YOUTH AND AGE (continued 3)

I have no ambition to wander into the inane and usurp the sceptre of the dim Hegel, situated Nowhere, with pure Nothing behind him, and pure Being before him, steadfastly and vainly endeavouring with his Werden to stop the sand-flowing of smiling Time.

Richard Hodgson (Early Unpublished Essay).

Werden in Hegel is usually translated “Becoming.” To Hegel the truth of the world is found in life or movement, not in Being which is changeless, but tells and does nothing.

Edwin (afterwards Sir Edwin) Arnold was with Herbert Spencer on a Nile steamer. Spencer was dyspeptic and irritable; Arnold was a nocturnal bird, pacing the deck alone in a long gown and smoking a long pipe. Suddenly appeared a white figure, Spencer in his night-shirt, who in the bad light took Arnold for a sailor (and Arnold did not undeceive him).

“Hi! there!”

“Ay, ay, Sir.”

“What are the men making that noise there forward for?”

“Cleaning the engines, Sir.”

“Just tell them not to make such a row, keeping good Christians from their sleep at this time of night.”

“Ay, ay, Sir.”

(Disappearance of ghost; joke next morning,)

(Told by Arnold to Hodgson, June, 1884).

The great agnostic, usually most precise in his language, describes himself as a “good Christian”!

WILLIAM BLAKE.

The desert of London town—Magna civitas, magna solitudo: “a great city is a great solitude.”

It is strange to think that these verses (and especially the last verse) were written by the pessimist who wrote in all sincerity the terrible lines in Pt. VIII of “The City of Dreadful Night.”

According to Donatus, Virgil wrote a couplet in praise of Cæsar and posted it anonymously on the portals of the palace (31 B.C.). Bathyllus gave himself out as the author of this couplet, and on that account received a present from Cæsar. Next night Sic vos non vobis (“So you not for you”) was found written four times in the same place. The Romans were puzzled as to what was meant by these words, until Virgil came forward and completed the verse—adding a preliminary line, Hos ego versiculos feci, tulit alter honores, “I wrote the lines, another wears the bays.”

Shelley in Song to the Men of England wrote as a socialist:

In previous verses he refers to bees, and, of course, the above quotation was in his mind.

This is from C. S. Calverley’s fine translation of the speech of Ajax.

Imitating the now-forgotten Martin Tupper.

Whosoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony.... Even that vulgar and Tavern Musick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the First Composer.... There is something in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers: it is an Hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole World, and creatures of God; such a melody to the ear as the whole World, well understood, would afford the understanding. In brief, it is a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God.

Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici).

(Speaking of an Essay on Wordsworth he is about to write for some Melbourne society) I purpose describing briefly the poetic tendencies, or rather the unpoetic tendencies, of the 18th Century, and the new school beginning to manifest itself in Cowper. I shall then refer to W.’s principles—shall banish to a future time the working out of the psychological connection between forms of nature and the human soul—shall banish also the feelings, the elementary feelings, of humanity, which W. drew powerful attention to, and confine myself to pointing out those characteristics in external nature which he took note of. These produce corresponding feelings in the “human,” and some of them are beauty, silence and calm, joyousness, generosity, freedom, grandeur, and Spirituality. These are found in Nature, and W. saw them, and in the growing familiarity with them a man’s soul becomes beautiful, calm, joyous, generous, free, grand, and spiritual. The first ones, of course, all depend on and grow from the last, and the Spirituality is God immanent. This last, as the root of all the others, will merit special attention—it exhibits W.’s poetico-philosophy so far as it regards the work of Nature upon man; and includes too the Platonic Reminiscence business. (Here follows personal chit-chat.) I think we might add the “supreme loftiness of labour” to the foregoing elements in Nature. In the Gipsies (I give both readings)

In 1877 Blake was little appreciated. (I remember only that in our children’s books we had “Tiger, Tiger burning bright”—and it was a strange thing to include in such books a poem which raises the problems of the existence of evil and the nature of God). Hence it will be evident why so keen a student of poetry as Hodgson did not couple Blake with Cowper as a precursor of the Romantic Revival. As a matter of fact Blake had more of the “Romantic” spirit than Cowper, and really preceded him, for the poor verse that Cowper published the year before Blake’s Poetical Sketches need not be considered. While still in his teens Blake wrote (“To the Muses”):

Curiously enough Gray also had in him an element of the Romantic which he suppressed. It is very remarkable that in his Elegy (published 1751) he cut out the following verse:

Slightly altered verbally to admit of quotation.

MEDITATIONS OF A HINDU PRINCE

MEDITATION OF A HINDU PRINCE AND SCEPTIC

The preceding poem by Lyall had the same title as these verses, “Meditation of a Hindu Prince and Sceptic” when first published in the Cornhill, September, 1877. I was fully convinced, for reasons that would take too long to set out here, that these verses were by Hodgson. But Mrs. Piper, the well-known trance-medium, says that Hodgson gave her a copy signed with other initials than his, and that she is sure he was not the author. She has mislaid the copy she refers to. In view of this statement I must not attribute the verses to Hodgson, although I cannot but doubt whether Mrs. Piper’s recollection is correct.

