The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1
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Title: The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1
Author: Thomas De Quincey
Editor: James Hogg
Release date: July 18, 2006 [eBook #18862]
Language: English
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[Transcriber's Notes: Text that was in italics in the original book is
shown between _underscore characters_ and text that was in small caps
is shown as ALL CAPS. Footnotes from the article titles are at the end
of the first paragraph of the article; all others follow the paragraph
in which they are referenced. The variation in the spelling of some
words is maintained from the original.]
[Illustration: (handwritten) Very truly yours,
Thomas de Quincey.]
THE UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS
OF
THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
WITH
A PREFACE AND ANNOTATIONS
BY
JAMES HOGG.
IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I.
[Illustration]
LONDON:
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO.,
PATERNOSTER SQUARE.
1890.
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON & BUNGAY.
PREFACE.
'_The last fruit off an old tree!_' This, in the words of WALTER
SAVAGE LANDOR, is what I have now the honour to set before the public
in these hitherto 'UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY.'
It was my privilege to be associated intimately with the Author some
thirty to forty years ago--from the beginning of 1850 until his death
in 1859.[1] Throughout the whole period during which he was engaged in
preparing for the Press his _Selections Grave and Gay_, I assisted in
the task.
[Footnote 1: DE QUINCEY, LEIGH HUNT, and MACAULAY all died in that
year.]
Of the singularly pleasant literary intercourse of that memorable time
I have given some reminiscences in _Harper's Magazine_ for this month.
I may yet combine in a Volume with these some amusing, scholarly
letters in my possession, and a Selection of Papers from the original
sources, which I feel warranted, by the Author's own estimate, in
calling _De Quincey's Choice Works_. Meantime, in dealing with the
various Essays and Stories here gathered together, I limit myself to
such notes as are necessary to point out the special circumstances
under which some of the papers were written; in others the nature of
the evidence I have found as to the indisputable authorship.
My special opportunities, derived from constant companionship and the
continuous discussion with DE QUINCEY of matters concerning his
writings, gave me the key to some of the admirable papers here
reprinted. It also entitles me to say, that he would have included a
number of them in his Collected Works alongside the _Suspiria de
Profundis_ (Sighs from the Depths), had he lived to continue his
labours.
When we find that most part of the _Suspiria_--perhaps the highest
reach of his intellect in impassioned power--did not appear in the
_Selections_ at all, the reader will at once understand that, in the
Author's own opinion, the Essays and Stories now first collected, were
neither less dignified in purpose nor less finished in style than
those which had passed under his hand in the fourteen volumes he
nearly completed. Rather like the _Suspiria_, some of these papers
were reserved as material upon the revision of which his energy might
be fitly bestowed when health would permit.
* * * * *
The interesting papers which appeared in _Tait's Magazine_ are all
duly vouched for in that periodical. I have not touched any of the
autobiographical matter which appeared in _Tait_,--the Author having
recast that as well as the _Sketches from Childhood_, published in
_The Instructor_ in the 'Autobiographic Sketches' with which he
opened the _Selections_. _The Casuistry of Duelling_, indeed, appeared
in _Tait_ as part of the Autobiographic Series, but, practically, it
stood as an independent paper. The touching personal passage in this
article reveals the misery caused by the unbridled scurrility of
certain notorious publications of the last generation.
The paper on _The German Language_ appeared in _Tait_ in June 1836,
and the _Brief Appraisal of Greek Literature_ in December 1838 and
June 1839.
* * * * *
Two long and valuable papers on _Education; Plans for the Instruction
of Boys in Large Numbers_, which appeared in _The London Magazine_ for
April and May, 1824, were duly authenticated by the following
characteristic letter from DE QUINCEY to CHRISTOPHER NORTH. It appears
in _Professor Wilson's Life_, written by his daughter, MRS. GORDON:--
'_London, Thursday, February 24th, 1825._
'MY DEAR WILSON,
'I write to you on the following occasion:--Some time ago, perhaps
nearly two years ago, Mr. Hill, a lawyer, published a book on
Education, detailing a plan on which his brothers had established a
school at Hazlewood, in Warwickshire. This book I reviewed in the
_London Magazine_, and in consequence received a letter of thanks from
the Author, who, on my coming to London about midsummer last year,
called on me. I have since become intimate with him, and, excepting
that he is a sad Jacobin (as I am obliged to tell him once or twice a
month), I have no one fault to find with him, for he is a very clever,
amiable, good creature as ever existed; and in particular directions
his abilities strike me as really very great indeed. Well, his book
has just been reviewed in the last _Edinburgh Review_ (of which some
copies have been in town about a week). This service has been done
him, I suppose, _through_ some of his political friends--(for he is
connected with Brougham, Lord Lansdowne, old Bentham, etc.),--but I
understand _by_ Mr. Jeffrey. Mr. Hill, in common with multitudes in
this Babylon--who will not put their trust in Blackwood as in God
(which, you know, he ought to do)--yet privately adores him as the
Devil; and indeed publicly too, is a great _prôneur_ of Blackwood.
For, in spite of his Jacobinism, he is liberal and inevitably just to
real wit. His fear is--that Blackwood may come as Nemesis, and compel
him to regorge any puffing and cramming which Tiff has put into his
pocket, and is earnest to have a letter addressed in an influential
quarter to prevent this. I alleged to him that I am not quite sure but
it is an affront to a Professor to presume that he has any connection
as contributor, or anything else, to any work which he does not
publicly avow as his organ for communicating with the world of
letters. He answers that it would be so in him,--but that an old
friend may write _sub rosa_. I rejoin that I know not but you may have
cut Blackwood--even as a subscriber--a whole lustrum ago. He rebuts,
by urging a just compliment paid to you, as a supposed contributor, in
the _News of Literature and Fashion_, but a moon or two ago.
Seriously, I have told him that I know not what was the extent of your
connection with Blackwood at _any_ time; and that I conceive the
labours of your Chair in the University must now leave you little
leisure for any but occasional contributions, and therefore for no
regular cognizance of the work as director, etc. However, as all that
he wishes--is simply an interference to save him from any very severe
article, and not an article in his favour, I have ventured to ask of
you if you hear of any such thing, to use such influence as must
naturally belong to you in your general character (whether maintaining
any connection with Blackwood or not) to get it softened. On the
whole, I suppose no such article is likely to appear. But to oblige
Hill I make the application. He has no _direct_ interest in the
prosperity of Hazlewood; he is himself a barrister in considerable
practice, and of some standing, I believe; but he takes a strong
paternal interest in it, all his brothers (who are accomplished young
men, I believe) being engaged in it. They have already had one shock
to stand: a certain Mr. Place, a Jacobin friend of the School till
just now, having taken the pet with it--and removed his sons. Now this
Mr. Place, who was formerly a tailor--leather-breeches maker and
habit-maker,--having made a fortune and finished his studies,--is
become an immense authority as a political and reforming head with
Bentham, etc., as also with the _Westminster Review_, in which quarter
he is supposed to have the weight of nine times nine men; whence, by
the way, in the "circles" of the booksellers, the Review has got the
name of the _Breeches Review_.' ... [The writer then passes on to
details of his own plans and prospects, and thus concludes.]
'I beg my kind regards to Mrs. Wilson and my young friends, whom I
remember with so much interest as I last saw them at Elleray.--I am,
my dear Wilson,
'Very affectionately yours,
'THOMAS DE QUINCEY.'
* * * * *
In approaching the consideration of other papers said, in various
quarters (with some show of authority) to have been written by DE
QUINCEY, it was necessary to act with extreme care. One was a
painstaking list on the whole, but very inaccurate as regards certain
contributions attributed to DE QUINCEY in _Blackwood_. I have had the
kind aid of MESSRS. BLACKWOOD in examining the archives of _Maga_ to
settle the points in question.
I was puzzled by some papers in _The London Magazine_ set down as DE
QUINCEY'S contributions in a memorandum said to have been furnished by
MESSRS. TAYLOR and HESSEY, its Publishers. The _Blackwood_ blunders
made me very sceptical. There was one story in particular--the long
droll one of _Mr. Schnackenberger; or, Two Masters to one Dog_, about
which I remained in doubt.
I had a faint recollection that one day DE QUINCEY dwelt on the merits
of 'JUNO,' and owned the story when he was discussing 'bull-dogs.'
By the way, he was rather fond of 'bull-dogs,' and had some good
anecdotes about them. It was a kind of pet-admiration-horror which he
shared with SOUTHEY, on account of the difficulty in making a
well-bred bull-dog relax his grip. Some member of the canine 'fancy'
down at the Lakes had given them a so-called infallible 'tip' for
making a bull-dog let go. I am sorry to say I have quite forgotten
this admirable receipt. To be sure, one ought never to forget such
valuable pieces of information. So I thought one day lately before the
muzzling order came into force, when a bloodthirsty monster,--a big,
white bull-dog, sprang suddenly at me in Cleveland Gardens. Instantly
there flashed the thought--what was it that DE QUINCEY recommended? A
lucky lunge which drove the ferule of my umbrella down the brute's
throat fortunately created a diversion, and allowed a little more time
for the study of the problem. Perhaps I will be pardoned this
digression, as it affords an opportunity of recording the fact that DE
QUINCEY and SOUTHEY both looked up to the bull-dog as an animal of
very decided 'character.'
I was loth to abandon _Mr. Schnackenberger_, but unwilling to lean
too much on my somewhat hazy remembrance. It seemed almost hopeless to
obtain the necessary evidence. MESSRS. TAYLOR and HESSEY were long
dead, and after groping about like a detective, no one could tell me
what had become of the records of _The London Magazine_. Suddenly
there came light in October last. I ascertained that a son of one of
the Publishers is the ARCHDEACON of MIDDLESEX, the Venerable J. A.
HESSEY, D.C.L.
I stated the case, and the worthy ARCHDEACON came most kindly and
promptly to my assistance. As a boy he remembered DE QUINCEY at his
father's house, and recollected very well reading _Mr. Schnackenberger_.
He informed me, 'I was greatly interested in the [London] Magazine
generally, so much so, that, at my father's request, I copied from his
private list, and attached to the head of each paper the name of the
Author.... This interesting set came to me at my father's death.'
DR. HESSEY had subsequently presented the series to his old pupil, MR.
WILLIAM CAREW HAZLITT (by whose courtesy I have been able to examine
it)--'the grandson of WILLIAM HAZLITT, who was a frequent writer in
the Magazine, and an old friend of my father. I thought he would like
to possess it, and that it would thus be in fitting hands. I should
not have parted with it in favour of any but a man like MR. HAZLITT,
who was sure to value it.'
As these valuable annotations of the ARCHDEACON ramify in various
directions--touching as they do the contributions of many brilliant
men of that period--it may not be amiss (as a possible help to others
in the future) to add a few more decisive words by DR. HESSEY:--
'If any papers are not marked (he refers only to those volumes
actually published by MESSRS. TAYLOR and HESSEY) it was because they
were anonymous, or because, from some inadvertency, they were not
assigned in my father's list. _So far as the record goes, it may be
depended upon._'
By its help I was able to fix the authorship by DE QUINCEY of (1) _The
Dog Story_--translated from the German, (2) _Moral Effects of
Revolutions_, (3) _Prefigurations of Remote Events_, (4) _Abstract of
Swedenborgianism by Immanuel Kant_.
* * * * *
Another perplexing element was the letter written by DE QUINCEY to his
uncle, COLONEL PENSON, in 1819 (PAGE'S _Life_, vol. i. p. 207),
wherein reference is made to certain contributions to _Blackwood's
Magazine_ and _The Quarterly Review_.
The archives of _Maga_ I find go back only as far as 1825. As to _The
Quarterly Review_, I have MR. MURRAY'S authority for stating that DE
QUINCEY never wrote a line in it. Whether any contributions were ever
commissioned, paid for, and afterwards suppressed, I have been unable
to ascertain. As a matter of fact, the _Schiller_ Series referred to
in the letter to COLONEL PENSON was never reviewed in _The Quarterly_
at all.
DE QUINCEY as a Newspaper Editor forms the subject of a Chapter in
PAGE'S _Life_. Some extracts are there given from cuttings out of _The
Westmorland Gazette_ found amongst the Author's Papers. This
editorship (1818-19) was of short duration, and pursued under hostile
circumstances, such as distance from the Press, &c., which soon led to
DE QUINCEY'S resignation. I had hoped to add some further specimens of
the newspaper work, but have not, as yet, obtained access to a file of
the period. In any future edition I may be able to add this in an
Appendix.
* * * * *
_The Love-Charm._--In spite of the marvellous tenacity of DE QUINCEY'S
memory, even as to the very words of a passage in an Author which he
had, perhaps, only _once_ read, there were _blanks_ which confounded
himself. One of these bore on his contributions to KNIGHT'S _Quarterly
Magazine_. MR. FIELDS had been so generally careful in obtaining
sufficient authority for what he published, in the original American
edition, that DE QUINCEY good-humouredly gave the verdict against
himself, and 'supposed he _must_ be wrong' in thinking that some of
these special papers were not from his pen. Still,--he demurred, and
before including them in _The Selections Grave and Gay_, it was
resolved to institute an inquiry. Accordingly, about 1852, I was
deputed to interview MR. CHARLES KNIGHT, and request his aid. My
mission was to obtain, if possible, a correct list of the various
contributions to the _Quarterly Magazine_, including this
_Love-Charm_.
MR. KNIGHT, MR. RAMSAY (his first lieutenant, as he called him), and
myself all met at Fleet Street, where we had the archives of the old
_Quarterly Magazine_ turned up, and a list checked. I lately found
this particular story also referred to circumstantially in the annexed
paragraph contained in CHARLES KNIGHT'S _Passages of a Working Life_
(THORNE'S re-issue, vol. I. chap. x. p. 339).
'DE QUINCEY had written to me in December 1824, in the belief that, as
he expressed it, "many of your friends will rally about you, and urge
you to some new undertaking of the same kind. If that should happen, I
beg to say, that you may count upon me, as one of your men, for any
extent of labour, to the best of my power, which you may choose to
command." He wrote a translation of _The Love-Charm_ of TIECK, with a
notice of the Author. This is not reprinted in his Collected Works,
though perhaps it is the most interesting of his translations from the
German. In this spring and summer DE QUINCEY and I were in intimate
companionship. It was a pleasant time of intellectual intercourse for
me.'
There is no doubt _The Love-Charm_ would have been reprinted had the
Author lived to carry the _Selections_ farther.
* * * * *
The curious little Essay _On Novels_,--written in a Lady's Album, had
passed out of MR. DAVEY'S hands before I became aware of its
existence. The _facsimile_, however, taken for _The Archivist_, by an
expert like MR. NETHERCLIFT, shows that it is, unquestionably, in the
handwriting of DE QUINCEY. I have been unable to trace the 'FAIR
INCOGNITA' to whom it was addressed.
* * * * *
The compositions which were written for me when I edited _Titan_, and
which I now place before the public in volume form, after the lapse of
a whole generation (thirty-three years, to speak 'by the card'),
demand some special comment, particularly in their relation to the
_Selections Grave and Gay_.
_Titan_ was a half-crown monthly Magazine, a continuation in an
enlarged form of _The Instructor_. I had become the acting Editor of
its predecessor, _the New Series_ of _The Instructor_, working in
concert with my Father, the proprietor. In this _New Series_ there
appeared from DE QUINCEY'S pen _The Sphinx's Riddle_, _Judas
Iscariot_, the Series of _Sketches from Childhood_, and other notable
papers.
At that time I was but a young editor--young and, perhaps, a little
'curly,' as LORD BEACONSFIELD put it. DE QUINCEY, with a truly
paternal solicitude, gave me much good advice and valuable help, both
in the selection of subjects for the Magazine and in the mode of
handling them. The notes on _The Lake Dialect_, _Shakspere's Text and
Suetonius Unravelled_, were written to me in the form of Letters, and
published in _Titan_.
_Storms in English History_ was a consideration of part of MR.
FROUDE'S well-known book, which on its publication made a great stir
in the literary world, and profoundly impressed DE QUINCEY.
_How to write English_ was the first of a series projected for _The
Instructor_. It never got beyond this 'Introduction,' but the fragment
contains some matter well worthy of preservation.
The circumstances attending the composition of the four papers on _The
English in India_ and _The English in China_, I have explained at some
length in the introductory notices attached to them.
And now for a confession! The 'gentle reader' may, perhaps, feel a
momentary inclination to blame me when I reveal, that I rather stood
in the way of some brilliant articles which were very seriously
considered at this period.
DE QUINCEY was eager to write them, and I should have been glad indeed
to have had them for _Titan_, but for a fear of allowing the Author to
wander too far from the ever-present and irksome _Works_. Any possible
escape--even through other downright hard work, from this perplexing
labour was joyfully hailed by him as a hopeful chance of obtaining a
prosperous holiday.
For a little I wavered under the temptation (Reader,--was it not
great?)--the idea of having a little relaxation which would permit
some, at least, of these well-planned papers to be written. But I was
keenly alive to the danger which overtook us at last. We are daily
reminded that 'art is long and life is short.' I had already saved the
_Works_ from being strangled at their birth in a legal tussle with MR.
JOHN TAYLOR.[2] My Father was at my elbow anxiously inquiring about
the progress of the 'copy' for each succeeding volume. There were
eager friends also, on both sides of the Atlantic, pressing resolutely
for it. So--prudence prevailed, and we held as straightly on our way
as the Author's uncertain health would permit.
[Footnote 2: This incident was a complicated contention, concerning
the copyright of _The Confessions_, in which DE QUINCEY had long
allowed his rights to lie dormant. It was at last happily settled in
an amicable manner.]
Thus it came to pass, dear Public, that you lost some charming essays,
while you gained the fourteen volumes of the _Selections_ which the
Author all but completed.
Wherefore, seeing that you may possibly expect it of me to make some
use of my rare opportunities by doing whatever I can in these matters,
'before the night cometh,'--I have prepared this book--_ohne hast,
ohne rast_.
I cannot close these few pages better than by quoting some strong,
just, sympathetic words which appeared in two great reviews--one
American, the other British.
_The North American Review_ said:--
'In DE QUINCEY we are struck at once by the exquisite refinement of
mind, the subtleness of association, and the extreme tenuity of the
threads of thought, the gossamer filaments yet finally weaving
themselves together, and thickening imperceptibly into a strong and
expanded web. Mingled with this, and perhaps springing from a similar
mental habit, is an occasional dreaminess both in speculation and in
narrative, when the mind seems to move vaguely round in vast returning
circles. The thoughts catch hold of nothing, but are heaved and tossed
like masses of cloud by the wind. An incident of trivial import is
turned and turned to catch the light of every possible consequence,
and so magnified as to become portentous and terrible.'
* * * * *
'A barren and trivial fact, under the power of that life-giving hand,
shoots out on all sides into waving branches and green leaves, and
odoriferous flowers. It is not the fact that interests us, but the
mind working upon it, investing it with mock-heroic dignity, or
rendering it illustrative of really serious principles; or, with the
true insight of genius, discovering, in that which a vulgar eye would
despise, the germs of grandeur and beauty; the passions of war in the
contests of the rival factions of schoolboys, the tragedy in every
peasant's death-bed.'
* * * * *
'DE QUINCEY constantly amazes us by the amount and diversity of his
learning. Two or three of the minor papers in the collected volumes
are absolutely loaded with the life spoils of their author's
scholarship, yet carry their burden as lightly as our bodies sustain
the weight of the circumambient atmosphere. So perfect is his tact in
finding, or rather making a place for everything, that, while
inviting, he eludes the charge of pedantry.'
* * * * *
'It is scarcely to be expected that one who tries his hand at so many
kinds of pencraft should always excel; yet such is the force of DE
QUINCEY'S intellect, the brilliancy of his imagination, and the charm
of his style, that he throws a new and peculiar interest over every
subject which he discusses, while his fictitious narratives in general
rivet the attention of the reader with a power not easily resisted.'
_The Quarterly Review_ said:--
'DE QUINCEY'S style is superb, his powers of reasoning unsurpassed,
his imagination is warm and brilliant, and his humour both masculine
and delicate.'
The writer continues:--
'A great master of English composition, a critic of uncommon delicacy,
an honest and unflinching investigator of received opinions, a
philosophic inquirer--DE QUINCEY has departed from us full of years,
and left no successor to his rank. The exquisite finish of his style,
with the scholastic vigour of his logic, form a combination which
centuries may never reproduce, but which every generation should study
as one of the marvels of English Literature.'
JAMES HOGG.
