem is:
Andrea del Sarto says that, but for certain unfortunate circumstances, he might have reached the high eminence of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michael Angelo. In heaven he may have another chance to compete with them.
This and the five following quotations and others through the book are from a small collection of word-pictures, that I had begun to put together. They are mostly well-known.
It is a ghost-child who is playing in the great cathedral.
Edward Fitzgerald, quoting this in “Euphranor,” says the “meadow” is the grass reserved for meadowing, or mowing.
THE FEAST OF ADONIS.
Gorgo. Is Praxinoë at home?
Praxinoë. My dear Gorgo, at last! Yes, here I am. Euno, find a chair—get a cushion for it.
Gorgo. It will do beautifully as it is.
Praxinoë. Do sit down.
Gorgo. Oh, this gad-about spirit! I could hardly get to you, Praxinoë, through all the crowd and all the carriages. Nothing but heavy boots, nothing but men in uniform. And what a journey it is! My dear child, you really live too far off.
Praxinoë. It is all that insane husband of mine. He has chosen to come out here to the end of the world, and take a hole of a place—for a house it is not—on purpose that you and I might not be neighbours. He is always just the same—anything to quarrel with one! anything for spite!
Gorgo. My dear, don’t talk so of your husband before the little fellow. Just see how astonished he looks at you. (Talking to the child.) Never mind, Zopyrio my pet, she is not talking about papa. (Good heavens, the child does really understand.) Pretty papa!
Praxinoë. That “pretty papa” of his the other day (though I told him beforehand to mind what he was about), when I sent him to a shop to buy soap and rouge, brought me home salt instead; stupid, great, big, interminable animal!
Gorgo. Mine is just the fellow to him. But never mind now, get on your things and let us be off to the palace to see the Adonis. I hear the Queen’s decorations are something splendid.
Praxinoë. “In grand people’s houses everything is grand.” What things you have seen in Alexandria! What a deal you will have to tell to anybody who has never been there!
Gorgo. Come, we ought to be going.
Praxinoë. “Every day is a holiday to people who have nothing to do.” Eunoë, pick up your work; and take care, you lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again; the cats find it just the bed they like. Come, stir yourself, fetch me some water, quick! I wanted the water first, and the girl brings me the soap. Never mind; give it me. Not all that, extravagant! Now pour out the water—stupid! Why don’t you take care of my dress? That will do. I have got my hands washed as it pleased God. Where is the key of the large wardrobe? Bring it here—quick!
Gorgo. Praxinoë, you can’t think how well that dress, made full, as you have got it, suits you. Tell me, how much did it cost—the dress by itself, I mean?
Praxinoë. Don’t talk of it, Gorgo: more than eight guineas of good hard money. And about the work on it, I have almost worn my life out.
Gorgo. Well, you couldn’t have done better.
Praxinoë. Thank you. Bring me my shawl, and put my hat properly on my head—properly. No, child (to her little boy,) I am not going to take you; there’s a bogey on horseback[88] who bites. Cry as much as you like; I’m not going to have you lamed for life. Now we’ll start. Nurse take the little one and amuse him; call the dog in, and shut the street door. (They go out.) Good heavens! what a crowd of people! How on earth are we ever to get through all this? They are like ants: you can’t count them. My dearest Gorgo, what will become of us? Here are the Royal Horse Guards. My good man, don’t ride over me! Look at that bay horse rearing bolt upright; what a vicious one! Eunoë, you mad girl, do take care!—that horse will certainly be the death of the man on his back. How glad I am now, that I left the child safe at home.
Gorgo. All right, Praxinoë, we are safe behind them; and they have gone on to where they are stationed.
Praxinoë. Well, yes, I begin to revive again. From the time I was a little girl I have had more horror of horses and snakes than of anything else in the world. Let us get on; here’s a great crowd coming this way upon us.
Gorgo (to an old woman). Mother, are you from the palace?
Old woman. Yes, my dears.
Gorgo. Has one a tolerable chance of getting there?
Old woman. My pretty young lady, the Greeks got to Troy by dint of trying hard; trying will do anything in this world.
Gorgo. The old creature has delivered an oracle and disappeared.
Praxinoë. Women can tell you everything about everything, even about Jupiter’s marriage with Juno!
Gorgo. Look, Praxinoë, what a squeeze at the palace gates.
Praxinoë. Tremendous! Take hold of me, Gorgo; and you, Eunoë, take hold of Eutychis!—tight hold, or you’ll be lost. Here we go in all together. Hold tight to us, Eunoë! Oh, dear! oh, dear! Gorgo, there’s my scarf torn right in two. For heaven’s sake, my good man, as you hope to be saved, take care of my dress!
Stranger. I’ll do what I can, but it doesn’t depend upon me.
Praxinoë. What heaps of people! They push like a drove of pigs.
Stranger. Don’t be frightened, ma’am, we are all right.
Praxinoë. May you be all right, my dear sir, to the last day you live, for the care you have taken of us! What a kind, considerate man! There is Eunoë jammed in a squeeze. Push, you goose, push! Capital! We are all of us the right side of the door, as the bridegroom said when he had locked himself in with the bride.
Gorgo. Praxinoë, come this way. Do but look at that work, how delicate it is!—how exquisite! Why, the gods might wear it in heaven.
Praxinoë. Goddess of Spinning, what hands were hired to do that work? Who designed those beautiful patterns? They seem to stand up and move about, as if they were real—as if they were living things, and not needlework. Well, man is a wonderful creature! And look, look, how charming he lies there on his silver couch, with just a soft down on his cheeks, that beloved Adonis—Adonis, whom one loves even though he is dead!
Another stranger. You wretched women, do stop your incessant chatter! Like turtles, you go on for ever.
Gorgo. Lord, where does the man come from? What is it to you if we are chatterboxes? Order about your own servants!
Praxinoë. Oh, honey-sweet Proserpine, let us have no more masters than the one we’ve got! We don’t the least care for you; pray don’t trouble yourself for nothing.
Gorgo. Be quiet, Praxinoë! That first-rate singer, the Argive woman’s daughter, is going to sing the Adonis hymn. She is the same who was chosen to sing the dirge last year. We are sure to have something first-rate from her. She is going through her airs and graces ready to begin.
Theocritus (Fifteenth Idyll).
This is Matthew Arnold’s translation of a poem by Theocritus, who lived in the Third Century B.C., 2,200 years ago, (see Arnold’s Essay on Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment). I have altered a few words and also omitted part because of its length.
Gorgo, a lady of Alexandria, calls on her friend Praxinoë, to take her to the Festival of Adonis. Greek ladies were allowed to go out on Festival days if veiled and attended, and, therefore, Gorgo and Praxinoë take with them their respective maids, Eutychis and Eunoë, who would no doubt be slave-girls.
Some curious facts may be noted. The wife is kept in seclusion and the husband does the marketing, buying among other things her rouge. Observe how perfunctory are the pretty lady’s ablutions (the soap, by the way, is in the form of paste). The little boy represents the ruling sex and will be removed at an early age from her control. She is disposed to rebel against her lord and master, but takes the utmost care of the important boy-child. While the ladies with their slaves make up their own dresses, the designs and the finest needlework are done by men. The Greek woman in Athens was practically uneducated and regarded as an inferior being; but these ladies were Dorian Greeks and would no doubt be better treated and have somewhat more freedom—especially in Alexandria, which was a colony and, therefore, probably less conservative. Although no doubt veiled, their eyes would be visible and, as seen in the East to-day, a pretty woman can always manage to show her beauty, if she chooses. It will be seen that one man is polite to the two young,[90] pretty, richly-dressed ladies, and saves them from being crushed by the crowd, while another is a crusty, grumpy person, who treats them with some rudeness and, in the original, ridicules their Dorian pronunciation. Praxinoë is most grateful to the polite man for what would now be an ordinary act of courtesy.
As regards the conversation Andrew Lang says: “Nothing can be more gay and natural than the chatter of the women, which has changed no more in two thousand years than the song of birds.”
Marriage is a desperate thing; the Frogs in Aesop were extreme wise: they had a great mind to some Water, but they would not leap into the Well, because they could not get out again.
’Tis reason a Man that will have a Wife should be at the Charge of her Trinkets, and pay all the Scores she sets on him. He that will keep a Monkey, ’tis fit he should pay for the Glasses he breaks.
Selden (Table Talk).
When you’re a married man, Samivel, you’ll understand a good many things as you don’t understand now; but vether it’s worth while goin’ through so much to learn so little, as the charity-boy said wen he got to the end of the alphabet, is a matter o’ taste. I rayther think it isn’t.
Charles Dickens (Pickwick Papers).
Matrimony is the only game of chance the clergy favour.
Author not traced.
A man, who admires a fine woman, has yet no more reason to wish himself her husband, than one, who admired the Hesperian fruit, would have had to wish himself the dragon that kept it.
Alexander Pope.
IN THE TWILIGHT.
I am especially pleased with their freundin (the German word meaning a female friend), which unlike the amica of the Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now I know it will be said that a friend is already something more than a friend, when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a female; but this I deny—in that sense at least in which the objection will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a sister—nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.
S. T. Coleridge (Biographia Literaria, Letter to a Lady).
Coleridge also says: “The qualities of the sexes correspond. The man’s courage is loved by the woman, whose fortitude again is coveted by the man. His vigorous intellect is answered by her infallible tact. Can it be true what is so constantly affirmed, that there is no sex in souls?—I doubt it, I doubt it exceedingly.”—Table Talk.
But surely Coleridge might have found the best proof of his contention in the nature of children, the small boy who fights with his fists, plays with tin soldiers and despises “girls,” and the girl-child who loves her doll and her pretty clothes. See next quotation.
Francis Thompson is one of the “difficult” poets who repay study. Here he says that, in the young girl, sex appears in a less complex form than in the woman and, just as Perseus could safely look at the reflection on his shield of the fatal Medusa’s head, so we can freely view womanhood in the girl-child. Nothing conceals her open, innocent, feminine nature. She is the Dryad, the Nymph who lives in the tree and is born and dies with it, but is as yet unconscious of the tree, that is, of her sex. Her “young sex is yet but in her soul,” and is like the juice of the grape which has not yet fermented into wine, or the calm air which sleeps undisturbed. The mystery of womanhood, which attracts and yet, in its own protection, repulses man, will not come to her until after the changes of years. It is the Aphrodite lying in unawakened beauty before she rises as a goddess from the sea. (“Facilely” appears to have the strained meaning “easy to understand” or “simply”; the word “gated,” “confined,” is a curious use of a university word: the Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate, who has misbehaved, may be “gated” for a period, i.e., confined to the precincts of his own college.) “The dragon to its own Hesperides”—the Hesperides were maidens who guarded the golden apples of love and fruitfulness, which Earth had given to Hera on her marriage to Zeus. The maidens were protected by a dragon. Here the dragon is the maiden’s own sensitive reserve and self-protecting nature, which enable her to protect herself. (“Conchèd,” Aphrodite is lying in her shell.)
Women, as they are like riddles in being unintelligible, so generally resemble them in this, that they please us no longer when once we know them.
Alexander Pope.
Compare the ancient with the modern world; “Look on this picture, and on that.” One broad distinction in the characters of men forces itself into prominence. Among all the men of the ancient heathen world there were scarcely one or two to whom we might venture to apply the epithet “holy.” In other words, there were not more than one or two, if any, who besides being virtuous in their actions were possessed with an unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides abstaining from vice regarded even a vicious thought with horror. Probably no one will deny that in Christian countries this higher-toned goodness, which we call holiness, has existed. Few will maintain that it has been exceedingly rare. Perhaps the truth is, that there has scarcely been a town in any Christian country since the time of Christ where a century has passed without exhibiting a character of such elevation that his mere presence has shamed the bad and made the good better, and has been felt at times like the presence of God Himself. And if this be so, has Christ failed? or can Christianity die?
Sir J. R. Seeley (Ecce Homo).
The quotation from Hamlet should read, “Look here, upon this picture, and on this.”
DAY
I shall be old and ugly one day, and I shall look for man’s chivalrous help, but I shall not find it. The bees are very attentive to the flowers till their honey is done, and then they fly over them.
Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm).
There are some of us who in after years say to Fate “Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.”
Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm).
Il n’a jamais fait couler larmes à personne sauf à sa mort.
(He never caused any one to shed tears, except at his death.)
B. Seebohm’s Life of Grellet.
Epitaph on Pétion, President of Hayti about 1816.
... that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.
George Eliot (Middlemarch).
If there are two things not to be hidden—love and a cough—I say there is a third, and that is ignorance, when one is obliged to do something besides wagging his head.
George Eliot (Romola—Nello speaking).
George Eliot is quoting the Latin proverb, Amor tussisque non celantur. It is also found in George Herbert’s Jacula Prudentum, 1640. The same proverb appears with all sorts of variations, “love and a sneeze,” “love and smoke,” “love and a red nose,” “love and poverty,” etc., being the things that cannot be hidden. “Love and murder will out” (Congreve, The Double Dealer, Act IV, 2). (I took these instances from some collection of proverbs.)
“You remember Tom Martin, Neddy? Bless my dear eyes,” said Mr. Roker, shaking his head slowly from side to side, and gazing abstractedly out of the grated window before him, as if he were fondly recalling some peaceful scene of his early youth; “it seems but yesterday that he whopped the coal-heaver down Fox-under-the-hill, by the wharf there. I think I can see him now, a-coming up the Strand between the two street-keepers, a little sobered by his bruising, with a patch o’ winegar and brown paper over his right eyelid, and that ’ere lovely bull-dog, as pinned the little boy arterwards, a-following at his heels. What a rum thing Time is, ain’t it, Neddy?”
Charles Dickens (Pickwick Papers).
Mr. Roker is a turnkey in the Fleet prison.
THE COURTIN’
What is the life of man? Is it not to turn from side to side? From sorrow to sorrow? To button up one cause of vexation and unbutton another?
Sterne (Tristram Shandy).
I know thy heart by heart.
P. J. Bailey (Festus).
HERBERT SPENCER’S “FIRST PRINCIPLES.”
Mr. Spencer’s genesis of the universe from chaos to the Crimean War ... For our own part, we must confess that this new book of Genesis appears to us no more credible than the old.
J. Martineau (Science, Nescience, and Faith).
JAMES MILL.
Did the facts of consciousness stand, as he represents them, his method would work. He satisfactorily explains—the wrong human nature.
J. Martineau (Essay on John Stuart Mill).
(Referring to those who insist on the practical as against the theoretical.) This solitary term (“practical”) serves a large number of persons as a substitute for all patient and steady thought; and, at all events, instead of meaning that which is useful as opposed to that which is useless, it constantly signifies that of which the use is grossly and immediately palpable, as distinguished from that of which the usefulness can only be discerned after attention and exertion.
Sir Henry Maine.
(Men are) dragged along the physiological history, because easy to conceive, and baffled by the spiritual, because it has no pictures to help it.
J. Martineau (Hours of Thought, I, 100).
As psychology comprises all our sensibilities, pleasures, affections, aspirations, capacities, it is thought on that ground to have a special nobility and greatness, and a special power of evoking in the student the feelings themselves. The mathematician, dealing with conic sections, spirals, and differential equations, is in danger of being ultimately resolved into a function or a co-efficient: the metaphysician, by investigating conscience, must become conscientious; driving fat oxen is the way to grow fat.
Alexander Bain (1818-1903) (Contemporary Review, April 1877).
There is a crude absurd materialism abroad which hasn’t yet learned the fundamental difference between Mind and Matter. It is altogether incomprehensible how any material processes can beget sensations and feelings and thoughts; it is altogether incomprehensible how you arose or I arose. Listen to Spencer:—“Were we compelled to choose between the alternatives of translating mental phenomena into physical phenomena, or of translating physical phenomena into mental phenomena, the latter alternative would seem the more preferable of the two.... Hence though of the two it seems easier to translate so-called Matter into so-called Spirit, than to translate so-called Spirit into so-called Matter (which latter is, indeed, wholly impossible), yet no translation can carry us beyond our symbols.”
Richard Hodgson (Letter, March 21, 1880).
Clown. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild-fowl?
Malvolio. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.
Clown. What thinkest thou of his opinion?
Malvolio. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion.
Clown. Fare thee well. Remain thou still in darkness.
Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, IV, 2).
As the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, “That, that is, is.”
Shakespeare (Twelfth Night, IV, 2).
WHAT IS LOVE?
The passion which unites the sexes ... is the most compound, and therefore the most powerful of all the feelings. Added to the purely physical elements of it are, first, those highly complex impressions produced by personal beauty.... With this there is united the complex sentiment which we term affection—a sentiment which, as it can exist between those of the same sex, must be regarded as an independent sentiment.... Then there is the sentiment of admiration, respect, or reverence.... There comes next the feeling called love of approbation. To be preferred above all the world, and that by one admired above all others, is to have the love of approbation gratified in a degree passing every previous experience.... Further, the allied emotion of self-esteem comes into play. To have succeeded in gaining such attachment from, and sway over, another is a proof of power which cannot fail agreeably to excite the amour propre. Yet again, the proprietary feeling has its share in the general activity: there is the pleasure of possession—the two belong to each other. Once more, the relation allows of an extended liberty of action. Towards other persons a restrained behaviour is requisite. Round each there is a subtle boundary that may not be crossed—an individuality on which none may trespass. But in this case the barriers are thrown down; and thus the love of unrestrained activity is gratified. Finally there is an exaltation of the sympathies. Egoistic pleasures of all kinds are doubled by another’s sympathetic participation; and the pleasures of another are added to the egoistic pleasures. Thus, round the physical feeling, forming the nucleus of the whole, are gathered the feelings produced by personal beauty, that constituting simple attachment, those of reverence, of love of approbation, of self-esteem, of property, of love of freedom, of sympathy. These, all greatly exalted, and severally tending to reflect their excitements on one another, unite to form the mental state we call Love.
Herbert Spencer (Principles of Psychology, 3rd Ed., Vol. I, 487).
The heading is, of course, mine—not Spencer’s.
WHAT AM I?
The aggregate of feelings and ideas, constituting the mental I, have not in themselves the principle of cohesion holding them together as a whole; but the I which continuously survives as the subject of these changing states is that portion of the[104] Unknowable Power, which is statically conditioned in (my particular one of those) special nervous structures pervaded by a dynamically-conditioned portion of the Unknowable Power called energy.
Herbert Spencer (Principles of Psychology, 3rd Ed., Vol. II, 504).
The heading and words in brackets are mine. As the reader may at any time be asked “What are you?” it would be well to be ready with a simple reply.
New truths, old truths! sirs, there is nothing new possible to be revealed to us in the moral world; we know all we shall ever know: and it is for simply reminding us, by their various respective expedients, how we do know this and the other matter, that men get called prophets, poets, and the like. A philosopher’s life is spent in discovering that, of the half-dozen truths he knew when a child, such an one is a lie, as the world states it in set terms; and then, after a weary lapse of years, and plenty of hard-thinking, it becomes a truth again after all, as he happens to newly consider it and view it in a different relation with the others: and so he restates it, to the confusion of somebody else in good time. As for adding to the original stock of truths,—impossible!
R. Browning (A Soul’s Tragedy).
The law of equal freedom which Herbert Spencer deduces is binding only upon those who admit both that human happiness is the Divine Will and that we should act in accordance with the Divine Will. Why should I obey this law? Because without such obedience human happiness cannot be complete. Why should I aim at human happiness? Because human happiness is the Divine Will. The inexorable why pursues us here—Why should I aim at the fulfilment of the Divine Will? To this question there seems no satisfactory reply but that it is for my own happiness to do so.
Richard Hodgson (Unpublished Essay, 1879).
I have no ambition to wander into the inane and usurp the sceptre of the dim Hegel, situated Nowhere, with pure Nothing behind him, and pure Being before him, steadfastly and vainly endeavouring with his Werden to stop the sand-flowing of smiling Time.
Richard Hodgson (Early Unpublished Essay).
Werden in Hegel is usually translated “Becoming.” To Hegel the truth of the world is found in life or movement, not in Being which is changeless, but tells and does nothing.
Edwin (afterwards Sir Edwin) Arnold was with Herbert Spencer on a Nile steamer. Spencer was dyspeptic and irritable; Arnold was a nocturnal bird, pacing the deck alone in a long gown and smoking a long pipe. Suddenly appeared a white figure, Spencer in his night-shirt, who in the bad light took Arnold for a sailor (and Arnold did not undeceive him).
“Hi! there!”
“Ay, ay, Sir.”
“What are the men making that noise there forward for?”
“Cleaning the engines, Sir.”
“Just tell them not to make such a row, keeping good Christians from their sleep at this time of night.”
“Ay, ay, Sir.”
(Disappearance of ghost; joke next morning,)
(Told by Arnold to Hodgson, June, 1884).
The great agnostic, usually most precise in his language, describes himself as a “good Christian”!
WILLIAM BLAKE.
The desert of London town—Magna civitas, magna solitudo: “a great city is a great solitude.”
It is strange to think that these verses (and especially the last verse) were written by the pessimist who wrote in all sincerity the terrible lines in Pt. VIII of “The City of Dreadful Night.”
According to Donatus, Virgil wrote a couplet in praise of Cæsar and posted it anonymously on the portals of the palace (31 B.C.). Bathyllus gave himself out as the author of this couplet, and on that account received a present from Cæsar. Next night Sic vos non vobis (“So you not for you”) was found written four times in the same place. The Romans were puzzled as to what was meant by these words, until Virgil came forward and completed the verse—adding a preliminary line, Hos ego versiculos feci, tulit alter honores, “I wrote the lines, another wears the bays.”
Shelley in Song to the Men of England wrote as a socialist:
In previous verses he refers to bees, and, of course, the above quotation was in his mind.
This is from C. S. Calverley’s fine translation of the speech of Ajax.
Imitating the now-forgotten Martin Tupper.
Whosoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony.... Even that vulgar and Tavern Musick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First Composer.... There is something in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole World, and creatures of God; such a melody to the ear as the whole World, well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God.
Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici).
(Speaking of an Essay on Wordsworth he is about to write for some Melbourne society) I purpose describing briefly the poetic tendencies, or rather the unpoetic tendencies, of the 18th Century, and the new school beginning to manifest itself in Cowper. I shall then refer to W.’s principles—shall banish to a future time the working out of the psychological connection between forms of nature and the human soul—shall banish also the feelings, the elementary feelings, of humanity, which W. drew powerful attention to, and confine myself to pointing out those characteristics in external nature which he took note of. These produce corresponding feelings in the “human,” and some of them are beauty, silence and calm, joyousness, generosity, freedom, grandeur, and Spirituality. These are found in Nature, and W. saw them, and in the growing familiarity with them a man’s soul becomes beautiful, calm, joyous, generous, free, grand, and spiritual. The first ones, of course, all depend on and grow from the last, and the Spirituality is God immanent. This last, as the root of all the others, will merit special attention—it exhibits W.’s poetico-philosophy so far as it regards the work of Nature upon man; and includes too the Platonic Reminiscence business. (Here follows personal chit-chat.) I think we might add the “supreme loftiness of labour” to the foregoing elements in Nature. In the Gipsies (I give both readings)
In 1877 Blake was little appreciated. (I remember only that in our children’s books we had “Tiger, Tiger burning bright”—and it was a strange thing to include in such books a poem which raises the problems of the existence of evil and the nature of God). Hence it will be evident why so keen a student of poetry as Hodgson did not couple Blake with Cowper as a precursor of the Romantic Revival. As a matter of fact Blake had more of the “Romantic” spirit than Cowper, and really preceded him, for the poor verse that Cowper published the year before Blake’s Poetical Sketches need not be considered. While still in his teens Blake wrote (“To the Muses”):
Curiously enough Gray also had in him an element of the Romantic which he suppressed. It is very remarkable that in his Elegy (published 1751) he cut out the following verse:
Slightly altered verbally to admit of quotation.
MEDITATIONS OF A HINDU PRINCE
MEDITATION OF A HINDU PRINCE AND SCEPTIC
The preceding poem by Lyall had the same title as these verses, “Meditation of a Hindu Prince and Sceptic” when first published in the Cornhill, September, 1877. I was fully convinced, for reasons that would take too long to set out here, that these verses were by Hodgson. But Mrs. Piper, the well-known trance-medium, says that Hodgson gave her a copy signed with other initials than his, and that she is sure he was not the author. She has mislaid the copy she refers to. In view of this statement I must not attribute the verses to Hodgson, although I cannot but doubt whether Mrs. Piper’s recollection is correct.
The present writer ... was seated in a railway-carriage, five minutes or so before starting, and had time to contemplate certain waggons or trucks filled with cattle, drawn up on a parallel line, and quite close to the window at which he sat. The cattle wore a much-enduring aspect; and, as he looked into their large, patient, melancholy eyes,—for, as before mentioned, there was no space to speak of intervening,—a feeling of puzzlement arose in his mind.... The much-enduring animals in the trucks opposite had unquestionably some rude twilight of a notion of a world; of objects they had some unknown cognizance; but he could not get behind the melancholy eye within a yard of him and look through it. How, from that window, the world shaped itself, he could not discover, could not even fancy; and yet, staring on the animals, he was conscious of a certain fascination in which there lurked an element of terror. These wild, unkempt brutes, with slavering muzzles, penned together, lived, could choose between this thing and the other, could be frightened, could be enraged, could even love and hate; and gazing into a placid, heavy countenance, and the depths of a patient eye, not a yard away, he was conscious of an obscure and shuddering recognition of a life akin so far with his own. But to enter into that life imaginatively, and to conceive it, he found impossible. Eye looked upon eye, but the one could not flash recognition on the other; and, thinking of this, he remembers, with what a sense of ludicrous horror, the idea came,—what, if looking on one another thus, some spark of recognition could be elicited; if some rudiment of thought could be detected; if there were indeed a point at which man and ox could meet and compare notes? Suppose some gleam or scintillation of humour had lighted up the unwinking, amber eye? Heavens, the bellow of the weaning calf would be pathetic, shoe-leather would be forsworn, the eating of roast meat, hot or cold, would be cannibalism, the terrified world would make a sudden dash into vegetarianism!
Alexander Smith (On the Importance of Man to Himself).
Does not this give the reason why we do not eat dogs and horses? We, more than other nations, recognize in the horse, as well as in the dog, a life and intelligence akin to our own. We also believe that both animals reciprocate the affection we feel towards them. (Coleridge in Table Talk says: “The dog alone, of all brute animals, has a στοργή or affection upwards to man.”)
When I am playing with my Cat, who knowes whether she have more sport in dallying with me, than I have in gaming with her? We entertaine one another with mutual apish trickes: If I have my houre to begin or to refuse, so hath she hers.
Montaigne (Bk. II, ch. 12).
“My life did—and does—smack sweet”—see note p. 236.
THE LAMB
Who can wrestle against Sleep? Yet is that giant very gentleness.
Martin Tupper (Of Beauty).
ON A FINE MORNING
This is not in the Selected Poems. It is interesting as showing Mr. Hardy in an optimistic mood.
Of two opposite methods of action, do you desire to know which should have the preference? Calculate their effects in pleasures and pains, and prefer that which promises the greater sum of pleasures.
Think not that a man will so much as lift up his little finger on your behalf, unless he sees his advantage in it.
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).
These cold-blooded and repulsive aphorisms are typical of Bentham’s Utilitarian philosophy, from which all sense of duty and moral aspiration were excluded. It is strange that these views should be held by a great thinker who was himself of benevolent character. Such a doctrine could not have survived to my time, had it not been supplemented by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who gave a different place to the humanist element. While still adhering to Bentham’s doctrine that there is no good but pleasure and no evil but pain, he introduced as the higher forms of pleasure those derived from the wish for self-culture and the desire to satisfy our mental and moral aims. He gave priority to all the sympathetic and altruistic motives that govern our actions. Whereas Bentham held that all pleasures were equal and could be counted in one column, Mill said that they differed in quality,[117] that they could no more be added up in one column than pounds, shillings and pence; that, in fact, there is no equivalent for a higher pleasure in any quantity of a lower one. This was typical of Mill’s sincerity: but he did not see that his additions were fatal to Bentham’s doctrine and to hedonism generally. How, for instance, is a higher pleasure to be known for a higher? In what respect is an intellectual pleasure or the satisfaction of doing one’s duty of higher quality than the gratification of the senses? To ascertain this it is necessary to pass from the pleasure itself to the thing that gives the pleasure or, in other words, to the character that finds the pleasure. Many illustrations of this might be given. In one of Sir Alfred Lyall’s poems, which is founded on fact, an Englishman who has been captured by Arabs has no religious belief; his loved ones are waiting his return; he can save his life if he will only repeat the Mahomedan formula; if he dies no one will know of his self-sacrifice: yet he decides to die for the honour of England. However, Bentham’s careful calculus of equal pleasures and pains, “push-pin” being “worth as much as poetry,”[18] came to an end through Mill, and Mill at once made way for Spencer on the one hand, and T. H. Green on the other; both of these rejected the calculation of pleasures or happiness as the standard of right either for the individual or the greatest number. In all directions the low moral stage of philosophic thought represented by Benthamism has been passed through and forgotten. We no longer hold the belief that the only sphere of Government is to protect our persons and property, but follow loftier ideals; and in art and poetry we look for higher aims than mere luxury and sensuous pleasure.
LIFE
Life is compared to the brief fall of a dewdrop, the Indian’s unconscious sleep while his boat hastens to destruction; but life also is Hope, Intellect, Beauty, and Physical Enjoyment.
PEU DE CHOSE ET PRESQUE TROP.
This haunting little lyric is a literary curiosity from one point of view. In spite of expostulations from the author (a Belgian poet), and repeated public statements by others from time to time, the poem is constantly being wrongly attributed to one or another of the French poets. It appeared in Le Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique, 1887, but had probably been written and published some years before that date. In the Nineteenth Century, September, 1893, William Sharp pointed out that the poem was always being attributed to the wrong author—even Andrew Lang being one of the culprits. The author himself wrote to The Literary World of June 3, 1904, to the same effect. The subject was again spoken of in Notes and Queries, January 5, 1907, when the author’s letter was republished. London Truth also brought the matter up at one time, and probably the same fact has been publicly pointed out elsewhere a hundred times—but the poem continues to be attributed to the wrong author! In the Dictionary of Foreign Phrases and Classical Quotations, by H. P. Jones, published so recently as 1913, the verses are ascribed to Alfred de Musset.
There is a third verse, which reads like an answer or retort to the other two:
(Life is such As God made it, And, just as it is, ... It suffices!)
One of the writers to Notes and Queries quotes the following lines:
(You enter, you cry, and that is life: you yawn, you go out, and that is death.)
A very strange, fantastic world—where each one pursues his own golden bubble, and laughs at his neighbour for doing the same. I have been thinking how a moral Linnæus would classify our race.
Author not traced.
TWO LOVERS
This sentiment has been expressed by many different authors. Some friends of mine have as their favourite motto, “I have had many troubles in my life, and most of them never happened.”
The six quotations above are from a series of word-pictures (see p. 85).
Whatever else may or may not work on through eternity, we are bound to believe that the love, which moved the Father to redeem the world at such infinite cost, must work on, while there is one pang in the universe, born of sin, which can touch the Divine pity, or one wretched prodigal in rags and hunger far from the home and the heart of God.
Rev. Baldwin Brown.
Canon Farrar is not happy in his rejoinder to the argument that to cast a doubt on the endlessness of punishment is to invalidate the argument for the endlessness of bliss, since both rest on exactly the same Biblical sanction. There are three replies, cumulatively exhaustive, which he has failed to adduce.... (Firstly, evil and temptation are banished from heaven; Second, the two arguments do not rest on the same Biblical sanction) ... Thirdly, the difference of the two eternities, heaven and hell, consists in the presence or absence of God. Let us put α for each of those eternities or aeons, and θ to denote Him. The assertion of the equality of the two, then, is that α + θ = α - θ, which can stand only if θ = 0, the postulate of atheism.
Rev. R. F. Littledale, D.C.L.
Both these passages come from an Article in the Contemporary for April, 1878.
As this book is partly intended to revive the memories of forty years ago, I include these out of the passages in my commonplace book which refer to the intense struggle that then raged over the question of Eternal Punishment. Surely no other word, since the world began, raised so tremendous an issue, created such conflict and caused so much heart-burning as the one word αἰώνιος.
(Liddell and Scott, 1901, gives the following meanings for αἰώνιος: lasting for an age, perpetual, everlasting, eternal.)
I thank God, and with joy I mention it, I was never afraid of Hell, nor never grew pale at the description of that place. I have so fixed my contemplations on Heaven, that I have almost forgot the Idea of Hell, and am afraid rather to lose the joys of the one, than endure the misery of the other: to be deprived of them is a perfect Hell, and needs, methinks, no addition to compleat our afflictions. That terrible term hath never detained me from sin, nor do I owe any good action to the name thereof. I fear GOD, yet am not afraid of Him: His Mercies make me ashamed of my sins, before His Judgments afraid thereof.
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) (Religio Medici).
Ne nous imaginons pas que l’enfer consiste dans ces étangs de feu et de soufre, dans ces flammes éternellement dévorantes, dans cette rage, dans ce désespoir, dans cet horrible grincement de dents. L’enfer, si nous l’entendons, c’est péché même: l’enfer, c’est d’être éloigné de Dieu.
Bossuet (1627-1704).
