YOUTH AND AGE (continued 6)

George Gissing (The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft).

ISOLATION

This fine poem is one of a series called “Switzerland,” which was written as the result of Arnold’s meeting and falling in love with a lady at Berne. The poem immediately preceding it in the series is entitled “Isolation: To Marguerite,” while this is called “To Marguerite, Continued” but as it is now quoted separately, it is better entitled “Isolation.”

In the preceding poems the lady has lost her affection while her lover is still devoted; and this leads to the subject of our isolation from each other in our inner lives. In the second verse the poet describes the moments when we most crave for love, sympathy, and mutual spiritual understanding and union.

For an interesting fact connected with this poem, see next quotation and note.

(Thackeray has been describing how husband, wife, mother, son—each of the inmates of a household—is interested in his or her own separate world and looking at the same things from a different point of view.) How lonely we are in the world! You and your wife have pressed the same pillow for forty years and fancy yourselves united: pshaw! does she cry out when you have the gout, or do you lie awake when she has the tooth-ache?... As for your wife—O philosophic reader, answer and say, Do you tell her all? Ah, sir, a distinct universe walks about under your hat and under mine—all things in nature are different to each—the woman we look at has not the same features, the dish we eat from has not the same taste to the one and the other—you and I are but a pair of infinite isolations, with some fellow-islands a little more or less near to us.

Thackeray (Pendennis, ch. XVI).

The similarity between this passage and the preceding poem, written at about the same time, is very curious. Arnold’s poem appeared in 1852 but was composed ten years earlier, while Pendennis was published in monthly parts in 1849-50. Therefore, neither author would consciously know at the time what the other had written.

The incident is probably an illustration of the mysterious way in which minds influence one another and create the spirit of the particular age. There is, I believe, a Chinese proverb to the effect that we are more the product of our age than of our parents. This permeating quality of thought and feeling is, no doubt, the explanation why the highest art and literature, though often unappreciated at the time, become ultimately recognized. It appears not to be sufficiently taken into account in other directions. For instance, it is repeatedly stated that Blake, because of the limited circulation of his poems, exercised no influence on the Romantic Revival—see for example The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. XI, 201. Yet we know that his work was known to and appreciated by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Southey, and Hayley. (Although little regarded now, Hayley’s fame was then so great that he was offered and refused the poet-laureateship. He appears to be the one man who was an intimate friend of both Blake and Cowper.) While a very long period went by before Blake’s poems became generally known, their influence may well have been very great, permeating unconsciously through other minds. See reference on p. 194 to the similar case of Fitzgerald’s “Omar Khayyam.”

Even if a poem were read by only one person, it might conceivably influence a generation of authors. Suppose, if that had been possible, a page of Swinburne’s “Tristram of Lyonesse” or F. W. H. Myers’ “Implicit Promise” (both quoted elsewhere) had been read by Pope or Dryden; how the monotonous heroic couplet of their time might have been transformed!

An impromptu written when the mother and child incident happened and not revised.

Humanity is neither a love for the whole human race, nor a love for each individual of it, but a love for the race, or for the ideal of man, in each individual. In other and less pedantic words, he who is truly humane considers every human being as such interesting and important, and without waiting to criticize each individual specimen, pays in advance to all alike the tribute of good wishes and sympathy.... If some human beings are abject and contemptible, if it be incredible to us that they can have any high dignity or destiny, do we regard them from so great a height as Christ? Are we likely to be more pained by their faults and deficiencies than he was? Is our standard higher than his? And yet he associated by preference with these meanest of the race; no contempt for them did he ever express, no suspicion that they might be less dear than the best and wisest to the common Father, no doubt that they were naturally capable of rising to a moral elevation like his own. There is nothing of which a man may be prouder than of this; it is the most hopeful and redeeming fact in history; it is precisely what was wanting to raise the love of man as man to enthusiasm. An eternal glory has been shed upon the human race by the love Christ bore to it.

Sir J. R. Seeley (Ecce Homo).

This was quoted by Lord Lytton in an essay on The Influence of Love upon Literature and Real Life.

It is hard for us to live up to our own eloquence, and keep pace with our winged words, while we are treading the solid earth and are liable to heavy dining.

George Eliot (Daniel Deronda).

So, then, as darkness had no beginning, neither will it ever have an end. So, then, is it eternal. The negation of aught else, is its affirmation. Where the light cannot come, there abideth the darkness. The light doth but hollow a mine out of the infinite extension of the darkness. And ever upon the steps of the light treadeth the darkness; yea, springeth in fountains and wells amidst it, from the secret channels of its mighty sea. Truly, man is but a passing flame, moving unquietly amid the surrounding rest of night; without which he yet could not be, and whereof he is in part compounded.

G. MacDonald (Phantastes).

In the story an ogre is reading this passage from a book. Phantastes is MacDonald’s finest work.

This is the poet’s vision of the city of the future, and will be interesting to the allotment-holders in English cities to-day.

Helen of Troy and Cleopatra—but, as Peacock mentioned in Gryll Grange, Cleopatra was of pure Greek descent and could not have been a “swarthy” lady.

The six quotations above are word-pictures (see note p. 85).

