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Title: Literary studies, volume 2 (of 2)
Author: Walter Bagehot
Editor: Richard Holt Hutton
Release date: April 15, 2026 [eBook #78450]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1891
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78450
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY STUDIES, VOLUME 2 (OF 2) ***
LITERARY STUDIES
VOL. II.
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
LITERARY STUDIES
BY THE LATE
WALTER BAGEHOT
M.A. AND FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON
_WITH A PREFATORY MEMOIR_
EDITED BY
RICHARD HOLT HUTTON
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. II.
_FOURTH EDITION_
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16th STREET
1891
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
ESSAY PAGE
I. EDWARD GIBBON (1856) 1
II. BISHOP BUTLER (1854) 54
III. STERNE AND THACKERAY (1864) 106
IV. THE WAVERLEY NOVELS (1858) 146
V. CHARLES DICKENS (1858) 184
VI. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1856) 221
VII. BÉRANGER (1857) 261
VIII. MR. CLOUGH’S POEMS (1862) 299
IX. HENRY CRABB ROBINSON (1869) 323
X. WORDSWORTH, TENNYSON, AND BROWNING; OR, PURE,
ORNATE, AND GROTESQUE ART IN ENGLISH POETRY
(1864) 338
_APPENDIX._
I. THE IGNORANCE OF MAN (1862) 391
II. ON THE EMOTION OF CONVICTION (1871) 412
III. THE METAPHYSICAL BASIS OF TOLERATION (1874) 422
IV. THE PUBLIC WORSHIP REGULATION BILL (1874) 438
LITERARY STUDIES.
_EDWARD GIBBON._[1]
(1856.)
A wit said of Gibbon’s autobiography, that he did not know the difference
between himself and the Roman Empire. He has narrated his ‘progressions
from London to Buriton, and from Buriton to London,’ in the same
monotonous majestic periods that record the fall of states and empires.
The consequence is, that a fascinating book gives but a vague idea of its
subject. It may not be without its use to attempt a description of him in
plainer though less splendid English.
The diligence of their descendant accumulated many particulars of
the remote annals of the Gibbon family; but its real founder was the
grandfather of the historian, who lived in the times of the ‘South Sea.’
He was a capital man of business according to the custom of that age—a
dealer in many kinds of merchandise—like perhaps the ‘complete tradesman’
of Defoe, who was to understand the price and quality of _all_ articles
made within the kingdom. The preference, however, of Edward Gibbon the
grandfather was for the article ‘shares;’ his genius, like that of Mr.
Hudson, had a natural tendency towards a commerce in the metaphysical
and non-existent; and he was fortunate in the age on which his lot was
thrown. It afforded many opportunities of gratifying that taste. Much
has been written on panics and manias—much more than with the most
outstretched intellect we are able to follow or conceive; but one thing
is certain, that at particular times a great many stupid people have a
great deal of stupid money. Saving people have often only the faculty of
saving; they accumulate ably, and contemplate their accumulations with
approbation; but what to do with them they do not know. Aristotle, who
was not in trade, imagined that money is barren; and barren it is to
quiet ladies, rural clergymen, and country misers. Several economists
have plans for preventing improvident speculation; one would abolish
Peel’s act, and substitute one-pound notes; another would retain Peel’s
act, and make the calling for one-pound notes a capital crime: but our
scheme is, not to allow any man to have a hundred pounds who cannot
prove to the satisfaction of the Lord Chancellor that he knows what to
do with a hundred pounds. The want of this easy precaution allows the
accumulation of wealth in the hands of rectors, authors, grandmothers,
who have no knowledge of business, and no idea except that their money
now produces nothing, and ought and must be forced immediately to produce
something. ‘I wish,’ said one of this class, ‘for the largest immediate
income, and I am therefore naturally disposed to purchase an _advowson_.’
At intervals, from causes which are not to the present purpose, the money
of these people—the blind capital (as we call it) of the country—is
particularly large and craving; it seeks for some one to devour it, and
there is ‘plethora’—it finds some one, and there is ‘speculation’—it is
devoured, and there is ‘panic.’ The age of Mr. Gibbon was one of these.
The interest of money was very low, perhaps under three per cent. The
usual consequence followed; able men started wonderful undertakings;
the ablest of all, a company ‘for carrying on an undertaking of great
importance, but no one to know what it was.’ Mr. Gibbon was not idle.
According to the narrative of his grandson, he already filled a
considerable position, was worth sixty thousand pounds, and had great
influence both in Parliament and in the City. He applied himself to
the greatest bubble of all—one so great, that it is spoken of in many
books as the cause and parent of all contemporary bubbles—the South-Sea
Company—the design of which was to reduce the interest on the national
debt, which, oddly enough, it did reduce, and to trade exclusively to
the South Sea or Spanish America, where of course it hardly did trade.
Mr. Gibbon became a director, sold and bought, traded and prospered; and
was considered, perhaps with truth, to have obtained much money. The
bubble was essentially a fashionable one. Public intelligence and the
quickness of communication did not then as now at once spread pecuniary
information and misinformation to secluded districts; but fine ladies,
men of fashion—the London world—ever anxious to make as much of its
money as it can, and then wholly unwise (it is not now very wise) in
discovering how the most _was_ to be made of it—‘went in’ and speculated
largely. As usual, all was favourable so long as the shares were rising;
the price was at one time very high, and the agitation very general; it
was, in a word, the railway mania in the South Sea. After a time, the
shares ‘hesitated,’ declined, and fell; and there was an outcry against
everybody concerned in the matter, very like the outcry against the οἱ
περὶ Hudson in our own time. The results, however, were very different.
Whatever may be said, and, judging from the late experience, a good deal
is likely to be said, as to the advantages of civilisation and education,
it seems certain that they tend to diminish a simple-minded energy. The
Parliament of 1720 did not, like the Parliament of 1847, allow itself
to be bored and incommoded by legal minutiæ, nor did it forego the use
of plain words. A committee reported the discovery of ‘a train of the
deepest villainy and fraud _hell_ ever contrived to ruin a nation;’ the
directors of the company were arrested, and Mr. Gibbon among the rest; he
was compelled to give in a list of his effects: the general wish was that
a retrospective act should be immediately passed, which would impose on
him penalties something like, or even more severe than those now enforced
on Paul and Strahan. In the end, however, Mr. Gibbon escaped with a
parliamentary conversation upon his affairs. His estate amounted to
140,000_l._; and as this was a great sum, there was an obvious suspicion
that he was a great criminal. The scene must have been very curious.
‘Allowances of twenty pounds or one shilling were facetiously voted.
A vague report that a director had formerly been concerned in another
project by which some unknown persons had lost their money, was admitted
as a proof of his actual guilt. One man was ruined because he had dropped
a foolish speech that his horses should feed upon gold; another because
he was grown so proud, that one day, at the Treasury, he had refused a
civil answer to persons far above him.’ The vanity of his descendant
is evidently a little tried by the peculiar severity with which his
grandfather was treated. Out of his 140,000_l._ it was only proposed that
he should retain 15,000_l._; and on an amendment even this was reduced to
10,000_l._ Yet there is some ground for believing that the acute energy
and practised pecuniary power which had been successful in obtaining so
large a fortune, were likewise applied with science to the inferior task
of retaining some of it. The historian indeed says, ‘On these ruins,’ the
10,000_l._ aforesaid, ‘with skill and credit of which parliament had not
been able to deprive him, my grandfather erected the edifice of a new
fortune: the labours of sixteen years were amply rewarded; and I have
reason to believe that the second structure was not much inferior to the
first.’ But this only shows how far a family feeling may bias a sceptical
judgment. The credit of a man in Mr. Gibbon’s position could not be
very lucrative; and his skill must have been enormous to have obtained
so much at the end of his life, in such circumstances, in so few years.
Had he been an early Christian, the narrative of his descendant would
have contained an insidious hint, ‘that pecuniary property _may_ be so
secreted as to defy the awkward approaches of political investigation.’
That he died rich is certain, for two generations lived solely on the
property he bequeathed.
The son of this great speculator, the historian’s father, was a man
to spend a fortune quietly. He is not related to have indulged in any
particular expense, and nothing is more difficult to follow than the
pecuniary fortunes of deceased families; but one thing is certain, that
the property which descended to the historian—making every allowance
for all minor and subsidiary modes of diminution, such as daughters,
settlements, legacies, and so forth—was enormously less than 140,000_l._;
and therefore if those figures are correct, the second generation must
have made itself very happy out of the savings of the past generation,
and without caring for the poverty of the next. Nothing that is related
of the historian’s father indicates a strong judgment or an acute
discrimination; and there are some scarcely dubious signs of a rather
weak character.
Edward Gibbon, the great, was born on the 27th of April 1737. Of his
mother we hear scarcely anything; and what we do hear is not remarkably
favourable. It seems that she was a faint, inoffensive woman, of ordinary
capacity, who left a very slight trace of her influence on the character
of her son, did little and died early. The real mother, as he is careful
to explain, of his understanding and education was her sister, and his
aunt, _Mrs._ Catherine Porten, according to the speech of that age, a
maiden lady of much vigour and capacity, and for whom her pupil really
seems to have felt as much affection as was consistent with a rather easy
and cool nature. There is a panegyric on her in the _Memoirs_; and in
a long letter upon the occasion of her death, he deposes: ‘To her care
I am indebted in earliest infancy for the preservation of my life and
health.... To her instructions I owe the first rudiments of knowledge,
the first exercise of reason, and a taste for books, which is still the
pleasure and glory of my life; and though she taught me neither language
nor science, she was certainly the most useful preceptress I ever had.
As I grew up, an intercourse of thirty years endeared her to me as the
faithful friend and the agreeable companion. You have observed with
what freedom and confidence we lived,’ &c. &c. To a less sentimental
mind, which takes a more tranquil view of aunts and relatives, it is
satisfactory to find that somehow he could not write to her. ‘I wish,’
he continues, ‘I had as much to applaud and as little to reproach in my
conduct to Mrs. Porten since I left England; and when I reflect that my
letter would have soothed and comforted her decline, I feel’—what an
ardent nephew would naturally feel at so unprecedented an event. Leaving
his maturer years out of the question—a possible rhapsody of affectionate
eloquence—she seems to have been of the greatest use to him in infancy.
His health was very imperfect. We hear much of rheumatism, and lameness,
and weakness; and he was unable to join in work and play with ordinary
boys. He was moved from one school to another, never staying anywhere
very long, and owing what knowledge he obtained rather to a strong
retentive understanding than to any external stimulants or instruction.
At one place he gained an acquaintance with the Latin elements at the
price of ‘many tears and some blood.’ At last he was consigned to the
instruction of an elegant clergyman, the Rev. Philip Francis, who had
obtained notoriety by a metrical translation of Horace, the laxity of
which is even yet complained of by construing schoolboys, and who, with
a somewhat Horatian taste, went to London as often as he could, and
translated _invisa negotia_ as ‘boys to beat.’
In school-work, therefore, Gibbon had uncommon difficulties and unusual
deficiencies; but these were much more than counterbalanced by a habit
which often accompanies a sickly childhood, and is the commencement of
a studious life, the habit of desultory reading. The instructiveness of
this is sometimes not comprehended. S. T. Coleridge used to say that
he felt a great superiority over those who had not read—and fondly
read—fairly tales in their childhood; he thought they wanted a sense
which he possessed, the perception, or apperception—we do not know which
he used to say it was—of the unity and wholeness of the universe. As to
fairy tales, this is a hard saying; but as to desultory reading it is
certainly true. Some people have known a time in life when there was no
book they could not read. The fact of its being a book went immensely in
its favour. In early life there is an opinion that the obvious thing to
do with a horse is to ride it; with a cake, to eat it; with sixpence, to
spend it. A few boys carry this further, and think the natural thing to
do with a book is to read it. There is an argument from design in the
subject: if the book was not meant for that purpose, for what purpose
was it meant? Of course, of any understanding of the works so perused
there is no question or idea. There is a legend of Bentham, in his
earliest childhood, climbing to the height of a huge stool and sitting
there evening after evening with two candles engaged in the perusal of
Rapin’s history. It might as well have been any other book. The doctrine
of utility had not then dawned on its immortal teacher; _cui bono_ was an
idea unknown to him. He would have been ready to read about Egypt, about
Spain, about coals in Borneo, the teak-wood in India, the current in the
river Mississipi, on natural history or human history, on theology or
morals, on the state of the dark ages or the state of the light ages,—on
Augustulus or Lord Chatham,—on the first century or the seventeenth,—on
the moon, the millennium, or the whole duty of man. Just then, reading
is an end in itself. At that time of life you no more think of a future
consequence, of the remote, the very remote possibility of deriving
knowledge from the perusal of a book, than you expect so great a result
from spinning a peg-top. You spin the top, and you read the book; and
these scenes of life are exhausted. In such studies, of all prose perhaps
the best is history. One page is so like another; battle No. 1 is so
much on a par with battle No. 2. Truth may be, as they say, stranger
than fiction, abstractedly; but in actual books, novels are certainly
odder and more astounding than correct history. It will be said, what is
the use of this? Why not leave the reading of great books till a great
age? Why plague and perplex childhood with complex facts remote from its
experience and inapprehensible by its imagination? The reply is, that
though in all great and combined facts there is much which childhood
cannot thoroughly imagine, there is also in very many a great deal which
can only be truly apprehended for the first time at that age. Catch an
American of thirty;—tell him about the battle of Marathon; what will he
be able to comprehend of all that you mean by it: of all that halo which
early impression and years of remembrance have cast around it? He may add
up the killed and wounded, estimate the missing, and take the dimensions
of Greece and Athens; but he will not seem to care much. He may say,
‘Well, sir, perhaps it was a smart thing in that small territory; but it
is a long time ago, and in my country James K. Burnup’—did that which he
will at length explain to you. Or try an experiment on yourself. Read the
account of a Circassian victory, equal in numbers, in daring, in romance,
to the old battle. Will you be able to feel about it at all in the same
way? It is impossible. You cannot form a new set of associations; your
mind is involved in pressing facts, your memory choked by a thousand
details; the liveliness of fancy is gone with the childhood by which
it was enlivened. Schamyl will never seem as great as Leonidas, or
Miltiades; Cnokemof, or whoever the Russian is, cannot be so imposing
as Xerxes; the unpronounceable place cannot strike on your heart like
Marathon or Platæa. Moreover, there is the further advantage which
Coleridge shadowed forth in the remark we cited. Youth has a principle of
consolidation. We begin with the whole. Small sciences are the labours
of our manhood; but the round universe is the plaything of the boy. His
fresh mind shoots out vaguely and crudely into the infinite and eternal.
Nothing is hid from the depth of it; there are no boundaries to its vague
and wandering vision. Early science, it has been said, begins in utter
nonsense; it would be truer to say that it starts with boyish fancies.
How absurd seem the notions of the first Greeks! Who could believe now
that air or water was the principle, the pervading substance, the eternal
material of all things? Such affairs will never explain a thick rock.
And what a white original for a green and sky-blue world! Yet people
disputed in those ages not whether it was either of those substances,
but which of them it was. And doubtless there was a great deal, at least
in quantity, to be said on both sides. Boys are improved; but some in
our own day have asked, ‘Mamma, I say, what did God make the world of?’
and several, who did not venture on speech, have had an idea of some
one gray primitive thing, felt a difficulty as to how the red came, and
wondered that marble could _ever_ have been the same as moonshine. This
is in truth the picture of life. We begin with the infinite and eternal,
which we shall never apprehend; and these form a framework, a schedule,
a set of co-ordinates to which we refer all which we learn later. At
first, like the old Greek, ‘we look up to the whole sky, and are lost in
the one and the all;’ in the end we classify and enumerate, learn each
star, calculate distances, draw cramped diagrams on the unbounded sky,
write a paper on α Cygni and a treatise on ε Draconis, map special facts
upon the indefinite void, and engrave precise details on the infinite
and everlasting. So in history; somehow the whole comes in boyhood; the
details later and in manhood. The wonderful series going far back to the
times of old patriarchs with their flocks and herds, the keen-eyed Greek,
the stately Roman, the watching Jew, the uncouth Goth, the horrid Hun,
the settled picture of the unchanging East, the restless shifting of the
rapid West, the rise of the cold and classical civilisation, its fall,
the rough impetuous middle ages, the vague warm picture of ourselves and
home,—when did we learn these? Not yesterday nor to-day; but long ago, in
the first dawn of reason, in the original flow of fancy. What we learn
afterwards are but the accurate littlenesses of the great topic, the
dates and tedious facts. Those who begin late learn only these; but the
happy first feel the mystic associations and the progress of the whole.
There is no better illustration of all this than Gibbon. Few have begun
early with a more desultory reading, and fewer still have described
it so skilfully. ‘From the ancient I leaped to the modern world; many
crude lumps of Speed, Rapin, Mezeray, Davila, Machiavel, Father Paul,
Bower, &c., I devoured like so many novels; and I swallowed with the
same voracious appetite the descriptions of India and China, of Mexico
and Peru. My first introduction to the historic scenes which have since
engaged so many years of my life must be ascribed to an accident. In
the summer of 1751 I accompanied my father on a visit to Mr. Hoare’s,
in Wiltshire; but I was less delighted with the beauties of Stourhead
than with discovering in the library a common book, the _Continuation
of Echard’s Roman History_, which is indeed executed with more skill
and taste than the previous work. To me the reigns of the successors
of Constantine were absolutely new; and I was immersed in the passage
of the Goths over the Danube when the summons of the dinner-bell
reluctantly dragged me from my intellectual feast. This transient
glance served rather to irritate than to appease my curiosity; and as
soon as I returned to Bath I procured the second and third volumes of
Howel’s _History of the World_, which exhibit the Byzantine period on
a larger scale. Mahomet and his Saracens soon fixed my attention; and
some instinct of criticism directed me to the genuine sources. Simon
Ockley, an original in every sense, first opened my eyes; and I was led
from one book to another till I had ranged round the circle of Oriental
history. Before I was sixteen I had exhausted all that could be learned
in English of the Arabs and Persians, the Tartars and Turks; and the same
ardour urged me to guess at the French of d’Herbelot, and to construe the
barbarous Latin of Pocock’s _Abulfaragius_.’ To this day the schoolboy
student of the Decline and Fall feels the traces of that schoolboy
reading. _Once_, he is conscious, the author like him felt, and solely
felt, the magnificent progress of the great story and the scenic aspect
of marvellous events.
A more sudden effect was at hand. However exalted may seem the praises
which we have given to loose and unplanned reading, we are not saying
that it is the sole ingredient of a good education. Besides this sort
of education, which some boys will voluntarily and naturally give
themselves, there needs, of course, another and more rigorous kind,
which must be impressed upon them from without. The terrible difficulty
of early life—the _use_ of pastors and masters—really is, that they
compel boys to a distinct mastery of that which they do not wish to
learn. There is nothing to be said for a preceptor who is not dry. Mr.
Carlyle describes with bitter satire the fate of one of his heroes who
was obliged to acquire whole systems of information in which he, the
hero, saw no use, and which he kept as far as might be in a vacant
corner of his mind. And this is the very point—dry language, tedious
mathematics, a thumbed grammar, a detested slate, form gradually an
interior separate intellect, exact in its information, rigid in its
requirements, disciplined in its exercises. The two grow together,
the early natural fancy touching the far extremities of the universe,
lightly playing with the scheme of all things; the precise, compacted
memory slowly accumulating special facts, exact habits, clear and painful
conceptions. At last, as it were in a moment, the cloud breaks up, the
division sweeps away; we find that in fact these exercises which puzzled
us, these languages which we hated, these details which we despised, are
the instruments of true thought, are the very keys and openings, the
exclusive access to the knowledge which we loved.
In this second education the childhood of Gibbon had been very defective.
He had never been placed under any rigid training. In his first boyhood
he disputed with his aunt, ‘that were I master of Greek and Latin, I must
interpret to myself in English the thoughts of the original, and that
such extemporary versions must be inferior to the elaborate translation
of professed scholars: a silly sophism,’ as he remarks, ‘which could not
easily be confuted by a person ignorant of any other language than her
own.’ Ill-health, a not very wise father, an ill-chosen succession of
schools and pedagogues, prevented his acquiring exact knowledge in the
regular subjects of study. His own description is the best—‘erudition
that might have puzzled a doctor, and ignorance of which a schoolboy
should have been ashamed.’ The amiable Mr. Francis, who was to have
repaired the deficiency, went to London, and forgot him. With an impulse
of discontent his father took a resolution, and sent him to Oxford at
sixteen.
It is probable that a worse place could not have been found. The
University of Oxford was at the nadir of her history and efficiency.
The public professorial training of the middle ages had died away, and
the intramural collegiate system of the present time had not begun. The
University had ceased to be a teaching body, and had not yet become an
examining body. ‘The professors,’ says Adam Smith, who had studied there,
‘have given up almost the pretence of lecturing.’ ‘The examination,’
said a great judge some years later, ‘was a farce in my time. I was
asked who founded University College; and I said, though the fact is now
doubted, that King Alfred founded it; and _that_ was the examination.’
The colleges, deprived of the superintendence and watchfulness of their
natural sovereign, fell, as Gibbon remarks, into ‘port and prejudice.’
The Fellows were a close corporation; they were chosen from every
conceivable motive—because they were respectable men, because they were
good fellows, because they were brothers of other Fellows, because their
fathers had patronage in the Church. Men so appointed could not be
expected to be very diligent in the instruction of youth; many colleges
did not even profess it; that of All Souls has continued down to our own
time to deny that it has anything to do with it. Undoubtedly a person
who came thither accurately and rigidly drilled in technical scholarship
found many means and a few motives to pursue it. Some tutorial system
probably existed at most colleges. Learning was not wholly useless in
the Church. The English gentleman has ever loved a nice and classical
scholarship. But these advantages were open only to persons who had
received a very strict training, and who were voluntarily disposed to
discipline themselves still more. To the mass of mankind the University
was a ‘graduating machine;’ the colleges, monopolist residences,—hotels
without bells.
Taking the place as it stood, the lot of Gibbon may be thought rather
fortunate. He was placed at Magdalen, whose fascinating walks, so
beautiful in the later autumn, still recall the name of Addison, the
example of the merits, as Gibbon is of the deficiencies, of Oxford. His
first tutor was, in his own opinion, ‘one of the best of the tribe.’ ‘Dr.
Waldegrave was a learned and pious man, of a mild disposition, strict
morals, and abstemious life, who seldom mingled in the politics or the
jollity of the college. But his knowledge of the world was confined to
the University; his learning was of the last, rather than of the present
age; his temper was indolent; his faculties, which were not of the first
rate, had been relaxed by the climate; and he was satisfied, like his
fellows, with the slight and superficial discharge of an important trust.
As soon as my tutor had sounded the insufficiency of his disciple in
school-learning, he proposed that we should read every morning, from
ten to eleven, the comedies of Terence. The sum of my improvement in
the University of Oxford is confined to three or four Latin plays; and
even the study of an elegant classic, which might have been illustrated
by a comparison of ancient and modern theatres, was reduced to a dry
and literal interpretation of the author’s text. During the first weeks
I constantly attended these lessons in my tutor’s room; but as they
appeared equally devoid of profit and pleasure, I was once tempted to
try the experiment of a formal apology. The apology was accepted with
a smile. I repeated the offence with less ceremony; the excuse was
admitted with the same indulgence: the slightest motive of laziness
or indisposition, the most trifling avocation at home or abroad, was
allowed as a worthy impediment; nor did my tutor appear conscious of
my absence or neglect. Had the hour of lecture been constantly filled,
a single hour was a small portion of my academic leisure. No plan of
study was recommended for my use; no exercises were prescribed for his
inspection; and, at the most precious season of youth, whole days and
weeks were suffered to elapse without labour or amusement, without advice
or account.’ The name of his second tutor is concealed in asterisks, and
the sensitive conscience of Dean Milman will not allow him to insert a
name ‘which _Gibbon_ thought proper to suppress.’ The account, however,
of the anonymous person is sufficiently graphic. ‘Dr. —— well remembered
that he had a salary to receive, and only forgot that he had a duty to
perform. Instead of guiding the studies and watching over the behaviour
of his disciple, I was never summoned to attend even the ceremony of
a lecture; and excepting one voluntary visit to his rooms, during the
eight months of his titular office the tutor and pupil lived in the
same college as strangers to each other.’ It added to the evils of this
neglect, that Gibbon was much younger than most of the students; and
that his temper, which was through life reserved, was then very shy.
His appearance, too, was odd; ‘a thin little figure, with a large head,
disputing and arguing with the greatest ability.’ Of course he was a joke
among undergraduates; he consulted his tutor as to studying Arabic, and
was seen buying _La Bibliothèque Orientale d’Herbelot_, and immediately
a legend was diffused that he had turned Mahomedan. The random cast was
not so far from the mark: cut off by peculiarities from the society of
young people; deprived of regular tuition and systematic employment;
tumbling about among crude masses of heterogeneous knowledge; alone with
the heated brain of youth,—he did what an experienced man would expect—he
framed a theory of all things. No doubt it seemed to him the most natural
thing in the world. Was he to be the butt of ungenial wine-parties, or
spend his lonely hours on shreds of languages? Was he not to know the
_truth_? There were the old problems, the everlasting difficulties, the
_mœnia mundi_, the Hercules’ pillars of the human imagination—‘fate,
free-will, fore-knowledge absolute.’ Surely these should come first; when
we had learned the great landmarks, understood the guiding-stars, we
might amuse ourselves with small points, and make a plaything of curious
information. What particular theory the mind frames when in this state
is a good deal matter of special accident. The _data_ for considering
these difficulties are not within its reach. Whether man be or be not
born to solve the ‘mystery of the knowable,’ he certainly is not born to
solve it at seventeen, with the first hot rush of the untrained mind. The
selection of Gibbon was remarkable: he became a Roman Catholic.
It seems now so natural that an Oxford man should take this step, that
one can hardly understand the astonishment it created. Lord Sheffield
tells us that the Privy Council interfered; and with good administrative
judgment examined a London bookseller—some Mr. Lewis—who had no concern
in it. In the manor-house of Buriton it would have probably created
less sensation if ‘dear Edward’ had announced his intention of becoming
a monkey. The English have ever believed that the Papist is a kind
of _creature_; and every sound mind would prefer a beloved child to
produce a tail, a hide of hair, and a taste for nuts, in comparison with
transubstantiation, wax-candles, and a belief in the glories of Mary.
What exact motives impelled Gibbon to this step cannot now be certainly
known; the autobiography casts a mist over them; but from what appears,
his conversion partly much resembled, and partly altogether differed
from, the Oxford conversions of our own time. We hear nothing of the
notes of a church, or the sin of the Reformation; and Gibbon had not an
opportunity of even rejecting Mr. Sewell’s theory that it is ‘a holy
obligation to acquiesce in the opinions of your grandmother.’ His
memoirs have a halo of great names—Bossuet, the _History of Protestant
Variations_, &c. &c.—and he speaks with becoming dignity of falling
by a noble hand. He mentioned also to Lord Sheffield, as having had a
preponderating influence over him, the works of Father Parsons, who
lived in Queen Elizabeth’s time. But in all probability these were
secondary persuasions, justifications after the event. No young man, or
scarcely any young man of seventeen, was ever converted by a systematic
treatise, especially if written in another age, wearing an obsolete look,
speaking a language which scarcely seems that of this world. There is an
unconscious reasoning: ‘The world has had this book before it so long,
and has withstood it. There must be something wrong; it seems all right
on the surface, but a flaw there must be.’ The mass of the volumes, too,
is unfavourable. ‘All the treatises in the world,’ says the young convert
in _Loss and Gain_, ‘are not equal to giving one a view in a moment.’
What the youthful mind requires is this short decisive argument, this
view in a moment, this flash as it were of the understanding, which
settles all, and diffuses a conclusive light at once and for ever over
the whole. It is so much the pleasanter if the young mind can strike this
view out for itself, from materials which are forced upon it from the
controversies of the day; if it can find a certain solution of pending
questions, and show itself wiser even than the wisest of its own, the
very last age. So far as appears, this was the fortune of Gibbon. ‘It was
not long,’ he says, ‘since Dr. Middleton’s _Free Inquiry_ had sounded an
alarm in the theological world; much ink and much gall had been spent in
defence of the primitive miracles; and the two dullest of their champions
were crowned with academic honours by the University of Oxford. The name
of Middleton was unpopular; and his proscription very naturally led me to
peruse his writings and those of his antagonists.’ It is not difficult
to discover in this work easy and striking arguments which might lead an
untaught mind to the communion of Rome. As to the peculiar belief of its
author, there has been much controversy, with which we have not here
the least concern; but the natural conclusion to which it would lead a
simple intellect is, that all miracles are equally certain or equally
uncertain. ‘It being agreed, then,’ says the acute controversialist,
‘that in the original promise of these miraculous gifts there is no
intimation of any particular period to which their continuance was
limited, the next question is, by what sort of evidence the precise time
of their duration is to be determined? But to this point one of the
writers just referred to excuses himself, as we have seen, from giving
any answer; and thinks it sufficient to declare in general that _the
earliest fathers unanimously affirm them to have continued down to their
times_. Yet he has not told us, as he ought to have done, to what age he
limits the character of _the earliest fathers_; whether to the second
or to the third century, or, with the generality of our writers, means
also to include the fourth. But to whatever age he may restrain it, the
difficulty at last will be to assign a reason why we must needs stop
there. In the meanwhile, by his appealing thus to the _earliest fathers_
only as unanimous on this article, a common reader would be apt to infer
that the later fathers are more cold or diffident, or divided upon it;
whereas the reverse of this is true, and the more we descend from those
earliest fathers the more strong and explicit we find their successors
in attesting the perpetual succession and daily exertion of the same
miraculous powers in their several ages; so that if the cause must be
determined by _the unanimous consent of fathers_, we shall find as much
reason to believe that those powers were continued even to the latest
ages as to any other, how early and primitive soever, after the days of
the apostles. But the same writer gives us two reasons why he does not
choose to say anything upon the subject of their duration; 1st, because
_there is not light enough in history to settle it_; 2ndly, because _the
thing itself is of no concern to us_. As to his first reason, I am at a
loss to conceive what further light a professed advocate of the primitive
ages and fathers can possibly require in this case. For as far as the
Church historians can illustrate or throw light upon anything, there
is not a single point in all history so constantly, explicitly, and
unanimously affirmed by them all, as the continual succession of these
powers through all ages, from the earliest father who first mentions
them down to the time of the Reformation. Which same succession is still
further deduced by persons of the most eminent character for their
probity, learning, and dignity in the Romish Church, to this very day.
So that the only doubt which can remain with us is, whether the Church
historians are to be trusted or not; for if any credit be due to them in
the present case, it must reach either to all or to none; because the
reason of believing them in any one age will be found to be of equal
force in all, as far as it depends on the characters of the persons
attesting, or the nature of the things attested.’ In _terms_ this and
the whole of Middleton’s argument is so shaped as to avoid including
in its scope the miracles of Scripture, which are mentioned throughout
with eulogiums and acquiescence, and so as to make you doubt whether the
author believed them or not. This is exactly one of the pretences which
the young strong mind delights to tear down. It would argue, ‘This writer
evidently _means_ that the apostolic miracles have just as much evidence
and no more than the popish or the patristic; and how strong’—for
Middleton is a master of telling statement—‘he shows that evidence to be!
I won’t give up the apostolic miracles, I cannot; yet I must believe what
has as much of historical testimony in its favour. It is no _reductio
ad absurdum_ that we must go over to the Church of Rome; it is the most
diffused of Christian creeds, the oldest of Christian churches.’ And so
the logic of the sceptic becomes, as often since, the most efficient
instrument of the all-believing and all-determining Church.
The consternation of Gibbon’s relatives seems to have been enormous.
They cast about what to do. From the experience of Oxford, they perhaps
thought that it would be useless to have recourse to the Anglican
clergy; this resource had failed. So they took him to Mr. Mallet, a
Deist, to see if he could do anything; but he did nothing. Their next
step was nearly as extraordinary. They placed him at Lausanne, in the
house of M. Pavilliard, a French Protestant minister. After the easy
income, complete independence, and unlimited credit of an English
undergraduate, he was thrown into a foreign country, deprived, as he
says, by ignorance of the language, both of ‘speech and hearing,’—in
the position of a schoolboy, with a small allowance of pocket-money,
and without the Epicurean comforts on which he already set some value.
He laments the ‘indispensable comfort of a servant,’ and the ‘sordid
and uncleanly table of Madame Pavilliard.’ In our own day the watchful
sagacity of Cardinal Wiseman would hardly allow a promising convert of
expectations and talents to remain unsolaced in so pitiful a situation;
we should hear soothing offers of flight or succour, some insinuation of
a popish domestic and interesting repasts. But a hundred years ago the
attention of the Holy See was very little directed to our English youth,
and Gibbon was left to endure his position.
It is curious that he made himself comfortable. Though destitute of
external comforts which he did not despise, he found what was the
greatest luxury to his disposition, steady study and regular tuition.
His tutor was, of course, to convert him if he could; but as they
had no language in common, there was the preliminary occupation of
teaching French. During five years both tutor and pupil steadily exerted
themselves to repair the defects of a neglected and ill-grounded
education. We hear of the perusal of Terence, Virgil, Horace, and
Tacitus. Cicero was translated into French, and translated back again
into Latin. In both languages the pupil’s progress was sound and good.
From letters of his which still exist, it is clear that he then acquired
the exact and steady knowledge of Latin of which he afterwards made so
much use. His circumstances compelled him to master French. If his own
letters are to be trusted, he would be an example of his own doctrine,
that no one is thoroughly master of more than one language at a time;
they read like the letters of a Frenchman trying and failing to write
English. But perhaps there was a desire to magnify his continental
progress, and towards the end of the time some wish to make his friends
fear he was forgetting his own language.
Meantime the work of conversion was not forgotten. In some letters which
are extant, M. Pavilliard celebrates the triumph of his logic. ‘_J’ai
renversé_,’ says the pastor, ‘_l’infaillibilité de l’Eglise; j’ai prouvé
que jamais Saint Pierre n’a été chef des apôtres; que quand il l’aurait
été, le pape n’est point son successeur; qu’il est douteux que Saint
Pierre ait jamais été à Rome; mais supposé qu’il y ait été, il n’a pas
été évêque de cette ville; que la transubstantiation est une invention
humaine, et peu ancienne dans l’Eglise_,’ &c., and so on through the
usual list of Protestant arguments. He magnifies a little Gibbon’s
strength of conviction, as it makes the success of his own logic seem
more splendid; but states two curious things: first, that Gibbon at
least _pretended_ to believe in the Pretender, and what is more amazing
still—all but incredible—that he fasted. Such was the youth of the
Epicurean historian!
It is probable, however, that the skill of the Swiss pastor was not
the really operating cause of the event. Perhaps experience shows that
the converts which Rome has made, with the threat of unbelief and the
weapons of the sceptic, have rarely been permanent or advantageous to
her. It is at best but a dangerous logic to drive men to the edge and
precipice of scepticism, in the hope that they will recoil in horror to
the very interior of credulity. Possibly men may show their courage—they
may vanquish the _argumentum ad terrorem_—they may not find scepticism
so terrible. This last was Gibbon’s case. A more insidious adversary
than the Swiss theology was at hand to sap his Roman Catholic belief.
Pavilliard had a fair French library—not ill stored in the recent
publications of that age—of which he allowed his pupil the continual
use. It was as impossible to open any of them and not come in contact
with infidelity, as to come to England and not to see a green field.
Scepticism is not so much a part of the French literature of that day
as its animating spirit—its essence, its vitality. You can no more
cut it out and separate it, than you can extract from Wordsworth his
conception of nature, or from Swift his common sense. And it is of the
subtlest kind. It has little in common with the rough disputation of the
English deist, or the perplexing learning of the German theologian, but
works with a tool more insinuating than either. It is, in truth, but
the spirit of the world, which does not argue, but assumes; which does
not so much elaborate as hints; which does not examine, but suggests.
With the traditions of the Church it contrasts traditions of its own;
its technicalities are _bon sens_, _l’usage du monde_, _le fanatisme_,
_l’enthousiasme_; to high hopes, noble sacrifices, awful lives, it
opposes quiet ease, skilful comfort, placid sense, polished indifference.
Old as transubstantiation may be, it is not older than Horace and
Lucian. Lord Byron, in the well-known lines, has coupled the names of
the two literary exiles on the Leman Lake. The page of Voltaire could
not but remind Gibbon that the scepticism from which he had revolted
was compatible with literary eminence and European fame—gave a piquancy
to ordinary writing—was the very expression of caustic caution and
gentlemanly calm.
The grave and erudite habits of Gibbon soon developed themselves.
Independently of these abstruse theological disputations, he spent many
hours daily—rising early and reading carefully—on classical and secular
learning. He was not, however, wholly thus engrossed. There was in the
neighbourhood of Lausanne a certain Mademoiselle Curchod, to whom he
devoted some of his time. She seems to have been a morbidly rational
lady; at least she had a grave taste. Gibbon could not have been a very
enlivening lover; he was decidedly plain, and his predominating taste
was for solid learning. But this was not all; she formed an attachment
to M. Necker, afterwards the most slow of premiers, whose financial
treatises can hardly have been agreeable even to a Genevese beauty.
This was, however, at a later time. So far as appears, Gibbon was her
first love. How extreme her feelings were one does not know. Those of
Gibbon can scarcely be supposed to have done him any harm. However,
there was an intimacy, a flirtation, an engagement—when, as usual, it
appeared that neither had any money. That the young lady should procure
any seems to have been out of the question; and Gibbon, supposing that
he might, wrote to his father. The reply was unfavourable. Gibbon’s
mother was dead; Mr. Gibbon senior was married again; and even in other
circumstances would have been scarcely ready to encourage a romantic
engagement to a lady with nothing. She spoke no English, too, and
marriage with a person speaking only French is still regarded as a most
unnatural event; forbidden, not indeed by the literal law of the Church,
but by those higher instinctive principles of our nature, to which the
bluntest own obedience. No father could be expected to violate at once
pecuniary duties and patriotic principles. Mr. Gibbon senior forbade
the match. The young lady does not seem to have been quite ready to
relinquish all hope; but she had shown a grave taste, and fixed her
affections on a sound and cold mind. ‘I sighed,’ narrates the historian,
‘as a lover; but I obeyed as a son.’ ‘I have seen,’ says M. Suard,
‘the letter in which Gibbon communicated to Mademoiselle Curchod the
opposition of his father to their marriage. The first pages are tender
and melancholy, as might be expected from an unhappy lover; the latter
become by degrees calm and reasonable; and the letter concludes with
these words: _C’est pourquoi, mademoiselle, j’ai l’honneur d’être votre
très-humble et très-obéissant serviteur, Edward Gibbon_.’ Her father
died soon afterwards, and she retired to Geneva, where, by teaching
young ladies, she earned a hard subsistence for herself and her mother;
but the tranquil disposition of her admirer preserved him from any
romantic display of sympathy and fidelity. He continued to study various
readings in Cicero, as well as the passage of Hannibal over the Alps;
and with those affectionate resources set sentiment at defiance. Yet
thirty years later the lady, then the wife of the most conspicuous man
in Europe, was able to suggest useful reflections to an aged bachelor,
slightly dreaming of a superannuated marriage: ‘_Gardez-vous, monsieur,
de former un de ces liens tardifs: le mariage qui rend heureux dans l’âge
mûr, c’est celui qui fut contracté dans la jeunesse. Alors seulement
la réunion est parfaite, les goûts se communiquent, les sentimens se
répandent, les idées deviennent communes, les facultés intellectuelles
se modèlent mutuellement. Toute la vie est double, et toute la vie est
une prolongation de la jeunesse; car les impressions de l’âme commandent
aux yeux, et la beauté qui n’est plus conserve encore son empire; mais
pour vous, monsieur, dans toute la vigueur de la pensée, lorsque toute
l’existence est décidée, l’on ne pourroit sans un miracle trouver une
femme digne de vous; et une association d’un genre imparfait rappelle
toujours la statue d’Horace, qui joint à une belle tête le corps d’un
stupide poisson. Vous êtes marié avec la gloire._’ She was then a
cultivated French lady, giving an account of the reception of the Decline
and Fall at Paris, and expressing rather peculiar ideas on the style of
Tacitus. The world had come round to her side, and she explains to her
old lover rather well her happiness with M. Necker.
After living nearly five years at Lausanne, Gibbon returned to England.
Continental residence has made a great alteration in many Englishmen;
but few have undergone so complete a metamorphosis as Edward Gibbon.
He left his own country a hot-brained and ill taught youth, willing to
sacrifice friends and expectations for a superstitious and half-known
creed; he returned a cold and accomplished man, master of many accurate
ideas, little likely to hazard any coin for any faith: already, it is
probable, inclined in secret to a cautious scepticism; placing thereby,
as it were, upon a system the frigid prudence and unventuring incredulity
congenial to his character. His change of character changed his position
among his relatives. His father, he says, met him as a friend; and they
continued thenceforth on a footing of ‘easy intimacy.’ Especially after
the little affair of Mademoiselle Curchod, and the ‘very sensible view
he took in that instance of the matrimonial relation,’ there can be but
little question that Gibbon was justly regarded as a most safe young
man, singularly prone to large books, and a little too fond of French
phrases and French ideas; but yet with a great feeling of common sense,
and a wise preference of permanent money to transitory sentiment. His
father allowed him a moderate, and but a moderate income, which he
husbanded with great care, and only voluntarily expended in the purchase
and acquisition of serious volumes. He lived an externally idle but
really studious life, varied by tours in France and Italy; the toils
of which, though not in description very formidable, a trifle tried a
sedentary habit and somewhat corpulent body. The only English avocation
which he engaged in was, oddly enough, war. It does not appear the most
likely in this pacific country, nor does he seem exactly the man for _la
grande guerre_; but so it was; and the fact is an example of a really
Anglican invention. The English have discovered pacific war. We may not
be able to kill people as well as the French, or fit out and feed distant
armaments as neatly as they do; but we are unrivalled at a quiet armament
here at home which never kills anybody, and never wants to be sent
anywhere. A ‘constitutional militia’ is a beautiful example of the mild
efficacy of civilisation, which can convert even the ‘great manslaying
profession’ (as Carlyle calls it) into a quiet and dining association.
Into this force Gibbon was admitted; and immediately, contrary to his
anticipations, and very much against his will, was called out for
permanent duty. The hero of the _corps_ was a certain dining Sir Thomas,
who used at the end of each new bottle to announce with increasing joy
how much soberer he had become. What his fellow-officers thought of
Gibbon’s French predilections and large volumes it is not difficult to
conjecture; and he complains bitterly of the interruption to his studies.
However, his easy composed nature soon made itself at home; his polished
tact partially concealed from the ‘mess’ his recondite pursuits, and he
contrived to make the Hampshire armament of classical utility. ‘I read,’
he says, ‘the Analysis of Cæsar’s Campaign in Africa. Every motion of
that great general is laid open with a critical sagacity. A complete
military history of his campaigns would do almost as much honour to M.
Guichardt as to Cæsar. This finished the _Mémoires_, which gave me a much
clearer notion of ancient tactics than I ever had before. Indeed, my own
military knowledge was of some service to me, as I am well acquainted
with the modern discipline and exercise of a battalion. So that though
much inferior to M. Folard and M. Guichardt, who had seen service, I am
a much better judge than Salmasius, Casaubon, or Lipsius; mere scholars,
who perhaps had never seen a battalion under arms.’
The real occupation of Gibbon, as this quotation might suggest, was
his reading; and this was of a peculiar sort. There are many kinds of
readers, and each has a sort of perusal suitable to his kind. There
is the voracious reader, like Dr. Johnson, who extracts with grasping
appetite the large features, the mere essence of a trembling publication,
and rejects the rest with contempt and disregard. There is the subtle
reader, who pursues with fine attention the most imperceptible and
delicate ramifications of an interesting topic, marks slight traits,
notes changing manners, has a keen eye for the character of his author,
is minutely attentive to every prejudice and awake to every passion,
watches syllables and waits on words, is alive to the light air of
nice associations which float about every subject—the motes in the
bright sunbeam—the delicate gradations of the passing shadows. There
is the stupid reader, who prefers dull books—is generally to be known
by his disregard of small books and English books, but likes masses in
modern Latin, _Grævius de torpor e mirabili_; _Horrificus de gravitate
sapientiæ_. But Gibbon was not of any of these classes. He was what
common people would call a matter-of-fact, and philosophers now-a-days
a _positive_ reader. No disciple of M. Comte could attend more strictly
to precise and provable phenomena. His favourite points are those which
can be weighed and measured. Like the dull reader, he had perhaps a
preference for huge books in unknown tongues; but, on the other hand, he
wished those books to contain real and accurate information. He liked the
firm earth of positive knowledge. His fancy was not flexible enough for
exquisite refinement, his imagination too slow for light and wandering
literature; but he felt no love of dullness in itself, and had a prompt
acumen for serious eloquence. This was his kind of reflection. ‘The
author of the Adventurer, No. 127 (Mr. Joseph Warton, concealed under the
signature of Z), concludes his ingenious parallel of the ancients and
moderns by the following remark: “That age will never again return, when
a Pericles, after walking with Plato in a portico built by Phidias and
painted by Apelles, might repair to hear a pleading of Demosthenes or a
tragedy of Sophocles.” It will never return, because it never existed.
Pericles (who died in the fourth year of the LXXXIXth Olympiad. ant. Ch.
429, Dio. Sic. l. xii. 46) was confessedly the patron of Phidias, and the
contemporary of Sophocles; but he could enjoy no very great pleasure in
the conversation of Plato, who was born in the same year that he himself
died (Diogenes Laertius in Platone v. Stanley’s History of Philosophy, p.
154). The error is still more extraordinary with regard to Apelles and
Demosthenes, since both the painter and the orator survived Alexander
the Great, whose death is above a century posterior to that of Pericles
(in 323). And indeed, though Athens was the seat of every liberal art
from the days of Themistocles to those of Demetrius Phalereus, yet no
particular era will afford Mr. Warton the complete synchronism he seems
to wish for; as tragedy was deprived of her famous triumvirate before the
arts of philosophy and eloquence had attained the perfection which they
soon after received from the hands of Plato, Aristotle, and Demosthenes.’
And wonderful is it for what Mr. Hallam calls ‘the languid students
of our present age’ to turn over the journal of his daily studies.
It is true, it seems to have been revised by himself; and so great a
narrator would group effectively facts with which he was so familiar;
but allowing any discount (if we may use so mean a word) for the skilful
art of the impressive historian, there will yet remain in the _Extraits
de mon Journal_ a wonderful monument of learned industry. You may open
them anywhere. ‘_Dissertation on the Medal of Smyrna_, by M. de Boze:
replete with erudition and taste; containing curious researches on the
pre-eminence of the cities of Asia.—_Researches on the Polypus_, by
Mr. Trembley. A new world: throwing light on physics, but darkening
metaphysics.—Vegetius’s _Institutions_. This writer on tactics has good
general notions; but his particular account of the Roman discipline is
deformed by confusion and anachronisms.’ Or, ‘I this day began a very
considerable task, which was, to read Cluverius’ _Italia Antiqua_ in
two volumes folio, Leyden 1624, Elzevirs;’ and it appears he did read
it as well as begin it, which is the point where most enterprising men
would have failed. From the time of his residence at Lausanne his Latin
scholarship had been sound and good, and his studies were directed
to the illustration of the best Roman authors; but it is curious to
find on August 16, 1761, after his return to England, and when he was
twenty-four years old, the following extract: ‘I have at last finished
the Iliad. As I undertook it to improve myself in the Greek language,
which I had totally neglected for some years past, and to which I never
applied myself with a proper attention, I must give a reason why I began
with Homer, and that contrary to Le Clerc’s advice. I had two: 1st,
As Homer is the most ancient Greek author (excepting perhaps Hesiod)
who is now extant; and as he was not only the poet, but the lawgiver,
the theologian, the historian, and the philosopher of the ancients,
every succeeding writer is full of quotations from, or allusions to his
writings, which it would be difficult to understand without a previous
knowledge of them. In this situation, was it not natural to follow the
ancients themselves, who always began their studies by the perusal of
Homer? 2ndly. No writer ever treated such a variety of subjects. As
every part of civil, military, or economical life is introduced into his
poems, and as the simplicity of his age allowed him to call everything
by its proper name, almost the whole compass of the Greek tongue is
comprised in Homer. I have so far met with the success I hoped for, that
I have acquired a great facility in reading the language, and treasured
up a very great stock of words. What I have rather neglected is, the
grammatical construction of them, and especially the many various
inflexions of the verbs. In order to acquire that dry but necessary
branch of knowledge, I propose bestowing some time every morning on the
perusal of the _Greek Grammar of Port Royal_, as one of the best extant.
I believe that I read nearly one-half of Homer like a mere schoolboy,
not enough master of the words to elevate myself to the poetry. The
remainder I read with a good deal of care and criticism, and made many
observations on them. Some I have inserted here; for the rest I shall
find a proper place. Upon the whole, I think that Homer’s few faults
(for some he certainly has) are lost in the variety of his beauties. I
expected to have finished him long before. The delay was owing partly to
the circumstances of my way of life and avocations, and partly to my own
fault; for while every one looks on me as a prodigy of application, I
know myself how strong a propensity I have to indolence.’ Posterity will
confirm the contemporary theory that he was a ‘prodigy’ of steady study.
Those who know what the Greek language is, how much of the Decline and
Fall depends on Greek authorities, how few errors the keen criticism of
divines and scholars has been able to detect in his employment of them,
will best appreciate the patient every-day labour which could alone
repair the early neglect of so difficult an attainment.
It is odd how little Gibbon wrote, at least for the public, in early
life. More than twenty-two years elapsed from his first return from
Lausanne to the appearance of the first volume of his great work, and in
that long interval his only important publication, if it can indeed be
so called, was a French essay, _Sur l’Etude de la Littérature_, which
contains some sensible remarks, and shows much regular reading; but which
is on the whole a ‘conceivable treatise,’ and would be wholly forgotten
if it had been written by any one else. It was little read in England,
and must have been a serious difficulty to his friends in the militia;
but the Parisians read it, or said they had read it, which is more in
their way, and the fame of being a French author was a great aid to him
in foreign society. It flattered, indeed, the French _literati_ more
than any one can now fancy. The French had then the idea that it was
uncivilised to speak any other language, and the notion of _writing_ any
other seemed quite a _bêtise_. By a miserable misfortune you might not
know French, but at least you could conceal it assiduously; white paper
any how might go unsoiled; posterity at least should not hear of such
ignorance. The Parisian was to be the universal tongue. And it did not
seem absurd, especially to those only slightly acquainted with foreign
countries, that this might in part be so. Political eminence had given
their language a diplomatic supremacy. No German literature existed as
yet; Italy had ceased to produce important books. There was only England
left to dispute the literary omnipotence; and such an attempt as Gibbon’s
was a peculiarly acceptable flattery, for it implied that her most
cultivated men were beginning to abandon their own tongue, and to write
like other nations in the cosmopolitan _lingua franca_. A few far-seeing
observers, however, already contemplated the train of events which at the
present day give such a preponderating influence to our own writers, and
make it an arduous matter even to explain the conceivableness of the
French ambition. Of all men living then or since, David Hume was the most
likely from prejudice and habit to take an unfavourable view of English
literary influence; he had more literary fame than he deserved in France,
and less in England; he had much of the French neatness, he had but
little of the English nature; yet his cold and discriminating intellect
at once emancipated him from the sophistries which imposed on those less
watchful. He wrote to Gibbon, ‘I have only one objection, derived from
the language in which it is written. Why do you compose in French, and
carry faggots into the wood, as Horace says with regard to Romans who
wrote in Greek? I grant that you have a like motive to those Romans, and
adopt a language much more generally diffused than your native tongue;
but have you not remarked the fate of those two ancient languages in
the following ages? The Latin, though then less celebrated and confined
to more narrow limits, has in some measure outlived the Greek, and
is now more generally understood by men of letters. Let the French,
therefore, triumph in the present diffusion of their tongue. Our solid
and increasing establishments in America, where we need less dread the
inundation of barbarians, promise a superior stability and duration to
the English language.’ The cool sceptic was correct. The great breeding
people have gone out and multiplied; colonies in every clime attest our
success; French is the _patois_ of Europe; English is the language of the
world.
Gibbon took the advice of his sagacious friend, and prepared himself for
the composition of his great work in English. His studies were destined,
however, to undergo an interruption. ‘Yesterday morning,’ he wrote to a
friend, ‘about half an hour after seven, as I was destroying an army of
barbarians, I heard a double rap at the door, and my friend Mr. Eliot was
soon introduced. After some idle conversation, he told me that if I was
desirous of being in parliament, he had an independent seat very much at
my service.’ The borough was Liskeard; and the epithet independent is,
of course, ironical, Mr. Eliot being himself the constituency of that
place. The offer was accepted, and one of the most learned of members of
parliament took his seat.
The political life of Gibbon is briefly described. He was a supporter
of Lord North. That well-known statesman was, in the most exact sense,
a representative man,—although representative of the class of persons
most out of favour with the transcendental thinkers who invented this
name. Germans deny it, but in every country common opinions are very
common. Everywhere, there exists the comfortable mass; quiet, sagacious,
short-sighted,—such as the Jews whom Rabshakeh tempted by their vine
and their fig-tree; such as the English with their snug dining-room and
after dinner nap, domestic happiness and Bullo coal; sensible, solid
men, without stretching irritable reason, but with a placid, supine
instinct; without originality and without folly; judicious in their
dealings, respected in the world; wanting little, sacrificing nothing;
good-tempered people in a word, ‘caring for nothing until they are
themselves hurt.’ Lord North was one of this class. You could hardly make
him angry. ‘No doubt,’ he said, tapping his fat sides, ‘I am that odious
thing, a minister; and I believe other people wish they were so too.’
Profound people look deeply for the maxims of his policy; and it being on
the surface, of course they fail to find it. He did not what the mind,
but what the _body_ of the community wanted to have done; he appealed to
the real people, the large English commonplace herd. His abilities were
great; and with them he did what people with no abilities wished to do,
and could not do. Lord Brougham has published the King’s Letters to him,
showing that which partial extracts had made known before, that Lord
North was quite opposed to the war he was carrying on; was convinced it
could not succeed; hardly, in fact, wished it might. Why did he carry it
on? _Vox populi_, the voice of well-dressed men commanded it to be done;
and he cheerfully sacrificed American people, who were nothing to him,
to English, who were something, and a king, who was much. Gibbon was
the very man to support such a ruler. His historical writings have given
him a posthumous eminence; but in his own time he was doubtless thought
a sensible safe man, of ordinary thoughts and intelligible actions. To
do him justice, he did not pretend to be a hero. ‘You know,’ he wrote to
his friend Deyverdun, ‘_que je suis entré au parlement sans patriotisme,
sans ambition, et que toutes mes vues se bornoient à la place commode et
honnête d’un_ lord of trade.’ ‘Wise in his generation’ was written on his
brow. He quietly and gently supported the policy of his time.
Even, however, amid the fatigue of parliamentary attendance,—the fatigue,
in fact, of attending a nocturnal and oratorical club, where you met the
best people, who could not speak, as well as a few of the worst, who
_would_,—Gibbon’s history made much progress. The first volume, a quarto,
one-sixth of the whole, was published in the spring of 1776, and at once
raised his fame to a high point. Ladies actually read it—read about
Bœtica and Tarraconensis, the Roman legions and the tribunitian powers.
Grave scholars wrote dreary commendations. ‘The first impression,’ he
writes, ‘was exhausted in a few days; a second and a third edition were
scarcely adequate to the demand; and my bookseller’s property was twice
invaded by the pirates of Dublin. My book was on every table’—tables
must have been rather few in that age—‘and almost on every toilette;
the historian was crowned by the taste or fashion of the day; nor was
the general voice disturbed by the barking of any profound critic.’ The
noise penetrated deep into the unlearned classes. Mr. Sheridan, who never
read anything ‘on principle,’ said that the crimes of Warren Hastings
surpassed anything to be found in the ‘correct sentences of Tacitus or
the _luminous_ page of Gibbon.’ Some one seems to have been struck with
the jet of learning, and questioned the great wit. ‘I said,’ he replied,
‘_vo_luminous.’
History, it is said, is of no use; at least a great critic, who is
understood to have in the press a very elaborate work in that kind, not
long since seemed to allege that writings of this sort did not establish
a theory of the universe, and were therefore of no avail. But whatever
may be the use of this sort of composition in itself and abstractedly,
it is certainly of great use relatively and to literary men. Consider
the position of a man of that species. He sits beside a library-fire,
with nice white paper, a good pen, a capital style, every means of saying
everything, but nothing to say; of course he is an able man; of course he
has an active intellect, beside wonderful culture; but still one cannot
always have original ideas. Every day cannot be an era; a train of new
speculation very often will not be found; and how dull it is to make it
your business to write, to stay by yourself in a room to write, and then
to have nothing to say! It is dreary work mending seven pens, and waiting
for a theory to ‘turn up.’ What a gain if something would happen! then
one could describe it. Something has happened, and that something is
history. On this account, since a sedate Greek discovered this plan for
a grave immortality, a series of accomplished men have seldom been found
wanting to derive a literary capital from their active and barbarous
kindred. Perhaps when a Visigoth broke a head, he thought that that was
all. Not so; he was making history; Gibbon has written it down.
The manner of writing history is as characteristic of the narrator as the
actions are of the persons who are related to have performed them; often
much more so. It may be generally defined as a view of one age taken by
another; a picture of a series of men and women painted by one of another
series. Of course, this definition seems to exclude contemporary history;
but if we look into the matter carefully, is there such a thing? What are
all the best and most noted works that claim the title—memoirs, scraps,
materials—composed by men of like passions with the people they speak of,
involved it may be in the same events describing them with the partiality
and narrowness of eager actors; or even worse, by men far apart in a
monkish solitude, familiar with the lettuces of the convent-garden,
but hearing only faint dim murmurs of the great transactions which they
slowly jot down in the barren chronicle; these are not to be named in
the same short breath, or included in the same narrow word, with the
equable, poised, philosophic narrative of the retrospective historian. In
the great histories there are two topics of interest—the man as a type
of the age in which he lives,—the events and manners of the age he is
describing; very often almost all the interest is the contrast of the two.
You should do everything, said Lord Chesterfield, in minuet time. It
was in that time that Gibbon wrote his history, and such was the manner
of the age. You fancy him in a suit of flowered velvet, with a bag
and sword, wisely smiling, composedly rounding his periods. You seem
to see the grave bows, the formal politeness, the finished deference.
You perceive the minuetic action accompanying the words: ‘Give,’ it
would say, ‘Augustus a chair: Zenobia, the humblest of your slaves:
Odoacer, permit me to correct the defect in your attire.’ As the
slap-dash sentences of a rushing critic express the hasty impatience
of modern manners; so the deliberate emphasis, the slow acumen, the
steady argument, the impressive narration bring before us what is now
a tradition, the picture of the correct eighteenth-century gentleman,
who never failed in a measured politeness, partly because it was due in
propriety towards others, and partly because from his own dignity it was
due most obviously to himself.
And not only is this true of style, but it may be extended to other
things also. There is no one of the many literary works produced in the
eighteenth century more thoroughly characteristic of it than Gibbon’s
history. The special characteristic of that age is its clinging to the
definite and palpable; it had a taste beyond everything for what is
called solid information. In literature the period may be defined as
that in which authors had ceased to write for students, and had not
begun to write for women. In the present day, no one can take up any
book intended for general circulation, without clearly seeing that the
writer supposes most of his readers will be ladies or young men; and
that in proportion to his judgment, he is attending to their taste.
Two or three hundred years ago books were written for professed and
systematic students,—the class the fellows of colleges were designed to
be,—who used to go on studying them all their lives. Between these there
was a time in which the more marked class of literary consumers were
strong-headed, practical men. Education had not become so general, or
so feminine, as to make the present style—what is called the ‘brilliant
style’—at all necessary; but there was enough culture to make the demand
of common diffused persons more effectual than that of special and
secluded scholars. A book-buying public had arisen of sensible men, who
would not endure the awful folio style in which the schoolmen wrote. From
peculiar causes, too, the business of that age was perhaps more free from
the hurry and distraction which disable so many of our practical men
now from reading. You accordingly see in the books of the last century
what is called a masculine tone; a firm, strong, perspicuous narration
of matter of fact, a plain argument, a contempt for everything which
distinct definite people cannot entirely and thoroughly comprehend. There
is no more solid book in the world than Gibbon’s history. Only consider
the chronology. It begins before the year one and goes down to the year
1453, and is a schedule or series of schedules of important events during
that time. Scarcely any fact deeply affecting European civilisation is
wholly passed over, and the great majority of facts are elaborately
recounted. Laws, dynasties, churches, barbarians, appear and disappear.
Everything changes; the old world—the classical civilisation of form and
definition—passes away, a new world of free spirit and inward growth
emerges; between the two lies a mixed weltering interval of trouble and
confusion, when everybody hates everybody, and the historical student
leads a life of skirmishes, is oppressed with broils and feuds. All
through this long period Gibbon’s history goes with steady consistent
pace; like a Roman legion through a troubled country—_hœret pede pes_;
up hill and down hill, through marsh and thicket, through Goth or
Parthian—the firm defined array passes forward—a type of order, and an
emblem of civilisation. Whatever may be the defects of Gibbon’s history,
none can deny him a proud precision and a style in marching order.
Another characteristic of the eighteenth century is its taste for
dignified pageantry. What an existence was that of Versailles! How
gravely admirable to see the _grand monarque_ shaved, and dressed, and
powdered; to look on and watch a great man carefully amusing himself
with dreary trifles. Or do we not even now possess an invention of that
age—the great eighteenth-century footman, still in the costume of his
era, with dignity and powder, vast calves and noble mien? What a world it
must have been when all men looked like that! Go and gaze with rapture at
the footboard of a carriage, and say, Who would not obey a premier with
such an air? Grave, tranquil, decorous pageantry is a part, as it were,
of the essence of the last age. There is nothing more characteristic of
Gibbon. A kind of pomp pervades him. He is never out of livery. He ever
selects for narration those themes which look most like a levee: grave
chamberlains seem to stand throughout; life is a vast ceremony, the
historian at once the dignitary and the scribe.
The very language of Gibbon shows these qualities. Its majestic march
has been the admiration—its rather pompous cadence the sport of all
perusers. It has the greatest merit of an historical style: it is always
going on; you feel no doubt of its continuing in motion. Many narrators
of the reflective class, Sir Archibald Alison for example, fail in
this: your constant feeling is, ‘Ah! he has pulled up; he is going to
be profound; he never will go on again.’ Gibbon’s reflections connect
the events; they are not sermons between them. But, notwithstanding, the
manner of the Decline and Fall is the last which should be recommended
for strict imitation. It is not a style in which you can tell the truth.
A monotonous writer is suited only to monotonous matter. Truth is of
various kinds—grave, solemn, dignified, petty, low, ordinary; and an
historian who has to tell the truth must be able to tell what is vulgar
as well as what is great, what is little as well as what is amazing.
Gibbon is at fault here. He _cannot_ mention Asia _Minor_. The petty
order of sublunary matters; the common gross existence of ordinary
people; the necessary littlenesses of necessary life, are little suited
to his sublime narrative. Men on the _Times_ feel this acutely; it is
most difficult at first to say many things in the huge imperial manner.
And after all you cannot tell everything. ‘How, sir,’ asked a reviewer
of Sydney Smith’s life, ‘do you say a “good fellow” in print?’ ‘Mr. ——,’
replied the editor, ‘you should not say it at all.’ Gibbon was aware of
this rule; he omits what does not suit him; and the consequence is, that
though he has selected the most various of historical topics, he scarcely
gives you an idea of variety. The ages change, but the varnish of the
narration is the same.
It is not unconnected with this fault that Gibbon gives us but an
indifferent description of individual character. People seem a good deal
alike. The cautious scepticism of his cold intellect, which disinclined
him to every extreme, depreciates great virtues and extenuates great
vices; and we are left with a tame neutral character, capable of nothing
extraordinary,—hateful, as the saying is, ‘both to God and to the enemies
of God.’
A great point in favour of Gibbon is the existence of his history. Some
great historians seem likely to fail here. A good judge was asked which
he preferred, Macaulay’s _History of England_ or Lord Mahon’s. ‘Why,’ he
replied, ‘you observe Lord Mahon has written his history; and by what
I see Macaulay’s will be written not only for, but _among_ posterity.’
Practical people have little idea of the practical ability required to
write a large book, and especially a large history. Long before you get
to the pen, there is an immensity of pure business; heaps of material
are strewn everywhere; but they lie in disorder, unread, uncatalogued,
unknown. It seems a dreary waste of life to be analysing, indexing,
extracting works and passages, in which one per cent. of the contents are
interesting, and not half of that percentage will after all appear in the
flowing narrative. As an accountant takes up a bankrupt’s books filled
with confused statements of ephemeral events, the disorderly record of
unprofitable speculations, and charges this to that head, and that to
this,—estimates earnings, specifies expenses, demonstrates failures;
so the great narrator, going over the scattered annalists of extinct
ages, groups and divides, notes and combines, until from a crude mass of
darkened fragments there emerges a clear narrative, a concise account of
the result and upshot of the whole. In this art Gibbon was a master. The
laborious research of German scholarship, the keen eye of theological
zeal, a steady criticism of eighty years, have found few faults of
detail. The account has been worked right, the proper authorities
consulted, an accurate judgment formed, the most telling incidents
selected. Perhaps experience shows that there is something English
in this talent. The Germans are more elaborate in single monographs;
but they seem to want the business-ability to work out a complicated
narrative, to combine a long whole. The French are neat enough, and their
style is very quick; but then it is difficult to believe their facts;
the account on its face seems too plain, and no true Parisian ever was
an antiquary. The great classical histories published in this country
in our own time show that the talent is by no means extinct; and they
likewise show, what is also evident, that this kind of composition is
easier with respect to ancient than with respect to modern times. The
barbarians burned the books; and though all the historians abuse them for
it, it is quite evident that in their hearts they are greatly rejoiced.
If the books had existed, they would have had to read them. Macaulay has
to peruse every book printed with long ſs; and it is no use after all;
somebody will find some stupid MS., an old account-book of an ‘ingenious
gentleman,’ and with five entries therein destroy a whole hypothesis. But
Gibbon was exempt from this; he could count the books the efficient Goths
bequeathed; and when he had mastered them he might pause. Still, it was
no light matter, as any one who looks at the books—awful folios in the
grave Bodleian—will most certainly credit and believe. And he did it all
himself; he never showed his book to any friend, or asked any one to help
him in the accumulating work, not even in the correction of the press.
‘Not a sheet,’ he says, ‘has been seen by any human eyes, excepting those
of the author and printer; the faults and the merits are exclusively my
own.’ And he wrote most of it with one pen, which must certainly have
grown erudite towards the end.
The nature of his authorities clearly shows what the nature of Gibbon’s
work is. History may be roughly divided into universal and particular;
the first being the narrative of events affecting the whole human race,
at least the main historical nations, the narrative of whose fortunes is
the story of civilisation; and the latter being the relation of events
relating to one or a few particular nations only. Universal history, it
is evident, comprises great areas of space and long periods of time; you
cannot have a series of events visibly operating on all great nations
without time for their gradual operation, and without tracking them
in succession through the various regions of their power. There is no
instantaneous transmission in historical causation; a long interval
is required for universal effects. It follows, that universal history
necessarily partakes of the character of a summary. You cannot recount
the cumbrous annals of long epochs without condensation, selection,
and omission; the narrative, when shortened within the needful limits,
becomes concise and general. What it gains in time, according to the
mechanical phrase, it loses in power. The particular history, confined
within narrow limits, can show us the whole contents of these limits,
explain its features of human interest, recount in graphic detail all
its interesting transactions, touch the human heart with the power of
passion, instruct the mind with patient instances of accurate wisdom. The
universal is confined to a dry enumeration of superficial transactions;
no action can have all its details; the canvas is so crowded that no
figure has room to display itself effectively. From the nature of the
subject, Gibbons history is of the latter class; the sweep of the
narrative is so wide; the decline and fall of the Roman Empire being in
some sense the most universal event which has ever happened,—being, that
is, the historical incident which has most affected all civilised men,
and the very existence and form of civilisation itself,—it is evident
that we must look rather for a comprehensive generality than a telling
minuteness of delineation. The history of a thousand years does not
admit the pictorial detail which a Scott or a Macaulay can accumulate on
the history of a hundred. Gibbon has done his best to avoid the dryness
natural to such an attempt. He inserts as much detail as his limits
will permit; selects for more full description striking people and
striking transactions; brings together at a single view all that relates
to single topics; above all, by a regular advance of narration, never
ceases to imply the regular progress of events and the steady course of
time. None can deny the magnitude of such an effort. After all, however,
these are merits of what is technically termed composition, and are
analogous to those excellences in painting or sculpture that are more
respected by artists than appreciated by the public at large. The fame
of Gibbon is highest among writers; those especially who have studied
for years particular periods included in his theme (and how many those
are; for in the East and West he has set his mark on all that is great
for ten centuries!) acutely feel and admiringly observe how difficult
it would be to say so much, and leave so little untouched; to compress
so many telling points; to present in so few words so apt and embracing
a narrative of the whole. But the mere unsophisticated reader scarcely
appreciates this; he is rather awed than delighted; or rather, perhaps,
he appreciates it for a little while, then is tired by the roll and
glare; then, on any chance—the creaking of an organ, or the stirring of
a mouse,—in time of temptation he falls away. It has been said, the way
to answer all objections to Milton is to take down the book and read him;
the way to reverence Gibbon is not to read him at all, but look at him,
from outside, in the bookcase, and think how much there is within; what
a course of events, what a muster-roll of names, what a steady solemn
sound! You will not like to take the book down; but you will think how
much you could be delighted if you would.
It may be well, though it can be only in the most cursory manner, to
examine the respective treatment of the various elements in this vast
whole. The history of the Decline and Fall may be roughly and imperfectly
divided into the picture of the Roman Empire—the narrative of barbarian
incursions—the story of Constantinople: and some few words may be hastily
said on each.
The picture—for so, from its apparent stability when contrasted with the
fluctuating character of the later period, we may call it—which Gibbon
has drawn of the united empire has immense merit. The organisation of
the imperial system is admirably dwelt on; the manner in which the old
republican institutions were apparently retained, but really altered,
is compendiously explained; the mode in which the imperial will was
transmitted to and carried out in remote provinces is distinctly
displayed. But though the mechanism is admirably delineated, the
dynamical principle, the original impulse, is not made clear. You never
feel you are reading about the Romans. Yet no one denies their character
to be most marked. Poets and orators have striven for the expression of
it.
Macaulay has been similarly criticised; it has been said, that
notwithstanding his great dramatic power, and wonderful felicity in the
selection of events on which to exert it, he yet never makes us feel
that we are reading about Englishmen. The coarse clay of our English
nature _cannot_ be represented in so fine a style. In the same way, and
to a much greater extent (for this is perhaps an unthankful criticism,
if we compare Macaulay’s description of any body with that of any other
historian), Gibbon is chargeable with neither expressing nor feeling
the essence of the people concerning whom he is writing. There was, in
truth, in the Roman people a warlike fanaticism, a puritanical essence,
an interior, latent, restrained, enthusiastic religion, which was utterly
alien to the cold scepticism of the narrator. Of course he was conscious
of it. He indistinctly felt that at least there was something he did not
like; but he could not realise or sympathise with it without a change
of heart and nature. The old Pagan has a sympathy with the religion of
enthusiasm far above the reach of the modern Epicurean.
It may indeed be said, on behalf of Gibbon, that the old Roman character
was in its decay, and that only such slight traces of it were remaining
in the age of Augustus and the Antonines that it is no particular defect
in him to leave it unnoticed. Yet, though the intensity of its nobler
peculiarities was on the wane, many a vestige would perhaps have been
apparent to so learned an eye, if his temperament and disposition had
been prone to seize upon and search for them. Nor is there any adequate
appreciation of the compensating element, of the force which really held
society together, of the fresh air of the Illyrian hills, of that army
which, evermore recruited from northern and rugged populations, doubtless
brought into the very centre of a degraded society the healthy simplicity
of a vital, if barbarous religion.
It is no wonder that such a mind should have looked with displeasure on
primitive Christianity. The whole of his treatment of that topic has
been discussed by many pens, and three generations of ecclesiastical
scholars have illustrated it with their emendations. Yet, if we turn
over this, the latest and most elaborate edition, containing all the
important criticisms of Milman and of Guizot, we shall be surprised to
find how few instances of definite exact error such a scrutiny has been
able to find out. As Paley, with his strong sagacity, at once remarked,
the subtle error rather lies hid in the sinuous folds than is directly
apparent on the surface of the polished style. Who, said the shrewd
archdeacon, can refute a sneer? And yet even this is scarcely the exact
truth. The objection of Gibbon is, in fact, an objection rather to
religion than to Christianity; as has been said, he did not appreciate,
and could not describe, the most inward form of pagan piety; he objected
to Christianity because it was the intensest of religions. We do not mean
by this to charge Gibbon with any denial, any overt distinct disbelief
in the existence of a supernatural Being. This would be very unjust; his
cold composed mind had nothing in common with the Jacobinical outbreak
of the next generation. He was no doubt a theist after the fashion of
natural theology; nor was he devoid of more than scientific feeling. All
constituted authorities struck him with emotion, all ancient ones with
awe. If the Roman Empire had descended to his time, how much he would
have reverenced it! He had doubtless a great respect for the ‘First
Cause;’ it had many titles to approbation; ‘it was not conspicuous,’
he would have said, ‘but it was potent.’ A sensitive decorum revolted
from the jar of atheistic disputation. We have already described him
more than enough. A sensible middle-aged man in political life; a
bachelor, not himself gay, but living with gay men; equable and secular;
cautious in his habits, tolerant in his creed, as Porson said, ‘never
failing in natural feeling, except when women were to be ravished and
Christians to be martyred.’ His writings are in character. The essence
of the far-famed fifteenth and sixteenth chapters is, in truth, but a
description of unworldly events in the tone of this world, of awful facts
in unmoved voice, of truths of the heart in the language of the eyes. The
wary sceptic has not even committed himself to definite doubts. These
celebrated chapters were in the first manuscript much longer, and were
gradually reduced to their present size by excision and compression. Who
can doubt that in their first form they were a clear, or comparatively
clear, expression of exact opinions on the Christian history, and that
it was by a subsequent and elaborate process that they were reduced to
their present and insidious obscurity? The toil has been effectual.
‘Divest,’ says Dean Milman of the introduction to the fifteenth chapter,
‘this whole passage of the latent sarcasm betrayed by the whole of the
subsequent dissertation, and it might commence a Christian history,
written in the most Christian spirit of candour.’
It is not for us here to go into any disquisition as to the comparative
influence of the five earthly causes, to whose secondary operation the
specious historian ascribes the progress of Christianity. Weariness
and disinclination forbid. There can be no question that the polity of
the Church, and the zeal of the converts, and other such things, did
most materially conduce to the progress of the Gospel. But few will now
attribute to these much of the effect. The real cause is the heaving of
the mind after the truth. Troubled with the perplexities of time, weary
with the vexation of ages, the spiritual faculty of man turns to the
truth as the child turns to its mother. The thirst of the soul was to
be satisfied, the deep torture of the spirit to have rest. There was an
appeal to those
‘High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.’
The mind of man has an appetite for the truth.
‘Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,—
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.’
All this was not exactly in Gibbon’s way, and he does not seem to have
been able to conceive that it was in any one else’s. Why his chapters
had given offence he could hardly make out. It actually seems that he
hardly thought that other people believed more than he did. ‘We may
be well assured,’ says he, of a sceptic of antiquity, ‘that a writer
conversant with the world would never have ventured to expose the
gods of his country to public ridicule, had they not been already the
objects of secret contempt among the polished and enlightened orders of
society.’ ‘Had I,’ he says of himself, ‘believed that the majority of
English readers were so fondly attached even to the name and shadow of
Christianity, had I foreseen that the pious, the timid, and the prudent
would feel, or would affect to feel, with such exquisite sensibility,—I
might perhaps have softened the two invidious chapters, which would
create many enemies and conciliate few friends.’ The state of belief
at that time is a very large subject; but it is probable that in the
cultivated cosmopolitan classes the continental scepticism was very rife;
that among the hard-headed classes the rough spirit of English Deism had
made progress. Though the mass of the people doubtless believed much as
they now believe, yet the entire upper class was lazy and corrupt, and
there is truth in the picture of the modern divine: ‘The thermometer of
the Church of England sunk to its lowest point in the first thirty years
of the reign of George III.... In their preaching, nineteen clergymen out
of twenty carefully abstained from dwelling upon Christian doctrines.
Such topics exposed the preacher to the charge of fanaticism. Even the
calm and sober Crabbe, who certainly never erred from excess of zeal, was
stigmatised in those days as a methodist, because he introduced into his
sermons the notion of future reward and punishment. An orthodox clergyman
(they said) should be content to show his people the worldly advantage
of good conduct, and to leave heaven and hell to the ranters. Nor can we
wonder that such should have been the notions of country parsons, when,
even by those who passed for the supreme arbiters of orthodoxy and
taste, the vapid rhetoric of Blair was thought the highest standard of
Christian exhortation.’ It is among the excuses for Gibbon that he lived
in such a world.
There are slight palliations also in the notions then prevalent of
the primitive Church. There was the Anglican theory, that it was a
_via media_, the most correct of periods, that its belief is to be
the standard, its institutions the model, its practice the test of
subsequent ages. There was the notion, not formally drawn out, but
diffused through and implied in a hundred books of evidence,—a notion in
opposition to every probability, and utterly at variance with the New
Testament,—that the first converts were sober, hard-headed, cultivated
inquirers,—Watsons, Paleys, Priestleys, on a small scale; weighing
evidence, analysing facts, suggesting doubts, dwelling on distinctions,
cold in their dispositions, moderate in their morals,—cautious in their
creed. We now know that these were not they of whom the world was not
worthy. It is ascertained that the times of the first Church were times
of excitement; that great ideas falling on a mingled world were distorted
by an untrained intellect, even in the moment in which they were received
by a yearning heart; that strange confused beliefs, Millennarianism,
Gnosticism, Ebionitism, were accepted, not merely by outlying obscure
heretics, but in a measure, half-and-half, one notion more by one man,
another more by his neighbour, confusedly and mixedly by the mass
of Christians; that the appeal was not to the questioning, thinking
understanding, but to unheeding, all-venturing emotion; to that lower
class ‘from whom faiths ascend,’ and not to the cultivated and exquisite
class by whom they are criticised; that fervid men never embraced a more
exclusive creed. You can say nothing favourable of the first Christians,
except that they _were_ Christians. We find no ‘form nor comeliness’
in them; no intellectual accomplishments, no caution in action, no
discretion in understanding. There is no admirable quality except that,
with whatever distortion, or confusion, or singularity, they at once
accepted the great clear outline of belief in which to this day we live,
move, and have our being. The offence of Gibbon is his disinclination to
this simple essence; his excuse, the historical errors then prevalent
as to the primitive Christians, the real defects so natural in their
position, the false merits ascribed to them by writers who from one
reason or another desired to treat them as ‘an authority.’
On the whole, therefore, it may be said of the first, and in some sense
the most important part of Gibbon’s work, that though he has given an
elaborate outline of the framework of society, and described its detail
with pomp and accuracy, yet that he has not comprehended or delineated
its nobler essence, Pagan or Christian. Nor perhaps was it to be expected
that he should, for he inadequately comprehended the dangers of the time;
he thought it the happiest period the world has ever known; he would
not have comprehended the remark, ‘To see the old world in its worst
estate we turn to the age of the satirist and of Tacitus, when all the
different streams of evil coming from east, west, north, south, the vices
of barbarism and the vices of civilisation, remnants of ancient cults
and the latest refinements of luxury and impurity, met and mingled on
the banks of the Tiber. What could have been the state of society when
Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Heliogabalus, were the rulers of the
world? To a good man we should imagine that death itself would be more
tolerable than the sight of such things coming upon the earth.’ So deep
an ethical sensibility was not to be expected in the first century; nor
is it strange when, after seventeen hundred years, we do not find it in
their historian.
Space has failed us, and we must be unmeaningly brief. The second head
of Gibbon’s history—the narrative of the barbarian invasions—has been
recently criticised, on the ground that he scarcely enough explains the
gradual but unceasing and inevitable manner in which the outer barbarians
were affected by and assimilated to the civilisation of Rome. Mr.
Congreve has well observed, that the impression which Gibbon’s narrative
is insensibly calculated to convey is, that there was little or no change
in the state of the Germanic tribes between the time of Tacitus and the
final invasion of the empire—a conclusion which is obviously incredible.
To the general reader there will perhaps seem some indistinctness in this
part of the work, nor is a free, confused barbarism a congenial subject
for an imposing and orderly pencil. He succeeds better in the delineation
of the riding monarchies, if we may so term them,—of the equestrian
courts of Attila or Timour, in which the great scale, the concentrated
power, the very enormity of the barbarism, give, so to speak, a shape
to unshapeliness; impart, that is, a horrid dignity to horse-flesh
and mare’s milk, an imposing oneness to the vast materials of a crude
barbarity. It is needless to say that no one would search Gibbon for an
explanation of the reasons or feelings by which the northern tribes were
induced to accept Christianity.
It is on the story of Constantinople that the popularity of Gibbon rests.
The vast extent of the topic; the many splendid episodes it contains;
its epic unity from the moment of the far-seeing selection of the city
by Constantine to its last fall; its position as a link between Europe
and Asia; its continuous history; the knowledge that through all that
time it was, as now, a diadem by the water-side, a lure to be snatched by
the wistful barbarian, a marvel to the West, a prize for the North and
for the East;—these, and such as these ideas, are congenial topics to a
style of pomp and grandeur. The East seems to require to be treated with
a magnificence unsuitable to a colder soil. The nature of the events,
too, is suitable to Gibbon’s cursory, imposing manner. It is the history
of a form of civilisation, but without the power thereof; a show of
splendour and vigour, but without bold life or interior reality. What
an opportunity for an historian who loved the imposing pageantry and
disliked the purer essence of existence! There were here neither bluff
barbarians nor simple saints; there was nothing admitting of particular
accumulated detail; we do not wish to know the interior of the stage;
the imposing movements are all which should be seized. Some of the
features, too, are curious in relation to those of the historian’s life:
the clear accounts of the theological controversies, followed out with
an appreciative minuteness so rare in a sceptic, are not disconnected
with his early conversion to the scholastic Church; the brilliancy of
the narrative reminds us of his enthusiasm for Arabic and the East; the
minute description of a licentious epoch evinces the habit of a mind
which, not being bold enough for the practice of license, took a pleasure
in following its theory. There is no subject which combines so much of
unity with so much of variety.
It is evident, therefore, where Gibbon’s rank as an historian must
finally stand. He cannot be numbered among the great painters of
human nature, for he has no sympathy with the heart and passions of
our race; he has no place among the felicitous describers of detailed
life, for his subject was too vast for minute painting, and his style
too uniform for a shifting scene. But he is entitled to a high—perhaps
to a first place—among the orderly narrators of great events; the
composed expositors of universal history; the tranquil artists who have
endeavoured to diffuse a cold polish over the warm passions and desultory
fortunes of mankind.
The life of Gibbon after the publication of his great work was not very
complicated. During its composition he had withdrawn from Parliament and
London to the studious retirement of Lausanne. Much eloquence has been
expended on this voluntary exile, and it has been ascribed to the best
and most profound motives. It is indeed certain that he liked a lettered
solitude, preferred easy continental society, was not quite insensible
to the charm of scenery, had a pleasure in returning to the haunts of
his youth. Prosaic and pure history, however, must explain that he went
abroad to _save_. Lord North had gone out of power. Mr. Burke, the
Cobden of that era, had procured the abolition of the Lords of Trade;
the private income of Gibbon was not equal to his notion of a bachelor
London life. The same sum was, however, a fortune at Lausanne. Most
things, he acknowledged, were as dear; but then he had not to buy so many
things. Eight hundred a year placed him high in the social scale of the
place. The inhabitants were gratified that a man of European reputation
had selected their out-of-the-way town for the shrine of his fame; he
lived pleasantly and easily among easy, pleasant people; a gentle hum
of local admiration gradually arose, which yet lingers on the lips of
erudite _laquais de place_. He still retains a fame unaccorded to any
other historian; they speak of the ‘hôtel Gibbon:’ there never was even
an _estaminet_ Tacitus, or a _café_ Thucydides.
This agreeable scene, like many other agreeable scenes, was broken by a
great thunderclap. The French revolution has disgusted many people; but
perhaps it has never disgusted any one more than Gibbon. He had swept
and garnished everything about him. Externally he had made a neat little
hermitage in a gentle, social place; internally he had polished up a
still theory of life, sufficient for the guidance of a cold and polished
man. Everything seemed to be tranquil with him; the rigid must admit his
decorum; the lax would not accuse him of rigour; he was of the world, and
an elegant society naturally loved its own. On a sudden the hermitage
was disturbed. No place was too calm for that excitement; scarcely
any too distant for that uproar. The French war was a war of opinion,
entering households, disturbing villages, dividing quiet friends. The
Swiss took some of the infection. There was a not unnatural discord
between the people of the Pays de Vaud and their masters the people of
Berne. The letters of Gibbon are filled with invectives on the ‘Gallic
barbarians’ and panegyrics on Mr. Burke; military details, too, begin to
abound—the peace of his retirement was at an end. It was an additional
aggravation that the Parisians should do such things. It would not have
seemed unnatural that northern barbarians—English, or other uncivilised
nations—should break forth in rough riot or cruel license; but that the
people of the most civilised of all capitals, speaking the sole dialect
of polished life, enlightened with all the enlightenment then known,
should be guilty of excesses unparalleled, unwitnessed, unheard of, was
a vexing trial to one who had admired them for many years. The internal
creed and belief of Gibbon was as much attacked by all this as were his
external circumstances. He had spent his time, his life, his energy,
in putting a polished gloss on human tumult, a sneering gloss on human
piety; on a sudden human passion broke forth—the cold and polished world
seemed to meet its end; the thin superficies of civilisation was torn
asunder; the fountains of the great deep seemed opened; impiety to meet
its end; the foundations of the earth were out of course.