(Let us not imagine that hell consists in those lakes of fire and brimstone, in those eternally-devouring flames, in that rage, in that despair, in that horrible gnashing of teeth. Hell, if we understand it aright, is sin itself: hell consists in being banished from God.)
... Sir Henry Wotton’s celebrated answer to a priest in Italy, who asked him, “Where was your religion to be found before Luther?” “My religion was to be found there—where yours is not to be found now—in the written word of God.” In Selden’s Table Talk we have the following more witty reply made to the same question: “Where was America an hundred or six score years ago?”
Boswell’s Life of Johnson, VIII, 176.
I do not wish to introduce sectarian questions, but these answers are interesting and clever. The next quotation is pro-Catholic.
During the horrible time of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, a French priest and a Jew became very intimate friends. The priest, very anxious for the future welfare of his friend, urged him to be received into the church: and the Jew promised to earnestly consider this advice. The priest, however, gave up all hope on learning that the Jew was called by his business to Rome, where he would see the unutterably monstrous life of the Pope and clergy. To his surprise the Jew on his return announced that he wished to be baptized, saying that a religion, which could still exist in spite of such abominations, must be the true religion.
Author not traced.
I noted this from an old French book, but the real story must be the earlier one of Boccaccio (1315-1375). Alexander Borgia was Pope, 1492-1503.
I verily believe that, if the knife were put into my hand, I should not have strength and energy enough to stick it into a Dissenter.
Sydney Smith.
Shortly before his death in 1844 he gave this as a singular proof of his declining strength! (See Memoir by his daughter, Lady Holland).
The “Prelude” is extremely interesting as a poet’s autobiography.
LONG EXPECTED
“Rich to die” is reminiscent of Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale:
I have ventured to put quotation marks in the above to make the meaning clear at first view. Also—but that italics seldom look well in a poem—I would have written the last two lines as follows:
A QUESTION
To Fausta.
This poem appeared in early editions of On viol and Flute, but is now omitted from Mr. Gosse’s poems.
I do not know whose paraphrase this is; it was prefixed by Tyndall to his Belfast Address, 1874. He probably imagined that these lines contained an argument in favour of materialism; but on the contrary the Greek philosopher affirms the existence of a supreme God. All that he says is that the conception of him as resembling a mortal in his physical attributes is wrong.
At the back of Tyndall’s mind was no doubt the prevalent idea that any “anthropomorphic” conception of the nature of the Deity is necessarily absurd. But there is nothing unreasonable in believing that His nature, though immeasurably superior, is nevertheless akin to our own. The[129] argument is that the source or power of the world must be greater than the highest thing it has produced, the mind of man; and that it must more nearly resemble the higher than the lower of its products. In particular it is impossible for us to believe that our moral ideas of truth, justice, right and wrong, etc., can differ at all in kind, however much in degree, from those of God. So also our reason must be akin to His insight. Such a belief should be regarded, not as “anthropomorphic,” but as (in a sense different from that of Clifford and Harrison) a “deification of man”—the recognition of the Divine that is in him.
To see the soul as she really is, not as we now behold her, marred by communion with the body and other miseries, you must contemplate her with the eye of reason, in her original purity—and then her beauty will be revealed.... We must remember that we have seen her only in a condition which may be compared to that of the sea-god Glaucus, whose original image can hardly be discerned because his natural members are broken off and crushed and damaged by the waves in all sorts of ways, and incrustations have grown over them of seaweed and shells and stones, so that he is more like some monster than his own natural form. And the soul which we behold is in a similar condition, disfigured by ten thousand ills. But not there, Glaucon, not there must we look.
Where then!
At her love of wisdom. Let us see whom she affects, and what society and converse she seeks in virtue of her near kindred with the immortal and eternal and divine; also how different she would become if wholly following this superior principle, and borne[130] by a divine impulse out of the ocean in which she now is, and disengaged from the stones and shells and things of earth and rock which in wild variety spring up around her because she feeds upon earth, and is overgrown by the good things of this life as they are termed: then you would see her as she is, and know ... what her nature is.
Plato (Republic, Bk. 10, Jowett’s translation).
Apart from the intrinsic interest of such a passage, the picture of the old sea-god, with long hair and long beard, his body ending in a scaly tail, battered about by the waves, and overgrown with seaweed and shells, is very curious. Without discussing how far the great philosopher himself or some other advanced thinkers believed in such divinities, it must be remembered that to the Greeks generally the gods were very real personages.
Ah, gracious powers! I wish you would send me an old aunt—a maiden aunt—an aunt with a lozenge on her carriage and a front of light, coffee-coloured hair—how my children should work work-bags for her, and my Julia and I would make her comfortable! Sweet—sweet vision! Foolish—foolish dream!
Thackeray (Vanity Fair).
IDENTITY.
Has anyone ever pinched into its pillulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?
George Eliot (Middlemarch).
TO R.K.
“R.K.” is Rudyard Kipling, but what was the “boy’s eccentric blunder” that brought him success I do not know. Stephen in this instance showed a want of judgment. The books Kipling had then produced, Plain Tales from the Hills, Departmental Ditties, and the six little books, Soldiers Three, etc., all written before the age of twenty-four, should have been sufficient to show that the author was certainly not a stripling to be “muzzled.” Stephen’s misjudgment was, however, trivial when we remember how many important writers have failed to understand and appreciate the most beautiful poems. Jeffrey (1773-1850) thought to the end of his days that of the poets of his time Keats and Shelley would die and Campbell and Rogers alone survive. Shelley was very unfortunate in his critics. Matthew Arnold and Carlyle also disparaged him, Theodore Hook said “Prometheus Unbound” was properly named as no one would think of binding it; and worst of all was Emerson. He said Shelley was not a poet, had no imagination and his muse was uniformly imitative (“Thoughts on Modern Literature”); his poetry was ‘rhymed English’ which ‘had no charm’ (“Poetry and Imagination”). Just as amazing was the article in The Edinburgh Review, 1816, on Coleridge’s volume containing “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan,” etc. This article, usually attributed to Hazlitt, and certainly having Jeffrey’s sanction, said: “We look upon this publication as one of the most notable pieces of impertinence of which the press has lately been guilty; and one of the boldest experiments that have as yet been made upon the patience or understanding of the public.” De Quincey said the style of Keats “belonged essentially to the vilest collections of waxwork filigree or gilt gingerbread.” Other instances are Swinburne’s abuse of George Eliot and Walt Whitman, Carlyle’s brutality towards Lamb, Jeffrey’s savage attack on Wordsworth (the famous “This will never do” article—although it was not so very inexcusable), Edward Fitzgerald’s letter that Mrs. Browning’s death was a relief to him (“No more Aurora Leighs, thank God!”), Samuel Rogers’ statement that he “could not relish Shakespeare’s sonnets,” and Steevens’ far worse condemnation of them, and indeed the list could be extended indefinitely. On the other hand, unmerited praise was given by whole generations of writers to poems which are now properly forgotten. In face of such facts it is somewhat of a mystery why the best things do survive. See next quotation.
If it be true, and it can scarcely be disputed, that nothing has been for centuries consecrated by public admiration, without possessing in a high degree some kind of sterling excellence, it is not because the average intellect and feeling of the majority of the public are competent in any way to distinguish what is really excellent, but because all erroneous opinion is inconsistent, and all ungrounded opinion transitory; so that while the fancies and feelings which deny deserved honour, and award what is undue, have neither root nor strength sufficient to maintain consistent testimony for a length of time, the opinions formed on right grounds by those few who are in reality competent judges, being necessarily stable, communicate themselves gradually from mind to mind, descending lower as they extend wider, until they leaven the whole lump, and rule by absolute[133] authority, even where the grounds and reasons for them cannot be understood. On this gradual victory of what is consistent over what is vacillating, depends the reputation of all that is highest in art and literature.
John Ruskin (Modern Painters, I, 1).
This is an excellent suggestion in explanation of the question raised in the preceding note. It is also interesting because of the youth of this great writer at the time. Ruskin was born in 1819, and the volume was published in 1843, when he was twenty-four. Because of his youth, it was thought inadvisable to give his name as author, and, therefore, the book was published as “by an Oxford Graduate.”
The ages have exulted in the manners of a youth, who owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his nature, shed an epic splendour around the facts of his death, which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact.
Emerson (Essay on Character).
Willest be asked, “requirest to be asked,” as in “God willeth Samuel to yield unto the importunity of the people” (1 Sam. viii., in margin).
Saint Paul was written for the Seatonian prize for religious English verse, Cambridge, about 1866, but failed to secure the prize!
(Speaking of future state) “Those who are neither good nor bad, or are too insignificant for notice, will be dropt entirely. This is my opinion. It is consistent with my idea of God’s justice, and with the reason that God has given me, and I gratefully know that He has given me a large share of that Divine gift”(!)
Thomas Paine (Age of Reason).
SIXTEEN CHARACTERISTICS OF LOVE (ΑΓΑΠΗ).
| 1. | It is long-suffering. |
| 2. | is kind. |
| 3. | envieth not. |
| 4. | vaunteth not itself. |
| 5. | is not puffed up. |
| 6. | doth not behave itself unseemly. |
| 7. | seeketh not its own. |
| 8. | is not easily provoked. |
| 9. | thinketh no evil. |
| 10. | rejoiceth not in iniquity. |
| 11. | rejoiceth in the truth. |
| 12. | beareth all things. |
| 13. | believeth all things. |
| 14. | hopeth all things. |
| 15. | endureth all things. |
| 16. | never faileth. |
St. Paul (1 Cor. xiii.)
Ἀγάπη, brotherly love, “Though I have all knowledge and all faith, though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not ἀγάπη, it profiteth me nothing.” (1 Cor. xiii, 2).
In the Eighth Century B.C., in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle. “And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”[20]
T. H. Huxley (Essays, IV, 161).
LOST DAYS.
BIRTHDAYS.
“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.” (Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1757.)
I do not find these lines in Middleton’s collected works, but I think they are his.
This often-quoted verse does not give the highest view of poetry, as Tennyson’s own poems show. The poet sings of a Universe,
He sings of Nature, Man, God, Immortality. (This note is from an early letter of Hodgson’s. His quotation is from The Prelude, Bk. XIV.)
Who is the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing his office? It is the Devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all other, he is never out of his diocese, ye shall never find him unoccupied, ye shall never find him out of the way, call for him when you will; he is ever at home, the diligentest preacher in all the Realm; ye shall never find him idle, I warrant you.... He is no lordly loiterer, but a busy ploughman, so that among all the pack of them the Devil shall go for my money! Therefore, ye prelates, learn of the Devil to be diligent in doing of your office. If you will not learn of God nor good men: for shame learn of the Devil.
Bishop Latimer (Sermon on the Ploughers, 1549).
APPRECIATION.
In the present day it is not easy to find a well-meaning man among our more earnest thinkers, who will not take upon himself to dispute the whole system of redemption, because he cannot unravel the mystery of the punishment of sin. But can he unravel the mystery of the punishment of NO sin? Can he entirely account for all that happens to a cab-horse? Has he ever looked fairly at the fate of one of those beasts as it is dying—measured the work it has done, and the reward it has got—put his hand upon the bloody wounds through which its bones are piercing, and so looked up to Heaven with an entire understanding of Heaven’s ways about the horse? Yet the horse is a fact—no dream—no revelation among the myrtle trees by night;[138] and the dust it dies upon, and the dogs that eat it, are facts; and yonder happy person, whose the horse was, till its knees were broken over the hurdles; who had an immortal soul to begin with, and wealth and peace to help forward his immortality; who has also devoted the powers of his soul, and body, and wealth, and peace, to the spoiling of houses, the corruption of the innocent, and the oppression of the poor; and has, at this actual moment of his prosperous life, as many curses waiting round about him in calm shadow, with their death-eyes fixed upon him, biding their time, as ever the poor cab-horse had launched at him in meaningless blasphemies, when his failing feet stumbled at the stones,—this happy person shall have no stripes,—shall have only the horse’s fate of annihilation! Or, if other things are indeed reserved for him, Heaven’s kindness or omnipotence is to be doubted therefore!
We cannot reason of these things. But this I know—and this may by all men be known—that no good or lovely thing exists in this world without its correspondent darkness; and that the universe presents itself continually to mankind under the stern aspect of warning, or of choice, the good and the evil set on the right hand and the left.
John Ruskin (Modern Painters, V, 19).
It is one of the arguments in Plato’s Phaedo that the soul must survive, since otherwise terribly wicked and cruel men would escape retribution; annihilation would be a good thing for them.
Every man is not a proper Champion for Truth, nor fit to take up the Gauntlet in the cause of Verity: many, from the ignorance of these Maximes, and an inconsiderate Zeal unto Truth, have too rashly charged the troops of Error, and remain as Trophies unto the enemies of Truth. A man may be in as just possession of[139] Truth as of a City and yet be forced to surrender; ’tis therefore far better to enjoy her with peace than to hazzard her on a battle.
Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici).
“Very well,” cried I, “that’s a good girl; I find you are perfectly qualified for making converts, and so go help your mother to make a gooseberry pye.”
Goldsmith (The Vicar of Wakefield).
Hope, folding her wings, looked backward and became Regret.
George Eliot (Silas Marner, ch. 15).
By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.
George Eliot (Middlemarch, ch. 39).
Change—i.e., change the subject. Many verses are omitted for the sake of brevity.
A world without a contingency or an agony could have no hero and no saint, and enable no Son of Man to discover that he was a Son of God. But for the suspended plot, that is folded in every life, history is a dead chronicle of what was known before as well as after; art sinks into the photograph of a moment, that hints at nothing else; and poetry breaks the cords and throws the lyre away. There is no Epic of the certainties; and no lyric without the surprise of sorrow and the sigh of fear. Whatever touches and ennobles us in the lives and in the voices of the past is a divine birth from human doubt and pain. Let then the shadows lie, and the perspective of the light still deepen beyond our view; else, while we walk together, our hearts will never burn within us as we go, and the darkness as it falls, will deliver us into no hand that is Divine.
Jas. Martineau (Hours of Thought, 1, 328).
The subject of the sermon is the uncertainties of life, the perils and catastrophies that cannot be foreseen or provided for, death, disease, and other ills which may fall upon us at any moment, the crises that arise in the history of men and nations. It is by reason of these that character is formed. If everything happened by known rule, and could be predicted as surely as the movements of the stars, we should have no affections or emotions and would be mere creatures of habit.
From a recent book of poems, The Lily of Malud, by J. C. Squire, I take the following musical verse. (“The Stronghold” is where pain, hate, and all unpleasant things are excluded and peace only reigns.)
Martineau not only did important work in philosophy, but he was also eminent as a moral teacher. Taking together his originality, sublimity of soul, and beauty of expression, the sermons in Hours of Thought and other similar writings are the finest product of modern religious thought. They indeed stand among the best productions of our literature, and should be read even by those (if there are any such persons) who love literature and thought but are indifferent to religion. To illustrate this, I choose—almost at random—a passage where the thought itself has no interest outside religion (Hours of Thought, II. 334):—
Worship is the free offering of ourselves to God; ever renewed, because ever imperfect. It expresses the consciousness that we are His by right, yet have not duly passed into His hand; that the soul has no true rest but in Him, yet has wandered in strange flights until her wing is tired. It is her effort to return home, the surrender again of her narrow self-will, her prayer to be merged in a life diviner than her own. It is at once the lowliest and loftiest attitude of her nature: we never hide ourselves in ravine so deep; yet overhead we never see the stars so clear and high. The sense of saddest estrangement, yet the sense also of eternal affinity between us and God meet and mingle in the act; breaking into the strains, now penitential and now jubilant, that, to the critic’s reason, may sound at variance but melt into harmony in the ear of a higher love. This twofold aspect devotion must ever have, pale with weeping, flushed with joy; deploring the past, trusting for the future; ashamed of what is, kindled by what is meant to be; shadow behind, and light before. Were we haunted by no presence of sin and want, we should only browse on the pasture of nature; were we stirred by no instinct of a holier kindred, we should not be drawn towards the life of God.
GROWN UP.
Many verses are omitted from this poem for want of space, and the last two are transposed in order.
Where gods are not, spectres rule.
Where children are is a golden age.
A people, like a child, is a separate educational problem.
Novalis.
Once in an age, God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false imagining, an unreal character—but, looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature—loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be. Such friends seem inspired by a divine gift of prophecy—like the mother of St. Augustine, who, in the midst of the wayward, reckless youth of her son, beheld him in a vision, standing, clothed in white, a ministering priest at the right hand of God—as he has stood for long ages since. Could a mysterious foresight unveil to us this resurrection form of the friends with whom we daily walk, compassed about with mortal infirmity, we should follow them with faith and reverence through all the disguises of human faults and weaknesses, “waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God.”
Harriet Beecher Stowe (The Minister’s Wooing).
Here two fine thoughts of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Browning are inspired by the vision of Monica, the saintly mother of the great St. Augustine (354-430).
This is a good illustration of the need of notes. Without a reference to St. Monica’s vision, I think that readers would be repelled, rather than attracted, by Mrs. Browning’s sonnet. It does not accord with one’s sense of modesty that a lady should say to her lover, “My unattractive person and incurable illness turned other men away, but you saw that, behind all this, I was ‘a patient angel waiting for a place in the new Heavens.’” I myself could not understand how Mrs. Browning could write and her husband could publish this poem, until Hodgson, in one of his letters to me, referred to “the use made by Mrs. Browning of St. Monica’s vision in one of her sonnets.”
The sonnet is not quoted as one of the finest of the series.
I have placed Mrs. Stowe’s quotation first for an obvious reason; but The Minister’s Wooing was published in 1859, while the sonnet appeared in 1847.
We live in a world, where one fool makes many fools, but one wise man only a few wise men.
Lichtenberg.
See note to next quotation.
TELLING STORIES.
As Coleridge says in the last quotation, “We receive but what we give.” We bring with us the mind that sees, and the feelings and emotions with which we contemplate the universe; and, so far as use, habit, and other causes still the activity and lessen the receptivity of the mind and spirit, the world around us becomes less instinct with life and beauty.
Putting aside the question whether, as Wordsworth says in his great Ode,
it will be familiar to anyone who has a sympathetic, appreciative sense that the child’s outlook on the world around him is very different from our own. It has in him a more intense emotional reaction. He sees it with a freshness and wonder unfelt by us, because our sensibility is blunted and less vivid. And for the same reason that we trust our faculties in their prime rather than in their degeneration, so the fresh and clear emotional response of a child’s nature represents more truthful appreciation than our own. Our sensibility is blunted, not only by use and habit, but also by the hardening and coarsening experiences of our lives; and also again by the development of intellect, which grows largely at the expense of the emotions. We lose the transparent soul of the child, his simple faith and trusting nature. To anyone who cannot feel the difference between the child’s outlook and his own, this will convey no meaning—and words cannot assist him. It is as if one tried to describe love to a person who has never loved, or a religious experience to one who has never had such an experience, indeed, in both love and religious experience, there is the same child-like attitude of pure emotion; and hence Christ’s comparison of His true followers to “little children.” Poetry, music, love of nature, and the highest art produce in us at times the same indefinable feeling and give us back for evanescent periods the fresh, clear, emotional sensibility of a child.
In Edward Fitzgerald’s Euphranor, at the point where Wordsworth’s ode is being discussed, the following passage is interesting:—
“I have heard tell of another poet’s saying that he knew of no human outlook so solemn as that from an infant’s eyes; and how it was from those of his own he learned that those of the Divine Child in Raffaelle’s Sistine Madonna were not overcharged with expression, as he had previously thought they might be.”
“Yes,” said I, “that was on the occasion, I think, of his having watched his child one morning worshipping the sunbeam on the bedpost—I suppose the worship of wonder.... If but the philosopher or poet could live in the child’s brain for a while!”
(The poet referred to was Tennyson, see Memoir by his son, the baby in question, Vol. I., 357).
THE REVELATION
The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself![21] To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily, through long years of the foretime, hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to their victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to-day. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along, and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.
William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience).
Et in Arcadia ego.
(I too have been in Arcady.)
Anon.
Arcadia was a mountainous district in Greece which was taken to be the deal of pastoral simplicity and rural happiness—as in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and other literature. It was famous for its musicians and a favourite haunt of Pan.
The saying is best known from the fine landscape in the Louvre by N. Poussin (1594-1665). In part of the landscape is a tomb on which these words are written, and some young people are seen reading them. I learn, however, from King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations that the words had been previously written on a picture by Bart. Schidone (1570-1615), where two young shepherds are looking at a skull.
The meaning intended was that death came even to the joyous shepherds of Arcady. But the quotation is now used in a more general sense. “I too had my golden days of youth and love and happiness.”
It often happens that those are the best people, whose characters have been most injured by slanderers; as we usually find that to be the sweetest fruit which the birds have been pecking at.
Alexander Pope.
There are many flowers of heavenly origin in this world; they do not flourish in this climate but are properly heralds, clear-voiced messengers of a better existence: Religion is one; Love is another.
Novalis.
ON DYING
On n’a pas d’antécédent pour cela. Il faut improviser—c’est donc si difficile. (Death admits of no rehearsal.)
Amiel.
C’est le maître jour; c’est le jour juge de tous les autres. (It is the master-day; the day that judges all the others.)
Montaigne.
Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower, where I thought a flower would grow.
Abraham Lincoln.
Why describe our life-history as a state of waking rather than of sleep? Why assume that sleep is the acquired, vigilance the normal condition? It would not be hard to defend the opposite thesis. The newborn infant might urge with cogency that his habitual state of slumber was primary, as regards the individual, ancestral as regards the race; resembling at least, far more closely than does our adult life, a primitive or protozoic habit. “Mine,” he might say, “is a centrally stable state. It would need only some change in external conditions (as the permanent immersion in a nutritive fluid) to be safely and indefinitely maintained. Your waking state, on the other hand, is centrally unstable. While you talk and bustle around me you are living on your physiological capital, and the mere prolongation of vigilance is torture and death.”
A paradox such as this forms no part of my argument; but it may remind us that physiology at any rate hardly warrants us in speaking of our waking state as if that alone represented our true selves, and every deviation from it must be at best a mere interruption. Vigilance in reality is but one of two co-ordinate phases of our personality, which we have acquired or differentiated from each other during the stages of our long evolution.
F. W. H. Myers (Multiplex Personality).
This is from an article in The Nineteenth Century for November, 1886, in which Myers urged the study of the trance-personalities that exhibit themselves under hypnotism. In his Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death his views on sleep may be very briefly summarized as follows: In the low forms of animal life there is an undifferentiated state, neither sleep nor waking, and this is also seen in our prenatal and earliest infantile life. In life generally the waking time can exist only for brief periods continuously. We cannot continue life without resort to the fuller vitality which sleep brings to us. Again, from the original undifferentiated state, our waking life has been developed by practical needs; the faculties required for our earthly life then become intensified, but by natural selection other faculties and sensations (including those which connect us with the spiritual world) are dropped out of our consciousness. The state of sleep cannot be regarded as the mere absence of waking faculties. In this state we have some faint glimmer of the other faculties and sensations in various forms—dreams, somnambulism, etc. Myers then develops the theory that the relations of hysteria and genius to ordinary life correspond to those of somnambulism and hypnotic trance to sleep; and he arrives at the question of self-suggestion and hypnotism generally.
Thus in sleep there are, first, certain physiological changes (including a greater control of the physical organism, as seen in the muscular powers of somnambulists); no length of time spent lying down awake in darkness and silence will give the recuperative effect that even a few moments of sleep will give. But also, secondly, we find existing in sleep the other faculties withdrawn from use in ordinary waking life. Thus during sleep we find memory revived, problems unexpectedly solved, poems like “Kubla Khan” composed, and many intense sensations and emotions experienced. Beyond these powers again Myers finds in sleep still higher powers which seem to connect us with the spiritual world. Hence the advisability of studying the phenomena of sleep and investigating it experimentally by employing hypnotism.
William James adopted much the same view as Myers (see, for example, The Varieties of Religious Experience). But much has been written of late about sub-consciousness and about dreams; and the tendency is rather to follow Martineau’s view of mental development—that the lower nervous centres are unconscious “habits” deposited from the old intelligence (see p. 304). Thus, for instance, memories of the past would be recorded in the sub-conscious, but there is nothing to be found there of a higher character than in the conscious self. In sleep, the waking control being removed, our dreams reveal impulses and desires that have been inhibited or kept under in waking life, but do not reveal anything of the higher indicated by Myers. However, although it is too large a subject to discuss here, there is a vast deal yet to be explained, as, for example, inspiration, and what we used to call “unconscious cerebration,” and the amazing results of hypnotism and suggestion. Also who or what is it that composes the dream-story, or who or what makes us act or dream the story?
Without good nature man is but a better kind of vermin.
Extreme self-lovers will set a man’s house on fire, though it were but to roast their eggs.
Bacon.
The Ship is the ship of life. The first line is taken from Wordsworth’s sonnet, “Where lies the land to which yon Ship must go.”
THE CORAL REEF
BENEATH MY WINDOW
MUSIC
THE MARTYR
These fresh, clear, spontaneous verses have a special value. They bring us a promise of Spring—the message that we may still hope for a revival of English Poetry.
Therefore, I have included them (in this third edition) although they are outside the general scope of my book.
Miss Betty Bray has been writing since she was seven years of age. She writes with great facility and has already filled two manuscript books. Her verses are entirely her own, no defects being pointed out or other assistance or guidance given her.
She was born on June 11th, 1906. She is the daughter of Mr. Denys de Saumarez Bray, C.S.I., and the grand-niece of my late partner the Hon. Sir John Bray, K.C.M.G., who was Premier of South Australia. Her grandfather was born in Adelaide.
Milton refers to his blindness in this and other passages—as in the well known sonnet.
THE ATTAINMENT
The poor man wants a new cloak, but his wife objects.
The verse is sung by Iago (Othello, Act II., Sc. 3), the words being a little different.
LOVE’S LAST MESSAGES
Beddoes intended to destroy this poem, but it was published without his knowledge. This is one of the cases where artists have shown themselves incapable critics of their own work.
On Dreamthorp centuries have fallen, and have left no more trace than have last winter’s snowflakes. This commonplace sequence and flowing on of life is immeasurably affecting. That winter morning when Charles lost his head in front of the banqueting-hall of his own palace, the icicles hung from the eaves of the houses here, and the clown kicked the snowballs from his clouted shoon, and thought but of his supper when, at three o’clock, the red sun set in the purple mist.... Battles have been fought, kings have died, history has transacted itself; but, all unheeding and untouched, Dreamthorp has watched apples-trees redden, and wheat ripen, and smoked its pipe, and quaffed its mug of beer, and rejoiced over its newborn children, and with proper solemnity carried its dead to the churchyard.
Alexander Smith (Dreamthorp).
“Do they call ungratefulness a virtue?”
Quixotism, or Utopianism: that is another of the devil’s pet words. I believe the quiet admission which we are all of us so ready to make, that, because things have long been wrong, it is impossible they should ever be right, is one of the most fatal sources of misery and crime from which this world suffers. Whenever you hear a man dissuading you from attempting to do well, on the ground that perfection is “Utopian,” beware of that man. Cast the word out of your dictionary altogether.
John Ruskin (Lectures on Architecture and Painting).
Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated character among my acquaintance: not one Christian: not one but undervalues Christianity—singly, what am I to do? Wesley (have you read his life?) was he not an elevated character? Wesley has said “Religion is not a solitary thing.” Alas! it necessarily is so with me, or next to solitary.
Charles Lamb (1775-1834) (Letter to S. T. Coleridge, Jan. 10, 1797).
Poor lovable Charles Lamb! When he wrote this he was only twenty-one years of age, he had already been himself confined in an asylum, and now his sister in a moment of madness had killed her mother. When afterwards he was allowed to take care of Mary, he had still to take her back to the asylum from time to time, as a fresh attack of mania began to manifest itself. The picture of the weeping brother and sister on their way to the asylum is dreadfully sad. The passage seems interesting because of Lamb’s reference to Wesley.
Madeline is lying asleep in bed—but the last line could be used in quite another sense as prettily expressing rejuvenation.
Autres temps, autres moeurs! Aldrich was Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, when he wrote these lines.
INSCRIPTION FOR A BUST OF CUPID
UP-HILL
Matthew Arnold says of this: “No, it is not all; but it is true, deeply true, and we have deep need to know it.... To see things in their beauty is to see things in their truth, and Keats knew it. ‘What the Imagination seizes on as Beauty must be Truth,’ he says in prose.”
Aux coeurs blessés—l’ombre et le silence.
(For the wounded heart—shade and silence.)
Balzac (Le Médecin de Campagne).
The huge mass of black crags that towered at the head of the gloomy defile was exactly what one would picture as the enchanted castle of the evil magician, within sight of which all vegetation withered, looking from over the desolate valley of ruins to the barren shore strewed with its sad wreckage, and the wild ocean beyond....
The land-crabs certainly looked their part of goblin guardians of the approaches to the wicked magician’s fastness. They were fearful as the firelight fell on their yellow cynical faces, fixed as that of the sphinx, but fixed in a horrid grin. Those who have observed this foulest species of crab will know my meaning. Smelling the fish we were cooking they came down the mountains in thousands upon us. We threw them lumps of fish, which they devoured with crab-like slowness, yet perseverance.
It is a ghastly sight, a land-crab at his dinner. A huge beast was standing a yard from me; I gave him a portion of fish, and watched him. He looked at me straight in the face with his outstarting eyes, and proceeded with his two front claws to tear up his food, bringing bits of it to his mouth with one claw, as with a fork. But all this while he never looked at what he was doing; his face was fixed in one position, staring at me. And when I looked around, lo! there were half a dozen others all steadily feeding, but with immovable heads turned to me with that fixed basilisk stare. It was indeed horrible, and the effect was nightmarish in the extreme. While we slept that night they attacked us, and would certainly have devoured us, had we not awoke; and did eat holes in our clothes. One of us had to keep watch, so as to drive them from the other two, otherwise we should have had no sleep.
Imagine a sailor cast alone on this coast, weary, yet unable to sleep a moment on account of these ferocious creatures. After a few days of an existence full of horror he would die raving mad, and then be consumed in an hour by his foes. In all Dante’s Inferno there is no more horrible a suggestion of punishment than this.
E. F. Knight (The Cruise of the “Falcon”).
The scene is in the Island of Trinidad, off the coast of Brazil.
As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely things are also necessary: the wild flower by the wayside, as well as the tended corn; and the wild birds and creatures of the forest, as well as the tended cattle: because man doth not live by bread alone, but also by the desert manna; by every wondrous word and unknowable work of God.
John Ruskin.
LOVE
Cet égoisme à deux.
De Staël.
It is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife and enmity of three.
Washington Irving.
I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight,—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our nature is this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears.... In these depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments—the veto, for example, which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith—sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth.
William James (Is Life Worth Living?).
(Mr. T. R. Glover in The Jesus of History points out that when Christ said “Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations” (Luke xxii, 26), He meant that the disciples had helped Him by their fidelity.)
The following is from Professor Hobhouse’s Questions of War and Peace, repeating what he had set out at length in his Development and Purpose (I take the quotation from The Spectator review, as the book is not yet procurable in Australia):
“I think, therefore, that we must go back into ourselves for faith, and away from ourselves into the world for reason. The deeper we go into ourselves the more we throw off forms and find the assurance not only that the great things exist, but that they are the heart of our lives, and, since after all we are of one stock, they must be at the heart of your lives as well as mine. You say there are bad men and wars and cruelties and wrong, I say all[166] these are the collision of undeveloped forms. What is the German suffering from but a great illusion that the State is something more than man, and that power is more than justice! Strip him of this and he is a man like yourself, pouring out his blood for the cause that he loves, and that you and I detest. Probe inwards, then, and you find the same spring of life everywhere and it is good. Look outwards, and you find, as you yourself admit the slow movement towards a harmony which just means that these impulses of primeval energy come, so to say, to understand one another. Every form they take as they grow will provoke conflict, perish, and be cast aside until the whole unites, and there you have the secret of your successive efforts and failures which yet leave something behind them. God is not the creator who made the world in six days, rested on the seventh and saw that it was good. He is growing in the actual evolution of the world.”
This poem was written before Blake was fourteen years of age.
The five quotations above are from a series of word-pictures (see p. 85).
SHE COMES AS COMES THE SUMMER NIGHT
This is from the author’s “Purple and Gold,” a book of poems published in Melbourne (Thomas C. Lothian, publisher).
No indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness.
G. MacDonald (Robert Falconer).
WHEN LOVE MEETS LOVE
BETWEEN OUR FOLDING LIPS
Compare the well-known lines by George MacDonald:
The suggestion that we are the result of God’s thought appears elsewhere in MacDonald, as in Robert Falconer:
If God were thinking me—ah! But if He be only dreaming me, I shall go mad.
And in The Marquis of Lossie:
I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first.
Checkle = chuckle.
Often ascribed to the Earl of Rochester. See Notes and Queries July 18, 1896.
Mr. Edmunds, when this was written in 1880, was a young English poet and spiritualist, but has since settled in Philadelphia. He has written a number of works, the principal being Buddhist and Christian Gospels now First Compared from the Originals.
