YOUTH AND AGE (continued 7)

It will be observed that Myers, like Swinburne, handled the old heroic couplet in a masterly manner, undreamt of by Pope, Dryden, and their generation.

I am much engaged, an old man and out of health, and I cannot spare time to answer your questions fully,—nor indeed can they be answered. Science has nothing to do with Christ, except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any Revelation. As for a future life every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities. Wishing you happiness, I remain, &c.

Charles Darwin (Letter to von Müller, June 5, 1879).

This letter is reproduced in the Life and Letters, but evidently Francis Darwin did not know that the “German youth” to whom he says it was written was Baron Ferdinand von Müller, K.C.M.G. (1825-1896), then fifty-three years of age! Von Müller was director of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens from 1857 to 1873, and died in Melbourne in 1896. He did important work in Australian botany.

As regards Darwin’s letter, it seems to me that a sufficient reason why a great and lovable man, who was at first a convinced believer in the immortality of the soul, became an agnostic is given in the next quotation. The higher aesthetic part of his brain had become atrophied.

Darwin himself thought that he had not given sufficient consideration to religious questions and was exceedingly anxious that his own agnostic views should not influence others,

I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a school-boy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseates me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music.... My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that (aesthetic) part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.... The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Charles Darwin.

This is from autobiographical notes made by Darwin for his children, and not intended for publication.

CHILDREN’S HYMN ON THE COAST OF BRITTANY.

WESLEY’S MEDICAL PRESCRIPTIONS

For an Ague:—Make six middling pills of cobwebs. Take one a little before the cold fit; two a little before the next fit (suppose the next day); the other three, if need be, a little before the third fit. This seldom fails.

A Cut:—Bind on toasted cheese. This will cure a deep cut.

A Fistula:—Grind an ounce of sublimate mercury as fine as possible.... (Two quarts of water to be added, then half a spoonful with two spoonfuls of water to be taken fasting every other day), ... In forty days this will also cure any cancer, any old sore or King’s evil.

The Iliac Passion:—Hold a live puppy constantly on the belly.

John Wesley (Primitive Physic. Ed. 1780).

The iliac passion, now known as ileus, is a severe colic due to intestinal obstruction.

It seems strange that so eminent a man should have believed in these absurd prescriptions, but as a matter of fact the book generally is much more sane and sound than one would expect from the habits and state of knowledge of the time. For example, in his rules of health Wesley strongly advises the practice of cold bathing, cleanliness, open-air exercise, moderation of food, etc. Also these prescriptions are chosen for their absurdity—in each case other more sensible remedies are offered. But Wesley in his preface says that he has omitted altogether from his book Cinchona bark, because it is “extremely dangerous.” This means that in regard to ague he omitted the only efficient remedy—which was much more unfortunate than his prescribing cobweb pills.

This book went to thirty-six editions between 1747 and 1840.

All our life is a meeting of cross-roads, where the choice of directions is perilous.

Victor Hugo.

Richard Lovelace (1618-1655) subsequently wrote (Orpheus to Beasts):

Then = than. See next quotation.

I think the deep love he had for that sweet, rounded blossom-like dark-eyed Hetty, of whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came out of the very strength of his nature, and not out of any inconsistent weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music?—to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being past and present in one unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love that has been scattered through the toilsome years; concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learnt lessons of self-renouncing sympathy; blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy? If not, then neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon by the exquisite curves of a woman’s cheek and neck and arms, by the liquid depths of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet childish pout of her lips. For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music: what can one say more? Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one woman’s soul that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them; it is more than a woman’s love that moves us in a woman’s eyes—it seems to be a far-off mighty love that has come near to us, and made speech for itself there; the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness—by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace. The noblest nature sees the most of this impersonal expression in beauty, and for this reason, the noblest nature is often the most blinded to the character of the woman’s soul that the beauty clothes. Whence, I fear, the tragedy of human life is likely to continue for a long time to come in spite of mental philosophers who are ready with the best receipts for avoiding all mistakes of the kind.

George Eliot (Adam Bede).

George Eliot would not know the preceding poem by Campion, whose lyrics had been forgotten until A. H. Bullen revived them in 1889; and most probably also she did not know Lovelace’s poem, as it is not one of the two or three lyrics by which alone he is remembered.

The degree of vision that dwells in a man is a correct measure of the man. If called to define Shakespeare’s faculty, I should say superiority of Intellect, and think I had included all under that. What indeed are faculties? We talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as he has hands, feet, and arms. That is a capital error. Then again, we hear of a man’s “intellectual nature,” and of his “moral nature,” as if these again were divisible and existed apart.... We ought to know, and to keep forever in mind, that these divisions are at bottom but names; that man’s spiritual nature, the vital Force which dwells in him, is essentially one and indivisible; that what we call imagination, fancy, understanding, and so forth, are but different figures of the same Power of Insight, all indissolubly connected with each other, physiognomically related; that if we knew one of them, we might know all of them. Morality itself, what we call the moral quality of a man, what is this but another side of the one vital Force whereby he is and works?.... Without hands a man might have feet, and could still walk: but, consider it,—without morality, intellect were impossible for him; a thoroughly immoral man could not know anything at all! To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathize with it; that is, be virtuously related to it.... Nature, with her truth, remains to the bad, to the selfish and the pusillanimous forever a sealed book: what such can know of Nature is mean, superficial, small.

Carlyle (Heroes and Hero Worship, III).

“IMBUTA”

The title evidently refers to Horace Ep. 1, 2, 69, 70, Quo semel est Imbuta recens servabit odorem testa diu. “The scent which once has flavoured the fresh jar will be preserved in it for many a day.” Moore no doubt had the same passage in his mind when, speaking of the memories of past joys, he wrote:

So Whyte-Melville says that when love is poured again into the heart of a man who has lost his first love, “The new wine, the new wine, It tasteth like the old.”