It is a mistake into which spiritually-minded men have fallen, that God is apprehended and known by a special faculty. The fact is that every faculty is serviceable in this noble work. We reach the Divine through our aesthetic faculties when our soul is stirred by a grand burst of music, or by the contemplation of a magnificent landscape. We reach the Divine through our purely intellectual faculties, when, by true reasoning, founded on sound observation, we master any great law by which God governs the world. We reach the Divine through our emotional nature when pure grief or pure love, holy longing, unselfish hope, righteous indignation, elevate us above the prosaic level of customary equanimity, and help us to realize the incomparable beauty of holiness.

Just as the weeping Magdalene[32] stood bewailing the loss of what even to her was only sacred clay, all unconscious that her Saviour had been given back to her without seeing corruption, in a glorified and eternal form, not dead, but alive for evermore, whom she could love with ever increasing ardour of devotion: so, we say, there are not a few in our time whose lot it is to wring their hands over the grave of lost ideas, which they loved and their fathers loved, but for which God himself is substituting ideas nobler and better far, which earlier ages failed to grasp only because they were not in circumstances to feel their higher worth.

One cannot demonstrate on any physical or visible basis whatever, that it is a nobler thing to suffer injustice than to commit it, that truth-speaking is honourable, forgiveness of injuries magnanimous, and loving self-sacrifice for others sublime. Honour, purity, humility, reverence, tenderness, courtesy, patience, these things cannot be weighed on physical scales, cannot be handled or touched, or melted or frozen in any mechanical or chemical laboratory. They belong to a different order of realities from acids and vapours: they are denizens of what, for want of any more definite or accurate expression, we are accustomed to call the spiritual world.

One can see how religion should, to a young person, be associated with repressive and prohibitive laws. Youth is the time for the luxuriating of newborn, and, therefore, delicious vital forces. But its very luxuriance is disorderly, and religion cannot coexist with disorder. Therefore, that which is so continually warning the young against impulse, and passion, and irregularity, ought not to be too greatly displeased if it should, by and by, come to be regarded by the young as a synonym for mere repressive force, and, therefore, as an unpleasant and unpopular thing. I believe, too, that there is no exception to the uniformity of the experience, that all young countries adopt freer systems of religion, and divest religious bodies more completely of all political and properly coercive power than older countries. It is all an illustration of the same thing. Young life, which most needs regulation, most dislikes it.[33]

As the genius of the bard is in the poem, as the wisdom of the legislator is in the law, as the skill of the mechanician is in the engine, as the soul of the musician is in the harmony and melody, as the words of a man’s lips issue from the inner world of his mental and spiritual character—so every work of God, and conspicuously man, as the noblest of God’s works, may truly be said to shadow forth a portion of the mind of God.

We talk of creation as a past thing. But the truth is, creation is eternal. Creation never ceases. Every time the clouds drop in rain, every time the waters freeze into new ice, every time the juices of nature gather into another violet, every time a new wail of life is heard upon a mother’s breast, every time you breathe another sigh, or shed another tear, there is God as truly present in His miraculous creative capacity as on the day when He said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

P. S. Menzies (Sermons).

Apart from their intrinsic value, the above extracts are given because this book of sermons is of special interest to Australians and because it has passed into oblivion. There are very few copies in existence.

Menzies came from Glasgow to Scots Church, Melbourne, in 1868 and died at the early age of thirty-four in 1874. At the Glasgow University he had been largely influenced mentally and spiritually by Principal Caird.

The sermons published in this book were selected by his widow after his death. Although not revised by their gifted young author, the fine thoughts expressed in chaste and beautiful language remind one of James Martineau.

Our sweet illusions are half of them conscious illusions—like effects of colour that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass, and rags.

George Eliot (The Lifted Veil).

Galligaskins, trunk-hose. “The Splendid Shilling” is a famous parody on Milton.

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

George Eliot (Middlemarch).

In the story Dorothea has found her husband to be a man of narrow mind and unsympathetic nature. Such a disillusionment after marriage frequently happens, and we are not deeply moved by what is not unusual, although it may mean a real life-tragedy. Ruskin says “God gives the disposition to every healthy human mind in some degree to pass over or even harden itself against evil things, else the suffering would be too great to be borne” (Modern Painters v., xix., 32). Only thus could we have lived through the horrors of the present war.

George Eliot’s analogy between intensity of the emotions and acuteness of the senses reminds one of Pope’s lines (“Essay on Man,” Ep. I.) where he says life would be insupportable, if we had the acute hearing, smell and other senses of insects and other animals; we should

Abt—or Abbé—Georg Joseph Vogler, 1749-1814, a German organist and composer, is probably chosen by Browning because, although an important musician, his compositions have perished. In this fine poem Vogler has been extemporizing, and his inspired music has lifted him in ecstasy to heaven. The sounds are his slaves who have built palaces of music, as in the Arab legends angels and demons built magic structures for Solomon. He grieves that this wonderful music should apparently have vanished for ever; but is comforted by the thought that no good thing, no fine aspiration, no great effort or noble impulse can really die, but must exist for ever in the mind of God.

If Browning had known the evidence now afforded scientifically by hypnotism and otherwise, he might have come to the conclusion that all our thoughts and feelings, both good and bad, are recorded deep down in our own consciousness. Moreover, the existence of thought-transference leads to the somewhat dreadful suggestion that this record of all our inmost thoughts and feelings may possibly become open to the inspection of every one.

