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COMMONPLACE BOOK
OF
A COMMONPLACE BOOK
OF
twfrnts, aitfr Jfsnms,
ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
PARTI. ETHICS AND CHARACTER.
PART II. LITERATURE AND ART.
BY MRS. JAMESON.
Un peu de chaque chose, et rien du tout, a la frangaise' " MONI A.IQN
oi'litlj Illustrations anb <ttjnttgs.
SECOND EDITION, CORRECTED.
LONDON:
LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS.
1855.
855
PREFACE,
I MUST be allowed to say a few words in explanation
of the contents of this little volume, which is truly
what its name sets forth a book of commonplaces, and
nothing more. If I have never, in any work I have
ventured to place before the public, aspired to teach,
(being myself a learner in all things,) at least I have
hitherto done my best to deserve the indulgence I have
met with ; and it would pain me if it could be supposed
that such indulgence had rendered me presumptuous or
careless.
For many years I have been accustomed to make a
memorandum of any thought which might come across
me (if pen and paper were at hand), and to mark (and
remark) any passage in a "book which excited either a
sympathetic or an antagonistic feeling. This collection
of notes accumulated insensibly from day to day. The
volumes on Shakspeare's Women, on Sacred and Legendary
Art, and various other productions, sprung from seed thus
lightly and casually sown, which, I hardly know how,
grew up and expanded into a regular, readable form, with
A 3
PREFACE.
a beginning, a middle, and an end. But what was to be
done with the fragments which remained without be-
ginning, and without end links of a hidden or a broken
chain ? Whether to preserve them or destroy them be-
came a question, and one I could not answer for myself.
In allowing a portion of them to go forth to the world in
their original form, as unconnected fragments, I have
been guided by the wishes of others, who deemed it not
wholly uninteresting or profitless to trace the path, some-
times devious enough, of an " inquiring spirit," even by
the little pebbles dropped as vestiges by the way side.
A book so supremely egotistical and subjective can do
good only in one way. It may, like conversation with
a friend, open up sources of sympathy and reflection ; ex-
cite to argument, agreement, or disagreement ; and, like
every spontaneous utterance of thought out of an earnest
mind, suggest far higher and better thoughts than any to
be found here to higher and more productive minds. If
I had not the humble hope of such a possible result?
instead of sending these memoranda to the printer, I
should have thrown them into the fire ; for I lack that
creative faculty which can work up the teachings of
heart-sorrow and world-experience into attractive forms
of fiction or of art ; and having no intention of leaving
any such memorials to be published after my death, they
must have gone into the fire as the only alternative left.
The passages from books are not, strictly speaking,
selected; they are not given here on any principle of
choice, but simply because that by some process of assimi-
lation they became a part of the individual mind. They
"found me," to borrow Coleridge's expression, "found
me in some depth of my being ; " I did not " find them"
PREFACE. vii
For the rest, all those passages which are marked by
inverted commas must be regarded as borrowed, though I
have not always been able to give my authority. All
passages not so marked are, I dare not say, original or
new, but at least the unstudied expression of a free dis-
cursive mind. Fruits, not advisedly plucked, but which
the variable winds have shaken from the tree : some ripe,
some " harsh and crude."
Wordsworth's famous poem of " The Happy Warrior "
(of which a new application will be found at page 87.),
is supposed by Mr. De Quincey to have been first
suggested by the character of Nelson. It has since been
applied to Sir Charles Napier (the Indian General), as
well as to the Duke of Wellington ; all which serves
to illustrate my position, that the lines in question are
equally applicable to any man or any woman whose moral
standard is irrespective of selfishness and expediency.
With regard to the fragment on Sculpture, it may be
necessary to state that it was written in 1848. The first
three paragraphs were inserted in the Art Journal for
April, 1849. It was intended to enlarge the whole into
a comprehensive essay on " Subjects fitted for Artistic
Treatment;" but this being now impossible, the frag-
ment is given as originally written ; others may think
it out, and apply it better than I shall live to do.
August, 1854.
A 4
CONTENTS.
PART I
6 tjrirs oft
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
Vanity -
Truths and Truisms
Beauty and Use -
What is Soul? -
The Philosophy of Happiness
Cheerfulness a Virtue
Intellect and Sympathy -
Old Letters , - .
The Point of Honour
Looking up -
Authors -
Thought and Theory
Impulse and Consideration
Principle and Expediency
Personality of the Evil Principle
The Catholic Spirit
Death-beds
Page
1
3
5
7
9
10
11
1-2
13
14
14
15
16
16
17
18
19
CONTENTS.
Thoughts on a Sermon - - -20
Love and Fear of God - - 22
Social Opinion - 23
Ba]zac ' - 23
Political - '24
Celibacy - 25
Landor's Wise Sayings - 26
Justice and Generosity - 27
Roman Catholic Converts - 28
Stealing and Borrowing - 28
Good and Bad - - 29
Italian Proverb. Greek Saying - 30
Silent Grief - 31
Past and Future - 32
Suicide. Countenance - - 33
Progress and Progression - 34
Happiness in Suffering - - - 35
Life in the Future - 36
Strength. Youth - 38
Moral Suffering - 40
The Secret of Peace - - 41
Motives and Impulses - - - - - 42
Principle and Passion - - - 43
Dominant Ideas - - 44
Absence and Death - - .. 45
Sydney Smith. Theodore Hook - 46
Werther and Childe Harold - - 50
Money Obligations - - 52
Charity. Truth - - 53
Women. Men - - - - 55
Compensation for Sorrow - - - 57
Religion. Avarice - - - 57
Genius. Mind - . . 59
Hirrnglyphical Colours - - 60
CONTENTS. xi
Page
Character - 61
Value of Words - - 62
Nature and Art - 64
Spirit and Form - 67
Penal Retribution. The Church - 68
Woman's Patriotism - 70
Doubt. Curiosity - 71
Tieck. Coleridge - 71
Application of a Bon Mot of Talleyrand - 73
Adverse Individualities - 75
Conflict in Love - 76
French Expressions - 77
Practical and Contemplative Life - 78
Joanna Baillie. Macaulay's Ballads - 80
Cunning - - 80
Browning's Paracelsus - 81
Men, Women, and Children - 84
Letters - - 100
Madame de Stael. Deja - 103
Thought too free - 105
Good Qualities, not Virtues - 106
Sense and Phantasy - - 107
Use the Present - - 108
Facts - - 109
Wise Sayings - - - - -111
Pestilence of Falsehood - - 112
Signs instead of Words. Relations with the World - 113
Milton's Adam and Eve - - - - - 115
Thoughts, sundry - 116
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD ~ - 117
THE INDIAN HUNTER AND THE FIRE ; an Allegory - - 147
POETICAL FRAGMENTS - - - - - 152
xii CONTENTS.
Page
THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL - - 155
Pandemonium - - - 158
Southey on the Religious Orders - 162
Forms in Religion Image Worship - - 1 64
Religious Differences - - 165
Expansive Christianity - - 169
NOTES FROM VARIOUS SERMONS :
A Roman Catholic Sermon - 172
Another - 1 76
Church of England Sermon - 173
Another - - - - 181
Dissenting Sermon - - 187
Father Taylor of Boston - - - - - 188
PART II.
littntun Kufo flrt
NOTES FROM BOOKS :
Dr. Arnold . 198
Niebuhr - - 220
Lord Bacon - ... 2 so
Chateaubriand -
- 240
Bishop Cumberland - - _ _ - 247
Comte's Philosophy - _ _ - 250
Goethe - - - - 261
Hazlitt's " Liber Amoris " - - 263
Francis Horner, " The Nightingale " - . 2 67
Thackeray's " English Humourists " - - - 271
NOTES ON ART :
Analogies
- 276
CONTENTS. xiii
Page
Definition of Art - 279
No Patriotic Art - 280
Verse and Colour - 280
Dutch Pictures - -- 28 1
Morals in Art - - 283
Physiognomy of Hands - - 288
Mozart and Chopin - 289
Music - - 293
Rachel, the Actress - 294
English and German Actresses - - 298
Character of Imogen - - 303
Shakspeare Club - '305
" Maria Mad dalena" - 305
The Artistic Nature - - 307
Woman's Criticism - 309
Artistic Influences - 310
The Greek Aphrodite - - 311
Love, in the Greek Tragedy - - 312
Wilkie's Life and Letters - 313
Wilhelm Schadow - 317
Artist Life - 32 1
Materialism in Art - 323
A Fragment on Sculpture, and on certain Characters in
History and Poetry, considered as Subjects for Modern
Art - - 326
Helen of Troy - - - 332
Penelope Laodamia - - 336
Hippolytus - 339
Iphigenia - 343
Eve . 347
Adam - - 350
Angels - - 351
Miriam Ruth - - 354
Christ Solomon David - - - 355
CONTENTS.
Ilagar Rebecca Rachel Queen of Sheba - - 356
LadyGodiva - - 357
Joan of Arc - - 359
Characters from Shakspeare - - 364
Characters from Spenser - 366
From Milton. The Lady Comus Satan - - 367
From the Italian and Modern Poets - - 370
LIST OF ETCHINGS.
1. Fruits and Flowers. After an old drawing.
2. Out of my garden.
3. Virgin Martyrs. Thought. Memory. Fancy. After Bene-
detto da Matera.
4. La Penserosa. After Ambrogio Lorenzette.
5. La Fille du Feu, From a sketch by Von Schwind.
6. Laus Dei. Angel after Hans Hemmeling.
7. Eve and Cam, After Steinle.
8. Study. After an old print.
9. The Parcae. From a sketch by Carstens.
10. Antique Owlet. In Goethe's collection at Weimar.
** The woodcuts are inserted to divide the paragraphs and sub-
jects, and are ornamental rather than illustrative. Where the
same vignette heads several paragraphs consecutively, it is to sig-
nify that the ideas expressed stand in relation to each other.
tftfrus
BACON says, how wisely ! that " there is often as
great vanity in withdrawing and retiring men's
conceits from the world, as in obtruding them."
Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of
ultra modesty. When I see people haunted by the
idea of self, spreading their hands before their
faces lest they meet the reflection of it in every
other face, as if the world were to them like a
B
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
French drawing-room, panelled with looking glass,
always fussily putting their obtrusive self behind
them, or dragging over it a scanty drapery of con-
sciousness, miscalled modesty, always on their
defence against compliments, or mistaking sympathy
for compliment, which is as great an error, and a
more vulgar one than mistaking flattery for sym-
pathy, when I see all this, as I have seen it, I am
inclined to attribute it to the immaturity of the
character, or to what is worse, a total want of sim-
plicity. \ To some characters fame is like an intoxi-
cating cup placed to the lips, they do well to turn
away from it, who fear it will turn their heads. But
to others, fame is " love disguised," the love that
answers to love, in its widest most exalted sense. It
seems to me, that we should all bring the best that
is in us (according to the diversity of gifts which
God has given us), and lay it a reverend offering on
the altar of humanity, if not to burn and enlighten,
at least to rise in incense to heaven. So will the
pure in heart, and the unselfish do ; and they will
not heed if those who can bring nothing or will
bring nothing, unless they can blaze like a beacon,
call out " VANITY ! "
TRUTHS AND TRUISMS.
2.
mHEKE are truths which, by perpetual repetition,
have subsided into passive truisms, till, in some
moment of feeling or experience, they kindle into
conviction, start to life and light, and the truism
becomes again a vital truth.
3.
IT is well that we obtain what we require at the
cheapest possible rate; yet those who cheapen
goods, or beat down the price of a good article, or buy
in preference to what is good and genuine of its kind
an inferior article at an inferior price, sometimes do
much mischief. Not only do they discourage the
production of a better article, but if they be anxious
about the education of the lower classes they undo
with one hand what they do with the other; they
encourage the mere mechanic and the production of
what may be produced without 'effort of mind and
without education, and they discourage and wrong
the skilled workman for whom education has done
much more and whose education has cost much more.
Every work so merely and basely mechanical,
that a man can throw into it no part of his own life
c
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
and soul, does, in the long run, degrade the human
being. It is only by giving him some kind of mental
and moral interest in the labour of his hands, making
it an exercise of his understanding, and an object of
his sympathy, that we can really elevate the work-
man ; and this is not the case with very cheap pro-
duction of any kind. (Southampton, Dec. 1849.)
Since this was written the same idea has been
carried out, with far more eloquent reasoning, in a
noble passage which I have just found in Mr. Bus-
kin's last volume of " The Stones of Venice " (the
Sea Stories). As I do not always subscribe to his
theories of Art, I am the more delighted with this
anticipation of a moral agreement between us.
"We have much studied and much perfected of
late, the great civilised invention of the division of
labour, only we give it a false name. It is not, truly
speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men :
divided into mere segments of men, broken into
small fragments and crumbs of life ; so that all the
little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not
enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself
in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.
Now, it is a good and desirable thing truly to make
many pins in a day, but if we could only see with
what crystal sand their points are polished sand of
Jiuman soul, much to be magnified before it can be
BEAUTY AND USE.
discerned for what it is, we should think there
might be some loss in it also ; and the great cry that
rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than
their furnace-blast,, is all in very deed for this,
that we manufacture everything there except men,
we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine
sugar, and shape pottery ; but to brighten, to
strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit,
never enters into our estimate of advantages; and
all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads,
can be met only in one way, not by teaching nor
preaching ; for to teach them is but to show them
their misery; and to preach to them if we do
nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It
can be met only by a right understanding on the
part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good
for men, raising them and making them happy ; by
a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty
or cheapness, as is to be got only by the degradation
of the workman, and by equally determined demand
for the products and results of a healthy and en-
nobling labour." ....
" We are always in these days trying to separate
the two (intellect and work). We want one man
to be always thinking, and another to be always
working; and we call one a gentleman and the
other an operative ; whereas, the workman ought to
be often thinking, and the thinker often working,
c 2
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. It
is only by labour that thought can be made healthy,
and only by thought that labour can be made
happy; and the two cannot be separated with
impunity."
Wordsworth, however, had said the same thing
before either of us :
" Our life is turn'd
Out of her course wherever man is made
An offering or a sacrifice, a tool
Or implement, a passive thing employed
As a brute mean, without acknowledgment
Of common right or interest in the end,
Used or abused as selfishness may prompt.
Say what can follow for a rational soul
Perverted thus, but weakness in all good
And strength in evil ?"
And this leads us to the consideration of another
mistake, analogous with the above, but referable in
its results chiefly to the higher, or what Mr. Ruskin
calls the thinking, classes of the community.
It is not good for us to have all that we value
of worldly material things in the form of money.
It is the most vulgar form in which value can be in-
vested. Not only books, pictures, and all beautiful
things are better ; but even jewels and trinkets are
WHAT IS SOUL?
sometimes to be preferred to mere hard money. Lands
and tenements are good, as involving duties ; but
still what is valuable in the market sense should
sometimes take the ideal and the beautiful form, and
be dear and lovely and valuable for its own sake as
well as for its convertible worth in hard gold. I
think the character would be apt to deteriorate when
all its material possessions take the form of money,
and when money becomes valuable for its own
sake, or as the mere instrument or representative
of power.
WE are told in a late account of Laura Bridge-
man, the blind, deaf, and dumb girl, that her
instructor once endeavoured to explain the difference
between the material and the immaterial, and used
the word " soul." She interrupted to ask, " What
is soul ? "
" That which thinks, feels, hopes, loves, "
" And aches ? " she added eagerly.
C 3
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
5.
I WAS reading to-day in the Notes to Boswell's
Life of Johnson that t( it is a theory which every
one knows to be false in fact, that virtue in real life
is always productive of happiness, and vice of misery."
I should say that all my experience teaches me that
the position is not false but true : that virtue does
produce happiness, and vice does produce misery.
But let us settle the meaning of the words. By
happiness, we do not necessarily mean a state of
worldly prosperity. By virtue, we do not mean a
series of good actions which may or may not be re-
warded, and, if done for reward, lose the essence of
virtue. Virtue, according to my idea, is the habitual
sense of right, and the habitual courage to act up to
that sense of right, combined with benevolent sym-
pathies, the charity which thinketh no evil. This
union of the highest conscience and the highest sym-
pathy fulfils my notion of virtue. Strength is essen-
tial to it; weakness incompatible with it. Where
virtue is, the noblest faculties and the softest feelings
are predominant ; the whole being is in that state of
harmony which I call happiness. Pain may reach it,
passion may disturb it, but there is always a glimpse
THE PHILOSOPHY OP HAPPINESS.
of blue sky above our head; as we ascend in dignity
of being, we ascend in happiness, which is, in my
sense of the word, the feeling which connects us
with the infinite and with God.
And vice is necessarily misery : for that fluctuation
of principle, that diseased craving for excitement,
that weakness out of which springs falsehood, that
suspicion of others, that discord with ourselves, with
the absence of the benevolent propensities, these
constitute misery as a state of being. The most
miserable person I ever met with in my life had
12,0007. a year; a cunning mind, dexterous to com-
pass its own ends ; very little conscience, not enough,
one would have thought, to vex with any retributive
pang ; but it was the absence of goodness that made
the misery, obvious and hourly increasing. The
perpetual kicking against the pricks, the unreason-
able exigeance with regard to things, without any high
standard with regard to persons, these made the
misery. I can speak of it as misery who had it daily
in my sight for five long years.
I have had arguments, if it be not presumption to
call them so, with Carlyle on this point. It appeared
to me that he confounded happiness with pleasure,
with self-indulgence. He set aside with a towering
scorn the idea of living for the sake of happiness, so
called : he styled this philosophy of happiness, <( the
philosophy of the frying-pan." But this was like
c 4
10 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
the reasoning of a child, whose idea of happiness is
plenty of sugar-plums. Pleasure, pleasurable sensa-
tion, is, as the world goes, something to thank God
for. I should be one of the last to undervalue it ;
I hope I am one of the last to live for it ; and pain
is pain, a great evil, which I do not like either to
inflict or suffer. But happiness lies beyond either
pain or pleasure is as sublime a thing as virtue
itself, indivisible from it; and under this point of
view it seems a perilous mistake to separate them.
6.
T\ ANTE places in his lowest Hell those who in life
U were melancholy and repining without a cause,
thus profaning and darkening God's blessed sun-
shine Tristi fummo neT aer dolce ; and in some of
the ancient Christian systems of virtues and vices,
Melancholy is unholy, and a vice ; Cheerfulness is
holy, and a virtue.
Lord Bacon also makes one of the characteristics
of moral health and goodness to consist in " a con-
stant quick sense of felicity, and a noble satisfac-
tion."
What moments, hours, days of exquisite felicity
must Christ, our Redeemer, have had, though it has
INTELLECT AND SYMPATHY.
become too customary to place him before us only in
the attitude of pain and sorrow ! Why should he be
always crowded with thorns, bleeding with wounds,
weeping over the world he was 'appointed to heal, to
save, to reconcile with God? The radiant head of
Christ in Raphael's Transfiguration should rather
be our ideal of Him who came " to bind up the
broken-hearted, to preach the acceptable year of the
Lord."
7.
A PROFOUND intellect is weakened and narrowed in
** general power and influence by a limited range of
sympathies. I think this is especially true of C :
excellent, honest, gifted as he is, he does not do half
the good he might do, because his sympathies are so
confined. And then he wants gentleness : he does
not seem to acknowledge that " the wisdom that is
from above is gentle." He is a man who carries his
bright intellect as a light in a dark-lantern ; he sees
only the objects on which he chooses to throw that
blaze of light : those he sees vividly, but, as it were,
exclusively. All other things, though lying neaiv
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
are dark, because perversely he will not throw the
light of his mind upon them.
WILHELM VON HuMBOLDT says, "Old letters
lose their vitality."
Not true. It is because they retain their vitality
that it is so dangerous to keep some letters, so
wicked to burn others.
A MAN thinks himself, and is thought by others
to be insulted when another man gives him the
lie. It is an offence to be retracted at once, or only to
be effaced in blood. To give a woman the lie is not
considered in the same unpardonable light by herself
or others, is indeed a slight thing. Now, whence
MORAL AND MENTAL ELEVATION.
this difference ? Is not truth as dear to a woman as
to a man ? Is the virtue 'itself, or the reputation of
it, less necessary to the woman than to the man?
If not, what causes this distinction, one so injurious
to the morals of both sexes ?
10.
IT is good for us to look up, morally and mentally.
If I were tired I would get some help to hold my
head up, as Moses got some one to hold up his arms
while he prayed.
" CE qui est moins que moi m'eteint et m'assomme ;
ce qui est a cote de moi m'ennuie et me fatigue. II
n'y a que ce qui est au-dessus de moi qui me sou-
tienne et m'arrache a moi-meme."
(HERE is an order of writers who, with characters
perverted or hardened through long practice of
14 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
iniquity, yet possess an inherent divine sense of the
good and the beautiful, and a passion for setting it
forth, so that men's hearts glow with the tenderness
and the elevation which live not in the heart of the
writer, only in his head.
And there is another class of writers who are ex-
cellent in the social relations of life, and kindly and
true in heart, yet who, intellectually, have a perverted
pleasure in the ridiculous and distorted, the cunning,
the crooked, the vicious, who are never weary of
holding up before us finished representations of folly
and rascality.
Now, which is the worst of these ? the former,
who do mischief by making us mistrust the good ?
or the latter, who degrade us by making us familiar
with evil ?
12.
rpnouGHT and theory," said Wordsworth, "must
precede all action that moves to salutary pur-
poses. Yet action is nobler in itself than either
thought or theory."
THOUGHT AND THEORY. 15
Yes, and no. What we act has its consequences
on earth. What we think) its consequences in hea-
ven. It is not without reason that action should
be preferred before barren thought ; but all action
which in its result is worth any thing, must result
from thought. So the old rhymester hath it :
" He that good thinketh good may do,
And God will help him there unto ;
For was never good work wrought,
Without beginning of good thought."
The result of impulse is the positive ; the result
of consideration the negative. The positive is es-
sentially and abstractedly better than the negative,
though relatively to facts and circumstances it may
not be the most expedient.
On my observing how often I had had reason to re-
gret not having followed the first impulse, o. G. said,
" In good minds the first impulses are generally
right and true, and, when altered or relinquished
from regard to expediency arising out of complicated
relations, I always feel sorry, for they remain right.
Our first impulses always lean to the positive, our
second thoughts to the negative ; and I have no
respect for the negative, it is the vulgar side of
every thing."
On the other hand, it must be conceded, that one
who stands endowed with great power and with great
responsibilities in the midst of a thousand duties and
16 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
interests, can no longer take things in this simple
fashion ; for the good first impulse, in its flow, meets,
perhaps, some rock, and splits upon it ; it recoils on
the heart, and becomes abortive. Or the impulse
to do good here becomes injury there, and we are
forced to calculate results ; we cannot trust to them.
I HAVE not sought to deduce my principles from
conventional notions of expediency, but have be-
lieved that out of the steady adherence to certain
fixed principles, the right and the expedient must
ensue, and I believe it still. The moment one begins
to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience
becomes like a piece of plated goods.
IT requires merely passive courage and strength
to resist, and in some cases to overcome evil. But
it requires more it needs bravery and self-reliance
and surpassing faith to act out the true inspirations
of your intelligence and the true impulses of your
heart.
OUT of the attempt to harmonise our actual life
PERSONALITY OF THE EVIL SPIRIT. 17
with our aspirations, our experience with our faith,
we make poetry, or, it may be, religion.
F - used the phrase " stung into heroism" as
Shelley said, " cradled into poetry" by wrong.
13.
COLERIDGE calls the personal existence of the
V Evil Principle, " a mere fiction, or, at best,
an allegory supported by a few popular phrases and
figures of speech, used incidentally or dramatically
by the Evangelists." And he says, that "the ex-
istence of a personal, intelligent, Evil Being, the
counterpart and antagonist of God, is in direct con-
tradiction to the most express declarations of Holy
Writ. f Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord
hath not done it? ' Amos, iii. 6. * / makepeace and
create eviV Isaiah, xlv. 7. This is the deep mystery
of the abyss of God."
Do our theologians go with him here ? I think
not : yet, as a theologian, Coleridge is constantly
appealed to by Churchmen.
18 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
14.
" TT7 E find ( in tne Epistle of St. Paul to the Co-
rinthians), every where instilled as the es-
sence of all well-being and well-doing, (without
which the wisest public and political constitution is
but a lifeless formula, and the highest powers of
individual endowment profitless or pernicious,) the
spirit of a divine sympathy with the happiness and
rights, with the peculiarities, gifts, graces, and en-
dowments of other minds, which alone, whether in
the family or in the Church, can impart unity and
effectual working together for good in the communi-
ties of men."
" The Christian religion was, in fact, a charter of
freedom to the whole human race." Thorn's Dis-
courses on St. Paul's .Epistle to the Corinthians.
And this is the true Catholic spirit, the spirit
and the teaching of Paul, in contradistinction to
the Roman Catholic spirit, the spirit and tendency
of Peter, which stands upon forms, which has no
respect for individuality except in so far as it can
UNCONSCIOUSNESS AT DEATH. 19
imprison this individuality within a creed, or use it
to a purpose.
15.
T\R. BAILLIE once said that " all his observation of
*J death-beds inclined him to believe that nature in-
tended that we should go out of the world as uncon-
scious as we came into it." " In all my experience,"
he added, " I have not seen one instance in fifty to
the contrary."
Yet even in such a large experience the occur-
rence of " one instance in fifty to the contrary "
would invalidate the assumption that such was the
law of nature (or " nature's intention," which, if it
means any thing, means the same).
The moment in which the spirit meets death is
perhaps like the moment in which it is embraced by
sleep. It never, I suppose, happened to any one
to be conscious of the immediate transition from the
waking to the sleeping state.
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
16.
Thoughts on a Sermon.
HE is really sublime, this man ! with his faith in
" the religion of pain," and " the deification of
sorrow ! " But is he therefore right ? What has he
preached to us to-day with all the force of eloquence,
all the earnestness of conviction ? that " pain is the
life of God as shown forth in Christ ; " " that we
are to be crucified to the world and the world to
us." This perpetual presence of a crucified God
between us and a pitying redeeming Christ, leads
many a mourner to the belief that this world is all a
Golgotha of pain, and that we are here to crucify
each other. Is this the law under which we are to
live and strive ? The missionary Bridaine accused
himself of sin in that he had preached fasting,
penance, and the chastisements of God to wretches
steeped in poverty and dying of hunger; and is
there not a similar cruelty and misuse of power in
the servants of Him who came to bind up the
THOUGHTS ON A SERMON. 21
broken-hearted, when they preach the necessity, or
at least the theory, of moral pain to those whose
hearts are aching from moral evil ?
Surely there is a great difference between the
resignation or the endurance of a truthful, faithful,
loving, hopeful spirit, and this dreadful theology of
suffering as the necessary and appointed state of
things ! I, for one, will not accept it. Even while
most miserable, I will believe in happiness; even
while I do or suffer evil, I will believe in goodness ;
even while my eyes see not through tears, I will be-
lieve in the existence of what I do not see that
God is benign, that nature is fair, that the world is
not made as a prison or a penance. While I stand
lost in utter darkness, I will yet wait for the return
of the unfailing dawn, even though my soul be
amazed into such a blind perplexity that I know not
on which side to look for it, and ask " where is the
East ? and whence the dayspring ? " For the East
holds its wonted place, and the light is withheld only
till its appointed time.
God so strengthen me that I may think of pain
and sin only as accidental apparent discords in his
great harmonious scheme of good ! Then I am ready
I will take up the cross, and bear it bravely, while
I must; but I will lay it down when I can, and in
any case I will never lay it on another.
D 2
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
17.
IF I fear God it is because I love him, and believe
in his love ; I cannot conceive myself as standing
in fear of any spiritual or human being in whose
love I do not entirely believe. Of that Impersona-
tion of Evil, who goes about seeking whom he may
devour, the image brings to me no fear, only intense
disgust and aversion. Yes, it is because of his love
for me that I fear to offend against God ; it is be-
cause of his love that his displeasure must be ter-
rible. And with regard to human beings, only the
being I love has the power to give me pain or
inspire me with fear; only those in whose love I
believe, have the power to injure me. Take away
my love, and you take away my fear : take away
their love, and you take away the power to do me
any harm which can reach me in the sources of life
and feeling.
SOCIAL OPINION.
18.
SOCIAL opinion is like a sharp knife. There are
foolish people who regard it only with terror,
and dare not touch or meddle with it. There are
more foolish people, who, in rashness or defiance,
seize it by the blade, and get cut and mangled for
their pains. And there are wise people, who grasp
it discreetly and boldly by the handle, and use it to
carve out their own purposes.
19.
"TTTHiLE we were discussing Balzac's celebrity as
a romance writer, she (o. G.) said, with a
shudder : " His laurels are steeped in the tears of
women, every truth he tells has been wrung in
tortures from some woman's heart."
D 3
24 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
20.
SIR WALTER SCOTT, writing in 1831,, seems to
regard it as a terrible misfortune that the whole
burgher class in Scotland should be gradually pre-
paring for representative reform. " I mean," he
says, " the middle and respectable classes : when
a borough reform comes, which, perhaps, cannot
long be delayed, ministers will no longer return a
member for Scotland from the towns." " The gentry,"
he adds, " will abide longer by sound principles, for
they are needy, and desire advancement for them-
selves, and appointments for their sons and so on. But
this is a very hollow dependence, and those who sin-
cerely hold ancient opinions are waxing old," &c. &c.
With a great deal more, showing the strange
moral confusion which his political bias had caused
in his otherwise clear head and honest mind. The
sound principles, then, by which educated people are
to abide, over the decay of which he laments, are
such as can only be upheld by the most vulgar self-
interest ! If a man should utter openly such senti-
ments in these days, what should we think of him ?
IN the order of absolutism lurk the elements of
change and destruction. In the unrest of freedom
the spirit of change and progress.
CELIBACY. 25
21.
A SINGLE life," said Bacon, " doth well with
*- churchmen, for charity will hardly water the
ground where it must first fill a pool."
Certainly there are men whose charities are
limited, if not dried up, by their concentrated do-
mestic anxieties and relations. But there are others
whose charities are more diffused, as well as healthier
and warmer, through the strength of their domestic
affections.
Wordsworth speaks strongly of the evils of ordain-
ing men as clergymen in places where they had been
born or brought up, or in the midst of their own
relatives : " Their habits, their manners, their talk,
their acquaintanceships, their friendships, and let me
say, even their domestic affections, naturally draw
them one way, while their professional obligations
point out another." If this were true universally, or
even generally, it would be a strong argument in
favour of the celibacy of the Koman Catholic clergy,
which certainly is one element, and not the least, of
their power.
D 4
26 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
22.
T AN DOR says truly : " Love is a secondary passion
-^ in those who love most, a primary in those who
love least : he who is inspired by it in the strongest
degree is inspired by honour in a greater."
" Whatever is worthy of being loved for any
thing is worthy to be preserved."
Again : " Those are the worst of suicides who
voluntarily and prepensely stab or suffocate their
own fame, when God hath commanded them to
stand on high for an example."
" Weak motives," he says, " are sufficient for
weak minds; whenever we see a mind which we
believed a stronger than our own moved habitually
by what appears inadequate, we may be certain that
there is to bring a metaphor from the forest more
top than root."
Here is another sentence from the same writer -
rich in wise sayings :
LANDOR'S WISE SAYINGS. 27
" Plato would make wives common to abolish
selfishness ; the very mischief which, above all others,
it would directly and immediately bring forth. There
is no selfishness where there is a wife and family.
There the house is lighted up by mutual charities ;
everything achieved for them is a victory; every-
thing endured a triumph. How many vices are sup-
pressed that there may be no bad example ! How
many exertions made to recommend and inculcate
a good one.
True: and I have much more confidence in the
charity which begins in the home and diverges into a
large humanity, than in the world-wide philanthropy
which begins at the outside of our horizon to con-
verge into egotism, of which I could show you many
and notable examples.
A LL my experience of the world teaches me that in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the safe side
and the just side of a question is the generous side
and the merciful side. This your mere worldly
people do not seem to know, and therein make the
sorriest and the vulgarest of all mistakes. " Pour
etre assez bon ilfaut Vetre trap : " we all need more
mercy than we deserve.
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
How often in this world the actions that we con-
demn are the result of sentiments that we love and
opinions that we admire !
23.
A . observed in reference to some of her
friends who had gone over to the Roman Ca-
tholic Church, " that the peace and comfort which
they had sought and found in that mode of faith was
like the drugged sleep in comparison with the natu-
ral sleep : necessary, healing perhaps, where there is
disease and unrest, not otherwise,"
24.
" A POET," says Coleridge, " ought not to pick
* nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so
borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing.
GOOD AND BAD.
Examine nature accurately, but write from recollec-
tion, and trust more to your imagination than your
memory."
This advice is even more applicable to the painter,
but true perhaps in its application to all artists.
Raphael and Mozart were, in this sense, great
borrowers.
25.
TT7 HAT is the difference between being good and
being bad ? the good do not yield to temp-
tation and the bad do."
This is often the distinction between the good and
the bad in regard to act and deed ; but it does not
constitute the difference between being good and
being bad.
o ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
THE Italians say (in one of their characteristic
proverbs) Sospetto licenzia Fede. Lord Bacon
interprets the saying " as if suspicion did give a pass-
port to faith/' which is somewhat obscure and am-
biguous. It means, that suspicion discharges us from
the duty of good faith ; and in this, its original sense,
it is, like many of the old Italian proverbs, worldly
wise and profoundly immoral.
27.
IT was well said by Themistocles to the King of
Persia, that " speech was like cloth of arras
opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth
appear in figure, whereas in thoughts they lie but in
packs " (i. e. rolled up or packed up). Dry den had
evidently this passage in his mind when he wrote
those beautiful lines :
" Speech is the light, the morning of the mind ;
It spreads the beauteous images abroad,
Which else lie furled and shrouded in the soul."
Here the comparison of Themistocles, happy in itself,
is expanded into a vivid poetical image.
THE KILLING GRIEF.
28.
<f mHOSE are the killing griefs that do not speak,"
is true of some, not all characters. There are
natures in which the killing grief finds utterance
while it kills ; moods in which we cry aloud, " as the
beast crieth, expansive not appealing." That is my
own nature : so in grief or in joy, I say as the birds
sing:
" Und wenn der Menscli in seiner Qual verstummt,
Gab mir ein Got zu sagen was ich leide ! "
s
29.
T\LESSED is the memory of those who have kept
D themselves unspotted from the world! yet
more blessed and more dear the memory of those who
have kept themselves unspotted in the world !
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
30.
TnvERYTHiNG that ever has been, from the be-
-1^ ginning of the world till now, belongs to us, is
ours, is even a part of us. We belong to the future,
and shall be a part of it. Therefore the sympathies
of all are in the past ; only the poet and the prophet
sympathise with the future.
When Tennyson makes Ulysses say, "I am a
part of all that I have seen," it ought to be rather
the converse, "What I have seen becomes a part
of me."
31.
IN what regards policy government the interest
of the many is sacrificed to the few ; in what
regards society, the morals and happiness of indi-
viduals are sacrificed to the many.
SUICIDE. 33
WE spoke to-night of the cowardice, the crime of
a particular suicide : O. G. agreed as to this
instance, but added : f< There is a different aspect
under which suicide might be regarded. It is not
always, I think, from a want of religion, or in a spirit
of defiance, or a want of confidence in God that we
quit life. It is as if we should flee to the feet of
the Almighty and embrace his knees, and exclaim,
6 O my father ! take me home ! I have endured as
long as it was possible ; I can endure no more, so I
come to you ! ' '
Of an amiable man with a disagreeable expression-
less face, she said : " His countenance always gives
me the idea of matter too strong, too hard for the
soul to pierce through. It is as a plaster mask
which I long to break (making the gesture with her
hand), that I may see the countenance of his heart,
for that must be beautiful ! "
34 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
33.
said to me: " I want to see some insti-
v^ tution to teach a man the truth, the worth, the
beauty, the heroism of which his present existence is
capable; where's the use of sending him to study
what the Greeks and Romans did, and said, and
wrote ? Do ye think the Greeks and Romans would
have been what they were, if they had just only
studied what the Phoenicians did before them ? " I
should have answered, had I dared : " Yet perhaps
the Greeks and Romans would not have been what
they were if the Egyptians and Phoenicians had not
been before them."
34.
CAN there be progress which is not progression
which does not leave a past from which to start
on which to rest our foot when we spring forward ?
No wise man kicks the ladder from beneath him, or
obliterates the traces of the road through which he
has travelled, or pulls down the memorials he has
built by the way side. We cannot get on without
linking our present and our future with our past. All
reaction is destructive all progress conservative.
PROGRESS AND PROGRESSION. 35
When we have destroyed that which the past built
up, what reward have we? we are forced to fall
back, and have to begin anew. " Novelty," as Lord
Bacon says, " cannot be content to add, but it must
deface." For this very reason novelty is not progress,
as the French would try to persuade themselves and
us. We gain nothing by defacing and trampling
down the idols of the past to set up new ones in their
places let it be sufficient to leave them behind us,
measuring our advance by keeping them in sight.
35.
E- was compassionating to-day the old and the
invalided ; those whose life is prolonged in spite
of suffering ; and she seemed, even out of the excess
of her pity and sympathy, to wish them fairly out of
the world ; but it is a mistake in reasoning and feel-
ing. She does not know how much of happiness may
consist with suffering, with physical suffering, and
even with mental suffering.
36 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
36.
ENONCEZ dans votre ame, et renoncez y ferme-
ment, une fois pour toutes, a vouloir vous
connaitre au-dela de cette existence passagere qui
vous est imposee, et vous redeviendrez agreable a
Dieu, utile aux autres hommes, tranquille avec vous-
memes."
This does not mean " renounce hope or faith in the
future." No ! But renounce that perpetual craving
after a selfish interest in the unrevealed future life
which takes the true relish from the duties and the
pleasures of this. We can conceive of no future life
which is not a continuation of this : to anticipate in
that future life, another life, a different life ; what is
it but to call in doubt our individual identity ?
If we pray, u O teach us where and what is
peace ! "would not the answer be, " In the grave ye
shall have it not before?" Yet is it not strange
that those who believe most absolutely in an after-
life, yet think of the grave as peace ? Now, if we
carry this life with us and what other life can we
carry with us, unless we cease to be ourselves how
shall there be peace ?
As to the future, my soul, like Cato's, " shrinks
back upon herself and startles at destruction ; " but
LIFE IN THE FUTURE. 37
I do not think of my own destruction, rather of that
which I love. That I should cease to be is not very
intolerable ; but that what I love, and do now in my
soul possess, should cease to be there is the pang,
the terror ! I desire that which I love to be im-
mortal, whether I be so myself or not.
Is not the idea which most men entertain of
another, of an eternal life, merely a continuation of
this present existence under pleasanter conditions?
We cannot conceive another state of existence,
we only fancy we do so.
" I CONCEIVE that in all probability we have
immortality already. Most men seem to divide life
and immortality, making them two distinct things,
when, in fact, they are one and the same. What is
immortality but a continuation of life life which is
already our own ? We have, then, begun our im-
mortality even now."
For the same reason, or, rather, through the
same want of reasoning by which we make life and
immortality two (distinct things), do we make time
and eternity two, which like the others are really one
E 2
n
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
and the same. As immortality is but the continua-
tion of life, so eternity is but the continuation of
time ; and what we call time is only that part of
eternity in which we exist now. The Neio Philo-
sophy.
37.
STRENGTH does not consist only in the more or the
less. There are different sorts of strength as
well as different degrees : The strength of marble
to resist; the strength of steel to oppose; the strength
of the fine gold, which you can twist round your
finger, but which can bear the force of innumerable
pounds without breaking.
r\ OETHE used to say, that while intellectual attain-
ment is progressive, it is difficult to be as good
when we are old, as we were when young. Dr.
Johnson has expressed the same thing.
RELATIVE GOODNESS OF YOUTH AND AGE. 39
Then are we to assume, that to do good effectively
and wisely is the privilege of age and experience ?
To be good, through faith in goodness, the privilege
of the young.
To preserve our faith in goodness with an ex-
tended knowledge of evil, to preserve the tenderness
of our pity after long contemplation of pain, and the
warmth of our charity after long experience of false-
hood, is to be at once good and wise to understand
and to love each other as the angels who look down
upon us from heaven.
WE can sometimes love what we do not under-
stand, but it is impossible completely to understand
what we do not love.
I OBSERVE, that in our relations with the people
around us, we forgive them more readily for what
they do, which they can help, than for what they are,
which they cannot help.
E 3
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
39.
ft TTT HENCE springs the greatest degree of moral
suffering?" was a question debated this
evening, but not settled. It was argued that it
would depend on the texture of character, its more
or less conscientiousness, susceptibility, or strength.
I thought from two sentiments from jealousy, that
is, the sense of a wrong endured, in one class of
characters ; from remorse, that is, from the sense of a
wrong inflicted, in another.
40.
HE bread of life is love ; the salt of life is work ;
the sweetness of life, poesy ; the water of life,
faith.
T
41.
T HAVE seen triflers attempting to draw out a deep
intellect ; and they reminded me of children
throwing pebbles down the well at Carisbrook, that
they might hear them sound.
THE SECRET OF PEACE.
42.
A BOND is necessary to complete our being, only
we must be careful that the bond does not be-
come bondage.
" THE secret of peace," said A. B., " is the reso-
lution of the lesser into the greater ; " meaning,
perhaps, the due relative appreciation of our duties,
and the proper placing of our affections : or, did she
not rather mean, the resolving of the lesser duties
and affections into the higher? But it is true in
either sense.
THE love we have for Genius is to common love
what the fire on the altar is to the fire on the hearth.
We cherish it not for warmth or for service, but for
an offering, as the expression of our worship.
ALL love not responded to and accepted is a spe-
cies of idolatry. It is like the worship of a dumb
beautiful image we have ourselves set up and deified,
E 4
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
but cannot inspire with life, nor warm with sym-
pathy. No ! though we should consume our own
hearts on the altar. Our love of God would be idol-
atry if we did not believe in his love for us his
responsive love.
IN the same moment that we begin to speculate
on the possibility of cessation or change in any strong
affection that we feel, even from that moment we
may date its death: it has become the fetch of the
living love.
" MOTIVES," said Coleridge, " imply weakness,
and the reasoning powers imply the existence
of evil and temptation. The angelic nature would
act from impulse alone." This is the sort of
angel which Angelico da Fiesole conceived and
represented, and he only.
Again : "If a man's conduct can neither be
ascribed to the angelic or the bestial within him, it
must be fiendish. Passion without appetite is
fiendish."
And, he might have added, appetite without
passion, bestial. Love in which is neither appetite
nor passion is angelic. The union of all is human ;
and according as one or other predominates, does the
MOTIVES AND IMPULSES.
human being approximate to the fiend, the beast, or
the angel.
43.
I DON'T mean to say that principle is not a finer
thing than passion ; but passions existed before
principles : they came into the world with us ; prin-
ciples are superinduced.
There are bad principles as well as bad passions ;
and more bad principles than bad passions. Good
principles derive life, and strength, and warmth from
high and good passions ; but principles do not give
life, they only bind up life into a consistent whole.
One great fault in education is, the pains taken to
inculcate principles rather than to train feelings.
It is as if we took it for granted that passions could
only be bad, and are to be ignored or repressed alto-
gether, the old mischievous monkish doctrine.
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS,
44.
I
T is easy to be humble where humility is a con-
descension easy to concede where we know
ourselves wronged easy to forgive where vengeance
is in our power.
" You and I," said H. G., yesterday, " are alike in
this : both of us so abhor injustice, that we are
ready to fight it with a broomstick if we can find
nothing better ! "
45.
<.( mHE wise only possess ideas the greater part of
mankind are possessed by them. When once
the mind, in despite of the remonstrating conscience,
has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse
or idea, then whatever tends to give depth and vivid-
ness to this idea or indefinite imagination, increases
its despotism, and in the same proportion renders the
reason and free will ineffectual." This paragraph
from Coleridge sounds like a truism until we have
felt its truth.
LOVE AFFECTED BY ABSENCE.
46.
T A Volonte, en se dereglant, devient passion ;
-*-^ cette passion continuee se change en habitude,
et faute de resister a cette habitude elle se transforme
en besoin." St. Augustin. Which may be ren-
dered " out of the unregulated will, springs pas-
sion, out of passion gratified, habit; out of habits
unresisted, necessity" This, also, is one of the truths
which become, from the impossibility of disputing
or refuting them, truisms and little regarded, till
the truth makes itself felt.
