Volume 1 — XXIV. BREVIA: SHORT ESSAYS (IN CONNECTION WITH EACH OTHER.) (continued 2)

If the Apostles were more celestially armed in any other sense than as we are all armed from above by calling forth our better natures, if in any other sense than as sorrow arms us by purifying our natures, as sorrowful reflection, as meditation and earnest endeavours to resist our angry instincts (which, on the contrary, how often do men obey under the vile pretence of being put by conscience on a painful duty), then, I say, what were the Apostles to us? Why should we admire them? How can we make them models of imitation? It is like that case of Anarcharsis the Scythian.

It does certainly incense a Christian to think that stupid Mahommedans should impute to us such childish idolatries as that of God having a son and heir—just as though we were barbarous enough to believe that God was liable to old age—that the time was coming, however distant, when somebody would say to him, 'Come, Sir,' or 'Come, my Lord, really you are not what you were. It's time you gave yourself some ease (ευφημι, time, indeed, that you resigned the powers to which you are unequal), and let a younger man take the reins.' None but a filthy barbarian could carry forward his thoughts so little as not to see that this son in due time would find himself in the same predicament.

Now mark how Christian lands would enforce this doctrine of unity by horrid coercions. They hang, drown, burn, crucify those who deny it. So that, be assured you are planting your corner-stone on the most windy of delusions. You yourselves do not ascribe any merit to Mahommed separate from that of revealing the unity of God. Consequently, if that is a shaken craze arising from mere inability on his part, a little, a very little information would have cut up by the very roots the whole peculiarity of Islam. For if a wise man could have assembled these conceited Arabians and told them: Great thieves, you fancy yourselves to have shot far ahead of the Christians as to the point of unity, and if you had I would grant that you had made a prodigious advance. But you are deceiving quarrellers. It is all a word—mere smoke, that blinds you. The Christian seems to affirm three Gods, and even to aggravate this wickedness by calling one of them 'a Son,' thus seeming to accept that monstrous notion that God is liable to old age and decrepitude, so as to provide wisely against His own dotage. But all this is an error: these three apparent Gods are but one, and in the most absolute sense one.

The most shockingly searching, influential, and permanent blunder that ever has affected the mind of man has been the fancy that a religion includes a creed as to its απορῥητα, and a morality; in short, that it was doctrinal by necessity, enactory, and (which has been the practical part of the blunder) therefore exclusive, because:

1. With our notion of a religion as essentially doctrinal, the very first axiom about it is, that being true itself it makes all others false. Whereas, the capital distinction of the Pagan was—that given, supposing to be assumed, 10,000 religions—all must be true simultaneously, all equally. When a religion includes any distinct propositions offered to the understanding (that is, I think, resting upon a principle or tendency to a consequence by way of differencing from facts which also are for the understanding, but then barely to contemplate not with a power of reacting on the understanding, for every principle introduces into the mind that which may become a modification, a restraint; whereas, a fact restrains nothing in the way of thought unless it includes a principle), it would rise continually in its exclusive power according to the number of those propositions. At first it might exclude all but ten, eight, seven, and so on; finally, as integrated it would exclude all.

2. If you ask on what principle a Pagan believed his religion, the question to him was almost amusing and laughable. I will illustrate the case. A man meets you who inquires in a hurried, suppose even in an agitated way, whether you met a tall man, blind of one eye, dressed in such a coloured dress, etc. Now, does it ever occur to you that the inquirer is lying? Lying! Wherefore should he lie? Or again, if you say that your house stands under a hill, that three out of four chimneys smoke, and that you must indeed try some of the inventions for remedying this annoyance, would any man in his senses think of speculating on the possibility that all this should be a romance? Or, to come nearer in the kind of fact, if a man represented his family fortune as having been bequeathed by a maiden aunt in the last generation, would any man say otherwise than that doubtless the man knew his own benefactors and relatives best? On this same principle, when Christ was mentioned as the divinity adored by a certain part of the Jews who were by way of distinction called Christians, why should a Roman object? What motive could he have for denying the existence or the divine existence of Christ? Even the idea of dissent or schism, some Jews worshipping, some protesting, would not much puzzle him. Something like it had occurred in Pagan lands. Neptune and Athene had contended for Attica. And under the slight inquiry which he would ever make, or listen to when made by others, he might wonder at the rancour displayed by the protesting party, but he would take it for granted that a divinity of some local section had been unduly pushed into pre-eminence over a more strictly epichorial divinity. He would go off with this notion, that whereas, the elder Jews insisted on paying vows, etc., to a God called Jehovah, a section sought to transfer that allegiance to a divinity called Christ. If he were further pressed on the subject, he would fancy that very possibly, as had been thought, found or imagined in the case of Syrian deities or Egyptian, etc., that perhaps Christ might correspond to Apollo, as Astarte to Diana, Neptune of Latium to the Poseidôn of Greece. But if not, that would cause no scruple at all. Thus far it was by possibility a mere affair of verbal difference. But suppose it ascertained that in no point of the symbols surrounding the worship of Christ, or the conception of His person, He could be identified with any previously-known Pagan God—that would only introduce Him into the matricula of Gods as a positive novelty. Nor would it have startled a Roman to hear that in India or any country large enough there should be a separate Pantheon of many thousand deities, plus some other Pantheon of divinities corresponding to their own. For Syria—but still more in one section of Syrian Palestine—this would surprise him quoad the degree, not quoad the principle. The Jew had a separate or peculiar God, why not? No nation could exist without Gods: the very separate existence of a people, trivial as it might be in power and wealth, argued a tutelary God, but, of course, proportioned to the destinies at least (and in part to the present size) of the country. Thus far no difficulties at all. But the morality! Aye, but that would never be accounted a part of religion. As well confound a science with religion. Aye, but the απορῥητα. These would be viewed as the rites of Adonis, or of Ceres; you could not warn him from his preconception that these concerned only Jews. Where, therefore, lodged the offence? Why here, as personalities—for such merely were all religions—the God must be measured by his nation. So some Romans proposed to introduce Christ into the Roman Pantheon. But what first exploded as a civil offence was the demand of supremacy and the inconceivable principle set up of incompatibility. This was mere folly.

A much more solemn, significant and prophetic meaning than the common one may be secured to the famous passage in St. Matthew—'And thou shalt call His name Jesus.' This injunction wears the most impressive character belonging to heavenly adjuration, when it is thus confided to the care and custody of a special angel, and in the very hour of inauguration, and amongst the very birth-throes of Christianity. For in two separate modes the attention is secretly pointed and solicited to the grand serpentine artifice, which met and confronted the almost insurmountable difficulty besetting Christianity on its very threshold: First, by the record of the early therapeutic miracles, since in that way only, viz., by a science of healing, which the philosopher equally with the populace recognised as resting upon inspiration from God, could the magistrate and civil authority have been steadily propitiated; secondly, by the very verbal suggestion couched in the name Jesus, or Healer. At the most critical of moments an angel reveals himself, for the purpose of saying 'Thou shalt call His name Jesus'—and why Jesus? Because, says the angel, 'He shall heal or cleanse His people from sin as from a bodily disease.' Thus, in one and the same moment is suggested prospectively to the early Christian, who is looking forward in search of some adequate protection against the civil magistrate, and theoretically and retrospectively is suggested to the Christian of our own philosophizing days, that admirable resource of what by a shorthand expression I will call Hakimism. The Hakim, the Jesus, the Healer, comes from God. Mobs must not be tolerated. But neither must the deep therapeutic inspirations of God be made of none effect, or narrowed in their applications. And thus in one moment was the panic from disease armed against the panic from insurgent mobs; the privileged Hakim was marshalled against the privileged magistrate; and the deep superstition, which saw, and not unreasonably, a demon raging in a lawless mob, saw also a demon not less blind or cruel in the pestilence that walked in darkness. And, as one magnet creates other magnets, so also the Hakim, once privileged, could secretly privilege others. And the physical Hakim could by no test or shibboleth be prevented from silently introducing the spiritual Hakim. And thus, whilst thrones and councils were tumultuating in panic, behold! suddenly the Christian soldier was revealed amongst them as an armed man.

'Écrasez l'infâme,' I also say: and who is he? It would be mere insanity to suppose that it could be any teacher of moral truths. Even I, who so much despise Socrates, could not reasonably call him l'infâme.

But who, then, is l'infâme? It is he who, finding in those great ideas which I have noticed as revelations from God, and which throw open to the startled heart the heaven of heavens, in the purity, the holiness, the peace which passeth all understanding, finding no argument of divinity, then afterwards does find it in the little tricks of legerdemain, in conjuring, in præstigia. But here, though perhaps roused a little to see the baseness of relying on these miracles, and also in the rear a far worse argument against them, he still feels uncomfortable at such words applied to things which Christ did. Christ could not make, nor wished to make, that great which was inherently mean; that relevant, which was originally irrelevant. If He did things in themselves mean, it was because He suited Himself to mean minds, incapable of higher views; wretches such as exist amongst us of modern days by millions, on whom all His Divine words were thrown away, wretches deaf and blind and besotted, to whom it was said in vain: 'He that looketh upon a woman,' and what follows, creating by a rod of divinity in man's heart a far superior ideal of the moral; who heard with indifference His 'Bless those who persecute you;' yes, listened unmoved to His 'Suffer little children to come unto Me;' who heard with anger His 'In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage;' who abhorred His great doctrine that the counsels of God were not read in the events of things[31]; who slighted as trivial that prayer which a wise man might study with profit for a thousand years; beasts, wretches, that turned away deaf and blind, even as their sons turn away, from these arguments of a truth far transcending all that yet had come amongst men; but whilst trampling with their brutal hoofs upon such flowers of Paradise, turned in stupid wonderment to some mere legerdemain or jugglery.

