YOUTH AND AGE (continued 4)

Beddoes intended to destroy this poem, but it was published without his knowledge. This is one of the cases where artists have shown themselves incapable critics of their own work.

On Dreamthorp centuries have fallen, and have left no more trace than have last winter’s snowflakes. This commonplace sequence and flowing on of life is immeasurably affecting. That winter morning when Charles lost his head in front of the banqueting-hall of his own palace, the icicles hung from the eaves of the houses here, and the clown kicked the snowballs from his clouted shoon, and thought but of his supper when, at three o’clock, the red sun set in the purple mist.... Battles have been fought, kings have died, history has transacted itself; but, all unheeding and untouched, Dreamthorp has watched apples-trees redden, and wheat ripen, and smoked its pipe, and quaffed its mug of beer, and rejoiced over its newborn children, and with proper solemnity carried its dead to the churchyard.

Alexander Smith (Dreamthorp).

“Do they call ungratefulness a virtue?”

Quixotism, or Utopianism: that is another of the devil’s pet words. I believe the quiet admission which we are all of us so ready to make, that, because things have long been wrong, it is impossible they should ever be right, is one of the most fatal sources of misery and crime from which this world suffers. Whenever you hear a man dissuading you from attempting to do well, on the ground that perfection is “Utopian,” beware of that man. Cast the word out of your dictionary altogether.

John Ruskin (Lectures on Architecture and Painting).

Coleridge, I have not one truly elevated character among my acquaintance: not one Christian: not one but undervalues Christianity—singly, what am I to do? Wesley (have you read his life?) was he not an elevated character? Wesley has said “Religion is not a solitary thing.” Alas! it necessarily is so with me, or next to solitary.

Charles Lamb (1775-1834) (Letter to S. T. Coleridge, Jan. 10, 1797).

Poor lovable Charles Lamb! When he wrote this he was only twenty-one years of age, he had already been himself confined in an asylum, and now his sister in a moment of madness had killed her mother. When afterwards he was allowed to take care of Mary, he had still to take her back to the asylum from time to time, as a fresh attack of mania began to manifest itself. The picture of the weeping brother and sister on their way to the asylum is dreadfully sad. The passage seems interesting because of Lamb’s reference to Wesley.

Madeline is lying asleep in bed—but the last line could be used in quite another sense as prettily expressing rejuvenation.

Autres temps, autres moeurs! Aldrich was Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, when he wrote these lines.

INSCRIPTION FOR A BUST OF CUPID

UP-HILL

Matthew Arnold says of this: “No, it is not all; but it is true, deeply true, and we have deep need to know it.... To see things in their beauty is to see things in their truth, and Keats knew it. ‘What the Imagination seizes on as Beauty must be Truth,’ he says in prose.”

Aux coeurs blessés—l’ombre et le silence.

(For the wounded heart—shade and silence.)

Balzac (Le Médecin de Campagne).

The huge mass of black crags that towered at the head of the gloomy defile was exactly what one would picture as the enchanted castle of the evil magician, within sight of which all vegetation withered, looking from over the desolate valley of ruins to the barren shore strewed with its sad wreckage, and the wild ocean beyond....

The land-crabs certainly looked their part of goblin guardians of the approaches to the wicked magician’s fastness. They were fearful as the firelight fell on their yellow cynical faces, fixed as that of the sphinx, but fixed in a horrid grin. Those who have observed this foulest species of crab will know my meaning. Smelling the fish we were cooking they came down the mountains in thousands upon us. We threw them lumps of fish, which they devoured with crab-like slowness, yet perseverance.

It is a ghastly sight, a land-crab at his dinner. A huge beast was standing a yard from me; I gave him a portion of fish, and watched him. He looked at me straight in the face with his outstarting eyes, and proceeded with his two front claws to tear up his food, bringing bits of it to his mouth with one claw, as with a fork. But all this while he never looked at what he was doing; his face was fixed in one position, staring at me. And when I looked around, lo! there were half a dozen others all steadily feeding, but with immovable heads turned to me with that fixed basilisk stare. It was indeed horrible, and the effect was nightmarish in the extreme. While we slept that night they attacked us, and would certainly have devoured us, had we not awoke; and did eat holes in our clothes. One of us had to keep watch, so as to drive them from the other two, otherwise we should have had no sleep.

Imagine a sailor cast alone on this coast, weary, yet unable to sleep a moment on account of these ferocious creatures. After a few days of an existence full of horror he would die raving mad, and then be consumed in an hour by his foes. In all Dante’s Inferno there is no more horrible a suggestion of punishment than this.

E. F. Knight (The Cruise of the “Falcon”).

The scene is in the Island of Trinidad, off the coast of Brazil.

As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely things are also necessary: the wild flower by the wayside, as well as the tended corn; and the wild birds and creatures of the forest, as well as the tended cattle: because man doth not live by bread alone, but also by the desert manna; by every wondrous word and unknowable work of God.

John Ruskin.

LOVE

Cet égoisme à deux.

De Staël.

It is the torment of one, the felicity of two, the strife and enmity of three.

Washington Irving.

I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight,—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our nature is this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears.... In these depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments—the veto, for example, which the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith—sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth.

William James (Is Life Worth Living?).

(Mr. T. R. Glover in The Jesus of History points out that when Christ said “Ye are they that have continued with me in my temptations” (Luke xxii, 26), He meant that the disciples had helped Him by their fidelity.)