_London, February, 1890_.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE V
A BRIEF APPRAISAL OF THE GREEK LITERATURE
IN ITS FOREMOST-PRETENSIONS 23
THE GERMAN LANGUAGE, AND PHILOSOPHY OF KANT 91
MORAL EFFECTS OF REVOLUTIONS 130
PREFIGURATIONS OF REMOTE EVENTS 132
MEASURE OF VALUE 134
LETTER IN REPLY TO HAZLITT CONCERNING THE
MALTHUSIAN DOCTRINE OF POPULATION 141
THE SERVICES OF MR. RICARDO TO THE SCIENCE
OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 154
EDUCATION, AND CASE OF APPEAL 160
ABSTRACT OF SWEDENBORGIANISM 215
SKETCH OF PROFESSOR WILSON 225
THE LAKE DIALECT 265
STORMS IN ENGLISH HISTORY 275
THE ENGLISH IN INDIA 298
ON NOVELS (WRITTEN IN A LADY'S ALBUM) 354
DE QUINCEY'S PORTRAIT 357
A BRIEF APPRAISAL OF THE GREEK LITERATURE IN ITS FOREMOST PRETENSIONS:
_By way of Counsel to Adults who are hesitating as to the
Propriety of Studying the Greek Language with a view to the
Literature; and by way of consolation to those whom
circumstances have obliged to lay aside that plan._
No. I.
No question has been coming up at intervals for reconsideration more
frequently than that which respects the comparative pretensions of
Pagan (viz. Greek and Roman) Literature on the one side, and Modern
(that is, the Literature of Christendom) on the other. Being brought
uniformly before unjust tribunals--that is, tribunals corrupted and
bribed by their own vanity--it is not wonderful that this great
question should have been stifled and overlaid with peremptory
decrees, dogmatically cutting the knot rather than skilfully untying
it, as often as it has been moved afresh, and put upon the roll for a
re-hearing. It is no mystery to those who are in the secret, and who
can lay A and B together, why it should have happened that the most
interesting of all literary questions, and the most comprehensive
(for it includes most others, and some special to itself), has, in
the first place, never been pleaded in a style of dignity, of
philosophic precision, of feeling, or of research, proportioned to its
own merits, and to the numerous 'issues' (forensically speaking)
depending upon it; nor, in the second place, has ever received such an
adjudication as was satisfactory _even at the moment_. For, be it
remembered, after all, that any provisional adjudication--one growing
out of the fashion or taste of a single era--could not, at any rate,
be binding for a different era. A judgment which met the approbation
of Spenser could hardly have satisfied Dryden; nor another which
satisfied Pope, have been recognised as authentic by us of the year
1838. It is the normal or exemplary condition of the human mind, its
ideal condition, not its abnormal condition, as seen in the transitory
modes and fashions of its taste or its opinions, which only
'Can lay great bases for eternity,'
or give even a colourable permanence to any decision in a matter so
large, so perplexed, so profound, as this great pending suit between
antiquity and ourselves--between the junior men of this earth and
ourselves, the seniors, as Lord Bacon reasonably calls us. Appeals
will be brought _ad infinitum_--we ourselves shall bring appeals, to
set aside any judgment that may be given, until something more is
consulted than individual taste; better evidence brought forward than
the result of individual reading; something higher laid down as the
_grounds_ of judgment, as the very principles of the jurisprudence
which controls the court, than those vague _responsa prudentum_,
countersigned by the great name, perhaps, of Aristotle, but still too
often mere products of local convenience, of inexperience, of
experience too limited and exclusively Grecian, or of absolute
caprice--rules, in short, which are themselves not less truly _sub
judice_ and liable to appeal than that very appeal cause to which they
are applied as decisive.
We have remarked, that it is no mystery why the decision should have
gone pretty uniformly in favour of the ancients; for here is the
dilemma:--A man, attempting this problem, _is_ or _is not_ a classical
scholar. If he _is_, then he has already received a bias in his
judgment; he is a bribed man, bribed by his vanity; and is liable to
be challenged as one of the judges. If he is _not_, then he is but
imperfectly qualified--imperfectly as respects his knowledge and
powers; whilst, even as respects his will and affections, it may be
alleged that he also is under a bias and a corrupt influence; his
interest being no less obvious to undervalue a literature, which, as
to _him_, is tabooed and under lock and key, than his opponent's is to
put a preposterous value upon that knowledge which very probably is
the one sole advantageous distinction between him and his neighbours.
We might cite an illustration from the French literary history on this
very point. Every nation in turn has had its rows in this great
quarrel, which is, in fact, co-extensive with the controversies upon
human nature itself. The French, of course, have had _theirs_--solemn
tournaments, single duels, casual 'turn-ups,' and regular 'stand-up'
fights. The most celebrated of these was in the beginning of the last
century, when, amongst others who acted as bottle-holders, umpires,
&c., two champions in particular 'peeled' and fought a considerable
number of rounds, mutually administering severe punishment, and both
coming out of the ring disfigured: these were M. la Motte and Madame
Dacier. But Motte was the favourite at first, and once he got Dacier
'into chancery,' and 'fibbed' her twice round the ropes, so that she
became a truly pitiable and delightful spectacle to the connoisseurs
in fibbing and bloodshed. But here lay the difference: Motte was a
hard hitter; he was a clever man, and (which all clever men are not) a
man of sense; but, like Shakspeare, he had no Greek. On the other
hand, Dacier had nothing _but_ Greek. A certain abbé, at that time,
amused all Paris with his caricatures of this Madame Dacier, 'who,'
said he, 'ought to be cooking her husband's dinner, and darning his
stockings, instead of skirmishing and tilting with Grecian spears;
for, be it known that, after all her _not cooking_ and her _not
darning_, she is as poor a scholar as her injured husband is a good
one.' And _there_ the abbé was right; witness the husband's _Horace_,
in 9 vols., against the wife's _Homer_. However, this was not
generally understood. The lady, it was believed, waded petticoat-deep
in Greek clover; and in any Grecian field of dispute, naturally she
must be in the right, as against one who barely knew his own language
and a little Latin. Motte was, therefore, thought by most people to
have come off second best. For, as soon as ever he opened
thus--'Madame, it seems to me that, agreeably to all common sense or
common decorum, the Greek poet should here'----instantly, without
listening to his argument, the intrepid Amazon replied ([Greek:
hypodra idousa]), 'You foolish man! you remarkably silly man!--_that_
is because you know no better; and the reason you know no better, is
because you do not understand _ton d'apameibomenos_ as I do.' _Ton
d'apameibomenos_ fell like a hand-grenade amongst Motte's papers, and
blew him up effectually in the opinion of the multitude. No matter
what he might say in reply--no matter how reasonable, how
unanswerable--that one spell of 'No Greek! no Greek!' availed as a
talisman to the lady both for offence and defence; and refuted all
syllogisms and all eloquence as effectually as the cry of _À la
lanterne!_ in the same country some fourscore years after.
So it will always be. Those who (like Madame Dacier) possess no
accomplishment _but_ Greek, will, of necessity, set a superhuman value
upon that literature in all its parts, to which their own narrow skill
becomes an available key. Besides that, over and above this coarse and
conscious motive for overrating that which reacts with an equal and
answerable overrating upon their own little philological attainments,
there is another agency at work, and quite unconsciously to the
subjects of that agency, in disturbing the sanity of any estimate they
may make of a foreign literature. It is the habit (well known to
psychologists) of transferring to anything created by our own skill,
or which reflects our own skill, as if it lay causatively and
objectively[3] in the reflecting thing itself, that pleasurable power
which in very truth belongs subjectively[3] to the mind of him who
surveys it, from conscious success in the exercise of his own
energies. Hence it is that we see daily without surprise, young ladies
hanging enamoured over the pages of an Italian author, and calling
attention to trivial commonplaces, such as, clothed in plain mother
English, would have been more repulsive to them than the distinctions
of a theologian, or the counsels of a great-grandmother. They mistake
for a pleasure yielded by the author, what is in fact the pleasure
attending their own success in mastering what was lately an
insuperable difficulty.
[Footnote 3: _Objectively_ and _subjectively_ are terms somewhat too
metaphysical; but they are so indispensable to accurate thinking that
we are inclined to show them some indulgence; and, the more so, in
cases where the mere position and connection of the words are half
sufficient to explain their application.]
It is indeed a pitiable spectacle to any man of sense and feeling, who
happens to be really familiar with the golden treasures of his own
ancestral literature, and a spectacle which moves alternately scorn
and sorrow, to see young people squandering their time and painful
study upon writers not fit to unloose the shoes' latchets of many
amongst their own compatriots; making painful and remote voyages after
the drossy refuse, when the pure gold lies neglected at their feet.
Too often he is reminded of a case, which is still sometimes to be
witnessed in London. Now and then it will happen that a lover of art,
modern or antique alike, according to its excellence, will find
himself honoured by an invitation from some millionnaire, or some
towering grandee, to 'assist,' as the phrase is, at the opening of a
case newly landed from the Tiber or the Arno, and fraught (as he is
assured) with the very gems of Italian art, inter-mingled besides
with many genuine antiques. He goes: the cases are solemnly disgorged;
adulatory hangers on, calling themselves artists, and, at all events,
so much so as to appreciate the solemn farce enacted, stand by
uttering hollow applauses of my Lord's taste, and endeavouring to play
upon the tinkling cymbals of spurious enthusiasm: whilst every man of
real discernment perceives at a glance the mere refuse and sweeping of
a third-rate _studio_, such as many a native artist would disdain to
turn out of his hands; and antiques such as could be produced, with a
month's notice, by cart-loads, in many an obscure corner of London.
Yet for this rubbish has the great man taken a painful tour; compassed
land and sea; paid away in exchange a king's ransom; and claims now on
their behalf, the very humblest homage of artists who are taxed with
the basest envy if they refuse it, and who, meantime, cannot in
sincerity look upon the trumpery with other feelings than such as the
potter's wheel, if (like Ezekiel's wheels) it were instinct with
spirit, would entertain for the vilest of its own creations;--culinary
or 'post-culinary' mugs and jugs. We, the writers of this paper, are
not artists, are not connected with artists. And yet, upon the general
principle of sympathy with native merit, and of disgust towards all
affectation, we cannot but recall such anecdotes with scorn; and often
we recollect the stories recorded by poor Benvenuto Cellini, that
dissolute but brilliant vagabond, who (like our own British artists)
was sometimes upbraided with the degeneracy of modern art, and, upon
his humbly requesting some evidence, received, by way of practical
answer, a sculptured gem or vase, perhaps with a scornful demand
of--when would he be able to produce anything like that--'eh, Master
Ben? Fancy we must wait a few centuries or so, before you'll be ready
with the fellow of this.' And, lo! on looking into some hidden angle
of the beautiful production, poor Cellini discovered his own private
mark, the supposed antique having been a pure forgery of his own. Such
cases remind one too forcibly of the pretty Horatian tale, where, in a
contest between two men who undertake to mimic a pig's grunting, he
who happens to be the favourite of the audience is applauded to the
echo for his felicitous execution, and repeatedly encored, whilst the
other man is hissed off the stage, and well kicked by a band of
amateurs and cognoscenti, as a poor miserable copyist and impostor;
but, unfortunately for the credit of his exploders, he has just time,
before they have quite kicked him off, for exposing to view the real
pig concealed under his cloak, which pig it was, and not himself, that
had been the artist--forced by pinches into 'mimicry' of his own
porcine music. Of all baffled connoisseurs, surely, these Roman
pig-fanciers must have looked the most confounded. Yet there is no
knowing: and we ourselves have a clever friend, but rather too given
to subtilising, who contends, upon some argument not perfectly
intelligible to us, that Horace was not so conclusive in his logic as
he fancied; that the real pig might not have an 'ideal' or normal
squeak, but a peculiar and non-representative squeak; and that, after
all, the man might deserve the 'threshing' he got. Well, it may be so;
but, however, the Roman audience, wrong or not, for once fancied
themselves in the wrong; and we cannot but regret that our own
ungenerous disparagers of native merit, and _exclusive_ eulogisers of
the dead or the alien--of those only '_quos Libitina sacravit_,' or
whom oceans divide from us--are not now and then open to the same
_palpable_ refutation, as they are certainly guilty of the same mean
error, in prejudging the whole question, and refusing to listen even
to the plain evidence of their own feelings, or, in some cases, to the
voice of their own senses.
From this preface it is already abundantly clear what side _we_ take
in this dispute about modern literature and the antique.[4] And we now
propose to justify our leaning by a general review of the Pagan
authors, in their elder section--that is, the Grecians. These will be
enough in all conscience, for one essay; and even for them we meditate
a very cursory inquest; not such as would suffice in a grand
ceremonial day of battle--a _justum proelium_, as a Roman would
call it--but in a mere perfunctory skirmish, or (if the reader objects
to that word as pedantic, though, really, it is a highly-favoured word
amongst ancient divines, and with many a
'philosopher,
Who has read Alexander Ross over,')
why, in that case, let us indulge his fastidious taste by calling it
an autoschediastic combat, to which, surely, there can be no such
objection. And as the manner of the combat is autoschediastic or
extemporaneous, and to meet a hurried occasion, so is the reader to
understand that the object of our disputation is not the learned, but
the unlearned student; and our purpose, not so much to discontent the
one with his painful acquisitions, as to console the other under what,
upon the old principle of _omne ignotum pro magnifico_, he is too apt
to imagine his irreparable disadvantages. We set before us, as our
especial auditor, the reasonable man of plain sense but strong
feeling, who wishes to know how much he has lost, and what injury the
gods did him, when, though making him, perhaps, poetical, they cut
short his allowance of Latin, and, as to Greek, gave him not a jot
more than a cow has in her side pocket.
[Footnote 4: In general usage, '_The antique_' is a phrase limited to
the expression of art; but improperly so. It is quite as legitimately
used to denote the _literature_ of ancient times, in contradistinction
to the modern. As to the term _classical_, though generally employed
as equivalent to Greek and Roman, the reader must not forget this is
quite a false limitation, contradicting the very reason for applying
the word in _any_ sense to literature. For the application arose thus:
The social body of Rome being divided into six classes, of which the
lowest was the sixth, it followed that the highest was the first.
Thence, by a natural process common to most languages, those who
belonged to this highest had no number at all assigned to them. The
very absence of a number, the calling them _classici_, implied that
they belonged to _the_ class emphatically, or _par excellence_. _The
classics_ meant, therefore, the grandees in social consideration; and
thence by analogy in literature. But if this analogy be transferred
from Rome to Greece, where it had no corresponding root in civic
arrangement--then, by parity of reason, to all nations.]
Let us begin at the beginning--and that, as everybody knows, is Homer.
He is, indeed, so much at the beginning that, for that very reason (if
even there were no other), he is, and will be ever more, supremely
interesting. Is the unlearned reader aware of his age? Upon that point
there are more hypotheses than one or even two. Some there are among
the chronologers who make him eleven hundred years anterior to Christ.
But those who allow him least, place him more than nine--that is,
about two centuries before the establishment of the Grecian Olympiads,
and (which is pretty nearly the same thing as regards time) before
Romulus and Remus. Such an antiquity as this, even on its own account,
is a reasonable object of interest. A poet to whom the great-grandfather
of old Ancus Martius (his grandfather, did we say--that is, avus?--nay,
his _abavus_, his _atavus_, his _tritavus_) looked back as to one in a
line with his remote ancestor--a poet who, if he travelled about as
extensively as some have supposed him to do, or even as his own
countryman Herodotus most certainly did five or six hundred years
afterwards, might have conversed with the very workmen who laid the
foundations of the first temple at Jerusalem--might have bent the knee
before Solomon in all his glory:--Such a poet, were he no better than
the worst of our own old metrical romancers, would--merely for his
antiquity, merely for the sublime fact of having been coeval with the
eldest of those whom the eldest of histories presents to our knowledge;
coeval with the earliest kings of Judah, older than the greatest of the
Judean prophets, older than the separation of the two Jewish crowns and
the revolt of Israel, and, even with regard to Moses and to Joshua, not
in any larger sense junior than as we ourselves are junior to
Chaucer--purely and exclusively with regard to these pretensions, backed
and supported by an antique form of an antique language--the most
comprehensive and the most melodious in the world, would--could--should--ought
to merit a filial attention; and, perhaps with those who had
waggon-loads of time to spare, might plead the benefit, beyond most of
those in whose favour it was enacted, of that Horatian rule--
'vos exemplaria Græca,
Nocturnâ versate manu, versate diurna.'
In fact, when we recollect that, in round numbers, we ourselves may be
considered as two thousand years in advance of Christ, and that (by
assuming less even than a mean between the different dates assigned to
Homer) he stands a thousand years before Christ, we find between Homer
and ourselves a gulf of three thousand years, or about one clear half
of the total extent which we grant to the present duration of our
planet. This in itself is so sublime a circumstance in the relations
of Homer to our era, and the sense of power is so delightfully
titillated to that man's feeling, who, by means of Greek, and a very
moderate skill in this fine language, is able to grasp the awful span,
the vast arch of which one foot rest upon 1838, and the other almost
upon the war of Troy--the mighty rainbow which, like the archangel in
the Revelation, plants its western limb amongst the carnage and the
magnificence of Waterloo, and the other amidst the vanishing gleams
and the dusty clouds of Agamemnon's rearguard--that we may pardon a
little exultation to the man who can actually mutter to himself, as he
rides home of a summer evening, the very words and vocal music of the
old blind man at whose command
'----------the Iliad and the Odyssey
Rose to the murmurs of the voiceful sea.'
But pleasures in this world fortunately are without end. And every
man, after all, has many pleasures peculiar to himself--pleasures
which no man shares with him, even as he is shut out from many of
other men. To renounce one in particular, is no subject for sorrow, so
long as many remain in that very class equal or superior. Elwood the
Quaker had a luxury which none of us will ever have, in hearing the
very voice and utterance of a poet quite as blind as Homer, and by
many a thousand times more sublime. And yet Elwood was not perhaps
much happier for _that_. For now, to proceed, reader--abstract from
his _sublime_ antiquity, and his being the very earliest of authors,
allowance made for one or two Hebrew writers (who, being inspired, are
scarcely to be viewed as human competitors), how much is there in
Homer, _intrinsically_ in Homer, stripped of his fine draperies of
time and circumstance, in the naked Homer, disapparelled of the pride,
pomp, and circumstance of glorious antiquity, to remunerate a man for
his labour in acquiring Greek? Men think very differently about what
_will_ remunerate any given labour. A fool (professional _fool_) in
Shakspeare ascertains, by a natural process of logic, that a
'remuneration' means a _testern_, which is just sixpence; and two
remunerations, therefore, a testoon, or one shilling. But many men
will consider the same service ill paid by a thousand pounds. So, of
the reimbursement for learning a language. Lord Camden is said to have
learned Spanish, merely to enjoy Don Quixote more racily. Cato, the
elder Cato, after abusing Greek throughout his life, sat down in
extreme old age to study it: and wherefore? Mr. Coleridge mentions an
author, in whom, upon opening his pages with other expectations, he
stumbled upon the following fragrant passage--'But from this frivolous
digression upon philosophy and the fine arts, let us return to a
subject too little understood or appreciated in these sceptical
days--the subject of _dung_.' Now, _that_ was precisely the course of
thought with this old censorious Cato: So long as Greek offered, or
seemed to offer, nothing but philosophy or poetry, he was clamorous
against Greek; but he began to thaw and melt a little upon the charms
of Greek--he 'owned the soft impeachment,' when he heard of some
Grecian treatises upon _beans_ and _turnips_; and, finally, he sank
under its voluptuous seductions, when he heard of others upon DUNG.
There are, therefore, as different notions about a 'remuneration' in
this case, as the poor fool had met with it in _his_ case. We,
however, unappalled by the bad names of 'Goth,' 'Vandal,' and so
forth, shall honestly lay before the reader _our_ notions.
When Dryden wrote his famous, indeed matchless, epigram upon the three
great masters (or reputed masters) of the Epopee, he found himself at
no loss to characterize the last of the triad--no matter what
qualities he imputed to the first and the second, he knew himself safe
in imputing them all to the third. The mighty modern had everything
that his predecessors were ever _thought_ to have, as well as
something beside.[5] So he expressed the surpassing grandeur of
Milton, by saying that in him nature had embodied, by concentration as
in one focus, whatever excellencies she had scattered separately
amongst her earlier favourites. But, in strict regard to the facts,
this is far from being a faithful statement of the relations between
Milton and his elder brothers of the _Epos_: in sublimity, if that is
what Dryden meant by 'loftiness of thought,' it is not so fair to
class Milton with the greatest of poets, as to class him apart,
retired from all others, sequestered, 'sole-sitting by the shores of
old romance.' In other poets, in Dante for example, there may be rays,
gleams, sudden coruscations, casual scintillations, of the sublime;
but for any continuous and sustained blaze of the sublime, it is in
vain to look for it, _except_ in Milton, making allowances (as before)
for the inspired sublimities of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and of the great
Evangelist's Revelations. As to Homer, no critic who writes from
personal and _direct_ knowledge on the one hand, or who understands
the value of words on the other, ever contended in any critical sense
for sublimity, as a quality to which he had the slightest pretensions.