The Toucan has an enormous bill, makes a noise like a puppy dog, and lays his eggs in hollow trees. How astonishing are the freaks and fancies of nature! To what purpose, we say, is a bird placed in the woods of Cayenne with a bill a yard long, making a noise like a puppy dog, and laying eggs in hollow trees? The Toucans, to be sure, might retort, to what purpose were gentlemen in Bond Street created? To what purpose were certain foolish prating Members of Parliament created?—pestering the House of Commons with their ignorance and folly, and impeding the business of the country? There is no end of such questions. So we will not enter into the metaphysics of the Toucan.

Sydney Smith (Review of “Waterton’s Travels in South America”).

Above green-flashing plunges of a weir, and shaken by the thunder below, lilies, golden and white, were swaying at anchor among the reeds. Meadow-sweet hung from the banks thick with weed and trailing bramble, and there also hung a daughter of earth. Her face was shaded by a broad straw hat with a flexible brim that left her lips and chin in the sun, and, sometimes nodding, sent forth a light of promising eyes. Across her shoulders, and behind, flowed large loose curls, brown in shadow, almost golden where the ray touched them. She was simply dressed, befitting decency and the season. On a closer inspection you might see that her lips were stained. This blooming young person was regaling on dewberries. They grew between the bank and the water. Apparently she found the fruit abundant, for her hand was making pretty progress to her mouth. Fastidious youth, which revolts at woman plumping her exquisite proportions on bread-and-butter, and would (we must suppose) joyfully have her scraggy to have her poetical, can hardly object to dewberries. Indeed the act of eating them is dainty and induces musing. The dewberry is a sister to the lotus, and an innocent sister. You eat: mouth, eye, and hand are occupied, and the undrugged mind free to roam. And so it was with the damsel who knelt there. The little skylark went up above her, all song, to the smooth southern cloud lying along the blue: from a dewy copse dark over her nodding hat the blackbird fluted, calling to her with thrice mellow note: the kingfisher flashed emerald out of green osiers: a bow-winged heron travelled aloft, seeking solitude: a boat slipped toward her, containing a dreamy youth; and still she plucked the fruit, and ate, and mused, as if no fairy prince were invading her territories, and as if she wished not for one, or knew not her wishes. Surrounded by the green shaven meadows, the pastoral summer buzz, the weirfall’s thundering white, amid the breath and beauty of wild flowers, she was a bit of lovely human life in a fair setting; a terrible attraction. The Magnetic Youth leaned round to note his proximity to the weir-piles, and beheld the sweet vision. Stiller and stiller grew nature, as at the meeting of two electric clouds. Her posture was so graceful, that though he was making straight for the weir, he dared not dip a scull. Just then one enticing dewberry caught her eyes. He was floating by unheeded, and saw that her hand stretched low, and could not gather what it sought. A stroke from his right brought him beside her. The damsel glanced up dismayed, and her whole shape trembled over the brink. Richard sprang from his boat into the water. Pressing a hand beneath her foot, which she had thrust against the crumbling wet sides of the bank to save herself, he enabled her to recover her balance, and gain safe earth, whither he followed her....

To-morrow this place will have a memory—the river and the meadow, and the white falling weir: his heart will build a temple here; and the skylark will be its high-priest, and the old blackbird its glossy-gowned chorister, and there will be a sacred repast of dewberries.

George Meredith (The Ordeal of Richard Feverel).

LETTY’S GLOBE

Charles Tennyson, a brother of Lord Tennyson and author with him of Poems by Two Brothers, took the name of Turner.

There is an infinite pathos in these lines. Having lost her faith in a future life, George Eliot tries to find consolation in the thought that, when she has passed into nothingness—when she “joins the choir invisible”—she will have done something to ennoble the minds of those who come after her. But why should generation after generation of insect-lives waste themselves in raising and purifying the minds of the generations that follow, if all in turn pass into nothingness? The higher and purer men became, the more they would love their fellow-beings and the more they would shudder at the insensate pain and cruelty in the world—the physical torture they themselves endure, and the mental torture both of losing for ever those they love and of seeing the sufferings of others. One should act in conformity with one’s belief. Instead of thus adding greater pain and sorrow to each succeeding generation, the effort should be to coarsen and brutalize our natures, so that love, duty, and moral aspiration shall disappear, and we shall cease to be saddened by the appalling cruelty of our existence. Our lives should, in fact, correspond with the brutal, ugly and stupid scheme of the universe.

This is the direct answer to George Eliot, allowing her very important assumption that we have a duty towards others, including those who come after us. But this assumption is logically unwarranted, if at the end of our brief years we pass into nothingness and have no further concern with any living being. This brings us to a familiar train of argument. Why should we be irresistibly impelled to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others? And, apart from altruism, why should we develop our own higher attributes—why seek to ennoble our own selves, since those selves disappear? Why fill with jewels the hollow log that is to be thrown on the fire? Why are we swayed by a sense of honour, a desire for justice, a love of purity and truth and beauty, a craving for affection, a thirst for knowledge, which persist up to the very gates of death? To take an illustration of Edward Caird’s, is not the path of life which is so traversed like the path of a star to the astronomer, which enables him to prophesy its future course—beyond the end which hides it from our eyes? Otherwise, to use another simile, it is as though Pheidias spent his life sculpturing in snow.

(This does not mean, as the sceptic usually sneers, that the virtuous man merely desires a reward for his virtuous conduct. It is an inquiry why he is virtuous—what is a sane view of the scheme of the universe.)

In forming the conclusion that there was no possible future for man, George Eliot and an immense number of other thinkers of her time made also the vast assumption that there was nothing left to discover. Blanco White’s sonnet alone might have taught them the folly of such premature judgments. Or we may take an illustration, used by F. W. H. Myers, namely, the discovery that, far beyond the red and the violet of the spectrum or the rainbow, extend rays that have been (and will for ever be) invisible to our eyes. Since George Eliot’s time the Society for Psychical Research has during the last thirty-five years accumulated unanswerable evidence of survival after death.