In 1883 he was cataloguing a library at Sunderland, and came across books on the Alps, etc., by a Rev. Leslie Stephen. He wrote to the publishers to find out if they were by the same writer as the Leslie Stephen who had written on Ethics. Sir (then Mr.) Leslie Stephen had just been appointed Clark Lecturer at Cambridge. He replied to Edmunds, “I am one person,” adding that he had given up holy orders. Edmunds replied:
SPIRITUALISM
See note to previous quotation. This poem was written in 1883.
Although I preserved these verses, I may add that I had no interest whatever in spiritualism, permeated as it was with childishness and fraud. But, nevertheless, it (together with the so-called “Theosophy”) led to the happy result that the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882. Although spiritualism did good in this way, its unhappy associations do harm to the Society and hamper it in the important work it has carried on during the last thirty-eight years. Popular prejudice continues to associate it with the old spiritualism, and in consequence no proper attention is paid to its intensely interesting and most valuable investigations. For example, there are, apart from Public Libraries and Universities, only six members or associates in the whole of Australia! And yet, besides important work in other directions, it must be admitted by any open-minded person that the evidence collected by the Society that the dead (by telepathy or otherwise) communicate with the living is unanswerable.
He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed.
Thomas Fuller.
This refers to the French proverb, “Il ne faut pas vendre la peau de l’ours avant de l’avoir tué,” or, as we say, “Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.”
Habit dulls the senses and puts the critical faculty to sleep. The fierceness and hardness of ancient manners is apparent to us, but the ancients themselves were not shocked by sights which were familiar to them. To us it is sickening to think of the gladiatorial show, of the massacres common in Roman warfare, of the infanticide practised by grave and respectable citizens, who did not merely condemn their children to death, but often in practice, as they well knew, to what was still worse—a life of prostitution and beggary. The Roman regarded a gladiatorial show as we regard a hunt; the news of the slaughter of two hundred thousand Helvetians by Cæsar or half a million Jews by Titus excited in his mind a thrill of triumph; infanticide committed by a friend appeared to him a prudent measure of household economy.
Sir J. R. Seeley (Ecce Homo).
It is still more important to realize that the exposure of children was a recognized practice also among the Greeks, and that no one, not even Plato, their noblest philosopher, saw anything wrong in it. It is only by letting the mind dwell on such facts as these, until their significance is fully appreciated, that we can realize the width and depth of the great gulf that separates the Pagan and the Christian, the ancient and the modern world. Take this one fact only: imagine the Greek father looking at his helpless babe and coldly deciding that to rear it will be inconvenient,[24] or that there are already enough children to divide the inheritance, or that the child is sickly or deformed, or that its person offends his idea of beauty—and then consigning his own offspring to slavery, prostitution, or death! (The child would either die or be picked up to be reared for some such purpose.) Even in the very imperfect state of our own civilization, we at least have children’s hospitals and crèches, and are inflamed with righteous rage when even an unknown baby is ill-treated. (We, indeed, go further, and have laws and societies for prevention of cruelty to animals.)
The consideration of such a fact leads us also to inquire as to the relations of husband and wife, seeing that the woman would have at least the affection for her offspring that is common among the lower animals. We then find that the modern chivalrous idea of womanhood was unknown to the Greeks; the wife was not educated, and was considered an inferior being; she was married mainly in order to provide sons to carry out certain ritual observances necessary for the father’s welfare after death; she was kept in an almost Eastern seclusion (and therefore had to improve her pallid complexion by paint); she would associate mainly with the children and slaves. We also find that fidelity of the husband to the wife was neither required nor esteemed; and that there was little marital love or family life. (Plato in his model Republic would abolish both the latter, for there was to be promiscuity of women, and all children were to be brought up by the State.)
Considering further this practice of exposing children, we realize that it indicates the want of pity for the helpless and suffering, which is seen among the lower animals (but with exceptions even among them). From this we may reasonably infer that the Greeks would show little humanity in treating other helpless or suffering people, the sick or distressed, dependents or slaves, conquered enemies or others in their power. (In this respect, however, they, as an intellectual people, would subject themselves to and be controlled by necessary social laws and practical considerations; and also, as a fact, they at times showed generosity to a valiant foe.) Again we can infer that, where even the spirit of mercy was so wanting, the gospel of love could not possibly exist, and that the Greeks lived on a far lower moral plane than ours. These questions are far too large to discuss in this book, and I must leave them to be dealt with elsewhere.
But, even from this very small portion of the available evidence, we can arrive at three resulting facts: First, that when in translations from the Greek we find such words as “kindness,” “love,” “morality,” “purity,”[174] “virtue,” “religion,” etc., they have for us a far larger and higher content than the Greek words in the original; secondly, that therefore, the reader must get incorrect impressions of Greek literature and thought; and, thirdly, that truly marvellous as the Greeks were in art and literature, the current conception of them as a noble-minded and refined people is erroneous.
In referring to the Greeks, one needs to limit the people and period, and I am referring to the great age of the Attic or Athenian Greeks, say the Fifth Century, B.C. There would, of course, be gradations of character among them, and, no doubt, some would be kind-hearted, others would have affection for their wives, and so on. But this can only be assumption, for there is little in their literature to support it. This will be seen if the evidence adduced by Mr. Livingstone (“The Greek Genius,” pp. 117-122) is carefully and critically examined. (His references to Homer, who lived in a far distant age must be omitted.) Also the fact that Herodotus, in the course of his narrative, tells us that some men of another state had a moment of compassion for a baby whom they were about to slay, does not prove in the slightest degree that he was himself humane. The wording of Mr. Livingstone’s translation, p. 118, “It happened by a divine chance that the baby smiled, etc.,” would appear to confirm this view of his; but the Greek words simply mean that a god by chance intervened. Knowing what we do of the Greek gods, that intervention would certainly not be actuated by any kindly feeling towards the infant—the object presumably was that the child should live to fulfil the destiny prophesied by the Delphic Oracle. (Herodotus was a typical Greek to whom the world was peopled with gods, and he sees them constantly interposing in human affairs.) As regards the exposure of children, the point is that it was a recognized and common practice, duly sanctioned by law, and never condemned by any writer. Indeed Plato and Aristotle definitely approve of it, and in Plato’s Ideal Republic the weakly and deformed children were to be killed by the State.
As regards the current conception of the Greeks, Shelley in his “Preface to Hellas” describes them as “those glorious beings whom the imagination almost refuses to figure to itself as belonging to our kind.” Similar statements could be gathered from innumerable English and European writers.
THE PACE THAT KILLS
Cato said ‘he had rather people should inquire why he had not a statue erected to his memory, than why he had.’
Plutarch (Political Precepts).
CHAMOUNI AND RYDAL.
Wordsworth lived at Rydal Mount. These verses were published in Macmillan’s, 1879.
“Nor something fairer far.” In Sir F. Younghusband’s Kashmir (1911) there is another suggestion, supplementary to this: “There came upon me this thought, which doubtless has occurred to many another besides myself—why the scene should so influence me and yet make no impression on the men about me. Here were men with far keener eyesight than my own, and around me were animals with eyesight keener still.... Clearly it is not the eye, but the soul that sees. But then comes the still further reflection: what may there not be staring me straight in the face which I am as blind to as the Kashmir stags are to the beauties amidst which they spend their entire lives? The whole panorama may be vibrating with beauties man has not yet the soul to see. Some already living, no doubt, see beauties that we ordinary men cannot appreciate. It is only a century ago that mountains were looked upon as hideous. And in the long centuries to come may we not develop a soul for beauties unthought of now? Undoubtedly we must. And often in reverie on the mountains I have tried to imagine what still further loveliness they may yet possess for men.”
He that dies in an earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot blood, who for the time scarce feels the hurt; and therefore a mind, fixed and bent upon somewhat that is good, doth best avert the dolours of death.
Bacon.
As Dr. Johnson said; “In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.”
“En Angleterre,” said a cynical Dutch diplomatist, “numéro deux va chez numéro un, pour s’en glorifier auprès de numéro trois.”
(In England, Number Two goes to Number One’s house in order to boast about it to Number Three.)
Laurence Oliphant (Piccadilly).
Our ideas, like the children of our youth, often die before us, and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are fast approaching—where, though the brass and marble may remain, the inscriptions are effaced by time and the imagery moulders away.
John Locke (1632-1704).
What makes such a passage attractive is its use of poetic imagery; and yet Locke had no regard for poetry. See next quotation.
If these may be any reasons against children’s making Latin themes at school, I have much more to say, and of more weight, against their making verses—verses of any sort. For if he has no genius to Poetry, ’tis the most unreasonable thing in the world to torment a child and waste his time about that which can never succeed; and if he have a poetic vein, ’tis to me the strangest thing in the world that the father should desire or suffer it to be cherished or improved. Methinks the parents should labour to have it stifled and suppressed as much as may be; and I know not what reason a father can have to wish his son a poet, who does not desire to have him bid defiance to all other callings and business.... For it is very seldom seen that any one discovers mines of gold or silver in Parnassus.... Poetry and Gaming usually go together.... If, therefore, you would not have your son the fiddle to every jovial company, without whom the Sparks could not relish their wine, nor know how to pass an afternoon idly; if you would not have him to waste his time and estate to divert others, and contemn the dirty acres left him by his ancestors, I do not think you will very much care he should be a Poet.
John Locke (1632-1704) (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693).
Locke was writing during the dreary Dryden period, when poetry had so greatly degenerated since the brilliant Elizabethan epoch. He himself evidently had no interest in poetry. We know that he did not appreciate Milton (whose Paradise Lost appeared in 1667, when Locke was in his prime).
Compare with the above quotation p. 357.
INDWELLING.
As in other cases mentioned in the Preface, I find that these lines, so familiar in my day, appear to be unknown to younger men.
ON BLACKSTONE’S COMMENTARIES.
In taking leave of our Author (Sir William Blackstone) I finish gladly with this pleasing peroration: a scrutinizing judgment, perhaps, would not be altogether satisfied with it; but the ear is soothed by it, and the heart is warmed.
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) (A Fragment of Government).
I think it worth while quoting from my notes this amusing piece of sarcasm aimed by a young man of twenty-eight at the most renowned legal writer of the time. A Fragment of Government (1776), the first of Bentham’s works, not only showed the utter folly of Blackstone’s praise of the English constitution, but also laid the foundation of political science. (The passage, which the quotation refers to, is in Sec. 2 of the Introduction to the Commentaries, “Thus far as to the right of the supreme power to make law ... public tranquillity.”)
Not only was the English constitution a subject of eulogy in Bentham’s day, but also English law, then in a most barbarous state, was alleged to be the perfection of human reason! Through the efforts of this great and original thinker many dreadful abuses were removed, but it is a remarkable illustration of the blind strength of English conservatism that his[182] wise counsel has not yet been followed in many exceedingly important directions.
In the seventy-eighty period, with which this book mainly deals there was a strong agitation for law reform, which had some results.
It was the boast of Augustus, that he found Rome of brick and left it of marble. But how much nobler will be our Sovereign’s boast when he shall have it to say that he found law dear, and left it cheap; found it a sealed book—left it a living letter; found it the patrimony of the rich—left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the two-edged sword of craft and oppression—left it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence!
Lord Brougham (1778-1868) (Speech in Parliament, 1828).
It would indeed be a proud boast—but not one of these objects has yet been achieved.
When Lord Ellenborough was trying one of the Government charges against Horne Tooke, he found occasion to praise the impartial manner in which justice is administered. “In England, Mr. Tooke, the law is open to all men, rich or poor.” “Yes, my lord,” answered the prisoner, “and so is the London Tavern.”
Henry S. Leigh (Jeux d’Esprit).
The same story is told in Rogers’ Table Talk, but a different judge is named. (Probably both are wrong, but it is immaterial.) The London Tavern was where Horne Tooke’s Constitutional Society met, and must have been often referred to during the trial; but of course the meaning simply is that the throne of justice cannot be approached with an empty purse.
Revenons à nos moutons.
(Let us return to our sheep.)
(La Farce de Maistre Pierre Patelin, Anon. 15 Cent.).
In the farce, a cloth merchant, who is suing his shepherd for stolen sheep, discovers also that the attorney on the other side is a man who had robbed him of some cloth. Dropping the charge against the shepherd, he begins accusing the lawyer of his offence; and, to recall him to the point, the judge impatiently interrupts him with Sus revenons à nos moutons, “Come, let us get back to our sheep.”
Compare Martial VI, 19: “My suit has nothing to do with assault, or battery, or poisoning, but is about three goats, which, I complain, have been stolen by my neighbour. This the judge desires to have proved to him; but you, with swelling words and extravagant gestures, dilate on the Battle of Cannae, the Mithridatic war, and the perjuries of the insensate Carthaginians, the Syllae, the Marii, and the Mucii. It is time, Postumus, to say something about my three goats.”
The reference to the French play I owe to King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations.
(The wife of a poor man deserted him for another man, and he married again. On being convicted for bigamy Mr. Justice Maule sentenced him as follows:) Prisoner at the bar: You have been convicted of the offence of bigamy, that is to say, of marrying a woman while you had a wife still alive, though it is true she has deserted you and is living in adultery with another man. You have, therefore, committed a crime against the laws of your country, and you have also acted under a very serious misapprehension of the course which you ought to have pursued. You should have gone to the ecclesiastical court and there obtained against your wife a decree a mensa et thoro. You should then have brought an action in the courts of common law and recovered, as no doubt you would have recovered, damages against your wife’s paramour. Armed with these decrees, you should have approached the legislature and obtained an Act of Parliament which would have rendered you free and legally competent to marry the person whom you have taken on yourself to marry with no such sanction. It is quite true that these proceedings would have cost you many hundreds of pounds, whereas you probably have not as many pence. But the law knows no distinction between rich and poor. The sentence of the court upon you, therefore, is that you be imprisoned for one day, which period has already been exceeded, as you have been in custody since the commencement of the assizes.
Sir W. H. Maule (1788-1858).
This fine piece of irony, well known to lawyers, materially helped to end the old bad state of the law of divorce. We need more men of the same stamp to draw attention to other abuses.
Is this pleading causes, Cinna? Is this speaking eloquently to say nine words in ten hours? Just now you asked with a loud voice for four more clepsydrae.[26] What a long time you take to say nothing, Cinna!
Martial VIII, 7.
In Racine’s comedy, Les Plaideurs, Act III, Sc. III, a prolix advocate begins his speech by referring to the Creation of the world. “Avocat, passons au déluge” (Let us get along to the Deluge), says the judge. See also The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Sc. I:—
Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing; more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them; and, when you have them, they are not worth the search.
“There’s nae place like hame,” quoth the de’il, when he found himself in the Court o’ Session.
Scottish Proverb.
I understand that the original wording was “‘Hame’s hamely,’ quoth the de’il, etc.” Perhaps the only English Institution which the Hindu appreciates is that of English Law—but not as a system of Justice. To his acute mind it is a remarkably clever and most ingenious gambling game. It is said that two Hindus will even fabricate mutual complaints, the one against the other, to bring before the Courts—and that it is almost equivalent to a patent of nobility to have had a case taken to the Privy Council. The following incident actually happened to a friend of mine who was Resident in a Native State. Sitting in his judicial capacity he reproved a Hindu gentleman for his excessive litigiousness. The latter retorted that it was a case of the pot calling the kettle black; that he had seen the Resident put his rupees on the totalisator the day before; and the British race-course wasn’t a bit more of a gamble than the British Law Courts. For his part he preferred to have his flutter on the latter.
BALDER’S RETURN TO EARTH[27]
I retain this extract from Buchanan’s poem for the reason set out in the preface.
I have “Compensation” as the title of these verses, but it must surely be incorrect. If a man passes through life unrecognised by kindred souls, it is the reverse of ‘compensation’ to him if he also fails to recognise other sympathetic natures.
The author is, or was, an American Catholic priest.
ALL SUNG
Mr. le Gallienne was not the first to complain that poetic subjects were exhausted. A recent Spectator quotes the following from Choerilus, a Samian poet of the Fifth Century, B.C. (2,000 years before Shakespeare): “Happy was the follower of the muses in that time, when the field was still virgin soil. But now when all has been divided up and the arts have reached their limits, we are left behind in the race, and, look where’er we may, there is no room anywhere for a new-yoked chariot to make its way to the front.” (St. John Thackeray, Anthologia Graeca).
Go out into the woods and valleys, when your heart is rather harassed than bruised, and when you suffer from vexation more than grief. Then the trees all hold out their arms to you to relieve you of the burthen of your heavy thoughts; and the streams under the trees glance at you as they run by, and will carry away your trouble along with the fallen leaves; and the sweet-breathing air[189] will draw it off together with the silver multitudes of the dew. But let it be with anguish or remorse in your heart that you go forth into Nature, and instead of your speaking her language, you make her speak yours. Your distress is then infused through all things and clothes all things, and Nature only echoes and seems to authenticate your self-loathing or your hopelessness. Then you find the device of your sorrow on the argent shield of the moon, and see all the trees of the field weeping and wringing their hands with you, while the hills, seated at your side in sackcloth, look down upon you prostrate, and reprove you like the comforters of Job.
Robert Alfred Vaughan (1823-1857) (Hours with the Mystics).
If this fine writer had lived, much might have been expected of him. He is one of the many instances of “the fatal thirty-fours and thirty-sevens.”
The gases gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant and grows; arrives at the quadruped and walks; arrives at the man and thinks.
Emerson (Uses of Great Men).
HIAWATHA’S PHOTOGRAPHING
It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man’s death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too,—as if it were comparatively a light thing to fail in love and reverence to the brother who has to climb the whole toilsome steep with us, and all our tears and tenderness were due to the one who is spared that hard journey.
George Eliot (Janet’s Repentance).
It has been said by Schiller, in his letters on aesthetic culture, that the sense of beauty never farthered the performance of a single duty.
Although this gross and inconceivable falsity will hardly be accepted by any one in so many terms, seeing that there are few so utterly lost but that they receive, and know that they receive, at certain moments, strength of some kind, or rebuke from the appealings of outward things; and that it is not possible for a Christian man to walk across so much as a rood of the natural earth, with mind unagitated and rightly poised, without receiving strength and hope from stone, flower, leaf or sound, nor without a sense of a dew falling upon him out of the sky; though I say this falsity is not wholly and in terms admitted, yet it seems to be partly and practically so in much of the doing and teaching even of holy men, who in the recommending of the love of God to us, refer but seldom to those things in which it is most abundantly and immediately shown; though they insist much on his giving of bread, and raiment, and health (which he gives to all inferior creatures), they require us not to thank him for that glory of his works which he has permitted us alone to perceive: they tell us often to meditate in the closet, but they send us not, like Isaac, into the fields at even; they dwell on the duty of self-denial, but they exhibit not the duty of delight.[29]
John Ruskin (Modern Painters, III, I, XV).
“All (that) I could never be, All (that) man ignored in me.” All that the world could not know, a man’s thoughts, desires, and intentions, all that he wished or tried to be or do, although unknown to his fellows, have their value in God’s eyes. Man is the Cup, whose shape (i.e., character) has been formed by the wheel of the great Potter, God. See further as to this Eastern metaphor.
The late Mrs. A. W. Verrall, widow of Doctor Verrall and herself a brilliant scholar, pointed out in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, June, 1911, a probable connection between “Rabbi ben Ezra,” and “Omar Khayyam,” and I do not think that her interesting views have been published elsewhere.
Both poems centre round the idea of man as a Cup, but treat the metaphor from very different standpoints. Omar’s cup (quoting from the first edition) is to be filled with “Life’s Liquor” (ii), with “Wine! Red Wine!” (vi), with what “clears To-Day of past regrets” (xx); the object is to drown the memory of the fact that “without asking” we are “hurried hither” and “hurried hence” (xxx); the “Ruby Vintage” is to be drunk “with old Khayyam,” and “when the Angel with his darker Draught draws up” to us we are to take that draught without shrinking (xlviii). On the other hand Rabbi ben Ezra’s Cup is to be used by the great Potter. We are told to look “not down but up! to uses of a cup” (30). The Rabbi asks “God who mouldest men ... to take and use His work” (32) and the ultimate purpose of the Cup, when it has been made “perfect as planned,” is to slake the thirst of the Master.
The comparison of man to the Clay of the Potter in both poems is not sufficient in itself to show any connection between them. Such a comparison is found, as Fitzgerald reminds us, “in the Literature of the World from the Hebrew Prophets to the present time”[30]; and it is as appropriately employed by the Hebrew as by the Persian thinker. But Mrs. Verrall has other grounds:
The little pamphlet in its brown wrapper containing the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was first published by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859, and, as is well known, attracted so little attention that, although there were only 250 copies, it found its way into the two-penny boxes of the book-sellers, (It now sells for about £50!) But, nevertheless, the poem was eagerly read and enthusiastically praised by a small group, among whom were Swinburne and Rossetti. In 1861 Robert Browning came to live[195] in London, and often saw Rossetti, who was his friend. It is, therefore, very improbable that he did not learn of the poem, which had so impressed Rossetti. In 1864 “Rabbi ben Ezra” was published in the volume called Dramatis Personae.
Again, there is intrinsic evidence that Browning intended a direct refutation of Omar’s theory of life. Compare verses 26 and 27 of “Rabbi ben Ezra” with verses xxxvi and xxxvii of “Omar Khayyam” (first edition).
Omar says that he “watched the Potter thumping his wet clay,” and, thereupon advises:
Rabbi ben Ezra says:
and proceeds:
Although the “carpe diem” (“seize to-day”) theory of life is no doubt common to all literatures, the cumulative effect of Mrs. Verrall’s argument is strong, although not conclusive.
As regards the above verses, compare the next quotation.
Sabaoth, armies, hosts. “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.”
Between the great things that we cannot do, and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing.
Adolph Monod (1802-1856).
Reputation is what men and women think of us; Character is what God and the angels know of us.
Thomas Paine.
Love is the Amen of the Universe.
Novalis.
He (Dr. Johnson) would not allow Scotland to derive any credit from Lord Mansfield, for he was educated in England. “Much,” said he, “may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.”
Boswell (Life of Johnson).
(A Mr. Strahan, a Scotchman, asked Dr. Johnson what he thought of Scotland) “That it is a very vile country to be sure, Sir,” returned for answer Dr. Johnson. “Well, Sir!” replied the other, somewhat mortified, “God made it.” “Certainly he did,” answered Mr. Johnson again, “but we must always remember that he made it for Scotchmen.”
Mrs. Piozzi (Johnsoniana).
These are the two best of Johnson’s chaffing jibes against Scotchmen. The neatness of the latter is, to my mind, spoilt by the words at the end, which I have omitted: “and—comparisons are odious, Mr. Strahan,—but God made hell.” The following may also be quoted as showing both Johnson and that clever charlatan, Wilkes, quizzing Boswell (year 1781):
Wilkes: “Pray, Boswell, how much may be got in a year by an advocate at the Scotch bar?”
Boswell: “I believe two thousand pounds.”
Wilkes: “How can it be possible to spend that money in Scotland?”
Johnson: “Why, Sir, the money may be spent in England; but there is a harder question. If one man in Scotland gets possession of two thousand pounds, what remains for all the rest of the nation?”
Many Scotchmen undoubtedly enjoy chaff against themselves and their country, and I think this was so with Boswell. It is a phase of social psychology that needs explaining.
In these jokes Johnson was, consciously or not, influenced by the fine Royalist poet, John Cleveland (1613-1658); but the latter was very much in earnest. He detested the Scotch for fighting against Charles I. His references to Scotland in The Rebel Scot are wonderfully clever:—
And again:—
God is present by His essence; which, because it is infinite, cannot be contained within the limits of any place; and because He is of an essential purity and spiritual nature, He cannot be undervalued by being supposed present in the places of unnatural uncleanness: because, as the sun, reflecting upon the mud of strands and shores, is unpolluted in its beams, so is God not dishonoured when we suppose Him in every one of His creatures, and in every part of every one of them.
Jeremy Taylor (Holy Living, Ch. 1, Sec. 3).
There is an old Scottish proverb, “The sun is no waur for shining on the midden.”
I dare say Alexander the Great was somewhat staggered in his plans of conquest by Parmenio’s way of putting things. “After you have conquered Persia what will you do?” “Then I shall conquer India.” “After you have conquered India, what will you do?” “Conquer Scythia.” “And after you have conquered Scythia, what will you do?” “Sit down and rest.” “Well,” said Parmenio to the conqueror, “why not sit down and rest now?”
A. K. H. Boyd (The Recreations of a Country Parson).
I include this because it is a good short paraphrase of the actual story of Pyrrhus and Cineas (Plutarch’s Lives—“Pyrrhus”) and because of the curious absurdity of attributing such philosophic advice to the warrior, Parmenio. This general was the only one of Alexander’s old advisers who urged him to invade Asia! (Plutarch’s Lives—“Alexander”).
Sorrow and care and anxiety may quite well live in Elizabethan cottages, grown over with honeysuckle and jasmine; and very sad eyes may look forth from windows around which roses twine.
A. K. H. Boyd (The Recreations of a Country Parson).
This book had a great vogue, but not sufficient merit to preserve it from oblivion.
CANADIAN BOAT-SONG
From the Gaelic.
The authorship of these verses is uncertain, but it probably lies between John Galt, author of Annals of the Parish, and Lockhart, son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott. The verses were quoted by Professor Wilson (Christopher North) in his Noctes Ambrosianae in Blackwood, Sept., 1829, but, because Wilson was not the author, they are not reproduced in his collected works (Blackwood, 1855).
A degenerate Lord, &c. This refers to the eviction of the Highland crofters and cottars. In 1829 the Duke of Hamilton had just cleared the population out of the Isle of Arran.
Sheiling or Shealing, a hut used by shepherds, fishermen, or others for shelter when at work at a distance from home.
Anterôs is the god of mutual love, who punishes those who do not return the love of others, as otherwise his brother Erôs, god of love, will be unhappy.
The fine poem from which this is quoted represents one of the phases of Myers’ experience. It was published in 1882, but written about ten years before. He had then lost his faith in Christianity, but believed in a future life on grounds based partly upon philosophy and partly on “vision.” He had those moments of exaltation when, as he says:
For entrance into the future life, Love and complete Self-surrender are the best equipment for the soul.
Life is short, and we have not too much time for gladdening the lives of those who are travelling the dark road with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind.
Amiel’s Journal.
SELF-SACRIFICE
We bury decay in the earth; we plant in it the perishing; we feed it with offensive refuse: but nothing grows out of it that is not clean; it gives us back life and beauty.
Charles Dudley Warner (My Summer in a Garden).
SOUL’S BEAUTY
Although Rossetti was not a classical student, he seems here to have arrived at the Platonic idea of an abstract Beauty, of whose essence are all beautiful things, “sea or sky or woman.” Love and death, terror and mystery guard her, as a goddess on her throne, and all lovers of the beautiful are worshippers at her shrine.
Thinking is only a dream of feeling; a dead feeling; a pale-grey, feeble life.
Novalis.
A whetstone cannot cut, but it makes iron sharp, and gives it a keen edge.
Isocrates (436-338 B.C.).
This is quoted in Plutarch’s Lives. Isocrates was asked why he taught rhetoric so much and yet spoke so rarely; and this was his reply. Horace (Ars Poetica 304) playfully says that he is no longer able to write verses but he will teach others to write, adding “a whetstone is not used for cutting, but is used for sharpening steel nevertheless.”
The career of Isocrates, “that old man eloquent,”[31] is extremely interesting. He preserved his energy and his influence to the end of his long life of 98 years.
A very musical expression of a very ugly thought.
Women never betray themselves to men as they do to each other.
George Eliot (Middlemarch).
THE RETREAT
I include this poem, although it is in the anthologies, because from my own experience a young reader will not see its beauty without some words of explanation. It is the precursor of the greatest ode ever written, Wordsworth’s[204] Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Wordsworth, Vaughan, and many others believe that we had a separate existence before we came into this world (and there is much in the experience of each of us to warrant that belief). Wordsworth says:
But in order to appreciate either Wordsworth’s or Vaughan’s poem it is not necessary to have this belief in a past separate existence—it is enough to realize that
One may see the small value God has for riches by the people He gives them to.
Alexander Pope.
Browning in his last poem, the well-known “Epilogue,” speaks with another voice. He wishes his friends to think of him after death as he was when alive:—
F. W. H. Myers wrote:—
We need a summons to no houri-haunted paradise, no passionless contemplation, no monotony of prayer and praise; but to endless advance by endless effort, and, if need be, by endless pain. Be it mine, then, to plunge among the unknown Destinies—to dare and still to dare!
Emerson’s heaven also was
In life, Love comes first. Indeed, we only come because Love calls for us. We find it waiting with outstretched arms on arrival. Love is the beginning of everything.
F. W. Boreham (Faces in the Fire).
Tóward, “approaching.”
My closing remark is as to avoiding debates that are in their very nature interminable.... There is a certain intensity of emotion, interest, bias or prejudice if you will, that can neither[206] reason nor be reasoned with. On the purely intellectual side, the disqualifying circumstances are complexity and vagueness. If a topic necessarily hauls in numerous other topics of difficulty, the essay may do something for it, but not the debate. Worst of all is the presence of several large, ill-defined, and unsettled terms. A not unfrequent case is a combination of the several defects, each, perhaps, in a small degree. A tinge of predilection or party, a double or triple complication of doctrines, and one or two hazy terms will make a debate that is pretty sure to end as it began. Thus it is that a question, plausible to appearance, may contain within it capacities of misunderstanding, cross-purposes, and pointless issues, sufficient to occupy the long night of Pandemonium, or beguile the journey to the nearest fixed star.
Alexander Bain (Contemporary Review, April, 1877).
From an address to the Edinburgh University Philosophical Society.
Diogenes, seeing Neptune’s temple with votive pictures of those saved from wreck, says, “Yea, but where are they painted, that have been drowned?”
Bacon.
THE BELLE OF THE BALL-ROOM
A canon of my own in judging verses is that no man has a right to put into metre what he can as well say out of metre. To which I may add, as a corollary, that a fortiore he has no right to put into metre what he can better say out of metre.
W. S. Lilly (Essay on George Eliot).
Aujourd’hui, ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d’être dit, on le chante.
(Now-a-days when a thing is not worth saying they sing it—i.e. put it in a song.)
Beaumarchais (Le Barbier de Séville, Act I. Sc. I.)
I do not know whether I gave you at any time the details of my work here, or the principles upon which I have been proceeding.... Some of the work set down includes Ancient Ethics—which is almost entirely grossly wrong and great rubbish also. This part I have persistently refused to get up, not because I disliked it, but because it is decidedly injurious to warp and[208] twist the brain by impressing it with wrong thoughts and systems—just as it would be insane in the polisher of a mirror to think it would reflect the external world more truly, if he gave it a dint here, a scratch there, a bulge in another place, and so forth. It would take me too long to describe the details. Suffice it to say that one of the examiners in Mental Philosophy and in Moral and Political Philosophy is an old, blind (literally) man of the old school, who gave a very abnormally large amount of questions relating to Ancient Ethics, and an abnormally large amount to the early part of English Ethics—leaving hardly any marks to be scored by thorough understanding and ability to use the principles of the subjects.
The consequence was that those, who had crammed up the earlier text-books and could reproduce them, had an enormous advantage. This old fogey moreover is strongly anti-Spencerian. Indeed I heard that he had objected to my answers because “there was too much of Spencer and myself!” So that instead of criticism and originality, he avowedly preferred mere reproduction, a good example of the slavishness of that method of examination predominant mostly, which, as Spencer wrote to me some time ago, is devised for testing a man’s “power of acquisition instead of using that which has been acquired.”
Richard Hodgson (1855-1905) (Letter, Dec., 1881).
This letter was written to me from Cambridge, when Hodgson (see Preface) had found his immediate prospects blasted by the results of the Moral Science Tripos. No one was placed in the First Class and he (although at the head of the Tripos) only in the Second Class. This meant that he had no hope of a Fellowship, which would have enabled him to go on with original work in philosophy, and he would have to employ his time in earning a livelihood. Added to this was the cruel disappointment to his family and friends.
Hodgson was one of the most gifted men that Australia has produced. He had completed his M.A. and LL.D. courses in Melbourne by 1877, when he was twenty-two years of age, and then, discarding the profession of the law, left for Cambridge to read Mental and Moral Science. While still an undergraduate there he had written an article in reply to T. H. Green, and submitted it to Herbert Spencer, who highly approved of it, and sent it to the Contemporary. However, as stated above, Hodgson’s immediate future depended on the result of the examination. (He was at the time preparing one of the articles he contributed to Mind, and had in view further original work.)
When the result of the Tripos appeared, Henry Sidgwick and Venn who were then Lecturers and by far the best Moral Science men in Cambridge, came to sympathize with Hodgson, on the unfair result. They urged him to go to Germany so that he might acquire that perfect command of the German language which was necessary for his philosophic work. On learning that he was not in a position to do this, Sidgwick[209] insisted—as he said, “in the interests of philosophy”—on defraying the whole of the expenses of Hodgson’s residence in Germany. As he insisted strongly, Hodgson accepted the offer, and went to Jena, armed with a very flattering letter of introduction from Herbert Spencer to Haeckel.
Almost immediately after his return from Germany the Society for Psychical Research was founded, and Hodgson joined it. He came to the conclusion that the work of this Society was more important than any other study, while probably it would also be of fundamental assistance to philosophy. He went out to India in 1884, and thoroughly exposed Madame Blavatsky and her “Theosophy,” and, from about 1886, devoted the rest of his life to Psychical Research. Although maintaining his reading and his intimacy with Henry Sidgwick, William James, and others, his services practically became lost to philosophy. This, however, does not affect the important fact illustrated by the Tripos incident. We learn what ineptitude can exist in a great university, and what grave results must necessarily follow therefrom.