The Truth.—But what tongue can express, what scale can measure, the awful change in man's relations to the unseen world? Where there had been a blank not filled by anything, not by any smoke or dusky tarnish of suspicion, not filled by so much as any shadowy outline or vague phantom of possibility, there was now seen rising, 'like Teneriffe or Atlas'—say rather, by symbolizing the greatest of human interests by the greatest of human visual objects, like the snowy peaks of the Himalaya, peaks that by men's feelings are referred to the heavens rather than to the earth; to the beings 'whose dwelling is no thick flesh,' rather than to men who have in no age succeeded in scaling them; and who in their steps to those mighty thrones have heard nothing but dread crashes of sound—again to fade or vanish, the colossal form, never the mighty idea of 'The Truth.'[32] Where there had been nothing, a blank, a chasm, there stood in solemn proportions a new object for man, called The Truth. Why was it called The Truth? How could such an idea arise? Many persons will be weak enough to fancy that, as ὁποητης was sometimes an artifice of rhetoric for expressing the exclusive supremacy of Homer, and as by a pure affectation and movement of dissimulation a man was called by the title of The Orator, his own favourite Greek or Roman thus affecting for the moment to know of no other (for all such emphatic and exclusive uses of the imply a momentary annihilation of the competitors, as though in comparison of the ideal exemplification these minor and approximating forms had no existence—or at least, not quoad hunc locum—as 'the mountain in Sicily' would rightly indicate Etna), on the same artificial principle they may imagine rhetoricians to have denominated (or if not, to have had it in their power to denominate) some one department of truth which they wished to favour as the truth. But this conventional denomination would not avail, and for two reasons: First, that rival modes of truth (physics against mathematics, rhetoric against music) would contest the title, and no such denomination would have a basis of any but a sort of courtesy or vicarious harmonious reality from the very first. Secondly, that, standing in no relation whatever to God, every mode, form, division or subdivision of truth merely intellectual would gain nothing at all by such ostentatious arts. Algebra has been distinguished by glorious names; so has the fancied knowledge of transmutation applied to the metals; so, doubtless, has many a visionary speculation of magic; so, again, has the ridiculous schwermerey of the Rabbis in particular ages. But those are as transient and even for the moment as partial titles as the titles of Invincible or Seraphic applied to scholastic divines. Out of this idea the truth grew, next (suppose x) another Martyrdom.

The difference between all human doctrines and this is as between a marble statue and a quick thing. The statue may be better, and it may be of better material; it may be of ivory, of marble, and amongst marbles known to the ancient sculptors of several different kinds the most prized; of silver gilt, of hollow gold, of massy gold, and in all degrees of skill; but still one condition applies to all—whatever the material, whoever the artist, the statue is inanimate, the breath of life is not within its nostrils. Motion, spontaneity, action and antagonist action, the subtle watch-work of the brain, the mighty laboratory of the heart, vision, sensibility, self-propagated warmth, pleasure, hope, memory, thought, liberty—not one of these divine gifts does it possess. It is cold, icy, senseless, dull, inert matter. Let Phidias have formed the statue, it is no better. Let the purest gold be its material, it is no worthier than the meanest model in clay to the valuation of the philosopher. And here, as in so many cases, the great philosopher meets with the labouring man; both meet with the little innocent child. All have the same undervaluation of the statue. And if any man values it preposterously, it will be neither a great philosopher, nor a labouring man with horny fists, nor a little innocent and natural child. It will be some crazy simpleton, who dignifies himself as a man of taste, as elegans formarum spectator, as one having a judicious eye for the distinctions of form. But now, suddenly, let one of the meanest of these statues begin to stir and shiver with the mystery of life, let it be announced that something 'quick' is in the form, let the creeping of life, the suffusion of sensibility, the awful sense of responsibility and accountability ripen themselves, what a shock—what a panic! What an interest—how profound—would diffuse itself in every channel. Such is the ethics of God as contrasted with the ethics of Greek philosophers. The only great thing ever done by Greece or by Greek philosophers was the ethics. Yet, after all, these were but integrations of the natural ethics implanted in each man's heart. Integrations they were, but rearrangements—redevelopments from some common source.

It is remarkable that the Scriptures, valuing clearness and fencing against misunderstandings above all things, never suspend—there is no εποχη in the scriptural style of the early books. And, therefore, when I first came to a text, 'If when,' I was thunderstruck, and I found that this belongs to the more cultivated age of Hebrew literature.

'And the swine because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unclean unto you' (Deut. xiv. 8). Now the obvious meaning is, primâ facie, that the ground of its uncleanness was its dividing the hoof. Whereas, so far from this, to divide the hoof is a ground of cleanness. It is a fact, a sine quâ non—that is, a negative condition of cleanness; but not, therefore, taken singly the affirmative or efficient cause of cleanness. It must in addition to this chew the cud—it must ruminate. Which, again, was but a sine quâ non—that is, a negative condition, indispensable, indeed; whose absence could not be tolerated in any case, but whose presence did not therefore, and as a matter of course, avail anything. For the reverse case occurred in the camel, hare, and rabbit. They do chew the cud, the absence of which habit caused the swine to be rejected, but then they 'divide not the hoof.' Accordingly they were equally rejected as food with the swine.

We see the great Jewish lawgiver looking forward to cases which actually occurred nearly five hundred years after, as demanding a king, and again looking still farther to cases eight hundred and a thousand years after—their disobedience and rebellion to God. Now, many will think that it must have been an easy thing for any people, when swerving from their law, and especially in that one great fundamental article of idolatry as the Jews so continually did, and so naturally when the case is examined, to always have an easy retreat: the plagues and curses denounced would begin to unfold themselves, and then what more easy than to relinquish the idolatrous rites or customs, resuming with their old rituals to God their old privileges? But this was doubly impossible. First, because men utterly misconceive the matter when they suppose that with direct consecutive succession the judgment would succeed the trespass. Large tracts of time would intervene. Else such direct clockwork as sin and punishment, repentance and relief, would dishonour God not less than they would trivialize the people. God they would offend by defeating all His purposes; the people they would render vile by ripening into mechanic dissimulation. The wrath of God slept often for a long season; He saw as one who saw not. And by the time that His large councils had overtaken them, and His judgments were fast coming up with the offenders, they had so hardened themselves in error that a whole growth of false desires had sprung up, and of false beliefs, blind maxims, bad habits, bad connections, and proverbs, which found out a reconciliation of that irreconcilable truth with the foulest pollutions. The victims of temptation had become slow even to suspect their own condition. And, if some more enlightened did so, the road of existence was no longer easy. Error had woven chains about them. They were enmeshed. And it is but a faint emblem of their situation to say, that as well may a man commence a habit of intoxication for the purpose of having five years' pleasure, and then halting in his career, as the Jews may contaminate themselves tentatively with idolatrous connections under the delusion that it would always be time enough for untreading their steps when these connections had begun to produce evil. For they could not recover the station from which they swerved. They that had now realized the casus fœderis, the case in which they had covenanted themselves to desist from idolatry, were no longer the men who had made that covenant. They had changed profoundly and imperceptibly. So that the very vision of truth was overcast with carnal doubts; the truth itself had retired to a vast distance and shone but feebly for them, and the very will was palsied in its motions of recovery.

In such a state, suppose it confirmed and now threatening towards a total alienation from the truth once delivered, what could avail to save them? Nothing but affliction in the heaviest form. Vain it was now to hope for a cheaper restoration, since the very first lightening of their judicial punishment would seem to them a reason for relapsing, by seeming to argue that there had been two principles. It was but a false alarm, they would say, after all. Affliction, therefore, was past all substitution or remedy. Yet even this case, this prostration to the ground, had been met for a thousand years by God's servants.

If I have shown that quickening spirit which, diffusing itself through all thoughts, schemata, possible principles, motives of sensibility, and forms of taste, has differenced the pre-Christian man from the post-Christian; if I have detected that secret word which God subtly introduced into this world, kept in a state of incubation for two millennia, then with the flames and visible agency of a volcanic explosion forced into infinite disruption, caused to kindle into a general fire—that word by which sadness is spread over the face of things, but also infinite grandeur—then may I rightly lay this as one chapter of my Emendation of Human Knowledge.

The same thing precisely takes place in literature as in spiritual things. When a man is entangled and suffocated in business, all relating to that which shrinks up to a point—and observe, I do not mean that being conceived as a tent above his head it contracts, but that, viewed as a body at a distance, it shrinks up to a point, and really vanishes as a real thing—when this happens, having no subjective existence at all, but purely and intensely objective, he misconceives it just in the same way as a poor ignorant man misconceives learning or knowledge; fancying, e.g., like Heylius senior, that he ought to know the road out of the wood in which they were then entangled.