See preceding quotation.

We may well begin to doubt whether the known and the natural can suffice for human life. No sooner do we try to think so than pessimism raises its head. The more our thoughts widen and deepen, as the universe grows upon us and we become accustomed to boundless space and time, the more petrifying is the contrast of our own insignificance, the more contemptible become the pettiness, shortness, fragility of the individual life. A moral paralysis creeps upon us. For awhile we comfort ourselves with the notion of self-sacrifice; we say, what matter if I pass, let me think of others! But the other has become contemptible no less than the self; all human griefs alike seem little worth assuaging, human happiness too paltry at the best to be worth increasing. The whole moral world is reduced to a point; good and evil, right and wrong become infinitesimal ephemeral matters, while eternity and infinity remain attributes of that only which is outside the sphere of morality. Life becomes more intolerable the more we know and discover, so long as everything widens and deepens except our own duration, and that remains as pitiful as ever. The affections die away in a world where everything great and enduring is cold; they die of their own conscious feebleness and bootlessness.

Sir J. R. Seeley (Natural Religion).

See the two preceding quotations.

LOVE-SWEETNESS

Jesus saith, Wherever there are two, they are not without God; and wherever there is one alone, I say, I am with him. Raise the stone and there thou shalt find me; cleave the wood and there am I.

(Logia of Jesus).

This is one of the Logia or Sayings of Jesus written on papyrus in the third century and discovered in Egypt by Grenfell and Hunt in 1897. The italics, of course, are mine.

The first of all Gospels is this, that a Lie cannot endure for ever.

Meanwhile it is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly.

There are quarrels in which even Satan, bringing help, were not unwelcome; even Satan, fighting stiffly, might cover himself with glory—of a temporary nature.

... Nothing but two clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of the drum species.

Thou art bound hastily for the City of Nowhere; and wilt arrive!

Carlyle (French Revolution).

It is interesting to learn from a correspondent of The Spectator (Feb. 17, 1917) that Carlyle wrote two verses which he combined with Shakespeare’s “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” (Cymbeline iv, 2) to make a requiem, of which he was very fond:

Byron in “Don Juan” says:

(Speaking of the rare and exalted nature of Dorothea, who has adopted the normal, domestic married life) Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me, as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

George Eliot (Middlemarch).

This passage, which finely expresses an important truth, is at the end of Middlemarch. The reference is to a story of Herodotus. He says that Cyrus, the Persian, was angry with the river Gyndes (Diyalah), because it had drowned one of the white horses, which, as being sacred to the sun, accompanied the expedition. He, therefore, employed his army to divert the river into 360 channels (representing the number of days in the year). The story was probably told to Herodotus as explaining the great irrigation system that existed in Mesopotamia. The Diyalah flows into the Tigris not far from Baghdad.

See reference to this poem in Preface.

But to come again unto Apelles, this was his manner and custom besides, which he perpetually observed, that no day went over his head, but what businesse soever he had otherwise to call him away, he would make one draught or other (and never misse) for to exercise his hand and keepe it in use, inasmuch as from him grew the proverbe, Nulla dies sine linea, i.e. Be alwaies doing somewhat, though you doe but draw a line. His order was when he had finished a piece of work or painted table, and layd it out of his hand, to set it forth in some open gallerie or thorowfare, to be seen of folke that passed by, and himselfe would lie close behind it to hearken what faults were found therewith; preferring the judgment of the common people before his owne, and imagining they would spy more narrowly, and censure his doings sooner than himselfe: and as the tale is told, it fell out upon a time, that a shoomaker as he went by seemed to controlle his workmanship about the shoo or pantofle that he had made to a picture, and namely, that there was one latchet fewer than there should be: Apelles acknowledging that the man said true indeed, mended that fault by the next morning, and set forth his table as his manner was. The same shoomaker comming again the morrow after, and finding the want supplied which he noted the day before, took some pride unto himselfe, that his former admonition had sped so well, and was so bold as to cavil at somewhat about the leg. Apelles could not endure that, but putting forth his head from behind the painted table, and scorning thus to be checked and reproved, Sirrha (quoth hee) remember you are but a shoomaker, and therefore meddle no higher I advise you, than with shoos. Which words also of his came afterwards to be a common proverbe, Ne sutor ultra crepidam.

Pliny (Natural History).

Apelles, the greatest painter of antiquity. The two proverbs mean: “No day without a line,” “A cobbler should stick to his last.” Pantofle, sandal; latchet, the thong fastening the sandal; painted table, panel picture; controlle, find fault with.

Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom—a third part bud; a third part past, a third part in full bloom—is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.

John Ruskin (Stones of Venice II, vi, 25).

The best of us are but poor wretches just saved from shipwreck: can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?

George Eliot (Janet’s Repentance).

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

The stanzas are reversed in order.

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

ON THE NONPAREIL

Naught but himself can be his parallel.

Randall was a pugilist of the time.

“None but himself can be his parallel” is a line from The Double Falsehood of Louis Theobald (1691-1744), but it comes originally from Seneca (Hercules Furens, Act I, Sc. I):

I copied the above sonnet from Gossip in a Library by Edmund Gosse (1891), partly because Mr. Gosse said of it, “Anthologies are not edited in a truly catholic spirit, or they would contain this very remarkable sonnet.” I hardly think this, but the lines seem sufficiently interesting to quote.

(The King, seeing her so beautiful, said to his nephew, “For one kiss, for a smile, for one hair of her head, Infante Don Ruy, I would give Spain and Peru.” The wind that blows over the mountain will drive me mad.)

Victor Hugo (Gastibelza).