The present writer ... was seated in a railway-carriage, five minutes or so before starting, and had time to contemplate certain waggons or trucks filled with cattle, drawn up on a parallel line, and quite close to the window at which he sat. The cattle wore a much-enduring aspect; and, as he looked into their large, patient, melancholy eyes,—for, as before mentioned, there was no space to speak of intervening,—a feeling of puzzlement arose in his mind.... The much-enduring animals in the trucks opposite had unquestionably some rude twilight of a notion of a world; of objects they had some unknown cognizance; but he could not get behind the melancholy eye within a yard of him and look through it. How, from that window, the world shaped itself, he could not discover, could not even fancy; and yet, staring on the animals, he was conscious of a certain fascination in which there lurked an element of terror. These wild, unkempt brutes, with slavering muzzles, penned together, lived, could choose between this thing and the other, could be frightened, could be enraged, could even love and hate; and gazing into a placid, heavy countenance, and the depths of a patient eye, not a yard away, he was conscious of an obscure and shuddering recognition of a life akin so far with his own. But to enter into that life imaginatively, and to conceive it, he found impossible. Eye looked upon eye, but the one could not flash recognition on the other; and, thinking of this, he remembers, with what a sense of ludicrous horror, the idea came,—what, if looking on one another thus, some spark of recognition could be elicited; if some rudiment of thought could be detected; if there were indeed a point at which man and ox could meet and compare notes? Suppose some gleam or scintillation of humour had lighted up the unwinking, amber eye? Heavens, the bellow of the weaning calf would be pathetic, shoe-leather would be forsworn, the eating of roast meat, hot or cold, would be cannibalism, the terrified world would make a sudden dash into vegetarianism!

Alexander Smith (On the Importance of Man to Himself).

Does not this give the reason why we do not eat dogs and horses? We, more than other nations, recognize in the horse, as well as in the dog, a life and intelligence akin to our own. We also believe that both animals reciprocate the affection we feel towards them. (Coleridge in Table Talk says: “The dog alone, of all brute animals, has a στοργή or affection upwards to man.”)

When I am playing with my Cat, who knowes whether she have more sport in dallying with me, than I have in gaming with her? We entertaine one another with mutual apish trickes: If I have my houre to begin or to refuse, so hath she hers.

Montaigne (Bk. II, ch. 12).

“My life did—and does—smack sweet”—see note p. 236.

THE LAMB

Who can wrestle against Sleep? Yet is that giant very gentleness.

Martin Tupper (Of Beauty).

ON A FINE MORNING

This is not in the Selected Poems. It is interesting as showing Mr. Hardy in an optimistic mood.

Of two opposite methods of action, do you desire to know which should have the preference? Calculate their effects in pleasures and pains, and prefer that which promises the greater sum of pleasures.

Think not that a man will so much as lift up his little finger on your behalf, unless he sees his advantage in it.

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).

These cold-blooded and repulsive aphorisms are typical of Bentham’s Utilitarian philosophy, from which all sense of duty and moral aspiration were excluded. It is strange that these views should be held by a great thinker who was himself of benevolent character. Such a doctrine could not have survived to my time, had it not been supplemented by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who gave a different place to the humanist element. While still adhering to Bentham’s doctrine that there is no good but pleasure and no evil but pain, he introduced as the higher forms of pleasure those derived from the wish for self-culture and the desire to satisfy our mental and moral aims. He gave priority to all the sympathetic and altruistic motives that govern our actions. Whereas Bentham held that all pleasures were equal and could be counted in one column, Mill said that they differed in quality, that they could no more be added up in one column than pounds, shillings and pence; that, in fact, there is no equivalent for a higher pleasure in any quantity of a lower one. This was typical of Mill’s sincerity: but he did not see that his additions were fatal to Bentham’s doctrine and to hedonism generally. How, for instance, is a higher pleasure to be known for a higher? In what respect is an intellectual pleasure or the satisfaction of doing one’s duty of higher quality than the gratification of the senses? To ascertain this it is necessary to pass from the pleasure itself to the thing that gives the pleasure or, in other words, to the character that finds the pleasure. Many illustrations of this might be given. In one of Sir Alfred Lyall’s poems, which is founded on fact, an Englishman who has been captured by Arabs has no religious belief; his loved ones are waiting his return; he can save his life if he will only repeat the Mahomedan formula; if he dies no one will know of his self-sacrifice: yet he decides to die for the honour of England. However, Bentham’s careful calculus of equal pleasures and pains, “push-pin” being “worth as much as poetry,”[18] came to an end through Mill, and Mill at once made way for Spencer on the one hand, and T. H. Green on the other; both of these rejected the calculation of pleasures or happiness as the standard of right either for the individual or the greatest number. In all directions the low moral stage of philosophic thought represented by Benthamism has been passed through and forgotten. We no longer hold the belief that the only sphere of Government is to protect our persons and property, but follow loftier ideals; and in art and poetry we look for higher aims than mere luxury and sensuous pleasure.

LIFE

Life is compared to the brief fall of a dewdrop, the Indian’s unconscious sleep while his boat hastens to destruction; but life also is Hope, Intellect, Beauty, and Physical Enjoyment.

PEU DE CHOSE ET PRESQUE TROP.