It is probable that Adam meant only the unity of man as to his nature, which also is meant by making all men of one blood. Similarly Boeckh—εν γενει—which does not mean that Gods and men are the same, but that of each the separate race has unity in itself. So the first man, Adam, will mean the earliest race of men, perhaps spread through thousands of years.

It is a violent case of prejudice, this ordinary appeal of Bossuet, 'Qu'ont gagné les philosophes avec leurs discours pompeux?' (p. 290). Now how should that case have been tried thoroughly before the printing of books? Yet it may be said the Gospel was so tried. True, but without having the power of fully gratifying itself through the whole range of its capability. That was for a later time, hence a new proof of its reality.

An Analogy.—1. I have somewhere read that a wicked set of Jews, probably, when rebuked for wickedness, replied, 'What! are we not the peculiar people of God? Strange, then, if we may not have a privilege more than others to do wrong!' The wretches fancied that to be the people of God—the chosen people—implied a license to do wrong, and had a man told them, No, it was just the other way; they were to be better than others, absolutely, they would have trembled with wrath.

2. Precisely the same idea, I am sure, lurks in many minds as to repentance. It is odious to think of, this making God the abettor and encourager of evil; but I am sure it is so, viz., that, because God has said He will have mercy on the penitent, they fancy that, as the chief consequence from that doctrine, they may commit sins without anxiety; though others, not under the Christian privilege, would be called to account for the same sin, penitent or not penitent. But they—such is their thought—are encouraged to sin by the assurance that repentance will always be open to them, and this they may pursue at leisure.

Now, if a man should say: 'But, my friends, this means real penitence;' they would reply, 'Oh, but we mean real penitence.' 'Well, if you do, you must know that that is not always possible.' 'Not possible!' Then make them understand that; they will roar with wrath, and protest against it as no privilege at all.

The literal interpretation of the Mosaic Cosmogony is the very expression of a barbarian mind and people, relying so far on magic as to make all natural process of generation or production impossible, relying so far on natural processes as to make the fiat of supreme power evidently inapplicable. It is exactly the Minerva of the Pagans draggled in her skirts.

Idolatry.—It is not only a mere blind crotchet of Isaiah's (Jeremiah's?) to ridicule idols—utterly wide of any real imperfection, but also it misses all that really might be bad. The true evil is not to kindle the idea of Apollo by an image or likeness, but to worship Apollo, i.e., a god to be in some sense false—belonging to a system connected with evil. That may be bad; but there can be no separate evil in reanimating the idea of this Apollo by a picture.

I have observed many times, but never could understand in any rational sense, the habit of finding a confirmation of the Bible in mere archæologic facts occasionally brought to light and tallying with the Biblical records. As in the Pharaonic and Egyptian usages, and lately in the case of Nimrod, a great collateral confirmation of Ezekiel has been fancied. But how? Supposing Ezekiel to have recited accurately the dimensions of Nineveh, how should that make him a true prophet? Or supposing him a false one, what motive should that furnish for mismeasuring Nineveh? The Gospels appear to have been written long after the events, and when controversies or variations had arisen about them, they have apparently been modified and shaped to meet those disputes.

The sun stands still. I am persuaded that this means no such incredible miracle as is ordinarily imagined. The interpretation arises from misconceiving an Oriental expression, and a forcible as well as natural one. Of all people the Jews could least mistake the nature of the sun and moon, as though by possibility they could stand in a relation to a particular valley: that the sun could have stood still in Gibeon, and the moon in Ajalon. Since they viewed sun and moon as two great lights, adequated and corresponding to day and night, that alone shows that they did not mean any objective solstice of the hour, for else why in Ajalon? Naturally it would be a phenomenon chiefly made known to the central sanctity of that God whose miraculous interposition had caused so unknown an arrest of ordinary nature; Jerusalem was not then known, it was Jebus, a city of Jebusites; and the fact which subsequently created its sanctity did not occur till more than four centuries afterwards (viz., on the threshing-floor of Araunah). But Shiloh existed, and Horeb, and Sinai, and the graves of the Patriarchs. And all those places would have expounded the reference of the miracle, would have traced it to the very source of its origin; so as to show not then only, not to the contemporaries only, but (which would be much more important) to after generations, who might suspect some mistake in their ancestors as explaining their meaning, or in themselves as understanding it. What it really means, I am persuaded, is merely to express that the day was, of all historical days, the most important. What! do people never reflect on the το positive of their reading? If they did, they would remember that the very idea of a great cardinal event, as of the foundation of the Olympiads, was as an arrest, a pausing, of time; causing you to hang and linger on that time. And the grandeur of this Jewish Waterloo in which God established possessions for His people and executed an earthly day of judgment on the ancient polluters (through perhaps a thousand years) of the sacred land (already sacred as the abode and burying-place of His first servants under a covenant) was expressed by saying that the day lingered, arrested itself by a burthen of glorious revolution so mighty as this great day of overthrow. For remember this: Would not God have changed Pharaoh's heart, so intractable, by such a miracle, had it been at all open to His eternal laws? Whereas, if you say, Aye, but on that account why grant even so much distinction to the day as your ancestor does? answer, it was the final-cause day.

The English Church pretends to give away the Bible without note or comment, or—which, in fact, is the meaning—any impulse or bias to the reader's mind. The monstrous conceit of the Protestant Churches, viz., the right of private judgment (which is, in effect, like the right to talk nonsense, or the right to criticise Sir John Herschel's books without mathematics), is thus slavishly honoured. Yet all is deception. Already in the translation at many hundred points she has laid a restraining bias on the reader, already by the division of verses, already by the running abstracts over the Prophets, she has done this.

Can the power adequated to a generation of minds, or to a succession of many generations, find its comprehension in an individual? Can the might which overflows the heaven of heavens be confined within a local residence like that which twice reared itself by its foundations, and three times by its battlements, above the threshing-floor of Araunah?[33] Of that mystery, of that local circumscription—in what sense it was effected, in what sense not effected, we know nothing. But this by mere human meditation, this profound difficulty we may humanly understand and measure, viz., the all but impossibility of reaching the man who stands removed to an extent of fifteen centuries. But here comes in the unspiritual mind which thinks only of facts—yet mark me so far, Rome by an augury of wicked gods stretched to a period of 1,200 years. Yet how open to doubt in one sense! Not, I am sure, in any sense understood by man, but I doubt not in the ominous sense intended. Changed in all things essential, she was yet a mighty sceptred potentate for the world until her dependency on Attila's good-will and forbearance. 444 after Christ added to 752 b. c. complete the period. But period for what? For whom? For a great idea that could not be lost. The conception could not perish if the execution perished. But, next think of the temptation to mythus. And, finally, of God's plan unrealized, His conceptions unanswered. We should remember that by the confusion introduced into the economy of internal Divine operations there is a twofold difficulty placed between the prayer and the attainment of the prayer. 1st, the deflection, slight though it may seem to the man, from the state of perfect simplicity and of natural desire; 2ndly, the deflection of the object desired from the parallelism with the purposes now became necessary to God in order to remedy abnormous shifting of the centre by man. And again, in the question of the language of Scripture, I see the same illustration. Sir William Jones, in a fit of luxurious pleasure-giving, like Gibbons' foolish fit[34] as to the Archbishop of Carthagena, praises the language of Scripture as unattainable. I say, No. This is hypocrisy. It is no dishonour if we say of God that, in the sense meant by Sir William Jones, it is not possible for Him to speak better than powerful writers can speak. They have the same language as their instrument, and as impossible would it be for Apollonius or Sir William Jones to perform a simple process of addition better than an ordinary keeper of a shop. In the schemata, because in the original ideas, God says indeed what man cannot, for these are peculiar to God; but who before myself has shown what they were? As to mere language, however, and its management, we have the same identically. And when a language labours under an infirmity, as all do, not God Himself could surmount it! He is compromised, coerced, by the elements of language; but what of that? It is an element of man's creating. And just as in descending on man by His answers God is defeated or distorted many times by the foul atmosphere in which man has thrown himself, so in descending upon the mind (unless by dreams, or some language that he may have kept pure), God is thwarted and controlled by the imperfections of human language. And, apart from the ideas, I myself could imitate the Scriptural language—I know its secret, its principle of movement which lies chiefly in high abstractions—far better than is done in most parts of the Apocrypha.

The power lies in the spirit—the animating principle; and verily such a power seems to exist. And the fact derived from the holiness, the restraints even upon the Almighty's power through His own holiness, goodness, and wisdom, are so vast that, instead of the unlimited power which hypocritical glorifiers ascribe to Him by way of lip-honour, in reaching man ex-abundantibus in so transcendent a way that mere excess of means would have perplexed a human choice, on the contrary, I am persuaded that besides the gulf of 1,500 years so as to hold on, so as to hold hard, and to effect the translation of His will unaltered, uncorrupted, through the violent assaults of idolatries all round, and the perverse, headstrong weakness of a naturally unbelieving people,[35] down to the time of Christ from the time of Moses—there was the labour hardly to be effected; and why? I have always been astonished at men treating such a case as a simple original problem as to God. But far otherwise. It was a problem secondary to a change effected by man. His rays, His sun, still descended as ever; but when they came near to the foul atmosphere of man, no ray could pierce unstained, unrefracted, or even untwisted. It was distorted so as to make it hardly within the limits of human capacity (observe, the difficulty was in the human power to receive, to sustain, to comprehend—not in the Divine power to radiate, to receive what was directed to it). Often I have reflected on the tremendous gulf of separation placed between man, by his own act, and all the Divine blessings which could visit him. (This is illustrated by prayer; for, while we think it odd that so many prayers of good men for legitimate objects of prayer should seem to be unanswered, we nevertheless act as to our prayers in a kind of unconscious hypocrisy, as though to our sense they had been answered in some ineffable way, and all the while our conduct, to speak strictly, lies outside all this, and remains wholly uninfluenced by it).