This charmingly extravagant praise of a lady’s beauty recalls the story of another poet. The Eastern conqueror, Timur (or Tamerlane), sent for the Persian poet Hafiz and very angrily asked him, “Art thou he who offered to give my two great cities, Samarkand and Bokhara, for the black mole on thy mistress’s cheek?” Hafiz, however, cleverly escaped trouble by replying, “Yes, sire, I always give freely, and in consequence am now reduced to poverty. May I crave your kind assistance?” Timur was amused at the reply and made the poet a present. The story, however, is considered doubtful, because Timur did not conquer Persia until some years after 1388, which is supposed to be the date of the poet’s death.

Mere verbal insults (to a Roman Emperor) were not considered treason; for, said the Emperors Theodosius, Arcadius and Honorius, in language that is a standing rebuke to pusillanimous tyrants, if the words are uttered in a spirit of frivolity, the attack merits contempt; if from madness, they excite pity; if from malice, they are to be forgiven.

William A. Hunter (1844-1898) (Roman Law, Appendix).

This recalls to mind the numerous cases of lèse-majesté for words spoken against the Kaiser before the war. The passage would make a pleasant retort to a rude opponent (a “pusillanimous tyrant”) in a debate.

I have discovered that a feigned familiarity in great ones, is a note of certain usurpation on the less. For great and popular men feign themselves to be servants of others, to make these slaves to them. So the fisher provides bait for the trout, roach, dace, etc., that they may be food for him.

Ben Jonson (Mores Aulici).

Paraphrased as:—

GLADSTONE AND THE SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH.

Mr. Gladstone’s relation to Psychical Research affords one more illustration of the width and force of his intellectual sympathies. Many men, even of high ability, if convinced as Mr. Gladstone was of the truth and sufficiency of the Christian revelation, permit themselves to ignore these experimental approaches to spiritual knowledge, as at best superfluous. They do not realize how profoundly the evidence, the knowledge, which we seek and which in some measure we find, must ultimately influence men’s views as to both the credibility and the adequacy of all forms of faith. Mr. Gladstone’s broad intellectual purview,—aided perhaps in this instance by something of the practical foresight of the statesman,—placed him in a quite different attitude towards our quest. “It is the most important work which is being done in the world,” he said in a conversation in 1885. “By far the most important,” he repeated, with a grave emphasis which suggested previous trains of thought, to which he did not care to give expression. He went on to apologize, in his courteous fashion, for his inability to render active help; and ended by saying “If you will accept sympathy without service, I shall be glad to join your ranks.” He became an Honorary Member, and followed with attention,—I know not with how much of study—the successive issues of our Proceedings. Towards the close of his life he desired that the Proceedings should be sent to St. Deiniol’s Library, which he had founded at Hawarden; thus giving final testimony to his sense of the salutary nature of our work. From a man so immersed in other thought and labour that work could assuredly claim no more; from men profoundly and primarily interested in the spiritual world it ought, I think, to claim no less.

F. W. H. Myers (S.P.R. Journal, June, 1898).

Apart from this interesting glimpse of Gladstone, it shows the importance he attached to the work of the Society for Psychical Research. To the severely orthodox, who think no evidence of life after death should be sought outside “Revelation,” his opinion should appeal. Every increase of knowledge is a further “Revelation.” In the Bible we are told of one resurrection, and there is certainly no reason why we should not seek the evidence of others. We should not shut our eyes and close our ears to new Revelation.

The Society has been thirty-eight years in existence and is still insufficiently appreciated. Hodgson said in The Forum, 1896 “There are so many ways of looking at the world. It may be a speck in space, or a huge cauldron with a graveyard for its crust, a place in which to get a hunger and satisfy it, the fighting ground for a while of dragon or ape, of Trojan or Turk, an evolutionary drama that must end in ice or fire. Many things it means to different men. One is busy with earthworms, another with stars, another with the splendour of the day or the strivings of the human soul. Numerous investigators are hunting for further proofs that we came out of the mud, but very few are seeking indications, in any scientific spirit, of what may follow the toil and turmoil of our individual existence here.”

Myers says: “The question of the survival of man is a branch of experimental psychology. Is there, or is there not, evidence in the actual observed phenomena of automatism, apparitions and the like, for a transcendental energy in living men, or for an influence emanating from personalities which have overpassed the tomb? This is the definite question, which we can at least intelligibly discuss, and which either we or our descendants may some day hope to answer.”

(A woman, look you, is a certain animal hard to understand and much inclined to mischief.)

Molière (Le Dépit Amoureux).

Swinburne introduced the new Hellenism or paganism, which was followed by Pater and J. A. Symonds and ended with Oscar Wilde (see p. 310 note.) Here Time is the supreme god who wrecks Christian Churches, etc.

Although Swinburne had no important message to deliver, yet by his wonderful mastery of metre and language he was of tremendous service in transforming English Poetry (see p. 219.) But in spite of the magical effect of his new melodies, he was wanting in the art (of which Milton is the supreme example) of varying his rhythm and accents. His extreme regularity, notwithstanding the fine language and the splendid swing of his verses, produces in his longer poems a certain effect of monotony. Swinburne spoke of the “spavined and spur-galled Pegasus” of George Eliot, but although she lacked his wonderful lyric melody, she was more artistic and effective than he in varying the rhythm of her verse. However, the immense influence of Swinburne on all subsequent poetry can never be forgotten. Even the dreary Iambic couplet in his hands was transformed into music.

There is the love of the good for the good’s sake, and the love of the truth for the truth’s sake. I have known many, especially women, love the good for the good’s sake; but very few, indeed—and scarcely one woman—love the truth for the truth’s sake. Yet without the latter, the former may become, as it has a thousand times been, the source of the persecution of the truth—the pretext and motive of inquisitorial cruelty and party zealotry. To see clearly that the love of the good and the true is ultimately identical is given only to those who love both sincerely and without any foreign ends.

