Friends in Council — First Series
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Title: Friends in Council — First Series
Author: Sir Arthur Helps
Release date: February 1, 2005 [eBook #7438]
Most recently updated: July 25, 2014
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIENDS IN COUNCIL — FIRST SERIES ***
This eBook was produced by Les Bowler.
CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY.
* * * * *
Friends in Council
First Series
* * * * *
BY
SIR ARTHUR HELPS.
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
_LONDON_, _PARIS & MELBOURNE_.
1891.
INTRODUCTION.
ARTHUR HELPS was born at Streatham on the 10th of July, 1813. He went at
the age of sixteen to Eton, thence to Trinity College, Cambridge. Having
graduated B.A. in 1835, he became private secretary to the Hon. T. Spring
Rice, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Melbourne’s Cabinet,
formed in April, 1835. This was his position at the beginning of the
present reign in June, 1837.
In 1839—in which year he graduated M.A.—Arthur Helps was transferred to
the service of Lord Morpeth, who was Irish Secretary in the same
ministry. Lord Melbourne’s Ministry was succeeded by that of Sir Robert
Peel in September, 1841, and Helps then was appointed a Commissioner of
French, Danish, and Spanish Claims. In 1841 he published “Essays Written
in the Intervals of Business.” Their quiet thoughtfulness was in accord
with the spirit that had given value to his services as private secretary
to two ministers of State. In 1844 that little book was followed by
another on “The Claims of Labour,” dealing with the relations of
employers to employed. There was the same scholarly simplicity and grace
of style, the same interest in things worth serious attention. “We say,”
he wrote, towards the close, “that Kings are God’s Vicegerents upon
Earth; but almost every human being has, at one time or other of his
life, a portion of the happiness of those around him in his power, which
might make him tremble, if he did but see it in all its fulness.” To
this book Arthur Helps added an essay “On the Means of Improving the
Health and Increasing the Comfort of the Labouring Classes.”
His next book was this First Series of “Friends in Council,” published in
1847, and followed by other series in later years. There were many other
writings of his, less popular than they would have been if the same
abilities had been controlled by less good taste. His “History of the
Conquest of the New World” in 1848, and of “The Spanish Conquest of
America,” in four volumes, from 1855 to 1861, preceded his obtaining from
his University, in 1864, the honorary degree of D.C.L. In June, 1860,
Arthur Helps was made Clerk of the Privy Council, and held that office of
high trust until his death on the 7th of March, 1875. He had become Sir
Arthur in 1872.
H. M.
CHAPTER I.
NONE but those who, like myself, have once lived in intellectual society,
and then have been deprived of it for years, can appreciate the delight
of finding it again. Not that I have any right to complain, if I were
fated to live as a recluse for ever. I can add little, or nothing, to
the pleasure of any company; I like to listen rather than to talk; and
when anything apposite does occur to me, it is generally the day after
the conversation has taken place. I do not, however, love good talk the
less for these defects of mine; and I console myself with thinking that I
sustain the part of a judicious listener, not always an easy one.
Great, then, was my delight at hearing last year that my old pupil,
Milverton, had taken a house which had long been vacant in our
neighbourhood. To add to my pleasure, his college friend, Ellesmere, the
great lawyer, also an old pupil of mine, came to us frequently in the
course of the autumn. Milverton was at that time writing some essays
which he occasionally read to Ellesmere and myself. The conversations
which then took place I am proud to say that I have chronicled. I think
they must be interesting to the world in general, though of course not so
much so as to me.
Milverton and Ellesmere were my favourite pupils. Many is the heartache
I have had at finding that those boys, with all their abilities, would do
nothing at the University. But it was in vain to urge them. I grieve to
say that neither of them had any ambition of the right kind. Once I
thought I had stimulated Ellesmere to the proper care and exertion; when,
to my astonishment and vexation, going into his rooms about a month
before an examination, I found that, instead of getting up his subjects,
like a reasonable man, he was absolutely endeavouring to invent some new
method for proving something which had been proved before in a hundred
ways. Over this he had wasted two days, and from that moment I saw it
was useless to waste any more of my time and patience in urging a scholar
so indocile for the beaten path.
What tricks he and Milverton used to play me, pretending not to
understand my demonstration of some mathematical problem, inventing all
manner of subtle difficulties, and declaring they could not go on while
these stumbling-blocks lay in their way! But I am getting into college
gossip, which may in no way delight my readers. And I am fancying, too,
that Milverton and Ellesmere are the boys they were to me; but I am now
the child to them. During the years that I have been quietly living
here, they have become versed in the ways of the busy world. And though
they never think of asserting their superiority, I feel it, and am glad
to do so.
My readers would, perhaps, like one to tell them something of the
characters of Ellesmere and Milverton; but it would ill become me to give
that insight into them, which I, their college friend and tutor, imagine
I have obtained. Their friendship I could never understand. It was not
on the surface very warm, and their congeniality seemed to result more
from one or two large common principles of thought than from any peculiar
similarity of taste, or from great affection on either side. Yet I
should wrong their friendship if I were to represent it otherwise than a
most true-hearted one; more so, perhaps, than some of softer texture.
What needs be seen of them individually will be by their words, which I
hope I have in the main retained.
The place where we generally met in fine weather was on the lawn before
Milverton’s house. It was an eminence which commanded a series of
valleys sloping towards the sea. And, as the sea was not more than nine
miles off, it was a matter of frequent speculation with us whether the
landscape was bounded by air or water. In the first valley was a little
town of red brick houses, with poplars coming up amongst them. The ruins
of a castle, and some water which, in olden times, had been the lake in
“the pleasaunce,” were between us and the town. The clang of an anvil,
or the clamour of a horn, or busy wheelwright’s sounds, came faintly up
to us when the wind was south.
I must not delay my readers longer with my gossip, but bring them at once
into the conversation that preceded our first reading.
* * * * *
_Milverton_. I tell you, Ellesmere, these are the only heights I care to
look down from, the heights of natural scenery.
_Ellesmere_. Pooh! my dear Milverton, it is only because the particular
mounds which the world calls heights, you think you have found out to be
but larger ant-heaps. Whenever you have cared about anything, a man more
fierce and unphilosophical in the pursuit of it I never saw. To
influence men’s minds by writing for them, is that no ambition?
_Milverton_. It may be, but I have it not. Let any kind critic convince
me that what I am now doing is useless, or has been done before, or that,
if I leave it undone, some one else will do it to my mind; and I should
fold up my papers, and watch the turnips grow in that field there, with a
placidity that would, perhaps, seem very spiritless to your now restless
and ambitious nature, Ellesmere.
_Ellesmere_. If something were to happen which will not, then—O
Philosophy, Philosophy, you, too, are a good old nurse, and rattle your
rattles for your little people, as well as old Dame World can do for
hers. But what are we to have to-day for our first reading?
_Milverton_. An Essay on Truth.
_Ellesmere_. Well, had I known this before, it is not the novelty of the
subject which would have dragged me up the hill to your house. By the
way, philosophers ought not to live upon hills. They are much more
accessible, and I think quite as reasonable, when, Diogenes-like, they
live in tubs upon flat ground. Now for the essay.
TRUTH.
Truth is a subject which men will not suffer to grow old. Each age has
to fight with its own falsehoods: each man with his love of saying to
himself and those around him pleasant things and things serviceable for
to-day, rather than the things which are. Yet a child appreciates at
once the divine necessity for truth; never asks, “What harm is there in
saying the thing that is not?” and an old man finds, in his growing
experience, wider and wider applications of the great doctrine and
discipline of truth.
Truth needs the wisdom of the serpent as well as the simplicity of the
dove. He has gone but a little way in this matter who supposes that it
is an easy thing for a man to speak the truth, “the thing he troweth;”
and that it is a casual function, which may be fulfilled at once after
any lapse of exercise. But, in the first place, the man who would speak
truth must know what he troweth. To do that, he must have an uncorrupted
judgment. By this is not meant a perfect judgment or even a wise one,
but one which, however it may be biassed, is not bought—is still a
judgment. But some people’s judgments are so entirely gained over by
vanity, selfishness, passion, or inflated prejudices and fancies long
indulged in; or they have the habit of looking at everything so
carelessly, that they see nothing truly. They cannot interpret the world
of reality. And this is the saddest form of lying, “the lie that sinketh
in,” as Bacon says, which becomes part of the character and goes on
eating the rest away.
Again, to speak truth, a man must not only have that martial courage
which goes out, with sound of drum and trumpet, to do and suffer great
things; but that domestic courage which compels him to utter small
sounding truths in spite of present inconvenience and outraged
sensitiveness or sensibility. Then he must not be in any respect a slave
to self-interest. Often it seems as if but a little misrepresentation
would gain a great good for us; or, perhaps, we have only to conceal some
trifling thing, which, if told, might hinder unreasonably, as we think, a
profitable bargain. The true man takes care to tell, notwithstanding.
When we think that truth interferes at one time or another with all a
man’s likings, hatings, and wishes, we must admit, I think, that it is
the most comprehensive and varied form of self-denial.
Then, in addition to these great qualities, truth-telling in its highest
sense requires a well-balanced mind. For instance, much exaggeration,
perhaps the most, is occasioned by an impatient and easily moved
temperament which longs to convey its own vivid impressions to other
minds, and seeks by amplifying to gain the full measure of their
sympathy. But a true man does not think what his hearers are feeling,
but what he is saying.
More stress might be laid than has been on the intellectual requisites
for truth, which are probably the best part of intellectual cultivation;
and as much caused by truth as causing it. {12} But, putting the
requisites for truth at the fewest, see of how large a portion of the
character truth is the resultant. If you were to make a list of those
persons accounted the religious men of their respective ages, you would
have a ludicrous combination of characters essentially dissimilar. But
true people are kindred. Mention the eminently true men, and you will
find that they are a brotherhood. There is a family likeness throughout
them.
* * * * *
If we consider the occasions of exercising truthfulness and descend to
particulars, we may divide the matter into the following heads:—truth to
oneself—truth to mankind in general—truth in social relations—truth in
business—truth in pleasure.
1. Truth to oneself. All men have a deep interest that each man should
tell himself the truth. Not only will he become a better man, but he
will understand them better. If men knew themselves, they could not be
intolerant to others.
It is scarcely necessary to say much about the advantage of a man knowing
himself for himself. To get at the truth of any history is good; but a
man’s own history—when he reads that truly, and, without a mean and
over-solicitous introspection, knows what he is about and what he has
been about, it is a Bible to him. “And David said unto Nathan, I have
sinned before the Lord.” David knew the truth about himself. But truth
to oneself is not merely truth about oneself. It consists in maintaining
an openness and justness of soul which brings a man into relation with
all truth. For this, all the senses, if you might so call them, of the
soul must be uninjured—that is, the affections and the perceptions must
be just. For a man to speak the truth to himself comprehends all
goodness; and for us mortals can only be an aim.
2. Truth to mankind in general. This is a matter which, as I read it,
concerns only the higher natures. Suffice it to say, that the
withholding large truths from the world may be a betrayal of the greatest
trust.
3. Truth in social relations. Under this head come the practices of
making speech vary according to the person spoken to; of pretending to
agree with the world when you do not; of not acting according to what is
your deliberate and well-advised opinion because some mischief may be
made of it by persons whose judgment in this matter you do not respect;
of maintaining a wrong course for the sake of consistency; of encouraging
the show of intimacy with those whom you never can be intimate with; and
many things of the same kind. These practices have elements of charity
and prudence as well as fear and meanness in them. Let those parts which
correspond to fear and meanness be put aside. Charity and prudence are
not parasitical plants which require boles of falsehood to climb up upon.
It is often extremely difficult in the mixed things of this world to act
truly and kindly too; but therein lies one of the great trials of man,
that his sincerity should have kindness in it, and his kindness truth.
4. Truth in business. The more truth you can get into any business, the
better. Let the other side know the defects of yours, let them know how
you are to be satisfied, let there be as little to be found as possible
(I should say nothing), and if your business be an honest one, it will be
best tended in this way. The talking, bargaining, and delaying that
would thus be needless, the little that would then have to be done over
again, the anxiety that would be put aside, would even in a worldly way
be “great gain.” It is not, perhaps, too much to say, that the third
part of men’s lives is wasted by the effect, direct or indirect, of
falsehoods.
Still, let us not be swift to imagine that lies are never of any service.
A recent Prime Minister said, that he did not know about truth always
prevailing and the like; but lies had been very successful against his
government. And this was true enough. Every lie has its day. There is
no preternatural inefficacy in it by reason of its falseness. And this
is especially the case with those vague injurious reports which are no
man’s lies, but all men’s carelessness. But even as regards special and
unmistakable falsehood, we must admit that it has its success. A
complete being might deceive with wonderful effect; however, as nature is
always against a liar, it is great odds in the case of ordinary mortals.
Wolsey talks of
“Negligence
Fit for a fool to fall by,”
when he gives Henry the wrong packet; but the Cardinal was quite
mistaken. That kind of negligence was just the thing of which far-seeing
and thoughtful men are capable; and which, if there were no higher
motive, should induce them to rely on truth alone. A very close vulpine
nature, all eyes, all ears, may succeed better in deceit. But it is a
sleepless business. Yet, strange to say, it is had recourse to in the
most spendthrift fashion, as the first and easiest thing that comes to
hand.
In connection with truth in business, it may be observed that if you are
a truthful man, you should be watchful over those whom you employ; for
your subordinate agents are often fond of lying for your interests, as
they think. Show them at once that you do not think with them, and that
you will disconcert any of their inventions by breaking in with the
truth. If you suffer the fear of seeming unkind to prevent your
thrusting well-meant inventions aside, you may get as much pledged to
falsehoods as if you had coined and uttered them yourself.
5. Truth in pleasure. Men have been said to be sincere in their
pleasures; but this is only that the taste and habits of men are more
easily discernible in pleasure than in business. The want of truth is as
great a hindrance to the one as to the other. Indeed, there is so much
insincerity and formality in the pleasurable department of human life,
especially in social pleasures, that instead of a bloom there is a slime
upon it, which deadens and corrupts the thing. One of the most comical
sights to superior beings must be to see two human creatures with
elaborate speech and gestures making each other exquisitely uncomfortable
from civility: the one pressing what he is most anxious that the other
should not accept, and the other accepting only from the fear of giving
offence by refusal. There is an element of charity in all this too; and
it will be the business of a just and refined nature to be sincere and
considerate at the same time. This will be better done by enlarging our
sympathy, so that more things and people are pleasant to us, than by
increasing the civil and conventional part of our nature, so that we are
able to do more seeming with greater skill and endurance. Of other false
hindrances to pleasure, such as ostentation and pretences of all kinds,
there is neither charity nor comfort in them. They may be got rid of
altogether, and no moaning made over them. Truth, which is one of the
largest creatures, opens out the way to the heights of enjoyment, as well
as to the depths of self-denial.
* * * * *
It is difficult to think too highly of the merits and delights of truth;
but there is often in men’s minds an exaggerated notion of some bit of
truth, which proves a great assistance to falsehood. For instance, the
shame of some particular small falsehood, exaggeration, or insincerity,
becomes a bugbear which scares a man into a career of false dealing. He
has begun making a furrow a little out of the line, and he ploughs on in
it to try and give some consistency and meaning to it. He wants almost
to persuade himself that it was not wrong, and entirely to hide the
wrongness from others. This is a tribute to the majesty of truth; also
to the world’s opinion about truth. It proceeds, too, upon the notion
that all falsehoods are equal, which is not the case; or on some fond
craving for a show of perfection, which is sometimes very inimical to the
reality. The practical, as well as the high-minded, view in such cases,
is for a man to think how he can be true now. To attain that, it may,
even for this world, be worth while for a man to admit that he is
inconsistent, and even that he has been untrue. His hearers, did they
know anything of themselves, would be fully aware that he was not
singular, except in the courage of owning his insincerity.
* * * * *
_Ellesmere_. That last part requires thinking about. If you were to
permit men, without great loss of reputation, to own that they had been
insincere, you might break down some of that majesty of truth you talk
about. And bad men might avail themselves of any facilities of owning
insincerity, to commit more of it. I can imagine that the apprehension
of this might restrain a man from making any such admission as you allude
to, even if he could make up his mind to do it otherwise.
_Milverton_. Yes; but can anything be worse than a man going on in a
false course? Each man must look to his own truthfulness, and keep that
up as well as he can, even at the risk of saying, or doing, something
which may be turned to ill account by others. We may think too much
about this reflection of our external selves. Let the real self be
right. I am not so fanciful as to expect men to go about clamouring that
they have been false; but at no risk of letting people see that, or of
even being obliged to own it, should they persevere in it.
_Dunsford_. Milverton is right, I think.
_Ellesmere_. Do not imagine that I am behind either of you in a wish to
hold up truth. My only doubt was as to the mode. For my own part, I
have such faith in truth that I take it mere concealment is in most cases
a mischief. And I should say, for instance, that a wise man would be
sorry that his fellows should think better of him than he deserves. By
the way, that is a reason why I should not like to be a writer of moral
essays, Milverton—one should be supposed to be so very good.
_Milverton_. Only by thoughtless people then. There is a saying given
to Rousseau, not that he ever did say it, for I believe it was a
misprint, but it was a possible saying for him, “Chaque homme qui pense
est méchant.” Now, without going the length of this aphorism, we may say
that what has been well written has been well suffered.
“He best can paint them who has felt them most.”
And so, though we should not exactly declare that writers who have had
much moral influence have been wicked men, yet we may admit that they
have been amongst the most struggling, which implies anything but serene
self-possession and perfect spotlessness. If you take the great ones,
Luther, Shakespeare, Goethe, you see this at once.
_Dunsford_. David, St. Paul.
_Milverton_. Such men are like great rocks on the seashore. By their
resistance, terraces of level land are formed; but the rocks themselves
bear many scars and ugly indents, while the sea of human difficulty
presents the same unwrinkled appearance in all ages. Yet it has been
driven back.
_Ellesmere_. But has it lost any of its bulk, or only gone elsewhere?
One part of the resemblance certainly is that these same rocks, which
were bulwarks, become, in their turn, dangers.
_Milverton_. Yes, there is always loss in that way. It is seldom given
to man to do unmixed good. But it was not this aspect of the simile that
I was thinking of: it was the scarred appearance.
_Dunsford_. Scars not always of defeat or flight; scars in the front.
_Milverton_. Ah, it hardly does for us to talk of victory or defeat, in
these cases; but we may look at the contest itself as something not bad,
terminate how it may. We lament over a man’s sorrows, struggles,
disasters, and shortcomings; yet they were possessions too. We talk of
the origin of evil and the permission of evil. But what is evil? We
mostly speak of sufferings and trials as good, perhaps, in their result;
but we hardly admit that they may be good in themselves. Yet they are
knowledge—how else to be acquired, unless by making men as gods, enabling
them to understand without experience. All that men go through may be
absolutely the best for them—no such thing as evil, at least in our
customary meaning of the word. But, you will say, they might have been
created different and higher. See where this leads to. Any sentient
being may set up the same claim: a fly that it had not been made a man;
and so the end would be that each would complain of not being all.