These ideas of God have life only by their own inherent power: yet what risk that Jews should lapse into supposing themselves separately a favoured people? By this very error they committed the rebellion against which they had been warned—in believing that they only were concerned in receiving a supernatural aid of redemption: thus silently substituting their own merits for the Divine purposes. All which did in fact happen. But their errors were overruled, else how could the human race be concerned in their offences, errors, or ministries? The Jews forgot what we moderns forget, that they were no separate objects of favour with God, but only a means of favour.

What occasion to 'argal-bargal' about why God did not sooner accomplish the scheme of Christianity? For besides that, 1st, possibly the scheme in its expansion upon earth required a corresponding expansion elsewhere; 2ndly, it is evident even to our human sense that none but the most childish eudamonist, whose notion of happiness is that of lazy luxury, would think of cramming men, bidding them open their mouths, and at once drugging them with a sensual opium (as all blessing must be without previous and commensurate elevation to the level of that blessing); 3rdly, the physical nature of the evil to be undone was such as would not have been (objectively would not have been, but still less could it subjectively have been) for the conception of man that dreadful mystery which it really is, had the awful introversion been measured back by fewer steps; 4thly, and finally, it seems at first sight shocking to say of God that He cannot do this and this, but it is not so. Without adverting to the dark necessities that compass our chaotic sense when we ascend by continual abstraction to the absolute, without entangling ourselves vainly in those wildernesses that no created intellect can range or measure—even one sole attribute of God, His holiness, makes it as impossible for Him to proceed except by certain steps as it would be impossible for a man, though a free agent, and apparently master, as he feels and thinks, of his own life, to cut his throat while in a state of pleasurable health both of mind and body.

5.—Political, etc.

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Sir Robert Walpole, as to patriots, was like a man who has originally, from his nursery up, been thoroughly imbued with the terror of ghosts, which by education and example afterwards he has been encouraged to deny. Half he does disbelieve, and, under encouraging circumstances, he does disbelieve it stoutly. But at every fresh plausible alarm his early faith intrudes with bitter hatred against a class of appearances that, after all, he is upon system pledged to hold false. Nothing can be more ludicrous than his outcry, and his lashing of his own tail to excite his courage and his wrath and his denial—than his challenge of the lurking patriots in what he conceives the matter of frauds on the revenue. He assaults them as if he saw them standing in a row behind the door, and yet he pummels them for being mere men of the shades—horrible mockeries. Had there been any truth in their existence, surely, so strongly as they muster by their own report, some one or other of this fact should have given me warning—should have exposed the frauds. But no, all are silent as the grave. But here Sir Robert Walpole is as much wrong as if, doubting the value or power of Methodist preachers, he should make it the test of their useful existence that, as often as a highwayman, a footpad, started out of the wayside, from the other side should start a Methodist preacher to reason with him and to convert him.

Are the Whigs less aristocratic than the Tories? Not at all. In tendency by principle they are the same. The real difference is not in the creed, in the groundwork, but in certain points of practice and method.

'He took his stand upon the truth'—said by me of Sir Robert Peel—might seem to argue a lower use of 'the truth,' but in fact it is as happens to the article the itself: you say the guard, speaking of a coach; the key, speaking of a trunk or watch, i.e., the as by usage appropriated to every coach, watch, trunk. So here the truth, namely, of the particular perplexity.

The Sepoy mutiny will be best understood if you suppose the Roman emperors, from Romulus to Augustus, from the Alban Fathers down to the Ostrogoths—the whole line of a thousand years crowded into two.

Trunkmakers may be great men: they clearly have the upper hand of authors whom all the world admits to be great men. For the trunkmaker is the principal in the concern—he makes the trunk, whereas the author, quite a secondary artist, furnishes only the linings.

Case of Casuistry.—Wraxall justly notices that errors like Prince Rupert's from excess of courage, however ruinous, are never resented by a country. Ergo the inference that prudence would be, always if in Byng's or Lord St. German's cases, in a matter of doubt held to be bold fighting; and yet in morals is that an allowable position?

6.—Personal Confessions, etc.

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Avaunt, ye hypocrites! who make a whining pretence, according to a fixed rule, of verbally uttering thanks to God for every chastisement, and who say this is good for you. So do not I, being upright, and God seeing my heart, who also sees that I murmur not; but if it were not good in the end, yet I submit. He is not offended that with upright sincerity I give no thanks for it. And I say that, unless a man perceives the particular way in which it has been good for him, he cannot sincerely, truly, or so as not to mock God with his lips, give thanks simply on an à priori principle, though, of course, he may submit in humbleness.

I do not believe that the faith of any man in the apparent fact that he will never again see such a person (i.e., by being removed by death) is real. I believe that the degree of faith in this respect is regulated by an original setting or fixing of our nature quite unconscious to ourselves. So, again, I believe that hope is never utterly withdrawn, despair is never absolute. And again, I believe that, at the lowest nadir, the resource of dying as a means of escape and translation to new chances and openings is lodged in every man far down below the sunlights of consciousness. He feels that his death is not final; were it otherwise he could not rush at the escape so lightly. Indeed, were his fate fixed immutably, I feel that it would not have been left possible for him to commit suicide.

Justice.—You say in the usual spirit of vanity, Y or X has the same degree of the spirit of justice as V. This is easily said, but the test is, what will he do for it? Suppose a man to propose rewards exclusively to those who assisted at a fire, then X and Y, suppose, have equally seen that many did not assist, even refused to do so. But X perhaps will shrink from exposing them; V will encounter any hatred for truth and justice by exposing the undeserving.

It is a foolish thing to say 'Hard words break no bones.' How impossible to call up from the depths of forgotten times all the unjust or shocking insinuations, all the scornful refusals to understand one aright, etc. But surely an injury is nothing to them; for that may be measured, made sensible, and cannot be forgotten, whereas the other case is like the dispute, 'Is he wrong as a poet?' compared with this, 'Is he wrong as a geometrician?' There need be no anger with the latter dispute; it is capable of decision.

Then, again, a heart so lacerated is required by Christianity to forgive the lacerator. Hard it is to do, and imperfectly it is ever done, except through the unbuckling of human nature under higher inspirations working together with time.

Instead of being any compliment it is the most profound insult, the idea one can write something rapidly. It is no homage to the writer; it is villainous insensibility to the written.

Two subjects of stories occur to me. 1. For my Arabian tales, founded on the story of the Minyas Treasure-House at Orchomenus. 2. Another of an abbess, who was such by dispensation, but had been married; her accomplished son succeeds in carrying off a nun. She labours for the discovery and punishment of the unknown criminal, till she learns who he is; then parting from him for ever in the early dawn, she, sacrificing to a love that for her was to produce only hatred and the total destruction of the total hopes of her ageing life. Splendide Mendax! and the more angel she.

I find the double effect as the reason of my now reading again with profit every book, however often read in earlier times, that by and through my greater knowledge and the more numerous questions growing out of that knowledge, I have deeper interest, and by and through this deeper interest I have a value put upon those questions, and I have other questions supervening through the interest alone. The interest is incarnated in the wider knowledge; the knowledge is incarnated in the interest, or at least the curiosity and questions.

Upon trying to imprint upon my memory that at such a period the Argives ceased to be called Pelasgi, and were henceforward called Danai, I felt how impracticable (and doubtless in their degree injurious, for though an infinitesimal injury only as regards any single act doubtless, yet, per se, by tendency doubtless all blank efforts of the memory unsupported by the understanding are bad), must be any violent efforts of the memory not falling in with a previous preparedness.

Music.—I am satisfied that music involves a far greater mystery than we are aware of. It is that universal language which binds together all creatures, and binds them by a profounder part of their nature than anything merely intellectual ever could.

It is remarkable (as proving to me the delibility of caste) that the Sudras of Central India, during its vast confusions under the Mahrattas have endeavoured to pass themselves for descendants of the Kshatriyas (or warrior caste) by assuming the sacred thread, also assumed by the Rajpoots, and also by some of the Sikhs.

I never see a vast crowd of faces—at theatres, races, reviews—but one thing makes them sublime to me: the fact that all these people have to die. Strange it is that this multitude of people, so many of them intellectually, but also (which is worse) morally, blind, are without forethought or sense of the realities of life.

Though I love fun, eternal jesting, buffoonery, punning absolutely kills me. Such things derive all their value from being made to intervene well with other things.

This is curious:

This offends nobody, not till you say, 'I'll buy a rope.' But now:

though the same essentially, this shocks all men.