This haunting little lyric is a literary curiosity from one point of view. In spite of expostulations from the author (a Belgian poet), and repeated public statements by others from time to time, the poem is constantly being wrongly attributed to one or another of the French poets. It appeared in Le Parnasse de la Jeune Belgique, 1887, but had probably been written and published some years before that date. In the Nineteenth Century, September, 1893, William Sharp pointed out that the poem was always being attributed to the wrong author—even Andrew Lang being one of the culprits. The author himself wrote to The Literary World of June 3, 1904, to the same effect. The subject was again spoken of in Notes and Queries, January 5, 1907, when the author’s letter was republished. London Truth also brought the matter up at one time, and probably the same fact has been publicly pointed out elsewhere a hundred times—but the poem continues to be attributed to the wrong author! In the Dictionary of Foreign Phrases and Classical Quotations, by H. P. Jones, published so recently as 1913, the verses are ascribed to Alfred de Musset.

There is a third verse, which reads like an answer or retort to the other two:

(Life is such As God made it, And, just as it is, ... It suffices!)

One of the writers to Notes and Queries quotes the following lines:

(You enter, you cry, and that is life: you yawn, you go out, and that is death.)

A very strange, fantastic world—where each one pursues his own golden bubble, and laughs at his neighbour for doing the same. I have been thinking how a moral Linnæus would classify our race.

Author not traced.

TWO LOVERS

This sentiment has been expressed by many different authors. Some friends of mine have as their favourite motto, “I have had many troubles in my life, and most of them never happened.”

The six quotations above are from a series of word-pictures (see p. 85).

Whatever else may or may not work on through eternity, we are bound to believe that the love, which moved the Father to redeem the world at such infinite cost, must work on, while there is one pang in the universe, born of sin, which can touch the Divine pity, or one wretched prodigal in rags and hunger far from the home and the heart of God.

Rev. Baldwin Brown.

Canon Farrar is not happy in his rejoinder to the argument that to cast a doubt on the endlessness of punishment is to invalidate the argument for the endlessness of bliss, since both rest on exactly the same Biblical sanction. There are three replies, cumulatively exhaustive, which he has failed to adduce.... (Firstly, evil and temptation are banished from heaven; Second, the two arguments do not rest on the same Biblical sanction) ... Thirdly, the difference of the two eternities, heaven and hell, consists in the presence or absence of God. Let us put α for each of those eternities or aeons, and θ to denote Him. The assertion of the equality of the two, then, is that α + θ = α - θ, which can stand only if θ = 0, the postulate of atheism.

Rev. R. F. Littledale, D.C.L.

Both these passages come from an Article in the Contemporary for April, 1878.

As this book is partly intended to revive the memories of forty years ago, I include these out of the passages in my commonplace book which refer to the intense struggle that then raged over the question of Eternal Punishment. Surely no other word, since the world began, raised so tremendous an issue, created such conflict and caused so much heart-burning as the one word αἰώνιος.

(Liddell and Scott, 1901, gives the following meanings for αἰώνιος: lasting for an age, perpetual, everlasting, eternal.)

I thank God, and with joy I mention it, I was never afraid of Hell, nor never grew pale at the description of that place. I have so fixed my contemplations on Heaven, that I have almost forgot the Idea of Hell, and am afraid rather to lose the joys of the one, than endure the misery of the other: to be deprived of them is a perfect Hell, and needs, methinks, no addition to compleat our afflictions. That terrible term hath never detained me from sin, nor do I owe any good action to the name thereof. I fear GOD, yet am not afraid of Him: His Mercies make me ashamed of my sins, before His Judgments afraid thereof.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) (Religio Medici).

Ne nous imaginons pas que l’enfer consiste dans ces étangs de feu et de soufre, dans ces flammes éternellement dévorantes, dans cette rage, dans ce désespoir, dans cet horrible grincement de dents. L’enfer, si nous l’entendons, c’est péché même: l’enfer, c’est d’être éloigné de Dieu.

Bossuet (1627-1704).

(Let us not imagine that hell consists in those lakes of fire and brimstone, in those eternally-devouring flames, in that rage, in that despair, in that horrible gnashing of teeth. Hell, if we understand it aright, is sin itself: hell consists in being banished from God.)

... Sir Henry Wotton’s celebrated answer to a priest in Italy, who asked him, “Where was your religion to be found before Luther?” “My religion was to be found there—where yours is not to be found now—in the written word of God.” In Selden’s Table Talk we have the following more witty reply made to the same question: “Where was America an hundred or six score years ago?”

Boswell’s Life of Johnson, VIII, 176.

I do not wish to introduce sectarian questions, but these answers are interesting and clever. The next quotation is pro-Catholic.

During the horrible time of the Borgia Pope, Alexander VI, a French priest and a Jew became very intimate friends. The priest, very anxious for the future welfare of his friend, urged him to be received into the church: and the Jew promised to earnestly consider this advice. The priest, however, gave up all hope on learning that the Jew was called by his business to Rome, where he would see the unutterably monstrous life of the Pope and clergy. To his surprise the Jew on his return announced that he wished to be baptized, saying that a religion, which could still exist in spite of such abominations, must be the true religion.

Author not traced.