47.
T WISH I could realise what you call my "grand
idea of being independent of the absent." I have
not a friend worthy the name, whose absence is not
pain and dread to me; death itself is terrible only
as it is absence. At some moments, if I could, I
would cease to love those who are absent from me,
or to speak more correctly, those whose path in life
diverges from mine whose dwelling house is far
off; with whom I am united in the strongest bonds
of sympathy while separated by duties and interests
by space and time. The presence of those whom we
love is as a double life ; absence, in its anxious
46 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
longing, and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of
death.
" LA mort de nos amis ne compte pas du moment
ou ils meurent, mais de celui ou nous cessons de vivre
avec eux;"or, it might rather be said, pour eux;
but I think this arises from a want either of faith or
faithfulness.
<f LA peur des morts est une abominable faiblesse !
c'est la plus commune et la plus barbare des profana-
tions; les meres ne la connaissent pas!"- And why?
Because the most faithful love is the love of the
mother for her child.
48,
A T dinner to-day there was an attempt made
** by two very clever men to place Theodore Hook
above Sydney Smith. I fought with all my might
against both. It seems to me that a mind must be
strangely warped that could ever place on a par
two men with aspirations and purposes so different,
whether we consider them merely as individuals, or
called before the bar of the public as writers. I
do not take to Sydney Smith personally, because
THEODORE HOOK AND SYDNEY SMITH. 47
my nature feels the want of the artistic and imagin-
ative in his nature ; but see what he has done for
humanity, for society, for liberty, for truth, for
us women ! What has Theodore Hook done that
has not perished with him ? Even as wits and
I have been in company with both I could not
compare them; but they say the wit of Theodore
Hook was only fitted for the company of men the
strongest proof that it was not genuine of its kind,
that when most bearable, it was most superficial. I
set aside the other obvious inference, that it required
to be excited by stimulants and those of the coarsest,
grossest kind. The wit of Sydney Smith almost
always involved a thought worth remembering for
its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its
brilliant vehicle : the value of ten thousand pounds
sterling of sense concentrated into a cut and polished
diamond.
It is not true, as I have heard it said, that after
leaving the society of Sydney Smith you only re-
membered how much you had laughed, not the good
things at which you had laughed. Few men wits
by profession ever said so many memorable things
as those recorded of Sydney Smith.
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
49.
M-TTTHEN we would show any one that he is mis-
f ' taken our best course is to observe on what
side he considers the subject, for his view of it is
generally right on this side, and admit to him
that he is right so far. He will be satisfied with
this acknowledgment, that he was not wrong in
his judgment, but only inadvertent in not looking
at the whole of the case." Pascal.
50.
T1TE should reflect," says Jeremy Taylor,
* * preaching against ambition, " that what-
ever tempts the pride and vanity of ambitious
persons is not so big as the smallest star which we
see scattered in disorder and unregarded on the
pavement of heaven."
Very beautiful and poetical, but certainly no good
argument against the sin he denounces. The star is
inaccessible, and what tempts our pride or our ambi-
BISHOP TAYLOR'S APHORISMS. 49
tion is only that which we consider with hope as ac-
cessible. That we look up to the stars not desiring,
not aspiring, but only loving therein lies our
hearts' truest, holiest, safest devotion as contrasted
with ambition.
It is the " desire of the moth for the star," that
leads to its burning itself in the candle.
51.
mHE brow stamped " with the hieroglyphics of an
-- eternal sorrow," is a strong and beautiful ex-
pression of Bishop Taylor's.
He says truly : " It is seldom that God sends
such calamities upon men as men bring upon them-
selves and suffer willingly." And again : " What
will not tender women suffer to hide their shame ! "
What indeed ! And again : " Nothing is intolerable
that is necessary." And again : " Nothing is to be
esteemed evil which God and nature have fixed with
eternal sanctions."
There is not one of these ethical sentences which
might not be treated as a text and expounded, open-
ing into as many " branches " of consideration as ever
did a Presbyterian sermon. Yet several involve a
fallacy, as it seems to me ; others a deeper, wider,
50 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
and more awful signification than Taylor himself
seems to have contemplated when he uttered them.
52.
miiE same reasons which rendered Goethe's " Wer-
-- ther " so popular, so passionately admired at the
time it appeared just after the seven years' war,
helped to render Lord Byron so popular in his time.
It was not the individuality of " Werther," nor the
individuality of " Childe Harold " which produced
the effect of making them, for a time, a pervading
power, a part of the life of their contemporaries.
It was because in both cases a chord was struck
which was ready to vibrate. A phase of feeling pre-
existent, palpitating at the heart of society, which
had never found expression in any poetic form since
the days of Dante, was made visible and audible as
if by an electric force ; words and forms were given
to a diffused sentiment of pain and resistance, caused
by a long period of war, of political and social
commotion, and of unhealthy moral excitement.
" Werther " and" Childe Harold" will never perish;
because, though they have ceased to be the echo
of a wide despair, there will always be, unhappily,
individual minds and hearts to respond to the indi-
viduality.
PICTURESQUE LINES. 51
LORD BYRON has sometimes, to use his own ex-
pression, (( curdled" a whole world of meaning into
the compass of one line :
" The starry Galileo and his woes."
" The blind old man of Ohio's rocky isle."
Here every word, almost every syllable, paints an
idea. Such lines are picturesque. And I remember
another, from Thomson, I think :
" Placed far amid the melancholy main."
In general, where words are used in description,
the objects and ideas flow with the words in succes-
sion. But in each of these lines the mind takes in a
wide horizon, comprising a multitude of objects at
once, as the eye takes in a picture, with scene, and
action, and figures, foreground and background, all
at once. That is the reason I call such lines pic-
turesque.
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
53.
I HAVE a great admiration for power, a great terror
of weakness especially in my own sex, yet
feel that my love is for those who overcome the
mental and moral suffering and temptation, through
excess of tenderness rather than through excess of
strength ; for those whose refinement and softness of
nature mingling with high intellectual power and the
capacity for strong passion, present to me a prob-
lem to solve, which, when solved, I take to my
heart. The question is not, which of the two di-
versities of character be the highest and best, but
which is most sympathetic with my own.
54.
C. told me, that some time ago, when poor
Bethune the Scotch poet first became known,
and was in great hardship, C - himself had col-
lected a little sum (about 307. ), and sent it to him
through his publishers. Bethune wrote back to
refuse it absolutely, and to say that, while he had
head and hands, he would not accept charity. C
wrote to him in answer, still anonymously, arguing
DISGUST AT PECUNIARY OBLIGATION. 53
against the principle, as founded in false pride, &c.
Now poor Bethune is dead, and the money is found
untouched, left with a friend to be returned to the
donors !
This sort of disgust and terror, which all finely
constituted minds feel with regard to pecuniary obli-
gation, my own utter repugnance to it, even from
the hands of those I most love, makes one sad to
think of. It gives one such a miserable impression
of our social humanity !
Goethe makes the same remark in the " Wilhelm
Meister : " Es 1st sonderbar welch ein wunder-
liches Bedenken man sich macht, Geld von Freunden
und Gonnern anzunehmen, von denen man jede
andere Gabe mit Dank und Freude empfangen
wiirde."
55.
'' T N the celestial hierarchy, according to Dionysius
Areopageta, the angels of Love hold the first
place, the angels of Light the second, and the
F 2
54 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
Thrones and Dominations the third. Among ter-
restrials, the Intellects, which act through the ima-
gination upon the heart of man ?. e. poets and
artists may be accounted first in order; the merely
scientific intellects the second ; and the merely
ruling intellects those which apply themselves to
the government of mankind, without the aid of
either science or imagination will not be dis-
paraged if they are placed last."
All government, all exercise of power no matter
in what form which is not based in love and
directed by knowledge, is a tyranny. It is not of
God, and shall not stand.
" A time will come when the operations of
charity will no longer be carried on by machinery,
relentless, ponderous, indiscriminate, but by human
creatures, watchful, tearful, considerate, and wise."-
Westminster Review.
56.
" mHOSE writers who never go further into a subject
than is compatible with making what they say
indisputably clear to man, woman, and child, may be
WOMAN'S SYMPATHY. 55
the lights of this age, but they will not be the lights
of another"
" IT is not always necessary that truth should
take a bodily form, a material palpable form. It is
sometimes better that it should dwell around us
spiritually, creating harmony, sounding through
the air like the solemn sweet tone of a bell."
57.
TT7OMEN are inclined to fall in love with priests
and physicians, because of the help and com-
fort they derive from both in perilous moral and
physical maladies. They believe in the presence of
real pity, real sympathy, where the tone and look of
each have become merely habitual and conventional,
I may say professional. On the other hand,
women are inclined to fall in love with criminal and
miserable men out of the pity which in our sex is
akin to love, and out of the power of bestowing
comfort or love. " Car les femmes ont un instinct
celeste pour le malheur." So, in the first instance,
F 3
56 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
they love from gratitude or faith ; in the last, from
compassion or hope.
58.
EN ^ a ^ countl> i e ^" savs Sir James Mack-
intosh, " appear to be more alike in their
best qualities than the pride of civilisation would be
willing to allow."
And in their worst. The distinction between
savage and civilised humanity lies not in the qua-
lities) but the habits.
59.
Coleridge notices (f the increase in modern times
of vicious associations with things in themselves in-
different," as a sign of unhealthiness in taste, in feel-
ing, in conscience.
The truth of this remark is particularly illustrated
in the French literature of the last century.
COMPENSATIONS OF CALAMITY. 57
60.
f< A ND yet the compensations of calamity are made
* apparent to the understanding also after long
intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel
disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends,
seems at the moment unpaid loss and unpayable, but
the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that
underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife,
brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation,
somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or
genius; for it commonly operates a revolution in
our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or
youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up
a wonted occupation, or a household, or a style of
living, and allows the formation of new influences
that prove of the first importance during the next
years." Emerson.
61.
RELIGION, in its general sense, is properly the
comprehension and acknowledgment of an
unseen spiritual power and the soul's allegiance to
F 4
58
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS,
it ; and CHRISTIANITY, in its particular sense, is
the comprehension and appreciation of the personal
character of Christ, arid the heart's allegiance to
that.
62.
A VARICE is to the intellect what sensuality is to the
4V morals. It is an intellectual form of sensuality,
inasmuch as it is the passion for the acquisition, the
enjoyment in the possession, of a palpable, tangible,
selfish pleasure ; and it would have the same
tendency to unspiritualise, to degrade, and to harden
the higher faculties that a course of grosser sensual-
ism would have to corrupt the lower faculties.
Both dull the edge of all that is fine and tender
within us.
GENIUS.
63.
A KING or a prince becomes by accident a part of
history. A poet or an artist becomes by
nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.
As what we call Genius arises out of the dispro-
portionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the
great difficulty lies in harmonising with it the rest of
the character.
" Though it burn our house down, who does not
venerate fire ? " says the Hindoo proverb.
64.
AN elegant mind informing a graceful person is
like a spirit lamp in an alabaster vase, shedding
round its own softened radiance and heightening the
beauty of its medium. An elegant mind in a plain
ungraceful person is like the same lamp enclosed in a
vase of bronze ; we may, if we approach near enough,
rejoice in its influence, though we may not behold
its radiance.
60 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
LAN DOR, in a passage I was reading to-day, speaks
of a language of criticism, in which qualities
should be graduated by colours ; " as, for instance,
purple might express grandeur and majesty of
thought ; scarlet, vigour of expression ; pink, live-
liness ; green, elegant and equable composition, and
so on."
Blue, then, might express contemplative power ?
yellow, wit ? violet, tenderness ? and so on.
G6.
T QUOTED to A. the saying of a sceptical philo-
-*- sopher : " The world is but one enormous WILL,
constantly rushing into life."
"Is that," she responded quickly, "another ne\v
name for God ? "
A
67.
DEATH-BED repentance has become proverbial
for its fruitlessness, and a death-bed forgiveness
INTELLECT AND SYMPATHY. 61
equally so. They who wait till their own death-bed
to make reparation, or till their adversary's death-
bed to grant absolution, seem to me much upon a
par in regard to the moral, as well as the religious,
failure.
68.
A CHARACTER endued with a large, vivacious, active
-*- intellect and a limited range of sympathies,
generally remains immature. We can grow wise
only through the experience which reaches us
through our sympathies and becomes a part of our
life. All other experience may be gain, but it
remains in a manner extraneous, adds to our
possessions without adding to our strength, and
sharpens our implements without increasing our
capacity to use them.
Not always those who have the quickest, keenest,
perception of character are the best to deal with it,
and perhaps for that very reason. Before we can
influence or deal with mind, contemplation must be
lost in sympathy, observation must be merged in
love.
62 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS-
69.
MONTAIGNE, in his eloquent tirade against melan-
choly, observes that the Italians have the same
word, Tristezza, for melancholy and for malignity or
wickedness. The noun Tristo, " a wretch," has the
double sense of our English word corresponding with
the French noun miserable. So Judas Iscariot is
called quel tristo. Our word " wretchedness " is not,
however, used in the double sense of tristezza.
" ON ne considere pas assez les paroles comme dcs
faits : " that was well said !
Since for the purpose of circulation and inter-
communication we are obliged to coin truth into
words, we should be careful not to adulterate the
coin, to keep it pure, and up to the original standard
of significance and value, that it may be reconvertible
into the truth it represents.
If I use a term in a sense wherein I know it is
ON THE ACCURATE USE OP WORDS. 63
not understood by the person I address, then I am
guilty of using words (in so far as they represent
truth), if not to ensnare intentionally, yet to mislead
consciously ; it is like adulterating coin.
" COMMON people," said Johnson, " do not accu-
rately adapt their words to their thoughts, nor their
thoughts to the objects ; " that is to say, they
neither apprehend truly nor speak truly and in
this respect children, half-educated women, and ill-
educated men, are the " common people."
It is one of the most serious mistakes in Education
that we are not sufficiently careful to habituate chil-
dren to the accurate use of words. Accuracy of
language is one of the bulwarks of truth. If we
looked into the matter we should probably find that
all the varieties and modifications of conscious and
unconscious lying as exaggeration, equivocation,
evasion, misrepresentation might be traced to the
early misuse of words ; therefore the contemptuous,
careless tone in which people say sometimes ei words
words mere words ! " is unthinking and unwise.
It tends to debase the value of that which is the only
medium of the inner life between man and man :
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
" Nous ne sommes hommes, et nous ne tenons les
uns aux autres, que par la parole," said Montaigne.
70.
are k a PP v > g oc ^ tranquil, in proportion as
our inner life is accessible to the external life,
and in harmony with it. When we become dead to
the moving life of Nature around us, to the changes
of day and night (I do not speak here of the sympa-
thetic influences of our fellow-creatures), then we
may call ourselves philosophical, but we are surely
either bad or mad."
" Or perhaps only sad ? "
THERE are moments in the life of every con-
i templative being, when the healing power of Nature
is felt even as Wordsworth describes it felt in
the blood, in every pulse along the veins. In such
moments converse, sympathy, the faces, the presence
of the dearest, come so near to us, they make us
NATURE'S HEALING POWER. 65
shrink ; books, pictures, music, anything, any object
which has passed through the medium of mind, and
has been in a manner humanised, is felt as an in-
trusive reflection of the busy, weary, thought- worn
self within us. Only Nature, speaking through no
, interpreter, gently steals us out of our humanity,
giving us a foretaste of that more diffused disem-
bodied life which may hereafter be ours. Beautiful
and genial, and not wholly untrue, were the old
I superstitions which placed a haunting divinity in
every grove, and heard a living voice responsive in
every murmuring stream.
This present Sunday I set off with the others to
walk to church, but it was late ; I could not keep
up with the pedestrians, and, not to delay them,
turned back. I wandered down the hill path to the
river brink, and crossed the little bridge and strolled
along, pensive yet with no definite or continuous
subject of thought. How beautiful it was how
tranquil ! not a cloud in the blue sky, not a breath
of air ! " And where the dead leaf fell there did it
rest ; " but so still it was that scarce a single leaf did
flutter or fall, though the narrow pathway along the
water's edge was already encumbered with heaps of
decaying foliage. Everywhere around, the autumnal
tints prevailed, except in one sheltered place under
the towering cliff, where a single tree, a magnificent
66 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
lime, still flourished in summer luxuriance, with not
a leaf turned or shed. I stood still opposite, looking
on it quietly for a long time. It seemed to me a
happy tree, so fresh and fair and grand, as if its
guardian Dryad would not suffer it to be defaced.
Then I turned, for close beside me sounded the soft,
interrupted, half -suppressed warble of a bird, sitting
on a leafless spray, which seemed to bend with its
tiny weight. Some lines which I used to love in
my childhood came into my mind, blending softly
with the presences around me.
" The little bird now to salute the morn
Upon the naked branches sets her foot,
The leaves still lying at the mossy root,
And there a silly chirruping doth keep,
As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep ;
Praising fair summer that too soon is gone,
And sad for winter, too soon coming on ! " Drayton.
The river, where I stood, taking an abrupt turn,
ran wimpling by ; not as I had seen it but a few
days before, rolling tumultuously, the dead leaves
whirling in its eddies, swollen and turbid with the
mountain torrents, making one think of the kelpies,
the water wraiths, and such uncanny things, but
gentle, transparent, and flashing in the low sunlight ;
even the barberries, drooping with rich crimson
clusters over the little pools near the bank, and re-
flected in them as in a mirror, I remember vividly as
a part of the exquisite loveliness which seemed to
SPIRIT AND FORM.
melt into my life. For such moments we are grate-
ful : we feel then what God can do for us, and what
man can not. Carolside, November 6th, 1843.
71.
" TN the early ages of faith, the spirit of Chris-
J- tianity glided into and gave a new significance
to the forms of heathenism. It was not the forms of
heathenism which encrusted and overlaid the spirit of
Christianity, for in that case the spirit would have
burst through such extraneous formulas, and set them
aside at once and for ever."
72.
QUESTIONS. In the execution of the penal statutes,
can the individual interest of the convict be re-
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
conciled with the interest of society? or must the
good of the convict and the good of society be con-
sidered as inevitably and necessarily opposed ? the
one sacrificed to the other, and at the best only a
compromise possible ?
This is a question pending at present, and will
require wise heads to decide it ? How would Christ
have decided it? When He set the poor accused
woman free, was He considering the good of the cul-
prit or the good of society ? and how far are we
bound to follow His example? If He consigned
the wicked to weeping and gnashing of teeth, was it
for atonement or retribution, punishment or penance?
and how far are we bound to follow His example ?
73.
~r MARKED the following passage in Montaigne as
most curiously applicable to the present times, in
so far as our religious contests are concerned ; and I
leave it in his quaint old French.
" C'est un effet de la Providence divine de per-
mettre sa saincte Eglise etre agitee, comme nous la
voyons, de tant de troubles et d'orages, pour eveiller
LIBERTY.
par ce contraste les araes pies et les ravoir de
1'oisivete et du sommeil ou les avait plongees une si
longue tranquillite. Si nous contrepesons la perte
que nous avons faite par le n ombre de ceux qui se
sont devoyes, au gain qui nous vient par nous etre
remis en haleine, ressuscite notre zele et nos forces a
1'occasion de ce combat, je ne sais si 1'utilite ne sur-
monte point le dommage."
74.
" mHEY (the friends of Cassius) were divided in
* opinion, some holding that servitude was
the extreme of evils, and others that tyranny was
better than civil war."
Unhappy that nation, wherever it may be, where
the question is yet pending between servitude and
civil war ! such a nation might be driven to solve
the problem after the manner of Cassius with the
dagger's point.
" Surely," said Moore, " it is wrong for the lovers
of liberty to identify the principle of resistance to
power with such an odious person as the devil ! "
7(1
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
" Y\7 HERE tne question is of a great deal of good
to ensue from a small injustice, men must
pursue the things which are Justin present, and leave
the future to Divine Providence."
This so simple rule of right is seldom attended to
as a rule of life till we are placed in some strait in
which it is forced upon us.
76.
A WOMAN'S patriotism is more of a sentiment than
a man's, more passionate : it is only an ex-
tension of the domestic affections, and with her la
patrie is only an enlargement of home. In the same
manner, a woman's idea of fame is always a more
extended sympathy, and is much more of a presence
than an anticipation. To her the voice of fame is
only the echo fainter and more distant of the
voice of love.
COLERIDGE. -TIECK. 71
77.
" T A doute s'introduit dans Fame qui reve, la foi
" descend dans 1'ame qui souffre."
The reverse is equally true, and judging from
my own experience, I should say oftener true.
L
78.
A curiosite est si voisine a la perfidie qu'elle
peut enlaidir les plus beaux visages."
79.
TT7HEN I told Tieck of the death of Coleridge (I
had just received the sad but not unexpected
news in a letter from England), he exclaimed with
emotion, " A great spirit has passed away from the
earth, and has left no adequate memorial of its great-
ness." Speaking of him afterwards he said, " Cole-
ridge possessed the creative and inventive spirit of
poetry, not the productive ; he thought too much to
G 3
1-1
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
produce, the analytical power interfered with the
genius : Others with more active faculties seized and
worked out his magnificent hints and ideas. Walter
Scott and Lord Byron borrowed the first idea of the
form and spirit of their narrative poems from
Coleridge's ' Christabelle.' " This judgment of one
great poet and critic passed on another seemed to me
worth preserving.
80.
/COLERIDGE says, " In politics what begins in fear
V usually ends in folly."
He might have gone farther, and added : In morals
what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness. In
religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanati-
cism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the
beginning of all evil.
IN another place he says,
" Talent lying in the understanding is often in-
herited; genius, being the action of reason and
imagination, rarely or never."
SARA COLERIDGE. TALLEYRAND. 78
There seems confusion here, for genius lies not
in the amount of intellect it is a quality of the
intellect apart from quantity. And the distinction
between talent and genius is definite. Talent com-
bines and uses ; genius combines and creates.
OF Sara Coleridge, Mr. Kenyon said very truly
and beautifully, <f that like her father she had
the controversial intellect without the controversial
spirit.' 9
81.
WE all remember the famous bon mot of Talleyrand.
When seated between Madame de Stael and
Madame Recamier, and pouring forth gallantry, first
at the feet of one, then of the other, Madame de Stael
suddenly asked him if she and Madame Recamier
fell into the river, which of the two he would save
first ? " Madame," replied Talleyrand, " je crois que
vous savez nager ! " Now we will match this
pretty bon mot with one far prettier, and founded on
it. Prince S., whom I knew formerly, was one day
G 4
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
loitering on the banks of the Isar, in the English
garden at Munich, by the side of the beautiful
Madame de V., then the object of his devoted ad-
miration. For a while he had been speaking to her
of his mother, for whom, vaurien as he was, he
had ever shown the strongest filial love and respect.
Afterwards, as they wandered on, he began to pour
forth his soul to the lady of his love with all the
eloquence of passion. Suddenly she turned and said
to him, " If your mother and myself were both to
fall into this river, whom would you save first?"
" My mother ! " he instantly replied ; and then, look-
ing at her expressively, immediately added, " To
save you first would be as if I were to save myself
first!" *
82.
IF we were not always bringing ourselves into
comparison with others, we should know them
better.
ADVERSE INDIVIDUALITIES. 7.~,
83.
mil ERE are ways of governing every mind which
J- lies within the circle described by our own;
the only question is, whether the means required be
such as we can use? and if so, whether we shall
think it right to do so ?
You think I do not know you, or that I mistake
you utterly, because I am actuated by the impulses
of my own nature, rather than by my perception of
the impulses of yours ? It is not so.
IF we would retain our own consistency, without
which there is no moral strength, we must stand
firm upon our own moral life.
" Be true unto thyself ;
And it shall follow as the night to day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man."
But to be true to others as well as ourselves, is
not merely to allow to them the same independence,
but to sympathise with it. Unhappily here lies the
chief difficulty. There are brains so large that they
unconsciously swamp all individualities which come
in contact or too near, and brains so small that they
cannot take in the conception of any other individu-
ality as a whole, only in part or parts. As in
Religion, where there is a strong, sincere, definite
faith, there is generally more or less intolerance ; so
in character, where there is strong individuality;,
76 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
self-assurance, and defined principles of action, there
is usually something hard and intolerant of the indi-
viduality of others. In some characters we meet
with, toleration is a principle of the reason, and
intolerance a quality of the mind, and then the
whole being strikes a discord.
84.
IF we can still love those who have made us suffer,
we love them all the more. It is as if the prin-
ciple, that conflict is a necessary law of progress,
were applicable even to love. For there is no love
like that which has roused up the intensest feelings
I O
of our nature, revealed us to ourselves, like light-
ning suddenly disclosing an abyss, yet has survived
all the storm and tumult of such passionate discord
and all the terror of such a revelation.
85.
FHAS much, much to learn! Through power,
. through passion, through feeling we do much, but
only through observation, reflection, and sympathy
we learn much ; hence it is that minds highly gifted
FRENCH EXPRESSIONS. 77
often remain immature. Artist minds especially, so
long as they live only or chiefly for their art, their
faculties bent on creating or representing, remain
immature on one side the reasoning and reflecting
side of the character.
86.
SAID a Frenchman of his adversary, " II se croit
superieur a moi de toute la hauteur desabetise ! "
There is a mingled felicity, politeness, and acrimony o
in this phrase quite untranslatable.
87.
IT is a pity that we have no words to express the
French distinction between rever and revasser.
The one implies meditation on a definite subject : the
other the abandonment of the mind to vague dis-
cussion, aimless thoughts.
78 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
88.
IT seems to me that the conversation of the first
converser in the world would tire me, pall on me
at last, where I am not sure of the sincerity. Talk
without truth is the hollow brass ; talk without love
is like the tinkling cymbal, and where it does not
tinkle it gingles, and where it does not gingle, it jars.
89.
nnHERE are few things more striking, more inter-
JL esting to a thoughtful mind, than to trace
through all the poetry, literature, and art of the
Middle Ages that broad ever-present distinction be-
tween the practical and the contemplative life. This
was, no doubt, suggested and kept in view by the one
grand division of the whole social community into
those who were devoted to the religious profession
(an immense proportion of both sexes) and those who
were not. All through Dante, all through the
productions of mediaeval art, we find this pervading
idea: and we must understand it well and keep
it in mind, or we shall never be able to appre-
PRACTICAL AND CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE. 79
hend the entire beauty and meaning of certain
religious groups in sculpture and painting, and the
significance of the characters introduced. Thus,
in subjects from the Old Testament, Leah always
represents the practical, Rachel, the contemplative
life. In the New Testament, Martha and Mary
figure in the same allegorical sense; and among
the saints we always find St. Catharine and St.
Clara patronising the religious and contemplative
life, while St. Barbara and St. Ursula preside
over the military or secular existence. It was
a part, and a very important part, of that beautiful
and expressive symbolism through which art in all
its forms spoke to the popular mind.
For myself, I have the strongest admiration for
the practical) but the strongest sympathy with the
contemplative life. I bow to Leah and to Martha,
but my love is for Rachel and for Mary.
90.
T)ETTINA does not describe nature, she informs it
with her own life : she seems to live in the ele-
ments, to exist in the fire, the air, the water, like a
sylph, a gnome, an elf; she does not contemplate
nature, she is nature ; she is like the bird in the air,
80 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
the fish in the sea, the squirrel in the wood. It is
one thing to describe nature, and quite another un-
consciously so to inform nature with a portion of our
own life.
91.
JOANNA BAILLIE had a great admiration of Ma-
** caulay's Roman Ballads. " But," said some
one, "do you really account them as poetry ?" She
replied, "They are poetry if the sounds of the
trumpet be music ! "
A LL my own experience of life teaches me the
" contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase
" profound cunning " has always seemed to me a
contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning
mind which was not either shallow, or on some point
diseased. People dissemble sometimes who yet hate
dissembling, but a " cunning mind " emphatically
delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey
of cunning. That " pleasure in deceiving and apt-
ness to be deceived" usually go together, was one of
the wise sayings of the wisest of men.
PARACELSUS. 81
93.
IT was a saying of Paracelsus, that "Those who
would understand the course of the heavens above
must first of all recognise the heaven in man : "
meaning, I suppose, that all pursuit of knowledge
which is not accompanied by praise of God and love
of our fellow-creatures must turn to bitterness,
emptiness, foolishness. We must imagine him to
have come to this conclusion only late in life.
Browning, in that wonderful poem of Paracel-
sus, a poem in which there is such a profound
far-seeing philosophy, set forth with such a luxuri-
ance of illustration and imagery, and such a wealth
of glorious eloquence, that I know nothing to be
compared with it since Goethe and Wordsworth,
represents his aspiring philosopher as at first im-
pelled solely by the appetite to know. He asks
nothing of men, he despises them ; but he will serve
them, raise them, after a sort of God-like fashion,
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
independent of their sympathy, scorning their ap-
plause, using them like instruments, cheating them
like children, all for their good; but it will not do.
In Aprile, "who would love infinitely, and be be-
loved," is figured the type of the poet-nature, de-
siring only beauty, resolving all into beauty ; while
in Paracelsus we have the type of the reflecting, the
inquiring mind desiring only knowledge, resolving
all into knowledge, asking nothing more to crown
his being. And both find out their mistake ; both
come to feel that love without knowledge is blind
and weak, and knowledge without love barren and
vain.
" I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE,
Excluding love as thou refuse d'st knowledge ;
Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake !
*****
Are we not halves of one dissever'd world,
Whom this strange chance unites once more ? Part ? Never !
Till thou, the lover, know, and I, the knower,
Love until both are saved ! "
After all, perhaps, only the same old world-
renowned myth in another form the marriage of
Cupid and Psyche; Love and Intelligence long
parted, long suffering, again embracing, and lighted
on by Beauty to an immortal union. But to return
to our poet. Aprile, exhausted by his own aimless,
dazzling visions, expires on the bosom of him who
knows; and Paracelsus, who began with a self-
COLONIES.
sufficing scorn of his kind, dies a baffled and de-
graded man in the arms of him who loves ; yet
wiser in his fall than through his aspirations, he dies
trusting in the progress of humanity so long as
humanity is content to be human; to love as well
as to know ; to fear, to hope, to worship, as well as
to aspire.
94.
T ORD BACON says : " I like a plantation (in the
^ sense of colony) in a pure soil ; that is, where
people are not displanted to the end to plant in
others : for else it is rather an extirpation than a
plantation." (Bacon, who wrote this, counselled to
James I. the plantation of Ulster exactly on the
principle he has here deprecated.)
He adds, " It is a shameful and unblessed thing to
take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men,
to be the people with whom you plant " (i. e. colo-
nise). And it is only now that our politicians are
beginning to discover and act upon this great moral
84 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
truth and obvious fitness of things ! like Bacon,
adopting practically, and from mere motives of ex-
pediency, a principle they would theoretically abjure!
95.
TJECAUSE in real life we cannot, or do not, re-
concile the high theory with the low practice,
we use our wit to render the theory ridiculous, and
our reason to reconcile us to the practice. We ought
to do just the reverse.
MANY would say, if they spoke the truth, that it
had cost them a life-long effort to unlearn what they
had been taught.
For as the eye becomes blinded by fashion to
positive deformity, so through social convention-
alism the conscience becomes blinded to positive
immorality.
It is fatal in any mind to make the moral standard
for men high and the moral standard for women low,
or vice versa. This has appeared to me the very
MEN AND WOMEN. 85
commonest of all mistakes in men and women who
have lived much in the world, but fatal nevertheless,
and in three ways ; first, as distorting the moral
ideal, so far as it exists in the conscience ; secondly,
as perplexing the bounds, practically, of right and
wrong ; thirdly, as being at variance with the spirit
and principles of Christianity. Admit these pre-
mises, and it follows inevitably that such a mistake
is fatal in the last degree, as disturbing the con-
sistency and the elevation of the character, morally,
practically, religiously.
Akin to this mistake, or identical with it, is the
belief that there are essential masculine and feminine
virtues and vices. It is not, in fact, the quality
itself, but the modification of the quality, which is
masculine or feminine : and on the manner or degree
in which these are balanced and combined in the
individual, depends the perfection of that individual
character its approximation to that of Christ.
I firmly believe that as the influences of religion are
extended, and as civilisation advances, those qualities
which are now admired as essentially feminine will be
considered as essentially human, such as gentleness,
purity, the more unselfish and spiritual sense of
duty, and the dominance of the affections over the
passions. This is, perhaps, what Buffon, speaking
a naturalist, meant, when he said that with the
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
progress of humanity, (( Les races se feminisent ; "
at least I understand the phrase in this sense.
A man who requires from his own sex manly
direct truth, and laughs at the cowardly subterfuges
and small arts of women as being feminine ; a
woman who requires from her own sex tenderness
and purity, and thinks ruffianism and sensuality
pardonable in a man as being masculine, these
have repudiated the Christian standard of morals
which Christ, in his own person, bequeathed to us
that standard which we have accepted as Christians
theoretically at least and which makes no dis-
tinction between "the highest, holiest manhood,"
and the highest, holiest womanhood.
I might illustrate this position not only scriptu-
rally but philosophically, by quoting the axiom of
the Greek philosopher Antisthenes, ihe disciple of
Socrates, t( The virtue of the man and the woman
is the same ; " which shows a perception of the moral
truth, a sort of anticipation of the Christian doc-
trine, even in the pagan times. But I prefer an
illustration which is at once practical and poeti-
cal, and plain to the most prejudiced among men or
women.
Every reader of Wordsworth will recollect, if he
does not know by heart, the poem entitled " The
Happy Warrior." It has been quoted often as an
MEN AND WOMEN. 87
epitome of every manly, soldierly, and elevated
quality. I have heard it applied to the Duke of
Wellington. Those who make the experiment of
merely substituting the word woman for the word
warrior, and changing the feminine for the mas-
culine pronoun, will find that it reads equally well;
that almost from beginning to end it is literally
as applicable to the one sex as to the other. As
thus : -
CHARACTER OF THE HAPPY WOMAN.
Who is the happy woman ? Who is she
That every woman born should wish to be ?
It is the generous spirit, who, when brought
Among the tasks of real life, had wrought
Upon the plan that pleased her childish thought ;
Whose high endeavours are an inward light,
That make the path before her always bright :
Who, with a natural instinct to discern
What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn ;
Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,
But makes her moral being her prime care ;
Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
And Fear, and Sorrow, miserable train !
Turns that necessity to glorious gain ;
In face of these doth exercise a power
Which is our human nature's highest dower :
Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves
Of their bad influence, and their good receives ;
By objects, which might force the soul to abate
Her feeling, rendered more compassionate ;
Is placable because occasions rise
So often that demand such sacrifice ;
More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure
As tempted more j more able to endure,
H 3
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
As more exposed to suffering and distress ;
Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.
"Pis she whose law is reason ; who depends
Upon that law as on the best of friends ;
Whence in a state where men are tempted still
To evil for a guard against worse ill,
And what in quality or act is best,
Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,
She fixes good on good alone, and owes
To virtue every triumph that she knows.
Who, if she rise to station of command,
Rises by open means ; and there will stand
On honourable terms, or else retire,
******
Who comprehends her trust, and to the same
Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim ;
And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait
For wealth, or honours, or for worldly state ;
Whom they must follow ; on whose head must fall
Like showers of manna, if they come at all :
Whose powers shed round her in the common strife
Or mild concerns of ordinary life,
A constant influence, a peculiar grace ;
But who, if she be called upon to face
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
Great issue, good or bad for human kind,
Is happy as a lover ; and attired
With sudden brightness, like to one inspired ;
And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
In calmness made, and sees what she foresaw ;
Or if an unexpected call succeed,
Come when it will, is equal to the need !
In all these fifty-six lines there is only one line
which cannot be feminised in its significance, that
which I have filled up with asterisks, and which is
totally at variance with our ideal of A HAPPY
WOMAN. It is the line
MEN AND WOMEN.
" And in himself possess his own desire."
No woman could exist happily or virtuously in
such complete independence of all external affections
as these words express. " Her desire is to her hus-
band," this is the sort of subjection prophesied for
the daughters of Eve. A woman doomed to exist
O
without this earthly rest for her affections, does not
" in herself possess her own desire ; " she turns
towards God; and if she does not make her life a
life of worship, she makes it a life of charity, (which
in itself is worship,) or she dies a spiritual and a
moral death. Is it much better with the man who
concentrates his aspirations in himself? I should
think not.
SWIFT, as a man and a writer, is one of those who
had least sympathy with women ; and I have some-
times thought that the exaggeration, even to mor-
bidity, of the coarse and the cruel in his character,
arose from this want of sympathy ; but his strong
sense showed him the one great moral truth as
regards the two sexes, and gave him the courage to
avow it.
He says, " I am ignorant of any one quality that
is amiable in a woman which is not equally so in a
man. I do not except even modesty and gentleness
of nature ; nor do I know one vice or folly which is
H 4
90 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
not equally detestable in both." Then, remarking
that cowardice is an infirmity generally allowed to
women, he wonders that they should fancy it be-
coming or graceful, or think it worth improving by
affectation, particularly as it is generally allied to
cruelty.
Here is a passage from one of Humboldt's letters,
which I have seen quoted with sympathy and ad-
miration, as applied to the manly character only :
ee Masculine independence of mind I hold to be
in reality the first requisite for the formation of a
character of real manly worth. The man who suffers
himself to be deceived and carried away by his own
weakness, may be a very amiable person in other
respects, but cannot be called a good man ; such
beings should not find favour in the eyes of a woman,
for a truly beautiful and purely feminine nature
should be attracted only by what is highest and
noblest in the character of man."
Now we will take this bit of moral philosophy,
and, without the slightest alteration of the context,
apply it to the female character.
fs Feminine independence of mind I hold to be
in reality the first requisite for the formation of a
character of real feminine worth. The woman who
allows herself to be deceived and carried away by
MEN AND WOMEN. 91
her own weakness may be a very amiable person in
other respects, but cannot be called a good woman ;
such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a
man, for the truly beautiful and purely manly nature
should be attracted only by what is highest and
noblest in the character of woman."
After reading the above extracts, does it not seem
clear, that by the exclusive or emphatic use of certain
phrases and epithets, as more applicable to one sex
than to the other, we have introduced a most un-
christian confusion into the conscience, and have
prejudiced it early against the acceptance of the
larger truth ?
It might seem, that where we reject the distinc-
tion between masculine and feminine virtues, one
and the same type of perfection should suffice for
the two sexes ; yet it is clear that the moment we
come to consider the personality, the same type will
not suffice : and it is worth consideration that when
we place before us the highest type of manhood, as
exemplified in Christ, we do not imagine him as the
father, but as the son ; and if we think of the most
perfect type of womanhood, we never can exclude
the mother.
Montaigne deals with the whole question in his
own homely straightforward fashion :
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
" Je dis que les males et les femelles sont jettes en
nieme moule ; sauf 1'institution et Pusage la difference
n'y est pas grande. Platon appelle indifferemment
les uns et les autres a la societe de touts etudes,
exercises, charges, et vocations guerrieres et paisibles
en sa republique, et le philosophe Antisthenes otait
toute distinction entre leur vertu et la notre. II est
bien plus aise d'accuser un sexe que d'excuser
1'autre : c'est ce qu'on dit, 6 le fourgon se moque de
lapoele.'"
Not that I agree with Plato, rather would
leave all the fighting, military and political, if there
must be fighting, to the men.
AMONG the absurdities talked about women, one
hears, perhaps, such an aphorism as the following
quoted with a sort of ludicrous complacency, " The
woman's strength consists in her weakness ! " as if it
were not the weakness of a woman which makes her
in her violence at once so aggravating and so con-
temptible, in her dissimulation at once so shallow
and so dangerous, and in her vengeance at once so
cowardly and so cruel.
I SHOULD not say, from my experience of my own
sex, that a woman's nature is flexible and impressible,
MEN AND WOMEN.
though her feelings are. I know very few instances
of a very inferior man ruling the mind of a superior
woman,, whereas I know twenty fifty of a very
inferior woman ruling a superior man. If he love
her, the chances are that she will in the end weaken
and demoralise him. If a superior woman marry a
vulgar or inferior man he makes her miserable, but
he seldom governs her mind, or vulgarises her
nature, and if there be love on his side the chances
are that in the end she will elevate and refine him.
The most dangerous man to a woman is a man of
high intellectual endowments morally perverted ; for
in a woman's nature there is such a necessity to
approve where she admires, and to believe where
she loves, a devotion compounded of love and
faith is so much a part of her being, that while
the instincts remain true and the feelings uncor-
rupted, the conscience and the will may both be led
far astray. Thus fell " our general mother," type
of her sex, overpowered, rather than deceived, by
the colossal intellect, half serpent, half angelic.
COLERIDGE speaks, and with a just indignant
>rn, of those who consider chastity as if it were a
thing a thing which might be lost or kept by
external accident a thing of which one might be
5M ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
robbed, instead of a state of being. According to
law and custom, the chastity of Woman is as the
property of Man, to whom she is accountable for it,
rather than to God and her own conscience. What-
ever people may say, such is the common, the social,
the legal view of the case. It is a remnant of
Oriental barbarism. It tends to much vice, or, at
the best, to a low standard of morality, in both
sexes. This idea of property in the woman survives
still in our present social state, particularly among
the lower orders, and is one cause of the ill treat-
ment of wives. All those who are particularly
acquainted with the manners and condition of the
people will testify to this ; namely, that when a
child or any weaker individual is ill treated, those
standing by will interfere and protect the victim;
but if the sufferer be the wife of the oppressor, it is a
point of etiquette to look on, to take no part in the
fray, and to leave the brute man to do what he likes
" with his own." Even the victim herself, if she be
not pummelled to death, frequently deprecates such
an interference with the dignity and the rights of
her owner. Like the poor woman in the " Me*decin
malgre' lui : " " Voyez un peu cet impertinent qui
veut empecher les maris de battre leurs femmes ! et
si je veux qu'il me batte, moi?" and so ends by
giving her defender a box on the ear.
MEN AND WOMEN. 95
" Au milieu de tous les obstacles que la nature et
la socie*te ont semes sur les pas de la femme, la seule
condition de repos pour elle est de s'entourer de
barrieres que les passions ne puissent franchir ; in-
capable de s'approprier Fexistence, elle est toujours
semblable a la Chinoise dont les pieds ont ete mutile's
et pour laquelle toute liberte est un leurre, toute
espace ouverte une cause de chute. En attendant
que l'e*ducation ait donne aux femmes leur veritable
place, malheur a celles qui brisent les lisses accoutu-
mees ! pour elles 1'independance ne sera, comme la
gloire, qu'un deuil eclatant du bonheur ! " B.
Constant.
This also is one of those common-places of well-
sounding eloquence, in which a fallacy is so wrapt
up in words we have to dig it out. If this be true,
it is true only so long as you compress the feet and
compress the intellect, no longer.
Here is another :
u L'experience lui avait appris que quel que fut
leur age, ou leur caractere, toutes les femmes vivaient
avec le meme reve, et qu'elles avaient toutes au fond
du coeur un roman commence dont elles attendaient
jusqu'a la mort le heros, comme les juifs attendent
le Messie."
This " roman commence," (et qui ne finit jamais),
is true as regards women who are idle, and who have
not replaced dreams by duties. And what are the
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
" barrieres " which passion cannot overleap, from the
moment it has subjugated the will ? How fine, how
true that scene in Calderon's " Magico Prodigioso,"
where Justina conquers the fiend only by not con-
senting to ill !
- " This agony
Of passion which afflicts my heart' and soul
May sweep imagination in its storm ;
The will is firm."
And the baffled demon shrinks back,
" Woman, thou hast subdued me
Only by not owning thyself subdued ! "
A FKIEND of mine was once using some mincing
elegancies of language to describe a high degree of
moral turpitude, when a man near her interposed,
with stern sarcasm, " Speak out ! Give things their
proper names ! Half words are the perdition of
women ! "
" I OBSERVE," said Sydney Smith, " that generally
about the age of forty, women get tired of being
MEN AND WOMEN. 97
virtuous and men of being honest." This was said
and received with a laugh as one of his good things ;
but, like many of his good things, how dreadfully
true ! And why ? because, generally, education has
made the virtue of the woman and the honesty of the
man a matter of external opinion, not a law of the
inward life.
DANTE, in his lowest hell, has placed those who
have betrayed women ; and in the lowest deep of the
lowest deep those who have betrayed trust.