I have in the course of my misfortunes fasted for thirty years: a dreadful fate, if it had been to come. But, being past, it is lawful to regard it with satisfaction, as having, like all fasting and mortification, sharpened to an excruciating degree my intellectual faculties. Hence my love and even furor now for mathematics, from which in my youth I fled.

The Arrow Ketch, six guns, is recorded in the Edinburgh Advertiser for June 14th, 1844, as having returned home (to Portsmouth) on Thursday, June 7th, 'after six years and upwards in commission,' most of it surveying the Falkland Islands; 'has lost only two men during this long service, and those from natural causes;' 'never lost a spar, and has ploughed the ocean for upwards of 100,000 miles.'

Anecdotes from Edinburgh Advertiser, for June and May. The dog of a boy that died paralytic from grief. Little child run over by railway waggon and horse, clapping its hands when the shadow passed away, leaving it unhurt. Little girl of six committing suicide from fear of a stepmother's wrath.

To note the dire reactions (?) of evils: young thieves growing to old ones, no sewers, damp, famine-engendering, desolating and wasting plagues or typhus fever, want of granaries or mendacious violence destroying food, civil feuds coming round in internecine wars, and general desolations, and, as in Persia, eight millions occupying the homesteads of three hundred millions. Here, if anywhere, is seen the almighty reactions through which the cycle of human life, oscillating, moves.

In the speech of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh (reported on June 14th, 1844), it is recited that boys 'left to stroll about the streets and closes,' acquire habits so fixed, if not of vice, at least of idleness, that in consequence of their not being trained to some kind of discipline in their early years, the habit of vagabondizing acquires such power that it is uncontrollable. And how apt and forcible was that quotation in the place assigned it: 'If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not, doth not He that pondereth the heart, consider it?'—consider it, regard it, make account of it.

Manners.—The making game of a servant before company—a thing impossible to well-bred people. Now observe how this is illustrative of H—— Street.

I confess myself wholly at a loss to comprehend the objections of the Westminster reviewer and even of my friend Dr. Nichol, to my commentary on the strange appearance in Orion. The reviewer says that this appearance (on which he seems to find my language incomprehensible) had been dispersed by Lord Rosse's telescope. True, or at least so I hear. But for all this, it was originally created by that telescope. It was in the interval between the first report and the subsequent reports from Lord Rosse's telescope that I made my commentary. But in the case of contradiction between two reports, more accurate report I have not. As regards the reviewer, there had been no time for this, because the book, which he reviews, is a simple reprint in America, which he knows I had had no opportunity of revising. But Dr. Nichol perplexes me. That a new stage of progress had altered the appearances, as doubtless further stages will alter them, concerns me nothing, though referring to a coming republication; for both alike apparently misunderstood the case as though it required a real phenomenon for its basis. To understand the matter as it really is, I beg to state this case. Wordsworth in at least four different places (one being in the fourth book of 'The Excursion,' three others in Sonnets) describes most impressive appearances amongst the clouds: a monster, for instance, with a bell-hanging air, a dragon agape to swallow a golden spear, and various others of affecting beauty. Would it have been any just rebuke to Wordsworth if some friend had written to him: 'I regret most sincerely to say that the dragon and the golden spear had all vanished before nine o'clock'? So, again, of Hawthorne's face on a rock. The very beauty of such appearances is in part their evanescence.

To be or not to be. 'Not to be, by G——' said Garrick. This is to be cited in relation to Pope's—

Political Economy.—Which of these two courses shall I take? 1. Shall I revise, extend, condense my logic of Political Economy, embodying every doctrine (and numbering them) which I have amended or re-positioned, and introduce them thus in a letter to the Politico-Economical Society: 'Gentlemen, certain ideas fundamental to Political Economy I presented in a book in the endeavour to effect a certain purpose. These were too much intermingled with less elementary ideas in consequence of my defective self-command from a dreadful nervous idea, and thus by interweaving they were overlapped and lost. But I am not disposed to submit to that wrong. I affirm steadily that the foundations of Political Economy are rotten and crazy. I defy, and taking up my stand as a scholar of Aristotle, I defy all men to gainsay the following exposures of folly, one or any of them. And when I show the darkness all round the very base of the hill, all readers may judge how great is that darkness.' Or, 2. Shall I introduce them as a chapter in my Logic?

7.—Pagan Literature.

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We must never forget, that it is not impar merely, but also dispar. And such is its value in this light, that I protest five hundred kings' ransoms, nay, any sum conceivable as a common contribution from all nations would not be too much for the infinite treasure of the Greek tragic drama alone. Is it superior to our own? No, nor (so far as capable of collation) not by many degrees approaching to it. And were the case, therefore, one merely of degrees, there would be no room for the pleasure I express. But it shows us the ultimatum of the human mind mutilated and castrated of its infinities, and (what is worse) of its moral infinities.

You must imagine not only everything which there is dreadful in fact, but everything which there is mysterious to the imagination in the pariah condition, before you can approach the Heracleidæ. Yet, even with this pariah, how poorly do most men conceive it as nothing more than a civil, a police, an economic affair!

Valckenaer, an admirable Greek scholar, was not a man of fine understanding; nor, to say the truth, was Porson. Indeed, it is remarkable how mean, vulgar, and uncapacious has been the range of intellect in many first-rate Grecians; though, on the other hand, the reader would deeply deceive himself if he should imagine that Greek is an attainment other than difficult, laborious, and requiring exemplary talents. Greek taken singly is, to use an indispensable Latin word, instar, the knowledge of all other languages. But men of the highest talents have often beggarly understandings. Hence, in the case of Valckenaer, we must derive the contradictions in his diatribe. He practises this intolerable artifice; he calls himself φιλενριπιδειος; bespeaks an unfair confidence from the reader; he takes credit for being once disposed to favour and indulge Euripides. In this way he accredits to the careless reader all the false charges or baseless concessions which he makes on any question between Euripides and his rivals. Such men as Valckenaer it is who are biased and inflected beforehand, without perceiving it, by all the commonplaces of criticism. These, it is true, do not arise out of mere shadows. Usually they have a foundation in some fact or modification. What they fail in is, in the just interpretation of these truths, and in the reading of their higher relations. 'The Correggiosity of Correggio' was precisely meant for Valckenaer. The Sophocleity of Sophocles he is keen to recognise, and the superiority of Sophocles as an artist is undeniable; nor is it an advantage difficult to detect. On the other hand, to be more Homeric than Homer is no praise for a tragic poet. It is far more just, pertinent praise, it is a ground of far more interesting praise, that Euripides is granted by his undervalues to be the most tragic (τραγιχοτατος) of tragic poets. After that he can afford to let Sophocles be 'Ὁμεριχωτος, who, after all, is not 'Ὁμεριχωτυτος, so long as Æschylus survives. But even so far we are valuing Euripides as a poet. In another character, as a philosopher, as a large capacious thinker, as a master of pensive and sorrow-tainted wisdom, as a large reviewer of human life, he is as much beyond all rivalship from his scenic brethren as he is below one of them as a scenic artist.

Is the Nile ancient? So is Homer. Is the Nile remote and hiding its head in fable? So is Homer. Is the Nile the diffusive benefactor of the world? So is Homer.[36]

The Æneid.—It is not any supposed excellence that has embalmed this poem; but the enshrining of the differential Roman principle (the grand aspiring character of resolution), all referred to the central principle of the aggrandizement of Rome.

The sublime of wrath is nowhere exhibited so well as in Juvenal. Yet in Juvenal pretty glimpses of rural rest—

That is pretty! There is another which comes to my mind and suggests his rising up and laying aside, etc., and shows it to be an occasional act, and, ergo, his garden is but a relaxation, amusement.

Glances which the haughty eyes of Rome threw sometimes gently and relentingly aside on man or woman, children or the flowers.

Herodotus is as sceptical as Plutarch is credulous. How often is now and at this time applied to the fictitious present of the author, whilst a man arguing generally beforehand would say that surely a man could always distinguish between now and then.

8.—Historical, etc.

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Growth of the House of Commons.—The House of Commons was the power of the purse, and what gave its emphasis to that power? Simply the growing necessity of standing forces, and the growing increase of war, so that now out of twenty millions, fifteen are applied to army and navy.