The following is from Professor Hobhouse’s Questions of War and Peace, repeating what he had set out at length in his Development and Purpose (I take the quotation from The Spectator review, as the book is not yet procurable in Australia):

“I think, therefore, that we must go back into ourselves for faith, and away from ourselves into the world for reason. The deeper we go into ourselves the more we throw off forms and find the assurance not only that the great things exist, but that they are the heart of our lives, and, since after all we are of one stock, they must be at the heart of your lives as well as mine. You say there are bad men and wars and cruelties and wrong, I say all these are the collision of undeveloped forms. What is the German suffering from but a great illusion that the State is something more than man, and that power is more than justice! Strip him of this and he is a man like yourself, pouring out his blood for the cause that he loves, and that you and I detest. Probe inwards, then, and you find the same spring of life everywhere and it is good. Look outwards, and you find, as you yourself admit the slow movement towards a harmony which just means that these impulses of primeval energy come, so to say, to understand one another. Every form they take as they grow will provoke conflict, perish, and be cast aside until the whole unites, and there you have the secret of your successive efforts and failures which yet leave something behind them. God is not the creator who made the world in six days, rested on the seventh and saw that it was good. He is growing in the actual evolution of the world.”

This poem was written before Blake was fourteen years of age.

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

SHE COMES AS COMES THE SUMMER NIGHT

This is from the author’s “Purple and Gold,” a book of poems published in Melbourne (Thomas C. Lothian, publisher).

No indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness.

G. MacDonald (Robert Falconer).

WHEN LOVE MEETS LOVE

BETWEEN OUR FOLDING LIPS

Compare the well-known lines by George MacDonald:

The suggestion that we are the result of God’s thought appears elsewhere in MacDonald, as in Robert Falconer:

If God were thinking me—ah! But if He be only dreaming me, I shall go mad.

And in The Marquis of Lossie:

I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first.

Checkle = chuckle.

Often ascribed to the Earl of Rochester. See Notes and Queries July 18, 1896.

Mr. Edmunds, when this was written in 1880, was a young English poet and spiritualist, but has since settled in Philadelphia. He has written a number of works, the principal being Buddhist and Christian Gospels now First Compared from the Originals.

In 1883 he was cataloguing a library at Sunderland, and came across books on the Alps, etc., by a Rev. Leslie Stephen. He wrote to the publishers to find out if they were by the same writer as the Leslie Stephen who had written on Ethics. Sir (then Mr.) Leslie Stephen had just been appointed Clark Lecturer at Cambridge. He replied to Edmunds, “I am one person,” adding that he had given up holy orders. Edmunds replied:

SPIRITUALISM

See note to previous quotation. This poem was written in 1883.

Although I preserved these verses, I may add that I had no interest whatever in spiritualism, permeated as it was with childishness and fraud. But, nevertheless, it (together with the so-called “Theosophy”) led to the happy result that the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882. Although spiritualism did good in this way, its unhappy associations do harm to the Society and hamper it in the important work it has carried on during the last thirty-eight years. Popular prejudice continues to associate it with the old spiritualism, and in consequence no proper attention is paid to its intensely interesting and most valuable investigations. For example, there are, apart from Public Libraries and Universities, only six members or associates in the whole of Australia! And yet, besides important work in other directions, it must be admitted by any open-minded person that the evidence collected by the Society that the dead (by telepathy or otherwise) communicate with the living is unanswerable.

He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed.

Thomas Fuller.

This refers to the French proverb, “Il ne faut pas vendre la peau de l’ours avant de l’avoir tué,” or, as we say, “Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.”

Habit dulls the senses and puts the critical faculty to sleep. The fierceness and hardness of ancient manners is apparent to us, but the ancients themselves were not shocked by sights which were familiar to them. To us it is sickening to think of the gladiatorial show, of the massacres common in Roman warfare, of the infanticide practised by grave and respectable citizens, who did not merely condemn their children to death, but often in practice, as they well knew, to what was still worse—a life of prostitution and beggary. The Roman regarded a gladiatorial show as we regard a hunt; the news of the slaughter of two hundred thousand Helvetians by Cæsar or half a million Jews by Titus excited in his mind a thrill of triumph; infanticide committed by a friend appeared to him a prudent measure of household economy.

Sir J. R. Seeley (Ecce Homo).

It is still more important to realize that the exposure of children was a recognized practice also among the Greeks, and that no one, not even Plato, their noblest philosopher, saw anything wrong in it. It is only by letting the mind dwell on such facts as these, until their significance is fully appreciated, that we can realize the width and depth of the great gulf that separates the Pagan and the Christian, the ancient and the modern world. Take this one fact only: imagine the Greek father looking at his helpless babe and coldly deciding that to rear it will be inconvenient,[24] or that there are already enough children to divide the inheritance, or that the child is sickly or deformed, or that its person offends his idea of beauty—and then consigning his own offspring to slavery, prostitution, or death! (The child would either die or be picked up to be reared for some such purpose.) Even in the very imperfect state of our own civilization, we at least have children’s hospitals and crèches, and are inflamed with righteous rage when even an unknown baby is ill-treated. (We, indeed, go further, and have laws and societies for prevention of cruelty to animals.)

