A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
by Mrs. Jameson · English · Gutenberg #39680 · 441,858 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
Author: Mrs. Jameson
Release date: May 12, 2012 [eBook #39680]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COMMONPLACE BOOK OF THOUGHTS, MEMORIES, AND FANCIES. ***
Produced by Julia Miller, Turgut Dincer and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
A
COMMONPLACE BOOK
OF
Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
[Illustration]
A COMMONPLACE BOOK--
OF
Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
PART I.--ETHICS AND CHARACTER.
PART II.--LITERATURE AND ART.
BY MRS. JAMESON.
"Un peu de chaque chose, et rien du tout,--à la française!"--MONTAIGNE.
With Illustrations and Etchings.
SECOND EDITION, CORRECTED.
LONDON:
LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS.
1855.
[Illustration]
PREFACE.
I must be allowed to say a few words in explanation of the contents of
this little volume, which is truly what its name sets forth--a book of
common-places, and nothing more. If I have never, in any work I have
ventured to place before the public, aspired to _teach_, (being myself a
_learner_ in all things,) at least I have hitherto done my best to
deserve the indulgence I have met with; and it would pain me if it could
be supposed that such indulgence had rendered me presumptuous or
careless.
For many years I have been accustomed to make a memorandum of any
thought which might come across me--(if pen and paper were at hand), and
to mark (and _remark_) any passage in a book which excited either a
sympathetic or an antagonistic feeling. This collection of notes
accumulated insensibly from day to day. The volumes on Shakspeare's
Women, on Sacred and Legendary Art, and various other productions,
sprung from seed thus lightly and casually sown, which, I hardly know
how, grew up and expanded into a regular, readable form, with a
beginning, a middle, and an end. But what was to be done with the
fragments which remained--without beginning, and without end--links of a
hidden or a broken chain? Whether to preserve them or destroy them
became a question, and one I could not answer for myself. In allowing a
portion of them to go forth to the world in their original form, as
unconnected fragments, I have been guided by the wishes of others, who
deemed it not wholly uninteresting or profitless to trace the path,
sometimes devious enough, of an "inquiring spirit," even by the little
pebbles dropped as vestiges by the way side.
A book so supremely egotistical and subjective can do good only in one
way. It may, like conversation with a friend, open up sources of
sympathy and reflection; excite to argument, agreement, or disagreement;
and, like every spontaneous utterance of thought out of an earnest mind,
suggest far higher and better thoughts than any to be found here to
higher and more productive minds. If I had not the humble hope of such a
possible result, instead of sending these memoranda to the printer, I
should have thrown them into the fire; for I lack that creative faculty
which can work up the teachings of heart-sorrow and world-experience
into attractive forms of fiction or of art; and having no intention of
leaving any such memorials to be published after my death, they must
have gone into the fire as the only alternative left.
The passages from books are not, strictly speaking, _selected_; they are
not given here on any principle of choice, but simply because that by
some process of assimilation they became a part of the individual mind.
They "found _me_,"--to borrow Coleridge's expression,--"found me in some
depth of my being;" I did not "find _them_."
For the rest, all those passages which are marked by inverted commas
must be regarded as borrowed, though I have not always been able to give
my authority. All passages not so marked are, I dare not say, original
or new, but at least the unstudied expression of a free discursive mind.
Fruits, not advisedly plucked, but which the variable winds have shaken
from the tree: some ripe, some "harsh and crude."
Wordsworth's famous poem of "The Happy Warrior" (of which a new
application will be found at page 87.), is supposed by Mr. De Quincey to
have been first suggested by the character of Nelson. It has since been
applied to Sir Charles Napier (the Indian General), as well as to the
Duke of Wellington; all which serves to illustrate my position, that the
lines in question are equally applicable to any man or any woman whose
moral standard is irrespective of selfishness and expediency.
With regard to the fragment on Sculpture, it may be necessary to state
that it was written in 1848. The first three paragraphs were inserted in
the Art Journal for April, 1849. It was intended to enlarge the whole
into a comprehensive essay on "Subjects fitted for Artistic Treatment;"
but this being now impossible, the fragment is given as originally
written; others may think it out, and apply it better than I shall live
to do.
August, 1854.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
CONTENTS.
PART I.
Ethics and Character.
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. Page
Vanity 1
Truths and Truisms 3
Beauty and Use 5
What is Soul? 7
The Philosophy of Happiness 9
Cheerfulness a Virtue 10
Intellect and Sympathy 11
Old Letters 12
The Point of Honour 13
Looking up 14
Authors 14
Thought and Theory 15
Impulse and Consideration 16
Principle and Expediency 16
Personality of the Evil Principle 17
The Catholic Spirit 18
Death-beds 19
Thoughts on a Sermon 20
Love and Fear of God 22
Social Opinion 23
Balzac 23
Political 24
Celibacy 25
Landor's Wise Sayings 26
Justice and Generosity 27
Roman Catholic Converts 28
Stealing and Borrowing 28
Good and Bad 29
Italian Proverb. Greek Saying 30
Silent Grief 31
Past and Future 32
Suicide. Countenance 33
Progress and Progression 34
Happiness in Suffering 35
Life in the Future 36
Strength. Youth 38
Moral Suffering 40
The Secret of Peace 41
Motives and Impulses 42
Principle and Passion 43
Dominant Ideas 44
Absence and Death 45
Sydney Smith. Theodore Hook 46
Werther and Childe Harold 50
Money Obligations 52
Charity. Truth 53
Women. Men 55
Compensation for Sorrow 57
Religion. Avarice 57
Genius. Mind 59
Hieroglyphical Colours 60
Character 61
Value of Words 62
Nature and Art 64
Spirit and Form 67
Penal Retribution. The Church 68
Woman's Patriotism 70
Doubt. Curiosity 71
Tieck. Coleridge 71
Application of a Bon Mot of Talleyrand 73
Adverse Individualities 75
Conflict in Love 76
French Expressions 77
Practical and Contemplative Life 78
Joanna Baillie. Macaulay's Ballads 80
Cunning 80
Browning's Paracelsus 81
Men, Women, and Children 84
Letters 100
Madame de Staël. Dejà 103
Thought too free 105
Good Qualities, not Virtues 106
Sense and Phantasy 107
Use the Present 108
Facts 109
Wise Sayings 111
Pestilence of Falsehood 112
Signs instead of Words. Relations with the World 113
Milton's Adam and Eve 115
Thoughts, sundry 116
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD 117
THE INDIAN HUNTER AND THE FIRE;
an Allegory 147
POETICAL FRAGMENTS 152
Theological.
THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL 155
Pandemonium 158
Southey on the Religious Orders 162
Forms in Religion--Image Worship 164
Religious Differences 165
Expansive Christianity 169
NOTES FROM VARIOUS SERMONS:--
A Roman Catholic Sermon 172
Another 176
Church of England Sermon 178
Another 181
Dissenting Sermon 187
Father Taylor of Boston 188
PART II.
Literature and Art.
NOTES FROM BOOKS:--
Dr. Arnold 198
Niebuhr 220
Lord Bacon 230
Chateaubriand 240
Bishop Cumberland 247
Comte's Philosophy 250
Goethe 261
Hazlitt's "Liber Amoris" 263
Francis Horner, "The Nightingale" 267
Thackeray's "English Humourists" 271
NOTES ON ART:--
Analogies 276
Definition of Art 279
No Patriotic Art 280
Verse and Colour 280
Dutch Pictures 281
Morals in Art 283
Physiognomy of Hands 288
Mozart and Chopin 289
Music 293
Rachel, the Actress 294
English and German Actresses 298
Character of Imogen 303
Shakspeare Club 305
"Maria Maddalena" 305
The Artistic Nature 307
Woman's Criticism 309
Artistic Influences 310
The Greek Aphrodite 311
Love, in the Greek Tragedy 312
Wilkie's Life and Letters 313
Wilhelm Schadow 317
Artist Life 321
Materialism in Art 323
A Fragment on Sculpture, and on certain Characters in
History and Poetry, considered as Subjects for Modern
Art 326
Helen of Troy 332
Penelope--Laodamia 336
Hippolytus 339
Iphigenia 343
Eve 347
Adam 350
Angels 351
Miriam--Ruth 354
Christ--Solomon--David 355
Hagar--Rebecca--Rachel--Queen of Sheba 356
Lady Godiva 357
Joan of Arc 359
Characters from Shakspeare 364
Characters from Spenser 366
From Milton. The Lady--Comus--Satan 367
From the Italian and Modern Poets 370
LIST OF ETCHINGS.
1. Fruits and Flowers. After an old drawing.
2. Out of my garden.
3. Virgin Martyrs. Thought. Memory. Fancy. After Benedetto
da Matera.
4. La Penserosa. After Ambrogio Lorenzette.
5. La Fille du Feu. From a sketch by Von Schwind.
6. Laus Dei. Angel after Hans Hemmeling.
7. Eve and Cain. After Steinle.
8. Study. After an old print.
9. The Parcæ. From a sketch by Carstens.
10. Antique Owlet. In Goethe's collection at Weimar.
*** The woodcuts are inserted to divide the
paragraphs and subjects, and are ornamental rather than
illustrative. Where the same vignette heads several paragraphs
consecutively, it is to signify that the _ideas_ expressed
stand in relation to each other.
PART I.
Ethics and Character.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Ethical Fragments.
1.
Bacon says, how wisely! that "there is often as great vanity in
withdrawing and retiring men's conceits from the world, as in obtruding
them." Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.
When I see people haunted by the idea of self,--spreading their hands
before their faces lest they meet the reflection of it in every other
face, as if the world were to them like a French drawing-room, panelled
with looking glass,--always fussily putting their obtrusive self behind
them, or dragging over it a scanty drapery of consciousness, miscalled
modesty,--always on their defence against compliments, or mistaking
sympathy for compliment, which is as great an error, and a more vulgar
one than mistaking flattery for sympathy,--when I see all this, as I have
seen it, I am inclined to attribute it to the immaturity of the
character, or to what is worse, a total want of simplicity. To some
characters fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips,--they do
well to turn away from it, who fear it will turn their heads. But to
others, fame is "love disguised," the love that answers to love, in its
widest most exalted sense. It seems to me, that we should all bring the
best that is in us (according to the diversity of gifts which God has
given us), and lay it a reverend offering on the altar of humanity,--if
not to burn and enlighten, at least to rise in incense to heaven. So
will the pure in heart, and the unselfish do; and they will not heed if
those who _can_ bring nothing or _will_ bring nothing, unless they can
blaze like a beacon, call out "VANITY!"
[Illustration]
2.
There are truths which, by perpetual repetition, have subsided into
passive truisms, till, in some moment of feeling or experience, they
kindle into conviction, start to life and light, and the truism becomes
again a vital truth.
[Illustration]
3.
It is well that we obtain what we require at the cheapest possible rate;
yet those who cheapen goods, or beat down the price of a good article,
or buy in preference to what is good and genuine of its kind an inferior
article at an inferior price, sometimes do much mischief. Not only do
they discourage the production of a better article, but if they be
anxious about the education of the lower classes they undo with one hand
what they do with the other; they encourage the mere mechanic and the
production of what may be produced without effort of mind and without
education, and they discourage and wrong the skilled workman for whom
education has done much more and whose education has cost much more.
Every work so merely and basely mechanical, that a man can throw into it
no part of his own life and soul, does, in the long run, degrade the
human being. It is only by giving him some kind of mental and moral
interest in the labour of his hands, making it an exercise of his
understanding, and an object of his sympathy, that we can really elevate
the workman; and this is not the case with very cheap production of any
kind. (Southampton, Dec. 1849.)
Since this was written the same idea has been carried out, with far more
eloquent reasoning, in a noble passage which I have just found in Mr.
Ruskin's last volume of "The Stones of Venice" (the Sea Stories). As I
do not _always_ subscribe to his theories of Art, I am the more
delighted with this anticipation of a moral agreement between us.
"We have much studied and much perfected of late, the great civilised
invention of the division of labour, only we give it a false name. It is
not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men:--divided
into mere segments of men,--broken into small fragments and crumbs of
life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man
is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the
point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now, it is a good and desirable
thing truly to make many pins in a day, but if we could only see with
what crystal sand their points are polished--sand of human soul, much to
be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is,--we should think
there might be some loss in it also; and the great cry that rises from
all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace-blast, is all in
very deed for this,--that we manufacture everything there except men,--we
blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape
pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single
living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages; and all the
evil to which that cry is urging our myriads, can be met only in one
way,--not by teaching nor preaching; for to teach them is but to show
them their misery; and to preach to them--if we do nothing more than
preach,--is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding on
the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men,
raising them and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such
convenience, or beauty or cheapness, as is to be got only by the
degradation of the workman, and by equally determined demand for the
products and results of a healthy and ennobling labour." ....
"We are always in these days trying to separate the two (intellect and
work). We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always
working; and we call one a gentleman and the other an operative;
whereas, the workman ought to be often thinking, and the thinker often
working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. It is only by
labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour
can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity."
Wordsworth, however, had said the same thing before either of us:
"Our life is turn'd
Out of her course wherever man is made
An offering or a sacrifice,--a tool
Or implement,--a passive thing employed
As a brute mean, without acknowledgment
Of common right or interest in the end,
Used or abused as selfishness may prompt.
Say what can follow for a rational soul
Perverted thus, but weakness in all good
And strength in evil?"
[Illustration]
And this leads us to the consideration of another mistake, analogous
with the above, but referable in its results chiefly to the higher, or
what Mr. Ruskin calls the _thinking_, classes of the community.
It is not good for us to have all that we value of worldly material
things in the form of money. It is the most vulgar form in which value
can be invested. Not only books, pictures, and all beautiful things are
better; but even jewels and trinkets are sometimes to be preferred to
mere hard money. Lands and tenements are good, as involving duties; but
still what is valuable in the market sense should sometimes take the
ideal and the beautiful form, and be dear and lovely and valuable for
its own sake as well as for its convertible worth in hard gold. I think
the character would be apt to deteriorate when all its material
possessions take the form of money, and when money becomes valuable for
its own sake, or as the mere instrument or representative of power.
[Illustration]
4.
We are told in a late account of Laura Bridgeman, the blind, deaf, and
dumb girl, that her instructor once endeavoured to explain the
difference between the material and the immaterial, and used the word
"soul." She interrupted to ask, "What is soul?"
"That which thinks, feels, hopes, loves,----"
"And _aches_?" she added eagerly.
[Illustration]
5.
I was reading to-day in the Notes to Boswell's Life of Johnson that "it
is a theory which every one knows to be _false in fact_, that virtue in
real life is always productive of happiness, and vice of misery." I
should say that all my experience teaches me that the position is not
false but true: that virtue _does_ produce happiness, and vice _does_
produce misery. But let us settle the meaning of the words. By
_happiness_, we do not necessarily mean a state of worldly prosperity.
By _virtue_, we do not mean a series of good actions which may or may
not be rewarded, and, if done for reward, lose the essence of virtue.
Virtue, according to my idea, is the habitual sense of right, and the
habitual courage to act up to that sense of right, combined with
benevolent sympathies, the charity which thinketh no evil. This union of
the highest conscience and the highest sympathy fulfils my notion of
virtue. Strength is essential to it; weakness incompatible with it.
Where virtue is, the noblest faculties and the softest feelings are
predominant; the whole being is in that state of harmony which I call
happiness. Pain may reach it, passion may disturb it, but there is
always a glimpse of blue sky above our head; as we ascend in dignity of
being, we ascend in happiness, which is, in my sense of the word, the
feeling which connects us with the infinite and with God.
And vice is necessarily misery: for that fluctuation of principle, that
diseased craving for excitement, that weakness out of which springs
falsehood, that suspicion of others, that discord with ourselves, with
the absence of the benevolent propensities,--these constitute misery as a
state of being. The most miserable person I ever met with in my life had
12,000_l._ a year; a cunning mind, dexterous to compass its own ends;
very little conscience, not enough, one would have thought, to vex with
any retributive pang; but it was the absence of goodness that made the
misery, obvious and hourly increasing. The perpetual kicking against the
pricks, the unreasonable _exigéance_ with regard to things, without any
high standard with regard to persons,--these made the misery. I can speak
of it as misery who had it daily in my sight for five long years.
I have had arguments, if it be not presumption to call them so, with
Carlyle on this point. It appeared to me that he confounded happiness
with pleasure, with self-indulgence. He set aside with a towering scorn
the idea of living for the sake of happiness, so called: he styled this
philosophy of happiness, "the philosophy of the frying-pan." But this
was like the reasoning of a child, whose idea of happiness is plenty of
sugar-plums. Pleasure, pleasurable sensation, is, as the world goes,
something to thank God for. I should be one of the last to undervalue
it; I hope I am one of the last to live for it; and pain is pain, a
great evil, which I do not like either to inflict or suffer. But
happiness lies beyond either pain or pleasure--is as sublime a thing as
virtue itself, indivisible from it; and under this point of view it
seems a perilous mistake to separate them.
[Illustration]
6.
Dante places in his lowest Hell those who in life were melancholy and
repining without a cause, thus profaning and darkening God's blessed
sunshine--_Tristi fummo nel' aer dolce_; and in some of the ancient
Christian systems of virtues and vices, Melancholy is unholy, and a
vice; Cheerfulness is holy, and a virtue.
Lord Bacon also makes one of the characteristics of moral health and
goodness to consist in "a constant quick sense of felicity, and a noble
satisfaction."
What moments, hours, days of exquisite felicity must Christ, our
Redeemer, have had, though it has become too customary to place him
before us only in the attitude of pain and sorrow! Why should he be
always crowned with thorns, bleeding with wounds, weeping over the world
he was appointed to heal, to save, to reconcile with God? The radiant
head of Christ in Raphael's Transfiguration should rather be our ideal
of Him who came "to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach the acceptable
year of the Lord."
[Illustration]
7.
A profound intellect is weakened and narrowed in general power and
influence by a limited range of sympathies. I think this is especially
true of C----: excellent, honest, gifted as he is, he does not do half the
good he might do, because his sympathies are so confined. And then he
wants gentleness: he does not seem to acknowledge that "the wisdom that
is from above is _gentle_." He is a man who carries his bright intellect
as a light in a dark-lantern; he sees only the objects on which he
chooses to throw that blaze of light: those he sees vividly, but, as it
were, exclusively. All other things, though lying near, are dark,
because perversely he _will_ not throw the light of his mind upon them.
[Illustration]
8.
Wilhelm von Humboldt says, "Old letters lose their vitality."
Not true. It is because they retain their vitality that it is so
dangerous to keep some letters,--so wicked to burn others.
[Illustration]
9.
A Man thinks himself, and is thought by others to be insulted when
another man gives him the lie. It is an offence to be retracted at once,
or only to be effaced in blood. To give a woman the lie is not
considered in the same unpardonable light by herself or others,--is
indeed a slight thing. Now, whence this difference? Is not truth as
dear to a woman as to a man? Is the virtue itself, or the reputation of
it, less necessary to the woman than to the man? If not, what causes
this distinction,--one so injurious to the morals of both sexes?
[Illustration]
10.
It is good for us to look up, morally and mentally. If I were tired I
would get some help to hold my head up, as Moses got some one to hold up
his arms while he prayed.
"Ce qui est moins que moi m'éteint et m'assomme; ce qui est à côté de
moi m'ennuie et me fatigue. II n'y a que ce qui est au-dessus de moi qui
me soutienne et m'arrache à moi-même."