The quotation reminds one of Wordsworth’s sonnet on the “Inside of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge.”

See the preceding note. The poet says that Painting and Poetry are “art in obedience to laws,” but the musician exerts a higher creative will akin to that of God. The painter has before him the pictures he reproduces, the poet borrows his imagery from visible things and has apt words in which to express his thoughts: the musician has nothing visible, nothing outside his own soul, to assist him, and can use only the meaningless sounds which we hear everywhere around us. By combining, however, three of those empty sounds (in a chord) he evolves a fourth sound, which so transcends all that other arts can do in expressing emotion that Browning compares it to a “star.”

But this expresses only part of the poet’s meaning. In using this tremendous comparison to a star, as also in enthroning music supreme above art and poetry, he means that it transcends their loftiest flights and rises above our world to the heavens above. In the earlier part of the poem the “pinnacled glory” built by the slaves of sound at the bidding of the musician’s soul is based “broad on the roots of things” and ascends until it “attains to heaven.”

F. W. H. Myers, in “The Renewal of Youth,” has a passage on music. His theme is that while music (as in Mozart’s operas) may express human passion, it also (as in Beethoven) rises to greater heights and appears to voice the emotions of a world beyond our senses. In the lines I have italicized in the following passage he no doubt refers to Browning’s line, “That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star!”—the “star” meaning that music ascends to a higher world than our own:—

Not only does Browning unselfishly assert that the sister-art is superior to his own, but he goes further, and doubts if music is not the greatest of all man’s gifts. I do not discuss either contention—leaving musicians to rejoice in the tribute of a great poet.

“Jenny” was Mrs. Carlyle.

The world is so inconveniently constituted, that the vague consciousness of being a fine fellow is no guarantee of success in any line of business.

George Eliot (Brother Jacob).

From Guy Mannering. Scott says it is a prayer or spell, which was used in Scotland or Northern England to speed the passage of a parting spirit, like the tolling of a bell in Catholic days.

Evil of every kind, being familiar to us as an object of apprehension, appears to be external to ourselves. And yet it is invested with the greater part of its severity by the mind: it acts upon us by the ideas it awakens, the affections it wounds, the aspirations it disappoints. If its outward pressure were all, and it dealt with us as beings of sense alone, it would lose most of its poignancy and would dwindle down into a few animal pangs.... It is our higher nature that creates immeasurably the greater part of the ills we endure: they are ideal, not sensible: and it is the privilege of reason to have tears instead of groans; of love to know grief instead of pain; of conscience to replace uneasiness with remorse.... Penury, disgrace, bereavement, guilt, are evils which we must be human in order to feel; and it is the penalty of our nobleness, not only to be weighed down by their occasional burthen, but to be perpetually haunted by the phantom of their approach.

James Martineau (Hours of Thought, II, 150).

Two or three of them got round me, and begged me for the twentieth time to tell them the name of my country. Then, as they could not pronounce it satisfactorily, they insisted that I was deceiving them, and that it was a name of my own invention. One funny old man, who bore a ludicrous resemblance to a friend of mine at home, was almost indignant. “Unglung!” said he, “who ever heard of such a name?—anglang, angerlang—that can’t be the name of your country; you are playing with us.” Then he tried to give a convincing illustration. “My country is Wanumbai—anybody can say Wanumbai. I’m an orang-Wanumbai; but N-glung! who ever heard of such a name? Do tell us the real name of your country, and when you are gone we shall know how to talk about you.” To this luminous argument and remonstrance I could oppose nothing but assertion, and the whole party remained firmly convinced that I was for some reason or other deceiving them.

A. R. Wallace (The Malay Archipelago).

This was written in 1863, but ten years earlier Alexander Smith, in “A Life Drama,” had written:

Other writers have also used the same simile. See next poem.

QUA CURSUM VENTUS

Two friends, who through absence have become “soul from soul estranged,” are compared to two ships, which unconsciously draw apart during the night and must continue a diverging course; but, being both bound for the same port, will at the end of their life-voyage be re-united.

Tennyson, here and elsewhere (see, for example, the king’s beautiful speech in “The Passing of Arthur”) urges us to prayer, and adds his belief in a personal intercourse with an ever-present and loving God. Innumerable men of the highest character during nineteen centuries have testified to the same direct communion with the Almighty.

A man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin and a jerkin’s lining: rumple the one, you rumple the other.

Sterne (Tristram Shandy).

Il (Boucher) trouvait la nature trop verte et mal éclairée. Et son ami, Lancret, le peintre des salons à la mode, lui répondait: “Je suis de votre sentiment, la nature manque d’harmonie et de séduction.”

(He, Boucher, found nature too green and badly lit. And his friend, Lancret, the fashionable painter of the day, replied to him, “I am of your opinion, nature is wanting in harmony and seductiveness.”)

Charles Blanc.

See following quotation.