_Ellesmere_. Say it all over again, my dear Milverton: it is rather
hard. [Milverton did so, in nearly the same words.] I think I have
heard it all before. But you may have it as you please. I do not say
this irreverently, but the truth is, I am too old and too earthly to
enter upon these subjects. I think, however, that the view is a
stout-hearted one. It is somewhat in the same vein of thought that you
see in Carlyle’s works about the contempt of happiness. But in all these
cases, one is apt to think of the sage in “Rasselas,” who is very wise
about human misery till he loses his daughter. Your fly illustration has
something in it. Certainly when men talk big about what might have been
done for man, they omit to think what might be said, on similar grounds,
for each sentient creature in the universe. But here have we been
meandering off into origin of evil, and uses of great men, and wickedness
of writers, etc., whereas I meant to have said something about the essay.
How would you answer what Bacon maintains? “A mixture of a lie doth ever
add pleasure.”
_Milverton_. He is not speaking of the lies of social life, but of
self-deception. He goes on to class under that head “vain opinions,
flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would.” These
things are the sweetness of “the lie that sinketh in.” Many a man has a
kind of mental kaleidoscope, where the bits of broken glass are his own
merits and fortunes, and they fall into harmonious arrangements and
delight him—often most mischievously and to his ultimate detriment, but
they are a present pleasure.
_Ellesmere_. Well, I am going to be true in my pleasures: to take a long
walk alone. I have got a difficult case for an opinion, which I must go
and think over.
_Dunsford_. Shall we have another reading tomorrow?
_Milverton_. Yes, if you are both in the humour for it.
CHAPTER II.
AS the next day was fine, we agreed to have our reading in the same spot
that I have described before. There was scarcely any conversation worth
noting, until after Milverton had read us the following essay on
Conformity.
CONFORMITY.
The conformity of men is often a far poorer thing than that which
resembles it amongst the lower animals. The monkey imitates from
imitative skill and gamesomeness: the sheep is gregarious, having no
sufficient will to form an independent project of its own. But man often
loathes what he imitates, and conforms to what he knows to be wrong.
It will ever be one of the nicest problems for a man to solve how far he
shall profit by the thoughts of other men, and not be enslaved by them.
He comes into the world, and finds swaddling clothes ready for his mind
as well as his body. There is a vast scheme of social machinery set up
about him; and he has to discern how he can make it work with him and for
him, without becoming part of the machinery himself. In this lie the
anguish and the struggle of the greatest minds. Most sad are they,
having mostly the deepest sympathies, when they find themselves breaking
off from communion with other minds. They would go on, if they could,
with the opinions around them. But, happily, there is something to which
a man owes a larger allegiance than to any human affection. He would be
content to go away from a false thing, or quietly to protest against it;
but in spite of him the strife in his heart breaks into burning utterance
by word or deed.
Few, however, are those who venture, even for the shortest time, into
that hazy world of independent thought, where a man is not upheld by a
crowd of other men’s opinions, but where he must find a footing of his
own. Among the mass of men, there is little or no resistance to
conformity. Could the history of opinions be fully written, it would be
seen how large a part in human proceedings the love of conformity, or
rather the fear of non-conformity, has occasioned. It has triumphed over
all other fears; over love, hate, pity, sloth, anger, truth, pride,
comfort, self-interest, vanity, and maternal love. It has torn down the
sense of beauty in the human soul, and set up in its place little ugly
idols which it compels us to worship with more than Japanese devotion.
It has contradicted Nature in the most obvious things, and been listened
to with abject submission. Its empire has been no less extensive than
deep-seated. The serf to custom points his finger at the slave to
fashion—as if it signified whether it is an old or a new thing which is
irrationally conformed to. The man of letters despises both the slaves
of fashion and of custom, but often runs his narrow career of thought,
shut up, though he sees it not, within close walls which he does not
venture even to peep over.
It is hard to say in what department of human thought and endeavour
conformity has triumphed most. Religion comes to one’s mind first; and
well it may when one thinks what men have conformed to in all ages in
that matter. If we pass to art, or science, we shall see there too the
wondrous slavery which men have endured—from puny fetters, moreover,
which one stirring thought would, as we think, have burst asunder. The
above, however, are matters not within every one’s cognisance; some of
them are shut in by learning or the show of it; and plain “practical” men
would say, they follow where they have no business but to follow. But
the way in which the human body shall be covered is not a thing for the
scientific and the learned only: and is allowed on all hands to concern,
in no small degree, one half at least of the creation. It is in such a
simple thing as dress that each of us may form some estimate of the
extent of conformity in the world. A wise nation, unsubdued by
superstition, with the collected experience of peaceful ages, concludes
that female feet are to be clothed by crushing them. The still wiser
nations of the west have adopted a swifter mode of destroying health, and
creating angularity, by crushing the upper part of the female body. In
such matters nearly all people conform. Our brother man is seldom so
bitter against us, as when we refuse to adopt at once his notions of the
infinite. But even religious dissent were less dangerous and more
respectable than dissent in dress. If you want to see what men will do
in the way of conformity, take a European hat for your subject of
meditation. I dare say there are twenty-two millions of people at this
minute each wearing one of these hats in order to please the rest. As in
the fine arts, and in architecture, especially, so in dress, something is
often retained that was useful when something else was beside it. To go
to architecture for an instance, a pinnacle is retained, not that it is
of any use where it is, but in another kind of building it would have
been. That style of building, as a whole, has gone out of fashion, but
the pinnacle has somehow or other kept its ground and must be there, no
one insolently going back to first principles and asking what is the use
and object of building pinnacles. Similar instances in dress will occur
to my readers. Some of us are not skilled in such affairs; but looking
at old pictures we may sometimes see how modern clothes have attained
their present pitch of frightfulness and inconvenience. This matter of
dress is one in which, perhaps, you might expect the wise to conform to
the foolish; and they have.
When we have once come to a right estimate of the strength of conformity,
we shall, I think, be more kindly disposed to eccentricity than we
usually are. Even a wilful or an absurd eccentricity is some support
against the weighty common-place conformity of the world. If it were not
for some singular people who persist in thinking for themselves, in
seeing for themselves, and in being comfortable, we should all collapse
into a hideous uniformity.
It is worth while to analyse that influence of the world which is the
right arm of conformity. Some persons bend to the world in all things,
from an innocent belief that what so many people think must be right.
Others have a vague fear of the world as of some wild beast which may
spring out upon them at any time. Tell them they are safe in their
houses from this myriad-eyed creature: they still are sure that they
shall meet with it some day, and would propitiate its favour at any
sacrifice. Many men contract their idea of the world to their own
circle, and what they imagine to be said in that circle of friends and
acquaintances is their idea of public opinion—“as if,” to use a saying of
Southey’s, “a number of worldlings made a world.” With some unfortunate
people, the much dreaded “world” shrinks into one person of more mental
power than their own, or perhaps merely of coarser nature; and the fancy
as to what this person will say about anything they do, sits upon them
like a nightmare. Happy the man who can embark his small adventure of
deeds and thoughts upon the shallow waters round his home, or send them
afloat on the wide sea of humanity, with no great anxiety in either case
as to what reception they may meet with! He would have them steer by the
stars, and take what wind may come to them.
A reasonable watchfulness against conformity will not lead a man to spurn
the aid of other men, still less to reject the accumulated mental capital
of ages. It does not compel us to dote upon the advantages of savage
life. We would not forego the hard-earned gains of civil society because
there is something in most of them which tends to contract the natural
powers, although it vastly aids them. We would not, for instance, return
to the monosyllabic utterance of barbarous men, because in any formed
language there are a thousand snares for the understanding. Yet we must
be most watchful of them. And in all things, a man must beware of so
conforming himself as to crush his nature and forego the purpose of his
being. We must look to other standards than what men may say or think.
We must not abjectly bow down before rules and usages; but must refer to
principles and purposes. In few words, we must think, not whom we are
following, but what we are doing. If not, why are we gifted with
individual life at all? Uniformity does not consist with the higher
forms of vitality. Even the leaves of the same tree are said to differ,
each one from all the rest. And can it be good for the soul of a man
“with a biography of his own like to no one else’s,” to subject itself
without thought to the opinions and ways of others: not to grow into
symmetry, but to be moulded down into conformity?
* * * * *
_Ellesmere_. Well, I rather like that essay. I was afraid, at first, it
was going to have more of the fault into which you essay writers
generally fall, of being a comment on the abuse of a thing, and not on
the thing itself. There always seems to me to want another essay on the
other side. But I think, at the end, you protect yourself against
misconstruction. In the spirit of the essay, you know, of course, that I
quite agree with you. Indeed, I differ from all the ordinary biographers
of that independent gentleman, Don’t Care. I believe Don’t Care came to
a good end. At any rate he came to some end. Whereas numbers of people
never have beginning, or ending, of their own. An obscure dramatist,
Milverton, whom we know of, makes one of his characters say, in reply to
some world-fearing wretch:
“While you, you think
What others think, or what you think they’ll say,
Shaping your course by something scarce more tangible
Than dreams, at best the shadows on the stream
Of aspen leaves by flickering breezes swayed—
Load me with irons, drive me from morn till night,
I am not the utter slave which that man is
Whose sole word, thought, and deed are built on what
The world may say of him.”
_Milverton_. Never mind the obscure dramatist. But, Ellesmere, you
really are unreasonable, if you suppose that, in the limits of a short
essay, you can accurately distinguish all you write between the use and
the abuse of a thing. The question is, will people misunderstand
you—not, is the language such as to be logically impregnable? Now, in
the present case, no man will really suppose it is a wise and just
conformity that I am inveighing against.
_Ellesmere_. I am not sure of that. If everybody is to have independent
thought, would there not be a fearful instability and want of
compactness? Another thing, too—conformity often saves so much time and
trouble.
_Milverton_. Yes; it has its uses. I do not mean, in the world of
opinion and morality, that it should be all elasticity and no
gravitation; but at least enough elasticity to preserve natural form and
independent being.
_Ellesmere_. I think it would have been better if you had turned the
essay another way, and instead of making it on conformity, had made it on
interference. That is the greater mischief and the greater folly, I
think. Why do people unreasonably conform? Because they feel
unreasonable interference. War, I say, is interference on a small scale
compared with the interference of private life. Then the absurdity on
which it proceeds; that men are all alike, or that it is desirable that
they should be; and that what is good for one is good for all.
_Dunsford_. I must say, I think, Milverton, you do not give enough
credit for sympathy, good-nature, and humility as material elements in
the conformity of the world.
_Ellesmere_. I am not afraid, my dear Dunsford, of the essay doing much
harm. There is a power of sleepy conformity in the world. You may just
startle your conformists for a minute, but they gravitate into their old
way very soon. You talk of their humility, Dunsford, but I have heard
people who have conformed to opinions, without a pretence of
investigation, as arrogant and intolerant towards anybody who differed
from them, as if they stood upon a pinnacle of independent sagacity and
research.
_Dunsford_. One never knows, Ellesmere, on which side you are. I
thought you were on mine a minute or two ago; and now you come down upon
me with more than Milverton’s anti-conforming spirit.
_Ellesmere_. The greatest mischief, as I take it, of this slavish
conformity, is in the reticence it creates. People will be, what are
called, intimate friends, and yet no real interchange of opinion takes
place between them. A man keeps his doubts, his difficulties, and his
peculiar opinions to himself. He is afraid of letting anybody know that
he does not exactly agree with the world’s theories on all points. There
is no telling the hindrance that this is to truth.
_Milverton_. A great cause of this, Ellesmere, is in the little reliance
you can have on any man’s secrecy. A man finds that what, in the heat of
discussion, and in the perfect carelessness of friendship, he has said to
his friend, is quoted to people whom he would never have said it to;
knowing that it would be sure to be misunderstood, or half-understood, by
them. And so he grows cautious; and is very loth to communicate to
anybody his more cherished opinions, unless they fall in exactly with the
stream. Added to which, I think there is in these times less than there
ever was of a proselytising spirit; and people are content to keep their
opinions to themselves—more perhaps from indifference than from fear.
_Ellesmere_. Yes, I agree with you.
By the way, I think your taking dress as an illustration of extreme
conformity is not bad. Really it is wonderful the degree of square and
dull hideousness to which, in the process of time and tailoring, and by
severe conformity, the human creature’s outward appearance has arrived.
Look at a crowd of men from a height, what an ugly set of ants they
appear! Myself, when I see an Eastern man, one of the people attached to
their embassies, sweeping by us in something flowing and stately, I feel
inclined to take off my hat to him (only that I think the hat might
frighten him), and say, Here is a great, unhatted, uncravated, bearded
man, not a creature clipt and twisted and tortured into tailorhood.
_Dunsford_. Ellesmere broke in upon me just now, so that I did not say
all that I meant to say. But, Milverton, what would you admit that we
are to conform to? In silencing the general voice, may we not give too
much opportunity to our own headstrong suggestions, and to wilful
licence?
_Milverton_. Yes: to be somewhat deaf to the din of the world may be no
gain, even loss, if then we only listen more to the worst part of
ourselves; but in itself it is a good thing to silence that din. It is
at least a beginning of good. If anything good is then gained, it is not
a sheepish tendency, but an independent resolve growing out of our
nature. And, after all, when we talk of non-conformity, it may only be
that we non-conform to the immediate sect of thought or action about us,
to conform to a much wider thing in human nature.
_Ellesmere_. Ah me! how one wants a moral essayist always at hand to
enable one to make use of moral essays.
_Milverton_. Your rules of law are grand things—the proverbs of justice;
yet has not each case its specialities, requiring to be argued with much
circumstance, and capable of different interpretations? Words cannot be
made into men.
_Dunsford_. I wonder you answer his sneers, Milverton.
_Ellesmere_. I must go and see whether words cannot be made into
guineas: and then guineas into men is an easy thing. These trains will
not wait even for critics, so, for the present, good-bye.
CHAPTER III.
ELLESMERE soon wrote us word that he would be able to come down again;
and I agreed to be at Worth-Ashton (Milverton’s house) on the day of his
arrival. I had scarcely seated myself at our usual place of meeting
before the friends entered, and after greeting me, the conversation thus
began:
_Ellesmere_. Upon my word, you people who live in the country have a
pleasant time of it. As Milverton was driving me from the station
through Durley Wood, there was such a rich smell of pines, such a
twittering of birds, so much joy, sunshine, and beauty, that I began to
think, if there were no such place as London, it really would be very
desirable to live in the country.
_Milverton_. What a climax! But I am always very suspicious, when
Ellesmere appears to be carried away by any enthusiasm, that it will
break off suddenly, like the gallop of a post-horse.
_Dunsford_. Well, what are we to have for our essay!
_Milverton_. Despair.
_Ellesmere_. I feel equal to anything just now, and so, if it must be
read sometime or other, let us have it now.
_Milverton_. You need not be afraid. I want to take away, not to add
gloom. Shall I read?
We assented, and he began.
DESPAIR.
Despair may be serviceable when it arises from a temporary prostration of
spirits: during which the mind is insensibly healing, and her scattered
power silently returning. This is better than to be the sport of a
teasing hope without reason. But to indulge in despair as a habit is
slothful, cowardly, short-sighted; and manifestly tends against Nature.
Despair is then the paralysis of the soul.
These are the principal causes of despair—remorse, the sorrows of the
affections, worldly trouble, morbid views of religion, native melancholy.
REMORSE.
Remorse does but add to the evil which bred it, when it promotes, not
penitence, but despair. To have erred in one branch of our duties does
not unfit us for the performance of all the rest, unless we suffer the
dark spot to spread over our whole nature, which may happen almost
unobserved in the torpor of despair. This kind of despair is chiefly
grounded on a foolish belief that individual words or actions constitute
the whole life of man: whereas they are often not fair representatives of
portions even of that life. The fragments of rock in a mountain stream
may tell much of its history, are in fact results of its doings, but they
are not the stream. They were brought down when it was turbid; it may
now be clear: they are as much the result of other circumstances as of
the action of the stream; their history is fitful: they give us no sure
intelligence of the future course of the stream, or of the nature of its
waters; and may scarcely show more than that it has not been always as it
is. The actions of men are often but little better indications of the
men themselves.
A prolonged despair arising from remorse is unreasonable at any age, but
if possible, still more so when felt by the young. To think, for
example, that the great Being who made us could have made eternal ruin
and misery inevitable to a poor half-fledged creature of eighteen or
nineteen! And yet how often has the profoundest despair from remorse
brooded over children of that age and eaten into their hearts.
There is frequently much selfishness about remorse. Put what has been
done at the worst. Let a man see his own evil word, or deed, in full
light, and own it to be black as hell itself. He is still here. He
cannot be isolated. There still remain for him cares and duties; and,
therefore, hopes. Let him not in imagination link all creation to his
fate. Let him yet live in the welfare of others, and, if it may be so,
work out his own in this way: if not, be content with theirs. The
saddest cause of remorseful despair is when a man does something
expressly contrary to his character: when an honourable man, for
instance, slides into some dishonourable action; or a tender-hearted man
falls into cruelty from carelessness; or, as often happens, a sensitive
nature continues to give the greatest pain to others from temper, feeling
all the time, perhaps, more deeply than the persons aggrieved. All these
cases may be summed up in the words, “That which I would not that I do,”
the saddest of all human confessions, made by one of the greatest men.
However, the evil cannot be mended by despair. Hope and humility are the
only supports under this burden. As Mr. Carlyle says,
“What are faults, what are the outward details of a life; if the
inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled,
never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten. ‘It is not in man that
walketh to direct his steps.’ Of all acts, is not, for a man,
_repentance_ the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were that
same supercilious consciousness of no sin; that is death: the heart
so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility, and fact; is dead:
it is ‘pure’ as dead dry sand is pure. David’s life and history, as
written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest
emblem ever given of a man’s moral progress and warfare here below.
All earnest souls will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an
earnest human soul towards what is good and best. Struggle often
baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck; yet a struggle
never ended; ever, with tears, repentance, true unconquerable
purpose, begun anew. Poor human nature! is not a man’s walking, in
truth, always that: a ‘succession of falls!’ Man can do no other.
In this wild element of a Life, he has to struggle onwards; now
fallen, deep abased; and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleeding
heart, he has to rise again, struggle again still onwards. That his
struggle be a faithful unconquerable one: this is the question of
questions.”
THE SORROWS OF THE AFFECTIONS.
The loss by death of those we love has the first place in these sorrows.
Yet the feeling in this case, even when carried to the highest, is not
exactly despair, having too much warmth in it for that. Not much can be
said in the way of comfort on this head. Queen Elizabeth, in her hard,
wise way, writing to a mother who had lost her son, tells her that she
will be comforted in time; and why should she not do for herself what the
mere lapse of time will do for her? Brave words! and the stern woman,
more earnest than the sage in “Rasselas,” would have tried their virtue
on herself. But I fear they fell somewhat coldly on the mother’s ear.
Happily, in these bereavements, kind Nature with her opiates, day by day
administered, does more than all the skill of the physician moralists.
Sir Thomas Browne says,
“Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares
with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly
remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave
but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows
destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.
Afflictions induce callosities, miseries are slippery, or fall like
snow upon us, which, notwithstanding, is no unhappy stupidity. To be
ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is a merciful
provision in Nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our few and
evil days, and our delivered senses not relapsing into cutting
remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of
repetitions.”
The good knight thus makes much comfort out of our physical weakness.
But something may be done in a very different direction, namely, by
spiritual strength. By elevating and purifying the sorrow, we may take
it more out of matter, as it were, and so feel less the loss of what is
material about it.