Although Hodgson was writing under stress of a grievous calamity (yet with a dauntless heart—see verse on Dedication page), his remarks on Ancient Ethics are not, in my opinion, exaggerated.
Herbert Spencer’s remark to Hodgson about examinations may also be noted.
In Shelley’s great poem, Prometheus is not merely the Titan who, having stolen fire from heaven to benefit man, was chained to a pillar while an eagle tore at his vitals, he is the spirit of humanity. Man has (through superstition) given the god, Zeus, great powers which he uses to enslave and oppress man’s own mind and body. Ultimately the god is overthrown, Prometheus, the spirit of man, is released, and the world enters upon its progress towards perfection.
This and the following quotations are from a collection of references to Mother-Earth.
An imitation of Stolberg’s Hymne an die Erde.
SONG OF PROSERPINE.
Proserpine, daughter of Ceres, whilst gathering flowers with her playmates at Enna in Sicily, was carried off by Pluto, also called Dis, god of the dead. (For two-thirds, or, according to later writers, one-half of each year, she returns to the earth, bringing spring and summer.)
Hold thee to her breast, give rest in death.
THE MUSICAL INSTRUMENT
There is little merit in inventing a happy idea, or attractive situation, so long as it is only the author’s voice which we hear. As a being whom we have called into life by magic arts, as soon as it has received existence, acts independently of the master’s impulse, so the poet creates his persons, and then watches and relates what they do and say. Such creation is poetry in the literal sense of the term, and its possibility is an unfathomable enigma. The gushing fullness of speech belongs to the poet, and it flows from the lips of each of his magic beings in the thoughts and words peculiar to its nature.
Niebuhr (Letters, &c., Vol. III, 196).
Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but, when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.
Shelley (A Defence of Poetry).
“Loose”—by committing suicide.
When the white block of marble shines so solid and so costly, who remembers that it was once made up of decaying shell and rotting bones and millions of dying insect-lives, pressed to ashes ere the rare stone was?
(Chandos).
The madness that starves and is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods. For it is an insanity unfruitful—except to the future. And for the future, who cares—save those madmen themselves?
... The gods that most of all have pity on man, the gods of the Night and of the Grave.
Our eyes are set to the light, but our feet are fixed in the mire.
(Folle-Farine).
“If the cucumber be bitter, throw it away,” says Antoninus: do the same with a thought.... There is no cucumber so heavy that one cannot throw it over some wall.
Ouida (Tricotrin).
Antoninus, 120-180 A.D., the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, usually known by his first two names Marcus Aurelius, is the author of the well-known Meditations. The quotation is from Bk. VIII., “The gourd is bitter; drop it, then! There are brambles in the path; then turn aside! It is enough. Do not go on to argue, Why pray have these things a place in the world?” etc.
These quotations from Ouida may serve to illustrate the saying of Pliny the Elder, “No book is so bad but some good may be got out of it” (Pliny’s Letters, III., 10)—a saying which was no doubt true until printing let loose on the world such a multitude of worthless writers.
WHEN WE ALL ARE ASLEEP
CHORUS
She (the ship of Odysseus) came to the limits of the world, to the deep flowing Oceanus. There is the land and the city of the Cimmerians, shrouded in mist and cloud, and never does the shining sun look down on them with his rays, neither when he climbs up the starry heavens, nor when again he turns earthward from the firmament, but deadly night is outspread over miserable mortals. Thither we came and ran the ship ashore and took out the sheep; but for our part we held on our way along the stream of Oceanus, till we came to the place which Circe had declared to us.
There Perimedes and Eurylochus held the victims, but I drew my sharp sword from my thigh, and dug a pit, as it were a cubit in length and breadth, and about it poured a drink-offering to all the dead, first with mead and thereafter with sweet wine and for the third time with water.... When I had besought the tribes of the dead with vows and prayers, I took the sheep and cut their throats over the trench, and the dark blood flowed forth, and lo, the spirits of the dead that be departed gathered them from out of Erebus. Brides and youths unwed, and old men of many and evil days, and tender maidens with griefs yet fresh[218] at heart; and many there were, wounded with bronze-shod spears, men slain in fight with their bloody mail about them. And these many ghosts flocked together from every side about the trench with a wondrous cry, and pale fear gat hold on me.... I drew the sharp sword from my thigh and sat there, suffering not the strengthless heads of the dead to draw nigh to the blood, ere I had word of Teiresias....
Anon came up the soul of my mother dead, Anticleia, the daughter of Autolycus, the great-hearted, whom I left alive when I departed for sacred Ilios. At the sight of her I wept, and was moved with compassion, yet even so, for all my sore grief, I suffered her not to draw nigh to the blood, ere I had word of Teiresias.
Anon came the soul of Theban Teiresias, with a golden sceptre in his hand, and he knew me and spake unto me: “Son of Laertes of the seed of Zeus, Odysseus of many devices, what seekest thou now, wretched man—wherefore hast thou left the sunlight and come hither to behold the dead and a land desolate of joy? Nay, hold off from the ditch and draw back thy sharp sword, that I may drink of the blood and tell thee sooth.” So spake he, and I put up my silver-studded sword into the sheath, and when he had drunk the dark blood, even then did the noble seer speak unto me....
Odyssey, Bk. XI. (Butcher & Lang’s translation).
In this weird scene Odysseus is summoning the shade of Teiresias from the under-world. He has with his sword to keep off the host of spirits, including that of his own mother, whom the spilt blood has attracted—and the hero is himself terrified at the awful spectacle.
What adds to the interest of such a passage is that to the ancient Greeks this was no imaginary picture but a statement of actual facts. It will be observed that the dead live in a dark land, “desolate of joy.”
To the little-travelled Greeks the ocean was a river.
It is hardly possible for a younger generation to realize the almost intoxicating effect produced upon us by Swinburne’s new melodies. Although the Poems and Ballads were largely erotic, the curious fact is that we were too much carried away by the beauty and swing of his verse to trouble about the sensual element in it. That element was in itself an artificial production and not a reflection of the poet’s own emotions, for he was free from sensuality. It was with us more a question of music. Swinburne himself preferred a musical word or line to one that would more aptly express his meaning; and in the “Dedication,” from which the above verses are quoted, several lines will not bear analysis. However, this was one of our favourites among his poems.
He asks that his wild “storm-birds of passion” may find a home in our calmer world:—
Then come the final verses quoted above. These are somewhat detached in meaning from the rest, and form a sort of Envoi: “Whatever changes or passes, there is always some beautiful thing that survives.”
As might be expected Swinburne was much parodied (and indeed in the Heptalogia and in the poems lately published he parodied himself). The above poem has been cleverly parodied by a lawyer, Sir Frederick Pollock. (Although parodies go as far back as the Fifth Century B.C.[221] I know of no other lawyer who, qua lawyer, has successfully taken a hand in the game.) In his parody Pollock’s subject was the great changes effected by the Judicature Act, when the old Courts of Common Law, Chancery, and others were consolidated into one Supreme Court, and the various classes of business assigned to different “Divisions.” Also owing to changes in procedure, much of the old technical learning became obsolete. His last verse is as follows (compare with the second verse quoted above):
Wulf died, as he had lived, a heathen. Placidia, who loved him well, as she loved all righteous and noble souls, had succeeded once in persuading him to accept baptism. Adolf himself acted as one of his sponsors; and the old warrior was in the act of stepping into the font, when he turned suddenly to the bishop and asked, ‘Where were the souls of his heathen ancestors?’ “In hell,” replied the worthy prelate. Wulf drew back from the font, and threw his bearskin cloak around him—“He would prefer, if Adolf had no objection, to go to his own people.” And so he died unbaptized, and went to his own place.
Charles Kingsley (Hypatia).
This story appears in several old chronicles (Notes and Queries, 7th Ser. X, 33), but the name should be Radbod. He was Duke or Chief of the Frisians, and the episode probably occurred in Heligoland, from which island he ruled his people.
I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best; and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.... In the morning[222] I awake, and find the old world, wife, babes and mother, Concord and Boston, the dear old spiritual world, and even the dear old devil not far off. If we will take the good we find, asking no questions, we shall have heaping measures. The great gifts are not got by analysis. Everything good is on the highway.
R. W. Emerson (Essay on Experience).
THE FRIEND OF HUMANITY AND THE KNIFE GRINDER
Written in Sapphics and said to be a parody of a poem of Southey’s, which was afterwards suppressed.
The lady prefers Duty to Love, but she will remain constant to her lover, and reunion with him in heaven will make amends for all. (In the remainder of the poem Browning puts the case of the lover who, although deserted, is expected to remain constant through life—and who falls. The lady had disobeyed Love, because of the hardship and trouble that would follow, and Browning, whose own married life had been a most happy one, says this was no excuse.)
This and the next five quotations are word-pictures (see p. 85).
The above are from a series of word-pictures (see p. 85.)
We take cunning for a sinister or crooked wisdom; and certainly there is a great difference between a cunning man and a wise man—not only in point of honesty, but in point of ability.
Bacon.
Cunning, being the ape of wisdom, is the most distant from it that can be. And as an ape for the likeness it has to a man—wanting what really should make him so—is by so much the uglier, cunning is only the want of understanding, which, because it cannot compass its ends by direct ways, would do it by a trick and circumvention.
John Locke (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693).
A rogue is a roundabout fool; a fool in circumbendibus.
S. T. Coleridge.
It is only by a wide comparison of facts that the wisest full-grown men can distinguish well-rolled barrels from more supernal thunder.
George Eliot (Mill on the Floss).
Let its teaching (the teaching of scientific and other books of information, the “literature of knowledge”) be even partially revised, let it be expanded, nay, even let its teaching be but placed in a better order, and instantly it is superseded. Whereas the feeblest works in the literature of power (poetry and what is generally known as literature), surviving at all, survive as finished and unalterable amongst men.... The Iliad, the Prometheus of Æschylus—the Othello or King Lear—the Hamlet or Macbeth—and the Paradise Lost, are triumphant for ever, as long as the languages exist in which they speak or can be taught to speak. They never can transmigrate into new incarnations. To reproduce these in new forms, or variations, even if in some things they should be improved, would be to plagiarize. A good steam engine is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michael Angelo.
De Quincey (Alexander Pope).
De Quincey’s division of literature into “literature of power” and “literature of knowledge” still remains a useful classification.
A man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is in him.
Sydney Smith.
I had this attributed to Robert Burton, but cannot find it in the Anatomy of Melancholy. It may possibly be from Richard Brathwaite, whose works I think were at one time attributed to Burton; but I have no opportunity of consulting them.
I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good work, therefore, I can do or show to any fellow creature, let me do it now! Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
William Penn.
I find that there has been much discussion in Notes and Queries and elsewhere as to the origin of this quotation, and it is now usually attributed to the French-American Quaker, Stephen Grellet. As, however, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations gives “I shall not pass this way again” as a favourite saying of William Penn’s, it seems more reasonable to consider him the author of the above.
Youth is a blunder, Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.
Disraeli (Coningsby).
She went into the garden to cut a cabbage to make an apple pie. Just then, a great she-bear coming down the street poked its nose into the shop-window. “What! no soap?” So he died, and she (very imprudently) married the barber. And there were present at the wedding the Joblillies, and the Piccannies, and the Gobelites, and the great Panjandrum himself, with the little button on top. So they all set to playing Catch-who-catch-can, till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.
Samuel Foote, 1720-1777.
Charles Macklin (1699-1797), actor and playwright, said in a lecture on oratory that by practice he had brought his memory to such perfection that he could learn anything by rote on once hearing or reading it. Foote (a more important dramatist and actor) wrote out the above and handed it up to Macklin to read and then repeat from memory! The passage was very familiar to us from Miss Edgeworth’s Harry and Lucy; and also from Verdant Green, by Cuthbert Bede (Edward Bradley) where it was set in the bogus examination paper “To be turned into Latin after the manner of the Animals of Tacitus.”
Truly it is to be noted, that children’s plays are not sports, and should be regarded as their most serious actions.
Montaigne.
Boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable to man; so that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular like the sun and moon; and the harmless art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the United States.
R. L. Stevenson (The Lantern-Bearers).
This was taken from a poor collection of epigrams by C. S. Carey (1872), no author being given. Andrew Lang quoted it in his Presidential address to the Society for Psychical Research, and it was duly inscribed in the Proceedings. I, with some diffidence, follow an illustrious example.
In my notes, this strange poem is stated to have been actually written by Smith on the night before his wedding; but it is difficult to believe this. In the poem, the poet sits until dawn on his wedding-eve thinking of the “long-lost passions of his youth,” and comparing them with his calm and unimpassioned love, “pale blossom of the snow,” for the bride of the morrow. He even fears that his wife’s tenderness will keep alive the memories of his youthful loves:
This is sufficiently gruesome. However he finally comes to the conclusion (although it seems dragged in to save a very difficult situation) that his love for his future bride may become more satisfactory to him:
Smith, with P. J. Bailey, Sydney Dobell and others, belonged to what was called the “Spasmodic” school which the Britannica says is “now fallen into oblivion.” I do not know what this means. Smith, Bailey, and Dobell no doubt wrote extravagantly, but they have all written good verses. Take for example the following from Smith’s first poem, “A Life Drama,” written at twenty-two years of age:
Smith was also a charming essayist. See quotations elsewhere.
Soft music came to mine ear. It was like the rising breeze, that whirls, at first, the thistle’s beard; then flies, dark-shadowy, over the grass. It was the maid of Füarfed wild: she raised the nightly song; for she knew that my soul was a stream, that flowed at pleasant sounds.
James Macpherson (1736-1796).
Macpherson alleged that he had discovered poems by the Gaelic bard, Ossian, who lived in the Third Century, and he published translations of them. Actually the poems were his own, but they were beautiful and had a considerable effect upon literature.
I should like to make every man, woman, and child discontented with themselves, even as I am discontented with myself. I should like to waken in them, about their physical, their intellectual, their moral condition, that divine discontent which is the parent, first of upward aspiration and then of self-control, thought, effort to fulfil that aspiration even in part. For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of all virtue.
Charles Kingsley (The Science of Health, 1872).
The origin of the expression “divine discontent.”
My Lord St. Albans said that wise nature did never put her precious jewels into a garret four stories high; and, therefore, that exceeding tall men had ever empty heads.
Bacon (Apothegms).
See The Inn Album (IV) where Browning makes his heroine say:
There is a secret belief among some men that God is displeased with man’s happiness; and in consequence they slink about creation, ashamed and afraid to enjoy anything.
Sir A. Helps (Companions of my Solitude).
O eloquent, just, and mightie Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised. Thou hast drawne together all the farre stretched greatnesse, all the pride, crueltie, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, Hic jacet!
Sir Walter Raleigh (Historie of the World).
A REQUIEM
AMPHIBIAN
This is not one of Browning’s best poems, but it is interesting. The butterfly in the air over the poet swimming is compared to a ‘certain soul,’ Mrs. Browning, looking down upon him from heaven. The ‘flying,’ free and entirely released from the earth, is the life of the soul, to which the poet cannot attain; but during periods of inspiration he lives a life free of ‘worldly noise and dust,’ which approaches that of the soul. Such periods of inspiration are likened to ‘swimming’ with the land always in sight, as compared with the ‘flying’ of the soul in the far-removed celestial regions. “We substitute, in a fashion, For heaven—poetry.”
Whatever they are we seem: during inspiration the poet’s life is a reflex of or approach to the heavenly life.
Amphibian, because the poet is of earth and yet can “swim” in the sea of imagination. Charles Lamb speaks of his charming Child Angel, half-angel, half-human, as Amphibium. Browning’s poem may have been an unconscious development of a passage from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici:—“Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds: for though there be but one to sense, there are two to reason, the one visible, the other invisible.”
The sixth and last verses are interesting. Browning, while in the world “Both lives and likes life’s way,” nor is anxious that his “wings” should be “unfurled”; and he wonders how his angel-wife regards him, content with his “mimic flight.”—See p. 114.
Prowse wrote excellent verses before he was 20 and he died at 34.
A woman needs to be wooed long after she is won, and the husband who ceases to court his wife is courting disaster.
Author not traced.
TO A GIPSY CHILD BY THE SEASHORE
These lines, put into the mouth of the dying Emperor, have been translated by Vaughan, Prior, Byron and others. Mr. Clodd (The Question—If a Man Die) gives this version, without naming the translator:—
In all these versions pallidula, etc., are applied to animula, but, as Mr. Alfred S. West points out to me, they appear to be epithets of loca thus:—“Fleeting, winsome soul, my body’s guest and comrade, that art now about to set out for regions wan, cold and bare, no more to jest according to thy wont.”
The dog walked off to play with a black beetle. The beetle was hard at work trying to roll home a great ball of dung it had been collecting all the morning; but Doss broke the ball, and ate the beetle’s hind legs, and then bit off its head. And it was all play, and no one could tell what it had lived and worked for. A striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing.
Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm).
The author is depicting the sadness of life.
GRACE FOR A CHILD
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old.
O. W. Holmes.
From letter to Julia Ward Howe in 1889 on her seventieth birthday. Mrs. Howe wrote the fine “Battle Hymn of the American Republic,” beginning:—
INSOMNIA
She did “fall asleep” at the early age of twenty-six in June, 1892.
The world is full of willing people: some willing to work, and the rest willing to let them.
Author not traced.
“THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY”
Plus je vois les hommes, plus j’admire les chiens.
(The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs.)
Author not traced.
He who doth not smoke hath either known no great griefs, or refuseth himself the softest consolation next to that which cometh from heaven. “What, softer than woman?” whispers the young reader. Young reader, woman teases as well as consoles. Woman makes half the sorrows which she boasts the privilege of soothing. On the whole, then, woman in this scale, the weed in that—Jupiter![242] hang out thy balance and weigh them both; and, if thou give the preference to woman, all I can say is, the next time Juno ruffles thee, O Jupiter, try the weed!
Bulwer Lytton (What will He do with It?)
Compare Kipling in “The Betrothed”:—
A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.
Il y a toujours l’un qui baise, et l’autre qui tend la joue.
(There is always one who kisses and the other who offers the cheek.)
Author not traced.
The painter says that his wife, instead of urging him to work for immediate gain, might have incited him to nobler efforts.
CHILDHOOD AND HIS VISITORS
L’ENVOI
A great sea-song; we are on board passing through scene after scene and feeling the very movement of the ship and its gear.
The Quakers have contracted themselves too much by leaving the works of God out of their system. Though I reverence their philanthropy, I can not help smiling at the conceit, that, if the taste of a Quaker could have been consulted at the creation, what a silent and drab-coloured creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, nor a bird been permitted to sing.
Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason).
This quotation reminds me of an interesting passage in Professor Bateson’s Presidential Address to the British Association at Melbourne in 1914. Although it has not a very close connection with the quotation the reader will not object to my giving it a place here:—
“Everyone must have a preliminary sympathy with the aims of eugenists both abroad and at home. Their efforts at the least are doing something to discover and spread truth as to the physiological structure of society. The spread of such organizations, however, almost of necessity suffers from a bias towards the accepted and the ordinary, and if they had power it would go hard with many ingredients of society that could be ill-spared. I notice an ominous passage in which even Galton, the founder of eugenics, feeling perhaps some twinge of his Quaker ancestry, remarks that ‘as the Bohemianism in the nature of our race is destined to perish, the sooner it goes, the happier for mankind.’ It is not the eugenists who will give us what Plato has called ‘divine releases from the common ways.’ If some fancier with the catholicity of Shakespeare would take us in hand, well and good; but I would not trust Shakespeares, meeting as a committee. Let us remember that Beethoven’s father was an habitual drunkard and that his mother died of consumption. From the genealogy of the patriarchs also we learn—what may very well be the truth—that the fathers of such as dwell in tents, and of all such as handle the harp or organ, and the instructor of every artificer in brass or iron—the founders, that is to say, of the arts and the sciences—came in direct descent from Cain, and not in the posterity of the irreproachable Seth, who is to us, as he probably was also in the narrow circle of his own contemporaries, what naturalists call a nomen nudum.”
Nomen nudum is a bare name without further particulars, but Donne, no doubt on the authority of Josephus (I. 2.3), attributes Astronomy to Seth (“The Progresse of the Soule”):—
Donne (1573-1631) is “vext” with Astronomy, presumably because at that time Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo (1564-1642) were affirming the Copernican system and making other discoveries supposed to be dangerous to religion.
A SONNET
“Two Voices are there; one is of the sea,” is Wordsworth’s fine sonnet on the subjugation of Switzerland.
It is certainly extraordinary how the great poet at times dropped into the most prosaic language and commonplace verse. This, however, was only in his earlier poems and only in a few of those poems. His theory at that time was that poetic language should be natural, such as used by ordinary men, and not essentially different from prose. Actually, however, at the root of the matter was his want of any sense of humour. Only so can we account for his beginning a poem “Spade! with which Wilkinson hath tilled his lands,” or writing absurdly babyish verses. The one instance on record in which he did apparently exhibit a grotesque kind of humour was in a verse of Peter Bell:—
But this he no doubt wrote quite seriously and without any idea that the verse was humorous. Shelley placed this verse at the head of his parody of Peter Bell, and Wordsworth omitted it from the poem after 1819.
It is, perhaps, true that no one at any time longs for death; and that our desire is for “more life and fuller.” But men have for various reasons longed to die, though they may not have longed for death. There are those to whom the remainder of life will be one torment of pain to themselves and a continuous mental distress to their friends; and there have been men of firm religious belief who desired to pass into a nobler life beyond the grave. Again, Richard Hodgson definitely assured me in 1897 that he wished to die. He was absolutely satisfied with the evidence of survival after death, which he had had in connection with the Society for Psychical Research; and his desire was to “pass over” and be with the friends with whom for years he had been in communication. Hodgson was incapable of saying anything insincere.
Remember what Simonides said—that he never repented that he had held his tongue, but often that he had spoken.
Plutarch (Morals).
Not the truth of which a man is or believes himself to be possessed, but the earnest efforts which he has made to attain truth, make the worth of the man. For it is not through the possession of, but through the search for truth, that he develops those powers in which alone consists his ever-growing perfection. Possession makes the mind stagnant, indolent, proud.
If God held in His right hand all truth, and in His left the ever-living desire for truth—although with the condition that I should remain in error for ever—and if He said to me “Choose,” I should humbly bow before His left hand, and say “Father, give; pure truth is for Thee alone.”
Lessing (1729-1781) Wolfenbüttel Fragments
When Lessing wrote this famous passage he was contending that criticism should be absolutely free in regard to religious, as to all other, subjects. “The argument on which he chiefly relies is that the Bible cannot be considered necessary to a belief in Christianity, since Christianity was a living and conquering power before the New Testament in its present form was recognised by the church. The true evidence for what is essential in Christianity, he contends, is its adaptation to the wants of human nature; hence the religious spirit is undisturbed by the speculations of the boldest thinkers.” (Encyclopaedia Britannica).
The light of every soul burns upward. Let us allow for atmospheric disturbance.
G. Meredith (Diana of the Crossways).
Human life may be painted according to two methods. There is the stage method. According to that, each character is duly marshalled at first, and ticketed; we know with an immutable certainty that, at the right crises, each one will reappear and act his part, and, when the curtain falls, all will stand before it bowing. There is a sense of satisfaction in this—and of completeness. But there is another method—the method of the life we all lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. When the crisis comes, the man who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls, no one is ready. When the footlights are brightest they are blown out; and what the name of the play is no one knows. If there sits a spectator who knows, he sits so high that the players in the gaslight cannot hear his breathing.
Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm).
This is from the preface to the second edition. This book must be unique, for surely no other girl in her teens has written a book so brilliant in itself and indicating such originality and genius. It is a great loss to literature that the writer became entirely absorbed in South African politics and controversy.
I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another’s misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.
Alexander Pope.
NIGHT AND DEATH
(See preface.) This sonnet, apart from its great excellence, is a remarkable literary curiosity. By this one poem alone Blanco White achieved a lasting reputation as a poet. The point is that this is his only poem. He certainly had previously written a sonnet of little merit on survival after death, but “Night and Death” was apparently an inspired transfiguration of his earlier effort. It is a startling instance of inspiration coming to a man once only in his life—and then coming in its very highest form. There are other poets, whose work is generally of poor quality, but who have each produced one surprisingly good poem which alone keeps their memory alive. An instance of this is Christopher Smart (1722-1771), who wrote several volumes of verse but only one fine poem, the “Song of David.” Charles Wolfe (1791-1823) is also known only by his “Burial of Sir John Moore,” but his other poems, though forgotten, are said to have had some merit.
The sonnet is also interesting for another reason. White’s family had settled in Spain for two generations, his grandfather having changed his name to Blanco. His mother was Spanish, he was educated in Spain, and became a Spanish priest, and he did not leave for England until 1810, when thirty-five years of age. Yet White’s beautiful thought could hardly be expressed in finer language. There is, however, one defect in the words “fly and leaf and insect.” (William Sharp courageously altered “fly” into “flower.”)
Coleridge thought this “the finest and most grandly conceived sonnet in our language.” Leigh Hunt said that in point of thought it “stands supreme, perhaps, above all in any language: nor can we ponder it too deeply, or with too hopeful a reverence.”
I sleep, I eat and drink, I read and meditate, I walk in my neighbour’s pleasant fields and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all that in which God delights—that is, in virtue[253] and wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God Himself. And he, that hath so many causes of joy, and so great, is very much in love with sorrow and peevishness, who loses all these pleasures, and chooses to sit down upon his little handful of thorns.
Jeremy Taylor.
ONLY SEVEN
(A Pastoral Story, after Wordsworth.)
POSTSCRIPT.
It seems wicked to travesty Wordsworth’s tender little poem, but Leigh’s verses amused us greatly when they appeared. Mark Akenside (1721-1770) is a poet now almost forgotten.
Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in those far-off days which live in us, and transform our perception into love.
George Eliot (Mill on the Floss).
It will be observed that the thought is the same in both passages.
For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to keep pigs. Gunpowder and printing, which the other day we imitated, and a school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity. They walk the earth with us, but it seems they must be of different clay. They hear the clock strike the[256] same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel by steam conveyance, yet with such baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed, spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so old that our language looks a halfling boy alongside; philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for thousands of miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way, or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world out of the railway windows. And when either of us turned his thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must there not have been in these pictures of the mind—when I beheld that old, gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with the flag of Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over all; and the man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the same affection, home.
R. L. Stevenson (Across the Plains).
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying that he is wiser to-day than he was yesterday.
Alexander Pope.
We have all of us considerable regard for our past self, and are not fond of casting reflections on that respected individual by a total negation of his opinions.
George Eliot (Scenes from Clerical Life).
SAY NOT THE STRUGGLE NOUGHT AVAILETH
The Cynic in society becomes the Pessimist in religion. The large embrace of sympathy, which fails him as interpreter of human life, will no less be wanting when he reads the meaning of the universe. The harmony of the great whole escapes him in his[258] hunt for little discords here and there. He is blind to the august balance of nature, in his preoccupation with some creaking show of defect. He misses the comprehensive march of advancing purpose, because while he himself is in it, he has found some halting member that seems to lag behind. He picks holes in the universal order; he winds through its tracks as a detective, and makes scandals of all that is not to his mind; trusts nothing that he cannot see: and he sees chiefly the exceptional, the dubious, the harsh. The glory of the midnight heavens affects him not, for thinking of a shattered planet or the uninhabitable moon. He makes more of the flood which sweeps the crop away, than of the perpetual river that feeds it year by year. For him the purple bloom upon the hills, peering through the young green woods, does but dress up a stony desert with deceitful beauty; and in the new birth of summer, he cannot yield himself to the exuberance of glad existence for wonder why insects tease and nettles sting. Nothing is so fair, nothing so imposing, as to beguile him into faith and hope.... In selfish minds the same temper resorts to the pettiest reasons for the most desolating thoughts: “If God were good, why should I be born with a club-foot? If the world were justly governed how could my merits be so long overlooked?”
J. Martineau (Hours of Thought, I, 97).
Reverting to this subject later, Martineau says (Hours of Thought II., 354) “Wherever he moves, he empties the space around him of its purest elements; with his low thought he roofs it over from the heavenly light and the sweet air; and then complains of the world as a close-breathed and stifling place.”
Cynicism is intellectual dandyism without the coxcomb’s feathers; and it seems to me that cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves.
George Meredith (The Egoist).
Goethe says somewhere there is something in every man for which, if we only knew it, we would hate him. I would prefer to say that there is something in every man for which, if we only knew it, we would love him.
R. Hodgson (Letter).
The “Friend” is God. The lines “All my days, I’ll go the softlier, sadlier, For that dream’s sake,” seem to me very beautiful. In so few words Browning, with dramatic insight, expresses the feeling of a Renan or George Eliot after they had lost their faith in Christianity.
The world is his, who can see through its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance—by your sufferance. See it to be a lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow....
In proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the kings of the world who give the colour of their present thought to all nature and all art.... The great man makes the great thing.... Linnæus makes botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herb-woman; Davy, chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.
Emerson (The American Scholar).
Cantat Deo, qui vivit Deo.
(He sings to God, who lives to God.)
Author not traced.
Jenny Lind used to say, “I sing to God.”
A CONSERVATIVE
He had formed several ingenious plans by which he meant to circumvent people of large fortune and small capacity; but then he never met with exactly the right people under exactly the right circumstances.... It is possible to pass a great many bad half-pennies and bad half-crowns, but I believe there has no instance been known of passing a half-penny or a half-crown for a sovereign.
George Eliot (Brother Jacob).
This is one of the queer fancies in a curious poem.
Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark and the romance quits our vessel, and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.
Emerson (Essay on Experience).
De vitiis nostris scalam nobis facimus, si vitia ipsa calcamus.
(We make for ourselves a ladder of our vices, when we tread under foot the vices themselves.)
St. Augustine (De Ascensione).
I can bear it no longer—this diabolical invention of gentility, which kills natural kindliness and honest friendship. Proper pride, indeed! Rank and precedence, forsooth! The table of ranks and degrees is a lie, and should be flung into the[264] fire. Organize rank and precedence! That was well for the masters of ceremonies of former ages. Come forward, some great marshal, and organize Equality in society.
Thackeray (Book of Snobs).
... The too susceptible Tupman, who, to the wisdom and experience of maturer years, superadded the enthusiasm and ardour of a boy, in the most interesting and pardonable of human weaknesses, love. Time and feeding had expanded that once romantic form; the black silk waistcoat had become more and more developed; inch by inch had the gold watch-chain beneath it disappeared from within the range of Tupman’s vision; and gradually had the capacious chin encroached upon the borders of the white cravat; but the soul of Tupman had known no change.
Charles Dickens (Pickwick Papers).
The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality. And the worst of all this is, that love and friendship may be the outcome of a certain condition of knowledge; increase the knowledge, and love and friendship beat their wings and go. Every man’s road in life is marked by the graves of his personal likings. Intimacy is frequently the road to indifference; and marriage a parricide.
Alexander Smith (The Importance of a Man to Himself).
I think sometimes how good it were had I some one by me to listen when I am tempted to read a passage aloud. Yes, but is there any mortal in the whole world upon whom I could invariably depend for sympathetic understanding—nay, who would even generally be at one with me in my appreciation? Such harmony of intelligences is the rarest thing. All through life we long for it ... and, after all, we learn that the vision is illusory. To every man is it decreed: Thou shalt live alone.
George Gissing (The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft).
ISOLATION
This fine poem is one of a series called “Switzerland,” which was written as the result of Arnold’s meeting and falling in love with a lady at Berne. The poem immediately preceding it in the series is entitled “Isolation: To Marguerite,” while this is called “To Marguerite, Continued” but as it is now quoted separately, it is better entitled “Isolation.”
In the preceding poems the lady has lost her affection while her lover is still devoted; and this leads to the subject of our isolation from each other in our inner lives. In the second verse the poet describes the moments when we most crave for love, sympathy, and mutual spiritual understanding and union.
For an interesting fact connected with this poem, see next quotation and note.
(Thackeray has been describing how husband, wife, mother, son—each of the inmates of a household—is interested in his or her own separate world and looking at the same things from a different point of view.) How lonely we are in the world! You and your wife have pressed the same pillow for forty years and fancy yourselves united: pshaw! does she cry out when you have the gout, or do you lie awake when she has the tooth-ache?... As for your wife—O philosophic reader, answer and say, Do you tell her all? Ah, sir, a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine—all things in nature are different to each—the woman we look at has not the same features, the dish we eat from has not the same taste to the one and the other—you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with some fellow-islands a little more or less near to us.
Thackeray (Pendennis, ch. XVI).
The similarity between this passage and the preceding poem, written at about the same time, is very curious. Arnold’s poem appeared in 1852 but was composed ten years earlier, while Pendennis was published in monthly parts in 1849-50. Therefore, neither author would consciously know at the time what the other had written.