I noted this from an old French book, but the real story must be the earlier one of Boccaccio (1315-1375). Alexander Borgia was Pope, 1492-1503.

I verily believe that, if the knife were put into my hand, I should not have strength and energy enough to stick it into a Dissenter.

Sydney Smith.

Shortly before his death in 1844 he gave this as a singular proof of his declining strength! (See Memoir by his daughter, Lady Holland).

The “Prelude” is extremely interesting as a poet’s autobiography.

LONG EXPECTED

“Rich to die” is reminiscent of Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale:

I have ventured to put quotation marks in the above to make the meaning clear at first view. Also—but that italics seldom look well in a poem—I would have written the last two lines as follows:

A QUESTION

To Fausta.

This poem appeared in early editions of On viol and Flute, but is now omitted from Mr. Gosse’s poems.

I do not know whose paraphrase this is; it was prefixed by Tyndall to his Belfast Address, 1874. He probably imagined that these lines contained an argument in favour of materialism; but on the contrary the Greek philosopher affirms the existence of a supreme God. All that he says is that the conception of him as resembling a mortal in his physical attributes is wrong.

At the back of Tyndall’s mind was no doubt the prevalent idea that any “anthropomorphic” conception of the nature of the Deity is necessarily absurd. But there is nothing unreasonable in believing that His nature, though immeasurably superior, is nevertheless akin to our own. The argument is that the source or power of the world must be greater than the highest thing it has produced, the mind of man; and that it must more nearly resemble the higher than the lower of its products. In particular it is impossible for us to believe that our moral ideas of truth, justice, right and wrong, etc., can differ at all in kind, however much in degree, from those of God. So also our reason must be akin to His insight. Such a belief should be regarded, not as “anthropomorphic,” but as (in a sense different from that of Clifford and Harrison) a “deification of man”—the recognition of the Divine that is in him.

To see the soul as she really is, not as we now behold her, marred by communion with the body and other miseries, you must contemplate her with the eye of reason, in her original purity—and then her beauty will be revealed.... We must remember that we have seen her only in a condition which may be compared to that of the sea-god Glaucus, whose original image can hardly be discerned because his natural members are broken off and crushed and damaged by the waves in all sorts of ways, and incrustations have grown over them of seaweed and shells and stones, so that he is more like some monster than his own natural form. And the soul which we behold is in a similar condition, disfigured by ten thousand ills. But not there, Glaucon, not there must we look.

Where then!

At her love of wisdom. Let us see whom she affects, and what society and converse she seeks in virtue of her near kindred with the immortal and eternal and divine; also how different she would become if wholly following this superior principle, and borne by a divine impulse out of the ocean in which she now is, and disengaged from the stones and shells and things of earth and rock which in wild variety spring up around her because she feeds upon earth, and is overgrown by the good things of this life as they are termed: then you would see her as she is, and know ... what her nature is.

Plato (Republic, Bk. 10, Jowett’s translation).

Apart from the intrinsic interest of such a passage, the picture of the old sea-god, with long hair and long beard, his body ending in a scaly tail, battered about by the waves, and overgrown with seaweed and shells, is very curious. Without discussing how far the great philosopher himself or some other advanced thinkers believed in such divinities, it must be remembered that to the Greeks generally the gods were very real personages.

Ah, gracious powers! I wish you would send me an old aunt—a maiden aunt—an aunt with a lozenge on her carriage and a front of light, coffee-coloured hair—how my children should work work-bags for her, and my Julia and I would make her comfortable! Sweet—sweet vision! Foolish—foolish dream!

Thackeray (Vanity Fair).

IDENTITY.

Has anyone ever pinched into its pillulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?

George Eliot (Middlemarch).

TO R.K.

“R.K.” is Rudyard Kipling, but what was the “boy’s eccentric blunder” that brought him success I do not know. Stephen in this instance showed a want of judgment. The books Kipling had then produced, Plain Tales from the Hills, Departmental Ditties, and the six little books, Soldiers Three, etc., all written before the age of twenty-four, should have been sufficient to show that the author was certainly not a stripling to be “muzzled.” Stephen’s misjudgment was, however, trivial when we remember how many important writers have failed to understand and appreciate the most beautiful poems. Jeffrey (1773-1850) thought to the end of his days that of the poets of his time Keats and Shelley would die and Campbell and Rogers alone survive. Shelley was very unfortunate in his critics. Matthew Arnold and Carlyle also disparaged him, Theodore Hook said “Prometheus Unbound” was properly named as no one would think of binding it; and worst of all was Emerson. He said Shelley was not a poet, had no imagination and his muse was uniformly imitative (“Thoughts on Modern Literature”); his poetry was ‘rhymed English’ which ‘had no charm’ (“Poetry and Imagination”). Just as amazing was the article in The Edinburgh Review, 1816, on Coleridge’s volume containing “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan,” etc. This article, usually attributed to Hazlitt, and certainly having Jeffrey’s sanction, said: “We look upon this publication as one of the most notable pieces of impertinence of which the press has lately been guilty; and one of the boldest experiments that have as yet been made upon the patience or understanding of the public.” De Quincey said the style of Keats “belonged essentially to the vilest collections of waxwork filigree or gilt gingerbread.” Other instances are Swinburne’s abuse of George Eliot and Walt Whitman, Carlyle’s brutality towards Lamb, Jeffrey’s savage attack on Wordsworth (the famous “This will never do” article—although it was not so very inexcusable), Edward Fitzgerald’s letter that Mrs. Browning’s death was a relief to him (“No more Aurora Leighs, thank God!”), Samuel Rogers’ statement that he “could not relish Shakespeare’s sonnets,” and Steevens’ far worse condemnation of them, and indeed the list could be extended indefinitely. On the other hand, unmerited praise was given by whole generations of writers to poems which are now properly forgotten. In face of such facts it is somewhat of a mystery why the best things do survive. See next quotation.