[Illustration]
11.
There is an order of writers who, with characters perverted or hardened
through long practice of iniquity, yet possess an inherent divine sense
of the good and the beautiful, and a passion for setting it forth, so
that men's hearts glow with the tenderness and the elevation which live
not in the heart of the writer,--only in his head.
And there is another class of writers who are excellent in the social
relations of life, and kindly and true in heart, yet who,
intellectually, have a perverted pleasure in the ridiculous and
distorted, the cunning, the crooked, the vicious,--who are never weary of
holding up before us finished representations of folly and rascality.
Now, which is the worst of these? the former, who do mischief by making
us mistrust the good? or the latter, who degrade us by making us
familiar with evil?
[Illustration]
12.
"Thought and theory," said Wordsworth, "must precede all action that
moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either
thought or theory."
Yes, and no. What we _act_ has its consequences on earth. What we
_think_, its consequences in heaven. It is not without reason that
action should be preferred before barren thought; but all action which
in its result is worth any thing, must result from thought. So the old
rhymester hath it:
"He that good thinketh good may do,
And God will help him there unto;
For was never good work wrought,
Without beginning of good thought."
The result of impulse is the positive; the result of consideration the
negative. The positive is essentially and abstractedly better than the
negative, though relatively to facts and circumstances it may not be the
most expedient.
On my observing how often I had had reason to regret not having followed
the first impulse, O. G. said, "In _good_ minds the first impulses are
generally right and true, and, when altered or relinquished from regard
to expediency arising out of complicated relations, I always feel sorry,
for they remain right. Our first impulses always lean to the positive,
our second thoughts to the negative; and I have no respect for the
negative,--it is the vulgar side of every thing."
On the other hand, it must be conceded, that one who stands endowed with
great power and with great responsibilities in the midst of a thousand
duties and interests, can no longer take things in this simple fashion;
for the good first impulse, in its flow, meets, perhaps, some rock, and
splits upon it; it recoils on the heart, and becomes abortive. Or the
impulse to do good _here_ becomes injury _there_, and we are forced to
calculate results; we cannot trust to them.
[Illustration]
I have not sought to deduce my principles from conventional notions of
expediency, but have believed that out of the steady adherence to
certain fixed principles, the right and the expedient _must_ ensue, and
I believe it still. The moment one begins to solder right and wrong
together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.
[Illustration]
It requires merely passive courage and strength to resist, and in some
cases to overcome evil. But it requires more--it needs bravery and
self-reliance and surpassing faith--to act out the true inspirations of
your intelligence and the true impulses of your heart.
[Illustration]
Out of the attempt to harmonise our actual life with our aspirations,
our experience with our faith, we make poetry,--or, it may be, religion.
[Illustration]
F---- used the phrase "_stung into heroism_" as Shelley said, "_cradled
into poetry_," by wrong.
[Illustration]
13.
Coleridge calls the personal existence of the Evil Principle, "a mere
fiction, or, at best, an allegory supported by a few popular phrases and
figures of speech, used incidentally or dramatically by the
Evangelists." And he says, that "the existence of a personal,
intelligent, Evil Being, the counterpart and antagonist of God, is in
direct contradiction to the most express declarations of Holy Writ.
'_Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?_'--Amos,
iii. 6. '_I make peace and create evil._'--Isaiah, xlv. 7. This is the
deep mystery of the abyss of God."
Do our theologians go with him here? I think not: yet, as a theologian,
Coleridge is constantly appealed to by Churchmen.
[Illustration]
14.
"We find (in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians), every where
instilled as the essence of all well-being and well-doing, (without
which the wisest public and political constitution is but a lifeless
formula, and the highest powers of individual endowment profitless or
pernicious,) the spirit of a divine sympathy with the happiness and
rights,--with the peculiarities, gifts, graces, and endowments of other
minds, which alone, whether in the family or in the Church, can impart
unity and effectual working together for good in the communities of
men."
"The Christian religion was, in fact, a charter of freedom to the whole
human race."--_Thom's Discourses on St. Paul's Epistle to the
Corinthians._
And this is the true Catholic spirit,--the spirit and the teaching of
Paul,--in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic spirit,--the spirit and
tendency of Peter, which stands upon forms, which has no respect for
individuality except in so far as it can imprison this individuality
within a creed, or use it to a purpose.
[Illustration]
15.
Dr. Baillie once said that "all his observation of death-beds inclined
him to believe that nature intended that we should go out of the world
as unconscious as we came into it." "In all my experience," he added, "I
have not seen one instance in fifty to the contrary."
Yet even in such a large experience the occurrence of "one instance in
fifty to the contrary" would invalidate the assumption that such was the
law of nature (or "nature's intention," which, if it means any thing,
means the same).
The moment in which the spirit meets death is perhaps like the moment in
which it is embraced by sleep. It never, I suppose, happened to any one
to be conscious of the immediate transition from the waking to the
sleeping state.
[Illustration]
16.
_Thoughts on a Sermon._
He is really sublime, this man! with his faith in "the religion of
pain," and "the deification of sorrow!" But is he therefore right? What
has he preached to us to-day with all the force of eloquence, all the
earnestness of conviction? that "pain is the life of God as shown forth
in Christ;"--"that we are to be crucified to the world and the world to
us." This perpetual presence of a crucified God between us and a pitying
redeeming Christ, leads many a mourner to the belief that this world is
all a Golgotha of pain, and that we are here to crucify each other. Is
this the law under which we are to live and strive? The missionary
Bridaine accused himself of sin in that he had preached fasting,
penance, and the chastisements of God to wretches steeped in poverty and
dying of hunger; and is there not a similar cruelty and misuse of power
in the servants of Him who came to bind up the broken-hearted, when
they preach the necessity, or at least the theory, of moral pain to
those whose hearts are aching from moral evil?
Surely there is a great difference between the resignation or the
endurance of a truthful, faithful, loving, hopeful spirit, and this
dreadful theology of suffering as the necessary and appointed state of
things! I, for one, will not accept it. Even while most miserable, I
will believe in happiness; even while I do or suffer evil, I will
believe in goodness; even while my eyes see not through tears, I will
believe in the existence of what I do not see--that God is benign, that
nature is fair, that the world is not made as a prison or a penance.
While I stand lost in utter darkness, I will yet wait for the return of
the unfailing dawn,--even though my soul be amazed into such a blind
perplexity that I know not on which side to look for it, and ask "where
is the East? and whence the dayspring?" For the East holds its wonted
place, and the light is withheld only till its appointed time.
God so strengthen me that I may think of pain and sin only as accidental
apparent discords in his great harmonious scheme of good! Then I am
ready--I will take up the cross, and hear it bravely, while I _must_; but
I will lay it down when I can, and in any case I will never lay it on
another.
[Illustration]
17.
If I fear God it is because I love him, and believe in his love; I
cannot conceive myself as standing in fear of any spiritual or human
being in whose love I do not entirely believe. Of that Impersonation of
Evil, who goes about seeking whom he may devour, the image brings to me
no fear, only intense disgust and aversion. Yes, it is because of his
love for me that I fear to offend against God; it is because of his love
that his displeasure must be terrible. And with regard to human beings,
only the being I love has the power to give me pain or inspire me with
fear; only those in whose love I believe, have the power to injure me.
Take away my love, and you take away my fear: take away _their_ love,
and you take away the power to do me any harm which can reach me in the
sources of life and feeling.
18.
Social opinion is like a sharp knife. There are foolish people who
regard it only with terror, and dare not touch or meddle with it. There
are more foolish people, who, in rashness or defiance, seize it by the
blade, and get cut and mangled for their pains. And there are wise
people, who grasp it discreetly and boldly by the handle, and use it to
carve out their own purposes.
[Illustration]
19.
While we were discussing Balzac's celebrity as a romance writer, she (O.
G.) said, with a shudder: "His laurels are steeped in the tears of
women,--every truth he tells has been wrung in tortures from some woman's
heart."
[Illustration]
20.
Sir Walter Scott, writing in 1831, seems to regard it as a terrible
misfortune that the whole burgher class in Scotland should be gradually
preparing for representative reform. "I mean," he says, "the middle and
respectable classes: when a borough reform comes, which, perhaps, cannot
long be delayed, ministers will no longer return a member for Scotland
from the towns." "The gentry," he adds, "will abide longer by _sound_
principles, for they are needy, and desire advancement for themselves,
and appointments for their sons and so on. But this is a very hollow
dependence, and those who sincerely hold ancient opinions are waxing
old," &c. &c.
With a great deal more, showing the strange moral confusion which his
political bias had caused in his otherwise clear head and honest mind.
The sound principles, then, by which educated people are to abide,--over
the decay of which he laments,--are such as can only be upheld by the
most vulgar self-interest! If a man should utter openly such sentiments
in these days, what should we think of him?
[Illustration]
In the order of absolutism lurk the elements of change and destruction.
In the unrest of freedom the spirit of change and progress.
[Illustration]
21.
"A single life," said Bacon, "doth well with churchmen, for charity will
hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool."
Certainly there are men whose charities are limited, if not dried up, by
their concentrated domestic anxieties and relations. But there are
others whose charities are more diffused, as well as healthier and
warmer, through the strength of their domestic affections.
Wordsworth speaks strongly of the evils of ordaining men as clergymen in
places where they had been born or brought up, or in the midst of their
own relatives: "Their habits, their manners, their talk, their
acquaintanceships, their friendships, and let me say, even their
domestic affections, naturally draw them one way, while their
professional obligations point out another." If this were true
universally, or even generally, it would be a strong argument in favour
of the celibacy of the Roman Catholic clergy, which certainly is one
element, and not the least, of their power.
[Illustration]
22.
Landor says truly: "Love is a secondary passion in those who love most,
a primary in those who love least: he who is inspired by it in the
strongest degree is inspired by honour in a greater."
"Whatever is worthy of being loved for any thing is worthy to be
preserved."
Again:--"Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely
stab or suffocate their own fame, when God hath commanded them to stand
on high for an example."
"Weak motives," he says, "are sufficient for weak minds; whenever we see
a mind which we believed a stronger than our own moved habitually by
what appears inadequate, we may be certain that there is--to bring a
metaphor from the forest--_more top than root_."
Here is another sentence from the same writer--rich in wise sayings:--
"Plato would make wives common to abolish selfishness; the very mischief
which, above all others, it would directly and immediately bring forth.
There is no selfishness where there is a wife and family. There the
house is lighted up by mutual charities; everything achieved for them is
a victory; everything endured a triumph. How many vices are suppressed
that there may be no _bad_ example! How many exertions made to recommend
and inculcate a _good_ one."
True: and I have much more confidence in the charity which begins in the
home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the world-wide
philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge into
egotism, of which I could show you many and notable examples.
[Illustration]
All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out
of a hundred, the safe side and the just side of a question is the
generous side and the merciful side. This your mere worldly people do
not seem to know, and therein make the sorriest and the vulgarest of all
mistakes. "_Pour être assez bon il faut l'être trop_:" we all need more
mercy than we deserve.
How often in this world the actions that we condemn are the result of
sentiments that we love and opinions that we admire!
[Illustration]
23.
A.---- observed in reference to some of her friends who had gone over to
the Roman Catholic Church, "that the peace and comfort which they had
sought and found in that mode of faith was like the drugged sleep in
comparison with the natural sleep: necessary, healing perhaps, where
there is disease and unrest, not otherwise."
[Illustration]
24.
"A poet," says Coleridge, "ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him
borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine
nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to your
imagination than your memory."
This advice is even more applicable to the painter, but true perhaps in
its application to all artists. Raphael and Mozart were, in this sense,
great borrowers.
[Illustration]
25.
"What is the difference between being good and being bad? the good do
not yield to temptation and the bad do."
This is often the distinction between the good and the bad in regard to
act and deed; but it does not constitute the difference between _being_
good and _being_ bad.
[Illustration]
26.
The Italians say (in one of their characteristic proverbs) _Sospetto
licenzia Fede_. Lord Bacon interprets the saying "as if suspicion did
give a passport to faith," which is somewhat obscure and ambiguous. It
means, that suspicion discharges us from the duty of good faith; and in
this, its original sense, it is, like many of the old Italian proverbs,
worldly wise and profoundly immoral.
[Illustration]
27.
IT was well said by Themistocles to the King of Persia, that "speech was
like cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth
appear in figure, whereas in thoughts they lie but in packs" (_i. e._
rolled up or packed up). Dryden had evidently this passage in his mind
when he wrote those beautiful lines:
"Speech is the light, the morning of the mind;
It spreads the beauteous images abroad,
Which else lie furled and shrouded in the soul."
Here the comparison of Themistocles, happy in itself, is expanded into a
vivid poetical image.
[Illustration]
28.
"Those are the killing griefs that do not speak," is true of some, not
all characters. There are natures in which the killing grief finds
utterance while it kills; moods in which we cry aloud, "as the beast
crieth, expansive not appealing." That is my own nature: so in grief or
in joy, I say as the birds sing:
"Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt,
Gab mir ein Got zu sagen was ich leide!"
[Illustration]
29.
Blessed is the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted _from_
the world!--yet more blessed and more dear the memory of those who have
kept themselves unspotted _in_ the world!
[Illustration]
30.
Everything that ever has been, from the beginning of the world till now,
belongs to us, is ours, is even a part of us. We belong to the future,
and shall be a part of it. Therefore the sympathies of _all_ are in the
past; only the poet and the prophet sympathise with the future.
When Tennyson makes Ulysses say, "I am a part of all that I have seen,"
it ought to be rather the converse,--"What I have seen becomes a part of
me."
[Illustration]
31.
In what regards policy--government--the interest of the many is sacrificed
to the few; in what regards society, the morals and happiness of
individuals are sacrificed to the many.
32.
We spoke to-night of the cowardice, the crime of a particular suicide:
O. G. agreed as to this instance, but added: "There is a different
aspect under which suicide might be regarded. It is not always, I think,
from a want of religion, or in a spirit of defiance, or a want of
confidence in God that we quit life. It is as if we should flee to the
feet of the Almighty and embrace his knees, and exclaim, 'O my father!
take me home! I have endured as long as it was possible; I can endure no
more, so I come to you!'"
Of an amiable man with a disagreeable expressionless face, she said:
"His countenance always gives me the idea of matter too strong, too hard
for the soul to pierce through. It is as a plaster mask which I long to
break (making the gesture with her hand), that I may see the countenance
of his heart, for that must be beautiful!"
[Illustration]
33.
Carlyle said to me: "I want to see some institution to teach a man the
truth, the worth, the beauty, the heroism of which his present existence
is capable; where's the use of sending him to study what the Greeks and
Romans did, and said, and wrote? Do ye think the Greeks and Romans would
have been what they were, if they had just only studied what the
Phoenicians did before them?" I should have answered, had I dared: "Yet
perhaps the Greeks and Romans would not have been what they were if the
Egyptians and Phoenicians had not been before them."
[Illustration]
34.
Can there be _progress_ which is not _progression_--which does not leave
a past from which to start--on which to rest our foot when we spring
forward? No wise man kicks the ladder from beneath him, or obliterates
the traces of the road through which he has travelled, or pulls down the
memorials he has built by the way side. We cannot _get on_ without
linking our present and our future with our past. All reaction is
destructive--all progress conservative. When we have destroyed that
which the past built up, what reward have we?--we are forced to fall
back, and have to begin anew. "Novelty," as Lord Bacon says, "cannot be
content to add, but it must deface." For this very reason novelty is not
progress, as the French would try to persuade themselves and us. We gain
nothing by defacing and trampling down the idols of the past to set up
new ones in their places--let it be sufficient to leave them behind us,
measuring our advance by keeping them in sight.
[Illustration]
35.
E---- was compassionating to-day the old and the invalided; those whose
life is prolonged in spite of suffering; and she seemed, even out of the
excess of her pity and sympathy, to wish them fairly out of the world;
but it is a mistake in reasoning and feeling. She does not know how much
of happiness may consist with suffering, with physical suffering, and
even with mental suffering.
[Illustration]
36.
"Renoncez dans votre âme, et renoncez y fermement, une fois pour toutes,
à vouloir vous connaître au-delà de cette existence passagère qui vous
est imposée, et vous redeviendrez agréable à Dieu, utile aux autres
hommes, tranquille avec vous-mêmes."
This does not mean "renounce hope or faith in the future." No! But
renounce that perpetual craving after a selfish interest in the
unrevealed future life which takes the true relish from the duties and
the pleasures of this. We can conceive of no future life which is not a
continuation of this: to anticipate in that _future_ life, _another_
life, a _different_ life; what is it but to call in doubt our individual
identity?
If we pray, "O teach us where and what is peace!" would not the answer
be, "In the grave ye shall have it--not before?" Yet is it not strange
that those who believe most absolutely in an after-life, yet think of
the grave as peace? Now, if we carry this life with us--and what other
life can we carry with us, unless we cease to be ourselves--how shall
there be peace?
[Illustration]
As to the future, my soul, like Cato's, "shrinks back upon herself and
startles at destruction;" but I do not think of my own destruction,
rather of that which I love. That I should cease to be is not very
intolerable; but that what I love, and do now in my soul possess, should
cease to be--there is the pang, the terror! I desire that which I love to
be immortal, whether I be so myself or not.
[Illustration]
Is not the idea which most men entertain of another, of an eternal life,
merely a continuation of this present existence under pleasanter
conditions? We cannot conceive another state of existence,--we only fancy
we do so.
[Illustration]
"I conceive that in all probability we have immortality already. Most
men seem to divide life and immortality, making them two distinct
things, when, in fact, they are one and the same. What is immortality
but a continuation of life--life which is already our own? We have, then,
begun our immortality even now."
For the same reason, or, rather, through the same want of reasoning by
which we make _life_ and _immortality_ two (distinct things), do we make
_time_ and _eternity_ two, which like the others are really one and the
same. As immortality is but the continuation of life, so eternity is but
the continuation of time; and what we call time is only that part of
eternity in which we exist _now_.--_The New Philosophy._
[Illustration]
37.
Strength does not consist only in the _more_ or the _less_. There are
different sorts of strength as well as different degrees:--The strength
of marble to resist; the strength of steel to oppose; the strength of
the fine gold, which you can twist round your finger, but which can bear
the force of innumerable pounds without breaking.
[Illustration]
38.
Goethe used to say, that while intellectual attainment is progressive,
it is difficult to be as good when we are old, as we were when young.
Dr. Johnson has expressed the same thing.
Then are we to assume, that to _do_ good effectively and wisely is the
privilege of age and experience? To _be_ good, through faith in
goodness, the privilege of the young.
To preserve our faith in goodness with an extended knowledge of evil, to
preserve the tenderness of our pity after long contemplation of pain,
and the warmth of our charity after long experience of falsehood, is to
be at once good and wise--to understand and to love each other as the
angels who look down upon us from heaven.
[Illustration]
We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible
completely to understand what we do not love.
I observe, that in our relations with the people around us, we forgive
them more readily for what they _do_, which they _can_ help, than for
what they _are_, which they _cannot_ help.
[Illustration]
39.
"Whence springs the greatest degree of moral suffering?" was a question
debated this evening, but not settled. It was argued that it would
depend on the texture of character, its more or less conscientiousness,
susceptibility, or strength. I thought from two sentiments--from
_jealousy_, that is, the sense of a wrong endured, in one class of
characters; from _remorse_, that is, from the sense of a wrong
inflicted, in another.