The consideration of such a fact leads us also to inquire as to the relations of husband and wife, seeing that the woman would have at least the affection for her offspring that is common among the lower animals. We then find that the modern chivalrous idea of womanhood was unknown to the Greeks; the wife was not educated, and was considered an inferior being; she was married mainly in order to provide sons to carry out certain ritual observances necessary for the father’s welfare after death; she was kept in an almost Eastern seclusion (and therefore had to improve her pallid complexion by paint); she would associate mainly with the children and slaves. We also find that fidelity of the husband to the wife was neither required nor esteemed; and that there was little marital love or family life. (Plato in his model Republic would abolish both the latter, for there was to be promiscuity of women, and all children were to be brought up by the State.)

Considering further this practice of exposing children, we realize that it indicates the want of pity for the helpless and suffering, which is seen among the lower animals (but with exceptions even among them). From this we may reasonably infer that the Greeks would show little humanity in treating other helpless or suffering people, the sick or distressed, dependents or slaves, conquered enemies or others in their power. (In this respect, however, they, as an intellectual people, would subject themselves to and be controlled by necessary social laws and practical considerations; and also, as a fact, they at times showed generosity to a valiant foe.) Again we can infer that, where even the spirit of mercy was so wanting, the gospel of love could not possibly exist, and that the Greeks lived on a far lower moral plane than ours. These questions are far too large to discuss in this book, and I must leave them to be dealt with elsewhere.

But, even from this very small portion of the available evidence, we can arrive at three resulting facts: First, that when in translations from the Greek we find such words as “kindness,” “love,” “morality,” “purity,” “virtue,” “religion,” etc., they have for us a far larger and higher content than the Greek words in the original; secondly, that therefore, the reader must get incorrect impressions of Greek literature and thought; and, thirdly, that truly marvellous as the Greeks were in art and literature, the current conception of them as a noble-minded and refined people is erroneous.

In referring to the Greeks, one needs to limit the people and period, and I am referring to the great age of the Attic or Athenian Greeks, say the Fifth Century, B.C. There would, of course, be gradations of character among them, and, no doubt, some would be kind-hearted, others would have affection for their wives, and so on. But this can only be assumption, for there is little in their literature to support it. This will be seen if the evidence adduced by Mr. Livingstone (“The Greek Genius,” pp. 117-122) is carefully and critically examined. (His references to Homer, who lived in a far distant age must be omitted.) Also the fact that Herodotus, in the course of his narrative, tells us that some men of another state had a moment of compassion for a baby whom they were about to slay, does not prove in the slightest degree that he was himself humane. The wording of Mr. Livingstone’s translation, p. 118, “It happened by a divine chance that the baby smiled, etc.,” would appear to confirm this view of his; but the Greek words simply mean that a god by chance intervened. Knowing what we do of the Greek gods, that intervention would certainly not be actuated by any kindly feeling towards the infant—the object presumably was that the child should live to fulfil the destiny prophesied by the Delphic Oracle. (Herodotus was a typical Greek to whom the world was peopled with gods, and he sees them constantly interposing in human affairs.) As regards the exposure of children, the point is that it was a recognized and common practice, duly sanctioned by law, and never condemned by any writer. Indeed Plato and Aristotle definitely approve of it, and in Plato’s Ideal Republic the weakly and deformed children were to be killed by the State.

As regards the current conception of the Greeks, Shelley in his “Preface to Hellas” describes them as “those glorious beings whom the imagination almost refuses to figure to itself as belonging to our kind.” Similar statements could be gathered from innumerable English and European writers.

THE PACE THAT KILLS

Cato said ‘he had rather people should inquire why he had not a statue erected to his memory, than why he had.’

Plutarch (Political Precepts).

CHAMOUNI AND RYDAL.

Wordsworth lived at Rydal Mount. These verses were published in Macmillan’s, 1879.

“Nor something fairer far.” In Sir F. Younghusband’s Kashmir (1911) there is another suggestion, supplementary to this: “There came upon me this thought, which doubtless has occurred to many another besides myself—why the scene should so influence me and yet make no impression on the men about me. Here were men with far keener eyesight than my own, and around me were animals with eyesight keener still.... Clearly it is not the eye, but the soul that sees. But then comes the still further reflection: what may there not be staring me straight in the face which I am as blind to as the Kashmir stags are to the beauties amidst which they spend their entire lives? The whole panorama may be vibrating with beauties man has not yet the soul to see. Some already living, no doubt, see beauties that we ordinary men cannot appreciate. It is only a century ago that mountains were looked upon as hideous. And in the long centuries to come may we not develop a soul for beauties unthought of now? Undoubtedly we must. And often in reverie on the mountains I have tried to imagine what still further loveliness they may yet possess for men.”

He that dies in an earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot blood, who for the time scarce feels the hurt; and therefore a mind, fixed and bent upon somewhat that is good, doth best avert the dolours of death.

Bacon.

As Dr. Johnson said; “In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.”

“En Angleterre,” said a cynical Dutch diplomatist, “numéro deux va chez numéro un, pour s’en glorifier auprès de numéro trois.”

(In England, Number Two goes to Number One’s house in order to boast about it to Number Three.)

Laurence Oliphant (Piccadilly).

Our ideas, like the children of our youth, often die before us, and our minds represent to us those tombs to which we are fast approaching—where, though the brass and marble may remain, the inscriptions are effaced by time and the imagery moulders away.