The other sorrows of the affections which may produce despair, are those
in which the affections are wounded, as jealousy, love unrequited,
friendship betrayed and the like. As, in despair from remorse, the whole
life seems to be involved in one action: so in the despair we are now
considering, the whole life appears to be shut up in the one unpropitious
affection. Yet human nature, if fairly treated, is too large a thing to
be suppressed into despair by one affection, however potent. We might
imagine that if there were anything that would rob life of its strength
and favour, it is domestic unhappiness. And yet how numerous is the bond
of those whom we know to have been eminently unhappy in some domestic
relation, but whose lives have been full of vigorous and kindly action.
Indeed the culture of the world has been largely carried on by such men.
As long as there is life in the plant, though it be sadly pent in, it
will grow towards any opening of light that is left for it.
WORLDLY TROUBLE.
This appears too mean a subject for despair, or, at least, unworthy of
having any remedy, or soothing thought out of it. Whether a man lives in
a large room or a small one, rides or is obliged to walk, gets a
plenteous dinner every day, or a sparing one, do not seem matters for
despair. But the truth is, that worldly trouble, such for instance, as
loss of fortune, is seldom the simple thing that poets would persuade us.
“The little or the much she gave is quietly resigned;
Content with poverty, my soul I arm,
And virtue, though in rags will keep me warm.”
So sings Dryden, paraphrasing Horace, but each of them with their
knowledge of the world, cross-questioned in prose, could have told us how
the stings of fortune really are felt. The truth is, that fortune is not
exactly a distinct isolated thing which can be taken away—“and there an
end.” But much has to be severed, with undoubted pain in the operation.
A man mostly feels that his reputation for sagacity, often his honour,
the comfort, too, or supposed comfort, of others are embarked in his
fortunes. Mere stoicism, and resolves about fitting fortune to oneself,
not oneself to fortune, though good things enough in their way, will not
always meet the whole of the case. And a man who could bear personal
distress of any kind with Spartan indifference, may suffer himself to be
overwhelmed by despair growing out of worldly trouble. A frequent origin
of such despair, as indeed of all despair (not by any means excluding
despair from remorse), is pride. Let a man say to himself, “I am not the
perfect character I meant to be; this is not the conduct I had imagined
for myself; these are not the fortunate circumstances I had always
intended to be surrounded by.” Let him at once admit that he is on a
lower level than his ideal one; and then see what is to be done there.
This seems the best way of treating all that part of worldly trouble
which consists of self-reproval. We scarcely know of any outward life
continuously prosperous (and a very dull one it would be): why should we
expect the inner life to be one course of unbroken self-improvement,
either in prudence, or in virtue?
Before a man gives way to excessive grief about the fortunes of his
family being lost with his own, he should think whether he really knows
wherein lies the welfare of others. Give him some fairy power,
inexhaustible purses or magic lamps, not, however, applying to the mind;
and see whether he could make those whom he would favour good or happy.
In the East, they have a proverb of this kind, Happy are the children of
those fathers who go to the Evil One. But for anything that our Western
experience shows, the proverb might be reversed, and, instead of running
thus, Happy are the sons of those who have got money anyhow, it might be,
Happy are the sons of those who have failed in getting money. In fact,
there is no sound proverb to be made about it either way. We know
nothing about the matter. Our surest influence for good or evil over
others is, through themselves. Our ignorance of what is physically good
for any man may surely prevent anything like despair with regard to that
part of the fortunes of others dear to us, which, as we think, is bound
up with our own.
MORBID VIEWS OF RELIGION.
As religion is the most engrossing subject that can be presented to us,
it will be considered in all states of mind and by all minds. It is
impossible but that the most hideous and perverted views of religion must
arise. To combat the particular views which may be supposed to cause
religious despair, would be too theological an undertaking for this
essay. One thing only occurs to me to say, namely, that the lives and
the mode of speaking about themselves adopted by the founders of
Christianity, afford the best contradiction to religious melancholy that
I believe can be met with.
NATIVE MELANCHOLY.
There is such a thing. Jacques, without the “sundry contemplation” of
his travels, or any “simples” to “compound” his melancholy form, would
have ever been wrapped in a “most humorous sadness.” It was innate.
This melancholy may lay its votaries open to any other cause of despair,
but having mostly some touch of philosophy (if it be not absolutely
morbid), it is not unlikely to preserve them from any extremity. It is
not acute, but chronic.
It may be said in its favour that it tends to make men indifferent to
their own fortunes. But then the sorrow of the world presses more deeply
upon them. With large open hearts, the untowardness of things present,
the miseries of the past, the mischief, stupidity, and error which reign
in the world, at times almost crush your melancholy men. Still, out of
their sadness may come their strength, or, at least, the best direction
of it. Nothing, perhaps, is lost; not even sin—much less sorrow.
_Ellesmere_. I am glad you have ended as you have: for, previously, you
seemed to make too much of getting rid of all distress of mind. I always
liked that passage in “Philip van Artevelde,” where Father John says,
“He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend.
Eternity mourns that.”
You have a better memory than I have: how does it go on?
_Milverton_.
“’Tis an ill cure
For life’s worst ills, to have no time to feel them.
Where sorrow’s held intrusive and turned out,
There wisdom will not enter, nor true power,
Nor aught that dignifies humanity.”
Still this does not justify despair, which was what I was writing about.
_Ellesmere_. Perhaps it was not a just criticism of mine. One part of
the subject you have certainly omitted. You do not tell us how much
there often is of physical disorder in despair. I dare say you will
think it a coarse and unromantic mode of looking at things; but I must
confess I agree with what Leigh Hunt has said somewhere, that one can
walk down distress of mind—even remorse, perhaps.
_Milverton_. Yes; I am for the Peripatetics against all other
philosophers.
_Ellesmere_. By the way, there is a passage in one of Hazlitt’s essays,
I thought of while you were reading, about remorse and religious
melancholy. He speaks of mixing up religion and morality; and then goes
on to say, that Calvinistic notions have obscured and prevented
self-knowledge. {42}
Give me the essay—there is a passage I want to look at. This comparison
of life to a mountain stream, the rocks brought down by it being the
actions, is too much worked out. When we speak of similes not going on
four legs, it implies, I think, that a simile is at best but a
four-legged animal. Now this is almost a centipede of a simile. I think
I have had the same thought as yours here, and I have compared the life
of an individual to a curve. You both smile. Now I thought that
Dunsford at any rate would be pleased with this reminiscence of college
days. But to proceed with my curve. You may have numbers of the points
through which it passes given, and yet know nothing of the nature of the
curve itself. See, now, it shall pass through here and here, but how it
will go in the interval, what is the law of its being, we know not. But
this simile would be too mathematical, I fear.
_Milverton_. I hold to the centipede.
_Ellesmere_. Not a word has Dunsford said all this time.
_Dunsford_. I like the essay. I was not criticising as we went along,
but thinking that perhaps the greatest charm of books is, that we see in
them that other men have suffered what we have. Some souls we ever find
who could have responded to all our agony, be it what it may. This at
least robs misery of its loneliness.
_Ellesmere_. On the other hand, the charm of intercourse with our
fellows, when we are in sadness, is that they do not reflect it in any
way. Each keeps his own trouble to himself, and often pretending to
think and care about other things, comes to do so for the time.
_Dunsford_. Well, but you might choose books which would not reflect
your troubles.
_Ellesmere_. But the fact of having to make a choice to do this, does
away, perhaps, with some part of the benefit: whereas, in intercourse
with living men, you take what you find, and you find that neither your
trouble, nor any likeness of it, is absorbing other people. But this is
not the whole reason: the truth is, the life and impulses of other men
are catching; you cannot explain exactly how it is that they take you out
of yourself.
_Milverton_. No man is so confidential as when he is addressing the
whole world. You find, therefore, more comfort for sorrow in books than
in social intercourse. I mean more direct comfort; for I agree with what
Ellesmere says about society.
_Ellesmere_. In comparing men and books, one must always remember this
important distinction—that one can put the books down at any time. As
Macaulay says, “Plato is never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant.
Demosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays too long.”
_Milverton_. Besides, one can manage to agree so well, intellectually,
with a book; and intellectual differences are the source of half the
quarrels in the world.
_Ellesmere_. Judicious shelving!
_Milverton_. Judicious skipping will nearly do. Now when one’s friend,
or oneself, is crotchety, dogmatic, or disputatious, one cannot turn over
to another day.
_Ellesmere_. Don’t go, Dunsford. Here is a passage in the essay I meant
to have said something about—“why should we expect the inner life to be
one course of unbroken self-improvement,” etc.—You recollect? Well, it
puts me in mind of a conversation between a complacent poplar and a grim
old oak, which I overheard the other day. The poplar said that it grew
up quite straight, heavenwards, that all its branches pointed the same
way, and always had done so. Turning to the oak, which it had been
talking at before for some time, the poplar went on to remark, that it
did not wish to say anything unfriendly to a brother of the forest, but
those warped and twisted branches seemed to show strange struggles. The
tall thing concluded its oration by saying, that it grew up very fast,
and that when it had done growing, it did not suffer itself to be made
into huge floating engines of destruction. But different trees had
different tastes. There was then a sound from the old oak, like an “ah”
or a “whew,” or, perhaps, it was only the wind amongst its resisting
branches; and the gaunt creature said that it had had ugly winds from
without and cross-grained impulses from within; that it knew it had
thrown out awkwardly a branch here and a branch there, which would never
come quite right again it feared; that men worked it up, sometimes for
good and sometimes for evil—but that at any rate it had not lived for
nothing. The poplar began again immediately, for this kind of tree can
talk for ever, but I patted the old oak approvingly and went on.
_Milverton_. Well, your trees divide their discourse somewhat
Ellesmerically: they do not talk with the simplicity La Fontaine’s would;
but there is a good deal in them. They are not altogether sappy.
_Ellesmere_. I really thought of this fable of mine the other day, as I
was passing the poplar at the end of the valley, and I determined to give
it you on the first occasion.
_Dunsford_. I hope, Ellesmere, you do not intend to put sarcastic
notions into the sap of our trees hereabouts. There’s enough of sarcasm
in you to season a whole forest.
_Ellesmere_. Dunsford is afraid of what the trees may say to the country
gentlemen, and whether they will be able to answer them. I will be
careful not to make the trees too clever.
_Milverton_. Let us go and try if we can hear any more forest talk. The
winds, shaped into voices by the leaves, say many things to us at all
times.
CHAPTER IV.
IN the course of our walk Milverton promised to read the following essay
on Recreation the next day. I have no note of anything that was said
before the reading.
RECREATION.
This subject has not had the thought it merits. It seems trivial. It
concerns some hours in the daily life of each of us; but it is not
connected with any subject of human grandeur, and we are rather ashamed
of it. Schiller has some wise, but hard words that relate to it. He
perceives the pre-eminence of the Greeks, who could do many things. He
finds that modern men are units of great nations; but not great units
themselves. And there is some room for this reasoning of his.
Our modern system of division of labour divides wits also. The more
necessity there is, therefore, for funding in recreation something to
expand men’s intelligence. There are intellectual pursuits almost as
much divided as pin-making; and many a man goes through some intellectual
process, for the greater part of his working hours, which corresponds
with the making of a pin’s head. Must there not be some danger of a
general contraction of mind from this convergence of attention upon
something very small, for so considerable a portion of a man’s life?
What answer can civilisation give to this? It can say that greater
results are worked out by the modern system; that though each man is
doing less himself than he might have done in former days, he sees
greater and better things accomplished; and that his thoughts, not bound
down by his petty occupation, travel over the work of the human family.
There is a great deal, doubtless, in this argument; but man is not
altogether an intellectual recipient. He is a constructive animal also.
It is not the knowledge that you can pour into him that will satisfy him,
or enable him to work out his nature. He must see things for himself; he
must have bodily work and intellectual work different from his
bread-getting work; or he runs the danger of becoming a contracted pedant
with a poor mind and a sickly body.
I have seen it quoted from Aristotle, that the end of labour is to gain
leisure. It is a great saying. We have in modern times a totally wrong
view of the matter. Noble work is a noble thing, but not all work. Most
people seem to think that any business is in itself something grand; that
to be intensely employed, for instance, about something which has no
truth, beauty, or usefulness in it, which makes no man happier or wiser,
is still the perfection of human endeavour, so that the work be intense.
It is the intensity, not the nature, of the work that men praise. You
see the extent of this feeling in little things. People are so ashamed
of being caught for a moment idle, that if you come upon the most
industrious servants or workmen whilst they are standing looking at
something which interests them, or fairly resting, they move off in a
fright, as if they were proved, by a moment’s relaxation, to be
neglectful of their work. Yet it is the result that they should mainly
be judged by, and to which they should appeal. But amongst all classes,
the working itself, incessant working, is the thing deified. Now what is
the end and object of most work? To provide for animal wants. Not a
contemptible thing by any means, but still it is not all in all with man.
Moreover, in those cases where the pressure of bread-getting is fairly
past, we do not often find men’s exertions lessened on that account.
There enter into their minds as motives, ambition, a love of hoarding, or
a fear of leisure—things which, in moderation, may be defended or even
justified; but which are not so peremptory, and upon the face of them
excellent, that they at once dignify excessive labour.
The truth is, that to work insatiably requires much less mind than to
work judiciously, and less courage than to refuse work that cannot be
done honestly. For a hundred men whose appetite for work can be driven
on by vanity, avarice, ambition, or a mistaken notion of advancing their
families, there is about one who is desirous of expanding his own nature
and the nature of others in all directions, of cultivating many pursuits,
of bringing himself and those around him in contact with the universe in
many points, of being a man and not a machine.
It may seem as if the preceding arguments were directed rather against
excessive work than in favour of recreation. But the first object in an
essay of this kind should be to bring down the absurd estimate that is
often formed of mere work. What ritual is to the formalist, or
contemplation to the devotee, business is to the man of the world. He
thinks he cannot be doing wrong as long as he is doing that.
No doubt hard work is a great police agent. If everybody were worked
from morning till night and then carefully locked up, the register of
crimes might be greatly diminished. But what would become of human
nature? Where would be the room for growth in such a system of things?
It is through sorrow and mirth, plenty and need, a variety of passions,
circumstances, and temptations, even through sin and misery, that men’s
natures are developed.
* * * * *
Again, there are people who would say, “Labour is not all; we do not
object to the cessation of labour—a mere provision for bodily ends; but
we fear the lightness and vanity of what you call recreation.” Do these
people take heed of the swiftness of thought—of the impatience of
thought? What will the great mass of men be thinking of, if they are
taught to shun amusements and the thoughts of amusement? If any
sensuality is left open to them, they will think of that. If not
sensuality, then avarice, or ferocity for “the cause of God,” as they
would call it. People who have had nothing else to amuse them have been
very apt to indulge themselves in the excitement of persecuting their
fellow creatures.
Our nation, the northern part of it especially, is given to believe in
the sovereign efficacy of dulness. To be sure, dulness and solid vice
are apt to go hand in hand. But then, according to our notions, dulness
is in itself so good a thing—almost a religion.
Now, if ever a people required to be amused, it is we sad-hearted
Anglo-Saxons. Heavy eaters, hard thinkers, often given up to a peculiar
melancholy of our own, with a climate that for months together would
frown away mirth if it could—many of us with very gloomy thoughts about
our hereafter—if ever there were a people who should avoid increasing
their dulness by all work and no play, we are that people. “They took
their pleasure sadly,” says Froissart, “after their fashion.” We need
not ask of what nation Froissart was speaking.
There is a theory which has done singular mischief to the cause of
recreation and of general cultivation. It is that men cannot excel in
more things than one; and that if they can, they had better be quiet
about it. “Avoid music, do not cultivate art, be not known to excel in
any craft but your own,” says many a worldly parent, thereby laying the
foundation of a narrow, greedy character, and destroying means of
happiness and of improvement which success, or even real excellence, in
one profession only cannot give. This is, indeed, a sacrifice of the end
of living for the means.
Another check to recreation is the narrow way in which people have
hitherto been brought up at schools and colleges. The classics are
pre-eminent works. To acquire an accurate knowledge of them is an
admirable discipline. Still, it would be well to give a youth but few of
these great works, and so leave time for various arts, accomplishments,
and knowledge of external things exemplified by other means than books.
If this cannot be done but by over-working, then it had better not be
done; for of all things, that must be avoided. But surely it can be
done. At present, many a man who is versed in Greek metre, and
afterwards full of law reports, is childishly ignorant of Nature. Let
him walk with an intelligent child for a morning, and the child will ask
him a hundred questions about sun, moon, stars, plants, birds, building,
farming, and the like, to which he can give very sorry answers, if any;
or, at the best, he has but a second-hand acquaintance with Nature.
Men’s conceits are his main knowledge. Whereas, if he had any pursuits
connected with Nature, all Nature is in harmony with it, is brought into
his presence by it, and it affords at once cultivation and recreation.
But, independently of those cultivated pursuits which form a high order
of recreation, boyhood should never pass without the boy’s learning
several modes of recreation of the humbler kind. A parent or teacher
seldom does a kinder thing by the child under his care than when he
instructs it in some manly exercise, some pursuit connected with Nature
out of doors, or even some domestic game. In hours of fatigue, anxiety,
sickness, or worldly ferment, such means of amusement may delight the
grown-up man when other things would fail.
An indirect advantage, but a very considerable one, attendant upon
various modes of recreation, is, that they provide opportunities of
excelling in something to boys and men who are dull in things which form
the staple of education. A boy cannot see much difference between the
nominative and the genitive cases—still less any occasion for aorists—but
he is a good hand at some game or other; and he keeps up his
self-respect, and the respect of others for him, upon his prowess in that
game. He is better and happier on that account. And it is well, too,
that the little world around him should know that excellence is not all
of one form.
There are no details about recreation in this essay, the object here
being mainly to show the worth of recreation, and to defend it against
objections from the over-busy and the over-strict. The sense of the
beautiful, the desire for comprehending Nature, the love of personal
skill and prowess, are not things implanted in men merely to be absorbed
in producing and distributing the objects of our most obvious animal
wants. If civilisation required this, civilisation would be a failure.
Still less should we fancy that we are serving the cause of godliness
when we are discouraging recreation. Let us be hearty in our pleasures,
as in our work, and not think that the gracious Being Who has made us so
open-hearted to delight, looks with dissatisfaction at our enjoyment, as
a hard taskmaster might, who in the glee of his slaves could see only a
hindrance to their profitable working. And with reference to our
individual cultivation, we may remember that we are not here to promote
incalculable quantities of law, physic, or manufactured goods, but to
become men—not narrow pedants, but wide-seeing, mind-travelled men. Who
are the men of history to be admired most? Those whom most things
became—who could be weighty in debate, of much device in council,
considerate in a sick-room, genial at a feast, joyous at a festival,
capable of discourse with many minds, large-souled, not to be shrivelled
up into any one form, fashion, or temperament. Their contemporaries
would have told us that men might have various accomplishments and hearty
enjoyments, and not for that be the less effective in business, or less
active in benevolence. I distrust the wisdom of asceticism as much as I
do that of sensuality; Simeon Stylites no less than Sardanapalus.
* * * * *
_Ellesmere_. You alluded to Schiller at the beginning of the essay: can
you show me his own words? I have a lawyer’s liking for the best
evidence.
_Milverton_. When we go in, I will show you some passages which bear me
out in what I have made him say—at least, if the translation is faithful.
{53}
_Ellesmere_. I have had a great respect for Schiller ever since I heard
that saying of his about death, “Death cannot be an evil, for it is
universal.”
_Dunsford_. Very noble and full of faith.