[Illustration]
40.
The bread of life is love; the salt of life is work; the sweetness of
life, poesy; the water of life, faith.
[Illustration]
41.
I have seen triflers attempting to draw out a deep intellect; and they
reminded me of children throwing pebbles down the well at Carisbrook,
that they might hear them sound.
[Illustration]
42.
A bond is necessary to complete our being, only we must be careful that
the bond does not become bondage.
[Illustration]
"The secret of peace," said A. B., "is the resolution of the lesser into
the greater;" meaning, perhaps, the due relative appreciation of our
duties, and the proper placing of our affections: or, did she not rather
mean, the resolving of the lesser duties and affections into the higher?
But it is true in either sense.
[Illustration]
The love we have for Genius is to common love what the fire on the altar
is to the fire on the hearth. We cherish it not for warmth or for
service, but for an offering, as the expression of our worship.
[Illustration]
All love not responded to and accepted is a species of idolatry. It is
like the worship of a dumb beautiful image we have ourselves set up and
deified, but cannot inspire with life, nor warm with sympathy.
No!--though we should consume our own hearts on the altar. Our love of
God would be idolatry if we did not believe in his love for us--his
responsive love.
[Illustration]
In the same moment that we begin to speculate on the possibility of
cessation or change in any strong affection that we feel, even from that
moment we may date its death: it has become the _fetch_ of the living
love.
[Illustration]
"Motives," said Coleridge, "imply weakness, and the reasoning powers
imply the existence of evil and temptation. The angelic nature would act
from impulse alone." This is the sort of angel which Angelico da Fiesole
conceived and represented, and _he_ only.
Again:--"If a man's conduct can neither be ascribed to the angelic or the
bestial within him, it must be fiendish. Passion without appetite is
_fiendish_."
And, he might have added, appetite without passion, _bestial_. Love in
which is neither appetite nor passion is _angelic_. The union of all is
human; and according as one or other predominates, does the human being
approximate to the fiend, the beast, or the angel.
[Illustration]
43.
I don't mean to say that principle is not a finer thing than passion;
but passions existed before principles: they came into the world with
us; principles are superinduced.
There are bad principles as well as bad passions; and more bad
principles than bad passions. Good principles derive life, and strength,
and warmth from high and good passions; but principles do not give life,
they only bind up life into a consistent whole. One great fault in
education is, the pains taken to inculcate principles rather than to
train feelings. It is as if we took it for granted that passions could
_only_ be bad, and are to be ignored or repressed altogether,--the old
mischievous monkish doctrine.
[Illustration]
44.
It is easy to be humble where humility is a condescension--easy to
concede where we know ourselves wronged--easy to forgive where vengeance
is in our power.
[Illustration]
"You and I," said H. G., yesterday, "are alike in this:--both of us so
abhor injustice, that we are ready to fight it with a broomstick if we
can find nothing better!"
[Illustration]
45.
"The wise only _possess_ ideas--the greater part of mankind are
_possessed by_ them. When once the mind, in despite of the remonstrating
conscience, has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse or idea,
then whatever tends to give depth and vividness to this idea or
indefinite imagination, increases its despotism, and in the same
proportion renders the reason and free will ineffectual." This paragraph
from Coleridge sounds like a _truism_ until we have felt its _truth_.
46.
"La Volonté, en se déréglant, devient passion; cette passion continuée
se change en habitude, et faute de résister à cette habitude elle se
transforme en besoin."--_St. Augustin_. Which may be rendered--"out of the
unregulated will, springs _passion_, out of passion gratified, _habit_;
out of habits unresisted, _necessity_." This, also, is one of the truths
which become, from the impossibility of disputing or refuting them,
_truisms_--and little regarded, till the truth makes itself felt.
[Illustration]
47.
I wish I could realise what you call my "_grand_ idea of being
independent of the absent." I have not a friend worthy the name, whose
absence is not pain and dread to me;--death itself is terrible only as it
is absence. At some moments, if I could, I would cease to love those who
are absent from me, or to speak more correctly, those whose path in life
diverges from mine--whose dwelling house is far off;--with whom I am
united in the strongest bonds of sympathy while separated by duties and
interests by space and time. The presence of those whom we love is as a
double life; absence, in its anxious longing, and sense of vacancy, is
as a foretaste of death.
"La mort de nos amis ne compte pas du moment où ils meurent, mais de
celui où nous cessons de vivre avec eux;" or, it might rather be said,
_pour eux_; but I think this arises from a want either of _faith_ or
_faithfulness_.
"La peur des morts est une abominable faiblesse! c'est la plus commune
et la plus barbare des profanations; _les mères ne la connaissent
pas_!"--And why? Because the most _faithful_ love is the love of the
mother for her child.
[Illustration]
48.
At dinner to-day there was an attempt made by two very clever men to
place Theodore Hook above Sydney Smith. I fought with all my might
against both. It seems to me that a mind must be strangely warped that
could ever place on a par two men with aspirations and purposes so
different, whether we consider them merely as individuals, or called
before the bar of the public as writers. I do not take to Sydney Smith
personally, because my nature feels the want of the artistic and
imaginative in _his_ nature; but see what he has done for humanity, for
society, for liberty, for truth,--for us women! What has Theodore Hook
done that has not perished with him? Even as wits--and I have been in
company with both--I could not compare them; but they say the wit of
Theodore Hook was only fitted for the company of men--the strongest proof
that it was not genuine of its kind, that when most bearable, it was
most superficial. I set aside the other obvious inference, that it
required to be excited by stimulants and those of the coarsest, grossest
kind. The wit of Sydney Smith almost always involved a thought worth
remembering for its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its
brilliant vehicle: the value of ten thousand pounds sterling of sense
concentrated into a cut and polished diamond.
It is not true, as I have heard it said, that after leaving the society
of Sydney Smith you only remembered how much you had laughed, not the
good things at which you had laughed. Few men--wits by profession--ever
said so many memorable things as those recorded of Sydney Smith.
[Illustration]
49.
"When we would show any one that he is mistaken our best course is to
observe on what side he considers the subject,--for his view of it is
generally right on _this_ side,--and admit to him that he is right so
far. He will be satisfied with this acknowledgment, that he was not
wrong in his judgment, but only inadvertent in not looking at the whole
of the case."--_Pascal._
[Illustration]
50.
"We should reflect," says Jeremy Taylor, preaching against ambition,
"that whatever tempts the pride and vanity of ambitious persons is not
so big as the smallest star which we see scattered in disorder and
unregarded on the pavement of heaven."
Very beautiful and poetical, but certainly no good argument against the
sin he denounces. The star is inaccessible, and what tempts our pride or
our ambition is only that which we consider with hope as _accessible_.
That we look up to the stars not desiring, not aspiring, but only
loving--therein lies our hearts' truest, holiest, safest _devotion_ as
contrasted with _ambition_.
It is the "_desire_ of the moth for the star," that leads to its burning
itself in the candle.
[Illustration]
51.
The brow stamped "with the hieroglyphics of an eternal sorrow," is a
strong and beautiful expression of Bishop Taylor's.
He says truly: "It is seldom that God sends such calamities upon men as
men bring upon themselves and suffer willingly." And again: "What will
not tender women suffer to hide their shame!" What indeed! And again:
"Nothing is intolerable that is necessary." And again: "Nothing is to be
esteemed evil which God and nature have fixed with eternal sanctions."
There is not one of these ethical sentences which might not be treated
as a text and expounded, opening into as many "branches" of
consideration as ever did a Presbyterian sermon. Yet several involve a
fallacy, as it seems to me;--others a deeper, wider, and more awful
signification than Taylor himself seems to have contemplated when he
uttered them.
[Illustration]
52.
The same reasons which rendered Goethe's "Werther" so popular, so
passionately admired at the time it appeared--just after the seven years'
war,--helped to render Lord Byron so popular in his time. It was not the
individuality of "Werther," nor the individuality of "Childe Harold"
which produced the effect of making them, for a time, a pervading
power,--a _part_ of the life of their contemporaries. It was because in
both cases a chord was struck which was ready to vibrate. A phase of
feeling preexistent, palpitating at the heart of society, which had
never found expression in any poetic form since the days of Dante, was
made visible and audible as if by an electric force; words and forms
were given to a diffused sentiment of pain and resistance, caused by a
long period of war, of political and social commotion, and of unhealthy
moral excitement. "Werther" and "Childe Harold" will never perish;
because, though they have ceased to be the echo of a wide despair, there
will always be, unhappily, individual minds and hearts to respond to the
individuality.
[Illustration]
Lord Byron has sometimes, to use his own expression, "curdled" a whole
world of meaning into the compass of one line:--
"The starry Galileo and his woes."
"The blind old man of Chio's rocky isle."
Here every word, almost every syllable, paints an idea. Such lines are
_picturesque_. And I remember another, from Thomson, I think:--
"Placed far amid the melancholy main."
In general, where words are used in description, the objects and ideas
flow with the words in succession. But in each of these lines the mind
takes in a wide horizon, comprising a multitude of objects at once, as
the eye takes in a picture, with scene, and action, and figures,
fore-ground and background, all at once. That is the reason I call such
lines _picturesque_.
[Illustration]
53.
I have a great admiration for power, a great terror of
weakness--especially in my own sex,--yet feel that my love is for those
who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation, through
excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength; for those
whose refinement and softness of nature mingling with high intellectual
power and the capacity for strong passion, present to me a problem to
solve, which, when solved, I take to my heart. The question is not,
which of the two diversities of character be the highest and best, but
which is most sympathetic with my own.
[Illustration]
54.
C---- told me, that some time ago, when poor Bethune the Scotch poet first
became known, and was in great hardship, C---- himself had collected a
little sum (about 30_l._), and sent it to him through his publishers.
Bethune wrote back to refuse it absolutely, and to say that, while he
had head and hands, he would not accept _charity_. C---- wrote to him in
answer, still anonymously, arguing against the principle, as founded in
false pride, &c. Now poor Bethune is dead, and the money is found
untouched,--left with a friend to be returned to the donors!
This sort of disgust and terror, which all finely constituted minds feel
with regard to pecuniary obligation,--my own utter repugnance to it, even
from the hands of those I most love,--makes one sad to think of. It gives
one such a miserable impression of our social humanity!
Goethe makes the same remark in the Wilhelm Meister:--"Es ist sonderbar
welch ein wunderliches Bedenken man sich macht, Geld von Freunden und
Gönnern anzunehmen, von denen man jede andere Gabe mit Dank und Freude
empfangen würde."
[Illustration]
55.
"In the celestial hierarchy, according to Dionysius Areopageta, the
angels of Love hold the first place, the angels of Light the second, and
the Thrones and Dominations the third. Among terrestrials, the
Intellects, which act through the imagination upon the heart of man--_i.
e._ poets and artists--may be accounted first in order; the merely
scientific intellects the second; and the merely ruling intellects--those
which apply themselves to the government of mankind, without the aid of
either science or imagination--will not be disparaged if they are placed
last."
All government, all exercise of power--no matter in what form--which is
not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny. It is not of
God, and shall not stand.
"A time will come when the operations of charity will no longer be
carried on by machinery, relentless, ponderous, indiscriminate, but by
human creatures, watchful, tearful, considerate, and wise."--_Westminster
Review._
[Illustration]
56.
"Those writers who never go further into a subject than is compatible
with making what they say indisputably clear to man, woman, and child,
may be the lights of _this_ age, but they will not be the lights of
_another_."
"It is not always necessary that truth should take a bodily form,--a
material palpable form. It is sometimes better that it should dwell
around us spiritually, creating harmony,--sounding through the air like
the solemn sweet tone of a bell."
[Illustration]
57.
Women are inclined to fall in love with priests and physicians, because
of the help and comfort they derive from both in perilous moral and
physical maladies. They believe in the presence of real pity, real
sympathy, where the tone and look of each have become merely habitual
and conventional,--I may say professional. On the other hand, women are
inclined to fall in love with criminal and miserable men out of the pity
which in our sex is akin to love, and out of the power of bestowing
comfort or love. "Car les femmes out un instinct céleste pour le
malheur." So, in the first instance, they love from gratitude or faith;
in the last, from compassion or hope.
[Illustration]
58.
"Men of all countries," says Sir James Mackintosh, "appear to be more
alike in their best qualities than the pride of civilisation would be
willing to allow."
And in their _worst_. The distinction between savage and civilised
humanity lies not in the _qualities_, but the _habits_.
59.
Coleridge notices "the increase in modern times of vicious associations
with things in themselves indifferent," as a sign of unhealthiness in
taste, in feeling, in conscience.
The truth of this remark is particularly illustrated in the French
literature of the last century.
[Illustration]
60.
"And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
understanding also after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation,
a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at
the moment unpaid loss and unpayable, but the sure years reveal the deep
remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend,
wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later
assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates a
revolution in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or youth
which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a
household, or a style of living, and allows the formation of new
influences that prove of the first importance during the next
years."--_Emerson._
[Illustration]
61.
Religion, in its general sense, is properly the comprehension and
acknowledgment of an unseen spiritual power and the soul's allegiance
to it; and CHRISTIANITY, in its particular sense, is the comprehension
and appreciation of the personal character of Christ, and the heart's
allegiance to that.
[Illustration]
62.
Avarice is to the intellect what _sensuality_ is to the morals. It is an
intellectual form of sensuality, inasmuch as it is the passion for the
acquisition, the enjoyment in the possession, of a palpable, tangible,
selfish pleasure; and it would have the same tendency to unspiritualise,
to degrade, and to harden the higher faculties that a course of grosser
sensualism would have to corrupt the lower faculties. Both dull the edge
of all that is fine and tender within us.
[Illustration]
63.
A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an
artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.
[Illustration]
As what we call Genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size
of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonising with
it the rest of the character.
"Though it burn our house down, who does not venerate fire?" says the
Hindoo proverb.
[Illustration]
64.
An elegant mind informing a graceful person is like a spirit lamp in an
alabaster vase, shedding round its own softened radiance and heightening
the beauty of its medium. An elegant mind in a plain ungraceful person
is like the same lamp enclosed in a vase of bronze; we may, if we
approach near enough, rejoice in its influence, though we may not behold
its radiance.
[Illustration]
65.
Landor, in a passage I was reading to-day, speaks of a language of
criticism, in which qualities should be graduated by colours; "as, for
instance, _purple_ might express grandeur and majesty of thought;
_scarlet_, vigour of expression; _pink_, liveliness; _green_, elegant
and equable composition, and so on."
_Blue_, then, might express contemplative power? _yellow_, wit?
_violet_, tenderness? and so on.
[Illustration]
66.
I quoted to A. the saying of a sceptical philosopher: "The world is but
one enormous WILL, constantly rushing into life."
"Is that," she responded quickly, "another new name for God?"
[Illustration]
67.
A death-bed repentance has become proverbial for its fruitlessness, and
a death-bed forgiveness equally so. They who wait till their own
death-bed to make reparation, or till their adversary's death-bed to
grant absolution, seem to me much upon a par in regard to the moral, as
well as the religious, failure.
[Illustration]
68.
A character endued with a large, vivacious, active intellect and a
limited range of sympathies, generally remains immature. We can grow
_wise_ only through the experience which reaches us through our
sympathies and becomes a part of our life. All other experience may be
gain, but it remains in a manner extraneous, adds to our possessions
without adding to our strength, and sharpens our implements without
increasing our capacity to use them.
Not always those who have the quickest, keenest, perception of character
are the best to deal with it, and perhaps for that very reason. Before
we can influence or deal with mind, contemplation must be lost in
sympathy, observation must be merged in love.
[Illustration]
69.
Montaigne, in his eloquent tirade against melancholy, observes that the
Italians have the same word, _Tristezza_, for melancholy and for
malignity or wickedness. The noun _Tristo_, "a wretch," has the double
sense of our English word corresponding with the French noun
_misérable_. So Judas Iscariot is called _quel tristo_. Our word
"wretchedness" is not, however, used in the double sense of _tristezza_.
[Illustration]
"On ne considère pas assez les paroles comme des faits:" that was well
said!
Since for the purpose of circulation and intercommunication we are
obliged to coin truth into words, we should be careful not to adulterate
the coin, to keep it pure, and up to the original standard of
significance and value, that it may be reconvertible into the truth it
represents.
If I use a term in a sense wherein I know it is not understood by the
person I address, then I am guilty of using words (in so far as they
represent truth), if not to ensnare intentionally, yet to mislead
consciously; it is like adulterating coin.
[Illustration]
"Common people," said Johnson, "do not accurately adapt their words to
their thoughts, nor their thoughts to the objects;"--that is to say, they
neither apprehend truly nor speak truly--and in this respect children,
half-educated women, and ill-educated men, are the "common people."
It is one of the most serious mistakes in Education that we are not
sufficiently careful to habituate children to the accurate use of words.
Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth. If we looked into
the matter we should probably find that all the varieties and
modifications of conscious and unconscious lying--as exaggeration,
equivocation, evasion, misrepresentation--might be traced to the early
misuse of words; therefore the contemptuous, careless tone in which
people say sometimes "words--words--mere words!" is unthinking and unwise.
It tends to debase the value of that which is the only medium of the
inner life between man and man: "Nous ne sommes hommes, et nous ne
tenons les uns aux autres, que par la parole," said Montaigne.
[Illustration]
70.
"We are happy, good, tranquil, in proportion as our inner life is
accessible to the external life, and in harmony with it. When we become
dead to the moving life of Nature around us, to the changes of day and
night (I do not speak here of the sympathetic influences of our
fellow-creatures), then we may call ourselves philosophical, but we are
surely either bad or mad."
"Or perhaps only sad?"
There are moments in the life of every contemplative being, when the
healing power of Nature is felt--even as Wordsworth describes it--felt in
the blood, in every pulse along the veins. In such moments converse,
sympathy, the faces, the presence of the dearest, come so near to us,
they make us shrink; books, pictures, music, anything, any object which
has passed through the medium of mind, and has been in a manner
humanised, is felt as an intrusive reflection of the busy, weary,
thought-worn self within us. Only Nature, speaking through no
interpreter, gently steals us out of our humanity, giving us a foretaste
of that more diffused disembodied life which may hereafter be ours.
Beautiful and genial, and not wholly untrue, were the old superstitions
which placed a haunting divinity in every grove, and heard a living
voice responsive in every murmuring stream.
This present Sunday I set off with the others to walk to church, but it
was late; I could not keep up with the pedestrians, and, not to delay
them, turned back. I wandered down the hill path to the river brink, and
crossed the little bridge and strolled along, pensive yet with no
definite or continuous subject of thought. How beautiful it was--how
tranquil! not a cloud in the blue sky, not a breath of air! "And where
the dead leaf fell there did it rest;" but so still it was that scarce a
single leaf did flutter or fall, though the narrow pathway along the
water's edge was already encumbered with heaps of decaying foliage.
Everywhere around, the autumnal tints prevailed, except in one sheltered
place under the towering cliff, where a single tree, a magnificent
lime, still flourished in summer luxuriance, with not a leaf turned or
shed. I stood still opposite, looking on it quietly for a long time. It
seemed to me a happy tree, so fresh and fair and grand, as if its
guardian Dryad would not suffer it to be defaced. Then I turned, for
close beside me sounded the soft, interrupted, half-suppressed warble of
a bird, sitting on a leafless spray, which seemed to bend with its tiny
weight. Some lines which I used to love in my childhood came into my
mind, blending softly with the presences around me.