S. T. Coleridge (Table Talk).

The old creeds grew out of human nature as genuinely as weeds and flowers out of the earth. It is well enough that the gardener, whose business it is to pull them up, should despise them as pigweed, wormwood, chickweed, shadblossom: so they are, out of their place; but the botanist picks up the same and recognizes them as Ambrosia, Stellaria, Amelanchier, Amaranth. Natura nihil agit frustra. Let us coax each to yield its last bud.

Moncure D. Conway.

I have not Conway’s book An Earthward Pilgrimage to refer to. The latter part of the above is apparently a quotation from Thoreau, as I remember it is so quoted by Emerson.

God is my witness, what hours of wretchedness I have spent at times, while reading the Bible devoutly from day to day, and reverencing every word of it as the Word of God, when petty contradictions met me which seemed to my reason to conflict with the notion of the absolute historical veracity of every part of Scripture, and which, as I felt, in the study of any other book we should honestly treat as errors or mis-statements, without in the least detracting from the real value of the book! But in those days, I was taught that it was my duty to fling the suggestion from me at once, “as if it were a loaded shell shot into the fortress of my soul,” or to stamp out desperately, as with an iron heel, each spark of honest doubt, which God’s own gift, the love of truth, had kindled in my bosom.... I thank God that I was not able long to throw dust in the eyes of my own mind, and do violence to the love of truth in this way.

Bishop Colenso (1814-1883) (Pentateuch).

(See G. W. Cox’s Life of Colenso, I, 493.) Colenso’s quotation, “as if it were a loaded shell,” etc., is from Bishop Wilberforce. Cox mentions elsewhere that in one of Wilberforce’s published sermons he speaks of a young man of great promise dying in darkness and despair, because he had indulged in doubt as to whether the sun and moon stood still at Joshua’s bidding! Who, that went through the experiences of those days, can ever forget them? We had been taught that we “must believe” every word of the Bible to be divinely inspired or else be eternally damned. And yet we realized that such belief was absolutely impossible!

The horror with which Bishop Colenso’s revelations were received in orthodox circles would to-day be scarcely credible, and not until after the eighties were the results of the Higher Criticism generally accepted.

Let a man be once fully persuaded that there is no difference between the two positions, “The Bible contains the religion revealed by God,” and “Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God”; and that whatever can be said of the Bible, collectively taken, may and must be said of each and every sentence of the Bible, taken for and by itself,—and I no longer wonder at these paradoxes. I only object to the inconsistency of those who profess the same belief, and yet affect to look down with a contemptuous or compassionate smile on John Wesley for rejecting the Copernican system as incompatible therewith; or who exclaim, “Wonderful!” when they hear that Sir Matthew Hale sent a crazy old woman to the gallows in honour of the Witch of Endor.... I challenge these divines and their adherents to establish the compatibility of a belief in the modern astronomy and natural philosophy with their and Wesley’s doctrine respecting the inspired Scriptures.

S. T. Coleridge.

Why do we respect some vegetables, and despise others? The bean is a graceful, confiding, engaging vine; but you never can put beans in poetry, nor into the highest sort of prose. Corn—which, in my garden, grows alongside the bean, and, so far as I can see, with no affectation of superiority—is, however, the child of song. It “waves” in all literature.

Charles Dudley Warner (My Summer in a Garden).

Mr. Yeats has, however, rescued the bean from its invidious position (The Lake Isle of Innisfree):—

Lady Middleton, a friend of old days in Adelaide and now in England, reminded me of these lines.

This is from Myers’ Poems, 1870, and is one of a pair of sonnets. I do not quote the first in full because its meaning seems obscure, but the last six lines on the shortness of life as compared with eternity are as follow:

In the second sonnet quoted above, Myers is not merely referring to the Biblical account of the future life in heaven as consisting in endless worship—which, if taken literally instead of symbolically, would certainly mean a “drear eternity.” The suggestion is that there must be some equivalent to work, thought, activity, progress, and definite aims to make eternal life preferable to annihilation. (I am reminded here of a curious statement made by the great Adam Smith, “What can be added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience!”) Myers ultimately came to the definite conclusion that the future life will be one of continued progress.

His name, Myers, is purely English, not Jewish. This gifted man was not only a fine poet, but also an important essayist and a remarkable classical scholar. He, Hodgson, and others formed the small band of able men who threw everything else aside and devoted their lives to Psychical Research. Myers’ best poems appeared in The Renewal of Youth and other Poems, 1882, and it was no doubt a loss to poetry that during the remaining eighteen years of his life he added little, if anything, more. However, he and Hodgson considered that the work to which they had devoted themselves was of the very highest importance. Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, the important work in which Myers embodied his conclusions, was left incomplete at his death, but Hodgson, with Miss Alice Johnson’s assistance, completed and edited it.

Myers was quite satisfied before his death, in 1901, that the evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research had already established in itself the fact of survival after death. But the interesting fact is that during the nineteen years since he “passed over to the other side” he has apparently been the principal agent in adding greatly to that evidence. There is every reason to believe that Myers has personally been communicating and arranging and directing much of the evidence that has since been given.

It is not the essayist’s duty to inform, to build pathways through metaphysical morasses, to cancel abuses, any more than it is the duty of the poet to do these things. Incidentally he may do something in that way, just as the poet may, but it is not his duty, and should not be expected of him. Skylarks are primarily created to sing, although a whole choir of them may be baked in pies and brought to table; they were born to make music, although they may incidentally stay the pangs of vulgar hunger.... The essay should be pure literature as the poem is pure literature.

Alexander Smith (On the Writing of Essays).

MIMNERMUS IN CHURCH

Mimnermus was a fine Greek elegiac poet—about 630-600 B.C.

MORS ET VITA

The evidence collected by the Society for Psychical Research indicates that friends do certainly meet. See the remarkably convincing Ear of Dionysius, lately published, where Dr. Verrall and Professor Butcher are clearly having a great time together on the other side.