_Ellesmere_. Touching the essay, I like it well enough; but, perhaps,
people will expect to find more about recreation itself—not only about
the good of it, but what it is, and how it is to be got.
_Milverton_. I do not incline to go into detail about the matter. The
object was to say something for the respectability of recreation, not to
write a chapter of a book of sports. People must find out their own ways
of amusing themselves.
_Ellesmere_. I will tell you what is the paramount thing to be attended
to in all amusements—that they should be short. Moralists are always
talking about “short-lived” pleasures: would that they were!
_Dunsford_. Hesiod told the world, some two thousand years ago, how much
greater the half is than the whole.
_Ellesmere_. Dinner-givers and managers of theatres should forthwith be
made aware of that fact. What a sacrifice of good things, and of the
patience and comfort of human beings, a cumbrous modern dinner is! I
always long to get up and walk about.
_Dunsford_. Do not talk of modern dinners. Think what a Roman dinner
must have been.
_Milverton_. Very true. It has always struck me that there is something
quite military in the sensualism of the Romans—an “arbiter bibendi”
chosen, and the whole feast moving on with fearful precision and
apparatus of all kinds. Come, come! the world’s improving, Ellesmere.
_Ellesmere_. Had the Romans public dinners? Answer me that. Imagine a
Roman, whose theory, at least, of a dinner was that it was a thing for
enjoyment, whereas we often look on it as a continuation of the business
of the day—I say, imagine a Roman girding himself up, literally girding
himself up to make an after-dinner speech.
_Milverton_. I must allow that is rather a barbarous practice.
_Ellesmere_. If charity, or politics, cannot be done without such
things, I suppose they are useful in their way; but let nobody ever
imagine that they are a form of pleasure. People smearing each other
over with stupid flattery, and most of the company being in dread of
receiving some compliment which should oblige them to speak!
_Dunsford_. I should have thought, now, that you would always have had
something to say, and therefore that you would not be so bitter against
after-dinner speaking.
_Ellesmere_. No; when I have nothing to say, I can say nothing.
_Milverton_. Would it not be a pleasant thing if rich people would ask
their friends sometimes to public amusements—order a play for them, for
instance—or at any rate, provide some manifest amusement? They might,
occasionally with great advantage, abridge the expense of their dinners;
and throw it into other channels of hospitality.
_Ellesmere_. Ah, if they would have good acting at their houses, that
would be very delightful; but I cannot say that the being taken to any
place of public amusement would much delight me. By the way, Milverton,
what do you say of theatres in the way of recreation? This decline of
the drama, too, is a thing you must have thought about: let us hear your
notions.
_Milverton_. I think one of the causes sometimes assigned, that reading
is more spread, is a true and an important one; but, otherwise, I fancy
that the present decline of the drama depends upon very small things
which might be remedied. As to a love of the drama going out of the
human heart, that is all nonsense. Put it at the lowest, what a great
pleasure it is to hear a good play read. And again, as to serious
pursuits unfitting men for dramatic entertainments, it is quite the
contrary. A man, wearied with care and business, would find more change
of ideas with less fatigue, in seeing a good play, than in almost any
other way of amusing himself.
_Dunsford_. What are the causes then of the decline of the drama?
_Milverton_. In England, or rather in London,—for London is England for
dramatic purposes; in London, then, theatrical arrangements seem to be
framed to drive away people of sense. The noisome atmosphere, the
difficult approach, the over-size of the great theatres, the intolerable
length of performances.
_Ellesmere_. Hear! hear!
_Milverton_. The crowding together of theatres in one part of the town,
the lateness of the hours—
_Ellesmere_. The folly of the audience, who always applaud in the wrong
place—
_Dunsford_. There is no occasion to say any more; I am quite convinced.
_Milverton_. But these annoyances need not be. Build a theatre of
moderate dimensions; give it great facility of approach; take care that
the performances never exceed three hours; let lions and dwarfs pass by
without any endeavour to get them within the walls; lay aside all
ambition of making stage waves which may almost equal real Ramsgate waves
to our cockney apprehensions. Of course there must be good players and
good plays.
_Ellesmere_. Now we come to the part of Hamlet.
_Milverton_. Good players and good plays are both to be had if there
were good demand for them. But, I was going to say, let there be all
these things, especially let there be complete ventilation, and the
theatre will have the most abundant success. Why, that one thing alone,
the villainous atmosphere at most public places, is enough to daunt any
sensible man from going to them.
_Dunsford_. There should be such a choice of plays—not merely
Chamberlain-clipt—as any man or woman could go to.
_Milverton_. There should be certainly, but how is such a choice to be
made, if the people who could regulate it, for the most part, stay away?
It is a dangerous thing, the better classes leaving any great source of
amusement and instruction wholly, or greatly, to the less refined
classes.
_Dunsford_. Yes, I must confess it is.
Great part of your arguments apply to musical as well as to theatrical
entertainments. Do you find similar results with respect to them?
_Milverton_. Why, they are not attended by any means as they would be,
or made what they might be, if the objections I mentioned were removed.
_Dunsford_. What do you say to the out-of-door entertainments for a town
population?
_Milverton_. As I said before, my dear Dunsford, I cannot give you a
chapter of a “Book of Sports.” There ought, of course, to be parks for
all quarters of the town: and I confess it would please me better to see,
in holiday times and hours of leisure, hearty games going on in these
parks, than a number of people sauntering about in uncomfortably new and
unaccustomed clothes.
_Ellesmere_. Do you not see, Dunsford, that, like a cautious official
man, he does not want to enter into small details, which have always an
air of ridicule? He is not prepared to pledge himself to cricket, golf,
football, or prisoner’s bars; but in his heart he is manifestly a Young
Englander—without the white waistcoat. Nothing would please him better
than to see in large letters, on one of those advertising vans, “Great
match! Victoria Park!! Eleven of Fleet Street against the Eleven of
Saffron Hill!!!”
_Milverton_. Well, there is a great deal in the spirit of Young England
that I like very much, indeed that I respect.
_Ellesmere_. I should like the Young England party better myself if I
were quite sure there was no connection between them and a clan of sour,
pity-mongering people, who wash one away with eternal talk about the
contrast between riches and poverty; with whom a poor man is always
virtuous; and who would, if they could, make him as envious and as
discontented as possible.
_Milverton_. Nothing can be more strikingly in contrast with such
thinkers than Young England. Young Englanders, according to the best of
their theories, ought to be men of warm sympathy with all classes. There
is no doubt of this, that very seldom does any good thing arise, but
there comes an ugly phantom of a caricature of it, which sidles up
against the reality, mouths its favourite words as a third-rate actor
does a great part, under-mimics its wisdom, over-acts its folly, is by
half the world taken for it, goes some way to suppress it in its own
time, and, perhaps, lives for it in history.
_Ellesmere_. Well brought out, that metaphor, but I don’t know that it
means more than that the followers of a system do in general a good deal
to corrupt it, or that when a great principle is worked into human
affairs, a considerable accretion of human folly and falseness mostly
grows round it: which things some of us had a suspicion of before.
_Dunsford_. To go back to the subject. What would you do for country
amusements, Milverton? That is what concerns me, you know.
_Milverton_. Athletic amusements go on naturally here: do not require so
much fostering as in towns. The commons must be carefully kept: I have
quite a Cobbettian fear of their being taken away from us under some
plausible pretext or other. Well, then, it strikes me that a great deal
might be done to promote the more refined pleasures of life among our
rural population. I hope we shall live to see many of Hullah’s pupils
playing an important part in this way. Of course, the foundation for
these things may best be laid at schools; and is being laid in some
places, I am happy to say.
_Ellesmere_. Humph, music, sing-song!
_Milverton_. Don’t you observe, Dunsford, that when Ellesmere wants to
attack us, and does not exactly see how, he mutters to himself
sarcastically, sneering himself up, as it were, to the attack.
_Ellesmere_. You and Dunsford are both wild for music, from
barrel-organs upwards.
_Milverton_. I confess to liking the humblest attempts at melody.
_Dunsford_. I feel as Sir Thomas Browne tells us he felt, that “even
that vulgar and tavern music, which makes one man merry, another mad,
strikes in me a deep fit of devotion and a profound contemplation of the
first composer. There is something in it of divinity more than the ear
discovers; it is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world
and creatures of God: such a melody to the ear as the whole world well
understood, would afford the understanding.”
_Milverton_. Apropos of music in country places, when I was going about
last year in the neighbouring county, I saw such a pretty scene at one of
the towns. They had got up a band, which played once a week in the
evening. It was a beautiful summer evening, and the window of my room at
the end overlooked the open space they had chosen for their performances.
There was the great man of the neighbourhood in his carriage looking as
if he came partly on duty, as well as for pleasure. Then there were
burly tradesmen, with an air of quiet satisfaction, sauntering about, or
leaning against railings. Some were no doubt critical—thought that Will
Miller did not play as well as usual this evening. Will’s young wife,
who had come out to look again at him in his band dress (for the band had
a uniform), thought differently. Little boys broke out into imaginary
polkas, having some distant reference to the music: not without grace
though. The sweep was pre-eminent: as if he would say, “Dirty and sooty
as I am I have a great deal of fun in me. Indeed, what would May-day be
but for me?” Studious little boys of the free-school, all green
grasshopper-looking, walked about as boys knowing something of Latin.
Here and there went a couple of them in childish loving way, with their
arms about each other’s necks. Matrons and shy young maidens sat upon
the door-steps near. Many a merry laugh filled up the interludes of
music. And when evening came softly down upon us, the band finished with
“God save the Queen,” the little circle of those who would hear the last
note moved off, there was a clattering of shutters, a shining of lights
through casement-windows, and soon the only sound to be heard was the
rough voice of some villager, who would have been too timid to adventure
anything by daylight, but now sang boldly out as he went homewards.
_Ellesmere_. Very pretty, but it sounds to me somewhat fabulous.
_Milverton_. I assure you—
_Ellesmere_. Yes, you were tired, had a good dinner, read a speech for
or against the corn-laws, fell asleep of course, and had this ingenious
dream, which, to this day, you believe to have been a reality. I
understand it all.
_Milverton_. I wish I could have many more such dreams.
CHAPTER V.
OUR last conversation broke off abruptly on the entrance of a visitor: we
forgot to name a time for our next meeting; and when I came again, I
found Milverton alone in his study. He was reading Count Rumford’s
essays.
_Dunsford_. So you are reading Count Rumford. What is it that interests
you there?
_Milverton_. Everything he writes about. He is to me a delightful
writer. He throws so much life into all his writings. Whether they are
about making the most of food or fuel, or propounding the benefits of
bathing, or inveighing against smoke, it is that he went and saw and did
and experimented himself upon himself. His proceedings at Munich to feed
the poor are more interesting than many a novel. It is surprising, too,
how far he was before the world in all the things he gave his mind to.
Here Ellesmere entered.
_Ellesmere_. I heard you were come, Dunsford: I hope we shall have an
essay to-day. My critical faculties have been dormant for some days, and
want to be roused a little. Milverton was talking to you about Count
Rumford when I came in, was he not? Ah, the Count is a great favourite
with Milverton when he is down here; but there is a book upstairs which
is Milverton’s real favourite just now, a portentous-looking book; some
relation to a blue-book, something about sewerage, or health of towns, or
public improvements, over which said book our friend here goes into
enthusiasms. I am sure if it could be reduced to the size of that
tatterdemalion Horace that he carries about, the poor little Horace would
be quite supplanted.
_Milverton_. Now, I must tell you, Dunsford, that Ellesmere himself took
up this book he talks about, and it was a long time before he put it
down.
_Ellesmere_. Yes, there is something in real life, even though it is in
the unheroic part of it, that interests one. I mean to get through the
book.
_Dunsford_. What are we to have to-day for our essay?
Milverton. Let us adjourn to the garden, and I will read you an essay on
Greatness, if I can find it.
* * * * *
We went to our favourite place, and Milverton read us the following
essay.
GREATNESS.
You cannot substitute any epithet for great, when you are talking of
great men. Greatness is not general dexterity carried to any extent; nor
proficiency in any one subject of human endeavour. There are great
astronomers, great scholars, great painters, even great poets who are
very far from great men. Greatness can do without success and with it.
William is greater in his retreats than Marlborough in his victories. On
the other hand, the uniformity of Cæsar’s success does not dull his
greatness. Greatness is not in the circumstances, but in the man.
What does this greatness then consist in? Not in a nice balance of
qualities, purposes, and powers. That will make a man happy, a
successful man, a man always in his right depth. Nor does it consist in
absence of errors. We need only glance back at any list that can be made
of great men, to be convinced of that. Neither does greatness consist in
energy, though often accompanied by it. Indeed, it is rather the breadth
of the waters than the force of the current that we look to, to fulfil
our idea of greatness. There is no doubt that energy acting upon a
nature endowed with the qualities that we sum up in the word cleverness,
and directed to a few clear purposes, produces a great effect, and may
sometimes be mistaken for greatness. If a man is mainly bent upon his
own advancement, it cuts many a difficult knot of policy for him, and
gives a force and distinctness to his mode of going on which looks grand.
The same happens if he has one pre-eminent idea of any kind, even though
it should be a narrow one. Indeed, success in life is mostly gained by
unity of purpose; whereas greatness often fails by reason of its having
manifold purposes, but it does not cease to be greatness on that account.
If greatness can be shut up in qualities, it will be found to consist in
courage and in openness of mind and soul. These qualities may not seem
at first to be so potent. But see what growth there is in them. The
education of a man of open mind is never ended. Then, with openness of
soul, a man sees some way into all other souls that come near him, feels
with them, has their experience, is in himself a people. Sympathy is the
universal solvent. Nothing is understood without it. The capacity of a
man, at least for understanding, may almost be said to vary according to
his powers of sympathy. Again, what is there that can counteract
selfishness like sympathy? Selfishness may be hedged in by minute
watchfulness and self-denial, but it is counteracted by the nature being
encouraged to grow out and fix its tendrils upon foreign objects.
The immense defect that want of sympathy is, may be strikingly seen in
the failure of the many attempts that have been made in all ages to
construct the Christian character, omitting sympathy. It has produced
numbers of people walking up and down one narrow plank of self-restraint,
pondering over their own merits and demerits, keeping out, not the world
exactly, but their fellow-creatures from their hearts, and caring only to
drive their neighbours before them on this plank of theirs, or to push
them headlong. Thus, with many virtues, and much hard work at the
formation of character, we have had splendid bigots or censorious small
people.
But sympathy is warmth and light too. It is, as it were, the moral
atmosphere connecting all animated natures. Putting aside, for a moment,
the large differences that opinions, language, and education make between
men, look at the innate diversity of character. Natural philosophers
were amazed when they thought they had found a new-created species. But
what is each man but a creature such as the world has not before seen?
Then think how they pour forth in multitudinous masses, from princes
delicately nurtured to little boys on scrubby commons, or in dark
cellars. How are these people to be understood, to be taught to
understand each other, but by those who have the deepest sympathies with
all? There cannot be a great man without large sympathy. There may be
men who play loud-sounding parts in life without it, as on the stage,
where kings and great people sometimes enter who are only characters of
secondary import—deputy great men. But the interest and the instruction
lie with those who have to feel and suffer most.
* * * * *
Add courage to this openness we have been considering, and you have a man
who can own himself in the wrong, can forgive, can trust, can adventure,
can, in short, use all the means that insight and sympathy endow him
with.
* * * * *
I see no other essential characteristics in the greatness of nations than
there are in the greatness of individuals. Extraneous circumstances
largely influence nations as individuals; and make a larger part of the
show of the former than of the latter; as we are wont to consider no
nation great that is not great in extent or resources, as well as in
character. But of two nations, equal in other respects, the superiority
must belong to the one which excels in courage and openness of mind and
soul.
Again, in estimating the relative merits of different periods of the
world, we must employ the same tests of greatness that we use to
individuals. To compare, for instance, the present and the past. What
astounds us most in the past is the wonderful intolerance and cruelty: a
cruelty constantly turning upon the inventors: an intolerance provoking
ruin to the thing it would foster. The most admirable precepts are
thrown from time to time upon this cauldron of human affairs, and
oftentimes they only seem to make it blaze the higher. We find men
devoting the best part of their intellects to the invariable annoyance
and persecution of their fellows. You might think that the earth brought
forth with more abundant fruitfulness in the past than now, seeing that
men found so much time for cruelty, but that you read of famines and
privations which these latter days cannot equal. The recorded violent
deaths amount to millions. And this is but a small part of the matter.
Consider the modes of justice; the use of torture, for instance. What
must have been the blinded state of the wise persons (wise for their day)
who used torture? Did they ever think themselves, “What should we not
say if we were subjected to this?” Many times they must really have
desired to get at the truth; and such was their mode of doing it. Now,
at the risk of being thought “a laudator” of time present, I would say,
here is the element of greatness we have made progress in. We are more
open in mind and soul. We have arrived (some of us at least) at the
conclusion that men may honestly differ without offence. We have learned
to pity each other more. There is a greatness in modern toleration which
our ancestors knew not.
Then comes the other element of greatness, courage. Have we made
progress in that? This is a much more dubious question. The subjects of
terror vary so much in different times that it is difficult to estimate
the different degrees of courage shown in resisting them. Men fear
public opinion now as they did in former times the Star Chamber; and
those awful goddesses, Appearances, are to us what the Fates were to the
Greeks. It is hardly possible to measure the courage of a modern against
that of an ancient; but I am unwilling to believe but that enlightenment
must strengthen courage.
The application of the tests of greatness, as in the above instance, is a
matter of detail and of nice appreciation, as to the results of which men
must be expected to differ largely: the tests themselves remain
invariable—openness of nature to admit the light of love and reason, and
courage to pursue it.
* * * * *
_Ellesmere_. I agree to your theory, as far as openness of nature is
concerned; but I do not much like to put that half-brute thing, courage,
so high.
_Milverton_. Well, you cannot have greatness without it: you may have
well-intentioned people and far-seeing people; but if they have no
stoutness of heart, they will only be shifty or remonstrant, nothing like
great.
_Ellesmere_. You mean will, not courage. Without will, your
open-minded, open-hearted man may be like a great, rudderless vessel
driven about by all winds: not a small craft, but a most uncertain one.
_Milverton_. No, I mean both: both will and courage. Courage is the
body to will.
_Ellesmere_. I believe you are right in that; but do not omit will. It
amused me to see how you brought in one of your old notions—that this age
is not contemptible. You scribbling people are generally on the other
side.
_Milverton_. You malign us. If I must give any account for my personal
predilection for modern times, it consists perhaps in this, that we may
now speak our mind. What Tennyson says of his own land,
“The land where, girt with friend or foe,
A man may say the thing he will,”—
may be said, in some measure, of the age in which we live. This is an
inexpressible comfort. This doubles life. These things surely may be
said in favour of the present age, not with a view to puff it up, but so
far to encourage ourselves, as we may by seeing that the world does not
go on for nothing, that all the misery, blood, and toil that have been
spent, were not poured out in vain. Could we have our ancestors again
before us, would they not rejoice at seeing what they had purchased for
us: would they think it any compliment to them to extol their times at
the expense of the present, and so to intimate that their efforts had led
to nothing?
_Ellesmere_. “I doubt,” as Lord Eldon would have said; no, upon second
thoughts, I do not doubt. I feel assured that a good many of these said
ancestors you are calling up would be much discomforted at finding that
all their suffering had led to no sure basis of persecution of the other
side.