If you examine the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, you will find that nearly all its expressions, having reference to the country, show ... either a foolish sentimentality, or a morbid fear, both of course coupled with the most curious ignorance. Nothing is more remarkable than the general conception of the country merely as a series of green fields, and the combined ignorance and dread of more sublime scenery. The love of fresh air and green grass forced itself upon the animal natures of men; but that of the sublimer features of scenery had no place in minds whose chief powers had been repressed by the formalisms of the age. And although in the second-rate writers continually, and in the first-rate ones occasionally, you find an affectation of interest in mountains, clouds, and forests, yet whenever they write from their heart, you will find an utter absence of feeling respecting anything beyond gardens and grass. Examine, for instance, the novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne, the comedies of Molière, and the writings of Johnson and Addison, and I do not think you will find a single expression of true delight in sublime nature in any one of them. Perhaps Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, in its total absence of sentiment on any subject but humanity, and its entire want of notice of anything at Geneva which might not as well have been seen at Coxwold, is the most striking instance I could give you; and if you compare with this negation of feeling on one side, the interludes of Molière, in which shepherds and shepherdesses are introduced in court dress, you will have a very accurate conception of the general spirit of the age.

John Ruskin (Architecture and Painting).

“My other piece of advice, Copperfield,” said Mr. Micawber, “you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the God of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and—and in short, you are for ever floored. As I am!”

Charles Dickens (David Copperfield).

This is Vision.

This was written in a game of bouts rimés (rhymed ends). Four lines had to be composed ending with “brook,” “why,” “crook,” “I.”

Referring to Bryant’s poem, “To a Waterfowl”:—

In the play Francis I (1494-1547) enters singing these lines. (Francis wrote on the walls of the royal apartments at Chambord Toute femme varie, “Every woman is fickle.”) One finds this never-ending theme of poets and cynics in Virgil’s Varium et mutabile semper Femina, “Woman is a fickle and changeable thing” (Aeneid iv, 569), La donna è mobile (Rigoletto), and countless other passages.

In his broken fashion Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs and great people generally were in the custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides it was very convenient on an excursion—much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible into walking-sticks. Upon occasion a chief would call his attendant, and desire him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree—perhaps in some damp marshy place.

Herman Melville (Moby Dick).

Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son métier.

(God will pardon me; that is His business.)

Heine.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SEA.

This was written in March, 1879, after Hodgson had left Australia for England. The love-episode is imaginary.

It is very true that the amazing intellectual power of the Greeks in a primitive age ensures them an immortality of fame; and this is finely expressed in the last two lines. But those two splendid lines are utterly spoilt by the two that precede them. One asks, Why “Greece and her foundations”? One does not say “a house and its foundations” are built somewhere or other. This by itself would be trivial, but next comes the question, What is the meaning of the second line? We know what Shelley intended—that the memory and influence of Greece will withstand its destruction by war—but why in that case should she not be built above, instead of submerged below the tide of war? Later on, in lines 836-7, the Emperor Palæologus, at the siege of Constantinople, is said to have cast himself “beneath the stream of war”; that is to say, he was overwhelmed and killed. The words, in fact, do not express the poet’s meaning. The third and fatal defect of the lines is the juxtaposition of “tide” and “sea” —the city is built below a tide, and also based on a sea. Not only is this combination absurd in itself, but it also destroys the beauty of the last two magnificent lines. The moving unstable water is scarcely a foundation to build upon, yet this meaning is forcibly impressed upon the word “sea” by the previous mention of a “tide.” What Shelley meant was an immense broad, deep, expanse of solid crystal—the “sea of glass like unto crystal” of Revelations (iv, 6) and the Mer de Glace (“sea of ice”), the great Alpine glacier.[34] Therefore, anyone who had exactness of thought or perception of poetry would omit the first two lines and give only the last two as a quotation.

Mrs. Shelley in her note on “Hellas” specially refers to this verse as a beautiful example of Shelley’s style, and she quotes all four lines. We may assume, therefore, that Shelley himself thought highly of the verse, and we thus have an illustration of the curious fact that a great poet is often a poor judge of his own poetry. (Almost certainly Shakespeare himself did not realize how god-like he stood above all other poets.) However, it is not only for this reason that I have included the above quotation, but because with it I propose to make a flank attack upon Mr. R. W. Livingstone, the author of The Greek Genius and its Meaning to us. I do this, of course, with a special object in view.

Mr. Livingstone’s book is important, valuable, and highly interesting—and is especially admirable because the author does not envelope his subject in the usual glamour, born of enthusiasm. He is, indeed, most exceptional in this respect, that he endeavours to look at the Greeks from an ordinary commonsense point of view. But he makes the mistake, not unusual with classical men, of supposing that he is a qualified critic of poetry; and he, therefore, gives us a special dissertation upon the comparative values of English and Greek poetry.

Apart from this dissertation, he quotes three or four passages from English poets in the course of the book. Of these the most prominent is the above verse of Shelley’s, and he quotes all four lines without comment. Thus we see an able man, in whom classical study should have induced exactness of thought, failing to analyse and understand what he is quoting. But, more than this, the question is one of poetic perception. The imagery in the last two lines is sublime—in the four lines it is ludicrous. Therefore, we begin with the fact that our literary critic was unable to see palpable and grave defects in one of the few verses he himself quotes. (I might give other illustrations, as where he admires poor verse of Dryden’s, but I must be brief.)