INVETERATE sensuality, which has the effect of
utterly stupifying and brutifying lower minds, gives
to natures more sensitively or more powerfully or-
ganised a horrible dash of ferocity. For there is
an awful relation between animal blood-thirstiness
and the proneness to sensuality, and in some sen-
sualists a sort of feline propensity to torment and
lacerate the prey they have not the appetite to
devour.
98 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
" La Che valerie faisait une tentative qui n'a
jamais reussi, quoique souvent essay ee ; la tentative
de se servir des passions humaines, et particuliere-
ment de Famour pour conduire 1'homme a la vertu.
Dans cette route Fhomme s'arrete toujours en cliemin.
L'amour inspire beaucoup de bons sentiments le
courage, le devouement, le sacrifice des biens et de la
vie ; mais il ne se sacrifie pas lui-meme, et c'est la
que la faiblesse humaine reprend ses droits." St.
Marc- Girardin.
I am not sure that this well-sounding remark is
true or, if true, it is true of the mere passion,
not of love in its highest phase, which is self-sacri-
ficing, which has its essence in the capability of
self-sacrifice.
" Love was given,
Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end ;
For this the passion to excess was driven,
That self might be annull'd."
IN every mind where there is a strong tendency
to fear, there is a strong capacity to hate. Those
who dwell in fear dwell next door to hate ; and I
think it is the cowardice of women which makes
them such intense haters.
MEN, WOMEN, CHILDREN.
OUR present social opinion says to the man, " You
may be a vulgar brutal sensualist, and use the basest
means to attain the basest ends ; but so long as you
do not offend against conventional good manners you
shall be held blameless." And to the woman it says,
" You shall be guilty of nothing but of yielding to
the softest impulses of tenderness, of relenting pity;
but if you cannot add hypocrisy you shall be
punished as the most desperate criminal."
96.
s TT is worthy of notice that the external expressions
- appropriated to certain feelings undergo change
at different periods of life and in different constitu-
tions. The child cries and sobs from fear or pain,
the adult more generally from sudden grief or warm
affection, or sympathy with the feeling of others."
Dr. Holland.
Those who have been accustomed to observe the
ways of children will doubt the accuracy of this
i
100 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
remark, though from the high authority of one of
the most accomplished physiologists of our time.
Children cry from grief, and from sympathy with
grief, at a very early age. I have seen an infant in
its mother's arms, before it could speak, begin to
whimper and cry when it looked up in her face,
which was disturbed and bathed with tears ; and that
has always appeared to me an exquisite touch of
most truthful nature in Wordsworth's description of
the desolation of Margaret : -
" Her little child
Had from its mother caught the trick of grief,
And sighed amid its playthings."
97.
" T ETTERS," said Sir James Mackintosh, " must
-*^ not be on a subject. Lady Mary Wortley's
letters on her journey to Constantinople are an admi-
rable book of travels, but they are not letters. A
meeting to discuss a question of science is not con-
versation, nor are papers written to another to
inform or discuss, letters. Conversation is relaxa-
tion, not business, and must never appear to be oc-
cupation ; nor must letters."
MADAME DE STAEL.
101
" A masculine character may be a defect in a
female, but a masculine genius is still a praise to a
writer of whatever sex. The feminine graces of
Madame de Sevigne's genius are exquisitely charm-
ing, but the philosophy and eloquence of Madame de
Stael are above the distinctions of sex."
98.
Or the wars between Napoleon and the Holy
Alliance, Madame de Stael once said with most
admirable and prophetic sense : "It is a contest
between a man who is the enemy of liberty, and a
system which is equally its enemy." But it is easier
to get rid of a man than of a system : witness the
Russians, who assassinate their czars one after an-
other, but cannot get rid of their system.
99.
\HE Empress Elizabeth of Russia during the war
with Sweden commanded the old Hetman of
I 2
102 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS-
the Cossacks to come to court on his way to Finland.
" If the Emperor, your father," said the Hetman,
"had taken my advice, your Majesty would not now
have been annoyed by the Swedes." " What was
your advice ? " asked the Empress. " To put all the
nobility to death, and transplant the people into
Russia." "But that," said the Empress, "would
have been cruel ! " " I do not see that," he replied
quietly ; " they are all dead now, and they would
only have been dead if my advice had been taken.
Something strangely comprehensive and unanswer-
able in this barbarian logic I
100.
IT was the Abbe Boileau who said of the Jesuits,
that they had lengthened the Creed and short-
ened the Decalogue. The same witty ecclesiastic
being asked why he always wrote in Latin, took a
pinch of snuff, and answered gravely, "Why, for
fear the bishops should read me ! "
DEJA.
103
101.
WHEN Talleyrand once visited a certain repro-
bate friend of his, who was ill of cholera, the
patient exclaimed in his agony, " Je sens les tourmens
de 1'enfer I "
" Deja? " said Talleyrand.
Much in a word! I remember seeing a pretty
French vaudeville wherein a lady is by some accident
or contrivance shut up perforce with a lover she has
rejected. She frets at the contretemps. He makes
use of the occasion to plead his cause. The cruel
fair one will not relent. Still he pleads still she
turns away. At length they are interrupted.
" Deja ! " exclaims the lady, in an accent we may
suppose to be very different from that of Talleyrand;
and on the intonation of this one word, pronounced
as only an accomplished French actress could pro-
nounce it, depends the denouement of the piece.
102.
"I" GUIS XVI. sent a distinguished physician over
to England to inquire into the management of
our hospitals. He praised them much, but added,
" II y manque deux choses ; nos cures et nos
hospitalieres ; " that is, he felt the want of the re-
I 3
104 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
ligious element in the official and medical treatment
of the sick. A want which, I think, is felt at
present and will be supplied.
103.
THOSE who have the largest horizon of thought,
the most extended vision in regard to the
relation of things, are not remarkable for self-reliance
and ready judgment. A man who sees limitedly
and clearly, is more sure of himself, and more direct
in his dealings with circumstances and with others,
than a man whose many-sided capacity embraces an
immense extent of objects and objections, just as,
they say, a horse with blinkers more surely chooses
his path, and is less likely to shy.
104.
WHAT we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in
some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by
changing the frame of the mind, for the moment
realises itself.
THOUGHT TOO FREE. 105
105.
are no such self-deceivers as those who
think they reason when they only feel.
106.
rpHERE are moments when the liberty of the inner
life, opposed to the trammels of the outer, be-
comes too oppressive : moments when we wish that
our mental horizon were less extended, thought less
free ; when we long to put the discursive soul into a
narrow path like a railway, and force it to run on in
a straight line to some determined goal.
107.
IF the deepest and best affections which God has
given us sometimes brood over the heart like
doves of peace, they sometimes suck out our life-
blood like vampires.
I 4
106 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
108,
'To a Frenchman the words that express things
seem often to suffice for the things themselves,
and he pronounces the words amour, grace, sensibilite,
as if with a relish in his mouth as if he tasted them
as if he possessed them.
109.
rpHERE are many good qualities, and valuable ones
too, which hardly deserve the name of virtues.
The word Virtue was synonymous in the old time
with valour, and seems to imply contest ; not merely
passive goodness, but active resistance to evil. I
wonder sometimes why it is that we so continually
hear the phrase, u a virtuous woman," and scarcely
ever that of a " virtuous man," except in poetry or
from the pulpit.
SENSE AND PHANTASY.
107
110.
A
LIE, though it be killed and dead, can sting some-
times, like a dead wasp.
in.
N me dit toute la journee dans le monde, telle
opinion, telle idee, sont regues. On ne sait
done pas qu'en fait d'opinion, et d'idees j'aime beau-
coup mieux les choses qui sont rejettees que celles
qui sont reues ? "
112.
QENSE can support herself handsomely in most
^ countries on some eighteenpence a day, but for
phantasy, planets and solar systems will not suffice."
And thence do you infer the superiority of sense
over phantasy ? Shallow reasoning ! God who made
the soul of man of sufficient capacity to embrace
whole worlds and systems of worlds, gave us thereby
a foretaste of our immortality.
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
113.
"fiAiTH in the hereafter is as necessary for the
intellectual as the moral character, and to the
man of letters as well as to the Christian, the present
forms but the slightest portion of his existence."
Southey.
Goethe did not think so. " Genutzt dem Augen-
blick," <e Use the present," was his favourite maxim ;
and always this notion of sacrificing or slighting the
present seems to me a great mistake. It ought to be
the most important part of our existence, as it is the
only part of it over which we have power. It is in
the present only that we absolve the past and lay the
foundation for the future.
114.
" TE allseitigen, je individueller," is a beautiful
" significant phrase, quite untranslateable, used,
I think, by Rahel (Madame Varnhagen). It means
that the more the mind can multiply on every side
its capacities of thinking and feeling, the more indi-
vidual, the more original, that mind becomes.
FACTS. -MORAL SYMPATHIES. 109
115.
IWONDEK," said c., "that facts should be
called stubborn things. I wonder, too, seeing
you can always oppose a fact with another fact, and
that nothing is so easy as to twist, pervert, and argue
or misrepresent a fact into twenty different forms.
"II n'y a rien qui s'arrange aussi facilement que les
faits," Nothing so tractable as facts, said Ben-
jamin Constant. True ; so long as facts are only ma-
terial, or as one should say, mere matter of fact,
you can modify them to a purpose, turn them upside
down and inside out ; but once vivify a fact with a
feeling, and it stands up before us a living and a very
stubborn thing.
116.
TTWERY human being is born to influence some
*-' other human being ; or many, or all human
beings, in proportion to the extent and power of the
sympathies, rather than of the intellect.
It was said, and very beautifully said, that " one
man's wit becomes all men's wisdom. 5 ' Even more
true is it that one man's virtue becomes a standard
which raises our anticipation of possible goodness
in all men.
110
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS,
117.
TT is curious that the memory, most retentive of
images, should yet be much more retentive of
feelings than of facts: for instance, we remember with
such intense vividness a period of suffering, that it
seems even to renew itself through the medium of
thought; yet, at the same time, we perhaps find
difficulty in recalling, with any distinctness, the
causes of that pain.
118.
has never manifested itself to me in such
a broad stream of light as seems to be poured
upon some minds. Truth has appeared to my
mental eye, like a vivid, yet small and trembling star
in a storm, now appearing for a moment with a
beauty that enraptured, now lost in such clouds, as,
had I less faith, might make me suspect that the pre-
vious clear sight had been a delusion." Blanco
White.
Very exquisite in the aptness as well as poetry of
the comparison! Some walk by daylight, some
SAYINGS. ill
walk by starlight. Those who see the sun do not
see the stars ; those who see the stars do not see the
sun.
He says in another place :
" I am averse to too much activity of the imagin-
ation on the future life. I hope to die full of con-
fidence that no evil awaits me : but any picture of a
future life distresses me. I feel as if an eternity of
existence were already an insupportable burden on
my soul."
How characteristic of that lassitude of the soul and
sickness of the heart which ' ( asks not happiness, but
longs for rest ! "
119.
' s rpnoSE are the worst of suicides who voluntarily
and prepensely stab or suffocate their fame
when God hath commanded them to stand on high
for an example."
120.
thus apostrophised a celebrated orator,
who abused his gift of eloquence to insincere
purposes of vanity, self-interest, and expediency :
112 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
" You blasphemous scoundrel ! God gave you that
gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth,
to make known your true meaning to us, not to be
rattled like a muffin-man's bell ! "
121.
I THINK, with Carlyle, that a lie should be trampled
on and extinguished wherever found. I am for
fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that false-
hood, like pestilence, breathes around me. A. thinks
this is too young a feeling, and that as the truth is
sure to conquer in the end, it is not worth while
to fight every separate lie, or fling a torch into every
infected hole. Perhaps not, so far as we are our-
selves concerned; but we should think of others.
While secure in our own antidote, or wise in our
own caution, we should not leave the miasma to
poison the healthful, or the briars to entangle the
unwary. There is no occasion perhaps for truth to
sally forth like a knight-errant tilting at every vizor,
but neither should she sit self-assured in her tower
of strength, leaving pitfalls outside her gate for the
blind to fall into.
SIGNS INSTEAD OF WORDS.
113
122.
(f mnEKE is a way to separate memory from ima-
* gination we may narrate without painting.
I am convinced that the mind can employ certain
indistinct signs to represent even its most vivid
impressions ; that instead of picture writing, it can
use something like algebraic symbols: such is the
language of the soul when the paroxysm of pain has
passed, and the wounds it received formerly are
skinned over, not healed : it is a language very
opposite to that used by the poet and the novel-
writer." Blanco White.
True ; but a language in which the soul can con-
verse only with itself; or else a language more con-
ventional than words, and like paper as a tender for
gold, more capable of being defaced and falsified.
There is a proverb we have heard quoted : " Speech
is silver, silence is golden." But better is the silver
diffused than the talent of gold buried.
123.
TTOWEVEK distinguished and gifted, mentally and
-*--*- morally, we find that in conduct and in our
114 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
external relations with society there is ever a levelling
influence at work. Seldom in our relations with the
world, and in the ordinary commerce of life, are the
best and highest within us brought forth; for the
whole system of social intercourse is levelling. As
it is said that law knows no distinction of persons
but that which it has itself instituted ; so of society
it may be said, that it allows of no distinction but
those which it can recognise external distinctions.
We hear it said that general society the world,
as it is called and a public school, are excellent
educators ; because in one the man, in the other the
boy, " finds, as the phrase is, his own level." He
does not ; he finds the level of others. That may
be good for those below mediocrity, but for those
above it bad: and it is for those we should most
care, for if once brought down in early life by the
levelling influence of numbers, they seldom rise
again, or only partially. Nothing so dangerous as
to be perpetually measuring ourselves against what
is beneath us, feeling our superiority to that which
we force ourselves to assimilate to. This has been
the perdition of many a school-boy and many a man.
MILTON'S ADAM AND EVE. 115
124.
" T L me semble que le plus noble rapport entre le
ciel et la terre, le plus beau don que Dieu ait fait
a 1'homme, la pensee, 1'inspiration, se decompose en
quelque sorte des qu'elle est descendue dans son ame.
Elle y vient simple et desinteressee ; il la reproduit
corrompue par tous les interets auxquels il 1'associe ;
elle lui a ete confiee pour la multiplier a 1'avantage
de tous ; il la public au profit de son amour-propre."
Madame de Saint- Aulaire.
There would be much to say about this, for it is
not always, nor generally, amour-propre or interest ;
it is the desire of sympathy, which impels the artist
mind to the utterance in words, or the expression in
form, of that thought or inspiration which God has
sent into his soul.
125.
~jl TILTON'S Eve is the type of the masculine stand-
ard of perfection in woman ; a graceful figure,
an abundance of fine hair, much " coy submission,"
and such a degree of unreasoning wilfulness as shall
risk perdition.
And the woman's standard for the man is Adam,
who rules and demands subjection, and is so in-
dulgent that he gives up to blandishment what he
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116 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
would refuse to reason, and what his own reason
condemns.
126.
EVERY subject which excites discussion impels to
thought. Every expression of a mind humbly
seeking truth, not assuming to have found it, helps
the seeker after truth.
128.
As a man just released from the rack stands
bruised and broken, bleeding at every pore,
and dislocated in every limb, and raises his eyes to
heaven, and says, " God be praised ! I suffer no
more ! " because to that past sharp agony the respite
comes like peace like sleep, so we stand, after
some great wrench in our best affections, where they
have been torn up by the root ; when the conflict is
over, and the tension of the heart-strings is relaxed,
then comes a sort of rest, but of what kind ?
129.
mo trust religiously, to hope humbly, to desire
nobly, to think rationally, to will resolutely,
and to work earnestly, may this be mine.
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD.
117
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD.
(FROM A LETTER.)
WE are all interested in this great question of
popular education ; but I see others much
more sanguine than I am. They hope for some im-
mediate good result from all that is thought, written,
spoken on the subject day after day. I see such
results as possible, probable, but far, far off. All
this talk is of systems and methods, institutions,
school houses, schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, school
books ; the ways and the means by which we are to
instruct, inform, manage, mould, regulate, that
which lies in most cases beyond our reach the
spirit sent from God. What do we know of the
mystery of child-nature, child-life ? What, indeed,
do we know of any life ? All life we acknowledge
to be an awful mystery, but child-life we treat as if
it were no mystery whatever just so much mate-
rial placed in our hands to be fashioned to a certain
form according to our will or our prejudices, fitted
K 2
H 8 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
to certain purposes according to our notions of expe-
diency. Till we know how to reverence childhood we
shall do no good. Educators commit the same mis-
take with . regard to childhood that theologians
commit with regard to our present earthly existence ;
thinking of it, treating of it, as of little value or
significance in itself, only transient, and preparatory
to some condition of being which is to follow as if
it were something separate from us and to be left
behind us as the creature casts its skin. But as in
the sight of God this life is also something for its
own sake, so in the estimation of Christ, childhood
was something for its own sake, something holy
and beautiful in itself, and dear to him. He saw it
not merely as the germ of something to grow out of
it, but as perfect and lovely in itself as the flower
which precedes the fruit. We misunderstand child-
hood, and we misuse it ; we delight in it, and we
pamper it ; we spoil it ingeniously, we neglect it
sinfully ; at the best we trifle with it as a plaything
which we can pull to pieces and put together at
pleasure ignorant, reckless, presumptuous that we
are !
And if we are perpetually making the .grossest
mistakes in the physical and practical management
of childhood, how much more in regard to what is
spirtual ! What do we know of that which lies in
the minds of children ? we know only what we put
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 119
there. The world of instincts, perceptions, experi-
ences, pleasures, and pains, lying there without self-
consciousness, sometimes helplessly mute, some-
times so imperfectly expressed, that we quite
mistake the manifestation what do we know of all
this ? How shall we come at the understanding of
it ? The child lives, and does not contemplate its
own life. It can give no account of that inward,
busy, perpetual activity of the growing faculties and
feelings which it is of so much importance that we
should know. To lead children by questionings to
think about their own identity, or observe their own
feelings, is to teach them to be artificial. To waken
self-consciousness before you awaken conscience is
the beginning of incalculable mischief. Introspec-
tion is always, as a habit, unhealthy : introspection
in childhood, fatally so. How shall we come at a
knowledge of life such as it is when it first gushes
from its mysterious fountain head ? We cannot re-
ascend the stream. We all, however we may re-
member the external scenes lived through in our
infancy, either do not, or cannot, consult that part
of our nature which remains indissolubly connected
with the inward life of that time. We so forget it,
that we know not how to deal with the child-nature
when it comes under our power. We seldom reason
about children from natural laws, or psychological
data. Unconsciously we confound our matured
K 3
120 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
experience with our memory : we attribute to chil-
dren what is not possible, exact from them what is
impossible; ignore many things which the child
has neither words to express, nor the will nor the
power to manifest. The quickness with which chil-
dren perceive, the keenness with which they suffer,
the tenacity with which they remember, I have
never seen fully appreciated. - What misery we
cause to children, what mischief we do them by
bringing our own minds, habits, artificial prejudices
and senile experiences, to bear on their young life,
and cramp and overshadow it it is fearful !
Of all the wrongs and anomalies that afflict our
earth, a sinful childhood, a suffering childhood, are
among the worst.
ye men ! who sit in committees, and are called
upon to legislate for children, for children who are
the offspring of diseased or degenerate humanity,
or the victims of a yet more diseased society, do
you, when you take evidence from jailors, and police-
men, and parish schoolmasters, and doctors of di-
vinity, do you ever call up, also, the wise physician,
the thoughtful physiologist, the experienced mother?
You have accumulated facts, great blue books full of
facts, but till you know in what fixed and uniform
principles of nature to seek their solution, your facts
remain a dead letter.
1 say nothing here of teaching, though very few
in truth understand that lowest part of our duty to
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 121
children. Men, it is generally allowed, teach better
than women because they have been better taught
the things they teach. Women train better than
men because of their quick instinctive perceptions
and sympathies, and greater tenderness and patience.
In schools and in families I would have some things
taught by men, and some by women : but we will
here put aside the art, the act of teaching : we will
turn aside from the droves of children in national
schools and reformatory asylums, and turn to the
individual child, brought up within the guarded
circle of a home or a select school, watched by an
intelligent, a conscientious influence. How shall we
deal with that spirit which has come out of nature's
hands unless we remember what we were ourselves
in the past ? What sympathy can we have with
that state of being which we regard as immature,
so long as we commit the double mistake of some-
times attributing to children motives which could
only spring from our adult experience, and some-
times denying to them the same intuitive tempers and
feelings which actuate and agitate our maturer life ?
We do not sufficiently consider that our life is not
made up of separate parts, but is one is a pro-
gressive whole. When we talk of leaving our
childhood behind us, we might as well say that the
river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain
behind.
K 4
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
121.
I WILL here put together some recollections of my
own child-life ; not because it was in any re-
spect an exceptional or remarkable existence, but
for a reason exactly the reverse, because it was like
that of many children; at least I have met with
many children who throve or suffered from the same
or similar unseen causes even under external con-
ditions and management every way dissimilar.
Facts, therefore, which can be relied on, may be
generally useful as hints towards a theory of conduct
in education. What I shall say here shall be simply
the truth so far as it goes ; not something between
the false and the true, garnished for effect, not
something half- remembered, half-imagined, but
plain, absolute, matter of fact.
No; certainly I was not an extraordinary child.
I have had something to do with children, and have
met with several more remarkable for quickness of
talent, and precocity of feeling. If any thing in
particular, I believe I was particularly naughty,
at least so it was said twenty times a day. But
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 123
looking back now, I do not think I was particular
even in this respect; I perpetrated not more than
the usual amount of mischief so called which
every lively active child perpetrates between five
and ten years old. I had the usual desire to know,
and the usual dislike to learn ; the usual love of
fairy tales, and hatred of French exercises. But
yot of what I learned, but of what I did not learn ;
not of what they taught me, but of what they could
not teach me; not of what was open, apparent,
manageable, but of the under current, the hidden,
the unmanaged or unmanageable, I have to speak,
and you, my friend, to hear and turn to account, if
you will, and how you will. As we grow old the
experiences of infancy come back upon us with a
strange vividness. There is a period when the over-
flowing, tumultuous life of our youth rises up
between us and those first years ; but as the torrent
subsides in its bed we can look across the impassable
gulf to that haunted fairy land which we shall never
more approach, and never more forget !
In memory I can go back to a very early age.
I perfectly remember being sung to sleep, and can
remember even the tune which was sung to me
blessings on the voice that sang it ! I was an affec-
tionate, but not, as I now think, a loveable nor an
attractive child. I did not, like the little Mozart,
124 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
ask of every one around me, " Do you love me ? "
The instinctive question was, rather, " Can I love
you? " Yet certainly I was not more than six years
old when I suffered from the fear of not being loved
where I had attached myself, and from the idea that
another was preferred before me, such anguish as had
nearly killed me. Whether those around me re-
garded it as a fit of ill-temper, or a fit of illness, I do
not know. I could not then have given a name to
the pang that fevered me. I knew not the cause,
but never forgot the suffering. It left a deeper im-
pression than childish passions usually do ; and the
recollection was so far salutary, that in after life I
guarded myself against the approaches of that hate-
ful, deformed, agonising thing which men call jea-
lousy, as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera.
If such self-knowledge has not saved me from the
pain, at least it has saved me from the demoralising
effects of the passion, by a wholesome terror, and
even a sort of disgust.
With a good temper, there was the capacity of
strong, deep, silent resentment, and a vindictive
spirit of rather a peculiar kind. I recollect that
when one of those set over me inflicted what
then appeared a most horrible injury and injustice,
the thoughts of vengeance haunted my fancy
for months: but it was an inverted sort of ven-
geance. I imagined the house of my enemy on fire,
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 125
and rushed through the flames to rescue her. She
was drowning, and I leaped into the deep water to
draw her forth. She was pining in prison, and I
forced bars and bolts to deliver her. If this were
magnanimity, it was not the less vengeance; for,
observe, I always fancied evil, and shame, and humi-
liation to my adversary ; to myself the role of supe-
riority and gratified pride. For several years this
sort of burning resentment against wrong done to
myself and others, though it took no mean or cruel
form, was a source of intense, untold suffering. No
one was aware of it. I was left to settle it; and
my mind righted itself I hardly know how : not
certainly by religious influences they passed over
my mind, and did not at the time sink into it, and
as for earthly counsel or comfort, I never had either
when most needed. And as it fared with me then,
so it has been in after life ; so it has been, must be,
with all those who, in fighting out alone the pitched
battle between principle and passion, will accept no
intervention between the infinite within them and
the infinite above them ; so it has been, must be, with
all strong natures. Will it be said that victory in
the struggle brings increase of strength? It may
be so with some who survive the contest ; but then,
how many sink ! how many are crippled morally
for life ! how many, strengthened in some particular
faculties, suffer in losing the harmony of the character
126 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
as a whole ! This is one of the points in which the
matured mind may help the childish nature at strife
with itself. It is impossible to say how far this sort
of vindictiveness might have penetrated and hardened
into the character, if I had been of a timid or re-
tiring nature. It was expelled at last by no outer
influences, but by a growing sense of power and self-
reliance.
>v
In regard to truth always such a difficulty in
education, I certainly had, as a child, and like
most children, confused ideas about it. I had a more
distinct and absolute idea of honour than of truth,
a mistake into which our conventional morality
leads those who educate and those who are educated.
I knew very well, in a general way, that to tell a lie
was wicked ; to lie for my own profit or pleasure, or
to the hurt of others, was, according to my infant
code of morals, worse than wicked it was dis-
honourable. But I had no compunction about
telling Actions ; inventing scenes and circum-
stances, which I related as real, and with a keen
sense of triumphant enjoyment in seeing the listener
taken in by a most artful and ingenious concatena-
tion of impossibilities. In this respect " Ferdinand
Mendez Pinto, that liar of the first magnitude," was
nothing in comparison to me. I must have been
twelve years old before my conscience was first
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 127
awakened up to a sense of the necessity of truth as a
principle, as well as its holiness as a virtue. After-
wards, having to set right the minds of others cleared
my own mind on this and some other important
points.
I do not think I was naturally obstinate, but re-
member going without food all day, and being sent
hungry and exhausted to bed, because I would not
do some trifling thing required of me. I think it
was to recite some lines I knew by heart. I was
punished as wilfully obstinate : but what no one
knew then, and: what I know now as the fact, was,
that after refusing to do what was required, and
bearing anger and threats in consequence, I lost the
power to do it. I became stone : the will was petri-
fied, and I absolutely could not comply. They might
have hacked me in pieces before my lips could have
unclosed to utterance. The obstinacy was not in
the mind, but on the nerves ; and I am persuaded
that what we call obstinacy in children, and grown-
up people, too, is often something of this kind, and
that it may be increased, by mismanagement, by
persistence, or what is called firmness, in the con-
trolling power, into disease, or something near to it.
There was in my childish mind another cause of
suffering besides those I have mentioned, less acute,
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
but more permanent and always unacknowledged.
It was fear fear of darkness and supernatural in-
fluences. As long as I can remember anything, I
remember these horrors of my infancy. How they
had been awakened I do not know ; they were never
revealed. I had heard other children ridiculed for
such fears, and held my peace. At first these
haunting, thrilling, stifling terrors were vague ; after-
wards the form varied ; but one of the most perma-
nent was the ghost in Hamlet. There was a volume
of Shakspeare lying about, in which was an en-
graving I have not seen since, but it remains dis-
tinct in my mind as a picture. On one side stood
Hamlet with his hair on end, literally te like quills
upon the fretful porcupine," and one hand with all
the fingers outspread. On the other strided the
ghost, encased in armour with nodding plumes ; one
finger pointing forwards, and all surrounded with a
supernatural light. O that spectre ! for three years
it followed me up and down the dark staircase, or
stood by my bed : only the blessed light had power
to exorcise it. How it was that 1 knew, while I
trembled and quaked, that it was unreal, never cried
out, never expostulated, never confessed, I do not
know. The figure of Apolly on looming over Christian,
which I had found in an old edition of the " Pilgrim's
Progress," was also a great torment. But worse,
perhaps, were certain phantasms without shape,
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD.
things like the vision in Job " A spirit pass( d be-
fore my face ; it stood still., but I could not discern the
form thereof: " and if not intelligible voices, there
were strange unaccountable sounds filling the air
around with a sort of mysterious life. In daylight
I was not only fearless, but audacious, inclined to
defy all power and brave all danger, that is, all
danger I could see. I remember volunteering to
lead the way through a herd of cattle (among which
was a dangerous bull, the terror of the neighbour-
hood) armed only with a little stick ; but first I said
the Lord's Prayer fervently. In the ghastly night
I never prayed ; terror stifled prayer. These vision-
ary sufferings, in some form or other, pursued me
till I was nearly twelve years old. If I had not
ssessed a strong constitution and a strong under-
standing, which rejected and contemned my own
fears, even while they shook me, I had been destroyed.
How much weaker children suffer in this way, I have
since known ; and have known how to bring them
help and strength, through sympathy and knowledge,
the sympathy that soothes and does not encourage
the knowledge that dispels, and does not suggest,
the evil.
People, in general, even those who have been
mcli interested in education, are not aware of the
duty of truth, exact truth in their intercourse
130 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS. *
with children. Limit what you tell them according
to the measure of their faculties ; but let what you
say be the truth. Accuracy not merely as to fact,
but well-considered accuracy in the use of words, is
essential with children. I have read some wise book
on the treatment of the insane, in which absolute
veracity and accuracy in speaking is prescribed
as a curative principle ; and deception for any pur-
pose is deprecated as almost fatal to the health
of the patient. Now, it is a good sanatory prin-
ciple, that what is curative is preventive ; and
that an unhealthy state of mind, leading to madness,
may, in some organisations, be induced by that sort
of uncertainty and perplexity which grows up where
the mind has not been accustomed to truth in its
external relations. It is like breathing for a con-
tinuance an impure or confined air.
Of the mischief that may be done to a childish mind
by a falsehood uttered in thoughtless gaiety, I re-
member an absurd and yet a painful instance. A
visitor was turning over, for a little girl, some prints,
one of which represented an Indian widow springing
into the fire kindled for the funeral pile of her hus-
band. It was thus explained to the child, who
asked innocently, whether, if her father died, her
mother would be burned? The person to whom
the question was addressed, a lively, amiable woman,
was probably much amused by the question, and an-
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 131
swered, giddily, " Oh, of course, certainly ! " and
was believed implicitly. But thenceforth, for many
weary months, the mind of that child was haunted
and tortured by the image of her mother springing
into the devouring flames, and consumed by fire, with
all the accessories of the picture, particularly the
drums beating to drown her cries. In a weaker or-
ganisation, the results might have been permanent
and serious. But to proceed.
These terrors I have described had an existence
external to myself: I had no power over them
to shape them by my will, and their power over
me vanished gradually before a more dangerous
infatuation, the propensity to reverie. This
shaping spirit of imagination began when I was
about eight or nine years old to haunt my inner
life. I can truly say that, from ten years old to
fourteen or fifteen, I lived a double existence ; one
outward, linking me with the external sensible world,
the other inward, creating a world to and for itself,
conscious to itself only. I carried on for whole
years a series of actions, scenes, and adventures ;
one springing out of another, and coloured and modi-
fied by increasing knowledge. This habit grew so
upon me, that there were moments as when I came
to some crisis in my imaginary adventures, when I
was not more awake to outward things than in sleep,
scarcely took cognisance of the beings around me.
L
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
When punished for idleness by being placed in soli-
tary confinement (the worst of all punishments for
children), the intended penance was nothing less than
a delight and an emancipation, giving me up to my
dreams. I had a very strict and very accomplished
governess, one of the cleverest women I have ever
met with in my life ; but nothing of this was known
or even suspected by her, and I exulted in possessing
something which her power could not reach. My
reveries were my real life : it was an unhealthy state
of things.
Those who are engaged in the training of children
will perhaps pause here. It may be said, in the first
place, How are we to reach those recesses of the
inner life which the God who made us keeps from
every eye but his own ? As when we walk over
the field in spring we are aware of a thousand
influences and processes at work of which we
have no exact knowledge or clear perception, yet
must watch and use accordingly, so it is with
education. And secondly, it may be asked, if
such secret processes be working unconscious mis-
chief, where the remedy ? The remedy is in em-
ployment. Then the mother or the teacher echoes
with astonishment, " Employment ! the child is em-
ployed from morning till night ; she is learning a
dozen sciences and languages ; she has masters and
lessons for every hour of every day : with her pencil,
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 133
her piano, her books, her companions, her birds, her
flowers, what can she want more ? " An energetic
child even at a very early age, and yet farther as the
physical organisation is developed, wants something
more and something better; employment which
shall bring with it the bond of a higher duty than
that which centres in self and self-improvement ;
employment which shall not merely cultivate the
understanding, but strengthen and elevate the con-
science ; employment for the higher and more gene-
rous faculties ; employment addressed to the sympa-
thies ; employment which has the aim of utility, not
pretended, but real, obvious, direct utility. A girl
who as a mere child is not always being taught or
being amused, whose mind is early restrained by the
bond of definite duty, and thrown out of the limit of
self, will not in after years be subject to fancies that
disturb or to reveries that absorb, and the present
and the actual will have that power they ought to
have as combined in due degree with desire and
anticipation.
The Roman Catholic priesthood understand this
well : employment, which enlists with the spiritual
the sympathetic part of our being, is a means through
which they guide both young and adult minds,
'hysicians who have to manage various states of
lental and moral disease understand this well ; they
speak of the necessity of employment (not mere
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134 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
amusement) as a curative means, but of employment
with the direct aim of usefulness, apprehended
and appreciated by the patient, else it is nothing.
It is the same with children. Such employment,
chosen with reference to utility, and in harmony
with the faculties, would prove in many cases either
preventive or curative. In my own case, as I now
think, it would have been both.
There was a time when it was thought essential
that women should know something of cookery,
something of medicine, something of surgery. If
all these things are far better understood now than
heretofore, is that a reason why a well educated
woman should be left wholly ignorant of them ? A
knowledge of what people call " common things "
of the elements of physiology, of the conditions of
health, of the qualities, nutritive or remedial, of sub-
stances commonly used as food or medicine, and the
most economical and most beneficial way of applying
both, these should form a part of the system of
every girls' school whether for the higher or the
lower classes. At present you shall see a girl study-
ing chemistry, and attending Faraday's lectures, who
would be puzzled to compound a rice-pudding or a
cup of barley-water: and a girl who could work
quickly a complicated sum in the Rule of Three,
afterwards wasting a fourth of her husband's wages
through want of management.
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 135
In my own case, how much of the practical and
the sympathetic in my nature was exhausted in airy
visions I
As to the stuff out of which my waking dreams
were composed, I cannot tell you much. I have a
remembrance that I was always a princess-heroine
in the disguise of a knight, a sort of Clorinda or
Britomart, going about to redress the wrongs of the
poor, fight giants, and kill dragons ; or founding a
society in some far-off solitude or desolate island,
which would have rivalled that of Gonsalez, where
there were to be no tears, no tasks, and no laws,
except those which I made myself, no caged
birds nor tormented kittens.
ENOUGH of the pains, and mistakes, and vagaries
of childhood; let me tell of some of its pleasures
equally unguessed and unexpressed. A great, and '
exquisite source of enjoyment arose out of an early,
instinctive, boundless delight in external beauty, i
How this went hand in hand with my terrors and
reveries, how it could coexist with them, I cannot
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136 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
tell now it was so ; and if this sympathy with the
external, living, beautiful world, had been properly,
scientifically cultivated, and directed to useful de-
finite purposes, it would have been the best remedy
for much that was morbid : this was not the case,
and we were, unhappily for me, too early removed
from the country to a town residence. I can re-
member, however, that in very early years the ap-
1 pearances of nature did truly " haunt me like a
1 passion ; " the stars were to me as the gates of heaven ;
the rolling of the wave to the shore, the graceful
weeds and grasses bending before the breeze as they
grew by the wayside ; the minute and delicate forms
of insects ; the trembling shadows of boughs and
leaves dancing on the ground in the highest noon ;
these were to me perfect pleasures of which the
imagery now in my mind is distinct. Wordsworth's
poem of " The Daffodils," the one beginning
" I wandered lonely as a cloud,"
may appear to some unintelligible or overcharged,
but to me it was a vivid truth, a simple fact ; and if
Wordsworth had been then in my hands I think I
must have loved him. nit was this intense sense of
beauty which gave the first zest to poetry : I love
it, not because it told me what I did not know, but
because it helped me to words in which to clothe my
own knowledge and perceptions, and reflected back
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 137
the pictures unconsciously hoarded up in my mind.
This was what made Thomson's <f Seasons " a favourite
book when I first began to read for my own amuse-
ment, and before I could understand one half of it ;
St. Pierre's " Indian Cottage " (" La Chaumiere In-
dienne ") was also charming, either because it re-
flected my dreams, or gave me new stuff for them in
pictures of an external world quite different from
that I inhabited, palm-trees, elephants, tigers,
dark-turbaned men with flowing draperies ; and the
" Arabian Nights " completed my Oriental intoxica-
tion, which lasted for a long time.
I have said little of the impressions left by
books, and of my first religious notions. A friend
of mine had once the wise idea of collecting together
a variety of evidence as to the impressions left by
certain books on childish or immature minds: If
carried out, it would have been one of the most
valuable additions to educational experience ever
made. For myself I did not much care about the
books put into my hands, nor imbibe much informa-
tion from them. I had a great taste, I am sorry to
say, for forbidden books ; yet it was not the forbid-
den books that did the mischief, except in their being
read furtively. I remember impressions of vice
and cruelty from some parts of the Old Testament
and Goldsmith's " History of England," which I
shudder to recall. Shakspeare was on the forbidden
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138 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
shelf. I had read him all through between seven
and ten years old. He never did me any moral
mischief. He never soiled my mind with any dis-
ordered image. What was exceptionable and coarse
in language I passed by without attaching any mean-
ing whatever to it. How it might have been if
I had read Shakspeare first when I was fifteen
or sixteen, I do not know ; perhaps the occasional
coarsenesses and obscurities might have shocked the
delicacy or puzzled the intelligence of that sen-
sitive and inquiring age. But at nine or ten I had
no comprehension of what was unseemly ; what might
be obscure in words to wordy commentators, was to
me lighted up by the idea I found or interpreted for
myself right or wrong.
No; I repeat, Shakspeare bless him! never
did me any moral mischief. Though the Witches in
Macbeth troubled me, though the Ghost in Hamlet
terrified me (the picture that is, for the spirit in
Shakspeare was solemn and pathetic, not hideous),
though poor little Arthur cost me an ocean of
tears, yet much that was obscure, and all that was
painful and revolting was merged on the whole in
the vivid presence of a new, beautiful, vigorous, living
world. The plays which I now think the most
wonderful produced comparatively little effect on my
fancy : Komeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, struck
me then less than the historical plays, and far less
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 139
than the Midsummer Night's Dream and Cymbeline.
It may be thought, perhaps, that Falstaff is not a
character to strike a child, or to be understood by
a child : no ; surely not. To me Falstaff was not
witty and wicked only irresistibly fat and funny;
and I remember lying on the ground rolling with
laughter over some of the scenes in Henry the
Fourth, the mock play, and the seven men in
buckram. But The Tempest and Cymbeline were
the plays I liked best and knew best.
Altogether I should say that in my early years
books were known to me, not as such, not for their
general contents, but for some especial image or
picture I had picked out of them and assimilated to
my own mind and mixed up with my own life. For
example out of Homer's Odyssey (lent to me by
the parish clerk) I had the picture of Nasicaa and
her maidens going down in their chariots to wash
their linen : so that when the first time I went
to the Pitti Palace, and could hardly see the
pictures through blinding tears, I saw that picture
of Rubens, which all remember who have been at
Florence, and it flashed delight and refreshment
through those remembered childish associations.
The Syrens and Polypheme left also vivid pic-
tures on my fancy. The Iliad, on the contrary ?
wearied me, except the parting of Hector and An-
dromache, in which the child, scared by its father's
140 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
dazzling helm and nodding crest, remains a vivid
image in my mind from that time.
The same parish clerk a curious fellow in his
way lent me also some religious tracts and stories,
by Hannah More. It is most certain that more
moral mischief was done to me by some of these
than by all Shakspeare's plays together. These so-
called pious tracts first introduced me to a knowledge
of the vices of vulgar life, and the excitements of a
vulgar religion, the fear of being hanged and the
fear of hell became co-existent in my mind ; and
the teaching resolved itself into this, that it was
not by being naughty, but by being found out, that
I was to incur the risk of both. My fairy world
was better !
About Religion : I was taught religion as chil-
dren used to be taught it in my younger days, and
are taught it still in some cases, I believe through
the medium of creeds and catechisms. I read the
Bible too early, and too indiscriminately, and too
irreverently. Even the New Testament was too
early placed in my hands ; too early made a lesson
book, as the custom then was. The letter of the
Scriptures the words were familiarised to me by
sermonising and dogmatising, long before I could
enter into the spirit. Meantime, happily, another
religion was growing up in my heart, which,
strangely enough, seemed to me quite apart from
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 141
that which was taught, which, indeed, I never in
any way regarded as the same which I was taught
when I stood up wearily on a Sunday to repeat the
collect and say the catechism. It was quite another
thing. Not only the taught religion and the senti-
ment of faith and adoration were never combined,
but it never for years entered into my head to com-
bine them ; the first remained extraneous, the latter
had gradually taken root in my life, even from the
moment my mother joined my little hands in prayer.
The histories out of the Bible (the Parables espe-
cially) were, however, enchanting to me, though my
interpretation of them was in some instances the
very reverse of correct or orthodox. To my infant
conception our Lord was a being who had come
down from heaven to make people good, and to tell
them beautiful stories. And though no pains were
spared to indoctrinate me, and all my pastors and
masters took it for granted that my ideas were quite
satisfactory, nothing could be more confused and
heterodox.
It is a common observation that girls of lively
talents are apt to grow pert and satirical. I fell
into this danger when about ten years old. Sallies
at the expense of certain people, ill-looking, or ill-
dressed, or ridiculous, or foolish, had been laughed
at and applauded in company, until, without being
142 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
naturally malignant, I ran some risk of becoming so
from sheer vanity.
The fables which appeal to our higher moral sym-
pathies may sometimes do as much for us as the
truths of science. So thought our Saviour when he
taught the multitude in parables.
A good clergyman who lived near us, a famous
Persian scholar, took it into his head to teach me
Persian (I was then about seven years old), and I
set to work with infinite delight and earnestness.
All I learned was soon forgotten ; but a few years
afterwards, happening to stumble on a volume of
Sir William Jones's works his Persian grammar
it revived my Orientalism, and I began to study it
eagerly. Among the exercises given was a Persian
fable or poem one of those traditions of our Lord
which are preserved in the East. The beautiful
apologue of " St. Peter and the Cherries," which
Goethe has versified or imitated, is a well known
example. This fable I allude to was something
similar, but I have not met with the original these
forty years, and must give it here from memory.
" Jesus," says the story, " arrived one evening at
the gates of a certain city, and he sent his disciples
forward to prepare supper, while he himself, intent
on doing good, walked through the streets into the
market place.
" And he saw at the corner of the market some
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 143
people gathered together looking at an object on the
ground ; and he drew near to see what it might be.
It was a dead dog, with a halter round his neck,
by which he appeared to have been dragged through
the dirt; and a viler, a more abject, a more unclean
thing, never met the eyes of man.
" And those who stood by looked on with ab-
horrence.
" e Faugh ! ' said one, stopping his nose ; ( it pol-
lutes the air.' ' How long,' said another, e shall this
foul beast offend our sight ? ' e Look at his torn
hide,' said a third ; ( one could not even cut a shoe
out of it.' ' And his ears,' said a fourth, f all drag-
gled and bleeding ! ' f No doubt,' said a fifth, ' he
hath been hanged for thieving ! '
" And Jesus heard them, and looking down com-
passionately on the dead creature, he said, ( Pearls
are not equal to the whiteness of his teeth ! '
" Then the people turned towards him with
amazement, and said among themselves, e Who is
this ? this must be Jesus of Nazareth, for only HE
could find something to pity and approve even in a
dead dog ; ' and being ashamed, they bowed their
heads before him, and went each on his way."