We now, after long familiarity and in much ignorance, can hardly read
the history of those years without horror: what an effect must they have
produced on those whose minds were fresh, and who knew the people killed!
‘Never,’ Gibbon wrote to an English nobleman, ‘did a revolution affect to
such a degree the private existence of such numbers of the first people
of a great country. Your examples of misery I could easily match with
similar examples in this country and neighbourhood, and our sympathy is
the deeper, as we do not possess, like you, the means of alleviating in
some measure the misfortunes of the fugitives.’ It violently affected his
views of English politics. He before had a tendency, in consideration of
his cosmopolitan cultivation, to treat them as local littlenesses, parish
squabbles; but now his interest was keen and eager. ‘But,’ he says,
‘in this rage against slavery, in the numerous petitions against the
slave-trade, was there no leaven of new democratical principles? no wild
ideas of the rights and natural equality of man? It is these I fear. Some
articles in newspapers, some pamphlets of the year, the Jockey Club, have
fallen into my hands. I do not infer much from such publications; yet I
have never known them of so black and malignant a cast. I shuddered at
Grey’s motion; disliked the half-support of Fox, admired the firmness of
Pitt’s declaration, and excused the usual intemperance of Burke. Surely
such men as ——, ——, ——, have talents for mischief. I see a club of reform
which contains some respectable names. Inform me of the professions, the
principles, the plans, the resources of these reformers. Will they heat
the minds of the people? Does the French democracy gain no ground? Will
the bulk of your party stand firm to their own interest and that of their
country? Will you not take some active measures to declare your sound
opinions, and separate yourselves from your rotten members? If you allow
them to perplex Government, if you trifle with this solemn business,
if you do not resist the spirit of innovation in the first attempt, if
you admit the smallest and most specious change in our parliamentary
system, you are lost. You will be driven from one step to another; from
principles just in theory to consequences most pernicious in practice;
and your first concession will be productive of every subsequent
mischief, for which you will be answerable to your country and to
posterity. Do not suffer yourselves to be lulled into a false security;
remember the proud fabric of the French monarchy. Not four years ago it
stood founded, as it might seem, on the rock of time, force, and opinion;
supported by the triple aristocracy of the Church, the nobility, and the
parliaments. They are crumbled into dust; they are vanished from the
earth. If this tremendous warning has no effect on the men of property
in England; if it does not open every eye, and raise every arm,—you
will deserve your fate. If I am too precipitate, enlighten; if I am too
desponding, encourage me. My pen has run into this argument; for, as much
a foreigner as you think me, on this momentous subject I feel myself an
Englishman.’
The truth clearly is, that he had arrived at the conclusion that he was
the sort of person a populace kill. People wonder a great deal why very
many of the victims of the French revolution were particularly selected;
the Marquis de Custine, especially, cannot divine why they executed _his_
father. The historians cannot show that they committed any particular
crimes; the marquises and marchionesses seem very inoffensive. The fact
evidently is, that they were killed for being polite. The world felt
itself unworthy of them. There were so many bows, such regular smiles,
such calm superior condescension,—could a mob be asked to endure it? Have
we not all known a precise, formal, patronising old gentleman—bland,
imposing, something like Gibbon? Have we not suffered from his dignified
attentions? If _we_ had been on the Committee of Public Safety, can we
doubt what would have been the fate of that man? Just so wrath and envy
destroyed in France an upper-class world.
After his return to England, Gibbon did not do much or live long. He
completed his _Memoirs_, the most imposing of domestic narratives, the
model of dignified detail. As we said before, if the Roman empire _had_
written about itself, this was how it would have done so. He planned
some other works, but executed none; judiciously observing that building
castles in the air was more agreeable than building them on the ground.
His career was, however, drawing to an end. Earthly dignity had its
limits, even the dignity of an historian. He had long been stout; and
now symptoms of dropsy began to appear. After a short interval, he died
on the 16th of January 1794. We have sketched his character, and have
no more to say. After all, what is our criticism worth? It only fulfils
his aspiration, ‘that a hundred years hence I may still continue to be
abused.’
_BISHOP BUTLER._[2]
(1854.)
About the close of the last century, some one discovered the wife of
a country rector in the act of destroying, for culinary purposes, the
last remnants of a box of sermons, which seemed to have been written
by Joseph Butler. The lady was reproved, but the exculpatory rejoinder
was, ‘Why, the box was full once, and I thought they were my husband’s.’
Nevertheless, when we first saw the above announcement of unpublished
remains, we hoped her exemplary diligence had not been wholly successful,
and that some important writings of Butler had been discovered. In this
we have been disappointed. The remains in question are slight and rather
trivial; the longest is an additional letter addressed to Dr. Clarke;
and in all the rest there is scarcely anything very characteristic,
except the remark, ‘What a wonderful incongruity it is for a man to see
the doubtfulness in which things are involved, and yet be impatient out
of action, or vehement in it. Say a man is a sceptic, and add what was
said of Brutus, _quicquid vult valde vult_, and you say there is the
greatest contrariety between his understanding and temper that can be
expressed in words:’—an observation which might be borne in mind by some
English writers who panegyrise Julius Cæsar, and the many French ones who
panegyrise Napoleon.
The life of Butler is one of those in which the events are few, the
transitions simple, and the final result strange. He was the son of
a dissenting shopkeeper in Berkshire, was always of a meditative
disposition and reading habit—grew to manhood—was destined to the
Dissenting ministry—began to question the principles of Dissent—entered
at Oriel College—made valuable acquaintances there—rose in the Church by
means of them—obtained, first the chaplaincy of the Rolls, then a decent
living—then the rectory of Stanhope, the ‘golden’ rectory, one of the
best in the English Church—was recommended by his old friends to Queen
Caroline—talked philosophy to her—pleased her (this being her favourite
topic)—was made Bishop of Bristol, and thence translated to the richest
of Anglican dignities—the prince-bishopric of Durham, and there died.
These are the single steps, and there is none of them which is remote
from our ordinary observation. We should not be surprised to see any of
them every day. But when we look on the life as a whole, when we see
its nature, when we observe the son of a dissenting tradesman, a person
of simple and pious disposition, of retiring habits, and scrupulous and
investigating mind—in a word, the least worldly of ecclesiastics—attain
to the most secular of ecclesiastical dignities, be a prince as well as
a bishop, become the great magnate of the North of England, and dispense
revenues to be envied by many a foreign potentate, we perceive the
singularity of such a man with such beginnings attaining such a fortune.
No man would guess from Butler’s writings that he ever had the disposal
of five pounds: it is odd to think what he did with the mining property
and landed property, the royalties and rectories, coal dues and curacies,
that he must have heard of from morning till evening.
It is certainly most strange that such a man should ever have been made
a bishop. In general we observe that those become most eminent in the
sheepfold, who partake most eminently of the qualities of the wolf.
Nor is this surprising. The Church is (as the Article defines it) a
congregation of men, faithful indeed, but faithful in various degrees.
In every corporation or combination of men, no matter for what purpose
collected, there are certain secular qualities which attain eminence
as surely as oil rises above water. Attorneys are for the world, and
the world is for attorneys. Activity, vigour, sharp-sightedness, tact,
boldness, watchfulness, and such qualities as these, raise a man in the
Church as certainly as in the State; so long as there is wealth and
preferment in the one, they will be attained a good deal as wealth and
office are in the other. The _prowling_ faculties will have their way.
Those who hunger and thirst after riches will have riches, and those who
hunger not, will not. Still to this there are exceptions, and Butler’s
case is one of them. We might really fancy the world had determined to
give for once an encouraging instance of its sensibility to rectitude, of
the real and great influence of real and great virtue.
The period at which Butler’s elevation occurred certainly does not
diminish the oddness of the phenomenon. We are not indeed of those,
mostly disciples of Carlyle or Newman, who speak with untempered contempt
of the eighteenth century. Rather, if we might trust our own feelings, we
view it with appreciating regard. It was the age of substantial comfort.
The grave and placid historian (we speak of Mr. Hallam), going learnedly
over the generations of men, is disposed to think that there never was
so much happiness before or since. Employment was plentiful; industry
remunerative. The advantages of material civilisation were enjoyed, and
its penalties scarcely foreseen. The troubles of the seventeenth century
had died out; those of the nineteenth had not begun. Cares were few;
the stir and conflict in which we live had barely commenced. It was not
an age to trouble itself with prospective tasks; it had no feverish
excitement, nor over-intellectual introspection; it lived on the fat
of the land; _quieta non movere_, was its motto. Like most comfortable
people, those of that time possessed a sleepy, supine sagacity, they had
no fine imaginings, no exquisite fancies; but a coarse sense of what
was common, a ‘large roundabout common sense’ (these are Locke’s words),
which was their guide in what concerned them. Some may not think this
romantic enough to be attractive, and yet it has a beauty of its own.
They did not ‘look before or after,’ nor ‘pine for what was not;’ they
enjoyed what was; a solid homeliness was their mark. Exactly as we like
to see a large lazy animal lying in the placid shade, without anxiety for
the future and chewing the cud of the past, we like to look back at the
age of our great-grandfathers, so solid in its habits and placid in the
lapse of years. Nevertheless—and this is what is to our purpose—we must
own at once that the very merits of that age are of the earth, earthy;
there was no talk then of ‘obstinate questionings,’ or ‘incommunicable
dream;’ heroism, enthusiasm, the sense of the supernatural, deep feeling,
seem in a manner foreign to the very idea of it. This is the point of
view in which the Tractarian movement was described as ‘tending towards
the realisation of something better and nobler than satisfied the last
century.’ For the clergy, the time was indeed evil. The popular view
of the profession seems accurately expressed in a well-known book of
memoirs. ‘But if this was your opinion, how came you not to let your
friend Sherlock,’ the well-known bishop, ‘into the secret? Why did
you not tell him that half the pack, and those you most depended on,
were drawn off, and the game escaped and safe, instead of leaving his
lordship there to bark and yelp by himself, and make the silly figure
he has done?’ ‘Oh,’ said Lord Carteret, ‘he talks like a parson, and
consequently is so used to talk to people who do not mind him, that I
left him to find it out at his leisure, and shall have him again for all
this, whenever I want him.’
The fact of Butler’s success is to be accounted for, as we have said,
by his personal excellence. Mr. Talbot liked him, _Bishop_ Talbot liked
him, the Queen liked him, the King liked him. He says himself in these
Remains, ‘Good men surely are not treated in this world as they deserve,
yet ’tis seldom, very seldom, their goodness makes them disliked, even
in cases where it may seem to be so; but ’tis some behaviour or other
which, however excusable, perhaps infinitely overbalanced by their
virtues, yet is offensive, possibly wrong, however such, it may be, as
would pass off very well in a man of the world.’ And he must have been
alive to the fact in practice. He had every excuse for making virtue
detestable. He was educated a Baptist, and brought up at a dissenting
academy. He was born in the vulgarest years of English Puritanism,
when it had fallen from its first estate, when it had least influence
with the higher classes, when the revival which dates from John Wesley
had not begun, and the very memory of gentlemen such as Hutchinson or
Hampden had passed away. A certain instinctive refinement, a ‘niceness’
and gentleness of nature, preserved him not only from the coarser
consequences of his position, but even from that angularity of mind
which is not often escaped by those early trained to object to what is
established.
Of his character the principal point may be described in the words which
Arnold so often uses to denote the end and aim of his education, ‘moral
thoughtfulness.’ A certain considerateness is, as it were, diffused over
all his sentences. To most men conscience is an occasional, almost an
external voice; to Butler it was a daily companion, a close anxiety. In
a recent novel this disposition is skilfully delineated and delicately
contrasted with its opposite. We may quote the passage, though it is
encumbered with some detail. ‘But what was a real trouble to Charles,’
this is the person whose character is in question, ‘it got clearer
and clearer to his apprehension, that his intimacy with Sheffield
was not quite what it had been. They had indeed passed the vacation
together, and saw of each other more than ever; but their sympathies
with each other were not as strong, they had not the same likings and
dislikings; in short, they had not such congenial minds, as when they
were freshmen. There was not so much heart in their conversations, and
they more easily endured to miss each other’s company. They were both
reading for honours, reading hard; but Sheffield’s whole heart was in
his work, and religion was but a secondary matter with him. He had no
doubts, difficulties, anxieties, sorrows, which much affected him. It
was not the certainty of faith which made a sunshine in his soul, and
dried up the mists of human weakness; rather he had no perceptible
need within him of that vision of the unseen, which is the Christian’s
life. He was unblemished in his character, exemplary in his conduct,
but he was content with what the perishable world gave him. Charles’s
characteristic, perhaps more than anything else, was an habitual
sense of the Divine Presence—a sense which, of course, did not insure
uninterrupted conformity of thought and deed to itself, but still there
it was: the pillar of the cloud before him and guiding him. He felt
himself to be God’s creature, and responsible to Him; God’s possession,
not his own.’ Again the same character is brought home to us, in a part
of Walton’s delineation of Hooker, which, indeed, except perhaps for the
great quickness attributed to his intellect, might as a whole stand well
enough for a description of Butler: ‘His complexion (if we may guess by
him at the age of forty) was sanguine, with a mixture of choler; and
yet his motion was slow even in his youth, and so was his speech, never
expressing an earnestness in either of them, but an humble gravity suited
to the aged. And it is observed (so far as inquiry is able to look back
at this distance of time) that at his being a schoolboy he was an early
questionist, quietly inquisitive why this was granted and that denied;
this being mixed with a remarkable modesty and a sweet serene quietness
of nature.... It is observable that he was never known to be ... extreme
in any of his desires; never heard to repine or dispute with Providence,
but, by a quiet gentle submission and resignation of his will to the
wisdom of the Creator, bore the burden of the day with patience; ...
and by this, and a grave behaviour, which is a divine charm, he begot
an early reverence for his person even from those that, at other times
and in other companies, took a liberty to cast off that strictness of
behaviour and discourse that is required in a collegiate life.’ Something
of this is a result of disposition; yet on the whole it seems mainly the
effect of the ‘moral thoughtfulness’ which has been mentioned.
The very name of this quality reminds us of a difficulty. We cannot but
doubt, with the experience of this age, how far this can be made, or
ought to be made, the abiding sentiment of all men; how far such teaching
as that of Arnold’s tends to introduce a too stiff and anxious habit
of mind; how far the perpetual presence of a purpose will interfere
with the simple happiness of life, and how far also it can be forced
on the ‘lilies of the field;’ how far the care of anxious minds and
active thoughts is to be obtruded on the young, on the cheerful, on the
natural. Other questions, too, might be asked, if the inculcation of
this temper and habit as a daily, universal obligation, a perpetual and
general necessity for all characters, would not, or might not, impair
the sanguine energy and masculine activity which are necessary for
social action; whether it does not, in matter of fact, even now, ‘burn
and brand’ into excitable fancies a few stern truths more deeply than
a feeble reason will bear or the equilibrium of the world demands? But
whatever be the issue of such questions, on which there is perhaps now
no decided or established opinion, there can be no question of the charm
of such a character in those to whom it is natural. We may admire what
we cannot share; reverence what we do not imitate. As those who cannot
comprehend a strain of soothing music, look with interest on those who
can; as those who cannot feel the gentle glow of a quiet landscape,
yet stand aside and seem inferior to those who do; so in character the
buoyant and the bold, the harsh and the practical, may, at least for the
moment, moralise and look upwards, reverence and do homage, when they
come to a close experience of what is gentler and simpler, more anxious
and more thoughtful, kinder and more religious, than themselves. At any
rate, so thought the contemporaries of Butler. They did, as a Frenchman
would say, ‘their possible’ for a good man; at least they made him a
bishop.
We gather, however, that their kindness was scarcely successful. Butler
was very prosperous; but it does not appear that he was at all happy.
In the midst of the princely establishment of his rich episcopate, so
anxious a nature found time to be rather melancholy. The responsibilities
of so cumbrous a position were but little pleasant to an apprehensive
disposition; wealth and honour were finery and foolishness to a quiet
and shrinking man. A small room in a tranquil college, daily walks and
thoughtful talk, a little income and a few friends—these, and these
only, suit a still and meditative mind. Such, however, were denied him.
He is said to have taken much pleasure in discussion and interchange
of mind; but his life was passed in courts and country parsonages—the
one too noisy, the last too still, to think or reason. Nor were there
many people, whom we know of, that were congenial to him in that age.
Scarcely any name of a friend of his has come down to us; one, indeed,
there is—that of Bishop Secker, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, the
author of a treatise on the Catechism, a serious work still used for the
purposes of tuition, with which, indeed, the name of the writer is now
with some so associated by early habit that it is difficult to fancy even
Butler on equal social terms with him; the notion of talking to him seems
like being asked to converse familiarly with the Catechism itself.
A not unremarkable circumstance, however, shows that Secker, though he
was educated at the same academy, could not have been on any terms of
extreme intimacy with Butler. Some time after Butler’s death, there
was a rumour that he had died a Papist. There is no doubt, in fact,
that Butler’s opinions, being formed on principles of evidence and
reasoning too strict to be extremely popular, were not likely to be
agreeable to those about him, and when an Englishman sees anything in
religion which he does not like, he always, _primâ facie_, imputes it
to the Pope. Besides this general and strong argument, there were two
particular ones—first, that he had erected a cross in the episcopal
chapel at Bristol; secondly, that he was of a melancholy and somewhat of
an ascetic turn; reasons which, though doubtless of force in their day
and generation, are not likely to be of avail with us, who know so much
more about crosses and fasting than they did then. We might have expected
that Secker, as Butler’s old friend and schoolfellow, would have been
able from his personal knowledge to throw a good deal of light upon the
question. He was only, however, able to advance ‘_presumptive_ arguments
that Bishop Butler did not die a Papist,’ which were no doubt valuable;
but yet give no great idea of the intimacy between the writer and the
person about whom he was writing. Such arguments may easily be found, and
have always convinced every one that there was no truth in this rumour.
The only reason for which we wish that Secker had been able to say he had
heard Butler talk on the subject, and that he was no Papist, is, that
we should then have known to whom Butler talked. There is nothing in
Butler’s writings at all showing any leaning to the peculiar tenets of
Roman Catholicism, and there is much which shows a strong opinion against
them; and it was far too extreme a doctrine to be at all agreeable to his
very English, moderate, and shrinking mind.
Calumny, however, is commonly instructive. It must be granted, that
though there is no trace or tendency in the writings of Butler to the
peculiar superstitions advocated by the Pope, there is a strong and
prevailing tinge of what may be called the principle of superstition,
that is, the religion of fear. Some may doubt, especially at the present
day, whether there be any true religion of that kind at all; yet it
seems, as Butler would have said, but a proper feeling ‘in such creatures
as we are, in such a world as the present one.’
We may reflect that there are two kinds of religion, which may for some
purposes be called, the one the natural, and the other the supernatural.
The former seems to take its rise from mere contemplation of external
beauty. We look on the world, and we see that it is good. The Greek of
former time, reclining softly in his own bright land, ‘looked up to the
whole sky and declared that the One was God.’ From the blue air and the
fair cloud, the green earth and the white sea, a presence streams upon
us. It modulates—
‘With murmurs of the air,
And motions of the forests and the sea,
And voice of living beings and woven hymns
Of night and day, and the deep heart of man.’
But the true home of the idea is in the starlight sky; we instinctively
mingle it with an admiration of infinite space, a cold purity is around
us, and the clear and steel-like words of the poet justly reflect the
doctrine of the clear and steel-like heaven:—
The magic car moved on.
Earth’s distant orb appeared
The smallest light that twinkles in the heaven;
Whilst round the chariot’s way
Innumerable systems rolled,
And countless spheres diffused
An ever-varying glory.
It was a sight of wonder: some
Were hornèd like the crescent moon;
Some shed a mild and silver beam
Like Hesperus across the western sea;
Some dashed athwart with trains of flame,
Like worlds to death and ruin driven;
Some shone like suns, and, as the chariot passed,
Eclipsed all other light.
Spirit of nature! here!
In this interminable wilderness
Of worlds, at whose immensity
Even soaring fancy staggers,
Here is thy fitting temple.
Yet not the lightest leaf
That quivers to the passing breeze
Is less instinct with thee:
Yet not——’
And so on; and so it will be as long as there are poets to look upon
the sky, or a sky to be looked at by them. The truth is, that there is
a certain expressiveness (if we may so speak) in nature which persons
of imagination naturally feel more acutely than others, and which
cannot easily be in its full degree brought home to others, except in
quotations of their writings, from which ‘smiling of the world,’ as it
has been called, more than from any other outward appearance, we infer
the existence of an immaterial and animating spirit. This expressiveness
perhaps produces its effect on the mind, by a principle analogous to,
perhaps in a severe analysis identical with, the interpretative faculty
by which we acquire a cognizance of the existence of other human minds.
There appear to be certain natural signs and tokens from which we (like
other animals) instinctively infer, or rather—for there is no conscious
reasoning—in which we silently see life and thought and mind. In this way
we interpret the detail of natural expression—the smile, the glance of
the eye, the common interjections, the universal tokens of our simplest
emotions; those signs and marks and expressions which we make in our
earliest infancy without teaching and by instinct, we appear also, by
instinct and without learning, to read off, interpret, and comprehend,
when used to us by others. The comprehension of this language is perhaps
as much an instinct as the using of it. There is no occasion, however,
for acute metaphysics; whatever was the origin of this faculty, such a
power of interpreting material phenomena, such a faculty of seeing life,
undoubtedly there is;—however we come by the power, we can distinguish
living from dead creatures. At any rate, if, like other living creatures,
we take a natural cognizance of the simple expressions of life and mind,
and without tuition comprehend the language and meaning of natural
signs, in like manner, though less clearly and forcibly, because our
attention is so much less forcibly directed to them, do we interpret the
significance of the beauty and the sublimity of outward nature. ‘In the
mountains’ do we ‘feel our faith.’ We seem to know there is something
behind. There is a perception of something—
‘Far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man—
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’
The Greek mythology is one entire and unmixed embodiment of this religion
of nature, as we may term it, this poetic interpretation of the spirit
that speaks to us in the signs and symbols within us. Nor can any
sensitive or imaginative mind scrutinise itself without being distinctly
conscious of its teaching.
Now of the poetic religion there is nothing in Butler. No one could tell
from his writings that the universe was beautiful. If the world were a
Durham mine or an exact square, if no part of it were more expressive
than a gravel-pit or a chalk-quarry, the teaching of Butler would be as
true as it is now. A young poet, not a very wise one, once said, ‘he did
not like the Bible, there was nothing about flowers in it.’ He might
have said so of Butler with great truth; a most ugly and stupid world
one would fancy _his_ books were written in. But in return and by way of
compensation for this, there is a religion of another sort, a religion
the source of which is within the mind, as the other’s was found to be
in the world without; the religion to which we just now alluded as the
religion (by an odd yet expressive way of speaking) of _superstition_.
The source of this, as most persons are practically aware, is in the
conscience. The moral principle (whatever may be said to the contrary by
complacent thinkers) is really and to most men a principle of fear. The
delights of a good conscience may be reserved for better things, but few
men who know themselves will say that they have often felt them by vivid
and actual experience. A sensation of shame, of reproach, of remorse, of
sin (to use the word we instinctively shrink from because it expresses
the meaning), is what the moral principle really and practically thrusts
on most men. Conscience is the condemnation of ourselves. We expect
a penalty. As the Greek proverb teaches, ‘where there is shame there
is fear;’ where there is the deep and intimate anxiety of guilt—the
feeling which has driven murderers, and other than murderers, forth to
wastes, and rocks, and stones, and tempests—we see, as it were, in a
single complex and indivisible sensation, the pain and sense of guilt,
and the painful anticipation of its punishment. How to be free from
this, is the question. How to get loose from this—how to be rid of the
secret tie which binds the strong man and cramps his pride, and makes
him angry at the beauty of the universe—which will not let him go forth
like a great animal, like the king of the forest, in the glory of his
might, but restrains him with an inner fear and a secret foreboding,
that if he do but exalt himself he shall be abased; if he do but set
forth his own dignity, he will offend One who will deprive him of it.
This, as has often been pointed out, is the source of the bloody rites
of heathendom. You are going to battle, you are going out in the bright
sun with dancing plumes and glittering spear; your shield shines, and
your feathers wave, and your limbs are glad with the consciousness of
strength, and your mind is warm with glory and renown,—with coming glory
and unobtained renown,—for who are you, to hope for these—who are you,
to go forth proudly against the pride of the sun, with your secret sin
and your haunting shame, and your real fear? First lie down, and abase
yourself—strike your back with hard stripes—cut deep with a sharp knife
as if you would eradicate the consciousness—cry aloud—put ashes on your
head—bruise yourself with stones, then perhaps God may pardon you; or,
better still—so runs the incoherent feeling—give Him something—your ox,
your ass, whole hecatombs, if you are rich enough; anything, it is but a
chance—you do not know what will please Him—at any rate, what you love
best yourself—that is, most likely, your first-born son; then, after
such gifts and such humiliation, He may be appeased, He may let you
off—He may without anger let you go forth Achilles-like in the glory of
your shield—He may _not_ send you home as He would else, the victim of
rout and treachery, with broken arms and foul limbs, in weariness and
humiliation.
Of course, it is not this kind of fanaticism that we impute to a prelate
of the English Church: human sacrifices are not respectable, and Achilles
was not rector of Stanhope. But though the costume and circumstances of
life change, the human heart does not; its feelings remain. The same
anxiety, the same consciousness of personal sin, which led in barbarous
times to what has been described, show themselves in civilised life as
well. In this quieter period, their great manifestation is scrupulosity,
a care about the ritual of life, an attention to meats and drinks, and
cups and washings. Being so unworthy as we are, feeling what we feel,
abased as we are abased, who shall say that these are beneath us? In
ardent imaginative youth they may seem so, but let a few years come, let
them dull the will or contract the heart, or stain the mind—then the
consequent feeling will be, as all experience shows, not that a ritual
is too mean, too low, too degrading for human nature, but that it is a
mercy we have to do no more—that we have only to wash in Jordan—that we
have not even to go out into the unknown distance to seek for Abana and
Pharpar, rivers of Damascus. We have no right to judge, we cannot decide,
we must do what is laid down for us,—we fail daily even in this,—we must
never cease for a moment in our scrupulous anxiety to omit by no tittle
and to exceed by no iota. An accomplished divine of the present day has
written a dissertation to show that this sort of piety is that expressed
by the Greek word εὐλάβεια, ‘piety contemplated on the side on which it
is a fear of God,’ and which he derives from εὐλαμβάνεσθαι, ‘the image
underlying the word being that of the careful taking hold, the cautious
handling of some precious yet delicate vessel, which with ruder or less
anxious handling might be broken,’ and he subsequently adds, ‘The only
three places in the New Testament in which εὐλαβὴς occurs are these:—Luke
ii. 25, Acts ii. 5, viii. 2. We have uniformly rendered it “devout,”
nor could this translation be bettered. It will be observed that on all
these occasions it is used to express Jewish, and, as one might say,
Old Testament piety. On the first it is applied to Simeon (δίκαιος καὶ
εὐλαβὴς); on the second to those Jews who came from distant parts to keep
the commanded feasts at Jerusalem; and on the third there can scarcely
be a doubt that the ἄνδρες εὐλαβεῖς who carry Stephen to his burial are
not, as might at first sight appear, _Christian_ brethren, but devout
Jews, who showed by this courageous act of theirs, as by their great
lamentation over the slaughtered saints, that they abhorred this deed of
blood, that they separated themselves in spirit from it, and thus, if it
might be, from all the judgments which it would bring down on the city
of those murderers. Whether it was also further given them to believe on
the Crucified who had such witnesses as Stephen, we are not told; we may
well presume that it was.... If we keep in mind that in that mingled fear
and love which together constitute the piety of man toward God, the Old
Testament placed its emphasis on the fear, the New places it on the love
(though there was love in the fear of God’s saints then, as there must
be fear in their love now), it will at once be evident how fitly εὐλαβὴς
was chosen to set forth their piety under the old covenant, who, like
Zacharias and Elizabeth, were righteous before God, walking in all the
commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless, and leaving nothing
willingly undone which pertained to the circle of their prescribed
duties. For this sense of accurately and scrupulously performing that
which is prescribed with the consciousness of the danger of slipping
into a negligent performance of God’s service, and of the need therefore
of anxiously watching against the adding to or diminishing from, or in
any other way altering, that which is commanded, lies ever in the words
εὐλαβὴς, εὐλάβεια, when used in their religious signification. Plutarch,
in more than one instructive passage, exalts the εὐλάβεια of the old
Romans in divine matters, as contrasted with the comparative carelessness
of the Greeks. Thus, in his “Coriolanus,” after other instances in
proof, he goes on to say, “Of late times also they did renew and begin
a sacrifice thirty times one after another, because they thought still
there fell out one fault or another in the same; so holy and devout were
they to the gods” (τοιαύτη μὲν εὐλάβεια πρὸς τὸ Θεῖον Ῥωμαῖων). Elsewhere
he portrays Æmilius Paulus as eminent for his εὐλάβεια. The passage is
long, and I will only quote a portion of it, availing myself again of
old Sir Thomas North’s translation, which, though somewhat loose, is in
essentials correct:—“When he did anything belonging to his office of
priesthood, he did it with great experience, judgment, and diligence;
leaving all other thoughts, and without omitting any ancient ceremony or
adding any new; contending oftentimes with his companions in things which
seemed light and of small moment; declaring to them that, though we do
presume the gods are easy to be pacified and that they readily pardon
all faults and scapes committed by negligence, yet if it were no more
but for respect of the Commonwealth’s sake, they should not slightly or
carelessly dissemble or pass over faults committed in those matters.”’[3]
This is the view suggested by what Butler has happily called the
‘presages of conscience’ by the ‘natural fear and apprehension’ of
punishment, ‘which restrains from crimes and is a declaration of nature
against them.’ The great difficulty of religious philosophy is, to
explain how we know that these two Beings are the same—from what course
and principle of reasoning it is that we acquire our knowledge that the
_curiosus Deus_, the watchful Deity, who is ever in our secret hearts,
who seeks us out in the fairest scenes, who is apt to terrify our
hearts, whose very eyes seem to shine through nature, is the same Being
that animates the universe with its beauty and its light, smoothes the
heaviness from our brow and the weight from our hearts, pervades the
floating cloud and buoyant air,—
‘And from the breezes, whether low or loud,
And from the rain of every passing cloud,
And from the singing of the summer birds,
And from all sounds, all silence,’
—gives hints of joy and hope. This seems the natural dualism—the singular
contrast of the God of imagination and the God of conscience, the God of
beauty and the God of fear. How do we know that the Being who refreshes
is the same as He who imposes the toil, that the God of anxiety is the
same as the God of help, that the intensely personal Deity of the inward
heart is the same as the almost neutral spirit of external nature, which
seems a thing more than a person, a light and impalpable vapour just
beautifying the universe, and no more?
If we are to offer a suggestion, as we have stated a difficulty, we
should hold that the only way of obviating or explaining the contrast,
which is so perplexing to susceptible minds, is by recurring to the same
primary assumption which is required to satisfy our belief in God’s
infinity, omnipotence, or veracity. We cannot _prove_ in any way that
God is infinite any more than that space is infinite; nor that God is
omnipotent, since we do not know what powers there are in nature—that He
is perfectly true, for we have had no experience or communication with
Him, in which His veracity could be tested. We assume these propositions,
and treat them, moreover, not as hypothetical assumptions or provisional
theories to be discarded if new facts should be discovered, and to be
rejected if more elaborate research should require it, but as positive
and clear certainties, on which we must ever act, and to which we must
reduce and square all new information that may be brought home to us. In
these respects we assume that God is perfect, and it is only necessary
for the solution of our difficulty to assume that He is perfect in all.
We have in both cases the same amount and description of evidence, the
same inward consciousness, the same speaking and urging voice, requiring
us to believe. In every step of religious argument we require the
assumption, the belief, the faith if the word is better, in an absolutely
_perfect_ Being—in and by whom we are, who is omnipotent as well as most
holy, who moves on the face of the whole world and ruleth all things by
the word of His power. If we grant this, the difficulty of the opposition
between what we have called the natural and the supernatural religion is
removed; and without granting it, that difficulty is perhaps insuperable.
It follows from the very idea and definition of an infinitely-perfect
Being, that He is within us, as well as without us—ruling the clouds of
the air, and the fishes of the sea, as well as the fears and thoughts
of man—smiling through the smile of nature, as well as warning with
the pain of conscience, ‘Sine qualitate bonum; sine quantitate magnum;
sine indigentiâ creatorem; sine situ præsidentem; sine habitu omnia
continentem; sine loco ubique totum; sine tempore sempiternum; sine ullâ
sui mutatione mutabilia facientem, nihilque patientem.’ If we assume
this, life is simple; without this all is dark.
The religion of the imagination is, in its consequences upon the
character, free and poetical. No one need trouble himself to set
about its defence. Its agreeability sufficiently defends it and its
congeniality to a refined and literary age. The religion of the
conscience will seem to many of the present day selfish and morbid.
And doubtless it may become so if it be allowed to eat into the fibre
of the character, and to supersede the manliness by which it should be
supported. The whole of religion, of course, is not of this sort, and
it is one which only very imperfect beings can have a share in. But so
long as men are very imperfect, the sense of great imperfection should
cleave to them, and while the consciousness of sin is on the mind, the
consequent apprehension of deserved punishment seems in its proper degree
to be a reasonable service. However, any more of this discussion is
scarcely to our purpose. No attentive reader of Butler’s writings will
hesitate to say that he, at all events, was an example of the ‘anxious
and scrupulous worshipper, who makes a conscience of changing anything,
of omitting anything, being in all things fearful to offend,’[4] and most
likely it was from this habit and characteristic of his mind, that he
obtained the unenviable reputation of living and dying a Papist.
Of Butler’s personal habits nothing in the way of detail has descended
to us. He was never married, and there is no evidence of his ever having
spoken to any lady save Queen Caroline. We hear, however, for certain
that he was commonly present at her Majesty’s philosophical parties, at
which all questions, religious and moral, speculative and practical, were
discussed with a freedom that would astonish the present generation.
Less intellectual unbelief existed probably at that time than there is
now, but there was an infinitely freer expression of what did exist. The
French Revolution frightened the English people. The awful calamities
and horrors of that period were thought to be, as in part they were, the
results and consequences of the irreligious opinions which just before
prevailed. Scepticism became what in the days of Lord Hervey it was not,
an ungentlemanly state of mind. At no meeting of the higher classes,
certainly at none where ladies are present, is there a tenth part of the
plain questioning and _bonâ fide_ discussion of primary Christian topics,
that there was at the select suppers of Queen Caroline. The effect of
these may be seen in many passages, and even in the whole tendency, of
Butler’s writings. No great Christian writer, perhaps, is so exclusively
occupied with elementary topics and philosophical reasonings. His mind
is ever directed towards the first principles of belief, and doubtless
this was because, more than any other, he lived with men who plainly and
clearly denied them. His frequent allusion to the difficulties of such
discussions are likewise suggestive of a familiar personal experience.
The whole list of directions which he gives the clergy of Durham on
religious argument shows a daily familiarity with sceptical men. ‘It is
come,’ he says, ‘I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons
that Christianity is not so much as a subject of inquiry, but that it is
now at length discovered to be false. And accordingly they treat it as if
this were an agreed point among all people of discernment, and nothing
remained but to set it up as a principal subject of ridicule, as it were
by way of reprisals for its having so long interrupted the pleasures of
the world.’ No one would so describe the tone of talk now, nor would
there be an equal reason for remembering Butler’s general caution against
rashly entering the lists with the questioners. Among gentlemen a
clergyman has scarcely the chance. ‘Then, again, the general evidence of
religion is complex and various. It consists of a long series of things:
one preparatory to and confirming another from the beginning of the world
till the present time, and it is easy to see how impossible it must
be in a cursory conversation to unite all this into one argument, and
represent it as it ought; and, could it be done, how utterly indisposed
would people be to attend to it. I say, in cursory conversation; whereas
unconnected objections are thrown out in few words, and are easily
apprehended without more attention than is usual in common talk, so
that, notwithstanding we have the best cause in the world, and though a
man were very capable of defending it, yet I know not why he should be
forward to undertake it upon so great a disadvantage and to so little
good effect, as it must be amid the gaiety and carelessness of common
conversation.’ It is not likely from these remarks that Butler had much
pleasure at the Queen’s talking parties.
What his pleasures were, indeed, does not very distinctly appear. In
reading we doubt if he took any keen interest. A voracious reader is
apt, when he comes to write, to exhibit his reading in casual references
and careless innuendoes, which run out insensibly from the fulness
of his literary memory. But of this in Butler there is nothing. His
writings contain little save a bare and often not a very plain statement
of the necessary argument; you cannot perhaps find a purely literary
allusion in his writings; none, at all events, which shows he had any
favourite books, whose topics were ever present to his mind, and whose
well-known words might be a constant resource in moments of weariness
and melancholy. There is, too, a philippic in the well-known ‘Preface’
against vague and thoughtless reading, which seems as if he felt the
evil consequences more than the agreeableness of that sin. Some men find
a compensation in the excitement of writing, for all other evils and
exclusions; but it is probable that, if Butler hated anything, he hated
his pen. Composition is pleasant work for men of ready words, fine ears,
and thick-coming illustrations. Wit and eloquence please the writer as
much as the reader. There is even some pleasantness in feeling that you
have given a precise statement of a strong argument. But Butler, so far
from having the pleasures of eloquence, had not even the comfort of
perspicuity. He never could feel that he had made an argument tell by his
way of wording it; it tells in his writings, if it tells at all, by its
own native and inherent force. In some places the mode of statement is
even stupid; it seems selected to occasion a difficulty. You often see
that writers,—Gibbon, for instance,—believe that their words are good
to eat, as well as to read; they had plainly a pleasure in rolling them
about in the mouth like sugar-plums, and gradually smoothing off any
knots or excrescences; but there is nothing of this in Butler.
The circumstance of so great a thinker being such a poor writer is not
only curious in itself, but indicates the class of thinkers to which
Butler belongs. Philosophers may be divided into seers on the one hand,
and into gropers on the other. Plato, to use a contrast which is often
used for other purposes, is the type of the first. On all subjects he
seems to have before him a landscape of thought, with clear outline, and
pure air, keen rocks and shining leaves, an Attic sky and crystal-flowing
river, each detail of which was as present, as distinct, as familiar
to his mind as the view from the Acropolis, or the road to Decelea. As
were his conceptions so is his style. What Protagoras said and Socrates
replied, what Thrasymachus and Polemo, what Gorgias and Callicles, all
comes out in distinct sequence and accurate expression; each feature is
engraved on the paper; an exact beauty is in every line. What a contrast
is the style of Aristotle! He sees nothing—he is like a man groping in
the dark about a room which he knows. He hesitates and suggests; proposes
first one formula and then another; rejects both, gives a multitude
of reasons, and ends at last with an expression which he admits to be
incorrect and an apologetic ‘let it make no difference.’ There are whole
passages in his writings—the discussion about Solon and happiness in the
‘Ethics,’ is an instance—in which he appears like a schoolboy who knows
the answer to a sum, but cannot get the figures to come to it.
This awkward and hesitating manner is likewise that of Butler. He
seems to have an obscure feeling, an undefined perception, of what
the truth is; but his manipulation of words and images is not apt
enough to bring it out. Like the miser in the story, he has a shilling
_about_ him somewhere, if people will only give him time and solitude
to make research for it. As a person hunting for a word or name he has
forgotten, he knows what it is, _only_ he cannot say it. The fault is one
characteristic of a strong and sound mind wanting in imagination. The
visual faculty is deficient. The soundness of such men’s understanding
ensures a correct report of what comes before them, and its strength is
shown in vigorous observations upon it; but they are unable to bring
those remarks out, the delineative power is wanting, they have no picture
of the particulars in their minds; no instance or illustration occurs
to them. Popular, in the large sense of the term, such writers can
never be. Influential they may often become. The learned have time for
difficulties; the critical mind is pleased with crooked constructions;
the detective intellect likes the research for lurking and half-hidden
truth. In this way portions of Aristotle have been noted these thousand
years, as Chinese puzzles; and without detracting for a moment from
Butler’s real merit, it may be allowed that some of his influence,
especially that which he enjoys in the English universities, is partially
due to that obscurity of style, which renders his writings such apt
exercises for the critical intellect, which makes the truth when found
seem more valuable from the difficulty of finding it, and gives scope for
an able lecturer to elucidate, annotate, and expound.
The fame of Butler rests mainly on two remarkable courses of reasoning,
one of which is contained in the well-known Sermons, the second in
the ‘Analogy.’ Both seem to be in a great measure suggested by the
circumstances and topics of the time. There was a certain naturalness
in Butler’s mind, which took him straight to the questions on which
men differed around him. Generally, it is safer to prove what no one
denies, and easier to explain difficulties which no one has ever felt.
A quiet reputation is best obtained in the literary _quæstiunculæ_ of
important subjects. But a simple and straightforward man studies great
topics because he feels a want of the knowledge which they contain; and
if he has ascertained an apparent solution of any difficulty, he is
anxious to impart it to others. He goes straight to the real doubts and
fundamental discrepancies; to those on which it is easy to excite odium,
and difficult to give satisfaction; he leaves to others the amusing
skirmishing and superficial literature accessory to such studies. Thus
there is nothing light in Butler; all is grave, serious, and essential;
nothing else would be characteristic of him.
The Sermons of Butler are primarily intended as an answer to that
recurring topic of ethical discussion, the Utilitarian Philosophy. He
is occasionally spoken of by enthusiastic disciples as having uprooted
this for ever. But this is hardly so. The selfish system still lives and
flourishes. Nor must any writer on the fundamental differences of human
opinion propose to himself such an aim. The source of the great heresies
of belief lies in their congeniality to certain types of character
frequent in the world, and liable to be reproduced by inevitable and
recurring circumstances. We do not mean that the variations of creeds
are the native and essential variances of the minds which believe them,
for this would render truth a matter of personal character, and make
general discussion impossible. We believe that all minds are originally
so constituted as to be able to acquire right opinions on all subjects
of the first importance to them; but, nevertheless, that the native bent
of their character instinctively inclines them to particular views; that
one man is naturally prone to one error, and another to its opposite;
that this is increased by circumstances, and becomes for practical
purposes invincible, unless it be met on the part of every man by early
and vigorous resistance. The Epicurean philosophy is an example of these
recurring and primary errors, inasmuch as it is congenial to clear,
vigorous, and hasty minds, which have no great depth of feeling, and no
searching introspection of thought, which prefer a ready solution to an
accurate, an easy to an elaborate, a simple to a profound. Draw a slight
worldliness—and the events of life will draw it—over such a mind, and you
have the best Epicurean. There is a use, however, in discussing topics
like these. Nothing would be more perverse than to abstain from proving
certain truths, because some men were naturally prone to the opposite
errors; rather, on the contrary, should we din them into the ears, and
thrust them upon the attention, of mankind; go out into the highways and
hedges, and leave as few as possible for invincible ignorance to mislead
or to excuse. It is much in every generation to state the ancient truth
in the manner which that generation requires; to state the old answer
to the old difficulty; to transmit, if not discover; convince, if not
invent; to translate into the language of the living, the truths first
discovered by the dead. This defence, though suggested by the subject,
is not, however, required by Butler. He may claim the higher praise of
having explained his subject in a manner essentially more satisfactory
than his predecessors.
We are not concerned to follow Butler into the entire range of this
ancient and well-discussed topic. We are only called on to make, and we
shall only make, two or three remarks on the position which he occupies
with respect to it. His grand merit is the simple but important one of
having given a less complex and more graphic description of the facts of
human consciousness than any one had done before. Before his time the
Utilitarians had the advantage of appearing to be the only people who
talked about real life and human transactions. The doctrines avowed by
their opponents were cloudy, lofty, and impalpable. Platonic philosophy
in its simple form is utterly inexplicable to the English mind. A plain
man will not soon succeed in making anything of an archetypal idea. If
an ordinary sensible Englishman takes up even such a book as Cudworth’s
‘Immutable Morality,’ it is nearly inevitable that he should put it down
as mystical fancy. True as a considerable portion of the conclusions of
that treatise are or may be, nevertheless the truth is commonly so put
as to puzzle an Englishman, and the error so as particularly to offend
him. We may open at random. ‘Wherefore,’ says Cudworth, ‘the result of
all that we have hitherto said is this, that the intelligible natures
and essences of things are neither arbitrary nor fantastical, that is,
neither alterable by any will or opinion; and therefore everything is
necessarily and immutably to science and knowledge what it is, whether
absolutely, or relatively to all minds and intellects in the world.
So that if moral good and evil, just and unjust, signify any reality,
either absolute or relative, in the things so denominated, as they must
have some certain natures, which are the actions or souls of men, they
are neither alterable by will or opinion. Upon which ground that wise
philosopher, Plato, in his “Minos,” determined that Νόμος, a law, is
not δόγμα πόλεως, any arbitrary decree of a city or supreme governors;
because there may be unjust decrees, which, therefore, are no laws, but
the _invention of that which_ IS, or what is absolutely or immutably
just in its own nature; though it be very true also that the arbitrary
constitutions of those that have the lawful authority of commanding when
they are not materially unjust, are laws also in a secondary sense,
by virtue of that natural and immutable justice or law that requires
political order to be observed. But I have not taken all this pains
only to confute scepticism or fantasticism, or merely to defend or
corroborate our argument for the immutable nature of the just and unjust;
but also for some other weighty purposes that are very much conducing
to the business we have in hand. And first of all, that the soul is not
a mere _tabula rasa_, a naked and passive thing, which has no innate
furniture or activity of its own, nor anything at all in it but what
was impressed on it from without; for, if it were so, then there could
not possibly be any such thing as moral good and evil, just and unjust,
forasmuch as these differences do not arise merely from outward objects
or from the impresses which they make upon us by sense, there being no
such thing in them, in which sense it is truly affirmed by the author
of the “Leviathan” (p. 24), “That there is no common rule of good and
evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves,” that is,
either considered absolutely in themselves, or relatively to external
sense only, but according to some other interior analogy which things
have to a certain inward determination in the soul itself from whence
the foundation of all this difference must needs arise, as I shall show
afterwards; not that the anticipations of morality spring merely from
intellectual forms and notional ideas of the mind, or from certain rules
or propositions printed on the “soul as on a book,” but from some other
more inward and vital principle in intellectual beings, as such, whereby
they have a natural determination in them to do certain things, and
to avoid others, which could not be, if they were mere naked, passive
things.’
It is instructive to compare Butler’s way of stating a doctrine
substantially similar:—
‘Mankind has various instincts and principles of action,
as brute creatures have; some leading most directly and
immediately to the good of the community, and some most
directly to private good.
‘Man has several which brutes have not; particularly reflection
or conscience, an approbation of some principles or actions,
and disapprobation of others.
‘Brutes obey their instincts or principles of action, according
to certain rules; suppose the constitution of their body, and
the objects around them.
‘The generality of mankind also obey their instincts and
principles, all of them; those propensions we call good, as
well as the bad, according to the same rules, namely, the
constitution of their body, and the external circumstances
which they are in.
‘Brutes, in acting according to the rules before mentioned,
their bodily constitution and circumstances, act suitably to
their whole nature.
‘Mankind also, in acting thus, would act suitably to their
whole nature, if no more were to be said of man’s nature than
what has been now said; if that, as it is a true, were also a
complete, adequate account of our nature.
‘But that is not a complete account of man’s nature. Somewhat
further must be brought in to give us an adequate notion of it,
namely, that one of those principles of action, conscience, or
reflection, compared with the rest, as they all stand together
in the nature of man, plainly bears upon it marks of authority
over all the rest, and claims the absolute direction of them
all, to allow or forbid their gratification; a disapprobation
of reflection being in itself a principle manifestly superior
to a mere propension. And the conclusion is, that to allow no
more to this superior principle or part of our nature, than to
other parts; to let it govern and guide only occasionally in
common with the rest, as its turn happens to come, from the
temper and circumstances one happens to be in,—this is not to
act conformably to the constitution of man. Neither can any
human creature be said to act conformably to his constitution
of nature, unless he allows to that superior principle the
absolute authority which is due to it. And this conclusion is
abundantly confirmed from hence, that one may determine what
course of action the economy of man’s nature requires, without
so much as knowing in what degrees of _strength_ the several
principles prevail, or which of them have actually the greatest
influence.
‘The practical reason of insisting so much upon this natural
authority of the principle of reflection or conscience is,
that it seems in a great measure overlooked by many, who are
by no means the worst sort of men. It is thought sufficient
to abstain from gross wickedness, and to be humane and kind
to such as happen to come in their way. Whereas, in reality,
the very constitution of our nature requires that we bring
our whole conduct before this superior faculty; wait its
determination; enforce upon ourselves its authority; and make
it the business of our lives, as it is absolutely the whole
business of a moral agent, to conform ourselves to it. This is
the true meaning of that ancient precept, _Reverence thyself_.’
We do not mean that Cudworth’s style is not as good, or better, than the
style of Butler; but that the language and illustrations of the latter
belong to the same world as that we live in, have a relation to practice,
and recall sentiments we remember to have felt and sensations which are
familiar to us, while those of Cudworth, on the contrary, seem difficult,
and are strange in the ears of the common people.
We do not need to go more deeply into the discussion of Butler’s
doctrine, for it is familiar to our readers. If there is any
incorrectness in the delineation which he has given of conscience, it is
in the passages in which he speaks, or seems to speak, of it more as an
animating or suggesting, than as a criticising or regulative faculty.
The error of this representation has been repeatedly pointed out and
illustrated in these pages.[5] It is probable, indeed, that Butler’s
attention had scarcely been directed with sufficient precision to this
portion of the subject. It follows easily, from his favourite principles,
that when two impulses—say benevolence and self-love—contend for mastery
in the mind, and conscience pronounces that one is a higher and better
motive of action than the other, the office of conscience is judicial,
and not impulsive. Conscience gives its opinion, and the will obeys or
disobeys at its pleasure; the impelling spring of action is the selected
impulse on which the will finally decides to act. At the same time, it
must be admitted that there are cases when, for practical purposes,
conscience is an impelling and goading faculty. We mean when it is
opposed by indolence. There is a heavy lassitude of the will, which is
certainly spurred, sometimes effectually, and sometimes in vain, by our
conscience. Possibly the correct language may be, that in such cases
the desire of ease is opposed by the desire of doing our duty; and that
in this case also the office of conscience is simply to say, that the
latter is higher than the former. To us it seems, however, if we may
trust our consciousness on points of such exact nicety, that it is more
graphically true to speak of the sluggishness of the will being goaded
and stimulated by the activity of conscience. There is a native inertness
in the voluntary faculty which will not come forth unless great occasion
is shown it. At any rate, something like this was perhaps the meaning of
Butler, and he, no doubt, would have included in the term conscience the
desire to do our duty as such, and because it is such.
Butler has been claimed by Mr. Austin, in his ‘Province of Jurisprudence’
(and sometimes since by other writers), as a supporter of the compound
Utilitarian scheme, as it has been called, which regards the promotion
of general happiness as the single inherent characteristic of virtuous
actions, and considers the conscience as a special instinct for directing
men in determining what actions are for the general interest and what
are not. This theory is, of course, distinct from the common Epicurean
scheme, which either denies, like Bentham, the fact of a conscience _in
limine_, or, like Mill, professes to explain it away as an effect of
illusion and association. The ‘Composite theory,’ on the other hand,
distinctly admits the existence and obligatory authority of conscience,
but regards it as a ready, expeditious, and, so to say, telegraphic mode
of arriving at results which could otherwise be reached only by toilsome
and dubious discussions of general utility. In our judgment, however,
the writings of Butler hardly warrant an authoritative ascription to
him of this philosophy. He doubtless held that the promotion of general
happiness, taking all time and all the world into a complete account, is
_one_ characteristic and ascertainable property of virtue; but there is
nothing to show that he thought it was the only one. On the contrary,
we think we could show, with some plausibility, from several passages,
that, in his judgment, virtuous actions had besides several essential
and appropriate qualities. He was, at all events, the last man to deny
that they might have; and his whole reasoning on the subject of moral
probation seems to imply that, inasmuch as such a state is, according to
every appearance, not at all the readiest or surest means of promoting
satisfaction and enjoyment, it cannot have been selected for the
cultivation of either satisfaction or enjoyment. It is one thing to hold
that, the nature of man being what it is, a virtuous life is the happiest
as well as best; and another, that such a life is the best because it is
the happiest, and that the nature of man was created in the manner it is
in order to produce such happiness. The first is, of course, the doctrine
of Butler; the second there does not seem any certain ground for imputing
to him.
The religious side of morals is rather indicated and implied, than
elaborated or worked out by Butler. Yet, as we formerly said, a constant
reference to the ‘presages of conscience’ pervades his writings.
Although he has nowhere drawn out the course of reasoning fully, or
step by step, it is certain that he relied on the moral evidence for
a moral Providence; not, indeed, with foolhardy assurance, but with
the cautious confidence which was habitual to him. The ideas which are
implied in the term justice—the connection between virtue and reward—sin
and punishment—a sacred law and holy Ruler, were plainly the trains of
reflection most commonly present to his mind.
Persons who give credence to an intuitive conscience are so often
taunted with the variations and mutability of human nature, that it is
worth noticing how complete is the coincidence, in essential points of
feeling, between minds so different as Butler, Kant, and Plato. We can
scarcely imagine among thoughtful men a greater diversity of times and
characters. The great Athenian in his flowing robes daily conversing
in captious Athens—the quiet rector wandering in Durham coalfields—the
smoking professor in ungainly Königsberg, would, if the contrast were
not too great for art, form a trio worthy of a picture. The whole series
of truths and reasonings which we have called the supernatural religion,
or that of conscience, is, however, as familiar to one as to the
other, and is the most important, if not the most conspicuous, feature
in the doctrinal teaching of all three. The very great differences
of nomenclature and statement, the entire contrast in the style of
expression, do but heighten the wonder of the essential and interior
correspondence. The doctrine has certainly shown its capability of
co-existing with several forms of civilisation; and at least the simplest
explanation of its diffusion is by supposing that it has a real warrant
in the nature and consciousness of man.
Such is the doctrine of the Sermons; the argument of the ‘Analogy’ is
of a different and more complicated kind; and, from its refinement,
requires to be stated with care and precaution. As the Sermons are in a
great measure a reply to the caricaturists of Locke, the ‘Analogy’ is,
in reality, designed as a confutation of Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke.
It was the object of those writers, as of others since, to disprove the
authority of the Christian and Jewish revelation, by showing that they
enjoined on man conduct forbidden by the law of nature, and likewise
imputed to the Deity actions of an evil tendency and degrading character.
These writers are commonly, and perhaps best, met by a clear denial of
the fact; by showing in detail, that Christianity is really open to no
such objections, contains no such precepts, and imputes no such actions:
the reply of Butler is much more refined and peculiar.
The argument has been thus expounded, and its supposed bearing explained
by Professor Rogers in the notice of Butler,—the title of which we have
ventured to affix to this Article:—
‘Further; we cannot but think that the conclusiveness of
Butler’s work as against its true object, “The Deist,” has
often been underrated by many even of its genuine admirers.
Thus, Dr. Chalmers, for instance, who gives such glowing proofs
of his admiration of the work, and expatiates in a congenial
spirit on its merits, affirms that “those overrate the power
of analogy who look to it for any very distinct or positive
contribution to the Christian argument. To repel objections,
in fact, is the great service which analogy has rendered to
the cause of Revelation, and it is the _only service_ which we
seek for at its hands.” This, abstractedly, is true; but, _in
fact_, considering the _position_ of the bulk of the objectors,
that they have been invincibly persuaded of the truth of
theism, and that their objections to Christianity have been
exclusively or chiefly of the kind dealt with in the “Analogy,”
the work is much more than an _argumentum ad hominem_—it is
not simply of negative value. To such _objectors_ it logically
establishes the truth of Christianity, or it forces them to
recede from theism, which the bulk will not do. If a man says,
“I am invincibly persuaded of the truth of proposition A, but
I cannot receive proposition B, because objections α, β, γ
are opposed to it; if these were removed, my objections would
cease;” then, if you can show that α, β, γ equally apply to
the proposition A, his reception of which, he says, is based
on invincible evidence, you do really compel such a man to
believe that not only B _may_ be true, but that it _is_ true,
unless he be willing (which few in the parallel case are) to
abandon proposition A as well as B. This is precisely the
condition in which the majority of Deists have ever been, if
we may judge from their writings. It is usually the _à priori_
assumption, that certain facts in the history of the Bible,
or some portions of its doctrine, are unworthy of the Deity,
and incompatible with his character or administration, that
has chiefly excited the incredulity of the Deist; far more
than any dissatisfaction with the positive evidence which
substantiates the Divine origin of Christianity. Neutralise
these objections by showing that they are _equally_ applicable
to what he declares he cannot relinquish—the doctrines of
theism; and you show him, if he has a particle of logical
sagacity, not only that Christianity may be true, but that it
is so; and his only escape is by relapsing into atheism, or
resting his opposition on other objections of a very feeble
character in comparison, and which, probably, few would ever
have been contented with alone; for, _apart_ from those
objections which Butler repels, the historical evidence for
Christianity—the evidence on behalf of the integrity of its
records and the honesty and sincerity of its founders—showing
that they could not have constructed such a system if they
_would_, and _would not_, supposing them impostors, if they
_could_—is stronger than that for any fact in history.
‘In consequence of this position of the argument, Butler’s
book, to large classes of objectors, though practically an
_argumentum ad hominem_, not only proves Christianity _may_ be
true, but in all logical fairness proves it _is_ so. This he
himself, with his usual judgment, points out. He says: “And
objections which are equally applicable to both natural and
revealed religion are, properly speaking, answered by its being
shown that they are so, _provided the former be admitted to be
true_.”’
No one can deny the ingenuity of this line of reasoning, but we can only
account for the great assent which it has received, by supposing that the
goodness of the cause for which it is commonly brought forward has not
unnaturally led to an undue approbation of the argument itself. From the
amount of authority in its favour we feel some diffidence, but otherwise
we should have said, without hesitation, that it was open to several
objections.
In the first place, so far from its being probable that Revelation would
have contained the same difficulties as Nature, we should have expected
that it would explain those difficulties. The very term Supernatural
Revelation implies that previously and by nature man is, to a great
extent, in ignorance; that particularly he is unaware of some fact,
or series of facts, which God deems it fit that he should know. The
instinctive presumption certainly is, that those facts would be most
important to us. No doubt it is possible that, for incomprehensible
reasons, a special revelation should be made of facts purely indifferent,
of the date when London was founded, or the precise circumstances of the
invasion by William the Conqueror. But this is in the highest degree
improbable. What seems likely (and the whole argument is essentially
one of likelihood), according to our mind, is that the Revelation which
God would vouchsafe to us would be one affecting our daily life and
welfare, would communicate truths either on the one hand conducing to our
temporal happiness in the present world, or removing the many doubts and
difficulties which surround the general plan of Providence, the entire
universe, and our particular destiny. These are the two classes of truths
on which we seem to require help, and it is in the first instance more
probable that assistance would be given us on those points on which it is
most required.
The argument of Butler, of course, relates to our religious difficulties.
And, it seems impossible to deny that this is the exact class of
difficulty which it is most likely a revelation, if given, would explain.
No one who reasons on this subject is likely to doubt that the natural
faculties of man are more clearly adequate to our daily and temporal
happiness, than to the explanation of the perplexities which have
confounded men since the beginning of speculation—of which the mere
statement is so vast—which relate to the scheme of the universe and
the plan of God. This is the one principle on which the most extreme
sceptics, and the most thorough advocates of revelation, meet and
agree. The sceptic says, ‘Man is not born to resolve the mystery of the
universe; but he must nevertheless attempt it, that he may keep within
the limits of the knowable:’ which really means that he is to fold his
hands and be quiet; to abstain from all religious inquiry; to confine
himself to this life, and be industrious and practical within its
limits. The advocate of revelation is for ever denying the competency
of man’s faculties to explain, or puzzle out, what in the large sense
most concerns him. There are difficulties celestial, and difficulties
terrestrial; but it is certainly more likely that God would interfere
miraculously to explain the first than to remove the second.
Let us look at the argument more at length. The supposition and idea of a
‘miraculous revelation’ rest on the ignorance of man. The scene of nature
is stretched out before him; it has rich imagery, and varied colours,
and infinite extent; its powers move with a vast sweep; its results are
executed with exact precision; it gladdens the eyes, and enriches the
imagination; it tells us something of God—something important, yet not
enough. For example, difficulties abound; poverty and sin, pain and
sorrow, fear and anger, press on us with a heavy weight. On every side
our knowledge is confined, and our means of enlarging it small. Of this
the outer world takes no heed; nature is ‘unfeeling;’ her laws roll on;
‘beautiful and dumb,’ she passes forward and vouchsafes no sign. Indeed,
she seems to hide, as one might fancy, the dark mysteries of life which
seem to lie beneath; our feeble eyes strain to look forward, but her
‘painted veil’ hangs over all, like an October mist upon the morning
hills. Here, as it seems, revelation intervenes; God will break the spell
that is upon us; will meet our need; will break, as it were, through the
veil of nature; He will show us of Himself. It is not likely, surely,
that He will break the everlasting silence to no end; that, having begun
to speak, He will tell us nothing; that He will leave the difficulties of
life where He found them; that He will repeat them in His speech; that
He will revive them in His word. It seems rather, as if His faintest
disclosure, His least word, would shed abundant light on all doubts,
would take the weight from our minds, would remove the gnawing anguish
from our hearts. Surely, surely, if He speaks He will make an end of
speaking, He will show us some good, He will destroy ‘the veil that is
spread over all nations,’ and the ‘covering over all people;’ He will not
‘darken counsel by words without knowledge.’
To this line of argument we know of but one objection; it may be said,
that, from the immensity of the universe in which man is, reasons may
exist for communicating to him facts of which he cannot appreciate the
importance, but a belief in which may nevertheless be most important to
his ultimate welfare. Of this kind, according to some divines, is the
doctrine of the ‘Atonement.’ As they think, it is impossible to explain
the mode in which the death of Christ conduces to the forgiveness of sin,
or why a belief in it should be made, as they think it is, a necessary
preliminary to such forgiveness. They consider that this is a revealed
matter of fact; part of a system of things which is not known now, which
would very likely be above our understanding if it were explained, which,
at all events, is not explained. We reply, that the revelation of an
inexplicable fact is possible, and that, if adequate evidence could be
adduced in its favour, we might be bound to acquiesce in it; but that,
on the other hand, such a revelation is extremely improbable: so far as
we can see, there was no occasion for it; it helps in nothing, explains
to us nothing; it enlarges our knowledge only thus far, that for some
unknown reason we are bound to believe something from which certain
effects follow in a manner which we cannot understand. Such a revelation
is, as has been said, possible; but it is much more likely, _à priori_,
that a revelation, if given, would be a revelation of facts suited to our
comprehension, and throwing a light on the world in which we are.
The same remark is applicable to a revelation commanding rites and
ceremonies which do not come home to the conscience as duties, and of
which the reasons are not explained to us by the revelation itself. The
Pharisaic code of ‘cups and washings’ is an obvious instance. It is
obviously most improbable that we should be ordered to do these things.
The fact may be so; but the evidence of it should be overwhelming,
and should be examined with almost suspicious and sceptical care. A
revelation of a rule of life which approves itself to the heart, which
awakens conscience, which seems to come from God, is the greatest
conceivable aid to man, the greatest explanation of our most practical
perplexities; a revelation of rites and ordinances is a revelation of new
difficulties, telling us nothing of God, imposing an additional taskwork
on ourselves.
We are to remember, that the ‘Analogy’ is, as the Germans would speak, a
‘Kritik’ of every possible revelation. The first principle of it rests on
the inquiry, ‘What would it be likely that a revelation, if vouchsafed,
would contain?’ The whole argument is one of preconception, presumption,
and probability. It claims to establish a principle, which may be used
in defence of any revelation, the Mahomedan as well as the Christian;
according to it, as soon as you can show that a difficulty exists in
nature, you may immediately expect to find it in revelation. If carried
out to its extreme logical development, it would come to this, that if
a catalogue were constructed of all the inexplicable arrangements and
difficulties of nature, you might confidently anticipate that these
very same difficulties in the same degree and in the same points would
be found in revelation. Both being from the same Author, it is presumed
that each would resemble the other. The principle, even to this length,
is enunciated by Mr. Rogers; the difficulties of nature are the α, β, γ
of the extract: and he asserts, that if you can show that all of them
exist in one system, you have every reason to expect _all_ of them in the
other. Yet, surely, what can be more monstrous than that a supernatural
communication from God should simply enumerate all the difficulties of
His natural government and not enlighten us as to any of them—should
revive our perplexities without removing them—should not satisfy one
doubt or one anxiety, but repeat and proclaim every fact which can give a
basis to them both?
The case does not rest here. There is a second ground of objection to
the argument of the ‘Analogy’ on which we are inclined to lay nearly
equal stress. As has been said, it is most likely that a revelation from
God would explain at least a part of the religious difficulties of
man; and, in matter of fact, all systems purporting to be revelations
have in their respective degrees professed to do so. They all deal
with what may be called the system of the universe—its moral plan and
scheme; the destiny of man therein—the motives from which God created
it—and the manner in which He directs it. Throughout the whole range of
doctrines, from Mormonism up to Christianity, no one has ever gained any
acceptance, has ever, perhaps, been sincerely put forward, which did not
deal with this whole range of facts—which did not tell man, according
to his view, whence he is, and whither he goes. Revelations, as such,
are communications concerning eternity. Now, it seems to us, that so
far from its being likely, _à priori_, that a revelation of this sort
would contain the same perplexing difficulties which cause so much evil
in this world, in the same degree in which they exist here, it would
be scarcely possible by any evidence, _à posteriori_, to establish the
communication of such a system from the Divine Being. It seems clear on
the surface of the subject that, the extent of the unknown world being
so enormous in comparison with that which is known, this scene being
so petty, and the plan of Providence so vast—earth being little, and
space infinite—Time short, and Eternity long—a difficulty, which is of
no moment in so contracted a sphere as this, becomes of infinite moment
when extended to the sphere of the Almighty. From the smallness of the
region which we see—the short time which we live—from the few things
which we know—it may well be that there are points which perplex the
feebleness of our understanding and puzzle the best feelings of our
hearts. We see, as some one expresses it, the universe ‘not in plan but
in section;’ and we cannot expect to understand very much of it. But when
our knowledge increases—when, by a revelation, that plan is unfolded to
us—when God vouchsafes to communicate to us the system on which He acts,
then it is rational to expect those difficulties would diminish—would
gradually disappear as the light dawned upon us—would vanish finally
when the dayspring arose on our hearts. If a difficulty of nature be
repeated in revelation, it would seem to show that it was not, as we
had before supposed, a consequence of our short-sighted views and
contracted knowledge, but a real inherent element in the scheme of the
universe; not a petty shade on a petty globe, but a pervading inherent
stain, extending over all things, destroying the beauty of the universe,
impairing the perfectness of all creation. Take, as an instance, the
extreme doctrine of Antinomian Calvinism—suppose that the eternal
condition of man depended in no degree on his acts, or works, or upon
himself in any form, but on an arbitrary act of selection by God, which
chose some, independently of any antecedent fitness on their part, for
eternal happiness, and consigns all others—irrespective of their guilt or
innocence—to eternal ruin. Nothing, of course, can be more shocking than
such a doctrine when stated in simple language; and if it really were
contained in any document that professes to be a revelation, we should
be plainly justified in passing it by as a document which no evidence
would prove to have been inspired by God. Yet the doctrine certainly
does not want partial analogies in this world. The condition of men here
does seem to be in a considerable measure the result not of what they
do, or of what their characters are, but of the mere circumstances in
which they are placed, over which they have no control, choice, or power.
One man is born in a ditch, another in a palace; one with a gloomy and
painful, another with a cheerful and happy mind; one to honour, another
to dishonour. We invent words—fortune, luck, chance—to express in a
subtle way the notion that some seem the favourites of circumstance,
others the scapegoats. So far as it goes, this is a distinct ‘election’
on the part of God of some to misery, of others to felicity, irrespective
of their personal qualities. Accordingly, it may be argued, why should
we not expect to find the same in the world of revelation, which is
from the hand of the same Creator? But this will scarcely impose on
any one. A certain indignation arises within us—conscience uplifts
her voice, and we reply, ‘It may well be that for a short time God may
afflict His people without their own fault, but that He should do so for
ever—that He should make no end of injustice—that He favours one without
a reason, and condemns another without a fault—this, come what may, we
will not believe—we would sooner cast ourselves at large on the waste of
uncertainty;—pass on with your teaching, and ask God, if so be that He
will pardon you for attributing such things to Him.’ We need not further
enlarge on this.
Again, and in the practical conduct of the argument this is a very
material consideration. All revelations impute _intentions_ to God. Acts
are done, observances enjoined, a providential plan pursued, for reasons
which are explained. The cause of this is evident from our previous
reasoning. As we have seen, all revelations profess to vindicate the
ways of God to man; and it is impossible to do so effectually without
declaring to us at least some of His motives and designs. It is most
important to observe, that no analogy from nature can justify us in
judging of these except by the standard of right or wrong which God has
implanted within us. From external observation we learn almost nothing of
God’s intentions. The scheme is too large; the universe too unbounded.
One phenomenon follows another; but, except in a few cases, and then
very dubiously, we cannot tell which was created for which—which was
the design—which the means—which the determining object—and which the
subservient purpose. Even in the few cases in which we do impute such
intentions, we do so because they seem to be in harmony with God’s moral
character; they are not strictly proved, they are mere conjectures; and
we should reject at once any that might seem ethically unworthy. But the
case is different with a revelation which, from its own nature, unfolds
ends and instruments in their due measure and their actual subordination,
which developes an orderly system, and communicates hidden motives and
unforeseen designs. A recent writer, for example, thus defends certain
apparent cruelties of the Old Testament by stating those of nature:
‘God,’ he says, ‘sends His pestilence, and produces horrors on which
imagination dare not dwell; horrors not only physical, but indirectly
moral; often transforming man into something like the fiend so many say
he can never become. He sends His famine, and thousands perish—men and
women, and “the child that knows not its right hand from its left”—in
prolonged and frightful agonies. He opens the mouths of volcanoes and
lakes; boils and fries the population of a whole city in torrents of
burning lava, &c. &c.’[6]—with much else to the same purpose. But this
must not be adduced in extenuation of anything of which the reasons are
narrated; on the contrary, these last must be judged of by the moral
faculties which are among God’s highest gifts. To the infliction of
pain, with an express view to what conscience tells us to be an unworthy
object, outward nature does and can afford no parallel. She has no
avowals; it is but from conjecture that we conceive her motives; her
laws pass forward; the crush of her forces is upon us; like a child in
a railway, we know not anything. The incomprehensible has no analogy
to the explained; the mysterious none to that on which the oracle has
intelligibly spoken.
Lastly, for a similar reason it is impossible that there should be
any analogy in nature for a precept from God opposed to the law of
conscience. External nature gives no precept; our knowledge of our duty
comes from within; the physical world is subordinate to our inward
teaching; it is silent on points of morality. On the other hand, a
revelation, supposing satisfactory means of attesting it were found,
might possibly contain such a precept. It is very painful to put such
suppositions before the mind; but the pain is inherent in the nature
of the subject. The topic of the difficulties and perplexities of man
cannot, by any artifice of rhetoric, be rendered pleasing. In such a
case, supposing there to be no difficulty of evidence in the case, our
duty might be to obey God even against conscience, from that assurance
of His essential perfection which is the most certain attestation of
conscience. But the existence of such a difficulty is in the highest
degree improbable; it is one which ought only to be admitted on the
completest proof and after the most rigid straining of evidence: it
is, from the nature of the case, without a parallel in the common and
unrevealed world.
To all these considerable objections, we believe the argument of the
‘Analogy’ is properly subject. We think in general that, according to
every reasonable presumption, a revelation would not repeat the same
difficulties as are to be found in nature, but would remove and explain
some of them; that difficulties, which are of small importance in the
natural world, on account of the smallness of its sphere and the brevity
of its duration, become of insuperable magnitude when extended to
infinity and eternity, when alleged to be co-extensive with the universe,
and to be inherent in its scheme and structure; and that,—what is of
less universal scope, but still of essential importance,—nature offers
no analogy to the ascription by any professed revelation of an unworthy
intention to God, or the inculcation through it of an immoral precept on
man.
It is impossible, then, by any such argument as this, to remove from
moral criticism the entire contents of any revelation. According to
the more natural view, the unimpeachable morality of those contents is
a most essential part of the evidence on which our belief must rest;
and this seems to remain so, notwithstanding these refinements. On the
other hand, we do not contend that the reasoning of the ‘Analogy’ is
wholly worthless. If Butler’s[7] argument had only been adduced to this
extent; if it had only been argued that, though a revelation might
be expected to explain some difficulties, it could not be expected
to explain all; that a certain number would, from our ignorance and
unworthiness, still remain; and these residuary difficulties would
be of the same order, class, and kind, to which we were accustomed;
that the style of Providence, if one may so say, would be the same in
the newly-communicated phenomena as we had observed it to be in those
we were familiar with before,—there could be little question of the
soundness of the principle. No one would expect that there would be new
difficulties introduced by a revelation; what difficulties were found
in it we should expect to be identical with those observed before in
nature; or, at least, to be similar to them, and likely to be explained
in the same way by a more adequate knowledge of God’s purposes. We should
particularly expect the difficulties of revelation to be _like_ those of
nature, limited in time and range, not extending to the entire scheme
of Providence, not diffused through infinity and eternity, not imputing
evil intentions to God, not inculcating immoral precepts on man. We can
hardly be said to _expect_ to find difficulties in revelation at all;
the utmost that seems probable, _à priori_, is, that it should leave
unnoticed some of those of nature. Nevertheless, there is no violent, no
overwhelming improbability in the fact of some perplexing points being
contained in a communication from God; we are so weak, that it may be
we cannot entirely understand the smallest intimation from the Infinite
Being. And if difficulties are found there, they are, of course, less
perplexing, when resembling those which we knew before, than if they be
wholly distinct and new in kind. But this principle is, on the face of
it, very different from the admission of an antecedent probability, that
all the difficulties discoverable in nature would be daguerreotyped in a
revelation.
The difference is seen very clearly by looking at the argument which
Butler’s reasoning is intended to confute. Suppose a professed revelation
to be laid before a person who was before unacquainted with it, and
that he finds in it several perplexing points. According to Butler’s
principle, or what is supposed by Mr. Rogers to be Butler’s principle, it
is enough to reply: You have those same difficulties in nature before;
you cannot consistently object to them now; they have not prevented your
ascribing nature to a Divine Author; they should not prevent you from
ascribing to Him this revelation. Nature is so full of difficulties,
that almost every doctrine that has ever been attributed to revelation
may be provided with a parallel more or less apt. Consequently, it would
be almost needless to criticise the contents of any alleged revelation,
when we may be met so easily by such a reply. No careful reasoner
would attempt that criticism. According to the doctrine which we have
reiterated, we should deem it a difficulty that these perplexing points
should be found in a revelation; but that difficulty would not amount
to much, would not counterbalance strong evidence, if it could be shown
that the system claiming to be revealed, although leaving these points
unexplained, threw ample light on others; that what gave cause for
perplexity was quite subordinate to what removed perplexity; that no
immoral actions were enjoined on man; no unworthy motives imputed to God;
no vice attributed to the whole scheme and plan of the Creator. There
would therefore remain the largest scope for internal criticism on all
systems claiming to be messages from God; on the very face they must seem
worthy of Him: in their very essence they must seem good.
This is plainly the obvious view. The natural opinion certainly is that
the moral and religious faculties would be those on which we should
primarily depend, in judging of an alleged communication from heaven; in
deciding whether it have a valid claim to that character or no. These
faculties are those which, antecedently to revelation, determine our
belief in all other moral and religious questions, and it is therefore
natural to look to them as the best judges of the authenticity of an
alleged revelation. Many divines, however, struggle to deny this. Thus,
in the memoir of Butler we are now reviewing, Mr. Rogers observes,—
‘The immortal “Analogy” has probably done more to silence the
objections of infidelity than any other ever written from the
earliest “apologies” downwards. It not only most critically
met the spirit of unbelief in the author’s own day, but is
equally adapted to meet that which _chiefly_ prevails in all
time. In every age, some of the principal, perhaps _the_
principal, objections to the Christian Revelation have been
those which men’s _preconceptions_ of the Divine character
and administration—of what God _must_ be, and of what God
_must_ do—have suggested against certain facts in the sacred
history, or certain doctrines it reveals. To show the objector,
then (supposing him to be a theist, as nine-tenths of all
such objectors have been), that the very same or similar
difficulties are found in the structure of the universe and the
divine administration of it, is to wrest every _such_ weapon
completely from his hands, if he be a fair reasoner and remain
a theist at all. He is bound, by strict logical obligation,
either to show that the parallel difficulties do _not_ exist,
or to show how he can solve them, while he _cannot_ solve those
of the Bible. In default of doing either of these things, he
ought either to renounce all _such_ objections to Christianity,
or abandon theism altogether. It is true, therefore, that
though Butler leaves the alternative of atheism open, he hardly
leaves any other alternative to nine-tenths of the theists who
have objected to Christianity.’
And there is a perpetual reiteration in the ‘Eclipse of Faith’ of the
same reasoning. In fact, so far as the latter work has a distinct
principle, this argument may be said to be that principle. The answer
is, that the proof of all ‘revelation’ itself rests on a ‘preconception’
respecting the Divine character, and that, if we assume the truth of that
one ‘preconception,’ we must not reject any others which may be found to
have the same evidence. We refer, of course, to the assumption of God’s
veracity; which can only be proved by arguments that, if admitted, would
likewise justify our attributing to Him all other perfect virtues. It is
evident that a doubt as to this attribute is not only impious in itself,
but quite destructive of all confidence in any communication which may be
received from Him. And yet, on what evidence does its acceptance rest?
It cannot be said to be demonstrated by what scientific men call ‘natural
theology.’ Competent and careful persons examine the material world, the
structure of animals and plants, the courses of the planets, the muscles
of man, and they find there a great preponderance of benevolence. They
show, with great labour and great merit, that the Being who arranged this
universe is, on the whole, a benevolent Being; but does it follow that
He will tell the truth? ‘In crossing a heath,’ says Paley, ‘suppose I
pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be
there, I might possibly answer that, for anything I knew to the contrary,
it had lain there for ever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show
the absurdity of this answer: but, suppose I had found a _watch_ on
the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch came to be in that
place, I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that, for
anything I knew, it had been always there.’ And he shows, with his usual
power, that this watch was, in all likelihood, made by a watchmaker.
There is nothing cleverer, perhaps, in argumentative writing, than the
way in which that argument is stated and pointed. But what evidence is
there that the watchmaker was _veracious_? The amplest examination of
the most refined designs, the minutest scrutiny of the most complex
contrivances, do not go one hair’s breadth to establish any such
conclusion. Nor can it be shown that the virtue of veracity is identical
with, or consequent on, the virtue of simple benevolence. We know well in
common life that there are such things as pleasing falsehoods, and that
such things exist as disagreeable truths. A person (what we ordinarily
call a good-natured person) whose only motive is simple benevolence, will
constantly assert the first and deny the second. In its application to
religion this tendency cannot be illustrated without suppositions which
it is painful even to make; but yet they must be made for a moment,
or the necessary argument must be left incomplete. Suppose, what is
doubtless true, that the belief in a ‘future state,’ even if false,
contributes to the temporal happiness of man in this world; that it does
more to enlarge his hopes, stimulate his imagination, and alleviate his
sorrows, than any one other consideration; that it contributes to the
order of society and the progress of civilisation; that it is, as some
one says, ‘the last restraint of the powerful, and the last hope of the
wretched.’ Indisputably, a Being whose only motive was benevolence, who
admitted no higher consideration, who looked steadily and solely to our
mere happiness, would endeavour to instil that belief although it were
quite untrue, would not think that _that_ had anything to do with the
question, would not hesitate to make a false revelation to confirm men
in a belief so pleasant, so advantageous, so consolatory. Perhaps this
supposition drives the argument home. We see that it is necessary for us
to admit a ‘preconception’ as to the character of God before we can even
begin to prove the truth of a revelation; that we _must_ reason of ‘what
God _must_ be and God _must_ do,’ before we show that there is even a
presumption in favour of any facts, or any doctrines, which are revealed
in the ‘sacred history.’
We have hinted, in an earlier part of this essay, that this doctrine
of God’s veracity seems to us to rest on the general assumption of the
existence of a ‘perfect’ Being, who rules and controls all things. It
is, perhaps, the Divine attribute of which it is most difficult to find
a trace in nature. Of His omnipotence, justice, benevolence, we cannot,
indeed, find absolute proof; for we believe that those attributes are
infinite, and we can only prove them strictly with respect to the finite
and very circumscribed world which we see and know. Yet, at the same
time, we discern indications and strong probabilities, that the Ruler of
the world possesses these attributes; we can hardly be said to be able to
do this with His veracity. The speechlessness of nature, if we may again
so speak, deprives us of any such evidence. All Theism is of the nature
of faith. We can never prove from experience any being to be infinite,
for our experience itself is essentially small and finite. We can often,
however, as in the instance of the attributes of God above enumerated,
and of others which might be added, establish by observation that the
qualities in question exist in a certain degree, and we have only to
rely on the principle of faith for our belief that these qualities exist
in a perfect and supreme degree. In the case of the Divine veracity, it
should seem that we believe it to exist in a perfect and infinite degree,
without, from the peculiarity of our circumstances, being able to fortify
it by any test or trial from experience.
Present controversies show that there should be a distinct understanding
as to this matter. Such writers as the author of the ‘Eclipse of Faith’
perpetually strive to justify what they think the difficulties of
revelation, by insinuating—we might say inculcating—a scepticism as to
the religious faculties and conscience of man. These faculties are at
one time said to be ‘depraved;’ once they were trustworthy, but man is
fallen from that high estate; he can only now believe what is announced
to him externally. But how can we then rely on those ‘depraved’ faculties
for our belief in the truthfulness of the Being who announces these
things? At another time all the horrid superstitions, all the immoral
rites, all the wretched aberrations of savage and licentious nations,
are enumerated, displayed, inculcated, in order to convince us that
these faculties give no certain information. We will not quote the
passages. We do not like to read hard attacks even on the worst side
of human nature; we cannot, like some, gloat upon such details. The
argument is plain without any painful accuracy. How can you believe in
the ‘intuition’ of the Divine justice, when the Hindoo says this? How
in that of his Holiness, when the Papuan accepts that impurity? But
this is no defence for any revelation. The writers who exult in such
errors because they think they can use them in their logic, are really
cutting away the substratum of evidentiary argument from under them. The
veracity of God has not been accepted by all nations any more than His
justice. In many times and countries He has been thought to inspire
falsehoods, to put a ‘lying spirit’ in the mouths of men, to deceive them
to their destruction. Agamemnon’s dream is but the type of a whole class
of legends imputing untrue revelations to the gods. If we liked such
work, we might prove, perhaps, that there is no man on the earth whose
ancestors have not believed the like. And what then? Why, we can only
answer that, debased, depraved, imperfect as they may be, these faculties
are our all. It is on them that we depend for life, and breath, and all
things. We must believe our heart and conscience, or we shall believe
nothing. We _must_ believe that God cannot lie, or we must renounce all
that our highest and innermost nature most cleaves to; but if we go so
far, we must go further—we cannot believe in God’s veracity and deny the
intuition of His justice—we know that He is pure on the same ground that
we know that He is true. If an alleged revelation contradict this justice
or this purity, we must at once deny that it can have proceeded from Him.
Even admitting, as we think it must be admitted, that Butler did not
firmly hold the principle which Mr. Rogers and others ascribe to him,
some may find a difficulty in so great a thinker having even a tendency
towards that tenet. On examination, however, the very error seems
characteristic of him.
A mind such as Butler’s was in a previous page described to be, is
very apt to be prone to over refinement. A thinker of what was there
called the picturesque order has a vision, a picture of the natural
view of the subject. Those certainties and conclusions, those doubts
and difficulties, which occur on the surface, strike him at once; he
sees with his mind’s eye some conspicuous instance in which all such
certainties are realised, and by which all such doubts are suggested.
Some great typical fact remains delineated before his mind, and is a
perpetual answer to all hypotheses which strive to be over-subtle. But
an unimaginative thinker has no such assistance; he has no pictures or
instances in his mind; he works by a process like an accountant, and
like an accountant he is dependent on the correctness with which he
works. He begins with a principle and reasons from it; and if any error
have crept into the deduction or into the principle, he has not any means
of detecting it. His mind does not yield, as with more fertile fancies,
a stock of instances on which to verify his elaborate conclusions.
Accordingly he is apt to say he has explained a difficulty, when in
reality he has but refined it away.