The incident is probably an illustration of the mysterious way in which minds influence one another and create the spirit of the particular age. There is, I believe, a Chinese proverb to the effect that we are more the product of our age than of our parents. This permeating quality of thought and feeling is, no doubt, the explanation why the highest art and literature, though often unappreciated at the time, become ultimately recognized. It appears not to be sufficiently taken into account in other directions. For instance, it is repeatedly stated that Blake, because of the limited circulation of his poems, exercised no influence on the Romantic Revival—see for example The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. XI, 201. Yet we know that his work was known to and appreciated by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Southey, and Hayley. (Although little[267] regarded now, Hayley’s fame was then so great that he was offered and refused the poet-laureateship. He appears to be the one man who was an intimate friend of both Blake and Cowper.) While a very long period went by before Blake’s poems became generally known, their influence may well have been very great, permeating unconsciously through other minds. See reference on p. 194 to the similar case of Fitzgerald’s “Omar Khayyam.”
Even if a poem were read by only one person, it might conceivably influence a generation of authors. Suppose, if that had been possible, a page of Swinburne’s “Tristram of Lyonesse” or F. W. H. Myers’ “Implicit Promise” (both quoted elsewhere) had been read by Pope or Dryden; how the monotonous heroic couplet of their time might have been transformed!
An impromptu written when the mother and child incident happened and not revised.
Humanity is neither a love for the whole human race, nor a love for each individual of it, but a love for the race, or for the ideal of man, in each individual. In other and less pedantic words, he who is truly humane considers every human being as such interesting and important, and without waiting to criticize each individual specimen, pays in advance to all alike the tribute of good wishes and sympathy.... If some human beings are abject and contemptible, if it be incredible to us that they can have any high dignity or destiny, do we regard them from so great a height as Christ? Are we likely to be more pained by their faults and deficiencies than he was? Is our standard higher than[268] his? And yet he associated by preference with these meanest of the race; no contempt for them did he ever express, no suspicion that they might be less dear than the best and wisest to the common Father, no doubt that they were naturally capable of rising to a moral elevation like his own. There is nothing of which a man may be prouder than of this; it is the most hopeful and redeeming fact in history; it is precisely what was wanting to raise the love of man as man to enthusiasm. An eternal glory has been shed upon the human race by the love Christ bore to it.
Sir J. R. Seeley (Ecce Homo).
This was quoted by Lord Lytton in an essay on The Influence of Love upon Literature and Real Life.
It is hard for us to live up to our own eloquence, and keep pace with our winged words, while we are treading the solid earth and are liable to heavy dining.
George Eliot (Daniel Deronda).
So, then, as darkness had no beginning, neither will it ever have an end. So, then, is it eternal. The negation of aught else, is its affirmation. Where the light cannot come, there abideth the darkness. The light doth but hollow a mine out of the infinite extension of the darkness. And ever upon the steps of the light treadeth the darkness; yea, springeth in fountains and wells amidst it, from the secret channels of its mighty sea. Truly, man is but a passing flame, moving unquietly amid the surrounding rest of night; without which he yet could not be, and whereof he is in part compounded.
G. MacDonald (Phantastes).
In the story an ogre is reading this passage from a book. Phantastes is MacDonald’s finest work.
This is the poet’s vision of the city of the future, and will be interesting to the allotment-holders in English cities to-day.
Helen of Troy and Cleopatra—but, as Peacock mentioned in Gryll Grange, Cleopatra was of pure Greek descent and could not have been a “swarthy” lady.
The six quotations above are word-pictures (see note p. 85).
It is a mistake into which spiritually-minded men have fallen, that God is apprehended and known by a special faculty. The fact is that every faculty is serviceable in this noble work. We reach the Divine through our aesthetic faculties when our soul is stirred by a grand burst of music, or by the contemplation of a magnificent landscape. We reach the Divine through our purely intellectual faculties, when, by true reasoning, founded on sound observation, we master any great law by which God governs the world. We reach the Divine through our emotional nature when pure grief or pure love, holy longing, unselfish hope, righteous indignation, elevate us above the[272] prosaic level of customary equanimity, and help us to realize the incomparable beauty of holiness.
Just as the weeping Magdalene[32] stood bewailing the loss of what even to her was only sacred clay, all unconscious that her Saviour had been given back to her without seeing corruption, in a glorified and eternal form, not dead, but alive for evermore, whom she could love with ever increasing ardour of devotion: so, we say, there are not a few in our time whose lot it is to wring their hands over the grave of lost ideas, which they loved and their fathers loved, but for which God himself is substituting ideas nobler and better far, which earlier ages failed to grasp only because they were not in circumstances to feel their higher worth.
One cannot demonstrate on any physical or visible basis whatever, that it is a nobler thing to suffer injustice than to commit it, that truth-speaking is honourable, forgiveness of injuries magnanimous, and loving self-sacrifice for others sublime. Honour, purity, humility, reverence, tenderness, courtesy, patience, these things cannot be weighed on physical scales, cannot be handled or touched, or melted or frozen in any mechanical or chemical laboratory. They belong to a different order of realities from acids and vapours: they are denizens of what, for want of any more definite or accurate expression, we are accustomed to call the spiritual world.
One can see how religion should, to a young person, be associated with repressive and prohibitive laws. Youth is the time for the luxuriating of newborn, and, therefore, delicious vital forces. But its very luxuriance is disorderly, and religion cannot coexist with disorder. Therefore, that which is so continually warning the young against impulse, and passion, and irregularity, ought not to be too greatly displeased if it should, by and by, come to be regarded by the young as a synonym for mere repressive[273] force, and, therefore, as an unpleasant and unpopular thing. I believe, too, that there is no exception to the uniformity of the experience, that all young countries adopt freer systems of religion, and divest religious bodies more completely of all political and properly coercive power than older countries. It is all an illustration of the same thing. Young life, which most needs regulation, most dislikes it.[33]
As the genius of the bard is in the poem, as the wisdom of the legislator is in the law, as the skill of the mechanician is in the engine, as the soul of the musician is in the harmony and melody, as the words of a man’s lips issue from the inner world of his mental and spiritual character—so every work of God, and conspicuously man, as the noblest of God’s works, may truly be said to shadow forth a portion of the mind of God.
We talk of creation as a past thing. But the truth is, creation is eternal. Creation never ceases. Every time the clouds drop in rain, every time the waters freeze into new ice, every time the juices of nature gather into another violet, every time a new wail of life is heard upon a mother’s breast, every time you breathe another sigh, or shed another tear, there is God as truly present in His miraculous creative capacity as on the day when He said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
P. S. Menzies (Sermons).
Apart from their intrinsic value, the above extracts are given because this book of sermons is of special interest to Australians and because it has passed into oblivion. There are very few copies in existence.
Menzies came from Glasgow to Scots Church, Melbourne, in 1868 and died at the early age of thirty-four in 1874. At the Glasgow University he had been largely influenced mentally and spiritually by Principal Caird.
The sermons published in this book were selected by his widow after his death. Although not revised by their gifted young author, the fine thoughts expressed in chaste and beautiful language remind one of James Martineau.
Our sweet illusions are half of them conscious illusions—like effects of colour that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass, and rags.
George Eliot (The Lifted Veil).
Galligaskins, trunk-hose. “The Splendid Shilling” is a famous parody on Milton.
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
George Eliot (Middlemarch).
In the story Dorothea has found her husband to be a man of narrow mind and unsympathetic nature. Such a disillusionment after marriage frequently happens, and we are not deeply moved by what is not unusual, although it may mean a real life-tragedy. Ruskin says “God gives the disposition to every healthy human mind in some degree to pass over or even harden itself against evil things, else the suffering would be too great to be borne” (Modern Painters v., xix., 32). Only thus could we have lived through the horrors of the present war.
George Eliot’s analogy between intensity of the emotions and acuteness of the senses reminds one of Pope’s lines (“Essay on Man,” Ep. I.) where he says life would be insupportable, if we had the acute hearing, smell and other senses of insects and other animals; we should
Abt—or Abbé—Georg Joseph Vogler, 1749-1814, a German organist and composer, is probably chosen by Browning because, although an important musician, his compositions have perished. In this fine poem Vogler has been extemporizing, and his inspired music has lifted him in ecstasy to heaven. The sounds are his slaves who have built palaces of music, as in the Arab legends angels and demons built magic structures for[276] Solomon. He grieves that this wonderful music should apparently have vanished for ever; but is comforted by the thought that no good thing, no fine aspiration, no great effort or noble impulse can really die, but must exist for ever in the mind of God.
If Browning had known the evidence now afforded scientifically by hypnotism and otherwise, he might have come to the conclusion that all our thoughts and feelings, both good and bad, are recorded deep down in our own consciousness. Moreover, the existence of thought-transference leads to the somewhat dreadful suggestion that this record of all our inmost thoughts and feelings may possibly become open to the inspection of every one.
The quotation reminds one of Wordsworth’s sonnet on the “Inside of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge.”
See the preceding note. The poet says that Painting and Poetry are “art in obedience to laws,” but the musician exerts a higher creative will akin to that of God. The painter has before him the pictures he reproduces,[277] the poet borrows his imagery from visible things and has apt words in which to express his thoughts: the musician has nothing visible, nothing outside his own soul, to assist him, and can use only the meaningless sounds which we hear everywhere around us. By combining, however, three of those empty sounds (in a chord) he evolves a fourth sound, which so transcends all that other arts can do in expressing emotion that Browning compares it to a “star.”
But this expresses only part of the poet’s meaning. In using this tremendous comparison to a star, as also in enthroning music supreme above art and poetry, he means that it transcends their loftiest flights and rises above our world to the heavens above. In the earlier part of the poem the “pinnacled glory” built by the slaves of sound at the bidding of the musician’s soul is based “broad on the roots of things” and ascends until it “attains to heaven.”
F. W. H. Myers, in “The Renewal of Youth,” has a passage on music. His theme is that while music (as in Mozart’s operas) may express human passion, it also (as in Beethoven) rises to greater heights and appears to voice the emotions of a world beyond our senses. In the lines I have italicized in the following passage he no doubt refers to Browning’s line, “That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star!”—the “star” meaning that music ascends to a higher world than our own:—
Not only does Browning unselfishly assert that the sister-art is superior to his own, but he goes further, and doubts if music is not the greatest of all man’s gifts. I do not discuss either contention—leaving musicians to rejoice in the tribute of a great poet.
“Jenny” was Mrs. Carlyle.
The world is so inconveniently constituted, that the vague consciousness of being a fine fellow is no guarantee of success in any line of business.
George Eliot (Brother Jacob).
From Guy Mannering. Scott says it is a prayer or spell, which was used in Scotland or Northern England to speed the passage of a parting spirit, like the tolling of a bell in Catholic days.
Evil of every kind, being familiar to us as an object of apprehension, appears to be external to ourselves. And yet it is invested with the greater part of its severity by the mind: it acts upon us by the ideas it awakens, the affections it wounds, the aspirations it disappoints. If its outward pressure were all, and it dealt with us as beings of sense alone, it would lose most of its poignancy and would dwindle down into a few animal pangs.... It is our higher nature that creates immeasurably the greater part of the ills we endure: they are ideal, not sensible: and it is the privilege of reason to have tears instead of groans; of love to know grief instead of pain; of conscience to replace uneasiness with remorse.... Penury, disgrace, bereavement, guilt, are evils which we must be human in order to feel; and it is the penalty of our nobleness, not only to be weighed down by their occasional burthen, but to be perpetually haunted by the phantom of their approach.
James Martineau (Hours of Thought, II, 150).
Two or three of them got round me, and begged me for the twentieth time to tell them the name of my country. Then, as they could not pronounce it satisfactorily, they insisted that I was deceiving them, and that it was a name of my own invention. One funny old man, who bore a ludicrous resemblance to a friend of mine at home, was almost indignant. “Unglung!” said he, “who ever heard of such a name?—anglang, angerlang—that can’t be the name of your country; you are playing with us.” Then he tried to give a convincing illustration. “My country is Wanumbai—anybody can say Wanumbai. I’m an orang-Wanumbai; but N-glung! who ever heard of such a name? Do tell us the real name of your country, and when you are gone we shall know how to talk about you.” To this luminous argument and remonstrance I could oppose nothing but assertion, and the whole party remained firmly convinced that I was for some reason or other deceiving them.
A. R. Wallace (The Malay Archipelago).
This was written in 1863, but ten years earlier Alexander Smith, in “A Life Drama,” had written:
Other writers have also used the same simile. See next poem.
QUA CURSUM VENTUS
Two friends, who through absence have become “soul from soul estranged,” are compared to two ships, which unconsciously draw apart during the night and must continue a diverging course; but, being both bound for the same port, will at the end of their life-voyage be re-united.
Tennyson, here and elsewhere (see, for example, the king’s beautiful speech in “The Passing of Arthur”) urges us to prayer, and adds his belief in a personal intercourse with an ever-present and loving God. Innumerable men of the highest character during nineteen centuries have testified to the same direct communion with the Almighty.
A man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin and a jerkin’s lining: rumple the one, you rumple the other.
Sterne (Tristram Shandy).
Il (Boucher) trouvait la nature trop verte et mal éclairée. Et son ami, Lancret, le peintre des salons à la mode, lui répondait: “Je suis de votre sentiment, la nature manque d’harmonie et de séduction.”
(He, Boucher, found nature too green and badly lit. And his friend, Lancret, the fashionable painter of the day, replied to him, “I am of your opinion, nature is wanting in harmony and seductiveness.”)
Charles Blanc.
See following quotation.
If you examine the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, you will find that nearly all its expressions, having reference to the country, show ... either a foolish sentimentality, or a morbid fear, both of course coupled with the most curious ignorance. Nothing is more remarkable than the general conception of the country merely as a series of green fields, and the combined ignorance and dread of more sublime scenery. The love of fresh air and green grass forced itself upon the animal natures of men; but that of the sublimer features of scenery had no place in minds whose chief powers had been repressed by the formalisms of the age. And although in the second-rate writers continually, and in the first-rate ones occasionally, you find an affectation of interest in mountains, clouds, and forests, yet whenever they write from their heart, you will find an utter absence of feeling respecting anything beyond gardens and grass. Examine, for instance, the novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne, the comedies of Molière, and the writings of Johnson and Addison, and I do not think you will find a single expression of true delight in sublime nature in any one of them. Perhaps Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, in its total absence of sentiment on any subject but humanity, and its entire want of notice of anything at Geneva which might not as well have been seen at[284] Coxwold, is the most striking instance I could give you; and if you compare with this negation of feeling on one side, the interludes of Molière, in which shepherds and shepherdesses are introduced in court dress, you will have a very accurate conception of the general spirit of the age.
John Ruskin (Architecture and Painting).
“My other piece of advice, Copperfield,” said Mr. Micawber, “you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the God of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and—and in short, you are for ever floored. As I am!”
Charles Dickens (David Copperfield).
This is Vision.
This was written in a game of bouts rimés (rhymed ends). Four lines had to be composed ending with “brook,” “why,” “crook,” “I.”
Referring to Bryant’s poem, “To a Waterfowl”:—
In the play Francis I (1494-1547) enters singing these lines. (Francis wrote on the walls of the royal apartments at Chambord Toute femme varie, “Every woman is fickle.”) One finds this never-ending theme of poets and cynics in Virgil’s Varium et mutabile semper Femina, “Woman is a fickle and changeable thing” (Aeneid iv, 569), La donna è mobile (Rigoletto), and countless other passages.
In his broken fashion Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs and great people generally were in the custom[287] of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides it was very convenient on an excursion—much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible into walking-sticks. Upon occasion a chief would call his attendant, and desire him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree—perhaps in some damp marshy place.
Herman Melville (Moby Dick).
Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier.
(God will pardon me; that is His business.)
Heine.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SEA.
This was written in March, 1879, after Hodgson had left Australia for England. The love-episode is imaginary.
It is very true that the amazing intellectual power of the Greeks in a primitive age ensures them an immortality of fame; and this is finely expressed in the last two lines. But those two splendid lines are utterly spoilt by the two that precede them. One asks, Why “Greece and her foundations”? One does not say “a house and its foundations” are built somewhere or other. This by itself would be trivial, but next comes the question, What is the meaning of the second line? We know what Shelley intended—that the memory and influence of Greece will withstand its destruction by war—but why in that case should she not be built above, instead of submerged below the tide of war? Later on, in lines 836-7, the Emperor Palæologus, at the siege of Constantinople, is said to have cast himself “beneath the stream of war”; that is to say, he was overwhelmed and killed. The words, in fact, do not express the poet’s meaning. The third and fatal defect of the lines is the juxtaposition of “tide” and “sea” —the city is built below a tide, and also based on a sea. Not only is this combination absurd in itself, but it also destroys the beauty of the last two magnificent lines. The moving unstable water is scarcely a foundation to build upon, yet this meaning is forcibly impressed upon the word “sea” by the previous mention of a “tide.” What Shelley meant was an immense broad, deep, expanse of solid crystal—the “sea of glass like unto crystal” of Revelations (iv, 6) and the Mer de Glace (“sea of ice”), the great Alpine glacier.[34] Therefore, anyone who had exactness of thought or perception of poetry would omit the first two lines and give only the last two as a quotation.
Mrs. Shelley in her note on “Hellas” specially refers to this verse as a beautiful example of Shelley’s style, and she quotes all four lines. We may assume, therefore, that Shelley himself thought highly of the verse, and we thus have an illustration of the curious fact that a great poet is[290] often a poor judge of his own poetry. (Almost certainly Shakespeare himself did not realize how god-like he stood above all other poets.) However, it is not only for this reason that I have included the above quotation, but because with it I propose to make a flank attack upon Mr. R. W. Livingstone, the author of The Greek Genius and its Meaning to us. I do this, of course, with a special object in view.
Mr. Livingstone’s book is important, valuable, and highly interesting—and is especially admirable because the author does not envelope his subject in the usual glamour, born of enthusiasm. He is, indeed, most exceptional in this respect, that he endeavours to look at the Greeks from an ordinary commonsense point of view. But he makes the mistake, not unusual with classical men, of supposing that he is a qualified critic of poetry; and he, therefore, gives us a special dissertation upon the comparative values of English and Greek poetry.
Apart from this dissertation, he quotes three or four passages from English poets in the course of the book. Of these the most prominent is the above verse of Shelley’s, and he quotes all four lines without comment. Thus we see an able man, in whom classical study should have induced exactness of thought, failing to analyse and understand what he is quoting. But, more than this, the question is one of poetic perception. The imagery in the last two lines is sublime—in the four lines it is ludicrous. Therefore, we begin with the fact that our literary critic was unable to see palpable and grave defects in one of the few verses he himself quotes. (I might give other illustrations, as where he admires poor verse of Dryden’s, but I must be brief.)
Mr. Livingstone’s point is that the “direct” and “truthful” character of Greek poetry is superior to the “imaginative” quality of English verse. He goes so far as to say that “Sappho and Simonides with four words make him see a nightingale and give him a greater and far saner pleasure” than Shelley’s poem “To a Skylark.” I take his quotation from Simonides, as it involves less discussion than that from Sappho.[35] It is (Fr, 73) ἀὴδονες πολυκώτιλοι χλωραύχενες εἰαριναί, “The warbling nightingales with olive necks, the birds of spring.”
As Mr. Livingstone is not discussing beauty of expression we can leave this out of consideration.[36] He is discussing the substance of poetry, comparing the “directness” and “truthfulness” of Simonides (in this case) with the imaginative element in Shelley’s poem. He would apparently discard the latter element altogether, and prefers a simple description of the nightingale—that it sings, has an olive neck, and appears in spring. The first suggestion that occurs to one is that if, say, an auctioneer’s catalogue of farm stock—without any addition whatever to its contents—could be worded prettily and made metrical, it would afford huge enjoyment to our literary critic.
The whole question is as to the value of the imaginative element which to our minds makes Shelley’s poem one of the most beautiful lyrics—possibly the most beautiful—in all literature. In sweeping away this element, Mr. Livingstone tells us how much of English poetry must be cast aside. But he does not realize that much else has also to be flung on the scrap-heap. Imagination, in its true sense, includes all those aesthetic, moral, and spiritual faculties which are higher than the intellect—all, in fact, that raises man above his material existence. (See pp. 39, 40, 358.) With the immense deal of English poetry which Mr. Livingstone proposes to “scrap” must go all our most beautiful music, all that is great in painting (which is never “direct” and “truthful” in this sense, or it would not be great), all Greek statuary, and all that expresses high moral and spiritual truths in our literature. I do not think that Mr. Livingstone will find many adherents to his new creed.
This critic also discusses style, and we find that he speaks of Pope as a “great poet,” and apparently revels in his monotonous verse! When pointing out that English verse, unlike what we have left of Greek poetry, includes much unequal and ill-finished work, he says, “Of all our great poets, perhaps only Milton and Pope can boast unfailing excellence of style.”
As regards this inequality in the work of English poets the answer is very simple. Mr. Livingstone forgets the fact—a very important fact in any speculation upon the scheme of the universe—that only the good things ultimately survive. How very little we have left of many Greek poets! Of Sophocles only seven plays remain out of one hundred and twenty-seven, and the Fragments collected are said to be very poor (many, of course, are only grammatical illustrations)—and more than half of Homer must have been dropped. We probably still have everything that is best in Greek literature. Again, it is not in fact desirable to restrict publication to work of the highest importance, and the facilities afforded by printing have made it unnecessary thus to restrict it—so that even My Commonplace Book is now, at least temporarily, part of English literature!
Greatly as I admire Mr. Livingstone’s book, I feel bound to call attention to a view of poetry that must do great harm to University students and others. I am also bound to mention him as an illustration of the fact that classical men usually imagine that their study of the Greek and Latin languages and literature qualifies them to become literary critics.[37] This fact has impressed itself upon me from youth upwards. One of my teachers, a man of some weight in the classical world, was in the habit of saying that only through study of Latin and Greek could a man learn to write good English![38] His own English was simply execrable.
I will now give another instance where the classical enthusiast, as in Mr. Livingstone’s case, tends to exaggerate the value of his favourite literature—truly wonderful as it is. Gissing’s Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is an interesting book of wide circulation, in which the author displays great admiration for and familiarity with the classics. Speaking of Xenophon’s Anabasis, he says “Were it the sole book existing in Greek, it would be abundantly worth while to learn the language in order to read it.” That is to say, it would be worth while expending, out of our short lives, some years of study for the sole purpose of reading in the original an extremely simple, prose historical narrative, which has been excellently translated! (If Gissing had said Homer instead of Xenophon, no one would have quarrelled with him.) Again, he says, “Many a single line presents a picture which deeply stirs the emotions”; and he gives us what he calls “a good instance of such a line.” A guide, who has led the Greeks through hostile country, has to return through the same perilous district, and the wonderful line is Ἐπεὶ ἑσπέρα ἐγένετο, ᾤχετο τῆς νυκτὸς ἀπιών. This line Gissing translates, “When evening came he took leave of us and went away by night”—a sentence which only by inadvertence could have appeared in, say, a Times leader, seeing that the words “by night” are redundant. As a matter of fact, the translation is incorrect; there is nothing about “taking leave of us,” and the meaning is, “As soon as evening came, he had slipped away into the darkness.”
(Professor Naylor points out to me that the word ᾤχετο in this line is interesting. It conveys the idea of a swift or abrupt departure or disappearance. It is used in connection with that most interesting man Alcibiades (Xen, Hell., 2. I. 26) and gives a fine impression of his quick insolent temper. The Greek admirals had put themselves in a position of extreme danger and he came to warn them of their peril. Their reply was the usual expression of ineptitude, “We are the admirals, not you”; and immediately follows the one word ᾤχετο, “he turned on his heels and left”—and with this word Alcibiades disappears from contemporary history.)
In referring to Mr. Livingstone’s remarks above I could not use the Sappho quotation, because there are certain initial questions that need to be first settled. (In briefly discussing these I must speak as though I were expressing definite opinions, since otherwise the note could not be compressed sufficiently, but I mean the following rather as suggestions which may possibly be found useful.)
Sappho’s line is (Fr, 39) Ἦρος ἄγγελος ἱμερόφωνος ἀήδων, which Mr. Livingstone translates “The messenger of spring, the lovely-voiced nightingale.” Now ἱμερος (himeros) means animal passion, so that ἱμερόφωνος (himerophonos) is a strong word meaning singing of, or with, passion—in this case the passion of the pairing-time. Why then does Mr. Livingstone, following Liddell and Scott, give the totally different meaning “lovely-voiced”? Apparently it is because Theocritus (XXVIII, 7) applies the expression “himerophonos” to the Charites, and, according to the current conception, those deities were pure unimpassionate beings.[39]
In questions of this character, seeing that the Greek gods were guilty of every form of immorality and the Greeks themselves were one of the most sensual nations that ever existed, the presumption is in favour of impurity: the onus of proof is on those who allege purity. I have not undertaken the heavy work of looking up the innumerable references to the Charites in Greek literature, but I know of nothing that supports the prevalent conception of those deities. Apart from the fact that Theocritus uses the word himerophonos, Meleager (Anth. Pal, V, 195) speaks of himeros as conferred by the Charites. There is nothing in the meaning of charis, or the verb charizesthai to support the current idea (both being even used in an immodest sense); Homer identifies Charis with Aphrodite, with whom Hesiod also identifies Aglaia, since each is made the wife of Hephaestus; the Charites are constantly associated with Aphrodite and Erôs (and consequently with Himeros, the personification of passion) so that the maxim Noscitur a sociis applies; Sappho repeatedly claims them as her patrons; as regards the representation of the Charites in art, girl friendship would be a subject quite alien to the Greek mind.
If the view suggested is correct our authorities with their preconceived ideas presume to correct Theocritus and Sappho! They not only give a wrong view of the Charites, but also hide the coarseness of the compliment paid by Theocritus to his lady friend—in each case distorting the truth.
Mr. Livingstone may have another reason for altering the meaning of “himerophonos.” He appears to hold the opinion that a Greek writer would not ascribe intelligence or emotion to a bird, as Mrs. Browning does in “To a Seamew.” (I quite agree with him as to the false, feminine sentiment in this poem. It is mainly the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” that raise Mrs. Browning above the minor poets.) Mr. Livingstone, for example, translates ἡμερόφων’ ἀλέκτωρ, “O cock that criest at dawn.” This should surely mean “that announceth the dawn;” the attitude and the very crow of the bird would suggest this to the Greeks; and the fowl did, as a matter of fact, serve in place of an alarm-clock to them (see, for instance, Aristophanes’ Birds, 488). Does not Mr. Livingstone forget that the Greeks attributed not only intelligence but also miraculous powers to animals (see p. 370)? If so, this illustrates another fact noticeable among classical authorities. They often fail to consider all the premises before arriving at a conclusion. Taking another illustration from Mr. Livingstone, he says that the Greeks had little of the feeling of wonder, did not “muse on the strangeness of the world,” and would not have experienced the emotion Pascal felt when viewing the starry heavens, “The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.” The premise he appears to omit here is the fact of the intense ignorance of the Greeks. Their world was a very limited one, with its flat earth and solid lid, certain bright objects conceived as gods or otherwise moving in the intermediate space. To illustrate this, Herodotus (II, 24) believes that the sun-god is forced by the cold winds in winter to move to the warm sky above Libya; and in 434 B.C. (about the same time) the great advanced thinker, Anaxagoras, is arrested for blasphemy and exiled because he taught that the sun must be a mass of blazing metal larger than the Peloponnesus! Everything in nature had its god, whose action explained whatever happened. If the Greeks had once realized the awful infinity of the universe their whole outlook on nature would have changed, and I cannot think that so highly[294] intellectual a people would not have been moved by wonder. I cannot see any element in “the Greek genius” that would indicate this. (Observe Ptolemy’s epigram on p. 10.)
Returning to the Sappho quotation, Mr. Livingstone translates ἦρος ἄγγελος literally as “the messenger of spring.” Does he mean the messenger “sent by spring” or “announcing spring”? Presumably he does not mean the latter, as it would impute intelligence or emotion to the bird. But, if we accept the former interpretation, it leads to the curious result that the poet, not content with a Goddess of Spring and the Hours who represent the seasons, intends still further to personify spring. Is not the true meaning of Sappho’s words “the nightingale with its passionate song sent (by Proserpine) to let men know that spring is approaching”? This is not mere captious criticism. To Sappho the goddess Proserpine was a concrete being with some sort of corporeal form, who brings a thing called spring, and who actually does send the nightingale ahead to sing of the passion of the pairing-time, and thus let men know that spring is coming. There is no poetic imagery, no imaginative picture in the poet’s mind, but the statement of an actual fact. See also the reference to the halcyon, p. 370. It seems to me that, in this as in other cases, our classical authorities fail to place themselves in the position of the Greeks. Here they interpret as imagination what was meant as reality. (However, as I have said before, the above are merely suggestions which I myself hope to consider further; but, until we knew exactly what Sappho’s verse meant, it could not be brought into the discussion of Mr. Livingstone’s views.)
Buchanan is speaking of the sad lives in the poor quarters of London.
A fine expression of a familiar fact. Under the influence of love, anger, or other strong passion, a man becomes an unreasoning animal, and actually hates to be told the truth. Wild passion glares through the bars of its self-constituted cage at philosophy standing calm, lofty, and serene. Only “when the fire is dying in the grate” do we again become akin to cold, dispassionate, star-like Philosophy.
The triumph of machinery is when man wonders at his own works; thus, says Derwent Coleridge, all science begins in wonder and ends in wonder, but the first is the wonder of ignorance, the last that of adoration.
Caroline Fox’s Journals.
Evidently a comment on S. T. Coleridge’s Aphorism IV. on “Spiritual Religion” (Aids to Reflection).
No one of himself can rise out of the depths, but must clasp some outstretched hand.
Seneca (? 3 B.C.-65 A.D.) (Epistle 52).
THE RIME OF REDEMPTION
This poem is cut down one-half and thereby loses much of its effect. Two adventures, in which the Knight refuses temptation and adheres to his oath, are entirely omitted.
This and the next five quotations are word-pictures (see p. 85).
If the collective energies of the universe are identified with Divine Will, and the system is thus animate with an eternal consciousness as its moulding life, the conception we frame of its history will conform itself to our experience of intellectual volition. It is in origination, in disposing of new conditions, in setting up order by differentiation, that the mind exercises[304] its highest function. When the product has been obtained, and a definite method of procedure established, the strain upon us is relaxed, habit relieves the constant demand for creation, and at length the rules of a practised art almost execute themselves. As the intensely voluntary thus works itself off into the automatic, thought, liberated from this reclaimed and settled province breaks into new regions, and ascends to ever higher problems: its supreme life being beyond the conquered and legislated realm, while a lower consciousness, if any at all, suffices for the maintenance of its ordered mechanism. Yet all the while it is one and the same mind that, under different modes of activity, thinks the fresh thoughts and carries on the old usages. Does anything forbid us to conceive similarly of the cosmical development; that it started from the freedom of indefinite possibilities and the ubiquity of universal consciousness; that, as intellectual exclusions narrowed the field, and traced the definite lines of admitted movement, the tension of purpose, less needed on these, left them as the habits of the universe, and operated rather for higher and ever higher ends not yet provided for; that the more mechanical, therefore, a natural law may be, the further is it from its source; and that the inorganic and unconscious portion of the world, instead of being the potentiality of the organic and conscious, is rather its residual precipitate, formed as the Indwelling Mind of all concentrates an intenser aim on the upper margin of the ordered whole, and especially on the inner life of natures that can resemble him?
James Martineau (1805-1900) (Modern Materialism).
The remarkably fine and suggestive essay in which this passage occurs was written in 1876, in the course of a discussion raised by Tyndall’s Belfast Address. It is not easy to appreciate the speculation that Martineau offers in direct opposition to the theory of Darwinism without reading his preceding argument.
It may be well to begin with a quotation from his sermon, “Perfection, Divine and Human”: “However vast and majestic the uniformities of nature, they are nevertheless finite: science counts them one by one; a completed science would count them all. God, however, is not finite; He lives out beyond the legislation He has made; and His thought, which defines the rules of matter, does not transmigrate into them and cease else-how to be; but merely flings out the law as an emanating act, and Himself abides behind as Thinking Power.”
In the present essay Martineau first develops the argument that there is only one Power that exercises all the forces in the universe, whether mechanical, chemical, or vital. That power is God, the Indwelling Mind of the world. He is of like nature to (although infinitely higher than) His highest product, which is conscious, thinking, and willing man. Seeing[305] that God and man are alike in their natures, Martineau proceeds to draw an analogy between the history of the world and the history of man’s own development. The Divine Mind at first consciously exercises the forces that we know as gravitation, cohesion, chemical attraction, etc.; just as, to take a simple example, a baby has at first consciously to use its muscles and balance its body in the process of walking. Later the baby, having formed the habit, does all this unconsciously and, while walking, can pay attention to other matters. So the Indwelling Mind of the world forms its habits which we know as the laws of gravitation, etc., and is free to attend to higher and higher objects. In this progress there is no evolution of the organic from the inorganic, or of the higher from the lower forms of life. Inorganic matter, having become subject to fixed laws, is precipitated and dropped out of further conscious effort; also each lower form of life is similarly laid aside as the Indwelling Mind proceeds to the higher forms, until finally man is reached. The highest result thus arrived at is the production of conscious Mind. All this involves what is usually known as Special Creation, and the idea of “God at His working-bench” creating one species after another is regarded as absurd. But it is not absurd on Martineau’s argument, because the Indwelling Mind is constantly doing the whole work of the world (and also because a fact to be accounted for by any theory is that a higher form of existence appears whenever the environment is suitable). In the present state of our knowledge Martineau’s speculation cannot be proved or disproved, but it may contain the germ of a true scheme of the universe—which scheme is yet far to seek. In any case, he makes the important point that the nature of power in the world must be judged from the best thing it has done—namely, the minds it has produced. The idea of a blind, unconscious force is incompatible with the fact that that force has produced conscious mind. It is the same argument as the Psalmist uses, “He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye, shall He not see? He that teacheth man knowledge, shall not He know?” (Ps. xciv, 9, 10.) The following (by whom written I do not know) has the same idea: “Every thing is a thought, and bears a relation to the thought that placed it there, and the thought that finds it there.” It is interesting to consider Martineau’s suggestion with that of William James on p. 165.