If it be true, and it can scarcely be disputed, that nothing has been for centuries consecrated by public admiration, without possessing in a high degree some kind of sterling excellence, it is not because the average intellect and feeling of the majority of the public are competent in any way to distinguish what is really excellent, but because all erroneous opinion is inconsistent, and all ungrounded opinion transitory; so that while the fancies and feelings which deny deserved honour, and award what is undue, have neither root nor strength sufficient to maintain consistent testimony for a length of time, the opinions formed on right grounds by those few who are in reality competent judges, being necessarily stable, communicate themselves gradually from mind to mind, descending lower as they extend wider, until they leaven the whole lump, and rule by absolute authority, even where the grounds and reasons for them cannot be understood. On this gradual victory of what is consistent over what is vacillating, depends the reputation of all that is highest in art and literature.

John Ruskin (Modern Painters, I, 1).

This is an excellent suggestion in explanation of the question raised in the preceding note. It is also interesting because of the youth of this great writer at the time. Ruskin was born in 1819, and the volume was published in 1843, when he was twenty-four. Because of his youth, it was thought inadvisable to give his name as author, and, therefore, the book was published as “by an Oxford Graduate.”

The ages have exulted in the manners of a youth, who owed nothing to fortune, and who was hanged at the Tyburn of his nation, who, by the pure quality of his nature, shed an epic splendour around the facts of his death, which has transfigured every particular into an universal symbol for the eyes of mankind. This great defeat is hitherto our highest fact.

Emerson (Essay on Character).

Willest be asked, “requirest to be asked,” as in “God willeth Samuel to yield unto the importunity of the people” (1 Sam. viii., in margin).

Saint Paul was written for the Seatonian prize for religious English verse, Cambridge, about 1866, but failed to secure the prize!

(Speaking of future state) “Those who are neither good nor bad, or are too insignificant for notice, will be dropt entirely. This is my opinion. It is consistent with my idea of God’s justice, and with the reason that God has given me, and I gratefully know that He has given me a large share of that Divine gift”(!)

Thomas Paine (Age of Reason).

SIXTEEN CHARACTERISTICS OF LOVE (ΑΓΑΠΗ).

1. It is long-suffering.

2. is kind.

3. envieth not.

4. vaunteth not itself.

5. is not puffed up.

6. doth not behave itself unseemly.

7. seeketh not its own.

8. is not easily provoked.

9. thinketh no evil.

10. rejoiceth not in iniquity.

11. rejoiceth in the truth.

12. beareth all things.

13. believeth all things.

14. hopeth all things.

15. endureth all things.

16. never faileth.

St. Paul (1 Cor. xiii.)

Ἀγάπη, brotherly love, “Though I have all knowledge and all faith, though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not ἀγάπη, it profiteth me nothing.” (1 Cor. xiii, 2).

In the Eighth Century B.C., in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle. “And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”[20]

T. H. Huxley (Essays, IV, 161).

LOST DAYS.

BIRTHDAYS.

“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.” (Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1757.)

I do not find these lines in Middleton’s collected works, but I think they are his.

This often-quoted verse does not give the highest view of poetry, as Tennyson’s own poems show. The poet sings of a Universe,

He sings of Nature, Man, God, Immortality. (This note is from an early letter of Hodgson’s. His quotation is from The Prelude, Bk. XIV.)

Who is the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing his office? It is the Devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all other, he is never out of his diocese, ye shall never find him unoccupied, ye shall never find him out of the way, call for him when you will; he is ever at home, the diligentest preacher in all the Realm; ye shall never find him idle, I warrant you.... He is no lordly loiterer, but a busy ploughman, so that among all the pack of them the Devil shall go for my money! Therefore, ye prelates, learn of the Devil to be diligent in doing of your office. If you will not learn of God nor good men: for shame learn of the Devil.

Bishop Latimer (Sermon on the Ploughers, 1549).

APPRECIATION.