Again, there is likewise a deeper sense in which the argument of the
‘Analogy’ is, even in its least valuable portions, characteristic of
Butler. On topics so peculiar, the minds most likely to hold right
opinions are exactly those most likely to advance wrong arguments in
support of them. The opinions themselves are suggested and supported by
deep and strong feelings, which it is painful to analyse, and not easy to
describe. The real and decisive arguments for those opinions are little
save a rational analysis and acute delineation of those feelings. It will
necessarily follow that the mind most prone to delineate and analyse
that part of itself will be most likely to succeed in the argumentative
exposition of these topics; and this is not likely to be the mind which
feels those emotions with the greatest intensity. The very keenness of
these feelings makes them painful to touch; their depth, difficult to
find: constancy, too, is liable to disguise them. The mind which always
feels them will, so to speak, be less conscious of them than one which
is only visited by them at long and rare intervals. Those who know a
place or a person best are not those most likely to describe it best;
their knowledge is so familiar that they cannot bring it out in words. A
deep, steady under-current of strong feeling is precisely what affects
men’s highest opinions most, and exactly what prevents men from being
able adequately to describe them. In the absence of the delineative
faculty, without the power to state their true reasons, minds of this
deep and steadfast class are apt to put up with reasons which lie on the
surface. They are caught by an appearance of fairness affect a dry and
intellectual tone, endeavour to establish their conclusions without the
premises which are necessary,—without mention of the grounds on which,
in their own minds, they really rest. The very heartfelt confidence of
Butler in Christianity was perhaps the cause of his seeming in part to
support it with considerations which appear to be erroneous.
It seems odd to say, and yet it is true, that the power of the ‘Analogy,’
is in its rhetoric. The ancient writers on that art made a distinction
between the modes of persuasion which lay in the illustrative and
argumentative efficacy of what was said, and a yet more subtle kind which
seemed to reside in the manner and disposition of the speaker himself.
In the first class, as has been before remarked, no writer of equal
eminence is so defective as Butler; his thoughts, if you take each one
singly, seem to lose a good deal from the feeble and hesitating manner
in which they are stated. And yet, if you read any considerable portion
of his writings, you become sensible of a strong disinclination to
disagree with him. A strong anxiety first to find the truth, and next to
impart it—an evident wish not to push arguments too far—a clear desire
not to convince men except by reasonable arguments of true opinions,
characterises every feeble word and halting sentence. Nothing is laid
down to dazzle or arouse. It is assumed that the reader wants to know
what is true, as much as the writer does to tell it. Very possibly
this may not be the highest species of religious author. The vehement
temperament, the bold assertion, the ecstatic energy of men like St.
Augustine or St. Paul, burn, so to speak, into the minds and memories of
men, and remain there at once and for ever. Such men excel in the broad
statement of great truths which flash at once with vivid evidence on the
minds which receive them. The very words seem to glow with life; and even
the sceptical reader is half awakened by them to a kindred and similar
warmth. Such are the men who move the creeds of mankind, and stamp a
likeness of themselves on ages that succeed them. But there is likewise
room for a quieter class, who partially state arguments, elaborate
theories, appreciate difficulties, solve doubts; who do not expect to
gain a hearing from the many—who do not cry in the streets or lift their
voice from the hill of Mars—who address quiet and lonely thinkers like
themselves, and are well satisfied if a single sentence in all their
writings remove one doubt from the mind of any man. Of these was Butler.
_Requiescat in pace_, for it was peace that he loved.
_STERNE AND THACKERAY._[8]
(1864.)
Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has expressed his surprise that no one before
him has narrated the life of Sterne in two volumes. We are much more
surprised that he has done so. The life of Sterne was of the very
simplest sort. He was a Yorkshire clergyman, and lived for the most part
a sentimental, questionable, jovial life in the country. He was a queer
parson, according to our notions; but in those days there were many queer
parsons. Late in life he wrote a book or two, which gave him access to
London society; and then he led a still more questionable and unclerical
life at the edge of the great world. After that he died in something like
distress, and leaving his family in something like misery. A simpler
life, as far as facts go, never was known; and simple as it is, the story
has been well told by Sir Walter Scott, and has been well commented
on by Mr. Thackeray. It should have occurred to Mr. Fitzgerald that a
subject may only have been briefly treated because it is a limited and
simple subject, which suggests but few remarks, and does not require an
elaborate and copious description.
There are but few materials, too, for a long life of Sterne. Mr.
Fitzgerald has stuffed his volumes with needless facts about Sterne’s
distant relations, his great uncles and ninth cousins, in which no
one now can take the least interest. Sterne’s daughter, who was left
ill-off, did indeed publish two little volumes of odd letters, which
no clergyman’s daughter would certainly have published now. But even
these are too small in size and thin in matter to be spun into a copious
narrative. We should in this [the _National_] Review have hardly given
even a brief sketch of Sterne’s life, if we did not think that his
artistic character presented one fundamental resemblance and many
superficial contrasts to that of a great man whom we have lately lost. We
wish to point these out; and a few interspersed remarks on the life of
Sterne will enable us to enliven the tedium of criticism with a little
interest from human life.
Sterne’s father was a shiftless, roving Irish officer in the early part
of the last century. He served in Marlborough’s wars, and was cast
adrift, like many greater people, by the caprice of Queen Anne and the
sudden peace of Utrecht. Of him only one anecdote remains. He was, his
son tells us, ‘a little smart man, somewhat rapid and hasty’ in his
temper; and during some fighting at Gibraltar he got into a squabble
with another young officer, a Captain Phillips. The subject, it seems,
was a goose; but that is not now material. It ended in a duel, which was
fought with swords in a room. Captain Phillips pinned Ensign Sterne to
a plaster-wall behind; upon which he quietly asked, or is said to have
asked, ‘_Do_ wipe the plaster off your sword before you pull it out of
me;’ which, if true, showed at least presence of mind. Mr. Fitzgerald, in
his famine of matter, discusses who this Captain Phillips was; but into
this we shall not follow him.
A smart, humorous, shiftless father of this sort is not perhaps a bad
father for a novelist. Sterne was dragged here and there, through scenes
of life where no correct and thriving parent would ever have taken him.
Years afterwards, with all their harshness softened and half their pains
dissembled, Sterne dashed them upon pages which will live for ever. Of
money and respectability Sterne inherited from his father little or none;
but he inherited two main elements of his intellectual capital—a great
store of odd scenes, and the sensitive Irish nature which appreciates odd
scenes.
Sterne was born in the year 1713, the year of the peace of Utrecht, which
cast his father adrift upon the world. Of his mother we know nothing.
Years after, it was said that he behaved ill to her; at least neglected
and left her in misery when he had the means of placing her in comfort.
His enemies neatly said that he preferred ‘whining over a dead ass to
relieving a living mother.’ But these accusations have never been proved.
Sterne was not remarkable for active benevolence, and certainly may have
neglected an old and uninteresting woman, even though that woman was
his mother; he was a bad hand at dull duties, and did not like elderly
females; but we must not condemn him on simple probabilities, or upon a
neat epigram and loose tradition. ‘The regiment,’ says Sterne, ‘in which
my father served being broke, he left Ireland as soon as I was able to
be carried, and came to the family seat at Elvington, near York, where
his mother lived.’ After this he was carried about for some years, as his
father led the rambling life of a poor ensign, who was one of very many
engaged during a very great war, and discarded at a hasty peace. Then,
perhaps luckily, his father died, and ‘my cousin Sterne of Elvington,’
as he calls him, took charge of him, and sent him to school and college.
At neither of these was he very eminent. He told one story late in
life which may be true, but seems very unlike the usual school-life.
‘My schoolmaster,’ he says, ‘had the ceiling of the schoolroom new
whitewashed: the ladder remained there. I one unlucky day mounted it, and
wrote with a brush in large capitals LAU. STERNE, for which the usher
severely punished me. My master was much hurt at this, and said before me
that never should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and
he was sure I should come to preferment.’ But ‘genius’ is rarely popular
in places of education; and it is, to say the least, remarkable that so
sentimental a man as Sterne should have chanced upon so sentimental an
instructor. It is wise to be suspicious of aged reminiscents; they are
like persons entrusted with ‘untold gold;’ there is no check on what they
tell us.
Sterne went to Cambridge, and though he did not acquire elaborate
learning, he thoroughly learned a gentlemanly stock of elementary
knowledge. There is even something scholarlike about his style. It bears
the indefinable traces which an exact study of words will always leave
upon the use of words. He was accused of stealing learning, and it is
likely enough that a great many needless quotations which were stuck
into _Tristram Shandy_ were abstracted from second-hand storehouses
where such things are to be found. But what he stole was worth very
little, and his theft may now at least be pardoned, for it injures the
popularity of his works. Our present novel-readers do not at all care for
an elaborate caricature of the scholastic learning; it is so obsolete
that we do not care to have it mimicked. Much of _Tristram Shandy_ is a
sort of antediluvian fun, in which uncouth Saurian jokes play idly in an
unintelligible world.
When he left college, Sterne had a piece of good fortune which in fact
ruined him. He had an uncle with much influence in the Church, and he
was thereby induced to enter the Church. There could not have been a
greater error. He had no special vice; he was notorious for no wild
dissipation or unpardonable folly; he had done nothing which even in this
more discreet age would be considered imprudent. He had even a refinement
which must have saved him from gross vice, and a nicety of nature which
must have saved him from coarse associations. But for all that he was
as little fit for a Christian priest as if he had been a drunkard and a
profligate. Perhaps he was less fit.
There are certain persons whom taste guides, much as morality and
conscience guide ordinary persons. They are ‘gentlemen.’ They revolt from
what is coarse; are sickened by that which is gross; hate what is ugly.
They have no temptation to what we may call ordinary vices; they have
no inclination for such raw food; on the contrary, they are repelled by
it, and loathe it. The law in their members does _not_ war against the
law of their mind; on the contrary, the _taste_ of their bodily nature
is mainly in harmony with what conscience would prescribe or religion
direct. They may not have heard the saying that the ‘beautiful is higher
than the good, for it includes the good.’ But when they do hear it,
it comes upon them as a revelation of their instinctive creed, of the
guidance under which they have been living all their lives. They are pure
because it is ugly to be impure; innocent because it is out of taste to
be otherwise; they live within the hedge-rows of polished society; they
do not wish to go beyond them into the great deep of human life; they
have a horror of that ‘impious ocean,’ yet not of the impiety, but of the
miscellaneous noise, the disordered confusion of the whole. These are
the men whom it is hardest to make Christian,—for the simplest reason;
paganism is sufficient for them. Their pride of the eye is a good pride;
their love of the flesh is a delicate and directing love. They keep
‘within the pathways’ because they dislike the gross, the uncultured, and
the untrodden. Thus they reject the primitive precept which comes before
Christianity. Repent! repent! says a voice in the wilderness; but the
delicate pagan feels superior to the voice in the wilderness. Why should
he attend to this uncouth person? He has nice clothes and well-chosen
food, the treasures of exact knowledge, the delicate results of the
highest civilisation. Is he to be directed by a person of savage habits,
with a distorted countenance, who lives on wild honey, who does not
wear decent clothes? To the pure worshipper of beauty, to the naturally
refined pagan, conscience and the religion of conscience are not merely
intruders, but barbarous intruders. At least so it is in youth, when
life is simple and temptations if strong are distinct. Years afterwards,
probably, the purest pagan will be taught by a constant accession of
indistinct temptations, and by a gradual declension of his nature, that
taste at the best, and sentiment of the very purest, are insufficient
guides in the perplexing labyrinth of the world.
Sterne was a pagan. He went into the Church; but Mr. Thackeray, no bad
judge, said most justly that his sermons ‘have not a single Christian
sentiment.’ They are well expressed, vigorous, moral essays; but they
are no more. Much more was not expected by many congregations in the
last age. The secular feeling of the English people, though always
strong,—though strong in Chaucer’s time, and though strong now,—was never
so all-powerful as in the last century. It was in those days that the
poet Crabbe was remonstrated with for introducing heaven and hell into
his sermons; such extravagances, he was told, were very well for the
Methodists, but a _clergyman_ should confine himself to sober matters of
this world, and show the prudence and the reasonableness of virtue during
this life. There is not much of heaven and hell in Sterne’s sermons, and
what there is seems a rhetorical emphasis which is not essential to the
argument, and which might perhaps as well be left out. Auguste Comte
might have admitted most of these sermons; they are healthy statements of
earthly truths, but they would be just as true if there was no religion
at all. Religion helps the argument, because foolish people might be
perplexed with this world, and they yield readily to another; religion
enables you—such is the real doctrine of these divines, when you examine
it—to coax and persuade those whom you cannot rationally convince; but it
does not alter the matter in hand—it does not affect that of which you
wish to persuade men, for you are but inculcating a course of conduct _in
this life_. Sterne’s sermons would be just as true if the secularists
should succeed in their argument, and the ‘valuable illusion’ of a deity
were omitted from the belief of mankind.
However, in fact, Sterne took orders, and by the aid of his uncle, who
was a Church politician, and who knew the powers that were, he obtained
several small livings. Being a pluralist was a trifle in those easy
times; nobody then thought that the parishioners of a parson had a right
to his daily presence; if some provision were made for the performance of
a Sunday service, he had done his duty, and he could spend the surplus
income where he liked. He might perhaps be bound to reside, if health
permitted, on one of his livings, but the law allowed him to have many,
and he could not be compelled to reside on them all. Sterne preached
well-written sermons on Sundays, and led an easy pagan life on other
days, and no one blamed him.
He fell in love too, and after he was dead, his daughter found two or
three of his love-letters to her mother, which she rashly published. They
have been the unfeeling sport of persons not in love up to the present
time. Years ago Mr. Thackeray used to make audiences laugh till they
cried by reading one or two of them, and contrasting them with certain
other letters also about his wife, but written many years later. This is
the sort of thing:—
‘Yes! I will steal from the world, and not a babbling tongue
shall tell where I am—Echo shall not so much as whisper my
hiding-place—suffer thy imagination to paint it as a little
sun-gilt cottage, on the side of a romantic hill—dost thou
think I will leave love and friendship behind me? No! they
shall be my companions in solitude, for they will sit down and
rise up with me in the amiable form of my L.—We will be as
merry and as innocent as our first parents in Paradise, before
the arch fiend entered that undescribable scene.
‘The kindest affections will have room to shoot and expand in
our retirement, and produce such fruit as madness, and envy,
and ambition have always killed in the bud.—Let the human
tempest and hurricane rage at a distance, the desolation is
beyond the horizon of peace. My L. has seen a polyanthus blow
in December—some friendly wall has sheltered it from the biting
wind. No planetary influence shall reach us, but that which
presides and cherishes the sweetest flowers.—God preserve us!
how delightful this prospect in idea! We will build, and we
will plant, in our own way—simplicity shall not be tortured
by art—we will learn of nature how to live—she shall be our
alchymist, to mingle all the good of life into one salubrious
draught.—The gloomy family of care and distrust shall be
banished from our dwelling, guarded by thy kind and tutelar
deity—we will sing our choral songs of gratitude, and rejoice
to the end of our pilgrimage.
‘Adieu, my L. Return to one who languishes for thy society.
L. STERNE.’
The beautiful language with which young ladies were wooed a century ago
is a characteristic of that extinct age; at least, we fear that no such
beautiful English will be discovered when our secret repositories are
ransacked. The age of ridicule has come in, and the age of good words has
gone out.
There is no reason to doubt, however, that Sterne was really in love with
Mrs. Sterne. People have doubted it because of these beautiful words;
but, in fact, Sterne was just the sort of man to be subject to this kind
of feeling. He took—and to this he owes his fame—the _sensitive_ view
of life. He regarded it not from the point of view of intellect, or
conscience, or religion, but in the plain way in which natural feeling
impresses, and will always impress, a natural person. He is a great
author; certainly not because of great thoughts, for there is scarcely a
sentence in his writings which can be called a thought; nor from sublime
conceptions which enlarge the limits of our imagination, for he never
leaves the sensuous,—but because of his wonderful sympathy with, and
wonderful power of representing, simple human nature. The best passages
in Sterne are those which every one knows, like this:
‘Thou hast left this matter short, said my uncle Toby to the
corporal, as he was putting him to bed,——and I will tell thee
in what, Trim.——In the first place, when thou madest an offer
of my services to Le Fever,—as sickness and travelling are
both expensive, and thou knowest he was but a poor lieutenant,
with a son to subsist as well as himself, out of his pay,—that
thou didst not make an offer to him of my purse; because, had
he stood in need, thou knowest, Trim, he had been as welcome
to it as myself.——Your honour knows, said the corporal, I had
no orders;——True, quoth my uncle Toby,—thou didst very right,
Trim, as a soldier, but certainly very wrong as a man.
‘In the second place, for which, indeed, thou hast the same
excuse, continued my uncle Toby,——when thou offeredst him
whatever was in my house,—thou shouldst have offered him
my house too:——A sick brother officer should have the best
quarters, Trim, and if we had him with us,—we could tend and
look to him:——Thou art an excellent nurse thyself, Trim,—and
what with thy care of him, and the old woman’s, and his boy’s,
and mine together, we might recruit him again at once, and set
him upon his legs.——
‘——In a fortnight or three weeks, added my uncle Toby,
smiling,—he might march.——He will never march, an’ please your
honour, in this world, said the corporal:——He will march, said
my uncle Toby, rising up from the side of the bed, with one
shoe off:——An’ please your honour, said the corporal, he will
never march, but to his grave:——He shall march, cried my uncle
Toby, marching the foot which had a shoe on, though without
advancing an inch,—he shall march to his regiment.——He cannot
stand it, said the corporal:——He shall be supported, said my
uncle Toby:——He’ll drop at last, said the corporal, and what
will become of his boy?——He shall not drop, said my uncle Toby,
firmly.——A-well-o’day,—do what we can for him, said Trim,
maintaining his point,—the poor soul will die:——He shall not
die, by G—! cried my uncle Toby.
‘—The ACCUSING SPIRIT, which flew up to heaven’s chancery with
the oath, blush’d as he gave it in;—and the RECORDING ANGEL, as
he wrote it down, dropp’d a tear upon the word, and blotted it
out for ever.
‘—My uncle Toby went to his bureau,—put his purse into his
breeches pocket, and having ordered the corporal to go early in
the morning for a physician,—he went to bed, and fell asleep.
‘The sun looked bright the morning after, to every eye in the
village but Le Fever’s and his afflicted son’s; the hand of
death pressed heavy upon his eye-lids,——and hardly could the
wheel at the cistern turn round its circle,—when my uncle
Toby, who had rose up an hour before his wonted time, entered
the lieutenant’s room, and without preface or apology, sat
himself down upon the chair by the bed-side, and independently
of all modes and customs, opened the curtain in the manner an
old friend and brother officer would have done it, and asked
him how he did,—how he had rested in the night,—what was his
complaint,—where was his pain,—and what he could do to help
him:——and without giving him time to answer any one of the
inquiries, went on and told him of the little plan which he had
been concerting with the corporal the night before for him.——
‘——You shall go home directly, Le Fever, said my uncle Toby,
to my house,—and we’ll send for a doctor to see what’s the
matter,—and we’ll have an apothecary,—and the corporal shall be
your nurse;——and I’ll be your servant, Le Fever.
‘There was a frankness in my uncle Toby,—not the _effect_ of
familiarity,—but the _cause_ of it,—which let you at once
into his soul, and showed you the goodness of his nature; to
this there was something in his looks, and voice, and manner,
super-added, which eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to
come and take shelter under him; so that before my uncle Toby
had half finished the kind offers he was making to the father,
had the son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and
had taken hold of the breast of his coat, and was pulling it
towards him.——The blood and spirit of Le Fever, which were
waxing cold and slow within him, and were retreating to their
last citadel, the heart,—rallied back,—the film forsook his
eyes for a moment,—he looked up wishfully in my uncle Toby’s
face,—then cast a look upon his boy,——and that _ligament_, fine
as it was,—was never broken.——
‘Nature instantly ebb’d again,—the film returned
to its place,——the pulse fluttered——stopp’d——went
on——throbb’d——stopp’d again——moved——stopp’d——shall I go
on?——No.’
In one of the ‘Roundabout Papers’ Mr. Thackeray introduces a literary
man complaining of his ‘sensibility.’ ‘Ah,’ he replies, ‘my good friend,
your sensibility is your livelihood: if you did not feel the events and
occurrences of life more acutely than others, you could not describe them
better; and it is the excellence of your description by which you live.’
This is precisely true of Sterne. He is a great author because he felt
acutely. He is the most pathetic of writers because he had—when writing,
at least—the most pity. He was, too, we believe, pretty sharply in love
with Mrs. Sterne, because he was sensitive to that sort of feeling
likewise.
The difficulty of this sort of character is the difficulty of keeping it.
It does not last. There is a certain bloom of sensibility and feeling
about it which, in the course of nature, is apt to fade soon, and which,
when it has faded, there is nothing to replace. A character with the
binding elements—with a firm will, a masculine understanding, and a
persistent conscience—may retain, and perhaps improve, the early and
original freshness. But a loose-set, though pure character, the moment
it is thrown into temptation sacrifices its purity, loses its gloss, and
gets, so to speak, out of form entirely.
We do not know with great accuracy what Sterne’s temptations were;
but there was one, which we can trace with some degree of precision,
which has left ineffaceable traces on his works,—which probably left
some traces upon his character and conduct. There was in that part of
Yorkshire a certain John Hall Stevenson, a country gentleman of some
fortune, and possessed of a castle, which he called Crazy Castle. Thence
he wrote tales, which he named ‘Crazy Tales,’ but which certainly are
not entitled to any such innocent name. The license of that age was
unquestionably wonderful. A man of good property could write any evil.
There was no legal check, or ecclesiastical check, and hardly any check
of public opinion. These ‘Crazy Tales’ have license without humour, and
vice without amusement. They are the writing of a man with some wit, but
only enough wit for light conversation, which becomes overworked and dull
when it is reduced to regular composition and made to write long tales.
The author, feeling his wit jaded perpetually, becomes immoral, in the
vain hope that he will cease to be dull. He has attained his reward; he
will be remembered for nauseous tiresomeness by all who have read him.
But though the ‘Crazy Tales’ are now tedious, Crazy Castle was a pleasant
place, at least to men like Sterne. He was an idle young parson, with
much sensibility, much love of life and variety, and not a bit of grave
goodness. The dull duties of a country parson, as we now understand
them, would never have been to his taste; and the sinecure idleness then
permitted to parsons left him open to every temptation. The frail texture
of merely natural purity, the soft fibre of the instinctive pagan, yield
to the first casualty. Exactly what sort of life they led at Crazy
Castle we do not know; but vaguely we do know, and we may be sure _Mrs._
Sterne was against it.
One part of Crazy Castle has had effects which will last as long as
English literature. It had a library richly stored in old folio learning,
and also in the amatory reading of other days. Every page of _Tristram
Shandy_ bears traces of both elements. Sterne, when he wrote it, had
filled his head and his mind, not with the literature of his own age, but
with the literature of past ages. He was thinking of Rabelais rather than
of Fielding; of forgotten romances rather than of Richardson. He wrote,
indeed, of his own times and of men he had seen, because his sensitive
vivid nature would only endure to write of present things. But the _mode_
in which he wrote was largely coloured by literary habits and literary
fashions that had long passed away. The oddity of the book was a kind
of advertisement to its genius, and that oddity consisted in the use of
old manners upon new things. No analysis or account of _Tristram Shandy_
could be given which would suit the present generation; being, indeed, a
book without plan or order, it is in every generation unfit for analysis.
This age would not endure a statement of the most telling points, as the
writer thought them, and no age would like an elaborate plan of a book in
which there is no plan, in which the detached remarks and separate scenes
were really meant to be the whole. The notion that ‘a plot was to hang
plums upon’ was Sterne’s notion exactly.
The real excellence of Sterne is single and simple; the defects are
numberless and complicated. He excels, perhaps, all other writers in mere
simple description of common sensitive human action. He places before
you in their simplest form the elemental facts of human life; he does
not view them through the intellect, he scarcely views them through the
imagination; he does but reflect the unimpaired impression that the facts
of life, which do not change from age to age, make on the deep basis of
human feeling, which changes as little though years go on. The example
we quoted just now is as good as any other, though not better than any
other. Our readers should go back to it again, or our praise may seem
overcharged. It is the portrait-painting of the heart. It is as pure a
reflection of mere natural feeling as literature has ever given, or will
ever give. The delineation is nearly perfect. Sterne’s feeling in his
higher moments so much overpowered his intellect, and so directed his
imagination, that no intrusive thought blemishes, no distorting fancy
mars, the perfection of the representation. The disenchanting facts
which deface, the low circumstances which debase the simpler feelings
oftener than any other feelings, his art excludes. The feeling which
would probably be coarse in the reality is refined in the picture. The
unconscious tact of the nice artist heightens and chastens reality, but
yet it is reality still. His mind was like a pure lake of delicate water:
it reflects the ordinary landscape, the rugged hills, the loose pebbles,
the knotted and the distorted firs perfectly and as they are, yet with
a charm and fascination that they have not in themselves. This is the
highest attainment of art, to be at the same time nature and something
more than nature.
But here the great excellence of Sterne ends as well as begins. In
_Tristram Shandy_ especially there are several defects which, while we
are reading it, tease and disgust so much that we are scarcely willing
even to admire as we ought to admire the refined pictures of human
emotion. The first of these, and perhaps the worst, is the fantastic
disorder of the form. It is an imperative law of the writing-art, that
a book should go straight on. A great writer should be able to tell a
great meaning as coherently as a small writer tells a small meaning. The
magnitude of the thought to be conveyed, the delicacy of the emotion to
be painted, render the introductory touches of consummate art not of less
importance, but of more importance. A great writer should train the mind
of the reader for his greatest things; that is, by first strokes and
fitting preliminaries he should form and prepare his mind for the due
appreciation and the perfect enjoyment of high creations. He should not
blunder upon a beauty, nor, after a great imaginative creation, should
he at once fall back to bare prose. The high-wrought feeling which a
poet excites should not be turned out at once and without warning into
the discomposing world. It is one of the greatest merits of the greatest
living writer of fiction,—of the authoress of _Adam Bede_,—that she
never brings you to anything without preparing you for it; she has no
loose lumps of beauty; she puts in nothing at random; after her greatest
scenes, too, a natural sequence of subordinate realities again tones down
the mind to this sublunary world. Her logical style—the most logical,
probably, which a woman ever wrote—aids in this matter her natural sense
of due proportion. There is not a space of incoherency—not a gap. It is
not natural to begin with the point of a story, and she does not begin
with it. When some great marvel has been told, we all wish to know what
came of it, and she tells us. Her natural way, as it seems to those who
do not know its rarity, of telling what happened produces the consummate
effect of gradual enchantment and as gradual disenchantment. But Sterne’s
style is _un_natural. He never begins at the beginning and goes straight
through to the end. He shies-in a beauty suddenly; and just when you are
affected he turns round and grins at it. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘is it not fine?’
And then he makes jokes which at that place and that time are out of
place, or passes away into scholastic or other irrelevant matter, which
simply disgusts and disheartens those whom he has just delighted. People
excuse all this irregularity of form by saying that it was imitated from
Rabelais. But this is nonsense. Rabelais, perhaps, could not in his day
venture to tell his meaning straight out; at any rate, he did not tell
it. Sterne should not have chosen a model so monstrous. Incoherency is
not less a defect because an imperfect foreign writer once made use of
it. ‘You may have, sir, a reason,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘for saying that
two and two make five, but they will still make four.’ Just so, a writer
may have a reason for selecting the defect of incoherency, but it is
a defect still. Sterne’s best things read best out of his books,—in
Enfield’s _Speaker_ and other places,—and you can say no worse of any one
as a continuous artist.
Another most palpable defect—especially palpable now-a-days—in _Tristram
Shandy_ is its indecency. It is quite true that the customary conventions
of writing are much altered during the last century, and much which would
formerly have been deemed blameless would now be censured and disliked.
The audience has changed; and decency is of course in part dependent
on who is within hearing. A divorce case may be talked over across a
club-table with a plainness of speech and development of expression
which would be indecent in a mixed party, and scandalous before young
ladies. Now, a large part of old novels may very fairly be called
club-books; they speak out plainly and simply the notorious facts of the
world, as men speak of them to men. Much excellent and proper masculine
conversation is wholly unfit for repetition to young girls; and just
in the same way, books written—as was almost all old literature,—for
men only, or nearly only, seem coarse enough when contrasted with
novels written by young ladies upon the subjects and in the tone of the
drawing-room. The change is inevitable; as soon as works of fiction are
addressed to boys and girls, they must be fit for boys and girls; they
must deal with a life which is real so far as it goes, but which is yet
most limited; which deals with the most passionate part of life, and yet
omits the errors of the passions; which aims at describing men in their
relations to women, and yet omits an all but universal influence which
more or less distorts and modifies all these relations.
As we have said, the change cannot be helped. A young ladies’ literature
must be a limited and truncated literature. The indiscriminate study of
human life is not desirable for them, either in fiction or in reality.
But the habitual formation of a scheme of thought and a code of morality
upon incomplete materials is a very serious evil. The readers for whose
sake the omissions are made cannot fancy what is left out. Many a girl of
the present day reads novels, and nothing but novels; she forms her mind
by them, as far as she forms it by reading at all; even if she reads a
few dull books, she soon forgets all about them, and remembers the novels
only; she is more influenced by them than by sermons. They form her idea
of the world, they define her taste, and modify her morality; not so much
in explicit thought and direct act, as unconsciously and in her floating
fancy. How is it possible to convince such a girl, especially if she
is clever, that on most points she is all wrong? She has been reading
most excellent descriptions of mere society; she comprehends those
descriptions perfectly, for her own experience elucidates and confirms
them. She has a vivid picture of a _patch_ of life. Even if she admits in
words that there is something beyond, something of which she has no idea,
she will not admit it really and in practice. What she has mastered and
realised will incurably and inevitably overpower the unknown something of
which she knows nothing, can imagine nothing, and can make nothing. ‘I am
not sure,’ said an old lady, ‘but I think it’s the novels that make my
girls so _heady_.’ It is the novels. A very intelligent acquaintance with
limited life makes them think that the world is far simpler than it is,
that men are easy to understand, ‘that mamma is _so_ foolish.’
The novels of the last age have certainly not this fault. They do not
err on the side of reticence. A girl may learn from them more than it is
desirable for her to know. But, as we have explained, they were meant for
men and not for girls; and if _Tristram Shandy_ had simply given a plain
exposition of necessary facts—necessary, that is, to the development
of the writer’s view of the world, and to the telling of the story in
hand,—we should not have complained; we should have regarded it as the
natural product of a now extinct society. But there are most unmistakable
traces of ‘Crazy Castle’ in _Tristram Shandy_. There is indecency for
indecency’s sake. It is made a sort of recurring and even permeating
joke to mention things which are not generally mentioned. Sterne himself
made a sort of defence, or rather denial, of this. He once asked a lady
if she had read _Tristram_. ‘I have not, Mr. Sterne,’ was the answer;
‘and, to be plain with you, I am informed it is not proper for female
perusal.’ ‘My dear good lady,’ said Sterne, ‘do not be gulled by such
stories; the book is like your young heir there’ (pointing to a child of
three years old who was rolling on the carpet in white tunics): ‘he shows
at times a good deal that is usually concealed, but it is all in perfect
innocence.’ But a perusal of _Tristram_ would not make good the plea.
The unusual publicity of what is ordinarily imperceptible is not the
thoughtless accident of amusing play; it is deliberately sought after as
a nice joke; it is treated as a good in itself.
The indecency of _Tristram Shandy_—at least of the early part, which was
written before Sterne had been to France—is especially an offence against
taste, because of its ugliness. _Moral_ indecency is always disgusting.
There certainly is a sort of writing which cannot be called decent, and
which describes a society to the core immoral, which nevertheless is no
offence against art; it violates a higher code than that of taste, but it
does not violate the code of taste. The _Mémoires de Grammont_—hundreds
of French memoirs about France—are of this kind, more or less. They
describe the refined, witty, elegant immorality of an idle aristocracy.
They describe a life ‘unsuitable to such a being as man in such a world
as the present one,’ in which there are no high aims, no severe duties,
where some precepts of morals seem not so much to be sometimes broken as
to be generally suspended and forgotten; such a life, in short, as God
has never suffered men to lead on this earth long, which He has always
crushed out by calamity and revolution. This life, though an offence in
morals, was not an offence in taste. It was an elegant, a _pretty_ thing
while it lasted. Especially in enhancing description, where the alloy
of life may be omitted, where nothing vulgar need be noticed, where
everything elegant may be neatly painted,—such a world is elegant enough.
Morals and policy must decide how far such delineations are permissible
or expedient; but the art of beauty,—art-criticism—has no objection to
them. They are pretty paintings of pretty objects, and that is all it has
to say. They may very easily do harm; if generally read among the young
of the middle class, they would be sure to do harm: they would teach not
a few to aim at a sort of refinement denied them by circumstances, and to
neglect the duties allotted them; it would make shopmen ‘bad imitations
of polished ungodliness,’ and also bad shopmen. But still, though it
would in such places be noxious literature, in itself it would be pretty
literature. The critic must praise it, though the moralist must condemn
it, and perhaps the politician forbid it.
But _Tristram Shandy’s_ indecency is the very opposite to this refined
sort. It consists in allusions to certain inseparable accompaniments of
actual life which are not beautiful, which can never be made interesting,
which would, _if_ they were decent, be dull and uninteresting. There is,
it appears, a certain excitement in putting such matters into a book:
there is a minor exhilaration even in petty crime. At first such things
look so odd in print that you go on reading them to see what they look
like; but you soon give up. What is disenchanting or even disgusting
in reality does not become enchanting or endurable in delineation. You
are more angry at it in literature than in life; there is much which is
barbarous and animal in reality that we could wish away; we endure it
because we cannot help it, because we did not make it and cannot alter
it, because it is an inseparable part of this inexplicable world. But why
we should put this coarse alloy, this dross of life, into the _optional_
world of literature, which we can make as we please, it is impossible
to say. The needless introduction of accessory ugliness is always a sin
in art, and is not at all less so when such ugliness is disgusting and
improper. _Tristram Shandy_ is incurably tainted with a pervading vice;
it dwells at length on, it seeks after, it returns to, it gloats over,
the most unattractive part of the world.
There is another defect in _Tristram Shandy_ which would of itself
remove it from the list of first-rate books, even if those which we
have mentioned did not do so. It contains eccentric characters only.
Some part of this defect may be perhaps explained by one peculiarity of
its origin. Sterne was so sensitive to the picturesque parts of life,
that he wished to paint the picturesque parts of the people he hated.
Country-towns in those days abounded in odd characters. They were out
of the way of the great opinion of the world, and shaped themselves to
little opinions of their own. They regarded the customs which the place
had inherited as the customs which were proper for it, and which it would
be foolish, if not wicked, to try to change. This gave English country
life a motley picturesqueness then, which it wants now, when London ideas
shoot out every morning, and carry on the wings of the railway a uniform
creed to each cranny of the kingdom, north and south, east and west.
These little public opinions of little places wanted, too, the crushing
power of the great public opinion of our own day; at the worst, a man
could escape from them into some different place which had customs and
doctrines that suited him better. We now may fly into another ‘city,’ but
it is all the same Roman empire; the same uniform justice, the one code
of heavy laws presses us down and makes us—the sensible part of us at
least—as like other people as we can make ourselves. The public opinion
of county towns yielded soon to individual exceptions; it had not the
confidence in itself which the opinion of each place now receives from
the accordant and simultaneous echo of a hundred places. If a man chose
to be queer, he was bullied for a year or two, then it was settled that
he was ‘queer;’ that was the fact about him, and must be accepted. In a
year or so he became an ‘institution’ of the place, and the local pride
would have been grieved if he had amended the oddity which suggested
their legends and added a flavour to their life. Of course, if a man was
rich and influential, he might soon disregard the mere opinion of the
petty locality. Every place has wonderful traditions of old rich men
who did exactly as they pleased, because they could set at naught the
opinions of the neighbours, by whom they were feared; and who did not,
as now, dread the unanimous conscience which does not fear even a squire
of 2000_l._ a year, or a banker of 8000_l._, because it is backed by the
wealth of London and the magnitude of all the country. There is little
oddity in county towns now; they are detached scraps of great places; but
in Sterne’s time there was much, and he used it unsparingly.
Much of the delineation is of the highest merit. Sterne knew how to
describe eccentricity, for he showed its relation to our common human
nature: he showed how we were related to it, how in some sort and
in some circumstances we might ourselves become it. He reduced the
abnormal formation to the normal rules. Except upon this condition,
eccentricity is no fit subject for literary art. Every one must have
known characters which, if they were put down in books, barely and as
he sees them, would seem monstrous and disproportioned,—which would
disgust all readers,—which every critic would term unnatural. While
characters are monstrous, they should be kept out of books; they are
ugly unintelligibilities, foreign to the realm of true art. But as soon
as they can be explained to us, as soon as they are shown in their union
with, in their outgrowth from common human nature, they are the best
subjects for great art—for they are new subjects. They teach us, not the
old lesson which our fathers knew, but a new lesson which will please us
and make us better than they. Hamlet is an eccentric character, one of
the most eccentric in literature; but because, by the art of the poet,
we are made to understand that he is a possible, a _vividly_ possible
man, he enlarges our conceptions of human nature; he takes us out of the
bounds of commonplace. He ‘instructs us by means of delight.’ Sterne does
this too. Mr. Shandy, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Mrs. Shandy,—for in
strictness she too is eccentric from her abnormal commonplaceness,—are
beings of which the possibility is brought home to us, which we feel
we could under circumstances and by influences become; which, though
contorted and twisted, are yet spun out of the same elementary nature,
the same thread as we are. Considering how odd these characters are, the
success of Sterne is marvellous, and his art in this respect consummate.
But yet on a point most nearly allied it is very faulty. Though each
individual character is shaded off into human nature, the whole is not
shaded off into the world. This society of originals and oddities is
left to stand by itself, as if it were a natural and ordinary society,—a
society easily conceivable and needing no explanation. Such is not the
manner of the great masters; in their best works a constant atmosphere
of half commonplace personages surrounds and shades off, illustrates and
explains every central group of singular persons.
On the whole, therefore, the judgment of criticism on _Tristram Shandy_
is concise and easy. It is immortal because of certain scenes suggested
by Sterne’s curious experience, detected by his singular sensibility,
and heightened by his delineative and discriminative imagination. It
is defective because its style is fantastic, its method illogical and
provoking; because its indecency is of the worst sort, as far as in
such matters an artistic judgment can speak of worst and best; because
its world of characters forms an incongruous group of singular persons
utterly dissimilar to, and irreconcilable with the world in which we
live. It is a great work of art, but of barbarous art. Its mirth is
boisterous. It is _provincial_. It is redolent of an inferior society;
of those who think crude animal spirits in themselves delightful; who do
not know that, without wit to point them, or humour to convey them, they
are disagreeable to others; who like disturbing transitions, blank pages,
and tricks of style; who do not know that a simple and logical form of
expression is the most effective, if not the easiest—the least laborious
to readers, if not always the most easily attained by writers.
The oddity of _Tristram Shandy_ was, however, a great aid to its
immediate popularity. If an author were to stand on his head now and
then in Cheapside, his eccentricity would bring him into contact with
the police, but it would advertise his writings; they would sell better:
people would like to see what was said by a great author who was so
odd as to stand so. Sterne put his eccentricity into his writings, and
therefore came into collision with the critics; but he attained the
same end. His book sold capitally. As with all popular authors, he went
to London; he was fêted. ‘The _man_ Sterne,’ growled Dr. Johnson, ‘has
dinner engagements for three months.’ The upper world—ever desirous of
novelty, ever tired of itself, ever anxious to be amused—was in hopes of
a new wit. It naturally hoped that the author of _Tristram Shandy_ would
talk well, and it sent for him to talk.
He did talk well, it appears, though not always very correctly, and never
very clerically. His appearance was curious, but yet refined. Eager eyes,
a wild look, a long lean frame, and what he called a cadaverous bale
of goods for a body, made up an odd exterior, which attracted notice,
and did not repel liking. He looked like a scarecrow with bright eyes.
With a random manner, but not without a nice calculation, he discharged
witticisms at London parties. His keen nerves told him which were fit
witticisms; _they_ took, and _he_ was applauded.
He published some sermons too. That tolerant age liked, it is instructive
as well as amusing to think, sermons by the author of _Tristram Shandy_.
People wonder at the rise of Methodism; but ought they to wonder? If
a clergyman publishes his sermons because he has written an indecent
novel—a novel which is purely pagan—which is outside the ideas of
Christianity, whose author can scarcely have been inside of them—if a man
so made and so circumstanced is _as such_ to publish Christian sermons,
surely Christianity is a joke and a dream. Wesley was right in this at
least; if Christianity be true, the upper-class life of the last century
was based on rotten falsehood. A world which is really secular, which
professes to be Christian, is the worst of worlds.
The only point in which Sterne resembles a clergyman of our own time is,
that he lost his voice. That peculiar affection of the chest and throat,
which is hardly known among barristers, but which inflicts such suffering
upon parsons, attacked him also. Sterne too, as might be expected, went
abroad for it. He ‘spluttered French,’ he tells us, with success in
Paris; the accuracy of the grammar some phrases in his letters would lead
us to doubt; but few, very few Yorkshire parsons could then talk French
at all, and there was doubtless a fine tact and sensibility in what he
said. A literary phenomenon wishing to enjoy society, and able to amuse
society, has ever been welcome in the Parisian world. After Paris, Sterne
went to the south of France, and on to Italy, lounging easily in pretty
places, and living comfortably, as far as one can see, upon the profits
of _Tristram Shandy_. Literary success has seldom changed more suddenly
and completely the course of a man’s life. For years Sterne resided in
a country parsonage, and the sources of his highest excitement were a
country town full of provincial oddities, and a ‘Crazy Castle’ full of
the license and the whims of a country squire. On a sudden London, Paris,
and Italy were opened to him. From a few familiar things he was suddenly
transferred to many unfamiliar things. He was equal to them, though the
change came so suddenly in middle life—though the change from a secluded
English district to the great and interesting scenes was far greater,
far fuller of unexpected sights and unforeseen phenomena, than it can
be now—when travelling is common—when the newspaper is ‘abroad’—when
every one has in his head some feeble image of Europe and the world.
Sterne showed the delicate docility which belongs to a sensitive and
experiencing nature. He understood and enjoyed very much of this new and
strange life, if not the whole.
The proof of this remains written in the _Sentimental Journey_. There is
no better painting of first and easy impressions than that book. After
all which has been written on the _ancien régime_, an Englishman at least
will feel a fresh instruction on reading these simple observations. They
are instructive _because_ of their simplicity. The old world at heart
was not like that; there were depths and realities, latent forces and
concealed results, which were hidden from Sterne’s eye, which it would
have been quite out of his way to think of or observe. But the old world
_seemed_ like that. This was the spectacle of it as it was seen by an
observing stranger; and we take it up, not to know what was the truth,
but to know what we should have thought to be the truth if we had lived
in those times. People say _Eöthen_ is not like the real East; very
likely it is not, but it is like what an imaginative young Englishman
would _think_ the East. Just so, the _Sentimental Journey_ is not the
true France of the old monarchy, but it is exactly what an observant
quick-eyed Englishman might fancy that France to be. This has given it
popularity; this still makes it a valuable relic of the past. It is not
true to the outward nature of real life, but it is true to the reflected
image of that life in an imaginative and sensitive man.
Here is the actual description of the old chivalry of France; the ‘cheap
defence of nations,’ as Mr. Burke called it a little while afterwards:
‘When states and empires have their periods of declension, and
feel in their turns what distress and poverty is—I stop not
to tell the causes which gradually brought the house d’E—— in
Brittany into decay. The Marquis d’E—— had fought up against
his condition with great firmness; wishing to preserve, and
still show to the world, some little fragments of what his
ancestors had been—their indiscretions had put it out of his
power. There was enough left for the little exigencies of
_obscurity_. But he had two boys who look’d up to him for
_light_—he thought they deserved it. He had tried his sword—it
could not open the way—the _mounting_ was too expensive—and
simple economy was not a match for it—there was no resource
but commerce.
‘In any other province in France, save Brittany, this was
smiting the root for ever of the little tree his pride and
affection wish’d to see reblossom. But in Brittany, there
being a provision for this, he avail’d himself of it; and
taking an occasion when the states were assembled at Rennes,
the Marquis, attended with his two boys, entered the court;
and having pleaded the right of an ancient law of the duchy,
which, though seldom claim’d, he said, was no less in force,
he took his sword from his side—Here, said he, take it; and be
trusty guardians of it, till better times put me in condition
to reclaim it.
‘The president accepted the Marquis’s sword—he stayed a few
minutes to see it deposited in the archives of his house—and
departed.
‘The Marquis and his whole family embarked the next day for
Martinico, and in about nineteen or twenty years of successful
application to business, with some unlook’d-for bequests from
distant branches of his house, return’d home to reclaim his
nobility and to support it.
‘It was an incident of good fortune which will never happen
to any traveller but a sentimental one, that I should be at
Rennes at the very time of this solemn requisition: I call it
solemn—it was so to me.
‘The Marquis enter’d the court with his whole family: he
supported his lady—his eldest son supported his sister, and
his youngest was at the other extreme of the line next his
mother—he put his handkerchief to his face twice—
‘—There was a dead silence. When the Marquis had approach’d
within six paces of the tribunal, he gave the Marchioness
to his youngest son, and advancing three steps before his
family—he reclaim’d his sword. His sword was given him; and the
moment he got it into his hand he drew it almost out of the
scabbard—’twas the shining face of a friend he had once given
up—he look’d attentively along it, beginning at the hilt, as
if to see whether it was the same—when observing a little rust
which it had contracted near the point he brought it near his
eye, and bending his head down over it—I think I saw a tear
fall upon the place: I could not be deceived by what followed.
‘“I shall find,” said he, “some _other way_ to get it off.”
‘When the Marquis had said this, he return’d his sword into its
scabbard, made a bow to the guardians of it—and with his wife
and daughter, and his two sons following him, walk’d out.
‘O how I envied him his feelings!’
It shows a touching innocence of the imagination to believe—for probably
Sterne did believe—or to expect his readers to believe, in a _noblesse_
at once so honourable and so theatrical.
In two points the _Sentimental Journey_, viewed with the critic’s eye,
and as a mere work of art, is a great improvement upon _Tristram Shandy_.
The style is simpler and better; it is far more connected; it does not
jump about, or leave a topic _because_ it is interesting; it does not
worry the reader with fantastic transitions, with childish contrivances
and rhetorical intricacies. Highly elaborate the style certainly is,
and in a certain sense artificial; it is full of nice touches, which
must have come only upon reflection—a careful polish and judicious
enhancement, in which the critic sees many a trace of time and toil. But
a style delicately adjusted and exquisitely polished belongs to such
a subject. Sterne undertook to write, _not_ of the coarse business of
life—very strong common sort of words are best for that—_not_ even of
interesting outward realities, which may be best described in a nice
and simple style; but of the passing moods of human nature, of the
impressions which a sensitive nature receives from the world without;
and it is only the nicest art and the most dexterous care which can
fit an obtuse language to such fine employment. How language was first
invented and made we may not know; but beyond doubt it was shaped and
fashioned into its present state by common ordinary men and women using
it for common and ordinary purposes. They wanted a carving-knife, not a
razor or lancet. And those great artists who have to use language for
more exquisite purposes, who employ it to describe changing sentiments
and momentary fancies and the fluctuating and indefinite inner world,
must use curious nicety, and hidden but effectual artifice, else they
cannot duly punctuate their thoughts, and slice the fine edges of their
reflections. A hair’s-breadth is as important to them as a yard’s-breadth
to a common workman. Sterne’s style has been criticised as artificial;
but it is justly and rightly artificial, because language used in its
natural and common mode was not framed to delineate, cannot delineate,
the delicate subjects with which he occupies himself.
That contact with the world, and with the French world especially,
should teach Sterne to abandon the arbitrary and fantastic structure of
_Tristram Shandy_ is most natural. French prose may be unreasonable in
its meaning, but is ever rational in its structure; it is logic itself.
It will not endure that the reader’s mind should be jarred by rough
transitions, or distracted by irrelevant oddities. _Antics_ in style
are prohibited by its severe code, just as eccentricities in manner are
kept down by the critical tone of a fastidious society. In a barbarous
country oddity may be attractive; in the great world it never is, except
for a moment; it is on trial to see whether it is really oddity, to see
if it does not contain elements which may be useful to, which may be
naturalised in society at large. But inherent eccentricity, oddity _pur
et simple_, is _immiscible_ in the great ocean of universal thought; it
is apart from it, even when it floats in and is contained in it; very,
very soon it is cast out from the busy waters, and left alone upon the
beach. Sterne had the sense to be taught by the sharp touch of the world;
he threw aside the ‘player’s garb’ which he had been tempted to assume.
He discarded too, as was equally natural, the ugly indecency of _Tristram
Shandy_. We will not undertake to defend the morality of certain scenes
in the _Sentimental Journey_; there are several which might easily do
much harm; but there is nothing displeasing to the natural man in them.
They are nice enough; to those whose æsthetic nature has not been laid
waste by their moral nature, they are attractive. They have a dangerous
prettiness, which may easily incite to practical evil; but in itself,
and separated from its censurable consequences, such prettiness is an
artistic perfection. It was natural that the aristocratic world should
easily teach Sterne that separation between the laws of beauty and the
laws of morality which has been familiar to it during many ages—which
makes so much of its essence.
Mrs. Sterne did not prosper all this time. She went abroad and stayed
at Montpellier with her husband; but it is not wonderful that a mere
‘wife,’ taken out of Yorkshire, should be unfit for the great world. The
domestic appendices of men who rise much hardly ever suit the high places
at which they arrive. Mrs. Sterne was no exception. She seems to have
been sensible, but it was _domestic_ sense. It was of the small world,
small: it was fit to regulate the Yorkshire parsonage, it was suitable
to a small _ménage_ even at Montpellier. But there was a deficiency in
general mind. She did not, we apprehend, comprehend or appreciate the new
thoughts and feelings which a new and great experience had awakened in
her husband’s mind. His mind moved, but hers could not; she was anchored,
but he was at sea.
To fastidious writers who will only use very dignified words, there is
much difficulty in describing Sterne’s life in his celebrity. But to
humbler persons, who can only describe the things of society in the
words of society, the case is simple. Sterne was ‘an old flirt.’ These
are short and expressive words, and they tell the whole truth. There
is no good reason to suspect his morals, but he dawdled about pretty
women. He talked at fifty with the admiring tone of twenty; pretended
to ‘freshness’ of feeling; though he had become mature, did not put
away immature things. That he had any real influence over women is
very unlikely; he was a celebrity, and they liked to exhibit him; he
was amusing, and they liked him to amuse them. But they doubtless felt
that he too was himself a joke. Women much respect real virtue; they
much admire strong and successful immorality; but they neither admire
nor respect the timid age which affects the forms of vice without its
substance; which preserves the exterior of youth, though the reality
is departed; which is insidious but not dangerous, sentimental but not
passionate. Of this sort was Sterne, and he had his reward. Women of the
world are willing to accept any admiration, but this sort they accept
with suppressed and latent sarcasm. They ridiculed his imbecility while
they accepted his attentions and enjoyed his society.
Many men have lived this life with but minor penalties, and justly; for
though perhaps a feeble and contemptible, it is not a bad or immoral
life. But Sterne has suffered a very severe though a delayed and
posthumous penalty. He was foolish enough to write letters to some of his
friends, and after his death, to get money, his family published them.
This is the sort of thing:
‘Eliza will receive my books with this. The sermons came all
hot from the heart: I wish that I could give them any title to
be offered to yours.—The others came from the head—I am more
indifferent about their reception.
‘I know not how it comes about, but I am half in love with
you—I ought to be wholly so; for I never valued (or saw more
good qualities to value) or thought more of one of your sex
than of you; so adieu.
‘Yours faithfully,
‘if not affectionately,
‘L. STERNE.’
‘I cannot rest, Eliza, though I shall call on you at half-past
twelve, till I know how you do.—May thy dear face smile,
as thou risest, like the sun of this morning. I was much
grieved to hear of your alarming indisposition yesterday; and
disappointed too, at not being let in. Remember, my dear, that
a friend has the same right as a physician. The etiquettes
of this town (you’ll say) say otherwise.—No matter! Delicacy
and propriety do not always consist in observing their frigid
doctrines.
‘I am going out to breakfast, but shall be at my lodgings by
eleven, when I hope to read a single line under thy own hand,
that thou art better, and wilt be glad to see thy Bramin.’
This Eliza was a Mrs. Draper, the wife of a judge in India, ‘much
respected in that part of the world.’ We know little of Eliza, except
that there is a stone in Bristol cathedral—
SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF
MRS. ELIZABETH DRAPER,
IN WHOM
GENIUS AND BENEVOLENCE
WERE UNITED.
SHE DIED AUGUST 3, 1778, AGED 35.
Let us hope she possessed, in addition to genius and benevolence, the
good sense to laugh at Sterne’s letters.
In truth, much of the gloss and delicacy of Sterne’s pagan instinct had
faded away by this time. He still retained his fine sensibility, his
exquisite power of entering into and of delineating plain human nature.
But the world had produced its inevitable effect on that soft and
voluptuous disposition. It is not, as we have said, that he was guilty of
grave offences or misdeeds; he made what he would have called a ‘splutter
of vice,’ but he would seem to have committed very little. Yet, as with
most minds which have exempted themselves from rigid principle, there was
a diffused texture of general laxity. The fibre had become imperfect; the
moral constitution was impaired; the high colour of rottenness had come
at last out, and replaced the delicate bloom and softness of the early
fruit. There is no need to write commonplace sermons on an ancient text.
The beauty and charm of natural paganism will not endure the stress and
destruction of this rough and complicated world. An instinctive purity
will preserve men for a brief time, but hardly through a long and varied
life of threescore and ten years.
Sterne, however, did not live so long. In 1768 he came to London for
the last time, and enjoyed himself much. He dined with literary friends
and supped with fast friends. He liked both. But the end was at hand.
His chest had long been delicate; he got a bad cold which became a
pleurisy, and died in a London lodging—a footman sent by ‘some gentlemen
who were dining,’ and a hired nurse, being the only persons present.
His family were away; and he had devoted himself to intellectual and
luxurious enjoyments, which are at least as sure to make a lonely
death-bed as a refined and cultivated life. ‘Self-scanned, self-centred,
self-secure,’ a man may perhaps live, but even so by _himself_ he will
be sure to die. For self-absorbed men the world at large cares little;
as soon as they cease to amuse, or to be useful, it flings them aside,
and they die alone. Even Sterne’s grave, they say, was so obscure and
neglected that the corpse-stealers ventured to open it, and his body was
dissected without being recognised. The life of literary men is often a
kind of sermon in itself; for the pursuit of fame, when it is contrasted
with the grave realities of life, seems more absurd and trifling than
most pursuits, and to leave less behind it. Mere _amusers_ are never
respected. It would be harsh to call Sterne a mere amuser, he is much
more; but so the contemporary world regarded him. They laughed at his
jests, disregarded his death-bed, and neglected his grave.
What, it may be asked, is there in such a career, or such a character
as this, to remind us of the great writer whom we have just lost? In
externals there seems little resemblance, or rather there seems to be
great contrast. On the one side a respected manhood, a long industry, an
honoured memory; on the other hand a life lax, if not dissolute, little
labour, and a dishonoured grave. Mr. Thackeray, too, has written a most
severe criticism on Sterne’s character. Can we, then, venture to compare
the two? We do so venture; and we allege, and that in spite of many
superficial differences, that there was one fundamental and ineradicable
resemblance between the two.
Thackeray, like Sterne, looked at everything—at nature, at life, at
art—from a _sensitive_ aspect. His mind was, to some considerable extent,
like a woman’s mind. It could comprehend abstractions when they were
unrolled and explained before it, but it never naturally created them;
never of itself, and without external obligation, devoted itself to them.
The visible scene of life—the streets, the servants, the clubs, the
gossip, the West End—fastened on his brain. These were to him reality.
They burnt in upon his brain; they pained his nerves; their influence
reached him through many avenues, which ordinary men do not feel much,
or to which they are altogether impervious. He had distinct and rather
painful sensations where most men have but confused and blurred ones.
Most men have felt the _instructive_ headache, during which they are more
acutely conscious than usual of all which goes on around them,—during
which everything seems to pain them, and in which they understand it,
because it pains them, and they cannot get their imagination away from
it. Thackeray had a nerve-ache of this sort always. He acutely felt
every possible passing fact—every trivial interlude in society. Hazlitt
used to say of himself, and used to say truly, that he could not enjoy
the society in a drawing-room for thinking of the opinion which the
footman formed of his odd appearance as he went upstairs. Thackeray
had too healthy and stable a nature to be thrown so wholly off his
balance; but the footman’s view of life was never out of his head. The
obvious facts which suggest it to the footman poured it in upon him;
he could not exempt himself from them. As most men say that the earth
_may_ go round the sun, but in fact, when we look at the sun, we cannot
help believing it goes round the earth,—just so this most impressible,
susceptible genius could not help half accepting, half believing the
common ordinary sensitive view of life, although he perfectly knew in his
inner mind and deeper nature that this apparent and superficial view of
life was misleading, inadequate, and deceptive. He could not help seeing
everything, and what he saw made so near and keen an impression upon him,
that he could not again exclude it from his understanding; it stayed
there, and disturbed his thoughts.
If, he often says, ‘people could write about that of which they are
really thinking, how interesting books would be!’ More than most writers
of fiction, he felt the difficulty of abstracting his thoughts and
imagination from near facts which _would_ make themselves felt. The
sick wife in the next room, the unpaid baker’s bill, the lodging-house
keeper who doubts your solvency; these, and such as these,—the usual
accompaniments of an early literary life,—are constantly alluded to
in his writings. Perhaps he could never take a grand enough view of
literature, or accept the truth of ‘high art,’ because of his natural
tendency to this stern and humble realism. He knew that he was writing
a tale which would appear in a green magazine (with others) on the 1st
of March, and would be paid for perhaps on the 11th, by which time,
probably, ‘Mr. Smith’ would have to ‘make up a sum,’ and would again
present his ‘little account.’ There are many minds besides his who feel
an interest in these realities, though they yawn over ‘high art’ and
elaborate judgments.
A painfulness certainly clings like an atmosphere round Mr. Thackeray’s
writings, in consequence of his inseparable and ever-present realism. We
hardly know where it is, yet we are all conscious of it less or more.
A free and bold writer, like Sir Walter Scott, throws himself far away
into fictitious worlds, and soars there without effort, without pain,
and with unceasing enjoyment. You see as it were between the lines of
Mr. Thackeray’s writings, that his thoughts were never long away from
the close proximate scene. His writings might be better if it had been
otherwise; but they would have been less peculiar, less individual; they
would have wanted their character, their flavour, if he had been able
while writing them to forget for many moments the ever-attending, the
ever-painful sense of himself.
Hence have arisen most of the censures upon him, both as he seemed to be
in society and as he was in his writings. He was certainly uneasy in the
common and general world, and it was natural that he should be so. The
world poured in upon him, and _inflicted_ upon his delicate sensibility
a number of petty pains and impressions which others do not feel at all,
or which they feel but very indistinctly. As he sat he seemed to read
off the passing thoughts—the base, common, ordinary impressions—of every
one else. Could such a man be at ease? Could even a quick intellect
be asked to set in order with such velocity so many data? Could any
temper, however excellent, be asked to bear the contemporaneous influx
of innumerable minute annoyances? Men of ordinary nerves who feel a
little of the pains of society, who perceive what really passes, who are
not absorbed in the petty pleasures of sociability, could well observe
how keen was Thackeray’s _sensation_ of common events, could easily
understand how difficult it must have been for him to keep mind and
temper undisturbed by a miscellaneous tide at once so incessant and so
forcible.
He could not emancipate himself from such impressions even in a case
where most men hardly feel them. Many people have—it is not difficult
to have—some vague sensitive perception of what is passing in the minds
of the guests, of the ideas of such as sit at meat; but who remembers
that there are also nervous apprehensions, also a latent mental life
among those who ‘stand and wait’—among the floating figures which pass
and carve? But there was no impression to which Mr. Thackeray was more
constantly alive, or which he was more apt in his writings to express. He
observes:
‘Between me and those fellow-creatures of mine who are sitting
in the room below, how strange and wonderful is the partition!
We meet at every hour of the daylight, and are indebted to
each other for a hundred offices of duty and comfort of life;
and we live together for years, and don’t know each other.
John’s voice to me is quite different from John’s voice when
it addresses his mates below. If I met Hannah in the street
with a bonnet on, I doubt whether I should know her. And all
these good people, with whom I may live for years and years,
have cares, interests, dear friends and relatives, mayhap
schemes, passions, longing hopes, tragedies of their own, from
which a carpet and a few planks and beams utterly separate me.
When we were at the sea-side, and poor Ellen used to look so
pale, and run after the postman’s bell, and seize a letter in
a great scrawling hand, and read it, and cry in a corner, how
should we know that the poor little thing’s heart was breaking?
She fetched the water, and she smoothed the ribbons, and she
laid out the dresses, and brought the early cup of tea in the
morning, just as if she had had no cares to keep her awake.
Henry (who lived out of the house) was the servant of a friend
of mine who lived in chambers. There was a dinner one day,
and Henry waited all through the dinner. The champagne was
properly iced, the dinner was excellently served; every guest
was attended to; the dinner disappeared; the dessert was set;
the claret was in perfect order, carefully decanted, and more
ready. And then Henry said, “If you please, sir, may I go
home?” He had received word that his house was on fire; and,
having seen through his dinner, he wished to go and look after
his children and little sticks of furniture. Why, such a man’s
livery is a uniform of honour. The crest on his button is a
badge of bravery.’
Nothing in itself could be more admirable than this instinctive sympathy
with humble persons; not many things are rarer than this nervous
apprehension of what humble persons think. Nevertheless it cannot, we
think, be effectually denied that it coloured Mr. Thackeray’s writings
and the more superficial part of his character—that part which was most
obvious in common and current society—with very considerable defects. The
pervading idea of the ‘Snob Papers’ is too frequent, too recurring, too
often insisted on, even in his highest writings; there was a slight shade
of similar feeling even in his occasional society, and though it was
certainly unworthy of him, it was exceedingly natural that it should be
so, with such a mind as his and in a society such as ours.
There are three methods in which a society may be constituted. There
is the equal system, which, with more or less of variation, prevails
in France and in the United States. The social presumption in these
countries always is that every one is on a level with every one else.
In America, the porter at the station, the shopman at the counter,
the boots at the hotel, when neither a Negro nor an Irishman, is your
equal. In France _égalité_ is a political first principle. The whole
of Louis Napoleon’s _régime_ depends upon it: remove that feeling, and
the whole fabric of the Empire will pass away. We once heard a great
French statesman illustrate this. He was giving a dinner to the clergy
of his neighbourhood, and was observing that he had now no longer the
power to help or hurt them, when an eager _curé_ said, with simple-minded
joy, ‘_Oui, monsieur, maintenant personne ne peut rien, ni le comte,
ni le prolétaire_.’ The democratic priest so rejoiced at the universal
levelling which had passed over his nation, that he could not help
boasting of it when silence would have been much better manners. We are
not now able—we have no room and no inclination—to discuss the advantages
of democratic society; but we think in England we may venture to assume
that it is neither the best nor the highest form which a society can
adopt, and that it is certainly fatal to that development of individual
originality and greatness by which the past progress of the human race
has been achieved, and from which alone, it would seem, all future
progress is to be anticipated. If it be said that people are all alike,
that the world is a plain with no natural valleys and no natural hills,
the picturesqueness of existence is destroyed, and, what is worse, the
instinctive emulation by which the dweller in the valley is stimulated to
climb the hill is annihilated and becomes impossible.
On the other hand, there is the opposite system, which prevails in the
East,—the system of irremovable inequalities, of hedged-in castes,
which no one can enter but by birth, and from which no born member can
issue forth. This system likewise, in this age and country, needs no
attack, for it has no defenders. Every one is ready to admit that it
cramps originality, by defining our work irrespective of our qualities
and before we were born; that it retards progress, by restraining
the wholesome competition between class and class, and the wholesome
migration from class to class, which are the best and strongest
instruments of social improvement.
And if both these systems be condemned as undesirable and prejudicial,
there is no third system except that which we have—the system of
_removable inequalities_, where many people are inferior to and
worse off than others, but in which each may _in theory_ hope to be
on a level with the highest below the throne, and in which each may
reasonably, and without sanguine impracticability, hope to gain one
step in social elevation, to be at last on a level with those who at
first were just above them. But, from the mere description of such a
society, it is evident that, taking man as he is, with the faults which
we know he has, and the tendencies which he invariably displays, some
poison of ‘snobbishness’ is inevitable. Let us define it as the habit
of ‘pretending to be higher in the social scale than you really are.’
Everybody will admit that such pretension is a fault and a vice, yet
every observant man of the world would also admit that, considering
what other misdemeanours men commit, this offence is not inconceivably
heinous; and that, if people never did any thing worse, they might be
let off with a far less punitive judgment than in the actual state of
human conduct would be just or conceivable. How are we to hope men will
pass their lives in putting their best foot foremost, and yet will never
boast that their better foot is farther advanced and more perfect than in
fact it is? Is boasting to be made a capital crime? Given social ambition
as a propensity of human nature; given a state of society like ours,
in which there are prizes which every man may seek, degradations which
every one may erase, inequalities which every one may remove,—it is idle
to suppose that there will not be all sorts of striving to cease to be
last and to begin to be first, and it is equally idle to imagine that all
such strivings will be of the highest kind. This effort will be, like
all the efforts of our mixed and imperfect human nature, partly good and
partly bad, with much that is excellent and beneficial in it, and much
also which is debasing and pernicious. The bad striving after unpossessed
distinction is snobbishness, which from the mere definition cannot be
defended, but which may be excused as a natural frailty in an emulous
man who is not distinguished, who hopes to be distinguished, and who
perceives that a valuable means of gaining distinction is a judicious,
though false pretension that it has already been obtained.
Mr. Thackeray, as we think, committed two errors in this matter. He
lacerates ‘snobs’ in his books as if they had committed an unpardonable
outrage and inexpiable crime. That man, he says, is anxious ‘to know
lords; and he pretends to know more of lords than he really does know.
What a villain! what a disgrace to our common nature; what an irreparable
reproach to human reason!’ Not at all; it is a fault which satirists
should laugh at, and which moralists condemn and disapprove, but which
yet does not destroy the whole vital excellence of him who possesses
it,—which may leave him a good citizen, a pleasant husband, a warm
friend; ‘a fellow,’ as the undergraduate said, ‘_up_ in his _morals_.’
In transient society it is possible, we think, that Mr. Thackeray thought
too much of social inequalities. They belonged to that common, plain,
perceptible world which filled his mind, and which left him at times, and
at casual moments, no room for a purely intellectual and just estimate of
men as they really are in themselves, and apart from social perfection
or defect. He could gauge a man’s reality as well as any observer, and
far better than most: his attainments were great, his perception of men
instinctive, his knowledge of casual matters enormous; but he had a
greater difficulty than other men in relying only upon his own judgment.
‘What the footman—what Mr. Yellowplush Jeames would think and say,’ could
not but occur to his mind, and would modify, not his settled judgment,
but his transient and casual opinion of the poet or philosopher. By the
constitution of his mind he thought much of social distinctions; and yet
he was in his writings too severe on those who, in cruder and baser ways,
showed that they also were thinking much.
Those who perceive that this irritable sensibility was the basis of
Thackeray’s artistic character, that it gave him his materials, his
implanted knowledge of things and men, and gave him also that keen
and precise style which hit in description the nice edges of all
objects,—those who trace these great qualities back to their real source
in a somewhat painful organisation, must have been vexed or amused,
according to their temperament, at the common criticism which associates
him with Fielding. Fielding’s essence was the very reverse; it was a
bold spirit of bounding happiness. No just observer could talk to Mr.
Thackeray, or look at him, without seeing that he had deeply felt many
sorrows—perhaps that he was a man _likely_ to feel sorrows—that he was
of an anxious temperament. Fielding was a reckless enjoyer. He saw the
world—wealth and glory, the best dinner and the worst dinner, the gilded
_salon_ and the low sponging-house—and he saw that they were good. Down
every line of his characteristic writings there runs this elemental
energy of keen delight. There is no trace of such a thing in Thackeray.
A musing fancifulness is far more characteristic of him than a joyful
energy.
Sterne had all this sensibility also, but—and this is the cardinal
discrepancy—it did not make him irritable. He was not hurried away, like
Fielding, by buoyant delight; he stayed and mused on painful scenes.
But they did not make him angry. He was not irritated at the ‘foolish
fat scullion.’ He did not vex himself because of the vulgar. He did not
amass petty details to prove that tenth-rate people were ever striving to
be ninth-rate people. He had no tendency to rub the bloom off life. He
accepted pretty-looking things, even the French aristocracy, and he owes
his immortality to his making them prettier than they are. Thackeray was
pained by things, and exaggerated their imperfections; Sterne brooded
over things with joy or sorrow, and he idealised their sentiment—their
pathetic or joyful characteristics. This is why the old lady said, ‘Mr.
Thackeray was an uncomfortable writer,’—and an uncomfortable writer he is.
Nor had Sterne a trace of Mr. Thackeray’s peculiar and characteristic
scepticism. He accepted simply the pains and pleasures, the sorrows and
the joys of the world; he was not perplexed by them, nor did he seek to
explain them, or account for them. There is a tinge—a mitigated, but
perceptible tinge—of Swift’s philosophy in Thackeray. ‘Why is all this?
Surely this is very strange? Am I right in sympathising with such stupid
feelings, such petty sensations? Why are these things? Am I not a fool
to care about or think of them? The world is dark, and the great curtain
hides from us all.’ This is not a steady or an habitual feeling, but it
is never quite absent for many pages. It was inevitable, perhaps, that in
a sceptical and inquisitive age like this, some vestiges of puzzle and
perplexity should pass into the writings of our great sentimentalist. He
would not have fairly represented the moods of his time if he omitted
that pervading one.
We had a little more to say of these great men, but our limits are
exhausted, and we must pause. Of Thackeray it is too early to speak at
length. A certain distance is needful for a just criticism. The present
generation have learned too much from him to be able to judge him
rightly. We do not know the merit of those great pictures which have sunk
into our minds, and which have coloured our thoughts, which are become
habitual memories. In the books we know best, as in the people we know
best, small points, sometimes minor merits, sometimes small faults, have
an undue prominence. When the young critics of this year have gray hairs,
their children will tell them what is the judgment of posterity upon Mr.
Thackeray.
_THE WAVERLEY NOVELS._[9]
(1858.)
It is not commonly on the generation which was contemporary with the
production of great works of art that they exercise their most magical
influence. Nor is it on the distant people whom we call posterity.
Contemporaries bring to new books formed minds and stiffened creeds;
posterity, if it regard them at all, looks at them as old subjects,
worn-out topics, and hears a disputation on their merits with languid
impartiality, like aged judges in a court of appeal. Even standard
authors exercise but slender influence on the susceptible minds of a
rising generation; they are become ‘papa’s books;’ the walls of the
library are adorned with their regular volumes; but no hand touches them.
Their fame is itself half an obstacle to their popularity; a delicate
fancy shrinks from employing so great a celebrity as the companion of an
idle hour. The generation which is really most influenced by a work of
genius is commonly that which is still young when the first controversy
respecting its merits arises; with the eagerness of youth they read and
re-read; their vanity is not unwilling to adjudicate: in the process
their imagination is formed; the creations of the author range themselves
in the memory; they become part of the substance of the very mind. The
works of Sir Walter Scott can hardly be said to have gone through this
exact process. Their immediate popularity was unbounded. No one—a few
most captious critics apart—ever questioned their peculiar power. Still
they are subject to a transition, which is in principle the same. At the
time of their publication mature contemporaries read them with delight.
Superficial the reading of grown men in some sort must be; it is only
once in a lifetime that we can know the passionate reading of youth;
men soon lose its eager learning power. But from peculiarities in their
structure, which we shall try to indicate, the novels of Scott suffered
less than almost any book of equal excellence from this inevitable
superficiality of perusal. Their plain, and, so to say, cheerful merits
suit the occupied man of genial middle life. Their appreciation was to
an unusual degree coincident with their popularity. The next generation,
hearing the praises of their fathers in their earliest reading time,
seized with avidity on the volumes; and there is much in very many of
them which is admirably fitted for the delight of boyhood. A third
generation has now risen into at least the commencement of literary
life, which is quite removed from the unbounded enthusiasm with which
the Scotch novels were originally received, and does not always share
the still more eager partiality of those who, in the opening of their
minds, first received the tradition of their excellence. New books have
arisen to compete with these; new interests distract us from them. The
time, therefore, is not perhaps unfavourable for a slight criticism of
these celebrated fictions; and their continual republication, without any
criticism for many years, seems almost to demand it.
There are two kinds of fiction which, though in common literature they
may run very much into one another, are yet in reality distinguishable
and separate. One of these, which we may call the _ubiquitous_, aims
at describing the whole of human life in all its spheres, in all its
aspects, with all its varied interests, aims, and objects. It searches
through the whole life of man; his practical pursuits, his speculative
attempts, his romantic youth, and his domestic age. It gives an entire
picture of all these; or if there be any lineaments which it forbears to
depict, they are only such as the inevitable repression of a regulated
society excludes from the admitted province of literary art. Of this
kind are the novels of Cervantes and Le Sage, and, to a certain extent,
of Smollett or Fielding. In our own time, Mr. Dickens is an author whom
nature intended to write to a certain extent with this aim. He should
have given us _not_ disjointed novels, with a vague attempt at a romantic
plot, but sketches of diversified scenes, and the obvious life of varied
mankind. The literary fates, however, if such beings there are, allotted
otherwise. By a very terrible example of the way in which in this world
great interests are postponed to little ones, the genius of authors is
habitually sacrificed to the tastes of readers. In this age, the great
readers of fiction are young people. The ‘addiction’ of these is to
romance; and accordingly a kind of novel has become so familiar to us as
almost to engross the name, which deals solely with the passion of love;
and if it uses other parts of human life for the occasions of its art,
it does so only cursorily and occasionally, and with a view of throwing
into a stronger or more delicate light those sentimental parts of earthly
affairs which are the special objects of delineation. All prolonged
delineation of other parts of human life is considered ‘dry,’ stupid, and
distracts the mind of the youthful generation from the ‘fantasies’ which
peculiarly charm it. Mr. Olmstead has a story of some deputation of the
Indians, at which the American orator harangued the barbarian audience
about the ‘great spirit,’ and ‘the land of their fathers,’ in the style
of Mr. Cooper’s novels; during a moment’s pause in the great stream, an
old Indian asked the deputation, ‘Why does your chief speak thus to us?
We did not wish great instruction or fine words; we desire brandy and
tobacco.’ No critic in a time of competition will speak uncourteously
of any reader of either sex; but it is indisputable that the old kind
of novel, full of ‘great instruction’ and varied pictures, does not
afford to some young gentlemen and some young ladies either the peculiar
stimulus or the peculiar solace which they desire.
The Waverley Novels were published at a time when the causes that thus
limit the sphere of fiction were coming into operation, but when they had
not yet become so omnipotent as they are now. Accordingly, these novels
everywhere bear marks of a state of transition. They are not devoted with
anything like the present exclusiveness to the sentimental part of human
life. They describe great events, singular characters, strange accidents,
strange states of society; they dwell with a peculiar interest—and as if
for their own sake—on antiquarian details relating to a past society.
Singular customs, social practices, even political institutions which
existed once in Scotland, and even elsewhere, during the middle ages, are
explained with a careful minuteness. At the same time the sentimental
element assumes a great deal of prominence. The book is in fact, as well
as in theory, a narrative of the feelings and fortunes of the hero and
heroine. An attempt more or less successful has been made to insert an
interesting love-story in each novel. Sir Walter was quite aware that the
best delineation of the oddest characters, or the most quaint societies,
or the strangest incidents, would not in general satisfy his readers. He
has invariably attempted an account of youthful, sometimes of decidedly
juvenile, feelings and actions. The difference between Sir Walter’s
novels and the specially romantic fictions of the present day is, that
in the former the love-story is always, or nearly always, connected with
some great event, or the fortunes of some great historical character, or
the peculiar movements and incidents of some strange state of society;
and that the author did not suppose or expect that his readers would
be so absorbed in the sentimental aspect of human life as to be unable
or unwilling to be interested in, or to attend to, any other. There is
always a _locus in quo_, if the expression may be pardoned, in the
Waverley Novels. The hero and heroine walk among the trees of the forest
according to rule, but we are expected to take an interest in the forest
as well as in them.
No novel, therefore, of Sir Walter Scott’s can be considered to come
exactly within the class which we have called the ubiquitous. None of
them in any material degree attempts to deal with human affairs in all
their spheres—to delineate as a whole the life of man. The canvas has a
large background, in some cases too large either for artistic effect or
the common reader’s interest; but there are always real boundaries—Sir
Walter had no _thesis_ to maintain. Scarcely any writer will set himself
to delineate the whole of human life, unless he has a doctrine concerning
human life to put forth and inculcate. The effort is _doctrinaire_.
Scott’s imagination was strictly conservative. He could understand (with
a few exceptions) any considerable movement of human life and action,
and could always describe with easy freshness everything which he did
understand; but he was not obliged by stress of fanaticism to maintain
a dogma concerning them, or to show their peculiar relation to the
general sphere of life. He described vigorously and boldly the peculiar
scene and society which in every novel he had selected as the theatre of
romantic action. Partly from their fidelity to nature, and partly from a
consistency in the artist’s mode of representation, these pictures group
themselves from the several novels in the imagination, and an habitual
reader comes to think of and understand what is meant by ‘Scott’s world;’
but the writer had no such distinct object before him. No one novel was
designed to be a delineation of the world as Scott viewed it. We have
vivid and fragmentary histories; it is for the slow critic of after-times
to piece together their teaching.
From this intermediate position of the Waverley Novels, or at any rate
in exact accordance with its requirements, is the special characteristic
for which they are most remarkable. We may call this in a brief phrase
their _romantic sense_; and perhaps we cannot better illustrate it than
by a quotation from the novel to which the series owes its most usual
name. It occurs in the description of the Court ball which Charles Edward
is described as giving at Holyrood House the night before his march
southward on his strange adventure. The striking interest of the scene
before him, and the peculiar position of his own sentimental career, are
described as influencing the mind of the hero.
‘Under the influence of these mixed sensations, and cheered
at times by a smile of intelligence and approbation from the
Prince as he passed the group, Waverley exerted his powers of
fancy, animation, and eloquence, and attracted the general
admiration of the company. The conversation gradually assumed
the line best qualified for the display of his talents and
acquisitions. The gaiety of the evening was exalted in
character, rather than checked, by the approaching dangers of
the morrow. All nerves were strung for the future, and prepared
to enjoy the present. This mood is highly favourable for the
exercise of the powers of imagination, for poetry, and for that
eloquence which is allied to poetry.’
Neither ‘eloquence’ nor ‘poetry’ are the exact words with which it would
be appropriate to describe the fresh style of the Waverley Novels; but
the imagination of their author was stimulated by a fancied mixture of
sentiment and fact, very much as he describes Waverley’s to have been
by a real experience of the two at once. The second volume of Waverley
is one of the most striking illustrations of this peculiarity. The
character of Charles Edward, his adventurous undertaking, his ancestral
rights, the mixed selfishness and enthusiasm of the Highland chiefs,
the fidelity of their hereditary followers, their striking and strange
array, the contrast with the Baron of Bradwardine and the Lowland gentry;
the collision of the motley and half-appointed host with the formed and
finished English society, its passage by the Cumberland mountains and
the blue lake of Ullswater—are unceasingly and without effort present
to the mind of the writer, and incite with their historical interest
the susceptibility of his imagination. But at the same time the mental
struggle, or rather transition, in the mind of Waverley—for his mind
was of the faint order which scarcely struggles—is never for an instant
lost sight of. In the very midst of the inroad and the conflict, the
acquiescent placidity with which the hero exchanges the service of the
imperious for the appreciation of the ‘nice’ heroine, is kept before
us, and the imagination of Scott wandered without effort from the great
scene of martial affairs to the natural but rather unheroic sentiments
of a young gentleman not very difficult to please. There is no trace of
effort in the transition, as is so common in the inferior works of later
copyists. Many historical novelists, especially those who with care and
pains have ‘read up’ their detail, are often evidently in a strait how
to pass from their history to their sentiment. The fancy of Sir Walter
could not help connecting the two. If he had given us the English side of
the race to Derby, he would have described the Bank of England paying in
sixpences, and also the loves of the cashier.
It is not unremarkable in connection with this, the special
characteristic of the ‘Scotch novels,’ that their author began his
literary life by collecting the old ballads of his native country. Ballad
poetry is, in comparison at least with many other kinds of poetry, a
sensible thing. It describes not only romantic events, but historical
ones, incidents in which there is a form and body and consistence—events
which have a result. Such a poem as ‘Chevy Chace,’ we need not explain,
has its prosaic side. The latest historian of Greece has nowhere been
more successful than in his attempt to derive from Homer, the greatest of
ballad poets, a thorough and consistent account of the political working
of the Homeric state of society. The early natural imagination of men
seizes firmly on all which interests the minds and hearts of natural
men. We find in its delineations the council as well as the marriage;
the harsh conflict as well as the deep love-affair. Scott’s own poetry
is essentially a modernised edition of the traditional poems which his
early youth was occupied in collecting. The _Lady of the Lake_ is a sort
of _boudoir_ ballad, yet it contains its element of common sense and
broad delineation. The exact position of Lowlander and Highlander would
not be more aptly described in a set treatise than in the well-known
lines:
‘Saxon, from yonder mountain high
I marked thee send delighted eye
Far to the south and east, where lay,
Extended in succession gay,
Deep waving fields and pastures green,
With gentle slopes and groves between:
These fertile plains, that softened vale,
Were once the birthright of the Gael.
The stranger came with iron hand,
And from our fathers reft the land.
Where dwell we now! See, rudely swell
Crag over crag, and fell o’er fell.
Ask we this savage hill we tread,
For fattened steer or household bread;
Ask we for flocks these shingles dry,—
And well the mountain might reply:
To you, as to your sires of yore,
Belong the target and claymore;
I give you shelter in my breast,
Your own good blades must win the rest.
Pent in this fortress of the North,
Think’st thou we will not sally forth
To spoil the spoiler as we may,
And from the robber rend the prey?
Ay, by my soul! While on yon plain
The Saxon rears one shock of grain;
While of ten thousand herds there strays
But one along yon river’s maze;
The Gael, of plain and river heir,
Shall with strong hand redeem his share.’
We need not search the same poem for specimens of the romantic element,
for the whole poem is full of them. The incident in which Ellen
discovers who Fitz-James really is, is perhaps excessively romantic. At
any rate the lines,—
‘To him each lady’s look was lent;
On him each courtier’s eye was bent;
Midst furs and silks and jewels sheen,
He stood in simple Lincoln green,
The centre of the glittering ring,
And Snowdoun’s knight is Scotland’s king,’—
may be cited as very sufficient example of the sort of sentimental
incident which is separable from extreme feeling. When Scott, according
to his own half-jesting but half-serious expression, was ‘beaten out of
poetry’ by Byron, he began to express in more pliable prose the same
combination which his verse had been used to convey. As might have
been expected, the sense became in the novels more free, vigorous,
and flowing, because it is less cramped by the vehicle in which it is
conveyed. The range of character which can be adequately delineated in
narrative verse is much narrower than that which can be described in
the combination of narrative with dramatic prose; and perhaps even the
sentiment of the novels is manlier and freer; a delicate unreality hovers
over the _Lady of the Lake_.
The sensible element, if we may so express it, of the Waverley Novels
appears in various forms. One of the most striking is in the delineation
of great political events and influential political institutions. We
are not by any means about to contend that Scott is to be taken as an
infallible or an impartial authority for the parts of history which
he delineates. On the contrary, we believe all the world now agrees
that there are many deductions to be made from, many exceptions to be
taken to, the accuracy of his delineations. Still, whatever period or
incident we take, we shall always find in the error a great, in one or
two cases perhaps an extreme, mixture of the mental element which we term
common sense. The strongest _un_sensible feeling in Scott was perhaps
his Jacobitism, which crept out even in small incidents and recurring
prejudice throughout the whole of his active career, and was, so to say,
the emotional aspect of his habitual Toryism. Yet no one can have given
a more sensible delineation, we might say a more statesmanlike analysis,
of the various causes which led to the momentary success, and to the
speedy ruin, of the enterprise of Charles Edward. Mr. Lockhart says,
that notwithstanding Scott’s imaginative readiness to exalt Scotland at
the expense of England, no man would have been more willing to join in
emphatic opposition to an anti-English party, if any such had presented
itself with a practical object. Similarly his Jacobitism, though not
without moments of real influence, passed away when his mind was directed
to broad masses of fact, and general conclusions of political reasoning.
A similar observation may be made as to Scott’s Toryism; although it is
certain that there was an enthusiastic, and, in the malicious sense,
poetical element in Scott’s Toryism, yet quite as indisputably it partook
largely of two other elements, which are in common repute prosaic. He
shared abundantly in the love of administration and organisation, common
to all men of great active powers. He liked to contemplate method at
work and order in action. Everybody hates to hear that the Duke of
Wellington asked ‘how the king’s government was to be carried on.’ No
amount of warning wisdom will bear so fearful a repetition. Still he
_did_ say it, and Scott had a sympathising foresight of the oracle
before it was spoken. One element of his conservatism is his sympathy
with the administrative arrangement, which is confused by the objections
of a Whiggish opposition and is liable to be altogether destroyed by
uprisings of the populace. His biographer, while pointing out the strong
contrast between Scott and the argumentative and parliamentary statesmen
of his age, avows his opinion that in other times, and with sufficient
opportunities, Scott’s ability in managing men would have enabled him to
‘play the part of Cecil or of Gondomar.’ We may see how much a suppressed
enthusiasm for such abilities breaks out, not only in the description of
hereditary monarchs, where the sentiment might be ascribed to a different
origin, but also in the delineation of upstart rulers, who could have
no hereditary sanctity in the eyes of any Tory. Roland Græme, in the
_Abbot_, is well described as losing in the presence of the Regent Murray
the natural impertinence of his disposition. ‘He might have braved with
indifference the presence of an earl merely distinguished by his belt
and coronet; but he felt overawed in that of the soldier and statesman,
the wielder of a nation’s power, and the leader of her armies.’ It is
easy to perceive that the author shares the feeling of his hero by the
evident pleasure with which he dwells on the Regent’s demeanour: ‘He then
turned slowly round toward Roland Græme, and the marks of gaiety, real or
assumed, disappeared from his countenance as completely as the passing
bubbles leave the dark mirror of a still profound lake into which the
traveller has cast a stone; in the course of a minute his noble features
had assumed their natural expression of melancholy gravity,’ &c. In real
life, Scott used to say, that he never remembered feeling abashed in any
one’s presence except the Duke of Wellington’s. Like that of the hero of
his novel, his imagination was very susceptible to the influence of great
achievements and prolonged success in wide-spreading affairs.