One great evil, as in practice it had begun to show itself, pressed with equal injustice on the party who suffered from it (viz., the nation), and the party who seemed to reap its benefit. This was the fact that as yet no separation had taken place between the royal peculiar revenue, and that of the nation. The advance of the nation was now (1603, 1st of James I.) approaching to the point which made the evil oppression, and yet had not absolutely reached the point at which it could be undeniably perceived. Much contest and debate divided the stage of incipient evil from the stage of confessed grievance. In spending £100,000 upon a single fête, James I. might reasonably allege that he misapplied, at any rate, his own funds. Wise or not, the act concerned his own private household. Yet, on the other hand, in the case of money really public, the confusion of the two expenditures invited and veiled the transfer of much from national objects that could wait, and were, at any rate, hidden from effectual scrutiny to the private objects which tempted the king's profusion. When Mr. Macaulay speaks so often of England sinking under this or that Stuart to a third-rate power, he is anachronizing. There was no scale of powers. Want of roads and intercommunication forbade it. And hence until the Thirty Years' War there was no general war. Austria, as by fiction the Roman Empire, and always standing awfully near to North Italy, had a natural relation and gravitation towards Rome. France, by vainglory and the old literary pretensions of Anjou, had also a balancing claim upon Italy. Milanese formed indeed (as Flanders afterwards) the rendezvous for the two powers. Otherwise, only Austria and Spain (and Spain not till joined to Austria) and France—as great powers that touched each other in many points—had ever formed a warlike trio. No quadrille had existed until the great civil war for life and death between Popery and Protestantism. It was another great evil that the functions towards which, by inevitable instincts and tendency of progress, the House of Commons was continually travelling,—not, I repeat, through any encroaching spirit as the Court and that House of Commons itself partially fancied,—were not yet developed: false laws of men, i.e., laws framed under theories misunderstood of rights and constitutional powers, having as much distorted the true natural play of the organic manifestation and tendency towards a whole, as ever a dress too tight, or a flower-pot too narrow, impeded the development of child or plant. Queen Elizabeth, therefore, always viewed the House of Commons as a disturber of the public peace, as a mutineer and insurrectionist, when any special accident threw it upon its natural function; she spoke of State affairs, and especially of foreign affairs, as beyond their 'capacity,' which expression, however, must in charity be interpreted philosophically as meaning the range of comprehension consistent with their total means of instruction and preparation, including, therefore, secret information, knowledge of disposable home resources as known to the official depositaries of State secrets, etc., and not, as the modern reader will understand it, simply and exclusively the intellectual power of appreciation. Since, with all her disposition to exalt the qualities of princely persons, she could not be so absurdly haughty as to claim for princes and the counsellors whom interest or birth had suggested to them a precedency in pure natural endowments.

Charles was a sincere believer but not an earnest believer of the Roman Catholic faith. James was both sincere and preternaturally earnest.

The Reformation.—This seems to show two things: 1st, that a deep searching and 'sagacious-from-afar' spirit of morality can mould itself under the prompting of Christianity, such as could not have grown up under Paganism. For it was the abominations in point of morality (en fait de moralité?)—indulgences, the confessional, absolution, the prevalence of a mere ritual—the usurpation of forms—these it was which Rome treated violently; and if she draw in her horns for the present, still upon any occasion offering, upon the cloud of peril passing away, clearly she would renew her conduct. It was a tendency violently and inevitably belonging to the Roman polity combined with the Roman interest, unless, perhaps, as permanently controlled by a counter-force. 2ndly, the synthesis of this curative force is by apposition of parts separately hardly conscious of the danger or even of their own act. For we cannot suppose the vast body of opposition put forward was so under direct conscious appreciation of the evil and by an adequate counter-action—doubtless it was by sympathy with others having better information. These last burned more vividly as the evil was fiercer. That more vivid sympathy drew increase of supporters.

Memorandum.—In my historical sketches not to forget the period of woe, anterior to the Siege of Jerusalem, which Josephus describes as occurring in all the Grecian cities, but which is so unaccountably overlooked by historians.

The rule is to speak like the foolish, and think like the wise, and therefore I agree to call our worthy old mother 'little'—our 'little island'—as that seems to be the prevailing notion; otherwise I myself consider Great Britain rather a tall island. A man is not called short because some few of his countrymen happen to be a trifle taller; and really I know but of two islands, among tens of thousands counted up by gazetteers on our planet, that are taller; and I fancy, with such figures as theirs, they are neither of them likely to think of any rivalship with our dear old mother. What island, for instance, would choose to be such a great fat beast as Borneo, as broad as she is long, with no apology for a waist? Talk of lacing too tight, indeed! I'm sure Borneo does not injure herself in that way. Now our mother, though she's old, and has gone through a world of trouble in her time, is as jimp about the waist as a young lass of seventeen. Look at her on any map of Europe, and she's quite a picture. It's an old remark that the general outline of the dear creature exactly resembles a lady sitting. She turns her back upon the Continent, no doubt, and that's what makes those foreigneering rascals talk so much of her pride. But she must turn her back upon somebody, and who is it that should have the benefit of her countenance, if not those people in the far West that are come of her own blood? They say she's 'tetchy' also. Well, then, if she is, you let her alone, good people of the Continent. She'll not meddle with you if you don't meddle with her. She's kind enough, and, as to her person, I do maintain that she's quite tall enough, rather thin, it's true, but, on the whole, a bonny, elegant, dear old fighting mamma.

Mora Alexandrina.—Note on Middleton's affected sneer. A villa of Cicero's, where probably the usual sound heard would be the groans of tormented slaves, had been changed for the cells of Christian monks. Now mark: what the hound Middleton means is, how shocking to literary sensibilities that where an elegant master of Latinity had lived, there should succeed dull, lazy monks, writing (if they wrote at all) in a barbarous style, and dreaming away their lives in torpor. Now permit me to pause a little. This is one of those sneers which Paley[38] and Bishop Butler[39] think so unanswerable, that we must necessarily lie down and let the sneer ride rough-shod over us all. Let us see, and for this reason, reader, do not grudge a little delay, especially as you may 'skip' it.

Dr. Conyers ought to have remembered, in the first place, that the villa could not long remain in the hands of Cicero. Another owner would succeed, and then the chances would be that the sounds oftenest ascending in the hour of sunset or in the cool of the dawn would be the shrieks of slaves under torture. By their own poor miserable fare contrasted with the splendour reeking around them, these slaves had a motive, such as our tenderly-treated (often pampered) servants can never know the strength of, for breaking the seal of any wine cask. From the anecdote told of his own mother by the wretched Quintus Cicero, the foul brother of Marcus, it appears that generally there was some encouragement to do this, on the chance of 'working down' on the master that the violated seal had been amongst the casks legitimately opened. For it seems that old Mrs. Cicero's housewifely plan was to seal up all alike, empty and not empty. Consequently with her no such excuse could avail. Which proves that often it did avail, since her stratagem is mentioned as a very notable artifice. What follows? Why, that the slave was doubly tempted: 1st, by the luxury he witnessed; 2ndly, by the impunity on which he might calculate. Often he escaped by sheer weight of metal in lying. Like Chaucer's miller, he swore, when charged with stealing flour, that it was not so. But this very prospect and likelihood of escape was often the very snare for tempting to excesses too flagrant or where secret marks had been fixed. Besides, many other openings there were, according to the individual circumstances, but this was a standing one, for tempting the poor unprincipled slave into trespass that irritated either the master or the mistress. And then came those periodical lacerations and ascending groans which Seneca mentions as the best means of telling what o'clock it was in various households, since the punishments were going on just at that hour.

After, when the gracious revolution of Christianity had taught us, and by a memento so solemn and imperishable, no longer to pursue our human wrath, that hour of vesper sanctity had come, which, by the tendency of the Christian law and according to the degree in which it is observed, is for us a type and a symbol and a hieroglyphic of wrath extinguished, of self-conquest, of charity in heaven and on earth.

Now, the monks, it is supposable, might be commonplace drones. Often, however, they would be far other, transmitters by their copying toils of those very Ciceronian works which, but for them, would have perished. And pausing duly here, what sense, what propriety would there be in calling on the reader to notice with a shock the profanation of classical ground in such an example as this: 'Mark the strange revolutions of ages; there, where once the divine Plato's Academus stood, now rises a huge printing-house chiefly occupied for the last two years in reprinting Plato's works.' Why, really Plato himself would look graciously on that revolution, Master Conyers. But next, the dullest of these monks would hear the Gloria in Excelsis.

Oh, how pitiful it is to hear B—— alleging against Mahomet that he had done no public miracles. What? Would it, then, alter your opinion of Mahomet if he had done miracles? What a proof, how full, how perfect! That Christianity, in spirit, in power, in simplicity, and in truth, had no more hold over B—— than it had over any Pagan Pontiff in Rome, is clear to me from that. So, then, the argument against Mahomet is not that he wants utterly the meekness—wants? wants? No, that he utterly hates the humility, the love that is stronger than the grave, the purity that cannot be imagined, the holiness as an ideal for man that cannot be approached, the peace that passeth all understanding, that power which out of a little cloud no bigger than a man's hand grows for ever and ever until it will absorb the world and all that it inherit, that first of all created the terror of death and the wormy grave; but that first and last she might triumph over time—not these, it seems by B——, are the arguments against Mahomet, but that he did not play legerdemain tricks, that he did not turn a cow into a horse!

In which position B—— is precisely on a level with those Arab Sheikhs, or perhaps Mamelukes, whom Napoleon so foolishly endeavoured to surprise by Chinese tricks: 'Aye, all this is very well, but can you make one to be in Cairo and in Damascus at the same moment?' demanded the poor brutalized wretches. And so also for B—— it is nothing. Oh, blind of heart not to perceive that the defect was entirely owing to the age. Mahomet came to a most sceptical region. There was no semblance or shadow among the Arabs of that childish credulity which forms the atmosphere for miracle. On the contrary, they were a hard, fierce people, and in that sense barbarous; but otherwise they were sceptical, as is most evident from all that they accomplished, which followed the foundation of Islamism. Here lies the delusion upon that point. The Arabs were evidently like all the surrounding nations. They were also much distinguished among all Oriental peoples for courage. This fact has been put on record in (1) the East Indies, where all the Arab troops have proved themselves by far more formidable than twelve times the number of effeminate Bengalese and Mahrattas, etc. (2) At Aden, where as rude fighters without the science of war they have been most ugly customers. (3) In Algeria, where the French, with all advantage of discipline, science, artillery, have found it a most trying and exhausting war. Well, as they are now, so they were before Mahomet, and just then they were ripe for conquest. But they wanted a combining motive and a justifying motive. Mahomet supplied both these. Says he, 'All nations are idolaters; go and thrust them into the mill that they may be transformed to our likeness.'