What! not Longinus? If he did, it would have been of little
consequence; for he had no field of comparison, as we, knowing no
literature but one--whereas we have a range of seven or eight. But he
did not: [Greek: To hypsêlon],[6] or the elevated, in the Longinian
sense, expressed all, no matter of what origin, of what tendency,
which gives a character of life and animation to composition--whatever
raises it above the dead level of flat prosaic style. Emphasis, or
what in an artist's sense gives _relief_ to a passage, causing it to
stand forward, and in advance of what surrounds it--that is the
predominating idea in the 'sublime' of Longinus. And this explains
what otherwise has perplexed his modern interpreters--viz. that
amongst the elements of his sublime, he ranks even the pathetic, _i. e._
(say they) what by connecting itself with the depressing passion
of grief is the very counter-agent to the elevating affection of the
sublime. True, most sapient sirs, my very worthy and approved good
masters: but that very consideration should have taught you to look
back, and reconsider your translation of the capital word [Greek:
hypsos]. It was rather too late in the day, when you had waded
half-seas over in your translation, to find out either that you
yourselves were ignoramuses, or that your principal was an ass.
'Returning were as tedious as go o'er.' And any man might guess how
you would settle such a dilemma. It is, according to you, a little
oversight of your principal: '_humanum aliquid passus est._' We, on
the other hand, affirm that, if an error at all on the part of
Longinus, it is too monstrous for any man to have 'overlooked.' As
long as he could see a pike-staff, he must have seen that. And,
therefore, we revert to _our_ view of the case--viz. that it is
yourselves who have committed the blunder, in translating by the Latin
word _sublimis_[7] at all, but still more after it had received new
determinations under modern usage.
[Footnote 5: The beauty of this famous epigram lies in the _form_ of
the conception. The first had A; the second had B; and when nature, to
furnish out a third, should have given him C, she found that A and B
had already exhausted her cycle; and that she could distinguish her
third great favourite only by giving him both A and B in combination.
But the filling up of this outline is imperfect: for the A
(_loftiness_) and the B (_majesty_) are one and the same quality,
under different names.]
[Footnote 6: Because the Latin word _sublimis_ is applied to objects
soaring upwards, or floating aloft, or at an aerial altitude, and
because the word does _sometimes_ correspond to our idea of the
sublime (in which the notion of height is united with the notion of
moral grandeur), and because, in the excessive vagueness and lawless
latitudinarianism of our common Greek Lexicons, the word [Greek:
hypsos] is translated, _inter alia_, by [Greek: to] _sublime_,
_sublimitas_, &c. Hence it has happened that the title of the little
essay ascribed to Longinus, [Greek: Peri hypsous], is usually rendered
into English, _Concerning the sublime_. But the idea of the Sublime,
as defined, circumscribed, and circumstantiated, in English
literature--an idea altogether of English growth--the _sublime byway
of polar antithesis to the Beautiful_, had no existence amongst
ancient critics; consequently it could have no expression. It is a
great thought, a true thought, a demonstrable thought, that the
Sublime, as thus ascertained, and in contraposition to the Beautiful,
grew up on the basis of _sexual_ distinctions, the Sublime
corresponding to the male, the Beautiful, its anti-pole, corresponding
to the female. Behold! we show you a mystery.]
[Footnote 7: No word has ever given so much trouble to modern critics
as this very word (now under discussion) of the _sublime_. To those
who have little Greek and _no_ Latin, it is necessary in the first
place that we should state what are the most obvious elements of the
word. According to the noble army of etymologists, they are these two
Latin words--_sub_, under, and _limus_, mud. Oh! gemini! who would
have thought of groping for the sublime in such a situation as
that?--unless, indeed, it were that writer cited by Mr. Coleridge, and
just now referred to by ourselves, who complains of frivolous modern
readers, as not being able to raise and sequester their thoughts to
the abstract consideration of dung. Hence it has followed, that most
people have quarrelled with the etymology. "Whereupon the late Dr.
Parr, of pedantic memory, wrote a huge letter to Mr. Dugald Stewart,
but the marrow of which lies in a nutshell, especially being rather
hollow within. The learned doctor, in the first folio, grapples with
the word _sub_, which, says he, comes from the Greek--so much is
clear--but from what Greek, Bezonian? The thoughtless world, says he,
trace it to [Greek: hypo] (hypo), sub, _i. e._ under; but I, Ego,
Samuel Parr, the Birmingham doctor, trace it to [Greek: hyper]
(hyper), super, _i. e._ above; between which the difference is not
less than between a chestnut horse and a horse-chestnut. To this
learned Parrian dissertation on mud, there cannot be much reasonably
to object, except its length in the first place; and, secondly, that
we ourselves exceedingly doubt the common interpretation of _limus_.
Most unquestionably, if the sublime is to be brought into any relation
at all to mud, we shall all be of one mind--that it must be found
_above_. But to us it appears--that when the true modern idea of mud
was in view, _limus_ was not the word used. Cicero, for instance, when
he wishes to call Piso 'filth, mud,' &c. calls him _Cænum_: and, in
general, _limus_ seems to have involved the notion of something
adhesive, and rather to express _plaister_, or artificially prepared
cement, &c., than that of filth or impure depositions. Accordingly,
our own definition differs from the Parrian, or Birmingham definition;
and may, nevertheless, be a Birmingham definition also. Not having
room to defend it, for the present we forbear to state it.]
Now, therefore, after this explanation, recurring to the Longinian
critiques upon Homer, it will avail any idolator of Homer but little,
it will affect us not much, to mention that Longinus makes frequent
reference to the _Iliad_, as the great source of the sublime--
'A quo, ceu fonte perenni,
Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis';
for, as respected Grecian poets, and as respected _his_ sense of the
word, it cannot be denied that Homer was such. He was the great
well-head of inspiration to the Pagan poets of after times, who,
however (_as a body_), moved in the narrowest circle that has ever yet
confined the natural freedom of the poetic mind. But, in conceding
this, let it not be forgotten how much we concede--we concede as much
as Longinus demanded; that is, that Homer furnished an ideal or model
of fluent narration, picturesque description, and the first outlines
of what could be called characteristic delineations of persons.
Accordingly, uninventive Greece--for we maintain loudly that Greece,
in her poets, _was_ uninventive and sterile beyond the example of
other nations--received, as a traditional inheritance, the characters
of the Paladins of the Troad.[8] Achilles is always the
all-accomplished and supreme amongst these Paladins, the Orlando of
ancient romance; Agamemnon, for ever the Charlemagne; Ajax, for ever
the sullen, imperturbable, columnar champion, the Mandricardo, the
_Bergen-op-Zoom_ of his faction, and corresponding to our modern
'Chicken' in the pugilistic ring, who was so called (as the books of
the Fancy say) because he was a 'glutton'; and a 'glutton' in this
sense--that he would take any amount of cramming (_i. e._ any possible
quantum of 'milling,' or 'punishment'). Ulysses, again, is uniformly,
no matter whether in the solemnities of the tragic scene, or the
festivities of the Ovidian romance, the same shy cock, but also sly
cock, with the least thought of a white feather in his plumage; Diomed
is the same unmeaning double of every other hero, just as Rinaldo is
with respect to his greater cousin, Orlando; and so of Teucer,
Meriones, Idomeneus, and the other less-marked characters. The Greek
drama took up these traditional characters, and sometimes deepened,
saddened, exalted the features--as Sophocles, for instance, does with
his 'Ajax Flagellifer'--Ajax the knouter of sheep--where, by the way,
the remorse and penitential grief of Ajax for his own self-degradation,
and the depth of his affliction for the triumph which he had afforded to
his enemies--taken in connection with the tender fears of his wife,
Tecmessa, for the fate to which his gloomy despair was too manifestly
driving him; her own conscious desolation, and the orphan weakness of
her son, in the event which she too fearfully anticipates--the final
suicide of Ajax; the brotherly affection of Teucer to the widow and the
young son of the hero, together with the unlooked-for sympathy of
Ulysses, who, instead of exulting in the ruin of his antagonist, mourns
over it with generous tears--compose a situation, and a succession of
situations, not equalled in the Greek tragedy; and, in that instance, we
see an effort, rare in Grecian poetry, of conquest achieved by
idealisation over a mean incident--viz. the hallucination of brain in
Ajax, by which he mistakes the sheep for his Grecian enemies, ties them
up for flagellation, and scourges them as periodically as if he were a
critical reviewer. But really, in one extremity of this madness, where
he fixes upon an old ram for Agamemnon, as the leader of the flock, the
[Greek: anax andrôn Agamemnôn], there is an extravagance of the
ludicrous against which, though not exhibited scenically, but simply
narrated, no solemnity of pathos could avail; even in narration, the
violation of tragical dignity is insufferable, and is as much worse than
the hyper-tragic horrors of _Titus Andronicus_ (a play which is usually
printed, without reason, amongst those of Shakspeare) as absolute farce
or contradiction of all pathos must inevitably be a worse indecorum than
physical horrors which simply outrage it by excess. Let us not,
therefore, hear of the judgment displayed upon the Grecian stage, when
even Sophocles, the chief master of dramatic economy and scenical
propriety, could thus err by an aberration so far transcending the most
memorable violation of stage decorum which has ever been charged upon
the English drama.
[Footnote 8: There is a difficulty in assigning any term as
comprehensive enough to describe the Grecian heroes and their
antagonists, who fought at Troy. The seven chieftains against Thebes
are described sufficiently as Theban captains; but, to say _Trojan_
chieftains, would express only the heroes of one side; _Grecian_,
again, would be liable to that fault equally, and to another far
greater, of being under no limitation as to time. This difficulty must
explain and (if it can) justify our collective phrase of the Paladins
of the Troad.]
From Homer, therefore, were left, as a bequest to all future poets,
the romantic adventures which grow, as so many collateral
dependencies,
'From the tale of Troy divine';
and from Homer was derived also the discrimination of the leading
characters, which, after all, were but coarsely and rudely
discriminated; at least, for the majority. In one instance only we
acknowledge an exception. We have heard a great modern poet dwelling
with real and not counterfeit enthusiasm upon the character (or rather
upon the general picture, as made up both of character and position),
which the course of the _Iliad_ assigns gradually to Achilles. The
view which he took of this impersonation of human grandeur, combining
all gifts of intellect and of body, matchless speed, strength,
inevitable eye, courage, and the immortal beauty of a god, being also,
by his birth-right, half-divine, and consecrated to the imagination by
his fatal interweaving with the destinies of Troy, and to the heart by
the early death which to _his own knowledge_[9] impended over his
magnificent career, and so abruptly shut up its vista--the view, we
say, which our friend took of the presiding character throughout the
_Iliad_, who is introduced to us in the very first line, and who is
only eclipsed for seventeen books, to emerge upon us with more awful
lustre;--the view which he took was--that Achilles, and Achilles only,
in the Grecian poetry, was a great idea--an idealised creation; and we
remember that in this respect he compared the Homeric Achilles with
the Angelica of Ariosto. Her only he regarded as an idealisation in
the _Orlando Furioso_. And certainly in the luxury and excess of her
all-conquering beauty, which drew after her from 'ultimate Cathay' to
the camps of the baptised in France, and back again, from the palace
of Charlemagne, drew half the Paladins, and 'half Spain militant,' to
the portals of the rising sun; that sovereign beauty which (to say
nothing of kings and princes withered by her frowns) ruined for a time
the most princely of all the Paladins, the supreme Orlando, crazed him
with scorn,
'And robbed him of his noble wits outright'--
in all this, we must acknowledge a glorification of power not unlike
that of Achilles:--
'Irresistible Pelides, whom, unarm'd,
No strength of man or wild beast could withstand;
Who tore the lion as the lion tears the kid;
Ran on embattl'd armies clad in iron;
And, weaponless himself,
Made arms ridiculous, useless the forgery
Of brazen shield and spear, the hammer'd cuirass,
Chalybean temper'd steel, and frock of mail,
Adamantéan proof;
But safest he who stood aloof,
When insupportably his foot advanced
Spurned them to death by troops. The bold Priamides
Fled from his lion ramp; old warriors turn'd
Their plated backs under his heel,
Or, groveling, soil'd their crested helmets in the dust.'
These are the words of Milton in describing that 'heroic Nazarete,'
'God's champion'--
'Promis'd by heavenly message twice descending';
heralded, like Pelides,
'By an angel of his birth,
Who from his father's field
Rode up in flames after his message told';
these are the celestial words which describe the celestial prowess of
the Hebrew monomachist, the irresistible Sampson; and are hardly less
applicable to the 'champion paramount' of Greece confederate.
[Footnote 9: 'To his own knowledge'--see, for proof of this, the
gloomy serenity of his answer to his dying victim, when, predicting
his approaching end:--
'Enough; I know my fate: to die--to see no more
My much-lov'd parents, and my native shore,' &c. &c.]
This, therefore, this unique conception, with what power they might,
later Greek poets adopted; and the other Homeric characters they
transplanted somewhat monotonously, but at times, we are willing to
admit, and have already admitted, improving and solemnizing the
original epic portraits when brought upon the stage. But all this
extent of obligation amongst later poets of Greece to Homer serves
less to argue his opulence than their penury. And if, quitting the one
great blazing jewel, the Urim and Thummim of the _Iliad_, you descend
to individual passages of poetic effect; and if amongst these a fancy
should seize you of asking for a specimen of the _Sublime_ in
particular, what is it that you are offered by the critics? Nothing
that we remember beyond one single passage, in which the god Neptune
is described in a steeple chase, and 'making play' at a terrific
pace. And certainly enough is exhibited of the old boy's hoofs, and
their spanking qualities, to warrant our backing him against a
railroad for a rump and dozen; but, after all, there is nothing to
grow frisky about, as Longinus does, who gets up the steam of a
blue-stocking enthusiasm, and boils us a regular gallop of ranting, in
which, like the conceited snipe[10] upon the Liverpool railroad, he
thinks himself to run a match with Sampson; and, whilst affecting to
admire Homer, is manifestly squinting at the reader to see how far he
admires his own flourish of admiration; and, in the very agony of his
frosty raptures, is quite at leisure to look out for a little private
traffic of rapture on his own account. But it won't do; this old
critical posture-master (whom, if Aurelian hanged, surely he knew what
he was about) may as well put up his rapture pipes, and (as Lear says)
'not squiny' at us; for let us ask Master Longinus, in what earthly
respect do these great strides of Neptune exceed Jack with his
seven-league boots? Let him answer that, if he can. We hold that Jack
has the advantage. Or, again look at the Koran: does any man but a
foolish Oriental think that passage sublime where Mahomet describes
the divine pen? It is, says he, made of mother-of-pearl; so much for
the 'raw material,' as the economists say. But now for the size: it
can hardly be called a 'portable' pen at all events, for we are told
that it is so tall of its age, that an Arabian 'thoroughbred horse
would require 500 years for galloping down the slit to the nib. Now
this Arabic sublime is _in this instance_ quite a kin brother to the
Homeric.
[Footnote 10: On the memorable inaugural day of the Liverpool
railroad, when Mr. Huskisson met with so sad a fate, a snipe or a
plover tried a race with Sampson, one of the engines. The race
continued neck and neck for about six miles, after which, the snipe
finding itself likely to come off second best, found it convenient to
wheel off, at a turn of the road, into the solitudes of Chat Moss.]
However, it is likely that we shall here be reminded of our own
challenge to the Longinian word [Greek: hypsêlon] as not at all
corresponding, or even alluding to the modern word sublime. But in
this instance, the distinction will not much avail that critic--for no
matter by what particular _word_ he may convey his sense of its
quality, clear it is, by his way of illustrating its peculiar merit,
that, in his opinion, these huge strides of Neptune's have something
supernaturally grand about them. But, waiving this solitary instance
in Homer of the sublime, according to his idolatrous critics--of the
pseudo sublime according to ourselves--in all other cases where
Longinus, or any other Greek writer has cited Homer as the great
exemplary model of [Greek: hypsos] in composition, we are to
understand him according to the Grecian sense of that word. He must
then be supposed to praise Homer, not so much for any ideal grandeur
either of thought, image, or situation, as in a general sense for his
animated style of narration, for the variety and spirited effect with
which he relieves the direct formal narration in his own person by
dialogue between the subjects of his narration, thus ventriloquising
and throwing his own voice as often as he can into the surrounding
objects--or again for the similes and allusive pictures by which he
points emphasis to a situation or interest to a person.
Now then we have it: when you describe Homer, or when you hear him
described as a lively picturesque old boy [by the way, why does
everybody speak of Homer as old?], full of life, and animation, and
movement, then you say (or you hear say) what is true, and not much
more than what is true. Only about that word picturesque we demur a
little: as a chirurgeon, he certainly _is_ picturesque; for Howship
upon gunshot wounds is a joke to him when he lectures upon _traumacy_,
if we may presume to coin that word, or upon traumatic philosophy (as
Mr. M'Culloch says so grandly, Economic Science). But, apart from
this, we cannot allow that simply to say [Greek: Zakunthos nemoessa],
woody Zacynthus, is any better argument of picturesqueness than Stony
Stratford, or Harrow on the Hill. Be assured, reader, that the Homeric
age was not ripe for the picturesque. _Price on the Picturesque_, or,
_Gilpin on Forest Scenery_, would both have been sent post-haste to
Bedlam in those days; or perhaps Homer himself would have tied a
millstone about their necks, and have sunk them as public nuisances by
woody Zante. Besides, it puts almost an extinguisher on any little
twinkling of the picturesque that might have flared up at times from
this or that suggestion, when each individual had his own regular
epithet stereotyped to his name like a brass plate upon a door:
Hector, the tamer of horses; Achilles, the swift of foot; the ox-eyed,
respectable Juno. Some of the 'big uns,' it is true, had a dress and
an undress suit of epithets: as for instance, Hector was also [Greek:
korythaiolos], Hector with the tossing or the variegated plumes.
Achilles again was [Greek: dios] or divine. But still the range was
small, and the monotony was dire.
And now, if you come in good earnest to picturesqueness, let us
mention a poet in sober truth worth five hundred of Homer, and that is
Chaucer. Show us a piece of Homer's handywork that comes within a
hundred leagues of that divine prologue to the _Canterbury Tales_, or
of 'The Knight's Tale,' of the 'Man of Law's Tale,' or of the 'Tale of
the Patient Griseldis,' or, for intense life of narration and festive
wit, to the 'Wife of Bath's Tale.' Or, passing out of the _Canterbury
Tales_ for the picturesque in human manner and gesture, and play of
countenance, never equalled as yet by Pagan or Christian, go to the
_Troilus and Cresseid_, and, for instance, to the conversation between
Troilus and Pandarus, or, again, between Pandarus and Cresseid.
Rightly did a critic of the 17th century pronounce Chaucer a miracle
of natural genius, as having 'taken into the compass of his
_Canterbury Tales_, the various manners and humours of the whole
English nation in his age; not a single character has escaped him.'
And this critic then proceeds thus--'The matter and manner of these
tales, and of their telling, are so suited to their different
educations, humours, and calling, that each of them would be improper
in any other mouth. Even the grave and serious characters are
distinguished by their several sorts of gravity. Even the ribaldry of
the low characters is different. But there is such a variety of game
springing up before me, that I am distracted in my choice, and know
not which to follow. It is sufficient to say, according to the
proverb, that here is God's plenty.' And soon after he goes on to
assert (though Heaven knows in terms far below the whole truth), the
superiority of Chaucer to Boccaccio. And, in the meantime, who was
this eulogist of Chaucer? Why, the man who himself was never equalled
upon this earth, unless by Chaucer, in the art of fine narration: it
is John Dryden whom we have been quoting.
Between Chaucer and Homer--as to the main art of narration, as to the
picturesque life of the manners, and as to the exquisite delineation
of character--the interval is as wide as between Shakespeare, in
dramatic power, and Nic. Rowe.