I can recall, at this hour, the vivid, yet softening
and pathetic impression left on my fancy by this old
Eastern story. It struck me as exquisitely humor-
ous, as well as exquisitely beautiful. It gave me
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
a pain in my conscience, for it seemed thenceforward
so easy and so vulgar to say satirical things, and so
much nobler to be benign and merciful, and I took
the lesson so home, that I was in great danger of
falling into the opposite extreme, of seeking the
beautiful even in the midst of the corrupt and the
repulsive. Pity, a large element in my compo-
sition, might have easily degenerated into weakness,
threatening to subvert hatred of evil in trying to
find excuses for it ; and whether my mind has ever
completely righted itself, I am not sure.
Educators are not always aware, I think, how acute
are the perceptions, and how permanent the memo-
ries, of children. I remember experiments tried upon
my temper and feelings, and how I was made aware
of this, by their being repeated, and, in some in-
stances, spoken of, before me. Music, to which I
was early and peculiarly sensitive, was sometimes
made the medium of these experiments. Discordant
sounds were not only hateful, but made me turn
white and cold, and sent the blood backward to my
heart; and certain tunes had a curious effect, I
cannot now account for: for though, when heard
for the first time, they had little effect, they became
intolerable by repetition ; they turned up some
hidden emotion within me too strong to be borne. It
could not have been from association, which I believe
A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD. 145
to be a principal element in the emotion excited by
music. I was too young for that. What associations
could such a baby have had with pleasure or with
pain ? Or could it be possible that associations with
some former state of existence awoke up to sound ?
That our life "hath elsewhere its beginning, and
cometh from afar," is a belief or at least an instinct,
in some minds, which music, and only music, seems
to thrill into consciousness. At this time, when I was
about five or six years old, Mrs. Arkwright she was
then Fanny Kemble used to come to our house,
and used to entrance me with her singing. I had a
sort of adoration for her, such as an ecstatic votary
might have for a Saint Cecilia. I trembled with
pleasure when I only heard her step. But her
voice ! it has charmed hundreds since; whom has
it ever moved to a more genuine passion of delight
than the little child that crept silent and tremulous
to her side ? And she was fond of me, fond of
singing to me, and, it must be confessed, fond also
of playing these experiments on me. The music of
<f Paul and Virginia " was then in vogue, and there
was one air a very simple air in that opera,
which, after the first few bars, always made me stop
my ears and rush out of the room. I became at last
aware that this was sometimes done by particular
desire to please my parents, or amuse and interest
others by the display of such vehement emotion.
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146 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
My infant conscience became perplexed between the
reality of the feeling and the exhibition of it. People
are not always aware of the injury done to children
by repeating before them things they say, or de-
scribing things they do: words and actions, spon-
taneous and unconscious, become thenceforth arti-
ficial and conscious. I can speak of the injury done
to myself, between five and eight years old. There
was some danger of my becoming a precocious actress,
danger of permanent mischief such as I have seen
done to other children, but I was saved by the
recoil of resistance and resentment excited in my
mind.
This is enough. All that has been told here
refers to a period between five and ten years old.
THE INDIAN HUNTER AND THE FIRE.
(FROM THE GERMAN.)
ONCE upon a time the lightning from heaven fell
upon a tree standing in the old primeval forest and
kindled it, so that it flamed on high. And it happened
that a young hunter, who had lost his path in that
wilderness, beheld the gleam of the flames from a
distance, and, forcing his way through the thicket, he
flung himself down in rapture before the blazing tree.
" O divine light and warmth ! " he exclaimed,
ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
stretching forth his arms. " O blessed ! O heaven-
descended Fire ! let me thank thee ! let me adore
thee ! Giver of a new existence, quickening thro'
every pulse, how lost, how cold, how dark have I
dwelt without thee ! Restorer of my life I remain
ever near me, and, through thy benign and celestial
influence, send love and joy to illuminate my soul ! "
And the Fire answered and said to him, " It is true
that my birth is from heaven, but I am now, through
mingling with earthly elements, subdued to earthly
influences ; therefore, beware how you choose me
for thy friend, without having first studied my two-
fold nature. O youth ! take heed lest what appear to
thee now a blessing, may be turned, at some future
time, to fiery pain and death." And the youth re-
plied, " No ! O no ! thou blessed Fire, this could
never be. Am I then so senseless, so inconstant, so
thankless ? O believe it not ! Let me stay near thee ;
let me be thy priest, to watch and tend thee truly.
Ofttimes in my wild wintry life, when the chill dark-
ness encompassed me, and the ice-blast lifted my hair,
have I dreamed of the soft summer breath, of the
sunshine that should light up the world within me and
the world around me. But still that time came not.
It seemed ever far, far off; and I had perished utterly
before the light and the warmth had reached me, had
it not been for thee ! "
Thus the youth poured forth his soul, and the
THE HUNTER AND THE FIRE. 149
Fire answered him in murmured tones, while her
beams with a softer radiance played over his cheek
and brow : " Be it so then. Yet do thou watch
me constantly and minister to me carefully ; neglect
me not, leave me not to myself, lest the light and
warmth in which thou so delightest fail thee sud-
denly, and there be no redress; and O watch thy-
self also ! beware lest thou too ardently stir up my
impatient fiery being ! beware lest thou heap too
much fuel upon me ; once more beware, lest, instead
of life, and love, and joy, I bring thee only death
and burning pain ! " And the youth passionately
vowed to keep her behest : and in the beginning all
went well. How often, for hours together, would
le lie gazing entranced toward the radiant beneficent
Fire, basking in her warmth, and throwing now a
leafy spray, now a fragment of dry wood, anon a
handful of odorous gums, as incense, upon the flame,
which gracefully curling and waving upwards, quiver-
ing and sparkling, seemed to whisper in return divine
oracles; or he fancied he beheld, while gazing into
the glowing depths, marvellous shapes, fairy visions
dancing and glancing along. Then he would sing to
her songs full of love, and she, responding to the
song she had herself inspired, sometimes replied, in
softest whispers, so loving and so low, that even the
jealous listening woods could not overhear ; at other
times she would shoot up suddenly in rapturous
150 ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.
splendour, like a pillar of light, and revealed to him
all the wonders and the beauties which lay around
him, hitherto veiled from his sight.
But at length, as he became accustomed to the
glory and the warmth, and nothing more was left for
the fire to bestow, or her light to reveal, then he
began to weary and to dream again of the morning,
and to long for the sun-beams ; and it was to him as
if the fire stood between him and the sun's light, and
he reproached her therefore, and he became moody
and ungrateful ; and the fire was no longer the same,
but unquiet and changeful, sometimes flickering un-
steadily, sometimes throwing out a lurid glare. And
when the youth, forgetful of his ministry, left the
flame unfed and unsustuined, so that ofttimes she
drooped and waned, and crept in dying gleams along
the damp ground, his heart would fail him with a
sudden remorse, and he would cast on the fuel with
such a rough and lavish hand that the indignant fire
hissed thereat, and burst forth in a smoky sullen
gleam, then died away again. Then the youth,
half sorrowful, half impatient, would remember how
bright, how glowing, how dazzling was the flame in
those former happy days, when it played over his
chilled and wearied limbs, and shed its warmth upon
his brow, and he desired eagerly to recall that once
inspiring glow. And he stirred up the embers vio-
lently till they burned him, and then he grew angry.
THE HUNTER AND THE FIRE.
151
and then again he wearied of all the watching and
the care which the subtle, celestial, tameless element
required at his hand : and at length, one day in a
sullen mood, he snatched up a pitcher of water from
the fountain and poured it hastily on the yet living
flame.
For one moment it arose blazing towards heaven,
shed a last gleam upon the pale brow of the youth,
and then sank down in darkness extinguished for
ever!
H 2
152 POETICAL FRAGMENTS.
PAULINA.
FEOM AN UNFINISHED TALE, 1823.
AND think'st thou that the fond o'erflowing love
I bear thee in my heart could ever be
Kepaid by careless smiles that round thee rove,
And beam on others as they beam on me ?
Oh, could I speak to thee ! could I but tell
The nameless thoughts that in my bosom swell,
And struggle for expression ! or set free
From the o'er mastering spirit's proud control
The pain that throbs in silence at my soul,
Perhaps yet no I will not sue, nor bend,
To win a heartless pity Let it end !
I have been near thee still at morn, at eve ;
Have mark'd thee in thy joy, have seen thee grieve ;
Have seen thee gay with triumph, sick with fears,
Radiant in beauty, desolate in tears :
And communed with thy heart, till I made mine
The echo and the mirror unto thine.
And I have sat and looked into thine eyes
As men on earth look to the starry skies,
That seek to read in Heaven their human destinies !
Too quickly I read mine, I knew it well,
I judg'd not of thy heart by all it gave,
But all that it withheld ; and I could tell
The very sea-mark where affection's wave
Would cease to flow, or flow to ebb again,
And knew my lavish love was pour'd in vain,
As fruitless streams o'er sandy deserts melt,
Unrecompensed, unvalued, and unfelt !
POETICAL FRAGMENTS.
153
LINES.' 1840.
TAKE me, my mother Earth, to thy cold breast,
And fold me there in everlasting rest,
The long day is o'er !
I'm weary, I would sleep
But deep, deep,
Never to waken more !
I have had joy and sorrow ; I have proved
What life could give ; have lov'd, have been belov'd
I am sick, and heart sore,
And weary, let me sleep !
But deep, deep,
Never to waken more !
To thy dark chambers, mother Earth, I come,
Prepare my dreamless bed in my last home ;
Shut down the marble door,
And leave me, let me sleep !
But deep, deep,
Never to waken more !
Now I lie down, I close my aching eyes,
If on this night another morn must rise,
Wake me not, I implore !
I only ask to sleep,
And deep, deep,
Never to waken more !
M 3
/ragmnits,
THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL.
(A PARABLE, FROM ST. JEROME.)
A CERTAIN holy anchorite had passed a long life in
a cave of the Thebaid, remote from all communion
with men ; and eschewing, as he would the gates of
Hell, even the very presence of a woman ; and he
fasted and prayed, and performed many and severe
penances ; and his whole thought was how he should
make himself of account in the sight of God, that he
might enter into his paradise.
And having lived this life for three score and ten
M 4
156 THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
years he was puffed up with the notion of his own
great virtue and sanctity, and, like to St. Anthony,
he besought the Lord to show him what saint he
should emulate as greater than himself, thinking
perhaps, in his heart, that the Lord would answer
that none was greater or holier. And the same
night the angel of God appeared to him, and said,
" If thou wouldst excel all others in virtue and
sanctity, thou must strive to be like a certain minstrel
who goes begging and singing from door to door."
And the holy man was in great astonishment, and
he arose and took his staff and ran forth in search of
this minstrel ; and when he had found him he ques-
tioned him earnestly, saying, " Tell me, I pray thee,
my brother, what good works thou hast performed
in thy lifetime, and by what prayers and penances
thou hast made thyself acceptable to God ? "
And the man, greatly wondering and ashamed to
be so questioned, hung down his head as he replied,
" I beseech thee, holy father, mock me not ! I have
performed no good works, and as to praying, alas !
sinner that I am, I am not worthy to pray. I do
nothing but go about from door to door amusing the
people with my viol and my flute."
And the holy man insisted and said, " Nay, but
peradventure in the midst of this thy evil life thou
hast done some good works?" And the minstrel
replied, ts I know of nothing good that I have done."
THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL.
157
And the hermit, wondering more and more, said,
" How hast thou become a beggar : hast thou spent
thy substance in riotous living, like most others of
thy calling ? " and the man answering, said, " Nay ;
but there was a poor woman whom I found running
hither and thither in distraction, for her husband and
her children had been sold into slavery to pay a debt.
And the woman being very fair, certain sons of
Belial pursued after her ; so I took her home to my
hut and protected her from them, and I gave her all
I possessed to redeem her family, and conducted her
in safety to the city, where she was reunited to her
husband and children. But what of that, my father ;
is there a man who would not have done the same ? "
And the hermit, hearing the minstrel speak these
words, wept bitterly, saying, " For my part, I have
not done so much good in all my life ; and yet they
call me a man of God, and thou art only a poor min-
strel!"
At Vienna, some years ago, I saw a picture by
r on Schwind, which was conceived in the spirit
of this old apologue. It exhibited the lives of two
twin brothers diverging from the cradle. One of
them, by profound study, becomes a most learned
id skilful physician, and ministers to the sick ; at-
dning to great riches and honours through his
labours and his philanthropy. The other brother,
M 4
158 THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
who lias no turn for study, becomes a poor fiddler,
and spends his life in consoling, by his music, suffer-
ings beyond the reach of the healing art. In the
end, the two brothers meet at the close of life. He
who had been fiddling through the world is sick and
worn out : his brother prescribes for him, and is seen
culling simples for his restoration, while the fiddler
touches his instrument for the solace of his kind
physician.
It is in such representations that painting did once
speak, and might again speak to the hearts of the
people.
Another version of the same thought, we find in
De Berenger's pretty ballad, " Les deux Sceurs cfe
Charite."
2.
TTTHEN I was a child, and read Milton for the first
time, his Pandemonium seemed to me a mag-
nificent place. It struck me more than his Paradise,
for that was beautiful, but Pandemonium was terrible
and beautiful too. The wondrous fabric that " from
PANDEMONIUM.
159
the earth rose like an exhalation to the sound of
dulcet symphonies and voices sweet," - - the splendid
piles of architecture sweeping line beyond line,
" Cornice and frieze with bossy sculptures graven,"
realised a certain picture of Palmyra I had once
seen, and which had taken possession of my imagina-
tion : then the throne, outshining the wealth of Ormuz
and of Ind, the flood of light streaming from "starry
lamps and blazing cressets " quite threw the flames of
perdition into the shade. As it was said of Erskine,
that he always spoke of Satan with respect, as of a
great statesman out of place, a sort of leader of the
Opposition ; so to me the grand arch-fiend was a hero,
like my then favourite Greeks and Eomans, a Cymon,
a Curtius, a Decius, devoting himself for the good of
his country ; such was the moral confusion created
in my mind. Pandemonium inspired no horror ; on
the contrary, my fancy revelled in the artistic
beauty of the creation. I felt that I should like to
go and see it ; so that, in fact, if Milton meant to
inspire abhorrence, he has failed, even to the height
of his sublimity. Dante has succeeded better.
Those who dwell with complacency on the doctrine
of eternal punishments must delight in the ferocity
and the ingenuity of his grim inventions, worthy of
a vengeful theology. Wicked latitudinarians may
shudder and shiver at the images called up gro-
tesque, abominable, hideous but then Dante him-
160 THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
self would sternly rebuke them for making their
human sympathies a measure for the judgments of
God, and compassion only a veil for treason and
rebellion :
" Chi e piu scellerato di colui
Ch' al giudicio divin passion porta ? "
"Who can show greater wickedness than he
Whose passion by the will of God is moved ? "
However, it must be said in favour of Dante's
Inferno, that no one ever wished to go there.
These be the Christian poets ! but they must
yield in depth of imagined horrors to the Christian
Fathers. Tertullian (writing in the second century)
not only sends the wicked into that dolorous region
of despair, but makes the endless measureless torture
of the doomed a part of the joys of the redeemed.
The spectacle is to give them the same sort of
delight as the heathen took in their games, and
Pandemonium is to be as a vast amphitheatre for the
amusement of the New Jerusalem. " How magni-
ficent," exclaims this pious doctor of the Church,
" will be the scale of that game ! With what
admiration, what laughter, what glee, what triumph,
shall I behold so many mighty monarchs, who had
been given out as received into the skies, moaning in
unfathomable gloom ! Persecutors of the Christians
liquefying amid shooting spires of flame ! Philoso-
phers blushing before their disciples amid those
; e
PANDEMONIUM,
ddy fires ! Then," he goes on, still alluding to the
amphitheatre, " then is the time to hear the tragedians
doubly pathetic, now that they bewail their own
agonies ! To observe actors released by the fierce-
ness of their torments from all restraints on their
gestures! Then may we admire the charioteer
glowing all over in his car of torture, and watch the
wrestlers struggling, not in the gymnasium but with
flames ! " And he asks exultingly, " What praetor,
or consul, or questor, or priest, can purchase you by
his munificence a game of triumph like this ? "
And even more terrible are the imaginations of
good Bishop Taylor, who distils the essence from all
sins, all miseries, all sorrows, all terrors, all plagues,
and mingles them in one chalice of wrath and
engeance to be held to the lips and forced down
e unwilling throats of the doomed " with violence
of devils and accursed spirits ! " Are these mere
words ? Did any one ever fancy or try to realise
hat they express ?
THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
I
WAS surprised to find this passage in one of
Southey's letters :
" A Catholic Establishment would be the best,
perhaps the only means of civilising Ireland. Jesuits
and Benedictines, though they would not enlighten
the savages, would humanise them and bring the
country into cultivation. A petition that asked for
this, saying plainly, e We are Papists, and will be so,
and this is the best thing that can be done for us and
you too,' such a petition I would support, consider-
ing what the present condition of Ireland is, how
wretchedly it has always been governed, and how
hopeless the prospect." (1805.)
Southey was thinking of what the religious orders
had done for Paraguay; whether he would have
penned the same sentiments twenty or even ten
years later, is more than doubtful,
4.
mHE old monks and penitents dirty, ugly, ema-
ciated old fellows they were ! spent their days
in speaking and preaching of their own and others'
sinfulness, yet seem to have had ever present before
them a standard of beauty, brightness, beneficence,
IMAGE WORSHIP.
163
spirations which nothing earthly could satisfy,
which made their ideas of sinfulness and misery
comparative, and their scale was graduated from
icmselves upwards. We philosophers reverse this.
We teach and preach the spiritual dignity, the lofty
ipabilities of humanity. Yet, by some mistake, we
;em to be always speculating on the amount of evil
rhich may or can be endured, and on the amount of
dckedness which may or must be tolerated ; and our
le is graduated from ourselves downwards.
<( QO long as the ancient mythology had any sepa-
^ rate establishment in the empire, the spiritual
^orship which our religion demands, and so essentially
iplies as only fitting for it, was preserved in its
mrity by means of the salutary contrast; but no
mer had the Church become completely trium-
it and exclusive, and the parallel of Pagan
idolatry totally removed, than the old constitutional
ippetite revived in all its original force, and after a
short but famous struggle with the Iconoclasts, an
image worship was established, and consecrated by
bulls and canons, which, in whatever light it is
regarded, differed in no respect but the names of its
)bjects from that which had existed for so many
164 THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
ages as the chief characteristic of the religious faith
of the Gentiles." H. Nelson Coleridge.
I think, with submission, that it differed in senti-
ment ; for in the mythology of the Pagans the wor-
ship was to beauty, immortality, and power, and in
the Christian mythology if I may call it so of
the Middle Ages, the worship was to purity, self-
denial, and charity.
6.
A NARROW half-enlightened reason may easily
H- make sport of all those forms in which re-
ligious faith has been clothed by human imagination,
and ask why they are retained, and why one should
be preferred to another ? It is sufficient to reply,
that some forms there must be if Religion is to en-
dure as a social influence, and that the forms already
in existence are the best, if they are in unison with
human sympathies, and express, with the breadth
and vagueness which every popular utterance must
from its nature possess, the interior convictions of
the general mind. What would become of the most
sacred truth if all the forms which have harboured it
were destroyed at once by an unrelenting reason,
and it were driven naked and shivering about the
earth till some clever logician had devised a suitable
abode for its reception? It is on these outward
RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES. 165
forms of religion that the spirit of artistic beauty
descends and moulds them into fitting expressions of
the invisible grace and majesty of spiritual truth."
Prospective Review, Feb. 24. 1845.
Tl AVE not Dying Christs taught fortitude to the
-L-L virtuous sufferer ? Have not Holy Families
cherished and ennobled domestic affections? The
tender genius of the Christian morality, even in its
most degenerate state, has made the Mother and her
Child the highest objects of affectionate superstition.
How much has that beautiful superstition by the
pencils of great artists contributed to humanise man-
kind ? " Sir James Mackintosh, writing in 1802.
8.
I REMEMBER once at Merton College Chapel (May,
1844), while Archdeacon Manning was preaching
an eloquent sermon on the eternity of reward and
punishment in the future life, I was looking at the
row of windows opposite, and I saw that there were
seven, all different in pattern and construction, yet
all harmonising with each other and with the build-
of which they formed a part ; a symbol they
166
THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
might have been of differences in the Church of
Christ. From the varied windows opposite I looked
down to the faces of the congregation, all upturned
to the preacher, with expression how different !
Faith, hope, fear, in the open mouths and expanded
eyelids of some ; a sort of silent protest in the com-
pressed lips and knitted brows of others ; a specula-
tive inquiry and interest, or merely admiring acqui-
escence in others ; as the high or low, the wide or
contracted head prevailed ; and all this diversity in
organisation, in habits of thought, in expression, har-
monised for the time by one predominant object, one
feeling! the hungry sheep looking up to be fed!
When I sigh over apparent disagreement, let me
think of those windows in Merton College Chapel,
and the same light from heaven streaming through
them all! and of that assemblage of human faces,
uplifted with the same aspiration one and all !
Q
j HAVE just read the article (by Sterling, I believe)
-L in the " Edinburgh Review " for Jnlv : anc
Edinburgh Review " for July ; and
RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES. 167
as it chanced, this same evening, Dr. Channing's
" Discourse on the Church," and Captain Macono-
chie's " Report on Secondary Punishments " from
Sydney, came before me.
And as I laid them down, one after another, this
thought struck me : that about the same time, in
three different and far divided regions of the globe,
three men, one military, the other an ecclesiastic, the
third a lawyer, and belonging apparently to different
religious denominations, all gave utterance to nearly
the same sentiments in regard to a Christian Church.
Channing says, " A church destined to endure
through all ages, to act on all, to blend itself with
new forms of society, and with the highest improve-
ments of the race, cannot be expected to ordain an
immutable mode of administration, but must leave its
modes of worship and communion to conform them-
ves silently and gradually to the wants and pro-
gress of humanity. The rites and arrangements
which suit one period lose their significance or effici-
ency in another ; the forms which minister to the
d now may fetter it hereafter, and must give
place to its free unfolding," &c., and more to the
me purpose.
The reviewer says, " We believe that in the
dgment of an enlightened charity, many Christian
ieties who are accustomed to denounce each others'
rrors, will at length come to be regarded as members
V>HV '
min"
168 THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
in common of one great and comprehensive Church,
in which diversity of forms are harmonised by an all-
pervading unity of spirit." And more to the same
purpose. The soldier and reformer says, " I believe
there may be error because there must be imper-
fection in the religious faith of the best among us ;
but that the degree of this error is not vital in any
Christian denomination seems demonstrable by the
best fruits of faith good works being evidenced
by all."
It is pleasant to see benign spirits divided in
opinion, but harmonised by faith, thus standing hand
in hand upon a shore of peace, and looking out to-
gether in serene hope for the dawning of a better
day, instead of rushing forth, each with his own
farthing candle, under pretence of illuminating the
world every one even more intent on putting out
his neighbour's light than on guarding his own.
(Nov. 15. 1841.)
WHILE the idea of possible harmony in the uni-
versal Church of Christ (by which I mean all who
accept His teaching and are glad to bear His name)
is gaining ground theoretically, practically it seems
more and more distant; since 1841 (when the above
was written) the divergence is greater than ever ;
and, as in politics, moderate opinions appear (since
1848) to merge on either side into the extremes of
EXPANSIVE CHRISTIANITY.
169
ultra conservatism and ultra radicalism, as fear of
the past or hope of the future predominate, so it is
in the Church. The sort of dualism which prevails
in politics and religion might give some colour to
Lord Lindsay's theory of " progress through an-
tagonism."
i
10.
INCLINE to agree with those who think it a great
mistake to consider the present conditions or
conception of Christianity as complete and final :
like the human soul to which it was fitted by Divine
love and wisdom, it has an immeasurable capacity of
development, and " The Lord hath more truth yet
break forth out of his Holy Word."
11.
THE nations of the present age want not less re-
ligion, but more. They do not wish for less com-
N 2
170 THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
munity with the Apostolic times, but for more ; but
above all, they want their wounds healed by a
Christianity showing a life-renewing vitality allied
to reason and conscience, and ready and able to
reform the social relations of life, beginning with the
domestic and culminating with the political. They
want no negations, but positive reconstruction no
conventionality, but an honest bond fide foundation,
deep as the human mind, and a structure free and
organic as nature. In the meantime let no national
form be urged as identical with divine truth, let no
dogmatic formula oppress conscience and reason, and
let no corporation of priests, no set of dogmatists,
sow discord and hatred in the sacred communities of
domestic and national life. This view cannot be ob-
tained without national efforts, Christian education,
free institutions, and social reforms. Then no zeal
will be called Christian which is not hallowed by
charity, no faith Christian which is not sanctioned
by reason." Hippolitus.
" Any author who in our time treats theological
and ecclesiastical subjects frankly, and therefore with
reference to the problems of the age, must expect to
be ignored, and if that cannot be done, abused and
reviled."
The same is true of moral subjects on which strong
prejudices (or shall I say strong convictions ?) exist in
minds not very strong.
EXPANSIVE CHRISTIANITY.
171
It is not perhaps of so much consequence what we
believe, as it is important that we believe ; that we
do not affect to believe, and so belie our own souls.
Belief is not always in our power, but truth is.
12.
IT seems an arbitrary limitation of the design of
Christianity to assume, as Priestley does, that " it
consists solely in the revelation of a future life con-
firmed by the bodily resurrection of Christ." This
is truly a very material view of Christianity. If I
were to be sure of annihilation I should not be less
certain of the truth of Christianity as a system of
morals exquisitely adapted for the improvement and
happiness of man as an individual ; and equally
)ted to conduce to the amelioration and progres-
sive happiness of mankind as a species.
N 3
172 THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
NOTES FROM VARIOUS SERMONS,
MADE OK THE SPOT;
SHOWING SOME THINGS IN WHICH ALL GOOD MEN ARE AGREED.
I.
From a Roman Catholic Sermon.
TTTHEN travelling in Ireland, I- stayed over one
' Sunday in a certain town in the north, am
rambled out early in the morning. It was cold am
wet, the streets empty and quiet, but the sound o
voices drew me in one direction, down a court where
was a Roman Catholic chapel. It was so crowdec
that many of the congregation stood round the door
I remarked among them a number of soldiers anc
most miserable-looking women. All made way for
me with true national courtesy, and I entered at the
moment the priest was finishing mass, and about to
begin his sermon. There was no pulpit, and he
AN IRISH SERMON. 173
on the step of the altar; a fine-looking man,
dth a bright face, a sonorous voice, and a very
strong Irish accent. His text was from Matt. v.
13, 44.
He began by explaining what Christ really meant
)y the words " Love thy neighbour." Then drew a
picture in contrast of hatred and dissension, com-
mencing with dissension in families, between kin-
I, and between husband and wife. Then made a
lost touching appeal in behalf of children brought
ip in an atmosphere of contention where no love is.
" God help them ! God pity them ! small chance for
them of being either good or happy ! for their young
hearts are saddened and soured with strife, and they
eat their bread in bitterness ! "
Then he preached patience to the wives, indul-
gence to the husbands, and denounced scolds and
quarrelsome women in a manner that seemed to
glance at recent events : " When ye are found in the
streets vilifying and slandering one another, ay, and
fighting and tearing each other's hair, do ye think
ye're women ? no, ye're not ! ye're devils incarnate,
and ye'll go where the devils will be fit companions
for ye ! " &c. (Here some women near me, with
long black hair streaming down, fell upon their
knees, sobbing with contrition.) He then went on,
in the same strain of homely eloquence, to the evils
of political and religious hatred, and quoted the
N 4
174
THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
text, "If it be possible, as much as lieth in you,
live peaceably with all men." " I'm a Catholic," he
went on, " and I believe in the truth of my own
religion above all others. I'm convinced, by long
study and observation, it's the best that is ; but
what then ? Do ye think I hate my neighbour be-
cause he thinks differently ? Do ye think I mane to
force my religion down other people's throats ? If I
were to preach such uncharity to ye, my people,
you wouldn't listen to me, ye oughtn't to listen to
me. Did Jesus Christ force His religion down other
people's throats ? Not He ! He endured all, He was
kind to all, even to the wicked Jews that afterwards
crucified Him." " If you say you can't love your
neighbour because he's your enemy, and has injured
you, what does that mane? ( ye can't! ye can't!' as
if that excuse will serve God ? hav'n't ye done more
and worse against Him? and didn't He send His
only Son into the world to redeem ye? My good
people, you're all sprung from one stock, all sons of
Adam, all related to one another. When God
created Eve, mightn't He have made her out of any
thing, a stock or a stone, or out of nothing at all,
at all ? but He took one of Adam's ribs and moulded
her out of that, and gave her to him, just to show
that we're all from one original, all related together,
men and women, Catholics and Protestants, Jews
and Turks and Christians ; all bone of one bone, and
AN IRISH SERMON. 175
flesh of one flesh ! " He then insisted and demon-
strated that all the miseries of life, all the sorrows
and mistakes of men, women, and children ; and, in
particular, all the disasters of Ireland, the bankrupt
landlords, the religious dissensions, the fights do-
mestic and political, the rich without thought for the
poor, and the poor without food or work, all arose
from nothing but the want of love. "Down on
your knees," he exclaimed, " and ask God's mercy
and pardon; and as ye hope to find it, ask pardon
one of another for every angry word ye have spoken,
for every uncharitable thought that has come into
your minds ; and if any man or woman have aught
against his neighbour, no matter what, let it be
plucked out of his heart before he laves this place,
let it be forgotten at the door of this chapel. Let
me, your pastor, have no more rason to be ashamed
of you ; as if I were set over wild bastes, instead of
Christian men and women ! "
After more in this fervid strain, which I cannot
recollect, he gave his blessing in the same earnest
heartfelt manner. I never saw a congregation more
attentive, more reverent, and apparently more touched
id edified. (1848.)
176 THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
II.
From another Roman Catholic Sermon, delivered in
the private chapel of a Nobleman.
mms Discourse was preached on the festival of
-*- St. John the Baptist, and was a summary of his
doctrine, life, and character. The text was taken
from St. Luke, iii. 9. to 14. ; in which St. John
answers the question of the people, " what shall we
do then?" by a brief exposition of their several
duties.
" What is most remarkable in all this," said the
priest, " is truly that there is nothing very remark-
able in it. The Baptist required from his hearers
very simple and very familiar duties, such as he
was not the first to preach, such as had been re-
cognised as duties by all religions ; and do you think
that those who were neither Jews nor Christians
were therefore left without any religion ? No ! never
did God leave any of his creatures without religion ;
they could not utter the words right, wrong, beau-
tiful, hateful, without recognising a religion written
by God on their hearts from the beginning a
religion which existed before the preaching of John,
before the coming of Christ, and of which the appear-
ance of John and the doctrine and sacrifice of Christ,
were but the fulfilment. For Christ came to fulfil
the law, not to destroy it. Do you ask what law?
ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST. 177
Tot the law of Moses, but the universal law of God's
loral truth written in our hearts. It is, my friends,
folly to talk of natural religion as of something
Ferent from revealed religion.
" The great proof of the truth of John's mission
lies in its comprehensiveness : men and women, ar-
tisans and soldiers, the rich and the poor, the young
and the old, gathered to him in the wilderness;
and he included all in his teaching, for he was
sent to all; and the best proof of the truth of his
teaching lies in its harmony with that law already
written in the heart and the conscience of men.
When Christ came afterwards, he preached a doctrine
more sublime, with a more authoritative voice ; but
here, also, the best proof we have of the truth of
that divine teaching lies in this that he had pre-
pared from the beginning the heart and the con-
science of man to harmonise with it."
This was a very curious sermon; quiet, elegant,
and learned, with a good deal of sacred and profane
history introduced in illustration, which I am sorry
I cannot remember in detail. It made, however, no
appeal to feeling or to practice ; and after listening
to it, we all went in to luncheon and discussed our
newspapers.
178 THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
HI.
Fragments of a Sermon (Anglican Church).
Text, Luke iv., from the 14th to the 18th, but more
especially the 18th verse. This sermon was extempore.
fTlHE preacher began by observing, that our Lord's
* sermon at Nazareth established the second of two
principles. By his sermon from the Mount, in which
he had addressed the multitude in the open air, under
the vault of the blue heaven alone, he has left to us
the principle that all places are fitted for the service
of God, and that all places may be sanctified by the
preaching of his truth. While, by his sermon in the
Synagogue (that which is recorded by St. Luke in
this passage), he has established the principle, that it
is right to set apart a place to assemble together in
worship and to listen to instruction; and it is ob-
servable that on this occasion our Saviour taught in
the synagogue, where there was no sacrifice, no
ministry of the priests, as in the Temple ; but where
a portion of the law and the prophets might be read
by any man ; and any man, even a stranger (as he
was himself), might be called upon to expound.
Then reading impressively the whole of the nar-
rative down to the 32nd verse, the preacher closed
the sacred volume, and went on to this effect :
AN ENGLISH SERMON.
" There are two orders of evil in the world Sin
and Crime. Of the second, the world takes strict
cognisance ; of the first, it takes comparatively little ;
yet that is worse in the eyes of God. There are two
orders of temptation: the temptation which assails
our lower nature our appetites; the temptation
which assails our higher nature our intellect. The
first, leading to sin in the body, is punished in the
body, the consequence being pain, disease, death.
The second, leading to sins of the soul, as pride
chiefly, uncharitableness, selfish sacrifice of others to
our own interests or purposes, is punished in the
soul in the HELL OF THE SPIRIT."
(All this part of his discourse very beautiful,
earnest, eloquent; but I regretted that he did not
follow out the distinction he began with between sin
and crime, and the views and deductions, religious
and moral, which that distinction leads to.)
He continued to this effect : " Christ said that it
was a part of his mission to heal the broken-hearted.
What is meant by the phrase ' a broken heart ? ' " He
illustrated it by the story of Eli, and by the wife of
Phineas, both of whom died broken in heart ; " and
our Saviour himself died on the cross heart-broken
by sorrow rather than by physical torture."
(I lost something here because I was questioning
and doubting within myself, for I have always had
the thought that Christ must have been glad to die.)
180 THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
He went on: "To heal the broken-hearted is
to say to those who are beset by the remembrance
and the misery of sin, 'My brother, the past is
past think not of it to thy perdition; arise and
sin no more.'" (All this, and more to the same
purpose, wonderfully beautiful! and I became all
soul subdued to listen.) " There are two ways of
meeting the pressure of misery and heart-break:
first, by trusting to time " (then followed a quotation
from Schiller's " Wallenstein," in reference to grief,
which sounded strange, and yet beautiful, from the
pulpit, " Was verschmerzte nicht der Mensch ? "
what cannot man grieve down?); "secondly, by
defiance and resistance, setting oneself resolutely to
endure. But Christ taught a different way from
either by submission by the complete surrender
of our whole being to the will of God.
"The next part of Christ's mission was to preach
deliverance to the captives." (Then followed a most
eloquent and beautiful exposition of Christian free-
dom of who were free; and who were not free, but
properly spiritual captives.) " To be content within
limitations is freedom ; to desire beyond those limit-
ations is bondage. The bird which is content within
her cage is free ; the bird which can fly from tree to
tree, yet desires to soar like the eagle, the eagle
which can ascend to the mountain peak yet desires
to reach the height of that sun on which his eye is
SOLOMON AND THE QUEEN OP SHEBA. 181
fixed, these are in bondage. The man who is not
content within his sphere of duties and powers, but
feels his faculties, his position, his profession ; a per-
petual trammel, he is spiritually in bondage. The
only freedom is the freedom of the soul, content
within its external limitations, and yet elevated spi-
ritually far above them by the inward powers and
impulses which lift it up to God."
IV.
Recollections of another Church of England Sermon
preached extempore.
The text was taken from Matt. xii. 42. : " The Queen of
the South shall rise up in the judgment with this gene-
ration, and shall condemn it" &c.
THE preacher began by drawing that distinction
between knowledge and wisdom which so many
comprehend and allow, and so few apply. He then
described the two parties in the great question of
popular education. Those who would base all human
progress on secular instruction, on knowledge in
contradistinction to ignorance, as on light opposed to
darkness ; and the mistake of those who, taking the
contrary extreme, denounce all secular instruction
imparted to the poor as dangerous, or contemn it as
less. The error of those who sneer at the triumph
THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
of intellect he termed a species of idiocy ; and the
error of those who do not see the insufficiency of
knowledge, blind presumption. Then he contrasted
worldly wisdom, and spiritual; with a flow of gor-
geous eloquence he enlarged on the picture of worldly
wisdom as exhibited in the character of Solomon, and
of intellect, and admiration for intellect, in the cha-
racter of the Queen of Sheba. " In what consisted
the wisdom of Solomon? He made, as the sacred
history assures us, three thousand proverbs, mostly
prudential maxims relating to conduct in life ; the
use and abuse of riches ; prosperity and adversity.
His acquirements in natural philosophy seem to
have been confined to the appearances of material
and visible things ; the herbs and trees, the beasts
and birds, the creeping things and fishes. His
political wisdom consisted in increasing his wealth, his
dominions, and the number of his subjects and cities.
On his temple he lavished all that art had then
accomplished, and on his own house a world of riches
in gold, and silver, and precious things : but all was
done for his own glory nothing for the improvement
or the happiness of his people, who were ground
down by taxes, suffered in the midst of all his mag-
nificence, and remained ignorant in spite of all his
knowledge. Witness the wars, tyrannies, miseries,
delusions, and idolatries which followed after his
death."
SOLOMON AND THE QUEEN OF SHEBA. 183
But the Queen of Sheba came not from the
uttermost parts of the earth to view the magnificence
and wonder at the greatness of the King, she came
to hear his wisdom. She came not to ask anything
from him, but to prove him with hard questions.
No idea of worldly gain, or selfish ambition was
in her thoughts ; she paid even for the pleasure of
hearing his wise sayings by rare and costly gifts."
" Knowledge is power ; but he who worships
knowledge not for its own sake, but for the power it
brings, worships power. Knowledge is riches; but
he who worships knowledge for the sake of all it
bestows, worships riches. The Queen of Sheba
worshipped knowledge solely for its own sake ; and
the truths which she sought from the lips of Solomon
she sought for truth's sake. She gave, all she could
give, in return, the spicy products of her own land,
treasures of pure gold, and blessings warm from her
heart. The man who makes a voyage to the anti-
podes only to behold the constellation of the Southern
Cross, the man who sails to the North to see how the
magnet trembles and varies, these love knowledge
for its own sake, and are impelled by the same en-
thusiasm as the Queen of Sheba." He went on to
analyse the character of Solomon, and did not treat
him, I thought, with much reverence either as sage
or prophet. He remarked that, (e of the thousand
songs of Solomon one only survives, and that both
184 THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
in this song and in his proverbs his meaning has
often been mistaken ; it is supposed to be spiritual,
and is interpreted symbolically, when in fact the
plain, obvious, material significance is the true one."
He continued to this effect, but with a power
of language and illustration which I cannot render.
" We see in Solomon's own description of his do-
minion, his glory, his wealth, his fame, what his
boasted wisdom achieved ; what it could, and what it
could not do for him. What was the end of all his
magnificence? of his worship of the beautiful? of
his intellectual triumphs? of his political subtlety?
of his ships, and his commerce, and his chariots, and
his horses, and his fame which reached to the ends
of the earth? All as it is related ended in fee-
bleness, in scepticism, in disbelief of happiness, in
sensualism, idolatry, and dotage ! The whole ' Book
of Ecclesiastes,' fine as it is, presents a picture of
selfishness and epicurism. This was the King of
the Jews ! the King of those that know ! (21 maestro
di color chi sanno.) Solomon is a type of worldly
wisdom, of desire of knowledge for the sake of all
that knowledge can give. We imitate him when
we would base the happiness of a people on know-
ledge. When we have commanded the sun to be
our painter, and the lightning to run on our errands,
what reward have we ? Not the increase of happi-
SOLOMON AND THE QUEEN OF SHEBA. 185
ness, nor the increase of goodness ; nor what is
next to both our faith in both."
" It would seem profane to contrast Solomon and
Christ had not our Saviour himself placed that
contrast distinctly before us. He consecrated the
comparison by applying it 4 Behold a greater than
Solomon is here.' In quoting these words we do
not presume to bring into comparison the two
natures, but the two intellects the two aspects
of truth. Solomon described the external world ;
Christ taught the moral law. Solomon illustrated
the aspects of nature ; Christ helped the aspirations
of the spirit. Solomon left as a legacy the saying
that * in much wisdom there is much grief; ' and
Christ preached to us the lowly wisdom which can
consecrate grief; making it lead to the elevation of
our whole being and to ultimate happiness. The
two majesties the two kings how different! Not
till we are old, and have suffered, and have laid
our experience to heart, do we feel the immeasurable
distance between the teaching of Christ and the
teaching of Solomon ! "
Then returning to the Queen of Sheba, he treated
the character as the type of the intellectual woman.
He contrasted her rather favourably with Solomon.
He described with picturesque felicity, her long and
toilsome journey to see, to admire, the man whose
isdom had made him renowned; the mixture of
o 2
THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
enthusiasm and humility which prompted her desire
to learn, to prove the truth of what rumour had
conveyed to her, to commune with him of all that
was in her heart. And she returned to her own
country rich in wise sayings. But did the final
result of all this glory and knowledge reach her
there? and did it shake her faith in him she had
bowed to as the wisest of kings and men ?
He then contrasted the character of the Queen of
Sheba with that of Mary, the mother of our Lord,
that feminine type of holiness, of tenderness, of long-
suffering ; of sinless purity in womanhood, wifehood,
and motherhood : and rising to more than usual ]
eloquence and power, he prophesied the regeneration <
of all human communities through the social eleva- J
tion, the intellect, the purity, and the devotion of \
Woman.
THE BODY, A TEMPLE. 187
V.
r rom a Sermon (apparently extempore) by a Dissent-
ing Minister.
T
HE ascetics of the old times seem to have had a
belief that all sin was in the body ; that the spirit
belonged to God, and the body to his adversary the
devil ; and that to contemn, ill-treat, and degrade by
every means this frame of ours, so wonderfully, so
fearfully, so exquisitely made, was to please the
Being who made it ; and who, for gracious ends, no
doubt, rendered it capable of such admirable de-
velopment of strength and beauty. Miserable mis-
take !
To some, this body is as a prison from which we
are to rejoice to escape by any permitted means : to
others, it is as a palace to be luxuriously kept up and
decorated within and without. But what says Paul
(Cor. vi. 19.), "Know ye not that your body is
the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which
e have from God, and which is not your own ? "
Surely not less than a temple is that form which
the Divine Redeemer took upon him, and deigned,
for a season, to inhabit ; which he consecrated by his
life, sanctified by his death, glorified by his trans-
figuration, hallowed and beautified by his resur-
rection !
o 3
THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
It is because they do not recognise this body as a
temple, built up by God's intelligence, as a fitting
sanctuary for the immortal Spirit, and this life equally
with any other form of life as dedicate to Him, that
men fall into such opposite extremes of sin : the
spiritual sin which contemns the body, and the sen-
sual sin which misuses it.
VI.
WHEN I was at Boston I made the acquaintance
of Father Taylor, the founder of the Sailors
Home in that city. He was considered as the apostle
of the seamen, and I was full of veneration for him a
the enthusiastic teacher and philanthropist. But i
is not of his virtues or his labours that I wish to
speak. He struck me in another way, as a poet
he was a born poet. Until he was five-and-twenty
he had never learned to read, and his reading after
wards was confined to such books as aided him in
his ministry. He remained an illiterate man to the
last, but his mind was teeming with spontaneou
FATHER TAYLOR.
lagery, allusion, metaphor. One might almost say
him,
" He could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope ! "
ese images and allusions had a freshness, an origi-
ality, and sometimes an oddity that was quite start-
ling, and they were generally, but not always, bor-
Rwed from his former profession that of a sailor.
One day we met him in the street. He told us
a melancholy voice that he had been burying a
child, and alluded almost with emotion to the great
number of infants he had buried lately. Then after
a pause, striking his stick on the ground and looking
upwards, he added, " There must be something wrong
somewhere ! there's a storm brewing, when the doves
are all flying aloft ! "
One evening in conversation with me, he compared
the English and the Americans to Jacob's vine, which,
planted on one side of the wall, grew over it and
hung its boughs and clusters on the other side, " but
it is still the same vine, nourished from the same
root!"