John Locke (1632-1704).

What makes such a passage attractive is its use of poetic imagery; and yet Locke had no regard for poetry. See next quotation.

If these may be any reasons against children’s making Latin themes at school, I have much more to say, and of more weight, against their making verses—verses of any sort. For if he has no genius to Poetry, ’tis the most unreasonable thing in the world to torment a child and waste his time about that which can never succeed; and if he have a poetic vein, ’tis to me the strangest thing in the world that the father should desire or suffer it to be cherished or improved. Methinks the parents should labour to have it stifled and suppressed as much as may be; and I know not what reason a father can have to wish his son a poet, who does not desire to have him bid defiance to all other callings and business.... For it is very seldom seen that any one discovers mines of gold or silver in Parnassus.... Poetry and Gaming usually go together.... If, therefore, you would not have your son the fiddle to every jovial company, without whom the Sparks could not relish their wine, nor know how to pass an afternoon idly; if you would not have him to waste his time and estate to divert others, and contemn the dirty acres left him by his ancestors, I do not think you will very much care he should be a Poet.

John Locke (1632-1704) (Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693).

Locke was writing during the dreary Dryden period, when poetry had so greatly degenerated since the brilliant Elizabethan epoch. He himself evidently had no interest in poetry. We know that he did not appreciate Milton (whose Paradise Lost appeared in 1667, when Locke was in his prime).

Compare with the above quotation p. 357.

INDWELLING.

As in other cases mentioned in the Preface, I find that these lines, so familiar in my day, appear to be unknown to younger men.

ON BLACKSTONE’S COMMENTARIES.

In taking leave of our Author (Sir William Blackstone) I finish gladly with this pleasing peroration: a scrutinizing judgment, perhaps, would not be altogether satisfied with it; but the ear is soothed by it, and the heart is warmed.

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) (A Fragment of Government).

I think it worth while quoting from my notes this amusing piece of sarcasm aimed by a young man of twenty-eight at the most renowned legal writer of the time. A Fragment of Government (1776), the first of Bentham’s works, not only showed the utter folly of Blackstone’s praise of the English constitution, but also laid the foundation of political science. (The passage, which the quotation refers to, is in Sec. 2 of the Introduction to the Commentaries, “Thus far as to the right of the supreme power to make law ... public tranquillity.”)

Not only was the English constitution a subject of eulogy in Bentham’s day, but also English law, then in a most barbarous state, was alleged to be the perfection of human reason! Through the efforts of this great and original thinker many dreadful abuses were removed, but it is a remarkable illustration of the blind strength of English conservatism that his wise counsel has not yet been followed in many exceedingly important directions.

In the seventy-eighty period, with which this book mainly deals there was a strong agitation for law reform, which had some results.

It was the boast of Augustus, that he found Rome of brick and left it of marble. But how much nobler will be our Sovereign’s boast when he shall have it to say that he found law dear, and left it cheap; found it a sealed book—left it a living letter; found it the patrimony of the rich—left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the two-edged sword of craft and oppression—left it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence!

Lord Brougham (1778-1868) (Speech in Parliament, 1828).

It would indeed be a proud boast—but not one of these objects has yet been achieved.

When Lord Ellenborough was trying one of the Government charges against Horne Tooke, he found occasion to praise the impartial manner in which justice is administered. “In England, Mr. Tooke, the law is open to all men, rich or poor.” “Yes, my lord,” answered the prisoner, “and so is the London Tavern.”

Henry S. Leigh (Jeux d’Esprit).

The same story is told in Rogers’ Table Talk, but a different judge is named. (Probably both are wrong, but it is immaterial.) The London Tavern was where Horne Tooke’s Constitutional Society met, and must have been often referred to during the trial; but of course the meaning simply is that the throne of justice cannot be approached with an empty purse.

Revenons à nos moutons.

(Let us return to our sheep.)

(La Farce de Maistre Pierre Patelin, Anon. 15 Cent.).

In the farce, a cloth merchant, who is suing his shepherd for stolen sheep, discovers also that the attorney on the other side is a man who had robbed him of some cloth. Dropping the charge against the shepherd, he begins accusing the lawyer of his offence; and, to recall him to the point, the judge impatiently interrupts him with Sus revenons à nos moutons, “Come, let us get back to our sheep.”

Compare Martial VI, 19: “My suit has nothing to do with assault, or battery, or poisoning, but is about three goats, which, I complain, have been stolen by my neighbour. This the judge desires to have proved to him; but you, with swelling words and extravagant gestures, dilate on the Battle of Cannae, the Mithridatic war, and the perjuries of the insensate Carthaginians, the Syllae, the Marii, and the Mucii. It is time, Postumus, to say something about my three goats.”

The reference to the French play I owe to King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations.