And we might wind up this main chapter, of the comparison between
Grecian and English literature--viz. the chapter on Homer, by this
tight dilemma. You do or you do not use the Longinian word [Greek:
hypsos] in the modern sense of the sublime. If you do not, then of
course you translate it in the Grecian sense, as explained above; and
in that sense, we engage to produce many scores of passages from
Chaucer, not exceeding 50 to 80 lines, which contain more of
picturesque simplicity, more tenderness, more fidelity to nature, more
felicity of sentiment, more animation of narrative, and more truth of
character, than can be matched in all the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_. On
the other hand, if by [Greek: hypsos] you choose absurdly to mean
sublimity in the modern sense, then it will suffice for us that we
challenge _you_ to the production of one instance which truly and
incontestably embodies that quality.[11] The burthen of proof rests
upon you who affirm, not upon us who deny. Meantime, as a kind of
choke-pear, we leave with the Homeric adorer this one brace of
portraits, or hints for such a brace, which we commend to his
comparison, as Hamlet did the portraits of the two brothers to his
besotted mother. We are talking of the sublime: that is our thesis.
Now observe: there is a catalogue in the _Iliad_--there is a catalogue
in the _Paradise Lost_. And, like a river of Macedon and of Monmouth,
the two catalogues agree in that one fact--viz. that they _are_ such.
But as to the rest, we are willing to abide by the issue of that one
comparison, left to the very dullest sensibility, for the decision of
the total question at issue. And what is that? Not, Heaven preserve
us! as to the comparative claims of Milton and Homer in this point of
sublimity--for surely it would be absurd to compare him who has most
with him whom we affirm to have none at all--but whether Homer has the
very smallest pretensions in that point. The result, as we state it,
is this:--The catalogue of the ruined angels in Milton, is, in itself
taken separately, a perfect poem, with the beauty, and the felicity,
and the glory of a dream. The Homeric catalogue of ships is exactly on
a level with the muster-roll of a regiment, the register of a
tax-gatherer, the catalogue of an auctioneer. Nay, some catalogues are
far more interesting, and more alive with meaning. 'But him followed
fifty black ships!'--'But him follow seventy black ships!' Faugh! We
could make a more readable poem out of an Insolvent's Balance Sheet.
[Footnote 11: The description of Apollo in wrath as [Greek: nukti
eoikô], like night, is a doubtful case. With respect to the shield of
Achilles, it cannot be denied that the general conception has, in
common with all abstractions (as _e. g._ the abstractions of dreams,
of prophetic visions, such as that in the 6th Æneid, that to Macbeth,
that shown by the angel Michael to Adam), something fine and, in its
own nature, let the execution be what it may, sublime. But this part
of the _Iliad_, we firmly believe to be an interpolation of times long
posterior to that of Homer.]
One other little suggestion we could wish to offer. Those who would
contend against the vast superiority of Chaucer (and him we mention
chiefly because he really has in excess those very qualities of life,
motion, and picturesque simplicity, to which the Homeric
characteristics chiefly tend), ought to bear in mind one startling
fact evidently at war with the _degree_ of what is claimed for Homer.
It is this: Chaucer is carried naturally by the very course of his
tales into the heart of domestic life, and of the scenery most
favourable to the movements of human sensibility. Homer, on the other
hand, is kept out of that sphere, and is imprisoned in the monotonies
of a camp or a battle-field, equally by the necessities of his story,
and by the proprieties of Grecian life (which in fact are pretty
nearly those of Turkish life at this day). Men and women meet only
under rare, hurried, and exclusive circumstances. Hence it is, that
throughout the entire _Iliad_, we have but one scene in which the
finest affections of the human heart can find an opening for display;
of course, everybody knows at once that we are speaking of the scene
between Hector, Andromache, and the young Astyanax. No need for
question here; it is Hobson's choice in Greek literature, when you are
seeking for the poetry of human sensibilities. One such scene there
is, and no more; which, of itself, is some reason for suspecting its
authenticity. And, by the way, at this point, it is worth while
remarking, that a late excellent critic always pronounced the words
applied to Andromache [Greek: dakryoen gelasasa] (_tearfully smiling_,
or, _smiling through_ _her tears_), a mere Alexandrian interpolation.
And why? Now mark the reason. Was it because the circumstance is in
itself vicious, or out of nature? Not at all: nothing more probable or
more interesting under the general situation of peril combined with
the little incident of the infant's alarm at the plumed helmet. But
any just taste feels it to be out of the Homeric key; the barbarism of
the age, not mitigated (as in Chaucer's far less barbarous age) by the
tenderness of Christian sentiment, turned a deaf ear and a repulsive
aspect to such beautiful traits of domestic feeling; to Homer himself
the whole circumstance would have been one of pure effeminacy. Now, we
recommend it to the reader's reflection--and let him weigh well the
condition under which that poetry moves that cannot indulge a tender
sentiment without being justly suspected of adulterous commerce with
some after age. This remark, however, is by the by; having grown out
of the [Greek: dakryoen gelasasa], itself a digression. But, returning
from that to our previous theme, we desire every candid reader to ask
himself what must be the character, what the circumscription, of that
poetry which is limited, by its very subject,[12] to a scene of such
intense uniformity as a battle or a camp; and by the prevailing spirit
of manners to the exclusive society of men. To make bricks without
straw, was the excess even of Egyptian bondage; Homer could not fight
up against the necessities of his age, and the defects of its
manners. And the very apologies which will be urged for him, drawn as
they must be from the spirit of manners prevalent in his era, are
reciprocally but so many reasons for not seeking in him the kind of
poetry which has been ascribed to him by ignorance, or by defective
sensibility, or by the mere self-interest of pedantry.
[Footnote 12: But the _Odyssey_, at least, it will be said, is not
thus limited: no, not by its subject; because it carries us amongst
cities and princes in a state of peace; but it is equally limited by
the spirit of manners; we are never admitted amongst women, except by
accident (Nausicaa)--by necessity (Penelope)--or by romance (Circe).]
From Homer, the route stretches thus:--The Grecian drama lies about
six hundred years nearer to the Christian era, and Pindar lies in the
interval. These--_i. e._ the Dramatic and Lyric--are the important
chapters of the Greek poetry; for as to Pastoral poetry, having only
Theocritus surviving, and a very little of Bion and Moschus, and of
these one only being of the least separate importance--we cannot hold
that department entitled to any notice in so cursory a review of the
literature, else we have much to say on this also. Besides that,
Theocritus was not a natural poet, indigenous to Sicily, but an
artificial blue-stocking; as was Callimachus in a different class.
The drama we may place loosely in the generation next before that of
Alexander the Great. And his era may be best remembered by noting it
as 333 years B. C. Add thirty years to this era--that will be the era
of the Drama. Add a little more than a century, and that will be the
era of Pindar. Him, therefore, we will notice first.
Now, the chief thing to say as to Pindar is--to show cause, good and
reasonable, why no man of sense should trouble his head about him.
There was in the seventeenth century a notion prevalent about Pindar,
the very contradiction to the truth. It was imagined that he 'had a
demon'; that he was under a burthen of prophetic inspiration; that he
was possessed, like a Hebrew prophet or a Delphic priestess, with
divine fury. Why was this thought?--simply because no mortal read him.
Laughable it is to mention, that Pope, when a very young man, and
writing his _Temple of Fame_ (partly on the model of Chaucer's), when
he came to the great columns and their bas-reliefs in that temple,
each of which is sacred to one honoured name, having but room in all
for six, chose Pindar for one[13] of the six. And the first bas-relief
on Pindar's column is so pretty, that we shall quote it; especially as
it suggested Gray's car for Dryden's 'less presumptuous flight!'
'Four swans sustain a car of silver bright,
With heads advanc'd, and pinions stretch'd for flight:
Here, _like some furious prophet_, Pindar rode,
And seem'd to _labour with th' inspiring god_.'
[Footnote 13: The other five were Homer, Virgil, Horace, Aristotle,
Cicero.]
Then follow eight lines describing other bas-reliefs, containing 'the
figured games of Greece' (Olympic, Nemean, &c.). But what we spoke of
as laughable in the whole affair is, that Master Pope neither had then
read one line of Pindar, nor ever read one line of Pindar: and reason
good; for at that time he could not read the simple Homeric Greek;
while the Greek of Pindar exceeds all other Greek in difficulty,
excepting, perhaps, a few amongst the tragic choruses, which are
difficult for the very same reason--lyric abruptness, lyric
involution, and lyric obscurity of transition. Not having read Homer,
no wonder that Pope should place, amongst the bas-reliefs illustrating
the _Iliad_, an incident which does not exist in the _Iliad_.[14] Not
having read Pindar, no wonder that Pope should ascribe to Pindar
qualities which are not only imaginary, but in absolute contradiction
to his true ones. A more sober old gentleman does not exist: his
demoniac possession is a mere fable. But there are two sufficient
arguments for not reading him, so long as innumerable books of greater
interest remain unread. First, he writes upon subjects that, to us,
are mean and extinct--race-horses that have been defunct for
twenty-five centuries, chariots that were crazy in his own day, and
contests with which it is impossible for us to sympathise. Then his
digressions about old genealogies are no whit better than his main
theme, nor more amusing than a Welshman's pedigree. The best
translator of any age, Mr. Carey, who translated Dante, has done what
human skill could effect to make the old Theban readable; but, after
all, the man is yet to come who _has_ read Pindar, _will_ read Pindar,
or _can_ read Pindar, except, indeed, a translator in the way of duty.
And the son of Philip himself, though he bade 'spare the house of
Pindarus,' we vehemently suspect, never read the works of Pindarus;
that labour he left to some future Hercules. So much for his subjects:
but a second objection is--his metre: The hexameter, or heroic metre
of the ancient Greeks, is delightful to our modern ears; so is the
Iambic metre fortunately of the stage: but the Lyric metres generally,
and those of Pindar without one exception, are as utterly without
meaning to us, as merely chaotic labyrinths of sound, as Chinese music
or Dutch concertos. Need we say more?
[Footnote 14: Viz. the supposed dragging of Hector three times round
Troy by Achilles--a mere post-Homeric fable. But it is ludicrous to
add, that, in after years--nay, when nearly at the end of his
translation of the _Iliad_, in 1718--Pope took part in a discussion
upon Homer's reasons for ascribing such conduct to his hero, seriously
arguing the _pro_ and _con_ upon a pure fiction.]
Next comes the drama. But this is too weighty a theme to be discussed
slightly; and the more so because here only we willingly concede a
strong motive for learning Greek; here, only, we hold the want of a
ready introduction to be a serious misfortune. Our general argument,
therefore, which had for its drift to depreciate Greek, dispenses, in
this case, with our saying anything; since every word we _could_ say
would be hostile to our own purpose. However, we shall, even upon this
field of the Greek literature, deliver one oracular sentence, tending
neither to praise nor dispraise it, but simply to state its relations
to the modern, or, at least, the English drama. In the ancient drama,
to represent it justly, the unlearned reader must imagine grand
situations, impressive groups; in the modern tumultuous movement, a
grand stream of action. In the Greek drama, he must conceive the
presiding power to be _Death_; in the English, _Life_. What
Death?--What Life? That sort of death or of life locked up and frozen
into everlasting slumber, which we see in sculpture; that sort of
life, of tumult, of agitation, of tendency to something beyond, which
we see in painting. The picturesque, in short, domineers over English
tragedy; the sculpturesque, or the statuesque, over the Grecian.
The moralists, such as Theogins, the miscellaneous or didactic poets,
such as Hesiod, are all alike below any notice in a sketch like this.
The Epigrammatists, or writers of monumental inscriptions, &c.,
remain; and they, next after the dramatic poets, present the most
interesting field by far in the Greek literature; but these are too
various to be treated otherwise than _viritim_ and in detail.
There remains the prose literature; and, with the exception of those
critical writers who have written on rhetoric (such as Hermogenes,
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Demetrius Phalerius, &c. &c., some of whom
are the best writers extant, on the mere art of constructing
sentences, but could not interest the general reader), the prose
writers may be thus distributed: 1st, the orators; 2nd, the
historians; 3rd, the philosophers; 4th, the literateurs (such as
Plutarch, Lucian, &c.).
As to the philosophers, of course there are only two who can present
any general interest--Plato and Aristotle; for Xenophon is no more a
philosophic writer than our own Addison. Now, in this department, it
is evident that the matter altogether transcends the manner. No man
will wish to study a profound philosopher, but for some previous
interest in his doctrines; and, if by any means a man has obtained
this, he may pursue this study sufficiently through translations. It
is true that neither Sydenham nor Taylor has done justice to Plato,
for example, as respects the colloquial graces of his style; but, when
the object is purely to pursue a certain course of principles and
inferences, the student cannot complain much that he has lost the
dramatic beauties of the dialogue, or the luxuriance of the style.
These he was not then seeking, by the supposition--what he _did_ seek,
is still left; whereas in poetry, if the golden apparel is lost, if
the music has melted away from the thoughts, all, in fact, is lost.
Old Hobbes, or Ogilbie, is no more Homer than the score of Mozart's
_Don Giovanni_ is Mozart's _Don Giovanni_.
If, however, Grecian philosophy presents no absolute temptations to
the attainment of Greek, far less does Grecian history. If you except
later historians--such as Diodorus, Plutarch, and those (like Appian,
Dionysius, Dion Cassius) who wrote of Roman things and Roman persons
in Greek, and Polybius, who comes under the same class, at a much
earlier period--and none of whom have any interest of style, excepting
only Plutarch: these dismissed, there are but three who can rank as
classical Greek historians; _three who can lose by translation_. Of
these the eldest, Herodotus, is perhaps of real value. Some call him
the father of history; some call him the father of lies. Time and
Major Rennel have done him ample justice. Yet here, again, see how
little need of Greek for the amplest use of a Greek author. Twenty-two
centuries and more have passed since the fine old man read his history
at the Grecian games of Olympia. One man only has done him right, and
put his enemies under his footstool; _and yet this man had no Greek_.
Major Rennel read Herodotus only in the translation of Beloe. He has
told us so himself. Here, then, is a little fact, my Grecian boys,
that you won't easily get over. The father of history, the eldest of
prose writers, has been first explained, illustrated, justified,
liberated from scandal and disgrace, first had his geography set to
rights, first translated from the region of fabulous romance, and
installed in his cathedral chair, as Dean (or eldest) of historians,
by a military man, who had no more Greek than Shakspeare, or than we
(perhaps you, reader) of the Kalmuck.
Next comes Thucydides. He is the second in order of time amongst the
Grecian historians who survive, and the first of those (a class which
Mr. Southey, the laureate, always speaks of as the corruptors of
genuine history) who affect to treat it philosophically. If the
philosophic historians are not always so faithless as Mr. Southey
alleges, they are, however, always guilty of dulness. Commend us to
one picturesque, garrulous old fellow, like Froissart, or Philip de
Comines, or Bishop Burnet, before all the philosophic prosers that
ever prosed. These picturesque men will lie a little now and then, for
the sake of effect--but so will the philosophers. Even Bishop Burnet,
who, by the way, was hardly so much a picturesque as an anecdotal
historian, was famous for his gift of lying; so diligently had he
cultivated it. And the Duchess of Portsmouth told a noble lord, when
inquiring into the truth of a particular fact stated by the very
reverend historian, that he was notorious in Charles the Second's
court, and that no man believed a word he said. But now Thucydides,
though writing about his own time, and doubtless embellishing by
fictions not less than his more amusing brethren, is as dull as if he
prided himself on veracity. Nay, he tells us no secret anecdotes of
the times--surely there must have been many; and this proves to us,
that he was a low fellow without political connections, and that he
never had been behind the curtain. Now, what business had such a man
to set himself up for a writer of history and a speculator on
politics? Besides, his history is imperfect; and, suppose it were
not, what is its subject? Why simply one single war; a war which
lasted twenty-seven years; but which, after all, through its whole
course was enlivened by only two events worthy to enter into general
history--viz. the plague of Athens, and the miserable licking which
the Athenian invaders received in Sicily. This dire overthrow dished
Athens out and out; for one generation to come, there was an end of
Athenian domination; and that arrogant state, under the yoke of their
still baser enemies of Sparta, learned experimentally what were the
evils of a foreign conquest. There was therefore, in the domination of
the Thirty Tyrants, something to 'point a moral' in the Peloponnesian
war: it was the judicial reaction of martial tyranny and foreign
oppression, such as we of this generation have beheld in the double
conquest of Paris by insulted and outraged Christendom. But nothing of
all this will be found in Thucydides--he is as cool as a cucumber upon
every act of atrocity; whether it be the bloody abuse of power, or the
bloody retribution from the worm that, being trampled on too long,
turns at last to sting and to exterminate--all alike he enters in his
daybook and his ledger, posts them up to the account of brutal Spartan
or polished Athenian, with no more expression of his feelings (if he
had any) than a merchant making out an invoice of puncheons that are
to steal away men's wits, or of frankincense and myrrh that are to
ascend in devotion to the saints. Herodotus is a fine, old, genial
boy, that, like Froissart or some of the crusading historians, kept
himself in health and jovial spirits by travelling about; nor did he
confine himself to Greece or the Grecian islands; but he went to
Egypt, got bousy in the Pyramid of Cheops, ate a beef-steak in the
hanging-gardens of Babylon, and listened to no sailors' yarns at the
Piræus, which doubtless, before his time, had been the sole authority
for Grecian legends concerning foreign lands. But, as to Thucydides,
our own belief is, that he lived like a monk shut up in his _museum_
or study; and that, at the very utmost, he may have gone in the
steamboat[15] to Corfu (_i. e._ Corcyra), because _that_ was the
island which occasioned the row of the Peloponnesian war.
[Footnote 15: 'In the steamboat!' Yes, reader, the steamboat. It is
clear that there _was_ one in Homer's time. See the art. _Phæacian_ in
the _Odyssey_: if it paid then, _à fortiori_ six hundred years after.
The only point unknown about it, is the captain's name and the
state-cabin fares.]
Xenophon now is quite another sort of man; he could use his pen; but
also he could use his sword; and (when need was) his heels, in running
away. His Grecian history of course is a mere fraction of the general
history; and, moreover, our own belief, founded upon the differences
of the style, is, that the work now received for his must be spurious.
But in this place the question is not worth discussing. Two works
remain, professedly historical, which, beyond a doubt, _are_ his; and
one of them the most interesting prose work by much which Athens has
bequeathed us; though, by the way, Xenophon was living in a sort of
elegant exile at a chateau in Thessaly, and not under Athenian
protection, when he wrote it. Both of his great works relate to a
Persian Cyrus, but to a Cyrus of different centuries. The _Cyropædia_
is a romance, pretty much on the plan of Fenelon's _Telemaque_, only
(Heaven be praised!) not so furiously apoplectic. It pursues the
great Cyrus, the founder of the Persian empire, the Cyrus of the
Jewish prophets, from his infancy to his death-bed; and describes
evidently not any real prince, according to any authentic record of
his life, but, upon some basis of hints and vague traditions, improves
the actual Cyrus into an ideal fiction of a sovereign and a military
conqueror, as he _ought_ to be. One thing only we shall say of this
work, though no admirers ourselves of the twaddle which Xenophon
elsewhere gives us as philosophic memorabilia, that the episode of
Abradates and Panthea (especially the behaviour of Panthea after the
death of her beloved hero, and the incident of the dead man's hand
coming away on Cyrus grasping it) exceeds for pathos everything in
Grecian literature, always excepting the Greek drama, and comes
nearest of anything, throughout Pagan literature, to the impassioned
simplicity of Scripture, in its tale of Joseph and his brethren. The
other historical work of Xenophon is the _Anabasis_. The meaning of
the title is _the going-up_ or _ascent_--viz. of Cyrus the younger.
This prince was the younger brother of the reigning king Artaxerxes,
nearly two centuries from Cyrus the Great; and, from opportunity
rather than a better title, and because his mother and his vast
provincial government furnished him with royal treasures able to hire
an army, most of all, because he was richly endowed by nature with
personal gifts--took it into his head that he would dethrone his
brother; and the more so, because he was only his half-brother. His
chance was a good one: he had a Grecian army, and one from the very
_élite_ of Greece; whilst the Persian king had but a small corps of
Grecian auxiliaries, long enfeebled by Persian effeminacy and Persian
intermarriages. Xenophon was personally present in this expedition.
And the catastrophe was most singular, such as does not occur once in
a thousand years. The cavalry of the great King retreated before the
Greeks continually, no doubt from policy and secret orders; so that,
when a pitched battle became inevitable, the foreign invaders found
themselves in the very heart of the land, and close upon the
Euphrates. The battle was fought: the foreigners were victorious: they
were actually singing _Te Deum_ or _Io Pæan_ for their victory, when
it was discovered that their leader, the native prince in whose behalf
they had conquered, was missing; and soon after, that he was dead.