_Dunsford_. I wonder, Ellesmere, what you would have done in persecuting
times. What escape would your sarcasm have found for itself?
_Milverton_. Some orthodox way, I daresay. I do not think he would have
been particularly fond of martyrdom.
_Ellesmere_. No. I have no taste for making torches for truth, or being
one: I prefer humane darkness to such illumination. At the same time one
cannot tell lies; and if one had been questioned about the
incomprehensibilities which men in former days were so fierce upon, one
must have shown that one disagreed with all parties.
_Dunsford_. Do not say “one:” _I_ should not have disagreed with the
great Protestant leaders in the Reformation, for instance.
_Ellesmere_. Humph.
_Milverton_. If we get aground upon the Reformation, we shall never push
off again—else would I say something far from complimentary to those
Protestant proceedings which we may rather hope were Tudoresque than
Protestant.
_Ellesmere_. No, that is not fair. The Tudors were a coarse, fierce
race; but it will not do to lay the faults of their times upon them only.
Look at Elizabeth’s ministers. They had about as much notion of
religious tolerance as they had of Professor Wheatstone’s telegraph. It
was not a growth of that age.
_Milverton_. I do not know. You have Cardinal Pole and the Earl of
Essex, both tolerant men in the midst of bigots.
_Ellesmere_. Well, as you said, Milverton, we shall never push off, if
we once get aground on this subject.
_Dunsford_. I am in fault: so I will take upon myself to bring you quite
away from the Reformation. I have been thinking of that comparison in
the essay of the present with the past. Such comparisons seem to me very
useful, as they best enable us to understand our own times. And, then,
when we have ascertained the state and tendency of our own age, we ought
to strive to enrich it with those qualities which are complementary to
its own. Now with all this toleration, which delights you so much, dear
Milverton, is it not an age rather deficient in caring about great
matters?
_Milverton_. If you mean great speculative matters, I might agree with
you; but if you mean what I should call the greatest matters, such as
charity, humanity, and the like, I should venture to differ with you,
Dunsford.
_Dunsford_. I do not like to see the world indifferent to great
speculative matters. I then fear shallowness and earthiness.
_Milverton_. It is very difficult to say what the world is thinking of
now. It is certainly wrong to suppose that this is a shallow age because
it is not driven by one impulse. As civilisation advances, it becomes
more difficult to estimate what is going on, and we set it all down as
confusion. Now there is not one “great antique heart,” whose beatings we
can count, but many impulses, many circles of thought in which men are
moving many objects. Men are not all in the same state of progress, so
cannot be moved in masses as of old. At one time chivalry urged all men,
then the Church, and the phenomena were few, simple, and broad, or at
least they seem so in history.
_Ellesmere_. Very true; still I agree somewhat with Dunsford, that men
are not agitated as they used to be by the great speculative questions.
I account for it in this way, that the material world has opened out
before us, and we cannot but look at that, and must play with it and work
at it. I would say, too, that philosophy had been found out, and there
is something in that. Still, I think if it were not for the interest now
attaching to material things, great intellectual questions, not exactly
of the old kind, would arise and agitate the world.
_Milverton_. There is one thing in my mind that may confirm your view.
I cannot but think that the enlarged view we have of the universe must in
some measure damp personal ambition. What is it to be a King, Sheik,
Tetrarch, or Emperor, over a bit of a little bit? Macbeth’s speech,
“we’d jump the life to come,” is a thing a man with modern lights,
however madly ambitious, would hardly utter.
_Dunsford_. Religious lights, Milverton.
_Milverton_. Of course not, if he had them; but I meant scientific
lights. Sway over our fellow-creatures, at any rate anything but mental
sway, has shrunk into less proportions.
_Ellesmere_. I have been looking over the essay. I think you may put in
somewhere—that that age would probably be the greatest in which there was
the least difference between great men and the people in general—when the
former were only neglected, not hunted down.
_Milverton_. Yes.
_Ellesmere_. You are rather lengthy here about the cruelties to be found
in history; but we are apt to forget these matters.
_Milverton_. They always press upon my mind.
_Dunsford_. And on mine. I do not like to read much of history for that
very reason. I get so sick at heart about it all.
_Milverton_. Ah, yes, history is a stupendous thing. To read it is like
looking at the stars; we turn away in awe and perplexity. Yet there is
some method running through the little affairs of man as through the
multitude of suns, seemingly to us as confused as routed armies in full
flight.
_Dunsford_. Some law of love.
_Ellesmere_. I am afraid it is not in the past alone that we should be
awestruck with horrors: we, who have a slave-trade still on earth. But,
to go back to the essay, I like what you say about the theory of
constructing the Christian character without geniality; only you do not
go far enough. You are afraid. People are for ever talking, especially
you philanthropical people, about making others happy. I do not know any
way so sure of making others happy as of being so oneself, to begin with.
I do not mean that people are to be self-absorbed; but they are to drink
in nature and life a little. From a genial, wisely-developed man good
things radiate; whereas you must allow, Milverton, that benevolent people
are very apt to be one-sided and fussy, and not of the sweetest temper if
others will not be good and happy in their way.
_Milverton_. That is really not fair. Of course, acid, small-minded
people carry their narrow notions and their acidity into their
benevolence. Benevolence is no abstract perfection. Men will express
their benevolence according to their other gifts or want of gifts. If it
is strong, it overcomes other things in the character which would be
hindrances to it; but it must speak in the language of the soul it is in.
_Ellesmere_. Come, let us go and see the pigs. I hear them grunting
over their dinners in the farmyard. I like to see creatures who can be
happy without a theory.
CHAPTER VI.
THE next time that I came over to Worth-Ashton it was raining, and I
found my friends in the study.
“Well, Dunsford,” said Ellesmere, “is it not comfortable to have our
sessions here for once, and to be looking out on a good solid English wet
day?”
_Dunsford_. Rather a fluid than a solid. But I agree with you in
thinking it is very comfortable here.
_Ellesmere_. I like to look upon the backs of books. First I think how
much of the owner’s inner life and character is shown in his books; then
perhaps I wonder how he got such a book which seems so remote from all
that I know of him—
_Milverton_. I shall turn my books the wrong side upwards when you come
into the study.
_Ellesmere_. But what amuses me most is to see the odd way in which
books get together, especially in the library of a man who reads his
books and puts them up again wherever there is room. Now here is a
charming party: “A Treatise on the Steam-Engine” between “Locke on
Christianity” and Madame de Stael’s “Corinne.” I wonder what they talk
about at night when we are all asleep. Here is another happy
juxtaposition: old Clarendon next to a modern metaphysician whom he would
positively loathe. Here is Sadler next to Malthus, and Horsley next to
Priestley; but this sort of thing happens most in the best regulated
libraries. It is a charming reflection for controversial writers, that
their works will be put together on the same shelves, often between the
same covers; and that, in the minds of educated men, the name of one
writer will be sure to recall the name of the other. So they go down to
posterity as a brotherhood.
_Milverton_. To complete Ellesmere’s theory, we may say that all those
injuries to books which we choose to throw upon some wretched worm, are
but the wounds from rival books.
_Ellesmere_. Certainly. But now let us proceed to polish up the weapons
of another of these spiteful creatures.
_Dunsford_. Yes. What is to be our essay to-day, Milverton?
_Milverton_. Fiction.
_Ellesmere_. Now, that is really unfortunate. Fiction is just the
subject to be discussed—no, not discussed, talked over—out of doors on a
hot day, all of us lying about in easy attitudes on the grass, Dunsford
with his gaiters forming a most picturesque and prominent figure. But
there is nothing complete in this life. “Surgit amari aliquid:” and so
we must listen to Fiction in arm-chairs.
FICTION.
The influence of works of fiction is unbounded. Even the minds of
well-informed people are often more stored with characters from
acknowledged fiction than from history or biography, or the real life
around them. We dispute about these characters as if they were
realities. Their experience is our experience; we adopt their feelings,
and imitate their acts. And so there comes to be something traditional
even in the management of the passions. Shakespeare’s historical plays
were the only history to the Duke of Marlborough. Thousands of Greeks
acted under the influence of what Achilles or Ulysses did, in Homer. The
poet sings of the deeds that shall be. He imagines the past; he forms
the future.
Yet how surpassingly interesting is real life when we get an insight into
it. Occasionally a great genius lifts up the veil of history, and we see
men who once really were alive, who did not always live only in history;
or, amidst the dreary page of battles, levies, sieges, and the
sleep-inducing weavings and unweavings of political combination, we come,
ourselves, across some spoken or written words of the great actors of the
time, and are then fascinated by the life and reality of these things.
Could you have the life of any man really portrayed to you, sun-drawn as
it were, its hopes, its fears, its revolutions of opinion in each day,
its most anxious wishes attained, and then, perhaps, crystallising into
its blackest regrets—such a work would go far to contain all histories,
and be the greatest lesson of love, humility, and tolerance, that men had
ever read.
Now fiction does attempt something like the above. In history we are
cramped by impertinent facts that must, however, be set down; by theories
that must be answered; evidence that must be weighed; views that must be
taken. Our facts constantly break off just where we should wish to
examine them most closely. The writer of fiction follows his characters
into the recesses of their hearts. There are no closed doors for him.
His puppets have no secrets from their master. He plagues you with no
doubts, no half-views, no criticism. Thus they thought, he tells you;
thus they looked, thus they acted. Then, with every opportunity for
scenic arrangement (for though his characters are confidential with him,
he is only as confidential with his reader as the interest of the story
will allow), it is not to be wondered at that the majority of readers
should look upon history as a task, but tales of fiction as a delight.
The greatest merit of fiction is the one so ably put forward by Sir James
Mackintosh, namely, that it creates and nourishes sympathy. It extends
this sympathy, too, in directions where, otherwise, we hardly see when it
would have come. But it may be objected that this sympathy is
indiscriminate, and that we are in danger of mixing up virtue and vice,
and blurring both, if we are led to sympathise with all manner of
wrong-doers. But, in the first place, virtue and vice are so mixed in
real life, that it is well to be somewhat prepared for that fact; and,
moreover, the sympathy is not wrongly directed. Who has not felt intense
sympathy for Macbeth? Yet could he be alive again, with evil thoughts
against “the gracious Duncan,” and could he see into all that has been
felt for him, would that be an encouragement to murder? The intense pity
of wise people for the crimes of others, when rightly represented, is one
of the strongest antidotes against crime. We have taken the extreme case
of sympathy being directed towards bad men. How often has fiction made
us sympathise with obscure suffering and retiring greatness, with the
world-despised, and especially with those mixed characters in whom we
might otherwise see but one colour—with Shylock and with Hamlet, with
Jeanie Deans and with Claverhouse, with Sancho Panza as well as with Don
Quixote.
* * * * *
On the other hand, there is a danger of too much converse with fiction
leading us into dream-land, or rather into lubber-land. Of course this
“too much converse” implies large converse with inferior writers. Such
writers are too apt to make life as they would have it for themselves.
Sometimes, also, they must make it to suit booksellers’ rules. Having
such power over their puppets they abuse it. They can kill these
puppets, change their natures suddenly, reward or punish them so easily,
that it is no wonder they are led to play fantastic tricks with them.
Now, if a sedulous reader of the works of such writers should form his
notions of real life from them, he would occasionally meet with rude
shocks when he encountered the realities of that life.
* * * * *
For my own part, notwithstanding all the charms of life in
swiftly-written novels, I prefer real life. It is true that, in the
former, everything breaks off round, every little event tends to some
great thing, everybody one meets is to exercise some great influence for
good or ill upon one’s fate. I take it for granted one fancies oneself
the hero. Then all one’s fancy is paid in ready money, or at least one
can draw upon it at the end of the third volume. One leaps to remote
wealth and honour by hairbreadth chances; and one’s uncle in India always
dies opportunely. To be sure the thought occurs, that if this novel life
could be turned into real life, one might be the uncle in India and not
the hero of the tale. But that is a trifling matter, for at any rate one
should carry on with spirit somebody else’s story. On the whole,
however, as I said before, I prefer real life, where nothing is tied up
neatly, but all in odds and ends; where the doctrine of compensation
enters largely, where we are often most blamed when we least deserve it,
where there is no third volume to make things straight, and where many an
Augustus marries many a Belinda, and, instead of being happy ever
afterwards, finds that there is a growth of trials and troubles for each
successive period of man’s life.
* * * * *
In considering the subject of fiction, the responsibility of the writers
thereof is a matter worth pointing out. We see clearly enough that
historians are to be limited by facts and probabilities; but we are apt
to make a large allowance for the fancies of writers of fiction. We must
remember, however, that fiction is not falsehood. If a writer puts
abstract virtues into book-clothing, and sends them upon stilts into the
world, he is a bad writer: if he classifies men, and attributes all
virtue to one class and all vice to another, he is a false writer. Then,
again, if his ideal is so poor, that he fancies man’s welfare to consist
in immediate happiness; if he means to paint a great man and paints only
a greedy one, he is a mischievous writer and not the less so, although by
lamplight and amongst a juvenile audience, his coarse scene-painting
should be thought very grand. He may be true to his own fancy, but he is
false to Nature. A writer, of course, cannot get beyond his own ideal:
but at least he should see that he works up to it: and if it is a poor
one, he had better write histories of the utmost concentration of
dulness, than amuse us with unjust and untrue imaginings.
* * * * *
_Ellesmere_. I am glad you have kept to the obvious things about
fiction. It would have been a great nuisance to have had to follow you
through intricate theories about what fiction consists in, and what are
its limits, and so on. Then we should have got into questions touching
the laws of representation generally, and then into art, of which,
between ourselves, you know very little.
_Dunsford_. Talking of representation, what do you two, who have now
seen something of the world, think about representative government?
_Ellesmere_. Dunsford plumps down upon us sometimes with awful
questions: what do you think of all philosophy? or what is your opinion
of life in general? Could not you throw in a few small questions of that
kind, together with your representative one, and we might try to answer
them all at once. Dunsford is only laughing at us, Milverton.
_Milverton_. No, I know what was in Dunsford’s mind when he asked that
question. He has had his doubts and misgivings, when he has been reading
a six nights’ debate (for the people in the country I daresay do read
those things), whether representative government is the most complete
device the human mind could suggest for getting at wise rulers.
_Ellesmere_. It is a doubt which has crossed my mind.
_Milverton_. And mine; but the doubt, if it has ever been more than mere
petulance, has not had much practical weight with me. Look how the
business of the world is managed. There are a few people who think out
things, and a few who execute. The former are not to be secured by any
device. They are gifts. The latter may be well chosen, have often been
well chosen, under other forms of government than the representative one.
I believe that the favourites of kings have been a superior race of men.
Even a fool does not choose a fool for a favourite. He knows better than
that: he must have something to lean against. But between the thinkers
and the doers (if, indeed, we ought to make such a distinction), _what a
number of useful links there are in a representative government_ on
account of the much larger number of people admitted into some share of
government. What general cultivation must come from that, and what
security! Of course, everything has its wrong side; and from this number
of people let in there comes declamation and claptrap and mob-service,
which is much the same thing as courtiership was in other times. But
then, to make the comparison a fair one, you must take the wrong side of
any other form of government that has been devised.
_Dunsford_. Well, but so much power centring in the lower house of
Parliament, and the getting into Parliament being a thing which is not
very inviting to the kind of people one would most like to see there, do
you not think that the ablest men are kept away?
_Milverton_. Yes; but if you make your governing body a unit or a ten,
or any small number, how is this power, unless it is Argus-eyed, and
myriad-minded, and right-minded too, to choose the right men any better
than they are found now? The great danger, as it appears to me, of
representative government is lest it should slide down from
representative government to delegate government. In my opinion, the
welfare of England, in great measure, depends upon what takes place at
the hustings. If, in the majority of instances, there were abject
conduct there, electors and elected would be alike debased; upright
public men could not be expected to arise from such beginnings; and
thoughtful persons would begin to consider whether some other form of
government could not forthwith be made out.
_Ellesmere_. I have a supreme disgust for the man who at the hustings
has no opinion beyond or above the clamour round him. How such a fellow
would have kissed the ground before a Pompadour, or waited for hours in a
Buckingham’s antechamber, only to catch the faintest beam of reflected
light from royalty.
But I declare we have been just like schoolboys talking about forms of
government and so on.
“For forms of government let fools contest,
That which is _worst_ administered is best,”—
that is, representative government.
_Milverton_. I should not like either of you to fancy, from what I have
been saying about representative government, that I do not see the
dangers and the evils of it. In fact, it is a frequent thought with me
of what importance the House of Lords is at present, and of how much
greater importance it might be made. If there were Peers for life, and
official members of the House of Commons, it would, I think, meet most of
your objections, Dunsford.
_Dunsford_. I suppose I am becoming a little rusty and disposed to
grumble, as I grow old; but there is a good deal in modern government
which seems to me very rude and absurd. There comes a clamour, partly
reasonable; power is deaf to it, overlooks it, says there is no such
thing; then great clamour; after a time, power welcomes that, takes it to
its arms, says that now it is loud it is very wise, wishes it had always
been clamour itself.
_Ellesmere_. How many acres do you farm, Dunsford? How spiteful you
are!
_Dunsford_. I am not thinking of Corn Laws alone, as you fancy, Master
Ellesmere. But to go to other things. I quite agree, Milverton, with
what you were saying just now about the business of the world being
carried on by few, and the thinking few being in the nature of gifts to
the world, not elicited by King or Kaiser.
_Milverton_. The mill-streams that turn the clappers of the world arise
in solitary places.
_Ellesmere_. Not a bad metaphor, but untrue. Aristotle, Bacon—
_Milverton_. Well, I believe it would be much wiser to say, that we
cannot lay down rules about the highest work; either when it is done,
where it will be done, or how it can be made to be done. It is too
immaterial for our measurement; for the highest part even of the mere
business of the world is in dealing with ideas. It is very amusing to
observe the misconceptions of men on these points. They call for what is
outward—can understand that, can praise it. Fussiness and the forms of
activity in all ages get great praise. Imagine an active, bustling
little prætor under Augustus, how he probably pointed out Horace to his
sons as a moony kind of man, whose ways were much to be avoided, and told
them it was a weakness in Augustus to like such idle men about him
instead of men of business.
_Ellesmere_. Or fancy a bustling Glasgow merchant of Adam Smith’s day
watching him. How little would the merchant have dreamt what a number of
vessels were to be floated away by the ink in the Professor’s inkstand;
and what crashing of axes, and clearing of forests in distant lands, the
noise of his pen upon the paper portended.
_Milverton_. It is not only the effect of the still-working man that the
busy man cannot anticipate, but neither can he comprehend the present
labour. If Horace had told my prætor that
“Abstinuit Venere et vino, sudavit et alsit,”
“What, to write a few lines!” would his prætorship have cried out. “Why,
I can live well and enjoy life; and I flatter myself no one in Rome does
more business.”
_Dunsford_. All of it only goes to show how little we know of each
other, and how tolerant we ought to be of others’ efforts.
_Milverton_. The trials that there must be every day without any
incident that even the most minute household chronicler could set down:
the labours without show or noise!
_Ellesmere_. The deep things that there are which, with unthinking
people, pass for shallow things, merely because they are clear as well as
deep. My fable of the other day, for instance—which instead of producing
any moral effect upon you two, only seemed to make you both inclined to
giggle.
_Milverton_. I am so glad you reminded me of that. I, too, fired with a
noble emulation, have invented a fable since we last met which I want you
to hear. I assure you I did not mean to laugh at yours: it was only that
it came rather unexpectedly upon me. You are not exactly the person from
whom one should expect fables.