Mr. Livingstone’s point is that the “direct” and “truthful” character of Greek poetry is superior to the “imaginative” quality of English verse. He goes so far as to say that “Sappho and Simonides with four words make him see a nightingale and give him a greater and far saner pleasure” than Shelley’s poem “To a Skylark.” I take his quotation from Simonides, as it involves less discussion than that from Sappho.[35] It is (Fr, 73) ἀὴδονες πολυκώτιλοι χλωραύχενες εἰαριναί, “The warbling nightingales with olive necks, the birds of spring.”

As Mr. Livingstone is not discussing beauty of expression we can leave this out of consideration.[36] He is discussing the substance of poetry, comparing the “directness” and “truthfulness” of Simonides (in this case) with the imaginative element in Shelley’s poem. He would apparently discard the latter element altogether, and prefers a simple description of the nightingale—that it sings, has an olive neck, and appears in spring. The first suggestion that occurs to one is that if, say, an auctioneer’s catalogue of farm stock—without any addition whatever to its contents—could be worded prettily and made metrical, it would afford huge enjoyment to our literary critic.

The whole question is as to the value of the imaginative element which to our minds makes Shelley’s poem one of the most beautiful lyrics—possibly the most beautiful—in all literature. In sweeping away this element, Mr. Livingstone tells us how much of English poetry must be cast aside. But he does not realize that much else has also to be flung on the scrap-heap. Imagination, in its true sense, includes all those aesthetic, moral, and spiritual faculties which are higher than the intellect—all, in fact, that raises man above his material existence. (See pp. 39, 40, 358.) With the immense deal of English poetry which Mr. Livingstone proposes to “scrap” must go all our most beautiful music, all that is great in painting (which is never “direct” and “truthful” in this sense, or it would not be great), all Greek statuary, and all that expresses high moral and spiritual truths in our literature. I do not think that Mr. Livingstone will find many adherents to his new creed.

This critic also discusses style, and we find that he speaks of Pope as a “great poet,” and apparently revels in his monotonous verse! When pointing out that English verse, unlike what we have left of Greek poetry, includes much unequal and ill-finished work, he says, “Of all our great poets, perhaps only Milton and Pope can boast unfailing excellence of style.”

As regards this inequality in the work of English poets the answer is very simple. Mr. Livingstone forgets the fact—a very important fact in any speculation upon the scheme of the universe—that only the good things ultimately survive. How very little we have left of many Greek poets! Of Sophocles only seven plays remain out of one hundred and twenty-seven, and the Fragments collected are said to be very poor (many, of course, are only grammatical illustrations)—and more than half of Homer must have been dropped. We probably still have everything that is best in Greek literature. Again, it is not in fact desirable to restrict publication to work of the highest importance, and the facilities afforded by printing have made it unnecessary thus to restrict it—so that even My Commonplace Book is now, at least temporarily, part of English literature!

Greatly as I admire Mr. Livingstone’s book, I feel bound to call attention to a view of poetry that must do great harm to University students and others. I am also bound to mention him as an illustration of the fact that classical men usually imagine that their study of the Greek and Latin languages and literature qualifies them to become literary critics.[37] This fact has impressed itself upon me from youth upwards. One of my teachers, a man of some weight in the classical world, was in the habit of saying that only through study of Latin and Greek could a man learn to write good English![38] His own English was simply execrable.

I will now give another instance where the classical enthusiast, as in Mr. Livingstone’s case, tends to exaggerate the value of his favourite literature—truly wonderful as it is. Gissing’s Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is an interesting book of wide circulation, in which the author displays great admiration for and familiarity with the classics. Speaking of Xenophon’s Anabasis, he says “Were it the sole book existing in Greek, it would be abundantly worth while to learn the language in order to read it.” That is to say, it would be worth while expending, out of our short lives, some years of study for the sole purpose of reading in the original an extremely simple, prose historical narrative, which has been excellently translated! (If Gissing had said Homer instead of Xenophon, no one would have quarrelled with him.) Again, he says, “Many a single line presents a picture which deeply stirs the emotions”; and he gives us what he calls “a good instance of such a line.” A guide, who has led the Greeks through hostile country, has to return through the same perilous district, and the wonderful line is Ἐπεὶ ἑσπέρα ἐγένετο, ᾤχετο τῆς νυκτὸς ἀπιών. This line Gissing translates, “When evening came he took leave of us and went away by night”—a sentence which only by inadvertence could have appeared in, say, a Times leader, seeing that the words “by night” are redundant. As a matter of fact, the translation is incorrect; there is nothing about “taking leave of us,” and the meaning is, “As soon as evening came, he had slipped away into the darkness.”

(Professor Naylor points out to me that the word ᾤχετο in this line is interesting. It conveys the idea of a swift or abrupt departure or disappearance. It is used in connection with that most interesting man Alcibiades (Xen, Hell., 2. I. 26) and gives a fine impression of his quick insolent temper. The Greek admirals had put themselves in a position of extreme danger and he came to warn them of their peril. Their reply was the usual expression of ineptitude, “We are the admirals, not you”; and immediately follows the one word ᾤχετο, “he turned on his heels and left”—and with this word Alcibiades disappears from contemporary history.)

In referring to Mr. Livingstone’s remarks above I could not use the Sappho quotation, because there are certain initial questions that need to be first settled. (In briefly discussing these I must speak as though I were expressing definite opinions, since otherwise the note could not be compressed sufficiently, but I mean the following rather as suggestions which may possibly be found useful.)