What was to be done? The man who should have improved their victory,
and placed them at his own right hand when on the throne of Persia,
was no more; key they had none to unlock the great fortresses of the
empire, none to unloose the enthusiasm of the native population. Yet
such was the desperation of their circumstances, that a _coup-de-main_
on the capital seemed their best chance. The whole army was and felt
itself a forlorn hope. To go forward was desperate, but to go back
much more so; for they had a thousand rivers without bridges in their
rear; and, if they set their faces in that direction, they would have
300,000 light cavalry upon their flanks, besides nations innumerable--
'Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreath'd';
fierce fellows who understood no Greek, and, what was worse, no
joking, but well understood the use of the scymitar. Bad as things
were, they soon became worse; for the chiefs of the Grecian army,
being foolish enough to accept a dinner invitation from the Persian
commander-in-chief, were assassinated; and the words of Milton became
intelligible--that in the lowest deep a lower deep had opened to
destroy them. In this dilemma, Xenophon, the historian of the
expedition, was raised to a principal command; and by admirable skill
he led back the army by a different route to the Black Sea, on the
coast of which he knew that there were Grecian colonies: and from one
of these he obtained shipping, in which he coasted along (when he did
not march by land) to the mouth of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles.
This was the famous retreat of the ten thousand; and it shows how much
defect of literary skill there was in those days amongst Grecian
authors, that the title of the book, _The Going Up_, does not apply to
the latter and more interesting seven-eighths of the account. The
Going Up is but the preparation or preface to the Going Down, the
_Anabasis_ to the _Katabasis_, in which latter part it is that
Xenophon plays any conspicuous part. A great political interest,
however, over and above the personal interest, attaches to this
expedition: for there can be no doubt, that to this proof of weakness
in the Persian empire, and perhaps to this, _as recorded by Xenophon_,
was due the expedition of Alexander in the next generation, which
changed the face of the world.
The literateurs, as we have styled Plutarch and Lucian, though far
removed from the true classical era, being both posterior to
Christianity, are truly interesting. And, for Lucian in particular,
though he is known by reputation only as a humorous and sneering
writer, we can say, upon our personal knowledge, that there are
passages of more terrific effect, more German, and approaching to the
sublime, than anywhere else in Greek literature, out of the tragic
poets. Of Plutarch we need hardly speak; one part of his voluminous
works--viz. his biographies of Greek and Roman leaders in arts[16] and
arms--being so familiar to all nations; and having been selected by
Rousseau as the book for him who should be limited (or, like Collins
the poet, should limit himself) to one book only--a foolish choice
undoubtedly, but still arguing great range of resources in Plutarch,
that he should be thought of after so many myriads of modern books had
widened the range of selection. Meantime, the reader is not to forget
that, whatever may be his powers of amusement, a more inaccurate or
faithless author as to dates, and, indeed, in all matters of research,
does not exist than Plutarch. We make it a rule, whenever we see
_Plut._ at the bottom of a dictionary article, as the authority on
which it rests, to put the better half down as a bouncer. And, in
fact, Joe Miller is quite as good authority for English history as
Plutarch for Roman.
[Footnote 16: 'In arts,' we say, because great orators are amongst his
heroes; but, after all, it is very questionable whether, simply as
orators, Plutarch would have noticed them. They were also statesmen;
and Mitford always treats Demosthenes as first lord of the treasury
and premier. Plutarch records no poet, no artist, however brilliant.]
Now remain the orators; and of these we have a right to speak, for we
have read them; and, believe us, reader, not above one or two men in a
generation have. If the Editor would allow us room, we would gladly
contrast them with modern orators; and we could easily show how
prodigious are the advantages of modern orators in every point which
can enter into a comparison. But to what purpose? Even modern orators,
with all the benefit of modern interest, and of allusions everywhere
intelligible, are not read in any generation after their own, pulpit
orators only being excepted. So that, if the gods _had_ made our
reader a Grecian, surely he would never so far misspend his precious
time, and squander his precious intellect upon old dusty quarrels,
never of more value to a philosopher than a tempest in a wash-hand
bason, but now stuffed with obscurities which no man can explain, and
with lies to which no man can bring the counter-statement. But this
would furnish matter for a separate paper.
No. II.--THE GREEK ORATORS.
Now, let us come to the orators. Isocrates, the eldest of those who
have survived, is a mere scholastic rhetorician: for he was a timid
man, and did not dare to confront the terrors of a stormy political
audience; and hence, though he lived about an entire century, he never
once addressed the Athenian citizens. It is true, that, although no
_bonâ fide_ orator--for he never _spoke_ in any usual acceptation of
that word, and, as a consequence, never had an opportunity of
replying, which only can bring forward a man's talents as a
_debater_--still he employed his pen upon real and upon existing
questions of public policy; and did not, as so many generations of
chamber rhetoricians continued to do in Greece, confine his powers to
imaginary cases of political difficulty, or (what were tantamount to
imaginary) cases fetched up from the long-past era of King Priam, or
the still earlier era of the Seven Chiefs warring against the
Seven-gated Thebes of Boeotia, or the half-fabulous era of the
Argonauts. Isocrates was a man of sense--a patriot in a temperate
way--and with something of a feeling for Greece generally, not merely
a champion of Athens. His heart was given to politics: and, in an age
when heavy clouds were gathering over the independence and the civil
grandeur of his country, he had a disinterested anxiety for drawing
off the lightning of the approaching storms by pacific counsels.
Compared, therefore, with the common mercenary orators of the Athenian
forum--who made a regular trade of promoting mischief, by inflaming
the pride, jealousy, vengeance, or the martial instincts of a 'fierce
democracy,' and, generally speaking, with no views, high or low, sound
or unsound, that looked beyond the momentary profit to themselves from
thus pandering to the thoughtless nationality of a most sensitive
people--Isocrates is entitled to our respect. His writings have also a
separate value, as memorials of political transactions from which the
historian has gathered many useful hints; and, perhaps, to a diligent
search, they might yield more. But, considered as an orator--if that
title can be, with any propriety, allowed to one who declaimed only in
his closet--one who, in relation to public affairs, was what, in
England, when speaking of practical jurisprudence, we call a Chamber
Counsel--Isocrates is languid, and with little of anything
characteristic in his manner to justify a separate consideration. It
is remarkable that he, beyond all other rhetoricians of that era,
cultivated the _rhythmus_ of his periods. And to this object he
sacrificed not only an enormity of time, but, I have no doubt, in many
cases, the freedom and natural movement of the thoughts. My reason,
however, for noticing this peculiarity in Isocrates, is by way of
fixing the attention upon the superiority, even artificial ornaments,
of downright practical business and the realities of political strife,
over the torpid atmosphere of a study or a school. Cicero, long after,
had the same passion for _numerositas_, and the full, pompous
rotundity of cadence. But in Cicero, all habits and all faculties were
nursed by the daily practice of life and its impassioned realities, in
the forum or in the senate. What is the consequence? Why this--that,
whereas in the most laboured performance of Isocrates (which cost him,
I think, one whole _decennium_, or period of ten years), few modern
ears are sensible of any striking art, or any great result of harmony;
in Cicero, on the other hand, the fine, sonorous modulations of his
periodic style, are delightful to the dullest ear of any European.
Such are the advantages from real campaigns, from the unsimulated
strife of actual stormy life, over the torpid dreams of what the
Romans called an _umbratic_[17] experience.
[Footnote 17: 'Umbratic.' I have perhaps elsewhere drawn the attention
of readers to the peculiar effects of climate, in shaping the modes of
our thinking and imaging. A life of _inertia_, which retreats from the
dust and toil of actual experience, we (who represent the idea of
effeminacy more naturally by the image of shrinking from cold) call a
chimney-corner of a fireside experience; but the Romans, to whom the
same effeminacy more easily fell under the idea of shrinking from the
heat of the sun, called it an experience won in the shade; and a mere
scholastic student, they called an _umbraticus doctor_.]
_Isocrates_ I have noticed as the oldest of the surviving Greek
orators: _Demosthenes_, of course, claims a notice more emphatically,
as, by universal consent of Athens, and afterwards of Rhodes, of Rome,
and other impartial judges, the greatest, or, at least, the most
comprehensively great. For, by the way, it must not be forgotten--though
modern critics _do_ forget this rather important fact in weighing the
reputation of Demosthenes--he was not esteemed, in his own day, as the
greatest in that particular quality of energy and demoniac power
([Greek: deinotês]) which is generally assumed to have been his leading
characteristic and his _forte_; not only by comparison with his own
compatriots, but even with Cicero and the greatest men of the Roman bar.
It was not of Demosthenes that the Athenians were accustomed to say, 'he
thunders and lightens,' but of Pericles, an elder orator; and even
amongst the written oratory of Greece, which still survives (for as to
the speeches ascribed to Pericles by Thucydides, I take it for granted
that, as usual, these were mere forgeries of the historian), there is a
portion which perhaps exceeds Demosthenes in the naked quality of
vehemence. But this, I admit, will not impeach his supremacy; for it is
probable, that wherever an orator is characterised exclusively by
turbulent power, or at least remembered chiefly for that quality, all
the other numerous graces of eloquence were wanting to that man, or
existed only in a degree which made no equipoise to his insulated gift
of Jovian terror. The Gracchi, amongst the Roman orators, were probably
more properly 'sons of thunder' than Crassus or Cicero, or even than
Cæsar himself, whose oratory, by the way, was, in this respect, like his
own character and infinite accomplishments; so that even by Cicero it is
rarely cited without the epithet of splendid, magnificent, &c. We must
suppose, therefore, that neither Cicero nor Demosthenes was held to be
at the head of their respective fields in Rome and Athens, in right of
any absolute pre-eminence in the one leading power of an orator--viz.
native and fervent vigour--but in right of a large comprehensive harmony
of gifts, leaving possibly to some other orators, elder or rival to
themselves, a superiority in each of an orator's talents taken apart,
but claiming the supremacy, nevertheless, upon the whole, by the
systematic union of many qualities tending to one result: pleasing the
taste by the harmonious _coup d'oeil_ from the total assemblage, and
also adapting itself to a far larger variety of situations; for, after
all, the _mere_ son of thunder is disarmed, and apt to become
ridiculous, if you strip him of a passionate cause, of a theme saturated
with human strife, and of an excitable or tempestuous audience.
Such an audience, however, it will be said that Demosthenes had, and
sometimes (but not very often in those orations which survive) such a
theme. As to his audience, certainly it was all that could be wished
in point of violence and combustible passion; but also it was
something more. A mighty advantage it is, doubtless, to an orator,
when he sees and hears his own kindling passions instantaneously
reflected in the blazing eyes and fiery shouts (the _fremitus_) of
his audience--when he sees a whole people, personally or by
deputation, swayed backwards and forwards, like a field of corn in a
breeze, by the movements of his own appeals. But, unfortunately, in
the Athenian audience, the ignorance, the headstrong violence of
prejudice, the arrogance, and, above all, the levity of the national
mind--presented, to an orator the most favourite, a scene like that of
an ocean always rocking with storms; like a wasp always angry; like a
lunatic, always coming out of a passion or preparing to go into one.
Well might Demosthenes prepare himself by sea-shore practice; in which
I conceive that his purpose must have been, not so much (according to
the common notion) to overcrow the noise of the forum, as to _stand
fire_ (if I may so express it) against the uproarious demonstrations
of mob fury.
This quality of an Athenian audience must very seriously have
interfered with the intellectual display of an orator. Not a word
could he venture to say in the way of censure towards the public
will--not even hypothetically to insinuate a fault; not a syllable
could he utter even in the way of dissent from the favourite
speculations of the moment. If he did, instantly a roar of menaces
recalled him to a sense even of personal danger. And, again, the mere
vivacity of his audience, requiring perpetual amusement and variety,
compelled a man, as great even as Demosthenes, to curtail his
arguments, and rarely, indeed, to pursue a theme with the requisite
fulness of development or illustration; a point in which the superior
dignity and the far less fluctuating mobility of the Roman mind gave
an immense advantage to Cicero.
Demosthenes, in spite of all the weaknesses which have been arrayed
against his memory by the hatred of his contemporaries, or by the
anti-republican feelings of such men as Mitford, was a great man and
an honest man. He rose above his countrymen. He despised, in some
measure, his audience; and, at length, in the palmy days of his
influence, he would insist on being heard; he would insist on telling
the truth, however unacceptable; he would not, like the great rout of
venal haranguers, lay any flattering unction to the capital distempers
of the public mind; he would point out their errors, and warn them of
their perils. But this upright character of the man, victorious over
his constitutional timidity, does but the more brightly illustrate the
local law and the tyranny of the public feeling. How often do we find
him, when on the brink of uttering 'odious truth,' obliged to pause,
and to propitiate his audience with deprecatory phrases, entreating
them to give him time for utterance, not to yell him down before they
had heard his sentence to the end. [Greek: Mê thoryzeite]--'Gentlemen
of Athens! for the love of God, do not make an uproar at what I am
going to say! Gentlemen of Athens! humbly I beseech you to let me
finish my sentence!' Such are his continual appeals to the better
feelings of his audience. Now, it is very evident that, in such
circumstances, no man could do justice to any subject. At least, when
speaking not before a tribunal of justice, but before the people in
council assembled--that is, in effect, on his greatest stage of
all--Demosthenes (however bold at times, and restive in a matter which
he held to be paramount) was required to bend, and did bend, to the
local genius of democracy, reinforced by a most mercurial
temperament. The very air of Attica, combined with great political
power, kept its natives in a state of habitual intoxication; and even
wise men would have had some difficulty in mastering, as it affected
themselves, the permanent bias towards caprice and insolence.
Is this state of things at all taken into account in our modern
critiques upon Demosthenes? The upshot of what I can find in most
modern lecturers upon rhetoric and style, French or English, when
speaking of Demosthenes, is this notable simile, by way of
representing the final effect of his eloquence--'that, like a mountain
torrent, swollen by melting snow, or by rain, it carries all things
before it.' Prodigiously original! and exceedingly discriminative! As
if such an illustration would not equally represent the effect of a
lyrical poem, of Mozart's music, of a stormy chorus, or any other form
whatever of impassioned vehemence. Meantime, I suspect grievously that
not one of these critics has ever read a paragraph of Demosthenes.
Nothing do you ever find quoted but a few notorious passages about
Philip of Macedon, and the too-famous oath, by the manes of those that
died at Marathon. I call it too famous, because (like Addison's
comparison of Marlborough, at Blenheim, to the angel in the storm--of
which a schoolmaster then living said, that nine out of every ten boys
would have hit upon it in a school exercise) it has no peculiar
boldness, and must have occurred to every Athenian, of any
sensibility, every day of his life. Hear, on the other hand, a modern
oath, and (what is most remarkable) an oath sworn in the pulpit. A
dissenting clergyman (I believe, a Baptist), preaching at Cambridge,
and having occasion to affirm or to deny something or other, upon his
general confidence in the grandeur of man's nature, the magnificence
of his conceptions, the immensity of his aspirations, &c., delivered
himself thus:--'By the greatness of human ideals--by the greatness of
human aspirations--by the immortality of human creations--_by the
Iliad_--_by the Odyssey_'--Now, that _was_ bold, startling, sublime.
But, in the other case, neither was the oath invested with any great
pomp of imagery or expression; nor, if it had--which is more to the
purpose--was such an oath at all representative of the peculiar manner
belonging to Demosthenes. It is always a rude and inartificial style
of criticism to cite from an author that which, whether fine or not in
itself, is no fair specimen of his ordinary style.
What then _is_ the characteristic style of Demosthenes?--It is one
which grew naturally, as did his defects (by which I mean faults of
_omission_, in contradiction to such as are positive), from the
composition of his audience. His audience, comprehending so much
ignorance, and, above all, so much high-spirited impatience, being, in
fact, always on the fret, kept the orator always on the fret. Hence
arose short sentences; hence, the impossibility of the long,
voluminous sweeps of beautiful rhythmus which we find in Cicero;
hence, the animated form of apostrophe and crowded interrogations
addressed to the audience. This gives, undoubtedly, a spirited and
animated character to the style of Demosthenes; but it robs him of a
large variety of structure applied to the logic, or the embellishment,
or the music of his composition. His style is full of life, but not
(like Cicero's) full of pomp and continuous grandeur. On the contrary,
as the necessity of rousing attention, or of sustaining it, obliged
the Attic orator to rely too much on the _personality_ of direct
question to the audience, and to use brief sentences, so also the same
impatient and fretful irritability forbade him to linger much upon an
idea--to theorise, to speculate, or, generally, to quit the direct
business path of the question then under consideration--no matter for
what purpose of beauty, dignity, instruction, or even of _ultimate_
effect. In all things, the _immediate_--the instant--the _præsens
præsentissimum_, was kept steadily before the eye of the Athenian
orator, by the mere coercion of self-interest.
And hence, by the way, arises one most important feature of
distinction between Grecian oratory (political oratory at least) on
the one hand, and Roman (to which, in this point, we may add British)
on the other. A Roman lawyer, senator, or demagogue, even, under
proper restrictions--a British member of parliament--or even a
candidate from the hustings--but, most assuredly, and by the evidence
of many a splendid example, an advocate addressing a jury--may
embellish his oration with a wide circuit of historical, or of
antiquarian, nay, even speculative discussion. Every Latin scholar
will remember the leisurely and most facetious, the good-natured and
respectful, yet keenly satiric, picture which the great Roman
barrister draws of the Stoic philosophy, by way of _rowing_ old Cato,
who professed that philosophy with too little indulgence for venial
human errors. The _judices_--that is, in effect, the jury--were
tickled to the soul by seeing the grave Marcus Cato badgered with
this fine razor-like raillery; and there can be no doubt that, by
flattering the self-respect of the jury, in presuming them susceptible
of so much wit from a liberal kind of knowledge, and by really
delighting them with such a display of adroit teasing applied to a man
of scenical gravity, this whole scene, though quite extrajudicial and
travelling out of the record, was highly useful in conciliating the
good-will of Cicero's audience. The same style of liberal _excursus_
from the more thorny path of the absolute business before the court,
has been often and memorably practised by great English
barristers--as, in the trial of Sacheverel, by many of the managers
for the Commons; by 'the fluent Murray,' on various occasions; in the
great cause of impeachment against our English Verres (or, at least,
our Verres as to the situation, though not the guilt), Mr. Hastings;
in many of Mr. Erskine's addresses to juries, where political rights
were at stake; in Sir James Mackintosh's defence of Peltier for a
libel upon Napoleon, when he went into a history of the press as
applied to politics--(a liberal inquiry, but which, except in the
remotest manner, could not possibly bear upon the mere question of
fact before the jury); and in many other splendid instances, which
have really made _our_ trials and the annals of _our_ criminal
jurisprudence one great fund of information and authority to the
historian. In the senate, I need not say how much farther, and more
frequently, this habit of large generalisation, and of liberal
excursion from perhaps a lifeless theme, has been carried by great
masters; in particular, by Edmund Burke, who carried it, in fact, to
such excess, and to a point which threatened so much to disturb the
movement of public business, that, from that cause more perhaps than
from rude insensibility to the value of his speculations, he put his
audience sometimes in motion for dinner, and acquired (as is
well-known) the surname of the Dinner Bell.[18]
[Footnote 18: Yet this story has been exaggerated; and, I believe, in
strict truth, the whole case arose out of some fretful expressions of
ill-temper on the part of Burke, and that the name was a retort from a
man of wit, who had been personally stung by a sarcasm of the offended
orator.]
Now, in the Athenian audience, all this was impossible: neither in
political nor in forensic harangues was there any license by rule, or
any indulgence by usage, or any special privilege by personal favour,
to the least effort at improving an individual case of law or politics
into general views of jurisprudence, of statesmanship, of diplomacy;
no collateral discussions were tolerated--no illustrative details--no
historical parallelisms--still less any philosophical moralisations.
The slightest show of any tendency in these directions was summarily
nipped in the bud: the Athenian gentlemen began to [Greek: thoryzein]
in good earnest if a man showed symptoms of entering upon any
discussion whatever that was not intensely needful and pertinent in
the first place--or which, in the second place, was not of a nature to
be wound up in two sentences when a summons should arise either to
dinner, or to the theatre, or to the succession of some variety
anticipated from another orator.