"The little bird now to salute the morn
Upon the naked branches sets her foot,
The leaves still lying at the mossy root,
And there a silly chirruping doth keep,
As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep;
Praising fair summer that too soon is gone,
And sad for winter, too soon coming on!" _Drayton._
The river, where I stood, taking an abrupt turn, ran wimpling by; not as
I had seen it but a few days before,--rolling tumultuously, the dead
leaves whirling in its eddies, swollen and turbid with the mountain
torrents, making one think of the kelpies, the water wraiths, and such
uncanny things,--but gentle, transparent, and flashing in the low
sunlight; even the barberries, drooping with rich crimson clusters over
the little pools near the bank, and reflected in them as in a mirror, I
remember vividly as a part of the exquisite loveliness which seemed to
melt into my life. For such moments we are grateful: we feel then what
God _can_ do for us, and what man can not.--_Carolside, November 5th,
1843._
[Illustration]
71.
"In the early ages of faith, the spirit of Christianity glided into and
gave a new significance to the forms of heathenism. It was not the forms
of heathenism which encrusted and overlaid the spirit of Christianity,
for in that case the spirit would have burst through such extraneous
formulæ, and set them aside at once and for ever."
[Illustration]
72.
Questions. In the execution of the penal statutes, can the individual
interest of the convict be reconciled with the interest of society? or
must the good of the convict and the good of society be considered as
inevitably and necessarily opposed?--the one sacrificed to the other, and
at the best only a compromise possible?
This is a question pending at present, and will require wise heads to
decide it? How would Christ have decided it? When He set the poor
accused woman free, was He considering the good of the culprit or the
good of society? and how far are we bound to follow His example? If He
consigned the wicked to weeping and gnashing of teeth, was it for
atonement or retribution, punishment or penance? and how far are we
bound to follow His example?
[Illustration]
73.
I marked the following passage in Montaigne as most curiously applicable
to the present times, in so far as our religious contests are concerned;
and I leave it in his quaint old French.
"C'est un effet de la Providence divine de permettre sa saincte Eglise
être agitée, comme nous la voyons, de tant de troubles et d'orages, pour
éveiller par ce contraste les âmes pies et les ravoir de l'oisiveté et
du sommeil ou les avail plongées une si longue tranquillité. Si nous
contrepèsons la perte que nous avons faite par le nombre de ceux qui se
sont dévoyés, au gain qui nous vient par nous être remis en haleine,
ressuscité notre zêle et nos forces à l'occasion de ce combat, je ne
sais si l'utilité ne surmonte point le dommage."
[Illustration]
74.
"They (the friends of Cassius) were divided in opinion,--some holding
that servitude was the extreme of evils, and others that tyranny was
better than civil war."
Unhappy that nation, wherever it may be, where the question is yet
pending between servitude and civil war! such a nation might be driven
to solve the problem after the manner of Cassius--with the dagger's
point.
"Surely," said Moore, "it is wrong for the lovers of liberty to identify
the principle of resistance to power with such an odious person as the
devil!"
[Illustration]
75.
"Where the question is of a great deal of good to ensue from a small
injustice, men must pursue the things which are just in present, and
leave the future to Divine Providence."
This so simple rule of right is seldom attended to as a rule of life
till we are placed in some strait in which it is forced upon us.
[Illustration]
76.
A woman's patriotism is more of a sentiment than a man's,--more
passionate: it is only an extension of the domestic affections, and with
her _la patrie_ is only an enlargement of _home_. In the same manner, a
woman's idea of fame is always a more extended sympathy, and is much
more of a presence than an anticipation. To her the voice of fame is
only the echo--fainter and more distant--of the voice of love.
[Illustration]
77.
"La doute s'introduit dans l'âme qui rêve, la foi descend dans l'âme qui
souffre."
The reverse is equally true,--and judging from my own experience, I
should say oftener true.
[Illustration]
78.
"La curiosité est si voisine à la perfidie qu'elle peut enlaidir les
plus beaux visages."
[Illustration]
79.
When I told Tieck of the death of Coleridge (I had just received the sad
but not unexpected news in a letter from England), he exclaimed with
emotion, "A great spirit has passed away from the earth, and has left no
adequate memorial of its greatness." Speaking of him afterwards he said,
"Coleridge possessed the creative and inventive spirit of poetry, not
the productive; he _thought_ too much to produce,--the analytical power
interfered with the genius: Others with more active faculties seized and
worked out his magnificent hints and ideas. Walter Scott and Lord Byron
borrowed the first idea of the form and spirit of their narrative poems
from Coleridge's 'Christabelle.'" This judgment of one great poet and
critic passed on another seemed to me worth preserving.
[Illustration]
80.
Coleridge says, "In politics what begins in fear usually ends in folly."
He might have gone farther, and added: In morals what begins in fear
usually ends in wickedness. In religion what begins in fear usually ends
in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning
of all evil.
[Illustration]
In another place he says,--
"Talent lying in the understanding is often inherited; genius, being the
action of reason and imagination, rarely or never."
There seems confusion here, for genius lies not in the amount of
intellect--it is a quality of the intellect apart from quantity. And the
distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and
uses; genius combines and creates.
[Illustration]
Of Sara Coleridge, Mr. Kenyon said very truly and beautifully, "that
like her father she had the controversial _intellect_ without the
controversial _spirit_."
[Illustration]
81.
We all remember the famous _bon mot_ of Talleyrand. When seated between
Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier, and pouring forth gallantry, first
at the feet of one, then of the other, Madame de Staël suddenly asked
him if she and Madame Récamier fell into the river, which of the two he
would save first? "Madame," replied Talleyrand, "je crois que vous savez
nager!" Now we will match this pretty _bon mot_ with one far prettier,
and founded on it. Prince S., whom I knew formerly, was one day
loitering on the banks of the Isar, in the English garden at Munich, by
the side of the beautiful Madame de V., then the object of his devoted
admiration. For a while he had been speaking to her of his mother, for
whom, _vaurien_ as he was, he had ever shown the strongest filial love
and respect. Afterwards, as they wandered on, he began to pour forth his
soul to the lady of his love with all the eloquence of passion. Suddenly
she turned and said to him, "If your mother and myself were both to fall
into this river, whom would you save first?" "My mother!" he instantly
replied; and then, looking at her expressively, immediately added, "To
save _you_ first would be as if I were to save _myself_ first!"
[Illustration]
82.
If we were not always bringing ourselves into comparison with others, we
should know them better.
[Illustration]
83.
There are ways of governing every mind which lies within the circle
described by our own; the only question is, whether the means required
be such as we _can_ use? and if so, whether we shall think it right to
do so?
You think I do not know you, or that I mistake you utterly, because I am
actuated by the impulses of my own nature, rather than by my perception
of the impulses of yours? It is not so.
If we would retain our own consistency, without which there is no moral
strength, we must stand firm upon our own moral life.
"Be true unto thyself;
And it shall follow as the night to day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
But to be true to others as well as ourselves, is not merely to allow to
them the same independence, but to sympathise with it. Unhappily here
lies the chief difficulty. There are brains so large that they
unconsciously swamp all individualities which come in contact or too
near, and brains so small that they cannot take in the conception of any
other individuality as a whole, only in part or parts. As in Religion,
where there is a strong, sincere, definite faith, there is generally
more or less intolerance; so in character, where there is strong
individuality, self-assurance, and defined principles of action, there
is usually something hard and intolerant of the individuality of others.
In some characters we meet with, toleration is a principle of the
reason, and intolerance a quality of the mind, and then the whole being
strikes a discord.
[Illustration]
84.
If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the
more. It is as if the principle, that conflict is a necessary law of
progress, were applicable even to love. For there is no love like that
which has roused up the intensest feelings of our nature,--revealed us to
ourselves, like lightning suddenly disclosing an abyss,--yet has survived
all the storm and tumult of such passionate discord and all the terror
of such a revelation.
[Illustration]
85.
F has much, much to learn! Through power, through passion, through
feeling we do much, but only through observation, reflection, and
sympathy we learn much; hence it is that minds highly gifted often
remain immature. Artist minds especially, so long as they live only or
chiefly for their art, their faculties bent on creating or representing,
remain immature on one side--the reasoning and reflecting side of the
character.
[Illustration]
86.
Said a Frenchman of his adversary, "Il se croit supérieur à moi de toute
la hauteur de sa bêtise!" There is a mingled felicity, politeness, and
acrimony, in this phrase quite untranslatable.
87.
It is a pity that we have no words to express the French distinction
between _rêver_ and _rêvasser_. The one implies meditation on a definite
subject: the other the abandonment of the mind to vague discussion,
aimless thoughts.
[Illustration]
88.
It seems to me that the conversation of the first converser in the world
would _tire_ me, _pall_ on me at last, where I am not sure of the
sincerity. Talk without truth is the hollow brass; talk without love is
like the tinkling cymbal, and where it does not tinkle it gingles, and
where it does not gingle, it jars.
[Illustration]
89.
There are few things more striking, more interesting to a thoughtful
mind, than to trace through all the poetry, literature, and art of the
Middle Ages that broad ever-present distinction between the practical
and the contemplative life. This was, no doubt, suggested and kept in
view by the one grand division of the whole social community into those
who were devoted to the religious profession (an immense proportion of
both sexes) and those who were not. All through Dante, all through the
productions of mediæval art, we find this pervading idea; and we must
understand it well and keep it in mind, or we shall never be able to
apprehend the entire beauty and meaning of certain religious groups in
sculpture and painting, and the significance of the characters
introduced. Thus, in subjects from the Old Testament, Leah always
represents the practical, Rachel, the contemplative life. In the New
Testament, Martha and Mary figure in the same allegorical sense; and
among the saints we always find St. Catharine and St. Clara patronising
the religious and contemplative life, while St. Barbara and St. Ursula
preside over the military or secular existence. It was a part, and a
very important part, of that beautiful and expressive symbolism through
which art in all its forms spoke to the popular mind.
For myself, I have the strongest admiration for the _practical_, but the
strongest sympathy with the _contemplative_ life. I bow to Leah and to
Martha, but my love is for Rachel and for Mary.
[Illustration]
90.
Bettina does not describe nature, she informs it, with her own life: she
seems to live in the elements, to exist in the fire, the air, the water,
like a sylph, a gnome, an elf; she does not contemplate nature, she _is_
nature; she is like the bird in the air, the fish in the sea, the
squirrel in the wood. It is one thing to describe nature, and quite
another unconsciously so to inform nature with a portion of our own
life.
[Illustration]
91.
Joanna Baillie had a great admiration of Macaulay's Roman Ballads.
"But," said some one, "do you really account them as poetry?" She
replied, "They _are_ poetry if the sounds of the trumpet be music!"
[Illustration]
92.
All my own experience of life teaches me the _contempt_ of cunning, not
the _fear_. The phrase "profound cunning" has always seemed to me a
contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either
shallow, or on some point diseased. People dissemble sometimes who yet
hate dissembling, but a "cunning mind" emphatically delights in its own
cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning. That "pleasure in deceiving
and aptness to be deceived" usually go together, was one of the wise
sayings of the wisest of men.
[Illustration]
93.
It was a saying of Paracelsus, that "Those who would understand the
course of the heavens above must first of all recognise the heaven in
man:" meaning, I suppose, that all pursuit of knowledge which is not
accompanied by praise of God and love of our fellow-creatures must turn
to bitterness, emptiness, foolishness. We must imagine him to have come
to this conclusion only late in life.
Browning, in that wonderful poem of Paracelsus,--a poem in which there is
such a profound far-seeing philosophy, set forth with such a luxuriance
of illustration and imagery, and such a wealth of glorious eloquence,
that I know nothing to be compared with it since Goethe and
Wordsworth,--represents his aspiring philosopher as at first impelled
solely by the appetite to _know_. He asks nothing of men, he despises
them; but he will serve them, raise them, after a sort of God-like
fashion, independent of their sympathy, scorning their applause, using
them like instruments, cheating them like children,--all for their good;
but it will not do. In Aprile, "who would love infinitely, and be
beloved," is figured the type of the poet-nature, desiring only beauty,
resolving all into beauty; while in Paracelsus we have the type of the
reflecting, the inquiring mind desiring only knowledge, resolving all
into knowledge, asking nothing more to crown his being. And both find
out their mistake; both come to feel that love without knowledge is
blind and weak, and knowledge without love barren and vain.
"I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE,
Excluding love as thou refused'st knowledge;
Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake!
* * * * *
"Are we not halves of one dissever'd world,
Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part?--Never!
Till thou, the lover, know, and I, the knower,
Love--until both are saved!"
After all, perhaps, only the same old world-renowned myth in another
form--the marriage of Cupid and Psyche; Love and Intelligence long
parted, long suffering, again embracing, and lighted on by Beauty to an
immortal union. But to return to our poet. Aprile, exhausted by his own
aimless, dazzling visions, expires on the bosom of him who knows; and
Paracelsus, who began with a selfsufficing scorn of his kind, dies a
baffled and degraded man in the arms of him who loves;--yet wiser in his
fall than through his aspirations, he dies trusting in the progress of
humanity so long as humanity is content to be _human_; to _love_ as well
as to _know_;--to fear, to hope, to worship, as well as to aspire.
[Illustration]
94.
Lord Bacon says: "I like a plantation (in the sense of colony) in a
_pure_ soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to
plant in others: for else it is rather an extirpation than a
plantation." (Bacon, who wrote this, counselled to James I. the
plantation of Ulster exactly on the principle he has here deprecated.)
He adds, "It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of
people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant"
(_i. e._ colonise). And it is only now that our politicians are
beginning to discover and act upon this great moral truth and obvious
fitness of things!--like Bacon, adopting practically, and from mere
motives of expediency, a principle they would theoretically abjure!
[Illustration]
95.
Because in real life we cannot, or do not, reconcile the high theory
with the low practice, we use our wit to render the theory ridiculous,
and our reason to reconcile us to the practice. We ought to do just the
reverse.
[Illustration]
Many would say, if they spoke the truth, that it had cost them a
life-long effort to unlearn what they had been taught.
For as the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so
through social conventionalism the conscience becomes blinded to
positive immorality.
It is fatal in any mind to make the moral standard for men high and the
moral standard for women low, or _vice versâ_. This has appeared to me
the very commonest of all mistakes in men and women who have lived much
in the world, but _fatal_ nevertheless, and in three ways; first, as
distorting the moral ideal, so far as it exists in the conscience;
secondly, as perplexing the bounds, practically, of right and wrong;
thirdly, as being at variance with the spirit and principles of
Christianity. Admit these premises, and it follows inevitably that such
a mistake is _fatal_ in the last degree, as disturbing the consistency
and the elevation of the character, morally, practically, religiously.
Akin to this mistake, or identical with it, is the belief that there are
essential masculine and feminine virtues and vices. It is not, in fact,
the quality itself, but the modification of the quality, which is
masculine or feminine: and on the manner or degree in which these are
balanced and combined in the individual, depends the perfection of that
individual character--its approximation to that of Christ. I firmly
believe that as the influences of religion are extended, and as
civilisation advances, those qualities which are now admired as
essentially _feminine_ will be considered as essentially _human_, such
as gentleness, purity, the more unselfish and spiritual sense of duty,
and the dominance of the affections over the passions. This is, perhaps,
what Buffon, speaking as a naturalist, meant, when he said that with
the progress of humanity, "_Les races se féminisent_;" at least I
understand the phrase in this sense.
A man who requires from his own sex manly direct truth, and laughs at
the cowardly subterfuges and small arts of women as being _feminine_;--a
woman who requires from her own sex tenderness and purity, and thinks
ruffianism and sensuality pardonable in a man as being
_masculine_,--these have repudiated the Christian standard of morals
which Christ, in his own person, bequeathed to us--that standard which we
have accepted as Christians--theoretically at least--and which makes no
distinction between "the highest, holiest manhood," and the highest,
holiest womanhood.
I might illustrate this position not only scripturally but
philosophically, by quoting the axiom of the Greek philosopher
Antisthenes, the disciple of Socrates,--"The virtue of the man and the
woman is the same;" which shows a perception of the moral truth, a sort
of anticipation of the Christian doctrine, even in the pagan times. But
I prefer an illustration which is at once practical and poetical, and
plain to the most prejudiced among men or women.
Every reader of Wordsworth will recollect, if he does not know by heart,
the poem entitled "The Happy Warrior." It has been quoted often as an
epitome of every manly, soldierly, and elevated quality. I have heard it
applied to the Duke of Wellington. Those who make the experiment of
merely substituting the word _woman_ for the word _warrior_, and
changing the feminine for the masculine pronoun, will find that it reads
equally well; that almost from beginning to end it is literally as
applicable to the one sex as to the other. As thus:--
CHARACTER OF THE HAPPY WOMAN.
Who is the happy _woman_? Who is _she_
That every _woman_ born should wish to be?
It is the generous spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, had wrought
Upon the plan that pleased _her_ childish thought;
Whose high endeavours are an inward light,
That make the path before _her_ always bright:
Who, with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;
Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,
But makes _her_ moral being _her_ prime care;
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Sorrow, miserable train!
Turns _that_ necessity to glorious gain;
In face of these doth exercise a power
Which is our human nature's highest dower:
Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves
Of their bad influence, and their good receives;
By objects, which might force the soul to abate
_Her_ feeling, rendered more compassionate;
Is placable--because occasions rise
So often that demand such sacrifice;
More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure
As tempted more; more able to endure,
As more exposed to suffering and distress;
Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.
'Tis _she_ whose law is reason; who depends
Upon that law as on the best of friends;
Whence in a state where men are tempted still
To evil for a guard against worse ill,
And what in quality or act is best,
Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,
_She_ fixes good on good alone, and owes
To virtue every triumph that _she_ knows.
Who, if _she_ rise to station of command,
Rises by open means; and there will stand
On honourable terms, or else retire.
* * * * *
Who comprehends _her_ trust, and to the same
Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim;
And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait
For wealth, or honours, or for worldly state;
Whom they must follow; on whose head must fall
Like showers of manna, if they come at all:
Whose powers shed round _her_ in the common strife
Or mild concerns of ordinary life,
A constant influence, a peculiar grace;
But who, if _she_ be called upon to face
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
Great issue, good or bad for human kind,
Is happy as a lover; and attired
With sudden brightness, like to one inspired;
And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what _she_ foresaw;
Or if an unexpected call succeed,
Come when it will, is equal to the need!
In all these fifty-six lines there is only one line which cannot be
feminised in its significance,--that which I have filled up with
asterisks, and which is totally at variance with our ideal of A HAPPY
WOMAN. It is the line--
"And in himself possess his own desire."
No woman could exist happily or virtuously in such complete independence
of all external affections as these words express. "Her desire is to her
husband,"--this is the sort of subjection prophesied for the daughters of
Eve. A woman doomed to exist without this earthly rest for her
affections, does not "in herself possess her own desire;" she turns
towards God; and if she does not make her life a life of worship, she
makes it a life of charity, (which in itself is worship,) or she dies a
spiritual and a moral death. Is it much better with the man who
concentrates his aspirations in himself? I should think not.
[Illustration]
Swift, as a man and a writer, is one of those who had least sympathy
with women; and I have sometimes thought that the exaggeration, even to
morbidity, of the coarse and the cruel in his character, arose from this
want of sympathy; but his strong sense showed him the one great moral
truth as regards the two sexes, and gave him the courage to avow it.