In the present day it is not easy to find a well-meaning man among our more earnest thinkers, who will not take upon himself to dispute the whole system of redemption, because he cannot unravel the mystery of the punishment of sin. But can he unravel the mystery of the punishment of NO sin? Can he entirely account for all that happens to a cab-horse? Has he ever looked fairly at the fate of one of those beasts as it is dying—measured the work it has done, and the reward it has got—put his hand upon the bloody wounds through which its bones are piercing, and so looked up to Heaven with an entire understanding of Heaven’s ways about the horse? Yet the horse is a fact—no dream—no revelation among the myrtle trees by night; and the dust it dies upon, and the dogs that eat it, are facts; and yonder happy person, whose the horse was, till its knees were broken over the hurdles; who had an immortal soul to begin with, and wealth and peace to help forward his immortality; who has also devoted the powers of his soul, and body, and wealth, and peace, to the spoiling of houses, the corruption of the innocent, and the oppression of the poor; and has, at this actual moment of his prosperous life, as many curses waiting round about him in calm shadow, with their death-eyes fixed upon him, biding their time, as ever the poor cab-horse had launched at him in meaningless blasphemies, when his failing feet stumbled at the stones,—this happy person shall have no stripes,—shall have only the horse’s fate of annihilation! Or, if other things are indeed reserved for him, Heaven’s kindness or omnipotence is to be doubted therefore!

We cannot reason of these things. But this I know—and this may by all men be known—that no good or lovely thing exists in this world without its correspondent darkness; and that the universe presents itself continually to mankind under the stern aspect of warning, or of choice, the good and the evil set on the right hand and the left.

John Ruskin (Modern Painters, V, 19).

It is one of the arguments in Plato’s Phaedo that the soul must survive, since otherwise terribly wicked and cruel men would escape retribution; annihilation would be a good thing for them.

Every man is not a proper Champion for Truth, nor fit to take up the Gauntlet in the cause of Verity: many, from the ignorance of these Maximes, and an inconsiderate Zeal unto Truth, have too rashly charged the troops of Error, and remain as Trophies unto the enemies of Truth. A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City and yet be forced to surrender; ’tis therefore far better to enjoy her with peace than to hazzard her on a battle.

Sir Thomas Browne (Religio Medici).

“Very well,” cried I, “that’s a good girl; I find you are perfectly qualified for making converts, and so go help your mother to make a gooseberry pye.”

Goldsmith (The Vicar of Wakefield).

Hope, folding her wings, looked backward and became Regret.

George Eliot (Silas Marner, ch. 15).

By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.

George Eliot (Middlemarch, ch. 39).

Change—i.e., change the subject. Many verses are omitted for the sake of brevity.

A world without a contingency or an agony could have no hero and no saint, and enable no Son of Man to discover that he was a Son of God. But for the suspended plot, that is folded in every life, history is a dead chronicle of what was known before as well as after; art sinks into the photograph of a moment, that hints at nothing else; and poetry breaks the cords and throws the lyre away. There is no Epic of the certainties; and no lyric without the surprise of sorrow and the sigh of fear. Whatever touches and ennobles us in the lives and in the voices of the past is a divine birth from human doubt and pain. Let then the shadows lie, and the perspective of the light still deepen beyond our view; else, while we walk together, our hearts will never burn within us as we go, and the darkness as it falls, will deliver us into no hand that is Divine.

Jas. Martineau (Hours of Thought, 1, 328).

The subject of the sermon is the uncertainties of life, the perils and catastrophies that cannot be foreseen or provided for, death, disease, and other ills which may fall upon us at any moment, the crises that arise in the history of men and nations. It is by reason of these that character is formed. If everything happened by known rule, and could be predicted as surely as the movements of the stars, we should have no affections or emotions and would be mere creatures of habit.

From a recent book of poems, The Lily of Malud, by J. C. Squire, I take the following musical verse. (“The Stronghold” is where pain, hate, and all unpleasant things are excluded and peace only reigns.)

Martineau not only did important work in philosophy, but he was also eminent as a moral teacher. Taking together his originality, sublimity of soul, and beauty of expression, the sermons in Hours of Thought and other similar writings are the finest product of modern religious thought. They indeed stand among the best productions of our literature, and should be read even by those (if there are any such persons) who love literature and thought but are indifferent to religion. To illustrate this, I choose—almost at random—a passage where the thought itself has no interest outside religion (Hours of Thought, II. 334):—

Worship is the free offering of ourselves to God; ever renewed, because ever imperfect. It expresses the consciousness that we are His by right, yet have not duly passed into His hand; that the soul has no true rest but in Him, yet has wandered in strange flights until her wing is tired. It is her effort to return home, the surrender again of her narrow self-will, her prayer to be merged in a life diviner than her own. It is at once the lowliest and loftiest attitude of her nature: we never hide ourselves in ravine so deep; yet overhead we never see the stars so clear and high. The sense of saddest estrangement, yet the sense also of eternal affinity between us and God meet and mingle in the act; breaking into the strains, now penitential and now jubilant, that, to the critic’s reason, may sound at variance but melt into harmony in the ear of a higher love. This twofold aspect devotion must ever have, pale with weeping, flushed with joy; deploring the past, trusting for the future; ashamed of what is, kindled by what is meant to be; shadow behind, and light before. Were we haunted by no presence of sin and want, we should only browse on the pasture of nature; were we stirred by no instinct of a holier kindred, we should not be drawn towards the life of God.

GROWN UP.

Many verses are omitted from this poem for want of space, and the last two are transposed in order.

Where gods are not, spectres rule.

Where children are is a golden age.

A people, like a child, is a separate educational problem.

Novalis.