Consequently, the great idea of the truth, of a truth transcending all available rights on the other side, was foreign to Mahometanism, and any glimmering of this that may seem to be found in it was borrowed, was filched from Christianity.

9.—Literary.

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The three greatest powers which we know of in moulding human feelings are, first, Christianity; secondly, the actions of men emblazoned by history; and, in the third place, poetry. If the first were represented to the imagination by the atmospheric air investing our planet, which we take to be the most awful laboratory of powers—mysterious, unseen, and absolutely infinite—the second might be represented by the winds, and the third by lightning. Napoleon and Lord Byron have done more mischief to the moral feelings, to the truth of all moral estimates, to the grandeur and magnanimity of man, in this present generation, than all other causes acting together. But how? Simply by throwing human feelings into false combinations. Both of them linked the mean to the grand, the base to the noble, in a way which often proves fatally inextricable to the poor infirm mind of the ordinary spectator. Here is Napoleon, simply because he wields a vast national machinery, throwing a magic of celerity and power into a particular action which absolutely overpowers the genus attonitorum, so that they are reconciled by the dazzle of a splendour not at all in Napoleon, to a baseness which really is in Napoleon. The man that never praised an enemy is shown to this vile mob by the light thrown off from the radiant power of France as the greatest of men; he is confounded with his supporting element, even as the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias, that never spared a woman in his lust, seemed the holiest of deities when his rottenness was concealed by ivory and gold, and his libidinous head was lighted up by sunbeams from above. Here is Lord Byron connecting, in the portrait of some poor melodramatic hero possibly, some noble quality of courage or perseverance with scorn the most puerile and senseless. Prone enough is poor degraded human nature to find something grand in scorn; but, after this arbitrary combination of Lord Byron's, never again does the poor man think of scorn but it suggests to him moral greatness, nor think of greatness but it suggests scorn as its indispensable condition.

Wordsworth is always recording phenomena as they are enjoyed; Coleridge as they reconcile themselves with opposing or conflicting phenomena.

W. W.'s social philosophy is surely shallow. It is true the man who has a shallow philosophy under the guidance of Christianity has a profound philosophy. But this apart, such truths as 'He who made the creature will allow for his frailties,' etc., are commonplace.

Invention as a Characteristic of Poets.—I happened this evening (Saturday, August 3rd, '44) to be saying of W. W. to myself: 'No poet is so free from all cases like this, viz., where all the feelings and spontaneous thoughts which they have accumulated coming to an end, and yet the case seeming to require more to finish it, or bring it round, like a peal of church bells, they are forced to invent, and form descants on raptures never really felt. Suddenly this suggested that invention, therefore, so far from being a differential quality of poetry, was, in fact, the polar opposite, spontaneousness being the true quality.

Tragedy.—I believe it is a very useful thing to let young persons cultivate their kind feelings by repeated indulgences. Thus my children often asked when anything was to be paid or given to any person, that they might have the satisfaction of giving it. So I see clearly that young boys or girls allowed to carry abroad their infant brothers and sisters, when the little creature feels and manifests a real dependence upon them in every act and movement, which matre præsente they would not have done, which again seen and felt calls out every latent goodness of the elder child's heart. So again (here I have clipped out the case). However, feeding rabbits, but above all the action upon women's hearts in the enormous expansion given by the relation to their own children, develops a feeling of tenderness that afterwards sets the model for the world, and would die away, or freeze, or degenerate, if it were generally balked. Now just such an action has tragedy, and if the sympathy with calamities caused to noble natures by ignobler, or by dark fates, were never opened or moved or called out, it would slumber inertly, it would rust, and become far less ready to respond upon any call being made. Such sensibilities are not consciously known to the possessor until developed.

Punctuation.—Suppose an ordinary case where the involution of clauses went three deep, and that each was equally marked off by commas, now I say that so far from aiding the logic it would require an immense effort to distribute the relations of logic. But the very purpose and use of points is to aid the logic. If indeed you could see the points at all in this relation

then indeed all would be clear, but the six commas will and must be viewed by every reader unversed in the logical mechanism of sentences as merely a succession of ictuses, so many minute-guns having no internal system of correspondence, but merely repeating and reiterating each other, exactly as in men, guns, horses, timbrels, baggage-waggons, standards.

Sheridan's Disputatiousness.—I never heard of any case in the whole course of my life where disputatiousness was the author of any benefit to man or beast, excepting always one, in which it became a storm anchor for poor Sheridan, saving him from sudden shipwreck. This may be found in Mr. Moore's life, somewhere about the date of 1790, and in chapter xiii. The book is thirty-seven miles off, which is too far to send for water, or for scandal, or even for 'extract,' though I'm 'fond of extract.' Therefore, in default of Mr. Moore's version, I give my own. The situation was this: Sheridan had been cruising from breakfast to dinner amongst Jews, Christians, and players (men, women, and Herveys),[40] and constantly in the same hackney coach, so that the freight at last settled like the sand-heap of an hour-glass into a frightful record of costly moments. Pereunt et imputantur, say some impertinent time-pieces, in speaking of the hours. They perish and are debited to our account. Yes, and what made it worse, the creditor was an inexorable old Jarvie, who, though himself a creditor, had never heard the idea of credit. A guinea might be owing, and Sheridan, seldom remembering his purse, had but a shilling, which even in a court of Irish law seemed too small a compromise to offer. Black looked the horizon, stormy the offing, and night was coming on, whilst the port of consignment was now within thirty minutes' sail. Suddenly a sight of joy was described. Driving before the wind, on bare poles, was a well-known friend of Sheridan's, Richardson, famed for various talent, but also for an invincible headlong necessity of disputing. To pull the check-string, to take his friend on board, and to rush into fierce polemic conversation was the work of a moment for Sheridan. He well understood with this familiar friend how to bring on a hot dispute. In three minutes it raged, yard-arm to yard-arm. Both grew warm. Sheridan grew purple with rage. Violently interrupting Richardson, he said: 'And these are your real sentiments?' Richardson with solemnity and artificial restraint replied: 'Most solemnly they are.' 'And you stand to them, and will maintain them?' 'I will,' said Richardson, with menacing solemnity and even mournfulness. 'I will to my dying day.' 'Then,' said Sheridan furiously, 'I'm hanged if I'll stay another minute with a man capable of such abominable opinions!' Bang went the door, out he bounced, and Richardson, keeping his seat, pursued him with triumphant explosions. 'Ah, wretch! what? you can't bear the truth. You're obliged to hate the truth. That is why you cut and run before it. Huzza! Mr. Sheridan, M. P. for Stafford, runs like a hare for fear that he should hear the truth.' Precisely so, the truth it was that he ran from. The truth at this particular moment was too painful to his heart. Sheridan had fled; the awful truth amounted to eighteen shillings.

Yes, virtuous Richardson, you were right; truth it was that he fled from; truth had just then become too painful to his infirm mind, although it was useless to tell him so, as by this time he was out of hearing. 'Yes,' said Richardson meditatively to himself, 'the truth has at last become insupportable to this unhappy man.' Right, it had so. And in one minute more it became insupportable even to the virtuous Richardson, when the coachman revealed the odious extent of the truth, viz., that the fare now amounted to two-and-twenty shillings.

As I hate everything that the people love, and above all the odious levity with which they adopt every groundless anecdote, especially where it happens to be calumnious, I beg not to be supposed a believer in the common stories current about Sheridan's carelessness of pecuniary obligations. So far from 'never paying,' which is what public slander has not ceased to report of him, he was (in Mr. Moore's language) 'always paying;' and for once that he paid too little, a thousand times he paid a great deal too much. Had, indeed, all his excesses of payment been gathered into one fund, that fund would have covered his deficits ten times over. It is, however, true that, whilst he was continually paying the hundred-pound demands against him, with all their Jewish accumulations of interest, he was continually unfurnished with money for his 'menus plaisirs' and trifling personal expenses.

By strong natural tendency of disposition, Sheridan was a man of peculiarly sensitive honour, and the irregularities into which he fell, more conspicuously after the destruction of Drury Lane by fire, pained nobody so much as himself. It is the sense of this fact, and the belief that Sheridan was never a defaulter through habits of self-indulgence, which call out in my mind a reaction of indignation at the stories current against him.