Death’s Jest-Book was published in 1850, after Beddoes’ death; The Origin of Species appeared in 1859: the passage is, therefore, curious. In suggesting, however, development by the addition of faculties, it affords no explanation how those faculties came to be added.
“OUTLANDISH PROVERBS”
The reader may not know of the “saintly Herbert’s” collection of “Outlandish Proverbs, Sentences, etc.” from which the few examples above are taken.
AVALON.
An American author who wrote the well-known song, “The Rosary.”
IF I COULD HOLD YOUR HANDS
(From twice-cooked food, from an ignorant doctor, from a reconciled enemy, from a wicked woman, Lord, deliver us.)
Old Monkish Litany.
CONSTANCY REWARDED
The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?
To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate[310] attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening....
We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.
Walter Pater (1839-1894) (The Renaissance).
In the Adelaide edition of this book this famous “pulsation” passage appeared as originally written; it is now given as Pater afterwards altered it.
Pater was a Hellenist and preached the new paganism of last century. The Greek ideal life was supposed to be one of purely aesthetic enjoyment, divorced from religious problems or from any sense of the higher in our nature. Pater, however, altered his views, Marius, the Epicurean, being intended as a recantation, and he became in effect an Anglo-Catholic. (See p. 343 note.)
Pater was “Rose” in Mallock’s New Republic.
A CHILD
Is a man in a small Letter, yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted of the Apple.... He is nature’s fresh picture, newly drawn in oil, which time and much handling dims and defaces. His soul is yet a white paper, unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith at length it becomes a blurred note-book. He is purely happy, because he knows no evil, nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery. He kisses and loves all, and when the smart of the rod is past, smiles on his beater.... His hardest labour is his tongue, as if he were loth to use so deceitful an organ.... We laugh at his foolish sports, but his game[311] is our earnest: and his drums, rattles and hobby-horses but the emblems and mocking of man’s business. His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember; and sighs to see what innocence he has outlived. The older he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches.... Could he put off his body with his little Coat, he had got eternity without a burthen, and exchanged but one Heaven for another.
John Earle (Micro-Cosmographie, 1628).
The Griffin, with head and wings of a bird and body of a lion, is pursuing, “half on foot, half flying,” the one-eyed Arimaspian, who is fleeing on horseback with the purloined gold. The Griffins guarded mines of gold and hidden treasure. (Herodotus, iv, 27.)
A WOMAN’S THOUGHT
Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.
Macaulay (On Niccolo Machiavelli).
A wonderful record, if it were correct, but “Old Nick” is said to be derived from Scandinavian mythology.
I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more as I grow older.
Montaigne (Essay, Of Repentance).
Coleridge was holding forth on the effects produced by his preaching, and appealed to Lamb: “You have heard me preach, I think?” “I have never heard you do anything else,” was the urbane reply.
(John Sterling said) Coleridge is best described in his own words:
Madame de Staël was by no means pleased with her intercourse with him, saying spitefully and feelingly, “M. Coleridge a un grand talent pour le monologue” (“Mr. Coleridge has a great talent for monologue”).
Caroline Fox’s Journals.
Here we have different views of Coleridge’s monologues. Mme. de Staël objected to his monopolizing the conversation, but his friends loved to hear him. Lamb, of course, had to have his joke.
What would one not give to have been present at the Mermaid Tavern with the wonderful Elizabethans who met there? Among them were Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh, Beaumont, Fletcher, Donne, Carew, and John Selden. One is reminded of the Symposium of Plato.
The poem of Keats is well known:
A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries with him the germ of his most exceptional actions; and, if we wise people make fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.
George Eliot.
I understand those women who say they don’t want the ballot. They purpose to hold the real power, while we go through the mockery of making laws. They want the power without the responsibility.
Charles Dudley Warner (My Summer in a Garden).
If we cannot find God in your house or in mine; upon the roadside or the margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the day duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret grief; in the procession of life, ever entering[315] afresh, and solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not think we should discern Him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God’s hand is, there is miracle; and it is simply undevoutness which imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of God. The customs of Heaven ought to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than the strange things which He does not love well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath the sun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise.
James Martineau (Endeavours after the Christian Life).
Advice, like snow, the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon and the deeper it sinks into the mind.
S. T. Coleridge.
This poem is omitted from My Lyrical Life, Massey’s collected poems.
THE MOTHER WHO DIED TOO
It will be observed that Myers, like Swinburne, handled the old heroic couplet in a masterly manner, undreamt of by Pope, Dryden, and their generation.
I am much engaged, an old man and out of health, and I cannot spare time to answer your questions fully,—nor indeed can they be answered. Science has nothing to do with Christ, except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any Revelation. As for a future life every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities. Wishing you happiness, I remain, &c.
Charles Darwin (Letter to von Müller, June 5, 1879).
This letter is reproduced in the Life and Letters, but evidently Francis Darwin did not know that the “German youth” to whom he says it was written was Baron Ferdinand von Müller, K.C.M.G. (1825-1896), then fifty-three years of age! Von Müller was director of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens from 1857 to 1873, and died in Melbourne in 1896. He did important work in Australian botany.
As regards Darwin’s letter, it seems to me that a sufficient reason why a great and lovable man, who was at first a convinced believer in the immortality of the soul, became an agnostic is given in the next quotation. The higher aesthetic part of his brain had become atrophied.
Darwin himself thought that he had not given sufficient consideration to religious questions and was exceedingly anxious that his own agnostic views should not influence others,
I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great[319] pleasure, and even as a school-boy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseates me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music.... My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that (aesthetic) part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.... The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
Charles Darwin.
This is from autobiographical notes made by Darwin for his children, and not intended for publication.
CHILDREN’S HYMN ON THE COAST OF BRITTANY.
WESLEY’S MEDICAL PRESCRIPTIONS
For an Ague:—Make six middling pills of cobwebs. Take one a little before the cold fit; two a little before the next fit (suppose the next day); the other three, if need be, a little before the third fit. This seldom fails.
A Cut:—Bind on toasted cheese. This will cure a deep cut.
A Fistula:—Grind an ounce of sublimate mercury as fine as possible.... (Two quarts of water to be added, then half a spoonful with two spoonfuls of water to be taken fasting every other day), ... In forty days this will also cure any cancer, any old sore or King’s evil.
The Iliac Passion:—Hold a live puppy constantly on the belly.
John Wesley (Primitive Physic. Ed. 1780).
The iliac passion, now known as ileus, is a severe colic due to intestinal obstruction.
It seems strange that so eminent a man should have believed in these absurd prescriptions, but as a matter of fact the book generally is much more sane and sound than one would expect from the habits and state of knowledge of the time. For example, in his rules of health Wesley strongly advises the practice of cold bathing, cleanliness, open-air exercise, moderation of food, etc. Also these prescriptions are chosen for their absurdity—in each case other more sensible remedies are offered. But Wesley in his preface says that he has omitted altogether from his book Cinchona bark, because it is “extremely dangerous.” This means that in regard to ague he omitted the only efficient remedy—which was much more unfortunate than his prescribing cobweb pills.
This book went to thirty-six editions between 1747 and 1840.
All our life is a meeting of cross-roads, where the choice of directions is perilous.
Victor Hugo.
Richard Lovelace (1618-1655) subsequently wrote (Orpheus to Beasts):
Then = than. See next quotation.
I think the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded blossom-like dark-eyed Hetty, of whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came out of the very strength of his nature, and not out of any inconsistent weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music?—to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being past and present in one unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love that has been scattered through the toilsome years; concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learnt lessons of self-renouncing sympathy; blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy? If not, then neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon by the exquisite curves of a woman’s cheek and neck and arms, by the liquid depths of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet childish pout of her lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music: what can one say more? Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one woman’s soul that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them; it is more than a woman’s love that moves us in a woman’s eyes—it seems to be a far-off mighty love that has come near to us, and made speech for itself there; the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness—by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace. The noblest nature sees the most of this impersonal expression in beauty, and for this reason, the noblest nature is often the most blinded to the character of the woman’s soul that the beauty clothes. Whence, I fear, the tragedy of human life is likely to continue for a long time to come in spite of mental philosophers who are ready with the best receipts for avoiding all mistakes of the kind.
George Eliot (Adam Bede).
George Eliot would not know the preceding poem by Campion, whose lyrics had been forgotten until A. H. Bullen revived them in 1889; and most probably also she did not know Lovelace’s poem, as it is not one of the two or three lyrics by which alone he is remembered.
The degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakespeare’s faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet, and arms. That is a capital error. Then again, we hear of a man’s “intellectual nature,” and of his “moral nature,” as if these again were divisible and existed apart.... We ought to know, and to keep forever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; that man’s spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another side of the one vital Force whereby he is and works?.... Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but, consider it,—without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a thoroughly immoral man could not know anything at all! To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathize with it; that is, be virtuously related to it.... Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the pusillanimous forever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is mean, superficial, small.
Carlyle (Heroes and Hero Worship, III).
“IMBUTA”
The title evidently refers to Horace Ep. 1, 2, 69, 70, Quo semel est Imbuta recens servabit odorem testa diu. “The scent which once has flavoured the fresh jar will be preserved in it for many a day.” Moore no doubt had the same passage in his mind when, speaking of the memories of past joys, he wrote:
So Whyte-Melville says that when love is poured again into the heart of a man who has lost his first love, “The new wine, the new wine, It tasteth like the old.”
The Toucan has an enormous bill, makes a noise like a puppy dog, and lays his eggs in hollow trees. How astonishing are the freaks and fancies of nature! To what purpose, we say, is a bird placed in the woods of Cayenne with a bill a yard long, making a noise like a puppy dog, and laying eggs in hollow trees? The Toucans, to be sure, might retort, to what purpose were gentlemen in Bond Street created? To what purpose were certain foolish prating Members of Parliament created?—pestering the House of Commons with their ignorance and folly, and impeding the business of the country? There is no end of such questions. So we will not enter into the metaphysics of the Toucan.
Sydney Smith (Review of “Waterton’s Travels in South America”).
Above green-flashing plunges of a weir, and shaken by the thunder below, lilies, golden and white, were swaying at anchor among the reeds. Meadow-sweet hung from the banks thick with weed and trailing bramble, and there also hung a daughter of earth. Her face was shaded by a broad straw hat with a flexible brim that left her lips and chin in the sun, and, sometimes nodding, sent forth a light of promising eyes. Across her shoulders, and behind, flowed large loose curls, brown in shadow, almost golden where the ray touched them. She was simply dressed, befitting decency and the season. On a closer inspection you might see that her lips were stained. This blooming young person was regaling on dewberries. They grew between the bank and the water. Apparently she found the fruit abundant, for her hand was making pretty progress to her mouth. Fastidious youth, which revolts at woman plumping her exquisite proportions on bread-and-butter, and would (we must suppose) joyfully have her scraggy to have her poetical, can hardly object to dewberries. Indeed the act of eating them is dainty and induces musing. The dewberry is a sister to the lotus, and an innocent sister. You eat: mouth, eye, and hand are occupied, and the undrugged mind free to roam. And so it was with the damsel who knelt there. The little skylark went up above her, all song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue: from a dewy copse dark over her nodding hat the blackbird fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note: the kingfisher flashed emerald out of green osiers: a bow-winged heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude: a boat slipped toward her, containing a dreamy youth; and still she plucked the fruit, and ate, and mused, as if no fairy prince were invading her territories, and as if she wished not for one, or knew not her wishes. Surrounded by the green shaven meadows, the pastoral summer buzz, the weirfall’s thundering white, amid the breath and beauty of wild flowers, she was a bit of lovely human life in a fair setting; a terrible attraction. The Magnetic Youth leaned round to note his proximity to the weir-piles, and beheld the sweet vision. Stiller and stiller grew nature, as at the meeting of two electric clouds. Her posture was so graceful, that though he was making straight for the weir, he dared not dip a scull. Just then one enticing dewberry caught her eyes. He was floating by unheeded, and saw that her hand stretched low, and could not gather what it sought. A stroke from his right brought him beside her. The damsel glanced up dismayed, and her whole shape trembled over the brink. Richard sprang from his boat into the water. Pressing a hand beneath her foot, which she had thrust against the crumbling wet sides of the bank to save herself, he enabled her to recover her balance, and gain safe earth, whither he followed her....
To-morrow this place will have a memory—the river and the meadow, and the white falling weir: his heart will build a[327] temple here; and the skylark will be its high-priest, and the old blackbird its glossy-gowned chorister, and there will be a sacred repast of dewberries.
George Meredith (The Ordeal of Richard Feverel).
LETTY’S GLOBE
Charles Tennyson, a brother of Lord Tennyson and author with him of Poems by Two Brothers, took the name of Turner.
There is an infinite pathos in these lines. Having lost her faith in a future life, George Eliot tries to find consolation in the thought that, when she has passed into nothingness—when she “joins the choir invisible”—she will have done something to ennoble the minds of those who come after her. But why should generation after generation of insect-lives waste themselves in raising and purifying the minds of the generations that follow, if all in turn pass into nothingness? The higher and purer men became, the more they would love their fellow-beings and the more they would shudder at the insensate pain and cruelty in the world—the physical torture they themselves endure, and the mental torture both of losing for ever those they love and of seeing the sufferings of others. One should act in conformity with one’s belief. Instead of thus adding greater pain and sorrow to each succeeding generation, the effort should be to coarsen and brutalize our natures, so that love, duty, and moral aspiration shall disappear, and we shall cease to be saddened by the appalling cruelty of our existence. Our lives should, in fact, correspond with the brutal, ugly and stupid scheme of the universe.
This is the direct answer to George Eliot, allowing her very important assumption that we have a duty towards others, including those who come after us. But this assumption is logically unwarranted, if at the end of our brief years we pass into nothingness and have no further concern with any living being. This brings us to a familiar train of argument. Why should we be irresistibly impelled to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others? And, apart from altruism, why should we develop our own higher attributes—why seek to ennoble our own selves, since those selves disappear? Why fill with jewels the hollow log that is to be thrown on the fire? Why are we swayed by a sense of honour, a desire for justice, a love of purity and truth and beauty, a craving for affection, a thirst for knowledge, which persist up to the very gates of death? To take an illustration of Edward Caird’s, is not the path of life which is so traversed like the path of a star to the astronomer, which enables him to prophesy its future course—beyond the end which hides it from our eyes? Otherwise, to use another simile, it is as though Pheidias spent his life sculpturing in snow.
(This does not mean, as the sceptic usually sneers, that the virtuous man merely desires a reward for his virtuous conduct. It is an inquiry why he is virtuous—what is a sane view of the scheme of the universe.)
In forming the conclusion that there was no possible future for man, George Eliot and an immense number of other thinkers of her time made also the vast assumption that there was nothing left to discover. Blanco White’s sonnet alone might have taught them the folly of such premature judgments. Or we may take an illustration, used by F. W. H. Myers, namely, the discovery that, far beyond the red and the violet of the spectrum or the rainbow, extend rays that have been (and will for ever be) invisible to our eyes. Since George Eliot’s time the Society for Psychical Research has during the last thirty-five years accumulated unanswerable evidence of survival after death.
See preceding quotation.
We may well begin to doubt whether the known and the natural can suffice for human life. No sooner do we try to think so than pessimism raises its head. The more our thoughts widen and deepen, as the universe grows upon us and we become accustomed to boundless space and time, the more petrifying is the contrast of our own insignificance, the more contemptible become the pettiness, shortness, fragility of the individual life. A moral paralysis creeps upon us. For awhile we comfort ourselves with the notion of self-sacrifice; we say, what matter if I pass, let me think of others! But the other has become contemptible no less than the self; all human griefs alike seem little worth assuaging, human happiness too paltry at the best to be worth increasing. The whole moral world is reduced to a point; good and evil, right and wrong become infinitesimal ephemeral matters, while eternity and infinity remain attributes of that only which is outside the sphere of morality. Life becomes more intolerable the more we know and discover, so long as everything widens and deepens except our own duration, and that remains as pitiful as ever. The affections die away in a world where everything great and enduring is cold; they die of their own conscious feebleness and bootlessness.
Sir J. R. Seeley (Natural Religion).
See the two preceding quotations.
LOVE-SWEETNESS
Jesus saith, Wherever there are two, they are not without God; and wherever there is one alone, I say, I am with him. Raise the stone and there thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and there am I.
(Logia of Jesus).
This is one of the Logia or Sayings of Jesus written on papyrus in the third century and discovered in Egypt by Grenfell and Hunt in 1897. The italics, of course, are mine.
The first of all Gospels is this, that a Lie cannot endure for ever.
Meanwhile it is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly.
There are quarrels in which even Satan, bringing help, were not unwelcome; even Satan, fighting stiffly, might cover himself with glory—of a temporary nature.
... Nothing but two clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of the drum species.
Thou art bound hastily for the City of Nowhere; and wilt arrive!
Carlyle (French Revolution).
It is interesting to learn from a correspondent of The Spectator (Feb. 17, 1917) that Carlyle wrote two verses which he combined with Shakespeare’s “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” (Cymbeline iv, 2) to make a requiem, of which he was very fond:
Byron in “Don Juan” says:
(Speaking of the rare and exalted nature of Dorothea, who has adopted the normal, domestic married life) Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me, as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
George Eliot (Middlemarch).
This passage, which finely expresses an important truth, is at the end of Middlemarch. The reference is to a story of Herodotus. He says that Cyrus, the Persian, was angry with the river Gyndes (Diyalah), because it had drowned one of the white horses, which, as being sacred to the sun, accompanied the expedition. He, therefore, employed his army to divert the river into 360 channels (representing the number of days in the year). The story was probably told to Herodotus as explaining the great irrigation system that existed in Mesopotamia. The Diyalah flows into the Tigris not far from Baghdad.
See reference to this poem in Preface.
But to come again unto Apelles, this was his manner and custom besides, which he perpetually observed, that no day went over his head, but what businesse soever he had otherwise to call him away, he would make one draught or other (and never misse) for to exercise his hand and keepe it in use, inasmuch as from him grew the proverbe, Nulla dies sine linea, i.e. Be alwaies doing somewhat, though you doe but draw a line. His order was when he had finished a piece of work or painted table, and layd it out of his hand, to set it forth in some open gallerie or thorowfare, to be seen of folke that passed by, and himselfe would lie close behind it to hearken what faults were found therewith; preferring the judgment of the common people before his owne, and imagining they would spy more narrowly, and censure his doings sooner than himselfe: and as the tale is told, it fell out upon a time, that a shoomaker as he went by seemed to controlle his workmanship about the shoo or pantofle that he had made to a picture, and namely, that there was one latchet fewer than there should be: Apelles acknowledging that the man said true indeed, mended that fault by the next morning, and set forth his table as his manner was. The same shoomaker comming again the morrow after, and finding the want supplied which he noted the day before, took some pride unto himselfe, that his former admonition had sped so well, and was so bold as to cavil at somewhat about the leg. Apelles could not endure that, but putting forth his head from behind the painted table, and scorning thus to be checked and reproved, Sirrha (quoth hee) remember you are but a shoomaker, and therefore meddle no higher I advise you, than with shoos. Which words also of his came afterwards to be a common proverbe, Ne sutor ultra crepidam.
Pliny (Natural History).
Apelles, the greatest painter of antiquity. The two proverbs mean: “No day without a line,” “A cobbler should stick to his last.” Pantofle, sandal; latchet, the thong fastening the sandal; painted table, panel picture; controlle, find fault with.
Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom—a third part bud; a third part past, a third part in full bloom—is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.
John Ruskin (Stones of Venice II, vi, 25).
The best of us are but poor wretches just saved from shipwreck: can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?
George Eliot (Janet’s Repentance).
This and the next three quotations are word-pictures (see p. 85).
The stanzas are reversed in order.
The above are from a series of word-pictures (see p. 85).
ON THE NONPAREIL
Naught but himself can be his parallel.
Randall was a pugilist of the time.
“None but himself can be his parallel” is a line from The Double Falsehood of Louis Theobald (1691-1744), but it comes originally from Seneca (Hercules Furens, Act I, Sc. I):
I copied the above sonnet from Gossip in a Library by Edmund Gosse (1891), partly because Mr. Gosse said of it, “Anthologies are not edited in a truly catholic spirit, or they would contain this very remarkable sonnet.” I hardly think this, but the lines seem sufficiently interesting to quote.
(The King, seeing her so beautiful, said to his nephew, “For one kiss, for a smile, for one hair of her head, Infante Don Ruy, I would give Spain and Peru.” The wind that blows over the mountain will drive me mad.)
Victor Hugo (Gastibelza).
This charmingly extravagant praise of a lady’s beauty recalls the story of another poet. The Eastern conqueror, Timur (or Tamerlane), sent for the Persian poet Hafiz and very angrily asked him, “Art thou he who offered to give my two great cities, Samarkand and Bokhara, for the black mole on thy mistress’s cheek?” Hafiz, however, cleverly escaped trouble by replying, “Yes, sire, I always give freely, and in consequence am now reduced to poverty. May I crave your kind assistance?” Timur was amused at the reply and made the poet a present. The story, however, is considered doubtful, because Timur did not conquer Persia until some years after 1388, which is supposed to be the date of the poet’s death.
Mere verbal insults (to a Roman Emperor) were not considered treason; for, said the Emperors Theodosius, Arcadius and Honorius, in language that is a standing rebuke to pusillanimous tyrants, if the words are uttered in a spirit of frivolity, the attack merits contempt; if from madness, they excite pity; if from malice, they are to be forgiven.
William A. Hunter (1844-1898) (Roman Law, Appendix).
This recalls to mind the numerous cases of lèse-majesté for words spoken against the Kaiser before the war. The passage would make a pleasant retort to a rude opponent (a “pusillanimous tyrant”) in a debate.
I have discovered that a feigned familiarity in great ones, is a note of certain usurpation on the less. For great and popular men feign themselves to be servants of others, to make these slaves to them. So the fisher provides bait for the trout, roach, dace, etc., that they may be food for him.
Ben Jonson (Mores Aulici).
Paraphrased as:—
GLADSTONE AND THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH.
Mr. Gladstone’s relation to Psychical Research affords one more illustration of the width and force of his intellectual sympathies. Many men, even of high ability, if convinced as Mr. Gladstone was of the truth and sufficiency of the Christian revelation, permit themselves to ignore these experimental approaches to spiritual knowledge, as at best superfluous. They do not realize how profoundly the evidence, the knowledge, which we seek and which in some measure we find, must ultimately influence men’s views as to both the credibility and the adequacy of all forms of faith. Mr. Gladstone’s broad intellectual purview,—aided perhaps in this instance by something of the practical foresight of the statesman,—placed him in a quite different attitude towards our quest. “It is the most important work which is being done in the world,” he said in a conversation in 1885. “By far the most important,” he repeated, with a grave emphasis which suggested previous trains of thought, to which he did not care to give expression. He went on to apologize, in his courteous fashion, for his inability to render active help; and ended by saying “If you will accept sympathy without service, I shall be glad to join your ranks.” He became an Honorary Member, and followed with attention,—I know not with how much of study—the[340] successive issues of our Proceedings. Towards the close of his life he desired that the Proceedings should be sent to St. Deiniol’s Library, which he had founded at Hawarden; thus giving final testimony to his sense of the salutary nature of our work. From a man so immersed in other thought and labour that work could assuredly claim no more; from men profoundly and primarily interested in the spiritual world it ought, I think, to claim no less.
F. W. H. Myers (S.P.R. Journal, June, 1898).
Apart from this interesting glimpse of Gladstone, it shows the importance he attached to the work of the Society for Psychical Research. To the severely orthodox, who think no evidence of life after death should be sought outside “Revelation,” his opinion should appeal. Every increase of knowledge is a further “Revelation.” In the Bible we are told of one resurrection, and there is certainly no reason why we should not seek the evidence of others. We should not shut our eyes and close our ears to new Revelation.
The Society has been thirty-eight years in existence and is still insufficiently appreciated. Hodgson said in The Forum, 1896 “There are so many ways of looking at the world. It may be a speck in space, or a huge cauldron with a graveyard for its crust, a place in which to get a hunger and satisfy it, the fighting ground for a while of dragon or ape, of Trojan or Turk, an evolutionary drama that must end in ice or fire. Many things it means to different men. One is busy with earthworms, another with stars, another with the splendour of the day or the strivings of the human soul. Numerous investigators are hunting for further proofs that we came out of the mud, but very few are seeking indications, in any scientific spirit, of what may follow the toil and turmoil of our individual existence here.”
Myers says: “The question of the survival of man is a branch of experimental psychology. Is there, or is there not, evidence in the actual observed phenomena of automatism, apparitions and the like, for a transcendental energy in living men, or for an influence emanating from personalities which have overpassed the tomb? This is the definite question, which we can at least intelligibly discuss, and which either we or our descendants may some day hope to answer.”
(A woman, look you, is a certain animal hard to understand and much inclined to mischief.)
Molière (Le Dépit Amoureux).
Swinburne introduced the new Hellenism or paganism, which was followed by Pater and J. A. Symonds and ended with Oscar Wilde (see p. 310 note.) Here Time is the supreme god who wrecks Christian Churches, etc.
Although Swinburne had no important message to deliver, yet by his wonderful mastery of metre and language he was of tremendous service in transforming English Poetry (see p. 219.) But in spite of the magical effect of his new melodies, he was wanting in the art (of which Milton is the supreme example) of varying his rhythm and accents. His extreme regularity, notwithstanding the fine language and the splendid swing of his verses, produces in his longer poems a certain effect of monotony. Swinburne spoke of the “spavined and spur-galled Pegasus” of George Eliot, but although she lacked his wonderful lyric melody, she was more artistic and effective than he in varying the rhythm of her verse. However, the immense influence of Swinburne on all subsequent poetry can never be forgotten. Even the dreary Iambic couplet in his hands was transformed into music.
There is the love of the good for the good’s sake, and the love of the truth for the truth’s sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good’s sake; but very few, indeed—and scarcely one woman—love the truth for the truth’s sake. Yet without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of the persecution of the truth—the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry. To see clearly that the love of the good and the true is ultimately identical is given only to those who love both sincerely and without any foreign ends.
S. T. Coleridge (Table Talk).
The old creeds grew out of human nature as genuinely as weeds and flowers out of the earth. It is well enough that the gardener, whose business it is to pull them up, should despise them as pigweed, wormwood, chickweed, shadblossom: so they[344] are, out of their place; but the botanist picks up the same and recognizes them as Ambrosia, Stellaria, Amelanchier, Amaranth. Natura nihil agit frustra. Let us coax each to yield its last bud.
Moncure D. Conway.
I have not Conway’s book An Earthward Pilgrimage to refer to. The latter part of the above is apparently a quotation from Thoreau, as I remember it is so quoted by Emerson.
God is my witness, what hours of wretchedness I have spent at times, while reading the Bible devoutly from day to day, and reverencing every word of it as the Word of God, when petty contradictions met me which seemed to my reason to conflict with the notion of the absolute historical veracity of every part of Scripture, and which, as I felt, in the study of any other book we should honestly treat as errors or mis-statements, without in the least detracting from the real value of the book! But in those days, I was taught that it was my duty to fling the suggestion from me at once, “as if it were a loaded shell shot into the fortress of my soul,” or to stamp out desperately, as with an iron heel, each spark of honest doubt, which God’s own gift, the love of truth, had kindled in my bosom.... I thank God that I was not able long to throw dust in the eyes of my own mind, and do violence to the love of truth in this way.
Bishop Colenso (1814-1883) (Pentateuch).
(See G. W. Cox’s Life of Colenso, I, 493.) Colenso’s quotation, “as if it were a loaded shell,” etc., is from Bishop Wilberforce. Cox mentions elsewhere that in one of Wilberforce’s published sermons he speaks of a young man of great promise dying in darkness and despair, because he had indulged in doubt as to whether the sun and moon stood still at Joshua’s bidding! Who, that went through the experiences of those days, can ever forget them? We had been taught that we “must believe” every word of the Bible to be divinely inspired or else be eternally damned. And yet we realized that such belief was absolutely impossible!
The horror with which Bishop Colenso’s revelations were received in orthodox circles would to-day be scarcely credible, and not until after the eighties were the results of the Higher Criticism generally accepted.
Let a man be once fully persuaded that there is no difference between the two positions, “The Bible contains the religion revealed by God,” and “Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God”; and that whatever can be said of the Bible, collectively taken, may and must be said[345] of each and every sentence of the Bible, taken for and by itself,—and I no longer wonder at these paradoxes. I only object to the inconsistency of those who profess the same belief, and yet affect to look down with a contemptuous or compassionate smile on John Wesley for rejecting the Copernican system as incompatible therewith; or who exclaim, “Wonderful!” when they hear that Sir Matthew Hale sent a crazy old woman to the gallows in honour of the Witch of Endor.... I challenge these divines and their adherents to establish the compatibility of a belief in the modern astronomy and natural philosophy with their and Wesley’s doctrine respecting the inspired Scriptures.
S. T. Coleridge.
Why do we respect some vegetables, and despise others? The bean is a graceful, confiding, engaging vine; but you never can put beans in poetry, nor into the highest sort of prose. Corn—which, in my garden, grows alongside the bean, and, so far as I can see, with no affectation of superiority—is, however, the child of song. It “waves” in all literature.
Charles Dudley Warner (My Summer in a Garden).
Mr. Yeats has, however, rescued the bean from its invidious position (The Lake Isle of Innisfree):—
Lady Middleton, a friend of old days in Adelaide and now in England, reminded me of these lines.
This is from Myers’ Poems, 1870, and is one of a pair of sonnets. I do not quote the first in full because its meaning seems obscure, but the last six lines on the shortness of life as compared with eternity are as follow:
In the second sonnet quoted above, Myers is not merely referring to the Biblical account of the future life in heaven as consisting in endless worship—which, if taken literally instead of symbolically, would certainly mean a “drear eternity.” The suggestion is that there must be some equivalent to work, thought, activity, progress, and definite aims to make eternal life preferable to annihilation. (I am reminded here of a curious statement made by the great Adam Smith, “What can be added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience!”) Myers ultimately came to the definite conclusion that the future life will be one of continued progress.
His name, Myers, is purely English, not Jewish. This gifted man was not only a fine poet, but also an important essayist and a remarkable classical scholar. He, Hodgson, and others formed the small band of able men who threw everything else aside and devoted their lives to Psychical Research. Myers’ best poems appeared in The Renewal of Youth and other Poems, 1882, and it was no doubt a loss to poetry that during the remaining eighteen years of his life he added little, if anything, more. However, he and Hodgson considered that the work to which they had devoted themselves was of the very highest importance. Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, the important work in which Myers embodied his conclusions, was left incomplete at his death, but Hodgson, with Miss Alice Johnson’s assistance, completed and edited it.
Myers was quite satisfied before his death, in 1901, that the evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research had already established in itself the fact of survival after death. But the interesting fact is that during the nineteen years since he “passed over to the other side” he has apparently been the principal agent in adding greatly to that evidence. There is every reason to believe that Myers has personally been communicating and arranging and directing much of the evidence that has since been given.
It is not the essayist’s duty to inform, to build pathways through metaphysical morasses, to cancel abuses, any more than it is the duty of the poet to do these things. Incidentally he may do something in that way, just as the poet may, but it is not his duty, and should not be expected of him. Skylarks are primarily created to sing, although a whole choir of them may be baked in pies and brought to table; they were born to make music, although they may incidentally stay the pangs of vulgar hunger.... The essay should be pure literature as the poem is pure literature.
Alexander Smith (On the Writing of Essays).
MIMNERMUS IN CHURCH
Mimnermus was a fine Greek elegiac poet—about 630-600 B.C.
MORS ET VITA
The evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research indicates that friends do certainly meet. See the remarkably convincing Ear of Dionysius, lately published, where Dr. Verrall and Professor Butcher are clearly having a great time together on the other side.
The teaching of Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) led to an important evangelical movement in the Roman Catholic Church. When, however, the Jansenists became subjected to persecution, the usual result followed that numbers of them became fanatics. The more corrupt the French Court and Society became, the more frenzied became this fanaticism. In 1727 the Jansenist deacon, Pâris, a man of very holy life, was buried in the St. Médard churchyard, and shortly afterwards miracles were said to take place at his tomb. In consequence large crowds of convulsionnaires assembled there and very shocking scenes were enacted, men and women in hysterical and epileptic fits and ecstatic delirium, eating the earth of the grave and inflicting frightful tortures on themselves and each other. When in 1732 the Court interposed and closed the churchyard some wit wrote the above couplet on the gate.
Mr. King in his Classical and Foreign Quotations has “De faire des miracles,” but the above version seems correct (See Larousse.)