Once in an age, God sends to some of us a friend who loves in us, not a false imagining, an unreal character—but, looking through all the rubbish of our imperfections, loves in us the divine ideal of our nature—loves, not the man that we are, but the angel that we may be. Such friends seem inspired by a divine gift of prophecy—like the mother of St. Augustine, who, in the midst of the wayward, reckless youth of her son, beheld him in a vision, standing, clothed in white, a ministering priest at the right hand of God—as he has stood for long ages since. Could a mysterious foresight unveil to us this resurrection form of the friends with whom we daily walk, compassed about with mortal infirmity, we should follow them with faith and reverence through all the disguises of human faults and weaknesses, “waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe (The Minister’s Wooing).

Here two fine thoughts of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Browning are inspired by the vision of Monica, the saintly mother of the great St. Augustine (354-430).

This is a good illustration of the need of notes. Without a reference to St. Monica’s vision, I think that readers would be repelled, rather than attracted, by Mrs. Browning’s sonnet. It does not accord with one’s sense of modesty that a lady should say to her lover, “My unattractive person and incurable illness turned other men away, but you saw that, behind all this, I was ‘a patient angel waiting for a place in the new Heavens.’” I myself could not understand how Mrs. Browning could write and her husband could publish this poem, until Hodgson, in one of his letters to me, referred to “the use made by Mrs. Browning of St. Monica’s vision in one of her sonnets.”

The sonnet is not quoted as one of the finest of the series.

I have placed Mrs. Stowe’s quotation first for an obvious reason; but The Minister’s Wooing was published in 1859, while the sonnet appeared in 1847.

We live in a world, where one fool makes many fools, but one wise man only a few wise men.

Lichtenberg.

See note to next quotation.

TELLING STORIES.

As Coleridge says in the last quotation, “We receive but what we give.” We bring with us the mind that sees, and the feelings and emotions with which we contemplate the universe; and, so far as use, habit, and other causes still the activity and lessen the receptivity of the mind and spirit, the world around us becomes less instinct with life and beauty.

Putting aside the question whether, as Wordsworth says in his great Ode,

it will be familiar to anyone who has a sympathetic, appreciative sense that the child’s outlook on the world around him is very different from our own. It has in him a more intense emotional reaction. He sees it with a freshness and wonder unfelt by us, because our sensibility is blunted and less vivid. And for the same reason that we trust our faculties in their prime rather than in their degeneration, so the fresh and clear emotional response of a child’s nature represents more truthful appreciation than our own. Our sensibility is blunted, not only by use and habit, but also by the hardening and coarsening experiences of our lives; and also again by the development of intellect, which grows largely at the expense of the emotions. We lose the transparent soul of the child, his simple faith and trusting nature. To anyone who cannot feel the difference between the child’s outlook and his own, this will convey no meaning—and words cannot assist him. It is as if one tried to describe love to a person who has never loved, or a religious experience to one who has never had such an experience, indeed, in both love and religious experience, there is the same child-like attitude of pure emotion; and hence Christ’s comparison of His true followers to “little children.” Poetry, music, love of nature, and the highest art produce in us at times the same indefinable feeling and give us back for evanescent periods the fresh, clear, emotional sensibility of a child.

In Edward Fitzgerald’s Euphranor, at the point where Wordsworth’s ode is being discussed, the following passage is interesting:—

“I have heard tell of another poet’s saying that he knew of no human outlook so solemn as that from an infant’s eyes; and how it was from those of his own he learned that those of the Divine Child in Raffaelle’s Sistine Madonna were not overcharged with expression, as he had previously thought they might be.”

“Yes,” said I, “that was on the occasion, I think, of his having watched his child one morning worshipping the sunbeam on the bedpost—I suppose the worship of wonder.... If but the philosopher or poet could live in the child’s brain for a while!”

(The poet referred to was Tennyson, see Memoir by his son, the baby in question, Vol. I., 357).

THE REVELATION

The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with. The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself![21] To believe in the carnivorous reptiles of geologic times is hard for our imagination—they seem too much like mere museum specimens. Yet there is no tooth in any one of those museum-skulls that did not daily, through long years of the foretime, hold fast to the body struggling in despair of some fated living victim. Forms of horror just as dreadful to their victims, if on a smaller spatial scale, fill the world about us to-day. Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along, and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.

William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience).

Et in Arcadia ego.

(I too have been in Arcady.)

Anon.

Arcadia was a mountainous district in Greece which was taken to be the deal of pastoral simplicity and rural happiness—as in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and other literature. It was famous for its musicians and a favourite haunt of Pan.

The saying is best known from the fine landscape in the Louvre by N. Poussin (1594-1665). In part of the landscape is a tomb on which these words are written, and some young people are seen reading them. I learn, however, from King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations that the words had been previously written on a picture by Bart. Schidone (1570-1615), where two young shepherds are looking at a skull.

The meaning intended was that death came even to the joyous shepherds of Arcady. But the quotation is now used in a more general sense. “I too had my golden days of youth and love and happiness.”

It often happens that those are the best people, whose characters have been most injured by slanderers; as we usually find that to be the sweetest fruit which the birds have been pecking at.

Alexander Pope.

There are many flowers of heavenly origin in this world; they do not flourish in this climate but are properly heralds, clear-voiced messengers of a better existence: Religion is one; Love is another.