He says, "I am ignorant of any one quality that is amiable in a woman
which is not equally so in a man. I do not except even modesty and
gentleness of nature; nor do I know one vice or folly which is not
equally detestable in both." Then, remarking that cowardice is an
_infirmity_ generally allowed to women, he wonders that they should
fancy it becoming or graceful, or think it worth improving by
affectation, particularly as it is generally allied to cruelty.
Here is a passage from one of Humboldt's letters, which I have seen
quoted with sympathy and admiration, as applied to the manly character
only:--
"Masculine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first
requisite for the formation of a character of real manly worth. The man
who suffers himself to be deceived and carried away by his own weakness,
may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be called a
good man; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a woman, for
a truly beautiful and purely feminine nature should be attracted only by
what is highest and noblest in the character of man."
Now we will take this bit of moral philosophy, and, without the
slightest alteration of the context, apply it to the female character.
"Feminine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first
requisite for the formation of a character of real feminine worth. The
woman who allows herself to be deceived and carried away by her own
weakness may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be
called a good woman; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a
man, for the truly beautiful and purely manly nature should be attracted
only by what is highest and noblest in the character of woman."
After reading the above extracts, does it not seem clear, that by the
exclusive or emphatic use of certain phrases and epithets, as more
applicable to one sex than to the other, we have introduced a most
un-christian confusion into the conscience, and have prejudiced it early
against the acceptance of the larger truth?
It might seem, that where we reject the distinction between masculine
and feminine virtues, one and the same type of perfection should suffice
for the two sexes; yet it is clear that the moment we come to consider
the personality, the same type will not suffice: and it is worth
consideration that when we place before us the highest type of manhood,
as exemplified in Christ, we do not imagine him as the father, but as
the son; and if we think of the most perfect type of womanhood, we never
can exclude the mother.
Montaigne deals with the whole question in his own homely
straightforward fashion:--
"Je dis que les mâles et les fémelles sont jettés en même moule; sauf
l'institution et l'usage la différence n'y est pas grande. Platon
appelle indifféremment les uns et les autres à la société de touts
études, exercises, charges, et vocations guerrières et paisibles en sa
république, et le philosophe Antisthènes ôtait toute distinction entre
leur vertu et la nôtre. Il est bien plus aisé d'accuser un sexe que
d'excuser l'autre: c'est ce qu'on dit, 'le fourgon se moque de la
poële.'"
Not that I agree with Plato,--rather would leave all the fighting,
military and political, if there must be fighting, to the men.
[Illustration]
Among the absurdities talked about women, one hears, perhaps, such an
aphorism as the following quoted with a sort of ludicrous
complacency,--"The woman's strength consists in her weakness!" as if it
were not the weakness of a woman which makes her in her violence at once
so aggravating and so contemptible, in her dissimulation at once so
shallow and so dangerous, and in her vengeance at once so cowardly and
so cruel.
[Illustration]
I should not say, from my experience of my own sex, that a woman's
nature is flexible and impressible, though her feelings are. I know
very few instances of a very inferior man ruling the mind of a superior
woman, whereas I know twenty--fifty--of a very inferior woman ruling a
superior man. If he love her, the chances are that she will in the end
weaken and demoralise him. If a superior woman marry a vulgar or
inferior man he makes her miserable, but he seldom governs her mind, or
vulgarises her nature, and if there be love on his side the chances are
that in the end she will elevate and refine him.
The most dangerous man to a woman is a man of high intellectual
endowments morally perverted; for in a woman's nature there is such a
necessity to approve where she admires, and to believe where she
loves,--a devotion compounded of love and faith is so much a part of her
being,--that while the instincts remain true and the feelings
uncorrupted, the conscience and the will may both be led far astray.
Thus fell "our general mother,"--type of her sex,--overpowered, rather
than deceived, by the colossal intellect,--half serpent, half angelic.
[Illustration]
Coleridge speaks, and with a just indignant scorn, of those who consider
chastity as if it were a _thing_--a thing which might be lost or kept by
external accident--a thing of which one might be robbed, instead of a
state of being. According to law and custom, the chastity of Woman is as
the property of Man, to whom she is accountable for it, rather than to
God and her own conscience. Whatever people may say, such is the common,
the social, the legal view of the case. It is a remnant of Oriental
barbarism. It tends to much vice, or, at the best, to a low standard of
morality, in both sexes. This idea of property in the woman survives
still in our present social state, particularly among the lower orders,
and is one cause of the ill treatment of wives. All those who are
particularly acquainted with the manners and condition of the people
will testify to this; namely, that when a child or any weaker individual
is ill treated, those standing by will interfere and protect the victim;
but if the sufferer be _the wife_ of the oppressor, it is a point of
etiquette to look on, to take no part in the fray, and to leave the
brute man to do what he likes "with his own." Even the victim herself,
if she be not pummelled to death, frequently deprecates such an
interference with the dignity and the rights of her owner. Like the poor
woman in the "Médecin malgré lui:"--"Voyez un peu cet impertinent qui
vent empêcher les maris de battre leurs femmes!--et si je veux qu'il me
batte, moi?"--and so ends by giving her defender a box on the ear.
[Illustration]
"Au milieu de tous les obstacles que la nature et la société out semés
sur les pas de la femme, la seule condition de repos pour elle est de
s'entourer de barrières que les passions ne puissent franchir; incapable
de s'approprier l'existence, elle est toujours semblable a la Chinoise
dont les pieds ont été mutilés et pour laquelle toute liberté est un
leurre, toute espace ouverte une cause de chute. En attendant que
l'éducation ait donné aux femmes leur véritable place, malheur à celles
qui brisent les lisses accoutumées! pour elles l'indépendance ne sera,
comme la gloire, qu'un deuil éclatant du bonheur!"--_B. Constant._
This also is one of those common-places of well-sounding eloquence, in
which a fallacy is so wrapt up in words we have to dig it out. If this
be true, it is true only so long as you compress the feet and compress
the intellect,--no longer.
Here is another:--
"L'expérience lui avait appris que quel que fut leur âge, ou leur
caractère, toutes les femmes vivaient avec le même rêve, et qu'elles
avaient toutes au fond du coeur un roman commencé dont elles attendaient
jusqu'à la mort le héros, comme les juifs attendent le Messie."
This "roman commencé," (et qui ne finit jamais), is true as regards
women who are idle, and who have not replaced dreams by duties. And what
are the "barrières" which passion cannot overleap, from the moment it
has subjugated the will? How fine, how true that scene in Calderon's
"Magico Prodigioso," where Justina conquers the fiend only by not
_consenting_ to ill!
----"This agony
Of passion which afflicts my heart and soul
May sweep imagination in its storm;
The will is firm."
And the baffled demon shrinks back,--
"Woman, thou hast subdued me
Only by not owning thyself subdued!"
[Illustration]
A friend of mine was once using some mincing elegancies of language to
describe a high degree of moral turpitude, when a man near her
interposed, with stern sarcasm, "Speak out! Give things their proper
names! _Half words are the perdition of women!_"
[Illustration]
"I observe," said Sydney Smith, "that _generally_ about the age of
forty, women get tired of being virtuous and men of being honest." This
was said and received with a laugh as one of his good things; but, like
many of his good things, how dreadfully true! And why? because,
_generally_, education has made the virtue of the woman and the honesty
of the man a matter of external opinion, not a law of the inward life.
[Illustration]
Dante, in his lowest hell, has placed those who have betrayed women; and
in the lowest deep of the lowest deep those who have betrayed trust.
[Illustration]
Inveterate sensuality, which has the effect of utterly stupifying and
brutifying lower minds, gives to natures more sensitively or more
powerfully organised a horrible dash of ferocity. For there is an awful
relation between animal blood-thirstiness and the proneness to
sensuality, and in some sensualists a sort of feline propensity to
torment and lacerate the prey they have not the appetite to devour.
[Illustration]
"La Chevalerie faisait une tentative qui n'a jamais réussi, quoique
souvent essayée; la tentative de se servir des passions humaines, et
particulièrement de l'amour pour conduire l'homme à la vertu. Dans cette
route l'homme s'arrête toujours en chemin. L'amour inspire beaucoup de
bons sentiments--le courage, le dévouement, le sacrifice des biens et de
la vie; mais il ne se sacrifie pas lui-même, et c'est là que la
faiblesse humaine reprend ses droits."--_St. Marc-Girardin._
I am not sure that this well-sounding remark is true--or, if true, it is
true of the mere passion, not of love in its highest phase, which is
self-sacrificing, which has its essence in the capability of
self-sacrifice.
"Love was given,
Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end;
For this the passion to excess was driven,
That _self_ might be annull'd."
[Illustration]
In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear, there is a
strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell next door to
hate; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such
intense haters.
[Illustration]
Our present social opinion says to the man, "You may be a vulgar brutal
sensualist, and use the basest means to attain the basest ends; but so
long as you do not offend against conventional good manners you shall be
held blameless." And to the woman it says, "You shall be guilty of
nothing but of yielding to the softest impulses of tenderness, of
relenting pity; but if you cannot add hypocrisy you shall be punished as
the most desperate criminal."
[Illustration]
96.
"It is worthy of notice that the external expressions appropriated to
certain feelings undergo change at different periods of life and in
different constitutions. The child cries and sobs from fear or pain, the
adult more generally from sudden grief or warm affection, or sympathy
with the feeling of others."--_Dr. Holland._
Those who have been accustomed to observe the ways of children will
doubt the accuracy of this remark, though from the high authority of
one of the most accomplished physiologists of our time. Children cry
from grief, and from sympathy with grief, at a very early age. I have
seen an infant in its mother's arms, before it could speak, begin to
whimper and cry when it looked up in her face, which was disturbed and
bathed with tears; and that has always appeared to me an exquisite touch
of most truthful nature in Wordsworth's description of the desolation of
Margaret:--
"Her little child
Had from its mother caught the trick of grief,
And sighed amid its playthings."
[Illustration]
97.
"LETTERS," said Sir James Mackintosh, "must not be on a subject. Lady
Mary Wortley's letters on her journey to Constantinople are an admirable
book of travels, but they are not letters. A meeting to discuss a
question of science is not conversation, nor are papers written to
another to inform or discuss, letters. Conversation is relaxation, not
business, and must never appear to be occupation;--nor must letters."
"A masculine character may be a defect in a female, but a masculine
genius is still a praise to a writer of whatever sex. The feminine
graces of Madame de Sevigné's genius are exquisitely charming, but the
philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Staël are above the distinctions
of sex."
[Illustration]
98.
OF the wars between Napoleon and the Holy Alliance, Madame de Staël once
said with most admirable and prophetic sense:--"It is a contest between a
_man_ who is the enemy of liberty, and a _system_ which is equally its
enemy." But it is easier to get rid of a man than of a system: witness
the Russians, who assassinate their czars one after another, but cannot
get rid of their _system_.
[Illustration]
99.
The Empress Elizabeth of Russia during the war with Sweden commanded the
old Hetman of the Cossacks to come to court on his way to Finland. "If
the Emperor, your father," said the Hetman, "had taken my advice, your
Majesty would not now have been annoyed by the Swedes." "What was your
advice?" asked the Empress. "To put all the nobility to death, and
transplant the people into Russia." "But that," said the Empress, "would
have been cruel!" "I do not see that," he replied quietly; "they are all
dead now, and they would only have been dead if my advice had been
taken."
Something strangely comprehensive and unanswerable in this barbarian
logic!
[Illustration]
100.
IT was the Abbé Boileau who said of the Jesuits, that they had
lengthened the Creed and shortened the Decalogue. The same witty
ecclesiastic being asked why he always wrote in Latin, took a pinch of
snuff, and answered gravely, "Why, for fear the bishops should read
me!"
101.
When Talleyrand once visited a certain reprobate friend of his, who was
ill of cholera, the patient exclaimed in his agony, "Je sens les
tourmens de l'enfer!"
"Déjà?" said Talleyrand.
Much in a word! I remember seeing a pretty French vaudeville wherein a
lady is by some accident or contrivance shut up perforce with a lover
she has rejected. She frets at the _contretemps_. He makes use of the
occasion to plead his cause. The cruel fair one will not relent. Still
he pleads--still she turns away. At length they are interrupted.
"Déjà!" exclaims the lady, in an accent we may suppose to be very
different from that of Talleyrand; and on the intonation of this one
word, pronounced as only an accomplished French actress could pronounce
it, depends the _dénouement_ of the piece.
[Illustration]
102.
Louis XVI. sent a distinguished physician over to England to inquire
into the management of our hospitals. He praised them much, but added,
"Il y manque deux choses; nos curés et nos hospitalières;" that is, he
felt the want of the religious element in the official and medical
treatment of the sick. A want which, I think, is felt at present and
will be supplied.
[Illustration]
103.
Those who have the largest horizon of thought, the most extended vision
in regard to the relation of things, are not remarkable for
self-reliance and ready judgment. A man who sees limitedly and clearly,
is more sure of himself, and more direct in his dealings with
circumstances and with others, than a man whose many-sided capacity
embraces an immense extent of objects and _objections_,--just as, they
say, a horse with blinkers more surely chooses his path, and is less
likely to shy.
[Illustration]
104.
What we truly and earnestly aspire _to be_, that in some sense we _are_.
The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment
realises itself.
[Illustration]
105.
There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when
they only feel.
[Illustration]
106.
There are moments when the liberty of the inner life, opposed to the
trammels of the outer, becomes too oppressive: moments when we wish that
our mental horizon were less extended, thought less free; when we long
to put the discursive soul into a narrow path like a railway, and force
it to run on in a straight line to some determined goal.
[Illustration]
107.
If the deepest and best affections which God has given us sometimes
brood over the heart like doves of peace,--they sometimes suck out our
life-blood like vampires.
[Illustration]
108.
To a Frenchman the words that express things seem often to suffice for
the things themselves, and he pronounces the words _amour_, _grâce_,
_sensibilité_, as if with a relish in his mouth--as if he tasted them--as
if he possessed them.
[Illustration]
109.
There are many good qualities, and valuable ones too, which hardly
deserve the name of virtues. The word Virtue was synonymous in the old
time with valour, and seems to imply contest; not merely passive
goodness, but active resistance to evil. I wonder sometimes why it is
that we so continually hear the phrase, "a virtuous woman," and scarcely
ever that of a "virtuous man," except in poetry or from the pulpit.
[Illustration]
110.
A Lie, though it be killed and dead, can sting sometimes,--like a dead
wasp.
111.
"On me dit toute la journée dans le monde, telle opinion, telle idée,
sont _reçues_. On ne sait donc pas qu'en fait d'opinion, et d'idées
j'aime beaucoup mieux les choses qui sont rejettées que celles qui sont
reçues?"
[Illustration]
112.
"Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some
eighteenpence a day, but for phantasy, planets and solar systems will
not suffice." And _thence_ do you infer the superiority of sense over
phantasy? Shallow reasoning! God who made the soul of man of sufficient
capacity to embrace whole worlds and systems of worlds, gave us thereby
a foretaste of our immortality.
[Illustration]
113.
"Faith in the _hereafter_ is as necessary for the intellectual as the
moral character, and to the man of letters as well as to the Christian,
the present forms but the slightest portion of his
existence."--_Southey._
Goethe did not think so. "Genutzt dem Augenblick," "_Use_ the present,"
was _his_ favourite maxim; and always this notion of sacrificing or
slighting the present seems to me a great mistake. It ought to be the
most important part of our existence, as it is the only part of it over
which we have power. It is in the present only that we absolve the past
and lay the foundation for the future.
[Illustration]
114.
"Je allseitigen, je individueller," is a beautiful significant phrase,
quite untranslateable, used, I think, by Rahel (Madame Varnhagen). It
means that the more the mind can multiply on every side its capacities
of thinking and feeling, the more individual, the more original, that
mind becomes.
[Illustration]
115.
"I wonder," said C., "that facts should be called _stubborn_ things." I
wonder, too, seeing you can always oppose a fact with another fact, and
that nothing is so easy as to twist, pervert, and argue or misrepresent
a fact into twenty different forms. "Il n'y a rien qui s'arrange aussi
facilement que les faits,"--Nothing so _tractable_ as facts,--said
Benjamin Constant. True; so long as facts are only material,--or as one
should say, mere matter of fact,--you can modify them to a purpose, turn
them upside down and inside out; but once vivify a fact with a feeling,
and it stands up before us a living and a very stubborn thing.
[Illustration]
116.
Every human being is born to influence some other human being; or many,
or all human beings, in proportion to the extent and power of the
sympathies, rather than of the intellect.
It was said, and very beautifully said, that "one man's wit becomes all
men's wisdom." Even more true is it that one man's virtue becomes a
standard which raises our anticipation of possible goodness in all men.
117.
It is curious that the memory, most retentive of images, should yet be
much more retentive of feelings than of facts: for instance, we remember
with such intense vividness a period of suffering, that it seems even to
renew itself through the medium of thought; yet, at the same time, we
perhaps find difficulty in recalling, with any distinctness, the causes
of that pain.
[Illustration]
118.
"Truth has never manifested itself to me in such a broad stream of light
as seems to be poured upon some minds. Truth has appeared to my mental
eye, like a vivid, yet small and trembling star in a storm, now
appearing for a moment with a beauty that enraptured, now lost in such
clouds, as, had I less faith, might make me suspect that the previous
clear sight had been a delusion."--_Blanco White._
Very exquisite in the aptness as well as poetry of the comparison! Some
walk by daylight, some walk by starlight. Those who see the sun do not
see the stars; those who see the stars do not see the sun.
He says in another place:--
"I am averse to too much activity of the imagination on the future life.
I hope to die full of confidence that no evil awaits me: but any picture
of a future life distresses me. I feel as if an eternity of existence
were already an insupportable burden on my soul."
How characteristic of that lassitude of the soul and sickness of the
heart which "asks not happiness, but longs for rest!"
[Illustration]
119.
"Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely stab or
suffocate their fame when God hath commanded them to stand on high for
an example."
[Illustration]
120.
Carlyle thus apostrophised a celebrated orator, who abused his gift of
eloquence to insincere purposes of vanity, self-interest, and
expediency:--"You blasphemous scoundrel! God gave you that gifted tongue
of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning
to us, not to be rattled like a muffin-man's bell!"
[Illustration]
121.
I think, with Carlyle, that a lie should be trampled on and extinguished
wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that
falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me. A. thinks this is too
_young_ a feeling, and that as the truth is sure to conquer in the end,
it is not worth while to fight every separate lie, or fling a torch into
every infected hole. Perhaps not, so far as we are ourselves concerned;
but we should think of others. While secure in our own antidote, or wise
in our own caution, we should not leave the miasma to poison the
healthful, or the briars to entangle the unwary. There is no occasion
perhaps for truth to sally forth like a knight-errant tilting at every
vizor, but neither should she sit self-assured in her tower of strength,
leaving pitfalls outside her gate for the blind to fall into.
[Illustration]
122.
"There is a way to separate memory from imagination--we may narrate
without painting. I am convinced that the mind can employ certain
indistinct signs to represent even its most vivid impressions; that
instead of picture writing, it can use something like algebraic symbols:
such is the language of the soul when the paroxysm of pain has passed,
and the wounds it received formerly are skinned over, not healed:--it is
a language very opposite to that used by the poet and the
novel-writer."--_Blanco White._
True; but a language in which the soul can converse only with itself; or
else a language more conventional than words, and like paper as a tender
for gold, more capable of being defaced and falsified. There is a
proverb we have heard quoted: "Speech is silver, silence is golden." But
better is the silver diffused than the talent of gold buried.