The teaching of Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) led to an important evangelical movement in the Roman Catholic Church. When, however, the Jansenists became subjected to persecution, the usual result followed that numbers of them became fanatics. The more corrupt the French Court and Society became, the more frenzied became this fanaticism. In 1727 the Jansenist deacon, Pâris, a man of very holy life, was buried in the St. Médard churchyard, and shortly afterwards miracles were said to take place at his tomb. In consequence large crowds of convulsionnaires assembled there and very shocking scenes were enacted, men and women in hysterical and epileptic fits and ecstatic delirium, eating the earth of the grave and inflicting frightful tortures on themselves and each other. When in 1732 the Court interposed and closed the churchyard some wit wrote the above couplet on the gate.

Mr. King in his Classical and Foreign Quotations has “De faire des miracles,” but the above version seems correct (See Larousse.)

There are two things that fill my soul with a holy reverence and an ever-growing wonder: the spectacle of the starry sky, that virtually annihilates us as physical beings; and the moral law which raises us to infinite dignity as intelligent agents.

The ought expresses a kind of necessity, a kind of connection of actions with their grounds or reasons, such as is to be found nowhere else in the whole natural world. For of the natural world our understanding can know nothing except what is, what has been, or what will be. We cannot say that anything in it ought to be other than it actually was, is, or will be. In fact, so long as we are considering the course of nature, the ought has no meaning whatever. We can as little inquire what ought to happen in nature as we can inquire what properties a circle ought to have.

Immanuel Kant.

The first quotation (from the Kritik of Practical Reason) appears to be the same passage that is often rendered in such words as these: “Two things fill my soul with awe—the starry heavens in the still night, and the sense of duty in man.”

(——) is one of those men who go far to shake my faith in a future state of existence; I mean, on account of the difficulty of knowing where to place him. I could not bear to roast him; he is not so bad as that comes to: but then, on the other hand, to have to sit down with such a fellow in the very lowest pothouse of heaven is utterly inconsistent with the belief of that place being a place of happiness for me.

S. T. Coleridge (Table Talk).

Let us reflect that the highest path is pointed out by the pure Ideal of those, who look up to us, and who, if we tread less loftily, may never look so high again.

N. Hawthorne (Transformation).

One summer evening sitting by my window I watched for the first star to appear, knowing the position of the brightest in the southern sky. The dusk came on, grew deeper, but the star did not shine. By and by, other stars less bright appeared, so that it could not be the sunset which obscured the expected one. Finally, I considered that I must have mistaken its position, when suddenly a puff of air blew through the branch of a pear tree which overhung the window, a leaf moved, and there was the star behind the leaf.

At present the endeavour to make discoveries is like gazing at the sky up through the boughs of an oak. Here a beautiful star shines clearly; here a constellation is hidden by a branch; a universe by a leaf. Some mental instrument or organon is required to enable us to distinguish between the leaf which may be removed and a real void; when to cease to look in one direction, and to work in another.... There are infinities to be known, but they are hidden by a leaf.

Richard Jefferies (The Story of My Heart).

Emerson is always an optimist.

I knew a very wise man that believed that, if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

Fletcher of Saltoun (Letter to Montrose and others).

What would the wise man have said of “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary”?

FIRST LOVE

ON A FLY DRINKING OUT OF A CUP OF ALE

This was first published in 1732 as “The Fly—An Anachreontick” and Mr. Gosse in the Encyc. Britt. gave the first six lines as an example of an Anacreontic. He attributed the poem to Oldys, but the authorship is doubtful. (See Notes and Queries, 3rd Ser., I, 21). Vincent Bourne in a copy of his Poematia, 1734, in my possession, has written out and signed the two verses, entitling them “A Song,” the last line of each verse being repeated as a refrain. From this it might appear that he claimed the authorship. In 1743 he published a Latin version of the poem. Vincent Bourne, a beautiful Latinist, was much loved by his pupils, Charles Lamb and Cowper, who each translated into English some of his fine Latin verses.

An inscription on a tomb in Melrose Abbey, but said to be a version of lines by a Fourteenth Century poet, William Billing.

It takes very little water to make a perfect pool for a tiny fish, where it will find its world and paradise all in one, and never have a presentiment of the dry bank. The fretted summer shade, and stillness, and the gentle breathing of some loved life near—it would be paradise to us all, if eager thought, the strong angel with the implacable brow, had not long since closed the gates.

George Eliot (Romola).

All true Work is religion; and whatsoever religion is not Work may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes, or where it will; with me it shall have no harbour.

Carlyle (Reward).

The above are from a series of word-pictures (see p. 167).

(Phantasy or imagination may be true and clear or may be disordered and unsound) ... The phantastical part of men (if it be not disordered) is a representer of the best, most comely and bewtifull images or appearances of thinges to the soule and according to their very truth.... Of this sort of Phantasie are all good Poets, notable Captaines stratagematique, all cunning artificers and Engineers, all Legislators, Politiciens and Counsellours of estate, in whose exercises the inventive part is most employed and is to the sound and true judgement of man most needful.

George Puttenham (The Arte of English Poesie, 1589).

Just as a poet, besides imagination, must have intellect or judgment as a basis, so the higher imaginative faculty comes to the aid of intellect in other departments of life. As Maudsley says, “it performs the initial and essential functions in every branch of human development” (Body and Will). Ehrlich, seeking a substance that would destroy germs without injuring the human tissues, plods through endless tedious processes, and on his 606th experiment, discovers salvarsan, a cure for syphilis. Here the higher faculty has had little to do—but when, on the fall of an apple, Newton’s mind saw in a flash how the world was balanced, intellect soared aloft on the wings of imagination.