Hence, therefore, finally arises one great peculiarity of Greek
eloquence; and a most unfortunate one for its chance of ever
influencing a remote posterity, or, in any substantial sense, of its
ever surviving in the real unaffected admiration of us moderns--that
it embodies no alien, no collateral information as to manners, usages,
modes of feeling--no extrinsic ornament, no side glimpses into Grecian
life, no casual historical details. The cause, and nothing but the
cause--the political question, and nothing but the question--- pealed
for ever in the ears of the terrified orator, always on sufferance,
always on his good behaviour, always afraid, for the sake of his party
or of his client, lest his auditors should become angry, or become
impatient, or become weary. And from that intense fear, trammeling the
freedom of his steps at every turn, and overruling every motion to the
right or to the left, in pure servile anxiety for the mood and
disposition of his tyrannical master, arose the very opposite result
for us of this day--that we, by the very means adopted to prevent
weariness in the immediate auditors, find nothing surviving in Grecian
orations but what _does_ weary us insupportably through its want of
all general interest; and, even amongst private or instant details of
politics or law, presenting us with none that throw light upon the
spirit of manners, or the Grecian peculiarities of feeling. Probably
an Athenian mob would not have cared much at the prospect of such a
result to posterity; and, at any rate, would not have sacrificed one
atom of their ease or pleasure to obviate such a result: but, to an
Athenian orator, this result would have been a sad one to contemplate.
The final consequence is, that whilst all men find, or may find,
infinite amusement, and instruction of the most liberal kind, in that
most accomplished of statesmen and orators, the Roman Cicero--nay,
would doubtless, from the causes assigned, have found, in their
proportion, the same attractions in the speeches of the elder Antony,
of Hortensius, of Crassus, and other contemporaries or immediate
predecessors of Cicero--no person ever reads Demosthenes, still less
any other Athenian orator, with the slightest interest beyond that
which inevitably attaches to the words of one who wrote his own divine
language with probably very superior skill.
But, from all this, results a further inference--viz. the dire
affectation of those who pretend an enthusiasm in the oratory of
Demosthenes; and also a plenary consolation to all who are obliged,
from ignorance of Greek, to dispense with that novelty. If it be a
luxury at all, it is and can be one for those only who cultivate
verbal researches and the pleasures of philology.
Even in the oratory of our own times, which oftentimes discusses
questions to the whole growth and motion of which we have been
ourselves parties present, or even accessary--questions which we have
followed in their first emersion and separation from the clouds of
general politics; their advance, slow or rapid, towards a domineering
interest in the public passions; their meridian altitude; and perhaps
their precipitous descent downwards, whether from the consummation of
their objects (as in the questions of the Slave Trade, of Catholic
Emancipation, of East India Monopoly), or from a partial victory and
compromise with the abuse (as in the purification of that Augean
stable, prisons, and, still more, private houses for the insane), or
from the accomplishment of one stage or so in a progress which, by its
nature, is infinite (as in the various steps taken towards the
improvement, and towards the extension of education): even in cases
like these, when the primary and ostensible object of the speaker
already, on its own account, possesses a commanding attraction, yet
will it often happen that the secondary questions, growing out of the
leading one, the great elementary themes suggested to the speaker by
the concrete case before him--as, for instance, the general question
of Test Laws, or the still higher and transcendent question of
Religious Toleration, and the relations between the State and
religious opinions, or the general history of Slavery and the commerce
in the human species, the general principles of economy as applied to
monopolies, the past usages of mankind in their treatment of prisoners
or of lunatics--these comprehensive and transcendent themes are
continually allowed to absorb and throw into the shade, for a time,
the minor but more urgent question of the moment through which they
have gained their interest. The capital and primary interest gives way
for a time to the derivative interest; and it does so by a silent
understanding between the orator and his audience. The orator is well
assured that he will not be taxed with wandering; the audience are
satisfied that, eventually, they will not have lost their time: and
the final result is, to elevate and liberalise the province of
oratory, by exalting mere business (growing originally, perhaps, out
of contingencies of finance, or trade, or local police) into a field
for the higher understanding; and giving to the mere necessities of
our position as a nation the dignity of great problems for civilising
wisdom or philosophic philanthropy. Look back to the superb orations
of Edmund Burke on questions limited enough in themselves, sometimes
merely personal; for instance, that on American Taxation, on the
Reforms in our Household or Official Expenditure, or at that from the
Bristol hustings (by its _primâ facie_ subject, therefore, a mere
electioneering harangue to a mob). With what marvellous skill does he
enrich what is meagre, elevate what is humble, intellectualise what is
purely technical, delocalise what is local, generalise what is
personal! And with what result? Doubtless to the absolute
contemporaries of those speeches, steeped to the very lips in the
passions besetting their topics, even to those whose attention was
sufficiently secured by the domineering interest, friendly or hostile,
to the views of the speaker--even to these I say, that, in so far as
they were at all capable of an intellectual pleasure, those parts
would be most attractive which were least occupied with the present
business and the momentary details. This order of precedency in the
interests of the speech held even for them; but to us, removing at
every annual step we take in the century, to a greater distance from
the mere business and partisan interests of the several cases, this
secondary attraction is not merely the greater of the two--to us it
has become pretty nearly the sole one, pretty nearly the exclusive
attraction.
As to religious oratory, _that_ stands upon a different footing--the
questions afloat in that province of human speculation being eternal,
or at least essentially the same under new forms, receives a strong
illustration from the annals of the English senate, to which also it
gives a strong and useful illustration. Up to the era of James I., the
eloquence of either House could not, for political reasons, be very
striking, on the very principle which we have been enforcing.
Parliament met only for dispatch of business; and that business was
purely fiscal, or (as at times it happened) judicial. The
constitutional functions of Parliament were narrow; and they were
narrowed still more severely by the jealousy of the executive
government. With the expansion, or rather first growth and development
of a gentry, or third estate, expanded, _pari passu_, the political
field of their jurisdiction and their deliberative functions. This
widening field, as a birth out of new existences, unknown to former
laws or usages, was, of course, not contemplated by those laws or
usages. Constitutional law could not provide for the exercise of
rights by a body of citizens, when, as yet, that body had itself no
existence. A gentry, as the depository of a vast overbalance of
property, real as well as personal, had not matured itself till the
latter years of James I. Consequently the new functions, which the
instinct of their new situation prompted them to assume, were looked
upon by the Crown, most sincerely, as unlawful usurpations. This led,
as we know, to a most fervent and impassioned struggle, the most so of
any struggle which has ever armed the hands of men with the sword. For
the passions take a far profounder sweep when they are supported by
deep thought and high principles.
This element of fervid strife was already, for itself, an atmosphere
most favourable to political eloquence. Accordingly, the speeches of
that day, though generally too short to attain that large compass and
sweep of movement without which it is difficult to kindle or to
sustain any conscious enthusiasm in an audience, were of a high
quality as to thought and energy of expression, as high as their
circumstantial disadvantages allowed. Lord Strafford's great effort is
deservedly admired to this day, and the latter part of it has been
often pronounced a _chef-d'oeuvre_. A few years before that era, all
the orators of note were, and must have been, judicial orators; and,
amongst these, Lord Bacon, to whom every reader's thoughts will point
as the most memorable, attained the chief object of all oratory, if
what Ben Jonson reports of him be true, that he had his audience
passive to the motions of his will. But Jonson was, perhaps, too
scholastic a judge to be a fair representative judge; and, whatever he
might choose to say or to think, Lord Bacon was certainly too
weighty--too massy with the bullion of original thought--ever to have
realized the idea of a great popular orator--one who
'Wielded at will a fierce democracy,'
and ploughed up the great deeps of sentiment, or party strife, or
national animosities, like a Levanter or a monsoon. In the schools of
Plato, in the _palæstra Stoicorum_, such an orator might be potent;
not _in fæce Romuli_. If he had laboured with no other defect, had he
the gift of tautology? Could he say the same thing three times over in
direct sequence? For, without this talent of iteration--of repeating
the same thought in diversified forms--a man may utter good heads of
an oration, but not an oration. Just as the same illustrious man's
essays are good hints--useful topics--for essays; but no approximation
to what we, in modern days, understand by _essays_: they are, as an
eminent author once happily expressed it to myself, '_seeds, not
plants or shrubs; acorns, that is, oaks in embryo, but not oaks_.'
Reverting, however, to the oratory of the Senate, from the era of its
proper birth, which we may date from the opening of that our memorable
Long Parliament, brought together in November of 1642,[19] our
Parliamentary eloquence has now, within four years, travelled through
a period of two centuries. A most admirable subject for an essay, or a
Magazine article, as it strikes me, would be a bird's-eye view--or
rather a bird's-wing flight--pursuing rapidly the revolutions of that
memorable oracle (for such it really was to the rest of civilised
Europe), which, through so long a course of years, like the Delphic
oracle to the nations of old, delivered counsels of civil prudence and
of national grandeur, that kept alive for Christendom the
recollections of freedom, and refreshed to the enslaved Continent the
old ideas of Roman patriotism, which, but for our Parliament, would
have uttered themselves by no voices on earth. That this account of
the position occupied by our British Parliament, in relation to the
rest of Europe, at least after the publication of the Debates had been
commenced by Cave, with the aid of Dr. Johnson, is, in no respect,
romantic or overcharged, may be learned from the German novels of the
last century, in which we find the British debates as uniformly the
morning accompaniment of breakfast, at the houses of the rural gentry,
&c., as in any English or Scottish county. Such a sketch would, of
course, collect the characteristics of each age, show in what
connection these characteristics stood with the political aspects of
the time, or with the modes of managing public business (a fatal rock
to our public eloquence in England!), and illustrate the whole by
interesting specimens from the leading orators in each generation:
from Hampden to Pulteney, amongst oppositionists or patriots; from
Pulteney to O'Connell; or, again, amongst Ministers, from Hyde to
Somers, from Lord Sunderland to Lords Oxford and Bolingbroke; and from
the plain, downright Sir Robert Walpole, to the plain, downright Sir
Robert Peel.
[Footnote 19: There was another Parliament of this same year 1642,
which met in the spring (April, I think), but was summarily dissolved.
A small quarto volume, of not unfrequent occurrence, I believe,
contains some good specimens of the eloquence then prevalent--it was
rich in thought, never wordy--in fact, too parsimonious in words and
illustrations; and it breathed a high tone of religious principle as
well as of pure-minded patriotism; but, for the reason stated
above--its narrow circuit and very limited duration--the general
character of the Parliamentary eloquence was ineffective.]
Throughout the whole of this review, the same 'moral,' if one might so
call it, would be apparent--viz. that in proportion as the oratory was
high and intellectual, did it travel out into the collateral questions
of less instant necessity, but more durable interest; and that, in
proportion as the Grecian necessity _was_ or was _not_ enforced by the
temper of the House, or by the pressure of public business--the
necessity which cripples the orator, by confining him within the
severe limits of the case before him--in that proportion had or had
not the oratory of past generations a surviving interest for modern
posterity. Nothing, in fact, so utterly effete--not even old law, or
old pharmacy, or old erroneous chemistry--nothing so insufferably dull
as political orations, unless when powerfully animated by that spirit
of generalisation which only gives the breath of life and the salt
which preserves from decay, through every age alike. The very
strongest proof, as well as exemplification of all which has been said
on Grecian oratory, may thus be found in the records of the British
senate.
And this, by the way, brings us round to an aspect of Grecian oratory
which has been rendered memorable, and forced upon our notice, in the
shape of a problem, by the most popular of our native historians--the
aspect, I mean, of Greek oratory in comparison with English. Hume has
an essay upon the subject; and the true answer to that essay will open
a wide field of truth to us. In this little paper, Hume assumes the
superiority of Grecian eloquence, as a thing admitted on all hands,
and requiring no proof. Not the proof of this point did he propose to
himself as his object; not even the illustration of it. No. All that,
Hume held to be superfluous. His object was, to investigate the causes
of this Grecian superiority; or, if _investigate_ is too pompous a
word for so slight a discussion, more properly, he inquired for the
cause as something that must naturally lie upon the surface.
What is the answer? First of all, before looking for causes, a man
should be sure of his facts. Now, as to the main fact at issue, I
utterly deny the superiority of Grecian eloquence. And, first of all,
I change the whole field of inquiry by shifting the comparison. The
Greek oratory is all political or judicial: we have those also; but
the best of our eloquence, by immeasurable degrees, the noblest and
richest, is our religious eloquence. Here, of course, all comparison
ceases; for classical Grecian religious eloquence, in Grecian attire,
there is none until three centuries after the Christian era, when we
have three great orators, Gregory Nazianzen, Basil--of which two I
have a very fixed opinion, having read large portions of both--and a
third of whom I know nothing. To our Jeremy Taylor, to our Sir Thomas
Browne, there is no approach made in the Greek eloquence. The
inaugural chapter of the _Holy Dying_, to say nothing of many another
golden passage; or the famous passage in the _Urn Buriall_,
beginning--'Now, since these bones have rested under the drums and
tramplings of three conquests'--have no parallel in literature. The
winding up of the former is more, in its effect, like a great
tempestuous chorus from the _Judas Maccabeus_, or from Spohr's _St.
Paul_, than like human eloquence.
But, grant that this transfer of the comparison is unfair--still, it
is no less unfair to confine the comparison on our part to the weakest
part of our oratory; but no matter--let issue be joined even here.
Then we may say, at once, that, for the intellectual qualities of
eloquence, in fineness of understanding, in depth and in large compass
of thought, Burke far surpasses any orator, ancient or modern. But, if
the comparison were pushed more widely, very certain I am, that, apart
from classical prejudice, no qualities of just thinking, or fine
expression, or even of artificial ornament, could have been assigned
by Hume, in which the great body of our deliberative and forensic
orators fall short of Grecian models; though I will admit, that, by
comparison with the Roman model of Cicero, there is seldom the same
artful prefiguration of the oration throughout its future course, or
the same sustained rhythmus and oratorial tone. The qualities of art
are nowhere so prominently expressed, nowhere aid the effect so much,
as in the great Roman master.
But, as to Greece, let us now, in one word, unveil the sole advantage
which the eloquence of the Athenian _assembly_ has over that of the
English senate. It is this--_the public business of Athens was as yet
simple and unencumbered by details_; the dignity of the occasion was
scenically sustained. But, in England, the vast intricacy and complex
interweaving of property, of commerce, of commercial interests, of
details infinite in number, and infinite in littleness, break down and
fritter away into fractions and petty minutiæ, the whole huge
labyrinth of our public affairs. It is scarcely necessary to explain
my meaning. In Athens, the question before the public assembly was,
peace or war--before our House of Commons, perhaps the Exchequer
Bills' Bill; at Athens, a league or no league--in England, the Tithe
of Agistment Commutation-Bills' Renewal Bill; in Athens--shall we
forgive a ruined enemy? in England--shall we cancel the tax on
farthing rushlights? In short, with us, the infinity of details
overlays the simplicity and grandeur of our public deliberations.
Such was the advantage--a mighty advantage--for Greece. Now, finally,
for the use made of this advantage. To that point I have already
spoken. By the clamorous and undeliberative qualities of the Athenian
political audience, by its fitful impatience, and vehement arrogance,
and fervid partisanship, all wide and general discussion was barred
_in limine_. And thus occurred this singular inversion of
positions--the greatest of Greek orators was obliged to treat these
Catholic questions as mere Athenian questions of business. On the
other hand, the least eloquent of British senators, whether from the
immense advance in knowledge, or from the custom and usage of
Parliament, seldom fails, more or less, to elevate his intense details
of pure technical business into something dignified, either by the
necessities of pursuing the _historical_ relations of the matter in
discussion, or of arguing its merits as a case of general finance, or
as connected with general political economy, or, perhaps, in its
bearings on peace or war. The Grecian was forced, by the composition
of his headstrong auditory, to degrade and personalise his grand
themes; the Englishman is forced, by the difference of his audience,
by old prescription, and by the opposition of a well-informed, hostile
party, into elevating his merely technical and petty themes into great
national questions, involving honour and benefit to tens of millions.
THE GERMAN LANGUAGE, AND PHILOSOPHY OF KANT.
Using a New Testament, of which (in the narrative parts at least) any
one word being given will suggest most of what is immediately
consecutive, you evade the most irksome of the penalties annexed to
the first breaking ground in a new language: you evade the necessity
of hunting up and down a dictionary. Your own memory, and the
inevitable suggestions of the context, furnish a dictionary _pro hac
vice_. And afterwards, upon advancing to other books, where you are
obliged to forego such aids, and to swim without corks, you find
yourself already in possession of the particles for expressing
addition, succession, exception, inference--in short, of all the forms
by which transition or connection is effected (_if_, _but_, _and_,
_therefore_, _however_, _notwithstanding_), together with all those
adverbs for modifying or restraining the extent of a subject or a
predicate, which in all languages alike compose the essential
frame-work or _extra-linear_ machinery of human thought. The
filling-up--the _matter_ (in a scholastic sense)--may differ
infinitely; but the _form_, the periphery, the determining moulds
into which this matter is fused--all this is the same for ever: and so
wonderfully limited in its extent is this frame-work, so narrow and
rapidly revolving is the clock-work of connections among human
thoughts, that a dozen pages of almost any book suffice to exhaust all
the [Greek: epea pteroenta][20] which express them. To have mastered
these [Greek: epea pteroenta] is in effect to have mastered
seven-tenths, at the least, of any language; and the benefit of using
a New Testament, or the familiar parts of an Old Testament, in this
preliminary drill, is, that your own memory is thus made to operate as
a perpetual dictionary or nomenclator. I have heard Mr. Southey say
that, by carrying in his pocket a Dutch, Swedish, or other Testament,
on occasion of a long journey performed in '_muggy_' weather, and in
the inside of some venerable 'old heavy'--such as used to bestow their
tediousness upon our respectable fathers some thirty or forty years
ago--he had more than once turned to so valuable an account the
doziness or the dulness of his fellow-travellers, that whereas he had
'booked' himself at the coach-office utterly [Greek: analphabêtos],
unacquainted with the first rudiments of the given language, he had
made his parting bows to his coach brethren (secretly returning thanks
to them for their stupidity), in a condition for grappling with any
common book in that dialect. One of the polyglot Old or New Testaments
published by Bagster, would be a perfect Encyclopædia, or
_Panorganon_, for such a scheme of coach discipline, upon dull roads
and in dull company. As respects the German language in particular, I
shall give one caution from my own experience, to the self-instructor:
it is a caution which applies to the German language exclusively, or
to that more than to any other, because the embarrassment which it is
meant to meet, grows out of a defect of taste characteristic of the
German mind. It is this: elsewhere, you would naturally, as a
beginner, resort to _prose_ authors, since the license and audacity of
poetic thinking, and the large freedom of a poetic treatment, cannot
fail to superadd difficulties of individual creation to the general
difficulties of a strange dialect. But this rule, good for every other
case, is _not_ good for the literature of Germany. Difficulties there
certainly are, and perhaps in more than the usual proportion, from the
German peculiarities of poetic treatment; but even these are
overbalanced in the result, by the single advantage of being limited
in the extent by the metre, or (as it may happen) by the particular
stanza. To German poetry there is a known, fixed, calculable limit.
Infinity, absolute infinity, is impracticable in any German metre.
Not so with German prose. Style, in any sense, is an inconceivable
idea to a German intellect. Take the word in the limited sense of what
the Greeks called [Greek: Synthesis onomatôn]--_i. e._ the
construction of sentences--I affirm that a German (unless it were here
and there a Lessing) cannot admit such an idea. Books there are in
German, and, in other respects, very good books too, which consist of
one or two enormous sentences. A German sentence describes an arch
between the rising and the setting sun. Take Kant for illustration: he
has actually been complimented by the cloud-spinner, Frederic
Schlegel, who is now in Hades, as a most original artist in the matter
of style. 'Original' Heaven knows he was! His idea of a sentence was
as follows:--We have all seen, or read of, an old family coach, and
the process of packing it for a journey to London some seventy or
eighty years ago. Night and day, for a week at least, sate the
housekeeper, the lady's maid, the butler, the gentleman's gentleman,
&c., packing the huge ark in all its recesses, its 'imperials,' its
'wills,' its 'Salisbury boots,' its 'sword-cases,' its front pockets,
side pockets, rear pockets, its 'hammer-cloth cellars' (which a lady
explains to me as a corruption from _hamper-cloth_, as originally a
cloth for hiding a hamper, stored with _viaticum_), until all the uses
and needs of man, and of human life, savage or civilised, were met
with separate provision by the infinite chaos. Pretty nearly upon the
model of such an old family coach packing, did Kant institute and
pursue the packing and stuffing of one of his regular sentences.
Everything that could ever be needed in the way of explanation,
illustration, restraint, inference, by-clause, or indirect comment,
was to be crammed, according to this German philosopher's taste, into
the front pockets, side pockets, or rear pockets, of the one original
sentence. Hence it is that a sentence will last in reading whilst a
man
'Might reap an acre of his neighbour's corn.'