[Illustration]
123.
However distinguished and gifted, mentally and morally, we find that in
conduct and in our external relations with, society there is ever a
levelling influence at work. Seldom in our relations with the world, and
in the ordinary commerce of life, are the best and highest within us
brought forth; for the whole system of social intercourse is levelling.
As it is said that law knows no distinction of persons but that which it
has itself instituted; so of society it may be said, that it allows of
no distinction but those which it can recognise--external distinctions.
We hear it said that general society--the _world_, as it is called--and a
public school, are excellent educators; because in one the man, in the
other the boy, "finds, as the phrase is, his own level." He does not; he
finds the level of others. _That_ may be good for those below
mediocrity, but for those above it _bad_: and it is for those we should
most care, for if once brought down in early life by the levelling
influence of numbers, they seldom rise again, or only partially. Nothing
so dangerous as to be perpetually measuring ourselves against what is
beneath us, feeling our superiority to that which we force ourselves to
assimilate to. This has been the perdition of many a schoolboy and many
a man.
[Illustration]
124.
"Il me semble que le plus noble rapport entre le ciel et la terre, le
plus beau don que Dieu ait fait à l'homme, la pensée, l'inspiration, se
décompose en quelque sorte dès qu'elle est descendue dans son âme. Elle
y vient simple et désintéressée; il la reproduit corrompue par tous les
intérêts auxquels il l'associe; elle lui a été confiée pour la
multiplier à l'avantage de tous; il la publie au profit de son
amour-propre."--_Madame de Saint-Aulaire._
There would be much to say about this, for it is not always, nor
generally, _amour-propre_ or interest; it is the desire of sympathy,
which impels the artist mind to the utterance in words, or the
expression in form, of that thought or inspiration which God has sent
into his soul.
[Illustration]
125.
Milton's Eve is the type of the masculine standard of perfection in
woman; a graceful figure, an abundance of fine hair, much "coy
submission," and such a degree of unreasoning wilfulness as shall risk
perdition.
And the woman's standard for the man is Adam, who rules and demands
subjection, and is so indulgent that he gives up to blandishment what
he would refuse to reason, and what his own reason condemns.
[Illustration]
126.
Every subject which excites discussion impels to thought. Every
expression of a mind humbly seeking truth, not assuming to have found
it, helps the seeker after truth.
[Illustration]
128.
As a man just released from the rack stands bruised and broken,--bleeding
at every pore, and dislocated in every limb, and raises his eyes to
heaven, and says, "God be praised! I suffer no more!" because to that
past sharp agony the respite comes like peace--like sleep,--so we stand,
after some great wrench in our best affections, where they have been
torn up by the root; when the conflict is over, and the tension of the
heart-strings is relaxed, then comes a sort of rest,--but of what kind?
[Illustration]
129.
To trust religiously, to hope humbly, to desire nobly, to think
rationally, to will resolutely, and to work earnestly,--may this be
mine.
[Illustration]
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD.
(FROM A LETTER.)
We are all interested in this great question of popular education; but I
see others much more sanguine than I am. They hope for some immediate
good result from all that is thought, written, spoken on the subject day
after day. I see such results as possible, probable, but far, far off.
All this talk is of systems and methods, institutions, school houses,
schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, school books; the ways and the means by
which we are to instruct, inform, manage, mould, regulate, that which
lies in most cases beyond our reach--the spirit sent from God. What do we
know of the mystery of child-nature, child-life? What, indeed, do we
know of any life? All life we acknowledge to be an awful mystery, but
child-life we treat as if it were no mystery whatever--just so much
material placed in our hands to be fashioned to a certain form according
to our will or our prejudices,--fitted to certain purposes according to
our notions of expediency. Till we know how to _reverence_ childhood we
shall do no good. Educators commit the same mistake with regard to
childhood that theologians commit with regard to our present earthly
existence; thinking of it, treating of it, as of little value or
significance in itself, only transient, and preparatory to some
condition of being which is to follow--as if it were something separate
from us and to be left behind us as the creature casts its skin. But as
in the sight of God this life is also something for its own sake, so in
the estimation of Christ, childhood was something for its own
sake,--something holy and beautiful in itself, and dear to him. He saw it
not merely as the germ of something to grow out of it, but as perfect
and lovely in itself as the flower which precedes the fruit. We
misunderstand childhood, and we misuse it; we delight in it, and we
pamper it; we spoil it ingeniously, we neglect it sinfully; at the best
we trifle with it as a plaything which we can pull to pieces and put
together at pleasure--ignorant, reckless, presumptuous that we are!
And if we are perpetually making the grossest mistakes in the physical
and practical management of childhood, how much more in regard to what
is spiritual! What do we know of that which lies in the minds of
children? we know only what we put there. The world of instincts,
perceptions, experiences, pleasures, and pains, lying there without
self-consciousness,--sometimes helplessly mute, sometimes so imperfectly
expressed, that we quite mistake the manifestation--what do we know of
all this? How shall we come at the understanding of it? The child lives,
and does not contemplate its own life. It can give no account of that
inward, busy, perpetual activity of the growing faculties and feelings
which it is of so much importance that we should know. To lead children
by questionings to think about their own identity, or observe their own
feelings, is to teach them to be artificial. To waken self-consciousness
before you awaken conscience is the beginning of incalculable mischief.
Introspection is always, as a habit, unhealthy: introspection in
childhood, fatally so. How shall we come at a knowledge of life such as
it is when it first gushes from its mysterious fountain head? We cannot
reascend the stream. We all, however we may remember the external scenes
lived through in our infancy, either do not, or cannot, consult that
part of our nature which remains indissolubly connected with the inward
life of that time. We so forget it, that we know not how to deal with
the child-nature when it comes under our power. We seldom reason about
children from natural laws, or psychological data. Unconsciously we
confound our matured experience with our memory: we attribute to
children what is not possible, exact from them what is
impossible;--ignore many things which the child has neither words to
express, nor the will nor the power to manifest. The quickness with
which children perceive, the keenness with which they suffer, the
tenacity with which they remember, I have never seen fully appreciated.
What misery we cause to children, what mischief we do them by bringing
our own minds, habits, artificial prejudices and senile experiences, to
bear on their young life, and cramp and overshadow it--it is fearful!
Of all the wrongs and anomalies that afflict our earth, a sinful
childhood, a suffering childhood, are among the worst.
O ye men! who sit in committees, and are called upon to legislate for
children,--for children who are the offspring of diseased or degenerate
humanity, or the victims of a yet more diseased society,--do you, when
you take evidence from jailors, and policemen, and parish schoolmasters,
and doctors of divinity, do you ever call up, also, the wise physician,
the thoughtful physiologist, the experienced mother? You have
accumulated facts, great blue books full of facts, but till you know in
what fixed and uniform principles of nature to seek their solution, your
facts remain a dead letter.
I say nothing here of teaching, though very few in truth understand that
lowest part of our duty to children. Men, it is generally allowed,
_teach_ better than women because they have been better taught the
things they teach. Women _train_ better than men because of their quick
instinctive perceptions and sympathies, and greater tenderness and
patience. In schools and in families I would have some things taught by
men, and some by women: but we will here put aside the art, the act of
teaching: we will turn aside from the droves of children in national
schools and reformatory asylums, and turn to the individual child,
brought up within the guarded circle of a home or a select school,
watched by an intelligent, a conscientious influence. How shall we deal
with that spirit which has come out of nature's hands unless we remember
what we were ourselves in the past? What sympathy can we have with that
state of being which we regard as immature, so long as we commit the
double mistake of sometimes attributing to children motives which could
only spring from our adult experience, and sometimes denying to them the
same intuitive tempers and feelings which actuate and agitate our
maturer life? We do not sufficiently consider that our life is not made
up of separate parts, but is _one_--is a progressive whole. When we talk
of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river
flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.
[Illustration]
121.
I will here put together some recollections of my own child-life; not
because it was in any respect an exceptional or remarkable existence,
but for a reason exactly the reverse, because it was like that of many
children; at least I have met with many children who throve or suffered
from the same or similar unseen causes even under external conditions
and management every way dissimilar. Facts, therefore, which can be
relied on, may be generally useful as hints towards a theory of conduct
in education. What I shall say here shall be simply the truth so far as
it goes; not something between the false and the true, garnished for
effect,--not something half-remembered, half-imagined,--but plain,
absolute, matter of fact.
No; certainly I was not an extraordinary child. I have had something to
do with children, and have met with several more remarkable for
quickness of talent, and precocity of feeling. If any thing in
particular, I believe I was particularly naughty,--at least so it was
said twenty times a day. But looking back now, I do not think I was
particular even in this respect; I perpetrated not more than the usual
amount of mischief--so called--which every lively active child perpetrates
between five and ten years old. I had the usual desire to know, and the
usual dislike to learn; the usual love of fairy tales, and hatred of
French exercises. But not of what I learned, but of what I did _not_
learn; not of what they taught me, but of what they could _not_ teach
me; not of what was open, apparent, manageable, but of the under
current, the hidden, the unmanaged or unmanageable, I have to speak, and
you, my friend, to hear and turn to account, if you will, and how you
will. As we grow old the experiences of infancy come back upon us with a
strange vividness. There is a period when the overflowing, tumultuous
life of our youth rises up between us and those first years; but as the
torrent subsides in its bed we can look across the impassable gulf to
that haunted fairy land which we shall never more approach, and never
more forget!
In memory I can go back to a very early age. I perfectly remember being
sung to sleep, and can remember even the tune which was sung to
me--blessings on the voice that sang it! I was an affectionate, but not,
as I now think, a loveable nor an attractive child. I did not, like the
little Mozart, ask of every one around me, "Do you love me?" The
instinctive question was, rather, "Can I love you?" Yet certainly I was
not more than six years old when I suffered from the fear of not being
loved where I had attached myself, and from the idea that another was
preferred before me, such anguish as had nearly killed me. Whether those
around me regarded it as a fit of ill-temper, or a fit of illness, I do
not know. I could not then have given a name to the pang that fevered
me. I knew not the cause, but never forgot the suffering. It left a
deeper impression than childish passions usually do; and the
recollection was so far salutary, that in after life I guarded myself
against the approaches of that hateful, deformed, agonising thing which
men call jealousy, as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera. If
such self-knowledge has not saved me from the pain, at least it has
saved me from the demoralising effects of the passion, by a wholesome
terror, and even a sort of disgust.
With a good temper, there was the capacity of strong, deep, silent
resentment, and a vindictive spirit of rather a peculiar kind. I
recollect that when one of those set over me inflicted what then
appeared a most horrible injury and injustice, the thoughts of vengeance
haunted my fancy for months: but it was an inverted sort of vengeance. I
imagined the house of my enemy on fire, and rushed through the flames
to rescue her. She was drowning, and I leaped into the deep water to
draw her forth. She was pining in prison, and I forced bars and bolts to
deliver her. If this were magnanimity, it was not the less vengeance;
for, observe, I always fancied evil, and shame, and humiliation to my
adversary; to myself the _rôle_ of superiority and gratified pride. For
several years this sort of burning resentment against wrong done to
myself and others, though it took no mean or cruel form, was a source of
intense, untold suffering. No one was aware of it. I was left to settle
it; and my mind righted itself I hardly know how: not certainly by
religious influences--they passed over my mind, and did not at the time
sink into it,--and as for earthly counsel or comfort, I never had either
when most needed. And as it fared with me then, so it has been in after
life; so it has been, _must_ be, with all those who, in fighting out
alone the pitched battle between principle and passion, will accept no
intervention between the infinite within them and the infinite above
them; so it has been, _must_ be, with all strong natures. Will it be
said that victory in the struggle brings increase of strength? It may be
so with some who survive the contest; but then, how many sink! how many
are crippled morally for life! how many, strengthened in some particular
faculties, suffer in losing the harmony of the character as a whole!
This is one of the points in which the matured mind may help the
childish nature at strife with itself. It is impossible to say how far
this sort of vindictiveness might have penetrated and hardened into the
character, if I had been of a timid or retiring nature. It was expelled
at last by no outer influences, but by a growing sense of power and
self-reliance.
In regard to truth--always such a difficulty in education,--I certainly
had, as a child, and like most children, confused ideas about it. I had
a more distinct and absolute idea of honour than of truth,--a mistake
into which our conventional morality leads those who educate and those
who are educated. I knew very well, in a general way, that to tell a lie
was _wicked_; to lie for my own profit or pleasure, or to the hurt of
others, was, according to my infant code of morals, worse than wicked--it
was _dishonourable_. But I had no compunction about telling
_fictions_;--inventing scenes and circumstances, which I related as real,
and with a keen sense of triumphant enjoyment in seeing the listener
taken in by a most artful and ingenious concatenation of
impossibilities. In this respect "Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, that liar of
the first magnitude," was nothing in comparison to me. I must have been
twelve years old before my conscience was first awakened up to a sense
of the necessity of truth as a principle, as well as its holiness as a
virtue. Afterwards, having to set right the minds of others cleared my
own mind on this and some other important points.
I do not think I was naturally obstinate, but remember going without
food all day, and being sent hungry and exhausted to bed, because I
would not do some trifling thing required of me. I think it was to
recite some lines I knew by heart. I was punished as wilfully obstinate:
but what no one knew then, and what I know now as the fact, was, that
after refusing to do what was required, and bearing anger and threats in
consequence, I lost the power to do it. I became stone: the _will_ was
petrified, and I absolutely _could_ not comply. They might have hacked
me in pieces before my lips could have unclosed to utterance. The
obstinacy was not in the mind, but on the nerves; and I am persuaded
that what we call obstinacy in children, and grownup people, too, is
often something of this kind, and that it may be increased, by
mismanagement, by persistence, or what is called firmness, in the
controlling power, into disease, or something near to it.
There was in my childish mind another cause of suffering besides those I
have mentioned, less acute, but more permanent and always
unacknowledged. It was fear--fear of darkness and supernatural
influences. As long as I can remember anything, I remember these horrors
of my infancy. How they had been awakened I do not know; they were never
revealed. I had heard other children ridiculed for such fears, and held
my peace. At first these haunting, thrilling, stifling terrors were
vague; afterwards the form varied; but one of the most permanent was the
ghost in Hamlet. There was a volume of Shakspeare lying about, in which
was an engraving I have not seen since, but it remains distinct in my
mind as a picture. On one side stood Hamlet with his hair on end,
literally "like quills upon the fretful porcupine," and one hand with
all the fingers outspread. On the other strided the ghost, encased in
armour with nodding plumes; one finger pointing forwards, and all
surrounded with a supernatural light. O that spectre! for three years it
followed me up and down the dark staircase, or stood by my bed: only the
blessed light had power to exorcise it. How it was that I knew, while I
trembled and quaked, that it was unreal, never cried out, never
expostulated, never confessed, I do not know. The figure of Apollyon
looming over Christian, which I had found in an old edition of the
"Pilgrim's Progress," was also a great torment. But worse, perhaps, were
certain phantasms without shape, things like the vision in Job--"_A
spirit passed before my face; it stood still, but I could not discern
the form thereof_:"--and if not intelligible voices, there were strange
unaccountable sounds filling the air around with a sort of mysterious
life. In daylight I was not only fearless, but audacious, inclined to
defy all power and brave all danger,--that is, all danger I could see. I
remember volunteering to lead the way through a herd of cattle (among
which was a dangerous bull, the terror of the neighbourhood) armed only
with a little stick; but first I said the Lord's Prayer fervently. In
the ghastly night I never prayed; terror stifled prayer. These visionary
sufferings, in some form or other, pursued me till I was nearly twelve
years old. If I had not possessed a strong constitution and a strong
understanding, which rejected and contemned my own fears, even while
they shook me, I had been destroyed. How much weaker children suffer in
this way, I have since known; and have known how to bring them help and
strength, through sympathy and knowledge, the sympathy that soothes and
does not encourage--the knowledge that dispels, and does not suggest, the
evil.
People, in general, even those who have been much interested in
education, are not aware of the sacred duty of _truth_, exact truth in
their intercourse with children. Limit what you tell them according to
the measure of their faculties; but let what you say be the truth.
Accuracy not merely as to fact, but well-considered accuracy in the use
of words, is essential with children. I have read some wise book on the
treatment of the insane, in which absolute veracity and accuracy in
speaking is prescribed as a _curative_ principle; and deception for any
purpose is deprecated as almost fatal to the health of the patient. Now,
it is a good sanatory principle, that what is curative is preventive;
and that an unhealthy state of mind, leading to madness, may, in some
organisations, be induced by that sort of uncertainty and perplexity
which grows up where the mind has not been accustomed to truth in its
external relations. It is like breathing for a continuance an impure or
confined air.
Of the mischief that may be done to a childish mind by a falsehood
uttered in thoughtless gaiety, I remember an absurd and yet a painful
instance. A visitor was turning over, for a little girl, some prints,
one of which represented an Indian widow springing into the fire kindled
for the funeral pile of her husband. It was thus explained to the child,
who asked innocently, whether, if her father died, her mother would be
burned? The person to whom the question was addressed, a lively, amiable
woman, was probably much amused by the question, and answered, giddily,
"Oh, of course,--certainly!" and was believed implicitly. But
thenceforth, for many weary months, the mind of that child was haunted
and tortured by the image of her mother springing into the devouring
flames, and consumed by fire, with all the accessories of the picture,
particularly the drums beating to drown her cries. In a weaker
organisation, the results might have been permanent and serious. But to
proceed.
These terrors I have described had an existence external to myself: I
had no power over them to shape them by my will, and their power over me
vanished gradually before a more dangerous infatuation,--the propensity
to reverie. This shaping spirit of imagination began when I was about
eight or nine years old to haunt my _inner_ life. I can truly say that,
from ten years old to fourteen or fifteen, I lived a double existence;
one outward, linking me with the external sensible world, the other
inward, creating a world to and for itself, conscious to itself only. I
carried on for whole years a series of actions, scenes, and adventures;
one springing out of another, and coloured and modified by increasing
knowledge. This habit grew so upon me, that there were moments--as when I
came to some crisis in my imaginary adventures,--when I was not more
awake to outward things than in sleep,--scarcely took cognisance of the
beings around me. When punished for idleness by being placed in
solitary confinement (the worst of all punishments for children), the
intended penance was nothing less than a delight and an emancipation,
giving me up to my dreams. I had a very strict and very accomplished
governess, one of the cleverest women I have ever met with in my life;
but nothing of this was known or even suspected by her, and I exulted in
possessing something which her power could not reach. My reveries were
my real life: it was an unhealthy state of things.
Those who are engaged in the training of children will perhaps pause
here. It may be said, in the first place, How are we to reach those
recesses of the inner life which the God who made us keeps from every
eye but his own? As when we walk over the field in spring we are aware
of a thousand influences and processes at work of which we have no exact
knowledge or clear perception, yet must watch and use accordingly,--so it
is with education. And secondly, it may be asked, if such secret
processes be working unconscious mischief, where the remedy? The remedy
is in employment. Then the mother or the teacher echoes with
astonishment, "Employment! the child is employed from morning till
night; she is learning a dozen sciences and languages; she has masters
and lessons for every hour of every day: with her pencil, her piano,
her books, her companions, her birds, her flowers,--what can she want
more?" An energetic child even at a very early age, and yet farther as
the physical organisation is developed, wants something more and
something better; employment which shall bring with it the bond of a
higher duty than that which centres in self and self-improvement;
employment which shall not merely cultivate the understanding, but
strengthen and elevate the conscience; employment for the higher and
more generous faculties; employment addressed to the sympathies;
employment which has the aim of utility, not pretended, but real,
obvious, direct utility. A girl who as a mere child is not always being
taught or being amused, whose mind is early restrained by the bond of
definite duty, and thrown out of the limit of self, will not in after
years be subject to fancies that disturb or to reveries that absorb, and
the present and the actual will have that power they ought to have as
combined in due degree with desire and anticipation.