Sappho’s line is (Fr, 39) Ἦρος ἄγγελος ἱμερόφωνος ἀήδων, which Mr. Livingstone translates “The messenger of spring, the lovely-voiced nightingale.” Now ἱμερος (himeros) means animal passion, so that ἱμερόφωνος (himerophonos) is a strong word meaning singing of, or with, passion—in this case the passion of the pairing-time. Why then does Mr. Livingstone, following Liddell and Scott, give the totally different meaning “lovely-voiced”? Apparently it is because Theocritus (XXVIII, 7) applies the expression “himerophonos” to the Charites, and, according to the current conception, those deities were pure unimpassionate beings.[39]

In questions of this character, seeing that the Greek gods were guilty of every form of immorality and the Greeks themselves were one of the most sensual nations that ever existed, the presumption is in favour of impurity: the onus of proof is on those who allege purity. I have not undertaken the heavy work of looking up the innumerable references to the Charites in Greek literature, but I know of nothing that supports the prevalent conception of those deities. Apart from the fact that Theocritus uses the word himerophonos, Meleager (Anth. Pal, V, 195) speaks of himeros as conferred by the Charites. There is nothing in the meaning of charis, or the verb charizesthai to support the current idea (both being even used in an immodest sense); Homer identifies Charis with Aphrodite, with whom Hesiod also identifies Aglaia, since each is made the wife of Hephaestus; the Charites are constantly associated with Aphrodite and Erôs (and consequently with Himeros, the personification of passion) so that the maxim Noscitur a sociis applies; Sappho repeatedly claims them as her patrons; as regards the representation of the Charites in art, girl friendship would be a subject quite alien to the Greek mind.

If the view suggested is correct our authorities with their preconceived ideas presume to correct Theocritus and Sappho! They not only give a wrong view of the Charites, but also hide the coarseness of the compliment paid by Theocritus to his lady friend—in each case distorting the truth.

Mr. Livingstone may have another reason for altering the meaning of “himerophonos.” He appears to hold the opinion that a Greek writer would not ascribe intelligence or emotion to a bird, as Mrs. Browning does in “To a Seamew.” (I quite agree with him as to the false, feminine sentiment in this poem. It is mainly the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” that raise Mrs. Browning above the minor poets.) Mr. Livingstone, for example, translates ἡμερόφων’ ἀλέκτωρ, “O cock that criest at dawn.” This should surely mean “that announceth the dawn;” the attitude and the very crow of the bird would suggest this to the Greeks; and the fowl did, as a matter of fact, serve in place of an alarm-clock to them (see, for instance, Aristophanes’ Birds, 488). Does not Mr. Livingstone forget that the Greeks attributed not only intelligence but also miraculous powers to animals (see p. 370)? If so, this illustrates another fact noticeable among classical authorities. They often fail to consider all the premises before arriving at a conclusion. Taking another illustration from Mr. Livingstone, he says that the Greeks had little of the feeling of wonder, did not “muse on the strangeness of the world,” and would not have experienced the emotion Pascal felt when viewing the starry heavens, “The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me.” The premise he appears to omit here is the fact of the intense ignorance of the Greeks. Their world was a very limited one, with its flat earth and solid lid, certain bright objects conceived as gods or otherwise moving in the intermediate space. To illustrate this, Herodotus (II, 24) believes that the sun-god is forced by the cold winds in winter to move to the warm sky above Libya; and in 434 B.C. (about the same time) the great advanced thinker, Anaxagoras, is arrested for blasphemy and exiled because he taught that the sun must be a mass of blazing metal larger than the Peloponnesus! Everything in nature had its god, whose action explained whatever happened. If the Greeks had once realized the awful infinity of the universe their whole outlook on nature would have changed, and I cannot think that so highly intellectual a people would not have been moved by wonder. I cannot see any element in “the Greek genius” that would indicate this. (Observe Ptolemy’s epigram on p. 10.)

Returning to the Sappho quotation, Mr. Livingstone translates ἦρος ἄγγελος literally as “the messenger of spring.” Does he mean the messenger “sent by spring” or “announcing spring”? Presumably he does not mean the latter, as it would impute intelligence or emotion to the bird. But, if we accept the former interpretation, it leads to the curious result that the poet, not content with a Goddess of Spring and the Hours who represent the seasons, intends still further to personify spring. Is not the true meaning of Sappho’s words “the nightingale with its passionate song sent (by Proserpine) to let men know that spring is approaching”? This is not mere captious criticism. To Sappho the goddess Proserpine was a concrete being with some sort of corporeal form, who brings a thing called spring, and who actually does send the nightingale ahead to sing of the passion of the pairing-time, and thus let men know that spring is coming. There is no poetic imagery, no imaginative picture in the poet’s mind, but the statement of an actual fact. See also the reference to the halcyon, p. 370. It seems to me that, in this as in other cases, our classical authorities fail to place themselves in the position of the Greeks. Here they interpret as imagination what was meant as reality. (However, as I have said before, the above are merely suggestions which I myself hope to consider further; but, until we knew exactly what Sappho’s verse meant, it could not be brought into the discussion of Mr. Livingstone’s views.)

Buchanan is speaking of the sad lives in the poor quarters of London.