The view which Scott seems to have taken of democracy indicates exactly
the same sort of application of a plain sense to the visible parts of
the subject. His imagination was singularly penetrated with the strange
varieties and motley composition of human life. The extraordinary
multitude and striking contrast of the characters in his novels show this
at once. And even more strikingly is the same habit of mind indicated
‘by a tendency never to omit an opportunity of describing those varied
crowds and assemblages,’ which concentrate for a moment into a unity the
scattered and unlike varieties of mankind. Thus, but a page or two before
the passage which we alluded to in the _Abbot_, we find the following:
‘It was indeed no common sight to Roland, the vestibule of a
palace, traversed by its various groups,—some radiant with
gaiety—some pensive, and apparently weighed down by affairs
concerning the State, or concerning themselves. Here the
hoary statesman, with his cautious yet commanding look, his
furred cloak and sable pantoufles; there the soldier in buff
and steel, his long sword jarring against the pavement, and
his whiskered upper lip and frowning brow looking an habitual
defiance of danger, which perhaps was not always made good;
there again passed my lord’s serving-man, high of heart
and bloody of hand, humble to his master and his master’s
equals, insolent to all others. To these might be added the
poor suitor, with his anxious look and depressed mien—the
officer, full of his brief authority, elbowing his betters, and
possibly his benefactors, out of the road—the proud priest,
who sought a better benefice—the proud baron, who sought a
grant of church lands—the robber chief, who came to solicit a
pardon for the injuries he had inflicted on his neighbours—the
plundered franklin, who came to seek vengeance for that which
he had himself received. Besides, there was the mustering
and disposition of guards and soldiers—the despatching of
messengers, and the receiving them—the trampling and neighing
of horses without the gate—the flashing of arms, and rustling
of plumes, and jingling of spurs within it. In short, it was
that gay and splendid confusion, in which the eye of youth sees
all that is brave and brilliant, and that of experience much
that is doubtful, deceitful, false, and hollow—hopes that will
never be gratified—promises which will never be fulfilled—pride
in the disguise of humility—and insolence in that of frank and
generous bounty.’
As in the imagination of Shakespeare, so in that of Scott, the principal
form and object were the structure—that is a hard word—the undulation
and diversified composition of human society; the picture of this stood
in the centre, and everything else was accessory and secondary to it.
The old ‘rows of books,’ in which Scott so peculiarly delighted, were
made to contribute their element to this varied imagination of humanity.
From old family histories, odd memoirs, old law-trials, his fancy
elicited new traits to add to the motley assemblage. His objection to
democracy—an objection of which we can only appreciate the emphatic
force, when we remember that his youth was contemporary with the first
French Revolution, and the controversy as to the uniform and stereotyped
rights of man—was, that it would sweep away this entire picture, level
prince and peasant in a common _égalité_,—substitute a scientific
rigidity for the irregular and picturesque growth of centuries,—replace
an abounding and genial life by a symmetrical but lifeless mechanism. All
the descriptions of society in the novels,—whether of feudal society,
of modern Scotch society, or of English society,—are largely coloured
by this feeling. It peeps out everywhere, and liberal critics have
endeavoured to show that it was a narrow Toryism; but in reality, it is
a subtle compound of the natural instinct of the artist with the plain
sagacity of the man of the world.
It would be tedious to show how clearly the same sagacity appears in his
delineation of the various great events and movements in society which
are described in the Scotch novels. There is scarcely one of them which
does not bear it on its surface. Objections may, as we shall show, be
urged to the delineation which Scott has given of the Puritan resistance
and rebellions, yet scarcely any one will say there is not a worldly
sense in it. On the contrary, the very objection is, that it is too
worldly, and far too exclusively sensible.
The same thoroughly well-grounded sagacity and comprehensive appreciation
of human life is shown in the treatment of what we may call _anomalous_
characters. In general, monstrosity is no topic for art. Every one has
known in real life characters which if, apart from much experience,
he had found described in books, he would have thought unnatural and
impossible. Scott, however, abounds in such characters. Meg Merrilies,
Edie Ochiltree, Radcliffe, are more or less of that description. That of
Meg Merrilies especially is as distorted and eccentric as anything can
be. Her appearance is described as making Mannering ‘start;’ and well it
might.
‘She was full six feet high, wore a man’s greatcoat over the
rest of her dress, had in her hand a goodly sloethorn cudgel,
and in all points of equipment except her petticoats seemed
rather masculine than feminine. Her dark elf-locks shot out
like the snakes of the gorgon between an old-fashioned bonnet
called a bongrace, heightening the singular effect of her
strong and weather-beaten features, which they partly shadowed,
while her eye had a wild roll that indicated something of
insanity.’
Her career in the tale corresponds with the strangeness of her exterior.
‘Harlot, thief, witch, and gipsy,’ as she describes herself, the hero
is preserved by her virtues; half-crazed as she is described to be, he
owes his safety on more than one occasion to her skill in stratagem, and
ability in managing those with whom she is connected, and who are most
likely to be familiar with her weakness and to detect her craft. Yet on
hardly any occasion is the natural reader conscious of this strangeness.
Something is of course attributable to the skill of the artist; for no
other power of mind could produce the effect, unless it were aided by the
unconscious tact of detailed expression. But the fundamental explanation
of this remarkable success is the distinctness with which Scott saw how
such a character as Meg Merrilies arose and was produced out of the
peculiar circumstances of gipsy life in the localities in which he has
placed his scene. He has exhibited this to his readers not by lengthy
or elaborate description, but by chosen incidents, short comments, and
touches of which he scarcely foresaw the effect. This is the only way
in which the fundamental objection to making eccentricity the subject
of artistic treatment can be obviated. Monstrosity ceases to be such
when we discern the laws of nature which evolve it: when a real science
explains its phenomena, we find that it is in strict accordance with what
we call the natural type, but that some rare adjunct or uncommon casualty
has interfered and distorted a nature which is really the same, into
a phenomenon which is altogether different. Just so with eccentricity
in human character; it becomes a topic of literary art only when its
identity with the ordinary principles of human nature is exhibited in
the midst of, and as it were by means of, the superficial unlikeness.
Such a skill, however, requires an easy careless familiarity with usual
human life and common human conduct. A writer must have a sympathy
with health before he can show us how, and where, and to what extent,
that which is unhealthy deviates from it; and it is this consistent
acquaintance with regular life which makes the irregular characters of
Scott so happy a contrast to the uneasy distortions of less sagacious
novelists.
A good deal of the same criticism may be applied to the delineation which
Scott has given us of the _poor_. In truth, poverty is an anomaly to
rich people. It is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner
do not ring the bell. One half of the world, according to the saying,
do not know how the other half live. Accordingly, nothing is so rare
in fiction as a good delineation of the poor. Though perpetually with
us in reality, we rarely meet them in our reading. The requirements of
the case present an unusual difficulty to artistic delineation. A good
deal of the character of the poor is an unfit topic for continuous art,
and yet we wish to have in our books a lifelike exhibition of the whole
of that character. Mean manners and mean vices are unfit for prolonged
delineation; the every-day pressure of narrow necessities is too petty
a pain and too anxious a reality to be dwelt upon. We can bear the mere
description of the _Parish Register_—
‘But this poor farce has neither truth nor art
To please the fancy or to touch the heart.
Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean,
With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene;
Presents no objects tender or profound,
But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around;’—
but who could bear to have a long narrative of fortunes ‘dismal but yet
mean,’ with characters ‘dark but not awful,’ and no objects ‘tender or
profound’? Mr. Dickens has in various parts of his writings been led
by a sort of pre-Raphaelite _cultus_ of reality into an error of this
species. His poor people have taken to their poverty very thoroughly;
they are poor talkers and poor livers, and in all ways poor people
to read about. A whole array of writers have fallen into an opposite
mistake. Wishing to preserve their delineations clear from the defects
of meanness and vulgarity, they have attributed to the poor a fancied
happiness and Arcadian simplicity. The conventional shepherd of ancient
times was scarcely displeasing: that which is by everything except
express avowal removed from the sphere of reality does not annoy us by
its deviations from reality; but the fictitious poor of sentimental
novelists are brought almost into contact with real life, half claim
to be copies of what actually exists at our very doors, are introduced
in close proximity to characters moving in a higher rank, over whom no
such ideal charm is diffused, and who are painted with as much truth as
the writer’s ability enables him to give. Accordingly, the contrast is
evident and displeasing: the harsh outlines of poverty will not bear the
artificial rose-tint; they are seen through it, like high cheek-bones
through the delicate colours of artificial youth; we turn away with
some disgust from the false elegance and undeceiving art; we prefer the
rough poor of nature to the petted poor of the refining describer. Scott
has most felicitously avoided both these errors. His poor people are
never coarse and never vulgar; their lineaments have the rude traits
which a life of conflict will inevitably leave on the minds and manners
of those who are to lead it; their notions have the narrowness which
is inseparable from a contracted experience; their knowledge is not
more extended than their restricted means of attaining it would render
possible. Almost alone among novelists Scott has given a thorough,
minute, lifelike description of poor persons, which is at the same time
genial and pleasing. The reason seems to be, that the firm sagacity of
his genius comprehended the industrial aspect of poor people’s life
thoroughly and comprehensively, his experience brought it before him
easily and naturally, and his artist’s mind and genial disposition
enabled him to dwell on those features which would be most pleasing to
the world in general. In fact, his own mind of itself and by its own
nature dwelt on those very peculiarities. He could not remove his firm
and instructed genius into the domain of Arcadian unreality, but he was
equally unable to dwell principally, peculiarly, or consecutively, on
those petty, vulgar, mean details in which such a writer as Crabbe lives
and breathes. Hazlitt said that Crabbe described a poor man’s cottage
like a man who came to distrain for rent; he catalogued every trivial
piece of furniture, defects and cracks and all. Scott describes it as
a cheerful but most sensible landlord would describe a cottage on his
property: he has a pleasure in it. No detail, or few details, in the
life of the inmates escape his experienced and interested eye; but he
dwells on those which do not displease him. He sympathises with their
rough industry and plain joys and sorrows. He does not fatigue himself or
excite their wondering smile by theoretical plans of impossible relief.
He makes the best of the life which is given, and by a sanguine sympathy
makes it still better. A hard life many characters in Scott seem to lead;
but he appreciates, and makes his reader appreciate, the full value of
natural feelings, plain thoughts, and applied sagacity.
His ideas of political economy are equally characteristic of his strong
sense and genial mind. He was always sneering at Adam Smith, and telling
many legends of that philosopher’s absence of mind and inaptitude for
the ordinary conduct of life. A contact with the Edinburgh logicians
had, doubtless, not augmented his faith in the formal deductions of
abstract economy; nevertheless, with the facts before him, he could give
a very plain and satisfactory exposition of the genial consequences of
old abuses, the distinct necessity for stern reform, and the delicate
humanity requisite for introducing that reform temperately and with
feeling:
‘Even so the Laird of Ellangowan ruthlessly commenced his
magisterial reform, at the expense of various established
and superannuated pickers and stealers, who had been his
neighbours for half a century. He wrought his miracles like a
second Duke Humphrey; and by the influence of the beadle’s rod,
caused the lame to walk, the blind to see, and the palsied to
labour. He detected poachers, black-fishers, orchard-breakers,
and pigeon-shooters; had the applause of the bench for his
reward, and the public credit of an active magistrate.
‘All this good had its rateable proportion of evil. Even an
admitted nuisance, of ancient standing, should not be abated
without some caution. The zeal of our worthy friend now
involved in great distress sundry personages whose idle and
mendicant habits his own _lâchesse_ had contributed to foster,
until these habits had become irreclaimable, or whose real
incapacity for exertion rendered them fit objects, in their
own phrase, for the charity of all well-disposed Christians.
The “long-remembered beggar,” who for twenty years had made
his regular rounds within the neighbourhood, received rather
as an humble friend than as an object of charity, was sent to
the neighbouring workhouse. The decrepit dame, who travelled
round the parish upon a hand-barrow, circulating from house
to house like a bad shilling, which every one is in haste to
pass to his neighbour; she who used to call for her bearers as
loud, or louder, than a traveller demands post-horses, even she
shared the same disastrous fate. The “daft Jock,” who, half
knave, half idiot, had been the sport of each succeeding race
of village children for a good part of a century, was remitted
to the county bridewell, where, secluded from free air and
sunshine, the only advantages he was capable of enjoying, he
pined and died in the course of six months. The old sailor, who
had so long rejoiced the smoky rafters of every kitchen in the
country, by singing _Captain Ward_ and _Bold Admiral Benbow_,
was banished from the county for no better reason than that
he was supposed to speak with a strong Irish accent. Even the
annual rounds of the pedlar were abolished by the Justice, in
his hasty zeal for the administration of rural police.
‘These things did not pass without notice and censure. We
are not made of wood or stone, and the things which connect
themselves with our hearts and habits cannot, like bark or
lichen, be rent away without our missing them. The farmer’s
dame lacked her usual share of intelligence, perhaps also
the self-applause which she had felt while distributing the
_awmous_ (alms), in shape of a _gowpen_ (handful) of oatmeal,
to the mendicant who brought the news. The cottage felt
inconvenience from interruption of the petty trade carried on
by the itinerant dealers. The children lacked their supply of
sugar-plums and toys; the young women wanted pins, ribbons,
combs, and ballads; and the old could no longer barter their
eggs for salt, snuff, and tobacco. All these circumstances
brought the busy Laird of Ellangowan into discredit, which was
the more general on account of his former popularity. Even his
lineage was brought up in judgment against him. They thought
“naething of what the like of Greenside, or Burnville, or
Viewforth, might do, that were strangers in the country; but
Ellangowan! that had been a name amang them since the mirk
Monanday, and lang before—_him_ to be grinding the puir at
that rate!—They ca’d his grandfather the Wicked Laird; but,
though he was whiles fractious aneuch, when he got into roving
company, and had ta’en the drap drink, he would have scorned to
gang on at this gate. Na, na, the muckle chumlay in the Auld
Place reeked like a killogie in his time, and there were as
mony puir folk riving at the banes in the court and about the
door, as there were gentles in the ha’. And the leddy, on ilka
Christmas night as it came round, gae twelve siller pennies to
ilka puir body about, in honour of the twelve apostles like.
They were fond to ca’ it papistrie; but I think our great folk
might take a lesson frae the papists whiles. They gie another
sort o’ help to puir folk than just dinging down a saxpence
in the brod on the Sabbath, and kilting, and scourging, and
drumming them a’ the sax days o’ the week besides.”’
Many other indications of the same healthy and natural sense, which
gives so much of their characteristic charm to the Scotch novels, might
be pointed out, if it were necessary to weary our readers by dwelling
longer on a point we have already laboured so much. One more, however,
demands notice because of its importance, and perhaps also because,
from its somewhat less obvious character, it might otherwise escape
without notice. There has been frequent controversy as to the penal
code, if we may so call it, of fiction; that is, as to the apportionment
of reward and punishment respectively to the good and evil personages
therein delineated; and the practice of authors has been as various
as the legislation of critics. One school abandons all thought on the
matter, and declares that in the real life we see around us, good people
often fail, and wicked people continually prosper; and would deduce the
precept, that it is unwise in an art which should hold the ‘mirror up
to nature,’ not to copy the uncertain and irregular distribution of
its sanctions. Another school, with an exactness which savours at times
of pedantry, apportions the success and the failure, the pain and the
pleasure of fictitious life to the moral qualities of those who are
living in it—does not think at all, or but little, of any other quality
in those characters, and does not at all care whether the penalty and
reward are evolved in natural sequence from the circumstances and
characters of the tale, or are owing to some monstrous accident far
removed from all relation of cause or consequence to those facts and
people. Both these classes of writers produce works which jar on the
natural sense of common readers, and are at issue with the analytic
criticism of the best critics. One school leaves an impression of an
uncared-for world, in which there is no right and no wrong; the other,
of a sort of Governesses’ Institution of a world, where all praise and
all blame, all good and all pain, are made to turn on special graces
and petty offences, pesteringly spoken of and teasingly watched for.
The manner of Scott is thoroughly different; you can scarcely lay down
any novel of his without a strong feeling that the world in which the
fiction has been laid, and in which your imagination has been moving,
is one subject to laws of retribution which, though not apparent on a
superficial glance, are yet in steady and consistent operation, and will
be quite sure to work their due effect, if time is only given to them.
Sagacious men know that this is in its best aspect the condition of
life. Certain of the ungodly may, notwithstanding the Psalmist, flourish
even through life like a green bay-tree; for providence, in external
appearance (far differently from the real truth of things, as we may one
day see it), works by a scheme of averages. Most people who ought to
succeed, do succeed; most people who do fail, ought to fail. But there
is no exact adjustment of ‘mark’ to merit; the competitive examination
system appears to have an origin more recent than the creation of
the world;—‘on the whole,’ ‘speaking generally,’ ‘looking at life as
a whole,’ are the words in which we must describe the providential
adjustment of visible good and evil to visible goodness and badness.
And when we look more closely, we see that these general results are
the consequences of certain principles which work half unseen, and
which are effectual in the main, though thwarted here and there. It
is this comprehensive though inexact distribution of good and evil,
which is suited to the novelist, and it is exactly this which Scott
instinctively adopted. Taking a firm and genial view of the common facts
of life,—seeing it as an experienced observer and tried man of action,—he
could not help giving the representation of it which is insensibly borne
in on the minds of such persons. He delineates it as a world moving
according to laws which are always producing their effect, never _have_
produced it; sometimes fall short a little; are always nearly successful.
Good sense produces its effect, as well as good intention; ability is
valuable as well as virtue. It is this peculiarity which gives to his
works, more than anything else, the life-likeness which distinguishes
them; the average of the copy is struck on the same scale as that of
reality; an unexplained, uncommented-on adjustment works in the one, just
as a hidden, imperceptible principle of apportionment operates in the
other.
The romantic susceptibility of Scott’s imagination is as obvious in his
novels as his matter-of-fact sagacity. We can find much of it in the
place in which we should naturally look first for it,—his treatment of
his heroines. We are no indiscriminate admirers of these young ladies,
and shall shortly try to show how much they are inferior as imaginative
creations to similar creations of the very highest artists. But the mode
in which the writer speaks of them everywhere indicates an imagination
continually under the illusion which we term romance. A gentle tone
of manly admiration pervades the whole delineation of their words and
actions. If we look carefully at the narratives of some remarkable
female novelists—it would be invidious to give the instances by name—we
shall be struck at once with the absence of this; they do not half like
their heroines. It would be satirical to say that they were jealous of
them; but it is certain that they analyse the mode in which their charms
produce their effects, and the _minutiæ_ of their operation, much in the
same way in which a slightly jealous lady examines the claims of the
heroines of society. The same writers have invented the atrocious species
of plain heroines. Possibly none of the frauds which are now so much the
topic of common remark are so irritating, as that to which the purchaser
of a novel is a victim on finding that he has only to peruse a narrative
of the conduct and sentiments of an ugly lady. ‘Two-and-sixpence to
know the heart which has high cheek-bones!’ Was there ever such an
imposition? Scott would have recoiled from such a conception. Even
Jeanie Deans, though no heroine, like Flora Macivor, is described as
‘comely,’ and capable of looking almost pretty when required, and she
has a compensating set-off in her sister, who is beautiful as well as
unwise. Speaking generally, as is the necessity of criticism, Scott makes
his heroines, at least by profession, attractive, and dwells on their
attractiveness, though not with the wild ecstasy of insane youth, yet
with the tempered and mellow admiration common to genial men of this
world. Perhaps at times we are rather displeased at his explicitness,
and disposed to hang back and carp at the admirable qualities displayed
to us. But this is only a stronger evidence of the peculiarity which
we speak of,—of the unconscious sentiments inseparable from Scott’s
imagination.
The same romantic tinge undeniably shows itself in Scott’s pictures of
the past. Many exceptions have been taken to the detail of mediæval
life as it is described to us in _Ivanhoe_; but one merit will always
remain to it, and will be enough to secure to it immense popularity. It
describes the middle ages as we should have wished them to have been. We
do not mean that the delineation satisfies those accomplished admirers of
the old Church system who fancy that they have found among the prelates
and barons of the fourteenth century a close approximation to the
theocracy which they would recommend for our adoption. On the contrary,
the theological merits of the middle ages are not prominent in Scott’s
delineation. ‘Dogma’ was not in his way: a cheerful man of the world is
not anxious for a precise definition of peculiar doctrines. The charm of
_Ivanhoe_ is addressed to a simpler sort of imagination, to that kind
of boyish fancy which idolises mediæval society as the ‘fighting time.’
Every boy has heard of tournaments, and has a firm persuasion that in
an age of tournaments life was thoroughly well understood. A martial
society, where men fought hand to hand on good horses with large lances,
in peace for pleasure, and in war for business, seems the very ideal of
perfection to a bold and simply fanciful boy. _Ivanhoe_ spreads before
him the full landscape of such a realm, with Richard Cœur-de-Lion, a
black horse, and the passage of arms at Ashby. Of course he admires it,
and thinks there was never such a writer, and will never more be such a
world. And a mature critic will share his admiration, at least to the
extent of admitting that nowhere else have the elements of a martial
romance been so gorgeously accumulated without becoming oppressive; their
fanciful charm been so powerfully delineated, and yet so constantly
relieved by touches of vigorous sagacity. One single fact shows how great
the romantic illusion is. The pressure of painful necessity is scarcely
so great in this novel, as in novels of the same writer in which the
scene is laid in modern times. Much may be said in favour of the mediæval
system as contradistinguished from existing society; much has been said.
But no one can maintain that general comfort was as much diffused as
it is now. A certain ease pervades the structure of later society. Our
houses may not last so long, are not so picturesque, will leave no such
ruins behind them; but they are warmed with hot water, have no draughts,
and contain sofas instead of rushes. A slight daily unconscious luxury
is hardly ever wanting to the dwellers in civilisation; like the gentle
air of a genial climate, it is a perpetual minute enjoyment. The absence
of this marks a rude barbaric time. We may avail ourselves of rough
pleasures, stirring amusements, exciting actions, strange rumours; but
life is hard and harsh. The cold air of the keen North may brace and
invigorate, but it cannot soothe us. All sensible people know that the
middle ages must have been very uncomfortable; there was a difficulty
about ‘good food;’—almost insuperable obstacles to the cultivation of
nice detail and small enjoyment. No one knew the abstract facts on which
this conclusion rests better than Scott; but his delineation gives
no general idea of the result. A thoughtless reader rises with the
impression that the middle ages had the same elements of happiness which
we have at present, and that they had fighting besides. We do not assert
that this tenet is explicitly taught; on the contrary, many facts are
explained, and many customs elucidated from which a discriminating and
deducing reader would infer the meanness of poverty and the harshness of
barbarism. But these less imposing traits escape the rapid, and still
more the boyish reader. His general impression is one of romance; and
though, when roused, Scott was quite able to take a distinct view of the
opposing facts, he liked his own mind to rest for the most part in the
same pleasing illusion.
The same sort of historical romance is shown likewise in Scott’s picture
of remarkable historical characters. His Richard I. is the traditional
Richard, with traits heightened and ennobled in perfect conformity to
the spirit of tradition. Some illustration of the same quality might be
drawn from his delineations of the Puritan rebellions and the Cavalier
enthusiasm. We might show that he ever dwells on the traits and incidents
most attractive to a genial and spirited imagination. But the most
remarkable instance of the power which romantic illusion exercised over
him, is his delineation of Mary Queen of Scots. He refused at one time
of his life to write a biography of that princess ‘because his opinion
was contrary to his feeling.’ He evidently considered her guilt to be
clearly established, and thought, with a distinguished lawyer, that
he should ‘direct a jury to find her guilty;’ but his fancy, like that
of most of his countrymen, took a peculiar and special interest in the
beautiful lady who, at any rate, had suffered so much and so fatally at
the hands of a queen of England. He could not bring himself to dwell with
nice accuracy on the evidence which substantiates her criminality, or on
the still clearer indications of that unsound and over-crafty judgment,
which was the fatal inheritance of the Stuart family, and which, in spite
of advantages that scarcely any other family in the world has enjoyed,
has made their name an historical by-word for misfortune. The picture in
the _Abbot_, one of the best historical pictures which Scott has given
us, is principally the picture of the Queen as the fond tradition of his
countrymen exhibited her. Her entire innocence, it is true, is never
alleged: but the enthusiasm of her followers is dwelt on with approving
sympathy; their confidence is set forth at large; her influence over
them is skilfully delineated; the fascination of charms chastened by
misfortune is delicately indicated. We see a complete picture of the
beautiful queen, of the suffering and sorrowful, but yet not insensible
woman. Scott could not, however, as a close study will show us, quite
conceal the unfavourable nature of his fundamental opinion. In one
remarkable passage the struggle of the judgment is even conspicuous,
and in others the sagacity of the practised lawyer,—the ‘thread of the
attorney,’ as he used to call it, in his nature,—qualifies and modifies
the sentiment hereditary in his countrymen, and congenial to himself.
This romantic imagination is a habit or power (as we may choose to call
it) of mind, which is almost essential to the highest success in the
historical novel. The aim, at any rate the effect, of this class of
works seems to be to deepen and confirm the received view of historical
personages. A great and acute writer may, from an accurate study of
original documents, discover that those impressions are erroneous, and
by a process of elaborate argument substitute others which he deems more
accurate. But this can only be effected by writing a regular history.
The essence of the achievement is the proof. If Mr. Froude had put
forward his view of Henry the Eighth’s character in a professed novel, he
would have been laughed at. It is only by a rigid adherence to attested
facts and authentic documents, that a view so original could obtain even
a hearing. We start back with a little anger from a representation which
is avowedly imaginative, and which contradicts our impressions. We do not
like to have our opinions disturbed by reasoning; but it is impertinent
to attempt to disturb them by fancies. A writer of the historical novel
is bound by the popular conception of his subject; and commonly it will
be found that this popular impression is to some extent a romantic one.
An element of exaggeration clings to the popular judgment: great vices
are made greater, great virtues greater also; interesting incidents
are made more interesting, softer legends more soft. The novelist who
disregards this tendency will do so at the peril of his popularity. His
business is to make attraction more attractive, and not to impair the
pleasant pictures of ready-made romance by an attempt at grim reality.
We may therefore sum up the indications of this characteristic excellence
of Scott’s novels by saying, that more than any novelist he has given us
fresh pictures of practical human society, with its cares and troubles,
its excitements and its pleasures; that he has delineated more distinctly
than any one else the framework in which this society inheres, and by
the boundaries of which it is shaped and limited; that he has made more
clear the way in which strange and eccentric characters grow out of that
ordinary and usual system of life; that he has extended his view over
several periods of society, and given an animated description of the
external appearance of each, and a firm representation of its social
institutions; that he has shown very graphically what we may call the
worldly laws of moral government; and that over all these he has spread
the glow of sentiment natural to a manly mind, and an atmosphere of
generosity congenial to a cheerful one. It is from the collective effect
of these causes, and from the union of sense and sentiment which is the
principle of them all, that Scott derives the peculiar healthiness which
distinguishes him. There are no such books as his for the sick-room, or
for freshening the painful intervals of a morbid mind. Mere sense is
dull, mere sentiment unsubstantial; a sensation of genial healthiness is
only given by what combines the solidity of the one and the brightening
charm of the other.
Some guide to Scott’s defects, or to the limitations of his genius, if
we would employ a less ungenial and perhaps more correct expression, is
to be discovered, as usual, from the consideration of his characteristic
excellence. As it is his merit to give bold and animated pictures of
this world, it is his defect to give but insufficient representations of
qualities which this world does not exceedingly prize,—of such as do not
thrust themselves very forward in it,—of such as are in some sense above
it. We may illustrate this in several ways.
One of the parts of human nature which are systematically omitted in
Scott, is the searching and abstract intellect. This did not lie in his
way. No man had a stronger sagacity, better adapted for the guidance of
common men, and the conduct of common transactions. Few could hope to
form a more correct opinion on things and subjects which were brought
before him in actual life; no man had a more useful intellect. But on the
other hand, as will be generally observed to be the case, no one was less
inclined to that probing and seeking and anxious inquiry into things in
general which is the necessity of some minds, and a sort of intellectual
famine in their nature. He had no call to investigate the theory of
the universe, and he would not have been able to comprehend those who
did. Such a mind as Shelley’s would have been entirely removed from his
comprehension. He had no call to mix ‘awful talk and asking looks’ with
his love of the visible scene. He could not have addressed the universe:
‘I have watched
Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps;
And my heart ever gazes on the depth
Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed
In charnels and on coffins, where black death
Keeps record of the trophies won from thee,
Hoping to still these obstinate questionings
Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost,
Thy messenger, to render up the tale
Of what we are.’
Such thoughts would have been to him ‘thinking without an object,’
‘abstracted speculations,’ ‘cobwebs of the unintelligible brain.’ Above
all minds, his had the Baconian propensity to work upon ‘stuff.’ At
first sight, it would not seem that this was a defect likely to be very
hurtful to the works of a novelist. The labours of the searching and
introspective intellect, however needful, absorbing, and in some degree
delicious, to the seeker himself, are not in general very delightful
to those who are not seeking. Genial men in middle life are commonly
intolerant of that philosophising which their prototype, in old times,
classed side by side with the lisping of youth. The theological novel,
which was a few years ago so popular, and which is likely to have a
recurring influence in times when men’s belief is unsettled, and persons
who cannot or will not read large treatises have thoughts in their minds
and inquiries in their hearts, suggests to those who are accustomed to it
the absence elsewhere of what is necessarily one of its most distinctive
and prominent subjects. The desire to attain a belief, which has become
one of the most familiar sentiments of heroes and heroines, would have
seemed utterly incongruous to the plain sagacity of Scott, and also to
his old-fashioned art. Creeds are _data_ in his novels; people have
different creeds, but each keeps his own. Some persons will think that
this is not altogether amiss; nor do we particularly wish to take up the
defence of the dogmatic novel. Nevertheless, it will strike those who
are accustomed to the youthful generation of a cultivated time, that
the passion of intellectual inquiry is one of the strongest impulses in
many of them, and one of those which give the predominant colouring to
the conversation and exterior mind of many more. And a novelist will not
exercise the most potent influence over those subject to that passion, if
he entirely omit the delineation of it. Scott’s works have only one merit
in this relation: they are an excellent rest to those who have felt this
passion, and have had something too much of it.
The same indisposition to the abstract exercises of the intellect
shows itself in the reflective portions of Scott’s novels, and perhaps
contributes to their popularity with that immense majority of the world
who strongly share in that same indisposition: it prevents, however,
their having the most powerful intellectual influence on those who have
at any time of their lives voluntarily submitted themselves to this acute
and refining discipline. The reflections of a practised thinker have a
peculiar charm, like the last touches of the accomplished artist. The
cunning exactitude of the professional hand leaves a trace in the very
language. A nice discrimination of thought makes men solicitous of the
most apt expressions to diffuse their thoughts. Both words and meaning
gain a metallic brilliancy, like the glittering precision of the pure
Attic air. Scott’s is a healthy and genial world of reflection, but it
wants the charm of delicate exactitude.
The same limitation of Scott’s genius shows itself in a very different
portion of art—in his delineation of his heroines. The same blunt
sagacity of imagination, which fitted him to excel in the rough
description of obvious life, rather unfitted him for delineating the
less substantial essence of the female character. The nice _minutiæ_
of society, by means of which female novelists have been so successful
in delineating their own sex, were rather too small for his robust and
powerful mind. Perhaps, too, a certain unworldliness of _imagination_
is necessary to enable men to comprehend or delineate that essence:
unworldliness of _life_ is no doubt not requisite; rather, perhaps,
worldliness is necessary to the acquisition of a sufficient experience.
But an absorption in the practical world does not seem favourable to a
comprehension of anything which does not precisely belong to it. Its
interests are too engrossing; its excitements too keen; it modifies the
fancy, and in the change unfits it for everything else. Something, too,
in Scott’s character and history made it more difficult for him to give a
representation of women than of men. Goethe used to say, that his idea of
woman was not drawn from his experience, but that it came to him before
experience, and that he explained his experience by a reference to it.
And though this is a German, and not very happy, form of expression, yet
it appears to indicate a very important distinction. Some efforts of the
imagination are made so early in life, just as it were at the dawn of
the conscious faculties, that we are never able to fancy ourselves as
destitute of them. They are part of the mental constitution with which,
so to speak, we awoke to existence. These are always far more firm,
vivid, and definite, than any other images of our fancy; and we apply
them, half unconsciously, to any facts and sentiments and actions which
may occur to us later in life, whether arising from within or thrust upon
us from the outward world. Goethe doubtless meant that the idea of the
female character was to him one of these first elements of imagination;
not a thing puzzled out, or which he remembered having conceived, but a
part of the primitive conceptions which, being coeval with his memory,
seemed inseparable from his consciousness. The descriptions of women
likely to be given by this sort of imagination will probably be the
best descriptions. A mind which would arrive at this idea of the female
character by this process, and so early, would be one obviously of more
than usual susceptibility. The early imagination does not commonly take
this direction; it thinks most of horses and lances, tournaments and
knights; only a mind with an unusual and instinctive tendency to this
kind of thought, would be borne thither so early or so effectually. And
even independently of this probable peculiarity of the individual, the
primitive imagination in general is likely to be the most accurate which
men can form; not, of course, of the external manifestations and detailed
manners, but of the inner sentiment and characteristic feeling of women.
The early imagination conceives what it does conceive very justly; fresh
from the facts, stirred by the new aspect of things, undimmed by the
daily passage of constantly forgotten images, not misled by the irregular
analogies of a dislocated life,—the early mind sees what it does see with
a spirit and an intentness never given to it again. A mind like Goethe’s,
of very strong imagination, aroused at the earliest age,—not of course by
passions, but by an unusual strength in that undefined longing which is
the prelude to our passions,—will form the best idea of the inmost female
nature which masculine nature can form. The difference is evident between
the characters of women formed by Goethe’s imagination or Shakespeare’s,
and those formed by such an imagination as that of Scott. The latter seem
so external. We have traits, features, manners; we know the heroine as
she appeared in the street; in some degree we know how she talked, but
we never know how she felt—least of all what she was: we always feel
there is a world behind, unanalysed, unrepresented, which we cannot
attain to. Such a character as Margaret in _Faust_ is known to us to the
very soul; so is Imogen; so is Ophelia. Edith Bellenden, Flora Macivor,
Miss Wardour, are young ladies who, we are told, were good-looking, and
well-dressed (according to the old fashion), and sensible; but we feel
we know but very little of them, and they do not haunt our imaginations.
The failure of Scott in this line of art is more conspicuous, because he
had not in any remarkable degree the later experience of female detail,
with which some minds have endeavoured to supply the want of the early
essential imagination, and which Goethe possessed in addition to it. It
was rather late, according to his biographer, before Scott set up for
a ‘squire of dames;’ he was a ‘lame young man, very enthusiastic about
ballad poetry;’ he was deeply in love with a young lady, supposed to
be imaginatively represented by Flora Macivor, but he was unsuccessful.
It would be over-ingenious to argue, from his failing in a single
love-affair, that he had no peculiar interest in young ladies in general;
but the whole description of his youth shows that young ladies exercised
over him a rather more divided influence than is usual. Other pursuits
intervened, much more than is common with persons of the imaginative
temperament, and he never led the life of flirtation from which Goethe
believed that he derived so much instruction. Scott’s heroines,
therefore, are, not unnaturally, faulty, since from a want of the very
peculiar instinctive imagination he could not give us the essence of
women, and from the habits of his life he could not delineate to us their
detailed life with the appreciative accuracy of habitual experience.
Jeanie Deans is probably the best of his heroines, and she is so because
she is the least of a heroine. The plain matter of-fact element in the
peasant-girl’s life and circumstances suited a robust imagination. There
is little in the part of her character that is very finely described
which is characteristically feminine. She is not a masculine, but she
is an epicene heroine. Her love-affair with Butler, a single remarkable
scene excepted, is rather commonplace than otherwise.
A similar criticism might be applied to Scott’s heroes. Everyone feels
how commonplace they are—Waverley excepted, whose very vacillation
gives him a sort of character. They have little personality. They are
all of the same type;—excellent young men—rather strong—able to ride
and climb and jump. They are always said to be sensible, and bear out
the character by being not unwilling sometimes to talk platitudes. But
we know nothing of their inner life. They are said to be in love; but
we have no special account of their individual sentiments. People show
their character in their love more than in anything else. These young
gentlemen all love in the same way—in the vague commonplace way of this
world. We have no sketch or dramatic expression of the life within. Their
souls are quite unknown to us. If there is an exception, it is Edgar
Ravenswood. But if we look closely, we may observe that the notion which
we obtain of his character, unusually broad as it is, is not a notion
of him in his capacity of hero, but in his capacity of distressed peer.
His proud poverty gives a distinctness which otherwise his lineaments
would not have. We think little of his love; we think much of his narrow
circumstances and compressed haughtiness.
The same exterior delineation of character shows itself in his treatment
of men’s religious nature. A novelist is scarcely, in the notion of
ordinary readers, bound to deal with this at all; if he does, it will be
one of his great difficulties to indicate it graphically, yet without
dwelling on it. Men who purchase a novel do not wish a stone or a sermon.
All lengthened reflections must be omitted; the whole armoury of pulpit
eloquence. But no delineation of human nature can be considered complete
which omits to deal with man in relation to the questions which occupy
him as man, with his convictions as to the theory of the universe and
his own destiny; the human heart throbs on few subjects with a passion
so intense, so peculiar, and so typical. From an artistic view, it is
a blunder to omit an element which is so characteristic of human life,
which contributes so much to its animation, and which is so picturesque.
A reader of a more simple mind, little apt to indulge in such criticism,
feels ‘a want of depth,’ as he would speak, in delineations from which
so large an element of his own most passionate and deepest nature is
omitted. It can hardly be said that there is an omission of the religious
nature in Scott. But, at the same time, there is no adequate delineation
of it. If we refer to the facts of his life, and the view of his
character which we collect from them, we shall find that his religion was
of a qualified and double sort. He was a genial man of the world, and had
the easy faith in the kindly _Dieu des bons gens_ which is natural to
such a person; and he had also a half-poetic principle of superstition in
his nature, inclining him to believe in ghosts, legends, fairies, and
elves, which did not affect his daily life, or possibly his superficial
belief, but was nevertheless very constantly present to his fancy, and
which affected, as is the constitution of human nature, through that
frequency, the undefined, half-expressed, inexpressible feelings which
are at the root of that belief. Superstition was a kind of Jacobitism in
his religion; as a sort of absurd reliance on the hereditary principle
modified insensibly his leanings in the practical world, so a belief
in the existence of unevidenced, and often absurd, supernatural beings
qualified his commonest speculations on the higher world. Both these
elements may be thought to enter into the highest religion; there is a
principle of cheerfulness which will justify in its measure a genial
enjoyment, and also a principle of fear which those who think only of
that enjoyment will deem superstition, and which will really become
superstition in the over-anxious and credulous acceptor of it. But in a
true religion these two elements will be combined. The character of God
images itself very imperfectly in any human soul; but in the highest it
images itself as a whole; it leaves an abiding impression which will
justify anxiety and allow of happiness. The highest aim of the religious
novelist would be to show how this operates in human character; to
exhibit in their curious modification our religious love, and also our
religious fear. In the novels of Scott the two elements appear in a state
of separation, as they did in his own mind. We have the superstition
of the peasantry in the _Antiquary_, in _Guy Mannering_, everywhere
almost; we have likewise a pervading tone of genial easy reflection
characteristic of the man of the world who produced, and agreeable to
the people of the world who read, these works. But we have no picture
of the two in combination. We are scarcely led to think on the subject
at all, so much do other subjects distract our interest; but if we do
think, we are puzzled at the contrast. We do not know which is true, the
uneasy belief of superstition, or the easy satisfaction of the world; we
waver between the two, and have no suggestion even hinted to us of the
possibility of a reconciliation. The character of the Puritans certainly
did not in general embody such a reconciliation, but it might have been
made by a sympathising artist the vehicle for a delineation of a struggle
after it. The two elements of love and fear ranked side by side in their
minds with an intensity which is rare even in minds that feel only one
of them. The delineation of Scott is amusing, but superficial. He caught
the ludicrous traits which tempt the mirthful imagination, but no other
side of the character pleased him. The man of the world was displeased
with their obstinate interfering zeal; their intensity of faith was an
opposition force in the old Scotch polity, of which he liked to fancy
the harmonious working. They were superstitious enough; but nobody likes
other people’s superstitions. Scott’s were of a wholly different kind.
He made no difficulty as to the observance of Christmas-day, and would
have eaten potatoes without the faintest scruple, although their name
does not occur in Scripture. Doubtless also his residence in the land
of Puritanism did not incline him to give anything except a satirical
representation of that belief. You must not expect from a Dissenter a
faithful appreciation of the creed from which he dissents. You cannot be
impartial on the religion of the place in which you live; you may believe
it, or you may dislike it; it crosses your path in too many forms for
you to be able to look at it with equanimity. Scott had rather a rigid
form of Puritanism forced upon him in his infancy; it is asking too much
to expect him to be partial to it. The aspect of religion which Scott
delineates best is that which appears in griefs, especially in the grief
of strong characters. His strong _natural_ nature felt the power of
death. He has given us many pictures of rude and simple men subdued, if
only for a moment, into devotion by its presence.
On the whole, and speaking roughly, these defects in the delineation
which Scott has given us of human life are but two. He omits to give us
a delineation of the soul. We have mind, manners, animation, but it is
the stir of this world. We miss the consecrating power; and we miss
it not only in its own peculiar sphere, which, from the difficulty of
introducing the deepest elements into a novel, would have been scarcely
matter for a harsh criticism, but in the place in which a novelist
might most be expected to delineate it. There are perhaps such things
as the love affairs of immortal beings, but no one would learn it from
Scott. His heroes and heroines are well dressed for this world, but not
for another; there is nothing even in their love which is suitable for
immortality. As has been noticed, Scott also omits any delineation of the
abstract side of unworldly intellect. This too might not have been so
severe a reproach, considering its undramatic, unanimated nature, if it
had stood alone; but taken in connection with the omission which we have
just spoken of, it is most important. As the union of sense and romance
makes the world of Scott so characteristically agreeable,—a fascinating
picture of this world in the light in which we like best to dwell on it;
so the deficiency in the attenuated, striving intellect, as well as in
the supernatural soul, gives to the ‘world’ of Scott the cumbrousness
and temporality—in short, the materialism—which is characteristic of the
world.
We have dwelt so much on what we think are the characteristic features of
Scott’s imaginative representations, that we have left ourselves no room
to criticise the two most natural points of criticism in a novelist—plot
and style. This is not, however, so important in Scott’s case as it would
commonly be. He used to say, ‘It was of no use having a plot; you could
not keep to it.’ He modified and changed his thread of story from day
to day,—sometimes even from bookselling reasons, and on the suggestion
of others. An elaborate work of narrative art could not be produced in
this way, every one will concede; the highest imagination, able to look
far over the work, is necessary for that task. But the plots produced,
so to say, by the pen of the writer as he passes over the events are
likely to have a freshness and a suitableness to those events, which
is not possessed by the inferior writers who make up a mechanical plot
before they commence. The procedure of the highest genius doubtless is
scarcely a procedure: the view of the whole story comes at once upon its
imagination like the delicate end and the distinct beginning of some long
vista. But all minds do not possess the highest mode of conception; and
among lower modes, it is doubtless better to possess the vigorous fancy
which creates each separate scene in succession as it goes, than the
pedantic intellect which designs everything long before it is wanted.
There is a play in unconscious creation which no voluntary elaboration
and preconceived fitting of distinct ideas can ever hope to produce. If
the whole cannot be created by one bounding effort, it is better that
each part should be created separately and in detail.
The style of Scott would deserve the highest praise if M. Thiers could
establish his theory of narrative language. He maintains that an
historian’s language approaches perfection in proportion as it aptly
communicates what is meant to be narrated without drawing any attention
to itself. Scott’s style fulfils this condition. Nobody rises from his
works without a most vivid idea of what is related, and no one is able
to quote a single phrase in which it has been narrated. We are inclined,
however, to differ from the great French historian, and to oppose to
him a theory derived from a very different writer. Coleridge used to
maintain that all good poetry was untranslatable into words of the same
language without injury to the sense: the meaning was, in his view, to
be so inseparably intertwined even with the shades of the language,
that the change of a single expression would make a difference in the
accompanying feeling, if not in the bare signification: consequently, all
good poetry must be remembered exactly,—to change a word is to modify
the essence. Rigidly this theory can only be applied to a few kinds
of poetry, or special passages in which the imagination is exerting
itself to the utmost, and collecting from the whole range of associated
language the very expressions which it requires. The highest excitation
of feeling is necessary to this peculiar felicity of choice. In calmer
moments the mind has either a less choice, or less acuteness of selective
power. Accordingly, in prose it would be absurd to expect any such
nicety. Still, on great occasions in imaginative fiction, there should be
passages in which the words seem to cleave to the matter. The excitement
is as great as in poetry. The words should become part of the sense. They
should attract our attention, as this is necessary to impress them on
the memory; but they should not in so doing distract attention from the
meaning conveyed. On the contrary, it is their inseparability from their
meaning which gives them their charm and their power. In truth, Scott’s
language, like his sense, was such as became a bold, sagacious man of
the world. He used the first sufficient words which came uppermost, and
seems hardly to have been sensible, even in the works of others, of that
exquisite accuracy and inexplicable appropriateness of which we have been
speaking.
To analyse in detail the faults and merits of even a few of the greatest
of the Waverley Novels would be impossible in the space at our command on
the present occasion. We have only attempted a general account of a few
main characteristics. Every critic must, however, regret to have to leave
topics so tempting to remark upon as many of Scott’s stories, and a yet
greater number of his characters.
_CHARLES DICKENS._[10]
(1858.)
It must give Mr. Dickens much pleasure to look at the collected series of
his writings. He has told us of the beginnings of _Pickwick_.
‘I was,’ he relates in what is now the preface to that work,
‘a young man of three-and-twenty, when the present publishers,
attracted by some pieces I was at that time writing in the
_Morning Chronicle_ newspaper (of which one series had lately
been collected and published in two volumes, illustrated by
my esteemed friend Mr. George Cruikshank), waited upon me
to propose a something that should be published in shilling
numbers—then only known to me, or I believe to anybody else,
by a dim recollection of certain interminable novels in that
form, which used, some five-and-twenty years ago, to be
carried about the country by pedlars, and over some of which
I remember to have shed innumerable tears, before I served my
apprenticeship to Life. When I opened my door in Furnival’s Inn
to the managing partner who represented the firm, I recognised
in him the person from whose hands I had bought, two or three
years previously, and whom I had never seen before or since, my
first copy of the magazine in which my first effusion—dropped
stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling,
into a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark court in
Fleet Street—appeared in all the glory of print; on which
occasion, by the bye,—how well I recollect it!—I walked down to
Westminster Hall, and turned into it for half-an-hour, because
my eyes were so dimmed with joy and pride, that they could not
bear the street, and were not fit to be seen there. I told my
visitor of the coincidence, which we both hailed as a good
omen; and so fell to business.’
After such a beginning, there must be great enjoyment in looking at
the long series of closely printed green volumes, in remembering their
marvellous popularity, in knowing that they are a familiar literature
wherever the English language is spoken,—that they are read with
admiring appreciation by persons of the highest culture at the centre of
civilisation,—that they amuse, and are fit to amuse, the roughest settler
in Vancouver’s Island.
The penetrating power of this remarkable genius among all classes
at home is not inferior to its diffusive energy abroad. The phrase
‘household book’ has, when applied to the works of Mr. Dickens, a
peculiar propriety. There is no contemporary English writer, whose works
are read so generally through the whole house, who can give pleasure
to the servants as well as to the mistress, to the children as well as
to the master. Mr. Thackeray without doubt exercises a more potent and
plastic fascination within his sphere, but that sphere is limited. It is
restricted to that part of the middle class which gazes inquisitively
at the ‘Vanity Fair’ world. The delicate touches of our great satirist
have, for such readers, not only the charm of wit, but likewise the
interest of valuable information; he tells them of the topics which they
want to know. But below this class there is another and far larger,
which is incapable of comprehending the idling world, or of appreciating
the accuracy of delineations drawn from it,—which would not know the
difference between a picture of Grosvenor Square by Mr. Thackeray and the
picture of it in a Minerva-Press novel,—which only cares for or knows of
its own multifarious, industrial, fig-selling world,—and over these also
Mr. Dickens has power.
It cannot be amiss to take this opportunity of investigating, even
slightly, the causes of so great a popularity. And if, in the course of
our article, we may seem to be ready with over-refining criticism, or to
be unduly captious with theoretical objections, we hope not to forget
that so great and so diffused an influence is a _datum_ for literary
investigation,—that books which have been thus _tried_ upon mankind and
have thus succeeded, must be books of immense genius,—and that it is
our duty as critics to explain, as far as we can, the nature and the
limits of that genius, but never for one moment to deny or question its
existence.
Men of genius may be divided into regular and irregular. Certain minds,
the moment we think of them, suggest to us the ideas of symmetry and
proportion. Plato’s name, for example, calls up at once the impression
of something ordered, measured, and settled: it is the exact contrary of
everything eccentric, immature, or undeveloped. The opinions of such a
mind are often erroneous, and some of them may, from change of time, of
intellectual _data_, or from chance, seem not to be quite worthy of it;
but the mode in which those opinions are expressed, and (as far as we can
make it out) the mode in which they are framed, affect us, as we have
said, with a sensation of symmetricalness. It is not very easy to define
exactly to what peculiar internal characteristic this external effect is
due: the feeling is distinct, but the cause is obscure; it lies hid in
the peculiar constitution of great minds, and we should not wonder that
it is not very easy either to conceive or to describe. On the whole,
however, the effect seems to be produced by a peculiar proportionateness,
in each instance, of the mind to the tasks which it undertakes, amid
which we see it, and by which we measure it. Thus we feel that the powers
and tendencies of Plato’s mind and nature were more fit than those of any
other philosopher for the due consideration and exposition of the highest
problems of philosophy, of the doubts and difficulties which concern man
as man. His genius was adapted to its element; any change would mar the
delicacy of the thought, or the polished accuracy of the expression. The
weapon was fitted to its aim. Every instance of proportionateness does
not, however, lead us to attribute this peculiar symmetry to the whole
mind we are observing. The powers must not only be suited to the task
undertaken, but the task itself must also be suited to a human being,
and employ all the marvellous faculties with which he is endowed. The
neat perfection of such a mind as Talleyrand’s is the antithesis to the
symmetry of genius; the niceties neither of diplomacy nor of conversation
give scope to the entire powers of a great nature. We may lay down as the
condition of a regular or symmetrical genius, that it should have the
exact combination of powers suited to graceful and easy success in an
exercise of mind great enough to task the whole intellectual nature.
On the other hand, men of irregular or unsymmetrical genius are eminent
either for some one or some few peculiarities of mind, have possibly
special defects on other sides of their intellectual nature, at any rate
want what the scientific men of the present day would call the _definite
proportion_ of faculties and qualities suited to the exact work they
have in hand. The foundation of many criticisms of Shakespeare is, that
he is deficient in this peculiar proportion. His overteeming imagination
gives at times, and not unfrequently, a great feeling of irregularity:
there seems to be confusion. We have the tall trees of the forest,
the majestic creations of the highest genius; but we have, besides,
a bushy second growth, an obtrusion of secondary images and fancies,
which prevent our taking an exact measure of such grandeur. We have not
the sensation of intense simplicity, which must probably accompany the
highest conceivable greatness. Such is also the basis of Mr. Hallam’s
criticism on Shakespeare’s language, which Mr. Arnold has lately revived.
‘His expression is often faulty,’ because his illustrative imagination,
somewhat predominating over his other faculties, diffuses about the main
expression a supplement of minor metaphors which sometimes distract the
comprehension, and almost always deprive his style of the charm that
arises from undeviating directness. Doubtless this is an instance of the
very highest kind of irregular genius, in which all the powers exist in
the mind in a very high, and almost all of them in the very highest
measure, but in which from a slight excess in a single one, the charm
of proportion is lessened. The most ordinary cases of irregular genius
are those in which single faculties are abnormally developed, and call
off the attention from all the rest of the mind by their prominence and
activity. Literature, as the ‘fragment of fragments,’ is so full of the
fragments of such minds that it is needless to specify instances.
Possibly it may be laid down that one of two elements is essential to a
symmetrical mind. It is evident that such a mind must either apply itself
to that which is theoretical or that which is practical, to the world of
abstraction or to the world of objects and realities. In the former case
the deductive understanding, which masters first principles, and makes
deductions from them, the thin ether of the intellect,—the ‘mind itself
by itself,’—must evidently assume a great prominence. To attempt to
comprehend principles without it, is to try to swim without arms, or to
fly without wings. Accordingly, in the mind of Plato, and in others like
him, the abstract and deducing understanding fills a great place; the
imagination seems a kind of eye to descry its data; the artistic instinct
an arranging impulse, which sets in order its inferences and conclusions.
On the other hand, if a symmetrical mind busy itself with the active
side of human life, with the world of concrete men and real things, its
principal quality will be a practical sagacity, which forms with ease a
distinct view and just appreciation of all the mingled objects that the
world presents,—which allots to each its own place, and its intrinsic and
appropriate rank. Possibly no mind gives such an idea of this sort of
symmetry as Chaucer’s. Every thing in it seems in its place. A healthy
sagacious man of the world has gone through the world; he loves it, and
knows it; he dwells on it with a fond appreciation; every object of the
old life of ‘merry England’ seems to fall into its precise niche in his
ordered and symmetrical comprehension. The _Prologue to the Canterbury
Tales_ is in itself a series of memorial tablets to mediæval society;
each class has its tomb, and each its apt inscription. A man without
such an apprehensive and broad sagacity must fail in every extensive
delineation of various life; he might attempt to describe what he did not
penetrate, or if by a rare discretion he avoided that mistake, his works
would want the _binding element_; he would be deficient in that distinct
sense of relation and combination which is necessary for the depiction
of the whole of life, which gives to it unity at first, and imparts to
it a mass in the memory ever afterwards. And eminence in one or other of
these marking faculties,—either in the deductive abstract intellect, or
the practical seeing sagacity,—seems essential to the mental constitution
of a symmetrical genius, at least in man. There are, after all, but two
principal all-important spheres in human life—thought and action; and we
can hardly conceive of a masculine mind symmetrically developed, which
did not evince its symmetry by an evident perfection in one or other of
those pursuits, which did not leave the trace of its distinct reflection
upon the one, or of its large insight upon the other of them. Possibly
it may be thought that in the sphere of pure art there may be room for
a symmetrical development different from these; but it will perhaps be
found, on examination of such cases, either that under peculiar and
appropriate disguises one of these great qualities is present, or that
the apparent symmetry is the narrow perfection of a limited nature, which
may be most excellent in itself, as in the stricter form of sacred art,
but which, as we explained, is quite opposed to that broad perfection of
the thinking being, to which we have applied the name of the symmetry of
genius.
If this classification of men of genius be admitted, there can be no
hesitation in assigning to Mr. Dickens his place in it. His genius
is essentially irregular and unsymmetrical. Hardly any English
writer perhaps is much more so. His style is an example of it. It is
descriptive, racy, and flowing; it is instinct with new imagery and
singular illustration; but it does not indicate that due proportion of
the faculties to one another which is a beauty in itself, and which
cannot help diffusing beauty over every happy word and moulded clause. We
may choose an illustration at random. The following graphic description
will do:
‘If Lord George Gordon had appeared in the eyes of Mr. Willet,
overnight, a nobleman of somewhat quaint and odd exterior,
the impression was confirmed this morning, and increased a
hundredfold. Sitting bolt upright upon his bony steed, with
his long, straight hair dangling about his face and fluttering
in the wind; his limbs all angular and rigid, his elbows stuck
out on either side ungracefully, and his whole frame jogged and
shaken at every motion of his horse’s feet; a more grotesque
or more ungainly figure can hardly be conceived. In lieu of
whip, he carried in his hand a great gold-headed cane, as
large as any footman carries in these days; and his various
modes of holding this unwieldy weapon—now upright before his
face like the sabre of a horse-soldier, now over his shoulder
like a musket, now between his finger and thumb, but always
in some uncouth and awkward fashion—contributed in no small
degree to the absurdity of his appearance. Stiff, lank, and
solemn, dressed in an unusual manner, and ostentatiously
exhibiting—whether by design or accident—all his peculiarities
of carriage, gesture, and conduct, all the qualities, natural
and artificial, in which he differed from other men, he might
have moved the sternest looker-on to laughter, and fully
provoked the smiles and whispered jests which greeted his
departure from the Maypole Inn.
‘Quite unconscious, however, of the effect he produced, he
trotted on beside his secretary, talking to himself nearly all
the way, until they came within a mile or two of London, when
now and then some passenger went by who knew him by sight, and
pointed him out to some one else, and perhaps stood looking
after him, or cried in jest or earnest as it might be, “Hurrah,
Geordie! No Popery!” At which he would gravely pull off his
hat, and bow. When they reached the town and rode along the
streets, these notices became more frequent; some laughed, some
hissed, some turned their heads and smiled, some wondered who
he was, some ran along the pavement by his side and cheered.
When this happened in a crush of carts and chairs and coaches,
he would make a dead stop, and pulling off his hat, cry,
“Gentlemen, No Popery!” to which the gentlemen would respond
with lusty voices, and with three times three; and then, on he
would go again with a score or so of the raggedest, following
at his horse’s heels, and shouting till their throats were
parched.
‘The old ladies too—there were a great many old ladies in the
streets, and these all knew him. Some of them—not those of the
highest rank, but such as sold fruit from baskets and carried
burdens—clapped their shrivelled hands, and raised a weazen,
piping, shrill “Hurrah, my lord.” Others waved their hands or
handkerchiefs, or shook their fans or parasols, or threw up
windows, and called in haste to those within, to come and see.
All these marks of popular esteem he received with profound
gravity and respect; bowing very low, and so frequently that
his hat was more off his head than on; and looking up at the
houses as he passed along, with the air of one who was making a
public entry, and yet was not puffed-up or proud.’
No one would think of citing such a passage as this, as exemplifying the
proportioned beauty of finished writing; it is not the writing of an
evenly developed or of a highly cultured mind; it abounds in jolts and
odd turns; it is full of singular twists and needless complexities: but,
on the other hand, no one can deny its great and peculiar merit. It is an
odd style, and it is very odd how much you read it. It is the overflow of
a copious mind, though not the chastened expression of an harmonious one.
The same quality characterises the matter of his works. His range is
very varied. He has attempted to describe every kind of scene in English
life, from quite the lowest to almost the highest. He has not endeavoured
to secure success by confining himself to a single path, nor wearied
the public with repetitions of the subjects by the delineation of which
he originally obtained fame. In his earlier works he never writes long
without saying something well; something which no other man would have
said; but even in them it is the characteristic of his power that it
is apt to fail him at once; from masterly strength we pass without
interval to almost infantine weakness,—something like disgust succeeds
in a moment to an extreme admiration. Such is the natural fate of an
unequal mind employing itself on a vast and variegated subject. In
writing on the ‘Waverley Novels,’ we ventured to make a division of
novels into the ubiquitous,—it would have been perhaps better to say
the miscellaneous,—and the sentimental: the first, as its name implies,
busying itself with the whole of human life, the second restricting
itself within a peculiar and limited theme. Mr. Dickens’s novels are
all of the former class. They aim to delineate nearly all that part of
our national life which can be delineated,—at least, within the limits
which social morality prescribes to social art; but you cannot read
his delineation of any part without being struck with its singular
incompleteness. An artist once said of the best work of another artist,
‘Yes, it is a pretty patch.’ If we might venture on the phrase, we should
say that Mr. Dickens’s pictures are graphic scraps; his best books are
compilations of them.
The truth is, that Mr. Dickens wholly wants the two elements which we
have spoken of, as one or other requisite for a symmetrical genius. He
is utterly deficient in the faculty of reasoning. ‘Mamma, what shall
I think about?’ said the small girl. ‘My dear, don’t think,’ was the
old-fashioned reply. We do not allege that in the strict theory of
education this was a correct reply; modern writers think otherwise;
but we wish some one would say it to Mr. Dickens. He is often troubled
with the idea that he must reflect, and his reflections are perhaps the
worst reading in the world. There is a sentimental confusion about them;
we never find the consecutive precision of mature theory, or the cold
distinctness of clear thought. Vivid facts stand out in his imagination;
and a fresh illustrative style brings them home to the imagination of
his readers; but his continuous philosophy utterly fails in the attempt
to harmonise them,—to educe a theory or elaborate a precept from them.
Of his social thinking we shall have a few words to say in detail; his
didactic humour is very unfortunate: no writer is less fitted for an
excursion to the imperative mood. At present, we only say, what is so
obvious as scarcely to need saying, that his abstract understanding is so
far inferior to his picturesque imagination as to give even to his best
works the sense of jar and incompleteness, and to deprive them altogether
of the crystalline finish which is characteristic of the clear and
cultured understanding.
Nor has Mr. Dickens the easy and various sagacity which, as has been
said, gives a unity to all which it touches. He has, indeed, a quality
which is near allied to it in appearance. His shrewdness in some things,
especially in traits and small things, is wonderful. His works are
full of acute remarks on petty doings, and well exemplify the telling
power of minute circumstantiality. But the minor species of perceptive
sharpness is so different from diffused sagacity, that the two scarcely
ever are to be found in the same mind. There is nothing less like the
great lawyer, acquainted with broad principles and applying them with
distinct deduction, than the attorney’s clerk who catches at small points
like a dog biting at flies. ‘Over-sharpness’ in the student is the most
unpromising symptom of the logical jurist. You must not ask a horse in
blinkers for a large view of a landscape. In the same way, a detective
ingenuity in microscopic detail is of all mental qualities most unlike
the broad sagacity by which the great painters of human affairs have
unintentionally stamped the mark of unity on their productions. They show
by their treatment of each case that they understand the whole of life;
the special delineator of fragments and points shows that he understands
them only. In one respect the defect is more striking in Mr. Dickens than
in any other novelist of the present day. The most remarkable deficiency
in modern fiction is its omission of the business of life, of all those
countless occupations, pursuits, and callings in which most men live and
move, and by which they have their being. In most novels money _grows_.
You have no idea of the toil, the patience, and the wearing anxiety by
which men of action provide for the day, and lay up for the future,
and support those that are given into their care. Mr. Dickens is not
chargeable with this omission. He perpetually deals with the pecuniary
part of life. Almost all his characters have determined occupations, of
which he is apt to talk even at too much length. When he rises from the
toiling to the luxurious classes, his genius in most cases deserts him.
The delicate refinement and discriminating taste of the idling orders
are not in his way; he knows the dry arches of London Bridge better than
Belgravia. He excels in inventories of poor furniture, and is learned in
pawnbrokers’ tickets. But, although his creative power lives and works
among the middle class and industrial section of English society, he has
never painted the highest part of their daily intellectual life. He made,
indeed, an attempt to paint specimens of the apt and able man of business
in _Nicholas Nickleby_; but the Messrs. Cheeryble are among the stupidest
of his characters. He forgot that breadth of platitude is rather
different from breadth of sagacity. His delineations of middle-class
life have in consequence a harshness and meanness which do not belong to
that life in reality. He omits the relieving element. He describes the
figs which are sold, but not the talent which sells figs well. And it is
the same want of diffused sagacity in his own nature which has made his
pictures of life so odd and disjointed, and which has deprived them of
symmetry and unity.
The _bizarrerie_ of Mr. Dickens’s genius is rendered more remarkable by
the inordinate measure of his special excellences. The first of these is
his power of observation in detail. We have heard,—we do not know whether
correctly or incorrectly,—that he can go down a crowded street, and tell
you all that is in it, what each shop was, what the grocer’s name was,
how many scraps of orange-peel there were on the pavement. His works give
you exactly the same idea. The amount of detail which there is in them is
something amazing,—to an ordinary writer something incredible. There are
single pages containing telling _minutiæ_, which other people would have
thought enough for a volume. Nor is his sensibility to external objects,
though omnivorous, insensible to the artistic effect of each. There are
scarcely anywhere such pictures of London as he draws. No writer has
equally comprehended the artistic material which is given by its extent,
its aggregation of different elements, its mouldiness, its brilliancy.
Nor does his genius—though, from some idiosyncrasy of mind or accident of
external situation, it is more especially directed to City life—at all
stop at the Citywall. He is especially at home in the picturesque and
obvious parts of country life, particularly in the comfortable and (so to
say) mouldering portion of it. The following is an instance; if not the
best that could be cited, still one of the best:—
‘They arranged to proceed upon their journey next evening, as a
stage-wagon, which travelled for some distance on the same road
as they must take, would stop at the inn to change horses, and
the driver for a small gratuity would give Nell a place inside.
A bargain was soon struck when the wagon came; and in due time
it rolled away; with the child comfortably bestowed among the
softer packages, her grandfather and the schoolmaster walking
on beside the driver, and the landlady and all the good folks
of the inn screaming out their good wishes and farewells.
‘What a soothing, luxurious, drowsy way of travelling, to lie
inside that slowly-moving mountain, listening to the tinkling
of the horses’ bells, the occasional smacking of the carter’s
whip, the smooth rolling of the great broad wheels, the rattle
of the harness, the cheery goodnights of passing travellers
jogging past on little short-stepped horses—all made pleasantly
indistinct by the thick awning, which seemed made for lazy
listening under, till one fell asleep! The very going to sleep,
still with an indistinct idea, as the head jogged to and fro
upon the pillow, of moving onward with no trouble or fatigue,
and hearing all these sounds like dreamy music, lulling to the
senses—and the slow waking up, and finding one’s self staring
out through the breezy curtain half-opened in the front, far up
into the cold bright sky with its countless stars, and downward
at the driver’s lantern dancing on like its namesake Jack of
the swamps and marshes, and sideways at the dark grim trees,
and forward at the long bare road rising up, up, up, until it
stopped abruptly at a sharp high ridge as if there were no more
road, and all beyond was sky—and the stopping at the inn to
bait, and being helped out, and going into a room with fire
and candles and winking very much, and being agreeably reminded
that the night was cold, and anxious for very comfort’s sake to
think it colder than it was! What a delicious journey was that
journey in the wagon!
‘Then the going on again—so fresh at first, and shortly
afterwards so sleepy. The waking from a sound nap as the mail
came dashing past like a highway comet, with gleaming lamps
and rattling hoofs, and visions of a guard behind, standing up
to keep his feet warm, and of a gentleman in a fur cap opening
his eyes and looking wild and stupefied—the stopping at the
turnpike, where the man was gone to bed, and knocking at the
door until he answered with a smothered shout from under the
bed-clothes in the little room above, where the faint light was
burning, and presently came down, night-capped and shivering,
to throw the gate wide open, and wish all wagons off the road
except by day. The cold sharp interval between night and
morning—the distant streak of light widening and spreading,
and turning from grey to white, and from white to yellow, and
from yellow to burning red—the presence of day, with all its
cheerfulness and life—men and horses at the plough—birds in
the trees and hedges, and boys in solitary fields frightening
them away with rattles. The coming to a town—people busy in
the market; light carts and chaises round the tavern yard;
tradesmen standing at their doors; men running horses up and
down the streets for sale; pigs plunging and grunting in the
dirty distance, getting off with long strings at their legs,
running into clean chemists’ shops and being dislodged with
brooms by ’prentices; the night-coach changing horses—the
passengers cheerless, cold, ugly, and discontented, with
three months’ growth of hair in one night—the coachmen fresh
as from a bandbox, and exquisitely beautiful by contrast:—so
much bustle, so many things in motion, such a variety of
incidents—when was there a journey with so many delights as
that journey in the wagon!’
Or, as a relief from a very painful series of accompanying characters, it
is pleasant to read and remember the description of the fine morning on
which Mr. Jonas Chuzzlewit does not reflect. Mr. Dickens has, however,
no feeling analogous to the nature-worship of some other recent writers.
There is nothing Wordsworthian in his bent; the interpreting inspiration
(as that school speak) is not his. Nor has he the erudition in difficult
names which has filled some pages in late novelists with mineralogy and
botany. His descriptions of nature are fresh and superficial; they are
not sermonic or scientific.
Nevertheless, it may be said that Mr. Dickens’s genius is especially
suited to the delineation of City life. London is like a newspaper.
Everything is there, and everything is disconnected. There is every
kind of person in some houses; but there is no more connection between
the houses than between the neighbours in the lists of ‘births,
marriages, and deaths.’ As we change from the broad leader to the squalid
police-report, we pass a corner and we are in a changed world. This is
advantageous to Mr. Dickens’s genius. His memory is full of instances
of old buildings and curious people, and he does not care to piece
them together. On the contrary, each scene, to his mind, is a separate
scene,—each street a separate street. He has, too, the peculiar alertness
of observation that is observable in those who live by it. He describes
London like a special correspondent for posterity.
A second most wonderful special faculty which Mr. Dickens possesses
is what we may call his _vivification_ of character, or rather of
characteristics. His marvellous power of observation has been exercised
upon men and women even more than upon town or country; and the store
of human detail, so to speak, in his books is endless and enormous. The
boots at the inn, the pickpockets in the street, the undertaker, the
Mrs. Gamp, are all of them at his disposal; he knows each trait and
incident, and he invests them with a kind of perfection in detail which
in reality they do not possess. He has a very peculiar power of taking
hold of some particular traits, and making a character out of them. He
is especially apt to incarnate particular professions in this way. Many
of his people never speak without some allusion to their occupation. You
cannot separate them from it. Nor does the writer ever separate them.
What would Mr. Mould be if not an undertaker? or Mrs. Gamp if not a
nurse? or Charley Bates if not a pickpocket? Not only is human nature in
them subdued to what it works in, but there seems to be no nature to
subdue; the whole character is the idealisation of a trade, and is not
in fancy or thought distinguishable from it. Accordingly, of necessity,
such delineations become caricatures. We do not in general contrast them
with reality; but as soon as we do, we are struck with the monstrous
exaggerations which they present. You could no more fancy Sam Weller,
or Mark Tapley, or the Artful Dodger really existing, walking about
among common ordinary men and women, than you can fancy a talking duck
or a writing bear. They are utterly beyond the pale of ordinary social
intercourse. We suspect, indeed, that Mr. Dickens does not conceive his
characters to himself as mixing in the society he mixes in. He sees
people in the street, doing certain things, talking in a certain way,
and his fancy petrifies them in the act. He goes on fancying hundreds
of reduplications of that act and that speech; he frames an existence
in which there is nothing else but that aspect which attracted his
attention. Sam Weller is an example. He is a man-servant, who makes a
peculiar kind of jokes, and is wonderfully felicitous in certain similes.
You see him at his first introduction:—
‘“My friend,” said the thin gentleman.
‘“You’re one o’ the adwice gratis order,” thought Sam, “or
you wouldn’t be so werry fond o’ me all at once.” But he only
said—“Well, sir?”
‘“My friend,” said the thin gentlemen, with a conciliatory
hem—“Have you got many people stopping here, now? Pretty busy?
Eh?”
‘Sam stole a look at the inquirer. He was a little high-dried
man, with a dark squeezed-up face, and small restless black
eyes, that kept winking and twinkling on each side of his
little inquisitive nose, as if they were playing a perpetual
game of peep-bo with that feature. He was dressed all in black,
with boots as shiny as his eyes, a low white neckcloth, and a
clean shirt with a frill to it. A gold watch-chain, and seals,
depended from his fob. He carried his black kid gloves _in_
his hands, not _on_ them; and as he spoke, thrust his wrists
beneath his coat-tails, with the air of a man who was in the
habit of propounding some regular posers.
‘“Pretty busy, eh?” said the little man.
‘“Oh, werry well, sir,” replied Sam, “we shan’t be bankrupts,
and we shan’t make our fort’ns. We eats our biled mutton
without capers, and don’t care for horse-radish ven ve can get
beef?”
‘“Ah,” said the little man, “you’re a wag, ain’t you?”
‘“My eldest brother was troubled with that complaint,” said
Sam, “it may be catching—I used to sleep with him.”
‘“This is a curious old house of yours,” said the little man,
looking round him.
‘“If you’d sent word you was a coming, we’d ha’ had it
repaired,” replied the imperturbable Sam.
‘The little man seemed rather baffled by these several
repulses, and a short consultation took place between him and
the two plump gentlemen. At its conclusion, the little man took
a pinch of snuff from an oblong silver box, and was apparently
on the point of renewing the conversation, when one of the
plump gentlemen, who, in addition to a benevolent countenance,
possessed a pair of spectacles and a pair of black gaiters,
interfered—
‘“The fact of the matter is,” said the benevolent gentleman,
“that my friend here” (pointing to the other plump gentleman)
“will give you half a guinea, if you’ll answer one or two—”
‘“Now, my dear sir—my dear sir,” said the little man, “pray
allow me—my dear sir, the very first principle to be observed
in these cases is this: if you place a matter in the hands of a
professional man, you must in no way interfere in the progress
of the business; you must repose implicit confidence in him.
Really, Mr. (he turned to the other plump gentleman, and
said)—I forget your friend’s name.”
‘“Pickwick,” said Mr. Wardle, for it was no other than that
jolly personage.
‘“Ah, Pickwick—really Mr. Pickwick, my dear sir, excuse me—I
shall be happy to receive any private suggestions of yours,
as _amicus curiæ_, but you must see the impropriety of your
interfering with my conduct in this case, with such an _ad
captandum_ argument as the offer of half a guinea. Really, my
dear sir, really,” and the little man took an argumentative
pinch of snuff, and looked very profound.
‘“My only wish, sir,” said Mr. Pickwick, “was to bring this
very unpleasant matter to as speedy a close as possible.”
‘“Quite right—quite right,” said the little man.
‘“With which view,” continued Mr. Pickwick, “I made use of the
argument which my experience of men has taught me is the most
likely to succeed in any case.”
‘“Ay, ay,” said the little man, “very good, very good indeed;
but you should have suggested it to _me_. My dear sir,
I’m quite certain you cannot be ignorant of the extent of
confidence which must be placed in professional men. If any
authority can be necessary on such a point, my dear sir, let me
refer you to the well-known case in Barnwell and—”
‘“Never mind George Barnwell,” interrupted Sam, who had
remained a wondering listener during this short colloquy;
“everybody knows vat sort of a case his was, tho’ it’s always
been my opinion, mind you, that the young ’ooman deserved
scragging a precious sight more than he did. Hows’ever, that’s
neither here nor there. You want me to except of half a guinea.
Werry well, I’m agreeable: I can’t say no fairer than that, can
I, sir? (Mr. Pickwick smiled.) Then the next question is, what
the devil do you want with me, as the man said wen he see the
ghost?”
‘“We want to know—” said Mr. Wardle.
‘“Now, my dear sir—my dear sir,” interposed the busy little man.
‘Mr. Wardle shrugged his shoulders, and was silent.
‘“We want to know,” said the little man, solemnly; “and we
ask the question of you, in order that we may not awaken
apprehensions inside—we want to know who you’ve got in this
house at present.”
‘“Who there is in the house!” said Sam, in whose mind the
inmates were always represented by that particular article of
their costume, which came under his immediate superintendence.
“There’s a wooden leg in number six; there’s a pair of Hessians
in thirteen; there’s two pair of halves in the commercial;
there’s these here painted tops in the snuggery inside the bar;
and five more tops in the coffee-room.”
‘“Nothing more?” said the little man.
‘“Stop a bit,” replied Sam, suddenly recollecting himself.
“Yes; there’s a pair of Wellingtons a good deal worn, and a
pair o’ lady’s shoes, in number five.”
‘“What sort of shoes?” hastily inquired Wardle, who, together
with Mr. Pickwick, had been lost in bewilderment at the
singular catalogue of visitors.
‘“Country make,” replied Sam.
‘“Any maker’s name?”
‘“Brown.”
‘“Where of?”
‘“Muggleton.”
‘“It _is_ them,” exclaimed Wardle. “By Heavens, we’ve found
them.”
‘“Hush!” said Sam. “The Wellingtons has gone to Doctors
Commons.”
‘“No,” said the little man.
‘“Yes, for a license.”
‘“We’re in time,” exclaimed Wardle. “Show us the room; not a
moment is to be lost.”
‘“Pray, my dear sir—pray,” said the little man; “caution,
caution.” He drew from his pocket a red silk purse, and looked
very hard at Sam as he drew out a sovereign.
‘Sam grinned expressively.
‘“Show us into the room at once, without announcing us,” said
the little man, “and it’s yours.”’
One can fancy Mr. Dickens hearing a dialogue of this sort,—not nearly
so good, but something like it,—and immediately setting to work to make
it better and put it in a book; then changing a little the situation,
putting the boots one step up in the scale of service, engaging him as
footman to a stout gentleman (but without for a moment losing sight of
the peculiar kind of professional conversation and humour which his first
dialogue presents), and astonishing all his readers by the marvellous
fertility and magical humour with which he maintains that style. Sam
Weller’s father is even a stronger and simpler instance. He is simply
nothing but an old coachman of the stout and extinct sort: you cannot
separate him from the idea of that occupation. But how amusing he is! We
dare not quote a single word of his talk; because we should go on quoting
so long, and every one knows it so well. Some persons may think that this
is not a very high species of delineative art. The idea of personifying
traits and trades may seem to them poor and meagre. Anybody, they may
fancy, can do that. But how would they do it? Whose fancy would not break
down in a page—in five lines? Who could carry on the vivification with
zest and energy and humour for volume after volume? Endless fertility in
laughter-causing detail is Mr. Dickens’s most astonishing peculiarity. It
requires a continuous and careful reading of his works to be aware of his
enormous wealth. Writers have attained the greatest reputation for wit
and humour, whose whole works do not contain so much of either as are to
be found in a very few pages of his.
Mr. Dickens’s humour is indeed very much a result of the two
peculiarities of which we have been speaking. His power of detailed
observation and his power of idealising individual traits of
character—sometimes of one or other of them, sometimes of both of them
together. His similes on matters of external observation are so admirable
that everybody appreciates them, and it would be absurd to quote
specimens of them; nor is it the sort of excellence which best bears to
be paraded for the purposes of critical example. Its off-hand air and
natural connection with the adjacent circumstances are inherent parts of
its peculiar merit. Every reader of Mr. Dickens’s works knows well what
we mean. And who is not a reader of them?
But his peculiar humour is even more indebted to his habit of vivifying
external traits, than to his power of external observation. He, as we
have explained, expands traits into people; and it is a source of true
humour to place these, when so expanded, in circumstances in which only
people—that is complete human beings—can appropriately act. The humour
of Mr. Pickwick’s character is entirely of this kind. He is a kind of
incarnation of simple-mindedness and what we may call obvious-mindedness.
The conclusion which each occurrence or position in life most immediately
presents to the unsophisticated mind is that which Mr. Pickwick is sure
to accept. The proper accompaniments are given to him. He is a stout
gentleman in easy circumstances, who is irritated into originality by
no impulse from within, and by no stimulus from without. He is stated
to have ‘retired from business.’ But no one can fancy what he was in
business. Such guileless simplicity of heart and easy impressibility
of disposition would soon have induced a painful failure amid the
harsh struggles and the tempting speculations of pecuniary life. As
he is represented in the narrative, however, nobody dreams of such
antecedents. Mr. Pickwick moves easily over all the surface of English
life from Goswell Street to Dingley Dell, from Dingley Dell to the
Ipswich elections, from drinking milk-punch in a wheelbarrow to sleeping
in the approximate pound, and no one ever thinks of applying to him the
ordinary maxims which we should apply to any common person in life, or
to any common personage in a fiction. Nobody thinks it is wrong in Mr.
Pickwick to drink too much milk-punch in a wheelbarrow, to introduce
worthless people of whom he knows nothing to the families of people for
whom he really cares; nobody holds him responsible for the consequences;
nobody thinks there is anything wrong in his taking Mr. Bob Sawyer and
Mr. Benjamin Allen to visit Mr. Winkle, senior, and thereby almost
irretrievably offending him with his son’s marriage. We do not reject
moral remarks such as these, but they never occur to us. Indeed, the
indistinct consciousness that such observations are possible, and that
they are hovering about our minds, enhances the humour of the narrative.
We are in a conventional world, where the mere maxims of common life do
not apply, and yet which has all the amusing detail, and picturesque
elements, and singular eccentricities of common life. Mr. Pickwick is
a personified ideal; a kind of amateur in life, whose course we watch
through all the circumstances of ordinary existence, and at whose follies
we are amused just as really skilled people are at the mistakes of an
amateur in their art. His being in the pound is not wrong; his being the
victim of Messrs. Dodson is not foolish. ‘Always shout with the mob,’
said Mr. Pickwick. ‘But suppose there are two mobs,’ said Mr. Snodgrass.
‘Then shout with the loudest,’ said Mr. Pickwick. This is not in him
weakness or time-serving, or want of principle, as in most even of
fictitious people it would be. It is his way. Mr. Pickwick was expected
to say something, so he said ‘Ah!’ in a grave voice. This is not pompous
as we might fancy, or clever as it might be, if intentionally devised; it
is simply his way. Mr. Pickwick gets late at night over the wall behind
the back-door of a young-ladies’ school, is found in that sequestered
place by the schoolmistress and the boarders and the cook, and there is
a dialogue between them. There is nothing out of possibility in this; it
is his way. The humour essentially consists in treating as a moral agent
a being who really is not a moral agent. We treat a vivified accident as
a man, and we are surprised at the absurd results. We are reading about
an acting thing, and we wonder at its scrapes, and laugh at them as if
they were those of the man. There is something of this humour in every
sort of farce. Everybody knows these are not real beings acting in real
life, though they talk as if they were, and want us to believe that they
are. Here, as in Mr. Dickens’s books, we have exaggerations pretending to
comport themselves as ordinary beings, caricatures acting as if they were
characters.
At the same time it is essential to remember, that however great may be
and is the charm of such exaggerated personifications, the best specimens
of them are immensely less excellent, belong to an altogether lower range
of intellectual achievements, than the real depiction of actual living
men. It is amusing to read of beings _out_ of the laws of morality, but
it is more profoundly interesting, as well as more instructive, to read
of those whose life in its moral conditions resembles our own. We see
this most distinctly when both representations are given by the genius
of one and the same writer. Falstaff is a sort of sack-holding paunch,
an exaggerated over-development which no one thinks of holding down to
the commonplace rules of the ten commandments and the statute-law. We
do not think of them in connection with him. They belong to a world
apart. Accordingly, we are vexed when the king discards him and reproves
him. Such a fate was a necessary adherence on Shakespeare’s part to the
historical tradition; he never probably thought of departing from it, nor
would his audience have perhaps endured his doing so. But to those who
look at the historical plays as pure works of imaginative art, it seems
certainly an artistic misconception to have developed so marvellous an
_un_moral impersonation, and then to have subjected it to an ethical
and punitive judgment. Still, notwithstanding this error, which was very
likely inevitable, Falstaff is probably the most remarkable specimen
of caricature-representation to be found in literature. And its very
excellence of execution only shows how inferior is the kind of art
which creates only such representations. Who could compare the genius,
marvellous as must be its fertility, which was needful to create a
Falstaff with that shown in the higher productions of the same mind
in Hamlet, Ophelia, and Lear? We feel instantaneously the difference
between the aggregating accident which rakes up from the externalities
of life other accidents analogous to itself, and the central ideal of
a real character which cannot show itself wholly in any accidents,
but which exemplifies itself partially in many, which unfolds itself
gradually in wide spheres of action, and yet, as with those we know best
in life, leaves something hardly to be understood, and after years of
familiarity is a problem and a difficulty to the last. In the same way,
the embodied characteristics and grotesque exaggerations of Mr. Dickens,
notwithstanding all their humour and all their marvellous abundance, can
never be for a moment compared with the great works of the real painters
of essential human nature.