Bookbinding and Book-Lettering.—Literature is a mean thing enough in the ordinary way of pursuing it as what the Germans call a Brodstudium; but in its higher relations it is so noble that it is able to ennoble other things, supposing them in any degree ministerial to itself. The paper-maker, ergo the rag-maker, ergo the linen cloth-maker, is the true and original creator of the modern press, as the Archbishop of Dublin long ago demonstrated. For the art of printing had never halted for want of the typographic secret; that was always known, known and practised hundreds of years before the Christian era. It halted for want of a material cheap enough and plentiful enough to make types other than a most costly substitute for hand-copying. Do you hear that, gentlemen blockheads, that seldom hear anything but yourselves? Next after the paper-maker, who furnished the sine quâ non, takes rank, not the engraver or illustrator (our modern novelist cannot swim without this caricaturing villain as one of his bladders; all higher forms of literature laugh at him), but the binder; for he, by raising books into ornamental furniture, has given even to non-intellectual people by myriads a motive for encouraging literature and an interest in its extension.

Any specimen of Mr. Ferrar's binding I never saw, but by those who have, it is said to have been magnificent. He and his family were once, if not twice, visited by Charles I., and they presented to that prince a most sumptuous Bible of their own binding; which Bible, a lady once told me, was in that collection gradually formed by George III. at Buckingham House, and finally presented to the nation by his son. I should fear it must be in ruins as a specimen of the Little Gidding workmanship. The man who goes to bed in his coffin dressed in a jewelled robe and a diamond-hilted sword, is very liable to a visit from the resurrection-man, who usually disarms and undresses him. The Bible that has its binding inlaid with gold, sowed with Oriental pearl, and made horrent with rubies, suggests to many a most unscriptural mode of searching into its treasures, and too like the Miltonic Mammon's mode of perusing the gorgeous floors of heaven. Besides that, if the Bible escaped the Parliamentary War, the true art of the Ferrar family would be better displayed in a case of less cost and luxury. Certainly, in no one art was the stupidity of Europe more atrociously recorded than in this particular art practised by the Ferrars. Boundless was the field for improvement. And in particular, I had myself drawn from this art, as practised of old, one striking memorial of that remarkable genius for stupidity, which in all ages alike seems to haunt man as by an inspiration, unless he is roused out of it by panic. It is this. Look at the lettering—that is, the labels lettered with the titles of books—in all libraries that are not of recent date. No man would believe that the very earliest attempt to impress a mark of ownership upon some bucket of the Argonauts, or the rudest scrawl of Polyphemus in forging a tarry brand upon some sheep which he had stolen, could be so bad, so staggering and illegible, as are these literary inscriptions. How much better to have had a thin tablet or veneering of marble or iron adjusted to the back of the book. A stone-cutter in a rural churchyard once told me that he charged a penny per letter. That may be cheap for a gravestone, but it seems rather high for a book. Plato would cost you fivepence, Aristotle would be shocking; and in decency you must put him into Latin, which would add twopence more to every volume. On a library like that of Dresden or the Vatican, it would raise a national debt to letter the books.

Cause of the Novel's Decline.—No man, it may be safely laid down as a general rule, can obtain a strong hold over the popular mind without more or less of real power. A reality there must be. The artifice, the trickery, cannot arise in this first stage, as by any substitution of a shadow for a reality. If the mass of readers feel a power, and acknowledge a power, in that case power there must be. It was the just remark of Dr. Johnson that men do not deceive themselves in their amusements. And amusement it is that the great public seek in literature. The meaner and the more sensual the demands of a man are, so much the less possible it becomes to cheat him. Seeking for warmth, he cannot be wrong when he says that he has found it. Asking for alcohol, he will never be cheated with water. His feelings in such a case, his impressions, instantaneously justify themselves; that is, they bear witness past all doubting to the certainty of what they report. So far there is no opening to mistake. The error, the opening to the spurious on the largest scale, arises first upon the quality of the power. Strength varies upon an endless scale, not merely by its own gradations, but by the modes and the degrees in which it combines with other qualities. And there are many combinations, cases of constant recurrence, in which some natural vigour, but of no remarkable order, enters into alliance with animal propensities; where a portentous success will indicate no corresponding power in the artist, but only an unusual insensibility to decency and the opinion of thoughtful persons.

Novels are the one sole class of books that ever interest the public, that reach its heart, or even catch its eye. And the reason why novels are becoming much more licentious, and much grosser in the arts by which they court public favour, lies undoubtedly in the quality of that new reading public which the extension of education has added to the old one. An education miserably shallow, whilst unavailing for any purpose of real elevation, lets in upon the theatre of what is called by courtesy literature a vast additional audience that once would have been excluded altogether. This audience, changed in no respect from its former condition of intellect and manners and taste, bringing only the single qualification of ability to read, is now strong enough in numbers to impress a new character upon literature in so far as literature has a motive for applying itself to their wants. The consequences are showing themselves, and will show themselves more broadly. It is difficult with proper delicacy to seek illustrations amongst our own living writers. Illustrations were all too easily found did we care to enter on the task.

It is true that, during the currency of any year, whilst the quantity is liable to indeterminate augmentation, ballads will be rather looking down in the market. But that is a shadow which settles upon every earthly good thing. No Greek book, for instance, amongst the many that have perished, would so much rejoice many of us by its resurrection as the comedies of Menander. Yet, if a correspondent should write word from Pompeii that twenty-five thousand separate dramas of Menander had been found in good preservation, adding in a postscript that forty thousand more had been impounded within the last two hours, and that there was every prospect of bagging two hundred thousand more before morning, we should probably petition Government to receive the importing vessels with chain-shot. Not even Milton or Shakespeare could make head against such a Lopez de Vega principle of ruinous superfluity. Allowing for this one case of preternatural excess, assuming only that degree of limitation which any absolute past must almost always create up to that point, we say that there is no conceivable composition, or class of compositions, which will not be welcomed into literature provided, as to matter, that it shall embody some natural strain of feeling, and provided, as to manner, that it illustrate the characteristic style of a known generation.

It might suffice for our present purpose to have once firmly distinguished between the two modes of literature. But it may be as well to point out a few corollaries from this distinction, which will serve at the same time to explain and to confirm it. For instance, first of all, it has been abundantly insisted on in our modern times, that the value of every literature lies in its characteristic part; a truth certainly, but a truth upon which the German chanticleer would not have crowed and flapped his wings so exultingly, had he perceived the original and indispensable schism between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power, because in this latter only can anything characteristic of a man or of a nation be embodied. The science of no man can be characteristic, no man can geometrize or chemically analyze after a manner peculiar to himself. He may be the first to open a new road, and in that meaning it may be called his road; but his it cannot be by any such peculiarities as will found an incommunicable excellence. In literature proper, viz., the literature of power, this is otherwise. There may doubtless have been many imitative poets, wearing little or nothing of a natural individuality; but of no poet, that ever led his own class, can it have been possible that he should have been otherwise than strongly differenced by inimitable features and by traits not transferable. Consequently the τὁ characteristic, of which in German cloudland so noisy a proclamation is made as of some transcendental discovery, is a mere inference from the very idea of a literature. For we repeat that in blank knowledge a separate peculiarity marking the individual is not conceivable, whereas in a true literature reflecting human nature, not as it represents, but as it wills, not as a passive minor, but as a self-moving power, it is not possible to avoid the characteristic except only in the degree by which the inspiring nature happens to be feeble. The exorbitations that differentiate them may be of narrow compass, but only where the motive power was originally weak. And agreeably to this remark it may be asserted that in all literature properly so-called genius, is always manifested, and talent generally; but in the literature of knowledge it may be doubted very seriously whether there is any opening for more than talent. Genius may be defined in the severest manner as that which is generally characteristic; but a thousand times we repeat that one man's mode of knowing an object cannot differ from another man's. It cannot be characteristic, and its geniality cannot be externally manifested. To have said, therefore, of the poetry surviving from ancient Latium, from Castile, from England, that this is nationally characteristic, and knowable apart by inalienable differences, is saying no more than follows out of the very definition by which any and every literature proper is limited and guarded as a mode of power.

Secondly, even in the exceptions and hesitations upon applying the rigour of this distinction, we may read the natural recognition (however latent or unconscious) of the rule itself. No man would think, for example, of placing a treatise on surveying, on mensuration, on geological stratifications, in any collection of his national literature. He would be lunatic to do so. A Birmingham or Glasgow Directory has an equal title to take its station in the national literature. But he will hesitate on the same question arising with regard to a history. Where upon examination the history turns out to be a mere chronicle, or register of events chronologically arranged, with no principle of combination pervading it, nor colouring from peculiar views of policy, nor sympathy with the noble and impassioned in human action, the decision will be universal and peremptory to cashier it from the literature. Yet this case, being one of degree, ranges through a large and doubtful gamut. A history like that of Froissart, or of Herodotus, where the subjective from the writer blends so powerfully with the gross objective, where the moral picturesque is so predominant, together with freshness of sensation which belongs to 'blissful infancy' in human life, or to a stage of society in correspondence to it, cannot suffer a demur of jealousy as to its privilege of entering the select fold of literature. But such advantages are of limited distribution. And, to say the truth, in its own nature neither history nor biography, unless treated with peculiar grace, and architecturally moulded, has any high pretension to rank as an organic limb of literature. The very noblest history, in much of its substance, is but by a special indulgence within the privilege of that classification. Biography stands on the same footing. Of the many memorials dedicated to the life of Milton, how few are entitled to take their station in the literature! And why? Not merely that they are disqualified by their defective execution, but often that they necessarily record what has become common property.