(The wife of a poor man deserted him for another man, and he married again. On being convicted for bigamy Mr. Justice Maule sentenced him as follows:) Prisoner at the bar: You have been convicted of the offence of bigamy, that is to say, of marrying a woman while you had a wife still alive, though it is true she has deserted you and is living in adultery with another man. You have, therefore, committed a crime against the laws of your country, and you have also acted under a very serious misapprehension of the course which you ought to have pursued. You should have gone to the ecclesiastical court and there obtained against your wife a decree a mensa et thoro. You should then have brought an action in the courts of common law and recovered, as no doubt you would have recovered, damages against your wife’s paramour. Armed with these decrees, you should have approached the legislature and obtained an Act of Parliament which would have rendered you free and legally competent to marry the person whom you have taken on yourself to marry with no such sanction. It is quite true that these proceedings would have cost you many hundreds of pounds, whereas you probably have not as many pence. But the law knows no distinction between rich and poor. The sentence of the court upon you, therefore, is that you be imprisoned for one day, which period has already been exceeded, as you have been in custody since the commencement of the assizes.

Sir W. H. Maule (1788-1858).

This fine piece of irony, well known to lawyers, materially helped to end the old bad state of the law of divorce. We need more men of the same stamp to draw attention to other abuses.

Is this pleading causes, Cinna? Is this speaking eloquently to say nine words in ten hours? Just now you asked with a loud voice for four more clepsydrae.[26] What a long time you take to say nothing, Cinna!

Martial VIII, 7.

In Racine’s comedy, Les Plaideurs, Act III, Sc. III, a prolix advocate begins his speech by referring to the Creation of the world. “Avocat, passons au déluge” (Let us get along to the Deluge), says the judge. See also The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Sc. I:—

Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing; more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them; and, when you have them, they are not worth the search.

“There’s nae place like hame,” quoth the de’il, when he found himself in the Court o’ Session.

Scottish Proverb.

I understand that the original wording was “‘Hame’s hamely,’ quoth the de’il, etc.” Perhaps the only English Institution which the Hindu appreciates is that of English Law—but not as a system of Justice. To his acute mind it is a remarkably clever and most ingenious gambling game. It is said that two Hindus will even fabricate mutual complaints, the one against the other, to bring before the Courts—and that it is almost equivalent to a patent of nobility to have had a case taken to the Privy Council. The following incident actually happened to a friend of mine who was Resident in a Native State. Sitting in his judicial capacity he reproved a Hindu gentleman for his excessive litigiousness. The latter retorted that it was a case of the pot calling the kettle black; that he had seen the Resident put his rupees on the totalisator the day before; and the British race-course wasn’t a bit more of a gamble than the British Law Courts. For his part he preferred to have his flutter on the latter.

BALDER’S RETURN TO EARTH[27]

I retain this extract from Buchanan’s poem for the reason set out in the preface.

I have “Compensation” as the title of these verses, but it must surely be incorrect. If a man passes through life unrecognised by kindred souls, it is the reverse of ‘compensation’ to him if he also fails to recognise other sympathetic natures.

The author is, or was, an American Catholic priest.

ALL SUNG

Mr. le Gallienne was not the first to complain that poetic subjects were exhausted. A recent Spectator quotes the following from Choerilus, a Samian poet of the Fifth Century, B.C. (2,000 years before Shakespeare): “Happy was the follower of the muses in that time, when the field was still virgin soil. But now when all has been divided up and the arts have reached their limits, we are left behind in the race, and, look where’er we may, there is no room anywhere for a new-yoked chariot to make its way to the front.” (St. John Thackeray, Anthologia Graeca).

Go out into the woods and valleys, when your heart is rather harassed than bruised, and when you suffer from vexation more than grief. Then the trees all hold out their arms to you to relieve you of the burthen of your heavy thoughts; and the streams under the trees glance at you as they run by, and will carry away your trouble along with the fallen leaves; and the sweet-breathing air will draw it off together with the silver multitudes of the dew. But let it be with anguish or remorse in your heart that you go forth into Nature, and instead of your speaking her language, you make her speak yours. Your distress is then infused through all things and clothes all things, and Nature only echoes and seems to authenticate your self-loathing or your hopelessness. Then you find the device of your sorrow on the argent shield of the moon, and see all the trees of the field weeping and wringing their hands with you, while the hills, seated at your side in sackcloth, look down upon you prostrate, and reprove you like the comforters of Job.

Robert Alfred Vaughan (1823-1857) (Hours with the Mystics).

If this fine writer had lived, much might have been expected of him. He is one of the many instances of “the fatal thirty-fours and thirty-sevens.”

The gases gather to the solid firmament; the chemic lump arrives at the plant and grows; arrives at the quadruped and walks; arrives at the man and thinks.

Emerson (Uses of Great Men).

HIAWATHA’S PHOTOGRAPHING

It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man’s death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too,—as if it were comparatively a light thing to fail in love and reverence to the brother who has to climb the whole toilsome steep with us, and all our tears and tenderness were due to the one who is spared that hard journey.

George Eliot (Janet’s Repentance).

It has been said by Schiller, in his letters on aesthetic culture, that the sense of beauty never farthered the performance of a single duty.

Although this gross and inconceivable falsity will hardly be accepted by any one in so many terms, seeing that there are few so utterly lost but that they receive, and know that they receive, at certain moments, strength of some kind, or rebuke from the appealings of outward things; and that it is not possible for a Christian man to walk across so much as a rood of the natural earth, with mind unagitated and rightly poised, without receiving strength and hope from stone, flower, leaf or sound, nor without a sense of a dew falling upon him out of the sky; though I say this falsity is not wholly and in terms admitted, yet it seems to be partly and practically so in much of the doing and teaching even of holy men, who in the recommending of the love of God to us, refer but seldom to those things in which it is most abundantly and immediately shown; though they insist much on his giving of bread, and raiment, and health (which he gives to all inferior creatures), they require us not to thank him for that glory of his works which he has permitted us alone to perceive: they tell us often to meditate in the closet, but they send us not, like Isaac, into the fields at even; they dwell on the duty of self-denial, but they exhibit not the duty of delight.[29]

John Ruskin (Modern Painters, III, I, XV).