_Dunsford_. Now for the fable.
_Milverton_. There was a gathering together of creatures hurtful and
terrible to man, to name their king. Blight, mildew, darkness, mighty
waves, fierce winds, Will-o’-the-wisps, and shadows of grim objects, told
fearfully their doings and preferred their claims, none prevailing. But
when evening came on, a thin mist curled up, derisively, amidst the
assemblage, and said, “I gather round a man going to his own home over
paths made by his daily footsteps; and he becomes at once helpless and
tame as a child. The lights meant to assist him, then betray. You find
him wandering, or need the aid of other Terrors to subdue him. I am,
alone, confusion to him.” And all the assemblage bowed before the mist,
and made it king, and set it on the brow of many a mountain, where, when
it is not doing evil, it may be often seen to this day.
_Dunsford_. Well, I like that fable: only I am not quite clear about the
meaning.
_Ellesmere_. You had no doubt about mine.
_Dunsford_. Is the mist calumny, Milverton?
_Ellesmere_. No, prejudice, I am sure.
_Dunsford_. Familiarity with the things around us, obscuring knowledge?
_Milverton_. I would rather not explain. Each of you make your own
fable of it.
_Dunsford_. Well, if ever I make a fable, it shall be one of the
old-fashioned sort, with animals for the speakers, and a good easy moral.
_Ellesmere_. Not a thing requiring the notes of seven German
metaphysicians. I must go and talk a little to my friends the trees, and
see if I can get any explanation from them. It is turning out a
beautiful day after all, notwithstanding my praise of its solidity.
CHAPTER VII.
WE met as usual at our old spot on the lawn for our next reading. I
forget what took place before reading, except that Ellesmere was very
jocose about our reading “Fiction” in-doors, and the following “November
Essay,” as he called it, “under a jovial sun, and with the power of
getting up and walking away from each other to any extent.”
ON THE ART OF LIVING WITH OTHERS.
The “Iliad” for war; the “Odyssey” for wandering; but where is the great
domestic epic? Yet it is but commonplace to say, that passions may rage
round a tea-table, which would not have misbecome men dashing at one
another in war-chariots; and evolutions of patience and temper are
performed at the fireside, worthy to be compared with the Retreat of the
Ten Thousand. Men have worshipped some fantastic being for living alone
in a wilderness; but social martyrdoms place no saints upon the calendar.
We may blind ourselves to it if we like, but the hatreds and disgusts
that there are behind friendship, relationship, service, and, indeed,
proximity of all kinds, is one of the darkest spots upon earth. The
various relations of life, which bring people together, cannot, as we
know, be perfectly fulfilled except in a state where there will, perhaps,
be no occasion for any of them. It is no harm, however, to endeavour to
see whether there are any methods which may make these relations in the
least degree more harmonious now.
In the first place, if people are to live happily together, they must not
fancy, because they are thrown together now, that all their lives have
been exactly similar up to the present time, that they started exactly
alike, and that they are to be for the future of the same mind. A
thorough conviction of the difference of men is the great thing to be
assured of in social knowledge: it is to life what Newton’s law is to
astronomy. Sometimes men have a knowledge of it with regard to the world
in general: they do not expect the outer world to agree with them in all
points, but are vexed at not being able to drive their own tastes and
opinions into those they live with. Diversities distress them. They
will not see that there are many forms of virtue and wisdom. Yet we
might as well say, “Why all these stars; why this difference; why not all
one star?”
Many of the rules for people living together in peace follow from the
above. For instance, not to interfere unreasonably with others, not to
ridicule their tastes, not to question and re-question their resolves,
not to indulge in perpetual comment on their proceedings, and to delight
in their having other pursuits than ours, are all based upon a thorough
perception of the simple fact that they are not we.
Another rule for living happily with others is to avoid having stock
subjects of disputation. It mostly happens, when people live much
together, that they come to have certain set topics, around which, from
frequent dispute, there is such a growth of angry words, mortified
vanity, and the like, that the original subject of difference becomes a
standing subject for quarrel; and there is a tendency in all minor
disputes to drift down to it.
Again, if people wish to live well together, they must not hold too much
to logic, and suppose that everything is to be settled by sufficient
reason. Dr. Johnson saw this clearly with regard to married people, when
he said, “Wretched would be the pair above all names of wretchedness, who
should be doomed to adjust by reason every morning all the minute detail
of a domestic day.” But the application should be much more general than
he made it. There is no time for such reasonings, and nothing that is
worth them. And when we recollect how two lawyers, or two politicians,
can go on contending, and that there is no end of one-sided reasoning on
any subject, we shall not be sure that such contention is the best mode
for arriving at truth. But certainly it is not the way to arrive at good
temper.
If you would be loved as a companion, avoid unnecessary criticism upon
those with whom you live. The number of people who have taken out
judges’ patents for themselves is very large in any society. Now it
would be hard for a man to live with another who was always criticising
his actions, even if it were kindly and just criticism. It would be like
living between the glasses of a microscope. But these self-elected
judges, like their prototypes, are very apt to have the persons they
judge brought before them in the guise of culprits.
One of the most provoking forms of the criticism above alluded to is that
which may be called criticism over the shoulder. “Had I been consulted,”
“Had you listened to me,” “But you always will,” and such short scraps of
sentences may remind many of us of dissertations which we have suffered
and inflicted, and of which we cannot call to mind any soothing effect.
Another rule is, not to let familiarity swallow up all courtesy. Many of
us have a habit of saying to those with whom we live such things as we
say about strangers behind their backs. There is no place, however,
where real politeness is of more value than where we mostly think it
would be superfluous. You may say more truth, or rather speak out more
plainly, to your associates, but not less courteously than you do to
strangers.
Again, we must not expect more from the society of our friends and
companions than it can give, and especially must not expect contrary
things. It is something arrogant to talk of travelling over other minds
(mind being, for what we know, infinite); but still we become familiar
with the upper views, tastes, and tempers of our associates. And it is
hardly in man to estimate justly what is familiar to him. In travelling
along at night, as Hazlitt says, we catch a glimpse into cheerful-looking
rooms with light blazing in them, and we conclude involuntarily how happy
the inmates must be. Yet there is heaven and hell in those rooms—the
same heaven and hell that we have known in others.
* * * * *
There are two great classes of promoters of social happiness—cheerful
people, and people who have some reticence. The latter are more secure
benefits to society even than the former. They are non-conductors of all
the heats and animosities around them. To have peace in a house, or a
family, or any social circle, the members of it must beware of passing on
hasty and uncharitable speeches, which, the whole of the context seldom
being told, is often not conveying but creating mischief. They must be
very good people to avoid doing this; for let Human Nature say what it
will, it likes sometimes to look on at a quarrel, and that not altogether
from ill-nature, but from a love of excitement, for the same reason that
Charles II. liked to attend the debates in the Lords, because they were
“as good as a play.”
* * * * *
We come now to the consideration of temper, which might have been
expected to be treated first. But to cut off the means and causes of bad
temper is, perhaps, of as much importance as any direct dealing with the
temper itself. Besides, it is probable that in small social circles
there is more suffering from unkindness than ill-temper. Anger is a
thing that those who live under us suffer more from than those who live
with us. But all the forms of ill-humour and sour-sensitiveness, which
especially belong to equal intimacy (though indeed, they are common to
all), are best to be met by impassiveness. When two sensitive persons
are shut up together, they go on vexing each other with a reproductive
irritability. {93} But sensitive and hard people get on well together.
The supply of temper is not altogether out of the usual laws of supply
and demand.
* * * * *
Intimate friends and relations should be careful when they go out into
the world together, or admit others to their own circle, that they do not
make a bad use of the knowledge which they have gained of each other by
their intimacy. Nothing is more common than this, and did it not mostly
proceed from mere carelessness, it would be superlatively ungenerous.
You seldom need wait for the written life of a man to hear about his
weaknesses, or what are supposed to be such, if you know his intimate
friends, or meet him in company with them.
* * * * *
Lastly, in conciliating those we live with, it is most surely done, not
by consulting their interests, nor by giving way to their opinions, so
much as by not offending their tastes. The most refined part of us lies
in this region of taste, which is perhaps a result of our whole being
rather than a part of our nature, and, at any rate, is the region of our
most subtle sympathies and antipathies.
* * * * *
It may be said that if the great principles of Christianity were attended
to, all such rules, suggestions, and observations as the above would be
needless. True enough! Great principles are at the bottom of all
things; but to apply them to daily life, many little rules, precautions,
and insights are needed. Such things hold a middle place between real
life and principles, as form does between matter and spirit, moulding the
one and expressing the other.
* * * * *
_Ellesmere_. Quite right that last part. Everybody must have known
really good people, with all Christian temper, but having so little
Christian prudence as to do a great deal of mischief in society.
_Dunsford_. There is one case, my dear Milverton, which I do not think
you have considered: the case where people live unhappily together, not
from any bad relations between them, but because they do not agree about
the treatment of others. A just person, for instance, who would bear
anything for himself or herself, must remonstrate, at the hazard of any
disagreement, at injustice to others.
_Milverton_. Yes. That, however, is a case to be decided upon higher
considerations than those I have been treating of. A man must do his
duty in the way of preventing injustice, and take what comes of it.
_Ellesmere_. For people to live happily together, the real secret is
that they should not live too much together. Of course, you cannot say
that; it would sound harsh, and cut short the essay altogether.
Again, you talk about tastes and “region of subtle sympathies,” and all
that. I have observed that if people’s vanity is pleased, they live well
enough together. Offended vanity is the great separator. You hear a man
(call him B) saying that he is really not himself before So-and-so; tell
him that So-and-so admires him very much and is himself rather abashed
before B, and B is straightway comfortable, and they get on harmoniously
together, and you hear no more about subtle sympathies or antipathies.
_Dunsford_. What a low view you do take of things sometimes, Ellesmere!
_Milverton_. I should not care how low it was, but it is not fair—at
least, it does not contain the whole matter. In the very case he has
put, there was a subtle embarrassment between B and So-and-so. Well,
now, let these people not merely meet occasionally, but be obliged to
live together, without any such explanation as Ellesmere has imagined,
and they will be very uncomfortable from causes that you cannot impute to
vanity. It takes away much of the savour of life to live amongst those
with whom one has not anything like one’s fair value. It may not be
mortified vanity, but unsatisfied sympathy, which causes this discomfort.
B thinks that the other does not know him; he feels that he has no place
with the other. When there is intense admiration on one side, there is
hardly a care in the mind of the admiring one as to what estimation he is
held in. But, in ordinary cases, some clearly defined respect and
acknowledgment of worth is needed on both sides. See how happy a man is
in any office or service who is acknowledged to do something well. How
comfortable he is with his superiors! He has his place. It is not
exactly a satisfaction of his vanity, but an acknowledgment of his useful
existence that contents him. I do not mean to say that there are not
innumerable claims for acknowledgment of merit and service made by
rampant vanity and egotism, which claims cannot be satisfied, ought not
to be satisfied, and which, being unsatisfied, embitter people. But I
think your word Vanity will not explain all the feelings we have been
talking about.
_Ellesmere_. Perhaps not.
_Dunsford_. Certainly not.
_Ellesmere_. Well, at any rate, you will admit that there is a class of
dreadfully humble people who make immense claims at the very time that
they are explaining that they have no claims. They say they know they
cannot be esteemed; they are well aware that they are not wanted, and so
on, all the while making it a sort of grievance and a claim that they are
not what they know themselves not to be; whereas, if they did but fall
back upon their humility, and keep themselves quiet about their demerits,
they would be strong then, and in their place and happy, doing what they
could.
_Milverton_. It must be confessed that these people do make their
humility somewhat obnoxious. Yet, after all, you allow that they know
their deficiencies, and they only say, “I know I have not much to
recommend me, but I wish to be loved, nevertheless.”
_Ellesmere_. Ah, if they only said it a few times! Besides, there is a
little envy mixed up with the humility that I mean.
_Dunsford_. Travelling is a great trial of people’s ability to live
together.
_Ellesmere_. Yes. Lavater says that you do not know a man until you
have divided an inheritance with him; but I think a long journey with him
will do.
_Milverton_. Well, and what is it in travelling that makes people
disagree? Not direct selfishness, but injudicious management; stupid
regrets, for instance, at things not being different from what they are,
or from what they might have been, if “the other route” had been chosen;
fellow-travellers punishing each other with each other’s tastes; getting
stock subjects of disputation; laughing unseasonably at each other’s
vexations and discomforts; and endeavouring to settle everything by the
force of sufficient reason, instead of by some authorised will, or by
tossing up. Thus, in the short time of a journey, almost all modes and
causes of human disagreement are brought into action.
_Ellesmere_. My favourite one not being the least—over-much of each
other’s company.
For my part, I think one of the greatest bores of companionship is, not
merely that people wish to fit tastes and notions on you just as they
might the first pair of ready-made shoes they meet with, a process
amusing enough to the bystander, but exquisitely uncomfortable to the
person being ready-shod: but that they bore you with never-ending talk
about their pursuits, even when they know that you do not work in the
same groove with them, and that they cannot hope to make you do so.
_Dunsford_. Nobody can accuse you of that fault, Ellesmere: I never
heard you dilate much upon anything that interested you, though I have
known you have some pet subject, and to be working at it for months. But
this comes of your coldness of nature.
_Ellesmere_. Well, it might bear a more favourable construction. But to
go back to the essay. It only contemplates the fact of people living
together as equals, if we may so say; but in general, of course, you must
add some other relationship or connection than that of merely being
together.
_Milverton_. I had not overlooked that; but there are certain general
rules in the matter that may be applied to nearly all relationship, just
as I have taken that one from Johnson, applied by him to married life,
about not endeavouring to settle all things by reasoning, and have given
it a general application which, I believe, it will bear.
_Ellesmere_. There is one thing that I should think must often make
women very unreasonable and unpleasant companions. Oh, you may both hold
up your hands and eyes, but I am not married, and can say what I please.
Of course you put on the proper official look of astonishment; and I will
duly report it. But I was going to say that Chivalry, which has
doubtless done a great deal of good, has also done a great deal of harm.
Women may talk the greatest unreason out of doors, and nobody kindly
informs them that it is unreason. They do not talk much before clever
men, and when they do, their words are humoured and dandled as children’s
sayings are. Now, I should fancy—mind, I do not want either of you to
say that my fancy is otherwise than quite unreasonable—I should fancy
that when women have to hear reason at home it must sound odd to them.
The truth is, you know, we cannot pet anything much without doing it
mischief. You cannot pet the intellect, any more than the will, without
injuring it. Well then, again, if you put people upon a pedestal and do
a great deal of worship around them, I cannot think but the will in such
cases must become rather corrupted, and that lessons of obedience must
fall rather harshly—
_Dunsford_. Why, you Mahometan, you Turk of a lawyer—would you do away
with all the high things of courtesy, tenderness for the weaker, and—
_Milverton_. No, I see what he means; and there is something in it.
Many a woman is brought up in unreason and self-will from these causes
that he has given, as many a man from other causes; but there is one
great corrective that he has omitted, and which is, that all forms,
fashions, and outward things have a tendency to go down before realities
when they come hand to hand together. Knowledge and judgment prevail.
Governing is apt to fall to the right person in private as in public
affairs.
_Ellesmere_. Those who give way in public affairs, and let the men who
can do a thing do it, are so far wise that they know what is to be done,
mostly. But the very things I am arguing against are the unreason and
self-will, which being constantly pampered, do not appreciate reason or
just sway. Besides, is there not a force in ill-humour and unreason to
which you constantly see the wisest bend? You will come round to my
opinion some day. I do not want, though, to convince you. It is no
business of mine.
_Milverton_. Well, I may be wrong, but I think, when we come to consider
education, I can show you how the dangers you fear may be greatly
obviated, without Chivalry being obliged to put on a wig and gown, and be
wise.
_Dunsford_. Meanwhile, let us enjoy the delightful atmosphere of
courtesy, unreasonable sometimes, if you like, which saves many people
being put down with the best arguments in the most convincing manner, or
being weighed, estimated, and given way to, so as not to spoil them.
_Ellesmere_. Do not tell, either of you, what I have been saying. I
shall always be poked up into some garret when I come to see you, if you
do.
_Dunsford_. I think the most curious thing, as regards people living
together, is the intense ignorance they sometimes are in of each other.
Many years ago, one or other of you said something of this kind to me,
and I have often thought of it since.
_Milverton_. People fulfil a relation towards each other, and they only
know each other in that relation, especially if it is badly managed by
the superior one; but any way the relationship involves some ignorance.
They perform orbits round each other, each gyrating, too, upon his own
axis, and there are parts of the character of each which are never
brought into view of the other.
_Ellesmere_. I should carry this notion of yours, Milverton, farther
than you do. There is a peculiar mental relation soon constituted
between associates of any kind, which confines and prevents complete
knowledge on both sides. Each man, in some measure therefore, knows
others only through himself. Tennyson makes Ulysses say,
“I am a part of all that I have seen;”
it might have run,
“I am a part of all that I have heard.”
_Dunsford_. Ellesmere becoming metaphysical and transcendental!
_Ellesmere_. Well, well, we will leave these heights, and descend in
little drops of criticism. There are two or three things you might have
pointed out, Milverton. Perhaps you would say that they are included in
what you have said, but I think not. You talk of the mischief of much
comment on each other amongst those who live together. You might have
shown, I think, that in the case of near friends and relations this
comment also deepens into interference—at least it partakes of that
nature. Friends and relations should, therefore, be especially careful
to avoid needless comments on each other. They do just the contrary.
That is one of the reasons why they often hate one another so much.
_Dunsford_. Ellesmere!
_Ellesmere_. Protest, if you like, my dear Dunsford.
Dissentient,
1. Because I wish it were not so.
2. Because I am sorry that it is.
(Signed) DUNSFORD.
_Milverton_. “Hate” is too strong a word, Ellesmere; what you say would
be true enough, if you would put “are not in sympathy with.”
_Ellesmere_. “Have a quiet distaste for.” That is the proper medium.
Now, to go to another matter. You have not put the case of over-managing
people, who are tremendous to live with.
_Milverton_. I have spoken about “interfering unreasonably with others.”
_Ellesmere_. That does not quite convey what I mean. It is when the
manager and the managee are both of the same mind as to the thing to be
done; but the former insists, and instructs, and suggests, and foresees,
till the other feels that all free agency for him is gone.
_Milverton_. It is a sad thing to consider how much of their abilities
people turn to tiresomeness. You see a man who would be very agreeable
if he were not so observant: another who would be charming, if he were
deaf and dumb: a third delightful, if he did not vex all around him with
superfluous criticism.
_Ellesmere_. A hit at me that last, I suspect. But I shall go on. You
have not, I think, made enough merit of independence in companionship.
If I were to put into an aphorism what I mean, I should say, Those who
depend wholly on companionship are the worst companions; or thus: Those
deserve companionship who can do without it. There, Mr. Aphoriser
General, what do you say to that?
_Milverton_. Very good, but—
_Ellesmere_. Of course a “but” to other people’s aphorisms, as if every
aphorism had not buts innumerable. We critics, you know, cannot abide
criticism. We do all the criticism that is needed ourselves. I wonder
at the presumption sometimes of you wretched authors. But to proceed.
You have not said anything about the mischief of superfluous condolence
amongst people who live together. I flatter myself that I could condole
anybody out of all peace of mind.