There is one class of Mr. Dickens’s pictures which may seem to form an
exception to this criticism. It is the delineation of the outlaw, we
might say the anti-law, world in _Oliver Twist_. In one or two instances
Mr. Dickens has been so fortunate as to hit on characteristics which,
by his system of idealisation and continual repetition, might really
be brought to look like a character. A man’s trade or profession in
regular life can only exhaust a very small portion of his nature; no
approach is made to the essence of humanity by the exaggeration of the
traits which typify a beadle or an undertaker. With the outlaw world it
is somewhat different. The bare fact of a man belonging to that world
is so important to his nature, that if it is artistically developed
with coherent accessories, some approximation to a distinctly natural
character will be almost inevitably made. In the characters of Bill
Sykes and Nancy this is so. The former is the skulking ruffian who may
be seen any day at the police-courts, and whom anyone may fancy he sees
by walking through St. Giles’s. You cannot attempt to figure to your
imagination the existence of such a person without being thrown into
the region of the passions, the will, and the conscience; the mere fact
of his maintaining, as a condition of life and by settled profession,
a struggle with regular society necessarily brings these deep parts of
his nature into prominence; great crime usually proceeds from abnormal
impulses or strange effort. Accordingly, Mr. Sykes is the character
most approaching to a coherent man who is to be found in Mr. Dickens’s
works. We do not say that even here there is not some undue heightening
admixture of caricature,—but this defect is scarcely thought of amid the
general coherence of the picture, the painful subject, and the wonderful
command of strange accessories. Miss Nancy is a still more delicate
artistic effort. She is an idealisation of the girl who may also be seen
at the police-courts and St. Giles’s; as bad, according to occupation and
common character, as a woman can be, yet retaining a tinge of womanhood,
and a certain compassion for interesting suffering, which under favouring
circumstances might be the germ of a regenerating influence. We need
not stay to prove how much the imaginative development of such a
personage must concern itself with our deeper humanity; how strongly,
if excellent, it must be contrasted with everything conventional or
casual or superficial. Mr. Dickens’s delineation is in the highest degree
excellent. It possesses not only the more obvious merits belonging to the
subject, but also that of a singular delicacy of expression and idea.
Nobody fancies for a moment that they are reading about anything beyond
the pale of ordinary propriety. We read the account of the life which
Miss Nancy leads with Bill Sykes without such an idea occurring to us:
yet, when we reflect upon it, few things in literary painting are more
wonderful than the depiction of a professional life of sin and sorrow,
so as not even to startle those to whom the deeper forms of either are
but names and shadows. Other writers would have given as vivid a picture:
Defoe would have poured out even a more copious measure of telling
circumstantiality, but he would have narrated his story with an inhuman
distinctness, which if not impure is _un_pure; French writers, whom we
need not name, would have enhanced the interest of their narrative by
trading on the excitement of stimulating scenes. It would be injustice
to Mr. Dickens to say that he has surmounted these temptations; the
unconscious evidence of innumerable details proves that, from a certain
delicacy of imagination and purity of spirit, he has not even experienced
them. Criticism is the more bound to dwell at length on the merits of
these delineations, because no artistic merit can make _Oliver Twist_ a
pleasing work. The squalid detail of crime and misery oppresses us too
much. If it is to be read at all, it should be read in the first hardness
of the youthful imagination, which no touch can move too deeply, and
which is never stirred with tremulous suffering at the ‘still sad music
of humanity.’ The coldest critic in later life may never hope to have
again the apathy of his boyhood.
It perhaps follows from what has been said of the characteristics of
Mr. Dickens’s genius, that it would be little skilled in planning plots
for his novels. He certainly is not so skilled. He says in his preface
to the _Pickwick Papers_ ‘that they were designed for the introduction
of diverting characters and incidents; that no ingenuity of plot was
attempted, or even at that time considered feasible by the author in
connection with the desultory plan of publication adopted;’ and he adds
an expression of regret that ‘these chapters had not been strung together
on a thread of more general interest.’ It is extremely fortunate that no
such attempt was made. In the cases in which Mr. Dickens has attempted
to make a long connected story, or to develop into scenes or incidents
a plan in any degree elaborate, the result has been a complete failure.
A certain consistency of genius seems necessary for the construction
of a consecutive plot. An irregular mind naturally shows itself in
incoherency of incident and aberration of character. The method in
which Mr. Dickens’s mind works, if we are correct in our criticism upon
it, tends naturally to these blemishes. Caricatures are necessarily
isolated; they are produced by the exaggeration of certain conspicuous
traits and features; each being is enlarged on its greatest side; and
we laugh at the grotesque grouping and the startling contrast. But that
connection between human beings on which a plot depends is rather severed
than elucidated by the enhancement of their diversities. Interesting
stories are founded on the intimate relations of men and women. These
intimate relations are based not on their superficial traits, or common
occupations, or most visible externalities, but on the inner life of
heart and feeling. You simply divert attention from that secret life
by enhancing the perceptible diversities of common human nature, and
the strange anomalies into which it may be distorted. The original
germ of _Pickwick_ was a ‘Club of Oddities.’ The idea was professedly
abandoned; but traces of it are to be found in all Mr. Dickens’s books.
It illustrates the professed grotesqueness of the characters as well as
their slender connection.
The defect of plot is heightened by Mr. Dickens’s great, we might say
complete, inability to make a love-story. A pair of lovers is by custom
a necessity of narrative fiction, and writers who possess a great
general range of mundane knowledge, and but little knowledge of the
special sentimental subject, are often in amusing difficulties. The
watchful reader observes the transition from the hearty description of
well-known scenes, of prosaic streets, or journeys by wood and river, to
the pale colours of ill-attempted poetry, to such sights as the novelist
evidently wishes that he need not try to see. But few writers exhibit
the difficulty in so aggravated a form as Mr. Dickens. Most men by
taking thought can make a lay figure to look not so very unlike a young
gentleman, and can compose a telling schedule of ladylike charms. Mr.
Dickens has no power of doing either. The heroic character—we do not
mean the form of character so called in life and action, but that which
is hereditary in the heroes of novels—is not suited to his style of
art. Hazlitt wrote an essay to inquire ‘Why the heroes of romances are
insipid;’ and without going that length it may safely be said that the
character of the agreeable young gentleman who loves and is loved should
not be of the most marked sort. Flirtation ought not to be an exaggerated
pursuit. Young ladies and their admirers should not express themselves in
the heightened and imaginative phraseology suited to Charley Bates and
the Dodger. Humour is of no use, for no one makes love in jokes: a tinge
of insidious satire may perhaps be permitted as a rare and occasional
relief, but it will not be thought ‘a pretty book,’ if so malicious an
element be at all habitually perceptible. The broad farce in which Mr.
Dickens indulges is thoroughly out of place. If you caricature a pair of
lovers ever so little, by the necessity of their calling you make them
ridiculous. One of Sheridan’s best comedies is remarkable for having no
scene in which the hero and heroine are on the stage together; and Mr.
Moore suggests that the shrewd wit distrusted his skill in the light
dropping love-talk which would have been necessary. Mr. Dickens would
have done well to imitate so astute a policy; but he has none of the
managing shrewdness which those who look at Sheridan’s career attentively
will probably think not the least remarkable feature in his singular
character. Mr. Dickens, on the contrary, pours out painful sentiments
as if he wished the abundance should make up for the inferior quality.
The excruciating writing which is expended on Miss Ruth Pinch passes
belief. Mr. Dickens is not only unable to make lovers talk, but to
describe heroines in mere narrative. As has been said, most men can make
a jumble of blue eyes and fair hair and pearly teeth, that does very well
for a young lady, at least for a good while; but Mr. Dickens will not,
probably cannot, attain even to this humble measure of descriptive art.
He vitiates the repose by broad humour, or disenchants the delicacy by
an unctuous admiration.
This deficiency is probably nearly connected with one of Mr. Dickens’s
most remarkable excellences. No one can read Mr. Thackeray’s writings
without feeling that he is perpetually treading as close as he dare
to the border-line that separates the world which may be described in
books from the world which it is prohibited so to describe. No one knows
better than this accomplished artist where that line is, and how curious
are its windings and turns. The charge against him is that he knows it
but too well; that with an anxious care and a wistful eye he is ever
approximating to its edge, and hinting with subtle art how thoroughly
he is familiar with, and how interesting he could make, the interdicted
region on the other side. He never violates a single conventional rule;
but at the same time the shadow of the immorality that is not seen is
scarcely ever wanting to his delineation of the society that is seen.
Every one may perceive what is passing in his fancy. Mr. Dickens is
chargeable with no such defect: he does not seem to feel the temptation.
By what we may fairly call an instinctive purity of genius, he not only
observes the conventional rules, but makes excursions into topics which
no other novelist could safely handle, and, by a felicitous instinct,
deprives them of all impropriety. No other writer could have managed
the humour of Mrs. Gamp without becoming unendurable. At the same time
it is difficult not to believe that this singular insensibility to the
temptations to which many of the greatest novelists have succumbed is
in some measure connected with his utter inaptitude for delineating the
portion of life to which their art is specially inclined. He delineates
neither the love-affairs which ought to be, nor those which ought not to
be.
Mr. Dickens’s indisposition to ‘make capital’ out of the most commonly
tempting part of human sentiment is the more remarkable because he
certainly does not show the same indisposition in other cases. He has
naturally great powers of pathos; his imagination is familiar with the
common sort of human suffering; and his marvellous conversancy with the
detail of existence enables him to describe sick-beds and death-beds
with an excellence very rarely seen in literature. A nature far more
sympathetic than that of most authors has familiarised him with such
subjects. In general, a certain apathy is characteristic of book-writers,
and dulls the efficacy of their pathos. Mr. Dickens is quite exempt
from this defect; but, on the other hand, is exceedingly prone to a
very ostentatious exhibition of the opposite excellence. He dwells on
dismal scenes with a kind of fawning fondness; and he seems unwilling to
leave them, long after his readers have had more than enough of them.
He describes Mr. Dennis the hangman as having a professional fondness
for his occupation: he has the same sort of fondness apparently for the
profession of death-painter. The painful details he accumulates are a
very serious drawback from the agreeableness of his writings. Dismal
‘light literature’ is the dismallest of reading. The reality of the
police reports is sufficiently bad, but a fictitious police report would
be the most disagreeable of conceivable compositions. Some portions of
Mr. Dickens’s books are liable to a good many of the same objections.
They are squalid from noisome trivialities, and horrid with terrifying
crime. In his earlier books this is commonly relieved at frequent
intervals by a graphic and original mirth. As we will not say age, but
maturity, has passed over his powers, this counteractive element has
been lessened; the humour is not so happy as it was, but the wonderful
fertility in painful _minutiæ_ still remains.
Mr. Dickens’s political opinions have subjected him to a good deal
of criticism, and to some ridicule. He has shown, on many occasions,
the desire—which we see so frequent among able and influential men—to
start as a political reformer. Mr. Spurgeon said, with an application
to himself, ‘If you’ve got the ear of the public, _of course_ you must
begin to tell it its faults.’ Mr. Dickens has been quite disposed to
make this use of his popular influence. Even in _Pickwick_ there are
many traces of this tendency; and the way in which it shows itself in
that book and in others is very characteristic of the time at which
they appeared. The most instructive political characteristic of the
years from 1825 to 1845 is the growth and influence of the scheme of
opinion which we call Radicalism. There are several species of creeds
which are comprehended under this generic name, but they all evince a
marked reaction against the worship of the English constitution and the
affection for the English _status quo_, which were then the established
creed and sentiment. All Radicals are anti-Eldonites. This is equally
true of the Benthamite or philosophical radicalism of the early period,
and the Manchester, or ‘definite-grievance radicalism,’ among the
last vestiges of which we are now living. Mr. Dickens represents a
species different from either. His is what we may call the ‘sentimental
radicalism;’ and if we recur to the history of the time, we shall find
that there would not originally have been any opprobrium attaching to
such a name. The whole course of the legislation, and still more of the
administration, of the first twenty years of the nineteenth century was
marked by a harsh unfeelingness which is of all faults the most contrary
to any with which we are chargeable now. The world of the ‘Six Acts,’
of the frequent executions, of the Draconic criminal law, is so far
removed from us that we cannot comprehend its having ever existed. It is
more easy to understand the recoil which has followed. All the social
speculation, and much of the social action of the few years succeeding
the Reform Bill, bear the most marked traces of the reaction. The spirit
which animates Mr. Dickens’s political reasonings and observations
expresses it exactly. The vice of the then existing social authorities,
and of the then existing public, had been the forgetfulness of the pain
which their own acts evidently produced,—an unrealising habit which
adhered to official rules and established maxims, and which would not
be shocked by the evident consequences, by proximate human suffering.
The sure result of this habit was the excitement of the habit precisely
opposed to it. Mr. Carlyle, in his _Chartism_, we think, observes of
the poor-law reform: ‘It was then, above all things, necessary that
outdoor relief should cease. But how? What means did great Nature take
for accomplishing that most desirable end? She created a race of men who
believed the cessation of outdoor relief to be the one thing needful.’
In the same way, and by the same propensity to exaggerated opposition
which is inherent in human nature, the unfeeling obtuseness of the
early part of this century was to be corrected by an extreme, perhaps
an excessive, sensibility to human suffering in the years which have
followed. There was most adequate reason for the sentiment in its origin,
and it had a great task to perform in ameliorating harsh customs and
repealing dreadful penalties; but it has continued to repine at such
evils long after they ceased to exist, and when the only facts that at
all resemble them are the necessary painfulness of due punishment and the
necessary rigidity of established law. Mr. Dickens is an example both
of the proper use and of the abuse of the sentiment. His earlier works
have many excellent descriptions of the abuses which had descended to the
present generation from others whose sympathy with pain was less tender.
Nothing can be better than the description of the poor debtors’ gaol in
_Pickwick_, or of the old parochial authorities in _Oliver Twist_. No
doubt these descriptions are caricatures, all his delineations are so;
but the beneficial use of such art can hardly be better exemplified.
Human nature endures the aggravation of vices and foibles in written
description better than that of excellences. We cannot bear to hear even
the hero of a book for ever called ‘just;’ we detest the recurring praise
even of beauty, much more of virtue. The moment you begin to exaggerate a
character of true excellence, you spoil it; the traits are too delicate
not to be injured by heightening, or marred by over-emphasis. But a
beadle is made for caricature. The slight measure of pomposity that
humanises his unfeelingness introduces the requisite comic element; even
the turnkeys of a debtors’ prison may by skilful hands be similarly
used. The contrast between the destitute condition of Job Trotter and Mr.
Jingle and their former swindling triumph is made comic by a rarer touch
of unconscious art. Mr. Pickwick’s warm heart takes so eager an interest
in the misery of his old enemies, that our colder nature is tempted
to smile. We endure the over-intensity, at any rate the unnecessary
aggravation, of the surrounding misery; and we endure it willingly,
because it brings out better than anything else could have done the
half-comic intensity of a sympathetic nature.
It is painful to pass from these happy instances of well-used power to
the glaring abuses of the same faculty in Mr. Dickens’s later books. He
began by describing really removable evils in a style which would induce
all persons, however insensible, to remove them if they could; he has
ended by describing the natural evils and inevitable pains of the present
state of being, in such a manner as must tend to excite discontent and
repining. The result is aggravated, because Mr. Dickens never ceases
to hint that these evils are removable, though he does not say by what
means. Nothing is easier than to show the evils of anything. Mr. Dickens
has not unfrequently spoken, and what is worse, he has taught a great
number of parrot-like imitators to speak, in what really is, if they knew
it, a tone of objection to the necessary constitution of human society.
If you will only write a description of it, any form of government will
seem ridiculous. What is more absurd than a despotism, even at its best?
A king of ability or an able minister sits in an orderly room filled
with memorials, and returns, and documents, and memoranda. These are his
world; among these he of necessity lives and moves. Yet how little of
the real life of the nation he governs can be represented in an official
form! How much of real suffering is there that statistics can never tell!
how much of obvious good is there that no memorandum to a minister will
ever mention! how much deception is there in what such documents contain!
how monstrous must be the ignorance of the closet statesman, after all
his life of labour, of much that a ploughman could tell him of! A free
government is almost worse, as it must read in a written delineation.
Instead of the real attention of a laborious and anxious statesman,
we have now the shifting caprices of a popular assembly—elected for
one object, deciding on another; changing with the turn of debate;
shifting in its very composition; one set of men coming down to vote
to-day, to-morrow another and often unlike set, most of them eager for
the dinner-hour, actuated by unseen influences, by a respect for their
constituents, by the dread of an attorney in a far-off borough. What
people are these to control a nation’s destinies, and wield the power
of an empire, and regulate the happiness of millions! Either way we are
at fault. Free government seems an absurdity, and despotism is so too.
Again, every form of law has a distinct expression, a rigid procedure,
customary rules and forms. It is administered by human beings liable to
mistake, confusion, and forgetfulness, and in the long run, and on the
average, is sure to be tainted with vice and fraud. Nothing can be easier
than to make a case, as we may say, against any particular system, by
pointing out with emphatic caricature its inevitable miscarriages, and
by pointing out nothing else. Those who so address us may assume a tone
of philanthropy, and for ever exult that they are not so unfeeling as
other men are; but the real tendency of their exhortations is to make men
dissatisfied with their inevitable condition, and, what is worse, to make
them fancy that its irremediable evils can be remedied, and indulge in a
succession of vague strivings and restless changes. Such, however,—though
in a style of expression somewhat different,—is very much the tone with
which Mr. Dickens and his followers have in later years made us familiar.
To the second-hand repeaters of a cry so feeble, we can have nothing
to say; if silly people cry because they think the world is silly,
let them cry; but the founder of the school cannot, we are persuaded,
peruse without mirth the lachrymose eloquence which his disciples have
perpetrated. The soft moisture of irrelevant sentiment cannot have
entirely entered into his soul. A truthful genius must have forbidden
it. Let us hope that his pernicious example may incite some one of equal
genius to preach with equal efficiency a sterner and a wiser gospel; but
there is no need just now for us to preach it without genius.
There has been much controversy about Mr. Dickens’s taste. A great many
cultivated people will scarcely concede that he has any taste at all;
a still larger number of fervent admirers point, on the other hand, to
a hundred felicitous descriptions and delineations which abound in apt
expressions and skilful turns and happy images,—in which it would be
impossible to alter a single word without altering for the worse; and
naturally inquire whether such excellences in what is written do not
indicate good taste in the writer. The truth is, that Mr. Dickens has
what we may call creative taste; that is to say, the habit or faculty,
whichever we may choose to call it, which at the critical instant of
artistic production offers to the mind the right word, and the right
word only. If he is engaged on a good subject for caricature, there will
be no defect of taste to preclude the caricature from being excellent.
But it is only in moments of imaginative production that he has any
taste at all. His works nowhere indicate that he possesses in any degree
the passive taste which decides what is good in the writings of other
people, and what is not, and which performs the same critical duty upon a
writer’s own efforts when the confusing mists of productive imagination
have passed away. Nor has Mr. Dickens the gentlemanly instinct which in
many minds supplies the place of purely critical discernment, and which,
by constant association with those who know what is best, acquires a
second-hand perception of that which is best. He has no tendency to
conventionalism for good or for evil; his merits are far removed from the
ordinary path of writers, and it was not probably so much effort to him
as to other men to step so far out of that path: he scarcely knew how far
it was. For the same reason, he cannot tell how faulty his writing will
often be thought, for he cannot tell what people will think.
A few pedantic critics have regretted that Mr. Dickens had not received
what they call a regular education. And if we understand their meaning,
we believe they mean to regret that he had not received a course of
discipline which would probably have impaired his powers. A regular
education should mean that ordinary system of regulation and instruction
which experience has shown to fit men best for the ordinary pursuits of
life. It applies the requisite discipline to each faculty in the exact
proportion in which that faculty is wanted in the pursuits of life; it
develops understanding, and memory, and imagination, each in accordance
with the scale prescribed. To men of ordinary faculties this is nearly
essential; it is the only mode in which they can be fitted for the
inevitable competition of existence. To men of regular and symmetrical
genius also, such a training will often be beneficial. The world knows
pretty well what are the great tasks of the human mind, and has learnt in
the course of ages with some accuracy what is the kind of culture likely
to promote their exact performance. A man of abilities extraordinary
in degree but harmonious in proportion will be the better for having
submitted to the kind of discipline which has been ascertained to fit a
man for the work to which powers in that proportion are best fitted; he
will do what he has to do better and more gracefully; culture will add
a touch to the finish of nature. But the case is very different with
men of irregular and anomalous genius, whose excellences consist in
the aggravation of some special faculty, or at the most of one or two.
The discipline which will fit such a man for the production of great
literary works is that which will most develop the peculiar powers in
which he excels; the rest of the mind will be far less important; it
will not be likely that the culture which is adapted to promote this
special development will also be that which is most fitted for expanding
the powers of common men in common directions. The precise problem is to
develop the powers of a strange man in a strange direction. In the case
of Mr. Dickens, it would have been absurd to have shut up his observant
youth within the walls of a college. They would have taught him nothing
about Mrs. Gamp there; Sam Weller took no degree. The kind of early life
fitted to develop the power of apprehensive observation is a brooding
life in stirring scenes; the idler in the streets of life knows the
streets; the bystander knows the picturesque effect of life better than
the player; and the meditative idler amid the hum of existence is much
more likely to know its sound and to take in and comprehend its depths
and meanings than the scholastic student intent on books, which, if they
represent any world, represent one which has long passed away,—which
commonly try rather to develop the reasoning understanding than the
seeing observation,—which are written in languages that have long been
dead. You will not train by such discipline a caricaturist of obvious
manners.
Perhaps, too, a regular instruction and daily experience of the searching
ridicule of critical associates would have detracted from the pluck
which Mr. Dickens shows in all his writings. It requires a great deal
of courage to be a humorous writer; you are always afraid that people
will laugh at you instead of with you: undoubtedly there is a certain
eccentricity about it. You take up the esteemed writers, Thucydides and
the _Saturday Review_; after all, they do not make you laugh. It is not
the function of really artistic productions to contribute to the mirth of
human beings. All sensible men are afraid of it, and it is only with an
extreme effort that a printed joke attains to the perusal of the public:
the chances are many to one that the anxious producer loses heart in the
correction of the press, and that the world never laughs at all. Mr.
Dickens is quite exempt from this weakness. He has what a Frenchman might
call the courage of his faculty. The real daring which is shown in the
_Pickwick Papers_, in the whole character of Mr. Weller senior, as well
as in that of his son, is immense, far surpassing any which has been
shown by any other contemporary writer. The brooding irregular mind is in
its first stage prone to this sort of courage. It perhaps knows that its
ideas are ‘out of the way;’ but with the infantine simplicity of youth,
it supposes that originality is an advantage. Persons more familiar with
the ridicule of their equals in station (and this is to most men the
great instructress of the college time) well know that of all qualities
this one most requires to be clipped and pared and measured. Posterity,
we doubt not, will be entirely perfect in every conceivable element of
judgment; but the existing generation like what they have heard before—it
is much easier. It required great courage in Mr. Dickens to write what
his genius has compelled them to appreciate.
We have throughout spoken of Mr. Dickens as he was, rather than as he
is; or, to use a less discourteous phrase, and we hope a truer, of his
early works rather than of those which are more recent. We could not do
otherwise consistently with the true code of criticism. A man of great
genius, who has written great and enduring works, must be judged mainly
by them; and not by the inferior productions which, from the necessities
of personal position, a fatal facility of composition, or other cause, he
may pour forth at moments less favourable to his powers. Those who are
called on to review these inferior productions themselves, must speak of
them in the terms they may deserve; but those who have the more pleasant
task of estimating as a whole the genius of the writer, may confine their
attention almost wholly to those happier efforts which illustrate that
genius. We should not like to have to speak in detail of Mr. Dickens’s
later works, and we have not done so. There are, indeed, peculiar reasons
why a genius constituted as his is (at least if we are correct in the
view which we have taken of it) would not endure without injury during a
long life the applause of the many, the temptations of composition, and
the general excitement of existence. Even in his earlier works it was
impossible not to fancy that there was a weakness of fibre unfavourable
to the longevity of excellence. This was the effect of his deficiency in
those masculine faculties of which we have said so much,—the reasoning
understanding and firm far-seeing sagacity. It is these two component
elements which stiffen the mind, and give a consistency to the creed and
a coherence to its effects,—which enable it to protect itself from the
rush of circumstances. If to a deficiency in these we add an extreme
sensibility to circumstances,—a mobility, as Lord Byron used to call it,
of emotion, which is easily impressed, and still more easily carried
away by impression,—we have the idea of a character peculiarly unfitted
to bear the flux of time and chance. A man of very great determination
could hardly bear up against them with such slight aids from within and
with such peculiar sensibility to temptation. A man of merely ordinary
determination would succumb to it; and Mr. Dickens has succumbed. His
position was certainly unfavourable. He has told us that the works of
his later years, inferior as all good critics have deemed them, have
yet been more read than those of his earlier and healthier years. The
most characteristic part of his audience, the lower middle-class, were
ready to receive with delight the least favourable productions of his
genius. Human nature cannot endure this; it is too much to have to endure
a coincident temptation both from within and from without. Mr. Dickens
was too much inclined by natural disposition to lachrymose eloquence
and exaggerated caricature. Such was the kind of writing which he wrote
most easily. He found likewise that such was the kind of writing that
was read most readily; and of course he wrote that kind. Who would have
done otherwise? No critic is entitled to speak very harshly of such
degeneracy, if he is not sure that he could have coped with difficulties
so peculiar. If that rule is to be observed, who is there that will not
be silent? No other Englishman has attained such a hold on the vast
populace; it is little, therefore, to say that no other has surmounted
its attendant temptations.
_THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY._[11]
(1856.)
This is a marvellous book. Everybody has read it, and every one has read
it with pleasure. It has little advantage of subject. When the volumes
came out, an honest man said, ‘I suppose something happened between the
years 1689 and 1697; but what happened I do not know.’ Every one knows
now. No period with so little obvious interest will henceforth be so
familiarly known. Only a most felicitous and rather curious genius could
and would shed such a light on such an age. If in the following pages we
seem to cavil and find fault, let it be remembered, that the business of
a critic is criticism; that it is _not_ his business to be thankful; that
he must attempt an estimate rather than a eulogy.
Macaulay seems to have in a high degree the temperament most likely to
be that of a historian. This may be summarily defined as the temperament
which inclines men to take an interest in actions as contrasted with
objects, and in past actions in preference to present actions. We should
expand our meaning. Some people are unfortunately born scientific. They
take much interest in the objects of nature. They feel a curiosity
about shells, snails, horses, butterflies. They are delighted at an
ichthyosaurus, and excited at a polyp; they are learned in minerals,
vegetables, animals; they have skill in fishes, and attain renown in
pebbles: in the highest cases they know the great causes of grand
phenomena, can indicate the courses of the stars or the current of the
waves; but in every case their minds are directed not to the actions of
man, but to the scenery amidst which he lives; not to the inhabitants
of this world, but to the world itself; not to what most resembles
themselves, but to that which is most unlike. What compels men to take
an interest in what they do take an interest in, is commonly a difficult
question—for the most part, indeed, it is an insoluble one; but in this
case it would seem to have a negative cause—to result from the absence
of an intense and vivid nature. The inclination of mind which abstracts
the attention from that in which it can feel sympathy to that in which it
cannot, seems to arise from a want of sympathy. A tendency to devote the
mind to trees and stones as much as, or in preference to, men and women,
appears to imply that the intellectual qualities, the abstract reason,
and the inductive scrutiny which can be applied equally to trees and to
men, to stones and to women, predominate over the more special qualities
solely applicable to our own race,—the keen love, the eager admiration,
the lasting hatred, the lust of rule which fastens men’s interests on
people and to people. As a confirmation of this, we see that, even in
the greatest cases, scientific men have been calm men. Their actions
are unexceptionable; scarcely a spot stains their excellence: if a
doubt is to be thrown on their character, it would be rather that they
were insensible to the temptations than that they were involved in the
offences of ordinary men. An aloofness and abstractedness cleave to their
greatness. There is a coldness in their fame. We think of Euclid as of
fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the Peak of Teneriffe. Even the
intensest labours, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect,
seem to carry us into a region different from our own—to be in a _terra
incognita_ of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.
We know that the taste of most persons is quite opposite. The tendency
of man is to take an interest in man, and almost in man only. The world
has a vested interest in itself. Analyse the minds of the crowd of men,
and what will you find? Something of the outer earth, no doubt,—odd
geography, odd astronomy, doubts whether Scutari is in the Crimea,
investigations whether the moon is less or greater than Jupiter; some
idea of herbs, more of horses; ideas, too, more or less vague, of the
remote and supernatural,—notions which the tongue cannot speak, which
it would seem the world would hardly bear if thoroughly spoken. Yet,
setting aside these which fill the remote corners and lesser outworks
of the brain, the whole stress and vigour of the ordinary faculties is
expended on their possessor and his associates, on the man and on his
fellows. In almost all men, indeed, this is not simply an intellectual
contemplation; we not only look on, but act. The impulse to busy
ourselves with the affairs of men goes further than the simple attempt to
know and comprehend them: it warms us with a further life; it incites us
to stir and influence those affairs; its animated energy will not rest
till it has hurried us into toil and conflict. At this stage the mind
of the historian, as we abstractedly fancy it, naturally breaks off: it
has more interest in human affairs than the naturalist; it instinctively
selects the actions of man for occupation and scrutiny, in preference to
the habits of fishes or the structure of stones; but it has not so much
vivid interest in them as the warm and active man. To know is sufficient
for it; it can bear not to take a part. A want of impulse seems born with
the disposition. To be constantly occupied about the actions of others;
to have constantly presented to your contemplation and attention events
and occurrences memorable only as evincing certain qualities of mind and
will, which very qualities in a measure you feel within yourself, and yet
to be without an impulse to exhibit them in the real world, ‘which is the
world of all of us;’ to contemplate, yet never act; ‘to have the House
before you,’ and yet to be content with the reporters’ gallery,—shows a
chill impassiveness of temperament, a sluggish insensibility to ardent
impulse, a heavy immobility under ordinary emotion. The image of the
stout Gibbon placidly contemplating the animated conflicts, the stirring
pleadings of Fox and Burke, watching a revolution and heavily taking no
part in it, gives an idea of the historian as he is likely to be. ‘Why,’
it is often asked, ‘is history dull? It is a narrative of life, and life
is of all things the most interesting.’ The answer is, that it is written
by men too dull to take the common interest in life, in whom languor
predominates over zeal, and sluggishness over passion.
Macaulay is not dull, and it may seem hard to attempt to bring him within
the scope of a theory which is so successful in explaining dulness. Yet,
in a modified and peculiar form, we can perhaps find in his remarkable
character unusually distinct traces of the insensibility which we ascribe
to the historian. The means of scrutiny are ample. Macaulay has not spent
his life in a corner; if posterity should refuse—of course they will not
refuse—to read a line of his writings, they would yet be sought out by
studious inquirers, as those of a man of high political position, great
notoriety, and greater oratorical power. We are not therefore obliged, as
in so many cases even among contemporaries, to search for the author’s
character in his books alone; we are able from other sources to find
out his character, and then apply it to explain the peculiarities of
his works. Macaulay has exhibited many high attainments, many dazzling
talents, much singular and well-trained power; but the quality which
would most strike the observers of the interior man is what may be called
his _in_experiencing nature. Men of genius are in general distinguished
by their extreme susceptibility to external experience. Finer and softer
than other men, every exertion of their will, every incident of their
lives, influences them more deeply than it would others. Their essence
is at once finer and more impressible; it receives a distincter mark,
and receives it more easily than the souls of the herd. From a peculiar
sensibility, the man of genius bears the stamp of life commonly more
clearly than his fellows; even casual associations make a deep impression
on him: examine his mind, and you may discern his fortunes. Macaulay has
nothing of this. You could not tell what he has been. His mind shows no
trace of change. What he is, he was; and what he was, he is. He early
attained a high development, but he has not increased it since; years
have come, but they have whispered little; as was said of the second
Pitt, ‘He never grew, he was cast.’ The volume of ‘speeches’ which he
has published places the proof of this in every man’s hand. His first
speeches are as good as his last; his last scarcely richer than his
first. He came into public life at an exciting season; he shared of
course in that excitement, and the same excitement still quivers in his
mind. He delivered marvellous rhetorical exercises on the Reform Bill
when it passed; he speaks of it with rhetorical interest even now. He is
still the man of ’32. From that era he looks on the past. He sees ‘Old
Sarum’ in the seventeenth century, and Gatton in the civil wars. You may
fancy an undertone. The Norman barons commenced the series of reforms
which ‘_we_ consummated;’ Hampden was ‘preparing for the occasion in
which I had a part;’ William ‘for the debate in which I took occasion to
observe.’ With a view to that era everything begins; up to that moment
everything ascends. That was the ‘fifth act’ of the human race; the
remainder of history is only an afterpiece. All this was very natural at
the moment; nothing could be more probable than that a young man of the
greatest talents, entering at once into important life at a conspicuous
opportunity, should exaggerate its importance; he would fancy it was
the ‘crowning achievement,’ the greatest ‘in the tide of time.’ But the
singularity is, that he should retain the idea now; that years have
brought no influence, experience no change. The events of twenty years
have been full of rich instruction on the events of twenty years ago;
but they have not instructed him. His creed is a fixture. It is the same
on his peculiar topic—on India. Before he went there he made a speech on
the subject; Lord Canterbury, who must have heard a million speeches,
said it was the best he had ever heard. It is difficult to fancy that so
much vivid knowledge could be gained from books—from horrible Indian
treatises; that such imaginative mastery should be possible without
actual experience. Not forgetting, or excepting, the orations of Burke,
it was perhaps as remarkable a speech as was ever made on India by an
Englishman who had not been in India. Now he has been there he speaks no
better—rather worse; he spoke excellently without experience, he speaks
no better with it,—if anything, it rather puts him out. His speech on the
Indian charter a year or two ago was not finer than that on the charter
of 1833. Before he went to India he recommended that writers should be
examined in the classics; after being in India he recommended that they
should be examined in the same way. He did not say he had seen the place
in the meantime; he did not think that had anything to do with it. You
could never tell from any difference in his style what he had seen, or
what he had not seen. He is so insensible to passing objects, that they
leave no distinctive mark, no intimate peculiar trace.
Such a man would naturally think literature more instructive than life.
Hazlitt said of Mackintosh, ‘He might like to read an _account_ of India;
but India itself, with its burning, shining face, was a mere blank, an
endless waste to him. Persons of this class have no more to say to a
plain matter of fact staring them in the face than they have to say to
a _hippopotamus_.’ This was a keen criticism on Sir James, savouring of
the splenetic mind from which it came. As a complete estimate, it would
be a most unjust one of Macaulay; but we know that there is a whole class
of minds which prefers the literary delineation of objects to the actual
eyesight of them. To some life is difficult. An insensible nature, like a
rough hide, resists the breath of passing things; an unobserving retina
in vain depicts whatever a quicker eye does not explain. But any one can
understand a book; the work is done, the facts observed, the formulæ
suggested, the subjects classified. Of course it needs labour, and a
following fancy, to peruse the long lucubrations and descriptions of
others; but a fine detective sensibility is unnecessary; type is plain,
an earnest attention will follow it and know it. To this class Macaulay
belongs: and he has characteristically maintained that dead authors are
more fascinating than living people.
‘Those friendships,’ he tells us, ‘are exposed to no danger
from the occurrences by which other attachments are weakened
or dissolved. Time glides by; fortune is inconstant; tempers
are soured; bonds which seemed indissoluble are daily sundered
by interest, by emulation, or by caprice. But no such cause
can affect the silent converse which we hold with the highest
of human intellects. That placid intercourse is disturbed by
no jealousies or resentments. These are the old friends who
are never seen with new faces; who are the same in wealth and
in poverty, in glory and in obscurity. With the dead there is
no rivalry. In the dead there is no change. Plato is never
sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes
unseasonably. Dante never stays too long. No difference of
political opinion can alienate Cicero. No heresy can excite the
horror of Bossuet.’
But Bossuet is dead; and Cicero was a Roman; and Plato wrote in Greek.
Years and manners separate us from the great. After dinner, Demosthenes
_may_ come unseasonably; Dante _might_ stay too long. _We_ are alienated
from the politician, and have a horror of the theologian. Dreadful
idea, having Demosthenes for an intimate friend! He had pebbles in his
mouth; he was always urging action; he spoke such good Greek; we cannot
dwell on it,—it is too much. Only a mind impassive to our daily life,
unalive to bores and evils, to joys and sorrows, incapable of the deepest
sympathies, a prey to print, could imagine it. The mass of men have
stronger ties and warmer hopes. The exclusive devotion to books tires. We
require to love and hate, to act and live.
It is not unnatural that a person of this temperament should preserve a
certain aloofness even in the busiest life. Macaulay has ever done so. He
has been in the thick of political warfare, in the van of party conflict.
Whatever a keen excitability would select for food and opportunity, has
been his; but he has not been excited. He has never thrown himself upon
action, he has never followed trivial details with an anxious passion.
He has ever been a man for a great occasion. He was by nature a _deus
ex machinâ_. Somebody has had to fetch him. His heart was in Queen
Anne’s time. When he came, he spoke as Lord Halifax might have spoken.
Of course, it may be contended that this is the _eximia ars_; that this
solitary removed excellence is particularly and essentially sublime.
But, simply and really, greater men have been more deeply ‘immersed
in matter.’ The highest eloquence quivers with excitement; there is
life-blood in the deepest action; a man like Strafford seems flung upon
the world. An orator should never talk like an observatory; no coldness
should strike upon the hearer.
It is characteristic also that Macaulay should be continually thinking
of posterity. In general, that expected authority is most ungrateful;
those who think of it most, it thinks of least. The way to secure its
favour is, to give vivid essential pictures of the life before you; to
leave a fresh glowing delineation of the scene to which you were born,
of the society to which you have peculiar access. This is gained, not by
thinking of your posterity, but by living in society; not by poring on
what is to be, but by enjoying what is. That spirit of thorough enjoyment
which pervades the great delineators of human life and human manners,
was not caused by ‘being made after supper, out of a cheese-paring;’
it drew its sustenance from a relishing, enjoying, sensitive life, and
the flavour of the description is the reality of that enjoyment. Of
course, this is not so in science. You may leave a name by an abstract
discovery, without having led a vigorous existence; yet what a name is
this! Taylor’s theorem will go down to posterity,—possibly its discoverer
was for ever dreaming and expecting it would; but what does posterity
know of the deceased Taylor? _Nominis umbra_ is rather a compliment; for
it is not substantial enough to have a shadow. But in other walks,—say in
political oratory, which is the part of Macaulay’s composition in which
his value for posterity’s opinion is most apparent,—the way to interest
posterity is to think but little of it. What gives to the speeches of
Demosthenes the interest they have? The intense, vivid, glowing interest
of the speaker in all that he is speaking about. Philip is not a person
whom ‘posterity will censure,’ but the man ‘whom I hate:’ the matter
in hand not one whose interest depends on the memory of men, but in
which an eager intense nature would have been absorbed if there had
been no posterity at all, on which he wished to deliver his own soul. A
_casual_ character, so to speak, is natural to the most intense words;
externally, even, they will interest the ‘after world’ more for having
interested the present world; they must have a life of _some_ place
and _some_ time before they can have one of all space and all time.
Macaulay’s oratory is the very opposite of this. School-boyish it is
not, for it is the oratory of a very sensible man; but the theme of a
schoolboy is not more devoid of the salt of circumstance. The speeches on
the Reform Bill have been headed, ‘Now, a man came up from college and
spoke thus;’ and, like a college man, he spoke rather to the abstract
world than to the present. He knew no more of the people who actually did
live in London than of people who would live in London, and there was
therefore no reason for speaking to one more than to the other. After
years of politics, he speaks so still. He looks on a question (he says)
as posterity will look on it; he appeals from this to future generations;
he regards existing men as painful prerequisites of great-grandchildren.
This seems to proceed, as has been said, from a distant and unimpressible
nature. But it is impossible to deny that it has one great advantage:
it has made him take pains. A man who speaks to people a thousand years
off will naturally speak carefully: he tries to be heard over the clang
of ages, over the rumours of myriads. Writing for posterity is like
writing on foreign post paper: you cannot say to a man at Calcutta what
you would say to a man at Hackney; you think ‘the yellow man is a very
long way off; this is fine paper, it will go by a ship;’ so you try to
say something worthy of the ship, something noble, which will keep and
travel. Writers like Macaulay, who think of future people, have a respect
for future people. Each syllable is solemn, each word distinct. No author
trained to periodical writing has so little of its slovenliness and its
imperfection.
This singularly constant contemplation of posterity has coloured his
estimate of social characters. He has no toleration for those great men
in whom a lively sensibility to momentary honours has prevailed over a
consistent reference to the posthumous tribunal. He is justly severe on
Lord Bacon:
‘In his library all his rare powers were under the guidance of
an honest ambition, of an enlarged philanthropy, of a sincere
love of truth. There no temptation drew him away from the
right course. Thomas Aquinas could pay no fees, Duns Scotus
could confer no peerages. The “Master of the Sentences” had no
rich reversions in his gift. Far different was the situation
of the great philosopher when he came forth from his study
and his laboratory to mingle with the crowd which filled the
galleries of Whitehall. In all that crowd there was no man
equally qualified to render great and lasting services to
mankind. But in all that crowd there was not a heart more set
on things which no man ought to suffer to be necessary to his
happiness,—on things which can often be obtained only by the
sacrifice of integrity and honour. To be the leader of the
human race in the career of improvement, to found on the ruins
of ancient intellectual dynasties a more prosperous and more
enduring empire, to be revered to the latest generations as
the most illustrious among the benefactors of mankind,—all
this was within his reach. But all this availed him nothing,
while some quibbling special pleader was promoted before him to
the Bench,—while some heavy country gentleman took precedence
of him by virtue of a purchased coronet,—while some pander,
happy in a fair wife, could obtain a more cordial salute from
Buckingham,—while some buffoon, versed in all the latest
scandal of the Court, could draw a louder laugh from James.’
Yet a less experience, or a less opportunity of experience, would have
warned a mind more observant that the bare desire for long posthumous
renown is but a feeble principle in common human nature. Bacon had
as much of it as most men. The keen excitability to this world’s
temptations must be opposed by more exciting impulses, by more retarding
discouragements, by conscience, by religion, by fear. If you would
vanquish earth, you must ‘invent heaven.’ It is the fiction of a cold
abstractedness that the possible respect of unseen people can commonly be
more desired than the certain homage of existing people.
In a more conspicuous manner the chill nature of the most brilliant
among English historians is shown in his defective dealing with the
passionate eras of our history. He has never been attracted, or not
proportionally attracted, by the singular mixture of heroism and
slavishness, of high passion and base passion, which mark the Tudor
period. The defect is apparent in his treatment of a period on which
he has written powerfully—the time of the civil wars. He has never in
the highest manner appreciated either of the two great characters—the
Puritan and the Cavalier—which are the form and life of those years.
What historian, indeed, has ever estimated the Cavalier character?
There is Clarendon—the grave, rhetorical, decorous lawyer—piling words,
congealing arguments,—very stately, a little grim. There is Hume—the
Scotch metaphysician—who has made out the best case for such people as
never were, for a Charles who never died, for a Strafford who would
never have been attainted,—a saving, calculating North-countryman,—fat,
impassive,—who lived on eightpence a day. What have these people to do
with an enjoying English gentleman? It is easy for a _doctrinaire_ to
bear a _post-mortem_ examination,—it is much the same whether he be
alive or dead; but not so with those who live during their life, whose
essence is existence, whose being is in animation. There seem to be
some characters who are not made for history, as there are some who
are not made for old age. A Cavalier is always young. The buoyant life
arises before us rich in hope, strong in vigour, irregular in action;
men young and ardent, framed in the ‘prodigality of nature;’ open to
every enjoyment, alive to every passion; eager, impulsive; brave without
discipline; noble without principle; prizing luxury, despising danger,
capable of high sentiment, but in each of whom the
‘Addiction was to courses vain;
His companies unlettered, rude and shallow,
His hours filled up with riots, banquets, sports,
And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration
From open haunts and popularity.’
We see these men setting forth or assembling to defend their King and
Church; and we see it without surprise; a rich daring loves danger; a
deep excitability likes excitement. If we look around us, we may see
what is analogous. Some say that the battle of the Alma was won by the
‘uneducated gentry;’ the ‘uneducated gentry’ would be Cavaliers now. The
political sentiment is part of the character. The essence of Toryism
is enjoyment. Talk of the ways of spreading a wholesome Conservatism
throughout this country: give painful lectures, distribute weary tracts
(and perhaps this is as well—you may be able to give an argumentative
answer to a few objections, you may diffuse a distinct notion of
the dignified dulness of politics); but as far as communicating and
establishing your creed are concerned—try a little pleasure. The way to
keep up old customs is, to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied
with the present state of things is, to enjoy that state of things. Over
the ‘Cavalier’ mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there
is an exultation in a daily event, zest in the ‘regular thing,’ joy
at an old feast. Sir Walter Scott is an example of this. Every habit
and practice of old Scotland was inseparably in his mind associated
with genial enjoyment. To propose to touch one of her institutions, to
abolish one of those practices, was to touch a personal pleasure—a point
on which his mind reposed, a thing of memory and hope. So long as this
world is this world, will a buoyant life be the proper source of an
animated Conservatism. The ‘Church-and-King’ enthusiasm has even a deeper
connection with the Cavaliers. Carlyle has said, in his vivid way, ‘Two
or three young gentlemen have said, “Go to, I will _make_ a religion.”’
This is the exact opposite of what the irregular, enjoying man can think
or conceive. What! is he, with his untrained mind and his changeful
heart and his ruleless practice, to create a creed? Is the gushing life
to be asked to construct a cistern? Is the varying heart to be its own
master, the evil practice its own guide? Sooner will a ship invent its
own rudder, devise its own pilot, than the eager being will find out the
doctrine which is to restrain him. The very intellect is a type of the
confusion of the soul. It has little arguments on a thousand subjects,
hearsay sayings, original flashes, small and bright, struck from the
heedless mind by the strong impact of the world. And it has nothing else.
It has no systematic knowledge; it has a hatred of regular attention.
What can an understanding of this sort do with refined questioning or
subtle investigation? It is obliged in a sense by its very nature to take
what comes; it is overshadowed in a manner by the religion to which it
is born; its conscience tells it that it owes obedience to something;
it craves to worship something; that something, in both cases, it takes
from the past. ‘Thou hast not chosen me, but I have chosen thee,’ might
his faith say to a believer of this kind. A certain bigotry is altogether
natural to him. His creed seems to him a primitive fact, as certain and
evident as the stars. The political faith (for it is a faith) of these
persons is of a kind analogous. The virtue of loyalty assumes in them a
passionate aspect, and overflows, as it were, all the intellect which
belongs to the topic. This virtue, this need of our nature, arises, as
political philosophers tell us, from the conscious necessity which man is
under of obeying an external moral rule. We feel that we are by nature
and by the constitution of all things under an obligation to conform to
a certain standard, and we seek to find or to establish in the sphere
without, an authority which shall enforce it, shall aid us in compelling
others and also in mastering ourselves. When a man impressed with this
principle comes in contact with the institution of civil government as
it now exists and as it has always existed, he finds what he wants—he
discovers an authority; and he feels bound to submit to it. We do not, of
course, mean that all this takes place distinctly and consciously in the
mind of the person; on the contrary, the class of minds most subject to
its influence are precisely those which have in general the least defined
and accurate consciousness of their own operations, or of what befalls
them. In matter of fact, they find themselves under the control of laws
and of a polity from the earliest moment that they can remember, and they
obey it from habit and custom years before they know why. Only in later
life, when distinct thought is from an outward occurrence forced upon
them, do they feel the necessity of some such power; and in proportion to
their passionate and impulsive disposition they feel it the more. The law
has in a less degree on them the same effect which military discipline
has in a greater. It braces them to defined duties, and subjects them
to a known authority. Quieter minds find this authority in an internal
conscience; but in riotous natures its still small voice is lost if it be
not echoed in loud harsh tones from the firm and outer world:
‘Their breath is agitation, and their life
A storm whereon they ride.’
From without they crave a bridle and a curb. The doctrine of
non-resistance is no _accident_ of the Cavalier character, though it
seems at first sight singular in an eager, tumultuous disposition. So
inconsistent is human nature, that it proceeds from the very extremity
of that tumult. They know that they cannot allow themselves to question
the authority which is upon them; they feel its necessity too acutely,
their intellect is untrained in subtle disquisitions, their conscience
fluctuating, their passions rising. They are sure that if they once
depart from that authority, their whole soul will be in anarchy. As a
riotous state tends to fall under a martial tyranny, a passionate mind
tends to subject itself to an extrinsic law—to enslave itself to an
outward discipline. ‘That is what the king says, boy, and that was ever
enough for Sir Henry Lee.’ An hereditary monarch is, indeed, the very
embodiment of this principle. The authority is so defined, so clearly
vested, so evidently intelligible; it descends so distinctly from the
past, it is imposed so conspicuously from without. Anything free refers
to the people; anything elected seems self-chosen. ‘The divinity that
doth hedge a king’ consists in his evidently representing an unmade,
unchosen, hereditary duty.
The greatness of this character is not in Macaulay’s way, and its faults
are. Its license affronts him; its riot alienates him. He is for ever
contrasting the dissoluteness of Prince Rupert’s horse with the restraint
of Cromwell’s pikemen. A deep enjoying nature finds no sympathy. The
brilliant style passes forward: we dwell on its brilliancy, but it is
cold. Macaulay has no tears for that warm life, no tenderness for that
extinct joy. The ignorance of the Cavalier, too, moves his wrath: ‘They
were ignorant of what every schoolgirl knows.’ Their loyalty to their
sovereign is the devotion of the Egyptians to the god Apis, who selected
‘a calf to adore.’ Their non-resistance offends the philosopher: their
license is commented on with the tone of a precisian. Their indecorum
does not suit the dignity of the narrator. Their rich free nature is
unappreciated; the tingling intensity of their joy is unnoticed. In a
word, there is something of the schoolboy about the Cavalier—there is
somewhat of a schoolmaster about the historian.
It might be thought, at first sight, that the insensibility and
coldness which are unfavourable to the appreciation of the Cavalier
would be particularly favourable to that of the Puritan. Some may say
that a natural aloofness from things earthly would dispose a man to
the doctrines of a sect which enjoins above all other commandments
abstinence and aloofness _from_ those things. In Macaulay’s case it
certainly has had no such consequence. He was bred up in the circle
which more than any other has resembled that of the greatest and best
Puritans—in the circle which has presented the evangelical doctrine in
its most influential and celebrated, and not its least genial form. Yet
he has revolted against it. The bray of ‘Exeter Hall’ is a phrase which
has become celebrated: it is an odd one for his father’s son. The whole
course of his personal fortunes, the entire scope of his historical
narrative, show an utter want of sympathy with the Puritan disposition.
It would be idle to quote passages; it will be enough to recollect the
contrast between the estimate—say, of Cromwell—by Carlyle and that by
Macaulay, to be aware of the enormous discrepancy. The one’s manner
evinces an instinctive sympathy, the other’s an instinctive aversion.
We believe that this is but a consequence of the same impassibility
of nature which we have said so much of. M. de Montalembert, in a
striking _éloge_ on a French historian—a man of the Southey type—after
speaking of his life in Paris during youth (a youth cast in the early
and exciting years of the first Revolution, and of the prelude to it),
and graphically portraying a man subject to scepticism, but not given
to vice; staid in habits, but unbelieving in opinion; without faith and
without irregularity,—winds up the whole by the sentence, that ‘_he was
hardened at once against good and evil_.’ In his view, the insensibility
which was a guard against exterior temptation was also a hindrance to
inward belief: and there is a philosophy in this. The nature of man
is not two things, but one thing. We have not one set of affections,
hopes, sensibilities, to be affected by the present world, and another
and a different to be affected by the invisible world: we are moved by
grandeur, or we are not; we are stirred by sublimity, or we are not; we
hunger after righteousness, or we do not; we hate vice, or we do not;
we are passionate, or not passionate; loving, or not loving; cold, or
not cold; our heart is dull, or it is wakeful; our soul is alive, or it
is dead. Deep under the surface of the intellect lies the _stratum_ of
the passions, of the intense, peculiar, simple impulses which constitute
the heart of man; there is the eager essence, the primitive desiring
being. What stirs this latent being we know. In general it is stirred
by everything. Sluggish natures are stirred little, wild natures are
stirred much; but all are stirred somewhat. It is not important whether
the object be in the visible or invisible world: whoso loves what he
has seen, will love what he has not seen; whoso hates what he has seen,
will hate what he has not seen. Creation is, as it were, but the garment
of the Creator: whoever is blind to the beauty on its surface, will be
insensible to the beauty beneath; whoso is dead to the sublimity before
his senses, will be dull to that which he imagines; whoso is untouched by
the visible man, will be unmoved by the invisible God. These are no new
ideas; and the conspicuous evidence of history confirms them. Everywhere
the deep religious organisation has been deeply sensitive to this world.
If we compare what are called sacred and profane literatures, the depth
of human affection is deepest in the sacred. A warmth as of life is on
the Hebrew, a chill as of marble is on the Greek. In Jewish history the
most tenderly religious character is the most sensitive to earth. Along
every lyric of the Psalmist thrills a deep spirit of human enjoyment; he
was alive as a child to the simple aspects of the world; the very errors
of his mingled career are but those to which the open, enjoying character
is most prone; its principle, so to speak, was a tremulous passion for
that which he had seen, as well as that which he had not seen. There is
no paradox, therefore, in saying that the same character which least
appreciates the impulsive and ardent Cavalier is also the most likely not
to appreciate the warm zeal of an overpowering devotion.
Some years ago it would have been necessary to show at length that
the Puritans had such a devotion. The notion had been that they were
fanatics, who simulated zeal, and hypocrites, who misquoted the Old
Testament. A new era has arrived; one of the great discoveries which the
competition of authors has introduced into historical researches has
attained a singular popularity. Times are changed. We are rather now, in
general, in danger of holding too high an estimate of the puritanical
character than a too low or contemptuous one. Among the disciples of
Carlyle it is considered that having been a Puritan is the next best
thing to having been in Germany. But though we cannot sympathise with
everything that the expounders of the new theory allege, and though we
should not select for praise the exact peculiarities most agreeable to
the slightly grim ‘gospel of earnestness,’ we acknowledge the great
service which they have rendered to English history. No one will now ever
overlook, that in the greater, in the original Puritans—in Cromwell, for
example—the whole basis of the character was a passionate, deep, rich,
religious organisation.
This is not in Macaulay’s way. It is not that he is sceptical; far
from it. ‘Divines of all persuasions,’ he tells us, ‘are agreed that
there is a religion;’ and he acquiesces in their teaching. But he
has no passionate self-questionings, no indomitable fears, no asking
perplexities. He is probably pleased at the exemption. He has praised
Bacon for a similar want of interest. ‘Nor did he ever meddle with those
enigmas which have puzzled hundreds of generations, and will puzzle
hundreds more. He said nothing about the grounds of moral obligation, or
the freedom of the human will. He had no inclination to employ himself
in labours resembling those of the damned in the Grecian Tartarus—to
spin for ever on the same wheel round the same pivot. He lived in an
age in which disputes on the most subtle points of divinity excited an
intense interest throughout Europe; and nowhere more than in England.
He was placed in the very thick of the conflict. He was in power at the
time of the Synod of Dort, and must for months have been daily deafened
with talk about election, reprobation, and final perseverance. Yet we
do not remember a line in his works from which it can be inferred that
he was either a Calvinist or an Arminian. While the world was resounding
with the noise of a disputatious philosophy and a disputatious theology,
the Baconian school, like Allworthy seated between Square and Thwackum,
preserved a calm neutrality,—half-scornful, half-benevolent,—and, content
with adding to the sum of practical good, left the war of words to those
who liked it.’ This may be the writing of good sense, but it is not the
expression of an anxious or passionate religious nature.
Such is the explanation of Macaulay’s not prizing so highly as he should
prize the essential excellences of the Puritan character. He is defective
in the one point in which they were very great; he is eminent in the very
point in which they were most defective. A spirit of easy cheerfulness
pervades his writings, a pleasant geniality overflows his history: the
rigid asceticism, the pain for pain’s sake, of the Puritan is altogether
alien to him. Retribution he would deny; sin is hardly a part of his
creed. His religion is one of thanksgiving. His notion of philosophy—it
would be a better notion of his own writing—is _illustrans commoda vitæ_.
The English Revolution is the very topic for a person of this character.
It is eminently an unimpassioned movement. It requires no appreciation
of the Cavalier or of the zealot; no sympathy with the romance of this
world; no inclination to pass beyond, and absorb the mind’s energies
in another. It had neither the rough enthusiasm of barbarism nor the
delicate grace of high civilisation; the men who conducted it had neither
the deep spirit of Cromwell’s Puritans nor the chivalric loyalty of the
enjoying English gentleman. They were hard-headed sensible men, who knew
that politics were a kind of business, that the essence of business is
compromise, of practicality concession. They drove no theory to excess;
for they had no theory. Their passions did not hurry them away; for
their temperament was still, their reason calculating and calm. Locke
is the type of the best character of his era. There is nothing in him
which a historian such as we have described could fail to comprehend,
or could not sympathise with when he did comprehend. He was the very
reverse of a Cavalier; he came of a Puritan stock; he retained through
life a kind of chilled Puritanism; he had nothing of its excessive,
overpowering, interior zeal, but he retained the formal decorum which
it had given to the manners, the solid earnestness of its intellect,
the heavy respectability of its character. In all the nations across
which Puritanism has passed you may notice something of its indifference
to this world’s lighter enjoyments; no one of them has been quite able
to retain its singular interest in what is beyond the veil of time and
sense. The generation to which we owe our Revolution was in the first
stage of the descent. Locke thought a zealot a dangerous person, and
a poet little better than a rascal. It has been said, with perhaps an
allusion to Macaulay, that our historians have held that ‘all the people
who lived before 1688 were either knaves or fools.’ This is, of course,
an exaggeration; but those who have considered what sort of person a
historian is likely to be, will not be surprised at his preference for
the people of that era. They had the equable sense which he appreciates;
they had not the deep animated passions to which his nature is insensible.
Yet, though Macaulay shares in the common temperament of historians,
and in the sympathy with, and appreciation of, the characters most
congenial to that temperament, he is singularly contrasted with them
in one respect—he has a vivid fancy, they have a dull one. History is
generally written on the principle that human life is a transaction;
that people come to it with defined intentions and a calm self-possessed
air, as stockjobbers would buy ‘omnium,’ as timber-merchants buy ‘best
middling;’ people are alike, and things are alike; everything is a
little dull, every one a little slow; manners are not depicted, traits
are not noticed; the narrative is confined to those great transactions
which can be understood without any imaginative delineation of their
accompaniments. There are two kinds of things—those which you need only
to _understand_, and those which you need also to _imagine_. That a man
bought nine hundredweight of hops is an intelligible idea—you do not
want the hops delineated or the man described; that he went into society
suggests an inquiry—you want to know what the society was like, and how
far he was fitted to be there. The great business transactions of the
political world are of the intelligible description. Macaulay has himself
said:
‘A history, in which every particular incident may be true,
may on the whole be false. The circumstances which have
most influence on the happiness of mankind, the changes of
manners and morals, the transition of communities from poverty
to wealth, from knowledge to ignorance, from ferocity to
humanity,—these are, for the most part, noiseless revolutions.
Their progress is rarely indicated by what historians are
pleased to call important events. They are not achieved by
armies, or enacted by senates. They are sanctioned by no
treaties, and recorded in no archives. They are carried on in
every school, in every church, behind ten thousand counters, at
ten thousand firesides. The upper current of society presents
no certain criterion by which we can judge of the direction
in which the under current flows. We read of defeats and
victories; but we know that nations may be miserable amidst
victories, and prosperous amidst defeats. We read of the fall
of wise ministers, and of the rise of profligate favourites;
but we must remember how small a proportion the good or evil
effected by a single statesman can bear to the good or evil of
a great social system.’
But of this sluggishness of imagination he has certainly no trace
himself. He is willing to be ‘behind ten thousand counters,’ to be a
guest ‘at ten thousand firesides.’ He is willing to see ‘ordinary men as
they appear in their ordinary business and in their ordinary pleasures.’
He has no objection to ‘mingle in the crowds of the Exchange and the
coffee-house.’ He would ‘obtain admittance to the convivial table and
the domestic hearth.’ So far as his dignity will permit, ‘he will bear
with vulgar expressions.’ And a singular efficacy of fancy gives him the
power to do so. Some portion of the essence of human nature is concealed
from him; but all its accessories are at his command. He delineates any
trait; he can paint, and justly paint, any manners he chooses.
‘A perfect historian,’ he tells us, ‘is he in whose work the
character and spirit of an age is exhibited in miniature. He
relates no fact, he attributes no expression to his characters,
which is not authenticated by sufficient testimony; but, by
judicious selection, rejection, and arrangement, he gives to
truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction. In
his narrative a due subordination is observed—some transactions
are prominent, others retire; but the scale on which he
represents them is increased or diminished, not according to
the dignity of the persons concerned in them, but according to
the degree in which they elucidate the condition of society
and the nature of man. He shows us the court, the camp, and
the senate; but he shows us also the nation. He considers no
anecdote, no peculiarity of manner, no familiar saying, as too
insignificant for his notice, which is not too insignificant
to illustrate the operation of laws, of religion, and of
education, and to mark the progress of the human mind. Men will
not merely be described, but will be made intimately known
to us. The changes of manners will be indicated, not merely
by a few general phrases, or a few extracts from statistical
documents, but by appropriate images presented in every line.
If a man, such as we are supposing, should write the history of
England, he would assuredly not omit the battles, the sieges,
the negotiations, the seditions, the ministerial changes; but
with these he would intersperse the details which are the
charm of historical romances. At Lincoln Cathedral there is
a beautiful painted window, which was made by an apprentice
out of the pieces of glass which had been rejected by his
master. It is so far superior to every other in the church,
that, according to the tradition, the vanquished artist killed
himself from mortification. Sir Walter Scott, in the same
manner, has used those fragments of truth which historians have
scornfully thrown behind them in a manner which may well excite
their envy. He has constructed out of their gleanings works
which, even considered as histories, are scarcely less valuable
than theirs. But a truly great historian would reclaim those
materials which the novelist has appropriated. The history
of the Government, and the history of the people, would be
exhibited in that mode in which alone they can be exhibited
justly, in inseparable conjunction and intermixture. We should
not then have to look for the wars and votes of the Puritans in
Clarendon, and for their phraseology in _Old Mortality_; for
one half of King James in Hume, and for the other half in the
_Fortunes of Nigel_.’
So far as the graphic description of exterior life goes, he has
completely realised his idea.
This union of a flowing fancy with an insensible organisation is very
rare. In general, a delicate fancy is joined with a poetic organisation.
Exactly why, it would be difficult to explain. It is for metaphysicians
in large volumes to explain the genesis of the human faculties; but,
as a fact, it seems to be clear that, for the most part, imaginative
men are the most sensitive to the poetic side of human life and natural
scenery. They are drawn by a strong instinct to what is sublime, grand,
and beautiful. They do not care for the coarse business of life. They
dislike to be cursed with its ordinary cares. Their nature is vivid; it
is interested by all which naturally interests; it dwells on the great,
the graceful, and the grand. On this account it naturally runs away from
history. The very name of it is too oppressive. Are not all such works
written in the _Index Expurgatorius_ of the genial satirist as works
which it was impossible to read? The coarse and cumbrous matter revolts
the soul of the fine and fanciful voluptuary. Take it as you will, human
life is like the earth on which man dwells. There are exquisite beauties,
grand imposing objects, scattered here and there; but the spaces between
these are wide; the mass of common clay is huge; the dead level of vacant
life, of commonplace geography, is immense. The poetic nature cannot bear
the preponderance; it seeks relief in selected scenes, in special topics,
in favourite beauties. History, which is the record of human existence,
is a faithful representative of it, at least in this: the poetic mind
cannot bear the weight of its narrations and the commonplaceness of its
events.
This peculiarity of character gives to Macaulay’s writing one of its
most curious characteristics. He throws over matters which are in their
nature dry and dull,—transactions—budgets—bills,—the charm of fancy which
a poetical mind employs to enhance and set forth the charm of what is
beautiful. An attractive style is generally devoted to what is in itself
specially attractive; here it is devoted to subjects which are often
unattractive, are sometimes even repelling, at the best are commonly
neutral, not inviting attention, if they do not excite dislike. In these
new volumes there is a currency reform, pages on Scotch Presbyterianism,
a heap of Parliamentary debates. Who could be expected to make anything
interesting of such topics? It is not cheerful to read in the morning
papers the debates of yesterday, though they happened last night; one
cannot like a Calvinistic divine when we see him in the pulpit; it is
awful to read on the currency, even when it concerns the bank-notes
which we use. How, then, can we care for a narrative when the divine is
dead, the shillings extinct, the whole topic of the debate forgotten
and passed away? Yet such is the power of style, so great is the charm
of very skilful words, of narration which is always passing forward,
of illustration which always hits the mark, that such subjects as
these not only become interesting, but very interesting. The proof is
evident. No book is so sought after. The Chancellor of the Exchequer
said, ‘all members of Parliament had read it.’ What other books could
ever be fancied to have been read by them? A county member—a real county
member—hardly reads two volumes _per_ existence. Years ago Macaulay said
a History of England might become more in demand at the circulating
libraries than the last novel. He has actually made his words true. It is
no longer a phrase of rhetoric, it is a simple fact.
The explanation of this remarkable notoriety is, the contrast of the
topic and the treatment. Those who read for the sake of entertainment
are attracted by the one; those who read for the sake of instruction are
attracted by the other. Macaulay has something that suits the readers
of Mr. Hallam; he has something which will please the readers of Mr.
Thackeray. The first wonder to find themselves reading such a style;
the last are astonished at reading on such topics—at finding themselves
studying by casualty. This marks the author. Only a buoyant fancy and
an impassive temperament could produce a book so combining weight with
levity.
Something similar may be remarked of the writings of a still
greater man—of Edmund Burke. The contrast between the manner of his
characteristic writings and their matter is very remarkable. He too threw
over the detail of business and of politics those graces and attractions
of manner which seem in some sort inconsistent with them; which are
adapted for topics more intrinsically sublime and beautiful. It was for
this reason that Hazlitt asserted that ‘no woman ever cared for Burke’s
writings.’ The matter, he said, was ‘hard and dry,’ and no superficial
glitter or eloquence could make it agreeable to those who liked what is,
in its very nature, fine and delicate. The charm of exquisite narration
has, in a great degree, in Macaulay’s case, supplied the deficiency; but
it may be _perhaps_ remarked, that some trace of the same phenomenon has
again occurred, from similar causes, and that his popularity, though
great among both sexes, is in some sense more masculine than feminine.
The absence of this charm of narration, to which accomplished women are,
it would seem, peculiarly sensitive, is very characteristic of Burke.
His mind was the reverse of historical. Although he had rather a coarse,
incondite temperament, not finely susceptible to the best influences, to
the most exquisite beauties of the world in which he lived, he yet lived
in that world thoroughly and completely. He did not take an interest,
as a poet does, in the sublime because it is sublime, in the beautiful
because it is beautiful; but he had the passions of more ordinary men in
a degree, and of an intensity, which ordinary men may be most thankful
that they have not. In no one has the intense faculty of intellectual
hatred—the hatred which the absolute dogmatist has for those in whom he
incarnates and personifies the opposing dogma—been fiercer or stronger;
in no one has the intense ambition to rule and govern,—in scarcely any
one has the daily ambition of the daily politician been fiercer and
stronger: he, if any man, cast himself upon his time. After one of his
speeches, peruse one of Macaulay’s: you seem transported to another
sphere. The fierce living interest of the one contrasts with the cold
rhetorical interest of the other; you are in a different part of the
animal kingdom; you have left the viviparous intellect; you have left
products warm and struggling with hasty life; you have reached the
oviparous, and products smooth and polished, cold and stately.
In addition to this impassive nature, inclining him to write on
past transactions—to this fancy, enabling him to adorn and describe
them—Macaulay has a marvellous memory to recall them; and what we may
call the Scotch intellect, enabling him to conceive them. The memory
is his most obvious power. An enormous reading seems always present to
him. No effort seems wanted—no mental excogitation. According to his
own description of a like faculty, ‘it would have been strange indeed
if you had asked for anything that was not to be found in that immense
storehouse. The article you required was not only there, it was ready. It
was in its own compartment. In a moment it was brought down, unpacked,
and explained.’ He has a literary illustration for everything; and his
fancy enables him to make a skilful use of his wealth. He always selects
the exact likeness of the idea which he wishes to explain. And though
it be less obvious, yet his writing would have been deficient in one
of its most essential characteristics if it had not been for what we
have called his Scotch intellect, which is a curious matter to explain.
It may be thought that Adam Smith had little in common with Sir Walter
Scott. Sir Walter was always making fun of him; telling odd tales of
his abstraction and singularity; not obscurely hinting, that a man who
could hardly put on his own coat, and certainly could not buy his own
dinner, was scarcely fit to decide on the proper course of industry and
the mercantile dealings of nations. Yet, when Sir Walter’s own works
come to be closely examined, they will be found to contain a good deal
of political economy of a certain sort,—and not a very bad sort. Any one
who will study his description of the Highland clans in _Waverley_; his
observations on the industrial side (if so it is to be called) of the
Border-life; his plans for dealing with the poor of his own time,—will be
struck not only with a plain sagacity, which we could equal in England,
but with the digested accuracy and theoretical completeness which they
show. You might cut paragraphs, even from his lighter writings, which
would be thought acute in the _Wealth of Nations_. There appears to be
in the genius of the Scotch people—fostered, no doubt, by the abstract
metaphysical education of their Universities, but also, by way of natural
taste, supporting that education, and rendering it possible and popular—a
power of reducing human actions to formulæ or principles. An instance
is now in a high place. People who are not lawyers,—rural people, who
have sense of their own, but have no access to the general repute and
opinion which expresses the collective sense of the great world,—never
can be brought to believe that Lord Campbell is a great man. They read
his speeches in the House of Lords—his occasional flights of eloquence
on the bench—his attempts at pathos—his stupendous _gaucheries_—and they
cannot be persuaded that a person guilty of such things can have really
first-rate talent. If you ask them how he came to be Chief Justice of
England, they mutter something angry, and say ‘Well, Scotchmen _do_ get
on somehow.’ This is really the true explanation. In spite of a hundred
defects, Lord Campbell has the Scotch faculties in perfection. He reduces
legal matters to a sound broad principle better than any man who is now
a judge. He has a steady, comprehensive, abstract, distinct consistency,
which elaborates a formula and adheres to a formula; and it is this
which has raised him from a plain—a very plain—Scotch lawyer to be Lord
Chief Justice of England. Macaulay has this too. Among his more brilliant
qualities, it has escaped the attention of critics; the more so, because
his powers of exposition and expression make it impossible to conceive
for a moment that the amusing matter we are reading is really Scotch
economy.
‘During the interval,’ he tells us, ‘between the Restoration
and the Revolution, the riches of the nation had been rapidly
increasing. Thousands of busy men found every Christmas that,
after the expenses of the year’s housekeeping had been defrayed
out of the year’s income, a surplus remained; and how that
surplus was to be employed was a question of some difficulty.
In our time, to invest such a surplus, at something more than
three per cent., on the best security that has ever been
known in the world, is the work of a few minutes. But in the
seventeenth century, a lawyer, a physician, a retired merchant,
who had saved some thousands, and who wished to place them
safely and profitably, was often greatly embarrassed. Three
generations earlier, a man who had accumulated wealth in a
profession generally purchased real property, or lent his
savings on mortgage. But the number of acres in the kingdom
had remained the same; and the value of those acres, though
it had greatly increased, had by no means increased so fast
as the quantity of capital which was seeking for employment.
Many, too, wished to put their money where they could find
it at an hour’s notice, and looked about for some species of
property which could be more readily transferred than a house
or a field. A capitalist might lend on bottomry or on personal
security; but, if he did so, he ran a great risk of losing
interest and principal. There were a few joint-stock companies,
among which the East India Company held the foremost place;
but the demand for the stock of such companies was far greater
than the supply. Indeed, the cry for a new East India Company
was chiefly raised by persons who had found difficulty in
placing their savings at interest on good security. So great
was that difficulty, that the practice of hoarding was common.
We are told that the father of Pope the poet, who retired from
business in the City about the time of the Revolution, carried
to a retreat in the country a strong box containing nearly
twenty thousand pounds, and took out from time to time what
was required for household expenses; and it is highly probable
that this was not a solitary case. At present the quantity of
coin which is hoarded by private persons is so small, that it
would, if brought forth, make no perceptible addition to the
circulation. But in the earlier part of the reign of William
the Third, all the greatest writers on currency were of opinion
that a very considerable mass of gold and silver was hidden in
secret drawers and behind wainscots.
‘The natural effect of this state of things was, that a crowd
of projectors, ingenious and absurd, honest and knavish,
employed themselves in devising new schemes for the employment
of redundant capital. It was about the year 1688 that the
word stockjobber was first heard in London. In the short
space of four years a crowd of companies, every one of which
confidently held out to subscribers the hope of immense gains,
sprang into existence: the Insurance Company, the Paper
Company, the Lutestring Company, the Pearl-Fishery Company,
the Glass-Bottle Company, the Alum Company, the Blythe Coal
Company, the Swordblade Company. There was a Tapestry Company,
which would soon furnish pretty hangings for all the parlours
of the middle class and for all the bedchambers of the higher.
There was a Copper Company, which proposed to explore the
mines of England, and held out a hope that they would prove
not less valuable than those of Potosi. There was a Diving
Company, which undertook to bring up precious effects from
shipwrecked vessels, and which announced that it had laid in
a stock of wonderful machines, resembling complete suits of
armour. In front of the helmet was a huge glass eye, like that
of a Cyclop; and out of the crest went a pipe, through which
the air was to be admitted. The whole process was exhibited
on the Thames. Fine gentlemen and fine ladies were invited
to the show, were hospitably regaled, and were delighted by
seeing the divers in their panoply descend into the river,
and return laden with old iron and ship’s tackle. There was a
Greenland Fishing Company, which could not fail to drive the
Dutch whalers and herring-busses out of the Northern Ocean.
There was a Tanning Company, which promised to furnish leather
superior to the best that was brought from Turkey or Russia.
There was a society which undertook the office of giving
gentlemen a liberal education on low terms, and which assumed
the sounding name of the Royal Academies Company. In a pompous
advertisement it was announced that the directors of the
Royal Academies Company had engaged the best masters in every
branch of knowledge, and were about to issue twenty thousand
tickets at twenty shillings each. There was to be a lottery:
two thousand prizes were to be drawn; and the fortunate
holders of the prizes were to be taught, at the charge of the
Company, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, conic sections,
trigonometry, heraldry, japanning, fortification, bookkeeping,
and the art of playing the theorbo. Some of these companies
took large mansions, and printed their advertisements in gilded
letters. Others, less ostentatious, were content with ink,
and met at coffee-houses in the neighbourhood of the Royal
Exchange. Jonathan’s and Garraway’s were in a constant ferment
with brokers, buyers, sellers, meetings of directors, meetings
of proprietors. Time-bargains soon came into fashion. Extensive
combinations were formed, and monstrous fables were circulated,
for the purpose of raising or depressing the price of shares.
Our country witnessed for the first time those phenomena with
which a long experience has made us familiar. A mania, of which
the symptoms were essentially the same with those of the mania
of 1720, of the mania of 1825, of the mania of 1845, seized the
public mind. An impatience to be rich, a contempt for those
slow but sure gains which are the proper reward of industry,
patience, and thrift, spread through society. The spirit of
the cogging dicers of Whitefriars took possession of the grave
senators of the City, wardens of trades, deputies, aldermen.
It was much easier and much more lucrative to put forth a
lying prospectus announcing a new stock, to persuade ignorant
people that the dividends could not fall short of twenty per
cent., and to part with five thousand pounds of this imaginary
wealth for ten thousand solid guineas, than to load a ship
with a well-chosen cargo for Virginia or the Levant. Every day
some new bubble was puffed into existence, rose buoyant, shone
bright, burst, and was forgotten.’
You will not find the cause of panics so accurately explained in the
dryest of political economists—in the Scotch M’Culloch.
These peculiarities of character and mind may be very conspicuously
traced through the _History of England_, and in the _Essays_. Their first
and most striking quality is the _intellectual entertainment_ which they
afford. This, as practical readers know, is a kind of sensation which
is not very common, and which is very productive of great and healthy
enjoyment. It is quite distinct from the amusement which is derived from
common light works. The latter is very great; but it is passive. The
mind of the reader is not awakened to any independent action: you see
the farce, but you see it without effort; not simply without painful
effort, but without any perceptible mental activity whatever. Again,
entertainment of intellect is contrasted with the high enjoyment of
consciously following pure and difficult reasoning; such a sensation is
a sort of sublimated pain. The highest and most intense action of the
intellectual powers is like the most intense action of the bodily on a
high mountain. We climb and climb: we have a thrill of pleasure, but
we have also a sense of effort and anguish. Nor is the sensation to be
confounded with that which we experience from the best and purest works
of art. The pleasure of high tragedy is also painful: the whole soul
is stretched; the spirit pants; the passions scarcely breathe: it is
a rapt and eager moment, too intense for continuance—so overpowering,
that we scarcely know whether it be joy or pain. The sensation of
intellectual entertainment is altogether distinguished from these by not
being accompanied by any pain, and yet being consequent on, or being
contemporaneous with, a high and constant exercise of mind. While we read
works which so delight us, we are conscious that we are delighted, and
are conscious that we are not idle. The opposite pleasures of indolence
and exertion seem for a moment combined. A sort of elasticity pervades
us; thoughts come easily and quickly; we seem capable of many ideas;
we follow cleverness till we fancy that we are clever. This feeling is
only given by writers who stimulate the mind just to the degree which is
pleasant, and who do not stimulate it more; who exact a moderate exercise
of mind, and who seduce us to it insensibly. This can only be, of
course, by a charm of style; by the inexplicable _je ne sais quoi_ which
attracts our attention; by constantly raising and constantly satisfying
our curiosity. And there seems to be a further condition. A writer who
wishes to produce this constant effect must not appeal to any single,
separate faculty of mind, but to the whole mind at once. The fancy tires,
if you appeal only to the fancy; the understanding is aware of its
dulness, if you appeal only to the understanding; the curiosity is soon
satiated unless you pique it with variety. This is the very opportunity
for Macaulay. He has fancy, sense, abundance; he appeals to both fancy
and understanding. There is no sense of effort. His books read like an
elastic dream. There is a continual sense of instruction; for who had
an idea of the transactions before? The emotions, too, which he appeals
to are the easy admiration, the cool disapprobation, the gentle worldly
curiosity, which quietly excite us, never fatigue us,—which we could bear
for ever. To read Macaulay for a day, would be to pass a day of easy
thought, of pleasant placid emotion.
Nor is this a small matter. In a state of high civilisation it is no
simple matter to give multitudes a large and healthy enjoyment. The old
bodily enjoyments are dying out; there is no room for them any more;
the complex apparatus of civilisation cumbers the ground. We are thrown
back upon the mind, and the mind is a barren thing. It can spin little
from itself: few that describe what they see are in the way to discern
much. Exaggerated emotions, violent incidents, monstrous characters,
crowd our canvas; they are the resource of a weakness which would obtain
the fame of strength. Reading is about to become a series of collisions
against aggravated breakers, of beatings with imaginary surf. In such
times a book of sensible attraction is a public benefit; it diffuses a
sensation of vigour through the multitude. Perhaps there is a danger
that the extreme popularity of the manner may make many persons fancy
they understand the matter more perfectly than they do: some readers may
become conceited; several boys believe that they too are Macaulays. Yet,
duly allowing for this defect, it is a great good that so many people
should learn so much on such topics so agreeably; that they should feel
that they _can_ understand them; that their minds should be stimulated
by a consciousness of health and power.
The same peculiarities influence the style of the narrative. The art of
narration is the art of writing in hooks-and-eyes. The principle consists
in making the appropriate thought follow the appropriate thought, the
proper fact the proper fact; in first preparing the mind for what is to
come, and then letting it come. This can only be achieved by keeping
continually and insensibly before the mind of the reader some one object,
character, or image, whose variations are the events of the story, whose
unity is the unity of it. Scott, for example, keeps before you the mind
of some one person,—that of Morton in _Old Mortality_, of Rebecca in
_Ivanhoe_, of Lovel in _The Antiquary_,—whose fortunes and mental changes
are the central incidents, whose personality is the string of unity.
It is the defect of the great Scotch novels that their central figure
is frequently not their most interesting topic,—that their interest is
often rather in the accessories than in the essential principle—rather
in that which surrounds the centre of narration than in the centre
itself. Scott tries to meet this objection by varying the mind which he
selects for his unit; in one of his chapters it is one character, in
the next a different; he shifts the scene from the hero to the heroine,
from the ‘Protector of the settlement’ of the story to the evil being
who mars it perpetually: but when narrowly examined, the principle of
his narration will be found nearly always the same,—the changes in the
position—external or mental—of some one human being. The most curiously
opposite sort of narration is that of Hume. He seems to carry a _view_,
as the moderns call it, through everything. He forms to himself a
metaphysical—that perhaps is a harsh word—an intellectual conception
of the time and character before him; and the gradual working out or
development of that view is the principle of his narration. He tells the
story of the conception. You rise from his pages without much remembrance
of or regard for the mere people, but with a clear notion of an
elaborated view, skilfully abstracted and perpetually impressed upon you.
A critic of detail should scarcely require a better task than to show how
insensibly and artfully the subtle historian infuses his doctrine among
the facts, indicates somehow—you can scarcely say how—their relation to
it; strings them, as it were, upon it, concealing it in seeming beneath
them, while in fact it altogether determines their form, their grouping,
and their consistency. The style of Macaulay is very different from
either of these. It is a diorama of political pictures. You seem to begin
with a brilliant picture,—its colours are distinct, its lines are firm;
on a sudden it changes, at first gradually, you can scarcely tell how
or in what, but truly and unmistakably,—a slightly different picture is
before you; then the second vision seems to change,—it too is another and
yet the same; then the third shines forth and fades; and so without end.
The unity of this delineation is the identity—the apparent identity—of
the picture; in no two moments does it seem quite different, in no two is
it identically the same. It grows and alters as our bodies would appear
to alter and grow, if you could fancy any one watching them, and being
conscious of their daily little changes. The events are picturesque
variations; the unity is a unity of political painting, of represented
external form. It is evident how suitable this is to a writer whose
understanding is solid, whose sense is political, whose fancy is fine and
delineative.
To this merit of Macaulay is to be added another. No one describes
so well what we may call the _spectacle_ of a character. The art of
delineating character by protracted description is one which grows in
spite of the critics. In vain is it alleged that the character should
be shown dramatically; that it should be illustrated by events; that it
should be exhibited in its actions. The truth is, that these homilies are
excellent, but incomplete; true, but out of season. There is a utility
in verbal portrait, as Lord Stanhope says there is in painted. Goethe
used to observe, that in society—in a _tête-à-tête_, rather—you often
thought of your companion as if he was his portrait: you were silent;
you did not care what he said; but you considered him as a picture, as
a whole, especially as regards yourself and your relations towards him.
You require something of the same kind in literature; _some_ description
of a man is clearly necessary as an introduction to the story of his
life and actions. But more than this is wanted; you require to have the
object placed before you as a whole, to have the characteristic traits
mentioned, the delicate qualities drawn out, the firm features gently
depicted. As the practice which Goethe hints at is, of all others,
the most favourable to a just and calm judgment of character, so the
literary substitute is essential as a steadying element, as a summary,
to bring together and give a unity to our views. We must see the man’s
face. Without it, we seem to have heard a great deal about the person,
but not to have known him; to be aware that he had done a good deal,
but to have no settled, ineradicable notion what manner of man he was.
This is the reason why critics like Macaulay, who sneer at the practice
when estimating the works of others, yet make use of it at great length,
and, in his case, with great skill, when they come to be historians
themselves. The kind of characters whom Macaulay can describe is
limited—at least we think so—by the bounds which we indicated just now.
There are some men whom he is too impassive to comprehend; but he can
always tell us of such as he does comprehend, what they looked like, and
what they were.
A great deal of this vividness Macaulay of course owes to his style.
Of its effectiveness there can be no doubt; its agreeableness no one
who has just been reading it is likely to deny. Yet it has a defect. It
is not, as Bishop Butler would have expressed it, such a style as ‘is
suitable to such a being as man, in such a world as the present one.’ It
is too omniscient. Everything is too plain. All is clear; nothing is
doubtful. Instead of probability being, as the great thinker expressed
it, ‘the very guide of life,’ it has become a rare exception—an uncommon
phenomenon. You rarely come across anything which is not decided; and
when you do come across it, you seem to wonder that the positiveness,
which has accomplished so much, should have been unwilling to decide
everything. This is hardly the style for history. The data of historical
narratives, especially of modern histories, are a heap of confusion.
No one can tell where they lie, or where they do not lie; what is in
them, or what is not in them. Literature is called the ‘fragment of
fragments;’ little has been written, and but little of that little has
been preserved. So history is a vestige of vestiges; few facts leave any
trace of themselves, any witness of their occurrence; of fewer still
is that witness preserved; a slight track is all anything leaves, and
the confusion of life, the tumult of change, sweeps even that away in
a moment. It is not possible that these data can be very fertile in
certainties. Few people would make anything of them: a memoir here,
a MS. there—two letters in a magazine—an assertion by a person whose
veracity is denied,—these are the sort of evidence out of which a flowing
narrative is to be educed; and of course it ought not to be too flowing.
‘If you please, sir, tell me what you do _not_ know,’ was the inquiry of
a humble pupil addressed to a great man of science. It would have been a
relief to the readers of Macaulay if he had shown a little the outside of
uncertainties, which there must be—the gradations of doubt, which there
ought to be—the singular accumulation of difficulties, which must beset
the extraction of a very easy narrative from very confused materials.
This defect in style is, indeed, indicative of a defect in understanding.
Macaulay’s mind is eminently gifted, but there is a want of graduation in
it. He has a fine eye for probabilities, a clear perception of evidence,
a shrewd guess at missing links of fact; but each probability seems to
him a certainty, each piece of evidence conclusive, each analogy exact.
The heavy Scotch intellect is a little prone to this: one figures it as a
heap of formulæ, and if fact _b_ is reducible to formula B, that is all
which it regards; the mathematical mill grinds with equal energy at flour
perfect and imperfect—at matter which is quite certain and at matter
which is only a little probable. But the great cause of this error is,
an abstinence from practical action. Life is a school of probability.