“All (that) I could never be, All (that) man ignored in me.” All that the world could not know, a man’s thoughts, desires, and intentions, all that he wished or tried to be or do, although unknown to his fellows, have their value in God’s eyes. Man is the Cup, whose shape (i.e., character) has been formed by the wheel of the great Potter, God. See further as to this Eastern metaphor.

The late Mrs. A. W. Verrall, widow of Doctor Verrall and herself a brilliant scholar, pointed out in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, June, 1911, a probable connection between “Rabbi ben Ezra,” and “Omar Khayyam,” and I do not think that her interesting views have been published elsewhere.

Both poems centre round the idea of man as a Cup, but treat the metaphor from very different standpoints. Omar’s cup (quoting from the first edition) is to be filled with “Life’s Liquor” (ii), with “Wine! Red Wine!” (vi), with what “clears To-Day of past regrets” (xx); the object is to drown the memory of the fact that “without asking” we are “hurried hither” and “hurried hence” (xxx); the “Ruby Vintage” is to be drunk “with old Khayyam,” and “when the Angel with his darker Draught draws up” to us we are to take that draught without shrinking (xlviii). On the other hand Rabbi ben Ezra’s Cup is to be used by the great Potter. We are told to look “not down but up! to uses of a cup” (30). The Rabbi asks “God who mouldest men ... to take and use His work” (32) and the ultimate purpose of the Cup, when it has been made “perfect as planned,” is to slake the thirst of the Master.

The comparison of man to the Clay of the Potter in both poems is not sufficient in itself to show any connection between them. Such a comparison is found, as Fitzgerald reminds us, “in the Literature of the World from the Hebrew Prophets to the present time”[30]; and it is as appropriately employed by the Hebrew as by the Persian thinker. But Mrs. Verrall has other grounds:

The little pamphlet in its brown wrapper containing the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was first published by Edward Fitzgerald in 1859, and, as is well known, attracted so little attention that, although there were only 250 copies, it found its way into the two-penny boxes of the book-sellers, (It now sells for about £50!) But, nevertheless, the poem was eagerly read and enthusiastically praised by a small group, among whom were Swinburne and Rossetti. In 1861 Robert Browning came to live in London, and often saw Rossetti, who was his friend. It is, therefore, very improbable that he did not learn of the poem, which had so impressed Rossetti. In 1864 “Rabbi ben Ezra” was published in the volume called Dramatis Personae.

Again, there is intrinsic evidence that Browning intended a direct refutation of Omar’s theory of life. Compare verses 26 and 27 of “Rabbi ben Ezra” with verses xxxvi and xxxvii of “Omar Khayyam” (first edition).

Omar says that he “watched the Potter thumping his wet clay,” and, thereupon advises:

Rabbi ben Ezra says:

and proceeds:

Although the “carpe diem” (“seize to-day”) theory of life is no doubt common to all literatures, the cumulative effect of Mrs. Verrall’s argument is strong, although not conclusive.

As regards the above verses, compare the next quotation.

Sabaoth, armies, hosts. “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.”

Between the great things that we cannot do, and the small things we will not do, the danger is that we shall do nothing.

Adolph Monod (1802-1856).

Reputation is what men and women think of us; Character is what God and the angels know of us.

Thomas Paine.

Love is the Amen of the Universe.

Novalis.

He (Dr. Johnson) would not allow Scotland to derive any credit from Lord Mansfield, for he was educated in England. “Much,” said he, “may be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.”

Boswell (Life of Johnson).

(A Mr. Strahan, a Scotchman, asked Dr. Johnson what he thought of Scotland) “That it is a very vile country to be sure, Sir,” returned for answer Dr. Johnson. “Well, Sir!” replied the other, somewhat mortified, “God made it.” “Certainly he did,” answered Mr. Johnson again, “but we must always remember that he made it for Scotchmen.”

Mrs. Piozzi (Johnsoniana).

These are the two best of Johnson’s chaffing jibes against Scotchmen. The neatness of the latter is, to my mind, spoilt by the words at the end, which I have omitted: “and—comparisons are odious, Mr. Strahan,—but God made hell.” The following may also be quoted as showing both Johnson and that clever charlatan, Wilkes, quizzing Boswell (year 1781):

Wilkes: “Pray, Boswell, how much may be got in a year by an advocate at the Scotch bar?”

Boswell: “I believe two thousand pounds.”

Wilkes: “How can it be possible to spend that money in Scotland?”

Johnson: “Why, Sir, the money may be spent in England; but there is a harder question. If one man in Scotland gets possession of two thousand pounds, what remains for all the rest of the nation?”

Many Scotchmen undoubtedly enjoy chaff against themselves and their country, and I think this was so with Boswell. It is a phase of social psychology that needs explaining.