_Milverton_. All depends upon whether condolence goes with the grain, or
against the grain, of vanity. I know what you mean, however: For
instance, it is a very absurd thing to fret much over other people’s
courses, not considering the knowledge and discipline that there is in
any course that a man may take. And it is still more absurd to be
constantly showing the people fretted over that you are fretting over
them. I think a good deal of what you call superfluous condolence would
come under the head of superfluous criticism.
_Ellesmere_. Not altogether. In companionship, when an evil happens to
one of the circle, the others should simply attempt to share and lighten
it, not to expound it, or dilate on it, or make it the least darker. The
person afflicted generally apprehends all the blackness sufficiently.
Now, unjust abuse by the world is to me like the howling of the wind at
night when one is warm within. Bring any draught of it into one’s house
though, and it is not so pleasant.
_Dunsford_. Talking of companionship, do not you think there is often a
peculiar feeling of home where age or infirmity is? The arm-chair of the
sick or the old is the centre of the house. They think, perhaps, that
they are unimportant; but all the household hopes and cares flow to them
and from them.
_Milverton_. I quite agree with you. What you have just depicted is a
beautiful sight, especially when, as you often see, the age or infirmity
is not in the least selfish or exacting.
_Ellesmere_. We have said a great deal about the companionship of human
beings; but, upon my word, we ought to have kept a few words for our dog
friends. Rollo has been lolling out his great tongue, and looking
wistfully from face to face, as we each began our talk. A few minutes
ago he was quite concerned, thinking I was angry with you, when I would
not let you “but” my aphorism. I am not sure which of the three I should
rather go out walking with now: Dunsford, Rollo, Milverton. The middle
one is the safest companion. I am sure not to get out of humour with
him. But I have no objection to try the whole three: only I vote for
much continuity of silence, as we have had floods of discussion to-day.
_Dunsford_. Agreed!
_Ellesmere_. Come, Rollo, you may bark now, as you have been silent,
like a wise dog, all the morning.
CHAPTER VIII.
IT was arranged, during our walk, that Ellesmere should come and stay a
day or two with me, and see the neighbouring cathedral, which is nearer
my house than Milverton’s. The visit over, I brought him back to
Worth-Ashton. Milverton saw us coming, walked down the hill to meet us,
and after the usual greetings, began to talk to Ellesmere.
_Milverton_. So you have been to see our cathedral. I say “our,” for
when a cathedral is within ten miles of us, we feel a property in it, and
are ready to battle for its architectural merits.
_Ellesmere_. You know I am not a man to rave about cathedrals.
_Milverton_. I certainly do not expect you to do so. To me a cathedral
is mostly somewhat of a sad sight. You have Grecian monuments, if
anything so misplaced can be called Grecian, imbedded against and cutting
into Gothic pillars; the doors shut for the greater part of the day; only
a little bit of the building used: beadledom predominant; the clink of
money here and there; white-wash in vigour; the singing indifferent; the
sermons not indifferent but bad; and some visitors from London forming,
perhaps, the most important part of the audience; in fact, the thing
having become a show. We look about, thinking when piety filled every
corner, and feel that the cathedral is too big for the Religion which is
a dried-up thing that rattles in this empty space.
_Ellesmere_. This is the boldest simile I have heard for a long time.
My theory about cathedrals is very different, I must confess.
_Dunsford_. Theory!
_Ellesmere_. Well, “theory” is not the word I ought to have used—feeling
then. My feeling is, how strong this creature was, this worship, how
beautiful, how alluring, how complete; but there was something
stronger—truth.
_Milverton_. And more beautiful?
_Ellesmere_. Yes, and far more beautiful.
_Milverton_. Doubtless, to the free spirits who brought truth forward.
_Ellesmere_. You are only saying this, Milverton, to try what I will
say; but, despite of all sentimentalities, you sympathise with any
emancipation of the human mind, as I do, however much the meagreness of
Protestantism may be at times distasteful to you.
_Milverton_. I did not say I was anxious to go back. Certainly not.
But what says Dunsford? Let us sit down on his stile and hear what he
has to say.
_Dunsford_. I cannot talk to you about this subject. If I tell you of
all the merits (as they seem to me) of the Church of England, you will
both pick what I say to pieces, whereas if I leave you to fight on, one
or the other will avail himself of those arguments on which our Church is
based.
_Milverton_. Well, Dunsford, you are very candid, and would make a
complete diplomatist: truth-telling being now pronounced (rather late in
the day) the very acme of diplomacy. But do you not own that our
cathedrals are sadly misused?
_Dunsford_. Now, very likely, if more were made of them, you, and men
who think like you, would begin to cry out “superstition”; and would
instantly turn round and inveigh against the uses which you now, perhaps,
imagine for cathedrals.
_Milverton_. Well, one never can answer for oneself; but at any rate, I
do not see what is the meaning of building new churches in neighbourhoods
where there are already the noblest buildings suitable for the same
purposes. Is there a church religion, and is there a cathedral religion?
_Ellesmere_. You cannot make the present fill the garb of the past,
Milverton, any more than you could make the past fill that of the
present. Now, as regards the very thing you are about to discuss to-day,
if it be the same you told us in our last walk—Education: if you are only
going to give us some institution for it, I daresay it may be very good
for to-day, or for this generation, but it will have its sere and yellow
leaf, and there will be a time when future Milvertons, in sentimental
mood, will moan over it, and wish they had it and all that has grown up
to take its place at the same time. But all this is what I have often
heard you say yourself in other words.
_Dunsford_. This is very hard doctrine, and not quite sound, I think.
In getting the new gain, we always sacrifice something, and we should
look with some pious regard to what was good in the things which are
past. That good is generally one which, though it may not be equal to
the present, would make a most valuable supplement to it.
_Milverton_. I would try and work in the old good thing with the new,
not as patchwork though, but making the new thing grow out in such a way
as to embrace the old advantage.
_Ellesmere_. Well, we must have the essay before we branch out into our
philosophy. Pleasure afterwards—I will not say what comes first.
EDUCATION.
The word education is so large, that one may almost as well put “world,”
or “the end and object of being,” at the head of an essay. It should,
therefore, soon be declared what such a heading does mean. The word
education suggests chiefly to some minds what the State can do for those
whom they consider its young people—the children of the poorer classes:
to others it presents the idea of all the training that can be got for
money at schools and colleges, and which can be fairly accomplished and
shut in at the age of one-and-twenty. This essay, however, will not be a
treatise on government education, or other school and college education,
but will only contain a few points in reference to the general subject,
which may escape more methodical and enlarged discussions.
* * * * *
In the first place, as regards government education, it must be kept in
mind that there is a danger of its being too interfering and formal, of
its overlying private enterprise, insisting upon too much uniformity, and
injuring local connections and regards. Education, even in the poorest
acceptance of the word, is a great thing: but the harmonious intercourse
of different ranks, if not a greater, is a more difficult one; and we
must not gain the former at any considerable sacrifice of the latter.
There is another point connected with this branch of the subject which
requires, perhaps, to be noted. If government provision is made in any
case, might it not be combined with private payment in other cases, or
enter in the way of rewards, so as to do good throughout each step of the
social ladder? The lowest kind of school education is a power, and it is
desirable that the gradations of this power should correspond to other
influences which we know to be good. For instance, a hard-working man
saves something to educate his children; if he can get a little better
education for them than other parents of his own rank for theirs, it is
an incentive and a reward to him, and the child’s bringing up at home is
a thing which will correspond to this better education at school. In
this there are the elements at once of stability and progress.
These views may possibly seem too refined, but at any rate they require
consideration.
* * * * *
The next branch of the subject is the ordinary education of young persons
not of the poorest classes, with which the State has hitherto had little
or nothing to do. This may be considered under four heads: religious,
moral, intellectual, and physical education. With regard to the first,
there is not much that can be put into rules about it. Parents and
tutors will naturally be anxious to impress those under their charge with
the religious opinions which they themselves hold. In doing this,
however, they should not omit to lay a foundation for charity towards
people of other religious opinions. For this purpose, it may be
requisite to give a child a notion that there are other creeds besides
that in which it is brought up itself. And especially, let it not
suppose that all good and wise people are of its church or chapel.
However desirable it may appear to the person teaching that there should
be such a thing as unity of religion, yet as the facts of the world are
against his wishes, and as this is the world which the child is to enter,
it is well that the child should in reasonable time be informed of these
facts. It may be said in reply that history sufficiently informs
children on these points. But the world of the young is the domestic
circle; all beyond is fabulous, unless brought home to them by comment.
The fact, therefore, of different opinions in religious matters being
held by good people should sometimes be dwelt upon, instead of being
shunned, if we would secure a ground-work of tolerance in a child’s mind.
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION.
In the intellectual part of education there is the absolute knowledge to
be acquired, and the ways of acquiring knowledge to be gained. The
latter of course form the most important branch. They can, in some
measure, be taught. Give children little to do, make much of its being
accurately done. This will give accuracy. Insist upon speed in
learning, with careful reference to the original powers of the pupil.
This speed gives the habit of concentrating attention, one of the most
valuable of mental habits. Then cultivate logic. Logic is not the hard
matter that is fancied. A young person, especially after a little
geometrical training, may soon be taught to perceive where a fallacy
exists, and whether an argument is well sustained. It is not, however,
sufficient for him to be able to examine sharply and to pull to pieces.
He must learn how to build. This is done by method. The higher branches
of method cannot be taught at first. But you may begin by teaching
orderliness of mind. Collecting, classifying, contrasting and weighing
facts, are some of the processes by which method is taught. When these
four things, accuracy, attention, logic, and method are attained, the
intellect is fairly furnished with its instruments.
As regards the things to be taught, they will vary to some extent in each
age. The general course of education pursued at any particular time may
not be the wisest by any means, and greatness will overleap it and
neglect it, but the mass of men may go more safely and comfortably, if
not with the stream, at least by the side of it.
In the choice of studies too much deference should not be paid to the
bent of a young person’s mind. Excellence in one or two things which may
have taken the fancy of a youth (or which really may suit his genius)
will ill compensate for a complete ignorance of those branches of study
which are very repugnant to him; and which are, therefore, not likely to
be learnt when he has freedom in the choice of his studies.
Amongst the first things to be aimed at in the intellectual part of
education is variety of pursuit. A human being, like a tree, if it is to
attain to perfect symmetry, must have light and air given to it from all
quarters. This may be done without making men superficial. Scientific
method may be acquired without many sciences being learnt. But one or
two great branches of science must be accurately known. So, too, the
choice works of antiquity may be thoroughly appreciated without extensive
reacting. And passing on from mere learning of any kind, a variety of
pursuits, even in what may be called accomplishments, is eminently
serviceable. Much may be said of the advantage of keeping a man to a few
pursuits, and of the great things done thereby in the making of pins and
needles. But in this matter we are not thinking of the things that are
to be done, but of the persons who are to do them. Not wealth but men.
A number of one-sided men may make a great nation, though I much incline
to doubt that; but such a nation will not contain a number of great men.
The very advantage that flows from division of labour, and the probable
consequences that men’s future bread-getting pursuits will be more and
more sub-divided, and therefore limited, make it the more necessary that
a man should begin life with a broad basis of interest in many things
which may cultivate his faculties and develop his nature. This
multifariousness of pursuit is needed also in the education of the poor.
Civilisation has made it easy for a man to brutalise himself: how is this
to be counteracted but by endowing him with many pursuits which may
distract him from vice? It is not that kind of education which leads to
no employment in after-life that will do battle with vice. But when
education enlarges the field of life-long good pursuits, it becomes
formidable to the soul’s worst enemies.
MORAL EDUCATION.
In considering moral education we must recollect that there are three
agents in this matter—the child himself, the influence of his grown-up
friends, and that of his contemporaries. All that his grown-up friends
tell him in the way of experience goes for very little, except in
palpable matters. They talk of abstractions which he cannot comprehend:
and the “Arabian Nights” is a truer world to him than that they talk of.
Still, though they cannot furnish experience, they can give motives.
Indeed, in their daily intercourse with the child, they are always doing
so. For instance, truth, courage, and kindness are the great moral
qualities to be instilled. Take courage, in its highest form—moral
courage. If a child perpetually hears such phrases (and especially if
they are applied to his own conduct), as, “What people will say,” “How
they will look at you,” “What they will think,” and the like, it tends to
destroy all just self-reliance in that child’s mind, and to set up
instead an exaggerated notion of public opinion, the greatest tyrant of
these times. People can see this in such an obvious thing as animal
courage. They will avoid over-cautioning children against physical
dangers, knowing that the danger they talk much about will become a
bug-bear to the child which it may never get rid of. But a similar peril
lurks in the application of moral motives. Truth, courage, and kindness
are likely to be learnt, or not, by children, according as they hear and
receive encouragement in the direction of these pre-eminent qualities.
When attempt is made to frighten a child with these worldly maxims, “What
will be said of you?” “Are you like such a one?” and such things, it is
meant to draw him under the rule of grown-up respectability. The last
thing thought of by the parent or teacher is, that such maxims will bring
the child under the especial guidance of the most unscrupulous of his
contemporaries. They will use ridicule and appeal to their little world,
which will be his world, and ask, “What will be said” of him. There
should be some stuff in him of his own to meet these awful generalities.
PHYSICAL EDUCATION.
The physical education of children is a very simple matter, too simple to
be much attended to without great perseverance and resolution on the part
of those who care for the children. It consists, as we all know, in good
air, simple diet, sufficient exercise, and judicious clothing. The first
requisite is the most important, and by far the most frequently
neglected. This neglect is not so unreasonable as it seems. It arises
from pure ignorance. If the mass of mankind knew what scientific men
know about the functions of the air, they would be as careful in getting
a good supply of it as of their other food. All the people that ever
were supposed to die of poison in the middle ages, and that means nearly
everybody whose death was worth speculating about, are not so many as
those who die poisoned by bad air in the course of any given year. Even
a slightly noxious thing, which is constant, affecting us every moment of
the day, must have considerable influence; but the air we breathe is not
a thing that slightly affects us, but one of the most important elements
of life. Moreover, children are the most affected by impurity of air.
We need not weary ourselves with much statistics to ascertain this. One
or two broad facts will assure us of it. In Nottingham there is a
district called Byron Ward, “the densest and worst-conditioned quarter of
the town.” A table has been made by Mr. William Hawksley of the
mortality of equal populations in different parts of the town:
“On comparing the diagram No. 1, relating to Park Ward, with the
diagram No. 7, relating to Byron Ward, it will be seen that the
heavier pressure of the causes of mortality occasions in the latter
district such an undue destruction of early life, that towards 100
deaths, however occurring, Byron Ward contributes fifty per cent.
more of children under five years of age than the Park Ward, for the
former sends sixty children to an early grave, while the latter sends
only forty.” {116a}
Mr. Hawksley, the former witness alluded to, goes on to say—
“It has been long known that, with increase of years, up to that
period of life which has been denominated the second childhood, the
human constitution becomes gradually more resistful, and as it were
slowly hardened against the repeated attacks of those more acute
disorders, incident to an inferior degree of sanitary civilisation,
by which large portions of an infant population are continually
overcome and rapidly swept away. From the operation of these and
more extraneous influences of a disturbing character, an infant
population is almost entirely exempted; and on this account it is
considered that an infant population constitutes, as it were, a
delicate barometer, from which we may derive more early and more
certain indications of the presence and comparative force of local
causes of mortality and disease than can be obtained from the more
general methods of investigation usually pursued.”
The above evidence is confirmed by Mr. Toynbee:—
“The disease of hydrocephalus, of water in the brain, so fatal to
children, I find associated with symptoms of scrofula, and arising in
abundance in these close rooms. I believe water in the brain, in the
class of patients whom I visit, to be almost wholly a scrofulous
affection.” {116b}
But supposing people aware of the necessity for good air, and therefore
for ventilation, what is to be done? In houses in great towns certainly,
and I should say in all houses, some of the care and expense that are
devoted to ornamental work, which when done is often a care, a trouble,
an eyesore, and a mischief, should be given to modes of ventilation,
{117a} sound building, abundant access of light, largeness of
sleeping-rooms, and such useful things. Less ormolu and tinsel of all
kinds in the drawing-rooms, and sweeter air in the regions above.
Similar things may be done for and by the poor. {117b} And it need
hardly be said that those people who care for their children, if of any
enlightenment at all, will care greatly for the sanitary condition of
their neighbourhood generally. At present you will find at many a rich
man’s door {117c} a nuisance which is poisoning the atmosphere that his
children are to breathe, but which he could entirely cure for less than
one day’s ordinary expenses.
I am afraid that ventilation is very little attended to in school-rooms,
either for rich or poor. Now it may be deliberately said that there is
very little learned in any school-room that can compensate for the
mischief of its being learned in the midst of impure air. This is a
thing which parents must look to, for the grown-up people in the
school-rooms, though suffering grievously themselves from insufficient
ventilation, will be unobservant of it. {118} In every system of
government inspection, ventilation must occupy a prominent part.
The advantage of simple food for children is a thing that people have
found out. And as regards exercise, children happily make great efforts
to provide a sufficiency of this for themselves. In clothing, the folly
and conformity of grown-up people enter again. Loving mothers, in
various parts of the world, carry about at present, I believe, and
certainly in times past, carried their little children strapped to a
board, with nearly as little power of motion as the board itself. Could
we get the returns of stunted miserable beings, or of deaths, from this
cause, they would be something portentous. Less in degree, but not less
fatally absurd in principle, are many of the strappings, bandages, and
incipient stays for children amongst us. They are all mischievous.
Allow children, at any rate, some freedom of limbs, some opportunity of
being graceful and healthy. Give Nature—dear motherly, much-abused
Nature—some chance of forming these little ones according to the
beneficent intentions of Providence, and not according to the angular
designs of ill-educated men and women.
I do not say that attention to the above matters of good air, judicious
clothing, and freedom from bandages, will absolutely secure health,
because these very things may have been so ill attended to in the parents
or in the parental stock as to have introduced special maladies; but at
least they are the most important objects to be minded now; and, perhaps,
the more to be minded in the children of those who have suffered most
from neglect in these particulars.
When we are considering the health of children, it is imperative not to
omit the importance of keeping their brains fallow, as it were, for
several of the first years of their existence. The mischief perpetrated
by a contrary course in the shape of bad health, peevish temper, and
developed vanity, is incalculable. It would not be just to attribute
this altogether to the vanity of parents; they are influenced by a
natural fear lest their children should not have all the advantages of
other children. Some infant prodigy which is a standard of mischief
throughout its neighbourhood misleads them. But parents may be assured
that this early work is not by any means all gain, even in the way of
work. I suspect it is a loss; and that children who begin their
education late, as it would be called, will rapidly overtake those who
have been in harness long before them. And what advantage can it be that
the child knows more at six years old than its compeers, especially if
this is to be gained by a sacrifice of health which may never be
regained? There may be some excuse for this early book-work in the case
of those children who are to live by manual labour. It is worth while,
perhaps, to run the risk of some physical injury to them, having only
their early years in which we can teach them book-knowledge. The chance
of mischief, too, will be less, being more likely to be counteracted by
their after-life. But for a child who has to be at book-work for the
first twenty-one years of its life, what folly it is to exhaust in the
least the mental energy, which, after all, is its surest implement.