As well Poets as Poesie are despised, and the name become, of honourable infamous, subject to scorne and derision, and rather a reproach than a prayse to any that useth it: for commonly whoso is studious in the Arte or shewes himselfe excellent in it, they call him in disdayne a phantasticall: and a light-headed or phantasticall man (by conversion) they call a Poet.... Of such among the Nobilitie or gentrie as be very well seene in many laudable sciences, and especially in Poesie, it is so come to passe that they have no courage to write and if they have, yet are they loath to be a-known of their skill. So as I know very many notable Gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably and suppressed it agayne, or else suffred it to be publisht without their owne names to it: as if it were a discredit for a gentleman to seeme learned, and to shew himselfe amorous of any good Arte.

George Puttenham (The Arte of English Poesie, 1589).

We do not always remember in what disheartening conditions the great Elizabethan literature was produced—the inferior position of the writer, his wretched remuneration and his dependence on patrons. It is strange to think that it was considered beneath the dignity of a gentleman to write poetry or to acknowledge its authorship—or apparently to show proficiency in other arts or sciences. Such men as Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh were exceptions. The curious fact is that Puttenham himself (assuming, as is probable, that he was the author) issued this important book anonymously. He had, however, acknowledged his Partheniades ten years before.

As Arber points out, the above passage, and another reference by Puttenham to the same subject, indicate that, at least in the earlier Elizabethan period, much talent must have been lost and much literature never reached the printing press. The same feeling that then existed is seen again in Locke’s time (see p. 180), and, if we consider a moment, we shall find that it has persisted to some extent to the present day. Think how miserably inadequate is the attention paid to poetry in our educational system, the methods employed being, indeed, calculated to make the student loathe the subject. (When I was young (“Ah, woful When”[49]) we had as a school text-book Palgrave’s Golden Treasury—a divine gift to us in those days. As we had a sympathetic teacher, we read it as poetry, and the consequence was that I and other boys knew the book practically by heart from cover to cover.)

It is surprising that Englishmen neglect the one great talent which they possess. What distinguishes them above all other nations is their superiority in the higher imaginative faculties.[50] This is shown in such a national characteristic as the love of travel and adventure, which has created the British Empire, and is proved concretely by the fact that England has produced the greatest wealth of poetry which the world has ever seen. This great treasure, which should be employed for encouraging the highest of all faculties, is allowed to lie idle. The fact seems to be overlooked that the study of poetry is not only of enormous intrinsic value in knowledge, and culture, but that it is the finest of all mental training. By analysis and paraphrase it gives knowledge of language, appreciation of style, practice in literary expression, and, above all things, precision of thought. In my opinion, poetry should form an essential part of education, beginning in childhood and continuing throughout the Arts course. It may be found that there are intelligent persons who are incapable of appreciating poetry, and the subject may, therefore, not be made a compulsory one. But my conviction is that, where men imagine themselves to be thus deficient, it is the result of a bad system of education. There is great truth in Stevenson’s fine essay, “The Lantern-Bearers.”

A Celtic flight of imagination.

A pretty compliment to his wife who in 1814 had introduced the dahlia into England from Spain. Previous attempts had failed (Liechtenstein’s Holland House).

C’est imiter quelqu’un que de planter des choux.

A. de Musset.

Quoted by Austin Dobson:—

... The great book of actual life, sad, diffuse, contradictory, yet always full of depth and significance.

George Sand (The Miller of Angibault).

A NOISELESS, PATIENT SPIDER

Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit.

(The modest Nymph saw her God and blushed.)

The conscious water saw its God and blushed.

Richard Crashaw (1616-1650).

Referring to the miracle of Cana. Both Latin and English epigrams are by Crashaw. In the former the water is personified by its Nymph.

Called on the W. Molesworths. He is threatened with total blindness, and his excellent wife is learning to work in the dark in preparation for a darkened chamber. What things wives are! What a spirit of joyous suffering, confidence, and love was incarnated in Eve! ’Tis a pity they should eat apples.

Caroline Fox’s Journals.

Vox, et praeterea nihil.

[Words (literally voice) and nothing more.]

Proverb.

Plutarch, in his Apophthegm, Lacon. Incert. XIII, says that a man after plucking a nightingale and finding little flesh on it, said φωνὰ τύ τις ἐσσὶ, καὶ οὐδὲν ἄλλο, “Thou art voice and nothing more” (King’s Classical and Foreign Quotations). No doubt this was the origin of the saying. It was applied to the nightingale, and to Echo—and then used in Hamlet’s sense, “Words, words, words.”

Two of the most marvellous lines in all literature. With them as a text volumes might be written.

Campbell the poet, who had always a bad razor, I suppose, and was late of rising, said he believed the man of civilization who lived to be sixty had suffered more pain in littles in shaving every day than a woman with a large family had from her lyings-in.

John Brown (Horae Subsecivae I, 457).

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and the beholder.

J. G. Zimmermann.

“Some bee had stung it.” It, of course, means the full underlip, as against the less full upperlip.

Such is the ascendancy which the great works of the Greek imagination have established over the mind of man that.... he is tempted to ignore the real superiority of our own religion, morality, civilization, and to re-shape in fancy an adult world on an adolescent ideal.

F. W. H. Myers (Essay on Greek Oracles).

That early burst of admiration for Virgil of which I have already spoken was followed by a growing passion for one after another of the Greek and Latin poets. From ten to sixteen I lived much in the inward recital of Homer, Æschylus, Lucretius, Horace, and Ovid. The reading of Plato’s Gorgias at fourteen was a great event; but the study of the Phaedo at sixteen affected upon me a kind of conversion. At that time, too, I returned to my worship of Virgil, whom Homer had for some years thrust into the background. I gradually wrote out Bucolics, Georgics, Aeneid from memory....

The discovery at seventeen, in an old school book, of the poems of Sappho, whom till then I had only known by name, brought an access of intoxicating joy. Later on, the solitary decipherment of Pindar made another epoch of the same kind. From the age of sixteen to twenty-three there was no influence in my life comparable to Hellenism in the fullest sense of the word. That tone of thought came to me naturally; the classics were but intensifications of my own being. They drew from me and fostered evil as well as good; they might aid imaginative impulse and detachment from sordid interests, but they had no check for pride.