In the writings of every man of patient practicality, in the midst of
whatever other defects, you will find a careful appreciation of the
degrees of likelihood; a steady balancing of them one against another;
a disinclination to make things too clear, to overlook the debit side
of the account in mere contemplation of the enormousness of the credit.
The reason is obvious: action is a business of risk; the real question
is the magnitude of that risk. Failure is ever impending; success is
ever uncertain; there is always, in the very best of affairs, a slight
probability of the former, a contingent possibility of the non-occurrence
of the latter. For practical men, the problem ever is to test the amount
of these inevitable probabilities; to make sure that no one increases too
far; that by a well-varied choice the number of risks may in itself be
a protection—be an insurance to you, as it were, against the capricious
result of any one. A man like Macaulay, who stands aloof from life, is
not so instructed; he sits secure: nothing happens in his study: he does
not care to test probabilities; he loses the detective sensation.
Macaulay’s so-called inaccuracy is likewise a phase of this defect.
Considering the enormous advantages which a picturesque style gives to
ill-disposed critics; the number of points of investigation which it
suggests; the number of assertions it makes, sentence by sentence; the
number of ill-disposed critics that there are in the world; remembering
Macaulay’s position,—set on a hill to be spied at by them,—he can
scarcely be thought an inaccurate historian. Considering all things,
they have found few certain blunders, hardly any direct mistakes. Every
sentence of his style requires minute knowledge; the vivid picture has
a hundred details; each of those details must have an evidence, an
authority, a proof. An historian like Hume passes easily over a period;
his chart is large; if he gets the conspicuous headlands, the large
harbours, duly marked, he does not care. Macaulay puts in the depth of
each wave, every remarkable rock, every tree on the shore. Nothing gives
a critic so great an advantage. It is difficult to do this for a volume;
simple for a page. It is easy to select a particular event, and learn all
which any one can know about it; examine Macaulay’s descriptions, say he
is wrong, that X is not buried where he asserts, that a little boy was
one year older than he states. But how would the critic manage, if he had
to work out all this for a million facts, for a whole period? Few men, we
suspect, would be able to make so few errors of simple and provable fact.
On the other hand, few men would arouse a sleepy critic by such startling
assertion. If Macaulay finds a new theory, he states it as a fact. Very
likely it really is the most probable theory; at any rate, we know of
no case in which his theory is not one among the most plausible. If it
had only been so stated, it would have been well received. His view of
Marlborough’s character, for instance, is a specious one; it has a good
deal of evidence, a large amount of real probability, but it has scarcely
more. Marlborough _may_ have been as bad as is said, but we can hardly be
_sure_ of it at this time.
Macaulay’s ‘party-spirit’ is another consequence of his positiveness.
When he inclines to a side, he inclines to it too much. His opinions are
a shade too strong; his predilections some degrees at least too warm.
William is too perfect, James too imperfect. The Whigs are a trifle
like angels; the Tories like, let us say, ‘our inferiors.’ Yet this is
evidently an honest party-spirit. It does not lurk in the corners of
sentences, it is not insinuated without being alleged; it does not,
like the unfairness of Hume, secrete itself so subtly in the turns of
the words, that when you look to prove it, it is gone. On the contrary,
it rushes into broad day. William is loaded with panegyric; James is
always spoken evil of. Hume’s is the artful pleading of a hired advocate;
Macaulay’s the bold eulogy of a sincere friend. As far as effect goes,
this is an error. The very earnestness of the affection leads to a
reaction; we are tired of having William called the ‘just;’ we cannot
believe so many pages; ‘all that’ can scarcely be correct. As we said, if
the historian’s preference for persons and parties had been duly tempered
and mitigated, if the probably good were only said to be probably good,
if the rather bad were only alleged to be rather bad, the reader would
have been convinced, and the historian would have escaped the savage
censure of envious critics.
The one thing which detracts from the pleasure of reading these
volumes, is the doubt whether they should have been written. Should not
these great powers be reserved for great periods? Is this abounding,
picturesque style suited for continuous history? Are small men to be so
largely described? Should not admirable delineation be kept for admirable
people? We think so. You do not want Raphael to paint sign-posts, or
Palladio to build dirt-pies. Much of history is necessarily of little
value,—the superficies of circumstance, the scum of events. It is very
well to have it described, indeed you must have it described; the chain
must be kept complete; the narrative of a country’s fortunes will not
allow of breaks or gaps. Yet all things need not be done equally well.
The life of a great painter is short. Even the industry of Macaulay will
not complete this history. It is a pity to spend such powers on such
events. It would have been better to have some new volumes of essays
solely on great men and great things. The diffuseness of the style
would have been then in place; we could have borne to hear the smallest
_minutiæ_ of magnificent epochs. If an inferior hand had executed
the connecting-links, our notions would have acquired an insensible
perspective; the works of the great artist, the best themes, would have
stood out from the canvas. They are now confused by the equal brilliancy
of the adjacent inferiorities.
Much more might be said on this narrative. As it will be read for very
many years, it will employ the critics for very many years. It would be
unkind to make all the best observations. Something, as Mr. Disraeli said
in a budget-speech, something should be left for ‘future statements of
this nature.’ There will be an opportunity. Whatever those who come after
may say against this book, it will be, and remain, the ‘Pictorial History
of England.’
_BERANGER._[12]
(1857.)
The invention of books has at least one great advantage. It has
half-abolished one of the worst consequences of the diversity of
languages. Literature enables nations to understand one another. Oral
intercourse hardly does this. In English a distinguished foreigner
says not what he thinks, but what he can. There is a certain intimate
essence of national meaning which is as untranslatable as good poetry.
Dry thoughts are cosmopolitan; but the delicate associations of language
which express character, the traits of speech which mark the man, differ
in every tongue, so that there are not even cumbrous circumlocutions
that are equivalent in another. National character is a deep thing—a shy
thing; you cannot exhibit much of it to people who have a difficulty in
understanding your language; you are in strange society, and you feel you
will not be understood. ‘Let an English gentleman,’ writes Mr. Thackeray,
‘who has dwelt two, four, or ten years in Paris, say at the end of any
given period how much he knows of French society, how many French houses
he has entered, and how many French friends he has made. Intimacy there
is none; we see but the outsides of the people. Year by year we live in
France, and grow grey and see no more. We play _écarté_ with Monsieur
de Trêfle every night; but what do we know of the heart of the man—of
the inward ways, thoughts, and customs of Trêfle? We have danced with
Countess Flicflac Tuesdays and Thursdays ever since the peace; and how
far are we advanced in her acquaintance since we first twirled her round
a room? We know her velvet gown and her diamonds; we know her smiles and
her simpers and her rouge; but the real, rougeless, _intime_ Flicflac we
know not.’[13] Even if our words did not stutter, as they do stutter on
our tongue, she would not tell us what she is. Literature has half mended
this. Books are exportable; the essence of national character lies flat
on a printed page. Men of genius with the impulses of solitude produce
works of art, whose words can be read and re-read and partially taken in
by foreigners to whom they could never be uttered, the very thought of
whose unsympathising faces would freeze them on the surface of the mind.
Alexander Smith has accused poetical reviewers of beginning as far as
possible from their subject. It may seem to some, though it is not so
really, that we are exemplifying this saying in commencing as we have
commenced an article on Béranger.
There are two kinds of poetry—which one may call poems of this world,
and poems not of this world. We see a certain society on the earth held
together by certain relations, performing certain acts, exhibiting
certain phenomena, calling forth certain emotions. The millions of
human beings who compose it have their various thoughts, feelings, and
desires. They hate, act, and live. The social bond presses them closely
together; and from their proximity new sentiments arise which are half
superficial and do not touch the inmost soul, but which nevertheless are
unspeakably important in the actual constitution of human nature, and
work out their effects for good and for evil on the characters of those
who are subjected to their influence. These sentiments of the world, as
one may speak, differ from the more primitive impulses and emotions of
our inner nature as the superficial phenomena of the material universe
from what we fancy is its real essence. Passing hues, transient changes
have their course before our eyes; a multiplex diorama is for ever
displayed; underneath it all we fancy—such is the inevitable constitution
of our thinking faculty—a primitive immovable essence, which is modified
into all the ever-changing phenomena we see, which is the grey granite
whereon they lie, the primary substance whose _débris_ they all are.
Just so from the original and primitive emotions of man, society—the
evolving capacity of combined action—brings out desires which seem new,
in a sense are new, which have no existence out of the society itself,
are coloured by its customs at the moment, change with the fashions of
the age. Such a principle is what we may call social gaiety: the love of
combined amusement which all men feel and variously express, and which
is to the higher faculties of the soul what a gay running stream is to
the everlasting mountain—a light, altering element which beautifies
while it modifies. Poetry does not shrink from expressing such feelings;
on the contrary, their renovating cheerfulness blends appropriately
with her inspiriting delight. Each age and each form of the stimulating
imagination has a fashion of its own. Sir Walter sings in his modernised
chivalry:
‘Waken, lords and ladies gay,
On the mountain dawns the day;
All the jolly chase is here,
With hawk and horse and hunting-spear.
Hounds are in their couples yelling,
Hawks are whistling, horns are knelling,
Merrily, merrily, mingle they:
Waken, lords and ladies gay.
‘Louder, louder chant the lay,
Waken, lords and ladies gay;
Tell them youth and mirth and glee
Run a course as well as we.
Time, stern huntsman, who can balk?
Stanch as hound and fleet as hawk;
Think of this, and rise with day,
Gentle lords and ladies gay.’
The poet of the people, ‘_vilain et très vilain_,’ sings with the pauper
Bohemian:
‘Voir, c’est avoir. Allons courir!
Vie errante
Est chose enivrante.
Voir, c’est avoir. Allons courir!
Car tout voir, c’est tout conquérir.
‘Nous n’avons donc, exempts d’orgueil,
De lois vaines,
De lourdes chaines;
Nous n’avons donc, exempts d’orgueil,
Ni berceau, ni toit, ni cercueil.
Mais croyez-en notre gaîté,
Noble ou prêtre,
Valet ou maître;
Mais, croyez-en notre gaîté,
Le bonheur, c’est la liberté.
‘Oui, croyez-en notre gaîté,
Noble ou prêtre,
Valet ou maître;
Oui, croyez-en notre gaîté,
Le bonheur, c’est la liberté.’
The forms of these poems of social amusement are, in truth, as various
as the social amusement itself. The variety of the world, singularly
various as it everywhere is, is nowhere so various as in that. Men have
more ways of amusing themselves than of doing anything else they do. But
the essence—the characteristic—of these poems everywhere is, that they
express more or less well the lighter desires of human nature;—those that
have least of unspeakable depth, partake most of what is perishable and
earthly, and least of the immortal soul. The objects of these desires
are social accidents; excellent, perhaps, essential, possibly—so is
human nature made—in one form and variety or another, to the well-being
of the soul, yet in themselves transitory, fleeting, and in other moods
contemptible. The old saying was, that to endure solitude a man must
either be a beast or a god. It is in the lighter play of social action,
in that which is neither animal nor divine, which in its half-way
character is so natural to man, that these poems of society, which we
have called poems of amusement, have their place.
This species does not, however, exhaust the whole class. Society gives
rise to another sort of poems, differing from this one as contemplation
differs from desire. Society may be thought of as an object. The varied
scene of men,—their hopes, fears, anxieties, maxims, actions,—presents
a sight more interesting to man than any other which has ever existed,
or which can exist; and it may be viewed in all moods of mind, and with
the change of inward emotion as the external object seems to change: not
that it really does so, but that some sentiments are more favourable to
clear-sightedness than others are; and some bring before us one aspect
of the subject, and fix our attention upon it, others a different one,
and bind our minds to that likewise. Among the most remarkable of these
varied views is the world’s view of itself. The world, such as it is,
has made up its mind what it is. Childishly deceivable by charlatans
on every other subject,—imposed on by pedantry, by new and unfounded
science, by ancient and unfounded reputation, a prey to pomposity,
overrun with recondite fools, ignorant of all else,—society knows itself.
The world knows a man of the world. A certain tradition pervades it; a
_disciplina_ of the market-place teaches what the collective society of
men has ever been, and what, so long as the nature of man is the same, it
cannot and will not cease to be. Literature, the written expression of
human nature in every variety, takes up this variety likewise. Ancient
literature exhibits it from obvious causes in a more simple manner
than modern literature can. Those who are brought up in times like the
present necessarily hear a different set of opinions, fall in with
other words, are under the shadow of a higher creed. In consequence,
they cannot have the simple _naïveté_ of the old world; they cannot
speak with easy equanimity of the fugitiveness of life, the necessity of
death, of goodness as a mean, of sin as an extreme. The theory of the
universe has ceased to be an open question. Still the spirit of Horace
is alive, and as potent as that of any man. His tone is that of prime
ministers; his easy philosophy is that of courts and parliaments; you
may hear his words where no other foreign words are ever heard. He is
but the extreme and perfect type of a whole class of writers, some of
whom exist in every literary age, and who give an expression to what we
may call the poetry of equanimity, that is, the world’s view of itself;
its self-satisfaction, its conviction that you must bear what comes,
not hope for much, think _some_ evil, never be excited, admire little,
and then you will be at peace. This creed does not sound attractive in
description. Nothing, it has been said, is so easy as to be ‘religious
on paper:’ on the other hand, it is rather difficult to be worldly in
speculation; the mind of man, when its daily maxims are put before
it, revolts from anything so stupid, so mean, so poor. It requires a
consummate art to reconcile men in print to that moderate and insidious
philosophy which creeps into all hearts, colours all speech, influences
all action. We may not stiffen common sense into a creed; our very
ambition forbids:—
‘It hears a voice within us tell
Calm’s not life’s crown, though calm is well:
’Tis all perhaps which man acquires;
But ’tis not what our youth desires.’
Still a great artist may succeed in making ‘calm’ interesting. Equanimity
has its place in literature; the poetry of equipoise is possible. Poems
of society have, thus, two divisions: that which we mentioned first,
the expression of the feelings which are called out by the accidents
of society; next, the harmonised expression of that philosophy of
indifference with which the world regards the fortunes of individuals and
its own.
We have said that no modern nation can produce literature embodying
this kind of cool reflection and delineation as it was once produced.
By way of compensation, however, it may be, it no doubt is, easier now
to produce the lyrical kind of poems of society—the light expression
of its light emotions—than it was in ancient times. Society itself is
better. There is something hard in Paganism, which is always felt even
in the softest traits of the most delicate society in antiquity. The
social influence of women in modern times gives an interest, a little
pervading excitement, to social events. Civilisation, besides, has made
comfort possible; it has, at least in part, created a scene in which
society can be conducted. Its petty conveniences may or may not be
great benefits according to a recondite philosophy; but there can be
no doubt that for actual men and women in actual conversation it is of
the greatest importance that their feet should not be cold; that their
eyes and mouths should not be troubled with smoke; that sofas should be
good, and attractive chairs many. Modern times have the advantage of the
ancient in the scenery of flirtation. The little boy complained that you
could not find ‘drawing-room’ in the dictionary. Perhaps even because our
reflections are deeper, our inner life less purely pagan, our apparent
life is softer and easier. Some have said, that one reason why physical
science made so little progress in ancient times was, that people were in
doubt about more interesting things; men must have, it has been alleged,
a settled creed as to human life and human hopes, before they will
attend to shells and snails and pressure. And whether this be so or not,
perhaps a pleasant society is only possible to persons at ease as to what
is beyond society. Those only can lie on the grass who fear no volcano
underneath, and can bear to look at the blue vault above.
Among modern nations it is not difficult to say where we should look for
success in the art of social poetry. ‘Wherever,’ said Mr. Lewes the other
day, ‘the French go, they take what they call their civilisation—that
is, a _café_ and a theatre.’ And though this be a trifle severe, yet in
its essence its meaning is correct. The French have in some manner or
other put their mark on all the externals of European life. The essence
of every country remains little affected by their teaching; but in all
the superficial embellishments of society they have enjoined the fashion;
and the very language in which those embellishments are spoken of, shows
at once whence they were derived. Something of this is doubtless due to
the accidents of a central position, and an early and prolonged political
influence; but more to a certain neatness of nature, a certain finish of
the senses, which enables them more easily than others to touch lightly
the light things of society, to see the _comme-il-faut_. ‘I like,’ said a
good judge, ‘to hear a Frenchman talk; he strikes a light.’ On a hundred
topics he gives the bright sharp edge, where others have only a blunt
approximation.
Nor is this anticipation disappointed. Reviewers do not advance such
theories unless they correspond with known results. For many years the
French have not been more celebrated for memoirs which professedly
describe a real society than they have been for the light social song
which embodies its sentiments and pours forth its spirit. The principle
on which such writings are composed is the taking some incident—not
voluntarily (for the incident doubtless of itself takes a hold on the
poet’s mind)—and out of that incident developing all which there is in
it. A grave form is of course inconsistent with such art. The spirit
of such things is half-mirthful; a very profound meaning is rarely to
be expected; but little incidents are not destitute of meaning, and a
delicate touch will delineate it in words. A profound excitement likewise
such poems cannot produce; they do not address the passions or the
intuitions, the heart or the soul, but a gentle pleasure, half sympathy,
half amusement, is that at which they aim. They do not please us equally
in all moods of mind: sometimes they seem nothing and nonsense, like
society itself. We must not be too active or too inactive, to like them;
the tension of mind must not be too great; in our highest moods the
littlenesses of life are petty; the mind must not be obtusely passive;
light touches will not stimulate a sluggish inaction. This dependence on
the mood of mind of the reader makes it dangerous to elucidate this sort
of art by quotation; Béranger has, however, the following:—
‘_Laideur et Beauté._
‘Sa trop grande beauté m’obsède;
C’est un masque aisément trompeur.
Oui, je voudrais qu’elle fût laide,
Mais laide, laide à faire peur.
Belle ainsi faut-il que je l’aime!
Dieu, reprends ce don éclatant;
Je le demande à l’enfer même:
Qu’elle soit laide et que je l’aime autant.
‘A ces mots m’apparaît le diable;
C’est le père de la laideur.
“Rendons-la,” dit-il, “effroyable,
De tes rivaux trompons l’ardeur.
J’aime assez ces métamorphoses.
Ta belle ici vient en chantant;
Perles, tombez; fanez-vous, roses:
La voilà laide, et tu l’aimes autant.”
‘—Laide! moi? dit-elle étonnée.
Elle s’approche d’un miroir,
Doute d’abord, puis, consternée,
Tombe en un morne désespoir.
“Pour moi seul tu jurais de vivre,”
Lui dis-je, à ses pieds me jetant;
“A mon seul amour il te livre.
Plus laide encore, je t’aimerais autant.”
‘Ses yeux éteints fondent en larmes,
Alors sa douleur m’attendrit.
“Ah! rendez, rendez-lui ses charmes.”
“—Soit!” répond Satan, qui sourit.
Ainsi que naît la fraîche aurore,
Sa beauté renaît à l’instant.
Elle est, je crois, plus belle encore:
Elle est plus belle, et moi je l’aime autant.
‘Vite au miroir elle s’assure
Qu’on lui rend bien tous ses appas;
Des pleurs restent sur sa figure,
Qu’elle essuie en grondant tout bas.
Satan s’envole, et la cruelle
Fuit et s’écrie en me quittant:
“Jamais fille que Dieu fit belle
Ne doit aimer qui peut l’aimer autant.”’
And this is even a more characteristic specimen:
‘_La Mouche._
‘Au bruit de notre gaîté folle,
Au bruit des verres, des chansons,
Quelle mouche murmure et vole,
Et revient quand nous la chassons? (_bis._)
C’est quelque dieu, je le soupçonne,
Qu’un peu de bonheur rend jaloux.
Ne souffrons point qu’elle bourdonne, }
Qu’elle bourdonne autour de nous. } (_bis._)
‘Transformée en mouche hideuse,
Amis, oui, c’est, j’en suis certain,
La Raison, déité grondeuse,
Qu’irrite un si joyeux festin.
L’orage approche, le ciel tonne,
Voilà ce que dit son courroux.
Ne souffrons point qu’elle bourdonne,
Qu’elle bourdonne autour de nous.
‘C’est la Raison qui vient me dire:
“A ton âge on vit en reclus.
Ne bois plus tant, cesse de rire,
Cesse d’aimer, ne chante plus.”
Ainsi son beffroi toujours sonne
Aux lueurs des feux les plus doux.
Ne souffrons point qu’elle bourdonne,
Qu’elle bourdonne autour de nous.
‘C’est la Raison, gare à Lisette!
Son dard la menace toujours.
Dieux! il perce la collerette:
Le sang coule! accourez, Amours!
Amours! poursuivez la félonne;
Qu’elle expire enfin sous vos coups.
Ne souffrons point qu’elle bourdonne,
Qu’elle bourdonne autour de nous.
‘Victoire! amis, elle se noie
Dans l’aï que Lise a versé.
Victoire! et qu’aux mains de la Joie
Le sceptre enfin soit replacé. (_bis._)
Un souffle ébranle sa couronne;
Une mouche nous troublait tous.
Ne craignons plus qu’elle bourdonne, }
Qu’elle bourdonne autour de nous.’ } (_bis._)
To make poetry out of a fly is a difficult operation. It used to be said
of the Lake school of criticism, in Mr. Wordsworth’s early and more rigid
days, that there was no such term as ‘elegant’ in its nomenclature. The
reason is that, dealing, or attempting to deal, only with the essential
aboriginal principles of human nature, that school had no room and no
occasion for those minor contrivances of thought and language which are
necessary to express the complex accumulation of little feelings, the
secondary growth of human emotion. The underwood of nature is ‘elegant;’
the bare ascending forest-tree despises what is so trivial,—it is grave
and solemn. To such verses, on the other hand, as have been quoted,
‘elegance’ is essential; the delicate finish of fleeting forms is the
only excellence they can have.
The characteristic deficiencies of French literature have no room to
show themselves in this class of art. ‘Though France herself denies,’
says a recent writer, ‘yet all other nations with one voice proclaim
her inferiority to her rivals in poetry and romance, and in all the
other elevated fields of fiction. A French Dante, or Michael Angelo,
or Cervantes, or Murillo, or Goethe, or Shakespeare, or Milton, we at
once perceive to be a mere anomaly; a supposition which may, indeed,
be proposed in terms, but which in reality is inconceivable and
impossible.’ In metaphysics, the reason seems to be that the French
character is incapable of being mastered by an unseen idea, without being
so tyrannised over by it as to be incapable of artistic development.
Such a character as Robespierre’s may explain what we mean. His entire
nature was taken up and absorbed in certain ideas; he had almost a vanity
in them; he was of them, and they were of him. But they appear in his
mind, in his speeches, in his life, in their driest and barest form;
they have no motion, life, or roundness. We are obliged to use many
metaphors remotely and with difficulty to indicate the procedure of the
imagination. In one of these metaphors we figure an idea of imagination
as a living thing, a kind of growing plant, with a peculiar form, and
ever preserving its identity, but absorbing from the earth and air all
kindred, suitable, and, so to say, annexable materials. In a mind such
as Robespierre’s, in the type of the fanatic mind, there is no such
thing. The ideas seem a kind of dry hard capsules, never growing, never
enlarging, never uniting. Development is denied them; they cannot expand,
or ripen, or mellow. Dogma is a dry hard husk; poetry has the soft down
of the real fruit. Ideas seize on the fanatic mind just as they do on
the poetical; they have the same imperious ruling power. The difference
is, that in the one the impelling force is immutable, iron, tyrannical;
in the other the rule is expansive, growing, free, taking up from all
around it moment by moment whatever is fit, as in the political world a
great constitution arises through centuries, with a shape that does not
vary, but with movement for its essence and the fluctuation of elements
for its vitality. A thin poor mind like Robespierre’s seems pressed and
hampered by the bony fingers of a skeleton hand; a poet’s is expanded
and warmed at the same time that it is impelled by a pure life-blood of
imagination. The French, as we have said, are hardly capable of this.
When great remote ideas seize upon them at all, they become fanatics.
The wild, chimerical, revolutionary, mad Frenchman has the stiffest of
human minds. He is under the law of his creed; he has not attained to
the higher freedom of the impelling imagination. The prosing rhetoric
of the French tragedy shows the same defect in another form. The ideas
which should have become living realities, remain as lean abstractions.
The characters are speaking officials, jets of attenuated oratory. But
exactly on this very account the French mind has a genius for the poetry
of society. Unable to remove itself into the higher region of imagined
forms, it has the quickest detective insight into the exact relation
of surrounding superficial phenomena. There are two ways of putting
it: either, being fascinated by the present, they cannot rise to what
is not present; or being by defect of nature unable to rise to what is
not present, they are concentrated and absorbed in that which is so. Of
course there ought not to be, but there is, a world of _bonbons_, of
_salons_, of _esprit_. Living in the present, they have the poetry of the
present. The English genius is just the opposite. Our cumbrous intellect
has no call to light artificialities. We do not excel in punctuated
detail or nicely-squared elaboration. It puts us out of patience that
others should. A respectable Englishman murmured in the _Café de Paris_,
‘I wish I had a hunch of mutton.’ He could not bear the secondary
niceties with which he was surrounded. Our art has the same principle.
We excel in strong, noble imagination, in solid stuff. Shakespeare is
tough work; he has the play of the rising energy, the buoyant freedom
of the unbounded mind; but no writer is so destitute of the simplifying
dexterities of the manipulating intellect.
It is dangerous for a foreigner to give an opinion on _minutiæ_ of style,
especially on points affecting the characteristic excellences of national
style. The French language is always neat; all French styles somehow seem
good. But Béranger appears to have a peculiar neatness. He tells us that
all his songs are the production of a painful effort. If so, the reader
should be most grateful; _he_ suffers no pain. The delicate elaboration
of the writer has given a singular currency to the words. Difficult
writing is rarely easy reading. It can never be so when the labour is
spent in piecing together elements not joined by an insensible touch of
imagination. The highest praise is due to a writer whose ideas are more
delicately connected by unconscious genius than other men’s are, and
yet who spends labour and toil in giving the production a yet cunninger
finish, a still smoother connection. The characteristic aloofness of the
Gothic mind, its tendency to devote itself to what is not present, is
represented in composition by a want of care in the pettinesses of style.
A certain clumsiness pervades all tongues of German origin. Instead of
the language having been sharpened and improved by the constant keenness
of attentive minds, it has been habitually used obtusely and crudely.
Light, loquacious Gaul has for ages been the contrast. If you take up a
pen just used by a good writer, for a moment you seem to write rather
well. A language long employed by a delicate and critical society is
a treasure of dexterous felicities. It is not, according to the fine
expression of Mr. Emerson, ‘fossil poetry;’ it is crystallised _esprit_.
A French critic has praised Béranger for having retained the _refrain_,
or burden, ‘_la rime de l’air_,’ as he calls it. Perhaps music is more
necessary as an accompaniment to the poetry of society than it is to
any other poetry. Without a sensuous reminder, we might forget that it
was poetry; especially in a sparkling, glittering, attenuated language,
we might be absorbed as in the defined elegances of prose. In half
trivial compositions we easily forget the little central fancy. The
music prevents this: it gives oneness to the parts, pieces together the
shavings of the intellect, makes audible the flow of imagination.
The poetry of society tends to the poetry of love. All poetry tends that
way. By some very subtle links, which no metaphysician has skilfully
tracked, the imagination, even in effects and employments which seem
remote, is singularly so connected. One smiles to see the feeling
recur. Half the poets can scarcely keep away from it: in the high and
dry epic you may see the poet return to it. And perhaps this is not
unaccountable. The more delicate and stealing the sensuous element, the
more the mind is disposed to brood upon it; the more we dwell on it in
stillness, the more it influences the wandering, hovering faculty which
we term imagination. The first constructive effort of imagination is
beyond the limit of consciousness; the faculty works unseen. But we
know that it works in a certain soft leisure only: and this in ordinary
minds is almost confined to, in the highest is most commonly accompanied
by, the subtlest emotion of reverie. So insinuating is that feeling,
that no poet is alive to all its influences; so potent is it, that the
words of a great poet, in our complex modern time, are rarely ever free
from its traces. The phrase ‘stealing calm,’ which most naturally and
graphically describes the state of soul in which the imagination works,
quite equally expresses, it is said, the coming in and continuance of the
not uncommon emotion. Passing, however, from such metaphysics, there is
no difficulty in believing that the poetry of society will tend to the
most romantic part of society,—away from aunts and uncles, antiquaries
and wigs, to younger and pleasanter elements. The talk of society does
so, probably its literature will do so likewise. There are, nevertheless,
some limiting considerations, which make this tendency less all-powerful
than we might expect it to be. In the first place, the poetry of society
cannot deal with passion. Its light touch is not competent to express
eager, intense emotion. Rather, we should say, the essential nature
of the poetry of amusement is inconsistent with those rugged, firm,
aboriginal elements which passion brings to the surface. The volcano is
inconsistent with careless talk; you cannot comfortably associate with
lava. Such songs as those of Burns are the very antithesis to the levity
of society. A certain explicitness pervades them:
‘Come, let me take thee to my breast,
And pledge we ne’er shall sunder;
And I shall spurn as vilest dust
The warld’s wealth and grandeur.’
There is a story of his having addressed a lady in society, some time
after he came to Edinburgh, in this direct style, and being offended that
she took notice of it. The verses were in English, and were not intended
to mean anything particular, only to be an elegant attention; but you
might as well ask a young lady to take brandy with you as compliment
her in this intense manner. The eager peasant-poet was at fault in
the polished refinements of the half-feeling drawing-room. Again, the
poetry of society can scarcely deal with affection. No poetry, except
in hints, and for moments, perhaps ever can. You might as well tell
secrets to the town-crier. The essence of poetry somehow is publicity.
It is very odd when one reads many of the sentiments which are expressed
there,—the brooding thought, the delicate feeling, the high conception.
What is the use of telling these to the mass of men? Will the grocer feel
them?—will the greasy butcher in the blue coat feel them? Are there not
some emphatic remarks by Lord Byron on Mr. Sanders (‘the d—d saltfish
seller’ of Venice), who could not appreciate _Don Juan_? Nevertheless,
for some subtle reason or other, poets do crave, almost more than other
men, the public approbation. To have a work of art in your imagination,
and that no one else should know of it, is a great pain. But even this
craving has its limits. Art can only deal with the universal. Characters,
sentiments, actions, must be described in what in the old language
might be called their conceptual shape. There must always be an idea in
them. If one compares a great character in fiction, say that of Hamlet,
with a well-known character in life, we are struck almost at once by
the typical and representative nature of the former. We seem to have a
more _summary_ conception of it, if the phrase may be allowed, than we
have of the people we know best in reality. Indeed, our notion of the
fictitious character rather resembles a notion of actual persons of whom
we know a little, and but a little,—of a public man, suppose, of whom
from his speeches and writings we know something, but with whom we never
exchanged a word. We generalise a few traits; we do what the historian
will have to do hereafter; we _make_ a man, so to speak, resembling the
real one, but more defined, more simple and comprehensible. The objects
on which affection turns are exactly the opposite. In their essence
they are individual, peculiar. Perhaps they become known under a kind
of confidence; but even if not, nature has hallowed the details of near
life by an inevitable secrecy. You cannot expect other persons to feel
them; you cannot tell your own intellect what they are. An individuality
lurks in our nature. Each soul (as the divines speak) clings to each
soul. Poetry is impossible on such points as these: they seem too sacred,
too essential. The most that it can do is, by hints and little marks in
the interstices of a universalised delineation, to suggest that there is
something more than what is stated, and more inward and potent than what
is stated. Affection as a settled subject is incompatible with art. And
thus the poetry of society is limited on its romantic side in two ways:
first, by the infinite, intense nature of passion, which forces the voice
of art beyond the social tone; and by the confidential, incomprehensible
nature of affection, which will not bear to be developed for the public
by the fancy in any way.
Being so bounded within the ordinary sphere of their art, poets of this
world have contrived or found a substitute. In every country there is a
society which is no society. The French, which is the most worldly of
literatures, has devoted itself to the delineation of this outside world.
There is no form, comic or serious, dramatic or lyrical, in which the
subject has not been treated: the burden is—
‘Lisette, ma Lisette,
Tu m’as trompé toujours;
Mais vive la grisette!
Je veux, Lisette,
Boire à nos amours.’
There is obviously no need of affection in _this_ society. The whole
plot of the notorious novel, _La Dame aux Camélias_,—and a very
remarkable one it is,—is founded on the incongruity of real feeling
with this world, and the singular and inappropriate consequences which
result, if, by any rare chance, it does appear there. Passion is almost
_à fortiori_ out of the question. The depths of human nature have nothing
to do with this life. On this account, perhaps, it is that it harmonises
so little with the English literature and character. An Englishman can
scarcely live on the surface; his passions are too strong, his power
of _finesse_ too little. Accordingly, since Defoe, who treated the
subject with a coarse matter-of-factness, there has been nothing in our
literature of this kind—nothing at least professedly devoted to it. How
far this is due to real excellence, how far to the _bourgeois_ and not
very outspoken temper of our recent writers, we need not in this place
discuss. There is no occasion to quote in this country the early poetry
of Béranger, at least not the sentimental part of it. We may take, in
preference, one of his poems written in old, or rather in middle age:
‘_Cinquante Ans._
‘Pourquoi ces fleurs? est-ce ma fête?
Non; ce bouquet vient m’annoncer
Qu’un demi-siècle sur ma tête
Achève aujourd’hui de passer.
Oh! combien nos jours sont rapides!
Oh! combien j’ai perdu d’instants!
Oh! combien je me sens de rides!
Hélas! hélas! j’ai cinquante ans.
‘A cet âge, tout nous échappe;
Le fruit meurt sur l’arbre jauni.
Mais à ma porte quelqu’un frappe;
N’ouvrons point: mon rôle est fini.
C’est, je gage, un docteur qui jette
Sa carte, où s’est logé le Temps.
Jadis, j’aurais dit: C’est Lisette.
Hélas! hélas! j’ai cinquante ans.
‘En maux cuisants vieillesse abonde:
C’est la goutte qui nous meurtrit;
La cécité, prison profonde;
La surdité, dont chacun rit.
Puis la raison, lampe qui baisse,
N’a plus que des feux tremblotants.
Enfants, honorez la vieillesse!
Hélas! hélas! j’ai cinquante ans!
‘Ciel! j’entends la Mort, qui, joyeuse,
Arrive en se frottant les mains.
A ma porte la fossoyeuse
Frappe; adieu, messieurs les humains!
En bas, guerre, famine et peste;
En haut, plus d’astres éclatants.
Ouvrons, tandis que Dieu me reste.
Hélas! hélas! j’ai cinquante ans.
‘Mais non; c’est vous! vous, jeune amie,
Sœur de charité des amours!
Vous tirez mon âme endormie
Du cauchemar des mauvais jours.
Semant les roses de votre âge
Partout, comme fait le printemps,
Parfumez les rêves d’un sage.
Hélas! hélas! j’ai cinquante ans.’
This is the last scene of the _grisette_, of whom we read in so many
songs sparkling with youth and gaiety.
A certain intellectuality, however, pervades Béranger’s love-songs.
You seem to feel, to see, not merely the emotion, but the mind, in the
background viewing that emotion. You are conscious of a considerateness
qualifying and contrasting with the effervescing champagne of the
feelings described. Desire is rarefied; sense half becomes an idea. You
may trace a similar metamorphosis in the poetry of passion itself. If
we contrast such a poem as Shelley’s _Epipsychidion_ with the natural
language of common passion, we see how curiously the intellect can take
its share in the dizziness of sense. In the same way, in the lightest
poems of Béranger we feel that it may be infused, may interpenetrate the
most buoyant effervescence.
Nothing is more odd than to contrast the luxurious and voluptuous nature
of much of Béranger’s poetry with the circumstances of his life. He never
in all his productive time had more than 80_l._ a year; the smallest
party of pleasure made him live, he tells us himself, most ascetically
for a week; so far from leading the life of a Sybarite, his youth was
one of anxiety and privation. A more worldly poet has probably never
written, but no poet has shown in life so philosophic an estimate of
this world’s goods. His origin is very unaristocratic. He was born in
August 1780, at the house of his grandfather, a poor old tailor. Of his
mother we hear nothing. His father was a speculative, sanguine man, who
never succeeded. His principal education was given him by an aunt, who
taught him to read and to write, and perhaps generally incited his mind.
His school-teaching tells of the philosophy of the revolutionary time.
By way of primary school for the town of Péronne, a patriotic member of
the National Assembly had founded an _institut d’enfants_. ‘It offered,’
we are told, ‘at once the image of a club and that of a camp; the boys
wore a military uniform; at every public event they named deputations,
delivered orations, voted addresses: letters were written to the citizen
Robespierre and the citizen Tallien.’ Naturally, amid such great affairs
there was no time for mere grammar; they did not teach _Latin_. Nor did
Béranger ever acquire any knowledge of that language; and he may be said
to be destitute of what is in the usual sense called culture. Accordingly
it has in these days been made a matter of wonder by critics, whom we
may think pedantic, that one so destitute should be able to produce such
works. But a far keener judge has pronounced the contrary. Goethe, who
certainly did not undervalue the most elaborate and artful cultivation,
at once pronounced Béranger to have ‘a nature most happily endowed,
firmly grounded in himself, purely developed from himself, and quite
in harmony with himself.’ In fact, as these words mean, Béranger, by
happiness of nature or self-attention, has that _centrality_ of mind,
which is the really valuable result of colleges and teaching. He puts
things together; he refers things to a principle; rather, they group
themselves in his intelligence insensibly round a principle. There is
nothing _distrait_ in his genius; the man has attained to be himself;
a cool oneness, a poised personality pervades him. ‘The unlearned,’ it
has been said, ‘judge at random.’ Béranger is not unlearned in this
sense. There is no one who judges more simply, smoothly, and uniformly.
His ideas refer to an exact measure. He has mastered what comes before
him. And though doubtless unacquainted with foreign and incongruous
literatures, he has mastered his own literature, which was shaped by
kindred persons, and has been the expression of analogous natures; and
this has helped him in expressing himself.
In the same way, his poor youth and boyhood have given a reality to his
productions. He seems to have had this in mind in praising the ‘practical
education which I have received.’ He was bred a printer; and the highest
post he attained was a clerkship at the university, worth, as has been
said, 80_l._ per annum. Accordingly he has everywhere a sympathy with the
common people, an unsought familiarity with them and their life. Sybarite
poetry commonly wants this. The aristocratic nature is superficial; it
relates to a life protected from simple wants, depending on luxurious
artifices. ‘Mamma,’ said the simple-minded nobleman, ‘when poor people
have no bread, why do not they eat buns? they are much better.’ An
over-perfumed softness pervades the poetry of society. You see this in
the songs of Moore, the best of the sort we have; all is beautiful, soft,
half-sincere. There is a little falsetto in the tone, everything reminds
you of the drawing-room and the _pianoforte_; and not only so—for all
poetry of society must in a measure do this—but it seems fit for no other
scene. Naturalness is the last word of praise that would be suitable. In
the scented air we forget that there is a _pavé_ and a multitude. Perhaps
France is of all countries which have ever existed the one in which
we might seek an exception from this luxurious limitation. A certain
_égalité_ may pervade its art as its society. There is no such difference
as with us between the shoeblack and the gentleman. A certain refinement
is very common; an extreme refinement possibly rare. Béranger was able to
write his poems in poverty: they are popular with the poor.
A success even greater than what we have described as having been
achieved by Béranger in the first class of the poems of society—that of
amusement—has been attained by him in the second class, expressive of
epicurean speculation. Perhaps it is one of his characteristics that
the two are for ever running one into another. There is animation in
his thinking; there is meaning in his gaiety. It requires no elaborate
explanation to make evident the connection between scepticism and
luxuriousness. Every one thinks of the Sadducee as in cool halls and soft
robes; no one supposes that the Sybarite believes. Pain not only purifies
the mind, but deepens the nature. A simple, happy life is animal; it
is pleasant, and it perishes. All writers who have devoted themselves
to the explanation of this world’s view of itself are necessarily in a
certain measure Sadducees. The world is Sadducee itself; it cannot be
anything else without recognising a higher creed, a more binding law,
a more solemn reality—without ceasing to be the world. Equanimity is
incredulous; impartiality does not care; an indifferent politeness is
sceptical. Though not a single speculative opinion is expressed, we may
feel this in _Roger Bontemps_:—
‘_Roger Bontemps._
‘Aux gens atrabilaires
Pour exemple donné,
En un temps de misères
Roger Bontemps est né.
‘Vivre obscur à sa guise,
Narguer les mécontents:
Eh gai! c’est la devise
Du gros Roger Bontemps.
‘Du chapeau de son père
Coiffé dans les grands jours,
De roses ou de lierre
Le rajeunir toujours;
Mettre un manteau de bure,
Vieil ami de vingt ans:
Eh gai! c’est la parure
Du gros Roger Bontemps.
‘Posséder dans sa hutte
Une table, un vieux lit,
Des cartes, une flûte,
Un broc que Dieu remplit,
Un portrait de maîtresse,
Un coffre et rien dedans:
Eh gai! c’est la richesse
Du gros Roger Bontemps.
‘Aux enfans de la ville
Montrer de petits jeux;
Etre un faiser habile
De contes graveleux;
Ne parler que de danse
Et d’almanachs chantants:
Eh gai! c’est la science
Du gros Roger Bontemps.
‘Faute de vin d’élite,
Sabler ceux du canton;
Préférer Marguerite
Aux dames du grand ton;
De joie et de tendresse
Remplir tous ses instants:
Eh gai! c’est la sagesse
Du gros Roger Bontemps.
‘Dire au Ciel: Je me fie,
Mon père, à ta bonté;
De ma philosophie
Pardonne la gaîté;
Que ma saison dernière
Soit encore un printemps:
Eh gai! c’est la prière
Du gros Roger Bontemps.
‘Vous, pauvres pleins d’envie,
Vous, riches désireux,
Vous, dont le char dévie
Après un cours heureux;
Vous, qui perdrez peut-être
Des titres éclatants,
Eh gai! prenez pour maître
Le gros Roger Bontemps.’
At the same time, in Béranger the scepticism is not extreme. The
skeleton is not paraded. That the world is a passing show, a painted
scene, is admitted; you seem to know that it is all acting and rouge and
illusion: still the pleasantness of the acting is dwelt on, the rouge
is never rubbed off, the dream runs lightly and easily. No nightmare
haunts you, you have no uneasy sense that you are about to awaken.
Persons who require a sense of reality may complain; pain is perhaps
necessary to sharpen their nerves, a tough effort to harden their
consciousness: but if you pass by this objection of the threshold, if
you admit the possibility of a superficial and fleeting world, you will
not find a better one than Béranger’s world. Suppose all the world
were a _restaurant_, his is a good _restaurant_; admit that life is an
effervescing champagne, his is the best for the moment.
In several respects Béranger contrasts with Horace, the poet whom in
general he most resembles. The song of _Roger Bontemps_ suggests one of
the most obvious differences. It is essentially democratic. As we have
said before, Béranger is the poet of the people; he himself says, _Le
peuple c’est ma muse_. Throughout Horace’s writings, however much he may
speak, and speak justly, of the simplicity of his tastes, you are always
conscious that his position is exceptional. Everybody cannot be the
friend of Mæcenas; every cheerful man of the world cannot see the springs
of the great world. The intellect of most self-indulgent men must satisfy
itself with small indulgences. Without a hard ascent you can rarely see
a great view. Horace had the almost unequalled felicity of watching the
characters and thoughts and tendencies of the governors of the world, the
nicest manipulation of the most ingenious statesmen, the inner tastes and
predilections which are the origin of the most important transactions;
and yet had the ease and pleasantness of the common and effortless life.
So rare a fortune cannot be a general model; the gospel of Epicureanism
must not ask a close imitation of one who had such very special
advantages. Béranger gives the acceptors of that creed a commoner type.
Out of nothing but the most ordinary advantages—the garret, the almost
empty purse, the not over-attired _grisette_—he has given them a model of
the sparkling and quick existence for which their fancy is longing. You
cannot imagine commoner materials. In another respect Horace and Béranger
are remarkably contrasted. Béranger, sceptical and indifferent as he is,
has a faith in, and zeal for, liberty. It seems odd that he should care
for that sort of thing; but he does care for it. Horace probably had a
little personal shame attaching to such ideas. No regimental officer of
our own time can have ‘joined’ in a state of more crass ignorance, than
did the stout little student from Athens in all probability join the
army of Brutus; the legionaries must have taken the measure of him, as
the sergeants of our living friends. Anyhow he was not partial to such
reflections; zeal for political institutions is quite as foreign to him
as any other zeal. A certain hope in the future is characteristic of
Béranger—
‘Qui découvrit un nouveau monde?
Un fou qu’on raillait en tout lieu.’
Modern faith colours even bystanding scepticism. Though probably with no
very accurate ideas of the nature of liberty, Béranger believes that it
is a great good, and that France will have it.
The point in which Béranger most resembles Horace is that which is the
most essential in the characters of them both—their geniality. This
is the very essence of the poems of society; it springs in the verses
of amusement, it harmonises with acquiescing sympathy the poems of
indifference. And yet few qualities in writing are so rare. A certain
malevolence enters into literary ink; the point of the pen pricks. Pope
is the very best example of this. With every desire to imitate Horace,
he cannot touch any of his subjects, or any kindred subjects, without
infusing a bitter ingredient. It is not given to the children of men to
be philosophers without envy. Lookers-on can hardly bear the spectacle
of the great world. If you watch the carriages rolling down to the House
of Lords, you will try to depreciate the House of Lords. Idleness is
cynical. Both Béranger and Horace are exceptions to this. Both enjoy
the roll of the wheels; both love the glitter of the carriages; neither
is angry at the sun. Each knows that he is as happy as he can be—that
he is all that he can be in his contemplative philosophy. In his means
of expression for the purpose in hand, the Frenchman has the advantage.
The Latin language is clumsy. Light pleasure was an exotic in the Roman
world; the terms in which you strive to describe it suit rather the
shrill camp and droning law-court. In English, as we hinted just now,
we have this too. Business is in our words; a too heavy sense clogs our
literature; even in a writer so apt as Pope at the _finesse_ of words,
you feel that the solid Gothic roots impede him. It is difficult not
to be cumbrous. The horse may be fleet and light, but the wheels are
ponderous and the road goes heavily. Béranger certainly has not this
difficulty; nobody ever denied that a Frenchman could be light, that the
French language was adapted for levity.
When we ascribed an absence of bitterness and malevolence to Béranger,
we were far from meaning that he is not a satirist. Every light writer
in a measure must be so. Mirth is the imagery of society; and mirth must
make fun of somebody. The nineteenth century has not had many shrewder
critics than its easy natured poet. Its intense dulness particularly
strikes him. He dreads the dreariness of the Academy; pomposity bores
him; formalism tires him; he thinks, and may well think, it dreary to have
‘Pour grands hommes des journalistes,
Pour amusement l’Opéra.’
But skilful as is the mirth, its spirit is genial and good-natured. ‘You
have been making fun of me, Sydney, for twenty years,’ said a friend to
the late Canon of St. Paul’s, ‘and I do not think you have said a single
thing I should have wished you not to say.’ So far as its essential
features are concerned, the nineteenth century may say the same of its
musical satirist. Perhaps, however, the Bourbons might a little object.
Clever people have always a _little_ malice against the stupid.
There is no more striking example of the degree in which the gospel of
good works has penetrated our modern society, than that Béranger has
talked of ‘utilising his talent.’ The epicurean poet considers that he
has been a political missionary. Well may others be condemned to the
penal servitude of industry, if the lightest and idlest of skilful men
boasts of being subjected to it. If Béranger thinks it necessary to
think that he has been useful, others may well think so too; let us
accept the heavy doctrine of hard labour; there is no other way to heave
off the rubbish of this world. The mode in which Béranger is anxious
to prove that he made his genius of use, is by diffusing a taste for
liberty, and expressing an enthusiasm for it; and also, as we suppose,
by quizzing those rulers of France who have not shared either the taste
or the enthusiasm. Although, however, such may be the idea of the poet
himself, posterity will scarcely confirm it. Political satire is the
most ephemeral kind of literature. The circumstances to which it applies
are local and temporary; the persons to whom it applies die. A very few
months will make unintelligible what was at first strikingly plain.
Béranger has illustrated this by an admission. There was a delay in
publishing the last volume of his poems, many of which relate to the
years or months immediately preceding the Revolution of 1830; the delay
was not long, as the volume appeared in the first month of 1833, yet he
says that many of the songs relate to the passing occurrences of a period
‘_déjà loin de nous_.’ On so shifting a scene as that of French political
life, the jests of each act are forgotten with the act itself; the eager
interest of each moment withdraws the mind from thinking of or dwelling
on anything past. And in all countries administration is ephemeral; what
relates to it is transitory. Satires on its detail are like the jests of
a public office; the clerks change, oblivion covers their peculiarities;
the point of the joke is forgotten. There are some considerable
exceptions to the saying that foreign literary opinion is a ‘contemporary
posterity’; but in relation to satires on transitory transactions it is
exactly expressive. No Englishman will now care for many of Béranger’s
songs which were once in the mouths of all his countrymen, which coloured
the manners of revolutions, perhaps influenced their course. The fame
of a poet may have a reference to politics; but it will be only to the
wider species, to those social questions which never die, the elements of
that active human nature which is the same age after age. Béranger can
hardly hope for this. Even the songs which relate to liberty can hardly
hope for this immortality. They have the vagueness which has made French
aspirations for freedom futile. So far as they express distinct feeling,
their tendency is rather anti-aristocratic than in favour of simple real
liberty. And an objection to mere rank, though a potent, is neither a
very agreeable nor a very poetical sentiment. Moreover, when the love of
liberty is to be imaginatively expressed, it requires to an Englishman’s
ear a sound bigger and more trumpet-tongued than the voice of Béranger.
On a deeper view, however, an attentive student will discover a great
deal that is most instructive in the political career of the not very
business-like poet. His life has been contemporaneous with the course
of a great change; and throughout it the view which he has taken of the
current events is that which sensible men took at the time, and which
a sensible posterity (and these events will from their size attract
attention enough to insure their being viewed sensibly) is likely to
take. Béranger was present at the taking of the Bastille, but he was then
only nine years old; the accuracy of opinion which we are claiming for
him did not commence so early. His mature judgment begins with the career
of Napoleon; and no one of the thousands who have written on that subject
has viewed it perhaps more justly. He had no love for the despotism of
the Empire, was alive to the harshness of its administration, did not
care too much for its glory, must have felt more than once the social
exhaustion. At the same time, no man was penetrated more profoundly, no
literary man half so profoundly, with the popular admiration for the
genius of the Empire. His own verse has given the truest and most lasting
expression of it:
‘_Les Souvenirs du Peuple._
‘On parlera de sa gloire
Sous le chaume bien longtemps.
L’humble toit, dans cinquante ans,
Ne connaîtra plus d’autre histoire.
Là viendront les villageois,
Dire alors à quelque vieille:
“Par des récits d’autrefois,
Mère, abrégez notre veille.
Bien, dit-on, qu’il nous ait nui,
Le peuple encor le révère,
Oui, le révère.
Parlez-nous de lui, grand’mère;
Parlez-nous de lui.” (_bis._)
‘“Mes enfants, dans ce village,
Suivi de rois, il passa.
Voilà bien longtemps de ça:
Je venais d’entrer en ménage.
A pied grimpant le coteau
Où pour voir je m’étais mise,
Il avait petit chapeau
Avec redingote grise.
Près de lui je me troublai;
Il me dit: ‘Bonjour, ma chère,
Bonjour, ma chère.’”
—“Il vous a parlé, grand’mère!
Il vous a parlé!”
‘“L’an d’après, moi, pauvre femme,
A Paris étant un jour,
Je le vis avec sa cour:
Il se rendait à Notre-Dame.
Tous les cœurs étaient contents;
On admirait son cortége.
Chacun disait: ‘Quel beau temps!
Le ciel toujours le protége.’
Son sourire était bien doux,
D’un fils Dieu le rendait père,
Le rendait père.”
—“Quel beau jour pour vous, grand’mère!
Quel beau jour pour vous!”
‘“Mais, quand la pauvre Champagne
Fut en proie aux étrangers,
Lui, bravant tous les dangers,
Semblait seul tenir la campagne.
Un soir, tout comme aujourd’hui,
J’entends frapper à la porte.
J’ouvre. Bon Dieu! c’était lui,
Suivi d’une faible escorte.
Il s’asseoit où me voilà,
S’écriant: ‘Oh! quelle guerre!
Oh! quelle guerre!”
—“Il s’est assis là, grand’mère!
Il s’est assis là!”
‘“‘J’ai faim,’ dit-il; et bien vite
Je sers piquette et pain bis;
Puis il sèche ses habits,
Même à dormir le feu l’invite.
Au réveil, voyant mes pleurs,
Il me dit: ‘Bonne espérance!
Je cours, de tous ses malheurs,
Sous Paris, venger la France.’
Il part; et, comme un trésor,
J’ai depuis gardé son verre,
Gardé son verre.”
“Vous l’avez encor, grand’mère!
Vous l’avez encor!”
‘“Le voici. Mais à sa perte
Le héros fut entraîné.
Lui, qu’un pape a couronné,
Est mort dans une île déserte.
Longtemps aucun ne l’a cru;
On disait: ‘Il va paraître;
Par mer il est accouru;
L’étranger va voir son maître.’
Quand d’erreur on nous tira,
Ma douleur fut bien amère!
Fut bien amère!”
—“Dieu vous bénira, grand’mère;
Dieu vous bénira.”’
This is a great exception to the transitoriness of political poetry. Such
a character as that of Napoleon displayed on so large a stage, so great a
genius amid such scenery of action, insures an immortality. ‘The page of
universal history’ which he was always coveting, he has attained; and it
is a page which, from its singularity and its errors, its shame and its
glory, will distract the attention from other pages. No one who has ever
had in his mind the idea of Napoleon’s character can forget it. Nothing
too can be more natural than that the French should remember it. His
character possessed the primary imagination, the elementary conceiving
power, in which they are deficient. So far from being restricted to the
poetry of society, he would not have even appreciated it. A certain
bareness marks his mind; his style is curt; the imaginative product is
left rude; there is the distinct abstraction of the military diagram. The
tact of light and passing talk, the detective imagination which is akin
to that tact, and discovers the quick essence of social things,—he never
had. In speaking of his power over popular fancies, Béranger has called
him ‘the greatest poet of modern times.’ No genius can be more unlike his
own, and therefore perhaps it is that he admires it so much. During the
Hundred Days, Béranger says he was never under the illusion, then not
rare, that the Emperor could become a constitutional monarch. The lion,
he felt, would not change his skin. After the return of the Bourbons,
he says, doubtless with truth, that his ‘_instinct du peuple_’ told him
they could never ally themselves with liberal principles, or unite with
that new order of society which, though dating from the Revolution, had
acquired in five-and-twenty years a half-prescriptive right. They and
their followers came in to _take_ possession, and it was impossible they
could unite with what _was_ in possession. During the whole reign of the
hereditary Bourbon dynasty, Béranger was in opposition. Representing the
natural sentiments of the new Frenchman, he could not bear the natural
tendency of the ruling power to the half-forgotten practices of old
France. The legitimate Bourbons were by their position the chieftains of
the party advocating their right by birth; they could not be the kings of
a people; and the poet of the people was against them. After the genius
of Napoleon, all other governing minds would seem tame and contracted;
and Charles X. was not a man to diminish the inevitable feeling. Béranger
despised him. As the poet warred with the weapons of poetry, the
Government retorted with the penalties of State. He was turned out of his
petty clerkship, he was twice imprisoned; but these things only increased
his popularity; and a firm and genial mind, so far from being moved, sang
songs at La Force itself. The Revolution of 1830 was willing to make his
fortune.
‘Je l’ai traitée,’ he says, ‘comme une puissance qui peut avoir
des caprices auxquels il faut être en mesure de résister. Tous
ou presque tous mes amis ont passé au ministère: j’en ai même
encore un ou deux qui restent suspendus à ce mât de cocagne. Je
me plais à croire qu’ils y sont accrochés par la basque, malgré
les efforts qu’ils font pour descendre. J’aurais donc pu avoir
part à la distribution des emplois. Malheureusement je n’ai
pas l’amour des sinécures, et tout travail obligé m’est devenu
insupportable, hors peut-être encore celui d’expéditionnaire.
Des médisants out prétendu que je faisais de la vertu. Fi donc!
je faisais de la paresse. Ce défaut m’a tenu lieu de bien des
qualités; aussi je le recommande à beaucoup de nos honnêtes
gens. Il expose pourtant à de singuliers reproches. C’est à
cette paresse si douce, que des censeurs rigides ont attribué
l’éloignement où je me suis tenu de ceux de mes honorables
amis qui ont eu le malheur d’arriver au pouvoir. Faisant trop
d’honneur à ce qu’ils veulent bien appeler ma bonne tête, et
oubliant trop combien il y a loin du simple bon sens à la
science des grandes affaires, ces censeurs prétendent que mes
conseils eussent éclairé plus d’un ministre. A les croire,
tapi derrière le fauteuil de velours de nos hommes d’état,
j’aurais conjuré les vents, dissipé les orages, et fait nager
la France dans un océan de délices. Nous aurions tous de la
liberté à revendre ou plutôt à donner, car nous n’en savons
pas bien encore le prix. Eh! messieurs mes deux ou trois amis,
qui prenez un chansonnier pour un magicien, on ne vous a donc
pas dit que le pouvoir est une cloche qui empêche ceux qui la
mettent en branle d’entendre aucun autre son? Sans doute des
ministres consultent quelquefois ceux qu’ils ont sous la main:
consulter est un moyen de parler de soi qu’on néglige rarement.
Mais il ne suffirait pas de consulter de bonne foi des gens
qui conseilleraient de même. Il faudrait encore exécuter: ceci
est la part du caractère. Les intentions les plus pures, le
patriotisme le plus éclairé ne le donnent pas toujours. Qui
n’a vu de hauts personnages quitter un donneur d’avis avec une
pensée courageuse, et, l’instant d’après, revenir vers lui,
de je ne sais quel lieu de fascination, avec l’embarras d’un
démenti donné aux résolutions les plus sages? “Oh!” disent-ils,
“nous n’y serons plus repris! quelle galère!” Le plus honteux
ajoute: “Je voudrais bien vous voir à ma place!” Quand un
ministre dit cela, soyez sûr qu’il n’a plus la tête à lui.
Cependant il en est un, mais un seul, qui, sans avoir perdu la
tête, a répété souvent ce mot de la meilleure foi du monde;
aussi ne l’adressait-il jamais à un ami.’
The statesman alluded to in the last paragraph is Manuel, his intimate
friend, from whom he declares he could never have been separated, but
whose death prevented his obtaining political honours. Nobody can
read the above passage without feeling its tone of political sense.
An enthusiasm for, yet half distrust of, the Revolution of July seems
as sound a sentiment as could be looked for even in the most sensible
contemporary. What he has thought of the present dynasty we do not know.
He probably has as little concurred in the silly encomiums of its mere
partisans as in the wild execrations of its disappointed enemies. His
opinion could not have been either that of the English who _fêted_ Louis
Napoleon in 1855, or of those who despised him in 1851. The political
fortunes of France during the last ten years must have been a painful
scene of observation to one who remembered the taking of the Bastille. If
there be such a thing as failure in the world, this looks like it.
Although we are very far from thinking that Béranger’s claims on
posterity are founded on his having utilised his talent in favour of
liberty, it is very natural that he should think or half-think himself
that it is so. His power over the multitude must have given him great
pleasure; it is something to be able to write mottoes for a revolution;
to write words for people to use, and hear people use those words.
The same sort of pleasure which Horace derived from his nearness to
the centre of great action, Béranger has derived from the power which
his thorough sympathy with his countrymen has given him over them.
A political satire may be ephemeral from the rapid oblivion of its
circumstances; but it is not unnatural that the author, inevitably proud
of its effect, may consider it of higher worth than mere verses of
society.
This shrewd sense gives a solidity to the verses of Béranger which the
social and amusing sort of poetry commonly wants; but nothing can redeem
it from the reproach of wanting _back_ thought. This is inevitable in
such literature; as it professes to delineate for us the light essence
of a fugitive world, it cannot be expected to dwell on those deep and
eternal principles on which that world is based. It ignores them as
light talk ignores them. The most opposite thing to the poetry of
society is the poetry of inspiration. There exists, of course, a kind
of imagination which detects the secrets of the universe—which fills
us sometimes with dread, sometimes with hope—which awakens the soul,
which makes pure the feelings, which explains nature, reveals what is
above nature, chastens ‘the deep heart of man.’ Our senses teach us
what the world is; our intuitions where it is. We see the blue and
gold of the world, its lively amusements, its gorgeous if superficial
splendour, its currents of men; we feel its light spirits, we enjoy its
happiness; we enjoy it, and we are puzzled. What is the object of all
this? Why do we do all this? What is the universe _for_? Such a book as
Béranger’s suggests this difficulty in its strongest form. It embodies
the essence of all that pleasure-loving, pleasure-giving, unaccountable
world in which men spend their lives,—which they are compelled to live
in, but which the moment you get out of it seems so odd that you can
hardly believe it is real. On this account, as we were saying before,
there is no book the impression of which varies so much in different
moods of mind. Sometimes no reading is so pleasant; at others you
half-despise and half-hate the idea of it; it seems to sum up and make
clear the littleness of your own nature. Few can bear the theory of their
amusements; it is essential to the pride of man to believe that he is
industrious. We are irritated at literary laughter, and wroth at printed
mirth. We turn angrily away to that higher poetry which gives the outline
within which all these light colours are painted. From the capital of
levity, and its self-amusing crowds; from the elastic _vaudeville_ and
the grinning actors; from _chansons_ and _cafés_ we turn away to the
solemn in nature, to the blue over-arching sky: the one remains, the many
pass; no number of seasons impairs the bloom of those hues, they are as
soft to-morrow as to-day. The immeasurable depth folds us in. ‘Eternity,’
as the original thinker said, ‘is everlasting.’ We breathe a deep breath.
And perhaps we have higher moments. We comprehend the ‘unintelligible
world;’ we see into ‘the life of things;’ we fancy we know whence we
come and whither we go; words we have repeated for years have a meaning
for the first time; texts of old Scripture seem to apply to _us_....
And—and—Mr. Thackeray would say, You come back into the town, and order
dinner at a _restaurant_, and read Béranger once more.
And though this is true—though the author of _Le Dieu des Bonnes Gens_
has certainly no claim to be called a profound divine—though we do not
find in him any proper expression, scarcely any momentary recognition,
of those intuitions which explain in a measure the scheme and idea of
things, and form the back-thought and inner structure of such minds
as ours,—his sense and sympathy with the people enable him, perhaps
compel him, to delineate those essential conditions which constitute the
structure of exterior life, and determine with inevitable certainty the
common life of common persons. He has no call to deal with heaven or the
universe, but he knows the earth; he is restricted to the boundaries of
time, but he understands time. He has extended his delineations beyond
what in this country would be considered correct; _Les Cinq Étages_ can
scarcely be quoted here; but a perhaps higher example of the same kind of
art may be so:
‘_Le Vieux Vagabond._
‘Dans ce fossé cessons de vivre;
Je finis vieux, infirme et las;
Les passants vont dire: “Il est ivre.”
Tant mieux! ils ne me plaindront pas.
J’en vois qui détournent la tête;
D’autres me jettent quelques sous.
Courez vite, allez à la fête:
Vieux vagabond, je puis mourir sans vous.
‘Oui, je meurs ici de vieillesse,
Parce qu’on ne meurt pas de faim.
J’espérais voir de ma détresse
L’hôpital adoucir la fin;
Mais tout est plein dans chaque hospice,
Tant le peuple est infortuné.
La rue, hélas! fut ma nourrice:
Vieux vagabond, mourons où je suis né.
‘Aux artisans, dans mon jeune âge,
J’ai dit: “Qu’on m’enseigne un métier.”
“Va, nous n’avons pas trop d’ouvrage,”
Répondaient-ils, “va mendier.”
Riches, qui me disiez: “Travaille,”
J’eus bien des os de vos repas;
J’ai bien dormi sur votre paille:
Vieux vagabond, je ne vous maudis pas.
‘J’aurais pu voler, moi, pauvre homme;
Mais non: mieux vaut tendre la main.
Au plus, j’ai dérobé la pomme
Qui mûrit au bord du chemin.
Vingt fois pourtant on me verrouille
Dans les cachots, de par le roi.
De mon seul bien on me dépouille:
Vieux vagabond, le soleil est à moi.
‘Le pauvre a-t-il une patrie?
Que me font vos vins et vos blés,
Votre gloire et votre industrie,
Et vos orateurs assemblés?
Dans vos murs ouverts à ses armes
Lorsque l’étranger s’engraissait,
Comme un sot j’ai versé des larmes:
Vieux vagabond, sa main me nourrissait.
‘Comme un insecte fait pour nuire,
Hommes, que ne m’écrasiez-vous!
Ah! plutôt vous deviez m’instruire
A travailler au bien de tous.
Mis à l’abri du vent contraire,
Le ver fût devenu fourmi;
Je vous aurais chéris en frère:
Vieux vagabond, je meurs votre ennemi.’
Pathos in such a song as this enters into poetry. We sympathise with
the essential lot of man. Poems of this kind are doubtless rare in
Béranger. His commoner style is lighter and more cheerful; but no poet
who has painted so well the light effervescence of light society can,
when he likes, paint so well the solid, stubborn forms with which it is
encompassed. The genial, firm sense of a large mind sees and comprehends
all of human life, which lies within the sphere of sense. He is an
epicurean, as all merely sensible men by inevitable consequence are; and
as an epicurean, he prefers to deal with the superficial and gay forms of
life; but he can deal with others when he chooses to be serious. Indeed,
there is no melancholy like the melancholy of the epicurean. He is alive
to the fixed conditions of earth, but not to that which is above earth.
He muses on the temporary, as such; he admits the skeleton, but not the
soul. It is wonderful that Béranger is so cheerful as he is.
We may conclude as we began. In all his works, in lyrics of levity, of
politics, of worldly reflection,—Béranger, if he had not a single object,
has attained a uniform result. He has given us an idea of the essential
French character, such as we fancy it must be, but can never for
ourselves hope to see that it is. We understand the nice tact, the quick
intelligence, the gay precision; the essence of the drama we know—the
spirit of what we have seen. We know his feeling:—
‘J’aime qu’un Russe soit Russe,
Et qu’un Anglais soit Anglais;
Si l’on est Prussien en Prusse,
En France soyons Français.’
He has acted accordingly: he has delineated to us the essential Frenchman.
_MR. CLOUGH’S POEMS._[14]
(1862.)
No one can be more rigid than we are in our rules as to the publication
of remains and memoirs. It is very natural that the friends of a
cultivated man who seemed about to do something, but who died before
he did it, should desire to publish to the world the grounds of their
faith, and the little symptoms of his immature excellence. But though
they act very naturally, they act very unwisely. In the present state
of the world there are too many half-excellent people: there is a
superfluity of persons who have all the knowledge, all the culture, all
the requisite taste,—all the tools, in short, of achievement, but who
are deficient in the latent impulse and secret vigour which alone can
turn such instruments to account. They have all the outward and visible
signs of future success; they want the invisible spirit, which can
only be demonstrated by trial and victory. Nothing, therefore, is more
tedious or more worthless than the posthumous delineation of the possible
successes of one who did not succeed. The dreadful remains of nice young
persons which abound among us prove almost nothing as to the future fate
of those persons, if they had survived. We can only tell that any one
is a man of genius by his having produced some work of genius. Young
men must practise themselves in youthful essays; and to some of their
friends these may seem works not only of fair promise, but of achieved
excellence. The cold world of critics and readers will not, however,
think so; that world well understands the distinction between promise and
performance, and sees that these laudable _juvenilia_ differ from good
books as much as legitimate bills of exchange differ from actual cash.
If we did not believe that Mr. Clough’s poems, or at least several
of them, had real merit, not as promissory germs, but as completed
performances, it would not seem to us to be within our province to notice
them. Nor, if Mr. Clough were now living among us, would he wish us to
do so. The marked peculiarity, and, so to say, the _flavour_ of his
mind, was a sort of truthful scepticism, which made him anxious never
to overstate his own assurance of anything; which disinclined him to
overrate the doings of his friends; and which absolutely compelled him
to underrate his own past writings, as well as his capability for future
literary success. He could not have borne to have his poems reviewed with
‘nice remarks’ and sentimental epithets of insincere praise. He was equal
to his precept:—
‘Where are the great, whom thou wouldst wish to praise thee?
Where are the pure, whom thou wouldst choose to love thee?
Where are the brave, to stand supreme above thee,
Whose high commands would cheer, whose chiding raise thee?
Seek, seeker, in thyself; submit to find
In the stones, bread, and life in the blank mind.’
To offer petty praise and posthumous compliments to a stoic of this
temper, is like buying sugar-plums for St. Simon Stylites. We venture to
write an article on Mr. Clough, because we believe that his poems depict
an intellect in a state which is always natural ‘to such a being as man
in such a world as the present,’ which is peculiarly natural to us just
now; and because we believe that many of these poems are very remarkable
for true vigour and artistic excellence, although they certainly have
defects and shortcomings, which would have been lessened, if not removed,
if their author had lived longer and had written more.
In a certain sense there are two great opinions about everything. There
are two about the universe itself. The world as we know it is this.
There is a vast, visible, indisputable sphere, of which we never lose
the consciousness, of which no one seriously denies the existence, about
the most important part of which most people agree tolerably and fairly.
On the other hand, there is the invisible world, about which men are
not agreed at all, which all but the faintest minority admit to exist
somehow and somewhere, but as to the nature or locality of which there
is no efficient popular demonstration, no such compulsory argument as
will _force_ the unwilling conviction of any one disposed to denial.
As our minds rise, as our knowledge enlarges, as our wisdom grows, as
our instincts deepen, our conviction of this invisible world is daily
strengthened, and our estimate of its nature is continually improved.
But—and this is the most striking peculiarity of the whole subject—the
more we improve, the higher we rise, the nobler we conceive the unseen
world which is in us and about us, in which we live and move, the more
unlike that world becomes to the world which we _do_ see. The divinities
of Olympus were in a very plain and intelligible sense part and parcel
of this earth; they were better specimens than could be found below, but
they belonged to extant species; they were better editions of visible
existences; they were like the heroines whom young men imagine after
seeing the young ladies of their vicinity—they were better and handsomer,
but they were of the same sort; they had never been seen, but they
might have been seen any day. So too of the God with whom the Patriarch
wrestled: he might have been wrestled with even if he was not; he was
that sort of person. If we contrast with these the God of whom Christ
speaks—the God who has not been seen at any time, whom no man hath seen
or can see, who is infinite in nature, whose ways are past finding out,
the transition is palpable. We have passed from gods—from an invisible
world which is similar to, which is a _natural appendix_ to, the world in
which we live,—and we have come to believe in an invisible world, which
is altogether unlike that which we see, which is certainly not opposed
to our experience, but is altogether beyond and unlike our experience;
which belongs to another set of things altogether; which is, as we speak,
transcendental. The ‘possible’ of early barbarism is like the reality of
early barbarism; the ‘may be,’ the ‘great perhaps,’ of late civilisation
is most unlike the earth, whether barbaric or civilised.
Two opinions as to the universe naturally result from this fundamental
contrast. There are plenty of minds like that of Voltaire, who have
simply no sense or perception of the invisible world whatever, who have
no ear for religion, who are in the technical sense unconverted, whom no
conceivable process could convert without altering what to bystanders
and ordinary observers is their identity. They are, as a rule, acute,
sensible, discerning, and humane; but the first observation which the
most ordinary person would make as to them is, that they are ‘limited;’
they understand palpable existence; they elaborate it, and beautify and
improve it; but an admiring bystander, who can do none of these things,
who can beautify nothing, who, if he tried, would only make what is ugly
uglier, is conscious of a latent superiority, which he can hardly help
connecting with his apparent inferiority. We cannot write Voltaire’s
sentences; we cannot make things as clear as he made them; but we do
not much care for our deficiency. Perhaps we think ‘things ought not
to be so plain as all that.’ There is a hidden, secret, unknown side
to this universe, which these picturesque painters of the visible,
these many-handed manipulators of the palpable, are not aware of, which
would spoil their dexterity if it were displayed to them. Sleep-walkers
can tread safely on the very edge of a precipice; but those who see,
cannot. On the other hand, there are those whose minds have not only
been converted, but in some sense _inverted_. They are so occupied with
the invisible world as to be absorbed in it entirely; they have no true
conception of that which stands plainly before them; they never look
coolly at it, and are cross with those who do; they are wrapt up in their
own faith as to an unseen existence; they rush upon mankind with ‘Ah,
there it is! there it is!—don’t you see it?’ and so incur the ridicule of
an age.
The best of us try to avoid both fates. We strive, more or less, to ‘make
the best of both worlds.’ We know that the invisible world cannot be duly
discerned, or perfectly appreciated. We know that we see as in a glass
darkly; but still we look on the glass. We frame to ourselves some image
which we know to be incomplete, which probably is in part untrue, which
we try to improve day by day, of which we do not deny the defects,—but
which nevertheless is our ‘all;’ which we hope, when the accounts are
taken, may be found not utterly _unlike_ the unknown reality. This is,
as it seems, the best religion for finite beings, living, if we may say
so, on the very edge of two dissimilar worlds, on the very line on which
the infinite, unfathomable sea surges up, and just where the queer little
bay of this world ends. We count the pebbles on the shore, and image to
ourselves as best we may the secrets of the great deep.
There are, however, some minds (and of these Mr. Clough’s was one)
which will not accept what appears to be an intellectual destiny. They
struggle against the limitations of mortality, and will not condescend
to use the natural and needful aids of human thought. They will not
_make their image_. They struggle after an ‘actual abstract.’ They feel,
and they rightly feel, that every image, every translation, every mode
of conception by which the human mind tries to place before itself the
Divine mind, is imperfect, halting, changing. They feel, from their own
experience, that there is no one such mode of representation which will
suit their own minds at all times, and they smile with bitterness at the
notion that they could contrive an image which will suit all other minds.
They could not become fanatics or missionaries, or even common preachers
without forfeiting their natural dignity, and foregoing their very
essence. To cry in the streets, to uplift their voice in Israel, to be
‘pained with hot thoughts,’ to be ‘preachers of a dream,’ would reverse
their whole cast of mind. It would metamorphose them into something
which omits every striking trait for which they were remarked, and which
contains every trait for which they were not remarked. On the other hand,
it would be quite as opposite to their whole nature to become followers
of Voltaire. No one knows more certainly and feels more surely that there
is an invisible world, than those very persons who decline to make an
image or representation of it, who shrink with a nervous horror from
every such attempt when it is made by any others. All this inevitably
leads to what common, practical people term a ‘curious’ sort of mind. You
do not know how to describe these ‘universal negatives,’ as they seem to
be. They will not fall into place in the ordinary intellectual world any
how. If you offer them any known religion, they ‘won’t have that;’ if you
offer them no religion, they will not have that either; if you ask them
to accept a new and as yet unrecognised religion, they altogether refuse
to do so. They seem not only to believe in an ‘unknown God,’ but in a God
whom no man can ever know. Mr. Clough has expressed, in a sort of lyric,
what may be called their essential religion:
‘O Thou whose image in the shrine
Of human spirits dwells divine!
Which from that precinct once conveyed,
To be to outer day displayed,
Doth vanish, part, and leave behind
Mere blank and void of empty mind,
Which wilful fancy seeks in vain
With casual shapes to fill again!
O Thou, that in our bosom’s shrine
Dost dwell, unknown because divine!
I thought to speak, I thought to say,
“The light is here,” “Behold the way,”
“The voice was thus” and “Thus the word,”
And “Thus I saw,” and “That I heard,”—
But from the lips that half essayed
The imperfect utterance fell unmade.
O Thou, in that mysterious shrine
Enthroned, as I must say, divine!
I will not frame one thought of what
Thou mayest either be or not.
I will not prate of “thus” and “so,”
And be profane with “yes” and “no,”
Enough that in our soul and heart
Thou, whatso’er Thou mayst be, art.’
It was exceedingly natural that Mr. Clough should incline to some such
creed as this, with his character and in his circumstances. He had by
nature, probably, an exceedingly real mind, in the good sense of that
expression and the bad sense. The actual visible world as it was, and as
he saw it, exercised over him a compulsory influence. The hills among
which he had wandered, the cities he had visited, the friends whom he
knew,—these were his world. Many minds of the poetic sort easily melt
down these palpable facts into some impalpable ether of their own. To
such a mind as Shelley’s the ‘solid earth’ is an immaterial fact; it
is not even a cumbersome difficulty—it is a preposterous imposture.
Whatever may exist, all that _clay_ does not exist; it would be too
absurd to think so. Common persons can make nothing of this dreaminess;
and Mr. Clough, though superficial observers set him down as a dreamer,
could not make much either. To him, as to the mass of men, the vulgar,
outward world was a primitive fact. ‘Taxes _is_ true,’ as the miser
said. Reconcile what you have to say with green peas, for green peas are
certain; such was Mr. Clough’s idea. He could not dissolve the world into
credible ideas and then believe those ideas, as many poets have done.
He could not catch up a creed as ordinary men do. He had a _straining_,
inquisitive, critical mind; he scrutinised every idea before he took it
in; he did not allow the moral forces of life to act as they should; he
was not content to gain a belief ‘by going on living.’ He said,
‘_Action will furnish belief_; but will that belief be the true one?
This is the point, you know.’
He felt the coarse facts of the plain world so thoroughly that he could
not readily take in anything, which did not seem in accordance with them
and like them. And what common idea of the invisible world seems in the
least in accordance with them or like them?
A journal-writer in one of his poems has expressed this:
‘Comfort has come to me here in the dreary streets of the city,
Comfort—how do you think?—with a barrel-organ to bring it.
Moping along the streets, and cursing my day as I wandered,
All of a sudden my ear met the sound of an English psalm-tune.
Comfort me it did, till indeed I was very near crying.
Ah, there is some great truth, partial very likely, but needful,
Lodged, I am strangely sure, in the tones of the English psalm-tune:
Comfort it was at least; and I must take without question
Comfort, however it come, in the dreary streets of the city.
‘What with trusting myself, and seeking support from within me,
Almost I could believe I had gained a religious assurance,
Formed in my own poor soul a great moral basis to rest on.
Ah, but indeed I see, I feel it factitious entirely;
I refuse, reject, and put it utterly from me;
I will look straight out, see things, not try to evade them;
Fact shall be fact for me, and the Truth the Truth as ever,
Flexible, changeable, vague, and multiform, and doubtful.—
Off, and depart to the void, thou subtle, fanatical tempter!’
Mr. Clough’s fate in life had been such as to exaggerate this naturally
peculiar temper. He was a pupil of Arnold’s; one of his best, most
susceptible and favourite pupils. Some years since there was much doubt
and interest as to the effect of Arnold’s teaching. His sudden death, so
to say, cut his life in the middle, and opened a tempting discussion as
to the effect of his teaching when those taught by him should have become
men and not boys. The interest which his own character then awakened, and
must always awaken, stimulated the discussion, and there was much doubt
about it. But now we need doubt no longer. The Rugby ‘men’ are _real_
men, and the world can pronounce its judgment. Perhaps that part of the
world which cares for such things has pronounced it. Dr. Arnold was
almost indisputably an admirable master for a common English boy,—the
small, apple-eating animal whom we know. He worked, he pounded, if the
phrase may be used, into the boy a belief, or at any rate a floating,
confused conception, that there are great subjects, that there are
strange problems, that knowledge has an indefinite value, that life is
a serious and solemn thing. The influence of Arnold’s teaching upon the
majority of his pupils was probably very vague, but very good. To impress
on the ordinary Englishman a general notion of the importance of what is
intellectual and the reality of what is supernatural, is the greatest
benefit which can be conferred upon him. The common English mind is too
coarse, sluggish, and worldly to take such lessons too much to heart. It
is improved by them in many ways, and is not harmed by them at all. But
there are a few minds which are very likely to think too much of such
things. A susceptible, serious, intellectual boy may be injured by the
incessant inculcation of the awfulness of life and the magnitude of great
problems. It is not desirable to take this world too much _au sérieux_;
most persons will not; and the one in a thousand who will, should not.
Mr. Clough was one of those who will. He was one of Arnold’s favourite
pupils, because he gave heed so much to Arnold’s teaching; and exactly
because he gave heed to it, was it bad for him. He required quite another
sort of teaching: to be told to take things easily; not to try to be wise
overmuch; to be ‘something beside critical;’ to go on living quietly
and obviously, and see what truth would come to him. Mr. Clough had to
his latest years what may be noticed in others of Arnold’s disciples,—a
fatigued way of looking at great subjects. It seemed as if he had been
put into them before his time, had seen through them, heard all which
could be said about them, had been bored by them, and had come to want
something else.
A still worse consequence was, that the faith, the doctrinal teaching
which Arnold impressed on the youths about him, was one personal
to Arnold himself, which arose out of the peculiarities of his own
character, which can only be explained by them. As soon as an inquisitive
mind was thrown into a new intellectual atmosphere, and was obliged
to naturalise itself in it, to consider the creed it had learned with
reference to the facts which it encountered and met, much of that creed
must fade away. There were inevitable difficulties in it, which only
the personal peculiarities of Arnold prevented his perceiving, and
which everyone else must soon perceive. The new intellectual atmosphere
into which Mr. Clough was thrown was peculiarly likely to have this
disenchanting effect. It was the Oxford of Father Newman; an Oxford
utterly different from Oxford as it is, or from the same place as it had
been twenty years before. A complete estimate of that remarkable thinker
cannot be given here; it would be no easy task even now, many years after
his influence has declined, nor is it necessary for the present purpose.
Two points are quite certain of Father Newman, and they are the only two
which are at present material. He was undeniably a consummate master of
the difficulties of the creeds of other men. With a profoundly religious
organisation which was hard to satisfy, with an imagination which could
not help setting before itself simply and exactly what different creeds
would come to and mean in life, with an analysing and most subtle
intellect which was sure to detect the weak point in an argument if a
weak point there was, with a manner at once grave and fascinating,—he was
a nearly perfect religious disputant, whatever may be his deficiencies as
a religious teacher. The most accomplished theologian of another faith
would have looked anxiously to the joints of his harness before entering
the lists with an adversary so prompt and keen. To suppose that a youth
fresh from Arnold’s teaching, with a hasty faith in a scheme of thought
radically inconsistent, should be able to endure such an encounter, was
absurd. Arnold flattered himself that he was a principal opponent of Mr.
Newman; but he was rather a principal fellow-labourer. There was but one
quality in a common English boy which would have enabled him to resist
such a reasoner as Mr. Newman. We have a heavy apathy on exciting topics,
which enables us to leave dilemmas unsolved, to forget difficulties,
to go about our pleasure or our business, and to leave the reasoner to
pursue his logic: ‘any how he is very _long_’—_that_ we comprehend.
But it was exactly this happy apathy, this commonplace indifference,
that Arnold prided himself on removing. He objected strenuously to Mr.
Newman’s creed, but he prepared anxiously the very soil in which that
creed was sure to grow. A multitude of such minds as Mr. Clough’s, from
being Arnoldites, became Newmanites.
A second quality in Mr. Newman is at least equally clear. He was much
better skilled in finding out the difficulties of other men’s creeds
than in discovering and stating a distinct basis for his own. In most
of his characteristic works he does not even attempt it. His argument
is essentially an argument _ad hominem_; an argument addressed to the
present creed of the person with whom he is reasoning. He says: ‘Give
up what you hold already, or accept what I now say; for that which you
already hold involves it.’ Even in books where he is especially called on
to deal with matters of first principle, the result is unsatisfactory.
We have heard it said that he has in later life accounted for the
argumentative vehemence of his book _against_ the Church of Rome by
saying: ‘I did it as a duty; I _put_ myself into a state of mind to write
that book.’ And this is just the impression which his arguments give. His
elementary principles seem _made_, not born. Very likely he would admit
the fact, and yet defend his practice. He would say: ‘Such a being as
man is, in such a world as this is, _must_ do so; he must make a venture
for his religion; he may see a greater probability that the doctrine of
the Church is true than that it is false; he may see before he believes
in her that she has greater evidence than any other creed; but he must
do the rest for himself. _By means of his will_ he must put himself into
a new state of mind; he must cast in his lot with the Church here and
hereafter; _then_ his belief will gradually strengthen; he will in time
become sure of what she says.’ He undoubtedly, in the time of his power,
persuaded many young men to try some such process as this. The weaker,
the more credulous, and the more fervent, were able to persevere; those
who had not distinct perceptions of real truth, who were dreamy and
fanciful by nature, persevered without difficulty. But Mr. Clough could
not do so; he felt it was ‘something factitious.’ He began to speak of
the ‘ruinous force of the will,’ and ‘our terrible notions of duty.’ He
ceased to be a Newmanite.
Thus Mr. Clough’s career and life were exactly those most likely to
develop and foster a morbid peculiarity of his intellect. He had, as we
have explained, by nature an unusual difficulty in forming a creed as to
the unseen world; he could not get the visible world out of his head; his
strong grasp of plain facts and obvious matters was a difficulty to him.
Too easily one great teacher inculcated a remarkable creed; then another
great teacher took it away; then this second teacher made him believe
for a time some of his own artificial faith; then it would not do. He
fell back on that vague, impalpable, unembodied religion which we have
attempted to describe.