On one occasion when I attended his chapel, the
sermon was preceded by a long prayer in behalf of
an afflicted family, one of whose members had died
o 4
190 THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
or been lost in a whaling expedition to the South
Seas. In the midst of much that was exquisitely
pathetic and poetical, refined ears were startled by
such a sentence as this, " Grant, O Lord ! that this
rod of chastisement be sanctified, every twig of it, to
the edification of their souls ! "
Then immediately afterwards he prayed that the
Divine Comforter might be near the bereaved father
" when his aged heart went forth from his bosom to
flutter round the far southern grave of his boy ! "
Praying for others of the same family who were on
the wide ocean, he exclaimed, stretching forth his
arms, " O save them ! O guard them ! thou angel
of the deep ! "
On another occasion, speaking of the insufficiency
of the moral principles without religious feelings, he
exclaimed, " Go heat your ovens with snowballs !
What! shall I send you to heaven with such an
icicle in your pocket ? I might as well put a mill-
stone round your neck to teach you to swim ! "
He was preaching against violence and cruelty :
" Don't talk to me," said he, fe of the savages ! a
ruffian in the midst of Christendom is the savage of
savages. He is as a man freezing in the sun's heat,
groping in the sun's light, a straggler in paradise, an
alien in heaven ! "
FATHER TAYLOR. 191
In his chapel all the principal seats in front of the
mlpit and down the centre aisle were filled by the
lors. We ladies, and gentlemen, and strangers,
curiosity had brought to hear him, were ranged
>n each side ; he would on no account allow us to
ike the best places. On one occasion, as he was de-
louncing hypocrisy, luxury, and vanity, and other
dees of more civilised life, he said emphatically, (( I
lon't mean you before me here," looking at the sailors ;
I believe you are wicked enough, but honest fel-
>ws in some sort, for you profess less, not more,
lan you practise ; but I mean to touch starboard and
larboard there ! " stretching out both hands with
the forefinger extended, and looking at us on either
side till we quailed.
He compared the love of God in sending Christ
upon earth to that of the father of a seaman who
sends his eldest and most beloved son, the hope of
the family, to bring back the younger one, lost on his
voyage, and missing when his ship returned to port.
Alluding to the carelessness of Christians, he used
the figure of a mariner, steering into port through a
narrow dangerous channel, " false lights here, rocks
there, shifting sand banks on one side, breakers on
the other ; and who, instead of fixing his attention to
keep the head of his vessel right, and to obey the
instructions of the pilot as he sings out from the
192 THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
wheel, throws the pilot overboard, lashes down the
helm, and walks the deck whistling, with his hands
in the pockets of his jacket." Here, suiting the action
to the word, he put on a true sailor-like look of de-
fiant jollity ; changed in a moment to an expres-
sion of horror as he added, " See ! See ! she drifts
to destruction ! "
One Sunday he attempted to give to his sailor con-
gregation an idea of Redemption. He began with an
eloquent description of a terrific storm at sea, rising
to fury through all its gradations ; then, amid the
waves, a vessel is seen labouring in distress and
driving on a lee shore. The masts bend and break,
and go overboard ; the sails are rent, the helm un-
shipped, they spring a leak ! the vessel begins to fill,
the water gains on them ; she sinks deeper, deeper,
deeper I deeper ! He bent over the pulpit repeating
the last words again and again ; his voice became low
and hollow. The faces of the sailors as they gazed
up at him with their mouths wide open, and their
eyes fixed, I shall never forget. Suddenly stopping,
and looking to the farthest end of the chapel as into
space, he exclaimed, with a piercing cry of exultation,
" A life boat ! a life boat ! " Then looking down
upon his congregation, most of whom had sprung to
their feet in an ecstasy of suspense, he said in a deep
impressive tone, and extending his arms, " Christ is
that lifeboat!"
HELIGION AND SCIENCE.
vir.
RELIGION AND SCIENCE.
" IT is true, that science has not made Nature as
expressive of God in the first instance, or to the be-
ginner in religion, as it was in earlier times. Science
reveals a rigid, immutable order ; and this to common
minds looks much like self-subsistence, and does not
manifest intelligence, which is full of life, variety,
and progressive operation. Men, in the days of
their ignorance, saw an immediate Divinity accom-
plishing an immediate purpose, or expressing an im-
mediate feeling, in every sudden, striking change of
nature in a storm, the flight of a bird, &c. ; and
Nature, thus interpreted, became the sign of a pre-
sent, deeply interested Deity. Science undoubtedly
brings vast aids, but it is to prepared minds, to those
who have begun in another school. The greatest aid
it yields consists in the revelation it makes of the
Infinite. It aids us not so much by showing us
marks of design in this or that particular thing as by
showing the Infinite in the finite. Science does this
Ice when it unfolds to us the unity of the universe,
o 6
104
THEOLOGICAL FRAGMENTS.
which thus becomes the sign, the efflux of one un-
bounded intelligence, when it reveals to us in every
work of Nature infinite connections, the influences of
all-pervading laws when it shows us in each created
thing unfathomable, unsearchable depths, to which
our intelligence is altogether unequal. Thus Nature
explored by science is a witness of the Infinite. It
is also a witness to the same truth by its beauty ; for
what is so undefined, so mysterious as beauty ? "
Dr. Charming.
frnm Inuks,
A GREAT advantage is derived from the occasional
practice of reading together, for each person
selects different beauties and starts different objec-
tions: while the same passage perhaps awakens in each
mind a different train of associated ideas, or raises
different images for the purposes of illustration."
Francis Homer.
/"VEST ainsi que je poursuis la communication de
^ quelque esprit fameux, non afin qu'il m'enseigne
mais afin que je le connaisse, et que le connaissant,
s'il le faut, je Pimite." Montaigne.
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
DR. ARNOLD.
T SAT up till half-past two this morning reading
Dr. Arnold's " Life and Letters," and have iny
soul full of him to-day.
On the whole I cannot say that the perusal of this
admirable book has changed any notion in my mind,
or added greatly to my stock of ideas. There was
no height of inspiration, or eloquence, or power, to
which I looked up; no profound depth of thought
or feeling into which I looked down ; no new lights ;
no new guides ; no absolutely new aspects of things
human or spiritual.
On the other hand, I never read a book of the
kind with a more harmonious sense of pleasure and
approbation, if the word be not from me pre-
sumptuous. While I read page after page, the
mind which was unfolded before me seemed to me a
brother's mind the spirit, a kindred spirit. It was
the improved, the elevated, the enlarged, the en-
riched, the every-way superior reflection of my own
intelligence, but it was certainly that. I felt it so
DR. ARNOLD. 199
from beginning to end. Exactly the reverse was the
feeling with which I laid down the Life and Letters
of Southey. I was instructed, amused, interested;
I profited and admired ; but with the man Southey
I had no sympathies : my mind stood off from his ;
the poetical intellect attracted, the material of the
character repelled me. I liked the embroidery, but
the texture was disagreeable, repugnant. Now with
regard to Dr. Arnold, my entire sympathy with
the character, with the material of the character, did
not extend to all its manifestations. I liked the tex-
ture better than the embroidery ; perhaps, because
of my feminine organisation.
Nor did my admiration of the intellect extend to
the acceptance of all the opinions which emanated
from it; perhaps because from the manner these
were enunciated, or merely touched upon (in letters
chiefly), I did not comprehend clearly the reasoning
on which they may have been founded. Perhaps, if
I had done so, I must have respected them more,
perhaps have been convinced by them ; so large, so
candid, so rich in knowledge, and apparently so
logical, was the mind which admitted them.
And yet this excellent, admirable man, seems to
have feared God, in the common-place sense of the
word fear. He considered the Jews as out of the pale
of equality ; he was against their political emancipation
from a hatred of Judaism. He subscribed to the
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
Athanasian Creed, which stuck even in George the
Third's orthodox throat. He believed in what Cole-
ridge could not admit, in the existence of the spirit
of evil as a person. He had an idea that the Church
of God may be destroyed by an Antichrist ; he speaks
of such a consummation as possible, as probable,
as impending ; as if any institution really from God
could be destroyed by an adverse power ! and he
thought that a lawyer could not be a Christian.
/CERTAIN passages filled me with astonishment as
V coming from a churchman, particularly what he
says of the sacraments (vol. ii. pp. 75. 113.) ; and in
another place, where he speaks of u the pestilent dis-
tinction between clergy and laity ;" and where he says,
"I hold that one form of Church government is exactly
as much according to Christ's will as another." And
in another place he speaks of the Anglican Church
(with reference to Henry VIII. as its father, and
Elizabeth as its foster-mother), as " the child of regal
and aristocratical selfishness and unprincipled tyranny,
who has never dared to speak boldly to the great,
but has contented herself with lecturing the poor ; "
but he forgot at the moment the trial of the bishops
in James's time, and their noble stand against regal
authority.
DR. ARNOLD. SECTARIANISM. 201
5,
TTTITH regard to conservatism (vol. ii. pp. 1 9. 62.),
he seems to mean as I understand the whole
passage, that it is a good instinct but a bad principle.
Yet as a principle is it, as he says, " always wrong ? "
Though as the adversary of progress, it must be
always wrong, yet as the adversary of change it may
be sometimes right.
HE remarks that most of those who are above
sectarianism are in general indifferent to Chris-
tianity, while almost all who profess to value Chris-
tianity seem, when they are brought to the test, to
care only for their own sect. " Now," he adds, " it
is manifest to me, that all our education must be
Christian, and not be sectarian." Yet the whole aim
of education up to this time has been, in this country,
eminently sectarian, and every statesman who has at-
tempted to place it on a broader basis has been either
wrecked or stranded.
ft All sects," he says in another place, " have had
among them marks of Christ's Catholic Church in the
graces of his Spirit and the confession of his name,"
and he seems to wish that some one would compile a
book showing side by side what professors of all sects
have done for the good of Christ's Church, the
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
martyrdoms, the missionary labours of Catholics,
Protestants, Arians, &c. ; " a grand field," he calls
it, and so it were; but it lies fallow up to this
time.
m HE philosophy of medicine, I imagine, is at zero ;
* our practice is empirical, and seems hardly more
than a course of guessing, more or less happy." In
another place (vol. ii. p. 72.), he says, " yet I honour
medicine as the most beneficent of all professions."
TTE says (vol. ii. p. 42.), " Narrow-mindedness tends
to wickedness, because it does not extend its
watchfulness to every part of our moral nature/'
" Thus, a man may have one or more virtues, such
as are according to his favourite ideas, in great per-
fection ; and still be nothing, because these ideas are
his idols, and, worshipping them with all his heart,
there is a portion of his heart, more or less con-
siderable, left without its proper object, guide, anc
nourishment ; and so this portion is left to the
dominion of evil," &c.
(One might ask how, if a man worship these ideas
with all his heart, a portion could be left ? but the
sense is so excellent, I cannot quarrel with a slight
inaccuracy in the expression. I never quite under-
DR. ARNOLD. CONSCIENCE. 203
stood before why it is difficult to subscribe to the
truth of the phrase " He is a good but a narrow-
minded man," but felt the incompatibility.)
9.
TTE says " the word useful implies the idea of good
robbed of its nobleness." Is this true ? the useful
is the yood applied to practical purposes; it need not,
therefore, be less noble. The nobleness lies in the
spirit in which it is so applied.
10.
TVENTHAMTSM (what is it ?), Puritanism, Judaism,
how he hates them! I suppose, because he
fears God and fi ars for the Church of God. Hatred
of all kinds seems to originate in fear.
11.
TTTHAT he says of conscience, very remarkable !
" Men get embarrassed by the common cases
of a misguided conscience : but a compass may be out
of order as well as a conscience ; and you can trace
the deranging influence on the latter quite as surely
as on the former. The needle may point due south
if you hold a powerful magnet in that direction ; still
the compass, generally speaking, is a true and sure
guide," &c. ; and then he adds, " he who believes his
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
conscience to be God's law, by obeying it obeys
God."
I think there would be much to say about all this
passage relating to conscience, nor am I sure that I
quite understand it. Derangement of the intellect
is madness ; is not derangement of the conscience
also madness ? might it not be induced, as we bring
on a morbid state of the other faculties, by over use
and abuse ? by giving it more than its due share of
power in the commonwealth of the mind ? It should
preside, not tyrannise; rule, not exercise a petty
cramping despotism. A healthy courageous con-
science gives to the powers, instincts, impulses, fair
play ; and having once settled the order of govern-
ment with a strong hand, is not always meddling
though always watchful.
Then again, how is conscience " God's law ? "
Conscience is not the law, but the interpreter of the
law ; it does not teach the difference between right
and wrong, it only impels us to do what we believe
to be right, and smites us when we think we have
been wrong. How is it that many have done wrong,
and every day do wrong for conscience' sake ? and
does that sanctify the wrong in the eyes of God, as
well as in those of John Huss ? *
* " Sancta Simplicitas!" was the exclamation of Huss to the
woman who, when he was burned at the stake, in her religious zeal
brought a faggot to light the pile.
DR. ARNOLD. COLERIDGE. 205
12.
" T)RAYER,," he says, " and kindly intercourse with
the poor, are the two great safeguards of
spiritual life its more than food and raiment."
True ; but there is something higher than this fed
and clothed spiritual life ; something more difficult,
yet less conscious.
13.
IN allusion to Coleridge, he says very truly, that
the power of contemplation becomes diseased
and perverted when it is the main employment of
life. But to the same great intellect he does beau-
tiful justice in another passage. " Coleridge seemed
to me to love truth really, and, therefore, truth pre-
sented herself to him, not negatively, as she does
to many minds, who can see that the objections
against her are unfounded, and therefore that she is
to be received ; but she filled him, as it were, heart
and mind, imbuing him with her very self, so that
all his being comprehended her fully, and loved her
ardently ; and that seems to me to be true wisdom."
14.
TTERY fine is a passage wherein he speaks against
meeting what is wrong and bad with negatives^
with merely proving the wrong to be wrong, and the
false to be false, without substituting for either the
positively good and true.
206 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
15.
HE contrasts as the two forms of the present danger
to the Church and to society, the prevalent
epicurean atheism, and the lying and formal spirit of
priestcraft. He seems to have had an impression that
the Church of God may be " utterly destroyed " (?),
or, he asks, " must we look forward for centuries to
come to the mere alternations of infidelity and super-
stition, scepticism, and Newmanism?" It is very
curious to see two such men as Arnold and Carlyle
both overwhelmed with a terror of the magnitude of
the mischiefs they see impending over us. They are
oppressed with the anticipation of evil as with a sense
of personal calamity. Something alike, perhaps, in
the temperaments of these two extraordinary men ;
large conscientiousness, large destructiveness, and
small hope : there was great mutual sympathy and
admiration,
16.
"TT ERY admirable what he says in favour of compre-
* hensive reading, against exclusive reading in one
line of study. He says, "Preserve proportion in
your reading, keep your view of men and things ex-
tensive, and depend upon it a mixed knowledge is
not a superficial one ; as far as it goes the views that
it gives are true ; but he who reads deeply in one
class of writers only, gets views which are almost
DR. ARNOLD. -HIS VIEWS ON BEAUTY. 207
sure to be perverted, and which are not only narrow
but false:'
17.
A LL his descriptions of natural scenery and beauty
jf*- show his intense sensibility to them, but nowhere
is there a trace of the love or the comprehension
of art, as the reflection from the mind of man
of the nature and the beauty he so loved. Thus,
after dwelling on a scene of exquisite natural
beauty, he says, " Much more beautiful, because
made truly after God's own image, are the forms and
colours of kind, and wise, and holy thoughts, words,
and actions ; " that is to say although he knew not
or made not the application ART, in the high
sense of the word, for that is the embodying in beau-
tiful hues and forms, what is kind, wise, and holy ;
in one word good. In fact, he says himself, art,
physical science, and natural history, were not in-
cluded within the reach of his mind; the first for
want of taste, the second for want of time, and the
lird for want of inclination.
18.
E says, " The whole subject of the brute creation
is to me one of such painful mystery, that I dare
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
not approach it." This is very striking from such a
man. How deep, consciously or unconsciously, does
this feeling lie in many minds !
Bayle had already termed the acts, motives, and
feelings of the lower order of animals, "un des
plus profonds abimes sur quoi not re raison peut
s'exerciser."
There is nothing, as I have sometimes thought, in
which men so blindly sin as in their appreciation and
treatment of the whole lower order of creatures. It
is affirmed that love and mercy towards animals are
not inculcated by any direct precept of Christianity,
but surely they are included in its spirit; yet it has
been remarked that cruelty towards animals is far
more common in Western Christendom than in the
East. With the Mahometan and Brahminical races
humanity to animals, and the sacredness of life in all
its forms, is much more of a religious principle than
among ourselves.
Bacon, in his " Advancement of Learning," does
not think it beneath his philosophy to point out as a
part of human morals, and a condition of human im-
provement, justice and mercy to the lower animals
" the extension of a noble and excellent principle of
compassion to the creatures subject to man." " The
Turks," he says, " though a cruel and sanguinary
nation both in descent and discipline, give alms to
brutes, and suffer them not to be tortured."
DR. ARNOLD. ANIMAL LIFE. 209
It should seem as if the primitive Christians, by
laying so much stress upon a future life in con-
tradistinction to this life, and placing the lower
creatures out of the pale of hope, placed them at the
same time out of the pale of sympathy, and thus laid
the foundation for this utter disregard of animals in
the light of our fellow creatures. The definition of
virtue among the early Christians was the same as
Paley's that it was good performed for the sake of
ensuring everlasting happiness which of course
excluded all the so-called brute creatures. Kind,
loving, submissive, conscientious, much enduring, we
know them to be ; but because we deprive them of
all stake in the future, because they have no selfish
calculated aim, these are not virtues ; yet if we say
" a vicious horse," why not say a virtuous horse ?
The following passage, bearing curiously enough
on the most abstruse part of the question, I found in
Hallam's Literature of the Middle Ages : " Few,"
he says, " at present, who believe in the imma-
teriality of the human soul, would deny the same to
an elephant; but it must be owned that the dis-
coveries of zoology have pushed this to consequences
which some might not readily adopt. The spiritual
being of a sponge revolts a little our prejudices; yet
there is no resting-place, and we must admit this, or
be content to sink ourselves into a mass of medullary
|>re. Brutes have been as slowly emancipated in
210 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
philosophy as some classes of mankind have been in
civil polity ; their souls, we see, were almost uni-
versally disputed to them at the end of the seven-
teenth century, even by those who did not absolutely
bring them down to machinery. Even within the
recollection of many, it was common to deny them
any kind of reasoning faculty, and to solve their
most sagacious actions by the vague word instinct.
We have come of late years to think better of our
humble companions ; and, as usual in similar cases,
the preponderant bias seems rather too much of a
levelling character."
When natural philosophers speak of "the higher
reason and more limited instincts of man," as com-
pared with animals, do they mean savage man or
cultivated man? In the savage man the instincts
have a power, a range, a certitude, like those of
animals. As the mental faculties become expanded
and refined the instincts become subordinate. In
tame animals are the instincts as strong as in wild
animals ? Can we not, by a process of training, sub-
stitute an entirely different set of motives and
habits ?
Why, in managing animals, do men in general
make brutes of themselves to address what is most
brute in the lower creature, as if it had not been
demonstrated that in using our higher faculties, our
reason and benevolence, we develop sympathetically
DR. ARNOLD. ANIMAL LIFE. 211
higher powers in them, and in subduing them through
what is best within us, raise them and bring them
nearer to ourselves ?
In general the more we can gather of facts, the
nearer we are to the elucidation of theoretic truth.
But with regard to animals, the multiplication of
facts only increases our difficulties and puts us to
confusion.
" Can we otherwise explain animal instincts than
by supposing that the Deity himself is virtually the
active and present moving principle within them?
If we deny them soul, we must admit that they have
some spirit direct from God, what we call unerring
instinct, which holds the place of it." This is the
opinion which Newton adopts. Then are we to
infer that the reason of man removes him further
from God than the animals, since we cannot offend
God in our instincts, only in our reason ? and that
the superiority of the human animal lies in the power
of sinning ? Terrible power ! terrible privilege ! out
of which we deduce the law of progress and the
necessity for a future life.
The following passage bearing on the subject is
from Bentham :
(f The day may come when the rest of the animal
creation may acquire those rights which never could
have been withholden from them but by the hand of
tyranny. It may come one day to be recognised
212 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or
the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons insuf-
ficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice
of a tormentor. What else is it that should trace
the insuperable line ? is it the faculty of reason, or,
perhaps, the faculty of discourse ? But a full-grown
horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational as
well as a more conversable animal than an infant of
a day, a week, or even a month old. But suppose
the case were otherwise, what w^ould it avail ? The
question is not, ' can they reason ? ' nor ( can they
speak ? ' but ' can they suffer ? ' "
I do not remember ever to have heard the kind
and just treatment of animals enforced upon Chris-
tian principles or made the subject of a sermon.
19.
ONCE, when I was at Vienna, there was a dread
of hydrophobia, and orders were given to
massacre all the dogs which were found unclaimed
DR. ARNOLD. ANIMAL LIFE. 213
>r uncollared in the city or suburbs. Men were em-
ployed for this purpose, and they generally carried
a short heavy stick, with they flung at the poor
proscribed animal with such certain aim as either
to kill or maim it mortally at one blow. It
happened one day that, close to the edge of the river,
near the Ferdinand's-Briicke, one of these men
flung his stick at a wretched dog, but with such bad
aim that it fell into the river. The poor animal,
following his instinct or his teaching, immediately
plunged in, redeemed the stick, and laid it down at
the feet of its owner, who, snatching it up, dashed
out the creature's brains.
I wonder what the Athenians would have done to
such a man? they who banished the judge of the
Areopagus because he flung away the bird which
had sought shelter in his bosom?
20.
RETUKN to Dr. Arnold. He laments the neglect
of our cathedrals and the absurd confusion in
so many men's minds " between what is really
I
214 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
Popery, and what is but wisdom and beauty adopted
by the Roman Catholics and neglected by us."
21.
HE says, " Then, only, can opportunities of evil
be taken from us, when we lose also all op-
portunity of doing or becoming good." An obvious,
even common place thought, well and tersely ex-
pressed. The inextricable co-relation and apparent
antagonism of good and evil were never more
strongly put.
22.
mHE defeat of Yarus by the Germans, and the de-
feat of the moors by Charles Martel, he ranked
as the two most important battles in the history of
the world. I see why. The first, because it de-
cided whether the north of Europe was to be com-
pletely Latinised ; the second, because it decided
whether all Europe was to be completely Ma-
homedanised.
23.
" TTOW can he who labours hard for his daily
bread hardly and with doubtful success
be made wise and good, and therefore how can
he be made happy ? This question undoubtedly the
Church was meant to solve ; for Christ's kingdom
was to undo the evil of Adam's sin ; but the Church
DR. ARNOLD. SCHOOL LIFE. 215
has not solved it nor attempted to do so, and no one
else has gone about it rightly. How shall the poor
man find time to be educated ? "
This question, which " the Church has not yet
solved," men have now set their wits to solve for
themselves.
24.
WHEN in Italy he writes: "It is almost awful
to look at the beauty which surrounds me and
then think of moral evil. It seems as if heaven and
hell, instead of being separated by a great gulf from
us and from each other, were close at hand and on
each other's confines."
(( Might but the sense of moral evil be as strong
in me as is my delight in external beauty ! "
A prayer I echo, Amen ! if by the sense he mean
the abhorrence of it; otherwise, to be perpetually
haunted with the perception of moral evil were
dreadful ; yet, on the other hand, I am half ashamed
sometimes of a conscious shrinking within myself
from the sense of moral evil, merely as I should
shrink from external filth and deformity, as hateful
to perception and recollection, rather than as hateful
to God and subversive of goodness.
25.
TTERE is a very striking passage. He says, " A
great school is very trying ; it never can pre-
216 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
sent images of rest and peace ; and when the spring
and activity of youth are altogether unsanctified by
anything pure and elevated in its desires, it becomes
a spectacle that is dizzying and almost more morally
distressing than the shouts and gambols of a set of
lunatics. It is very startling to see so much of sin
combined with so little of sorrow. In a parish,
amongst the poor, whatever of sin exists there is sure
also to be enough of suffering : poverty, sickness, and
old age are mighty tamers and chastisers. But, with
boys of the richer classes, one sees nothing but
plenty, health, and youth ; and these are really awful
to behold, when one must feel that they are un-
blessed. On the other hand, few things are more
beautiful than when one does see all holy and noble
thoughts and principles, not the forced growth of
pain, or infirmity, or privation, but springing up as
by God's immediate planting, in a sort of garden of
all that is fresh and beautiful ; full of so much hope
for this world as well as for heaven."
To this testimony of a schoolmaster let us add the
testimony of a schoolboy. De Quincey thus describes
in himself the transition from boyhood to manhood :
" Then first and suddenly were brought powerfully
before me the change which was worked in the
aspects of society by the presence of woman ; woman,
pure, thoughtful, noble, coming before me as Pandora
crowned with perfections. Right over against this
.
DR. ARNOLD. SCHOOL LIFE. 217
ennobling spectacle, with equal suddenness, I placed
the odious spectacle of schoolboy society no matter
in what region of the earth, schoolboy society, so
frivolous in the matter of its disputes, often so
brutal in the manner ; so childish and yet so remote
from simplicity; so foolishly careless, and yet so
revoltingly selfish ; dedicated ostensibly to learning,
and yet beyond any section of human beings so con-
spicuously ignorant."
There is a reverse to this picture, as I hope and
believe. If I have met with those who looked back
on their school-days with horror, as having first con-
taminated them with " evil communication," I have
met with others whose remembrances were all of
sunshine, of early friendships, of joyous sports.
Nor do I think that a large school composed
wholly of girls is in any respect better. In the low
languid tone of mind, the petulant tempers, the
small spitefuln esses, the cowardly concealments, the
compressed or ill-directed energies, the precocious
vanities and affectations, many such congregations of
Femmelettes would form a worthy pendant to the pic-
ture of boyish turbulence and vulgarity drawn by
De Quincey.
I am convinced from my own recollections, and
rom all I have learned from experienced teachers in
large schools, that one of the most fatal mistakes in
the training of children has been the too early sepa-
218 NOTES PROM BOOKS.
ration of the sexes. I say, has been, because I find
that everywhere this most dangerous prejudice has
been giving way before the light of truth and a more
general acquaintance with that primal law of nature,
which ought to teach us that the more we can assimi-
late on a large scale the public to the domestic train-
ing, the better for all. There exists still, the im-
pression in the higher classes especially that in
early education, the mixture of the two sexes would
tend to make the girls masculine and the boys effe-
minate, but experience shows us that it is all the
other way. Boys learn a manly and protecting ten-
derness, and the girls become at once more feminine
and more truthful. Where this association has
begun early enough, that is, before five years old,
and has been continued till about ten or twelve, it
has uniformly worked well; on this point the evi-
dence is unanimous and decisive. So long ago as
1812, Francis Horner, in describing a school he
visited at Enmore, near Bridgewater, speaks with
approbation of the boys and the girls standing up
together in the same class : it is the first mention, I
find, of this innovation on the old collegiate, or
charity-school plan, itself a continuation of the
monkish discipline. He says, "1 liked much the
placing the boys and girls together at an early age ;
it gave the boys a new spur to emulation." When
I have seen a class of girls stand up together, there
DR. ARNOLD. SCHOOL LIFE. 219
has been a sort of empty tittering, a vacancy in the
faces, an inertness, which made it, as I thought, very
up-hill work for the teacher ; so when it was a class
of boys, there has been often a sluggishness a ten-
dency to ruffian tricks requiring perpetual effort on
the part of the master. In teaching a class of boys
and girls, accustomed to stand up together, there is
little or nothing of this. They are brighter, readier,
better behaved ; there is a kind of mutual influence
working for good ; and if there be emulation, it is
not mingled with envy or jealousy. Mischief, such
as might be apprehended, is in this case far less
likely to arise than where boys and girls, habitually
separated from infancy, are first thrown together,
just at the age when the feelings are first awakened
and the association has all the excitement of novelty.
A very intelligent schoolmaster assured me that he
had had more trouble with a class of fifty boys, than
with a school of three hundred boys and girls to-
gether (in the midst of whom I found him) ; and that
there were no inconveniences resulting which a wise
and careful and efficient superintendence could not
control. " There is," said he, " not only more emu-
lation, more quickness of brain, but altogether a
superior healthiness of tone, body and mind, where
the boys and girls are trained together till about ten
years old; and it extends into their after life: I
should say because it is in accordance with the laws
220 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
of God in fo nning us with mutual sympathies, moral
and intellectual, and mutual dependence for help
from the very beginning of life."
What is curious enough, I find many people
fathers, mothers, teachers, who are agreed that in
the schools for the lower classes, the two sexes may
be safely and advantageously associated, yet have a
sort of horror of the idea of such an innovation in
schools for the higher classes. One would like to
know the reason for such a distinction, instead of
being encountered, as is usual, by a sneer or a vile
innuendo.
NIEBUHB.
LIFE AND LETTERS, 1852.
1
26.
N a letter to a young student in philology there are
noble passages in which I truly sympathise. He
NIEBUHR. 221
says, among other things : " I wish you had less
pleasure in satires, not excepting those of Horace.
Turn to the works which elevate the heart, in which
you contemplate great men and great events, and
live in a higher world. Turn away from those which
represent the mean and contemptible side of ordinary
circumstances and degenerate days : they are not
suitable for the young, who in ancient times would
not have been suffered to have them in their hands.
Homer, JEschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, these are
the poets for youth." And again : " Do not read
the ancient authors in order to make esthetic reflec-
tions on them, but in order to drink in their spirit
and to fill your soul with their thoughts; and in
order to gain that by reading which you would have
gained by reverently listening to the discourses of
great men."
We should turn to works of art with the same
feeling.
On the whole, all my own educational experience
has shown me the dangerous in some cases fatal
effects on the childish intellect, where precocious
criticism was encouraged, and where caricatures and
ugly disproportioned figures, expressing vile or ridi-
culous emotions, were placed before the eyes of
children, as a means of amusement.
If I were a legislator I would forbid travesties and
I" ^iculous burlesques of Shakspeare's finest and most
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
serious dramas to be acted in our theatres. That
this has been done and recently (as in the case of the
Merchant of Yenice) seems to me a national disgrace.
27.
IT is strange, confounding, to hear Niebuhr speak
thus of Goethe :
"I am inclined to think that Goethe is utterly
destitute of susceptibility to impressions from the fine
arts." (! !) He afterwards does more justice to Goethe
certainly one of the profoundest critics in art who
ever lived ; although I am inclined to think that
his was an educated perception rather than a natural
sensibility. Niebuhr's criticism on Goethe's Italian
travels, on Goethe's want of sympathy with the
people, his regarding the whole country and nation
simply as a sort of bazaar of art and antiquities,
an exhibition of beauty and a recreation for himself:
his habit of surveying all moral and intellectual great-
ness, all that speaks to the heart, with a kind of
patronising superiority, as if created for his use,
and finding amusement in the folly, degeneracy, and
corruption of the people ; all this appears to me
admirable, and so far I had strong sympathy with
Niebuhr ; for I well remember that in reading
Goethe's " Italianische Reise," I had the same per-
ception of the artless and the superficial in point
of feeling, in the midst of so much that was fine and
NIEBUHR. 223
valuable in criticism. It is well to be artistic in art,
but not to walk about the world en artiste, studying
humanity, and the deepest human interests, as if they
were art.
Niebuhr afterwards says, in speaking of Rome,
" I am sickened here of art, as I should be of sweet-
meats instead of bread." So it must be where art is
separated wholly from morals.
28.
HE speaks of the " wretched superstition," and the
" utter incapacity for piety " in the people of
the Roman States.
Superstition and the want of piety go together ;
and the combination is not peculiar to the Italians,
nor to the Roman Catholic faith.
29.
IN speaking of the education of his son, he de-
precates the learning by rote of hymns. " To a
happy child, hymns deploring the misery of human
life are without meaning." (And worse.) " So like-
wise to a good child are those expressing self-accu-
sation and contrition." (He might have added, and
self-applause.)
I am quite sure, from my own experience of
children who have been allowed to learn penitential
Q 3
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
psalms and hymns, that they think of wickedness as
a sort of thing which gives them self-importance.
so.
/~\NLY what the mind takes in willingly can it
^ assimilate with itself, and make its own, part
of its life."
A truism of the greatest value in education ; but
who thinks of it when cramming children's minds
with all sorts of distasteful heterogeneous things?
31.
TTTHEN reflection has become too one-sided and
too domineering over a deeply feeling heart,
it is apt to lead us into errors in our treatment of
others."
And all that follows very wise ! for the want of
this reflection leaves us stranded and wrecked through
feeling and perception merely.
32.
YTERY curious and interesting, as a trait of cha-
racter and feeling, is the passage in which he
represents himself, in the dangerous confinement of
his second wife, as praying to his first wife for
succour. (( In my terrible anxiety," he says, " I
prayed most earnestly, and entreated my Milly, too,
for help. I comforted Gretchen by telling her that
Milly would send help. When she was at the worst,
NIEBUHR.
she sighed out, ( Ah, cannot your Amelia send me a
blessing ? ' "
This is curious from a Protestant and a philo-
sopher. It shows that there may be something
nearly allied to our common nature in the Roman
Catholic invocation to the saints, and to the souls of
the dead.
33.
NIEBUHR, speaking of a lady (Madame von der
Kecke, I think, the " Elise " of Goethe) who
had patronised him, says, "I will receive roses
and myrtles from female hands, but no laurels."
This makes one smile ; for most of the laurels
which Niebuhr will receive in this country will be
through female hands through the admirable trans-
lation and arrangement of his life and letters by
Susanna Winkworth.
34.
HRHE following I read with cordial agreement:
"While I am ready to adopt any well-
grounded opinion " (regarding, I suppose, mere facts,
or speculations as to things), "my inmost soul re-
volts against receiving the judgment of others re-
specting persons ; and whenever I have done so I
have bitterly repented of it."
H
35.
says, " I cannot worship the abstraction of
Virtue. She only charms me when she ad-
Q 4
226
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
dresses herself to my heart, and speaks thus the love
from which she springs. I really love nothing but
what actually exists."
What does actually exist to us but that which we
believe in ? and where we strongly love do we not
believe sometimes in the unreal f is it not then the
existing and the actual to us ?
36.
" 4 FACULTY of a quite peculiar kind, and for which
** we have no word, is the recognition of the
incomprehensible. It is something which distin-
guishes the seer from the ordinary learned man."
But in religion this is faith. Does Niebuhr admit
this kind of faith, " the recognition of the incompre-
hensible," in philosophy, and not in religion ? for he
often complains of the want in himself of any faith
but an historic faith.
37.
TN times of good fortune it is easy to appear
-*- great nay, even to act greatly; but in
misfortune very difficult. The greatest man will
commit blunders in misfortune, because the want of
proportion between his means and his ends pro-
gressively increases, and his inward strength is
exhausted in fruitless efforts."
This is true ; but under all extremes of good or
NIEBUHR. 227
evil fortune we are apt to commit mistakes, because
the tide of the mind does not flow equally, but rushes
along impetuously in a flood, or brokenly and dis-
tractedly in a rocky channel, where its strength is
exhausted in conflict and pain. The extreme pressure
of circumstances will produce extremes of feeling in
minds of a sensitive rather than a firm cast.
38.
T\HIS next passage is curious as a scholar's opinion
of " free trade" in the year 1810 ; though I believe
the phrase "free trade" was not even invented at
that time certainly not in use in the statesman's
vocabulary.
" I presume you will admit that commerce is a
good thing, and the first requisite in the life of any
nation. It appears to me, that this much has now
been palpably demonstrated, namely, that an advanced
and complicated social condition like this in which we
live can only be maintained by establishing mutual
relationships between the most remote nations ; and
that the limitation of commerce would, like the
sapping of a main pillar, inevitably occasion the fall
of the whole edifice ; and also that commerce is so
essentially beneficial and in accordance with man's
nature, that the well-being of each nation is an
advantage to all the nations that stand in connection
with it."
2-28 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
It is strange how long we have been (forty years,
and more) in recognising these simple principles ;
and in Germany, where they were first enunciated,
they are not recognised yet.
CHARACTER OF DEMADES.
(FROM NIEBUHB'S LECTUEES.)
T\Y his wit and his talent, and more especially by
-*-* his gift as an improvisatore, he rose so high that
he exercised a great influence upon the people, and
sometimes was more popular even than Demosthe-
nes. "With a shamelessness amounting to honesty,
he bluntly told the people everything he felt and what
all the populace felt with him. When hearing such
a man the populace felt at their ease: he gave
them the feeling that they might be wicked without
being disgraced, and this excites with such people a
feeling of gratitude. There is a remarkable passage
in Plato, where he shows that those who deliver
hollow speeches, without being in earnest, have no
power or influence ; whereas others, who are devoid
of mental culture, but say in a straightforward
CHARACTER OF DEMADES. 229
manner what they think and feel, exercise great
power. It was this which in the eighteenth century
gave the materialist philosophy in France such enor-
mous influence with the higher classes ; for they were
told there was no need to be ashamed of the vul-
garest sensuality ; formerly people had been ashamed,
but now a man learned that he might be a brutal
sensualist, provided he did not offend against elegant
manners and social conventionalism. People rejoiced
at hearing a man openly and honestly say what they
themselves felt. Demades was a remarkable charac-
ter. He was not a bad man ; and I like him much
better than Eschines."
What an excuse, what a sanction is here for the
demagogues who direct the worst passions of men
to the worst and the most selfish purposes, and the
most debasing consequences ! Demades " not a bad
man ? " then what is a bad man ?
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
LORD BACON.
(1849.)
40.
ft TT was not the pure knowledge of nature and
universality, but it was the proud knowledge
of good and evil, with an intent in man to give the
law unto himself, which was the form of the first
temptation."
But, in this sense, the first temptation is only the
type of the perpetual and ever-present temptation
the temptation into which we are to fall through
necessity, that we may rise through love.
41.
TJERE is an excellent passage a severe comment-
L ary on the unsound, unchristian, ^philosophi-
cal distinction between morals and politics in govern-
ment :
LORD BACON. 231
" Although men bred in learning are perhaps to
seek in points of convenience and reasons of state
and accommodations for the present, yet, on the
other hand, to recompense this they are perfect in
those same plain grounds of religion, justice, honour,
and moral virtue which, if they be well and watch-
fully pursued, there will be seldom use of those other
expedients, no more than of physic in a sound, well-
directed body."
42.
fi 1V[O W ( m the time of Lord Bacon, that is,) now
J- 1 sciences are delivered to be believed and ac-
cepted, and not to be farther discovered ; and there-
fore, sciences stand at a clog, and have done for many
ages.''
In the present time, this is true only, or especially,
of theology as an art, and divinity as a science ;
so made by the schoolmen of former ages, and not
yet emancipated.
43.
ri ENERALLY he perceived in men of devout simpli-
^ city this opinion, that the secrets of nature
were the secrets of God, part of that glory into which
man is not to press too boldly."
God has placed no limits to the exercise of the
intellect he has given us on this side of the grave.
232 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
But not the less will he keep his own secrets from
us. Has he not proved it? who has opened that
door to the knowledge of a future being which it
has pleased him to keep shut fast, though watched
by hope and by faith ?
44.
mHE Christian philosophy of these latter times
appears to be foreshadowed in the following
sentence, where he speaks of such as have ventured
to deduce and confirm the truth of the Christian
religion from the principles and authorities of philo-
sophers : " Thus with great pomp and solemnity
celebrating the intermarriage of faith and sense as a
lawful conjunction, and soothing the minds of men
with a pleasing variety of matter, thoughj at the same
time, rashly and unequally intermixing things divine
and things human."
This last common-place distinction seems to me,
however, unworthy of Bacon. It should be banished
utterly set aside. Things which are divine should
be human, and things which are human, divine ; not
as a mixture, " a medley," in the sense of Bacon's
words, but an interfusion ; for nothing that we
esteem divine can be anything to us but as we make
it ours, i. e. humanise it ; and our humanity were a
poor thing but for " the divinity that stirs within
us." We do injury to our own nature we miscon-
LOED BACON.
ceive our relations to the Creator, to his universe,
and to each other, so long as we separate and stu-
diously keep wide apart the divine and the human.
45.
ft T ET no man, upon a weak conceit of sobriety or
" an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain
that a man can search too far or be too well studied
either in the book of God's word or the book of God's
works." Well advised ! But then he goes on to
warn men that they do not (t unwisely mingle or
confound their learnings together :" mischievous this
contradistinction between God's word and God's
works ; since both, if emanating from him, must be
equally true. And if there be one truth, then, to
borrow his own words in another place, " the voice
of nature will consent, whether the voice of man do
so or not."
46.
A PROPOS to education here is a good illustration :
P- <( Were it not better for a man in a fair room to
set up one great light or branching candlestick of
lights, than to go about with a rushlight into every
dark corner ? "
And here is another : " It is one thing to set
forth what ground lieth unmanured, and another to
correct ill husbandry in that which is manured."
23 1 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
47.
ff TT is without all controversy that learning doth
make the minds of men gentle and generous,
amiable, and pliant to government, whereas ignorance
maketh them churlish, thwarting, and mutinous."
48.
N impatience of doubt and an unadvised haste to
assertion without due and mature suspension
of the judgment, is an error in the conduct of the
understanding."
" In contemplation, if a man begin with certainties
he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to
begin with doubts he shall end in certainties." Well
said and profoundly true.
This is a celebrated and often- cited passage ; an
admitted principle in theory. I wish it were oftener
applied in practice, more especially in education.
For it seems to me that in teaching children we
ought not to be perpetually dogmatising. We ought
not to be ever placing before them only the known
and the definite ; but to allow the unknown, the
uncertain, the indefinite, to be suggested to their
minds : it would do more for the growth of a truly
religious feeling than all the catechisms of scien-
tific facts and creeds of theological definitions that
ever were taught in cut and dried question and
LOED BACON. 235
answer. Why should not the young candid mind
be allowed to reflect on the unknown, as such?
on the doubtful, as such open to inquiry and
liable to discussion ? Why will teachers suppose that
in confessing their own ignorance or admitting un-
certainties they must diminish the respect of their
pupils, or their faith in truth ? I should say from my
own experience that the effect is just the reverse.
I remember, when a child, hearing a very cele-
brated man profess his ignorance on some particular
subject, and I felt awe-struck it gave me a per-
ception of the infinite, as when looking up at the
starry sky. What we unadvisedly cram into a child's
mind in the same form it has taken in our own, does
not always healthily or immediately assimilate ; it
dissolves away in doubts, or it hardens into prejudice,
instead of mingling with the life as truth ought to
do. It is the early and habitual surrendering of the
mind to authority, which makes it afterwards so
ready for deception of all kinds.
49.
TT E speaks of " legends and narrations of miracles
wrought by martyrs, hermits, monks, which,
though they have had passage for a time by the ig-
norance of the people, the superstitious simplicity
of some, and the politic toleration of others, holding
them but as divine poesies ; yet after a time they
IR
236 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
grew up to be esteemed but as old wives' fables, to
the great scandal and detriment of religion."
Very ambiguous, surely. Does he mean that it
was to the great scandal and detriment of religion
that they existed at all? or that they came to be
regarded as old wives' fables ?
50.
HE says, farther on, " though truth and error are
carefully to be separated, yet rarities and re-
ports that seem incredible are not to be suppressed
or denied to the memory of men."
" For it is not yet known in what cases and how
far effects attributed to superstition do participate
of natural causes."
51.
mo be speculative with another man to the end
* to know how to work him or wind him, pro-
ceedeth from a heart that is double and cloven, and
not entire and ingenuous ; which, as in friendship, it
is a want of integrity, so towards princes or superiors
it is a want of duty" (No occasion, surely, for the
distinction here drawn; inasmuch as the want of
integrity involves the want of every duty.)
Then he speaks of " the stooping to points of ne-
cessity and convenience and outward basenesses," as to
be accounted " submission to the occasion, not to the
LORD BACON. 237
person." Vile distinction ! an excuse to himself for
his dedication to the King, and his flattery of Carr
and Yilliers.
52.
OUR English Universities are only now beginning
to show some sign (reluctant sign) of submitting
to that re- examination which the great philosopher
recommended two hundred and fifty years ago, when
he says : " Inasmuch as most of the usages and
orders of the universities were derived from more
obscure times, it is the more requisite they be re-
examined " and more to the same purpose.
53.