A fine expression of a familiar fact. Under the influence of love, anger, or other strong passion, a man becomes an unreasoning animal, and actually hates to be told the truth. Wild passion glares through the bars of its self-constituted cage at philosophy standing calm, lofty, and serene. Only “when the fire is dying in the grate” do we again become akin to cold, dispassionate, star-like Philosophy.

The triumph of machinery is when man wonders at his own works; thus, says Derwent Coleridge, all science begins in wonder and ends in wonder, but the first is the wonder of ignorance, the last that of adoration.

Caroline Fox’s Journals.

Evidently a comment on S. T. Coleridge’s Aphorism IV. on “Spiritual Religion” (Aids to Reflection).

No one of himself can rise out of the depths, but must clasp some outstretched hand.

Seneca (? 3 B.C.-65 A.D.) (Epistle 52).

THE RIME OF REDEMPTION

This poem is cut down one-half and thereby loses much of its effect. Two adventures, in which the Knight refuses temptation and adheres to his oath, are entirely omitted.

This and the next five quotations are word-pictures (see p. 85).

The above are from a series of word-pictures (see pp. 86, 122).

If the collective energies of the universe are identified with Divine Will, and the system is thus animate with an eternal consciousness as its moulding life, the conception we frame of its history will conform itself to our experience of intellectual volition. It is in origination, in disposing of new conditions, in setting up order by differentiation, that the mind exercises its highest function. When the product has been obtained, and a definite method of procedure established, the strain upon us is relaxed, habit relieves the constant demand for creation, and at length the rules of a practised art almost execute themselves. As the intensely voluntary thus works itself off into the automatic, thought, liberated from this reclaimed and settled province breaks into new regions, and ascends to ever higher problems: its supreme life being beyond the conquered and legislated realm, while a lower consciousness, if any at all, suffices for the maintenance of its ordered mechanism. Yet all the while it is one and the same mind that, under different modes of activity, thinks the fresh thoughts and carries on the old usages. Does anything forbid us to conceive similarly of the cosmical development; that it started from the freedom of indefinite possibilities and the ubiquity of universal consciousness; that, as intellectual exclusions narrowed the field, and traced the definite lines of admitted movement, the tension of purpose, less needed on these, left them as the habits of the universe, and operated rather for higher and ever higher ends not yet provided for; that the more mechanical, therefore, a natural law may be, the further is it from its source; and that the inorganic and unconscious portion of the world, instead of being the potentiality of the organic and conscious, is rather its residual precipitate, formed as the Indwelling Mind of all concentrates an intenser aim on the upper margin of the ordered whole, and especially on the inner life of natures that can resemble him?

James Martineau (1805-1900) (Modern Materialism).

The remarkably fine and suggestive essay in which this passage occurs was written in 1876, in the course of a discussion raised by Tyndall’s Belfast Address. It is not easy to appreciate the speculation that Martineau offers in direct opposition to the theory of Darwinism without reading his preceding argument.

It may be well to begin with a quotation from his sermon, “Perfection, Divine and Human”: “However vast and majestic the uniformities of nature, they are nevertheless finite: science counts them one by one; a completed science would count them all. God, however, is not finite; He lives out beyond the legislation He has made; and His thought, which defines the rules of matter, does not transmigrate into them and cease else-how to be; but merely flings out the law as an emanating act, and Himself abides behind as Thinking Power.”

In the present essay Martineau first develops the argument that there is only one Power that exercises all the forces in the universe, whether mechanical, chemical, or vital. That power is God, the Indwelling Mind of the world. He is of like nature to (although infinitely higher than) His highest product, which is conscious, thinking, and willing man. Seeing that God and man are alike in their natures, Martineau proceeds to draw an analogy between the history of the world and the history of man’s own development. The Divine Mind at first consciously exercises the forces that we know as gravitation, cohesion, chemical attraction, etc.; just as, to take a simple example, a baby has at first consciously to use its muscles and balance its body in the process of walking. Later the baby, having formed the habit, does all this unconsciously and, while walking, can pay attention to other matters. So the Indwelling Mind of the world forms its habits which we know as the laws of gravitation, etc., and is free to attend to higher and higher objects. In this progress there is no evolution of the organic from the inorganic, or of the higher from the lower forms of life. Inorganic matter, having become subject to fixed laws, is precipitated and dropped out of further conscious effort; also each lower form of life is similarly laid aside as the Indwelling Mind proceeds to the higher forms, until finally man is reached. The highest result thus arrived at is the production of conscious Mind. All this involves what is usually known as Special Creation, and the idea of “God at His working-bench” creating one species after another is regarded as absurd. But it is not absurd on Martineau’s argument, because the Indwelling Mind is constantly doing the whole work of the world (and also because a fact to be accounted for by any theory is that a higher form of existence appears whenever the environment is suitable). In the present state of our knowledge Martineau’s speculation cannot be proved or disproved, but it may contain the germ of a true scheme of the universe—which scheme is yet far to seek. In any case, he makes the important point that the nature of power in the world must be judged from the best thing it has done—namely, the minds it has produced. The idea of a blind, unconscious force is incompatible with the fact that that force has produced conscious mind. It is the same argument as the Psalmist uses, “He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye, shall He not see? He that teacheth man knowledge, shall not He know?” (Ps. xciv, 9, 10.) The following (by whom written I do not know) has the same idea: “Every thing is a thought, and bears a relation to the thought that placed it there, and the thought that finds it there.” It is interesting to consider Martineau’s suggestion with that of William James on p. 165.