The Roman Catholic priesthood understand this well: employment, which
enlists with the spiritual the sympathetic part of our being, is a means
through which they guide both young and adult minds. Physicians who have
to manage various states of mental and moral disease understand this
well; they speak of the necessity of employment (not mere amusement) as
a curative means, but of employment with the direct aim of usefulness,
apprehended and appreciated by the patient, else it is nothing. It is
the same with children. Such employment, chosen with reference to
utility, and in harmony with the faculties, would prove in many cases
either preventive or curative. In my own case, as I now think, it would
have been both.
There was a time when it was thought essential that women should know
something of cookery, something of medicine, something of surgery. If
all these things are far better understood now than heretofore, is that
a reason why a well educated woman should be left wholly ignorant of
them? A knowledge of what people call "common things"--of the elements of
physiology, of the conditions of health, of the qualities, nutritive or
remedial, of substances commonly used as food or medicine, and the most
economical and most beneficial way of applying both,--these should form a
part of the system of every girls' school--whether for the higher or the
lower classes. At present you shall see a girl studying chemistry, and
attending Faraday's lectures, who would be puzzled to compound a
rice-pudding or a cup of barley-water: and a girl who could work quickly
a complicated sum in the Rule of Three, afterwards wasting a fourth of
her husband's wages through want of management.
In my own case, how much of the practical and the sympathetic in my
nature was exhausted in airy visions!
As to the stuff out of which my waking dreams were composed, I cannot
tell you much. I have a remembrance that I was always a princess-heroine
in the disguise of a knight, a sort of Clorinda or Britomart, going
about to redress the wrongs of the poor, fight giants, and kill dragons;
or founding a society in some far-off solitude or desolate island, which
would have rivalled that of Gonsalez, where there were to be no tears,
no tasks, and no laws,--except those which I made myself,--no caged birds
nor tormented kittens.
[Illustration]
Enough of the pains, and mistakes, and vagaries of childhood; let me
tell of some of its pleasures equally unguessed and unexpressed. A
great, and exquisite source of enjoyment arose out of an early,
instinctive, boundless delight in external beauty. How this went hand in
hand with my terrors and reveries, how it could coexist with them, I
cannot tell now--it was so; and if this sympathy with the external,
living, beautiful world, had been properly, scientifically cultivated,
and directed to useful definite purposes, it would have been the best
remedy for much that was morbid: this was not the case, and we were,
unhappily for me, too early removed from the country to a town
residence. I can remember, however, that in very early years the
appearances of nature did truly "haunt me like a passion;" the stars
were to me as the gates of heaven; the rolling of the wave to the shore,
the graceful weeds and grasses bending before the breeze as they grew by
the wayside; the minute and delicate forms of insects; the trembling
shadows of boughs and leaves dancing on the ground in the highest noon;
these were to me perfect pleasures of which the imagery now in my mind
is distinct. Wordsworth's poem of "The Daffodils," the one beginning--
"I wandered lonely as a cloud,"
may appear to some unintelligible or overcharged, but to me it was a
vivid truth, a simple fact; and if Wordsworth had been then in my hands
I think I must have loved him. It was this intense sense of beauty which
gave the first zest to poetry: I love it, not because it told me what I
did not know, but because it helped me to words in which to clothe my
own knowledge and perceptions, and reflected back the pictures
unconsciously hoarded up in my mind. This was what made Thomson's
"Seasons" a favourite book when I first began to read for my own
amusement, and before I could understand one half of it; St. Pierre's
"Indian Cottage" ("La Chaumière Indienne") was also charming, either
because it reflected my dreams, or gave me new stuff for them in
pictures of an external world quite different from that I
inhabited,--palm-trees, elephants, tigers, dark-turbaned men with flowing
draperies; and the "Arabian Nights" completed my Oriental intoxication,
which lasted for a long time.
I have said little of the impressions left by books, and of my first
religious notions. A friend of mine had once the wise idea of collecting
together a variety of evidence as to the impressions left by certain
books on childish or immature minds: If carried out, it would have been
one of the most valuable additions to educational experience ever made.
For myself I did not much care about the books put into my hands, nor
imbibe much information from them. I had a great taste, I am sorry to
say, for forbidden books; yet it was not the forbidden books that did
the mischief, except in their being read furtively. I remember
impressions of vice and cruelty from some parts of the Old Testament and
Goldsmith's "History of England," which I shudder to recall. Shakspeare
was on the forbidden shelf. I had read him all through between seven
and ten years old. He never did me any moral mischief. He never soiled
my mind with any disordered image. What was exceptionable and coarse in
language I passed by without attaching any meaning whatever to it. How
it might have been if I had read Shakspeare first when I was fifteen or
sixteen, I do not know; perhaps the occasional coarsenesses and
obscurities might have shocked the delicacy or puzzled the intelligence
of that sensitive and inquiring age. But at nine or ten I had no
comprehension of what was unseemly; what might be obscure in words to
wordy commentators, was to me lighted up by the idea I found or
interpreted for myself--right or wrong.
No; I repeat, Shakspeare--bless him!--never did me any moral mischief.
Though the Witches in Macbeth troubled me,--though the Ghost in Hamlet
terrified me (the picture that is,--for the spirit in Shakspeare was
solemn and pathetic, not hideous),--though poor little Arthur cost me an
ocean of tears,--yet much that was obscure, and all that was painful and
revolting was merged on the whole in the vivid presence of a new,
beautiful, vigorous, living world. The plays which I now think the most
wonderful produced comparatively little effect on my fancy: Romeo and
Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, struck me then less than the historical plays,
and far less than the Midsummer Night's Dream and Cymbeline. It may be
thought, perhaps, that Falstaff is not a character to strike a child, or
to be understood by a child:--no; surely not. To me Falstaff was not
witty and wicked--only irresistibly fat and funny; and I remember lying
on the ground rolling with laughter over some of the scenes in Henry the
Fourth,--the mock play, and the seven men in buckram. But The Tempest and
Cymbeline were the plays I liked best and knew best.
Altogether I should say that in my early years books were known to me,
not as such, not for their general contents, but for some especial image
or picture I had picked out of them and assimilated to my own mind and
mixed up with my own life. For example out of Homer's Odyssey (lent to
me by the parish clerk) I had the picture of Nasicaa and her maidens
going down in their chariots to wash their linen: so that when the first
time I went to the Pitti Palace, and could hardly see the pictures
through blinding tears, I saw _that_ picture of Rubens, which all
remember who have been at Florence, and it flashed delight and
refreshment through those remembered childish associations. The Syrens
and Polypheme left also vivid pictures on my fancy. The Iliad, on the
contrary, wearied me, except the parting of Hector and Andromache, in
which the child, scared by its father's dazzling helm and nodding
crest, remains a vivid image in my mind from that time.
The same parish clerk--a curious fellow in his way--lent me also some
religious tracts and stories, by Hannah More. It is most certain that
more moral mischief was done to me by some of these than by all
Shakspeare's plays together. These so-called pious tracts first
introduced me to a knowledge of the vices of vulgar life, and the
excitements of a vulgar religion,--the fear of being hanged and the fear
of hell became co-existent in my mind; and the teaching resolved itself
into this,--that it was not by being naughty, but by being found out,
that I was to incur the risk of both. My fairy world was better!
About Religion:--I was taught religion as children used to be taught it
in my younger days, and are taught it still in some cases, I
believe--through the medium of creeds and catechisms. I read the Bible
too early, and too indiscriminately, and too irreverently. Even the New
Testament was too early placed in my hands; too early made a lesson
book, as the custom then was. The _letter_ of the Scriptures--the
words--were familiarised to me by sermonising and dogmatising, long
before I could enter into the _spirit_. Meantime, happily, another
religion was growing up in my heart, which, strangely enough, seemed to
me quite apart from that which was taught,--which, indeed, I never in
any way regarded as the same which I was taught when I stood up wearily
on a Sunday to repeat the collect and say the catechism. It was quite
another thing. Not only the taught religion and the sentiment of faith
and adoration were never combined, but it never for years entered into
my head to combine them; the first remained extraneous, the latter had
gradually taken root in my life, even from the moment my mother joined
my little hands in prayer. The histories out of the Bible (the Parables
especially) were, however, enchanting to me, though my interpretation of
them was in some instances the very reverse of correct or orthodox. To
my infant conception our Lord was a being who had come down from heaven
to make people good, and to tell them beautiful stories. And though no
pains were spared to _indoctrinate_ me, and all my pastors and masters
took it for granted that my ideas were quite satisfactory, nothing could
be more confused and heterodox.
It is a common observation that girls of lively talents are apt to grow
pert and satirical. I fell into this danger when about ten years old.
Sallies at the expense of certain people, ill-looking, or ill-dressed,
or ridiculous, or foolish, had been laughed at and applauded in company,
until, without being naturally malignant, I ran some risk of becoming
so from sheer vanity.
The fables which appeal to our higher moral sympathies may sometimes do
as much for us as the truths of science. So thought our Saviour when he
taught the multitude in parables.
A good clergyman who lived near us, a famous Persian scholar, took it
into his head to teach me Persian (I was then about seven years old),
and I set to work with infinite delight and earnestness. All I learned
was soon forgotten; but a few years afterwards, happening to stumble on
a volume of Sir William Jones's works--his Persian grammar--it revived my
Orientalism, and I began to study it eagerly. Among the exercises given
was a Persian fable or poem--one of those traditions of our Lord which
are preserved in the East. The beautiful apologue of "St. Peter and the
Cherries," which Goethe has versified or imitated, is a well known
example. This fable I allude to was something similar, but I have not
met with the original these forty years, and must give it here from
memory.
"Jesus," says the story, "arrived one evening at the gates of a certain
city, and he sent his disciples forward to prepare supper, while he
himself, intent on doing good, walked through the streets into the
market place.
"And he saw at the corner of the market some people gathered together
looking at an object on the ground; and he drew near to see what it
might be. It was a dead dog, with a halter round his neck, by which he
appeared to have been dragged through the dirt; and a viler, a more
abject, a more unclean thing, never met the eyes of man.
"And those who stood by looked on with abhorrence.
"'Faugh!' said one, stopping his nose; 'it pollutes the air.' 'How
long,' said another, 'shall this foul beast offend our sight?' 'Look at
his torn hide,' said a third; 'one could not even cut a shoe out of it.'
'And his ears,' said a fourth, 'all draggled and bleeding!' 'No doubt,'
said a fifth, 'he hath been hanged for thieving!'
"And Jesus heard them, and looking down compassionately on the dead
creature, he said, 'Pearls are not equal to the whiteness of his teeth!'
"Then the people turned towards him with amazement, and said among
themselves, 'Who is this? this must be Jesus of Nazareth, for only HE
could find something to pity and approve even in a dead dog;' and being
ashamed, they bowed their heads before him, and went each on his way."
I can recall, at this hour, the vivid, yet softening and pathetic
impression left on my fancy by this old Eastern story. It struck me as
exquisitely humorous, as well as exquisitely beautiful. It gave me a
pain in my conscience, for it seemed thenceforward so easy and so vulgar
to say satirical things, and so much nobler to be benign and merciful,
and I took the lesson so home, that I was in great danger of falling
into the opposite extreme,--of seeking the beautiful even in the midst of
the corrupt and the repulsive. Pity, a large element in my composition,
might have easily degenerated into weakness, threatening to subvert
hatred of evil in trying to find excuses for it; and whether my mind has
ever completely righted itself, I am not sure.
Educators are not always aware, I think, how acute are the perceptions,
and how permanent the memories, of children. I remember experiments
tried upon my temper and feelings, and how I was made aware of this, by
their being repeated, and, in some instances, spoken of, before me.
Music, to which I was early and peculiarly sensitive, was sometimes made
the medium of these experiments. Discordant sounds were not only
hateful, but made me turn white and cold, and sent the blood backward to
my heart; and certain tunes had a curious effect, I cannot now account
for: for though, when heard for the first time, they had little effect,
they became intolerable by repetition; they turned up some hidden
emotion within me too strong to be borne. It could not have been from
association, which I believe to be a principal element in the _emotion_
excited by music. I was too young for that. What associations could such
a baby have had with pleasure or with pain? Or could it be possible that
associations with some former state of existence awoke up to sound? That
our life "hath elsewhere its beginning, and cometh from afar," is a
belief or at least an instinct, in some minds, which music, and only
music, seems to thrill into consciousness. At this time, when I was
about five or six years old, Mrs. Arkwright--she was then Fanny
Kemble--used to come to our house, and used to entrance me with her
singing. I had a sort of adoration for her, such as an ecstatic votary
might have for a Saint Cecilia. I trembled with pleasure when I only
heard her step. But her voice!--it has charmed hundreds since; whom has
it ever moved to a more genuine passion of delight than the little child
that crept silent and tremulous to her side? And she was fond of
me,--fond of singing to me, and, it must be confessed, fond also of
playing these experiments on me. The music of "Paul and Virginia" was
then in vogue, and there was one air--a very simple air--in that opera,
which, after the first few bars, always made me stop my ears and rush
out of the room. I became at last aware that this was sometimes done by
particular desire to please my parents, or amuse and interest others by
the display of such vehement emotion. My infant conscience became
perplexed between the reality of the feeling and the exhibition of it.
People are not always aware of the injury done to children by repeating
before them things they say, or describing things they do: words and
actions, spontaneous and unconscious, become thenceforth artificial and
conscious. I can speak of the injury done to myself, between five and
eight years old. There was some danger of my becoming a precocious
actress,--danger of permanent mischief such as I have seen done to other
children,--but I was saved by the recoil of resistance and resentment
excited in my mind.
This is enough. All that has been told here refers to a period between
five and ten years old.
[Illustration]
THE INDIAN HUNTER AND THE FIRE.
(FROM THE GERMAN.)
Once upon a time the lightning from heaven fell upon a tree standing in
the old primeval forest and kindled it, so that it flamed on high. And
it happened that a young hunter, who had lost his path in that
wilderness, beheld the gleam of the flames from a distance, and, forcing
his way through the thicket, he flung himself down in rapture before the
blazing tree.
"O divine light and warmth!" he exclaimed, stretching forth his arms.
"O blessed! O heaven-descended Fire! let me thank thee! let me adore
thee! Giver of a new existence, quickening thro' every pulse, how lost,
how cold, how dark have I dwelt without thee! Restorer of my life!
remain ever near me, and, through thy benign and celestial influence,
send love and joy to illuminate my soul!"
And the Fire answered and said to him, "It is true that my birth is from
heaven, but I am now, through mingling with earthly elements, subdued to
earthly influences; therefore, beware how you choose me for thy friend,
without having first studied my twofold nature. O youth! take heed lest
what appear to thee now a blessing, may be turned, at some future time,
to fiery pain and death." And the youth replied, "No! O no! thou blessed
Fire, this could never be. Am I then so senseless, so inconstant, so
thankless? O believe it not! Let me stay near thee; let me be thy
priest, to watch and tend thee truly. Ofttimes in my wild wintry life,
when the chill darkness encompassed me, and the ice-blast lifted my
hair, have I dreamed of the soft summer breath,--of the sunshine that
should light up the world within me and the world around me. But still
that time came not. It seemed ever far, far off; and I had perished
utterly before the light and the warmth had reached me, had it not been
for thee!"
Thus the youth poured forth his soul, and the Fire answered him in
murmured tones, while her beams with a softer radiance played over his
cheek and brow: "Be it so then. Yet do thou watch me constantly and
minister to me carefully; neglect me not, leave me not to myself, lest
the light and warmth in which thou so delightest fail thee suddenly, and
there be no redress; and O watch thyself also! beware lest thou too
ardently stir up my impatient fiery being! beware lest thou heap too
much fuel upon me; once more beware, lest, instead of life, and love,
and joy, I bring thee only death and burning pain!" And the youth
passionately vowed to keep her behest: and in the beginning all went
well. How often, for hours together, would he lie gazing entranced
toward the radiant beneficent Fire, basking in her warmth, and throwing
now a leafy spray, now a fragment of dry wood, anon a handful of odorous
gums, as incense, upon the flame, which gracefully curling and waving
upwards, quivering and sparkling, seemed to whisper in return divine
oracles; or he fancied he beheld, while gazing into the glowing depths,
marvellous shapes, fairy visions dancing and glancing along. Then he
would sing to her songs full of love, and she, responding to the song
she had herself inspired, sometimes replied, in softest whispers, so
loving and so low, that even the jealous listening woods could not
overhear; at other times she would shoot up suddenly in rapturous
splendour, like a pillar of light, and revealed to him all the wonders
and the beauties which lay around him, hitherto veiled from his sight.
But at length, as he became accustomed to the glory and the warmth, and
nothing more was left for the fire to bestow, or her light to reveal,
then he began to weary and to dream again of the morning, and to long
for the sun-beams; and it was to him as if the fire stood between him
and the sun's light, and he reproached her therefore, and he became
moody and ungrateful; and the fire was no longer the same, but unquiet
and changeful, sometimes flickering unsteadily, sometimes throwing out a
lurid glare. And when the youth, forgetful of his ministry, left the
flame unfed and unsustained, so that ofttimes she drooped and waned, and
crept in dying gleams along the damp ground, his heart would fail him
with a sudden remorse, and he would cast on the fuel with such a rough
and lavish hand that the indignant fire hissed thereat, and burst forth
in a smoky sullen gleam,--then died away again. Then the youth, half
sorrowful, half impatient, would remember how bright, how glowing, how
dazzling was the flame in those former happy days, when it played over
his chilled and wearied limbs, and shed its warmth upon his brow, and he
desired eagerly to recall that once inspiring glow. And he stirred up
the embers violently till they burned him, and then he grew angry, and
then again he wearied of all the watching and the care which the subtle,
celestial, tameless element required at his hand: and at length, one day
in a sullen mood, he snatched up a pitcher of water from the fountain
and poured it hastily on the yet living flame.----
For one moment it arose blazing towards heaven, shed a last gleam upon
the pale brow of the youth, and then sank down in darkness extinguished
for ever!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
PAULINA.
FROM AN UNFINISHED TALE, 1823.
And think'st thou that the fond o'erflowing love
I bear thee in my heart could ever be
Repaid by careless smiles that round thee rove,
And beam on others as they beam on me?
Oh, could I speak to thee! could I but tell
The nameless thoughts that in my bosom swell,
And struggle for expression! or set free
From the o'er mastering spirit's proud control
The pain that throbs in silence at my soul,
Perhaps--yet no--I will not sue, nor bend,
To win a heartless pity--Let it end!
I have been near thee still at morn, at eve;
Have mark'd thee in thy joy, have seen thee grieve;
Have seen thee gay with triumph, sick with fears,
Radiant in beauty, desolate in tears:
And communed with thy heart, till I made mine
The echo and the mirror unto thine.
And I have sat and looked into thine eyes
As men on earth look to the starry skies,
That seek to read in Heaven their human destinies!