TF that great Workmaster (God) had been of a
J- human disposition, he would have cast the
stars into some pleasant and beautiful works and
orders like the frets in the roofs of houses ; whereas,
one can scarce find a posture in square or triangle
or straight line amongst such an infinite number, so
differing an harmony there is between the spirit of
man and the spirit of nature."
Perhaps if our human vision could be removed to
a sufficient distance to contemplate the whole of
what we now see in part, what appears disorder
might appear beautiful order. The stars which now
appear as if flung about at random, would perhaps be
R 2
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
resolved into some exquisitely beautiful and regular
edifice. The fly on the cornice, " whose feeble ray
scarce spreads an inch around," might as well dis-
cuss the proportions of the Parthenon as we the
true figure and frame of God's universe.
I remember seeing, through Lord Rosse's telescope,
one of those nebula which have hitherto appeared
like small masses of vapour floating about in space.
I saw it composed of thousands upon thousands of
brilliant stars, and the effect to the eye to mine at
least was as if I had had my hand full of diamonds,
and suddenly unclosing it, and flinging them forth,
they were dispersed as from a centre, in a kind of
partly irregular, partly fan-like form ; and I had a
strange feeling of suspense and amazement while
I looked, because they did not change their relative
position, did not fall though in act to fall but
seemed fixed in the very attitude of being flung forth
into space ; it was most wondrous and beautiful
to see !
LORD BACON.
54.
IT is pleasant to me to think that Bacon's
stupendous intellect believed in the moral pro-
gress of human societies, because it is my own belief,
and one that I would not for worlds resign. I indeed
believe that each human being must here (or here-
after ?) work out his own peculiar moral life : but
also that the whole race has a progressive moral life :
just as in our solar system every individual planet
moves in its own orbit, while the whole system
moves on together ; we know not whither, we know
not round what centre " ma pur si muove ! "
55.
YET he says in another place, with equal wit and
sublimity, " Every obtaining of a desire hath a
show of advancement, as motion in a circle hath a
show of progression." Perhaps our movement may
be spiral ? and every revolution may bring us nearer
and nearer to some divine centre in which we may
be absorbed at last ?
56.
HE refers in this following passage to that theory
of the angelic existences which we see ex-
pressed in ancient symbolic Art, first by variation of
colour only, and later, by variety of expression and
240 NOTES FEOM BOOKS.
form. He says, " We find, as far as credit is to
be given to the celestial hierarchy of that supposed
Dionysius, the senator of Athens, that the first place
or degree is given to the Angels of Love, which are
called Seraphim ; the second to the Angels of Light,
which are termed Cherubim ; and the third, and so
following, to Thrones, Principalities, and the rest
(which are all angels of power and ministry) ; so as
the angels of knowledge and illumination are placed
before the angels of office and domination."
But the Angels of LOVE are first and over all.
In other words, we have here in due order of pre-
cedence, 1. LOVE, 2. KNOWLEDGE, 3. POWER, the
angelic Trinity, which, in unity, is our idea of GOD.
CHATEAUBRIAND.
(" MEMOIEES D'OTJTRE TOMBE." 1851.)
57.
HATEAUBRIAND tells us that when his mother and
sisters urged him to marry, he resisted strongly
CHATEAUBRIAND.
he thought it too early ; he says, with a peculiar
iivete, " Je ne me sentais aucune qualite de mari :
toutes mes illusions etaient vivantes, rien n'etait
epuise en moi, 1'energie meme de mon existence
avait double par mes courses," &c.
So then the (f existence epuise " is to be kept for
the wife ! ff la vie usee " " la jeunesse abusee" is
good enough to make a husband! Chateaubriand,
who in many passages of his book piques himself on
his morality, seems quite unconscious that he has
here given utterance to a sentiment the most pro-
foundly immoral, the most fatal to both sexes, that
even his immoral age had ever the effrontery to set
forth.
58.
ff TL parait qu'on n'apprend pas a mourir en tuant
-*- les autres."
Nor do we learn to suffer by inflicting pain :
nothing so patient as pity.
59.
T E cynisme des moeurs ramene dans la societe, en
" annihilant le sens moral, une sorte de barbares ;
ces barbares de la civilisation, propres a detruire
comme les Goths, n'ont pas la puissance de fonder
comme eux ; ceux-ci etaient les enormes enfants
d'une nature vierge ; ceux-la sont les avortons mon-
strueux d'une nature depravee."
R 4
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
We too often make the vulgar mistake that
undisciplined or overgrown passions are a sign of
strength ;, they are the signs of immaturity, of
*' enormous childhood." And the distinction (above)
is well drawn and true. The real savage is that
monstrous, malignant, abject thing, generated out of
the rottenness and ferment of civilisation. And yet
extremes meet : I remember seeing on the shores of
Lake Huron some Indians of a distant tribe of Chip-
pawas, who in appearance were just like those
fearful abortions of humanity which crawl out of
the darkness, filth, and ignorance of our great towns,
just so miserable, so stupid, so cruel, only, per-
haps, less wicked.
60.
/CHATEAUBRIAND was always comparing himself
\J with Lord Byron he hints more than once,
that Lord Byron owed some of his inspiration to the
perusal of his works more especially to Renee. In
this he was altogether mistaken.
61.
" TT NE ifltelligence superieure n'enfante pas le mal
^ sans douleur, parceque ce n'est pas son fruit
natural, et qu'elle ne devait pas le porter."
M
62.
ADAME DE COESLIN (whom he describes as an
impersonation of aristocratic morgue and all
CHATEAUBRIAND. 243
. . . . . _
the pretension and prejudices of the ancien regime),
"lisant dans un journal la mort de plusieurs rois, elle
ota ses lunettes et dit en se mouchaiit, ' II y a done
une epizootic sur ces betes a couronne ! ' '
I once counted among my friends an elderly lady
of high rank, who had spent the whole of a long life
in intimacy with royal and princely personages. In
three different courts she had filled offices of trust
and offices of dignity. In referring to her experience
she never either moralised or generalised ; but her
scorn of " ces bejtes a couronne," was habitually
expressed with just such a cool epigrammatic blunt-
ness as that of Madame de Coeslin.
63.
T 'ARISTOCRATIE a trois ages successifs; Page des
-- superiorites, 1'age des privileges, 1'age des
vanites ; sortie du premier, elle degenere dans le
second et s'eteint dans le dernier."
In Germany they are still in the first epoch. In
England we seem to have arrived at the second. In
France they are verging on the third.
64.
r\ HATE AUBRIAND says of himself :
J^ "Dans le premier moment d'une offense je la
sens a peine ; mais elle se grave dans ma memoire ;
son souvenir au lieu de decroitre, s'augmente avec le
244
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
temps. II dort dans mon cceur des mois, des annees
entieres, puis il se reveille a la moindre circonstance
avec une force nouvelle, et ma blessure devient plus
vive que le premier jour : mais si je ne pardonne
point a mes ennemis je ne leur fais aucun mal ; je
suis rancunier et ne suis point vindicatif"
A very nice and true distinction in point of feel-
ing and character, yet hardly to be expressed in
English. We always attach the idea of malignity
to the word rancour, whereas the French words
rancune, rancunier, express the relentless without
the vengeful or malignant spirit.
Such characters make me turn pale, as I have done
at sight of a tomb in which an offending wretch had
been buried alive. There is in them always some-
thing acute and deep and indomitable in the internal
and exciting emotion; slow, scrupulous, and timid
in the external demonstration. Cordelia is such a
character.
65.
/CHATEAUBRIAND says of his friend Pelletrie,
^ " II n'avait pas precisement des vices, mais il
etait ronge d'une vermine de petits defauts dont on
ne pouvait 1'epurer." I know such a man ; and if he
had committed a murder every morning, and a high-
way robbery every night, if he had killed his
father and eaten him with any possible sauce, he
CHATEAUBRIAND.
mid not be more intolerable, more detestable than
ic is !
66.
UN homme nous protege par ce qu'il vaut ; une
femme par ce que vous valez : voila pourquoi
ces deux empires Pun est si odieux, 1'autre si
loux."
67.
E says of Madame Roland, " Elle avait du carac-
tre plutot que du genie ; le premier peut
lonner le second, le second ne peut donner le pre-
mier." What does the man mean? this is a mistake
surely. What the French call caractere never
could give genius, nor genius, caractere. Au reste,
I am not sure that Madame Roland admirable crea-
ture! had genius; but for talent, and caractere
first rate.
68.
QOYONS doux si nous voulons etre regrettes. La
^ hauteur du genie et les qualites superieures ne
sont pleurees que des anges."
" Veillons bien sur notre caractere. Songeons
que nous pouvons avec un attachement profond n'en
pas moins empoisonner des jours que nous rache-
terions au prix de tout notre sang. Quand nos amis
sont descendus dans la tombe, quels moyens avons
246
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
nous de reparer nos torts ? nos inutiles regrets, nos
vains repentirs, sont ils un remede aux peines que
nous leurs avons faites ? Ils auraient mieux aime de
nous un sourire pendant leur vie que toutes nos
larmes apres leur mort."
69.
T 'AMOUR est si bien la felicite qu'il est poursuivi
H de la chim^re d'etre toujours ; il ne veut pro-
noncer que des serments irre vocables ; au defaut de
ses joies, il cherche a eterniser ses douleurs ; ange
tombe, il parle encore le langage qu'il parlait au
sejour incorruptible ; son esperance est de ne cesser
jamais. Dans sa double nature et dans sa double
illusion, ici-bas il pretend se perpetuer par d'immor-
telles pensees et par des generations intarissables."
70.
MADAME D'HOUDETOT, after the death of Saint
Lambert, always before she went to bed used
to rap three times with her slipper on the floor, say-
ing, " Bon soir, mon ami ; bon soir, bon soir ! "
So then, she thought of her lover as gone down
not up ?
BISHOP CUMBERLAND. 247
BISHOP CUMBERLAND.
BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH IK 1691.
71.
TUSHOP CUMBERLAND founds the law of God,
as revealed in the Scriptures, upon the general
law of nature. He does not attempt to found the
laws of nature upon the Bible. <f We believe," he
says, " in the truth of Scripture, because it promotes
and illustrates the fundamental laws of nature in the
government of the world."
Then does the Bishop mean here that the Bible is
not the WOKD nor the WILL of God, but the exposi-
tion of the WORD and the record of the WILL, so far
as either could be rendered communicable to human
comprehension through the medium of human lan-
guage and intelligence ?
There is a striking passage in Bunsen's Hippolytus,
which may be considered with reference to this
opinion of the Bishop.
He (Bunsen) says, that " what relates the history
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
of { the word of God ' in his humanity, and in this
world, and what records its teachings, and warn-
ings, and promises (that is, the Bible ?) was mistaken
for ( the word of God ' itself, in its proper sense."
Does he mean that we deem erroneously the col-
lection of writings we call the Bible to be " the word
of God ; " whereas, in fact, it is " the history, the
record of the word of God ? " that is, of all that God
has spoken to man in various revelations through
human life by human deeds ? because this is
surely a most important and momentous distinction.
72.
A CCORDING to Bishop Cumberland, benevolence, in
* its large sense, that is, a regard for all GOOD,
universal and particular, is the primary law of
nature ; and justice is one form, and a secondary
form, of this law : a moral virtue, not a law of nature,
if I understand his meaning rightly.
Then which would he place highest) the law of
nature or the moral law ?
If you place them in contradistinction, then are
we to conclude that the law of nature precedes the
moral law, but that the moral law supersedes the law
of nature ? Yet no law of nature (as I understand
the word) can be superseded, though the moral law
may be based upon it, and in that sense may be
above it.
BISHOP CUMBERLAND.
IN this following passage the Bishop seems to have
anticipated what in more modern times has
been called the "greatest happiness principle" He
says :
" The good of all rational beings is a complex
whole, being nothing but the aggregate of good en-
joyed by each." " We can only act in our proper
spheres, labouring to do good, but this labour will
be fruitless, or rather mischievous, if we do not keep
in mind the higher gradations which terminate in
universal benevolence. Thus, no man must seek his
own pleasure or advantage otherwise than as his
family permits ; or provide for his family to the
detriment of his country ; or promote the good of his
country at the expense of mankind ; or serve man-
kind, if it were possible, without regard to the
majesty of God."
74.
T)ALEY deems the recognition of a future state so
essential that he even makes the definition of
virtue to consist in this, that it is good performed for
the sake of everlasting happiness. That is to say, he
makes it a sort of bargain between God and man, a
contract, or a covenant, instead of that obedience to
a primal law, from which if we stray in will, we do
250 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
so at the necessary expense of our happiness. Bishop
Cumberland has no reference to this doctrine of
Paley's ; seems, indeed, to set it aside altogether,
as contrary to the essence of virtue.
On the whole, this good Bishop appears to have
treated ethics not as an ecclesiastic, but as Bacon
treated natural philosophy ; the pervading spirit
is the perpetual appeal to experience, and not to
authority.
COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY.
1852.
75.
pOMTE makes out three elements of progress,
V " les philosophes, les proletaires, et les femmes ; "
- types of intellect, material activity, and sentiment.
From Woman, he says, is to proceed the prepon-
derance of the social duties and affections over egotism
and ambition. (La preponderance de la sociabilite
sur la personalite.) He adds: " Ce sexe est cer-
tainement superieure au notre quant a Pattribut le
COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY. 251
plus fondamentale de 1'espece humaine, la tendence
de faire prevaloir la sociabilite sur la personality
76.
ne fallait qv? aimer comme dans 1'Utopie
Chretienne, sur une vie future affranchie de
toute ego'iste necessite materielle, la femme regnerait ;
mais il faut surtout agir et penser pour combattre
centre les rigueurs de notre vraie destinee : des-lors
1'homme' doit commander malgre sa moindre ino-
ralite."
" Malgre? " Sometimes man commands because of
the " moindre moralite : " it spares much time in
scruples.
77.
" T 'INFLUENCE feminine devient 1'auxiliaire indis-
^ pensable de tout pouvoir spirituel, comme le
moyen age 1'a tant montre."
f( AM moyen age la Catholicisme occidentale
ebaucha la systematisation de la puissance morale en
superposant a 1'ordre pratique une libre autorite
spirituelle, habituellement secondee par les femmes."
78.
T A Force, proprement dite, c'est ce qui regit les
-*-^ actes, sans regler les volontes."
Herein lies a distinction between Force and
*ower ; for Power, properly so called, does both.
s
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
79.
TT E insists throughout on the predominance of so-
-*~L ciaUlite over personalite and what is that but
the Christian law philosophised ? and again, " II n'y
a de directement morale dans notre nature que
Famour." Where did he get this, if not in the
Epistle of St. John ?
" Celui qui se croirait independant des autres dans
ses affections, ses pensees, ou ses actes, ne pourrait
meme foramler un tel blaspheme sans une contra-
diction immediate puisque son langage meme ne lui
appartient pas."
80.
TTE says that if the women regret the age of
chivalry, it is not for the external homage then
paid to them, but because " 1'element le plus moral
de 1'humanite " (woman, to wit), " doit preferer a tout
autre le seul regime qui erigea directement en prin-
cipe la preponderance de la morale sur la politique.
Si elles regrettent leur douce influence ante*rieure,
c'est surtout comme s'effa^ant aujourd'hui sous un
grossier egoisme.
" Leurs vo3ux spontanes seconderont toujours les
efforts directes des philosophes et des proletaires
pour transformer enfin les debats politiques en
transactions sociales en faisant prevaloir les devoirs
sur les droits"
COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY. 253
This is admirable ; for we are all inclined to think
more about our rights (and our wrongs too) than
about our duties.
81.
ft Ql done aimer nous satisfait mieux que d'etre
^ aime, cela constate la superiorite naturelle des
affections desinteressees."
Meaning what is true that the love we bear to
another, much more fills the whole soul and is more
a possession of an actuating principle, than the love
of another for us : but both are necessary to the
complement of our moral life. The first is as the
air we breathe ; the last is as our daily bread.
82.
TTE says that the only true and firm friendship is
that between man and woman, because it is the
only affection "exempte de toute concurrence ac-
tuelle ou possible."
In this I am inclined to agree with him, and to
jgret that our conventional morality or immorality,
id the too early severance of the two sexes in edu-
ition, place men and women in such a relation to
other, socially, as to render such friendships
icult and rare.
83.
EN verite 1'amour ne saurait etre profond, s'il
n'est pas pur."
S 2
254 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
Christianity, he says, " a favorise 1'essor cle la
veritable passion, tandisque le polytheisme consacrait
surtout les appetits."
He is speaking here as teacher, philosopher, and
legislator, not as poet or sentimentalist. Perhaps it
will come to be recognised^ sooner or later, that what
people are pleased to call", the romance of life is
founded on the deepest and most" immutable laws of
our being, and that any system of ecclesiastical
polity, or civil legislation, or moral philosophy, which
takes no account of the primal instincts and affec-
tions, which are the springs of life and on which
God made the continuation of his world to depend,
must of necessity fail.
I have just read a volume of Psychological Essays
by one of the most celebrated of living surgeons, and
closed the book with a feeling of amazement : a long
life spent in physiological experiences, dissecting dead
bodies, and mending broken bones, has then led him,
at last, to some of the most obvious, most commonly
known facts in mental philosophy ? So some of our
profound politicians, after a long life spent in govern-
ing and reforming men, may arrive, at last, at some
of the commonest facts in social morals.
H
84.
E contends for the indissolubility of marriage, and
against divorce ; and he thinks that education
COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY. 255
, . __ , , 1 i .
should be in the hands of women to the age of ten or
twelve, " Afin que le coeur y prevale toujours sur
I'esprit : " all very excellent principles, but supposing
a hypothetical social and moral state, from which we
are as yet far removed. What he says, however, of
the indissolubility of the marriage bond is so beautiful
and eloquent, and so in accordance with my own
moral theories, that I cannot help extracting it from
a mass of heavy and sometimes unintelligible matter.
He begins by laying it down as a principle that the
" amelioration morale de 1'homme constitue la prin-
cipale mission de la femme," and that "une telle des-
tination indique aussitot que le lien conjugal doit
etre unique et indissoluble, afin que les relations
domestiques puissent acquerir la plenitude et la
fixite qu'exige leur efficacite morale." This, how-
ever, supposes the holiest and completest of all bonds
to be sealed on terms of equality, not that the latter
end of a man's life, la vie usee et la jeunesse epuisee,
are to be tacked on to the beginning of a woman's
fresh and innocent existence ; for then influences are
reversed, and instead of the amelioration of the mas-
culine, we have the demoralisation of the feminine,
nature. He supposes the possibility of circum-
stances which demand a personal separation, but even
then sans permettre un nouveau mariage. In such
a case his religion imposes on the innocent victim
s 3
256
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
(whether man or woman) <( une chaste te compatible
d'ailleurs avec la plus profonde tendresse. Si cette
condition lui semble rigoureuse, il doit 1'accepter,
d'abord, en vue de 1'ordre general ; puis, comme une
juste consequence de son erreur primitive."
There would be much to say upon all this, if it
were worth while to discuss a theory which it is not
possible to reduce to general practice. We cannot
imagine the possibility of a second marriage where
the first, though perhaps unhappy or early ruptured,
has been, not a personal relation only, but an inter-
fusion of our moral being, of the deepest impulses of
life with those of another ; these we cannot have a
second time to surrender to a second object ; but
this might be left to Nature and her holy instincts to
settle. However, he goes on in a strain of eloquence
and dignity, quite unusual with him, to this effect:
<f Ce n'est que par 1'assurance d'une inalterable per-
petuite que les liens intimes peuvent acquerir la
consistance et la plenitude indispensable aleur effica-
cite morale. La plus meprisable des sectes ephemeres
que suscita Panarchie moderne (the Mormons, for in-
stance?) me parait etre celle qui voulut eriger 1'incon-
stance en condition de bonheur." ....*' Entre deux
etres aussi complexes et aussi divers que rhomme et
la femme, ce n'est pas trop de toute la vie pour se
bien connaitre et s'aimer dignement. Loin de taxer
d'illusion la haute idee que deux vrais epoux se
COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY.
forment souvent 1'un de Fautre, je 1'ai presque
wjours attribute a Fappreciation plus profonde que
)rocure seule une pleine intimite, que d'ailleurs de-
reloppe des qualites inconnues aux indifferents. On
loit meme regarder comme tres-honorable pour
notre espece, cette grande estime que ses membres
s'inspirent mutuellement quand ils s'etudient beau-
coup. Car la haine et V indifference meriteraient
seules le reproche tfaveuglement qu'une appreciation
superficielle applique a Vamour. II faut done juger
pleinement conforme a la nature humaine 1'institution
qui prolonge au-dela du tombeau 1'indentification de
deux dignes epoux."
He lays down as one of the primal instincts of
human kind "Fhomme doit nourrir lafemme" This
may have been, as he says, a universal instinct;
perhaps it ought to be one of our social ordina-
tions ; perhaps it may be so at some future time ;
but we know that it is not a present fact ; that the
woman must in many cases maintain herself or
perish, and she asks nothing more than to be allowed
to do so.
However, I agree with Comte that the position
of a woman, enriched and independent by her own
labour, is anomalous and seldom happy. It is a
remark I have heard somewhere, and it appears to
me true, that there exists no being so hard, so
keen, so calculating, so unscrupulous, so merciless
8 4
258
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
in money matters as the wife of a Parisian shop-
keeper, where she holds the purse and manages the
concern, as is generally the case.
85.
HERE is a passage wherein he attacks that egotism
which with many good people enters so largely
into the notion of another world : which Paley in-
culcated, and which Coleridge ridiculed, when he
spoke of " this worldliness," and the " other world-
liness."
" La sagesse sacerdotale, digne organe de 1'instinct
public, y avait intimement rattache les principales
obligations sociales a titre de condition indispensable
du salut personnel : mais la recompense infinie pro-
mise ainsi a tous les sacrifices ne pouvait jamais
permettre une affection pleinement desinteressee."
This perpetual iteration of a system of future
reward and punishment, as a principle of our religion
and a motive of action, has in some sort demoralised
Christianity ; especially in minds where love is not a
chief element, and which do not love Christ for his
love's sake, but for his power's sake, and because
judgment and punishment are supposed to be in his
hand.
86.
T)UTTING the test of revelation out of the question,
and dealing with the philosopher philosophically,
COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY. 259
the best refutation of Comte's system is contained in
following criticism : it seems to me final.
se In limiting religion to the relations in which we
stand to each other, and towards Humanity, Comte
miits one very important consideration. Even upon
own showing, this Humanity can only be the
tpreme being of our planet, it cannot be the Supreme
^eing of the Universe. Now, although in this our
terrestrial sojourn, all we can distinctly know must
be limited to the sphere of our planet ; yet, stand-
ing on this ball and looking forth into infinitude, we
know that it is but an atom of the infinitude, and
that the humanity we worship here, cannot extend
its dominion there. If our relations to humanity
may be systematised into a cultus, and made a reli-
gion as they have formerly been made a morality,
and if the whole of our practical priesthood be
limited to this religion, there will, nevertheless
remain for us, outlying this terrestrial sphere, the
sphere of the infinite, in which our thoughts must
wander, and our emotions will follow our thoughts ;
so that besides the religion of humanity there must
ever be a religion of the Universe. Or, to bring
this conception within ordinary language, there must
ever remain the old distinctions between religion and
morality, our relations to God, and our relations
towards man. The only difference being, that in
the old theology moral precepts were inculcated with
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
a view to a celestial habitat; in the new, the moral
precepts are inculcated with a view to the general
progress of the race." Westminster Review.
In fact the doctrine of the non-plurality of worlds
as recently set forth by an eminent professor and
D. D. would exactly harmonise with Comte's "Culte
du Positif," as not merely limiting our sympathies
to this one form of intellectual being, but our re-
ligious notions to this one habitable orb.
But to those who take other views, the argument
above contains the philosophical objection to Comte's
system, as such; and I repeat, that it seems to me un-
answerable ; but there are excellent things in his
theory, notwithstanding; - things that make us pause
and think. In some parts it is like Christianity with
Christ, as a personalite, omitted. For Christ the
humanised divine, he substitutes an abstract deified
humanity. 1854.
GOETHE. 261
GOETHE.
(DICHTUNG UND WAHEHEIT.)
87.
t< A s a man embraces the determination to become
*X a soldier and go to the wars, bravely resolved
to bear dangers, and difficulties, and wounds, and
death itself, but at the same time never anticipating
the particular form in which those evils may surprise
us in an extremely unpleasant manner; just so we
rush into authorship ! "
88.
C\ OETHE says of Lavater, " that the conception of
humanity which had been formed in himself,
and in his own humanity, was so akin to the living
image of Christ, that it was impossible for him to
conceive how a man could live and breathe without
being a Christian. He had, so to speak, a physical
NOTES PROM BOOKS.
affinity with Christianity ; it was to him a necessity,
not only morally, but from organisation."
Lavater's individual feeling was, perhaps, but an
anticipation of that which may become general, uni-
versal. As we rise in the scale of being, as we
become more gentle, spiritualised, refined, and in-
telligent, will not our " physical affinity " with the
religion of Christ become more and more apparent,
till it is less a doctrine than a principle of life ? So
its Divine Author knew, who prepared it for us, and
is preparing and moulding us through progressive
improvement to comprehend and receive it.
89.
r\ GET HE speaks of " polishing up life with the
varnish of fiction;" the artistic turn of the man's
mind showed itself in this love of creating an effect
in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. But what
can fiction what can poetry do for life, but present
some one or two out of the multitudinous aspects of
that grand, beautiful, terrible, and infinite mystery ?
or by life, does he mean here the mere external forms
of society ? for it is not clear.
HAZLITT'S LIBER AMORIS.
HAZLITT'S "LIBER AMORIS."
1827.
90.
TS love, like faith, ennobled through its own depth
and fervour and sincerity ? or is it ennobled
through the nobility, and degraded through the
degradation of its object? Is it with love as with
worship ? Is it a religion, and holy when the object
is pure and good ? Is it a superstition, and unholy
when the object is impure and unworthy ?
Of all the histories I have read of the aberrations
of human passion, nothing ever so struck me with a
sort of amazed and painful pity as Hazlitt's " Liber
Amoris." The man was in love with a servant girl,
who in the eyes of others possessed no particular
charms of mind or person, yet did the. mighty love of
26i NOTES FROM BOOKS.
this strong, masculine, and gifted being, lift her into
a sort of goddess-ship ; and make his idolatry in its
intense earnestness and reality assume something of
the sublimity of an act of faith, and in its expression
take a flight equal to anything that poetry or fiction
have left us. It was all so terribly real, he sued with
such a vehemence, he suffered with such resistance,
that the powerful intellect reeled, tempest-tost, and
might have foundered but for the gift of expression.
He might have said like Tasso like Goethe rather
" Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen was ich leide ! "
And this faculty of utterance, eloquent utterance,
was perhaps the only thing which saved life, or reason,
or both. In such moods of passion, the poor unedu-
cated man, dumb in the midst of the strife and the
storm, unable to comprehend his intolerable pain or
make it comprehended, throws himself in a blind
fury on the cause of his torture, or hangs himself in
his neckcloth.
91.
TTAZLITT takes up his pen, dips it in fire and thus
-*--* he writes :
" Perfect love has this advantage in it, that it leaves
the possessor of it nothing farther to desire. There
is one object (at least), in which the soul finds abso-
lute content ; for which it seeks to live or dares to
die. The heart has, as it were, filled up the moulds
HAZLITT'S LIBER AMORIS. 265
of the imagination ; the truth of passion keeps pace
with, and outvies, the extravagance of mere language.
There are no words so fine, no flattery so soft, that
there is not a sentiment beyond them that it is im-
possible to express, at the bottom of the heart where
true love is. What idle sounds the common phrases
adorable creature, divinity, angel, are ! What a proud
reflection it is to have a feeling answering to all
these, rooted in the breast, unalterable, unutterable,
to which all other feelings are light and vain ! Per-
fect love reposes on the -object of its choice, like the
halcyon on the wave, and the air of heaven is around
it!"
92.
HE stood (while I pleaded my cause before her
with all the earnestness and fondness in the
world) with the tears trickling from her eye-lashes,
her head drooping, her attitude fixed, with the finest
expression that ever was seen of mixed regret, pity,
and stubborn resolution, but without speaking a word
without altering a feature. It was like a petri-
faction of a human face in the softest moment of pas-
93.
HALL I not love her," he exclaims, " for herself
alone, in spite of fickleness and folly ? to love
ler for her regard for me, is not to love her but
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
myself. She has robbed me of herself, shall she also
rob me of my love of her? did I not live on her
smile? is it less sweet because it is withdrawn from
me ? Did I not adore her every grace ? and does she
bend less enchantingly because she has turned from
me to another? Is my love then in the power of
fortune or of her caprice ? No, I will have it lasting
as it is pure ; and I will make a goddess of her, and
build a temple to her in niy heart, and worship her
on indestructible altars, and raise statues to her, and
my homage shall be unblemished as her unrivalled
symmetry of form. And when that fails, the memory
of it shall survive, and my bosom shall be proof to
scorn as hers has been to pity ; and I will pursue her
with an unrelenting love, and sue to be her slave and
tend her steps without notice, and without reward ;
and serve her living, and mourn for her when dead ;
and thus my love will have shown itself superior to
her hate, and I shall triumph and then die. This is
my idea of the only true and heroic love, and such is
mine for her."
Hazlitt, when he wrote all this, seemed to himself
full of high and calm resolve. The hand did not
fail, the pen did not stagger over the paper in a
formless scrawl, yet the brain was reeling like a
tower in an earthquake. " Passion," as it has been
well said, "when in a state of solemn and omni-
THE NIGHTINGALE. 267
potent vehemence, always appears to be calmness to
him whom it domineers ; " not unfrequently to others
also, as the tide at its highest flood looks tranquil,
and " neither way inclines."
THE NIGHTINGALE.
94.
T) EADING the Life and Letters of Francis Horner,
in the midst of a correspondence about Statistics
and Bullion, and Political Economy, and the Balance
of Parties, I came upon the following exquisite pas-
sage in a letter to his friend Mrs. Spencer :
te I was amused by your interrogatory to me about
the Nightingale's note. You meant to put me in a
dilemma with my politics on one side and my gal-
lantry on the other. Of course you consider it as a
)laintive note, and you were in hopes that no idolater
Charles Fox would venture to agree with that
>pinion. In this difficulty I must make the best
escape I can by saying, that it seems to me neither
iheerful nor melancholy, but always according to
ie circumstances in which you hear it, the scenery,
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
your own temper of mind, and so on. I settled it so
with myself early in this month, when I heard them
every night arid all day long at Wells. In daylight,
when all the other birds are in active concert, the
Nightingale only strikes you as the most active, emu-
lous, and successful of the whole band. At night,
especially if it is a calm one, with light enough to
give you a wide indistinct view, the solitary music of
this bird takes quite another character, from all the
associations of the scene, from the languor one feels
at the close of the day, and from the stillness of spirits
and elevation of mind which comes upon one when
walking out at that time. But it is not always so
different circumstances will vary in every possible
way the effect. Will the Nightingale's note sound
alike to the man who is going on an adventure to
meet his mistress (supposing he heeds it at all), and
when he loiters along upon his return? The last
time I heard the Nightingale it was an expe-
riment of another sort. It was after a thun-
derstorm in a mild night, while there was silent
lightning opening every few minutes, first on one
side of the heavens then on the other. The care-
less little fellow was piping away in the midst of
all this terror. To me, there was no melancholy in
his note, but a sort of sublimity ; yet it was the same
song which I had heard in the morning, and which
then seemed nothing but bustle."
THE NIGHTINGALE. 269
And in the same spirit Portia moralises :
The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by season, seasoned are
To their right praise and true perfection !
Nor will Coleridge allow the song of the nightin-
gale to be always plaintive, " most musical, most
melancholy;" he defies the epithet though it be
Milton's.
'Tis the merry nightingale,
That crowds and hurries and precipitates
With thick fast warble his delicious notes,
As he were fearful that an April night
Would be too short for him to utter forth
His love-chaunt, and disburtheu his full soul
Of all its music.
As a poetical commentary on these beautiful
iges, every reader of Joanna Baillie will remem-
ber the night scene in De Montfort, where the cry of
the Owl suggests such different feelings and associa-
tions to the two men who listen to it, under such
different circumstances. To De Montfort it is the
screech-owl, foreboding death and horror, and he
stands and shudders at the " instinctive wailing.' 1
To Rezenvelt it is the sound which recalls his boyish
days, when he merrily mimicked the night-bird till it
returned him cry for cry, and he pauses to listen
with a fanciful delight.
T 2
270 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
THACKERAY'S LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS.
(1853.)
95.
A LECTURE should not read like an essay ; and,
" therefore, it surprises me that these lectures so
carefully prepared, so skilfully adapted to meet the
requirements of oral delivery, should be such agree-
able reading. As lectures, they wanted only a little
more point, and emphasis and animation on the part
of the speaker : as essays, they atone in eloquence
and earnestness for what they want in finish and
purity of style.
Genius and sunshine have this in common that
they are the two most precious gifts of heaven to
earth, and are dispensed equally to the just and the
unjust. What struck me most in these lectures, when
I heard them, (and it strikes me now in turning over
the written pages,) is this : we deal here with writers
THE ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. 271
and artists, yet the purpose, from beginning to end,
is not artistic nor critical, but moral. Thackeray
tells us himself that he has not assembled his hearers
to bring them better acquainted with the writings of
these writers, or to illustrate the wit of these wits,
or to enhance the humour of these humourists ;
no; but to deal justice on the men as men to tell
us how they lived, and loved, suffered and made
suffer, who still have power to pain or to please;
to settle their claims to our praise or blame, our
love or hate, whose right to fame was settled long
ago, and remains undisputed. This is his purpose.
Thus then he has laid down and acted on the prin-
ciple that "morals have something to do with art;"
that there is a moral account to be settled with
men of genius ; that the power and the right re-
mains with us to do justice on those who being
dead yet rule our spirits from their urns; to try
them by a standard which perhaps neither them-
selves, nor those around them, would have admitted,
Did Swift when he bullied men, lampooned women,
trampled over decency and humanity, flung round
him filth and fire, did he anticipate the time when
before a company of intellectual men, and thinking,
feeling women, in both hemispheres, he should be
called up to judgment, hands bound, tongue-tied?
Where be now his gibes? and where his terrors?
Thackeray turns him forth, a spectacle, a lesson, a
272 NOTES FROM BOOKS.
warning ; probes the lacerated self-love, holds up to
scorn, or pity more intolerable, the miserable ego-
tism, the half-distempered brain. O Stella ! O
Vanessa ! are you not avenged ?
Then Sterne how he takes to pieces his feigned
originality, his feigned benevolence, his feigned misan-
thropy all feigned! the licentious parson, the
trader in sentiment, the fashionable lion of his day,
the man without a heart for those who loved him,
without a conscience for those who trusted him ! yet
the same man who gave us the pathos of " Le Fevre,"
and the humours of" Uncle Toby ! " Sad is it? un-
grateful is it ? ungracious is it ? well, it cannot be
helped ; you cannot stifle the conscience of humanity.
You might as well exclaim against any natural re-
sult of any natural law. Fancy a hundred years
hence some brave, honest, human-hearted Thackeray
standing up to discourse before our great-great-
grandchildren in the same spirit, with the same
stern truth, on the wits, and the poets and the
artists of the present time ! Hard is your fate,
O ye men and women of genius ! very hard and
pitiful, if ye must be subjected to the scalpel of
such a dissector! You, gifted sinner, whoever you
may be, walking among us now in all the impunity
of conventional forbearance, dealing in oracles and
sentimentalisms, performing great things, teaching
good things, you are set up as one of the lights of the
THACKERAY'S WOMEN.
273
world : Lo ! another time comes ; the torch is taken
out of your hand, and held up to your face. What !
is it a mask, and not a face ? " Off, off ye lendings ! "
O God! how much wiser, as well as better, not to
study how to seem, but how to be ! How much
wiser and better, not to have to shudder before
the truth as it oozes out from a thousand unguessed,
unguarded apertures, staining your lawn or your
ermine ; not to have to tremble at the thought of
that future Thackeray, who ( - shall pluck out the
heart of your mystery," and shall anatomise you, and
deliver lectures upon you, to illustrate the standard
of morals and manners in Queen Victoria's reign !
In these lectures, some fine and feeling and dis-
criminative passages on character, make amends for
certain offences and inconsistencies in the novels ; I
mean especially in regard to the female portraits. No
woman resents his Rebecca inimitable Becky!
no woman but feels and acknowledges with a shiver
the completeness of that wonderful and finished ar-
tistic creation ; but every woman resents the selfish
inane Amelia, and would be inclined to quote and
to apply the author's own words when speaking of
' Tom Jones : ' "I can't say that I think Amelia a
virtuous character. I can't say but I think Mr.
Thackeray's evident liking and admiration for his
Amelia shows that the great humourist's moral sense
was blunted by his life, and that here in art and
T 4
NOTES FROM BOOKS.
ethics there is a great error. If it be rig! it to have
a heroine whom we are to admire, let us take care at
least that she is admirable."
Laura, in ( Pendennis,' is a yet more fatal mistake.
She is drawn with every generous feeling, every good
gift. We do not complain that she loves that poor
creature Pendennis, for she loved him in her child-
hood. She grew up with that love in her heart ; it
came between her and the perception of his faults ; it
is a necessity indivisible from her nature. Hallowed,
through its constancy, therein alone would lie its best
excuse, its beauty and its truth. But Laura, faith-
less to that first affection ; Laura, waked up to the
appreciation of a far more manly and noble nature,
in love with Warrington, and then going back to
Pendennis, and marrying him ! Such infirmity might
be true of some women, but not of such a woman
as Laura ; we resent the inconsistency, the indelicacy
of the portrait.
And then Lady Castlewood, so evidently a
favourite of the author, what shall we say of her ?
The virtuous woman, par excellence, who " never
sins and never forgives," . who never resents, nor
relents, nor repents ; the mother, who is the rival of
her daughter ; the mother, who for years is the con-
fidante of a man's delirious passion for her own child,
and then consoles him by marrying him herself ! O
Mr. Thackeray ! this will never do ! such women may
THACKERAY'S WOMEN.
275
exist, but to hold them up as examples of excellence,
and fit objects of our best sympathies, is a fault, and
proves a low standard in ethics and in art. " When an
author presents to us a heroine whom we are called
upon to admire, let him at least take care that she is
admirable." If in these, and in some other instances,
Thackeray has given us cause of offence, in the
lectures we may thank him for some amends : he has
shown us what he conceives true womanhood and
true manliness ought to be ; so with this expression
of gratitude, and a far deeper debt of gratitude left
unexpressed, I close his book, and say, good night !
96.
QOMETIMES, in thoughtful moments, I am struck
^ by those beautiful analogies between things
apparently dissimilar those awful approximations
between things apparently far asunder which many
people would call fanciful and imaginary, but they
seem to bring all God's creation, spiritual and mate-
rial, into one comprehensive whole; they give me,
thus associated, a glimpse, a perception of that over-
ANALOGIES. 277
.whelming unity which we call the universe, the
multitudinous ONE.
Thus the principle of the highest ideal in art,
as conceived by the Greeks, and unsurpassed in its
purity and beauty, lay in considering well the cha-
racteristics which distinguish the human form from
the brute form; and then, in rendering the human
form, the first aim was to soften down, or, if pos-
sible, throw out wholly, those characteristics which
belong to the brute nature, or are common to the
brute and the man ; and the next, to bring into pro-
minence and even enlarge the proportions of those
manifestations of forms which distinguish humanity ;
till, at last, the human merged into the divine, and
the God in look, in limb, in feature, stood revealed.
Let us now suppose this broad principle which the
Greeks applied to form, ethically carried out, and
made the basis of all education the training of men
as a race. Suppose we started with the general
axiom that all propensities which we have in common
with the lower animals are to be kept subordinate,
and so far as is consistent with the truth of nature
refined away ; and that all the qualities which elevate,
all the aspirations which ally us with the spiritual, are
to be cultivated and rendered more and more promi-
nent, till at last the human being, in faculties as well
as form, approaches the God-like I only say
suppose ? -
278
NOTES ON ART.
Again : it has been said of natural philosophy (Zoo-
logy) that in order to make any real progress in the
science, as such, we must more and more disregard
differences, and more and more attend to the obscured
but essential conditions which are revealed in resem-
blances, in the constant and similar relations of prim-
itive structure." Now if the same principle were
carried out in theology, in morals, in art, as well as
in science, should we not come nearer to the essential
truth in all?
97.
" mHERE is an instinctive sense of propriety and
reality in every mind; and it is not true, as
some great authority has said, that in art we are
satisfied with contemplating the work without think-
ing of the artist. On the contrary, the artist himself
is one great object in the work. It is a$ embodying
the energies and excellences of the human mind, as
exhibiting the efforts of genius, as symbolising high
feeling, that we most value the creations of art ;
without design the representations of art are merely
fantastical, and without the thought of a design act-
DEFINITION OP ART. 279
ing upon fixed principles in accordance with a high
standard of goodness and truth, half the charm of
design is lost."
98.
A HT, used collectively for painting, sculpture,
-^*- architecture, and music, is the mediatress ,
between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is,
therefore, the power of humanising nature, of infusing
the thoughts and passions of man into everything
which is the object of his contemplation. Colour,
form, motion, sound, are the elements which it
combines, and it stamps them into unity in the
mould of a moral idea."
This is Coleridge's definition : Art then is nature,
humanised ; and in proportion as humanity is elevated
by the interfusion into our life of noble aims and pure
affections will art be spiritualised and moralised.
I
99.
F faith has elevated art, superstition has every
where debased it.
280
NOTES ON ART.
100.
/^\ OETHE observes that there is no patriotic art and
^-J no patriotic science that both are universal.
There is, however, national art, but not national
science : we say " national art," " natural science."
"TTERSE is in itself music, and the natural symbol
of that union of passion with thought and
pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all poetry
as contradistinguished from history civil or natural."
Coleridge.
In the arts of design, colour is to form what verse
is to prose a more harmonious and luminous vehicle
of the thought.
DUTCH PICTURES. 281
102.
SUBJECTS and representations in art not elevated
nor interesting in themselves, become instruc-
tive and interesting to higher minds from the manner
in which they have been treated ; perhaps because
they have passed through the medium of a higher
mind in taking form.
This is one reason, though we are not always con-
scious of it, that the Dutch pictures of common and
vulgar life give us a pleasure apart from their won-
derful finish and truth of detail. In the mind of
the artist there must have been the power to throw
himself into a sphere above what he represents.
Adrian Brouwer, for instance, must have been
something far better than a sot ; Ostade something
higher than a boor ; though the habits of both led
them into companionship with sots and boors. In
the most farcical pictures of Jan Steen there is a
depth of feeling and observation which remind me
of the humour of Goldsmith ; and Teniers, \ve
:now, was in his habits a refined gentleman; the
liant elegance of his pencil contrasting with the
grotesque vulgarity of his subjects. To a thinking
lind, some of these Dutch pictures of character are
full of material for thought, pathetic even where
Least sympathetic : no doubt, because of a latent
sympathy with the artist, apart from his subject.
2F2 NOTES ON ART.
103. ,
/COLERIDGE says, "Every human feeling is greater
*^ and larger than the exciting cause." (A philo-
sophical way of putting Rochefoucauld's neatly
expressed apophthegm : " Nous ne sommes jamais ni
si heureux ni si malheureux que nous l'imaginons.")
" A proof," he proceeds, " that man is designed for a
higher state of existence ; and this is deeply implied
in music, in which there is always something more
and beyond the immediate expression."
But not music only, every production of art
ought to excite emotions greater and thoughts larger
than itself. Thoughts and emotions which never
perhaps were in the mind of the artist, never were
anticipated, never were intended by him maybe
strongly suggested by his work. This is an impor-
tant part of the morals of art, which we must never
lose sight of. Art is not only for pleasure and profit,
but for good and for evil.