He has himself given in a poem, now first published, a very remarkable
description of this curious state of mind. He has prefixed to it the
characteristic motto, ‘_Il doutait de tout, même de l’amour_.’ It is the
delineation of a certain love-passage in the life of a hesitating young
gentleman, who was in Rome at the time of the revolution of 1848; who
could not make up his mind about the revolution, who could not make up
his mind whether he liked Rome, who could not make up his mind whether
he liked the young lady, who let her go away without him, who went in
pursuit of her, and could not make out which way to look for her,—who,
in fine, has some sort of religion, but cannot himself tell what it is.
The poem was not published in the author’s lifetime, and there are some
lines which we are persuaded he would have further polished, and some
parts which he would have improved, if he had seen them in print. It
is written in conversational hexameters, in a tone of semi-satire and
half-belief. Part of the commencement is a good example of them:
‘Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand, but
_Rubbishy_ seems the word that most exactly would suit it.
AU the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings,
All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages,
Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future.
Would to Heaven the old Goths had made a cleaner sweep of it!
Would to Heaven some new ones would come and destroy these churches!
However, one can live in Rome as also in London.
Rome is better than London, because it is other than London.
It is a blessing, no doubt, to be rid, at least for a time, of
All one’s friends and relations,—yourself (forgive me!) included,—
All the _assujettissement_ of having been what one has been,
What one thinks one is, or thinks that others suppose one;
Yet, in despite of all, we turn like fools to the English.
Vernon has been my fate; who is here the same that you knew him,—
Making the tour, it seems, with friends of the name of Trevellyn.
‘Rome disappoints me still; but I shrink and adapt myself to it.
Somehow a tyrannous sense of a superincumbent oppression
Still, wherever I go, accompanies ever, and makes me
Feel like a tree (shall I say?) buried under a ruin of brickwork.
Rome, believe me, my friend, is like its own Monte Testaceo,
Merely a marvellous mass of broken and castaway wine-pots.
Ye Gods! what do I want with this rubbish of ages departed,
Things that Nature abhors, the experiments that she has failed in?
What do I find in the Forum? An archway and two or three pillars.
Well, but St. Peter’s? Alas, Bernini has filled it with sculpture!
No one can cavil, I grant, at the size of the great Coliseum.
Doubtless the notion of grand and capacious and massive amusement,
This the old Romans had; but tell me, is this an idea?
Yet of solidity much, but of splendour little is extant:
“Brickwork I found thee, and marble I left thee!” their Emperor vaunted;
“Marble I thought thee, and brickwork I find thee!” the Tourist
may answer.’
As he goes on, he likes Rome rather better, but hazards the following
imprecation on the Jesuits:—
‘Luther, they say, was unwise; he didn’t see how things were going;
Luther was foolish,—but, O great God! what call you Ignatius?
O my tolerant soul, be still! but you talk of barbarians,
Alaric, Attila, Genseric;—why, they came, they killed, they
Ravaged, and went on their way; but these vile, tyrannous Spaniards,
These are here still,—how long, O ye heavens, in the country of Dante?
These, that fanaticised Europe, which now can forget them, release not
This, their choicest of prey, this Italy; here you see them,—
Here, with emasculate pupils and gimcrack churches of Gesù,
Pseudo-learning and lies, confessional-boxes and postures,—
Here, with metallic beliefs and regimental devotions,—
Here, overcrusting with slime, perverting, defacing, debasing
Michael Angelo’s dome, that had hung the Pantheon in heaven,
Raphael’s Joys and Graces, and thy clear stars, Galileo!’
The plot of the poem is very simple, and certainly is not very exciting.
The moving force, as in most novels of verse or prose, is the love of the
hero for the heroine; but this love assuredly is not of a very impetuous
and overpowering character. The interest of this story is precisely that
it is not overpowering. The over-intellectual hero, over-anxious to be
composed, will not submit himself to his love; over-fearful of what is
voluntary and factitious, he will not make an effort and cast in his lot
with it. He states his view of the subject better than we can state it:—
‘I am in love, meantime, you think; no doubt you would think so.
I am in love, you say, with those letters, of course, you would say so.
I am in love, you declare. I think not so; yet I grant you
It is a pleasure indeed to converse with this girl. Oh, rare gift,
Rare felicity, this! she can talk in a rational way, can
Speak upon subjects that really are matters of mind and of thinking,
Yet in perfection retain her simplicity; never, one moment,
Never, however you urge it, however you tempt her, consents to
Step from ideas and fancies and loving sensations to those vain
Conscious understandings that vex the minds of mankind.
No, though she talk, it is music; her fingers desert not the keys; ’tis
Song, though you hear in the song the articulate vocables sounded,
Syllables singly and sweetly the words of melodious meaning.
I am in love, you say; I do not think so, exactly.
There are two different kinds, I believe, of human attraction:
One which simply disturbs, unsettles, and makes you uneasy,
And another that poises, retains, and fixes and holds you.
I have no doubt, for myself, in giving my voice for the latter.
I do not wish to be moved, but growing where I was growing,
There more truly to grow, to live where as yet I had languished.
I do not like being moved: for the will is excited; and action
Is a most dangerous thing; I tremble for something factitious,
Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process;
We are so prone to these things, with our terrible notions of duty.
Ah, let me look, let me watch, let me wait, unhurried, unprompted!
Bid me not venture on aught that could alter or end what is present!
Say not, Time flies, and Occasion, that never returns, is departing!
Drive me not out, ye ill angels with fiery swords, from my Eden,
Waiting, and watching, and looking! Let love be its own inspiration!
Shall not a voice, if a voice there must be, from the airs that environ,
Yea, from the conscious heavens, without our knowledge or effort,
Break into audible words? And love be its own inspiration?’
It appears, however, that even this hesitating hero would have come to
the point at last. In a book, at least, the hero has nothing else to do.
The inevitable restrictions of a pretty story hem him in; to wind up the
plot, he must either propose or die, and usually he prefers proposing.
Mr. Claude—for such is the name of Mr. Clough’s hero—is evidently on his
road towards the inevitable alternative, when his fate intercepts him by
the help of a person who meant nothing less. There is a sister of the
heroine, who is herself engaged to a rather quick person, and who cannot
make out anyone’s conducting himself differently from her George Vernon.
She writes:—
‘Mr. Claude, you must know, is behaving a little bit better;
He and Papa are great friends; but he really is too _shilly-shally_,—
So unlike George! Yet I hope that the matter is going on fairly.
I shall, however, get George, before he goes, to say something.
Dearest Louise, how delightful to bring young people together!’
As the heroine says, ‘dear Georgina’ wishes for nothing so much as to
show her adroitness. George Vernon does interfere, and Mr. Claude may
describe for himself the change it makes in his fate:
‘Tibur is beautiful too, and the orchard slopes, and the Anio
Falling, falling yet, to the ancient lyrical cadence;
Tibur and Anio’s tide; and cool from Lucretilis ever,
With the Digentian stream, and with the Bandusian fountain,
Folded in Sabine recesses, the valley and villa of Horace:—
So not seeing I sung; so seeing and listening say I,
Here as I sit by the stream, as I gaze at the cell of the Sibyl,
Here with Albunea’s home and the grove of Tiburnus beside me;[15]
Tivoli beautiful is, and musical, O Teverone,
Dashing from mountain to plain, thy parted impetuous waters!
Tivoli’s waters and rocks; and fair under Monte Gennaro,
(Haunt even yet, I must think, as I wander and gaze, of the shadows,
Faded and pale, yet immortal, of Faunus, the Nymphs, and the Graces,)
Fair in itself, and yet fairer with human completing creations,
Folded in Sabine recesses, the valley and villa of Horace:—
So not seeing I sung; so now—Nor seeing, nor hearing,
Neither by waterfall lulled, nor folded in sylvan embraces,
Neither by cell of the Sibyl, nor stepping the Monte Gennaro,
Seated on Anio’s bank, nor sipping Bandusian waters,
But on Montorio’s height, looking down on the tile-clad streets, the
Cupolas, crosses, and domes, the bushes and kitchen-gardens,
Which, by the grace of the Tibur, proclaim themselves Rome of the Roman,—
But on Montorio’s height, looking forth to the vapoury mountains,
Cheating the prisoner Hope with illusions of vision and fancy,—
But on Montorio’s height, with these weary soldiers by me,
Waiting till Oudinot enter, to reinstate Pope and Tourist.
...
Yes, on Montorio’s height for a last farewell of the city,—
So it appears; though then I was quite uncertain about it.
So, however, it was. And now to explain the proceeding.
I was to go, as I told you, I think, with the people to Florence.
Only the day before, the foolish family Vernon
Made some uneasy remarks, as we walked to our lodging together,
As to intentions, forsooth, and so forth. I was astounded,
Horrified quite; and obtaining just then, as it happened, an offer
(No common favour) of seeing the great Ludovisi collection,
Why, I made this a pretence, and wrote that they must excuse me.
How could I go? Great Heavens! to conduct a permitted flirtation.
Under those vulgar eyes, the observed of such observers!
Well, but I now, by a series of fine diplomatic inquiries,
Find from a sort of relation, a good and sensible woman,
Who is remaining at Rome with a brother too ill for removal,
That it was wholly unsanctioned, unknown,—not, I think, by Georgina:
She, however, ere this,—and that is the best of the story,—
She and the Vernon, thank Heaven, are wedded and gone—honeymooning.
So—on Montorio’s height for a last farewell of the city.
Tibur I have not seen, nor the lakes that of old I had dreamt of;
Tibur I shall not see, nor Anio’s waters, nor deep en-
Folded in Sabine recesses the valley and villa of Horace;
Tibur I shall not see;—but something better I shall see.
Twice I have tried before, and failed in getting the horses;
Twice I have tried and failed: this time it shall not be a failure.’
But, of course, he does not reach Florence till the heroine and her
family are gone; and he hunts after them through North Italy, not very
skilfully, and then he returns to Rome; and he reflects, certainly not in
a very dignified or heroic manner:
‘I cannot stay at Florence, not even to wait for a letter.
Galleries only oppress me. Remembrance of hope I had cherished
(Almost more than as hope, when I passed through Florence the first time)
Lies like a sword in my soul. I am more a coward than ever,
Chicken-hearted, past thought. The _cafés_ and waiters distress me.
All is unkind, and, alas! I am ready for any one’s kindness.
Oh, I knew it of old, and knew it, I thought, to perfection,
If there is any one thing in the world to preclude all kindness,
It is the need of it,—it is this sad, self-defeating dependence.
Why is this, Eustace? Myself, were I stronger, I think I could tell you.
But it is odd when it comes. So plumb I the deeps of depression,
Daily in deeper, and find no support, no will, no purpose.
All my old strengths are gone. And yet I shall have to do something.
Ah, the key of our life, that passes all wards, opens all locks,
Is not _I will_, but _I must_. I must,—I must,—and I do it.
‘After all, do I know that I really cared so about her?
Do whatever I will, I cannot call up her image;
For when I close my eyes, I see, very likely, St. Peter’s,
Or the Pantheon façade, or Michael Angelo’s figures,
Or, at a wish, when I please, the Alban hills and the Forum,—
But that face, those eyes,—ah no, never anything like them;
Only, try as I will, a sort of featureless outline,
And a pale blank orb, which no recollection will add to.
After all, perhaps there was something factitious about it;
I have had pain, it is true: I have wept, and so have the actors.
‘At the last moment I have your letter, for which I was waiting;
I have taken my place, and see no good in inquiries.
Do nothing more, good Eustace, I pray you. It only will vex me.
Take no measures. Indeed, should we meet, I could not be certain;
All might be changed, you know. Or perhaps there was nothing to be
changed.
It is a curious history, this; and yet I foresaw it;
I could have told it before. The Fates, it is clear, are against us;
For it is certain enough I met with the people you mention;
They were at Florence the day I returned there, and spoke to me even;
Stayed a week, saw me often; departed, and whither I know not.
Great is Fate, and is best. I believe in Providence partly.
What is ordained is right, and all that happens is ordered.
Ah, no, that isn’t it. But yet I retain my conclusion.
I will go where I am led, and will not dictate to the chances.
Do nothing more, I beg. If you love me, forbear interfering.’
And the heroine, like a sensible, quiet girl, sums up:
‘You have heard nothing; of course, I know you can have heard nothing.
Ah, well, more than once I have broken my purpose, and sometimes,
Only too often, have looked for the little lake-steamer to bring him.
But it is only fancy,—I do not really expect it.
Oh, and you see I know so exactly how he would take it:
Finding the chances prevail against meeting again, he would banish
Forthwith every thought of the poor little possible hope, which
I myself could not help, perhaps, thinking only too much of;
He would resign himself, and go. I see it exactly.
So I also submit, although in a different manner.
Can you not really come? We go very shortly to England.’
And there, let us hope, she found a more satisfactory lover and husband.
The same defect which prevented Mr. Claude from obtaining his bride
will prevent this poem from obtaining universal popularity. The public
like stories which come to something; Mr. Arnold teaches that a great
poem must be founded on a great action, and this one is founded on a
long inaction. But Art has many mansions. Many poets, whose cast of
thought unfits them for very diffused popularity, have yet a concentrated
popularity which suits them and which lasts. Henry Taylor has wisely
said ‘that a poet does not deserve the name who would not rather be read
a thousand times by one man, than a single time by a thousand.’ This
repeated perusal, this testing by continual repetition and close contact,
is the very test of intellectual poetry; unless such poetry can identify
itself with our nature, and dissolve itself into our constant thought,
it is nothing, or less than nothing; it is an ineffectual attempt to
confer a rare pleasure; it teazes by reminding us of that pleasure,
and tires by the effort which it demands from us. But if a poem really
possesses this capacity of intellectual absorption—if it really is in
matter of fact accepted, apprehended, delighted in, and retained by a
large number of cultivated and thoughtful minds,—its non-recognition by
what is called the public is no more against it than its non-recognition
by the coal-heavers. The half-educated and busy crowd, whom we call the
public, have no more right to impose their limitations on highly educated
and meditative thinkers, than the uneducated and yet more numerous crowd
have to impose their still narrower limitations on the half-educated. The
coal-heaver will not read any books whatever; the mass of men will not
read an intellectual poem: it can hardly ever be otherwise. But timid
thinkers must not dread to have a secret and rare faith. But little deep
poetry is very popular, and no severe art. Such poetry as Mr. Clough’s,
especially, can never be so; its subjects would forbid it, even if its
treatment were perfect: but it may have a better fate; it may have a
tenacious hold on the solitary, the meditative, and the calm. It is this
which Mr. Clough would have wished; he did not desire to be liked by
‘inferior people’—at least he would have distrusted any poem of his own
which they did like.
The artistic skill of these poems, especially of the poem from which we
have extracted so much, and of a long vacation pastoral published in the
Highlands, is often excellent, and occasionally fails when you least
expect it. There was an odd peculiarity in Mr. Clough’s mind; you never
could tell whether it was that he would not show himself to the best
advantage, or whether he _could_ not; it is certain that he very often
did not, whether in life or in books. His intellect moved with a great
difficulty, and it had a larger inertia than any other which we have ever
known. Probably there was an awkwardness born with him, and his shyness
and pride prevented him from curing that awkwardness as most men would
have done. He felt he might fail, and he knew that he hated to fail. He
neglected, therefore, many of the thousand petty trials which fashion
and form the accomplished man of the world. Accordingly, when at last
he wanted to do something, or was obliged to attempt something, he had
occasionally a singular difficulty. He could not get his matter out of
him.
In poetry he had a further difficulty, arising from perhaps an
over-cultivated taste. He was so good a disciple of Wordsworth, he hated
so thoroughly the common sing-song metres of Moore and Byron, that he
was apt to try to write what will seem to many persons to have scarcely
a metre at all. It is quite true that the metre of intellectual poetry
should not be so pretty as that of songs, or so plain and impressive
as that of vigorous passion. The rhythm should pervade it and animate
it, but should not protrude itself upon the surface, or intrude itself
upon the attention. It should be a latent charm, though a real one. Yet,
though this doctrine is true, it is nevertheless a dangerous doctrine.
Most writers need the strict fetters of familiar metre; as soon as they
are emancipated from this, they fancy that _any_ words of theirs are
metrical. If a man will read any expressive and favourite words of his
own often enough, he will come to believe that they are rhythmical;
probably they have a rhythm as he reads them; but no notation of pauses
and accents could tell the reader how to read them in that manner;
and when read in any other mode they may be prose itself. Some of Mr.
Clough’s early poems, which are placed at the beginning of this volume,
are perhaps examples, more or less, of this natural self-delusion. Their
writer could read them as verse, but that was scarcely his business; and
the common reader fails.
Of one metre, however, the hexameter, we believe the most accomplished
judges, and also common readers, agree that Mr. Clough possessed a very
peculiar mastery. Perhaps he first showed in English its _flexibility_.
Whether any consummate poem of great length and sustained dignity can
be written in this metre, and in our language, we do not know. Until a
great poet has written his poem, there are commonly no lack of plausible
arguments that seem to prove he cannot write it; but Mr. Clough has
certainly shown that, in the hands of a skilful and animated artist, it
is capable of adapting itself to varied descriptions of life and manners,
to noble sentiments, and to changing thoughts. It is perhaps the most
flexible of English metres. Better than any others, it changes from grave
to gay without desecrating what should be solemn, or disenchanting that
which should be graceful. And Mr. Clough was the first to prove this, by
writing a noble poem, in which it was done.
In one principal respect Mr. Clough’s two poems in hexameters, and
especially the Roman one, from which we made so many extracts, are very
excellent. Somehow or other he makes you understand what the people of
whom he is writing precisely were. You may object to the means, but
you cannot deny the result. By fate he was thrown into a vortex of
theological and metaphysical speculation, but his genius was better
suited to be the spectator of a more active and moving scene. The play of
mind upon mind; the contrasted view which contrasted minds take of great
subjects; the odd irony of life which so often thrusts into conspicuous
places exactly what no one would expect to find in those places,—these
were his subjects. Under happy circumstances, he might have produced on
such themes something which the mass of readers would have greatly liked;
as it is, he has produced a little which meditative readers will much
value, and which they will long remember.
Of Mr. Clough’s character it would be out of place to say anything,
except in so far as it elucidates his poems. The sort of conversation for
which he was most remarkable rises again in the _Amours de Voyage_, and
gives them to those who knew him in life a very peculiar charm. It would
not be exact to call the best lines a pleasant cynicism; for cynicism
has a bad name, and the ill-nature and other offensive qualities which
have given it that name were utterly out of Mr. Clough’s way. Though
without much fame, he had no envy. But he had a strong realism. He saw
what it is considered cynical to see—the absurdities of many persons, the
pomposities of many creeds, the splendid zeal with which missionaries
rush on to teach what they do not know, the wonderful earnestness with
which most incomplete solutions of the universe are thrust upon us as
complete and satisfying. ‘_Le fond de la Providence_,’ says the French
novelist, ‘_c’est l’ironie_.’ Mr. Clough would not have said that; but he
knew what it meant, and what was the portion of truth contained in it.
Undeniably this _is_ an _odd_ world, whether it should have been so or
no; and all our speculations upon it should begin with some admission of
its strangeness and singularity. The habit of dwelling on such thoughts
as these will not of itself make a man happy, and may make unhappy one
who is inclined to be so. Mr. Clough in his time felt more than most
men the weight of the unintelligible world; but such thoughts make
an instructive man. Several survivors may think they owe much to Mr.
Clough’s quiet question, ‘Ah, then, you think—?’ Many pretending creeds,
and many wonderful demonstrations, passed away before that calm inquiry.
He had a habit of putting your own doctrine concisely before you, so that
you might see what it came to, and that you did not like it. Even now
that he is gone, some may feel the recollection of his society a check on
unreal theories and half-mastered thoughts. Let us part from him in his
own words:—
‘Some future day, when what is now is not,
When all old faults and follies are forgot,
And thoughts of difference passed like dreams away,
We’ll meet again, upon some future day.
When all that hindered, all that vexed our love,
As tall rank weeds will climb the blade above,
When all but it has yielded to decay,
We’ll meet again, upon some future day.
When we have proved, each on his course alone,
The wider world, and learnt what’s now unknown,
Have made life clear, and worked out each a way,
We’ll meet again,—we shall have much to say.
With happier mood, and feelings born anew,
Our boyhood’s bygone fancies we’ll review,
Talk o’er old talks, play as we used to play,
And meet again, on many a future day.
Some day, which oft our hearts shall yearn to see,
In some far year, though distant yet to be,
Shall we indeed,—ye winds and waters, say!—
Meet yet again, upon some future day?’
_HENRY CRABB ROBINSON._[16]
(1869.)
Perhaps I should be ashamed to confess it, but I own I opened the three
large volumes of Mr. Robinson’s memoirs with much anxiety. Their bulk,
in the first place, appalled me; but that was by no means my greatest
apprehension. I knew I had a hundred times heard Mr. Robinson say, that
he hoped something he would leave behind would ‘be published and be worth
publishing.’ I was aware too—for it was no deep secret—that for half a
century or more he had kept a diary, and that he had been preserving
correspondence besides; and I was dubious what sort of things these
would be, and what—to use Carlyle’s words—any human editor could make of
them. Even when Mr. Robinson used to talk so, I used to shudder; for the
men who have tried to be memoir-writers and failed, are as numerous, or
nearly so, as those who have tried to be poets and failed. A specific
talent is as necessary for the one as for the other. But as soon as I
had read a little of the volumes, all these doubts passed away. I saw at
once that Mr. Robinson had an excellent power of narrative-writing, and
that the editor of his remains had made a most judicious use of excellent
materials.
Perhaps more than anything it was the modesty of my old friend (I think
I may call Mr. Robinson my old friend, for though he _thought_ me a
modern youth, I _did_ know him twenty years)—perhaps, I say, it was his
modesty which made me nervous about his memoirs more than anything else.
I have so often heard him say (and say it with a vigour of emphasis
which is rarer in our generation even than in his),—‘Sir, I have no
literary talent. I cannot write. I never _could_ write anything, and I
never _would_ write anything,’—that being so taught, and so vehemently,
I came to believe. And there was this to justify my creed. The notes Mr.
Robinson used to scatter about him—and he was fond of writing rather
elaborate ones—were not always very good. At least they were too long
for the busy race of the present generation, and introduced Schiller
and Goethe where they need not have appeared. But in these memoirs
(especially in the Reminiscences and the Diary; for the moment he gets
to a letter the style is worse) the words flow with such an effectual
simplicity, that even Southey, the great master of such prose, could
hardly have written better. Possibly it was his real interest in his
old stories which preserved Mr. Robinson; in his letters he was not
so interested and he fell into words and amplifications; but in those
ancient anecdotes, which for years were his life and being, the style,
as it seems to me, could scarcely be mended even in a word. And though,
undoubtedly, the book is much too long in the latter half, I do not blame
Dr. Sadler, the editor and biographer, for it, or indeed blame anyone.
Mr. Robinson had led a very long and very varied life, and some of his
old friends had an interest in one part of his reminiscences and some
in another. An unhappy editor entrusted with ‘a deceased’s papers,’
cannot really and in practice omit much that any surviving friends much
want to have put in. One man calls with a letter ‘in which my dear and
honoured friend gave me advice that was of such inestimable value, I
hope, I cannot but think you will find room for it.’ And another calls
with memoranda of a dinner—a most ‘superior occasion,’ as they say in the
North—at which, he reports, ‘there was conversation to which I never, or
scarcely ever, heard anything equal. There were A. B. and C. D. and E.
F., all masters, as you remember, of the purest conversational eloquence;
surely I need not hesitate to believe that you will say something of
that dinner.’ And so an oppressed biographer has to serve up the
crumbs of ancient feasts, though well knowing in his heart that they
are crumbs, and though he feels, too, that the critics will attack him,
and cruelly say it is his fault. But remembering this, and considering
that Mr. Robinson wrote a diary beginning in 1811, going down to 1867,
and occupying thirty-five closely written volumes, and that there were
‘Reminiscences’ and vast unsorted papers, I think Dr. Sadler has managed
admirably well. His book is brief to what it might have been, and all his
own part is written with delicacy, feeling, and knowledge. He quotes,
too, from Wordsworth by way of motto—
‘A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays
And confident to-morrows; with a face
Not worldly minded, for it bears too much
A nation’s impress,—gaiety and health,
Freedom and hope;—but keen withal and shrewd:
His gestures note,—and, hark, his tones of voice
Are all vivacious as his mien and looks.’
It was a happy feeling for Mr. Robinson’s character that selected these
lines to stand at the beginning of his memoirs.
And yet in one material respect—in this case perhaps the most material
respect—Dr. Sadler has failed, and not in the least from any fault of
his. Sydney Smith used to complain that ‘no one had ever made him his
trustee or executor;’ being really a very sound and sensible man of
business, he felt that it was a kind of imputation on him, and that he
was not appreciated. But some one more justly replied, ‘But how could
_you_, Sydney Smith, expect to be made an executor? Is there any one
who wants their “remains” to be made fun of?’ Now every trustee of
biographical papers is exactly in this difficulty, that he cannot make
fun. The melancholy friends who left the papers would not at all like
it. And, besides, there grows upon every such biographer an ‘official’
feeling—a confused sense of vague responsibilities—a wish not to impair
the gravity of the occasion or to offend anyone by levity. But there
are some men who cannot be justly described quite gravely; and Crabb
Robinson is one of them. A certain grotesqueness was a part of him,
and, unless you liked it, you lost the very best of him. He is called,
and properly called, in these memoirs Mr. Robinson; but no well-judging
person ever called him so in life. He was always called ‘old Crabb,’
and that is the only name which will ever bring up his curious image to
me. He was, in the true old English sense of the word, a ‘character;’
one whom a very peculiar life, certainly, and perhaps also a rather
peculiar nature to begin with, had formed and moulded into something so
exceptional and singular that it did not seem to belong to ordinary life,
and almost caused a smile when you saw it moving there. ‘An aberrant
form,’ I believe, the naturalists call the seal and such things in
natural history; odd shapes that can only be explained by a long past,
and which swim with a certain incongruity in their present _milieu_.
Now ‘old Crabb’ was (to me at least) just like that. You watched with
interest and pleasure his singular gestures, and his odd way of saying
things, and muttered, as if to keep up the recollection, ‘And _this_ is
the man who was the friend of Goethe, and is the friend of Wordsworth!’
There was a certain animal oddity about ‘old Crabb,’ which made it a kind
of mental joke to couple him with such great names, and yet he was to
his heart’s core thoroughly coupled with them. If you leave out all his
strange ways (I do not say Dr. Sadler has quite left them out, but to
some extent he has been obliged, by place and decorum, to omit them), you
lose the life of the man. You cut from the Ethiopian his skin, and from
the leopard his spots. I well remember poor Clough, who was then fresh
from Oxford, and was much puzzled by the corner of London to which he had
drifted, looking at ‘old Crabb’ in a kind of terror for a whole breakfast
time, and muttering in mute wonder, almost to himself, as he came away,
‘Not at all the regular patriarch.’ And certainly no one could accuse Mr.
Robinson of an insipid regularity either in face or nature.
Mr. Robinson was one of the original founders of University College,
and was for many years both on its senate and council; and as he lived
near the college he was fond of collecting at breakfast all the elder
students—especially those who had any sort of interest in literature.
Probably he never appeared to so much advantage, or showed all the best
of his nature, so well as in those parties. Like most very cheerful
old people, he at heart preferred the company of the very young; and
a set of young students, even after he was seventy, suited him better
as society than a set of grave old men. Sometimes, indeed, he would
invite—I do not say some of his contemporaries, few of them even in
1847 were up to breakfast parties, but persons of fifty and sixty—those
whom young students call old gentlemen. And it was amusing to watch the
consternation of some of them at the surprising youth and levity of
their host. They shuddered at the freedom with which we treated him.
Middle-aged men, of feeble heads and half-made reputations, have a nice
dislike to the sharp arguments and the unsparing jests of ‘boys at
college;’ they cannot bear the rough society of those who, never having
tried their own strength, have not yet acquired a fellow-feeling for
weakness. Many such persons, I am sure, were half hurt with Mr. Robinson
for not keeping those ‘impertinent boys’ more at a just distance; but Mr.
Robinson liked fun and movement, and disliked the sort of dignity which
shelters stupidity. There was little to gratify the unintellectual part
of man at these breakfasts, and what there was was not easy to be got
at. Your host, just as you were sitting down to breakfast, found he had
forgotten to make the tea, then he could not find his keys, then he rang
the bell to have them searched for; but long before the servant came he
had gone off into ‘Schiller-Goethe,’ and could not the least remember
what he had wanted. The more astute of his guests used to breakfast
before they came, and then there was much interest in seeing a steady
literary man, who did not understand the region, in agonies at having to
hear three stories before he got his tea, one again between his milk
and his sugar, another between his butter and his toast, and additional
zest in making a stealthy inquiry that was sure to intercept the coming
delicacies by bringing on Schiller and Goethe.
It is said in these memoirs that Mr. Robinson’s parents were very
good-looking, and that when married they were called the handsome couple.
But in his old age very little regular beauty adhered to him, if he ever
had any. His face was pleasing from its animation, its kindness, and
its shrewdness, but the nose was one of the most slovenly which nature
had ever turned out, and the chin of excessive length, with portentous
power of extension. But, perhaps, for the purpose of a social narrator
(and in later years this was Mr. Robinson’s position), this oddity of
feature was a gift. It was said, and justly said, that Lord Brougham
used to punctuate his sentences with his nose; just at the end of a
long parenthesis he _could_, and did, turn up his nose, which served to
note the change of subject as well, or better, than a printed mark. Mr.
Robinson was not so skilful as this, but he made a very able use of the
chin at a conversational crisis, and just at the point of a story pushed
it out, and then very slowly drew it in again, so that you always knew
when to laugh, and the oddity of the gesture helped you in laughing.
Mr. Robinson had known nearly every literary man worth knowing in
England and Germany for fifty years and more. He had studied at Jena in
the ‘great time,’ when Goethe, and Schiller, and Wieland were all at
their zenith; he had lived with Charles Lamb and his set, and Rogers
and his set, besides an infinite lot of little London people; he had
taught Madame de Staël German philosophy in Germany, and helped her in
business afterwards in England; he was the real friend of Wordsworth,
and had known Coleridge and Southey almost from their ‘coming out’ to
their death. And he was not a mere literary man. He had been a _Times_
correspondent in the days of Napoleon’s early German battles, now more
than ‘seventy years since;’ he had been off Corunna in Sir John Moore’s
time; and last, but almost first it should have been, he was an English
barrister, who had for years a considerable business, and who was full of
picturesque stories about old judges. Such a varied life and experience
belong to very few men, and his social nature—at once accessible and
assailant—was just the one to take advantage of it. He seemed to be
lucky all through: in childhood he remembered when John Gilpin came out;
then he had seen—he could not hear—John Wesley preach; then he had heard
Erskine, and criticised him intelligently, in some of the finest of the
well-known ‘State trials;’ and so on during all his vigorous period.
I do not know that it would be possible to give a better idea of Mr.
Robinson’s best conversations than by quoting almost at random from the
earlier part of these memoirs:—
‘At the Spring assizes of 1791, when I had nearly attained my
sixteenth year, I had the delight of hearing Erskine. It was
a high enjoyment, and I was able to profit by it. The subject
of the trial was the validity of a will—Braham _v._ Rivett.
Erskine came down specially retained for the plaintiff, and
Mingay for the defendant. The trial lasted two days. The title
of the heir being admitted, the proof of the will was gone into
at once. I have a recollection of many of the circumstances
after more than fifty-four years; but of nothing do I retain so
perfect a recollection as of the figure and voice of Erskine.
There was a charm in his voice, a fascination in his eye; and
so completely had he won my affection, that I am sure had
the verdict been given against him I should have burst out
crying. Of the facts and of the evidence, I do not pretend to
recollect anything beyond my impressions and sensations. My
pocket-book records that Erskine was engaged two and a half
hours in opening the case, and Mingay two hours and twenty
minutes in his speech in defence. E.’s reply occupied three
hours. The testatrix was an old lady in a state of imbecility.
The evil spirit of the case was an attorney. Mingay was loud
and violent, and gave Erskine an opportunity of turning into
ridicule his imagery and illustrations. For instance, M. having
compared R. to the Devil going into the Garden of Eden, E. drew
a closer parallel than M. intended. Satan’s first sight of Eve
was related in Milton’s words—
‘“Grace was in all her steps, heaven in her eye,
In every gesture dignity and love;”
and then a picture of idiotcy from Swift was contrasted.
But the sentence that weighed on my spirits was a pathetic
exclamation—“If, gentlemen, you should by your verdict
annihilate an instrument so solemnly framed, _I should retire
a troubled man from this court_.” And as he uttered the word
_court_, he beat his breast and I had a difficulty in not
crying out. When in bed the following night I awoke several
times in a state of excitement approaching fever—the words
“_troubled man from this court_” rang in my ears.
‘A new trial was granted, and ultimately the will was set
aside. I have said I profited by Erskine. I remarked his great
artifice, if I may call it so; and in a small way I afterwards
practised it. It lay in his frequent repetitions. He had one or
two leading arguments and main facts on which he was constantly
dwelling. But then he had marvellous skill in varying his
phraseology, so that no one was sensible of tautology in the
expressions. Like the doubling of a hare, he was perpetually
coming to his old place. Other great advocates I have remarked
were ambitious of a great variety of arguments.
‘About the same time that I thus first heard the most perfect
of forensic orators, I was also present at an exhibition
equally admirable, and which had a powerful effect upon
my mind. It was, I believe, in October 1790, and not long
before his death, that I heard John Wesley in the great round
meeting-house at Colchester. He stood in a wide pulpit, and on
each side of him stood a minister, and the two held him up,
having their hands under his armpits. His feeble voice was
barely audible. But his reverend countenance, especially his
long white locks, formed a picture never to be forgotten. There
was a vast crowd of lovers and admirers. It was for the most
part pantomime, but the pantomime went to the heart. Of the
kind I never saw anything comparable to it in after life.’
And again:—
‘It was at the Summer Circuit that Rolfe made his first
appearance. He had been at the preceding Sessions. I have
a pleasure in recollecting that I at once foresaw that he
would become a distinguished man. In my Diary I wrote, “Our
new junior, Mr. Rolfe, made his appearance. His manners are
genteel; his conversation easy and sensible. He is a very
acceptable companion, but I fear a dangerous rival.” And my
brother asking me who the new man was, I said, “I will venture
to predict that you will live to see that young man attain a
higher rank than any one you ever saw upon the circuit.” It
is true he is not higher than Leblanc, who was also a puisne
judge, but Leblanc was never Solicitor-General; nor, probably,
is Rolfe yet at the end of his career. One day, when some
one remarked, “Christianity is part and parcel of the law of
the land,” Rolfe said to me, “Were you ever employed to draw
an indictment against a man for not loving his neighbour as
himself?”
‘Rolfe is, by universal repute, if not the very best, at least
one of the best judges on the Bench. He is one of the few with
whom I have kept up an acquaintance.’[17]
Of course, these stories came over and over again. It is the excellence
of a reminiscent to have a few good stories, and his misfortune that
people will remember what he says. In Mr. Robinson’s case an unskilled
person could often see the anecdote somewhere impending, and there was
often much interest in trying whether you could ward it off or not. There
was one great misfortune which had happened to his guests, though he used
to tell it as one of the best things that had ever happened to himself.
He had picked up a certain bust of Wieland by Schadow, which it appears
had been lost, and in the finding of which Goethe, even Goethe, rejoiced.
After a very long interval I still shudder to think how often I have
heard that story; it was one which no skill or care could long avert, for
the thing stood opposite our host’s chair, and the sight of it was sure
to recall him. Among the ungrateful students to whom he was so kind, the
first question always asked of anyone who had breakfasted at his house
was, ‘Did you undergo the _bust_?’
A reader of these memoirs would naturally and justly think that the
great interest of Mr. Robinson’s conversation was the strength of the
past memory; but quite as amusing or more so was the present weakness.
He never could remember names, and was very ingenious in his devices to
elude the defect. There is a story in these Memoirs:—
‘I was engaged to dine with Mr. Wansey at Walthamstow. When I
arrived there I was in the greatest distress, through having
forgotten his name. And it was not till after half an hour’s
worry that I recollected he was a Unitarian, which would answer
as well; for I instantly proceeded to Mr. Cogan’s. Having
been shown into a room, young Mr. Cogan came—“Your commands,
sir?”—“Mr. Cogan, I have taken the liberty to call on you in
order to know where I am to dine to-day.” He smiled. I went on:
“The truth is, I have accepted an invitation to dine with a
gentleman, a recent acquaintance, whose name I have forgotten;
but I am sure you can tell me, for he is a Unitarian, and the
Unitarians are very few here.”’
And at his breakfasts it was always the same; he was always in difficulty
as to some person’s name or other, and he had regular descriptions which
recurred, like Homeric epithets, and which he expected you to apply
to the individual. Thus poor Clough always appeared—‘That admirable
and accomplished man. You know whom I mean. The one who never says
anything.’ And of another living poet he used to say: ‘Probably the most
able, and certainly the most consequential, of all the young persons I
know. You know which it is. The one with whom I could never _presume_
to be intimate. The one whose father I knew so many years.’ And another
particular friend of my own always occurred as—‘That great friend of
yours that has been in Germany—that most accomplished and interesting
person—that most able and excellent young man. Sometimes I like him,
and sometimes I _hate_ him. You,’ turning to me, ‘know whom I mean, you
villain!’ And certainly I did know; for I had heard the same adjectives,
and been referred to in the same manner very many times.
Of course, a main part of Mr. Robinson’s conversation was on literary
subjects; but of this, except when it related to persons whom he had
known, or sonnets to ‘the conception of which he was privy,’ I do not
think it would be just to speak very highly. He spoke sensibly and
clearly—he could not on any subject speak otherwise; but the critical
faculty is as special and as peculiar almost as the poetical; and Mr.
Robinson in serious moments was quite aware of it, and he used to deny
that he had the former faculty more than the latter. He used to read
much of Wordsworth to me; but I doubt—though many of his friends will
think I am a great heretic—I doubt if he read the best poems; and even
those he did read (and he read very well) rather suffered from coming in
the middle of a meal, and at a time when you wanted to laugh, and not
to meditate. Wordsworth was a solitary man, and it is only in solitude
that his best poems, or indeed any of his characteristic poems, can be
truly felt or really apprehended. There are some at which I never look,
even now, without thinking of the wonderful and dreary faces which Clough
used to make while Mr. Robinson was reading them. To Clough certain of
Wordsworth’s poems were part of his inner being, and he suffered at
hearing them obtruded at meal times, just as a High Churchman would
suffer at hearing the collects of the Church. Indeed, these poems were
among the collects of Clough’s Church.
Still less do I believe that there is any special value in the
expositions of German philosophy in these volumes, or that there was any
in those which Mr. Robinson used to give on such matters in conversation.
They are clear, no doubt, and accurate; but they are not the expositions
of a born metaphysician. He speaks in these Memoirs of his having a
difficulty in concentrating his ‘attention on works of speculation.’
And such books as Kant can only be really mastered, can perhaps only be
usefully studied, by those who have an unusual facility in concentrating
their mind on impalpable abstractions, and an uncommon inclination to do
so. Mr. Robinson had neither; and I think the critical philosophy had
really very little effect on him, and had, during the busy years which
had elapsed since he studied it, very nearly run off him. There was
something very curious in the sudden way that anything mystical would
stop in him. At the end of a Sunday breakfast, after inflicting on you
much which was transcendental in Wordsworth or Goethe, he would say,
as we left him, with an air of relish, ‘Now I am going to run down to
Essex Street to hear Madge. I shall not be in time for the prayers; but
I do not so much care about that; what I do like is the sermon; it is
so clear.’ Mr. Madge was a Unitarian of the old school, with as little
mystical and transcendental in his nature as any one who ever lived.
There was a living piquancy in the friend of Goethe—the man who _would_
explain to you his writings—being also the admirer of ‘Madge;’ it was
like a proser, lengthily eulogising Kant to you, and then saying, ‘Ah!
but I do love Condillac; he is so clear.’
But, on the other hand, I used to hold—I was reading law at the time, and
so had some interest in the matter—that Mr. Robinson much underrated his
legal knowledge, and his practical power as a lawyer. What he used to
say was, ‘I never knew any law, sir, but I knew the practice.... I left
the bar because I feared my incompetence might be discovered. I was a
tolerable junior; but I was rising to be a leader, which I was unfit to
be; and so I retired, not to disgrace myself by some fearful mistake.’
In these Memoirs he says that he retired when he had made the sum of
money which he thought enough for a bachelor with few wants and not a
single expensive taste. The simplicity of his tastes is certain; very few
Englishmen indeed could live with so little show or pretence. But the
idea of his gross incompetence is absurd. No one who was incompetent ever
said so. There are, I am sure, plenty of substantial and well-satisfied
men at the English bar who do not know nearly as much law as Mr. Robinson
knew, and who have not a tithe of his sagacity, but who believe in
themselves and in whom their clients believe. On the other hand, Mr.
Robinson had many great qualifications for success at the bar. He was a
really good speaker: when over seventy I have heard him make a speech
that good speakers in their full vigour would be glad to make. He had
a good deal of the actor in his nature, which is thought, and I fancy
justly thought, to be necessary to the success of all great advocates,
and perhaps of all great orators. He was well acquainted with the petty
technicalities which intellectual men in middle life in general cannot
learn, for he had passed some years in an attorney’s office. Above
all, he was a very thinking man, and had an ‘idea of business’—that
inscrutable something which at once and altogether distinguishes the man
who is safe in the affairs of life from those who are unsafe. I do not
suppose he knew much black-letter law; but there are plenty of judges on
the bench who, unless they are much belied, also know very little—perhaps
none. And a man who can intelligently read Kant, like Mr. Robinson, need
not fear the book-work of English law. A very little serious study would
have taught him law enough to lead the Norfolk circuit. He really had
a sound, moderate, money-making business, and only a little pains was
wanted to give him more.
The real reason why he did not take the trouble, I fancy, was that,
being a bachelor, he was a kind of amateur in life, and did not really
care. He could not spend what he had on himself, and used to give away
largely, though in private. And even more, as with most men who have not
thoroughly worked when young, daily, regular industry was exceedingly
trying to him. No man could be less idle; far from it, he was always
doing something; but then he was doing what he chose. Sir Walter Scott,
one of the best workers of his time, used always to say that ‘he had no
temptation to be idle, but the greatest temptation, when one thing was
wanted of him, to go and do something else.’ Perhaps the only persons
who, not being forced by mere necessity, really conquer this temptation,
are those who were early broken to the yoke, and are fixed to the furrow
by habit. Mr. Robinson loitered in Germany, so he was not one of these.
I am not regretting this. It would be a base idolatry of practical life,
to require every man to succeed in it as far as he could, and to devote
to it all his mind. The world certainly does not need it; it pays well,
and it will never lack good servants. There will always be enough of
sound, strong men to be working barristers and judges, let who will
object to become so. But I own I think a man ought to be able to be a
‘Philistine’ if he chooses; there is a sickly incompleteness about people
too fine for the world, and too nice to work their way in it. And when a
man like Mr. Robinson had a real sagacity for affairs, it is for those
who respect his memory to see that his reputation does not suffer from
his modesty, and that his habitual self-depreciations—which, indeed,
extended to his powers of writing as well as to those of acting—are not
taken to be exactly true.
In fact, Mr. Robinson was usefully occupied in University College
business and University Hall business, and other such things. But there
is no special need to write on them in connection with his name; and it
would need a good deal of writing to make them intelligible to those
who do not know them now. And the greater part of his life was spent in
society where his influence was always manly and vigorous. I do not mean
that he was universally popular; it would be defacing his likeness to say
so. ‘I am a man,’ he once told me, ‘to whom a great number of persons
entertain the very strongest objection.’ Indeed he had some subjects
on which he could hardly bear opposition. Twice he nearly quarrelled
with me: once for writing in favour of Louis Napoleon, which, as he had
caught in Germany a thorough antipathy to the first Napoleon, seemed to
him quite wicked; and next for my urging that Hazlitt was a much greater
writer than Charles Lamb—a harmless opinion which I still hold, but which
Mr. Robinson met with this outburst: ‘You, sir, you prefer the works of
that scoundrel, that odious, that malignant writer, to the exquisite
essays of that angelic creature!’ I protested that there was no evidence
that angels could write particularly well; but it was in vain, and it
was some time before he forgave me. Some persons who casually encountered
peculiarities like these, did not always understand them. In his last
years, too, augmenting infirmities almost disqualified Mr. Robinson for
general society, and quite disabled him from showing his old abilities
in it. Indeed, I think that these Memoirs will give almost a new idea of
his power to many young men who had only seen him casually, and at times
of feebleness. After ninety it is not easy to make new friends. And, in
any case, this book will always have a great charm for those who knew Mr.
Robinson well when they were themselves young, because it will keep alive
for them the image of his buoyant sagacity, and his wise and careless
kindness.
_WORDSWORTH, TENNYSON, AND BROWNING; OR, PURE, ORNATE, AND GROTESQUE ART
IN ENGLISH POETRY.[18]_
(1864.)
We couple these two books together, not because of their likeness, for
they are as dissimilar as books can be; nor on account of the eminence
of their authors, for in general two great authors are too much for one
essay; but because they are the best possible illustration of something
we have to say upon poetical art—because they may give to it life and
freshness. The accident of contemporaneous publication has here brought
together two books very characteristic of modern art, and we want to show
how they are characteristic.
Neither English poetry nor English criticism have ever recovered the
_eruption_ which they both made at the beginning of this century into
the fashionable world. The poems of Lord Byron were received with an
avidity that resembles our present avidity for sensation novels, and were
read by a class which at present reads little but such novels. Old men
who remember those days may be heard to say, ‘We hear nothing of poetry
now-a-days; it seems quite down.’ And ‘down’ it certainly is, if for
poetry it be a descent to be no longer the favourite excitement of the
more frivolous part of the ‘upper’ world. That stimulating poetry is now
little read. A stray schoolboy may still be detected in a wild admiration
for the _Giaour_ or the _Corsair_ (and it is suitable to his age,
and he should not be reproached for it), but the _real_ posterity—the
quiet students of a past literature—never read them or think of them. A
line or two linger on the memory; a few telling strokes of occasional
and felicitous energy are quoted, but this is all. As wholes, these
exaggerated stories were worthless; they taught nothing, and therefore
they are forgotten. If now-a-days a dismal poet were, like Byron, to
lament the fact of his birth, and to hint that he was too good for the
world, the _Saturday Reviewers_ would say that ‘they doubted if he _was_
too good; that a sulky poet was a questionable addition to a tolerable
world; that he need not have been born, as far as they were concerned.’
Doubtless, there is much in Byron besides his dismal exaggeration, but
it was that exaggeration which made ‘the sensation’ which gave him a
wild moment of dangerous fame. As so often happens, the cause of his
momentary fashion is the cause also of his lasting oblivion. Moore’s
former reputation was less excessive, yet it has not been more permanent.
The prettiness of a few songs preserves the memory of his name, but as
a poet to _read_ he is forgotten. There is nothing to read in him; no
exquisite thought, no sublime feeling, no consummate description of true
character. Almost the sole result of the poetry of that time is the harm
which it has done. It degraded for a time the whole character of the
art. It said by practice, by a most efficient and successful practice,
that it was the aim, the _duty_ of poets, to catch the attention of the
passing, the fashionable, the busy world. If a poem ‘fell dead,’ it was
nothing; it was composed to please the ‘London’ of the year, and if that
London did not like it, why, it had failed. It fixed upon the minds
of a whole generation, it engraved in popular memory and tradition, a
vague conviction that poetry is but one of the many _amusements_ for the
enjoying classes, for the lighter hours of all classes. The mere notion,
the bare idea, that poetry is a deep thing, a teaching thing, the most
surely and wisely elevating of human things, is even now to the coarse
public mind nearly unknown.
As was the fate of poetry, so inevitably was that of criticism. The
science that expounds which poetry is good and which is bad, is dependent
for its popular reputation on the popular estimate of poetry itself. The
critics of that day had _a_ day, which is more than can be said for some
since; they professed to tell the fashionable world in what books it
would find new pleasure, and therefore they were read by the fashionable
world. Byron counted the critic and poet equal. The _Edinburgh Review_
penetrated among the young, and into places of female resort where it
does not go now. As people ask, ‘Have you read _Henry Dunbar_? and what
do you think of it?’ so they then asked, ‘Have you read the _Giaour_?
and what do you think of it?’ Lord Jeffrey, a shrewd judge of the world,
employed himself in telling it what to think; not so much what it ought
to think, as what at bottom it did think, and so by dexterous sympathy
with current society he gained contemporary fame and power. Such fame
no critic must hope for now. His articles will not penetrate where the
poems themselves do not penetrate. When poetry was noisy, criticism was
loud; now poetry is a still small voice, and criticism must be smaller
and stiller. As the function of such criticism was limited, so was its
subject. For the great and (as time now proves) the _permanent_ part of
the poetry of his time—for Shelley and for Wordsworth—Lord Jeffrey had
but one word. He said[19] ‘It won’t do.’ And it will not do to amuse a
drawing-room.
The doctrine that poetry is a light amusement for idle hours, a metrical
species of sensational novel, did not indeed become popular without
gainsayers. Thirty years ago, Mr. Carlyle most rudely contradicted it.
But perhaps this is about all that he has done. He has denied, but he has
not disproved. He has contradicted the floating paganism, but he has not
founded the deep religion. All about and around us a _faith_ in poetry
struggles to be extricated, but it is not extricated. Some day, at the
touch of the true word, the whole confusion will by magic cease; the
broken and shapeless notions will cohere and crystallize into a bright
and true theory. But this cannot be yet.
But though no complete theory of the poetic art as yet be possible for
us, though perhaps only our children’s children will be able to speak on
this subject with the assured confidence which belongs to accepted truth,
yet something of some certainty may be stated on the easier elements, and
something that will throw light on these two new books. But it will be
necessary to assign reasons, and the assigning of reasons is a dry task.
Years ago, when criticism only tried to show how poetry could be made a
good amusement, it was not impossible that criticism itself should be
amusing. But now it must at least be serious, for we believe that poetry
is a serious and a deep thing.
There should be a word in the language of literary art to express what
the word ‘picturesque’ expresses for the fine arts. _Picturesque_ means
fit to be put into a picture; we want a word _literatesque_, ‘fit
to be put into a book.’ An artist goes through a hundred different
country scenes, rich with beauties, charms and merits, but he does not
paint any of them. He leaves them alone; he idles on till he finds the
hundred-and-first—a scene which many observers would not think much of,
but which _he_ knows by virtue of his art will look well on canvas,
and this he paints and preserves. Susceptible observers, though not
artists, feel this quality too; they say of a scene, ‘How picturesque!’
meaning by this a quality distinct from that of beauty, or sublimity, or
grandeur—meaning to speak not only of the scene as it is in itself, but
also of its fitness for imitation by art; meaning not only that it is
good, but that its goodness is such as ought to be transferred to paper;
meaning not simply that it fascinates, but also that its fascination is
such as ought to be copied by man. A fine and insensible instinct has put
language to this subtle use; it expresses an idea without which fine art
criticism could not go on, and it is very natural that the language of
pictorial art should be better supplied with words than that of literary
criticism, for the eye was used before the mind, and language embodies
primitive sensuous ideas, long ere it expresses, or need express,
abstract and literary ones.
The reason why a landscape is ‘picturesque’ is often said to be, that
such landscape represents an ‘idea.’ But this explanation, though, in
the minds of some who use it, it is near akin to the truth, fails to
explain that truth to those who did not know it before; the word ‘idea’
is so often used in these subjects when people do not know anything
else to say; it represents so often a kind of intellectual insolvency,
when philosophers are at their wits’ end, that shrewd people will never
readily on any occasion give it credit for meaning anything. A wise
explainer must, therefore, look out for other words to convey what he has
to say. _Landscapes_, like everything else in nature, divide themselves
as we look at them into a sort of rude classification. We go down a
river, for example, and we see a hundred landscapes on both sides of it,
resembling one another in much, yet differing in something; with trees
here, and a farmhouse there, and shadows on one side, and a deep pool
far on, a collection of circumstances most familiar in themselves, but
making a perpetual novelty by the magic of their various combinations.
We travel so for miles and hours, and then we come to a scene which also
has these various circumstances and adjuncts, but which combines them
best, which makes the best whole of them, which shows them in their best
proportion at a single glance before the eye. Then we say, ‘This is the
place to paint the river; this is the picturesque point!’ Or, if not
artists or critics of art, we feel without analysis or examination that
somehow this bend or sweep of the river shall in future be _the river
to us_: that it is the image of it which we will retain in our mind’s
eye, by which we will remember it, which we will call up when we want to
describe or think of it. Some fine countries, some beautiful rivers, have
not this picturesque quality: they give us elements of beauty, but they
do not combine them together; we go on for a time delighted, but _after_
a time somehow we get wearied; we feel that we are taking in nothing and
learning nothing; we get no collected image before our mind; we see the
accidents and circumstances of that sort of scenery, but the summary
scene we do not see; we find _disjecta membra_, but no form; various
and many and faulty approximations are displayed in succession; but the
absolute perfection in that country’s or river’s scenery—its _type_—is
withheld. We go away from such places in part delighted, but in part
baffled; we have been puzzled by pretty things; we have beheld a hundred
different inconsistent specimens of the same sort of beauty; but the
rememberable idea, the full development, the characteristic individuality
of it, we have not seen.
We find the same sort of quality in all parts of painting. We see a
portrait of a person we know, and we say, ‘It is like—yes, like, of
course, but it is not _the man_;’ we feel it could not be anyone else,
but still, somehow it fails to bring home to us the individual as we know
him to be. _He_ is not there. An accumulation of features like his are
painted, but his essence is not painted; an approximation more or less
excellent is given, but the characteristic expression, the _typical_
form, of the man is withheld.
Literature—the painting of words—has the same quality, but wants the
analogous word. The word ‘_literatesque_’ would mean, if we possessed it,
that perfect combination in the _subject-matter_ of literature, which
suits the _art_ of literature. We often meet people, and say of them,
sometimes meaning well and sometimes ill, ‘How well so-and-so would do
in a book!’ Such people are by no means the best people; but they are
the most effective people—the most rememberable people. Frequently,
when we first know them, we like them because they explain to us so much
of our experience; we have known many people ‘like that,’ in one way or
another, but we did not seem to understand them; they were nothing to us,
for their traits were indistinct; we forgot them, for they hitched on
to nothing, and we could not classify them. But when we see the _type_
of the genus, at once we seem to comprehend its character; the inferior
specimens are explained by the perfect embodiment; the approximations are
definable when we know the ideal to which they draw near. There are an
infinite number of classes of human beings, but in each of these classes
there is a distinctive type which, if we could expand it in words, would
define the class. We cannot expand it in formal terms any more than a
landscape, or a species of landscape; but we have an art, an art of
words, which can draw it. Travellers and others often bring home, in
addition to their long journals—which, though so living to them, are so
dead, so inanimate, so undescriptive to all else—a pen-and-ink sketch,
rudely done very likely, but which, perhaps, even the more for the blots
and strokes, gives a distinct notion, an emphatic image, to all who see
it. We say at once, _now_ we know the sort of thing. The sketch has _hit_
the mind. True literature does the same. It describes sorts, varieties,
and permutations, by delineating the type of each sort, the ideal of each
variety, the central, the marking trait of each permutation.
On this account, the greatest artists of the world have ever shown
an enthusiasm for reality. To care for notions and abstractions; to
philosophise; to reason out conclusions; to care for schemes of thought,
are signs in the artistic mind of secondary excellence. A Schiller,
a Euripides, a Ben Jonson, cares for _ideas_—for the parings of the
intellect, and the distillation of the mind; a Shakespeare, a Homer,
a Goethe, finds his mental occupation, the true home of his natural
thoughts, in the real world—‘which is the world of all of us’—where the
face of nature, the moving masses of men and women, are ever changing,
ever multiplying, ever mixing one with the other. The reason is plain—the
business of the poet, of the artist, is with _types_; and those types are
mirrored in reality. As a painter must not only have a hand to execute,
but an eye to distinguish—as he must go here and there through the
real world to catch the picturesque man, the picturesque scene, which
is to live on his canvas—so the poet must find in that reality, the
_literatesque_ man, the _literatesque_ scene which nature intends for
him, and which will live in his page. Even in reality he will not find
this type complete, or the characteristics perfect; but there he will
find, at least, something, some hint, some intimation, some suggestion;
whereas, in the stagnant home of his own thoughts he will find nothing
pure, nothing as it is, nothing which does not bear his own mark, which
is not somehow altered by a mixture with himself.
The first conversation of Goethe and Schiller illustrates this conception
of the poet’s art. Goethe was at that time prejudiced against Schiller,
we must remember, partly from what he considered the outrages of the
_Robbers_, partly because of the philosophy of Kant. Schiller’s ‘Essay on
_Grace and Dignity_,’ he tells us—
‘Was yet less of a kind to reconcile me. The philosophy of
Kant, which exalts the dignity of mind so highly, while
appearing to restrict it, Schiller had joyfully embraced:
it unfolded the extraordinary qualities which Nature had
implanted in him; and in the lively feeling of freedom and
self-direction, he showed himself unthankful to the Great
Mother, who surely had not acted like a step-dame towards him.
Instead of viewing her as self-subsisting, as producing with
a living force, and according to appointed laws, alike the
highest and the lowest of her works, he took her up under the
aspect of some empirical native qualities of the human mind.
Certain harsh passages I could even directly apply to myself:
they exhibited my confession of faith in a false light; and I
felt that if written without particular attention to me, they
were still worse; for, in that case, the vast chasm which lay
between us gaped but so much the more distinctly.’
After a casual meeting at a Society for Natural History, they walked
home, and Goethe proceeds:
‘We reached his house; the talk induced me to go in. I then
expounded to him, with as much vivacity as possible, the
_Metamorphosis of Plants_,[20] drawing out on paper, with
many characteristic strokes, a symbolic plant for him, as I
proceeded. He heard and saw all this, with much interest and
distinct comprehension; but when I had done, he shook his head
and said: “This is no experiment, this is an idea.” I stopped
with some degree of irritation; for the point which separated
us was most luminously marked by this expression. The opinions
in _Dignity and Grace_ again occurred to me; the old grudge was
just awakening; but I smothered it, and merely said: “I was
happy to find that I had got ideas without knowing it, nay,
that I saw them before my eyes.”
‘Schiller had much more prudence and dexterity of management
than I; he was also thinking of his periodical the _Horen_,
about this time, and of course rather wished to attract than
repel me. Accordingly, he answered me like an accomplished
Kantite; and as my stiff-necked Realism gave occasion to many
contradictions, much battling took place between us, and at
last a truce, in which neither party would consent to yield the
victory, but each held himself invincible. Positions like the
following grieved me to the very soul: _How can there ever be
an experiment, that shall correspond with an idea? The specific
quality of an idea is, that no experiment can reach it or agree
with it._ Yet if he held as an idea, the same thing which I
looked upon as an experiment, there must certainly, I thought,
be some community between us—some ground whereon both of us
might meet!’
With Goethe’s natural history, or with Kant’s philosophy, we have here
no concern; but we can combine the expressions of the two great poets
into a nearly complete description of poetry. The ‘symbolic plant’ is the
_type_, of which we speak, the ideal at which inferior specimens aim, the
class characteristic in which they all share, but which none shows forth
fully. Goethe was right in searching for this in reality and nature;
Schiller was right in saying that it was an ‘idea,’ a transcending
notion to which approximations could be found in experience, but only
approximations—which could not be found there itself. Goethe, as a poet,
rightly felt the primary necessity of outward suggestion and experience;
Schiller, as a philosopher, rightly felt its imperfection.
But in these delicate matters, it is easy to misapprehend. There is,
undoubtedly, a sort of poetry which is produced as it were out of the
author’s mind. The description of the poet’s own moods and feelings is
a common sort of poetry—perhaps the commonest sort. But the peculiarity
of such cases is, that the poet does not describe himself _as_ himself:
autobiography is not his object; he takes himself as a specimen of
human nature; he describes, not himself, but a distillation of himself:
he takes such of his moods as are most characteristic, as most typify
certain moods of certain men, or certain moods of all men; he chooses
preponderant feelings of special sorts of men, or occasional feelings
of men of all sorts; but with whatever other difference and diversity,
the essence is that such self-describing poets describe what is _in_
them, but not _peculiar_ to them,—what is generic, not what is special
and individual. Gray’s _Elegy_ describes a mood which Gray felt more
than other men, but which most others, perhaps all others, feel too. It
is more popular, perhaps, than any English poem, because that sort of
feeling is the most diffused of high feelings, and because Gray added to
a singular nicety of fancy an habitual proneness to a _contemplative_—a
discerning but unbiassed—meditation on death and on life. Other poets
cannot hope for such success: a subject so popular, so grave, so wise,
and yet so suitable to the writer’s nature, is hardly to be found. But
the same ideal, the same unautobiographical character is to be found
in the writings of meaner men. Take sonnets of Hartley Coleridge, for
example:—
I.
TO A FRIEND.
‘When we were idlers with the loitering rills,
The need of human love we little noted:
Our love was nature; and the peace that floated
On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills,
To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills:
One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,
That, wisely doating, ask’d not why it doated,
And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.
But now I find, how dear thou wert to me;
That man is more than half of nature’s treasure,
Of that fair Beauty which no eye can see,
Of that sweet music which no ear can measure;
And now the streams may sing for others’ pleasure,
The hills sleep on in their eternity.’
II.
TO THE SAME.
‘In the great city we are met again,
Where many souls there are, that breathe and die,
Scarce knowing more of nature’s potency,
Than what they learn from heat, or cold, or rain,
The sad vicissitude of weary pain;—
For busy man is lord of ear and eye,
And what hath nature, but the vast, void sky,
And the thronged river toiling to the main?
Oh! say not so, for she shall have her part
In every smile, in every tear that falls,
And she shall hide her in the secret heart,
Where love persuades, and sterner duty calls:
But worse it were than death, or sorrow’s smart,
To live without a friend within these walls.’
III.
TO THE SAME.
‘We parted on the mountains, as two streams
From one clear spring pursue their several ways;
And thy fleet course hath been through many a maze
In foreign lands, where silvery Padus gleams
To that delicious sky, whose glowing beams
Brightened the tresses that old Poets praise;
Where Petrarch’s patient love, and artful lays,
And Ariosto’s song of many themes,
Moved the soft air. But I, a lazy brook,
As close pent up within my native dell,
Have crept along from nook to shady nook,
Where flow’rets blow, and whispering Naiads dwell.
Yet now we meet, that parted were so wide,
O’er rough and smooth to travel side by side.’
The contrast of instructive and enviable locomotion with refining but
instructive meditation is not special and peculiar to these two, but
general and universal. It was set down by Hartley Coleridge because he
was the most meditative and refining of men.
What sort of literatesque types are fit to be described in the sort of
literature called poetry, is a matter on which much might be written.
Mr. Arnold, some years since, put forth a theory that the art of poetry
could only delineate _great actions_. But though, rightly interpreted
and understood—using the word action so as to include high and sound
activity in contemplation—this definition may suit the highest poetry,
it certainly cannot be stretched to include many inferior sorts and
even many good sorts. Nobody in their senses would describe Gray’s
_Elegy_ as the delineation of a ‘great action;’ some kinds of mental
contemplation may be energetic enough to deserve this name, but Gray
would have been frightened at the very word. He loved scholarlike calm
and quiet inaction; his very greatness depended on his _not_ acting, on
his ‘wise passiveness,’ on his indulging the grave idleness which so well
appreciates so much of human life. But the best answer—the _reductio ad
absurdum_—of Mr. Arnold’s doctrine, is the mutilation which it has caused
him to make of his own writings. It has forbidden him, he tells us, to
reprint _Empedocles_—a poem undoubtedly containing defects and even
excesses, but containing also these lines:—
‘And yet what days were those Parmenides!
When we were young, when we could number friends
In all the Italian cities like ourselves,
When with elated hearts we join’d your train,
Ye Sun-born virgins! on the road of Truth.
Then we could still enjoy; then neither thought
Nor outward things were clos’d and dead to us,
But we receiv’d the shock of mighty thoughts
On simple minds with a pure natural joy;
And if the sacred load oppress’d our brain,
We had the power to feel the pressure eas’d,
The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,
In the delightful commerce of the world.
We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
Thought’s slaves, and dead to every natural joy.
The smallest thing could give us pleasure then—
The sports of the country people;
A flute note from the woods;
Sunset over the sea:
Seed-time and harvest;
The reapers in the corn;
The vinedresser in his vineyard;
The village-girl at her wheel.
Fulness of life and power of feeling, ye
Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,
Who dwell on a firm basis of content.
But he who has outliv’d his prosperous days,
But he, whose youth fell on a different world
From that on which his exil’d age is thrown;
Whose mind was fed on other food, was train’d
By other rules than are in vogue to-day;
Whose habit of thought is fix’d, who will not change,
But in a world he loves not must subsist
In ceaseless opposition, be the guard
Of his own breast, fetter’d to what he guards,
That the world win no mastery over him;
Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;
Who has no minute’s breathing space allow’d
To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy;—
Joy and the outward world must die to him
As they are dead to me.’
What freak of criticism can induce a man who has written such poetry as
this, to discard it, and say it is not poetry? Mr. Arnold is privileged
to speak of his own poems, but no other critic could speak so and not be
laughed at.
We are disposed to believe that no very sharp definition can be given—at
least in the present state of the critical art—of the boundary line
between poetry and other sorts of imaginative delineation. Between the
undoubted dominions of the two kinds there is a debatable land; everybody
is agreed that the ‘Œdipus at Colonus’ is poetry: everyone is agreed
that the wonderful appearance of Mrs. Veal is _not_ poetry. But the
exact line which separates grave novels in verse like _Aylmer’s Field_
or _Enoch Arden_, from grave novels not in verse like _Silas Marner_ or
_Adam Bede_, we own we cannot draw with any confidence. Nor, perhaps,
is it very important; whether a narrative is thrown into verse or not,
certainly depends in part on the taste of the age, and in part on its
mechanical helps. Verse is the only mechanical help to the memory in
rude times, and there is little writing till a cheap something is found
to write upon, and a cheap something to write with. Poetry—verse, at
least—is the literature of _all work_ in early ages; it is only later
ages which write in what _they_ think a natural and simple prose.
There are other casual influences in the matter too; but they are not
material now. We need only say here that poetry, because it has a more
marked rhythm than prose, must be more intense in meaning and more
concise in style than prose. People expect a ‘marked rhythm’ to imply
something worth marking; if it fails to do so they are disappointed.
They are displeased at the visible waste of a powerful instrument; they
call it ‘doggerel,’ and rightly call it, for the metrical expression
of full thought and eager feeling—the burst of metre—incident to high
imagination, should not be wasted on petty matters which prose does
as well,—which it does better—which it suits by its very limpness and
weakness, whose small changes it follows more easily, and to whose lowest
details it can fully and without effort degrade itself. Verse, too,
should be _more concise_, for long-continued rhythm tends to jade the
mind, just as brief rhythm tends to attract the attention. Poetry should
be memorable and emphatic, intense, and _soon over_.
The great divisions of poetry, and of all other literary art, arise from
the different modes in which these _types_—these characteristic men,
these characteristic feelings—may be variously described. There are
three principal modes which we shall attempt to describe—the _pure_,
which is sometimes, but not very wisely, called the classical; the
_ornate_, which is also unwisely called romantic; and the _grotesque_,
which might be called the mediæval. We will describe the nature of these
a little. Criticism, we know, must be brief—not, like poetry, because
its charm is too intense to be sustained—but, on the contrary, because
its interest is too weak to be prolonged; but elementary criticism, if
an evil, is a necessary evil; a little while spent among the simple
principles of art is the first condition, the absolute pre-requisite,
for surely apprehending and wisely judging the complete embodiments and
miscellaneous forms of actual literature.
The definition of _pure_ literature is, that it describes the type in
its simplicity—we mean, with the exact amount of accessory circumstance
which is necessary to bring it before the mind in finished perfection,
and no more than that amount. The _type_ needs some accessories from its
nature—a picturesque landscape does not consist wholly of picturesque
features. There is a setting of surroundings—as the Americans would say,
of fixings—without which the reality is not itself. By a traditional mode
of speech, as soon as we see a picture in which a complete effect is
produced by detail so rare and so harmonised as to escape us, we say, How
‘classical’! The whole which is to be seen appears at once and through
the detail, but the detail itself is not seen: we do not think of that
which gives us the idea; we are absorbed in the idea itself. Just so in
literature, the pure art is that which works with the fewest strokes; the
fewest, that is, for its purpose, for its aim is to call up and bring
home to men an idea, a form, a character, and if that idea be twisted,
that form be involved, that character perplexed, many strokes of literary
art will be needful. Pure art does not mutilate its object; it represents
it as fully as is possible with the slightest effort which is possible:
it shrinks from no needful circumstances, as little as it inserts any
which are needless. The precise peculiarity is not merely that no
incidental circumstance is inserted which does not tell on the main
design: no art is fit to be called art which permits a stroke to be put
in without an object; but that only the minimum of such circumstance is
inserted at all. The form is sometimes said to be bare, the accessories
are sometimes said to be invisible, because the appendages are so choice
that the shape only is perceived.
The English literature undoubtedly contains much impure literature;
impure in its style, if not in its meaning: but it also contains one
great, one nearly perfect, model of the pure style in the literary
expression of typical _sentiment_; and one not perfect, but gigantic and
close approximation to perfection in the pure delineation of objective
character. Wordsworth, perhaps, comes as near to choice purity of style
in sentiment as is possible; Milton, with exceptions and conditions to be
explained, approaches perfection by the strenuous purity with which he
depicts character.
A wit once said, that ‘_pretty_ women had more features than _beautiful_
women,’ and though the expression may be criticised, the meaning is
correct. Pretty women seem to have a great number of attractive points,
each of which attracts your attention, and each one of which you remember
afterwards; yet these points have not grown together, their features have
not linked themselves into a single inseparable whole. But a beautiful
woman is a whole as she is; you no more take her to pieces than a Greek
statue; she is not an aggregate of divisible charms, she is a charm
in herself. Such ever is the dividing test of pure art; if you catch
yourself admiring its details, it is defective; you ought to think of it
as a single whole which you must remember, which you must admire, which
somehow subdues you while you admire it, which is a ‘possession’ to you
‘for ever.’
Of course, no individual poem embodies this ideal perfectly; of course,
every human word and phrase has its imperfections, and if we choose an
instance to illustrate that ideal, the instance has scarcely a fair
chance. By contrasting it with the ideal, we suggest its imperfections;
by protruding it as an example, we turn on its defectiveness the
microscope of criticism. Yet these two sonnets of Wordsworth may be fitly
read in this place, not because they are quite without faults, or because
they are the very best examples of their kind of style; but because they
are luminous examples; the compactness of the sonnet and the gravity
of the sentiment, hedging in the thoughts, restraining the fancy, and
helping to maintain a singleness of expression.
‘THE TROSACHS.
‘There’s not a nook within this solemn Pass,
But were an apt Confessional for one
Taught by his summer spent, his autumn gone,
That Life is but a tale of morning grass
Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase
That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes
Feed it ’mid Nature’s old felicities,
Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass
Untouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy guest,
If from a golden perch of aspen spray
(October’s workmanship to rival May)
The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast
That moral sweeten by a heaven-taught lay,
Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest!’
‘COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPT. 3, 1802.
‘Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!’
Instances of barer style than this may easily be found instances of
colder style—few better instances of purer style. Not a single expression
(the invocation in the concluding couplet of the second sonnet perhaps
excepted) can be spared, yet not a single expression rivets the
attention. If, indeed, we take out the phrase—
‘The city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning,’
and the description of the brilliant yellow of autumn—
‘October’s workmanship to rival May,’
they have independent value, but they are not noticed in the sonnet when
we read it through; they fall into place there, and being in their place,
are not seen. The great subjects of the two sonnets, the religious aspect
of beautiful but grave nature—the religious aspect of a city about to
awaken and be alive, are the only ideas left in our mind. To Wordsworth
has been vouchsafed the last grace of the self-denying artist; you think
neither of him nor his style, but you cannot help thinking of—you _must_
recall—the exact phrase, the _very_ sentiment he wished.
Milton’s purity is more eager. In the most exciting parts of
Wordsworth—and these sonnets are not very exciting—you always feel, you
never forget, that what you have before you is the excitement of a
recluse. There is nothing of the stir of life; nothing of the brawl of
the world. But Milton, though always a scholar by trade, though solitary
in old age, was through life intent on great affairs, lived close to
great scenes, watched a revolution, and if not an actor in it, was at
least secretary to the actors. He was familiar—by daily experience and
habitual sympathy—with the earnest debate of arduous questions, on which
the life and death of the speakers certainly depended, on which the
weal or woe of the country perhaps depended. He knew how profoundly the
individual character of the speakers—their inner and real nature—modifies
their opinion on such questions; he knew how surely that nature will
appear in the expression of them. This great experience, fashioned
by a fine imagination, gives to the debate of the Satanic Council
in Pandæmonium its reality and its life. It is a debate in the Long
Parliament, and though the theme of _Paradise Lost_ obliged Milton to
side with the monarchical element in the universe, his old habits are
often too much for him; and his real sympathy—the impetus and energy of
his nature—side with the rebellious element. For the purposes of art this
is much better. Of a court, a poet can make but little; of a heaven, he
can make very little; but of a courtly heaven, such as Milton conceived,
he can make nothing at all. The idea of a court and the idea of a heaven
are so radically different, that a distinct combination of them is always
grotesque and often ludicrous. _Paradise Lost_, as a whole, is radically
tainted by a vicious principle. It professes to justify the ways of God
to man, to account for sin and death, and it tells you that the whole
originated in a political event; in a court squabble as to a particular
act of patronage and the due or undue promotion of an eldest son. Satan
may have been wrong, but on Milton’s theory he had an arguable case at
least. There was something arbitrary in the promotion; there were little
symptoms of a job; in _Paradise Lost_ it is always clear that the devils
are the weaker, but it is never clear that the angels are the better.
Milton’s sympathy and his imagination slip back to the Puritan rebels
whom he loved, and desert the courtly angels whom he could not love,
although he praised them. There is no wonder that Milton’s hell is better
than his heaven, for he hated officials and he loved rebels,—he employs
his genius below, and accumulates his pedantry above. On the great debate
in Pandæmonium all his genius is concentrated. The question is very
practical; it is, ‘What are we devils to do, now we have lost heaven?’
Satan, who presides over and manipulates the assembly—Moloch,
‘The fiercest spirit
That fought in Heaven, now fiercer by despair,’
who wants to fight again; Belial, ‘the man of the world,’ who does not
want to fight any more; Mammon, who is for commencing an industrial
career; Beelzebub, the official statesman,
‘Deep on his front engraven,
Deliberation sat and Public care,’
who, at Satan’s instance, proposes the invasion of earth—are as distinct
as so many statues. Even Belial, ‘the man of the world,’ the sort of man
with whom Milton had least sympathy, is perfectly painted. An inferior
artist would have made the actor who ‘counselled ignoble ease and
peaceful sloth,’ a degraded and ugly creature; but Milton knew better.
He knew that low notions require a better garb than high notions. Human
nature is not a high thing, but at least it has a high idea of itself; it
will not accept mean maxims, unless they are gilded and made beautiful.
A prophet in goatskin may cry, ‘Repent, repent,’ but it takes ‘purple
and fine linen’ to be able to say ‘Continue in your sins.’ The world
vanquishes with its speciousness and its show, and the orator who is to
persuade men to worldliness must have a share in them. Milton well knew
this; after the warlike speech of the fierce Moloch, he introduces a
brighter and a more graceful spirit.
‘He ended frowning, and his look denounced
Desp’rate revenge, and battle dangerous
To less than Gods. On th’ other side up rose
Belial, in act more graceful and humane:
A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seem’d
For dignity composed and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow, though his tongue
Dropt manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest counsels; for his thoughts were low;
To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds
Tim’rous and slothful: yet he pleased the ear,
And with persuasive accent thus began:’
He does not begin like a man with a strong case, but like a man with a
weak case; he knows that the pride of human nature is irritated by mean
advice, and though he may probably persuade men to take it, he must
carefully apologise for giving it. Here, as elsewhere, though the formal
address is to devils, the real address is to men: to the human nature
which we know, not to the fictitious diabolic nature we do not know.
‘I should be much for open war, O Peers!
As not behind in hate, if what was urged
Main reason to persuade immediate war,
Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast
Ominous conjecture on the whole success:
When he who most excels in fact of arms,
In what he counsels, and in what excels
Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair,
And utter dissolution, as the scope
Of all his aim, after some dire revenge.
First, what revenge? The tow’rs of Heav’n are fill’d
With armed watch, that render all access
Impregnable; oft on the bord’ring deep
Encamp their legions, or with obscure wing
Scout far and wide into the realm of night,
Scorning surprise. Or could we break our way
By force, and at our heels all Hell should rise
With blackest insurrection, to confound
Heav’n’s purest light, yet our Great Enemy,
All incorruptible, would on His throne
Sit unpolluted, and th’ ethereal mould
Incapable of stain would soon expel
Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire
Victorious. Thus repulsed, our final hope
Is flat despair. We must exasperate
Th’ Almighty Victor to spend all His rage,
And that must end us: that must be our cure,
To be no more? Sad cure; for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion? And who knows,
Let this be good, whether our angry Foe
Can give it, or will ever? How He can
Is doubtful; that He never will is sure.
Will He, so wise, let loose at once His ire
Belike through impotence, or unaware,
To give His enemies their wish, and end
Them in His anger, whom His anger saves
To punish endless? Wherefore cease we then?
Say they who counsel war, we are decreed,
Reserved, and destined, to eternal woe;
Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,
What can we suffer worse? Is this then worst,
Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?’
...
And so on.
Mr. Pitt knew this speech by heart, and Lord Macaulay has called it
incomparable; and these judges of the oratorical art have well decided.
A mean foreign policy cannot be better defended. Its sensibleness is
effectually explained, and its tameness as much as possible disguised.
But we have not here to do with the excellence of Belial’s policy, but
with the excellence of his speech; and with that speech in a peculiar
manner. This speech, taken with the few lines of description with which
Milton introduces them, embody, in as short a space as possible, with as
much perfection as possible, the delineation of the type of character
common at all times, dangerous in many times; sure to come to the surface
in moments of difficulty, and never more dangerous than then. As Milton
describes it, it is one among several _typical_ characters which will
ever have their place in great councils, which will ever be heard at
important decisions, which are part of the characteristic and inalienable
whole of this statesmanlike world. The debate in Pandæmonium is a debate
among these typical characters at the greatest conceivable crisis, and
with adjuncts of solemnity which no other situation could rival. It is
the greatest classical triumph, the highest achievement of the pure style
in English literature; it is the greatest description of the highest and
most typical characters with the most choice circumstances and in the
fewest words.
It is not unremarkable that we should find in Milton and in _Paradise
Lost_ the best specimen of pure style. Milton was a schoolmaster in a
pedantic age, and there is nothing so unclassical—nothing so impure in
style—as pedantry. The out-of-door conversational life of Athens was as
opposed to bookish scholasticism as a life can be. The most perfect books
have been written not by those who thought much of books, but by those
who thought little, by those who were under the restraint of a sensitive
talking world, to which books had contributed something, and a various,
eager life the rest. Milton is generally unclassical in spirit where he
is learned, and naturally, because the purest poets do not overlay their
conceptions with book knowledge, and the classical poets, having in
comparison no books, were under little temptation to impair the purity
of their style by the accumulation of their research. Over and above
this, there is in Milton, and a little in Wordsworth also, one defect
which is in the highest degree faulty and unclassical, which mars the
effect and impairs the perfection of the pure style. There is a want of
spontaneity, and a sense of effort. It has been happily said that Plato’s
words must have _grown_ into their places. No one would say so of Milton
or even of Wordsworth. About both of them there is a taint of duty; a
vicious sense of the good man’s task. Things seem right where they are,
but they seem to be put where they are. Flexibility is essential to the
consummate perfection of the pure style, because the sensation of the
poet’s efforts carries away our thoughts from his achievements. We are
admiring his labours when we should be enjoying his words. But this is a
defect in those two writers, not a defect in pure art. Of course it _is_
more difficult to write in few words than to write in many; to take the
best adjuncts, and those only, for what you have to say, instead of using
all which comes to hand; it _is_ an additional labour if you write verses
in a morning, to spend the rest of the day in _choosing_, that is, in
making those verses fewer. But a perfect artist in the pure style is as
effortless and as natural as in any style, perhaps is more so. Take the
well-known lines:—
‘There was a little lawny islet
By anemone and violet,
Like mosaic, paven:
And its roof was flowers and leaves
Which the summer’s breath enweaves,
Where nor sun, nor showers, nor breeze,
Pierce the pines and tallest trees,
Each a gem engraven:
Girt by many an azure wave
With which the clouds and mountains pave
A lake’s blue chasm.’
Shelley had many merits and many defects. This is not the place for a
complete or indeed for any estimate of him. But one excellence is most
evident. His words are as flexible as any words; the rhythm of some
modulating air seems to move them into their place without a struggle
by the poet, and almost without his knowledge. This is the perfection
of pure art, to embody typical conceptions in the choicest, the fewest
accidents, to embody them so that each of these accidents may produce its
full effect, and so to embody them without effort.
The extreme opposite to this pure art is what may be called ornate art.
This species of art aims also at giving a delineation of the typical
idea in its perfection and its fulness, but it aims at so doing in a
manner most different. It wishes to surround the type with the greatest
number of circumstances which it will bear. It works not by choice and
selection, but by accumulation and aggregation. The idea is not, as in
the pure style, presented with the least clothing which it will endure,
but with the richest and most involved clothing that it will admit.
We are fortunate in not having to hunt out of past literature an
illustrative specimen of the ornate style. Mr. Tennyson has just given
one admirable in itself, and most characteristic of the defects and the
merits of this style. The story of _Enoch Arden_, as he has enhanced
and presented it, is a rich and splendid composite of imagery and
illustration. Yet how simple that story is in itself. A sailor who sells
fish, breaks his leg, gets dismal, gives up selling fish, goes to sea, is
wrecked on a desert island, stays there some years, on his return finds
his wife married to a miller, speaks to a landlady on the subject, and
dies. Told in the pure and simple, the unadorned and classical style,
this story would not have taken three pages, but Mr. Tennyson has been
able to make it the principal—the largest tale in his new volume. He
has done so only by giving to every event and incident in the volume an
accompanying commentary. He tells a great deal about the torrid zone,
which a rough sailor like Enoch Arden certainly would not have perceived;
and he gives to the fishing village, to which all the characters belong,
a softness and a fascination which such villages scarcely possess in
reality.
The description of the tropical island on which the sailor is thrown, is
an absolute model of adorned art:—
‘The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes,
The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
The lustre of the long convolvuluses
That coil’d around the stately stems, and ran
Ev’n to the limit of the land, the glows
And glories of the broad belt of the world,
All these he saw; but what he fain had seen
He could not see, the kindly human face,
Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch’d
And blossom’d in the zenith, or the sweep
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
A shipwreck’d sailor, waiting for a sail:
No sail from day to day, but every day
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
The scarlet shafts of sunrise—but no sail.’
No expressive circumstances can be added to this description, no
enhancing detail suggested. A much less happy instance is the description
of Enoch’s life before he sailed:—
‘While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas,
Or often journeying landward; for in truth
Enoch’s white horse, and Enoch’s ocean spoil
In ocean-smelling osier, and his face,
Rough-redden’d with a thousand winter gales,
Not only to the market-cross were known,
But in the leafy lanes behind the down,
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp,
And peacock yew-tree of the lonely Hall,
Whose Friday fare was Enoch’s ministering.’
So much has not often been made of selling fish. The essence of ornate
art is in this manner to accumulate round the typical object, everything
which can be said about it, every associated thought that can be
connected with it without impairing the essence of the delineation.
The first defect which strikes a student of ornate art—the first which
arrests the mere reader of it—is what is called a want of simplicity.
Nothing is described as it is; everything has about it an atmosphere of
something else. The combined and associated thoughts, though they set
off and heighten particular ideas and aspects of the central and typical
conception, yet complicate it: a simple thing—‘a daisy by the river’s
brim’—is never left by itself, something else is put with it; something
not more connected with it than ‘lion-whelp’ and the ‘peacock yew-tree’
are with the ‘fresh fish for sale’ that Enoch carries past them. Even
in the highest cases, ornate art leaves upon a cultured and delicate
taste, the conviction that it is not the highest art, that it is somehow
excessive and over-rich, that it is not chaste in itself or chastening to
the mind that sees it—that it is in an explained manner unsatisfactory,
‘a thing in which we feel there is some hidden want!’
That want is a want of ‘definition.’ We must all know landscapes, river
landscapes especially, which are in the highest sense beautiful, which
when we first see them give us a delicate pleasure; which in some—and
these the best cases—give even a gentle sense of surprise that such
things should be so beautiful, and yet when we come to live in them,
to spend even a few hours in them, we seem stifled and oppressed. On
the other hand there are people to whom the seashore is a companion,
an exhilaration; and not so much for the brawl of the shore as for the
limited vastness, the finite infinite of the ocean as they see it.
Such people often come home braced and nerved, and if they spoke out
the truth, would have only to say, ‘We have seen the horizon line;’ if
they were let alone indeed, they would gaze on it hour after hour, so
great to them is the fascination, so full the sustaining calm, which
they gain from that union of form and greatness. To a very inferior
extent, but still, perhaps, to an extent which most people understand
better, a common arch will have the same effect. A bridge completes a
river landscape; if of the old and many-arched sort, it regulates by a
long series of defined forms the vague outline of wood and river, which
before had nothing to measure it; if of the new scientific sort, it
introduces still more strictly a geometrical element; it stiffens the
scenery which was before too soft, too delicate, too vegetable. Just such
is the effect of pure style in literary art. It calms by conciseness;
while the ornate style leaves on the mind a mist of beauty, an excess of
fascination, a complication of charm, the pure style leaves behind it the
simple, defined, measured idea, as it is, and by itself. That which is
chaste chastens; there is a poised energy—a state half thrill and half
tranquillity—which pure art gives, which no other can give; a pleasure
justified as well as felt; an ennobled satisfaction at what ought to
satisfy us, and must ennoble us.