When pushed thus far, the “Passion of the Past” must needs wear away sooner or later into an unsatisfied pain. In 1864 I travelled in Greece. I was mainly alone; nor were the traveller’s facts and feelings mapped out for him then as now. Ignorant as I was, according to modern standards, yet my emotions were all my own: and few men can have drunk that departed loveliness into a more passionate heart. It was the life of about the sixth century before Christ, on the isles of the Aegean, which drew me most;—that intensest and most unconscious bloom of the Hellenic spirit. Here alone in the Greek story do women play their due part with men. What might the Greeks have made of the female sex had they continued to care for it! Then it was that Mimnermus sang:—

Then it was that Praxilla’s cry rang out across the narrow seas, that call to fellowship, reckless and lovely with stirring joy. “Drink with me!” she cried, “be young along with me! Love with me! wear with me the garland crown! Mad be thou with my madness; be wise when I am wise!”

I looked through my open porthole close upon the Lesbian shore. There rose the heathery promontories, and waves lapped upon the rocks in dawning day:—lapped upon those rocks where Sappho’s feet had trodden; broke beneath the heather on which had sat that girl unknown, nearness to whom made a man the equal of the gods. I sat in Mytilene, to me a sacred city, between the hill-crest and the sunny bay....

Gazing thence on Delos on the Cyclades, and on those straits and channels of purple sea, I felt that nowise could I come closer still; never more intimately than thus could embrace that vanished beauty. Alas for an ideal which roots itself in the past! That longing cannot be allayed.

F. W. H. Myers (Fragments of Prose and Poetry).

The wonderful record of Myers in classical study will first be observed. If we did not know him to be absolutely trustworthy, we would find it practically impossible to believe his statement. Imagine, for instance, a boy of sixteen learning by heart the whole of Virgil for his own pleasure! However, anything vouched for by Myers must be accepted as literally true.

Extraordinary as this is, the above quotations introduce us to a subject quite as extraordinary and far more interesting and important, namely, the distortion of truth caused by extreme classical enthusiasm.[52] It is perfectly easy to see how such enthusiasm arises. Greek art and literature are not only intrinsically wonderful and valuable but, seeing that they were produced by a comparatively small population in a barbaric age, they constitute the greatest (secular) marvel in the history of the world. Everything tends to excite enthusiasm for this remote, alien, primitive, but most remarkable people. I need not speak of the art in which they stand unrivalled throughout the ages. As regards their literature, apart from its intrinsic excellence and the beauty of the language in which it is written, it has an additional fascination and charm, because it is the speech and song of the infancy of the world. Through it we see into the mind and realize the life of the most interesting race that ever lived. Possessing astounding intellect and intense originality, they were nevertheless the children of nature. Their earth was peopled with fauns and nymphs, their gods lived and moved and had their being in every natural object—and they had very little of our ideas of right and wrong. They had nothing of our wide knowledge and experience, yet they constructed a world of life and thought for themselves. It is absorbingly interesting to read their beautiful poetry, fine literature, and philosophic thought, bearing in mind that it was produced in the ignorant childhood and paganism of the human race, over two thousand years ago. And one of the most astonishing things about them is that essential product of civilization, a keen sense of humour. So curiously “modern” is their literature that the writers speak to us across the ages with as vivid a voice as if they were still alive. No other primitive race has been able to leave us any such adequate conception of its life and thought. Moreover, we can never forget how the Greek arose out of the tomb, where he had slept for many centuries, to preside at the re-birth of our own modern world—that emergence of Europe from medieval darkness which we call the Renaissance. It was largely Greek art and literature that stimulated the mental activity of the world and made us what we are to-day.

Very great enthusiasm is, therefore, warranted in the Greek student—but there comes a point where enthusiasm may become pure fanaticism, and lead to that most deadly of all things, the perversion of the truth.

In the above quotations two Greek poems are quoted, and another is referred to in the lines I have italicized. The first two[53] refer to vice, which to us is revolting and criminal, but to the whole Greek nation was natural, and recognised by law. The third expresses even more revolting passion. It will be seen, therefore, that Myers, in order to illustrate the “departed loveliness” of Greek life made a strange choice of quotations (which also, standing alone, would give a very false notion of classic Greek poetry).

Seeing that Myers was one of the purest-minded of men, what is the explanation of this very remarkable fact? The explanation is simply that Myers was a classical enthusiast. He had forgotten the warning he himself gave in the first quotation. It is absolutely amazing how such an enthusiast, however brilliant a scholar and capable a man in other respects, can blind himself to the most obvious facts where anything Greek is concerned. It is very certain that Myers read into each poem a perfectly innocent meaning—and he would not be alone in that respect. Take, for instance, the third quotation which is from Sappho. In my youth the great majority of classical men appeared to have convinced themselves that a poem of terribly fierce passion was an expression of mere friendship! Even our leading reference-book, Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, gave the same absurd view until about 1877.[54] However, we must get away from this ugly subject and seek further illustrations elsewhere.

This perverted enthusiasm seems to permeate all books of the last fifty or sixty years dealing with Greek life, art and literature that I have met with. This is a very large statement to make, and, of course, I do not mean that such flagrant instances as those above referred to are the rule. But to me there seems always to be some bias which tends to exaggerate or falsify the facts to some extent. We can trace this tendency back more than eighteen hundred years to Plutarch. (On the Malice of Herodotus). He, as Mr. Livingstone[55] says, “took the view that the Greeks of the great age could do no wrong, and rates the historian for ‘needlessly describing evil actions.’” And it is largely in this way that the enthusiast works—by omitting facts. I should think few readers unfamiliar with the classics will have known all the facts already put before them in these notes—because such facts, although known to all classical scholars, are kept in the background as much as possible. Again the tendency is to judge the Greeks by their greatest men—to imagine every Greek to have been a Plato!