Goethe (in the Dichtung und Wahrheif) describes
the reception of Marie Antoinette at Strasbourg,
where she passed the frontier to enter her new king-
dom. She was then a lovely girl of sixteen. He
MORALS IN ART. 283
relates that on visiting before her arrival the reception
room on the bridge over the Rhine, where her Ger-
man attendants were to deliver her into the hands of
the French authorities, he found the walls hung with
tapestries representing the ominous story of Jason
and Medea of all the marriages on record the most
fearful, the most tragic in its consequences. "What ! "
he exclaims, his poetical imagination struck with the
want of moral harmony, " was there among these
French architects and decorators no man who could
perceive that pictures represent things, that they
have a meaning in themselves, that they can im-
press sense and feeling, that they can awaken pre-
sentiments of good or evil? " But, as he tells us, his
exclamations of horror were met by the mockery of
his French companions, who assured him that it was
not everybody's concern to look for significance in
pictures.
These self- same tapestries of the story of Jason
and Medea were after the Restoration presented by
Louis XVIII. to George IV., and at present they
line the walls of the Ball-room in Windsor Castle.
We might repeat, with some reason, the question of
Goethe ; for if pictures have a significance, and speak
to the imagination, what has the tragedy of Jason
id Medea to do in a ball-room ?
Goethe, who thus laid down the principle that works
NOTES ON ART.
of art speak to the feelings and the conscience, and
can awaken associations tending to good and evil, by
some strange inconsistency places art and artists
out of the sphere of morals. He speaks some-
where with contempt and ridicule of those who
take their conscience and their morality with them
to an opera or a picture gallery. Yet surely he
is wrong. Why should we not? Are our con-
science and our morals like articles of dress which
we can take off and put on again as we fancy
it convenient or expedient? shut up in a drawer
and leave behind us when we visit a theatre or
a gallery of art ? or are they not rather a part of
ourselves our very life to graduate the worth, to
fix the standard of all that mingles with our life ?
The idea that what we call taste in art has something
quite distinctive from conscience, is one cause that
the popular notions concerning the productions of
art are abandoned to such confusion and uncer-
tainty ; that simple people regard taste as something
forensic, something to be learned, as they would
learn a language, and mastered by a study of rules
and a dictionary of epithets ; and they look up to
a professor of taste, just as they would look up to
a professor of Greek or of Hebrew. Either they
listen to judgments lightly and confidently promul-
gated with a sort of puzzled faith and a surrender
of their own moral sense, which are pitiable ;
MORALS IN ART.
as if art also had its infallible church and its hier-
archy of dictators ! or they fly into the opposite
extreme, and seeing themselves deceived and mis-
led, fall away into strange heresies. All from igno-
rance of a few laws simple in their form, yet infinite
in their application ; natural laws we must call
them, though here applied to art.
In my younger days I have known men conspicuous
for their want of elevated principle, and for their
dissipated habits, held up as arbiters and judges of
art ; but it was to them only another form of
epicurism and self-indulgence ; and I have seen
them led into such absurd and fatal mistakes for
want of the power to distinguish and to generalise,
that I have despised their judgment, and have come
to the conclusion that a really high standard of taste
and a low standard of morals are incompatible with
each other.
104.
THE fact of the highest artistic genius having
manifested itself in a polytheistic age, and
long a people whose moral views were essentially
legraded, has, we think, fostered the erroneous notion
u
NOTES ON ART.
that the sphere of art has no connection with that of
morality. The Greeks, with penetrative insight,
dilated the essential characteristics of man's organ-
ism as a vehicle of superior intelligence, while their
intense sympathy with physical beauty made them
alive to its most subtle manifestations ; and repro-
ducing their impressions through the medium of art,
they have given birth to models of the human form,
which reveal its highest possibilities, and the ex-
cellence of which depends upon their being individual
expressions of ideal truth. Thus, too, in their de-
scriptions of nature, instead of multiplying insig-
nificant details, they seized instinctively upon the
characteristic features of her varying aspects, and not
unfrequently embodied a finished picture in one
comprehensive and harmonious word. In association
with their marvellous geriius, however, we find a
cruelty, a treachery, and a licence which would be
revolting if it were not for the historical interest
which attaches to every genuine record of a bygoile
age. Their low moral standard cannot excite sur-
prise when we consider the debasing tendency of
their worship, the objects of their adoration being
nothing more than their own degraded passions in-
vested with some of the attributes of deity. Now,
among the modifications of thought introduced by
Christianity, there is perhaps none more pregnant
with important results than the harmony which it
MORALS IN ART. 287
has established between religion and morality. The
great law of right and wrong has acquired a sacred
character, when viewed as an expression of the divine
will ; it takes its rank among the eternal verities, and
to ignore it in our delineations of life, or to represent
sin otherwise than as treason against the supreme
ruler, is to retain in modern civilisation one of the
degrading elements of heathenism. Conscience is as
great a fact of our inner life as the sense of beauty,
and the harmonious action of both these instinctive
principles is essential to the highest enjoyment of
art, for any internal dissonance disturbs the repose
of the mind, and thereby shatters the image mirrored
in its depths." A. S.
1105.
f ~1 /TAis vous autres artistes, vous ne considerez
pour la plupart dans les ceuvres que la
beaute ou la singularite de Pexecution, sans vous
penetrer de 1'idee dont cet ceuvre est la forme;
ainsi votre intelligence adore souvent Fexpression
ti'un sentiment que votre co3ur repousserait s'il en
ivait la conscience." George Sand.
NOTES ON ART.
106.
T AVATER told Goethe that on a certain occasion
J-^ when he held the velvet bag in the church as
collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the
hands ; and he satisfied himself that in every indi-
vidual, the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the
action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the
bag, were distinctly different and individually cha-
racteristic.
What then shall we say of Van Dyck, who painted
the hands of his men and women, not from indi-
vidual nature, but from a model hand his own
very often? and every one who considers for a mo-
ment will see in Van Dyck's portraits, that, however
well painted and elegant the hands, they in very few
instances harmonise with the personalite ; that the
position is often affected, and as if intended for dis-
play, the display of what is in itself a positive fault,
and from which some little knowledge of comparative
physiology would have saved him.
There are hands of various character ; the hand to
catch, and the hand to hold ; the hand to clasp, and
PHYSIOGNOMY OF HANDS.
the hand to grasp. The hand that has worked or
could work, and the hand that has never done any-
thing but hold itself out to be kissed, like that of
Joanna of Arragon in Raphael's picture.
Let any one look at the hands in Titian's portrait
of old Paul IV. : though exquisitely modelled, they
have an expression which reminds us of claws ; they
belong to the face of that grasping old man, and
could belong to no other.
107.
Tl I OZART and Chopin, though their genius was dif-
-*-*-*- ferently developed, were alike in some things :
in nothing more than this, that the artistic element in
both minds wholly dominated over the social and
practical, and that their art was the element in which
they moved and lived, through which they felt and
thought. I doubt whether either of them could have
said, " D^abord je suis homme et puis je suis artiste ; "
whereas this could have been said with truth by
Mendelsohn and by Litzst. In Mendelsohn the
enormous creative power was modified by the in-
u 3
NOTES ON ART.
tellect and the conscience. Litzst has no creative
power.
Litzst has thus drawn the character of Chopin :
" Bien n'etait plus pur et plus exalte* en meme temps
que ses pensees ; rien n'etait plus tenace, plus exclusif,
et plus minutieusement devoue que ses affections.
Mais cet etre ne comprenait que ce qui etait iden-
tique a lui-me"me : le reste n'existait pour lui que
comme une sorte de reve facheux, auquel il essayait
de se soustraire en vivant au milieu du monde.
Toujours perdu dans ses reveries, la realite lui deplai-
sait. Enfant il ne pouvait toucher a un instrument
tranchant sans se blesser ; homme il ne pouvait se
trouver en face d'un homme different de lui, sans se
heurter contre cette contradiction vivante."
" Ce qui le preservait d'un antagonisme perpetuel
c'etait 1'habitude volontaire et bientot inveteree de
ne point voir, de ne pas entendre ce qui lui deplai-
sait : en general sans toucher a ses affections per-
sonelles, les etres qui ne pensaient pas comme lui
devenaient a ses yeux comme des especes de fantomes ;
et comme il etait d'une politesse charmante, on pou-
vait prendre pour une bienveillance courtoise ce qui
n'etait chez lui qu'un froid dedain une aversion
insurmon table."
T
108.
HE father of Mozart was a man of high and strict
religious principle. He had a conviction in his
CHOPIN AND MOZART. 291
more truly founded than is usual that he was
the father of a great, a surpassing genius, and con-
sequently of a being unfortunate in this, that he
must be in advance of his age, exposed to error, to
envy, to injustice, to strife; and to do his duty to his
son demanded large faith and large firmness. But
because he did estimate this sacred trust as a duty to
be discharged, not only with respect to his gifted son,
but to the God who had so endowed him ; so, in spite
of many mistakes, the earnest straightforward endea-
vour to do right in the parent seems to have saved
Mozart's moral life, and to have given that complete-
ness to the productions of his genius, which the har-
mony of the moral and creative faculties alone can
bestow.
" The modifying power of circumstances on Mo-
zart's style, is an interesting consideration. What-
ever of striking, of new or beautiful he met with in
the works of others left its impression on him ; and
he often reproduced these efforts, not sefvilely, but
mingling his own nature and feelings with them in
a manner not less surprising than delightful."
This is true equally of Shakespeare and of Raphael,
both of whom adapted or rather adopted much from
their precursors in the way of material to work
upon ; and whose incomparable originality consisted
in the interfusion of their own great individual genius
u 4
NOTES ON ART.
with every subject they touched, so that it became
theirs, and could belong to no other.
The Figaro was composed at Vienna. The Don
Juan and Clemenza di Tito at Prague ; which I
note because the localities are so characteristic of the
operas. Cimarosa's Matrimonio Segreto was composed
at Prague ; it was on the fortification of the Hrad-
schin one morning at sun-rise that he composed the
Pria che spunti in del V aurora.
When called upon to describe his method of com-
posing, what Mozart said of himself was very striking
from its naivete and truth. "I do not," he said,
(f aim at originality. I do not know in what my ori-
ginality consists. Why my productions take from
my hand that particular form or style which makes
them Mozartisk, and different from the works of
other composers is probably owing to the same cause
which makes my nose this or that particular shape ;
makes it, in short, Mozart's nose, and different from
other people's."
Yet, as a composer, Mozart was as objective, as
dramatic, as Shakspeare and Raphael; Chopin, in
comparison, was wholly subjective, the Byron of
Music.
MUSIC.
293
I
109.
once with Adelaide Kemble, after she had
been singing in the " Figaro," she compared the
music to the bosom of a full blown rose in its volup-
tuous, intoxicating richness. I said that some of
Mozart's melodies seemed to me not so much com-
posed, but found found on some sunshiny day in
Arcadia, among nymphs and flowers. " Yes," she
replied, with ready and felicitous expression, " not
inventions, but existences.^
no.
OLD George the Third, in his blindness and mad-
ness, once insisted on making the selection of
pieces for the concert of ancient music (May, 1811),
it was soon after the death of the Princess Amelia.
294
NOTES ON ART.
" The programme included some of the finest passages
in Handel's e Samson,' descriptive of blindness ; the
( Lamentation of Jephthah,' for his daughter ; Pur-
cePs ( Mad Tom,' and closed with ' God save the
King,' to make sure the application of all that went
before."
in.
" in VERY one who remembers what Madlle. Rachel
-" was seven or eight years ago, and who sees
her now (1853), will allow that she has made no pro-
gress in any of the essential excellences of her art :
a certain proof that she is not a great artist in the
true sense of the word. She is a finished actress,
but she is nothing more, and nothing better; not
enough the artist ever to forget or conceal her art ;
consequently there is a want somewhere, which a
mind highly toned and of quick perceptions feels from
beginning to end. The parts in which she once ex-
celled the Phedre and the Hermione, for instance
have become formalised and hard, like studies cast
in bronze ; and when she plays a new part it has no
MADLLE. RACHEL.
freshness. I always go to see her whenever I can.
I admire her as what she is the Parisian actress,
practised in every trick of her metier. I admire what
she does, I think how well it is all done, and am
inclined to clap and applaud her drapery, perfect and
ostentatiously studied in every fold, just with the
same feeling that I applaud herself.
As to the last scene of Adrienne Lecouvreur,
(which those who are avides de sensation, athirst for
painful emotion, go to see as they would drink a
dram, and critics laud as a miracle of art,) it is
altogether a mistake and a failure ; it is beyond the
just limits of terror and pity beyond the legitimate
sphere of art. It reminds us of the story of Gentil
Bellini and the Sultan. The Sultan much admired
Bellini's picture of the decollation of John the Bap-
tist, but informed him that it was inaccurate sur-
gically for the tendons and muscles ought to shrink
where divided; and then calling for one of his slaves,
he drew his scimitar, and striking off the head of the
wretch, gave the horror-struck artist a lesson in
practical anatomy. So we might possibly learn from
Rachel's imitative representation, (studied in an hos-
pital as they say,) how poison acts on the frame, and
how the limbs and features writhe into death ; but if
she were a great moral artist she would feel that
what is allowed to be true in painting, is true in art
generally ; that mere imitation, such as the vulgar
NOTES ON ART.
delight in, and hold up their hands so see, is the
vulgarest and easiest aim of the imitative arts, and
that between the true interpretation of poetry in art
and such base mechanical means to the lowest ends,
there lies an immeasurable distance.
I am disposed to think that Rachel has not genius,
but talent, and that her talent, from what I see year
after year, has a downward tendency, there is not
sufficient moral seasoning to save it from corruption.
I remember that when I first saw her in Hermione
she reminded me of a serpent, and the same impres-
sion continues. The long meagre form with its
graceful undulating movements, the long narrow face
and features, the contracted jaw, the high brow, the
brilliant supernatural eyes which seem to glance every
way at once; the sinister smile ; the painted red lips,
which look as though they had lapped, or could lap,
blood; all these bring before me the idea of a Lamia,
the serpent nature in the woman's form. In Lydia,
and in Athalie, she touches the extremes of vice and
wickedness with such a masterly lightness and pre-
cision, that I am full of wondering admiration for
the actress. There is not a turn of her figure, not an
expression in her face, not a fold in her gorgeous
drapery, that is not a study ; but withal such a
consciousness of her art, and such an ostentation of
the means she employs, that the power remains
MADLLE. RACHEL. 297
always extraneous, as it were, and exciting only to
the senses and the intellect.
Latterly she has become a hard mannerist. Her
face, once so flexible, has lost the power of expressing
the nicer shades and softer gradations of feeling ; so
much so, that they write dramas for her with super-
naturally wicked and depraved heroines to suit her
especial powers. I conceive that an artist could not
sink lower in degradation. Yet to satisfy the taste of
a Parisian audience and the ambition of a Parisian
actress this was not enough, and wickedness re-
quired the piquancy of immediate approximation with
innocence. In the Valeria she played two characters,
and appeared on the stage alternately as a miracle of
vice and a miracle of virtue : an abandoned prostitute
and a chaste matron. There was something in this
contrasted impersonation, considered simply in rela-
tion to the aims and objects of art, so revolting, that
I sat in silent and deep disgust, which was partly
deserved by the audience which could endure the
exhibition.
It is the entire absence of the high poetic and
moral element which distinguishes Rachel as an
actress, and places her at such an immeasurable dis-
tance from Mrs. Siddons, that it shocks me to hear
them named together.
298
NOTES ON ART.
112.
T T is no reproach to a capital actress to play effec-
tively a very wicked character. Mrs. Siddons
played the abandoned Milwood as carefully, as com-
pletely as she played Hermoine and Constance ; but
if it had required a perpetual succession of Calistas
and Mil woods to call forth her highest powers, what
should we think of the woman and the artist ?
113.
WHEN dramas and characters are invented to suit
the particular talent of a particular actor or
actress, it argues rather a limited range of the artistic
power ; though within that limit the power may be
great and the talent genuine.
Thus for Liston and for Miss O'Neil, so distin-
guished in their respective lines of Comedy and
Tragedy, characters were especially constructed and
plays written, which have not been acted since their
time.
114.
A CELEBRATED German actress (who has quitted
** the stage for many years) speaking of Rachel,
said that the reason she must always stop short of
the highest place in art, is because she is nothing but
an actress that only ; and has no aims in life, has
HISTRIONIC ART.
no duties, feelings, employments, sympathies, but
those which centre in herself in the interests of her
art ; which thus ceases to be art and becomes a
metier.
This reminded me of what Pauline Viardot once
said to me : " D'abord je suis femme, avec les de-
voirs, les affections, les sentiments d'une fernme ; et
puis je suis artiste."
115.
THE same German actress whose opinion I have
quoted, told me that the Leonora and the Iphi-
genia of Goethe were the parts she preferred to play.
The Thekla and the Beatrice of Schiller next. (In
all these she excelled.) The parts easiest to her,
requiring no effort scarcely, were Jerta (in Houwald's
Tragedy, " Die Schuld "), and Clarchen in Egmont ;
of the character of Jerta, she said beautifully :
u Ich habe es nicht gespielt, Ich habe es gesagt!" (I
did not play it, I uttered it.) This was extremely
characteristic of the woman.
I once asked Mrs. Siddons, which of her great
characters she preferred to play ? She replied, after
a moment's consideration, and in her rich deliberate
emphatic tones : " Lady Macbeth is the character
I have most studied.'" She afterwards said that she
had played the character during thirty years, and
scarcely acted it once, without carefully reading over
300 NOTES ON ART.
the part and generally the whole play in the morn-
ing ; and that she never read over the play without
finding something new in it ; " something," she said,
" which had not struck me so much as it ought to
have struck me."
Of Mrs. Pritchard, who preceded Mrs. Siddons in
the part of Lady Macbeth, it was well known that
she had never read the play. She merely studied
her own part as written out by the stage-copyist ; of
the other parts she knew nothing but the cues.
116.
TTTHEN I asked Mrs. Henry Siddons, which of her
characters she preferred playing? she said at
once "Imogen, in Cymbeline, was the character I
played with most ease to myself, and most success as
regarded the public ; it cost no effort."
This was confirmed by others. A very good
judge said of her " In some of her best parts, as
Juliet, Rosalind, and Lady Townley, she may have
been approached or equalled. In Viola and Imogen
she was never equalled. In the grace and simplicity
of the first, in the refinement and shy but impas-
sioned tenderness of the last, / at least have never
seen any one to be compared to her. She hardly
seemed to act these parts ; they came naturally to
her."
ACTRESSES. 301
This reminds me of another anecdote of the same
accomplished actress and admirable woman. The
people of Edinburgh, among whom she lived, had so
identified her with all that was gentle, refined and
noble, that they did not like to see her play wicked
parts. It happened that Godwin went down to
Edinburgh with a tragedy in his pocket, which had
been accepted by the theatre there, and in which
Mrs. Henry Siddons was to play the principal part
that of a very wicked woman (I forget the name
of the piece). He was warned that it risked the
success of his play, but her conception of the part
was so just and spirited, that he persisted. At the
rehearsal she stopped in the midst of one of her
speeches and said, with great na'ivete, " I am afraid,
Mr. Godwin, the people will not endure to hear me
say this ! " He replied coolly, " My dear, you cannot
be always young and pretty you must come to this
at last, go on." He mistook her meaning and the
feeling of " the people." The play failed ; and the
audience took care to discriminate between their
disapprobation of the piece and their admiration for
the actress.
117.
MADAME SCHRCEDER DEVKIENT told me that she
sung with most pleasure to herself in the
" Fidelio ; " and in this part I have never seen her
equalled.
302 NOTES ON ART.
Fanny Kemble told me the part she had playec
with most pleasure to herself, was Camiola, in Mas-
singer's " Maid of Honour." It was an exquisite
impersonation, but the play itself ineffective ant
not successful, because of the weak and worthless
character of the hero.
118.
II /TRS. CHARLES KEAN told me that she had played
Jj_L with great ease and pleasure to herself, the part
of Ginevra, in Leigh Hunt's " Legend of Florence.'
She made the part (as it is technically termed), ant
it was a very complete and beautiful impersonation.
These answers appear to me psychologically, as
well as artistically, interesting, and worth pre-
serving.
119.
II /TRS. SIDDONS, when looking over the statues in
Lord Lansdowne's gallery, told him that one
mode of expressing intensity of feeling was suggested
ACTRESSES. 303
to her by the position of some of the Egyptian statues
with the arms close down at the sides and the hands
clenched. This is curious, for the attitude in the
Egyptian gods is intended to express repose. As the
expression of intense passion self-controlled, it might
be appropriate to some characters and not to others.
Rachel, as I recollect, uses it in the PhMre :
Madame Rettich uses it in the Medea. It would not
be characteristic in Constance.
120.
ON a certain occasion when Fanny Kemble was
reading Cymbeline, a lady next to me remarked
that Imogen ought not to utter the words " Senseless
linen ! happier therein than I ! " aloud, and to
Pisanio, that it detracted from the strength of the
feeling, and that they should have been uttered aside,
and in a low, intense whisper. " lachimo," she
added, " might easily have won a woman who could
have laid her heart so bare to a mere attendant ! "
On my repeating this criticism to Fanny Kemble,
she replied just as I had anticipated : " Such criticism
x 2
304 NOTES ON ART.
is the mere expression of the natural emotions or
character of the critic. She would have spoken the
words in a whisper ; I should have made the exclama-
tion aloud. If there had been a thousand people by,
I should not have cared for them I should not have
been conscious of their presence. I should have
exclaimed before them all, ( Senseless linen! happier
therein than I ! '"
And thus the artist fell into the same mistake of
which she accused her critic she made Imogen utter
the words aloud, because she would have done so her-
self. This sort of subjective criticism in both was
quite feminine ; but the question was not how either
A. B. or F. K. would have spoken the words, but
what would have been most natural in such a woman
as Imogen?
And most undoubtedly the first criticism was as
exquisitely true and just as it was delicate. Such a
woman as Imogen would not have uttered those words
aloud. She would have uttered them in a whisper,
and turning her face from her attendant. With such
a woman, the more intense the passion, the more
conscious and the more veiled the expression.
MARIA MADDALENA.
305
121.
T KEAD in the life of Garrick that, " about 1741, a
taste for Shakespeare had lately been revived by
the encouragement of some distinguished persons of
taste of both sexes ; but more especially by the
ladies who formed themselves into a society, called
the ' Shakespeare Club.' " There exists a Shakes-
peare Society at this present time, but I do not
know that any ladies are members of it, or allowed
to be so.
122.
mHE " Maria Maddalena" of Friedrich Hebbel is a
domestic tragedy. It represents the position of a
young girl in the lower class of society a character
of quiet goodness and feeling, in a position the most
usual, circumstances the most common-place. The
representation is from the life, and set forth with a
truth which in its naked simplicity, almost hardness,
becomes most tragic and terrible. Around this girl,
x 3
306 NOTES ON AET.
portrayed with consummate delicacy, is a group of
men. First her father, an honest artisan, coarse,
harsh, despotic. Then a light-minded, good-natured,
dissipated brother, and two suitors. All these love
her according to their masculine individuality. To
the men of her own family she is as a part of the
furniture something they are accustomed to see
necessary to the daily well-being of the house, with-
out whom the fire would not be on the hearth, nor
the soup on the table ; and they are proud of her
charms and good qualities as belonging to them. By
her lovers she is loved as an object they desire to
possess and dispute with each other. But no one
of all these thinks of her of what she thinks, feels,
desires, suffers, is, or may be. Nor does she seem to
think of it herself, until the storm falls upon her,
enwraps her, overwhelms her. Then she stands in
the midst of the beings around her, and who are one
and all in a kind of external relation to her, com-
pletely alone. In her grief, in her misery, in her
amazement, her perplexity, her terror, there is no one
to take thought for her, no one to help, no one to
sympathise. Each is self-occupied, self-satisfied.
And so she sinks down and perishes, and they stand
wondering, at what they had not the sense to see,
wringing their hands over the irremediable. It is
the Lucy Ashton of vulgar life.
The manners and characters of this play are essen-
THE AETIST NATURE. 307
tially German ; but the stuff the material of the
piece the relative position of the personages, might
be true of any place in this Christian, civilised
Europe. The whole is wonderfully, painfully
natural, and strikes home to the heart, like Hood's
" Bridge of Sighs." It was a surprise to me that
such a piece should have been acted, and with ap-
plause, at the Court Theatre at Vienna ; but I believe
it has not been given since 1849.
123.
HERE is a very good analysis of the artistic nature :
" II ressent une veritable emotion, mais il
^'arrange pour la montrer. II fait un peu ce que
faisait cet acteur de 1'antiquite qui, venant de perdre
son fils unique et jouant quelque temps apres le role
d'Electre embrassant Furne d'Oreste, prit entre ses
mains 1'urne qui contenait les cendres de son enfant,
et joua sa propre douleur, dit Aulus Gellius, au lieu
de jouer celle de son role. Ce melange de Femotion
naturelle et de 1'emotion theatrale est plus frequent
qu'on ne croit, surtout a certaines epoques quand le
raffinement de 1'Education fait que 1'homme ne sent
x 4
NOTES ON ART.
pas seulement ses emotions, mais qu'il sent aussi
1'effet qu'elles peuvent produire. Beaucoup de gens
alor^, sont naturellement comediens; c'est a dire qu'ils
donnent un role a leurs passions: ils sentent en de-
hors au lieu de sentir en dedans ; leurs emotions sont
en relief au lieu d'etre en profondeur." St. Marc
Girardin.
I think Margaret Fuller must have had the above
passage in her mind when she worked out this happy
illustration into a more finished form. She says :
" The difference between the artistic nature and the
unartistic nature in the hour of emotion, is this : in
the first the feeling is a cameo, in the last an intaglio.
Raised in relief and shaped out of the heart in the
first ; cut into the heart, and hardly perceptible till
you take the impression, in the last."
And to complete this fanciful and beautiful ana-
logy, we might add, that because the artistic nature
is demonstrative, it is sometimes thought insincere ;
and insincere it is where the form is hollow in
proportion as it is cast outward, as in. the casts
and electrotype copies of the solid sculpture. And
because the unartistic nature is undemonstrative,
it is sometimes thought cold, unreal ; for of this also
there are imitations ; and in passing the touch over
certain intaglios, We feel by contact that they are
not so deep as we supposed.
God defend us from both ! from the hollowness
FEMALE CRITICISM.
that imitates solidity, and the shallowness that
imitates depth !
124.
/~1 OETHE said of some woman, " She knew some-
thing of devotion and love, but of the pure
admiration for a glorious piece of man's handiwork
of a mere sympathetic veneration for the creation of
the human intellect she could form no idea."
This may have been true of the individual woman
referred to; but that female critics look for something
in a production of art beyond the mere handiwork,
and that " our sympathetic veneration for a creation
of human intellect," is often dependent on our moral
associations, is not a reproach to us. Nor, if I may
presume to say so, does it lessen the value of our
criticism, where it can be referred to principles.
Women have a sort of unconscious logic in these
matters.
310 NOTES ON ART.
125.
" A/\7" HEN fiction/ Sa 7 s Sir James Mackintosh,
" represents a degree of ideal excellence
superior to any virtue which is observed in real life,
the effect is perfectly analogous to that of a model of
ideal beauty in the fine arts."
That is to say As the Apollo exalts our idea of
possible beauty, in form, so the moral ideal of man
or woman exalts our idea of possible virtue, provided
it be consistent as a whole. If we gave the Apollo a
god-like head and face and left a part of his frame
below perfection, the elevating effect of the whole
would be immediately destroyed, though the figure
might be more according to the standard of actual
nature
126.
TN Dante, as in Shakespeare, every man selects
by instinct that which assimilates with the
course of his own previous occupations and interests."
(Merivale.) True, not of Dante and Shakespeare
only, but of all books worth reading; and not merely
of books and authors, but of all productions of mind
in whatever form which speak to mind ; all works of
art, from which we imbibe., as it were, what is sympa-
thetic with our individuality. The more universal the
THE GREEK APHRODITE. 311
sympathies of the writer or the artist, the more of
such individualities will be included in his domain of
power.
127.
TPHE distinction so cleverly and beautifully drawn
by the Germans (by Lessing first I believe)
between " Bildende " and " Redende Kunst " is not
to be rendered into English without a lengthy para-
phrase. It places in immediate contradistinction the
art which is evolved in words, and the art which is
evolved informs.
128.
VENUS, .or rather the Greek Aphrodite, in the sub-
lime fragment of Eschylus (the Dana'ides) is a
grand, severe, and pure conception ; the principle
eternal of beauty, of love, and of fecundity or the
law of the continuation of being through beauty and
312 NOTES ON ART.
through love. Such a conception is no more like the
Ovidean Roman Venus than the Venus of Milo is
like the Venus de Medicis.
129.
TN the Greek tragedy, love figures as one of the
-*- laws of nature not as a power, or a passion ;
these are the aspects given to it by the Christian
imagination.
Yet this higher idea of love did exist among the
ancients only we must not seek it in their poetry,
but in their philosophy. Thus we find it in Plato,
set forth as a beautiful philosophical theory ; not as
a passion, to influence life, nor as a poetic feeling, to
adorn and exalt it. Nor do we moderns owe this idea
of a mystic, elevated, and elevating love to the Greek
philosophy. I rather agree with those who trace it
to the mingling of Christianity with the manners of
the old Germans, and their (almost) superstitious
reverence for womanhood. In the Middle Ages,
where morals were most depraved, and women most
helpless and oppressed, there still survived the theory
formed out of the combination of the Christian spirit,
and the Germanic customs ; and when in the 15th
WILKIE'S LIFE AND LETTERS. 313
century Plato became the fashion, then the theory
became a science, and what had been religion became
again philosophy. This sort of speculative love be-
came to real love what theology became to religion ;
it was a thesis to be talked about and argued in uni-
versities, sung in sonnets, set forth in art ; and so
being kept as far as possible from all bearings on
our moral life, it ceased to find consideration either
as a primeval law of God, or as a moral motive
influencing the duties and habits of our existence;
and thus we find the social code in regard to it
diverging into all the vagaries of celibacy on one
hand, and all the vilenesses of profligacy on the
other.
130.
WILKIE'S " Life and Letters " have not helped me
much. His opinions and criticisms on his own
art are sensible, not suggestive. I find, however, one
or two passages strongly illustrative of the value of
truth as a principle in art, and the sort of vitality it
gives to scenery and objects.
314 NOTES ON ART.
He writes, when travelling in Holland, to his
friend, Sir George Beaumont ;
" One of the first circumstances that struck me
wherever I went was what you had prepared me for;
the resemblance that everything bore to the Dutch
and Flemish pictures. On leaving Ostend, not only
the people, houses, trees, but whole tracks of country
reminded me of Teniers, and on getting further
into the country this was only relieved by the pictures
of Rubens and Wouvermans, or some other masters
taking his place.
" I thought I could trace the particular districts in
Holland where Ostade, Cuyp, and Rembrandt had
studied, and could almost fancy the spot where the
pictures of other masters had been painted. Indeed
nothing seemed new to me in the whole country; and
what one could not help wondering at, was, that
these old masters should have been able to draw the
materials of so beautiful a variety of art, from so
contracted and monotonous a theme."
Their variety arose out of their truthfulness. I
had the same feeling when travelling in Holland and
Belgium. It was to me a perpetual succession of
reminiscences, and so it has been with others.
Rubens and Rembrandt (as landscape painters)
Cuyp, Hobbima, were continually in my mind ;
occasionally the yet more poetical Ruysdaal ; but
who ever thinks of Wouvermans, or Bergham, or
TRUTH IN ART. 315
Karel du Jardin, as national or natural painters?
their scenery is all got up like the scenery in a ballet,
and I can conceive nothing more tiresome than a
room full of their pictures, elegant as they are.
131.
AGAIN, writing from Jerusalem, Wilkie says,
" Nothing here requires revolution in our
opinions of the finest works of art : with all their
discrepancies of detail, they are yet constantly re-
called by what is here before us. The back- ground
of the Heliodorus of Raphael is a Syrian building ;
the figures in the Lazarus of Sebastian del Piombo
are a Syrian people ; and the indescribable tone of
Rembrandt is brought to mind at every turn, whether
in the street, the Synagogue, or the Sepulchre."
And again : " The painter we are always referring
to, as one who has most truly given the eastern
people, is Rembrandt."
He partly contradicts this afterwards, but says,
that Venetian art reminds him of Syria. Now, the
Venetians were in constant communication with the
East ; all their art has a tinge of orientalism. As to
Rembrandt, he must have been in familiar inter-
course with the Jew merchants and Jewish families
settled in the Dutch commercial towns ; he painted
them frequently as portraits, and they perpetually
appear in his compositions.
316
NOTES ON ART.
132.
TN the following passage Wilkie seems uncon-
*- sciously to have anticipated the invention (or
rather the discovery) of the Daguerreotype, and some
of its results. He says : "If by an operation of
mechanism, animated nature could be copied with
the accuracy of a cast in plaster, a tracing on a wall,
or a reflection in a glass, without modification, and
without the proprieties and graces of art, all that
utility could desire would be perfectly attained, but
it would be at the expense of almost every quality
which renders art delightful."
One reason why the Daguerreotype portraits are
in general so unsatisfactory may perhaps be traced to
a natural law, though I have not heard it suggested.
It is this : every object that we behold we see not
with the eye only, but with the soul; and this is
especially true of the human countenance, which in
so far as it is the expression of mind we see through
the medium of our own individual mind. Thus a
portrait is satisfactory in so far as the painter has
sympathy with his subject, and delightful to us in
proportion as the resemblance reflected through his
sympathies is in accordance with our own. Now in the
Daguerreotype there is no such medium, and the face
comes before us without passing through the human
mind and brain to our apprehension. This may be
AN ALTAR PIECE.
317
the reason why a Daguerreotype, however beautiful
and accurate, is seldom satisfactory or agreeable, and
that while we acknowledge its truth as to fact, it
always leaves something for the sympathies to desire.
133.
TT e says, <f One thing alone seems common in all
the stages of early art ; the desire of making
all other excellences tributary to the expression of
thought and sentiment."
The early painters had no other excellences except
those of thought and expression; therefore could
not sacrifice what they did not possess. They drew
incorrectly, coloured ineffectively, and were Ignorant
of perspective.
134.
WHEN at Dusseldorf, I found the President of the
Academy, Wilhelm Schadow, employed on a
church picture in three compartments ; Paradise in
Y
I
318 NOTES ON ART.
the centre ; on the right side. Purgatory ; on the left
side, Hell. He explained to me that he had not
attempted to paint the interior of Paradise as the
sojourn of the blessed, because he could ^imagine no
kind of occupation or delight which, prolonged to
eternity, would not be wearisome. He had there-
fore represented the exterior of Paradise, where
Christ, standing on the threshold with outstretched
arms, receives and welcomes those who enter. (This
was better and in finer taste than the more common
allegory of St. Peter and his keys.) On one side of
the door, the Virgin Mary and a group of guardian
angels encourage those who approach. Among these
we distinguish a martyr who has died for the truth,
and a warrior who has fought for it. A care-worn,
penitent mother is presented by her innocent daugh-
ter. Those who were " in the world and the world
knew them not," are here acknowledged and eyes
dim with weeping, and heads bowed with shame, are
here uplifted, and bright with the rapturous gleam
which shone through the portals of Paradise.
The idea of Purgatory, he told me, was suggested
by a vision or dream related by St. Catherine of
Genoa, in which she beheld a great number of men
and women shut up in a dark cavern ; angels de-
scending from heaven, liberate them from time to
time, and they are borne away one after another
from darkness, pain, and penance, into life and light
AN ALTAR PIECE. 319
again to behold the face of their Maker recon-
ciled and healed. In his picture, Schadow has re-
presented two angels bearing away a liberated soul.
Below in the fore-ground groups of sinners are wait-
ing, sadly, humbly, but not unhopefully, the term of
their bitter penance. Among these he had placed a
group of artists and poets who, led away by tempta-
tion, had abused their glorious gifts to wicked or
worldly purposes ; Titian, Ariosto, and, rather to
my surprise, the beautiful, lamenting spirit of Byron.
Then, what was curious enough, as types of ambition,
Lady Macbeth and her husband, who, it seems, were
to be ultimately saved, I do not know why unless
for the love of Shakespeare.
Hell, like all the hells I ever saw, was a failure.
There was the usual amount of fire and flames,
dragons and serpents, ghastly, despairing spirits, but
nothing of original or powerful conception. When
I looked in Schadow's face, so beautiful with bene-
volence, I wondered how he could but in truth he
could not realise to himself the idea of a hell ; all
the materials he had used were borrowed and com-
monplace.
But among his cartoons for pictures already
painted, there was one charming idea of quite a
different kind. It was for an altar, and he called it
" THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE." Above, the sacrificed
Redeemer lies extended in his mother's arms. The
Y 2
NOTES ON AET.
pure abundant Waters of Salvation, gushing from
the rock beneath their feet, are received into a great
cistern. Saints, martyrs, teachers of the truth, are
standing round, drinking or filling their vases, which
they present to each other. From the cistern flows
a stream, at which a family of poor peasants are
drinking with humble, joyful looks ; and as the
stream divides and flows away through flowery mea-
dows, little sportive children stoop to drink of it,
scooping up the water in their tiny hands, or sipping
it with their rosy smiling lips. A beautiful and
significant allegory beautifully expressed, and as
intelligible to the people as any in the " Pilgrim's
Progress."
135.
TT AYDON discussed "High Art" as if it depended
-^-^- solely on the knowledge and the appreciation
of form. In this lay his great mistake. Form is but
the vehicle of the highest art.
136.
I OUTHEY says that the Franciscan Order " ex-
cluded all art, all science ; no pictures might
ARTIST -LIFE.
profane their churches." This is a most extraordinary
instance of ignorance in a man of Southey's uni-
versal learning. Did he forget Friar Bacon? had
he not heard of that museum of divine pictures, the
Franciscan church and convent at Assisi ? And
that some of the greatest mathematicians, architects*
mosaic workers, carvers, and painters, of the 13th
and 14th centuries were Franciscan friars ?
137.
WORDSWORTH'S remark on Sir Joshua Reynolds
as a painter, that " he lived too much for the
age and the people among whom he lived," is hardly
just; as a portrait -painter he could not well do
otherwise; his profession was to represent the people
among whom he lived. An artist who takes the
higher, the creative and imaginative walks of art, and
who thinks he can, at the same time, live for and
with the age, and for the passing and clashing in-
terests of the world, and the frivolities of society,
does so at a great risk : there must be perilous dis-
cord between the inner and the outer life such
discord as wears and irritates the whole physical and
moral being. Where the original material of the
character is not strong, the artistic genius will be
Y 3
NOTES ON ART.
gradually enfeebled and conventionalised, through
flattery, through sympathy, through misuse. If the
material be strong, the result may perhaps be worse ;
the genius may be demoralised and the mind lose its
balance. I have seen in my time instances of both.
138.
ft riUiE man," says Coleridge, " who reads a work
* meant for immediate effect on one age, with
the notions and feelings of another, may be a refined
gentleman but a very sorry critic."
This is especially true with regard to art: but
Coleridge should have put in the word, only, (" only
the notions and feelings of another age,") for a very
great pleasure lies in the power of throwing our-
selves into the sentiments and notions of one age,
while feeling with them, and reflecting upon them,
with the riper critical experience which belongs to
another age.
MATERIALISM IN ART. 323
139.
A good taste in art feels the presence or the
absence of merit ; a, just taste discriminates the
degree, the poco-piu and the poco-meno. A good
taste rejects faults ; a just taste selects excellences.
A good taste is often unconscious ; a just taste is
always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or
spoilt ; a just taste can only go on refining more and
more.
140.
A RTISTS are interesting to me as men. Their work,
**- as the product of mind, should lead us to a
knowledge of their own being ; else, as I have often
said and written, our admiration of art is a species of
atheism. To forget the soul in its highest manifes-
tation is like forgetting God in his creation.
141.
I" ES images peints du corps humain, dans les figures
-" ou domine par trop le savoir anatomique, en
revelant trop clairement a I'homme les secrets de sa
Y 4
324 NOTES ON ART.
structure, lui en decouvrent aussi par trop ce qu'on
pourrait appeler le point de vue materiel, ou, si Ton
veut, animal"
This is the fault of Michal- Angelo ; yet T have
sometimes thought that his very materialism, so
grand, and so peculiar in character, may have arisen
out of his profound religious feeling, his stern
morality, his lofty conceptions of our mortal, as well
as immortal destinies. He appears to have beheld
the human form only in a pure and sublime point of
view ; not as the animal man, but as the habitation,
fearfully and wondrously constructed, for the spirit
of man,
" The outward shape,
And unpolluted temple of the mind."
This is the reason that Michal- Angelo's materialism
affects us so differently from that of Rubens. In
the first, the predominance of form attains almost a
moral sublimity. In the latter, the predominance of
flesh and blood is debased into physical grossness.
Michal- Angelo believed in the resurrection of THE
BODY, emphatically ; and in his Last Judgment the
dead rise like Titans, strong to contend and mighty
to suffer. It is the apotheosis of form. In Ruben's
picture of the game subject (at Munich) the bodily
presence of resuscitated life is revolting, reminding
us of the text of St. Paul " Flesh and blood shall
not inherit the kingdom of God." Both pictures are
MATERIALISM IN ART. 325
aesthetically false, but artistically miracles., and should
thus be considered and appreciated.
I have never looked on those awful figures in the
Medici Chapel without thinking what stupendous
intellects must inhabit such stupendous forms ter-
rible in their quietude ; but they are supernatural,
rather than divine.
" Heidnische Ruhe und Christliche Milde, sie bleiben Dir fremde ;
Alt-testamentisch bist Du, Zlirnender, wie ist Dein Gott ! "
John Edward Taylor, in his profound and beau-
tiful essay " MICHAEL- ANGELO, A POET," says
truly that " Dante worshipped the philosophy of
religion, and Michael- Angelo adored the philosophy
of art." The religion of the one and the art of the
other were evolved in a strange combination of mys-
ticism, materialism, and moral grandeur. The two
men were congenial in character and in genius.
v 5
A FRAGMENT ON SCULPTURE.
AND ON CERTAIN CHARACTERS IN HISTORY AND POETRY CONSIDERED
AS SUBJECTS OF MODERN ART.
1848.
I SHOULD begin by admitting the position laid down
by Frederick Schlegel, that art and nature are not
identical. " Men," he says, " traduce nature, who
falsely give her the epithet of artistic ; " for though
nature comprehends all art, art cannot comprehend
all nature. Nature, in her sources of pleasures and
contemplation is infinite ; and art, as her reflection
in human works, finite. Nature is boundless in her
powers, exhaustless in her variety; the powers of
art and its capabilities of variety in production are
bounded on every side. Nature herself, the infinite,
A FRAGMENT ON SCULPTURE. 327
has circumscribed the bounds of finite art ; the one
is the divinity; the other, the priestess. And if
poetic art in the interpreting of nature share in her
infinitude, yet in representing nature through mate-
rial, form, and colour, she is, oh, how limited !
If each of the forms of poetic art has its law of
limitation as determined as the musical scale, nar-
rowest of all are the limitations of sculpture, to
which, notwithstanding, we give the highest place ;
and it is in regard to sculpture, we find most fre-
quently those mistakes which arise from a want of
knowledge of the true principles of art.
Admitting, then, as necessary and immutable, the
limitations of the art of sculpture as to the manage-
ment of the material in giving form and expression ;
its primal laws of repose and simplicity; its rejection
of the complex and conventional ; its bounded capa-
bilities as to choice of subject; must we also admit,
with some of the most celebrated critics of art, that
there is but one style of sculpture, the Greek ? And
that every deviation from pure Greek art must be
regarded as a depravation and perversion of the
powers and subjects of sculpture ? I do not see that
this follows.
It is absolute that Greek art reached long ago the
term of its development. In so far as regards the
323 NOTES ON ART.
principles of beauty and execution, it can go no far-
ther. We may stand and look at the relics of the
Parthenon in awe and in despair ; we can do neither
more, nor better. But we have not done with Greek
sculpture. What in it is purely ideal, is eternal ;
what is conventional, is in accordance with the primal
conditions of all imitative art. Therefore though
it may have reached the point at which develop-
ment stops, and though its capability of adaptation
be limited by necessary laws ; still its all-beautiful,
its immortal imagery is ever near us and around
us; still "doth the old feeling bring back the
old names," and with the old names, the forms ; still,
in those old familiar forms we continue to clothe all
that is loveliest in visible nature; still, in all our
associations with Greek art
"Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great,
And Venus who brings every thing that's fair."
That the supreme beauty of Greek art that the
majestic significance of the classical myths will ever
be to the educated mind and eye as things indifferent
and worn out, I cannot believe.