In these jokes Johnson was, consciously or not, influenced by the fine Royalist poet, John Cleveland (1613-1658); but the latter was very much in earnest. He detested the Scotch for fighting against Charles I. His references to Scotland in The Rebel Scot are wonderfully clever:—

And again:—

God is present by His essence; which, because it is infinite, cannot be contained within the limits of any place; and because He is of an essential purity and spiritual nature, He cannot be undervalued by being supposed present in the places of unnatural uncleanness: because, as the sun, reflecting upon the mud of strands and shores, is unpolluted in its beams, so is God not dishonoured when we suppose Him in every one of His creatures, and in every part of every one of them.

Jeremy Taylor (Holy Living, Ch. 1, Sec. 3).

There is an old Scottish proverb, “The sun is no waur for shining on the midden.”

I dare say Alexander the Great was somewhat staggered in his plans of conquest by Parmenio’s way of putting things. “After you have conquered Persia what will you do?” “Then I shall conquer India.” “After you have conquered India, what will you do?” “Conquer Scythia.” “And after you have conquered Scythia, what will you do?” “Sit down and rest.” “Well,” said Parmenio to the conqueror, “why not sit down and rest now?”

A. K. H. Boyd (The Recreations of a Country Parson).

I include this because it is a good short paraphrase of the actual story of Pyrrhus and Cineas (Plutarch’s Lives—“Pyrrhus”) and because of the curious absurdity of attributing such philosophic advice to the warrior, Parmenio. This general was the only one of Alexander’s old advisers who urged him to invade Asia! (Plutarch’s Lives—“Alexander”).

Sorrow and care and anxiety may quite well live in Elizabethan cottages, grown over with honeysuckle and jasmine; and very sad eyes may look forth from windows around which roses twine.

A. K. H. Boyd (The Recreations of a Country Parson).

This book had a great vogue, but not sufficient merit to preserve it from oblivion.

CANADIAN BOAT-SONG

From the Gaelic.

The authorship of these verses is uncertain, but it probably lies between John Galt, author of Annals of the Parish, and Lockhart, son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott. The verses were quoted by Professor Wilson (Christopher North) in his Noctes Ambrosianae in Blackwood, Sept., 1829, but, because Wilson was not the author, they are not reproduced in his collected works (Blackwood, 1855).

A degenerate Lord, &c. This refers to the eviction of the Highland crofters and cottars. In 1829 the Duke of Hamilton had just cleared the population out of the Isle of Arran.

Sheiling or Shealing, a hut used by shepherds, fishermen, or others for shelter when at work at a distance from home.

Anterôs is the god of mutual love, who punishes those who do not return the love of others, as otherwise his brother Erôs, god of love, will be unhappy.

The fine poem from which this is quoted represents one of the phases of Myers’ experience. It was published in 1882, but written about ten years before. He had then lost his faith in Christianity, but believed in a future life on grounds based partly upon philosophy and partly on “vision.” He had those moments of exaltation when, as he says:

For entrance into the future life, Love and complete Self-surrender are the best equipment for the soul.

Life is short, and we have not too much time for gladdening the lives of those who are travelling the dark road with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Amiel’s Journal.

SELF-SACRIFICE

We bury decay in the earth; we plant in it the perishing; we feed it with offensive refuse: but nothing grows out of it that is not clean; it gives us back life and beauty.

Charles Dudley Warner (My Summer in a Garden).

SOUL’S BEAUTY

Although Rossetti was not a classical student, he seems here to have arrived at the Platonic idea of an abstract Beauty, of whose essence are all beautiful things, “sea or sky or woman.” Love and death, terror and mystery guard her, as a goddess on her throne, and all lovers of the beautiful are worshippers at her shrine.

Thinking is only a dream of feeling; a dead feeling; a pale-grey, feeble life.

Novalis.

A whetstone cannot cut, but it makes iron sharp, and gives it a keen edge.

Isocrates (436-338 B.C.).

This is quoted in Plutarch’s Lives. Isocrates was asked why he taught rhetoric so much and yet spoke so rarely; and this was his reply. Horace (Ars Poetica 304) playfully says that he is no longer able to write verses but he will teach others to write, adding “a whetstone is not used for cutting, but is used for sharpening steel nevertheless.”

The career of Isocrates, “that old man eloquent,”[31] is extremely interesting. He preserved his energy and his influence to the end of his long life of 98 years.

A very musical expression of a very ugly thought.

Women never betray themselves to men as they do to each other.

George Eliot (Middlemarch).

THE RETREAT

I include this poem, although it is in the anthologies, because from my own experience a young reader will not see its beauty without some words of explanation. It is the precursor of the greatest ode ever written, Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Wordsworth, Vaughan, and many others believe that we had a separate existence before we came into this world (and there is much in the experience of each of us to warrant that belief). Wordsworth says:

But in order to appreciate either Wordsworth’s or Vaughan’s poem it is not necessary to have this belief in a past separate existence—it is enough to realize that

One may see the small value God has for riches by the people He gives them to.

Alexander Pope.

Browning in his last poem, the well-known “Epilogue,” speaks with another voice. He wishes his friends to think of him after death as he was when alive:—

F. W. H. Myers wrote:—

We need a summons to no houri-haunted paradise, no passionless contemplation, no monotony of prayer and praise; but to endless advance by endless effort, and, if need be, by endless pain. Be it mine, then, to plunge among the unknown Destinies—to dare and still to dare!

Emerson’s heaven also was

In life, Love comes first. Indeed, we only come because Love calls for us. We find it waiting with outstretched arms on arrival. Love is the beginning of everything.