Nor is this any peculiarity of Kant's. It is common to the whole
family of prose writers of Germany, unless when they happen to have
studied French models, who cultivate the opposite extreme. As a
caution, therefore, practically applied to this particular anomaly in
German prose-writing, I advise all beginners to choose between two
classes of composition--ballad poetry, or comedy--as their earliest
school of exercise; ballad poetry, because the form of the stanza
(usually a quatrain) prescribes a very narrow range to the sentences;
comedy, because the form of dialogue, and the imitation of daily life
in its ordinary tone of conversation, and the spirit of comedy
naturally suggesting a brisk interchange of speech, all tend to short
sentences. These rules I soon drew from my own experience and
observation. And the one sole purpose towards which I either sought or
wished for aid, respected the pronunciation; not so much for attaining
a just one (which I was satisfied could not be realised out of
Germany, or, at least, out of a daily intercourse with Germans) as for
preventing the formation, unawares, of a radically false one. The
guttural and palatine sounds of the _ch_, and some other German
peculiarities, cannot be acquired without constant practice. But the
false Westphalian or Jewish pronunciation of the vowels, diphthongs,
&c., may easily be forestalled, though the true delicacy of Meissen
should happen to be missed. Thus much guidance I purchased, with a
very few guineas, from my young Dresden tutor, who was most anxious
for permission to extend his assistance; but this I would not hear of:
and, in the spirit of fierce (perhaps foolish) independence, which
governed most of my actions at that time of life, I did all the rest
for myself.
'It was a banner broad unfurl'd,
The picture of that western world.'
These, or words like these, in which Wordsworth conveys the sudden
apocalypse, as by an apparition, to an ardent and sympathising spirit,
of the stupendous world of America, rising, at once, like an
exhalation, with all its shadowy forests, its endless savannas, and
its pomp of solitary waters--well and truly might I have applied to my
first launching upon that vast billowy ocean of the German literature.
As a past literature, as a literature of inheritance and tradition,
the German was nothing. Ancestral titles it had none; or none
comparable to those of England, Spain, or even Italy; and there, also,
it resembled America, as contrasted with the ancient world of Asia,
Europe, and North Africa.[21] But, if its inheritance were nothing,
its prospects, and the scale of its present development, were in the
amplest style of American grandeur. _Ten thousand_ new books, we are
assured by Menzel, an author of high reputation--a _literal
myriad_--is considerably below the number annually poured from all
quarters of Germany, into the vast reservoir of Leipsic; spawn
infinite, no doubt, of crazy dotage, of dreaming imbecility, of
wickedness, of frenzy, through every phasis of Babylonian confusion;
yet, also, teeming and heaving with life and the instincts of
truth--of truth hunting and chasing in the broad daylight, or of truth
groping in the chambers of darkness; sometimes seen as it displays its
cornucopia of tropical fruitage; sometimes heard dimly, and in
promise, working its way through diamond mines. Not the tropics, not
the ocean, not life itself, is such a type of variety, of infinite
forms, or of creative power, as the German literature, in its recent
motions (say for the last twenty years), gathering, like the Danube, a
fresh volume of power at every stage of its advance. A banner it was,
indeed, to me of miraculous promise, and suddenly unfurled. It seemed,
in those days, an El Dorado as true and undeceiving as it was
evidently inexhaustible. And the central object in this interminable
wilderness of what then seemed imperishable bloom and verdure--the
very tree of knowledge in the midst of this Eden--was the new or
transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
[Footnote 20: [Greek: Epea pteroenta], literally _winged words_. To
explain the use and origin of this phrase to non-classical readers, it
must be understood that, originally, it was used by Homer to express
the few, rapid, and significant words which conveyed some hasty order,
counsel, or notice, suited to any sudden occasion or emergency: _e.
g._ 'To him flying from the field the hero addressed these winged
words--"Stop, coward, or I will transfix thee with my spear."' But by
Horne Tooke, the phrase was adopted on the title-page of his
_Diversions of Purley_, as a pleasant symbolic expression for all the
non-significant particles, the _articuli_ or joints of language, which
in his well-known theory are resolved into abbreviations or
compendious forms (and therefore rapid, flying, _winged_ forms),
substituted for significant forms of greater length. Thus, _if_ is a
non-significant particle, but it is an abbreviated form of an
imperative in the second person--substituted for gif, or give, or
grant the case--put the case that. All other particles are shown by
Horne Tooke to be equally shorthand (or _winged_) substitutions.]
[Footnote 21: It has been rather too much forgotten, that Africa, from
the northern margin of Bilidulgerid and the Great Desert,
southwards--everywhere, in short, beyond Egypt, Cyrene, and the modern
Barbary States--belongs, as much as America, to the New World--the
world unknown to the ancients.]
I have described the gorgeousness of my expectations in those early
days of my prelusive acquaintance with German literature. I have a
little lingered in painting that glad aurora of my first pilgrimage to
the fountains of the Rhine and of the Danube, in order adequately to
shadow out the gloom and blight which soon afterwards settled upon the
hopes of that golden dawn. In Kant, I had been taught to believe,
were the keys of a new and a creative philosophy. Either '_ejus
ductu_,' or '_ejus auspiciis_'--that is, either directly under his
guidance, or indirectly under any influence remotely derived from his
principles--I looked confidingly to see the great vistas and avenues
of truth laid open to the philosophic inquirer. Alas! all was a dream.
Six weeks' study was sufficient to close my hopes in that quarter for
ever. The philosophy of Kant--so famous, so commanding in Germany,
from about the period of the French Revolution--already, in 1805, I
had found to be a philosophy of destruction, and scarcely, in any one
chapter, so much as _tending_ to a philosophy of reconstruction. It
destroys by wholesale, and it substitutes nothing. Perhaps, in the
whole history of man, it is an unexampled case, that such a scheme of
speculation--which offers nothing seducing to human aspirations,
nothing splendid to the human imagination, nothing even positive and
affirmative to the human understanding--should have been able to found
an interest so broad and deep among thirty-five millions of cultivated
men. The English reader who supposes this interest to have been
confined to academic bowers, or the halls of philosophic societies, is
most inadequately alive to the case. Sects, heresies, schisms, by
hundreds, have arisen out of this philosophy--many thousands of books
have been written by way of teaching it, discussing it, extending it,
opposing it. And yet it is a fact, that all its doctrines are
negative--teaching, in no case, what we _are_, but simply what we are
_not_ to believe--and that all its truths are barren. Such being its
unpopular character, I cannot but imagine that the German people have
received it with so much ardour, from profound incomprehension of its
meaning, and utter blindness to its drift--a solution which may seem
extravagant, but is not so; for, even amongst those who have expressly
commented on this philosophy, not one of the many hundreds whom I have
myself read, but has retracted from every attempt to explain its dark
places. In these dark places lies, indeed, the secret of its
attraction. Were light poured into them, it would be seen that they
are _culs-de-sac_, passages that lead to nothing; but, so long as they
continue dark, it is not known whither they lead, how far, in what
direction, and whether, in fact, they may not issue into paths
connected directly with the positive and the infinite. Were it known
that upon every path a barrier faces you insurmountable to human
steps--like the barriers which fence in the Abyssinian valley of
Rasselas--the popularity of this philosophy would expire at once; for
no popular interest can long be sustained by speculations which, in
every aspect, are known to be essentially negative and essentially
finite. Man's nature has something of infinity within itself, which
requires a corresponding infinity in its objects. We are told, indeed,
by Mr. Bulwer, that the Kantian system has ceased to be of any
authority in Germany--that it is defunct, in fact--and that we have
first begun to import it into England, after its root had withered, or
begun to wither, in its native soil. But Mr. Bulwer is mistaken. The
philosophy has never withered in Germany. It cannot even be said that
its fortunes have retrograded: they have oscillated: accidents of
taste and ability in particular professors, or caprices of fashion,
have given a momentary fluctuation to this or that new form of
Kantianism,--an ascendency, for a period, to various, and, in some
respects, conflicting, modifications of the transcendental system; but
all alike have derived their power mediately from Kant. No weapons,
even if employed as hostile weapons, are now forged in any armoury but
that of Kant; and, to repeat a Roman figure which I used above, all
the modern polemic tactics of what is called metaphysics, are trained
and made to move either _ejus ductu_ or _ejus auspiciis_. Not one of
the new systems affects to call back the Leibnitzian philosophy, the
Cartesian, or any other of earlier or later date, as adequate to the
purposes of the intellect in this day, or as capable of yielding even
a sufficient terminology. Let this last fact decide the question of
Kant's vitality. _Qui bene distinguit bene docet._ This is an old
adage. Now, he who imposes new names upon all the acts, the functions,
and the objects of the philosophic understanding, must be presumed to
have distinguished most sharply, and to have ascertained with most
precision, their general relations--_so long as his terminology
continues to be adopted_. This test, applied to Kant, will show that
his spirit yet survives in Germany. Frederic Schlegel, it is true,
twenty years ago, in his lectures upon literature, assures us that
even the disciples of the great philosopher have agreed to abandon his
philosophic nomenclature. But the German philosophic literature, since
that date, tells another tale. Mr. Bulwer is, therefore, wrong; and,
without going to Germany, looking only to France, he will see cause to
revise his sentence. Cousin--the philosophic Cousin, the only great
name in philosophy for modern France--familiar as he is with North
Germany, can hardly be presumed unacquainted with a fact so striking,
if it _were_ a fact, as the extinction of a system once so
triumphantly supreme as that of Kant; and yet Mr. Bulwer, admiring
Cousin as he does, cannot but have noticed his efforts to naturalise
Kant in France. Meantime, if it were even true that transcendentalism
had lost its hold of the public mind in Germany, _primâ facie_, this
would prove little more than the fickleness of that public which must
have been wrong in one of the two cases--either when adopting the
system, or when rejecting it. Whatever there may be of truth and value
in the system, will remain unimpeached by such caprices, whether of an
individual or of a great nation; and England would still be in the
right to import the philosophy, however late in the day, if it were
true even (which I doubt greatly) that she _is_ importing it.
Both truth and value there certainly _is_ in one part of the Kantian
philosophy; and that part is its foundation. I had intended, at this
point, to introduce an outline of the transcendental philosophy--not,
perhaps, as entering by logical claim of right into any biographical
sketch, but as a very allowable digression in the record of that man's
life to whom, in the way of hope and of profound disappointment, it
had been so memorable an object. For two or three years before I
mastered the language of Kant,[22] it had been a pole-star to my
hopes, and _in hypothesi_ agreeably to the uncertain plans of
uncertain knowledge, the luminous guide to my future life--as a life
dedicated and set apart to philosophy. Such it was some years _before_
I knew it: for, at least ten long years _after_ I came into a
condition of valueing its true pretensions and measuring its
capacities, this same philosophy shed the gloom of something like
misanthropy upon my views and estimates of human nature; for man was
an abject animal, if the limitations which Kant assigned to the
motions of his speculative reason were as absolute and hopeless as,
under _his_ scheme of the understanding and _his_ genesis of its
powers, too evidently they were. I belonged to a reptile race, if the
wings by which we had sometimes _seemed_ to mount, and the buoyancy
which had _seemed_ to support our flight, were indeed the fantastic
delusions which he represented them. Such, and so deep and so abiding
in its influence upon my life, having been the influence of this
German philosophy, according to all logic of proportions, in selecting
the objects of my notice, I might be excused for setting before the
reader, in its full array, the analysis of its capital sections.
However, in any memorial of a life which professes to keep in view
(though but as a secondary purpose) any regard to popular taste, the
logic of proportions must bend, after all, to the law of the
occasion--to the proprieties of time and place. For the present,
therefore, I shall restrict myself to the few sentences in which it
may be proper to gratify the curiosity of _some_ readers, the two or
three in a hundred, as to the peculiar distinctions of this
philosophy. Even to these two or three out of each hundred, I shall
not venture to ascribe a larger curiosity than with respect to the
most general 'whereabouts' of its position--from what point it
starts--whence and from what aspect it surveys the ground--and by what
links from this starting-point it contrives to connect itself with the
main objects of philosophic inquiry.
[Footnote 22: I might have mastered the philosophy of Kant, without
waiting for the German language, in which all his capital works are
written; for there is a Latin version of the whole, by Born, and a
most admirable digest of the cardinal work (admirable for its fidelity
and the skill by which that fidelity is attained), in the same
language, by Rhiseldek, a Danish professor. But this fact, such was
the slight knowledge of all things connected with Kant in England, I
did not learn for some years.]
Immanuel Kant was originally a dogmatist in the school of Leibnitz and
Wolf; that is, according to his trisection of all philosophy into
dogmatic, sceptical, and critical, he was, upon all questions,
disposed to a strong _affirmative_ creed, without courting any
particular examination into the grounds of this creed, or into its
assailable points. From this slumber, as it is called by himself, he
was suddenly aroused by the Humian doctrine of cause and effect. This
celebrated essay on the nature of necessary connection--so thoroughly
misapprehended at the date of its first publication to the world by
its _soi-disant_ opponents, Oswald, Beattie, &c., and so imperfectly
comprehended since then by various _soi-disant_ defenders--became in
effect the 'occasional cause' (in the phrase of the logicians) of the
entire subsequent philosophic scheme of Kant--every section of which
arose upon the accidental opening made to analogical trains of
thought, by this memorable effort of scepticism, applied by Hume to
one capital phenomenon among the necessities of the human
understanding. What is the nature of Hume's scepticism as applied to
this phenomenon? What is the main thesis of his celebrated essay on
cause and effect? For few, indeed, are they who really know anything
about it. If a man really understands it, a very few words will avail
to explain the _nodus_. Let us try. It is a necessity of the _human_
understanding (very probably not a necessity of a higher order of
intelligences) to connect its experiences by means of the idea of
_cause_ and its correlate, _effect_: and when Beattie, Oswald, Reid,
&c. were exhausting themselves in proofs of the indispensableness of
this idea, they were fighting with shadows; for no man had ever
questioned the practical necessity for such an idea to the coherency
of human thinking. Not the practical necessity, but the internal
consistency of this notion, and the original right to such a notion,
was the point of inquisition. For, attend, courteous reader, and three
separate propositions will set before your eyes the difficulty. _First
Prop._, which, for the sake of greater precision, permit me to throw
into Latin:--_Non datur aliquid_ [A] _quo posito ponitur aliud_ [B] _à
priori_; that is, in other words, You cannot lay your hands upon that
one object or phenomenon [A] in the whole circle of natural
existences, which, being assumed, will entitle you to assume _à
priori_, any other object whatsoever [B] as succeeding it. You could
not, I say, of any object or phenomenon whatever, assume this
succession _à priori_--that is, _previously to experience_. _Second
Prop._ But, if the succession of B to A be made known to you, not _à
priori_ (by the involution of B in the idea of A), but by experience,
then you cannot ascribe _necessity_ to the succession: the connection
between them is not necessary but contingent. For the very widest
experience--an experience which should stretch over all ages, from
the beginning to the end of time--can never establish a _nexus_ having
the least approximation to necessity; no more than a rope of sand
could gain the cohesion of adamant, by repeating its links through a
billion of successions. _Prop. Third._ Hence (_i. e._ from the two
preceding propositions), it appears that no instance or case of
_nexus_ that ever can have been offered to the notice of any human
understanding, has in it, or, by possibility, could have had anything
of necessity. Had the _nexus_ been necessary, you would have seen it
beforehand; whereas, by Prop. I. _Non datur aliquid, quo posito
ponitur aliud à priori._ This being so, now comes the startling fact,
that the notion of a _cause_ includes the notion of necessity. For, if
A (the cause) be connected with B (the effect) only in a casual or
accidental way, you do not feel warranted in calling it a cause. If
heat applied to ice (A) were sometimes followed by a tendency to
liquefaction (B) and sometimes not, you would not consider A connected
with B as a cause, but only as some variable accompaniment of the true
and unknown cause, which might allowably be present or be absent.
This, then, is the startling and mysterious phenomenon of the human
understanding--that, in a certain notion, which is indispensable to
the coherency of our whole experience, indispensable to the
establishing any _nexus_ between the different parts and successions
of our whole train of notices, we include an accessary notion of
necessity, which yet has no justification or warrant, no assignable
derivation from any known or possible case of human experience. We
have one idea at least--viz. the idea of causation--which transcends
our possible experience by one important element, the element of
_necessity_, that never can have been derived from the only source of
ideas recognised by the philosophy of this day. A Lockian never can
find his way out of this dilemma. The experience (whether it be the
experience of sensation or the experience of reflection) which he
adopts for his master-key, never will unlock this case; for the sum
total of human experience, collected from all ages, can avail only to
tell us what _is_, but never what _must be_. The idea of necessity is
absolutely transcendant to experience, _per se_, and must be derived
from some other source. From what source? Could Hume tell us? No: he,
who had started the game so acutely (for with every allowance for the
detection made in Thomas Aquinas, of the original suggestion, as
recorded in the _Biographia Literaria_ of Coleridge, we must still
allow great merit of a secondary kind to Hume for his modern revival
and restatement of the doctrine), this same acute philosopher broke
down confessedly in his attempt to hunt the game down. His solution is
worthless.
Kant, however, having caught the original scent from Hume, was more
fortunate. He saw, at a glance, that here was a test applied to the
Lockian philosophy, which showed, at the very least, its
_insufficiency_. If it were good even for so much as it
explained--which Burke is disposed to receive as a sufficient warrant
for the favourable reception of a new hypothesis--at any rate, it now
appeared that there was something which it could _not_ explain. But
next, Kant took a large step in advance _proprio morte_. Reflecting
upon the one idea adduced by Hume, as transcending the ordinary
source of ideas, he began to ask himself, whether it were likely that
this idea should stand alone? Were there not other ideas in the same
predicament; other ideas including the same element of necessity, and,
therefore, equally disowning the parentage assigned by Locke? Upon
investigation, he found that there were: he found that there were
eleven others in exactly the same circumstances. The entire twelve he
denominated categories; and the mode by which he ascertained their
number--that there were so many and no more--is of itself so
remarkable as to merit notice in the most superficial sketch. But, in
fact, this one explanation will put the reader in possession of Kant's
system, so far as he could understand it without an express and
toilsome study. With this explanation, therefore, of the famous
categories, I shall close my slight sketch of the system. Has the
reader ever considered the meaning of the term _Category_--a term so
ancient and so venerable from its connection with the most domineering
philosophy that has yet appeared amongst men? The doctrine of the
Categories (or, in its Roman appellation, of the _Predicaments_), is
one of the few wrecks from the Peripatetic philosophy which still
survives as a doctrine taught by public authority in the most ancient
academic institutions of Europe. It continues to form a section in the
code of public instruction; and perhaps under favour of a pure
accident. For though, strictly speaking, a _metaphysical_ speculation,
it has always been prefixed as a sort of preface to the _Organon_ (or
_logical_ treatises) of Aristotle, and has thus accidentally shared in
the immortality conceded to that most perfect of human works. Far
enough were the Categories from meriting such distinction. Kant was
well aware of this: he was aware that the Aristotelian Categories were
a useless piece of scholastic lumber: unsound in their first
conception; and, though illustrated through long centuries by the
schoolmen, and by still earlier Grecian philosophers, never in any one
known instance turned to a profitable account. Why, then, being aware
that even in idea they were false, besides being practically
unsuitable, did Kant adopt or borrow a name laden with this
superfetation of reproach--all that is false in theory superadded to
all that is useless in practice? He did so for a remarkable reason: he
felt, according to his own explanation, that Aristotle had been
_groping_ [the German word expressive of his blind procedure is
_herumtappen_]--groping in the dark, but under a semi-conscious
instinct of truth. Here is a most remarkable case or situation of the
human intellect, happening alike to individuals and to entire
generations--in the situation of yearning or craving, as it were, for
a great idea as yet unknown, but dimly and uneasily prefigured.
Sometimes the very brink, as it may be called, of such an idea is
approached; sometimes it is even imperfectly discovered; but with
marks in the very midst of its imperfections, which serve as
indications to a person coming better armed for ascertaining the
sub-conscious thought which had governed their tentative motions. As
it stands in Aristotle's scheme, the idea of a category is a mere
lifeless abstraction. Rising through a succession of species to
genera, and from these to still higher genera, you arrive finally at a
highest genus--a naked abstraction, beyond which no further regress is
possible. This highest genus, this _genus generalissimum_, is, in
peripatetic language, a category; and no purpose or use has ever been
assigned to any one of these categories, of which ten were enumerated
at first, beyond that of classification--_i. e._ a purpose of mere
convenience. Even for as trivial a purpose as this, it gave room for
suspecting a failure, when it was afterwards found that the original
ten categories did not exhaust the possibilities of the case; that
other supplementary categories (_post-prædicamenti_) became necessary.