There are two things that fill my soul with a holy reverence and an ever-growing wonder: the spectacle of the starry sky, that virtually annihilates us as physical beings; and the moral law which raises us to infinite dignity as intelligent agents.
The ought expresses a kind of necessity, a kind of connection of actions with their grounds or reasons, such as is to be found nowhere else in the whole natural world. For of the natural world our understanding can know nothing except what is, what has been, or what will be. We cannot say that anything in it ought to be other than it actually was, is, or will be. In fact, so long as we are considering the course of nature, the ought has no meaning whatever. We can as little inquire what ought to happen in nature as we can inquire what properties a circle ought to have.
Immanuel Kant.
The first quotation (from the Kritik of Practical Reason) appears to be the same passage that is often rendered in such words as these: “Two things fill my soul with awe—the starry heavens in the still night, and the sense of duty in man.”
(——) is one of those men who go far to shake my faith in a future state of existence; I mean, on account of the difficulty of knowing where to place him. I could not bear to roast him; he is not so bad as that comes to: but then, on the other hand, to have to sit down with such a fellow in the very lowest pothouse of heaven is utterly inconsistent with the belief of that place being a place of happiness for me.
S. T. Coleridge (Table Talk).
Let us reflect that the highest path is pointed out by the pure Ideal of those, who look up to us, and who, if we tread less loftily, may never look so high again.
N. Hawthorne (Transformation).
One summer evening sitting by my window I watched for the first star to appear, knowing the position of the brightest in the southern sky. The dusk came on, grew deeper, but the star did not shine. By and by, other stars less bright appeared, so that it could not be the sunset which obscured the expected one. Finally, I considered that I must have mistaken its position, when suddenly a puff of air blew through the branch of a pear tree which overhung the window, a leaf moved, and there was the star behind the leaf.
At present the endeavour to make discoveries is like gazing at the sky up through the boughs of an oak. Here a beautiful star shines clearly; here a constellation is hidden by a branch; a universe by a leaf. Some mental instrument or organon is required to enable us to distinguish between the leaf which may be removed and a real void; when to cease to look in one direction, and to work in another.... There are infinities to be known, but they are hidden by a leaf.
Richard Jefferies (The Story of My Heart).
Emerson is always an optimist.
I knew a very wise man that believed that, if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.
Fletcher of Saltoun (Letter to Montrose and others).
What would the wise man have said of “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary”?
FIRST LOVE
ON A FLY DRINKING OUT OF A CUP OF ALE
This was first published in 1732 as “The Fly—An Anachreontick” and Mr. Gosse in the Encyc. Britt. gave the first six lines as an example of an Anacreontic. He attributed the poem to Oldys, but the authorship is doubtful. (See Notes and Queries, 3rd Ser., I, 21). Vincent Bourne in a copy of his Poematia, 1734, in my possession, has written out and signed the two verses, entitling them “A Song,” the last line of each verse being repeated as a refrain. From this it might appear that he claimed the authorship. In 1743 he published a Latin version of the poem. Vincent Bourne, a beautiful Latinist, was much loved by his pupils, Charles Lamb and Cowper, who each translated into English some of his fine Latin verses.
An inscription on a tomb in Melrose Abbey, but said to be a version of lines by a Fourteenth Century poet, William Billing.
It takes very little water to make a perfect pool for a tiny fish, where it will find its world and paradise all in one, and never have a presentiment of the dry bank. The fretted summer shade, and stillness, and the gentle breathing of some loved life near—it would be paradise to us all, if eager thought, the strong angel with the implacable brow, had not long since closed the gates.
George Eliot (Romola).
All true Work is religion; and whatsoever religion is not Work may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes, or where it will; with me it shall have no harbour.
Carlyle (Reward).
The above are from a series of word-pictures (see p. 167).
(Phantasy or imagination may be true and clear or may be disordered and unsound) ... The phantastical part of men (if it be not disordered) is a representer of the best, most comely and bewtifull images or appearances of thinges to the soule and according to their very truth.... Of this sort of Phantasie are all good Poets, notable Captaines stratagematique, all cunning artificers and Engineers, all Legislators, Politiciens and Counsellours of estate, in whose exercises the inventive part is most employed and is to the sound and true judgement of man most needful.
George Puttenham (The Arte of English Poesie, 1589).
Just as a poet, besides imagination, must have intellect or judgment as a basis, so the higher imaginative faculty comes to the aid of intellect in other departments of life. As Maudsley says, “it performs the initial and essential functions in every branch of human development” (Body and Will). Ehrlich, seeking a substance that would destroy germs without injuring the human tissues, plods through endless tedious processes, and on his 606th experiment, discovers salvarsan, a cure for syphilis. Here the higher faculty has had little to do—but when, on the fall of an apple, Newton’s mind saw in a flash how the world was balanced, intellect soared aloft on the wings of imagination.
As well Poets as Poesie are despised, and the name become, of honourable infamous, subject to scorne and derision, and rather a reproach than a prayse to any that useth it: for commonly whoso is studious in the Arte or shewes himselfe excellent in it, they call him in disdayne a phantasticall: and a light-headed or phantasticall man (by conversion) they call a Poet.... Of such among the Nobilitie or gentrie as be very well seene in many laudable sciences, and especially in Poesie, it is so come to passe that they have no courage to write and if they have, yet are they loath to be a-known of their skill. So as I know very many notable Gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably and suppressed it agayne, or else suffred it to be publisht without their owne names to it: as if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seeme learned, and to shew himselfe amorous of any good Arte.
George Puttenham (The Arte of English Poesie, 1589).
We do not always remember in what disheartening conditions the great Elizabethan literature was produced—the inferior position of the writer, his wretched remuneration and his dependence on patrons. It is strange to think that it was considered beneath the dignity of a gentleman to write poetry or to acknowledge its authorship—or apparently to show proficiency in other arts or sciences. Such men as Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh were exceptions. The curious fact is that Puttenham himself (assuming, as is probable, that he was the author) issued this important book anonymously. He had, however, acknowledged his Partheniades ten years before.
As Arber points out, the above passage, and another reference by Puttenham to the same subject, indicate that, at least in the earlier Elizabethan period, much talent must have been lost and much literature never reached the printing press. The same feeling that then existed is seen again in Locke’s time (see p. 180), and, if we consider a moment, we shall find that it has persisted to some extent to the present day. Think how miserably inadequate is the attention paid to poetry in our educational system, the methods employed being, indeed, calculated to make the[358] student loathe the subject. (When I was young (“Ah, woful When”[49]) we had as a school text-book Palgrave’s Golden Treasury—a divine gift to us in those days. As we had a sympathetic teacher, we read it as poetry, and the consequence was that I and other boys knew the book practically by heart from cover to cover.)
It is surprising that Englishmen neglect the one great talent which they possess. What distinguishes them above all other nations is their superiority in the higher imaginative faculties.[50] This is shown in such a national characteristic as the love of travel and adventure, which has created the British Empire, and is proved concretely by the fact that England has produced the greatest wealth of poetry which the world has ever seen. This great treasure, which should be employed for encouraging the highest of all faculties, is allowed to lie idle. The fact seems to be overlooked that the study of poetry is not only of enormous intrinsic value in knowledge, and culture, but that it is the finest of all mental training. By analysis and paraphrase it gives knowledge of language, appreciation of style, practice in literary expression, and, above all things, precision of thought. In my opinion, poetry should form an essential part of education, beginning in childhood and continuing throughout the Arts course. It may be found that there are intelligent persons who are incapable of appreciating poetry, and the subject may, therefore, not be made a compulsory one. But my conviction is that, where men imagine themselves to be thus deficient, it is the result of a bad system of education. There is great truth in Stevenson’s fine essay, “The Lantern-Bearers.”
A Celtic flight of imagination.
A pretty compliment to his wife who in 1814 had introduced the dahlia into England from Spain. Previous attempts had failed (Liechtenstein’s Holland House).
C’est imiter quelqu’un que de planter des choux.
A. de Musset.
Quoted by Austin Dobson:—
... The great book of actual life, sad, diffuse, contradictory, yet always full of depth and significance.
George Sand (The Miller of Angibault).
A NOISELESS, PATIENT SPIDER
Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit.
(The modest Nymph saw her God and blushed.)
The conscious water saw its God and blushed.
Richard Crashaw (1616-1650).
Referring to the miracle of Cana. Both Latin and English epigrams are by Crashaw. In the former the water is personified by its Nymph.
Called on the W. Molesworths. He is threatened with total blindness, and his excellent wife is learning to work in the dark in preparation for a darkened chamber. What things wives are! What a spirit of joyous suffering, confidence, and love was incarnated in Eve! ’Tis a pity they should eat apples.
Caroline Fox’s Journals.
Vox, et praeterea nihil.
[Words (literally voice) and nothing more.]
Proverb.
Plutarch, in his Apophthegm, Lacon. Incert. XIII, says that a man after plucking a nightingale and finding little flesh on it, said φωνὰ τύ τις ἐσσὶ, καὶ οὐδὲν ἄλλο, “Thou art voice and nothing more” (King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations). No doubt this was the origin of the saying. It was applied to the nightingale, and to Echo—and then used in Hamlet’s sense, “Words, words, words.”
Two of the most marvellous lines in all literature. With them as a text volumes might be written.
Campbell the poet, who had always a bad razor, I suppose, and was late of rising, said he believed the man of civilization who lived to be sixty had suffered more pain in littles in shaving every day than a woman with a large family had from her lyings-in.
John Brown (Horae Subsecivae I, 457).
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and the beholder.
J. G. Zimmermann.
“Some bee had stung it.” It, of course, means the full underlip, as against the less full upperlip.
Such is the ascendancy which the great works of the Greek imagination have established over the mind of man that.... he is tempted to ignore the real superiority of our own religion, morality, civilization, and to re-shape in fancy an adult world on an adolescent ideal.
F. W. H. Myers (Essay on Greek Oracles).
That early burst of admiration for Virgil of which I have already spoken was followed by a growing passion for one after another of the Greek and Latin poets. From ten to sixteen I lived much in the inward recital of Homer, Æschylus, Lucretius, Horace, and Ovid. The reading of Plato’s Gorgias at fourteen was a great event; but the study of the Phaedo at sixteen affected upon me a kind of conversion. At that time, too, I returned to my worship of Virgil, whom Homer had for some years thrust into the background. I gradually wrote out Bucolics, Georgics, Aeneid from memory....
The discovery at seventeen, in an old school book, of the poems of Sappho, whom till then I had only known by name, brought an access of intoxicating joy. Later on, the solitary decipherment of Pindar made another epoch of the same kind. From the age of sixteen to twenty-three there was no influence in my life comparable to Hellenism in the fullest sense of the word. That tone of thought came to me naturally; the classics were but intensifications of my own being. They drew from me and fostered evil as well as good; they might aid imaginative impulse and detachment from sordid interests, but they had no check for pride.
When pushed thus far, the “Passion of the Past” must needs wear away sooner or later into an unsatisfied pain. In 1864 I travelled in Greece. I was mainly alone; nor were the traveller’s facts and feelings mapped out for him then as now. Ignorant as I was, according to modern standards, yet my emotions were all my own: and few men can have drunk that departed loveliness into a more passionate heart. It was the life of about the sixth century before Christ, on the isles of the Aegean, which drew me most;—that intensest and most unconscious bloom of the Hellenic spirit. Here alone in the Greek story do women play their due part with men. What might the Greeks have made of the female sex had they continued to care for it! Then it was that Mimnermus sang:—
Then it was that Praxilla’s cry rang out across the narrow seas, that call to fellowship, reckless and lovely with stirring joy. “Drink with me!” she cried, “be young along with me! Love with me! wear with me the garland crown! Mad be thou with my madness; be wise when I am wise!”
I looked through my open porthole close upon the Lesbian shore. There rose the heathery promontories, and waves lapped upon the rocks in dawning day:—lapped upon those rocks where Sappho’s feet had trodden; broke beneath the heather on which had sat that girl unknown, nearness to whom made a man the equal of the gods. I sat in Mytilene, to me a sacred city, between the hill-crest and the sunny bay....
Gazing thence on Delos on the Cyclades, and on those straits and channels of purple sea, I felt that nowise could I come closer still; never more intimately than thus could embrace that vanished beauty. Alas for an ideal which roots itself in the past! That longing cannot be allayed.
F. W. H. Myers (Fragments of Prose and Poetry).
The wonderful record of Myers in classical study will first be observed. If we did not know him to be absolutely trustworthy, we would find it practically impossible to believe his statement. Imagine, for instance, a boy of sixteen learning by heart the whole of Virgil for his own pleasure! However, anything vouched for by Myers must be accepted as literally true.
Extraordinary as this is, the above quotations introduce us to a subject quite as extraordinary and far more interesting and important, namely, the distortion of truth caused by extreme classical enthusiasm.[52] It is perfectly easy to see how such enthusiasm arises. Greek art and literature are not only intrinsically wonderful and valuable but, seeing that they were produced by a comparatively small population in a barbaric age, they constitute the greatest (secular) marvel in the history of the world. Everything tends to excite enthusiasm for this remote, alien, primitive, but most remarkable people. I need not speak of the art in which they stand unrivalled throughout the ages. As regards their literature, apart from its intrinsic excellence and the beauty of the language in which it is written, it has an additional fascination and charm, because it is the speech and song of the infancy of the world. Through it we see into the mind and realize the life of the most interesting race that ever lived. Possessing astounding intellect and intense originality, they were nevertheless the children of nature. Their earth was peopled with fauns and nymphs, their gods lived and moved and had their being in every natural object—and they had very little of our ideas of right and wrong. They had nothing of our wide knowledge and experience, yet they constructed a world of life and thought for themselves. It is absorbingly interesting to read their beautiful poetry, fine literature, and philosophic thought, bearing in mind that it was produced in the ignorant childhood and paganism of the human race, over two thousand years ago. And one of the most astonishing things about them is that essential product of civilization, a keen sense of humour. So curiously “modern” is their literature that the writers speak to us across the ages with as vivid a voice as if they were still alive. No other primitive race has been able to leave us any such adequate conception of its life and thought. Moreover, we can never forget how the Greek arose out of the tomb, where he had slept for many centuries, to preside at the re-birth of our own modern world—that emergence of Europe from medieval darkness which we call the Renaissance. It was largely Greek art and literature that stimulated the mental activity of the world and made us what we are to-day.
Very great enthusiasm is, therefore, warranted in the Greek student—but there comes a point where enthusiasm may become pure fanaticism, and lead to that most deadly of all things, the perversion of the truth.
In the above quotations two Greek poems are quoted, and another is referred to in the lines I have italicized. The first two[53] refer to vice, which to us is revolting and criminal, but to the whole Greek nation was natural, and recognised by law. The third expresses even more revolting passion. It will be seen, therefore, that Myers, in order to illustrate the “departed loveliness” of Greek life made a strange choice of quotations (which also, standing alone, would give a very false notion of classic Greek poetry).
Seeing that Myers was one of the purest-minded of men, what is the explanation of this very remarkable fact? The explanation is simply that Myers was a classical enthusiast. He had forgotten the warning he himself gave in the first quotation. It is absolutely amazing how such an enthusiast, however brilliant a scholar and capable a man in other respects, can blind himself to the most obvious facts where anything Greek is concerned. It is very certain that Myers read into each poem a perfectly innocent meaning—and he would not be alone in that respect. Take, for instance, the third quotation which is from Sappho. In my youth the great majority of classical men appeared to have convinced themselves that a poem of terribly fierce passion was an expression of mere friendship! Even our leading reference-book, Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, gave the same absurd view until about 1877.[54] However, we must get away from this ugly subject and seek further illustrations elsewhere.
This perverted enthusiasm seems to permeate all books of the last fifty or sixty years dealing with Greek life, art and literature that I have met with. This is a very large statement to make, and, of course, I do not mean that such flagrant instances as those above referred to are the rule. But to me there seems always to be some bias which tends to exaggerate or falsify the facts to some extent. We can trace this tendency back more than eighteen hundred years to Plutarch. (On the Malice of Herodotus). He, as Mr. Livingstone[55] says, “took the view that the Greeks of the great age could do no wrong, and rates the historian for ‘needlessly describing evil actions.’” And it is largely in this way that the enthusiast works—by omitting facts. I should think few readers unfamiliar with the classics will have known all the facts already put before them in these notes—because such facts, although known to all classical scholars, are kept in the background as much as possible. Again the tendency is to judge the Greeks by their greatest men—to imagine every Greek to have been a Plato!
I might add greatly to what I have already said about the Greeks, but I must confine myself to a few matters, repeating nothing that has been said in previous notes. The Greeks had very little regard for truthfulness. An oath was a matter of religion and was supposed to be binding upon them, but it was excusable to twist out of it. They also saw nothing[367] immoral in theft. Hermes was the god of thieves, and “the wily Odysseus” was a favourite hero of the Greeks. Autolycus, the grandfather of Odysseus, was taught by Hermes himself to surpass all men in stealing and perjury. (Od. XIX, 395.) Hence it was thought quite a proper thing to make war for the purpose of robbing neighbours of territory or property. I need quote only the truly “German” opinions of Socrates and Aristotle placed by Mr. Zimmern at the head of his chapter on Warfare in The Greek Commonwealth. “But, Socrates, it is possible to procure wealth for the State from our foreign enemies.” “Yes, certainly you may, if you are the stronger power” (Xen. Mem., III, 6, 7). “War is strictly a means of acquisition, to be employed against wild animals and against inferior races of men who, though intended by nature to be in subjection to us, are unwilling to submit[!], for war of such a kind is just by nature” (Aristotle, Politics, 1256). On considering that such sentiments are expressed by their greatest philosophers, we are not surprised to find that the history of the Greeks is one of lies, perfidy, and cruelty.[56] It further illustrates their unsympathetic pagan character when we find the Greek mother mourning for her dead son because he will not “feed her old age,” and Socrates valuing friendship because friends were useful.[57] When the enthusiast is confronted with the debased Greek religion he tells us, or leads us to think, that the people did not believe in their dissolute gods. As regards this I cannot do better than quote the terse statement of Mr. Livingstone. After pointing out that there were some advanced thinkers among the Greeks who were more or less sceptics (and that there were also some small sects who are said to have had higher moral beliefs than their countrymen[58]) he says, “We are concerned with the state religion, which Athenians learnt to reverence as children, which permeated the national literature, which crowned the high places of the city with its temples, which consecrated peace and war and everything solemn and ceremonial in civil life, which by its intimate connection with these things acquired that support of instinctive sentiment which is stronger than any moral or intellectual sanction.”[59] Something may be added to this. Why was the Greek so greatly concerned about his tomb and his burial rites? The main reason why he burdened himself with a wife and household was that a son should be left to see to those rites and look after his tomb. He did not see his wife before marriage, and, however beautiful he found her to be, the uneducated girl would be no companion for him; and her beauty would soon fade in the unwholesome confined life she led. Her office was fulfilled when she had borne him sons—and he looked for his pleasures elsewhere. Surely this one fact alone proves that the Greeks had a very real belief in their religion. Again why do we find that only Socrates and a few other thinkers appear to have been charged with impiety? Mr. Livingstone, curiously enough, argues from this that there was greater freedom of thought among the Greeks. Surely the simple and natural explanation is far preferable, namely, that there were no other pronounced sceptics than those few advanced thinkers. Imagine the danger of declaring anything against the gods which would throw in doubt[368] the divinity of the patron goddess Athena![60] It is often argued that the intelligent Greeks could no more have believed the monstrous stories of their gods, than we believe some of the Old Testament stories of Jehovah. But the position is entirely different. We disbelieve stories that offend our moral sense: the gods of the Greeks had a character similar to their own, and acted as they themselves would have acted if they had been gods. Also they had no ethnology, no knowledge of purer religions to teach them the falsity and depravity of their own—nor, indeed, would the proud Greeks have condescended to learn from barbarians (especially as they believed themselves descended from heroes who were sprung from the gods). Finally one has only to read the accounts of travellers in Greece to learn that the religion even lingers on to-day—see, for instance, S. C. Kaines Smith’s Greek Art and National Life (pp. 153, 172), where the woodcutters, when a tree is falling, throw themselves on the ground and hide their faces in deadly fear of the Dryads,[61] and an eminent Greek gentleman crosses himself at the name of the Nereïds. (See also W. H. D. Rouse’s Tales from the Isles of Greece. I learn from the Spectator review of a book just published, Balkan Home Life, by Lucy M. J. Garnett, that the religion has a very strong hold on the people.)
My statement has been very one-sided so far, as I have said very little of the virtues of the Greeks. These virtues were those of intelligent primitive people, love of freedom, justice, and equality (but confined to their own nation and not including their own women and slaves), personal courage, great patriotism, fidelity to kinsfolk and guests; they showed at times generosity to a valiant enemy and recognized some such duties as burying the dead. While I do not think we can carry the national virtues much further than this, there would be gradations of character among the Greeks, and probably many would be more or less kindly, others have a true affection for their wives, others show private virtues in various directions—we can only conjecture as to something of which there is very little evidence in their literature. On the one hand, we know that Socrates suffered martyrdom for the truth,[62] and we may surmise that there were other fine characters; on the other hand, we know that this highly intellectual nation put the philosopher to death as a blasphemer against their profligate gods.
But while we can give the Greeks credit for little of the morality of modern civilization, on the other hand we would be thinking very absurdly if we regarded their vices as though the people were on the same moral plane as ourselves. (This is the fact to be recognised. The ridiculous tendency of the modern enthusiast is to depict the Greeks as a highly moral nation striving for righteousness!) Strictly speaking, the Greek practices and habits should not be called vices, because the Greeks had no reason to believe that they were doing anything wrong. Their virtues and their vices were those of ordinary primitive life.[63] The moral principle, that highest product of creation, had not yet developed itself among the people to any appreciable extent, but we see it gradually emerging in the growing disbelief in the national religion among thinking men, and reaching an advanced stage in Plato, the greatest philosopher of antiquity. But to the average Greek, apart from religion (including respect for parents), the patriotism which they had learnt from Homer, their one great book, covered much of what they meant by “virtue”.[64] Whatever was good for the State was a virtue, whatever bad for the State a vice. We can hardly realize what Athens stood for in the Greek mind. For instance, Æschylus tells us that the patron goddess Athena came to Athens to preside over the balloting of the jurors and conduct the trial of Orestes, and also that the Furies lived among the citizens in a sacred grotto. The Greeks saw that they were immensely superior to the surrounding “barbarians,” and they regarded their State practically as an object of worship (as Rome was also regarded by the Romans).
It would have been interesting to discuss here the ethical views of the philosophers, but the subject is far too intricate for this note—and in any case they and their followers formed only a few exceptions among the Greeks. It will be seen later that the use of such words as “virtue,” “holiness,” etc., causes a vast deal of meaning to be read into Plato which never entered that philosopher’s mind.
The great outstanding fact about the Greeks is their astonishing intellect, combined with sound commonsense (σωφροσύνη) and a quite modern gift of humour. Their powerful intellect, however, had very poor material to work upon. In a previous note I have mentioned their remarkably limited idea of the world—but, while knowing this to be a fact, we still cannot realize the mental attitude of men who had even one false conception of such magnitude as regards their general outlook and thought. Let us take an instance of a different kind from the great philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), who came after Plato—bearing in mind that the average Greeks would be vastly more ignorant and superstitious than their greatest thinkers. In his Mechanica Aristotle explains the power of a lever to make a small weight lift a larger one. His explanation is that a circle has a certain magical character. A very wonderful thing is a circle, because it is both convex and concave; it is made by a fixed point and a moving line, which are contradictory to each other; and whatever has a[370] circular movement moves in opposite directions. Also, Aristotle says, movement in a circle is the most natural movement! Hence we get the result: the long arm of the lever moves in the larger circle and has the greater amount of this magical natural motion, and so requires the lesser force! Again, let us take a story which was as firmly believed by Aristotle as the most ignorant of his countrymen. Our word halcyon is the Greek word Alkuon, meaning a bird, probably of the Kingfisher species. The Greeks supposed the word to be formed of two words, hals kuon, meaning “conceived in the sea”—therefore they believed the bird was so conceived and that it was bred in a nest floating on the sea—and, as the sea must then be smooth, they further believed that a period of fourteen days’ calm necessarily occurred about Christmas—finding there was no such period of calm around their own coasts they either thought that it must occur (and the birds breed) elsewhere, or, like Theocritus, that the bird could charm the sea into tranquillity.[65]
The Greeks believed queer things about animals. I take the following instances of birds alone from Mr. Rogers’ Introduction to his Birds of Aristophanes, so that I need not give references. By looking at a plover, who returns the look, a man is cured of jaundice. Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, was said to have been so named because, having been cast into the sea, she was rescued by widgeons (Greek, penelops). The song of the dying swan was a belief of the Greeks. The raven was the bird of augury and had mysterious knowledge. The cranes fought the pygmies and swallowed stones for ballast. The young storks fed their aged parents. The sisken foresees the winter and snowstorms. Mr. Rogers has no need to discuss the yet more extravagant stories of the phœnix, sirens, harpies, etc. Plutarch (De Is. and Os. LXXI) tells us how the Greeks regarded birds and other animals in relation to the gods; he says that while they did not, like the Egyptians, worship animals, “they said and believed rightly that the dove was the sacred animal of Aphrodite, the raven of Apollo, the dog of Artemis, and so on.” (Possibly Aristophanes’ comedy did not win the prize, because the audience saw little humour in exaggerating the powers which they really believed the birds to have. To the Greeks the birds were greater and the gods smaller than we ourselves picture them. Ruskin’s translation of Od. V. 67,[66] the seabirds which “have care of the works of the sea,” seems much more likely to be correct than the accepted version that the birds live by diving and fishing. Consider how the Greeks would regard the birds that flew round and over their ships or fishing-nets and over the waves and rocks, where the sea-gods lay beneath—and compare Il. II, 614.)[67]
All that has been said about the Greeks in this and previous notes is intended, not so much to exhibit the character of that nation—a matter which does not greatly concern me—but for other reasons. In one instance the intention was to indicate how vast a gulf exists between Christianity and the ancient world. Many classical enthusiasts do not seem to realize this, and a definitely pagan tendency is very apparent in their habits of thought.
But the main object of pointing out the inferior state of civilization among the Greeks, their non-moral character in certain respects, their ignorance and superstition, and their low standard of morality generally, has to do with the important question of interpreting Greek literature and philosophy. It would matter very little that the enthusiast should picture the Greeks as a race of saints and demigods, if there were no beautiful and valuable literature to be coloured and falsified by reason of such views. It is only by realizing the actual life and thought of this primitive race that we can understand their language, that is to say, we can learn what meanings should be attached to the words they use. Only thus can we interpret their literature. We have already had two simple illustrations of this. In one case what appears to be a poetic fancy in Theocritus, when the voyager hopes the halcyons will calm the sea for him, is seen to be a wish that the birds will actually exercise the power that they possess. The other instance appears on page 294. But much more important is it that, in reading words of knowledge such as references to the starry heavens or the constitution of matter, or mental or moral phenomena, we should not attribute to the Greek writer conceptions far larger and higher than he had in his mind. To amplify what I have said in a previous note, let us take the words in Plato, Aristotle or, say, Euripides which are translated by such English words as “morality,” “purity,” “virtue,” “honour,” “religion,” etc. It is clear that the original Greek expressions cannot signify, for instance, either purity as we know it, or even abstention from unnatural vice or from infanticide.[68] We are, therefore, mistranslating when we use such English words (because they are the nearest equivalent to the Greek expressions), and this fact needs to be steadily borne in mind. Again when interpreting, say, a Greek play, it is necessary to bear in mind, not only the supposed character of the dramatist, but also the actual, known character of the audience to whom the play was addressed. I now propose to give an illustration which will bring me on dangerous ground.
Is it reasonable to ask if the Athenians, some few of whose characteristics have been outlined in these notes, would have flocked to hear, and have greatly enjoyed, a play replete with high moral teaching, and containing hymns that might have come out of a Church Hymnal? Now the Bacchae of Euripides, one of the most popular of Greek plays, and the Hippolytus of the same dramatist, have been translated by one great Greek scholar, Professor Gilbert Murray, in a manner that (at any rate, as regards the Bacchae) received the “hearty admiration and approval” of another great Greek scholar, Dr. Verrall. In this version, one after another of the debased Greek gods is called “God.” We also find such expressions as (note the capitals) “God’s grace,” “Virgin of God,” “Babe of God,” “God’s son,” and even “God’s true son” (who is Dionysus or Bacchus), “Spirit of God,” “Child of the Highest,” “Heaven,” “Purity,” “Saints” (who are the Maenads!), “righteous,” “divine,” “holy,” and so on.
Professor Murray is put in a difficulty when two or more gods are referred to. In some cases he becomes illogical (and reminds us of the Kaiser), as when Dionysus has to say “God and me.” In others he has to use the Greek name for one god, and then the words sound blasphemous, as when he speaks of Dionysus who was “born from the thigh of Zeus and now is God.” These instances are taken quite at random and there must be many others.
Take the following two lines as a short illustration of Professor Murray’s version:
The original reads: “Where the ambrosial fountains stream forth by the couches of the palaces of Zeus,” or, to give them a more musical turn, Mr. A. S. Way’s version is:
In Professor Murray’s two lines Zeus becomes “God,” “living waters” is taken from the Song of Solomon, and “God’s quiet garden” from Isaiah and Ezekiel. Such expressions, with their tender and beautiful associations, do not in the least convey the sense of the original. Used to describe the palace of a vicious, barbaric deity, they are a mistranslation. Also every one of the expressions referred to above is, wherever used, another mistranslation (although some may be necessitated by the limitation of language). Again there are other more pronounced mistranslations, some of which are pointed out by Verrall (Bacchants of Euripides). Thus where the very old man Cadmus, setting out on an unusual journey, merely says to his ancient comrade, “We have pleasantly forgotten that we are old” (Bacchae 184-9). Professor Murray interpolates a stage direction, “A mysterious strength and exaltation” (from the god Dionysus) “enters into him”—and he alters the words of Cadmus to conform with the miracle:
Here, therefore, we find an important episode deliberately introduced into the play.
Take another instance which Verrall does not mention. In the very enthusiastic “Introductory Essay,” Professor Murray tells us that Euripides longed to escape from the bad, hard, irreligious Athenians[69] of that day, and proceeds as follows:
“What else is wisdom?” he asks, in a marvellous passage:—
There is nothing here, nor in the translation that follows, to indicate that there has been any interference with the text. It is only upon turning to the notes at the end of the translation (which the average reader would hardly study) that we find the third line is “practically interpolated.” He gives reasons for this that are not easy to follow, and says “If I am wrong, the refrain is probably a mere cry for revenge;” I add that the latter is the generally accepted meaning, and the only meaning I can see in the original Greek.
Now Professor Murray’s object in all this is to convey in words that appeal to our minds his conception of the devout, religious and, therefore, highly moral attitude of, not only Euripides, but also his Athenian audience. The attitude of mind must be that of the audience, as well as the dramatist, because none but devout, religious people go to a “Service of Song,” and, as stated above, the Bacchae was a very popular play among the Greeks. If, however, Professor Murray thought that, by colouring, altering, and adding to the play, he gave a more correct impression of it as it appeared to the Greeks, he was perfectly at liberty with that object to mistranslate as much as he pleased—provided he told his readers and hearers that they were not reading or hearing the words that Euripides wrote.
Has he told them this? The book is entitled “Euripides translated into English rhyming verse.” In the Preface he also begins by telling us definitely that it is a translation; later on he says: “As to the method of this translation ... my aim has been to build up something as like the original as I possibly could, in form and what one calls ‘Spirit.’ To do this, the first thing needed was a work of painstaking scholarship, a work in which there should be no neglect of the letter in an attempt to snatch at the spirit.” He then goes on to tell us that “The remaining task” was to reproduce the poetry of the original and (here is the only admission that he has varied from the text) he ‘has often changed metaphors, altered the shapes of sentences, and the like.... On one occasion he has even omitted a line and a half’ (because unnecessary) and he says, he ‘has added, of course by conjecture, a few stage directions.’ Let the non-classical reader look back over what has been said above and ask himself whether such words—however carefully studied—would have given him the least impression of what this “translation” actually amounts to.
Without entering into any long discussion as to the so called “purity choruses” of the Bacchae, let us simply ask the question, Does this pious, fervently-religious version represent the actual play that the cruel, lying, treacherous and unspeakably sensual Greeks flocked to see and enjoy? Further comes a much more important question, Would such a “translation,” put before English readers, or staged before an English audience, give them a true or a false idea of the character of the Greeks?
I might compare with this Ruskin’s view of the Greek character (The Crown of Wild Olive.). This is what he says the Greeks won from their lives: “Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed trust, and requited love, and the sight of the peace of others, and the ministry to their pain.” (Italics mine.) This is truly amazing! I am tempted to go back again to Professor Murray’s Euripides (p. lxiii) and quote a like passage:
“Love thou the day and the night,” he (Euripides) says in another place. “It is only so that Life can be made what it really is, a Joy: by loving not only your neighbour—he is so vivid an element in life that, unless you do love him, he will spoil all the rest!—but the actual details and processes of living, etc., etc.”
The italics are again mine—but here it will be seen that Euripides has, as a matter of course, anticipated the great evangel of Christ! He has even gone a step further—but I must leave Professor Murray to his love of the “details and processes of living,” whatever that may mean.