Novalis.

ON DYING

On n’a pas d’antécédent pour cela. Il faut improviser—c’est donc si difficile. (Death admits of no rehearsal.)

Amiel.

C’est le maître jour; c’est le jour juge de tous les autres. (It is the master-day; the day that judges all the others.)

Montaigne.

Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower, where I thought a flower would grow.

Abraham Lincoln.

Why describe our life-history as a state of waking rather than of sleep? Why assume that sleep is the acquired, vigilance the normal condition? It would not be hard to defend the opposite thesis. The newborn infant might urge with cogency that his habitual state of slumber was primary, as regards the individual, ancestral as regards the race; resembling at least, far more closely than does our adult life, a primitive or protozoic habit. “Mine,” he might say, “is a centrally stable state. It would need only some change in external conditions (as the permanent immersion in a nutritive fluid) to be safely and indefinitely maintained. Your waking state, on the other hand, is centrally unstable. While you talk and bustle around me you are living on your physiological capital, and the mere prolongation of vigilance is torture and death.”

A paradox such as this forms no part of my argument; but it may remind us that physiology at any rate hardly warrants us in speaking of our waking state as if that alone represented our true selves, and every deviation from it must be at best a mere interruption. Vigilance in reality is but one of two co-ordinate phases of our personality, which we have acquired or differentiated from each other during the stages of our long evolution.

F. W. H. Myers (Multiplex Personality).

This is from an article in The Nineteenth Century for November, 1886, in which Myers urged the study of the trance-personalities that exhibit themselves under hypnotism. In his Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death his views on sleep may be very briefly summarized as follows: In the low forms of animal life there is an undifferentiated state, neither sleep nor waking, and this is also seen in our prenatal and earliest infantile life. In life generally the waking time can exist only for brief periods continuously. We cannot continue life without resort to the fuller vitality which sleep brings to us. Again, from the original undifferentiated state, our waking life has been developed by practical needs; the faculties required for our earthly life then become intensified, but by natural selection other faculties and sensations (including those which connect us with the spiritual world) are dropped out of our consciousness. The state of sleep cannot be regarded as the mere absence of waking faculties. In this state we have some faint glimmer of the other faculties and sensations in various forms—dreams, somnambulism, etc. Myers then develops the theory that the relations of hysteria and genius to ordinary life correspond to those of somnambulism and hypnotic trance to sleep; and he arrives at the question of self-suggestion and hypnotism generally.

Thus in sleep there are, first, certain physiological changes (including a greater control of the physical organism, as seen in the muscular powers of somnambulists); no length of time spent lying down awake in darkness and silence will give the recuperative effect that even a few moments of sleep will give. But also, secondly, we find existing in sleep the other faculties withdrawn from use in ordinary waking life. Thus during sleep we find memory revived, problems unexpectedly solved, poems like “Kubla Khan” composed, and many intense sensations and emotions experienced. Beyond these powers again Myers finds in sleep still higher powers which seem to connect us with the spiritual world. Hence the advisability of studying the phenomena of sleep and investigating it experimentally by employing hypnotism.

William James adopted much the same view as Myers (see, for example, The Varieties of Religious Experience). But much has been written of late about sub-consciousness and about dreams; and the tendency is rather to follow Martineau’s view of mental development—that the lower nervous centres are unconscious “habits” deposited from the old intelligence (see p. 304). Thus, for instance, memories of the past would be recorded in the sub-conscious, but there is nothing to be found there of a higher character than in the conscious self. In sleep, the waking control being removed, our dreams reveal impulses and desires that have been inhibited or kept under in waking life, but do not reveal anything of the higher indicated by Myers. However, although it is too large a subject to discuss here, there is a vast deal yet to be explained, as, for example, inspiration, and what we used to call “unconscious cerebration,” and the amazing results of hypnotism and suggestion. Also who or what is it that composes the dream-story, or who or what makes us act or dream the story?

Without good nature man is but a better kind of vermin.

Extreme self-lovers will set a man’s house on fire, though it were but to roast their eggs.

Bacon.

The Ship is the ship of life. The first line is taken from Wordsworth’s sonnet, “Where lies the land to which yon Ship must go.”

THE CORAL REEF

See Note on page 155.

BENEATH MY WINDOW

MUSIC

See Note on page 155.

THE MARTYR

These fresh, clear, spontaneous verses have a special value. They bring us a promise of Spring—the message that we may still hope for a revival of English Poetry.

Therefore, I have included them (in this third edition) although they are outside the general scope of my book.

Miss Betty Bray has been writing since she was seven years of age. She writes with great facility and has already filled two manuscript books. Her verses are entirely her own, no defects being pointed out or other assistance or guidance given her.

She was born on June 11th, 1906. She is the daughter of Mr. Denys de Saumarez Bray, C.S.I., and the grand-niece of my late partner the Hon. Sir John Bray, K.C.M.G., who was Premier of South Australia. Her grandfather was born in Adelaide.

Milton refers to his blindness in this and other passages—as in the well known sonnet.

THE ATTAINMENT

The poor man wants a new cloak, but his wife objects.

The verse is sung by Iago (Othello, Act II., Sc. 3), the words being a little different.

LOVE’S LAST MESSAGES