Too quickly I read mine,--I knew it well,--
I judg'd not of thy heart by all it gave,
But all that it withheld; and I could tell
The very sea-mark where affection's wave
Would cease to flow, or flow to ebb again,
And knew my lavish love was pour'd in vain,
As fruitless streams o'er sandy deserts melt,
Unrecompensed, unvalued, and unfelt!
[Illustration]
LINES.--1840.
Take me, my mother Earth, to thy cold breast,
And fold me there in everlasting rest,
The long day is o'er!
I'm weary, I would sleep--
But deep, deep,
Never to waken more!
I have had joy and sorrow; I have proved
What life could give; have lov'd, have been belov'd;
I am sick, and heart sore,
And weary,--let me sleep!
But deep, deep,
Never to waken more!
To thy dark chambers, mother Earth, I come,
Prepare my dreamless bed in my last home;
Shut down the marble door,
And leave me,--let me sleep!
But deep, deep,
Never to waken more!
Now I lie down,--I close my aching eyes,
If on this night another morn must rise,
Wake me not, I implore!
I only ask to sleep,
And deep, deep,
Never to waken more!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Theological Fragments.
1.
THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL.
(A PARABLE, FROM ST. JEROME.)
A certain holy anchorite had passed a long life in a cave of the
Thebaid, remote from all communion with men; and eschewing, as he would
the gates of Hell, even the very presence of a woman; and he fasted and
prayed, and performed many and severe penances; and his whole thought
was how he should make himself of account in the sight of God, that he
might enter into his paradise.
And having lived this life for three score and ten years he was puffed
up with the notion of his own great virtue and sanctity, and, like to
St. Anthony, he besought the Lord to show him what saint he should
emulate as greater than himself, thinking perhaps, in his heart, that
the Lord would answer that none was greater or holier. And the same
night the angel of God appeared to him, and said, "If thou wouldst excel
all others in virtue and sanctity, thou must strive to be like a certain
minstrel who goes begging and singing from door to door."
And the holy man was in great astonishment, and he arose and took his
staff and ran forth in search of this minstrel; and when he had found
him he questioned him earnestly, saying, "Tell me, I pray thee, my
brother, what good works thou hast performed in thy lifetime, and by
what prayers and penances thou hast made thyself acceptable to God?"
And the man, greatly wondering and ashamed to be so questioned, hung
down his head as he replied, "I beseech thee, holy father, mock me not!
I have performed no good works, and as to praying, alas! sinner that I
am, I am not worthy to pray. I do nothing but go about from door to door
amusing the people with my viol and my flute."
And the holy man insisted and said, "Nay, but peradventure in the midst
of this thy evil life thou hast done some good works?" And the minstrel
replied, "I know of nothing good that I have done." And the hermit,
wondering more and more, said, "How hast thou become a beggar: hast thou
spent thy substance in riotous living, like most others of thy calling?"
and the man answering, said, "Nay; but there was a poor woman whom I
found running hither and thither in distraction, for her husband and her
children had been sold into slavery to pay a debt. And the woman being
very fair, certain sons of Belial pursued after her; so I took her home
to my hut and protected her from them, and I gave her all I possessed to
redeem her family, and conducted her in safety to the city, where she
was reunited to her husband and children. But what of that, my father;
is there a man who would not have done the same?"
And the hermit, hearing the minstrel speak these words, wept bitterly,
saying, "For my part, I have not done so much good in all my life; and
yet they call me a man of God, and thou art only a poor minstrel!"
At Vienna, some years ago, I saw a picture by Von Schwind, which was
conceived in the spirit of this old apologue. It exhibited the lives of
two twin brothers diverging from the cradle. One of them, by profound
study, becomes a most learned and skilful physician, and ministers to
the sick; attaining to great riches and honours through his labours and
his philanthropy. The other brother, who has no turn for study, becomes
a poor fiddler, and spends his life in consoling, by his music,
sufferings beyond the reach of the healing art. In the end, the two
brothers meet at the close of life. He who had been fiddling through the
world is sick and worn out: his brother prescribes for him, and is seen
culling simples for his restoration, while the fiddler touches his
instrument for the solace of his kind physician.
It is in such representations that painting did once speak, and might
again speak to the hearts of the people.
Another version of the same thought, we find in De Berenger's pretty
ballad, "_Les deux Soeurs de Charité_."
[Illustration]
2.
When I was a child, and read Milton for the first time, his Pandemonium
seemed to me a magnificent place. It struck me more than his Paradise,
for _that_ was beautiful, but Pandemonium was terrible and beautiful
too. The wondrous fabric that "from the earth rose like an exhalation
to the sound of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet,"--the splendid piles
of architecture sweeping line beyond line, "Cornice and frieze with
bossy sculptures graven,"--realised a certain picture of Palmyra I had
once seen, and which had taken possession of my imagination: then the
throne, outshining the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind,--the flood of light
streaming from "starry lamps and blazing cressets" quite threw the
flames of perdition into the shade. As it was said of Erskine, that he
always spoke of Satan with respect, as of a great statesman out of
place, a sort of leader of the Opposition; so to me the grand arch-fiend
was a hero, like my _then_ favourite Greeks and Romans, a Cymon, a
Curtius, a Decius, devoting himself for the good of his country;--such
was the moral confusion created in my mind. Pandemonium inspired no
horror; on the contrary, my fancy revelled in the artistic beauty of the
creation. I felt that I should like to go and see it; so that, in fact,
if Milton meant to inspire abhorrence, he has failed, even to the height
of his sublimity. Dante has succeeded better. Those who dwell with
complacency on the doctrine of eternal punishments must delight in the
ferocity and the ingenuity of his grim inventions, worthy of a vengeful
theology. Wicked latitudinarians may shudder and shiver at the images
called up--grotesque, abominable, hideous--but then Dante himself would
sternly rebuke them for making their human sympathies a measure for the
judgments of God, and compassion only a veil for treason and rebellion:--
"Chi è piu scellerato di colui
Ch' al giudicio divin passion porta?"
"Who can show greater wickedness than he
Whose passion by the will of God is moved?"
However, it must be said in favour of Dante's Inferno, that no one ever
wished to go there.
These be the Christian poets! but they must yield in depth of imagined
horrors to the Christian Fathers. Tertullian (writing in the second
century) not only sends the wicked into that dolorous region of despair,
but makes the endless measureless torture of the doomed a part of the
joys of the redeemed. The spectacle is to give them the same sort of
delight as the heathen took in their games, and Pandemonium is to be as
a vast amphitheatre for the amusement of the New Jerusalem. "How
magnificent," exclaims this pious doctor of the Church, "will be the
scale of that game! With what admiration, what laughter, what glee, what
triumph, shall I behold so many mighty monarchs, who had been given out
as received into the skies, moaning in unfathomable gloom! Persecutors
of the Christians liquefying amid shooting spires of flame! Philosophers
blushing before their disciples amid those ruddy fires! Then," he goes
on, still alluding to the amphitheatre, "then is the time to hear the
tragedians doubly pathetic, now that they bewail their own agonies! To
observe actors released by the fierceness of their torments from all
restraints on their gestures! Then may we admire the charioteer glowing
all over in his car of torture, and watch the wrestlers struggling, not
in the gymnasium but with flames!" And he asks exultingly, "What prætor,
or consul, or questor, or priest, can purchase you by his munificence a
game of triumph like this?"
And even more terrible are the imaginations of good Bishop Taylor, who
distils the essence from all sins, all miseries, all sorrows, all
terrors, all plagues, and mingles them in one chalice of wrath and
vengeance to be held to the lips and forced down the unwilling throats
of the doomed "with violence of devils and accursed spirits!" Are these
mere words? Did any one ever fancy or try to realise what they express?
3.
I was surprised to find this passage in one of Southey's letters:--
"A Catholic Establishment would be the best, perhaps the only means of
civilising Ireland. Jesuits and Benedictines, though they would not
enlighten the savages, would humanise them and bring the country into
cultivation. A petition that asked for this, saying plainly, 'We are
Papists, and will be so, and this is the best thing that can be done for
us and you too,'--such a petition I would support, considering what the
present condition of Ireland is, how wretchedly it has always been
governed, and how hopeless the prospect." (1805.)
Southey was thinking of what the religious orders had done for Paraguay;
whether he would have penned the same sentiments twenty or even ten
years later, is more than doubtful.
[Illustration]
4.
The old monks and penitents--dirty, ugly, emaciated old fellows they
were!--spent their days in speaking and preaching of their own and
others' sinfulness, yet seem to have had ever present before them a
standard of beauty, brightness, beneficence, aspirations which nothing
earthly could satisfy, which made their ideas of sinfulness and misery
_comparative_, and their scale was graduated from themselves _upwards_.
We philosophers reverse this. We teach and preach the spiritual dignity,
the lofty capabilities of humanity. Yet, by some mistake, we seem to be
always speculating on the amount of evil which may or can be endured,
and on the amount of wickedness which may or must be tolerated; and our
scale is graduated from ourselves _downwards_.
[Illustration]
5.
"So long as the ancient mythology had any separate establishment in the
empire, the spiritual worship which our religion demands, and so
essentially implies as only fitting for it, was preserved in its purity
by means of the salutary contrast; but no sooner had the Church become
completely triumphant and exclusive, and the parallel of Pagan idolatry
totally removed, than the old constitutional appetite revived in all its
original force, and after a short but famous struggle with the
Iconoclasts, an image worship was established, and consecrated by bulls
and canons, which, in whatever light it is regarded, differed in no
respect but the names of its objects from that which had existed for so
many ages as the chief characteristic of the religious faith of the
Gentiles."--_H. Nelson Coleridge._
I think, with submission, that it differed in sentiment; for in the
mythology of the Pagans the worship was to _beauty_, _immortality_, and
_power_, and in the Christian mythology--if I may call it so--of the
Middle Ages, the worship was to _purity_, _self-denial_, and _charity_.
[Illustration]
6.
"A narrow half-enlightened reason may easily make sport of all those
forms in which religious faith has been clothed by human imagination,
and ask why they are retained, and why one should be preferred to
another? It is sufficient to reply, that some forms there must be if
Religion is to endure as a social influence, and that the forms already
in existence are the best, if they are in unison with human sympathies,
and express, with the breadth and vagueness which every popular
utterance must from its nature possess, the interior convictions of the
general mind. What would become of the most sacred truth if all the
forms which have harboured it were destroyed at once by an unrelenting
reason, and it were driven naked and shivering about the earth till some
clever logician had devised a suitable abode for its reception? It is on
these outward forms of religion that the spirit of artistic beauty
descends and moulds them into fitting expressions of the invisible grace
and majesty of spiritual truth."--_Prospective Review_, Feb. 24. 1845.
[Illustration]
7.
"Have not Dying Christs taught fortitude to the virtuous sufferer? Have
not Holy Families cherished and ennobled domestic affections? The tender
genius of the Christian morality, even in its most degenerate state, has
made the Mother and her Child the highest objects of affectionate
superstition. How much has that beautiful superstition by the pencils of
great artists contributed to humanise mankind?"--_Sir James Mackintosh_,
writing in 1802.
[Illustration]
8.
I remember once at Merton College Chapel (May, 1844), while Archdeacon
Manning was preaching an eloquent sermon on the eternity of reward and
punishment in the future life, I was looking at the row of windows
opposite, and I saw that there were seven, all different in pattern and
construction, yet all harmonising with each other and with the building
of which they formed a part;--a symbol they might have been of
differences in the Church of Christ. From the varied windows opposite I
looked down to the faces of the congregation, all upturned to the
preacher, with expression how different! Faith, hope, fear, in the open
mouths and expanded eyelids of some; a sort of silent protest in the
compressed lips and knitted brows of others; a speculative inquiry and
interest, or merely admiring acquiescence in others; as the high or low,
the wide or contracted head prevailed; and all this diversity in
organisation, in habits of thought, in expression, harmonised for the
time by one predominant object, one feeling! the hungry sheep looking up
to be fed! When I sigh over apparent disagreement, let me think of those
windows in Merton College Chapel, and the same light from heaven
streaming through them all!--and of that assemblage of human faces,
uplifted with the same aspiration one and all!
[Illustration]
9.
I have just read the article (by Sterling, I believe), in the "Edinburgh
Review" for July; and as it chanced, this same evening, Dr. Channing's
"Discourse on the Church," and Captain Maconochie's "Report on Secondary
Punishments" from Sydney, came before me.
And as I laid them down, one after another, _this_ thought struck
me:--that about the same time, in three different and far divided regions
of the globe, three men, one military, the other an ecclesiastic, the
third a lawyer, and belonging apparently to different religious
denominations, all gave utterance to nearly the same sentiments in
regard to a Christian Church. Channing says, "A church destined to
endure through all ages, to act on all, to blend itself with new forms
of society, and with the highest improvements of the race, cannot be
expected to ordain an immutable mode of administration, but must leave
its modes of worship and communion to conform themselves silently and
gradually to the wants and progress of humanity. The rites and
arrangements which suit one period lose their significance or efficiency
in another; the forms which minister to the mind _now_ may fetter it
hereafter, and must give place to its free unfolding," &c., and more to
the same purpose.
The reviewer says, "We believe that in the judgment of an enlightened
charity, many Christian societies who are accustomed to denounce each
others' errors, will at length come to be regarded as members in common
of one great and comprehensive Church, in which diversity of forms are
harmonised by an all-pervading unity of spirit." And more to the same
purpose. The soldier and reformer says, "I believe there may be error
because there must be imperfection in the religious faith of the best
among us; but that the degree of this error is not vital in any
Christian denomination seems demonstrable by the best fruits of
faith--good works--being evidenced by all."
It is pleasant to see benign spirits divided in opinion, but harmonised
by faith, thus standing hand in hand upon a shore of peace, and looking
out together in serene hope for the dawning of a better day, instead of
rushing forth, each with his own farthing candle, under pretence of
illuminating the world--every one even more intent on putting out his
neighbour's light than on guarding his own.
(Nov. 15. 1841.)
While the idea of possible harmony in the universal Church of Christ (by
which I mean all who accept His teaching and are glad to bear His name)
is gaining ground theoretically, _practically_ it seems more and more
distant; since 1841 (when the above was written) the divergence is
greater than ever; and, as in politics, moderate opinions appear (since
1848) to merge on either side into the extremes of ultra conservatism
and ultra radicalism, as fear of the past or hope of the future
predominate, so it is in the Church. The sort of dualism which prevails
in politics and religion might give some colour to Lord Lindsay's theory
of "progress through antagonism."
[Illustration]
10.
I Incline to agree with those who think it a great mistake to consider
the present conditions or conception of Christianity as complete and
final: like the human soul to which it was fitted by Divine love and
wisdom, it has an immeasurable capacity of development, and "The Lord
hath more truth yet to break forth out of his Holy Word."
[Illustration]
11.
The nations of the present age want not _less_ religion, but _more_.
They do not wish for less community with the Apostolic times, but for
more; but above all, they want their wounds healed by a Christianity
showing a life-renewing vitality allied to reason and conscience, and
ready and able to reform the social relations of life, beginning with
the domestic and culminating with the political. They want no negations,
but positive reconstruction--no conventionality, but an honest _bonâ
fide_ foundation, deep as the human mind, and a structure free and
organic as nature. In the meantime let no national form be urged as
identical with divine truth, let no dogmatic formula oppress conscience
and reason, and let no corporation of priests, no set of dogmatists, sow
discord and hatred in the sacred communities of domestic and national
life. This view cannot be obtained without national efforts, Christian
education, free institutions, and social reforms. Then no zeal will be
called Christian which is not hallowed by charity,--no faith Christian
which is not sanctioned by reason."--_Hippolitus._
"Any author who in our time treats theological and ecclesiastical
subjects frankly, and therefore with reference to the problems of the
age, must expect to be ignored, and if that cannot be done, abused and
reviled."
The same is true of moral subjects on which strong prejudices (or shall
I say strong _convictions_?) exist in minds not very strong.
It is not perhaps of so much consequence what we believe, as it is
important that we believe; that we do not affect to believe, and so
belie our own souls. Belief is _not_ always in our power, but truth is.
[Illustration]
12.
It seems an arbitrary limitation of the design of Christianity to
assume, as Priestley does, that "it consists solely in the revelation of
a future life confirmed by the bodily resurrection of Christ." This is
truly a very material view of Christianity. If I were to be sure of
annihilation I should not be less certain of the truth of Christianity
as a system of morals exquisitely adapted for the improvement and
happiness of man as an individual; and equally adapted to conduce to the
amelioration and progressive happiness of mankind as a species.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
NOTES FROM VARIOUS SERMONS,
MADE ON THE SPOT;
SHOWING SOME THINGS IN WHICH ALL GOOD MEN ARE AGREED.
I.
_From a Roman Catholic Sermon._
When travelling in Ireland, I stayed over one Sunday in a certain town
in the north, and rambled out early in the morning. It was cold and wet,
the streets empty and quiet, but the sound of voices drew me in one
direction, down a court where was a Roman Catholic chapel. It was so
crowded that many of the congregation stood round the door. I remarked
among them a number of soldiers and most miserable-looking women. All
made way for me with true national courtesy, and I entered at the moment
the priest was finishing mass, and about to begin his sermon. There was
no pulpit, and he stood on the step of the altar; a fine-looking man,
with a bright face, a sonorous voice, and a _very_ strong Irish accent.
His text was from Matt. v. 43, 44.
He began by explaining what Christ really meant by the words "Love thy
neighbour." Then drew a picture in contrast of hatred and dissension,
commencing with dissension in families, between kindred, and between
husband and wife. Then made a most touching appeal in behalf of children
brought up in an atmosphere of contention where no love is. "God help
them! God pity them! small chance for them of being either good or
happy! for their young hearts are saddened and soured with strife, and
they eat their bread in bitterness!"
Then he preached patience to the wives, indulgence to the husbands, and
denounced scolds and quarrelsome women in a manner that seemed to glance
at recent events: "When ye are found in the streets vilifying and
slandering one another, ay, and fighting and tearing each other's hair,
do ye think ye're women? no, ye're not! ye're devils incarnate, and
ye'll go where the devils will be fit companions for ye!" &c. (Here some
women near me, with long black hair streaming down, fell upon their
knees, sobbing with contrition.) He then went on, in the same strain of
homely eloquence, to the evils of political and religious hatred, and
quoted the text, "If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live
peaceably with all men." "I'm a Catholic," he went on, "and I believe in
the truth of my own religion above all others. I'm convinced, by long
study and observation, it's the best that is; but what then? Do ye think
I hate my neighbour because he thinks differently? Do ye think I _mane_
to force my religion down other people's throats? If I were to preach
such uncharity to ye, my people, you wouldn't listen to me, ye oughtn't
to listen to me. Did Jesus Christ force His religion down other people's
throats? Not He! He endured all, He was kind to all, even to the wicked
Jews that afterwards crucified Him." "If you say you can't love your
neighbour because he's your enemy, and has injured you, what does that
mane? '_ye can't! ye can't!_' as if that excuse will serve God? hav'n't
ye done more and worse against Him? and didn't He send His only Son into
the world to redeem ye? My good people, you're all sprung from one
stock, all sons of Adam, all related to one another. When God created
Eve, mightn't He have made her out of any thing, a stock or a stone, or
out of nothing at all, at all? but He took one of Adam's ribs and
moulded her out of that, and gave her to him, just to show that we're
all from one origi
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