Finally, in this extraordinary essay, I come to something which is absolutely repulsive. I must first briefly premise that the Dionysiac mystery cult was not sectarian. It was orthodox, believing in the plurality and the profligacy of the gods. Its adherents had no more idea of morality or purity than other Greeks. Its rites were indecent. The so-called “purification rites,” including regulations regarding continence, were simply training rules preparatory to their hideous orgies. The essential rite of the cult was practised by the Maenads or Bacchantes. They tore to pieces live animals (and at one time human beings) and devoured their raw, quivering flesh. As stated above, these horrible women are Professor Murray’s “Saints.” He now proceeds to draw an analogy between their loathsome god Dionysus and Jesus Christ! Thus Dionysus is born of God (Zeus) and a human mother. He is the “twice-born”—having been hidden in Zeus’s thigh after birth! He “comes to his own people of Thebes, and—his own receive him not.” Again “It seemed to Euripides in that favourite metaphor of his, which was always a little more than a metaphor, that a God had been rejected by the world that he came from.” Dionysus “gives his Wine to all men.... It is a mysticism which includes democracy, as it includes the love of your neighbour.” Dionysus “has given man Wine, which is his Blood and a religious symbol.” In the translation Dionysus is called “God’s son” and even “God’s true son.” Reading this and such statements as Miss Jane Harrison’s (see p. 292, n.), one stands amazed. Apparently this fanatical enthusiasm destroys the critical faculties, so that the enthusiast becomes utterly incapable of appreciating the beauty and value of Our Lord’s ethical teaching and its exemplification in His life.
For my last illustration of how enthusiasm affects our leading classical authorities (and, therefore, leads to perversion of the truth) I take Mr. A. E. Zimmern’s Greek Commonwealth. This, like Mr. Livingstone’s work, is a very excellent book, which should be in all libraries.
Mr. Zimmern quotes and definitely endorses the well-known statement in Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869), which is as follows:—“The average ability of the Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own, that is, about as much as our race is above that of the African Negro.” (The italics are mine.) Here I have happened by chance[70] upon an excellent illustration of classical enthusiasm, which is worth while dwelling upon at some length. In the first place Galton’s statement is perhaps the most absurd utterance ever made by an important thinker; in the second place it appears to have been accepted by English and European authorities for nearly half a century.
Galton bases his argument on the number of great men produced by a nation in proportion to its population. He states that between 530 and 430 B.C. the Athenian Greeks produced fourteen highly illustrious men:—Themistocles, Miltiades, Aristides, Cimon, and Pericles (statesmen and commanders), Thucydides, Socrates, Xenophon, and Plato (literary and scientific men), Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes (poets), and Pheidias (sculptor). I take the minor objections to his statement first.
He estimates the population of free-born Greeks in Attica at 90,000. In this instance he was misled by the authorities of his time and is not to blame; but I take Mr. Zimmern’s own figures, as he endorses Galton’s statement. The 90,000 should have been, according to Mr. Zimmern’s more correct figures, 180,000 to 200,000. This alone cuts down Galton’s estimate of the “average ability” of the Greeks to at least one-half. Galton also excludes the resident aliens who, according to him, numbered 40,000, but according to Mr. Zimmern 96,000. Yet both these and the outside aliens must be considered, for there were intermarriages. Themistocles and Cimon had alien mothers, Thucydides also probably had an alien mother, or at any rate was partly of Thracian descent, and there would be some ground for the charge of usurping citizenship repeatedly made by Cleon against Aristophanes. Galton also takes no account of the slaves, the number of whom he estimates at 400,000, but Zimmern at about 112,000. These cannot be entirely omitted when we consider the life of the Greek women and the habits of the men. It should be remembered that the slaves were often Greeks of other States and also by reason of the practice of exposing children some would be Athenians and even of the best families (Plato’s Laws, 930, deals with children of slaves and Greek men and women). However, on these figures, it will be seen that Galton’s estimate has to be enormously reduced.
Next, the greatest of all the names in his list, Plato, has to be struck out. There can be no reasonable doubt that he was not born until 428 or 427 B.C. (This appears to have been well recognised in 1869 and it is unaccountable that Galton and his reviewers should not have known it.) However, there is some evidence that he was born in 430, and let us assume that this is so. But, if we are to include in the 100 (or rather 101) years everyone who is born or died in that time, we are actually taking a period of 200, not 100, years, and doubling the proper estimate! Besides Plato, I may mention that Aristophanes and Xenophon could have been only about fourteen years of age in 430, Thucydides had not then begun to write, and of the eighteen plays extant of Euripides two only were written before 430. Here again is another enormous reduction of Galton’s estimate.
Again let us take Galton’s opinion of the ability of these fourteen men. It is amazingly high. It will be seen that there are only two grades between ourselves and the African negro. Again, in Galton’s table, “eminent men” are two grades above “the mass of men who obtain the ordinary prizes of life.” He now places the whole of these fourteen Greeks two grades above the eminent men! To what starry height he means to raise them, it is impossible to say, for the whole statement is exceedingly vague; but he tells us that two of the fourteen, Socrates and Pheidias, stand alone as the greatest men that ever lived.
It is clear then that the fourteen Greeks have to be placed at a tremendous height in our estimation. It is impossible here to take each man and[376] discuss his ability, but let us inquire what qualifications Galton had as a critic. We turn to his list of great modern English and European literary men. Although he goes back as far as the Fifteenth Century and his list comprises only fifty-two writers, he finds room among them for such names as John Aikin and Maria Edgeworth! Again his ten great English poets are Milton, Byron, Chaucer, Milman, Cowper, Dibdin(!), Dryden, Hook, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. (Some names would no doubt be omitted because they did not throw light on questions of heredity, but these lists in any case are highly absurd.)
We need not greatly prolong this part of the discussion. We might ask, however, what ground had Galton, for example, to place such men as Miltiades, Aristides, or Cimon even on an equality with, say, Cæsar, Alexander, or Marlborough. How can he class Xenophon as even equal to our great writers? It is the interesting facts he tells us of, not his literary ability, that makes this somewhat monotonous writer so very interesting. (The important point to remember is that Greek literature has a very special interest and value for us, quite apart from its great intrinsic literary value. Taking De Quincey’s classification, see p. 227, it is both “literature of power” and “literature of knowledge.”)
Now take another point which I might illustrate from Galton’s own pages. He tells us (in another connection) that about sixty years before the time he is writing (1869) there were Senior Wranglers in Cambridge who also obtained first classes in the Classical Tripos—and even at a later date men could take high rank in both departments. Is it then to be argued that the earlier men were the greater? Not so, but, as Galton says, knowledge had become so far advanced that it was no longer possible for a man to gain such a distinction in more than one of the two subjects. Here we have the point—the world of knowledge and activity is infinitely wider to-day than when it formed the subject of Greek speculation. Their great men were very original thinkers—but in a very few subjects. Moreover, they had no books to read, no foreign languages to learn. Even their social and political life was far less complicated and involved than our own.
Again, where we speak of “average ability,” it is not correct to compare large populous countries, where great talents are often submerged (see Gray’s “Elegy”) with smaller communities that afford far ampler scope. Take my own State, South Australia, with its huge territory and a population of under half a million, less than that of one of the larger English towns. We have our Premier, Government, Parliament, Town Councils, Heads of Departments, University, schools, judges, lawyers, journalists and literary men, financiers, merchants, men who design and construct railways, irrigation and other important works, mining men, heads of institutions and so on—which means a large number of men of ability and resource in all departments of life. If we compare ourselves with an average half-million of Englishmen, how great our superiority would apparently be! And yet, we know that we are not actually more capable—our ability has been simply brought into play. Mr. W. M. Hughes might himself have been a “flower to blush unseen,” if he had not emigrated to Australia.
We have so far dealt with minor matters, which have nevertheless reduced Galton’s arithmetical estimate by, say, 75 per cent. at the very least. Let us now take the one great misrepresentation that must have immediately flashed upon the minds of all reviewers of Galton’s book, if they had not been blinded by classical enthusiasm. It is truly remarkable that not a single one of them seems to have called attention to the obvious fact that Galton takes the one great Athenian period, as though it were an average period in their history! From Homer’s time to the Fifth Century, B.C., would probably be about as long as from the Norman Conquest to the present time, or from King Alfred to Shakespeare—and there are again the many centuries that followed. Is the “average ability” of the Greeks during hundreds or thousands of years to be estimated on their one most brilliant period? The question needs no discussion. Galton might in the same way have taken our Elizabethan period when London had a population of 150,000, and Great Britain of about three millions—and proved that our own ancestors were as far above ourselves as we are above the negro.[71]
Mr. C. T. Whiting, of the Adelaide Public Library, knowing how my time was limited, very kindly volunteered to make an extensive search for references to Galton’s statement in such of the literature of the time as is available in Adelaide. In addition to a number of books, he has searched through thirty-eight journals. He finds reviews of Galton’s book in the following:—Athenæum, British Quarterly, Saturday Review, Edinburgh Review, Fortnightly Review, Chambers’ Journal, Journal of Anthropology, Atlantic Monthly, Frazer’s Magazine, Nature, Times, and Westminster Review. The first seven do not refer at all to the statement—they apparently accept it as a matter of course. Of the last five Frazer’s mentions the statement, and says vaguely that the chapter in which it is contained “offers several vulnerable points to the critic;” the Westminster states the fact without taking any exception to it; the Atlantic Monthly raises the question whether Miltiades, Aristides, Cimon, and Xenophon were so very illustrious, and enters into an argument on Galton’s figures; the Times considers that we have had other men in different fields of human effort, who could be named with Socrates and Pheidias, and lays stress on the enormous increase of knowledge and activity in modern life; in Nature A. R. Wallace, misreading Galton as referring only to the age of Pericles[72] admits the truth of the statement as applied to the Athenians of that time. None of them refer to the fact that Galton takes the most brilliant period of Greek history as a normal period—and the arguments, taken together, amount to very little. As regards the twenty-six journals which appear to have taken no notice of so startling a statement in an important book, the fact seems[378] to indicate that to the writers for those journals the statement contained nothing of a remarkable or dubious character! (Even Punch missed the chance of an amusing cartoon!)
It may be objected that the reviewers of the book would not be classical men. But first it must be remembered that the writers of 1869 would practically all have had a classical education and secondly it needed no special classical knowledge to see the absurdity of the statement. Every one without exception would know, for example, that the period taken by Galton was the one great Greek period. The statement must also have excited interest on all sides. I myself remember how it was talked of when I was a boy in Melbourne, and I have heard it repeated as an acknowledged fact up to the present time—and, therefore, comment would have been expected in every direction. But apparently the statement was generally accepted. Mr. Whiting finds that in 1892, twenty-three years after, Galton calmly repeated the statement word for word, without reference to any criticisms. Again we find Mr. Zimmern accepting it as a matter of course in his second edition in 1915. As it was in his first edition, which would be reviewed in the classical journals, it must presumably have met with no adverse comments.
But we have to go even further than this. Galton’s was one of those important books that are studied by all Europe. Seeing that he makes no mention of adverse criticism in his second edition, and Mr. Zimmern sees no reason to qualify the statement, it is fair to assume that no serious objection has been made in England or Europe during nearly half a century. So amazingly does classical enthusiasm pervade the thought of the world! I do not think I need say anything further on this subject.[73]
Mr. Zimmern heads one of his chapters “Happiness or the Rule of Love,” the “Rule of Love” being his translation of εὐδαιμονία! This chapter is occupied exclusively by the famous Funeral Speech of Pericles. I invite the reader to look through that terribly hard speech, and see how much love it contains! Again to another chapter the heading is “Gentleness or the Rule of Religion,” followed by two quotations which are evidently intended to be read as parallel passages:
Apart from the question whether the proud Greek could ever by any possibility have become “lowly wise,” the word σωφροσύνη “temperance,” “moderation”—or perhaps better still, “commonsense”—becomes not only a “Rule of Religion” but even the highest conception of Christianity, self-sacrifice. It is very extraordinary. Imagine the Greeks—as we know them, and as Mr. Zimmern knows them—having the faintest conception of what we mean by self-sacrifice! It reminds one very much of Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word” (εὐδαιμονία or σωφροσύνη) “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
As this is my last note I am giving myself great latitude, but I must not prolong it into a treatise. I shall, as briefly as I can, refer to only one other matter, the Greek sense of beauty. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that we are given to believe that in this respect the Greeks are exalted high as gods above the rest of mankind. What is the fact? They saw beauty in only one natural object, the human body. In a land of clear skies, wonderful sunsets, starry nights, remarkable for its ranges of mountains and extent of sea-coast, they were (with some tiny exceptions not worth mentioning) absolutely blind to any beauty in inanimate nature. Nor did any bird or beast or insect, tree or flower appeal to them to any appreciable extent as a thing of beauty. They admired only what was useful or added to their comfort—the laden fruit tree, the shady grove, the clear spring, the soft water-meadows.
Various explanations have been given for the Greek failure to appreciate beauty in nature. Ruskin’s theory is most often quoted, that the Greeks were so familiar with beautiful scenes that they could not appreciate them. In the first place he forgot that it was not always the bright tourist-season in Greece; they had their dark and wintry times. In the second place, I have lived all my life in the southern part of Australia, which has much the same climate as Greece, and I do not think there are any greater lovers of nature than the Australians.
Is not the love of nature, as it came later,[75] also higher than love of the human form (omitting that facial expression which is an index of the soul)? Our ideals of human beauty appear to be purely relative and depend on our surroundings, while the same beauty in nature appeals to the most diverse nations. Take for example the Japanese and Dutch artists who both loved nature much as we do—yet they admired very different types of the human figure. I understand that the Japanese, originally at least, regarded with positive disgust our tall English beauties.
The beauty the Greeks saw in one object only, the human body, they reproduced in statues which have never been equalled in grace and charm, and are the admiration of the world. Their pure white marble statues and temples seem to be always present in our minds and to transfigure[380] our conceptions of the Greeks. We unconsciously picture them as a race of glorious men and beautiful women moving in a city of marble.[76] We find ourselves forgetting what we know of their character and habits—and also forgetting the fact that both statues and temples were painted.
With the disappearance of colour through the effect of time, the flesh effect has disappeared from their statues, and the chaste white marble gives an idealized and spiritual conception of the utmost purity. As stated before, this would be a conception quite alien to the Greek mind, which saw no beauty in physical purity. If, when we stand in admiring awe before that calm, majestic and exceedingly graceful and beautiful Venus of Milo, we imagine her as the Greeks saw her, how different is the picture! To begin with, the Greeks had little sense of colour, as is seen from their limited colour-vocabulary. For example, one word porphureos was used for dark-purple, red, rose, sea-blue, violet, and other shades even to a shimmery white. Their colours were harsh, glaring, and put together in shockingly bad taste (from our point of view). In temples and sculpture reds and blues were the main colours used. In the Venus of Milo we must, therefore, picture the hair painted red or red-brown, the lips a hard red, eyebrows black, the eyes red or red-brown with black pupils, the dress with borders and patterns of crude reds and greens or reds and blues. As regards the flesh surfaces, we know they were wax-polished, but there is no literary record or actual trace of any tinting or colouring. The effect of the white marble would have been so horrible to us against the living eyes and face, that Mr. Kaines Smith (being one of our enthusiasts) suggests that the artist “might quite well” have used some colouring matter for the nude parts of the figure! We must further picture the statue standing in a temple, which must of course also have been painted. The structure would have its borders generally of harsh reds and blues, and the decorative sculpture of the pediments, metopes and friezes would be painted in most inconceivable colours. Thus in the metope relief of the slaying of the Hydra at Olympia, the hydra is blue, the background red, and the hair, lips, and eyes of Hercules are coloured. I might go on to the Elgin marbles, the greatest sculptures that we possess in the world, and show them gorgeous in bronze and colour. (Armour, horse-trappings, etc., were attached to the marble in bronze or other metal.) The two masterpieces of Pheidias, forty and sixty feet high respectively, which have not survived to us, were much more admired by the Greeks than the sculptures of the Parthenon. These were in barbaric ivory and gold, with the same living eyes, red lips, and so on. The fact is that the Greek, “builded better than he knew.” He unintentionally produced objects whose spiritual beauty he was incapable of appreciating and, therefore, he gave them a grosser form that appealed to his own primitive sensual nature.
(Apart from this the Greek sculptor was very limited by the paucity of his subjects. How tiresome are the never-ending Centaurs and Amazons!)[77]
As regards Greek architecture, its ornament is a question of sculpture, its structure is the result of intellect combined with a certain amount of design due to their artistic sense of proportion. The Greeks did great service to humanity in working out the principles of building—but, thereafter, there was no scope for originality. Apart from its sculptural ornament, nothing more monotonous could well be imagined than a series of Greek temples, all of the same type and subject to definite, rigid rules of measurement.[78]
Finally there are two matters I am bound to refer to in connection with these rough notes. First, in merely enumerating the salient features of a nation’s character, one gives no picture whatever of the life they led. The Greek men led a highly intellectual, artistic, and on the whole a very gay life. If we look around us to-day, we shall find among ourselves Greeks, intellectual men who are moral sceptics, who simply do not understand that moral motives exist, who do no act in their lives from a sense of principle, and who live a purely material life (unless perhaps some great crisis, the arrival of the angel of Death or some other overwhelming event, awakens them to a sense of higher things). We can see something like a parallel to the Greeks in the gay, immoral, artistic French aristocracy who lived in the midst of a starving peasantry before the Revolution—or in George Eliot’s fascinating renaissance story in Romola of the young Greek Tito Melema. A man may be cruel, faithless and immoral, and yet live a gay artistic and intellectual life—but it is not such a life as would have appealed to Myers or to ourselves. Secondly, a clear knowledge of the truth about the Greek character does in no way detract from the miracle of their literature or of their art. It adds to the wonder of it all. (If one may with the utmost reverence make another comparison, how can we fully appreciate the wonder and beauty of Christ’s teaching, if we forget the conditions of the time?) To find most beautiful poetry, fine literature, deep philosophic thought, amazing grace and charm in art emanating from this primitive race is purely astounding in itself. And it needs to be borne in mind that even the men who took part in Plato’s Symposium lived in a different atmosphere from our own, and had a very different conception of the physical universe and the moral law. But this should add to our admiration, our veneration, for a Plato who could rise to so great a sublimity of thought in spite of such semi-barbarous conditions and surroundings. These men also looked upon the world with younger and fresher eyes. We are two thousand three hundred years older than they are. They knew very little of the past history of the world and had only an insignificant fraction of our scientific knowledge. If any religious doubts had begun to arise in their minds, they still could not possibly have rid themselves of the belief instilled into them since childhood—and they lived among Nymphs and Fauns, and saw a god in every star and under every wave. Never had they heard or dreamt of any Love of God, or Love of Man. It is only the enthusiast who, by picturing the Greeks as a modern moral nation, detracts from our real interest in them and robs their literature of its fascination. If knowledge of the true Greek character were to destroy all our enjoyment in their art and literature, even then truth must prevail “though the heavens fall”; but the fact is far otherwise. The fuller our knowledge the more we shall enjoy the greatness and beauty of their art and poetry and the more absorbing will be our interest in their literature.
[1] From Richard Hodgson’s Christmas Card, 1904, the Christmas before his death.
[2] To the readers of the Adelaide edition (which was issued only in Australia) I should explain why the book is now so much enlarged. The first issue was prepared hastily and without sufficient care. (The proceeds were to go to the Australian Repatriation Fund, and the book was hurriedly put together and printed to be ready for a Repatriation Day which was announced but actually was never held.) It was my first experience in publishing, and I did not realize the care and consideration required in issuing a book even of this character. Hence (1) part of my manuscript was entirely overlooked; (2) I failed to see that many quotations would be improved by adding their context; (3) I did not go properly through the great mass of Hodgson’s correspondence; and (4) I, wrongly, as I now think, excluded many quotations because I thought certain subjects were unsuitable for the book. Besides extending the scope of the collection by including those subjects I now have no longer restricted myself to the seventy-eighty period. The notes also add materially to the size of this volume.
[3] See Tennyson’s “Princess”:—
[4] I occasionally thought I had hit on something new, but usually discovered that I had been anticipated—and then deeply sympathized with St. Jerome’s old tutor, Donatus. It will be remembered that Jerome, in his commentary on “There is no new thing under the sun,” tells us that Donatus used to say, Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt, “Confound the fellows who anticipated us!”
[5] The flippancy is at times amusing, as when he says: “The account of the whale swallowing Jonah, though the whale may have been large enough to do so, borders greatly on the marvellous; but it would have approached nearer to the just idea of a miracle if Jonah had swallowed the whale.”
[6] Altered from “That,” which may be a misprint. “Thou” gives the same meaning and runs more smoothly.
[8] See Milton’s imitation of a fugue. Par. Lost XI.
[9] “I take the risk,” or “Mine the risk.”
[10] The above is a concrete illustration of Browning’s meaning in the preceding quotation, but a far wider illustration is seen in the terrible cruelties inflicted on the one side by the Inquisition and on the other by the Protestants. This was again due to the introduction of intellectualism, which distorted the Religion of Love into a Religion of Hate.
[12] The girls are bathing.
[13] The information in this note comes partly from Notes and Queries.
[15] It is unfortunate that this word is often used in the sense of something unreal as mere idle fancy instead of an active creative faculty, see pp. 357, 358.
[16] In 1843 Mrs. Browning’s fine appeal, “The Cry of the Children.” appeared in “Blackwood,” but I presume had little effect. So also Hood’s “Song of the Shirt,” “Bridge of Sighs,” and “Song of the Labourer,” were written about the same time, but could have made little real impression.
[17] The family name is now apparently pronounced as it is spelt (see “An English Pronouncing Dictionary,” by Daniel Jones, and the “Century” and “Webster”). Such a change must often happen. I have cousins named Colclough, who in Australia became so tired of correcting people that they finally resigned themselves to the loss of the old pronunciation “Cokely” and accepted the less euphonious “Colclo.”
[18] Was a phrase of Cowper’s in Bentham’s mind? The latter wrote to Christopher Rowley, “We are strange creatures, my little friend; everything that we do is in reality important, though half that we do seems to be push-pin.”
[19] “Squyer” is a dissyllable. The final e at the end of a line is always sounded like a in “China.” “Lokkes,” “sleves” and “faire” are also dissyllables, because e, ed, en, es are sounded as syllables, except before vowels and certain words beginning with h.
[20] Micah vi. 8.
[21] One certainly protests. There is a great mass of medical and other evidence to the contrary. Sir William Osler made notes of about 500 cases, and says, “To the great majority their death, like their birth, was a sleep and a forgetting.”
[22] The “Summit,” completion or end.
[23] The eyes, smile, etc., referred to in the intermediate verses.
[24] No doubt one reason would be that given by the Australian black woman for leaving her baby in the bush, “him too much cry.” The Greeks had numerous slaves, and were fond of comfort; and their houses were, of course, small and cramped compared with our own.
[25] Black care, Horace, Od. 3, 1, 40.
[26] Water-clocks, used like an hour-glass.
[27] When “Balder the Beautiful” was published in the Contemporary (March-May, 1877), Buchanan had the following note, which he has not repeated in his collected works: “Balder (in this poem) is the divine spirit of earthly beauty and joy, and the only one of the gods who loves and pities men. Sick of the darkness of heaven, he returns to the earth which fostered him, and of which he is beloved, and now for the first time he becomes conscious of that Shadow of Death, which darkens the lot of all mortal things.”
[28] Quoted in E. Clodd’s Story of Creation.
[29] Italics mine.
[30] See, for instance, Kipling’s beautiful poem “A Dedication”
[31] Milton’s sonnet, “To the Lady Margaret Ley.”
[32] “They say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him” (John xx. 13). The sermon is on the subject of the growth of religious ideas.
[33] This standing by itself may give a somewhat wrong impression of Menzies’ thought. As a matter of fact, the text of the sermon is: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John x. 10).
[34] So we speak of a “sea of heads”, “sea of faces,” “sea of sand,” “sea of clouds,” “sea of vegetation,” etc.
[35] See sub-note at the end of this note.
[36] We can, however, agree that the language of all three poets, Shelley, Sappho, and Simonides, is exquisitely beautiful. Professor Naylor points out that it is a characteristic of the early Greek poets to compress a description into a series of epithets full of expression, without connecting words—compare Tennyson (“The Passing of Arthur”).
[37] As Professor Darnley Naylor’s name appears at times in this book it is necessary to mention that he is so qualified and, therefore, is not one of the gentlemen referred to.
I may mention here that Mr. Livingstone deserves censure for not giving us an index to his valuable book. This neglect, being greatly provocative of profanity, is an offence against morality. Much loss of time and irritation have been caused to me in looking up passages I remembered in his book—and I have at times given up the search in despair.
[38] See interesting remarks on Matthew Arnold and Addison in Herbert Spencer’s “Study of Sociology,” Note 20 to Ch. 10. Professor Naylor also in the preface to his Latin and English Idiom, points out that verbally accurate translation of the Classics tends to ruin the English of a student.
[39] For example: Miss Jane Harrison (Mythology of Ancient Athens) says “all sweetness and love” come to mortals from the “holy” Charites who “were in the fullest sense ‘givers of all grace.’” (That is to say, these deities have the attributes of God, who is, of course, the sole giver of all grace! Compare with this Professor Gilbert Murray on the god Dionysus, p. 374.)
[40] Unshriven, without having received the sacrament.
[41] Crucifix.
[42] Homer tells us that Apollo and Poseidon “built” the walls of Troy; the legend that Apollo moved stones into their places by music is of a later date. See Ovid, Heroid, 16, 181; Propertius 3, 9, 39. See also Tennyson’s “Oenone.”
[43] “Physician, heal thyself,” Luke iv, 23. Also, although it is not very apropos, see the following from Nicharchus in the Greek Anthology (G. B. Grundy’s translation):—
MEDICAL ATTENDANCE
[44] This probably came from Erasmus. Compare:—
[45] Lincoln is alleged to have said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
[46] Showing that Sterne’s “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb” (Sentimental Journey) was his rendering of an older saying.
[47] “Kubla Khan.”
[48] An aromatic herb with yellow flowers.
[50] Curiously enough, they do not recognize this, but rather pride themselves upon being shrewd, commonsense, practical business-men, “a nation of shopkeepers”—although their entire history shows the contrary. That history is epitomized in such an expression as “England the Unready,” or, in the King’s appeal, “Wake up, England!” That they are idealists and dreamers can be shown by numberless facts. For example, what have they supported in the sacred name of Liberty? The laissez-faire doctrine, that law is an infringement of freedom, and, therefore, that cruelty, abuses, and absurdities must not be interfered with; the theory that England should be the home of freedom, and, therefore, that the scum of Europe shall infect the nation; the “Palladium of English Liberty,” Trial by Jury, which means the appointment of inexperienced, irresponsible, and easily-biassed judges; the economic policy, which, because it is falsely labelled Free Trade, becomes a fetish against which no practical objection must be urged and no lesson learned from the experience of other countries. On the other hand, our experience in the present war is a proof that the imaginative faculties are more powerful than mere intellect: for, when the Englishman bends his energies to the business of war, he soon surpasses the German for all his fifty years’ preparation. See p. 39.
[51] “What is life, what gladness without the golden Aphrodite? May death be mine when these joys no longer please me!”
[52] In the notes on the Greeks in this book it was necessary to keep to one State and a particular period. Greece consisted of a number of States of which Attica was one, with Athens as its centre. It comprised only seven hundred square miles, and, allowing for its colonies, would be about half the size of Lancashire. Its great and brilliant period corresponded roughly with the middle half of the Fifth Century B.C. A large proportion of the finest Greek art and literature was produced by this tiny state in that short period. This is the miracle of antiquity. It is to Attica during this period that my remarks mainly refer.
The reader will not be able to follow this note properly, unless he has read the other notes on the same subject (see Index of Subjects).
[53] The second is not by Praxilla. It is to be found in Athenaeus (XV. 695), and is written in the masculine. Most curiously the same mistake is made in the Parnasse des Dames, an 18th Century French book in which Myers would not have been interested.
[54] One at least of the Sappho enthusiasts still survives. See Professor T. G. Tucker’s Sappho.
[55] “The Greek Genius and its meaning to us.”
[56] It should be remembered, however, that this is largely the history of Prussia also.
[57] See Mr. Livingstone’s book.
[58] But see p. 374 as to Dionysiac sect.
[60] This should be taken into account in interpreting the plays of Euripides, who was probably a sceptic. The case of Aristophanes was different—he was known to be orthodox and almost any licence was permitted on the Comic Stage.
[61] Perhaps these woodcutters would not have entirely appreciated what Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson (The Greek View of Life) says of the Greek divinities. He tells us that the Greek originally felt “bewilderment and terror in the presence of the powers of nature,” but his religion developed “till at last from the womb of the dark enigma that haunted him in the beginning there emerged into the charmed light of a world of ideal grace a pantheon of fair and concrete personalities.” (The italics are mine). The classical enthusiast always pictures the Greeks as living in fairyland: actually the gods and lesser divinities were to them for the most part objects of awe and dread. In this “world of ideal grace” there would be, for example, the horrible Furies who dwelt in their grotto in Athens!
[62] I think it correct to say this, although there were political reasons also for prosecuting Socrates and, if he had shown less contempt for his judges, he might have been acquitted.
[63] I do not know how far unnatural vice extended among other peoples; but the statement in Plato’s “Symposium” that the Ionians and most of the barbarians held it in evil repute is strongly condemnatory of the Greeks.
[64] See how this idea pervades the whole of the famous Funeral Speech of Pericles, and how he defines what is “the good life” of a citizen.
[65] See Theoc. VII, 57, and what the Scholiast says. As to the subject generally see the references given by Mr. Rogers in The Birds of Aristophanes.
[66] Modern Painters, IV, XIII, 17.
[67] A few days after writing the above I was walking along the sea-beach with friends, and we came to a man and boy who were drawing in a net. It was a beautifully clear day, and no seagull or other bird could be seen anywhere. I pointed this out to my friends, and said, “You’ll see the patrol-bird arrive presently.” In a few minutes a gull appeared from nowhere, flew round the net, and then, as though the business was unimportant, flew away. The net when drawn in was empty! This is how the bird probably appeared to the Greeks. When the net brought in a haul, and the birds clamoured round it for their share, how very reasonable would this again appear to the Greeks.
[69] The same pious Athenians who so enjoyed the Bacchae!
[70] It is necessary to emphasize this, lest the reader should think that these illustrations are exceptional and the result of prolonged research. Actually I had no memoranda or other material when I began the many notes to this book, and those notes were all completed in ten months. For this note I simply took two books, Professor Murray’s and Mr. Zimmern’s, to illustrate my thesis. I might have chosen far more “enthusiastic” works than Mr. Zimmern’s excellent book.
[71] The whole argument seems to have little foundation. Are we to assume, for example, that the “average ability” of the Greeks before and after their great period, or of the English before and after the Elizabethan age, was enormously inferior because the proportion of very illustrious men was so much less? Why should not the average be higher, the ability (through intermarriage) being more equally distributed?
[72] If Galton had referred only to the Athenians of the great period, as Wallace imagined, the statement would have been even more absurd. It would then mean that an African tribe of blacks might suddenly become as intelligent as ourselves, continue so for two generations, and then relapse at once into their old barbarism. Yet Dr. Verrall went some distance in this direction, for he says the Athenians of the great period “had plainly an immense superiority of mind in comparison with their predecessors.” (The Bacchants of Euripides, p. 168).
[73] I may add, however, one personal remark. I am quite well aware—and my friends persistently and painfully impress the fact upon me—that this book will be reviewed by gentlemen who have been imbued from youth with even greater enthusiasm, seeing that the tendency has grown stronger and stronger since that time. Those reviewers will probably feel shocked that the naked facts should be set before the general public. I can quite understand this feeling, but I do not sympathize with it. Truth comes first, and I have no sympathy with the feminine view of truth (see p. 343), which is the same as the Jesuitical view. I do, however, sympathize with them in one respect, that the truth should be stated at an unfortunate time, when the beautiful Greek language and its glorious literature seem likely to be put on a back shelf with Hebrew and Sanskrit. It will be a sad thing if this should happen (I would much prefer to sacrifice the inferior Latin, in spite of the special reasons for its study), but the first and last word always is—Truth.
[74] “May moderation befriend me, the finest gift of the gods.”
[75] It would be interesting to trace the earliest references to love of Nature. They may, perhaps, be found in the Bible. In the Song of Solomon (which, however, in its present form is now supposed to date back only to the Fourth Century, B.C., and, therefore not to be by Solomon) we have the spring-song of love, with flowers and budding trees and vines and the singing of birds (II, 10-13). Professor Naylor also reminds me of our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, “Consider the lilies, etc.”
I repeat here what I say in the Preface that Professor Naylor takes no responsibility for any of the views I express in my notes on the Greeks.
[76] Their actual life was of course indescribably squalid and filthy, as could only be expected in a primitive race.
[77] Even as regards the human form Greek art is limited, as is seen in the Laocoon where the boys are simply miniature men. (The Laocoon, although of very late date, is nevertheless Greek with all the traditions of the art behind it.) I know very little on this subject, but it seems to me that something of much importance yet remains to be discovered about Greek sculpture.
[78] An excessive importance is attached to the cold conventional foliated designs.
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