A similar course of argument applies to taking children early to church,
and to over-developing their minds in any way. There is no knowing,
moreover, the disgust and weariness that may grow up in the minds of
young persons from their attention being prematurely claimed. We are
now, however, looking at early study as a matter of health; and we may
certainly put it down in the same class with impure air, stimulating
diet, unnecessary bandages, and other manifest physical disadvantages.
Civilised life, as it advances, does not seem to have so much repose in
it, that we need begin early in exciting the mind, for fear of the man
being too lethargical hereafter.
EDUCATION OF WOMEN.
It seems needful that something should be said specially about the
education of women. As regards their intellects they have been unkindly
treated—too much flattered, too little respected. They are shut up in a
world of conventionalities, and naturally believe that to be the only
world. The theory of their education seems to be, that they should not
be made companions to men, and some would say, they certainly are not.
These critics, however, in the high imaginations they justly form of what
women’s society might be to men, forget, perhaps, how excellent a thing
it is already. Still the criticism is not by any means wholly unjust.
It appears rather as if there had been a falling off since the olden
times in the education of women. A writer of modern days, arguing on the
other side, has said, that though we may talk of the Latin and Greek of
Lady Jane Grey and Queen Elizabeth, yet we are to consider that that was
the only learning of the time, and that many a modern lady may be far
better instructed, although she knew nothing of Latin and Greek. Certain
it is, she may know more facts, have read more books: but this does not
assure us that she may not be less conversable, less companionable.
Wherein does the cultivated and thoughtful man differ from the common
man? In the method of his discourse. His questions upon a subject in
which he is ignorant are full of interest. His talk has a groundwork of
reason. This rationality must not be supposed to be dulness. Folly is
dull. Now, would women be less charming if they had more power, or at
least more appreciation, of reasoning? Their flatterers tell them that
their intuition is such that they need not man’s slow processes of
thought. One would be very sorry to have a grave question of law that
concerned oneself decided upon by intuitive judges, or a question of fact
by intuitive jurymen. And so of all human things that have to be
canvassed, it is better, and more amusing too, that they should be
discussed according to reason. Moreover, the exercise of the reasoning
faculties gives much of the pleasure which there is in solid
acquirements; so that the obvious facts in life and history will hardly
be acquired by those who are not in the habit of reasoning upon them.
Hence it comes, that women have less interest in great topics, and less
knowledge of them, than they might have.
Again, if either sex requires logical education, it is theirs. The sharp
practice of the world drives some logic into the most vague of men; women
are not so schooled.
But, supposing the deficiency we have been considering to be admitted,
how is it to be remedied? Women’s education must be made such as to
ensure some accuracy and reasoning. This may be done with any subject of
education, and is done with men, whatever they learn, because they are
expected to produce and use their requirements. But the greatest object
of intellectual education, the improvement of the mental powers, is as
needful for one sex as the other, and requires the same means in both
sexes. The same accuracy, attention, logic, and method that are
attempted in the education of men should be aimed at in that of women.
This will never be sufficiently attended to, as there are no immediate
and obvious fruits from it. And, therefore, as it is probable, from the
different career of women to that of men, that whatever women study will
not be studied with the same method and earnestness as it would be by
men, what a peculiar advantage there is in any study for them, in which
no proficiency whatever can be made without some use of most of the
qualities we desire for them. Geometry, for instance, is such a study.
It may appear pedantic, but I must confess that Euclid seems to me a book
for the young of both sexes. The severe rules upon which the acquisition
of the dead languages is built would of course be a great means for
attaining the logical habits in question. But Latin and Greek is a
deeper pedantry for women than geometry, and much less desirable on many
accounts: and geometry would, perhaps, suffice to teach them what
reasoning is. I daresay, too, there are accomplishments which might be
taught scientifically; and so even the prejudice against the manifest
study of science by women be conciliated. But the appreciation of
reasoning must be got somehow.
It is a narrow view of things to suppose that a just cultivation of
women’s mental powers will take them out of their sphere: it will only
enlarge that sphere. The most cultivated women perform their common
duties best. They see more in those duties. They can do more. Lady
Jane Grey would, I daresay, have bound up a wound, or managed a
household, with any unlearned woman of her day. Queen Elizabeth did
manage a kingdom: and we find no pedantry in her way of doing it.
People who advocate a better training for women must not, necessarily, be
supposed to imagine that men and women are by education to be made alike,
and are intended to fulfil most of the same offices. There seems reason
for thinking that a boundary line exists between the intellects of men
and women which, perhaps, cannot be passed over from either side. But,
at any rate, taking the whole nature of both sexes, and the inevitable
circumstances which cause them to differ, there must be such a difference
between men and women that the same intellectual training applied to both
would produce most dissimilar results. It has not, however, been
proposed in these pages to adopt the same training: and would have been
still less likely to be proposed if it could be shown that such training
would tend to make men and women unpleasantly similar to each other. The
utmost that has been thought of here is to make more of women’s
faculties, not by any means to translate them into men’s—if such a thing
were possible, which, we may venture to say, is not. There are some
things that are good for all trees—light, air, room—but no one expects by
affording some similar advantages of this kind to an oak and a beech, to
find them assimilate, though by such means the best of each may be
produced.
Moreover, it should be recollected that the purpose of education is not
always to foster natural gifts, but sometimes to bring out faculties that
might otherwise remain dormant; and especially so far as to make the
persons educated cognisant of excellence in those faculties in others. A
certain tact and refinement belong to women, in which they have little to
learn from the first: men, too, who attain some portion of these
qualities, are greatly the better for them, and I should imagine not less
acceptable on that account to women. So, on the other side, there may be
an intellectual cultivation for women which may seem a little against the
grain, which would not, however, injure any of their peculiar
gifts—would, in fact, carry those gifts to the highest, and would
increase withal, both to men and women, the pleasure of each other’s
society.
There is a branch of general education which is not thought at all
necessary for women; as regards which, indeed, it is well if they are not
brought up to cultivate the opposite. Women are not taught to be
courageous. Indeed, to some persons courage may seem as unnecessary for
women as Latin and Greek. Yet there are few things that would tend to
make women happier in themselves, and more acceptable to those with whom
they live, than courage. There are many women of the present day,
sensible women in other things, whose panic-terrors are a frequent source
of discomfort to themselves and those around them. Now, it is a great
mistake to imagine that harshness must go with courage; and that the
bloom of gentleness and sympathy must all be rubbed off by that vigour of
mind which gives presence of mind, enables a person to be useful in
peril, and makes the desire to assist overcome that sickliness of
sensibility which can only contemplate distress and difficulty. So far
from courage being unfeminine, there is a peculiar grace and dignity in
those beings who have little active power of attack or defence, passing
through danger with a moral courage which is equal to that of the
strongest. We see this in great things. We perfectly appreciate the
sweet and noble dignity of an Anne Bullen, a Mary Queen of Scots, or a
Marie Antoinette. We see that it is grand for these delicately-bred,
high-nurtured, helpless personages to meet Death with a silence and a
confidence like his own. But there would be a similar dignity in women’s
bearing small terrors with fortitude. There is no beauty in fear. It is
a mean, ugly, dishevelled creature. No statue can be made of it that a
woman would like to see herself like.
Women are pre-eminent in steady endurance of tiresome suffering: they
need not be far behind men in a becoming courage to meet that which is
sudden and sharp. The dangers and the troubles, too, which we may
venture to say they now start at unreasonably, are many of them mere
creatures of the imagination—such as, in their way, disturb high-mettled
animals brought up to see too little, and therefore frightened at any
leaf blown across the road.
We may be quite sure that, without losing any of the most delicate and
refined of feminine graces, women may be taught not to give way to
unreasonable fears, which should belong no more to the fragile than to
the robust.
There is no doubt that courage may in some measure be taught. We agree
that the lower kinds of courage are matter of habit, therefore of
teaching: and the same thing holds good to some extent of all courage.
Courage is as contagious as fear. The saying is, that the brave are the
sons and daughters of the brave; but we might as truly say that they must
be brought up by the brave. The great novelist, when he wants a coward
descended from a valorous race, does well to take him from his clan and
bring him up in an unwarlike home. {126} Indeed, the heroic example of
other days is in great part the source of courage of each generation; and
men walk up composedly to the most perilous enterprises, beckoned onwards
by the shades of the brave that were. In civil courage, moral courage,
or courage shown in the minute circumstances of everyday life, the same
law is true. Courage may be taught by precept, enforced by example, and
is good to be taught to men, women, and children.
EDUCATION TO HAPPINESS.
It is a curious phenomenon in human affairs, that some of those matters
in which education is most potent should have been amongst the least
thought of as branches of it. What you teach a boy of Latin and Greek
may be good; but these things are with him but a little time of each day
in his after-life. What you teach him of direct moral precepts may be
very good seed: it may grow up, especially if it have sufficient moisture
from experience; but then, again, a man is, happily, not doing obvious
right or wrong all day long. What you teach him of any bread-getting art
may be of some import to him, as to the quantity and quality of bread he
will get; but he is not always with his art. With himself he is always.
How important, then, it is, whether you have given him a happy or a
morbid turn of mind; whether the current of his life is a clear wholesome
stream, or bitter as Marah. The education to happiness is a possible
thing—not to a happiness supposed to rest upon enjoyments of any kind,
but to one built upon content and resignation. This is the best part of
philosophy. This enters into the “wisdom” spoken of in the Scriptures.
Now it can be taught. The converse is taught every day and all day long.
To take an example. A sensitive disposition may descend to a child; but
it is also very commonly increased, and often created. Captiousness,
sensitiveness, and a Martha-like care for the things of this world, are
often the direct fruits of education. All these faults of the character,
and they are amongst the greatest, may be summed up in a disproportionate
care for little things. This is rather a growing evil. The painful
neatness and exactness of modern life foster it. Long peace favours it.
Trifles become more important, great evils being kept away. And so, the
tide of small wishes and requirements gains upon us fully as fast as we
can get out of its way by our improved means of satisfying them. Now the
unwholesome concern that many parents and governors manifest as to small
things must have a great influence on the governed. You hear a child
reprimanded about a point of dress, or some trivial thing, as if it had
committed a treachery. The criticisms, too, which it hears upon others
are often of the same kind. Small omissions, small commissions, false
shame, little stumbling-blocks of offence, trifling grievances of the
kind that Dr. Johnson, who had known hunger, stormed at Mrs. Thrale for
talking about, are made much of; general dissatisfaction is expressed
that things are not complete, and that everything in life is not turned
out as neat as a Long-Acre carriage; commands are expected to be
fulfilled by agents, upon very rapid and incomplete orders, exactly to
the mind of the person ordering;—these ways, to which children are very
attentive, teach them in their turn to be querulous, sensitive, and full
of small cares and wishes. And when you have made a child like this, can
you make a world for him that will satisfy him? Tax your civilisation to
the uttermost: a punctilious, tiresome disposition expects more. Indeed,
Nature, with her vague and flowing ways, cannot at all fit in with a
right-angled person. Besides, there are other precise, angular
creatures, and these sharp-edged persons wound each other terribly. Of
all the things which you can teach people, after teaching them to trust
in God, the most important is, to put out of their hearts any expectation
of perfection, according to their notions, in this world. This
expectation is at the bottom of a great deal of the worldliness we hear
so much reprehended, and necessarily gives to little things a most
irrational importance.
Observe the effect of this disproportionate care for little things in the
disputes of men. A man who does so care, has a garment embroidered with
hooks which catch at everything that passes by. He finds many more
causes of offence than other men; and each offence is a more bitter thing
to him than to others. He does not expect to be offended. Poor man! He
goes through life wondering that he is the subject of general attack, and
that the world is so quarrelsome.
The result of a bad education in developing undue care for trifles may be
seen in its effect on domestic government and government in general. If
those in power have this fault, they will make the persons under them
miserable by petty, constant blame; or they will make them indifferent to
all blame. If this fault is in the governed, they will captiously object
to all the ways and plans of their superiors, not knowing the difficulty
of doing anything; they will expect miracles of attention, justice, and
temper, which the rough-hewed ways of men do not admit of; and they will
repine and tease the life out of those in authority. Sometimes both
superiors and inferiors, governors and governed, have this fault. This
must often happen in a family, and is a fearful punishment to the elders
of it. Scarcely any goodness of disposition, and what are called great
qualities, can make such difficult materials work well together.
But I end with somewhat of the same argument as I began with, namely,
that as a man lives more with himself than with art, science, or even
with his fellows, a wise teacher, having before him the intent to make a
happy-minded man of his pupil, will try to lay a groundwork of divine
contentment in him. If he cannot make him easily pleased, he will at
least try and prevent him from being easily disconcerted. Why, even the
self-conceit that makes people indifferent to small things, wrapping them
in an atmosphere of self-satisfaction, is welcome in a man compared to
that querulousness which makes him an enemy to all around. But most
commendable is that easiness of mind which is easy because it is
tolerant, because it does not look to have everything its own way,
because it expects anything but smooth usage in its course here, because
it has resolved to manufacture as few miseries out of small evils as can
be.
Most of us know what it is to vex our minds because we cannot recall some
name or trivial thing which has escaped our memory for the moment. But
then we think how foolish this is, what little concern it is to us. We
are right in that; yet any defect of memory is a great concern compared
to many of the trifling niceties, comforts, offences, and
rectangularities which, perhaps, we do not think it an ignoble use of
heart and time to waste ourselves upon. It would be well enough to
entertain the rabble of small troubles and offences, if we could lay them
aside with the delightful facility of children, who, after an agony of
tears, are soon found laughing or asleep. But the chagrin and vexation
of grown-up people are grown-up too; and, however childish in their
origin, are not to be laughed or danced or slept away in childlike
simple-heartedness.
We must not imagine that too much stress can well be laid upon the
importance of an education to contentment, for it comes under the head of
those things which are not adjuncts or acquisitions for a man, but which
form the texture of his being. What a man has learnt is of importance;
but what he is, what he can do, what he will become, are more significant
things. Finally, it may be remarked, that, to make education a great
work, we must have the educators great; that book-learning is mainly good
as it gives us a chance of coming into the company of greater and better
minds than the average of men around us; and that individual greatness
and goodness are the things to be aimed at rather than the successful
cultivation of those talents which go to form some eminent membership of
society. Each man is a drama in himself—has to play all the parts in it;
is to be king and rebel, successful and vanquished, free and slave; and
needs a bringing-up fit for the universal creature that he is.
* * * * *
_Ellesmere_. You have been unexpectedly merciful to us. The moment I
heard the head of the essay given out, there flitted before my frightened
mind volumes of reports, Battersea schools, Bell, Wilderspin, normal
farms, National Society, British Schools, interminable questions about
how religion might be separated altogether from secular education, or so
much religion taught as all religious sects could agree in. These are
all very good things and people to discuss, I daresay; but, to tell the
truth, the whole subject sits heavy on my soul. I meet a man of
inexhaustible dulness, and he talks to me for three hours about some
great subject—this very one of education, for instance—till I sit
entranced by stupidity, thinking the while, “And this is what we are to
become by education—to be like you.” Then I see a man like D—, a
judicious, reasonable, conversable being, knowing how to be silent too—a
man to go through a campaign with—and I find he cannot read or write.
_Milverton_. This sort of contrast is just the thing to strike you,
Ellesmere: and yet you know as well as any of us that to bring forward
such contrasts by way of depreciating education would be most
unreasonable. There are three things that go to make a man—the education
that most people mean by education; then the education that goes deeper,
the education of the soul; and, thirdly, a man’s gifts of Nature. I
agree with all you say about D—; he never says a foolish thing, and does
a great many judicious ones. But look what a clever face he has. There
are gifts of Nature for you. Then, again, although he cannot read or
write, he may have been most judiciously brought up in other respects.
He may have had two, therefore, out of the three elements of education.
What such instances would show, I believe, if narrowly looked into, is
the immense importance of the education of heart and temper.
I feel with you in some measure about the dulness of the subject of
education. But then it extends to all things of the institution kind.
Men must have a great deal of pedantry, routine, and folly of all sorts,
in any large matter they undertake. I had had this feeling for a long
time (you know the way in which you have a thing in your mind, although
you have never said it out exactly even to yourself)—well, I came upon a
passage of Emerson’s which I will try to quote, and then I knew what it
was that I had felt.
“We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs intermeddle, and have
things in our own way, until the sacrifices and virtues of society are
odious. Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our
Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper societies, are yokes to the
neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural ways of
arriving at the same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive. Why
should all virtue work in one and the same way?” . . . “And why drag this
dead weight of a Sunday-school over the whole of Christendom? It is
natural and beautiful that childhood should inquire, and maturity should
teach; but it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do
not shut up the young people against their will in a pew, and force the
children to ask them questions for an hour against their will.”
Now, without agreeing with him in all points, we may sympathise with him.
_Ellesmere_. I agree with him.
_Dunsford_. I knew you would. You love an extreme.
_Milverton_. But look now. It is well to say, “It is natural and
beautiful that the young should ask and the old should teach”; but then
the old should be capable of teaching, which is not the case we have to
deal with. Institutions are often only to meet individual failings. Let
there be more instructed elders, and the “dead weight” of Sunday-schools
would be less needed.
I think the result of our thoughts would be, that there should be as much
life, joy, and Nature put into teaching as can be; but I, for one, am not
prepared to say that the most mechanical process is not better than none.
_Ellesmere_. Well, you have now shut up the subject, according to your
fashion, in a rounded sentence; and you think after that there is nothing
more to be said. But I say it goes to my heart—
_Dunsford_. What is that?
_Ellesmere_. To my heart to see the unmerciful quantity of instruction
that little children go through on a Sunday. I suppose I am a very
wicked man; but I know how wearied I should have been, at any time of my
life, if so much virtuous precept and good doctrine had been poured into
me.
_Milverton_. Well, I will not fight certainly for anything that is to
make Sunday a wearisome day for children. Indeed, what I meant by
putting more joy and life into teaching was, that in such a thing as this
Sunday-schooling, for instance, a judicious man, far from being anxious
to get a certain quantity of routine done about it, would do with the
least—would endeavour to connect it with something interesting—would, in
a word, love children, and not Sunday-schools.
_Ellesmere_. Ah, we will have no more about Sunday-schools. I know we
all agree in reality, although Dunsford has been looking very grave and
has not said a word. I wanted to tell you that I think you are quite
right, Milverton, in saying a good deal about multifariousness of
pursuit. You see a wretch of a pedant who knows all about tetrameters or
statutes of uses, but who, as you hinted an essay or two ago, can hardly
answer his child a question as they walk about the garden together. The
man has never given a good thought or look to Nature. Well then, again,
what a stupid thing it is that we are not all taught music. Why learn
the language of many portions of mankind, and leave the universal
language of the feelings, as you would call it, unlearnt?
_Milverton_. I quite agree with you; but I thought you always set your
face, or rather your ears, against music.
_Dunsford_. So did I.
_Ellesmere_. I should like to know all about it. It is not to my mind
that a cultivated man should be quite thrown out by any topic of
conversation, or that there should be any form of human endeavour or
accomplishment which he has no conception of.
_Dunsford_. I liked what you said, Milverton, about the philosophy of
making light of many things, and the way of looking at life that may thus
be given to those we educate. I rather doubted at first, though, whether
you were not going to assign too much power to education in the
modification of temper. But, certainly, the mode of looking at the daily
events of life, little or great, and the consequent habits of
captiousness or magnanimity, are just the matters which the young
especially imitate their elders in.
_Milverton_. You see, the very worst kind of tempers are established
upon the fretting care for trifles that I want to make war upon in the
essay. A
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