And, perhaps, 'more last words' might even yet be added, supplementary
supplements, and so forth, by a hair-splitting intellect. Failures as
gross as these, revisals still open to revision, and amendments
calling for amendments, were at once a broad confession that here
there was no falling in with any great law of nature. The paths of
nature may sometimes be arrived at in a tentative way; but they are
broad and determinate; and, when found, vindicate themselves. Still,
in all this erroneous subtilisation, and these abortive efforts, Kant
perceived a grasping at some real idea--fugitive indeed and coy, which
had for the present absolutely escaped; but he caught glimpses of it
continually in the rear; he felt its necessity to any account of the
human understanding that could be satisfactory to one who had
meditated on Locke's theory as probed and searched by Leibnitz. And in
this uneasy state--half sceptical, half creative, rejecting and
substituting, pulling down and building up--what was in sum and
finally the course which he took for bringing his trials and essays to
a crisis? He states this himself, somewhere in the Introduction to his
_Critik der reinen Vernunft_; and the passage is a memorable one.
Fifteen years at the least have passed since I read it; and,
therefore, I cannot pretend to produce the words; but the substance I
shall give; and I appeal to the candour of all his readers, whether
they have been able to apprehend his meaning. I certainly did not for
years. But, now that I do, the passage places his procedure in a most
striking and edifying light. Astronomers, says Kant, had gone on for
ages, assuming that the earth was the central body of our system; and
insuperable were the difficulties which attended that assumption. At
length, it occurred to try what would result from inverting the
assumption. Let the earth, instead of offering a fixed centre for the
revolving motions of other heavenly bodies, be supposed itself to
revolve about some one of these, as the sun. That supposition was
tried, and gradually all the phenomena which, before, had been
incoherent, anomalous, or contradictory, began to express themselves
as parts of a most harmonious system. 'Something,' he goes on to say,
'analogous to this I have practised with regard to the subject of my
inquiry--the human understanding. All others had sought their central
principle of the intellectual phenomena out of the understanding, in
something external to the mind. I first turned my inquiries upon the
mind itself. I first applied my examination to the very analysis of
the understanding.' In words, not precisely these, but pretty nearly
equivalent to them, does Kant state, by contradistinction, the value
and the nature of his own procedure. He first, according to his own
representation, thought of applying his investigation to the mind
itself. Here was a passage which for years (I may say) continued to
stagger and confound me. What! he, Kant, in the latter end of the 18th
century, about the year 1787--he the first who had investigated the
mind! This was not arrogance so much as it was insanity. Had he
said--I, first, upon just principles, or with a fortunate result,
investigated the human understanding, he would have said no more than
every fresh theorist is bound to suppose, as his preliminary apology
for claiming the attention of a busy world. Indeed, if a writer, on
any part of knowledge, does _not_ hold himself superior to all his
predecessors, we are entitled to say--Then, why do you presume to
trouble us? It may _look_ like modesty, but _is_, in effect, downright
effrontery for you to think yourself no better than other critics; you
were at liberty to think so whilst no claimant of public notice--as
being so, it is most arrogant in you to be modest. This would be the
criticism applied justly to a man who, in Kant's situation, as the
author of a new system, should use a language of unseasonable modesty
or deprecation. To have spoken boldly of himself was a duty; we could
not tolerate his doing otherwise. But to speak of himself in the
exclusive terms I have described, does certainly seem, and for years
did seem to myself, little short of insanity. Of this I am sure that
no student of Kant, having the passage before him, can have known
heretofore what consistent, what rational interpretation to give it;
and, in candour, he ought to own himself my debtor for the light he
will now receive. Yet, so easy is it to imagine, after a meaning is
once pointed out, and the station given from which it shows itself
_as_ the meaning--so easy, under these circumstances, is it to
imagine that one has, or that one could have, found it for one's
self--that I have little expectation of reaping much gratitude for my
explanation. I say this, not as of much importance one way or the
other in a single case of the kind, but because a general
consideration of this nature has sometimes operated to make me more
indifferent or careless as to the publication of commentaries on
difficult systems, when I had found myself able to throw much light on
the difficulties. The very success with which I should have
accomplished the task--the perfect removal of the obstacles in the
student's path--were the very grounds of my assurance-that the service
would be little valued. For I have found what it was occasionally, in
conversation, to be too luminous--to have explained, for instance, too
clearly a dark place in Ricardo. In such a case, I have known a man of
the very greatest powers, mistake the intellectual effort he had put
forth to apprehend my elucidation, and to meet it half way, for his
own unassisted conquest over the difficulties; and, within an hour or
two after, I have had, perhaps, to stand, as an attack upon myself,
arguments entirely and recently furnished by myself. No case is more
possible: even to apprehend a complex explanation, a man cannot be
passive; he must exert considerable energy of mind; and, in the fresh
consciousness of this energy, it is the most natural mistake in the
world for him to feel the argument which he has, by considerable
effort, appropriated to be an argument which he has originated. Kant
is the most unhappy champion of his own doctrines, the most
infelicitous expounder of his own meaning, that has ever existed.
Neither has any other commentator succeeded in throwing a moonlight
radiance upon his philosophy. Yet certain I am, that, were I, or any
man, to disperse all his darkness, exactly in that proportion in which
we did so--exactly in the proportion in which we smoothed all
hindrances--exactly in that proportion would it cease to be known or
felt that there had ever been any hindrances to be smoothed. This,
however, is digression, to which I have been tempted by the
interesting nature of the grievance. In a jesting way, this grievance
is obliquely noticed in the celebrated couplet--
'Had you seen but these roads before they were made,
You'd lift up your hands and bless Marshal Wade.'
The pleasant bull here committed conceals a most melancholy truth, and
one of large extent. Innumerable are the services to truth, to
justice, or society, which never _can_ be adequately valued by those
who reap their benefits, simply because the transition from the early
and bad state to the final or improved state cannot be retraced or
kept alive before the eyes. The record perishes. The last point gained
is seen; but the starting-point, the points _from_ which it was
gained, is forgotten. And the traveller never _can_ know the true
amount of his obligations to Marshal Wade, because, though seeing the
roads which the Marshal has created, he can only guess at those which
he superseded. Now, returning to this impenetrable passage of Kant, I
will briefly inform the reader that he may read it into sense by
connecting it with a part of Kant's system, from which it is in his
own delivery entirely dislocated. Going forwards some thirty or forty
pages, he will find Kant's development of his own categories. And, by
placing in juxtaposition with that development this blind sentence, he
will find a reciprocal light arising. All philosophers, worthy of that
name, have found it necessary to allow of some great cardinal ideas
that transcended all the Lockian origination--ideas that were larger
in their compass than any possible notices of sense or any reflex
notices of the understanding; and those who have denied such ideas,
will be found invariably to have supported their denial by a _vitium
subreptionis_, and to have deduced their pretended genealogies of such
ideas by means of a _petitio principii_--silently and stealthily
putting _into_ some step of their _leger-de-main_ process everything
that they would pretend to have extracted _from_ it. But, previously
to Kant, it is certain that all philosophers had left the origin of
these higher or transcendent ideas unexplained. Whence came they? In
the systems to which, Locke replies, they had been called _innate_ or
_connate_. These were the Cartesian systems. Cudworth, again, who
maintained certain '_immutable ideas_' of morality, had said nothing
about their origin; and Plato had supposed them to be reminiscences
from some higher mode of existence. Kant first attempted to assign
them an origin within the mind itself, though not in any Lockian
fashion of reflection upon sensible impressions. And this is doubtless
what he means by saying that he first had investigated the mind--that
is, he first for such a purpose.
Where, then, is it, in what act or function of the mind, that Kant
finds the matrix of these transcendent ideas? Simply in the logical
forms of the understanding. Every power exerts its agency under some
_laws_--that is, in the language of Kant, by certain _forms_. We leap
by certain laws--viz. of equilibrium, of muscular motion, of
gravitation. We dance by certain laws. So also we reason by certain
laws. These laws, or _formal_ principles, under a particular
condition, become the categories.
Here, then, is a short derivation, in a very few words, of those ideas
transcending sense, which all philosophy, the earliest, has been
unable to dispense with, and yet none could account for. Thus, for
example, every act of reasoning must, in the first place, express
itself in distinct propositions; that is, in such as contain a subject
(or that concerning which you affirm or deny something), a predicate
(that which you affirm or deny), and a copula, which connects them.
These propositions must have what is technically called, in logic, a
certain _quantity_, or compass (viz. must be universal, particular, or
singular); and again they must have what is called _quality_ (that is,
must be affirmative, or negative, or infinite): and thus arises a
ground for certain corresponding ideas, which are Kant's categories of
quantity and quality.
But, to take an illustration more appropriately from the very idea
which first aroused Kant to the sense of a vast hiatus in the received
philosophies--the idea of _cause_, which had been thrown as an apple
of discord amongst the schools, by Hume. How did Kant deduce this?
Simply thus: it is a doctrine of universal logic, that there are three
varieties of syllogism--viz. 1st, Categoric, or directly declarative
[_A is B_]; 2nd, Hypothetic, or conditionally declarative [_If C is D,
then A is B_]; 3rd, Disjunctive, or declarative, by means of a choice
which exhausts the possible cases [_A is either B, or C, or D; but
not C or D; ergo B_]. Now, the idea of _causation_, or, in Kant's
language, the category of Cause and Effect, is deduced immediately,
and most naturally, as the reader will acknowledge on examination,
from the 2nd or hypothetic form of syllogism, when the relation of
dependency is the same as in the idea of causation, and the
_necessary_ connection a direct type of that which takes place between
a cause and its effect.
Thus, then, without going one step further, the reader will find
grounds enough for reflection and for reverence towards Kant in these
two great results: 1st, That an order of ideas has been established,
which all deep philosophy has demanded, even when it could not make
good its claim. This postulate is fulfilled. 2ndly, The postulate is
fulfilled without mysticism or Platonic reveries. Ideas, however
indispensable to human needs, and even to the connection of our
thoughts, which came to us from nobody knew whence, must for ever have
been suspicious; and, as in the memorable instance cited from Hume,
must have been liable for ever to a question of validity. But, deduced
as they now are from a matrix within our own minds, they cannot
reasonably fear any assaults of scepticism.
Here I shall stop. A reader new to these inquiries may think all this
a trifle. But he who reflects a little, will see that, even thus far,
and going no step beyond this point, the Kantian doctrine of the
Categories answers a standing question hanging aloof as a challenge to
human philosophy, fills up a _lacuna_ pointed out from the era of
Plato. It solves a problem which has startled and perplexed every age:
viz. this--that man is in possession, nay, in the hourly exercise, of
ideas larger than he can show any title to. And in another way, the
reader may measure the extent of this doctrine, by reflecting that,
even so far as now stated, it is precisely coextensive with the famous
scheme of Locke. For what is the capital thesis of that scheme? Simply
this--that all necessity for supposing immediate impressions made upon
our understandings by God, or other supernatural, or antenatal, or
connatal, agencies, is idle and romantic; for that, upon examining the
furniture of our minds, nothing will be found there which cannot
adequately be explained out of our daily experience; and, until we
find something that cannot be solved by this explanation, it is
childish to go in quest of higher causes. Thus says Locke: and his
whole work, upon its first plan, is no more than a continual pleading
of this single thesis, pursuing it through all the plausible
objections. Being, therefore, as large in its extent as Locke, the
reader must not complain of the transcendental scheme as too narrow,
even in that limited section of it here brought under his notice.
For the purpose of repelling it, he must do one of two things: either
he must show that these categories or transcendent notions are not
susceptible of the derivation and genesis here assigned to them--that
is, from the forms of the _logos_ or formal understanding; or, if
content to abide by that derivation, he must allege that there are
other categories besides those enumerated, and unprovided with any
similar parentage.
Thus much in reply to him who complains of the doctrine here stated;
as, 1st, Too narrow; or, 2nd, As insufficiently established. But, 3rd,
in reply to him who wishes to see it further pursued or applied, I
say that the possible applications are perhaps infinite. With respect
to those made by Kant himself, they are chiefly contained in his main
and elementary work, the _Critik der reinen Vernunft_; and they are of
a nature to make any man melancholy. Indeed, let a man consider merely
this one notion of _causation_; let him reflect on its origin; let him
remember that, agreeably to this origin, it follows that we have no
right to view anything _in rerum naturâ_ as objectively, or in itself
a cause; that when, upon the fullest philosophic proof, we call A the
cause of B, we do in fact only subsume A under the notion of a cause;
we invest it with that function under that relation, that the whole
proceeding is merely with respect to a _human_ understanding, and by
way of indispensable _nexus_ to the several parts of our experience;
finally, that there is the greatest reason to doubt, whether the idea
of _causation_ is at all applicable to any other world than this, or
any other than a human experience. Let a man meditate but a little on
this or other aspects of this transcendental philosophy, and he will
find the steadfast earth itself rocking as it were beneath his feet; a
world about him, which is in some sense a world of deception; and a
world before him, which seems to promise a world of confusion, or '_a
world not realised_.' All this he might deduce for himself without
further aid from Kant. However, the particular purposes to which Kant
applies his philosophy, from the difficulties which beset them, are
unfitted for anything below a regular treatise. Suffice it to say
here, that, difficult as these speculations are from one or two
embarrassing doctrines on the Transcendental Consciousness, and
depressing as they are from their general tendency, they are yet
painfully irritating to the curiosity, and especially so from a sort
of _experimentum crucis_, which they yield in the progress of their
development on behalf of the entire doctrine of Kant--a test which, up
to this hour, has offered defiance to any hostile hand. The test or
defiance which I speak of, takes the shape of certain _antinomies_ (so
they are termed), severe adamantine arguments, affirmative and
negative, on two or three celebrated problems, with no appeal to any
possible decision, but one, which involves the Kantian doctrines. A
_quæstio vexata_ is proposed--for instance, the _infinite divisibility
of matter_; each side of this question, _thesis_ and _antithesis_, is
argued; the logic is irresistible, the links are perfect, and for each
side alternately there is a verdict, thus terminating in the most
triumphant _reductio ad absurdum_--viz. that A, at one and the same
time and in the same sense, is and is not B, from which no escape is
available, but through a Kantian solution. On any other philosophy, it
is demonstrated that this opprobrium of the human understanding, this
scandal of logic, cannot be removed. This celebrated chapter of
_antinomies_ has been of great service to the mere polemics of the
transcendental philosophy: it is a glove or gage of defiance,
constantly lying on the ground, challenging the rights of victory and
supremacy so long as it is _not_ taken up by any antagonist, and
bringing matters to a short decision when it _is_.
One section, and that the introductory section, of the transcendental
philosophy, I have purposely omitted, though in strictness not to be
insulated or dislocated from the faithful exposition even of that
which I have given. It is the doctrine of Space and Time. These
profound themes, so confounding to the human understanding, are
treated by Kant under two aspects--1st, as Anchauungen, or
_Intuitions_ (so the German word is usually translated for want of a
better); 2ndly, as forms, _à priori_, of all our other intuitions.
Often have I laughed internally at the characteristic exposure of
Kant's style of thinking--that he, a man of so much worldly sagacity,
could think of offering, and of the German scholastic habits, that any
modern nation could think of accepting such cabalistical phrases, such
a true and very '_Ignotium per Ignotius_,' in part payment of an
explanatory account of Time and Space. Kant repeats these words--as a
charm before which all darkness flies; and he supposes continually the
case of a man denying his explanations or demanding proofs of them,
never once the sole imaginable case--viz. of all men demanding an
explanation of these explanations. Deny them! Combat them! How should
a man deny, why should he combat, what might, for anything to the
contrary appearing, contain a promissory note at two months after date
for 100 guineas? No; it will cost a little preliminary work before
_such_ explanations will much avail any scheme of philosophy, either
for the _pro_ or the _con_. And yet I do myself really profess to
understand the dark words; and a great service it would be to sound
philosophy amongst us, if this one word _anschauung_ were adequately
unfolded and naturalised (as naturalised it might be) in the English
philosophic dictionary, by some full Grecian equivalent. Strange that
no man acquainted with German philosophy, should yet have been struck
by the fact--or, being struck, should not have felt it important to
call public attention to the fact of our inevitable feebleness in a
branch of study for which as yet we want the indispensable words. Our
feebleness is at once argued by this want, and partly caused.
Meantime, as respects the Kantian way of viewing space, by much the
most important innovation which it makes upon the old doctrines
is--that it considers space as a _subjective_ not an _objective_
aliquid; that is, as having its whole available foundation lying
ultimately in ourselves, not in any external or alien tenure. This one
distinction, as applied to space, for ever secures (what nothing else
_can_ secure or explain) the cogency of geometrical evidence. Whatever
is true for any determinations of a space originally included in
ourselves, must be true for such determinations for ever, since they
cannot become objects of consciousness to us but in and by that very
mode of conceiving space, that very form of schematism which
originally presented us with these determinations of space, or any
whatever. In the uniformity of our own space-conceiving faculty, we
have a pledge of the absolute and _necessary_ uniformity (or internal
agreement among themselves) of all future or possible determinations
of space; because they could not otherwise become to us conceivable
forms of space, than by adapting themselves to the known conditions of
our conceiving faculty. Here we have the _necessity_ which is
indispensable to all geometrical demonstration: it is a necessity
founded in our human organ, which cannot admit or conceive a space,
unless as preconforming to these original forms or schematisms.
Whereas, on the contrary, if space were something _objective_, and
consequently being a separate existence, independent of a human organ,
then it is altogether impossible to find any intelligible source of
_obligation_ or cogency in the evidence--such as is indispensable to
the very nature of geometrical demonstration. Thus we will suppose
that a regular demonstration has gradually, from step to step
downwards, through a series of propositions--No. 8 resting upon 7,
that upon 5, 5 upon 3--at length reduced you to the elementary axiom,
that Two straight lines cannot enclose a space. Now, if space be
_subjective_ originally--that is to say, founded (as respects us and
our geometry) in ourselves--then it is impossible that two such lines
can enclose a space, because the possibility of anything whatever
relating to the determinations of space is exactly co-extensive with
(and exactly expressed by) our power to conceive it. Being thus able
to affirm its impossibility universally, we can build a demonstration
upon it. But, on the other hypothesis, of space being _objective_, it
is impossible to guess whence we are to draw our proof of the alleged
inaptitude in two straight lines for enclosing a space. The most we
could say is, that hitherto no instance has been found of an enclosed
space circumscribed by two straight lines. It would not do to allege
our human inability to conceive, or in imagination to draw, such a
circumscription. For, besides that such a mode of argument is exactly
the one supposed to have been rejected, it is liable to this
unanswerable objection, so long as space is assumed to have an
_objective_ existence, viz. that the human inability to conceive such
a possibility, only argues (what in fact is often found in other
cases) that the _objective_ existence of space--_i. e._ the existence
of space in itself, and in its absolute nature--is far larger than its
subjective existence--_i. e._ than its mode of existing _quoad_ some
particular subject. A being more limited than man might be so framed
as to be unable to conceive curve lines; but this subjective
inaptitude for those determinations of space would not affect the
objective reality of curves, or even their subjective reality for a
higher intelligence. Thus, on the hypothesis of an objective existence
for space, we should be thrown upon an ocean of possibilities, without
a test for saying what was--what was not possible. But, on the other
hypothesis, having always in the last resort what is _subjectively_
possible or impossible (_i. e._ what is conceivable or not by us, what
can or cannot be drawn or circumscribed by a human imagination), we
have the means of demonstration in our power, by having the ultimate
appeals in our power to a known uniform test--viz. a known human
faculty.
This is no trifling matter, and therefore no trifling advantage on the
side of Kant and his philosophy, to all who are acquainted with the
disagreeable controversies of late years among French geometricians of
the first rank, and sometimes among British ones, on the question of
mathematical evidence. Legendre and Professor Leslie took part in one
such a dispute; and the temper in which it was managed was worthy of
admiration, as contrasted with the angry controversies of elder days,
if, indeed, it did not err in an opposite spirit, by too elaborate and
too calculating a tone of reciprocal flattery. But think as we may of
the discussion in this respect, most assuredly it was painful to
witness so infirm a philosophy applied to an interest so mighty. The
whole aerial superstructure--the heaven-aspiring pyramid of
geometrical synthesis--all tottered under the palsying logic of
evidence, to which these celebrated mathematicians appealed. And
wherefore?--From the want of any philosophic account of space, to
which they might have made a common appeal, and which might have so
far discharged its debt to truth, as at least to reconcile its theory
with the great outstanding phenomena in the most absolute of sciences.
Geometry is the _science_ of space: therefore, in any _philosophy_ of
space, geometry is entitled to be peculiarly considered, and used as a
court of appeal. Geometry has these two further claims to
distinction--that, 1st, It is the most perfect of the sciences, so far
as it has gone; and, 2n
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