But on the other hand it may well be doubted
whether the impersonation of the Greek allegories
in the purest forms of Greek art will ever give
intense pleasure to the people, or ever speak home
A FRAGMENT ON SCULPTURE. 329
to the hearts of the men and women of these times.
And this not from the want of an innate taste and
capacity in the minds of the masses not because
ignorance has " frozen the genial current in their
souls" not merely through a vulgar preference for
mechanical imitation of common and familiar forms ;
but from other causes not transient not accidental.
A classical education is not now, as heretofore, the
only education given ; and through an honest and
intense sympathy with the life of their own expe-
rience, and through a dislike to vicious associations,
though clothed in classical language and classical
forms, thence is it that the people have turned with
a sense of relief from gods and goddesses, Ledas and
Antiopes, to shepherds and shepherdesses, groups of
Charity, and young ladies in the character of Inno-
cence, harmless, picturesque inanities, bearing the
same relation to classical sculpture that Watts's
hymns bear to Homer and Sophocles.
Classical attainments of any kind are rare in our
English sculptors ; therefore it is, that we find them
often quite familiar with the conventional treatment
and outward forms of the usual subjects of Greek
art, without much knowledge of the original poetical
conception, its derivation, or its significance ; and
equally without any real appreciation of the idea of
which the form is but the vehicle. Hence they do
330
NOTES ON ART.
not seem to be aware how far this original concep-
tion is capable of being varied, modified, animated
as it were, with an infusion of fresh life, without
deviating from its essential truth, or transgressing
those narrow limits, within which all sculpture must
be bounded in respect to action and attitude. To
express character within these limits is the grand
difficulty. We must remember that too much value
given to the head as the seat of mind, too much
expression given to the features as the exponents
of character, must diminish the importance of those
parts of the form on which sculpture mainly depends
for its effect on the imagination. To convey the
idea of a complete individuality in a single figure,
and under these restrictions, is the problem to be
solved by the sculptor who aims at originality, yet
feels his aspirations restrained by a fine taste and cir-
cumscribed by certain inevitable associations.
It is therefore a question open to argument and
involving considerations of infinite delicacy and
moment, in morals and in art, whether the old
Greek legends, endued as they are with an imperish-
able vitality derived from their abstract youth, may
not be susceptible of a treatment in modern art ana-
logous to that which they have received in modern
poetry, where the significant myth, or the ideal
character, without losing its classic grace, has been
A FRAGMENT ON SCULPTURE. 831
animated with a purer sentiment, and developed into
a higher expressiveness. Wordsworth's Dion and
Laodomia ; Shelley's version of the Hymn to Mer-
cury ; Goethe's Iphigenia ; Lord Byron's Prome-
theus ; Keats's Hyperion ; Barry Cornwall's Proser-
pina ; are instances of what I mean in poetry. To
do the same thing in art, requires that our sculptors
should stand in the same relation to Phidias and
Praxiteles, that our greatest poets bear to Homer or
Euripides ; that they should be themselves poets
and interpreters, not mere translators and imitators.
Further, we all know, that there is often a neces-
sity for conveying abstract ideas in the forms of art.
We have then recourse to allegory ; yet allegorical
statues are generally cold and conventional and
addressed to the intellect merely. Now there are
occasions, in which an abstract quality or thought is
far more impressively and intelligibly conveyed by
an impersonation than by a personification. I mean,
that Aristides might express the idea of justice;
Penelope, that of conjugal faith ; Jonathan and
David (or Pylades and Orestes), friendship ; Rizpah,
devotion to the memory of the dead ; Iphigenia,
the voluntary sacrifice for a good cause ; and so of
many others ; and such figures would have this ad-
vantage, that with the significance of a symbol they
would combine all the powers of a sympathetic
reality.
332
NOTES ON ART.
HELEN.
T HAVE never seen any statue of Helen, ancient or
-^- modern. Treated in the right spirit, I can hardly
conceive a diviner subject for a sculptor. It would
be a great mistake to represent the Greek Helen
merely as a beautiful and alluring woman. This, at
least, is not the Homeric conception of the character,
which has a wonderful and fascinating individuality,
requiring the utmost delicacy and poetic feeling to
comprehend, and rare artistic skill to realise. The
oft- told story of the Grecian painter, who, to create
a Helen, assembled some twenty of the fairest models
he could find, and took from each a limb or a feature,
in order to compose from their separate beauties an
ideal of perfection, this story, if it were true, would
only prove that even Zeuxis could make a great mis-
take. Such a combination of heterogeneous elements
would be psychologically and artistically false, and
would never give us a Helen.
She has become the ideal type of a fatal, faithless,
dissolute woman ; but according to the Greek myth,
HELEtt.
she is predestined, at once the instrument and the
victim of that fiat of the gods which had long before
decreed the destruction of Troy, and her to be the
cause. She must not only be supremely beautiful,
ft a daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most
divinely fair ! " but as the offspring of Zeus (the
title by which she is so often designated in the Iliad),
as the sister of the great twin demi-gods Castor and
Pollux, she should have the heroic lineaments proper
to her Olympian descent, touched with a pensive
shade; for she laments the calamities which her fatal
charms have brought on all who have loved her, all
whom she has loved :
" Ah ! had I died ere to these shores I fled,
False to my country and my nuptial bed! "
She shrinks from the reproachful glances of those
whom she has injured ; and yet, as it is finely inti-
mated, wherever she appears her resistless loveliness
vanquishes every heart, and changes curses into
blessings. Priam treats her with paternal tender-
ness ; Hector with a sort of chivalrous respect.
" If some proud brother eyed me with disdain,
Or scornful sister with her sweeping train,
Thy gentle accents softened all my pain ;
Nor was it e'er my fate from thee to find
A deed ungentle or a word unkind."
Helen, standing on the walls of Troy, and looking
sadly over the battle plain, where the heroes of her
334
NOTES ON ART.
forfeited country, her kindred and her friends, are
assembled to fight and bleed for her sake, brings
before us an image full of melancholy sweetness as
well as of consummate beauty. Another passage in
which she upbraids Venus as the cause of her fault
not as a mortal might humbly expostulate with
an immortal, but almost on terms of equality, and
even with bitterness, is yet more characteristic.
" For what/' she asks, tauntingly, " am I reserved ?
To what new countries am I destined to carry war
and desolation ? For what new lover must I break
a second vow ? Let me go hence ! and if Paris
lament my absence, let Venus console him, and for
his sake ascend the skies no more ! " A regretful
pathos should mingle with her conscious beauty and
her half-celestial dignity ; and, to render her truly,
her Greek elegance should be combined with a deeper
and more complex sentiment than Greek art has
usually sought to express.
I am speaking here of Homer's Helen the
Helen of the Iliad, not the Helen of the tragedians
not the Helen who for two thousand years has
merely served e( to point a moral ; " and an artist
who should think to realise the true Homeric con-
ception, should beware of counterfeits, for such are
abroad.*
* Canova's bust of Helen is such a counterfeit ; whereas the
Helen of Gibson is, for a mere head, singularly characteristic.
HELEN. 835
There is a wild Greek myth that it was not the
real Helen, but the phantom of Helen, who fled with
Paris, and who caused the destruction of Troy ;
while Helen herself was leading, like Penelope, a
pattern life at Memphis. I must confess I prefer
the proud humility, the pathetic elegance of Homer's
Helen, to such jugglery.
It may flatter the pride of virtue, or it may move
our religious sympathies, to look on the forlorn
abasement of the Magdalene as the emblem of peni-
tence ; but there are associations connected with
Helen " sad Helen," as she calls herself, and as I
conceive the character, which have a deep tragic
significance ; and surely there are localities for which
the impersonation of classical art would be better
fitted than that of sacred art.
I do not know of any existing statue of Helen.
Nicetas "mentions among the relics of ancient art
destroyed when Constantinople was sacked by the
Latins in 1202, a bronze statue of Helen, with long
hair flowing to the waist ; and there is mention of
an Etruscan figure of her, with wings (expressive of
her celestial origin, for the Etruscans gave all their
gods and demi-gods wings): in Miiller I find these
two only. There are likewise busts ; and the story
of Helen, and the various events of her life, occur
perpetually on the antique gems, bas-reliefs, and
painted vases. The most frequent subject is her
Z
NOTES ON ART.
abduction by Paris. A beautiful subject for a bas-
relief, and one I believe not yet treated, would be
Helen and Priam mourning over the lifeless form of
Hector; yet the difficulty of preserving the simple
sculptural treatment, and at the same time discrimin-
ating between this and other similar funereal groups,
would render it perhaps a better subject for a picture,
as admitting then of such scenery and accessories as
would at once determine the signification.
PENELOPE.
ALCEST1S.
LAODAMIA.
STATUES of Penelope and Helen might stand in
beautiful and expressive contrast ; but it is a contrast
which no profane or prosaic hand should attempt to
realise. Penelope is all woman in her tenderness
and her truth ; Helen, half a goddess in the midst of
error and remorse.
Nor is Penelope the only character which might
stand as a type of conjugal fidelity in contrasted
companionship with Helen: Alcestis, who died for
LAODAMIA. 337
her husband ; or, better still, Laodamia, whose in-
tense love and longing recalled hers from the shades
below, are susceptible of the most beautiful sta-
tuesque treatment ; only we must bear in mind that
the leading motif in the Alcestis is duty, in the
Laodamia, love.
I remember a bas-relief in the Vatican, which
represents Hermes restoring Protesilaus to his mourn-
ing wife. The interview was granted for three hours
only ; and when the hero was taken from her a second
time, she died on the threshhold of her palace. This
is a frequent and appropriate subject for sarcophagi
and funereal vases. But there exists, I believe, no
single statue commemorative of the wife's passionate
devotion.
The modern sculptor should penetrate his fancy
with the sentiment of Wordsworth's Laodamia.
While the pen is in my hand I may remark that
two of the stanzas in the Laodamia have been
altered, and, as it seems to me, not improved, since
the first edition. Originally the poem opened thus :
" With sacrifice, before the rising morn
Perform'd, my slaughtcr'd lord have I required ;
And in thick darkness, amid shades forlorn,
Him of the infernal Gods have I desired :
Celestial pity I again implore ;
Restore him to my sight great Jove, restore !"
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838 NOTES ON ART.
Altered thus, and comparatively flat :
" With sacrifice before the rising morn
Vows have I made, by fruitless hope inspired ;
And from the infernal Gods, mid shades forlorn
Of night, my slaughtered lord have I required :
Celestial pity I again implore ;
Restore him to my sight great Jove, restore ! "
In the early edition the last stanza but one stood
thus : -
" Ah ! judge her gently who so deeply loved !
Her who, in reason's spite, yet without crime,
Was in a trance of passion thus removed ;
Delivered from the galling yoke of time,
And these frail elements, to gather flowers
Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers ! "
In the later editions thus altered, and, to my taste,
spoiled : -
" By no weak pity might the Gods be moved ;
She who thus perish'd not without the crime
Of lovers that in Reason's spite have loved,
Was doomed to wander in a grosser clime
Apart from happy ghosts, that gather flowers
Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers. "
Altered, probably, because Virgil has introduced
the shade of Laodamia among the criminal and un-
happy lovers, an instance of extraordinary bad taste
in the Roman poet; whatever may have been her
faults, she surely deserved to be placed in better
company than Phaedra and Pasiphae. Wordsworth's
HIPPOLYTUS. 339
intuitive feeling and taste were true in the first
instance, and he might have trusted to them. In
my own copy of Wordsworth I have been care-
ful to mark the original reading in justice to the
original Laodamia.
HIPPOLYTUS. NEOPTOLEMUS.
I HAVE never met with a statue, ancient or modern,
of Hippolytus ; the finest possible ideal of a Greek
youth, touched with some individual characteristics
which are peculiarly fitted for sculpture. He is a
hunter, not a warrior ; a tamer of horses, not a com-
batant with spear and shield. He should have the
slight, agile build of a young Apollo, but nothing of
the God's effeminacy ; on the contrary, there should
be an infusion of the severe beauty of his Amazonian
mother, with that sedateness and modesty which
should express the votary and companion of Diana ;
z 3
340 NOTES ON ART.
while, as the fated victim of Venus, whom he had
contemned, and of his stepmother Phaedra, whom he
had repulsed, there should be a kind of melancholy
in his averted features. A hound and implements of
the chase would be the proper accessories, and the
figure should be undraped, or nearly so.
A sculptor who should be tempted to undertake
this fine, and, as I think, untried subject at least
as a single figure must begin by putting Racine
out of his mind, whose 6f Seigneur Hippolyte " makes
sentimental love to the "Princesse Aricie," and
must penetrate his fancy with the conception of
Euripides.
I find in Schlegel's " Essais litteraires," a few lines
which will assist the fancy of the artist, in repre-
senting the person and character of Hippolytus.
" Quant a 1'Hippolyte d'Euripide il a une teinte
si divine que pour le sentir dignement il faut, pour
ainsi dire, etre initie dans les mysteres de la beaute,
avoir respire 1'air de la Grece. Kappelez vous ce que
Pantiquite nous a transmis de plus accompli parmi
les images d'une jeunesse heroique, les Dioscures de
Monte-Cavallo, le Meleagre et 1'Apollon du Vati-
can. Le caractere d'Hippolyte occupe dans la
poesie a peu pres la meme place que ces statues
dans la sculpture." " On peut remarquer dans plu-
sieurs beautes ideales de ^antique que les anciens
HIPPOLYTUS.
voulant creer une image perfectionnee de la nature
humaine ont fondu les nuances du caractere d'un
sexe avec celui de 1'autre ; que Junon, Pallas, Diane,
ont une majeste, une seVerite male ; qu' Apollon,
Mercure, Bacchus, au contraire, ont quelque chose
de la grace et de la douceur des femmes. De meme
nous voyons dans la beaute heroique et vierge
d'Hippolyte 1'image de sa mere 1'Amazone et le
reflet de Diane dans un mortel."
(The last lines are especially remarkable, and are
an artistic commentary on what I have ventured to
touch upon ethically at page 85.)
The story of Hippolytus is to be found in bas-
reliefs and gems ; it occurs on a particularly fine
sarcophagus now preserved in the cathedral at
Agrigentum, of which there is a cast in the British
Museum.
Under the heroic and classical form, Hippolytus
conveys the same idea of manly chastity and self-
control which in sacred art would be suggested by
the figure of Joseph the son of Jacob.
A noble companion to the Hippolytus would be
Neoptolernus, the son of Achilles. He is the young
Greek warrior, strong and bold and brave ; a fine
/ 4
342 NOTES ON ART.
ideal type of generosity and truth. The conception ,
as I imagine it, should be taken from the Philoctetes
of Sophocles, where Neoptolemus, indignant at the
craft of Ulysses, discloses the trick of which he had
been made the unwilling instrument, and restores
the fatal, envenomed arrows to Philoctetes. The
celebrated lines in the Iliad spoken by Achilles
" Who dares think one thing and another tell
My soul detests him as the gates of hell ! "
should give the leading characteristic motif in the
figure of his son. There should be something of
remorseful pity in the very youthful features; the
form ought to be heroically treated, that is, un-
draped, and he should hold the arrows in his hand.
Neoptolemus, as the savage avenger of his father's
death, slaying the grey-haired Priam at the foot of
the altar, and carrying off Andromache, is, of course,
quite a different version of the character. He then
figures as Pyrrhus -
" The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble."
The fine moral story of Neoptolemus and Philoc-
tetes is figured on the Etruscan vases. Of the
young, truth-telling, Greek hero I find no single
statue.
IPHtGENIA.
348
IPHIGENIA.
I HAVE often been surprised that we have no statue
of this eminently beautiful subject. We have the
story of Iphigenia constantly repeated in gems and
bas-reliefs ; the most celebrated example extant being
the Medici Vase. But no single figure of Iphigenia,
as the Greek ideal of heroic maidenhood and self-
devotion, exists, I believe, in antique sculpture.
The small and rather feebly elegant statuette by
Christian Tieck is the only modern example I have
seen.
Iphigenia may be represented under two very
different aspects, both beautiful.
First, as the Iphigenia in Aulis ; the victim sa-
crificed to obtain a fair wind for the Grecian fleet
detained on its way to Troy. Extreme youth and
grace, with a tender resignation not devoid of
dignity, should be the leading characteristics; for
we must bear in mind that Iphigenia, while re-
gretting life and the " lamp-bearing day," and " the
344 NOTES ON ART.
beloved light," and her Argive home and her
(e Mycenian handmaids," dies willingly, as the Greek
girl ought to die, for the good of her country.
She begins, indeed, with a prayer for pity, with la-
mentations for her untimely end, but she resumes
her nobler self; and all her sentiments, when she is
brought forth, crowned for sacrifice, are worthy of the
daughter of Agamemnon. She even exults that she
is called upon to perish for the good of Greece, and
to avenge the cause of right on the Spartan Helen.
" I give," she exclaims, " my life for Greece I sacri-
fice me and let Troy perish ! " When her mother
weeps, she reproves those tears : " It is not well,
O my mother! that I should love life too much.
Think that thou hast brought me forth for the com-
mon good of Greece, not for thyself only ! " She
glories in her anticipated renown, not vainly, since,
while the world endures, and far as the influences
of literature and art extend, her story and her
name shall live. The scene in Euripides should be
taken as the basis of the character the finest
scene in his finest drama. The tradition that Iphi-
genia was not really sacrificed, but snatched away
from the altar by Diana, and a hind substituted in
her place, should be present to the fancy of the
artist, when he sets himself to represent the majestic
resignation of the consecrated virgin; as adding a
touch of the marvellous and ideal to the Greek ele-
gance and simplicity of the conception.
IPHIGENIA. 345
The picture of Iphigenia as drawn by Tennyson
is wonderfully vivid; but it wants the Greek dig-
nity and statuesque feeling; it is emphatically a
picture, all over colour and light, and crowded with
accessories. He represents her as encountering
Helen in the land of Shadows, and, turning from her
" with sick and scornful looks averse," for she remem-
bers the tragedy at Aulis.
" My youth (she said) was blasted with a curse :
This woman was the cause !
I was cut off from hope in that sad place
Which yet to name my spirit loathes and fears.
My father held his hand upon his face ;
I, blinded with my tears,
Essayed to speak ; my voice came thick with sighs
As in a dream ; dimly I could descry
The stern black-bearded kings with wolfish eyes
Waiting to see me die.
The tall masts quiver'd as they lay afloat,
The temples and the people and the shore ;
One drew a sharp knife thro' my tender throat
Slowly and nothing more."
The famous picture of the sacrifice of Iphigenia by
Timanthes, the theme of admiration and criticism for
the last two thousand years, which every writer on art
deems it proper to mention in praise or in blame, could
hardly have been more vivid or more terrible than this.
The analogous idea, that of heroic resignation and
self-devotion in a great cause, would be conveyed in
sacred art by the figure of Jephtha's daughter ; she
too regrets the promises of life, but dies not the less
346 NOTES ON ART.
willingly. " My father, if thou hast opened thy
mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that
which hath proceeded out of thy mouth ; forasmuch
as the Lord hath taken vengeance for thee of thine
enemies, even of the children of Ammon." And for
a single statue, Jephtha's daughter would be a fine
subject one to task the powers of our best sculp-
tors; the sentiment would be the same as the Iphi-
genia, but the treatment altogether different.
For the Iphigenia in Tauris I think the modern
sculptor would do well to set aside the character as
represented by Euripides, and rather keep in view the
conception of Goethe.* In his hand it has lost no-
thing of its statuesque elegance and simplicity, and has
gained immeasurably in moral dignity and feminine
tenderness. The Iphigenia in Tauris is no longer
young, but she is still the consecrated virgin; no
more the victim, but herself the priestess of those
very rites by which she was once fated to perish.
While Euripides has depicted her as stern and astute,
Goethe has made her the impersonation of female
devotedness, and mild, but unflinching integrity. She
is like the young Neoptolemus when she disdains to
use the stratagem which Py lades had suggested, when
* There is a fine translation of the German Iphigenia by Miss
Swanwick. (Dramatic Works of Goethe. Bohn, 1850.)
EVE.
847
she dares to speak the truth, and trust to it alone for
help and safety. The scene in which she is haunted
by the recollection of her doomed ancestry, and
mutters over the song of the Parcae on that far-off
sullen shore, is sublime, but incapable of representa-
tion in plastic art. It should, however, be well
studied, as helping the artist to the abstract con-
ception of the character as a whole.
Carstens made a design, suggested by this tragedy,
of the Three Parcae singing their fatal mysterious
song. A model of one of the figures (that of Atropos)
used to stand in Goethe's library, and a cast from
this is before me while I write : every one who sees
it takes it for an antique.
EVE.
I HAVE but a few words to say of Eve. As she is
the only undraped figure which is allowable in sacred
art, the sculptors have multiplied representations of
348 NOTES ON ART.
her, more or less finely imagined ; but what I con-
ceive to be the true type has seldom, very seldom,
been attained. The remarks which follow are, how-
ever, suggestive, not critical.
It appears to me and I speak it with reverence
that the Miltonic type is not the highest con-
ceivable, nor the best fitted for sculptural treatment.
Milton has evidently lavished all his power on this
fairest of created beings ; but he makes her too
nymph-like too goddess-like. In one place he
compares her to a Wood-nymph, Oread, or Dryad
of the groves ; in another to Diana's self, " though
not, as she, with bow and quiver armed." The scrip-
tural conception of our first parent is not like this ;
it is ampler, grander, nobler far. I fancy her the
sublime ideal of maternity. It may be said that
this idea of her predestined motherhood should not
predominate in the conception of Eve before the
Fall : but I think it should.
It is most beautifully imagined by Milton that
Eve, separated from her mate, her Adam, is weak,
and given over to the merely womanish nature, for
only when linked together and supplying the com-
plement to each other's moral being, can man or
woman be strong ; but we must also remember that
the "spirited sly snake," in tempting Eve, even
when he finds her alone, uses no vulgar allurements.
" Ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil."
EVE. 349
Milton, indeed, seasons his harangue with flattery :
but for this he has no warrant in Scripture.
As the Eve of Paradise should be majestically
sinless, so after the Fall she should not cower and
wail like a disappointed girl. Her infinite fault,
her infinite woe, her infinite penitence, should have
a touch of grandeur. She has paid the inevitable
price for that mighty knowledge of good and evil
she so coveted ; that terrible predestined experi-
ence she has found it, or it has found her; and
she wears her crown of grief as erst her crown of
innocence.
I think the noble picture of Eve in Mrs. Brown-
ing's Drama of Exile, as that of the Mother of our
redemption not less than the Mother of suffering
humanity, might be read and considered with advan-
tage by a modern sculptor.
" Rise, woman, rise
To thy peculiar and best altitudes
Of doing good and of resisting ill !
Something thou hast to bear through womanhood ;
Peculiar suffering answering to the sin,
Some pang paid down for each new human life ;
Some weariness in guarding such a life,
Some coldness from the guarded ; some mistrust
From those thou hast too well served ; from those beloved"
Too loyally, some treason. But go, thy love
Shall chant to itself its own beatitudes
After its own life- working !
I bless thee to the desert and the thorns,
350
NOTES ON ART.
To the elemental change and turbulence,
And to the solemn dignities of grief ;
To each one of these ends, and to this end
Of Death and the hereafter !
Eve. I accept,
For me and for my daughters, this high part
Which lowly shall be counted ! "
The figure of Eve in Raphael's design (the one
engraved by Marc Antonio) is exquisitely statuesque
as well as exquisitely beautiful. In the moment
that she presents the apple to Adam she looks -
perhaps she ought to look like the Venus Vinci-
trice of the antique time ; but I am not sure ; and,
at all events, the less of the classical sentiment the
better.
ADAM.
I HAVE seen no statue of Adam ; but surely he is
a fine subject, either alone or as the companion of
Eve ; and the Miltonic type is here all-sufficient,
combining the heroic ideal of Greek art with some-
thing higher still
" Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure,"
whence true authority in men in fact, essential
manliness.
ANGELS. 351
Goethe had the idea that Adam ought to be re-
presented with a spade, as the progenitor of all who
till the ground, and partially draped with a deer-
skin, that is, after the Fall ; which would be well :
but he adds that Adam should have a child at his
feet in the act of strangling a serpent. This appears
to me objectionable and ambiguous ; if admissible at
all, the accessory figure would be a fitter accom-
paniment for Eve. .
ANGELS.
ANGELS, properly speaking, are neither winged
men nor winged children. Wings, in ancient art,
were the symbols of a divine nature ; and the early
Greeks, who humanised their gods and goddesses,
and deified humanity through the perfection of the
forms, at first distinguished the divine and the
human by giving wings to all the celestial beings ;
thus lifting them above the earth. Our religious
idea of angels is altogether different. Give to the
child-form wings, in other words, give to the child-
nature, innocent, and pure, the adjuncts of wisdom
and power, and thus you realise the idea of the
A A
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angel as Raphael conceived it. It is so difficult to
imagine in the adult form the union of perfect purity
and perfect wisdom, the absence of experience and
suffering, and the capacity of thinking and feeling,
a condition of being in which all conscious motive is
lost in the impulse to good, that it remains a problem
in art. The angels of Angelico da Fiesole, who
are not only winged, but convey the idea of move-
ment only by the wings, not by the limbs, are ex-
quisite, as fitted to minister to us in heaven, but
hardly as fitted to keep watch and ward for us on
earth
" Against foul fiends to aid us militant."
The feminine element always predominates in the
conception of angels, though they are supposed to
be masculine : I doubt whether it ought to be so.
* * * *
While these sheets are going through the press, I
find the following beautiful passage relative to angels
in the last number of " Fraser's Magazine " :
" It is safer, even, and perhaps more orthodox and
scriptural, to ' impersonate ' time and space, strength
and love, and even the laws of nature, than to give
us any more angel worlds, which are but dead skele-
tons of Dante's creations without that awful and
living reality which they had in his mind ; or to fill
children's books, as the High Church party are doing
ANGELS. 353
now, with pictures and tales of certain winged her-
maphrodites, in whom one cannot think (even by the
extremest stretch of charity) that the writers or
draughtsmen really believe, while one sees them ser-
vilely copying mediaeval forms, and intermingling
them with the ornaments of an extinct architecture ;
thus confessing naively to every one but themselves,
that they accept the whole notion as an integral por-
tion of a creed, to which, if they be members of the
Church of England, they cannot well belong, seeing
that it was, happily for us, expelled both by law and
by conscience at the Reformation."
This is eloquent and true ; but not the less true
it is, that if we have to represent in art those " spi-
ritual beings who walk this earth unseen, both when
we sleep and when we wake " beings, who (as the
author of the above passage seems to believe) may
be intimately connected with the phenomena of the
universe we must have a type, a bodily type,
under which to represent them ; and as we cannot do
this from knowledge, we must do it symbolically.
Angels, as we figure them, are symbols of moral and
spiritual existences elevated above ourselves we do
not believe in the forms, we only accept their signi-
ficance. I should be glad to see a better impersona-
tion than the impossible creatures represented in art ;
but till some artist-poet, or poet-artist, has invented
such an impersonation, we must employ that which
A A 2
NOTES ON ART.
is already familiarised to the eye and hallowed to
the fancy without imposing on the understanding.
MIRIAM. RTJTH.
BOTH the Old and the New Testament abound in
sculptural subjects; but fitly to deal with the Old
Testament required a Michal-Angelo. Beautiful as
are the gates of Ghiberti they are hardly what the
Germans would call " alt-testamentische," they are so
essentially elegant and graceful, and the old Hebrew
legends and personages are so tremendous. Even
Miriam and Ruth dilate into a sort of grandeur. In
representation I always fancy them above life-size.
I doubt whether the same artist who could conceive
the Prophets would be able to represent the Apostles,
or that the same hand which gave us Moses could
give us Christ. Michal-Angelo's idea of Christ,
both in painting and sculpture is, to me, revolting.
CHRIST. SOLOMON. DAVID. 355
CHEIST. SOLOMON. DAVID.
I DO not like the idea of Moses and Christ placed
together. Much finer in artistic and moral contrast
would be the two teachers, Christ as the divine and
spiritual law-giver, Solomon as the type of worldly
wisdom. They should stand side by side, or be seated
each on his throne, a crowned King, with book and
sceptre but how different in character !
We have multiplied statues of David. I have
never seen one which realised the finest conception of
his character, either as Hero, King, Prophet, or Poet.
In general he figures as the slayer of Goliath, and is
always too feeble and boyish. David, singing to his
lute before Saul ; David as the musician and poet,
young, beautiful, half-draped, heaven-inspired, exor-
cising by his art the dark spirit of evil which possessed
the jealous King : this would be a theme for an
artist, and would as finely represent the power of
sacred song as a figure of St. Cecilia. But the senti-
ment should not be that of a young Apollo, or an
Orpheus ; therein would lie the chief difficulty.
356 NOTES ON ART.
HAGAR. REBEKAH. RACHEL.
I REMEMBER to have seen fine statues of Hagar
holding her pitcher, of Rebekah contemplating her
bracelet, and of Rachel as the shepherdess. But I
would have a different version ; Hagar as the poor
cast-away, driven forth with her boy into the wilder-
ness ; Rebekah as the exulting bride ; and Rachel
as the mild, pensive wife. They would represent, in
a very complete manner, contrasted phases of the
destiny of Woman, connected together by our religious
associations, and appealing to our deepest human
sympathies.
THE QUEEN OF SHEBA.
The Queen of Sheba would be a fine subject for a
QUEEN OF SHEHA. LADY GOD1VA. 357
single statue, as the religious type of the queenly,
intellectual woman, the treatment being kept as far
as possible from that of a Pallas or a Muse.
The journey of the Queen of the South to visit
Solomon would be a capital subject for a processional
bas-relief, and as a pendant to the journey of " the
Wise Men of the East," to visit a greater than Solo-
mon. The latter has been perpetually treated from
the fourth century. Of the journey of the Queen
of Sheba I have seen, as yet, no example.
LADY GODIVA.
WITH regard to statuesque subjects from modern
history and poetry, Romantic Sculpture, as it is
styled, the taste both of the public and the artist
evidently sets in this direction. That the treatment
of such subjects should not be classical is admitted ;
but in the development of this romantic tendency
there is cause to fear that we may be inundated
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358 NOTES ON ART.
with all kinds of picturesque vagaries and violations
of the just laws and limits of art.
I remember, however, a circumstance which makes
me hopeful as to the progress of feeling ; knowledge
may come hereafter. I remember about twenty
years ago proposing the figure and story of Lady
Godiva as beautiful subjects for sculpture and paint-
ing. There were present on that occasion, among
others, two artists and a poet. The two artists
laughed outright, and the poet extemporised an
epigram upon Peeping Tom. If I were to propose
Lady Godiva as a subject now*, I believe it would
be received with a far different feeling even by those
very men. If I were Queen of England I would
have it painted in Fresco in my council chamber.
There should be seen the palfrey with its rich
housings, and near it, as preparing to mount, the
noble lady should stand, timid, but resolved : her
veil should lie on the ground ; the drapery just falling
from her fair limbs and partly sustained by one hand,
while with the other she loosens her golden tresses.
A bevy of waiting-maids, with averted faces, disap-
pear hurriedly beneath the massive porch of the Saxon
* 1848. At the moment I transcribe this (1854), a very charm-
ing statue of the Lady Godiva (suggested, I believe, by Tennyson's
poem) stands in the Exhibition of the Koyal Academy.
JOAN OP ARC. 359
palace, which forms the background, with sky and
trees seen through openings in the heavy architecture.
This is the picturesque version of the story ; but
there are many others. As a single statue, the
figure of Lady Godiva affords an opportunity for
the legitimate treatment of the undraped female form,
sanctified by the purest, the most elevated associa-
tions ; by woman's tearful pride and man's respect
and gratitude.
JOAN OF ARC.
SHAKSPEARE, who is so horribly unjust to Joan
of Arc, has put a sublime speech into her mouth
where she answers Burgundy who had accused her
of sorcery,
" Because you want the grace that others have,
You judge it straight a thing impossible
To compass wonders but by help of devils ! "
The whole theory of popular superstition comprised
in three lines !
But Joan herself how at her name the whole
NOTES ON ART.
heart seems to rise up in resentment, not so much
against her cowardly executioners as against those
who have so wronged her memory ! Never was a
character, historically pure, bright, definite, aud per-
fect in every feature and outline, so abominably
treated in poetry and fiction, perhaps for this
reason, that she was in herself so exquisitely wrought,
so complete a specimen of the heroic, the poetic, the
romantic, that she could not be touched by art or
modified by fancy, without being in some degree
profaned. As to art, I never saw yet any representa-
tion of " Jeanne la grande Pastoure," (except, per-
haps, the lovely statue by the Princess of Wurtem-
burg,) which I could endure to look at and even
that gives us the contemplative simplicity, but not
the power, intellect, and energy, which must have
formed so large a part of the character. Then as to
the poets, what shall be said of them? First Shaks-
peare, writing for the English stage, took up the
popular idea of the character as it prevailed in Eng-
land in his own time. Into the hypothesis that the
greater part of Henry VI. is not by Shakspeare,
there is no occasion to enter here ; the original
conception of the character of Joan of Arc may not
be his, but he has left it untouched in its principal
features. The English hated the memory of the
French Heroine because she had caused the loss of
France and had humiliated us as a nation ; and our
JOAN OF ARC.
chroniclers revenged themselves and healed their
wounded self-love by imputing her victories to
witchcraft. Shakspeare, giving her the attributes
which the historians of his time assigned to her, re-
presents her as a warlike, arrogant sorceress a
" monstrous woman " attended and assisted by
demons. I pass over the depraved and perverse
spirit in which Voltaire profaned this divine cha-
racter. A theme which a patriot poet would have
approached as he would have approached an altar,
he has made a vehicle for the most licentious parody
that ever disgraced a national literature. Schiller
comes next, and hardly seems to me more excusable.
Not only has he missed the character, he has deli-
berately falsified both character and fact. His
" Johanna " might have been called by any other
name ; and the scene of his tragedy might have been
placed anywhere in the wide world with just the
same probability and truth. Schiller and Goethe held a
principle that all considerations were to yield before
the proprieties of art. But Milton speaks some where
of those "faultless proprieties of nature" which
never can be violated with impunity : and Art can
never move freely but in the domain of nature and
of truth. All the fine writing in Schiller's " Maid
of Orleans " can never reconcile me to its absolute
and revolting falsehood. The sublime, simple-hearted
girl who to the last moment regarded herself as set
NOTES ON ART.
apart by God to do His work, he makes the victim
of an insane passion for a young Englishman. In
the love-sick classical heroines of Corneille and Ra-
cine there is nothing more Frenchified, more absurd,
more revolting. Then he makes her die victorious
on the field of battle defending the oriflamme ;
far, far more glorious as well as more pathetic her
real death but it offended against Schiller's aesthetic
conception of the dignity of tragedy.
Lastly, we have Southey's epic : what shall be
said of it? even what he said of the Lusiad of
Camoens, " that it is read with little emotion, and
remembered with little pleasure. " No. I do not
wish to see J oan turned into a heroine of tragedy or
tale, because, as it seems to me, the whole life and
death of this martyred girl is too near us, and too
historically distinct, and, I will add, too sacred, to
be dressed out in romantic prose or verse. What
Walter Scott might have made of her I do not
know something marvellously picturesque and life-
like, no doubt and yet I am glad he did not try
his hand on her. But she remains a legitimate and
most admirable subject for representative art ; and
as yet nothing has been done in sculpture to fix the
ideal and heroic in her character, nor in painting,
worthy of her exploits. There exists no cotemporary
portrait of her except in the brief description of her
in the old French Chronicle of the Siege of Orleans,
JOAN OF ARC.
where it is said that her figure was tall and slender,
her bust fine, her hair and eyes black ; that she wore
her hair short, and could never be persuaded to put
on a head-piece, and farther (and in this respect both
Schiller and Southey have wronged her), that she
had never slain a man, using her consecrated sword
merely to defend herself. I should like to see a fine
equestrian statue of her by one of our best English
sculptors, set up in a conspicuous place among us, as
a national expiation.
Southey mentions that in the beginning of the
last war, about 1795, when popular feeling, excited
almost to frenzy, raged against France, a pantomime,
or ballet, was performed at Covent Garden, from the
story of Joan of Arc, at the conclusion of which she
is carried away by demons, like a female Don Juan.
This denouement caused such a storm of indignation,
that the author one James Cross was obliged,
after the first two or three representations, to change
the demons into angels, and send her straight into
Heaven : an anecdote pleasant to record as illus-
trating the sure ultimate triumph of truth over false-
hood; of all the better sympathies over prejudice
and wrong ; in spite of history, and, what is more,
in spite of Shakspeare !
364 NOTES ON ART.
CHARACTERS FROM SHAKSPEARE.
JOAN OF ARC is not, however, a Shakspearian
character ; and, in fact, there are very few of his per-
sonages susceptible of sculptural treatment. They
are too dramatic, too profound, too complex in their
essential nature where they are tragic; too many-
sided and picturesque where they are comic.
For instance, the attempt to condense into marble
such light, evanescent, quaint creations as those in
" The Midsummer's Night's Dream" is better avoided ;
we feel that a marble fairy must be a heavy absurd-
ity. Oberon and Titania might perhaps float along
in a bas-relief; but we cannot put away the thought
that they have reality without substantiality, and we
do not like to see them, or Ariel, or Caliban fixed
in the definite forms of sculpture.
There are, however, a few of Shakspeare's charac-
ters which appear to me beautifully adapted for
statuesque treatment : Perdita holding her flowers ;
Miranda lingering on the shore ; might well replace
CHARACTERS FROM SHAKSPEARE. 365
the innumerable " Floras " and " Nymphs preparing
to bathe," which people the atdliers of our sculptors.
Cordelia has something of marble quietude about
her ; and Hermione is a statue ready made. And,
by the way, it is observable that Shakspeare repre-
sents Hermione as a coloured statue. Paulina will
not allow it to be touched, because " the colour is
not yet dry." Again,
" Would you not deem those veins
Did verily bear blood ?
The very life seems warm upon her lips,
The fixture of her eye hath motion in't,
And we are mocked by Art !
The ruddiness upon her lip is wet,
You'll mar it if you kiss it, stain your own
With oily painting."
I think it possible to model small ornamental
statuettes and groups from some few of the scenes in
Shakspeare's plays ; but this is quite different from
life-size figures of Hamlet, Othello, Shylock, Mac-
beth, which must either have the look of real in-
dividual portraiture, or become mere idealisations of
certain qualities ; and Shakspeare's creations are
neither the one nor the other.
366 NOTES ON ART.
CHARACTERS FROM SPENSER.
SPENSER is so essentially a picturesque poet, he
depends for his rich effects so much on the combina-
tion of colour and imagery, and multiplied accessories,
that one feels at least / feel, on laying down a
volume of the " Fairie Queene " dazzled as if I had
been walking in a gallery of pictures. His " Masque
of Cupid," for instance, although a procession of
poetical creations, could not be transferred to a bas-
relief without completely losing its Spenserian cha-
racter its wondrous glow of colour. Thus Cupid
"uprears himself exulting from the back of the
ravenous lion ;" removes the bandage from his eyes,
that he may look round on his victims; e< shakes
the darts which his right hand doth strain full
dreadfully," and " claps on high his coloured wings
twain." This certainly is not the Greek Cupid, nor
the Cupid of sculpture ; it is the Spenserian Cupid.
So of his Una, so of his Britomart, and the Red Cross
Knight and Sir Guy on : one might make elegant
statuesque impersonations of the allegories they in-
volve, as of Truth, Chastity, Faith, Temperance ; but
then they would lose immediately their Spenserian
SPENSER. MILTON.
character and sentiment, and must become something
altogether different.
THE LADY. COMUS.
IT is not so with Milton. The "Lady" in
Comus, whether she stands listening to the echos of
her own sweet voice, or motionless as marble under
the spell of the " false enchanter," looking that divine
reproof which in the poem she speaks,
" I hate when vice can bolt her arguments,
And virtue has no tongue. to check her pride"
is a subject perfectly fitted for sculpture, and never,
so far as I know, executed.. It would be a far more
appropriate ornament for a lady's boudoir than
French statues of MODESTY, which generally have
the effect of making one feel very much ashamed.*
Sabrina has been beautifully treated by Marshall.
It is difficult to render Comus without making
him too like a Bacchus or an Apollo. He is neither.
* For example, the statue of Modesty executed for Josephine's
boudoir.
B B
388 NOTES ON ART.
He represents not the beneficent, but the intoxicating
and brutifying power of wine. His joviality should
not be that of a God, but with something mis-
chievous, bestial, Faun-like ; and he should have,
with the Dionysan . grace, a dash of the cunning and
malignity of his Mother Circe. These characteristics
should be in the mind of the artist. The panther's
skin, the coronal of vine leaves, and, instead of the
Thyrsus, the magician's wand, are the proper acces-
sories. It is also worth notice, that in the antique
representations Comus has wings as a demigod, and
in a picture described by Philostratus (a night scene)
he lies crouched in a drunken sleep. Little use, how-
ever, is made of him in the antique myths, and the
Miltonic conception is that which should be embodied
by the modern sculptor.
II Penseroso and L' Allegro, if embodied in
sculpture as poetical abstractions (either masculine
or feminine) of Melancholy and Mirth, would cease
to be Miltonic, for the conceptions of the poet are
essentially picturesque, and expressed in both cases
by a luxuriant accumulation of images and acces-
sories, not to be brought within the limits of plastic
art without the most tasteless confusion and in-
consistency.
MILTON'S SATAN.
SATAN.
THE religious idea of a Satan the imperso-
nation of that mixture of the bestial, the malignant,
the impious, and the hopeless, which constitute
THE FIEND, the enemy of all that is human
and divine I conceive to be quite unfitted for
the purpose of sculpture. Danton's attempt dege-
nerates into grim caricature. Milton's Satan
"the archangel ruined," is however a strictly
poetical creation, and capable of the most poetical
statuesque treatment. But we must remember that,
if it be a gross mistake, religious and artistic, to
conceive the Messiah under the form of a larger,
stronger humanity, with a physique like that of a
wrestler, (as M. Angelo has done in the Last Judge-
ment) it is equally a mistake to conceive the lost
angel, our spiritual adversary, under any such coarse
Herculean lineaments. There can be no image of
the Miltonic Satan without the elements of beauty,
" though changed by pale ire, envy, and despair ! '
Colossal he may be, vast as Mount Athos ; but it is
not necessary to express this that he should be hewn
out of Mount Athos, or look like the giant Poly-
pheme ! His proportions, his figure, his features -
like his power are angelic. As the Hero for he
is so of the "Paradise Lost," the subject is open
B B 2
370 NOTES ON ART.
to poetic treatment ; but I am not aware that as yet
it has been poetically treated.
Of the Italian poetry and history, and all the
wondrous and lovely shapes which come thronging
out of that Elysian land, I can say nothing now,
or only this, that after all I am not quite sure that
I am right about Spenser. For, at first view, what
poet seems less amenable to statuesque treatment
than Dante ? One would have imagined that only a
preternatural fusion of Michal-Angelo and Rem-
brandt could fitly render the murky recesses and
ghastly and monstrous inhabitants of the Inferno, or
attempt to shadow forth the dazzling mysteries of
the Paradiso. Yet see what Flaxman has achieved !
His designs are legitimate bas-reliefs, not pictures in
outline. He has been true to his own art, and all
that could be done within the limitations of his art he
has accomplished. It is a translation of Dante's
ideas into sculpture, with every thing peculiarly
Dantesque in the treatment, set aside.
Now as to our more modern poets. From amid
the long array of beautiful subjects which seem to
move in succession before the fancy, there are two
which stand out prominent in their beauty. First,
Lord Byron's " Myrrha," who with her Ionian ele-
gance is susceptible of the purest classical treatment.
She should hold a torch ; but not with the air of a
Maenad, nor of a Thais about to fire Persepolis.
The sentiment should be deeper and quieter.
MYERHA.
ION.
371
" Dost thou think
A Greek girl dare not do for love that which
An Indian widow does for custom ? "
Ion in Talfourd's Tragedy the boy-hero, in all
the tenderness of extreme youth, already self-devoted
and touched with a melancholy grace and an eleva-
tion beyond his years is so essentially statuesque,
that I am surprised that no sculptor has attempted
it ; perhaps because, in this instance, as in that of
Myrrha, the popular realisation of both characters as
subjects of formative art has been spoiled by thea-
trical trappings and associations.
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