F. W. Boreham (Faces in the Fire).

Tóward, “approaching.”

My closing remark is as to avoiding debates that are in their very nature interminable.... There is a certain intensity of emotion, interest, bias or prejudice if you will, that can neither reason nor be reasoned with. On the purely intellectual side, the disqualifying circumstances are complexity and vagueness. If a topic necessarily hauls in numerous other topics of difficulty, the essay may do something for it, but not the debate. Worst of all is the presence of several large, ill-defined, and unsettled terms. A not unfrequent case is a combination of the several defects, each, perhaps, in a small degree. A tinge of predilection or party, a double or triple complication of doctrines, and one or two hazy terms will make a debate that is pretty sure to end as it began. Thus it is that a question, plausible to appearance, may contain within it capacities of misunderstanding, cross-purposes, and pointless issues, sufficient to occupy the long night of Pandemonium, or beguile the journey to the nearest fixed star.

Alexander Bain (Contemporary Review, April, 1877).

From an address to the Edinburgh University Philosophical Society.

Diogenes, seeing Neptune’s temple with votive pictures of those saved from wreck, says, “Yea, but where are they painted, that have been drowned?”

Bacon.

THE BELLE OF THE BALL-ROOM

A canon of my own in judging verses is that no man has a right to put into metre what he can as well say out of metre. To which I may add, as a corollary, that a fortiore he has no right to put into metre what he can better say out of metre.

W. S. Lilly (Essay on George Eliot).

Aujourd’hui, ce qui ne vaut pas la peine d’être dit, on le chante.

(Now-a-days when a thing is not worth saying they sing it—i.e. put it in a song.)

Beaumarchais (Le Barbier de Séville, Act I. Sc. I.)

I do not know whether I gave you at any time the details of my work here, or the principles upon which I have been proceeding.... Some of the work set down includes Ancient Ethics—which is almost entirely grossly wrong and great rubbish also. This part I have persistently refused to get up, not because I disliked it, but because it is decidedly injurious to warp and twist the brain by impressing it with wrong thoughts and systems—just as it would be insane in the polisher of a mirror to think it would reflect the external world more truly, if he gave it a dint here, a scratch there, a bulge in another place, and so forth. It would take me too long to describe the details. Suffice it to say that one of the examiners in Mental Philosophy and in Moral and Political Philosophy is an old, blind (literally) man of the old school, who gave a very abnormally large amount of questions relating to Ancient Ethics, and an abnormally large amount to the early part of English Ethics—leaving hardly any marks to be scored by thorough understanding and ability to use the principles of the subjects.

The consequence was that those, who had crammed up the earlier text-books and could reproduce them, had an enormous advantage. This old fogey moreover is strongly anti-Spencerian. Indeed I heard that he had objected to my answers because “there was too much of Spencer and myself!” So that instead of criticism and originality, he avowedly preferred mere reproduction, a good example of the slavishness of that method of examination predominant mostly, which, as Spencer wrote to me some time ago, is devised for testing a man’s “power of acquisition instead of using that which has been acquired.”

Richard Hodgson (1855-1905) (Letter, Dec., 1881).

This letter was written to me from Cambridge, when Hodgson (see Preface) had found his immediate prospects blasted by the results of the Moral Science Tripos. No one was placed in the First Class and he (although at the head of the Tripos) only in the Second Class. This meant that he had no hope of a Fellowship, which would have enabled him to go on with original work in philosophy, and he would have to employ his time in earning a livelihood. Added to this was the cruel disappointment to his family and friends.

Hodgson was one of the most gifted men that Australia has produced. He had completed his M.A. and LL.D. courses in Melbourne by 1877, when he was twenty-two years of age, and then, discarding the profession of the law, left for Cambridge to read Mental and Moral Science. While still an undergraduate there he had written an article in reply to T. H. Green, and submitted it to Herbert Spencer, who highly approved of it, and sent it to the Contemporary. However, as stated above, Hodgson’s immediate future depended on the result of the examination. (He was at the time preparing one of the articles he contributed to Mind, and had in view further original work.)

When the result of the Tripos appeared, Henry Sidgwick and Venn who were then Lecturers and by far the best Moral Science men in Cambridge, came to sympathize with Hodgson, on the unfair result. They urged him to go to Germany so that he might acquire that perfect command of the German language which was necessary for his philosophic work. On learning that he was not in a position to do this, Sidgwick insisted—as he said, “in the interests of philosophy”—on defraying the whole of the expenses of Hodgson’s residence in Germany. As he insisted strongly, Hodgson accepted the offer, and went to Jena, armed with a very flattering letter of introduction from Herbert Spencer to Haeckel.

Almost immediately after his return from Germany the Society for Psychical Research was founded, and Hodgson joined it. He came to the conclusion that the work of this Society was more important than any other study, while probably it would also be of fundamental assistance to philosophy. He went out to India in 1884, and thoroughly exposed Madame Blavatsky and her “Theosophy,” and, from about 1886, devoted the rest of his life to Psychical Research. Although maintaining his reading and his intimacy with Henry Sidgwick, William James, and others, his services practically became lost to philosophy. This, however, does not affect the important fact illustrated by the Tripos incident. We learn what ineptitude can exist in a great university, and what grave results must necessarily follow therefrom.