Death’s Jest-Book was published in 1850, after Beddoes’ death; The Origin of Species appeared in 1859: the passage is, therefore, curious. In suggesting, however, development by the addition of faculties, it affords no explanation how those faculties came to be added.

“OUTLANDISH PROVERBS”

The reader may not know of the “saintly Herbert’s” collection of “Outlandish Proverbs, Sentences, etc.” from which the few examples above are taken.

AVALON.

An American author who wrote the well-known song, “The Rosary.”

IF I COULD HOLD YOUR HANDS

(From twice-cooked food, from an ignorant doctor, from a reconciled enemy, from a wicked woman, Lord, deliver us.)

Old Monkish Litany.

CONSTANCY REWARDED

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening....

We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among “the children of this world,” in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

Walter Pater (1839-1894) (The Renaissance).

In the Adelaide edition of this book this famous “pulsation” passage appeared as originally written; it is now given as Pater afterwards altered it.

Pater was a Hellenist and preached the new paganism of last century. The Greek ideal life was supposed to be one of purely aesthetic enjoyment, divorced from religious problems or from any sense of the higher in our nature. Pater, however, altered his views, Marius, the Epicurean, being intended as a recantation, and he became in effect an Anglo-Catholic. (See p. 343 note.)

Pater was “Rose” in Mallock’s New Republic.

A CHILD

Is a man in a small Letter, yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted of the Apple.... He is nature’s fresh picture, newly drawn in oil, which time and much handling dims and defaces. His soul is yet a white paper, unscribbled with observations of the world, wherewith at length it becomes a blurred note-book. He is purely happy, because he knows no evil, nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery. He kisses and loves all, and when the smart of the rod is past, smiles on his beater.... His hardest labour is his tongue, as if he were loth to use so deceitful an organ.... We laugh at his foolish sports, but his game is our earnest: and his drums, rattles and hobby-horses but the emblems and mocking of man’s business. His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember; and sighs to see what innocence he has outlived. The older he grows, he is a stair lower from God; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches.... Could he put off his body with his little Coat, he had got eternity without a burthen, and exchanged but one Heaven for another.

John Earle (Micro-Cosmographie, 1628).

The Griffin, with head and wings of a bird and body of a lion, is pursuing, “half on foot, half flying,” the one-eyed Arimaspian, who is fleeing on horseback with the purloined gold. The Griffins guarded mines of gold and hidden treasure. (Herodotus, iv, 27.)

A WOMAN’S THOUGHT

Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.

Macaulay (On Niccolo Machiavelli).

A wonderful record, if it were correct, but “Old Nick” is said to be derived from Scandinavian mythology.

I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more as I grow older.

Montaigne (Essay, Of Repentance).

Coleridge was holding forth on the effects produced by his preaching, and appealed to Lamb: “You have heard me preach, I think?” “I have never heard you do anything else,” was the urbane reply.

(John Sterling said) Coleridge is best described in his own words:

Madame de Staël was by no means pleased with her intercourse with him, saying spitefully and feelingly, “M. Coleridge a un grand talent pour le monologue” (“Mr. Coleridge has a great talent for monologue”).

Caroline Fox’s Journals.

Here we have different views of Coleridge’s monologues. Mme. de Staël objected to his monopolizing the conversation, but his friends loved to hear him. Lamb, of course, had to have his joke.

What would one not give to have been present at the Mermaid Tavern with the wonderful Elizabethans who met there? Among them were Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh, Beaumont, Fletcher, Donne, Carew, and John Selden. One is reminded of the Symposium of Plato.

The poem of Keats is well known:

A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries with him the germ of his most exceptional actions; and, if we wise people make fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.

George Eliot.

I understand those women who say they don’t want the ballot. They purpose to hold the real power, while we go through the mockery of making laws. They want the power without the responsibility.

Charles Dudley Warner (My Summer in a Garden).

If we cannot find God in your house or in mine; upon the roadside or the margin of the sea; in the bursting seed or opening flower; in the day duty or the night musing; in the general laugh and the secret grief; in the procession of life, ever entering afresh, and solemnly passing by and dropping off; I do not think we should discern Him any more on the grass of Eden, or beneath the moonlight of Gethsemane. Depend upon it, it is not the want of greater miracles, but of the soul to perceive such as are allowed us still, that makes us push all the sanctities into the far spaces we cannot reach. The devout feel that wherever God’s hand is, there is miracle; and it is simply undevoutness which imagines that only where miracle is, can there be the real hand of God. The customs of Heaven ought to be more sacred in our eyes than its anomalies; the dear old ways, of which the Most High is never tired, than the strange things which He does not love well enough ever to repeat. And he who will but discern beneath the sun, as he rises any morning, the supporting finger of the Almighty, may recover the sweet and reverent surprise with which Adam gazed on the first dawn in Paradise.

James Martineau (Endeavours after the Christian Life).

Advice, like snow, the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon and the deeper it sinks into the mind.

S. T. Coleridge.

This poem is omitted from My Lyrical Life, Massey’s collected poems.

THE MOTHER WHO DIED TOO