Ornate art is to pure art what a painted statue is to an unpainted. It is
impossible to deny that a touch of colour does bring out certain parts;
does convey certain expressions; does heighten certain features, but
it leaves on the work as a whole, a want, as we say, ‘of something;’ a
want of that inseparable chasteness which clings to simple sculpture, an
impairing predominance of alluring details which impairs our satisfaction
with our own satisfaction; which makes us doubt whether a higher being
than ourselves will be satisfied even though we are so. In the very same
manner, though the rouge of ornate literature excites our eye, it also
impairs our confidence.
Mr. Arnold has justly observed that this self-justifying, self-proving
purity of style is commoner in ancient literature than in modern
literature, and also that Shakespeare is not a great or an unmixed
example of it. No one can say that he is. His works are full of
undergrowth, are full of complexity, are not models of style; except by a
miracle, nothing in the Elizabethan age could be a model of style; the
restraining taste of that age was feebler and more mistaken than that of
any other equally great age. Shakespeare’s mind so teemed with creation
that he required the most just, most forcible, most constant restraint
from without. He most needed to be guided among poets, and he was the
least and worst guided. As a whole no one can call his works finished
models of the pure style, or of any style. But he has many passages
of the most pure style, passages which could be easily cited if space
served. And we must remember that the task which Shakespeare undertook
was the most difficult which any poet has ever attempted, and that it
is a task in which after a million efforts every other poet has failed.
The Elizabethan drama—as Shakespeare has immortalised it—undertakes to
delineate in five acts, under stage restrictions, and in mere dialogue, a
whole list of _dramatis personæ_ a set of characters enough for a modern
novel, and with the distinctness of a modern novel. Shakespeare is not
content to give two or three great characters in solitude and in dignity,
like the classical dramatists; he wishes to give a whole party of
characters in the play of life, and according to the nature of each. He
would ‘hold the mirror up to nature,’ not to catch a monarch in a tragic
posture, but a whole group of characters engaged in many actions, intent
on many purposes, thinking many thoughts. There is life enough, there
is action enough, in single plays of Shakespeare to set up an ancient
dramatist for a long career. And Shakespeare succeeded. His characters,
taken _en masse_, and as a whole, are as well known as any novelist’s
characters; cultivated men know all about them, as young ladies know all
about Mr. Trollope’s novels. But no other dramatist has succeeded in such
an aim. No one else’s characters are staple people in English literature,
hereditary people whom everyone knows all about in every generation. The
contemporary dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Marlowe,
&c., had many merits, some of them were great men. But a critic must say
of them the worst thing he has to say: ‘they were men who failed in
their characteristic aim;’ they attempted to describe numerous sets of
complicated characters, and they failed. No one of such characters, or
hardly one, lives in common memory; the _Faustus_ of Marlowe, a really
great idea, is not remembered. They undertook to write what they could
not write—five acts full of real characters, and in consequence, the fine
individual things they conceived are forgotten by the mixed multitude,
and known only to a few of the few. Of the Spanish theatre we cannot
speak; but there are no such characters in any French tragedy: the whole
aim of that tragedy forbad it. Goethe has added to literature a few great
characters; he may be said almost to have added to literature the idea
of ‘intellectual creation,’—the idea of describing the great characters
through the intellect; but he has not added to the common stock what
Shakespeare added, a new multitude of men and women; and these not in
simple attitudes, but amid the most complex parts of life, with all
their various natures roused, mixed, and strained. The severest art must
have allowed many details, much overflowing circumstance to a poet who
undertook to describe what almost defies description. Pure art would have
commanded him to use details lavishly, for only by a multiplicity of such
could the required effect have been at all produced. Shakespeare could
accomplish it, for his mind was a spring, an inexhaustible fountain of
human nature, and it is no wonder that being compelled by the task of
his time to let the fulness of his nature overflow, he sometimes let it
overflow too much, and covered with erroneous conceits and superfluous
images characters and conceptions which would have been far more justly,
far more effectually, delineated with conciseness and simplicity. But
there is an infinity of pure art in Shakespeare, although there is a
great deal else also.
It will be said, if ornate art be as you say, an inferior species of art,
why should it ever be used? If pure art be the best sort of art, why
should it not always be used?
The reason is this: literary art, as we just now explained, is concerned
with literatesque characters in literatesque situations; and the
_best_ art is concerned with the _most_ literatesque characters in the
_most_ literatesque situations. Such are the subjects of pure art; it
embodies with the fewest touches, and under the most select and choice
circumstances, the highest conceptions; but it does not follow that only
the best subjects are to be treated by art, and then only in the very
best way. Human nature could not endure such a critical commandment
as that, and it would be an erroneous criticism which gave it. _Any_
literatesque character may be described in literature under _any_
circumstances which exhibit its literatesqueness.
The essence of pure art consists in its describing what is as it is,
and this is very well for what can bear it, but there are many inferior
things which will not bear it, and which nevertheless ought to be
described in books. A certain kind of literature deals with illusions,
and this kind of literature has given a colouring to the name romantic.
A man of rare genius, and even of poetical genius, has gone so far as to
make these illusions the true subject of poetry—almost the sole subject.
‘Without,’ says Father Newman, of one of his characters, ‘being
himself a poet, he was in the season of poetry, in the sweet
spring-time, when the year is most beautiful because it is new.
Novelty was beauty to a heart so open and cheerful as his;
not only because it was novelty, and had its proper charm as
such, but because when we first see things, we see them in a
gay confusion, which is a principal element of the poetical.
As time goes on, and we number and sort and measure things,—as
we gain views, we advance towards philosophy and truth, but we
recede from poetry.
‘When we ourselves were young, we once on a time walked on a
hot summer day from Oxford to Newington—a dull road, as anyone
who has gone it knows; yet it was new to us; and we protest
to you, reader, believe it or not, laugh or not, as you will,
to us it seemed on that occasion quite touchingly beautiful;
and a soft melancholy came over us, of which the shadows fall
even now, when we look back upon that dusty, weary journey. And
why? because every object which met us was unknown and full
of mystery. A tree or two in the distance seemed the beginning
of a great wood, or park, stretching endlessly; a hill implied
a vale beyond, with that vale’s history; the bye-lanes, with
their green hedges, wound on and vanished, yet were not lost
to the imagination. Such was our first journey; but when we
had gone it several times, the mind refused to act, the scene
ceased to enchant, stern reality alone remained; and we thought
it one of the most tiresome, odious roads we ever had occasion
to traverse.’
That is to say, that the function of the poet is to introduce a ‘gay
confusion,’ a rich medley which does not exist in the actual world—which
perhaps could not exist in any world—but which would seem pretty if it
did exist. Everyone who reads _Enoch Arden_ will perceive that this
notion of all poetry is exactly applicable to this one poem. Whatever
be made of Enoch’s ‘Ocean-spoil in ocean-smelling osier,’ of the
‘portal-warding lion-whelp, and the peacock yew-tree,’ everyone knows
that in himself Enoch could not have been charming. People who sell
fish about the country (and that is what he did, though Mr. Tennyson
won’t speak out, and wraps it up) never are beautiful. As Enoch was and
must be coarse, in itself the poem must depend for a charm on a ‘gay
confusion’—on a splendid accumulation of impossible accessories.
Mr. Tennyson knows this better than many of us—he knows the country
world; he has proved that no one living knows it better; he has painted
with pure art—with art which describes what is a race perhaps more
refined, more delicate, more conscientious, than the sailor—the _Northern
Farmer_, and we all know what a splendid, what a living thing, he has
made of it. He could, if he only would, have given us the ideal sailor in
like manner—the ideal of the natural sailor we mean—the characteristic
present man as he lives and is. But this he has not chosen. He has
endeavoured to describe an exceptional sailor, at an exceptionally
refined port, performing a graceful act, an act of relinquishment. And
with this task before him, his profound taste taught him that ornate
art was a necessary medium—was the sole effectual instrument—for his
purpose. It was necessary for him if possible to abstract the mind from
reality, to induce us _not_ to conceive or think of sailors as they
are while we are reading of his sailors, but to think of what a person
who did not know, might fancy sailors to be. A casual traveller on the
seashore, with the sensitive mood and the romantic imagination Dr.
Newman has described, might fancy, would fancy, a seafaring village to
be like that. Accordingly, Mr. Tennyson has made it his aim to call off
the stress of fancy from real life, to occupy it otherwise, to bury it
with pretty accessories; to engage it on the ‘peacock yew-tree,’ and the
‘portal-warding lion-whelp.’ Nothing, too, can be more splendid than the
description of the tropics as Mr. Tennyson delineates them, but a sailor
would not have felt the tropics in that manner. The beauties of nature
would not have so much occupied him. He would have known little of the
scarlet shafts of sunrise and nothing of the long convolvuluses. As in
Robinson Crusoe, his own petty contrivances and his small ailments would
have been the principal subject to him. ‘For three years,’ he might have
said, ‘my back was bad; and then I put two pegs into a piece of drift
wood and so made a chair; and after that it pleased God to send me a
chill.’ In real life his piety would scarcely have gone beyond that.
It will indeed be said, that though the sailor had no words for, and
even no explicit consciousness of, the splendid details of the torrid
zone, yet that he had, notwithstanding, a dim latent inexpressible
conception of them: though he could not speak of them or describe them,
yet they were much to him. And doubtless such is the case. Rude people
are impressed by what is beautiful—deeply impressed—though they could
not describe what they see, or what they feel. But what is absurd in
Mr. Tennyson’s description—absurd when we abstract it from the gorgeous
additions and ornaments with which Mr. Tennyson distracts us—is, that his
hero feels nothing else but these great splendours. We hear nothing of
the physical ailments, the rough devices, the low superstitions, which
really would have been the _first_ things, the favourite and principal
occupations of his mind. Just so when he gets home he _may_ have had
such fine sentiments, though it is odd, and he _may_ have spoken of
them to his landlady, though that is odder still,—but it is incredible
that his whole mind should be made up of fine sentiments. Beside those
sweet feelings, if he had them, there must have been many more obvious,
more prosaic, and some perhaps more healthy. Mr. Tennyson has shown
a profound judgment in distracting us as he does. He has given us a
classic delineation of the _Northern Farmer_ with no ornament at all—as
bare a thing as can be—because he then wanted to describe a true type
of real men: he has given us a sailor crowded all over with ornament
and illustration, because he then wanted to describe an unreal type of
fancied men,—not sailors as they are, but sailors as they might be wished.
Another prominent element in _Enoch Arden_ is yet more suitable to, yet
more requires the aid of, ornate art. Mr. Tennyson undertook to deal with
_half belief_. The presentiments which Annie feels are exactly of that
sort which everybody has felt, and which everyone has half believed—which
hardly anyone has more than half believed. Almost everyone, it has been
said, would be angry if anyone else reported that he believed in ghosts;
yet hardly anyone, when thinking by himself, wholly disbelieves them.
Just so such presentiments as Mr. Tennyson depicts, impress the inner
mind so much that the outer mind—the rational understanding—hardly likes
to consider them nicely or to discuss them sceptically. For these dubious
themes an ornate or complex style is needful. Classical art speaks out
what it has to say plainly and simply. Pure style cannot hesitate; it
describes in concisest outline what is, as it is. If a poet really
believes in presentiments he can speak out in pure style. One who could
have been a poet—one of the few in any age of whom one can say certainly
that they could have been and have not been—has spoken thus:—
‘When Heaven sends sorrow,
Warnings go first,
Lest it should burst
With stunning might
On souls too bright
To fear the morrow.
‘Can science bear us
To the hid springs
Of human things?
Why may not dream,
Or thought’s day-gleam,
Startle, yet cheer us?
‘Are such thoughts fetters,
While faith disowns
Dread of earth’s tones,
Recks but Heaven’s call,
And on the wall,
Reads but Heaven’s letters?’
But if a poet is not sure whether presentiments are true or not true; if
he wishes to leave his readers in doubt; if he wishes an atmosphere of
indistinct illusion and of moving shadow, he must use the romantic style,
the style of miscellaneous adjunct, the style ‘which shirks, not meets’
your intellect, the style which, as you are scrutinising, disappears.
Nor is this all, or even the principal lesson, which _Enoch Arden_ may
suggest to us, of the use of ornate art. That art is the appropriate art
for an _unpleasing type_. Many of the characters of real life, if brought
distinctly, prominently, and plainly before the mind, as they really are,
if shown in their inner nature, their actual essence, are doubtless very
unpleasant. They would be horrid to meet and horrid to think of. We fear
it must be owned that Enoch Arden is this kind of person. A dirty sailor
who did _not_ go home to his wife is not an agreeable being: a varnish
must be put on him to make him shine. It is true that he acts rightly;
that he is very good. But such is human nature that it finds a little
tameness in mere morality. Mere virtue belongs to a charity schoolgirl,
and has a taint of the catechism. All of us feel this, though most of us
are too timid, too scrupulous, too anxious about the virtue of others to
speak out. We are ashamed of our nature in this respect, but it is not
the less our nature. And if we look deeper into the matter there are many
reasons why we should not be ashamed of it. The soul of man, and as we
necessarily believe of beings greater than man, has many parts beside
its moral part. It has an intellectual part, an artistic part, even a
religious part, in which mere morals have no share. In Shakespeare or
Goethe, even in Newton or Archimedes, there is much which will not be
cut down to the shape of the commandments. They have thoughts, feelings,
hopes—immortal thoughts and hopes—which have influenced the life of men,
and the souls of men, ever since their age, but which the ‘whole duty
of man,’ the ethical compendium, does not recognise. Nothing is more
unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind. A highly developed
moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped
artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature, is of necessity
repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature—a good bit, of course—but
a bit only, in disproportionate, unnatural, and revolting prominence;
and therefore, unless an artist use delicate care, we are offended. The
dismal act of a squalid man needed many condiments to make it pleasant,
and therefore Mr. Tennyson was right to mix them subtly and to use them
freely.
A mere act of self-denial can indeed scarcely be pleasant upon paper.
An heroic struggle with an external adversary, even though it end in a
defeat, may easily be made attractive. Human nature likes to see itself
look grand, and it looks grand when it is making a brave struggle with
foreign foes. But it does not look grand when it is divided against
itself. An excellent person striving with temptation is a very admirable
being in reality, but he is not a pleasant being in description. We
hope he will win and overcome his temptation; but we feel that he would
be a more interesting being, a higher being, if he had not felt that
temptation so much. The poet must make the struggle great in order to
make the self-denial virtuous, and if the struggle be too great, we are
apt to feel some mixture of contempt. The internal metaphysics of a
divided nature are but an inferior subject for art, and if they are to be
made attractive, much else must be combined with them. If the excellence
of Hamlet had depended on the ethical qualities of Hamlet, it would
not have been the masterpiece of our literature. He acts virtuously of
course, and kills the people he ought to kill, but Shakespeare knew that
such goodness would not much interest the pit. He made him a handsome
prince, and a puzzling meditative character; these secular qualities
relieve his moral excellence, and so he becomes ‘nice.’ In proportion
as an artist has to deal with types essentially imperfect, he must
disguise their imperfections; he must accumulate around them as many
first-rate accessories as may make his readers forget that they are
themselves second-rate. The sudden _millionaires_ of the present day
hope to disguise their social defects by buying old places, and hiding
among aristocratic furniture; just so a great artist who has to deal with
characters artistically imperfect, will use an ornate style, will fit
them into a scene where there is much else to look at.
For these reasons ornate art is, within the limits, as legitimate as pure
art. It does what pure art could not do. The very excellence of pure
art confines its employment. Precisely because it gives the best things
by themselves and exactly as they are, it fails when it is necessary to
describe inferior things among other things, with a list of enhancements
and a crowd of accompaniments that in reality do not belong to it.
Illusion, half belief, unpleasant types, imperfect types, are as much
the proper sphere of ornate art, as an inferior landscape is the proper
sphere for the true efficacy of moonlight. A really great landscape
needs sunlight and bears sunlight; but moonlight is an equaliser of
beauties; it gives a romantic unreality to what will not stand the bare
truth. And just so does romantic art.
There is, however, a third kind of art which differs from these on the
point in which they most resemble one another. Ornate art and pure art
have this in common, that they paint the types of literature in a form
as perfect as they can. Ornate art, indeed, uses undue disguises and
unreal enhancements; it does not confine itself to the best types; on
the contrary, it is its office to make the best of imperfect types and
lame approximations; but ornate art, as much as pure art, catches its
subject in the best light it can, takes the most developed aspect of
it which it can find, and throws upon it the most congruous colours it
can use. But grotesque art does just the contrary. It takes the type,
so to say, _in difficulties_. It gives a representation of it in its
minimum development, amid the circumstances least favourable to it, just
while it is struggling with obstacles, just where it is encumbered with
incongruities. It deals, to use the language of science, not with normal
types but with abnormal specimens; to use the language of old philosophy,
not with what nature is striving to be, but with what by some lapse she
has happened to become.
This art works by contrast. It enables you to see, it makes you see,
the perfect type by painting the opposite deviation. It shows you what
ought to be by what ought not to be; when complete it reminds you of
the perfect image, by showing you the distorted and imperfect image. Of
this art we possess in the present generation one prolific master. Mr.
Browning is an artist working by incongruity. Possibly hardly one of his
most considerable efforts can be found which is not great because of its
odd mixture. He puts together things which no one else would have put
together, and produces on our minds a result which no one else would
have produced, or tried to produce. His admirers may not like all we
may have to say of him. But in our way we too are among his admirers.
No one ever read him without seeing not only his great ability but his
great _mind_. He not only possesses superficial useable talents, but
the strong something, the inner secret something, which uses them and
controls them; he is great not in mere accomplishments, but in himself.
He has applied a hard strong intellect to real life; he has applied the
same intellect to the problems of his age. He has striven to know what
is: he has endeavoured not to be cheated by counterfeits, not to be
infatuated with illusions. His heart is in what he says. He has battered
his brain against his creed till he believes it. He has accomplishments
too, the more effective because they are mixed. He is at once a student
of mysticism and a citizen of the world. He brings to the club-sofa
distinct visions of old creeds, intense images of strange thoughts: he
takes to the bookish student tidings of wild Bohemia, and little traces
of the _demi-monde_. He puts down what is good for the naughty, and what
is naughty for the good. Over women his easier writings exercise that
imperious power which belongs to the writings of a great man of the world
upon such matters. He knows women, and therefore they wish to know him.
If we blame many of Browning’s efforts, it is in the interest of art, and
not from a wish to hurt or degrade him.
If we wanted to illustrate the nature of grotesque art by an exaggerated
instance, we should have selected a poem which the chance of late
publication brings us in this new volume. Mr. Browning has undertaken
to describe what may be called _mind in difficulties_—mind set to make
out the universe under the worst and hardest circumstances. He takes
‘Caliban,’ not perhaps exactly Shakespeare’s Caliban, but an analogous
and worse creature; a strong thinking power, but a nasty creature—a gross
animal, uncontrolled and unelevated by any feeling of religion or duty.
The delineation of him will show that Mr. Browning does not wish to take
undue advantage of his readers by a choice of nice subjects.
‘Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin;
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh;
And while above his head a pompion plant,
Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch:’
This pleasant creature proceeds to give his idea of the origin of the
Universe, and it is as follows. Caliban speaks in the third person, and
is of opinion that the maker of the Universe took to making it on account
of his personal discomfort:—
‘Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
’Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.
‘’Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
But not the stars: the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.
‘’Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:
He hated that He cannot change His cold,
Nor cure its ache. ’Hath spied an icy fish
That longed to ’scape the rock-stream where she lived,
And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
O’ the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
A crystal spike ’twixt two warm walls of wave;
Only she ever sickened, found repulse
At the other kind of water, not her life,
(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o’ the sun)
Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,
And in her old bounds buried her despair,
Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.
‘’Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle,
Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.
Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye, in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue
That pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm,
And says a plain word when she finds her prize,
But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves
That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks
About their hole—He made all these and more,
Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?’
It may seem perhaps to most readers that these lines are very difficult,
and that they are unpleasant. And so they are. We quote them to
illustrate, not the _success_ of grotesque art, but the _nature_ of
grotesque art. It shows the end at which this species of art aims, and
if it fails it is from over-boldness in the choice of a subject by the
artist, or from the defects of its execution. A thinking faculty more in
difficulties—a great type,—an inquisitive, searching intellect under more
disagreeable conditions, with worse helps, more likely to find falsehood,
less likely to find truth, can scarcely be imagined. Nor is the mere
description of the thought at all bad: on the contrary, if we closely
examine it, it is very clever. Hardly anyone could have amassed so many
ideas at once nasty and suitable. But scarcely any readers—any casual
readers—who are not of the sect of Mr. Browning’s admirers will be able
to examine it enough to appreciate it. From a defect, partly of subject,
and partly of style, many of Mr. Browning’s works make a demand upon the
reader’s zeal and sense of duty to which the nature of most readers is
unequal. They have on the turf the convenient expression ‘staying power’:
some horses can hold on and others cannot. But hardly any reader not of
especial and peculiar nature can hold on through such composition. There
is not enough of ‘staying power’ in human nature. One of his greatest
admirers once owned to us that he seldom or never began a new poem
without looking on in advance, and foreseeing with caution what length
of intellectual adventure he was about to commence. Whoever will work
hard at such poems will find much mind in them: they are a sort of quarry
of ideas, but who ever goes there will find these ideas in such a jagged,
ugly, useless shape that he can hardly bear them.
We are not judging Mr. Browning simply from a hasty, recent production.
All poets are liable to misconceptions, and if such a piece as ‘Caliban
upon Setebos’ were an isolated error, a venial and particular exception,
we should have given it no prominence. We have put it forward because it
just elucidates both our subject and the characteristics of Mr. Browning.
But many other of his best known pieces do so almost equally; what
several of his devotees think his best piece is quite enough illustrative
for anything we want. It appears that on Holy Cross day at Rome the
Jews were obliged to listen to a Christian sermon in the hope of their
conversion, though this is, according to Mr. Browning, what they really
said when they came away:—
‘Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
Blessedest Thursday’s the fat of the week.
Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough,
Stinking and savoury, smug and gruff,
Take the church-road, for the bell’s due chime
Gives us the summons—’tis sermon-time.
‘Boh, here’s Barnabas! Job, that’s you?
Up stumps Solomon—bustling too?
Shame, man! greedy beyond your years
To handsel the bishop’s shaving-shears?
Fair play’s a jewel! leave friends in the lurch?
Stand on a line ere you start for the church.
‘Higgledy, piggledy, packed we lie,
Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye,
Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,
Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.
Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs
And buzz for the bishop—here he comes.’
And after similar nice remarks for a church, the edified congregation
concludes:—
‘But now, while the scapegoats leave our flock,
And the rest sit silent and count the clock,
Since forced to muse the appointed time
On these precious facts and truths sublime,—
Let us fitly employ it, under our breath,
In saying Ben Ezra’s Song of Death.
‘For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died,
Called sons and son’s sons to his side,
And spoke, “This world has been harsh and strange;
Something is wrong: there needeth a change.
But what, or where? at the last, or first?
In one point only we sinned, at worst.
‘“The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,
And again in his border see Israel set.
When Judah beholds Jerusalem,
The stranger-seed shall be joined to them:
To Jacob’s House shall the Gentiles cleave.
So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.
‘“Ay, the children of the chosen race
Shall carry and bring them to their place:
In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,
Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blame,
When the slave enslave, the oppressed ones o’er
The oppressor triumph for evermore?
‘“God spoke, and gave us the word to keep:
Bade never fold the hands nor sleep
’Mid a faithless world,—at watch and ward,
Till Christ at the end relieve our guard.
By His servant Moses the watch was set:
Though near upon cock-crow, we keep it yet.
‘“Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid watch came,
By the starlight, naming a dubious Name!
And if, too heavy with sleep—too rash
With fear—O Thou, if that martyr gash
Fell on Thee coming to take Thine own,
And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne—
‘“Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.
But, the judgment over, join sides with us!
Thine too is the cause! and not more Thine
Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,
Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,
Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!
‘“We withstood Christ then? be mindful how
At least we withstand Barabbas now!
Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,
To have called these—Christians, had we dared!
Let defiance to them pay mistrust of Thee,
And Rome make amends for Calvary!
‘“By the torture, prolonged from age to age,
By the infamy, Israel’s heritage,
By the Ghetto’s plague, by the garb’s disgrace,
By the badge of shame, by the felon’s place,
By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,
And the summons to Christian fellowship,—
‘“We boast our proof that at least the Jew
Would wrest Christ’s name from the Devil’s crew.
Thy face took never so deep a shade
But we fought them in it, God our aid!
A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band
South, East, and on to the Pleasant Land!”’
It is very natural that a poet whose wishes incline, or whose genius
conducts him to a grotesque art, should be attracted towards mediæval
subjects. There is no age whose legends are so full of grotesque
subjects, and no age whose real life was so fit to suggest them. Then,
more than at any other time, good principles have been under great
hardships. The vestiges of ancient civilisation, the germs of modern
civilisation, the little remains of what had been, the small beginnings
of what is, were buried under a cumbrous mass of barbarism and cruelty.
Good elements hidden in horrid accompaniments are the special theme of
grotesque art, and these mediæval life and legends afford more copiously
than could have been furnished before Christianity gave its new elements
of good, or since modern civilisation has removed some few at least of
the old elements of destruction. A _buried_ life like the spiritual
mediæval was Mr. Browning’s natural element, and he was right to be
attracted by it. His mistake has been, that he has not made it pleasant;
that he has forced his art to topics on which no one could charm, or on
which he, at any rate, could not; that on these occasions and in these
poems he has failed in fascinating men and women of sane taste.
We say ‘sane’ because there is a most formidable and estimable _insane_
taste. The will has great though indirect power over the taste, just as
it has over the belief. There are some horrid beliefs from which human
nature revolts, from which at first it shrinks, to which, at first, no
effort can force it. But if we fix the mind upon them they have a power
over us just because of their natural offensiveness. They are like the
sight of human blood: experienced soldiers tell us that at first men are
sickened by the smell and newness of blood almost to death and fainting,
but that as soon as they harden their hearts and stiffen their minds,
as soon as they _will_ bear it, then comes an appetite for slaughter, a
tendency to gloat on carnage, to love blood, at least for the moment,
with a deep, eager love. It is a principle that if we put down a healthy
instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy
insane attraction. For this reason, the most earnest truth-seeking men
fall into the worst delusions; they will not let their mind alone; they
force it towards some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a conceit
of intellect recommends, and nature punishes their disregard of her
warning by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so the most
industrious critics get the most admiration. They think it unjust to rest
in their instinctive natural horror: they overcome it, and angry nature
gives them over to ugly poems and marries them to detestable stanzas.
Mr. Browning possibly, and some of the worst of Mr. Browning’s admirers
certainly, will say that these grotesque objects exist in real life,
and therefore they ought to be, at least may be, described in art. But,
though pleasure is not the end of poetry, pleasing is a condition of
poetry. An exceptional monstrosity of horrid ugliness cannot be made
pleasing, except it be made to suggest—to recall—the perfection, the
beauty, from which it is a deviation. Perhaps in extreme cases no art is
equal to this; but then such self-imposed problems should not be worked
by the artist; these out-of-the-way and detestable subjects should be let
alone by him. It is rather characteristic of Mr. Browning to neglect this
rule. He is the most of a realist, and the least of an idealist, of any
poet we know. He evidently sympathises with some part at least of Bishop
Blougram’s apology. Anyhow this world exists. ‘There _is_ good wine—there
_are_ pretty women—there _are_ comfortable benefices—there _is_ money,
and it is pleasant to spend it. Accept the creed of your age and you get
these, reject that creed and you lose them. And for what do you lose
them? For a fancy creed of your own, which no one else will accept, which
hardly anyone will call a “creed,” which most people will consider a sort
of unbelief.’ Again, Mr. Browning evidently loves what we may call the
realism, the grotesque realism, of orthodox Christianity. Many parts of
it in which great divines have felt keen difficulties are quite pleasant
to him. He must _see_ his religion, he must have an ‘object-lesson’
in believing. He must have a creed that will _take_, which wins and
holds the miscellaneous world, which stout men will heed, which nice
women will adore. The spare moments of solitary religion—the ‘obdurate
questionings,’ the high ‘instincts,’ the ‘first affections,’ the ‘shadowy
recollections,’
‘Which, do they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day—
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;’
the great but vague faith—the unutterable tenets—seem to him worthless,
visionary; they are not enough immersed in matter; they move about ‘in
worlds not realised.’ We wish he could be tried like the prophet once;
he would have found God in the earthquake and the storm; he would have
deciphered from them a bracing and a rough religion: he would have known
that crude men and ignorant women felt them too, and he would accordingly
have trusted them; but he would have distrusted and disregarded the
‘still small voice:’ he would have said it was ‘fancy’—a thing you
thought you heard to-day, but were not sure you had heard to-morrow: he
would call it a nice illusion, an immaterial prettiness; he would ask
triumphantly ‘How are you to get the mass of men to heed this little
thing?’ he would have persevered and insisted ‘_My wife_ does not hear
it.’
But although a suspicion of beauty, and a taste for ugly reality, have
led Mr. Browning to exaggerate the functions, and to caricature the
nature of grotesque art, we own, or rather we maintain, that he has given
many excellent specimens of that art within its proper boundaries and
limits. Take an example, his picture of what we may call the _bourgeois_
nature in _difficulties_; in the utmost difficulty, in contact with magic
and the supernatural. He has made of it something homely, comic, true;
reminding us of what _bourgeois_ nature really is. By showing us the type
under abnormal conditions, he reminds us of the type under its best and
most satisfactory conditions:—
‘Hamelin Town’s in Brunswick,
By famous Hanover city;
The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its walls on the southern side;
A pleasanter spot you never spied;
But, when begins my ditty,
Almost five hundred years ago,
To see the townsfolk suffer so
From vermin, was a pity.
‘Rats!
They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cook’s own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.
‘At last the people in a body
To the Town Hall came flocking:
“’Tis clear,” cried they, “our Mayor’s a noddy;
And as for our Corporation—shocking,
To think we buy gowns lined with ermine,
For dolts that can’t or won’t determine
What’s best to rid us of our vermin!
You hope, because you’re old and obese,
To find in the furry civic robe ease?
Rouse up, Sirs! Give your brains a racking
To find the remedy we’re lacking,
Or, sure as fate, we’ll send you packing!”
At this the Mayor and Corporation
Quaked with a mighty consternation.’
A person of musical abilities proposes to extricate the civic dignitaries
from the difficulty, and they promise him a thousand guilders if he does.
‘Into the street the Piper stept,
Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while;
Then, like a musical adept,
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
And green and blue his sharp eye twinkled
Like a candle-flame when salt is sprinkled;
And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered
You heard as if an army muttered;
And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling:
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens.
Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives—
Followed the Piper for their lives.
From street to street he piped advancing,
And step for step they followed dancing
Until they came to the river Weser,
Wherein all plunged and perished!
—Save one who, stout as Julius Cæsar,
Swam across and lived to carry
(As he, the manuscript he cherished)
To Rat-land home his commentary:
Which was, “At the first shrill notes of the pipe,
I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
Into a cider-press’s gripe:
And a moving away of pickle-tub boards,
And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,
And a drawing the corks of train-oil flasks,
And a breaking the hoops of butter casks;
And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out, Oh rats, rejoice!
The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!
So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!
And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,
All ready staved, like a great sun shone
Glorious scarce an inch before me,
Just as methought it said, Come, bore me!
—I found the Weser rolling o’er me.”
You should have heard the Hamelin people
Ringing the bells till they rocked the steeple.
“Go,” cried the Mayor, “and get long poles,
Poke out the nests and block up the holes!
Consult with carpenters and builders,
And leave in our town not even a trace
Of the rats!”—when suddenly, up the face
Of the Piper perked in the market-place,
With a “First, if you please, my thousand guilders!”
‘A thousand guilders! The Mayor looked blue;
So did the Corporation too.
For council dinners made rare havoc
With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock;
And half the money would replenish
Their cellar’s biggest butt with Rhenish.
To pay this sum to a wandering fellow
With a gipsy coat of red and yellow!
“Beside,” quoth the Mayor with a knowing wink,
“Our business was done at the river’s brink;
We saw with our eyes the vermin sink,
And what’s dead can’t come to life, I think.
So, friend, we’re not the folks to shrink
From the duty of giving you something for drink,
And a matter of money to put in your poke;
But as for the guilders, what we spoke
Of them, as you very well know, was in joke.
Beside, our losses have made us thrifty.
A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!”
‘The Piper’s face fell, and he cried,
“No trifling! I can’t wait, beside!
I’ve promised to visit by dinner time
Bagdat, and accept the prime
Of the Head-Cook’s pottage, all he’s rich in,
For having left, in the Caliph’s kitchen,
Of a nest of scorpions no survivor—
With him I proved no bargain-driver.
With you, don’t think I’ll bate a stiver!
And folks who put me in a passion
May find me pipe to another fashion.”
‘“How?” cried the Mayor, “d’ye think I’ll brook
Being worse treated than a Cook?
Insulted by a lazy ribald
With idle pipe and vesture piebald?
You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,
Blow your pipe there till you burst!”
‘Once more he stept into the street;
And to his lips again
Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;
And ere he blew three notes (such sweet
Soft notes as yet musician’s cunning
Never gave the enraptured air)
There was a rustling that seemed like a bustling
Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling,
Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,
Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering,
And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,
Out came the children running.
‘All the little boys and girls,
With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,
And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls,
Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after
The wonderful music with shouting and laughter.
...
And I must not omit to say
That in Transylvania there’s a tribe
Of alien people that ascribe
The outlandish ways and dress
On which their neighbours lay such stress,
To their fathers and mothers having risen
Out of some subterraneous prison
Into which they were trepanned
Long time ago in a mighty band
Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
But how or why they don’t understand.’
Something more we had to say of Mr. Browning, but we must stop. It is
singularly characteristic of this age that the poems which rise to the
surface should be examples of ornate art, and grotesque art, not of pure
art. We live in the realm of the _half_ educated. The number of readers
grows daily, but the quality of readers does not improve rapidly. The
middle class is scattered, headless; it is well-meaning, but aimless;
wishing to be wise, but ignorant how to be wise. The aristocracy of
England never was a literary aristocracy, never even in the days of its
full power—of its unquestioned predominance, did it guide—did it even
seriously try to guide—the taste of England. Without guidance young men,
and tired men, are thrown amongst a mass of books; they have to choose
which they like; many of them would much like to improve their culture,
to chasten their taste, if they knew how. But left to themselves they
take, not pure art, but showy art; not that which permanently relieves
the eye and makes it happy whenever it looks, and as long as it looks,
but _glaring_ art which catches and arrests the eye for a moment,
but which in the end fatigues it. But before the wholesome remedy of
nature—the fatigue arrives—the hasty reader has passed on to some new
excitement, which in its turn stimulates for an instant, and then is
passed by for ever. These conditions are not favourable to the due
appreciation of pure art—of that art which must be known before it is
admired—which must have fastened irrevocably on the brain before you
appreciate it—which you must love ere it will seem worthy of your love.
Women too, whose voice in literature counts as well as that of men—and
in a light literature counts for more than that of men—women, such as
we know them, such as they are likely to be, ever prefer a delicate
unreality to a true or firm art. A dressy literature, an exaggerated
literature seem to be fated to us. These are our curses, as other times
had theirs.
‘And yet
Think not the living times forget,
Ages of heroes fought and fell,
That Homer in the end might tell;
O’er grovelling generations past
Upstood the Doric fane at last;
And countless hearts on countless years
Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,
Rude laughter and unmeaning tears;
Ere England Shakespeare saw, or Rome
The pure perfection of her dome.
Others I doubt not, if not we,
The issue of our toils shall see;
Young children gather as their own
The harvest that the dead had sown,
The dead forgotten and unknown.’[21]
APPENDIX.
_THE IGNORANCE OF MAN._[22]
(1862.)
A bold man once said that religion and morality were inconsistent.
He argued thus: The essence of religion—part of the essence, at any
rate—is recompense; a belief in another life is only another name for
the anticipation of a time when wickedness will be punished, and when
goodness will be rewarded. If you admit a Providence, you acknowledge
the existence of an adjusting agency, of a power which is recompensing
by its very definition, and of its very nature, which allots happiness
to virtue and pain to vice. On the other hand, the essence of morality
is disinterestedness; a man who does good for the sake of a future gain
to himself is, in a moral point of view, altogether inferior to one who
does good for the good’s sake, who hopes for nothing again, who is not
thinking of himself, who is not calculating his own futurity. Between a
man who does good to the world because he takes an intelligent view of
his real interest, and another who does harm to the world because he is
blind to that interest, there is only an intellectual difference,—the
one is mentally longsighted, the other mentally short-sighted. By the
admission of all mankind, a disinterested action is better than a selfish
action; a disinterested man is higher than a selfish man. Yet how is it
possible that a religious man can be disinterested? Heaven overarches
him, hell yawns before him. How can he help having his eyes attracted by
the one and terrified by the other? He boasts, indeed, that religion is
useful to mankind by producing good actions; he extols the attractive
influence of future reward, and the deterring efficacy of apprehended
penalty. But his boast is absurd and premature; by holding forth these
anticipated bribes, by menacing these pains, he extracts from virtue
_its virtue_; he makes it selfishness like the rest; he constructs
an edifying and hoping saint, but he spoils the disinterested and
uncalculating man.
These thoughts are not often boldly expressed. Fundamental difficulties
rarely are. They constantly confuse the mind, and they are always
floating like a vague mist in the intellectual air; they distort and blur
the outlines of everything else, but they have no distinct outline of
their own. An obscure difficulty is a pervading evil; the first requisite
for removing it is to make it clear; if you assign a limit, you notify
the frontier at which it may be attacked.
The objection is, in most people’s apprehensions, and in its common
incomplete expressions, confined exclusively to the doctrine of a future
life, but it is at least equally applicable to the belief in a God who
rules and governs. We can of course conceive of supernatural beings who
do not interfere with us, who do not care for us, who do not help us, who
have no connection with our moral life, who do good to no one, who do
evil to no one. Such were the gods of Lucretius, the most fascinating of
pure inventions; but such gods are not the gods of religion. The ancient
Epicurean, in times when obscure difficulties were discussed in plainer
words than is now either possible or advisable, expressly defended
them on that ground. He did not want his gods to interfere with him;
he thought it would impair the ideal languor of their life, as well as
the inapprehensive security of his own life. They lived ‘self-scanned,
self-centred, self-secure,’ and he was, in so far as was possible, to
do so also. He did not wish the voluptuaries of heaven to become the
busybodies of earth. He liked to have a pleasant dream of the upper
world, but he did not wish it to descend and rule him. But as soon as
we abandon the natural fiction of the voluptuous imagination; as soon
as we accept the idea of a God who is a providence in the universe, and
not an idol in heaven; as soon as we allow that He loves good and hates
evil; as soon as we are sure that He is our Father, and chastises us
as children; as soon as we acknowledge a God such as the human heart
and conscience crave for, the God of Christianity,—we at once reach the
primitive difficulty. Here is a Being whom _we know_ will reward the
good and punish the evil; how can we do good without reference to that
supernatural recompense, or evil without shrinking from that apprehended
penalty?
Nor is it for this purpose in the least material, though for many other
purposes it is very material, whether we consider God as acting by
irrevocable laws fixed once for all, or upon a system which (though
foreseen and immutable to Him, to whom all the future is as present
as all the past) is according to our view of it,—to our translation of
it, so to speak, into our limited capacities,—capable of flexibility at
His touch, and of modification at His pleasure. If we know that we are
rewarded and punished, it matters little, as respects our hope and our
apprehension, whether that punishment be inflicted by a machine or by a
person; in one case we shall shun the contact with the lacerating wheel,
in the other we shall dread a blow from the punitive hand. But in either
case the pain will be the determining motive, the deterring thought. We
shall act as we do act, not from a disinterested intention to do our
duty whatever be the consequences, but from a sincere wish to get off
patent and proximate suffering. The difficulty of reconciling a true
morality with a true religion is not confined to that part of religion
which relates to the anticipated life of man hereafter, but extends to
the very idea of a superintending providence and preadjusting Creator, in
whatever mode we conceive that superintendence to be exercised, and that
adjustment to have been made.
The answer most commonly given to this difficulty is unquestionably
fallacious. It is said that the desire of eternal life for ourselves is
a motive far greater and far better than the desire of anything else,
either for ourselves or for others. It is not conceived as a form of
selfishness at all—at least, not when regarded in this connection, and
employed to solve this problem. At other times, indeed, divines are ready
enough to twist the argument the other way. They will expand at length
the notion that there is a ‘common sense’ in the Gospel; that it appeals
to ‘business-like motives;’ that there is nothing ‘high-flown’ about
it; that it aims to persuade sensible men of this world, on sufficient
reasons of sound prudence, to sacrifice the present world in order to
gain the invisible one; that, whatever sentimentalists may assert, it
is reward which incites to achievement, and fear that restrains from
misdoing. Sermons are written in consecrated paragraphs, each of which is
sufficient to itself, and the connection between which is not intended
to be precisely adjusted; each has an edifying tendency, and the writer
and the hearer wish for no more. Otherwise it would not be possible, as
it often is, to hear religion commended in the same discourse at one time
as self-sacrificing, and at another as prudential; to have a eulogium on
disinterestedness in the exordium, and an appeal to selfishness at the
conclusion. A mode of composition which less disguised the true ideas
of the composer, would show that many divines really believe a desire
for a long pleasure in heaven, to be not only more longsighted and
sensible, but intrinsically higher, nobler, and better than a desire
for a short happiness on earth. Yet, when stated in short sentences and
plain English, the idea is palpably absurd. The ‘wish to come into a good
thing’ is of the same ethical order, whether the good thing be celestial
or be terrestrial, be distantly future, or be close at hand.
A second mode of solving the difficulty, though more ingenious, and in
every way far better, is erroneous also. It is said, ‘men generally
act from mixed motives, and they do so in this case. They are partly
disinterested, and partly not disinterested. They are desirous of doing
good because it is good, and they are desirous also of having the reward
of goodness hereafter. They wish at the very same time to benefit their
neighbour in this world, and also to benefit themselves in the world
to come.’ The reply is ingenious, but it overlooks the point of the
difficulty; it mistakes the nature of mixed motives. The constitution
of man is such that if you strengthen one of two co-operating motives,
you weaken, other things being equal, the force of the other: the lesser
impulse tends always to be absorbed in the stronger, and it may pass
entirely out of thought if the stronger is strengthened, if the greater
become more prominent. We see this in common life; it is undoubtedly
possible for a statesman to act at the same moment both from the love
of office and from the love of his country; from a wish to prolong
his power and a wish to benefit his nation. But strengthen one of
these motives, and, _cæteris paribus_, you weaken the other. Make the
statesman love office more, you thereby make him love his country less;
he will be readier to sacrifice what he will call a ‘vague theory and
an impracticable purpose’ for the sake of the power which he loves;
he will cease to care to do what he ought, from a wish to retain the
capacity of doing something. Or, suppose a further case: there have
been many times and countries where the loss of office was equivalent
to the loss of liberty, perhaps to that of life. In one age of English
history, one great historian says, ‘There was but a single step from the
throne to the scaffold.’ In another age, another great historian says,
‘It was as dangerous to be leader of opposition as to be a highwayman.’
The possessors of power in those times, upon principle, destroyed or
endeavoured to destroy their predecessors. Such a prospect would induce
a statesman to love office for its own sake. It would absorb the whole
of his attention; he could hardly be asked to think of his country.
Extraordinary men would do so, but ordinary men would be overwhelmed
by the ‘violent motive’ of personal fear; they would only be thinking
of themselves even when they were doing what in truth and fact was
beneficial to their country.
The case is similar to the ‘violent motive,’ as Paley calls it, of
religion, when presented in the same manner in which Paley presents it.
If you could extend before men the awful vision of everlasting perdition,
if they could see it as they see the things of earth—as they see Fleet
Street and St. Paul’s; if you could show men likewise the inciting vision
of an everlasting heaven, if they could see that too with undeniable
certainty and invincible distinctness,—who could say that they would have
a thought for any other motive? The personal incentive to good action,
and the personal dissuasion from bad action, would absorb all other
considerations, whether deterrent or persuasive. We could no more break
a divine law than we could commit a murder in the open street. The fact
that men act from mixed motives is no explanation of the great difficulty
with which we started; for the precise peculiarity of that difficulty is
to raise one of those mixed motives to an intensity which seems likely to
absorb, extinguish, and annihilate the other.
The true explanation is precisely the reverse. The moral part of
religion—the belief in a moral state hereafter, dependent for its nature
on our goodness or our wickedness, the belief in a moral Providence, who
apportions good to good, and evil to evil—does not annihilate the sense
of the inherent nature of good and evil because it is itself the result
of that sense. Our only ground for accepting an ethical and retributive
religion is the inward consciousness that virtue being virtue must
prosper, that vice being vice must fail. From these axioms we infer,
not logically, but practically, that there is a continuous eternity, in
which what we expect will be seen, that there is a Providence who will
apportion what is good, and punish what is evil. Of the mode in which
we do so we will speak presently more at length; but granting that this
description of our religion is true, it undeniably solves our difficulty.
Our religion cannot by possibility swallow up morality because it is
dependent for its origin—for its continuance—on that morality.
Suppose a person, say in a prison, to have no knowledge by the senses
that there was such a thing as human law; suppose that he never saw
either the judicial or the executive authorities, and that no one ever
told him of their existence; suppose that by a consciousness of the
inherent nature of good and evil, the fact that such an institution
_must_ exist should dawn upon his mind,—of course it would not, but
imagine that it should,—it is absurd to suppose that he would feel his
power of doing what is right _because_ it is right diminished. When
he goes out into the world, when he hears his judge, when he sees the
policeman, when he surveys the intrusive, the incessant, the pervading
moral apparatus of human society,—_then_ he would be able to disregard
and to forget what is due to intrinsic goodness and what is to be feared
from intrinsic evil. No one will or can say that he now abstains from
stealing oranges under a policeman’s eyes from any motive, good or bad,
save fear of the policeman; that motive is so evident, so pressing, so
irresistible, that it becomes the only motive. But if he only thought the
policeman _must_ exist because he believed stealing oranges to be wrong,
he would feel it quite possible to abstain from stealing oranges out of
pure and unselfish considerations.
Assume that a person only knows a particular fact from a certain
informant, and suppose that on a sudden he doubts that informant, of
course his confidence in the communicated fact ceases, or is diminished.
So, _if_ all our knowledge of the religious part of morality be derived
from the intrinsic impression of morality, as soon as we question the
accuracy of the informant, that instant we must be dubious of the
information. The derivative cannot be stronger than the original; cannot
overpower it; must grow when it grows, and wane when it wanes.
But is our knowledge of the moral part of religion thus derivative and
dependent? Two classes of disputants will deny it entirely: one class
will say they derive their knowledge from Natural Theology; another
will say they derive it from Revelation; and until the arguments of
both classes are examined, the subject must remain in partial darkness.
Natural theology is the simplest of theologies; it contains only a single
argument, and establishes but one conclusion. Observing persons have
gone to and fro through the earth, and they have accumulated a million
illustrations of a single analogy. They have accumulated indications
of design from all parts of the universe. They have not, indeed, shown
that _matter_ was created; the substance of matter, if there be a
substance, shows no structure, no evidence of design: according to all
common belief, according to the admission of such scientific men as
admit its existence, that matter is unorganised. By its nature it is a
raw material; it is that to which manufacture, manipulation, design—call
it what you like—is to be applied; necessarily therefore it shows no
indication of design itself. The reasoners from the workmanship of man
to that of God must always fail in this: man only adapts what he finds:
God creates what He uses. But within its legitimate limits the argument
from design has been most effectual for two thousand years. On a certain
class of purely intellectual minds, who think more than they live, who
reason more than they imagine, it has produced the strongest and most
vivid conception of God which, with their experience and their mental
limitation, they are capable of receiving. It has shown that _out of the
causes we know_, none is so likely to have worked up the substance of
matter into its present form as a designing and powerful mind. _Subject
to this assumption_, it shows that this mind intended to erect that
mixed, composite, involved human society which we see. These theologians
prove, for example, that man has a structure of body which enables him to
be what he is, which prevents his being in appearance, and in most real
particularities, different from what he is. They show that the physical
world is constructed so as to enable man to be what he is, and to show
what he is, so as to limit his power of being greatly different, or of
seeming so. They show, in fact, that, if the expression be allowed, we
live, as far as _they_ can tell us, in a factory, the builder of which
projected certain results, contrived certain large plans, devised certain
particular machines, foresaw certain functions, which he meant for us,
which he made our interest, which he gave us wages to perform. They show
not, indeed, that an omnipotent Being created the universe, but that an
able being has been (so to say) about it. They do not demonstrate that an
infinite Being created all things, but they _do_ show, and show so that
the mass of ordinary men will comprehend and believe it, that a large
mind has been concerned in manufacturing most things.
But these results do not constitute the interior essence; scarcely,
indeed, begin the exterior outwork of a substantial religion. They touch
neither that part of it which moves men’s hearts, nor that part which
occasions our primary difficulty. They do not show us an eternal state
of man hereafter, in which the anomalies of this world may be rectified
and recompensed; they do not show us an infinite Perfection, distributing
just reward with an omniscient accuracy, according to a perfect law.
It is not, indeed, to be expected that natural philosophy should prove
the immortality of man, since it does not prove the immortality of God.
It shows that an artful and able designer has been concerned in the
construction of the strange existing world; but may it not have been
the last work of the great artist? There is nothing in contriving skill
to evince immortality; nothing to prove that the ‘great artificer’ has
always been or is always going to be. Of his moral views we collect from
natural theology as much as this. There are certain laws of the physical
universe which cannot be broken without pain, which avenge themselves
on those who overlook, neglect, or violate them. These were presumedly
designed (according to the moral assumption of natural theology) for the
end which they effect; they were doubtless meant to accomplish that which
they conspicuously do. On a disregard of such laws, natural theology
shows that the Providence of which it speaks has imposed a penalty; the
_contriving_ God (so to speak, for it is necessary to speak plainly) is
opposed to recklessness. He does not wish His devices to be impaired
or His plans neglected. Every animal has in natural theology, if not a
mission, at least a function. There are certain results which a polyp
must produce or die; certain others which a horse must effect, or it
will be first in pain and then die too; certain other and more complex
results which man must produce, or he also will suffer and perish.
But recklessness is only a single form of vice: a watchful, heedful
selfishness is another form. For the latter, there is no indication
in natural theology of any divine disapprobation, or of any impending
penalty. A heedful being contriving for himself, living in the framework
of, adjusting himself with nice discernment and careful discretion to,
the laws of the visible world, incurs no censure from the theology
of design. On the contrary, he could justly say he had done what was
required of him. He had studiously observed, he could say, the rules of
the factory in which he lived; he had finished his own work; he had not
hindered any others from accomplishing theirs; he had complied with the
arrangements of the establishment: natural theology seems to require no
more. Self-absorbed foresight and contriving discretion may not be great
virtues according to a high morality, or according to a true religion;
but they are profitable in the visible world. They are the virtues of
men skilful in what they see. Accordingly, they suit a theology which is
exclusively based upon an analysis of the visible world, which computes
physical profits and sensible results, which aims to show that Providence
is prudent, that God is wise in His generation.
Natural theology, therefore, contains nothing to disturb the explanation
we have given of our original difficulty. The most cursory examination
of it would show as much. We have only to open the well-known volumes
in which the munificence of a former generation has embalmed the most
striking arguments of a theology which that generation valued at more
than it is worth. We find there pictures of a bat’s wing, of the human
hand, of a calf’s eye; and we are told how ingenious, how clever, so to
say,—for it is the true word—these contrivances are. But no one could
learn, or expect to learn, from a calf’s eye, that the Creator is pure,
just, merciful; that He is eternal or omnipotent; that he rewards good,
and punishes evil. Throughout all the physical world He sends rain upon
the just and the unjust; and no refined analysis of that world will
detect in it a preference of the former to the latter. As it is with the
moral holiness of God, so it is with the immortality of man: no one could
expect to discover by a minute inspection of the perishable body, what
was the fate of the imperceptible soul. Physical science may examine the
structure of the brain, but it cannot foresee the fortunes of the mind.
What, then, of Revelation? Does this informant disturb the solution of
our problem? The change from the world of natural theology to that of
any revelation is most striking. The most impressive characteristic of
natural theology is its bareness. It accumulates facts and proves little;
it has voluminous evidences and a short creed. Accordingly, the reason
why it does not disturb our philosophy is that its communications are
insufficient. It does not impart to us _such_ a knowledge of a divine
rewarder and punisher, of future human punishment and future human
reward, as would render it impossible to be disinterested and hardly
possible not to be foreseeing and selfish, because it communicates _no_
knowledge on the subject. It does not teach the divine characteristic
which involves the difficulty; it does not tell, either, that part of
man’s future fate which involves it likewise. With revelation it is
far otherwise. That informant is precise, full, and clear. It tells us
plainly what God is; it warns us what may happen, and easily happen, to
ourselves. We learn from it that God is the divine ruler; we learn from
it that we are punishable creatures, whose fate depends on ourselves. The
observations which have been justly made on natural theology are here
entirely inapplicable. We have passed from a _vacuum_ into a _plenum_.
The real reason why revealed religion does not invalidate our
pre-existing moral nature, is because it is itself dependent on that
nature. When we examine the evidence for revelation we alight at once on
a great and fundamental postulate; we assume that God is veracious; we
are so familiar with this great truth, that we hardly think of it save
as an axiom; both the readers of the treatises on the evidences and the
writers of them pass rapidly and easily over it. But, putting aside for a
moment the evidence of our inner consciousness, and regarding the subject
with the pure intellect and bare eyes, the assumption is an audacious
one. How do we know that it is true? We have proved by natural theology
that a designing Being, of great power, considerable age, ingenious
habits, and benevolent motives, somewhere exists; but how do we know
that Being to be ‘veracious’? We see that among human beings, the class
of intellectual beings of whom we know most, and whom we can observe
best, veracity is a rare virtue. We know that some nations seem wholly
destitute of it, and that one sex in all countries is deficient in it.
We know that a human being may have great power, and not tell the truth;
ingenious habits, and not tell the truth; kind intentions, and not tell
the truth. Why may not a superhuman Being be constituted in the same way,
possess a character similarly mixed, be remarkable not only for morals
similar to man’s, but also for defects analogous to his? Our inner nature
revolts at the supposition; but we are not now concerned with our inner
nature; we have, for the sake of distinctness, abstracted and left it
on one side. We are dealing now not with the evidence of the heart, but
with the evidence of the eyes; we are discussing not what really is, but
what would seem to be—what is all we could know to be, if we had only
five senses and a reasoning understanding. From these informants, how
could we know enough of the ingenious unknown Being, who is so useful
in the world, as to be confident He would tell us the truth in every
case? How could we presume to guess His unexperienced speech, His latent
motives, His imperceptible character? Our knowledge of the moral part of
the Divine character, of His veracity,—as well as of His justice,—comes
from our own moral nature. We feel that God is holy, just as we feel
that holiness _is_ holiness; just as we know by internal consciousness
that goodness is good in itself, and by itself; just as we know that God
in Himself is pure and holy. We feel that God is true, for veracity is
a part of holiness and a condition of purity. But if we did not think
holiness to be excellent in itself, if we did not feel it to be a motive
unaffected by consequences and independent of calculation, our belief in
the Divine holiness would fade away, and with it would fade our belief in
the Divine veracity also.
Revelation, therefore, cannot undermine the very principle upon which it
is itself dependent. Our notion of the character of God being revealed
to us by our moral nature, cannot impair or weaken the conclusion of
that nature. This is the meaning of the profound saying of Coleridge,
that ‘_all_ religion is revealed.’ He meant that all knowledge of God’s
character which is worth naming or regarding, which excites any portion
of the religious sentiment, which excites our love, our awe, or our fear,
is communicated to us by our internal nature, by that spirit within us
which is open to a higher world, by that spirit which is in some sense
God’s Spirit. True religion of this sort does not impair the moral spirit
which revealed it; it does not dare do so, for it knows that spirit to be
its only evidence.
But all religion is not true. A superstitious mind permits a certain
aspect of God’s character, say its justice, to obtain an exclusive hold
on it, to tyrannise over it, to absorb it. The soul becomes bound down by
the weight of its own revelation. Conscience is overshadowed, weakened,
and almost destroyed by the very idea which it originally suggested,
and of which it is really the only reliable informant. Such minds are
incapable of true virtue. The essential opposition which is alleged to
exist between morality and _all_ religion does exist between morality and
_their_ religion. They have a selfish fear of the future, which destroys
their disinterestedness, and almost destroys their manhood.
The same effect is undeniably produced on many minds—not necessarily
produced, but in fact produced—by a belief in revelation. They are
fearful of future punishment, because some being in the air has
threatened it. They have not the true belief in the Divine holiness which
arises from a love of holiness; they have not the true conception of God
which was suggested by conscience, and is kept alive by the activity
of conscience; but they have a vague persuasion that a great Personage
has asserted this, and why they should believe that Personage they do
not ask or know. While revelation remains connected in the mind with
the spirituality on which it is based, it is as consistent with true
morality as religion of any other sort; but if disconnected from that
spirituality, if it has become an isolated terrific tenet, like any other
superstition, it is inconsistent.
The original difficulty with which we started, and the true answer to
that difficulty, may be summed up thus: The objection is, that the
extrinsic motive to goodness (which religion reveals) must absorb the
intrinsic motives to goodness (which morality reveals). The answer is,
that the second revelation is contingent upon the first; that those only
have a substantial ground for believing the extrinsic motive who retain a
lively confidence in the intrinsic. Perhaps some may think this principle
too plain; perhaps others may think it too unimportant to justify so long
an exposition and such a strenuous inculcation. But if we dwell upon it
and trace it to its attendant results and consequences, we shall find
that it will account for more of the world than almost any other single
principle—at any rate, will explain much which puzzles us, and much which
is important to us.
First, this principle will explain to us the use and the necessity of
what we may call the _screen_ of the physical world. Every one who
has religious ideas must have been puzzled by what we may call the
irrelevancy of creation to his religion. We find ourselves lodged in
a vast theatre, in which a ceaseless action, a perpetual shifting
of scenes, an unresting life, is going forward; and that life seems
physical, unmoral, having no relation to what our souls tell us to be
great and good, to what religion says is the design of all things.
Especially when we see any new objects, or scenes, or countries, we
feel this. Look at a great tropical plant, with large leaves stretching
everywhere, and great stalks branching out on all sides; with a big
beetle on a leaf, and a humming-bird on a branch, and an ugly lizard
just below. What has such an object to do with _us_—with anything we
can conceive, or hope, or imagine? What _could_ it be created for,
if creation has a moral end and object? Or go into a gravel-pit, or
stone-quarry; you see there a vast accumulation of dull matter, yellow or
grey, and you ask, involuntarily and of necessity, why is all this waste
and irrelevant production, as it would seem, of material? Can anything
seem more stupid than a big stone _as_ a big stone, than gravel for
gravel’s sake? What is the use of such cumbrous, inexpressive objects
in a world where there are minds to be filled, and imaginations to be
aroused, and souls to be saved? A clever sceptic once said on reading
Paley that _he_ thought the universe was a furniture warehouse for
unknown beings; he assented to the indications of design visible in many
places, but what the end of most objects was, why _such_ things were,
what was the ultimate object contemplated by the whole, he could not
understand. He thought ‘divines are right in saying that much of the
universe has an expression, but surely sceptics are right in saying that
as much or more has no expression.’ Some of the world seems designed to
show a little of God; but much more seems also designed to hide Him and
keep Him off. The reply is, that if morality is to be disinterested,
some such irrelevant universe is essential. Life, moral life, the life
of tempted beings capable of virtue and liable to vice, of necessity
involves a theatre of some sort; it could not be carried on in a vast
vacuum; _some_ means of communication between mind and mind, _some_
external motive to question inward impulses, _some_ outward events as
the result of past action and the stimulus to new action, seem essential
to the life of a voluntary moral being, to a being tempted as a man is,
living as a man lives. The only admissible question is the nature of that
theatre. Is it to be in all its parts and objects expressive of God’s
character and communicative of man’s fate? or is it, as many say, in most
parts to express nothing and tell nothing? The reply is, that _if_ the
universe were to be incessantly expressive and incessantly communicative,
morality would be impossible; we should live under the unceasing pressure
of a supernatural interference, which would give us selfish motives for
doing everything, which would menace us with supernatural punishment if
we left anything undone. We should be living in a _chastising_ machine,
of which the secret would be patent and the penalties apparent. We are
startled to find a universe we did not expect. But if we lived in the
universe we did expect, the life which we lead, and were meant to lead,
would be impossible. We should expect a punitive world sanctioning moral
laws, and the perpetual punishment of those laws would be so glaringly
apparent that true virtue would become impossible. An ‘unfeeling nature,’
an unmoral universe, a sun that shines and a rain which falls equally on
the evil and on the good, are essential to morality in a being free like
man, and created as man was. A miscellaneous world is a suitable theatre
for a single-minded life, and, so far as we can see, the only one.
The same sort of reasoning partly elucidates, even if it does not
explain, the brevity of our apparent life. If visible life were eternal,
future punishments must be visible. We should meet in our streets with
old, old men enduring the consequences of offences which happened before
we were born. We should not see, perhaps, old age as we now see it;
decrepitude would be unknown to us. If there was immortal life on earth,
there would probably also be immortal youth; at any rate, immortal
activity. The perpetuity of existence would not be divided from the
perpetuity of what makes life desirable, of what makes effective life
possible. But if children saw their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers,
and their fathers’ ancestors, in an unending chain, suffering penalties
for certain acts, and obtaining rewards for certain deeds, how is it
possible that they could act otherwise than according to those visible
and evident examples? The consecutive tradition of self-interest would
be so strong among a perpetual race of immortal men that disinterested
virtue would be not so much impracticable as unthought-of and unknown.
The exact line of real self-benefit would be chalked out so plainly, so
conspicuously, so glaringly, that no other action would be conceivable,
or possible. The evidence of _all_ consequences would be like the
evidences of legal consequences now, only infinitely more effective
and infinitely more perceptible. In human law, the _detection_ of the
offence by man is a pre-requisite of all punishment by man. An offence
not proved to the ‘satisfaction of the court’ escapes the judgment of the
court. But in a visible immortal life, this pre-requisite would not be
needful. _If_ there be a future punishment, and _if_ man lived for all
futurity upon earth, that future punishment would be on earth, and it
would be inflicted by God. Undetected crime, that general bad character
without specific proved offence, which now mocks all law and laughs
at visible punishment, would then, under our very eyes, receive that
punishment. Job’s friends kindly argued with him, ‘You are suffering,
therefore you are guilty.’ And the argument was bad, because they only
saw an exceptional accident in the life of a good man, not his entire
life through a subsequent eternity; but if that eternal life had been
passed in continuous residence on this globe, if notorious bad fortune
had pursued him through eternity in the nineteenth generation, his
descendants might well have said, ‘Oh, Job, there is something wrong in
you, for you never come out right.’ A great historian has observed,—
‘That honesty is the best policy, is a maxim which we firmly
believe to be generally correct, even with respect to the
temporal interest of individuals; but with respect to
societies, the rule is subject to still fewer exceptions, and
that for this reason, that the life of societies is larger than
that of individuals. It is possible to mention men who have
owed great worldly prosperity to breaches of private faith; but
we doubt whether it be possible to mention a state which has,
on the whole, been a gainer by a breach of public faith.’
If the visible life of individuals were yet longer than the life of
societies, the rule would be subject to still fewer exceptions; if that
visible life were eternal, the rule would be subject to no exceptions;
the staring evidence of conspicuous results would purge temptation out of
the world.
The physical world now rewards what we may call the physical virtues,
and punishes what we may call the physical vices. There is a certain
state of the body which is a condition of physical well-being, and (as
life is constituted) very much of all well-being. If by gross excess
any man should impair that condition, physical law will punish him. The
body is our schoolmaster to bring us to the soul; it enforces on us the
preparatory merits, it scourges out of us the preparatory defects. The
law of human government is similar; it enforces on us that adherence
to obvious virtue, and that avoidance of obvious vice, which are the
essential preliminaries of real virtue. There is no true virtue or vice,
so long as physical law and human law are what they are in any such
matters. The dread of the penalties is too powerful not to extinguish
(speaking generally, and peculiar cases excepted) all other motives. But
these teachers strengthen the mental instruments of real virtue. They
strengthen our will; they hurt our vanity; they confirm our manhood.
Physical law and human law train and build up, if the expression may
be permitted, that good pagan, that sound-bodied, moderate, careful
creature, out of which a good Christian may, if he will and by God’s
help, in the end be constructed. If visible life were eternal instead
of temporary, the same intense discipline which so usefully creates
the preparatory prerequisites would likewise efface the possibility of
disinterested virtue.
Again, the great scene of human life may be explained, or at least
illustrated, in like manner: _we are souls in the disguise of animals_.
We lead a life in great part neither good nor evil, neither wicked nor
excellent. The larger number of men seem to an outside observer to
walk through life in a torpid sort of sleep. They are decent in their
morals, respectable in their manners, stupid in their conversation.
The incentives of their life are outward; its penalties are outward
too. The life of such people seems to some men always—to many men at
times—inexplicable. But if such beings were not permitted in the world,
perhaps a higher life might be impossible for any beings. They act
like a living screen, just as we say matter acts like a dead screen.
It is not desirable that the results of goodness should be distinctly
apparent; and if all human life were intensely and exclusively moral;
if all men were with all their strength pursuing good or pursuing evil,
the isolated consequences of that isolated principle must be apparent;
at least, could scarcely fail to be so. If one set of men were cooped up
in the exclusive pursuit of virtue, and were very ardent and warm about
it, and another set of men were eager in the pursuit of evil, and cared
for nothing but evil, the world would fall asunder into two dissimilar
halves. If goodness in the visible world had _any_, the least, tendency
to produce visible happiness, then incessant goodness would be very
happy. The accumulations of the slight tendency by perpetual renewal
would amount of necessity to a vast sum-total. Incessant badness would
produce awful misery. Those absorbed in vice would be warnings dangerous
to disinterestedness; those absorbed in virtue, attractions and examples
almost more dangerous. The mischief is prevented by those _unabsorbed_,
purposeless, divided characters which seem to puzzle us. They complicate
human life, and they do so the more effectually that they typify and
represent so much of what every man feels and must feel within himself.
In each man there is so much which is unmoral, so much which comes from
an unknown origin, and passes forward to an unknown destination, which is
of the earth, earthy; which has nothing to do with hell or heaven; which
occupies a middle place not recognised in any theology; which is hateful
both to the impetuous ‘friends of God’ and His most eager enemies. This
pervading and potent element involves life as it were in confusion and
hurry. We do not see distinctly whither we are going. Disinterestedness
is possible, for calculation is confused. Doubtless, even on earth virtue
of all kinds eventually must have, on a large average of cases, some
slight tendency to produce happiness. This earth is an extract from the
moral universe—partakes its nature. But that tendency is too slight to
be a considerable motive to high action; it would not be discovered but
for the inward principle which sets us to look for it; and even when
we find it, it is transient, and small, and dubious. It is lost in the
vast results of the unmoral universe, in the vague shows, the multiform
spectacle of human life.
Again, we may understand why the convictions of what duty is, and what
religion is, vary so much and so often among men. If all our convictions
on these points, on these infinitely important points, were identical
and alike, an accumulated public opinion would oppress us, would destroy
the freedom of our action and the purity of our virtue. If every one
said that certain penalties would be the consequence of certain actions,
we should believe that the consequences would be so and so, not because
we felt those actions to be intrinsically bad, but because we were told
that such would be the consequences. We should believe upon report, and
a vague impression would haunt us, not produced by our own conscience,
or our own sense of right and wrong, and would impair both our manhood
and our virtue. The extraordinary discrepancies of believed religion
and believed morality have weighed on many and will weigh on many; but
they have this use—they enable men to be disinterested. As there is no
sanctioned invincible firm custom, there are no customary penalties,
there is nothing men must shun; as the world has not made up its mind,
there is no executioner of the world ready to enforce that mind upon
every one.
Lastly, the same essential argument may be applied to a problem yet
more delicate and difficult, to one which it is difficult to treat in
Reviewer’s phraseology. Why is God so far from us? is the agonising
question which has depressed so many hearts, so long as we know there
were hearts, has puzzled so many intellects since intellects began to
puzzle themselves. But the moral part of God’s character could not be
shown to us with sensible conspicuous evidence; it could not be shown
to us as Fleet Street is shown to us, without impairing the first
pre-requisite of disinterestedness, and the primary condition of man’s
virtue. And if the moral aspect of God’s character must of necessity be
somewhat hidden from us, other aspects of it must be equally hidden.
An infinite Being may be viewed under innumerable aspects. God has
many qualities in His essence which the word ‘moral’ does not exhaust,
which it does not even hint at. Perhaps this essay has seemed to read
too sternly; as if the moral side of the Divine character, which is and
must be to imperfect beings in some sense a terrible side,—as if the
moral side of human life, which must be to mankind not always a pleasant
side,—had been forced into an exclusive prominence which of right did
not belong to it. But the _attractive_ aspects of God’s character must
not be made more apparent to such a being as man than His chastening and
severer aspects. We must not be invited to approach the Holy of holies
without being made aware, painfully aware, what Holiness is. We must know
our own unworthiness ere we are fit to approach or imagine an Infinite
Perfection. The most nauseous of false religions is that which affects a
fulsome fondness for a Being not to be thought of without awe, or spoken
of without reluctance.
On the whole, therefore, the necessary ignorance of man explains to us
much; it shows us that we could not be what we ought to be, if we lived
in the sort of universe we should expect. It shows us that a latent
Providence, a confused life, an odd material world, an existence broken
short in the midst and on a sudden, are not real difficulties, but real
helps; that they, or something like them, are essential conditions of a
moral life to a subordinate being. If we steadily remember that we only
know the ultimate fate, the extrinsic consequences of vice and virtue,
because we know of their inherent nature and intrinsic qualities, and
that any other evidence of the first would destroy the possibility of the
second, _then_ much which used to puzzle us may become clear to us.
But it may be said, What sort of evidence is this on which you base
the future moral life of man, and the present existence of a moral
Providence? Is it not impalpable? It is so, and necessarily so. If a
consecutive logical deduction, such as has often been sought between an
immutable morality and a true religion, could in fact be found, we should
be again met with our fundamental difficulty, though in a disguised and
secondary form. Morality might fall out of sight because religion was
obtruded upon us. Morality would be the axiom, religion the deduction;
and as a geometer does not keep Euclid’s axioms in his head when he is
employed upon conic sections, as a student of the differential calculus
may half forget the commencement of algebra,—so the great truths of
religion, if rigorously and mathematically deduced from the beginnings of
morality, might overshadow and destroy those ‘beggarly elements.’ No one
who has proved important doctrines by rigorous reasoning always retains
in his mind the primitive principles from which he set out. As the
concrete deductions advance, the primary abstractions recede. Happily,
the connection between morality and religion is of a very different kind.
Religion (in its moral part) is a secondary impression, produced and kept
alive by the first impression of morality. The intensity of the second
feeling depends on the continued intensity of the first feeling.
The highest part of human belief is based upon certain developable
instincts. Not the most important, but the most obvious of these,
is the instinct of beauty. Since the commencement of speculation,
ingenious thinkers, who delight in difficulties, have rejoiced to draw
out at length the difficulties of the subject. It is said, How can you
be certain that there is such an attribute as beauty, when no one is
sure what it is, or to what it should be applied? A barbarian thinks
one thing charming, the Greek another. Modern nations have a standard
different most materially from the ancient standard—founded upon it in
several important respects, no doubt, but differing from it in others as
important, and almost equally striking. Even within the limits of modern
nations this standard differs. The taste of the vulgar is one thing, the
taste of the refined and cultivated is altogether at variance with it.
The mass of mankind prefer a gaudy modern daub to a faded picture by
Sir Joshua, or to the cartoons of Raphael. What certainty, the sceptic
triumphantly asks, can there be in matters on which people differ so
much, on which it seems so impossible to argue; which seem to depend
on causes and relations simply personal; which are susceptible of no
positive test or ascertained criterion? You talk of impalpability, he
adds; here it is in perfection. But these recondite doubts impose on no
one. Not a single educated person would sleep less soundly if he were
told that his life depended on the correctness of his notion that the
cartoons of Raphael are more sublime and beautiful than a common daub. He
cannot prove it, and he cannot prove that Charles the First was beheaded;
but he is quite as certain of one as of the other. This is an instance of
an obvious, unmistakable instinct, which does produce effectual belief,
though sceptics explain to us that it should not.
The nature of this instinct differs altogether from that of those
intuitive and universal axioms which are borne in infallibly upon all the
human race, in every age and every place. It is not like the assertion
that ‘two straight lines cannot enclose a space,’ or the truth that two
and two make four. These are believed by every one, and no one can dream
of not believing them. But half of mankind would reject the idea that the
cartoons were in any sense admirable; they would prefer the overgrown
enormities of West, which are side by side with them. The characteristic
peculiarity of this instinct is, not that it is irresistible, but that
it is _developable_. The higher students of the subject, the more
cultivated, meditate upon it, acquire a new sense, which conveys truth to
them, though others are ignorant of it, and though they themselves cannot
impart it to those others. The appeal is not to the many, as with axioms
of Euclid, but to those few,—the exceptional few,—at whom the many scoff.
The case is similar with the yet higher instincts of morality and of
religion. It is idle to pretend that much of them can be found among
bloody savages, or simple and remote islanders, or a degraded populace.
It is still idler to fancy that because they cannot be discovered there
full-grown, and complete, and paramount, there is no evidence for them,
and no basis for relying upon them. They resemble the instinct of beauty
precisely. The evidence of the few—of the small, high-minded minority,
who are the exception of ages, and the salt of the earth—outweighs the
evidence of countless myriads who live as their fathers lived, think as
they thought, die as they died; who would have lived and died in the very
contrary impressions, if by chance they had inherited these instead of
the others. The criterion of true beauty is with those (and they are not
many) who have a sense of true beauty; the criterion of true morality
is with those who have a sense of true morality; the criterion of true
religion is with those who have a sense of true religion.
Nor can this defect of an absolute criterion throw the world into
confusion. We see it does not, and there was no reason to expect it
would. We all of us feel an analogous fluctuation and variation in
ourselves. We all of us feel that there are times in which first
principles seem borne in upon us by evidence as bright as noonday, and
that there are also times in which that evidence is much less, in which
it seems to fade away, in which we reckon up the number of persons who
differ from us, who reject our principles; times at which we ask, Who
are _we_, that we should be right and other men wrong? The unbelieving
moods of each mind are as certain as the unbelieving state of much of
the world. But no sound mind permits itself to be permanently disturbed,
though it may be transiently distracted, by these variations in its own
state. We have a _criterion_ faculty within us, which tells us which are
lower moods and which are higher. This faculty is a phase of conscience,
and if at its bidding we struggle _with_ the good moods, and _against_
the bad moods, we shall find that great beliefs remain, and that mean
beliefs pass away.
There is an analogous phenomenon in the history of the world. Beliefs
altogether differ at the base of society, but they agree, or tend to
agree, at its summit. As society goes on, the standard of beauty, and of
morality, and of religion also, tends to become fixed. The creeds of the
higher classes throughout the world, though far from identical in these
respects, are not entirely unlike, approach to similarity, approach to it
more and more as cultivation augments, goodness improves, and disturbing
agencies fall aside.
‘The Ethiop gods have Ethiop lips,
Bronze cheeks, and woolly hair;
The Grecian gods are like the Greeks,
As keen-eyed, cold, and fair.’
Such is the various and miscellaneous religion of barbarism; but the
religion and the morality of all the best among all nations tend more
and more to be the same with ‘the progress of the suns,’ and as society
itself improves.
The instincts of morality and religion, though we have called them two
for facility of speech, run into one another, and in practical human
nature are not easily separated. The distinction, like so many others
in mental philosophy, is not drawn where accurate science would have
directed, but where the first notions of mankind, and the necessity of
easy speaking, in a language shaped according to those notions, have
suggested. In a refined analysis, the instinct of religion, as we have
called it, is a complex aggregate of various instincts, not a single and
homogeneous one. But to analyse these, or even to name them, would be
far from our purpose now. Our business is with the relation between the
instinct of morality and that of religion, and with no other perplexities
or difficulties. The instinct of morality is the basis, and the instinct
of moral religion is based upon it, and arises out of it. We feel first
the intrinsic qualities of good actions and bad actions; then, as the
Greek proverb expressed it, ‘Where there is shame there is fear;’ we
expect consequences apportioned to our actions, good and evil; lastly,
for within the limits of purely moral ideas there is no higher stage, we
rise to the conception of Him who in His wisdom adjusts and allots those
far-off consequences to those conspicuous actions. The higher instinct
is based on the lower; would fade in the mind should the lower fade.
The coalescence of instinct effects what no other contrivance known to
us could effect; it enables us to be disinterested, although we know
the consequences of evil actions, because conscience is the revealing
sensation, and we only know those consequences so long as we are
disinterested.
These fundamental difficulties of life and morals are little discussed.
Few think of them clearly, and still fewer speak of them much. But they
cloud the brain and confuse the hopes of many who never stated them
explicitly to themselves, and never heard them stated explicitly by
others. Meanwhile superficial difficulties are in every one’s mouth; we
are deafened with controversies on remote matters which do not concern
us; we are confused with ‘Aids to Faith’ which neither harm nor help
us. A tumult of irrelevant theology is in the air which oppresses men’s
heads, and darkens their future, and scatters their hopes. For such a
calamity there is no thorough cure; it belongs to the confused epoch of
an age of transition, and is inseparable from it. But the best palliative
is a steady attention to primary difficulties—if possible, a clear
mastery over them; if not, a distinct knowledge how we stand respecting
them. The shrewdest man of the world who ever lived tells us, ‘That he
who begins in certainties shall end in doubts; but he who begins in
doubts shall end in certainties;’ and the maxim is even more applicable
to matters which are not of this world than to those which are.
_ON THE EMOTION OF CONVICTION._[23]
(1871.)
What we commonly term Belief includes, I apprehend, both an Intellectual
and an Emotional element; the first we more properly call ‘assent,’ and
the second ‘conviction.’ The laws of the Intellectual element in belief
are ‘the laws of evidence,’ and have been elaborately discussed; but
those of the Emotional part have hardly been discussed at all—indeed, its
existence has been scarcely perceived.
In the mind of a rigorously trained inquirer, the process of believing
is, I apprehend, this:—First comes the investigation, a set of facts are
sifted, and a set of arguments weighed; then the intellect perceives the
result of those arguments, and, we say, assents to it. Then an emotion
more or less strong sets in, which completes the whole. In calm and quiet
minds, the intellectual part of this process is so much the strongest
that they are hardly conscious of anything else; and as these quiet,
careful people have written our treatises, we do not find it explained in
them how important the emotional part is.
But take the case of the Caliph Omar, according to Gibbon’s description
of him. He burnt the Alexandrine Library, saying, ‘All books which
contain what is not in the Koran are dangerous; all those which contain
what is in the Koran are useless.’ Probably no one ever had an intenser
belief in anything than Omar had in this. Yet it is impossible to imagine
it preceded by an argument. His belief in Mahomet, in the Koran, and in
the sufficiency of the Koran, came to him probably in spontaneous rushes
of emotion; there may have been little vestiges of argument floating here
and there, but they did not justify the strength of the emotion, still
less did they create it, and they hardly even excused it.
There is so commonly some considerable argument for our modern beliefs,
that it is difficult now-a-days to isolate the emotional element,
and therefore, on the principle that in Metaphysics ‘egotism is the
truest modesty,’ I may give myself as an example of utterly irrational
conviction. Some years ago I stood for a borough in the West of England,
and after a keen contest was defeated by seven. Almost directly
afterwards there was accidentally another election, and as I would not
stand, another candidate of my own side was elected, and I of course
ceased to have any hold upon the place, or chance of being elected there.
But for years I had the deepest conviction that I should be Member for
‘Bridgwater’; and no amount of reasoning would get it out of my head. The
borough is now disfranchised; but even still, if I allow my mind to dwell
on the contest,—if I think of the hours I was ahead in the morning, and
the rush of votes at two o’clock by which I was defeated,—and even more,
if I call up the image of the nomination day, with all the people’s hands
outstretched, and all their excited faces looking the more different on
account of their identity in posture, the old feeling almost comes back
upon me, and for a moment I believe that I shall be Member for Bridgwater.
I should not mention such nonsense, except on an occasion when I may
serve as an intellectual ‘specimen,’[24] but I know I wish that I could
feel the same hearty, vivid faith in many conclusions of which my
understanding says it is satisfied, that I did in this absurdity. And
if it should be replied that such folly could be no real belief, for it
could not influence any man’s action, I am afraid I must say that it
did influence my actions. For a long time the ineradicable fatalistic
feeling, that I should some time have this constituency, of which I
had no chance, hung about my mind, and diminished my interest in other
constituencies, where my chances of election would have been rational, at
any rate.
This case probably exhibits the _maximum_ of conviction with the
_minimum_ of argument, but there are many approximations to it. Persons
of untrained minds cannot long live without some belief in any topic
which comes much before them. It has been said that if you can only get a
middle-class Englishman to think whether there are ‘snails in Sirius,’ he
will soon have an opinion on it. It will be difficult to make him think,
but if he does think, he cannot rest in a negative, he will come to some
decision. And on any ordinary topic, of course, it is so. A grocer has a
full creed as to foreign policy, a young lady a complete theory of the
sacraments, as to which neither has any doubt whatever. But in talking to
such persons, I cannot but remember my Bridgwater experience, and ask
whether causes like those which begat my folly may not be at the bottom
of their ‘invincible knowledge.’
Most persons who observe their own thoughts must have been conscious of
the exactly opposite state. There are cases where our intellect has gone
through the arguments, and we give a clear assent to the conclusions. But
our minds seem dry and unsatisfied. In that case we have the intellectual
part of Belief, but want the emotional part.
That belief is not a purely intellectual matter is evident from dreams,
where we are always believing, but scarcely ever arguing; and from
certain forms of insanity, where fixed delusions seize upon the mind
and generate a firmer belief than any sane person is capable of. These
are, of course, ‘unorthodox’ states of mind; but a good psychology must
explain them, nevertheless, and perhaps it would have progressed faster
if it had been more ready to compare them with the waking states of sane
people.
Probably, when the subject is thoroughly examined, ‘conviction’ will be
proved to be one of the intensest of human emotions, and one most closely
connected with the bodily state. In cases like the Caliph Omar’s, it
governs all other desires, absorbs the whole nature, and rules the whole
life. And in such cases it is accompanied or preceded by the sensation
that Scott makes his seer describe as the prelude to a prophecy:—
‘At length the fatal answer came,
In characters of living flame—
Not spoke in word, nor blazed in scroll,
But borne and branded on my soul.’
A hot flash seems to burn across the brain. Men in these intense states
of mind have altered all history, changed for better or worse the creed
of myriads, and desolated or redeemed provinces and ages. Nor is this
intensity a sign of truth, for it is precisely strongest in those points
in which men differ most from each other. John Knox felt it in his
anti-Catholicism; Ignatius Loyola in his anti-Protestantism; and both, I
suppose, felt it as much as it is possible to feel it.
Once acutely felt, I believe it is indelible; at least, it does something
to the mind which it is hard for anything else to undo. It has been often
said that a man who has once really loved a woman, never can be without
feeling towards that woman again. He may go on loving her, or he may
change and hate her. In the same way, I think, experience proves that
no one who has had real passionate conviction of a creed, the sort of
emotion that burns hot upon the brain, can ever be indifferent to that
creed again. He may continue to believe it, and to love it; or he may
change to the opposite, vehemently argue against it, and persecute it.
But he cannot forget it. Years afterwards, perhaps, when life changes,
when external interests cease to excite, when the apathy to surroundings
which belongs to the old, begins all at once, to the wonder of later
friends, who cannot imagine what is come to him, the grey-headed man
returns to the creed of his youth.
The explanation of these facts in metaphysical books is very imperfect.
Indeed, I only know one school which professes to explain the emotion,
as distinguished from the intellectual element in belief. Mr. Mill
(after Mr. Bain) speaks very instructively of the ‘animal nature of
belief,’ but when he comes to trace its cause, his analysis seems, to me
at least, utterly unsatisfactory. He says that ‘the state of belief is
identical with the activity or active disposition of the system at the
moment with reference to the thing believed.’ But in many cases there
is firm belief where there is no possibility of action or tendency to
it. A girl in a country parsonage will be sure ‘that Paris never can
be taken,’ or that ‘Bismarck is a wretch,’ without being able to act
on these ideas or wanting to act on them. Many beliefs, in Coleridge’s
happy phrase, slumber in the ‘dormitory of the soul’; they are present to
the consciousness, but they incite to no action. And perhaps Coleridge
is an example of misformed mind in which not only may ‘Faith’ not
produce ‘works,’ but in which it had a tendency to prevent works. Strong
convictions gave him a kind of cramp in the will, and he could not act
on them. And in very many persons much-indulged conviction exhausts the
mind with the attached ideas; teases it, and so, when the time of action
comes, makes it apt to turn to different, perhaps opposite ideas, and to
act on them in preference.
As far as I can perceive, the power of an idea to cause conviction,
independently of any intellectual process, depends on four properties.
1st. _Clearness._ The more unmistakable an idea is to a particular mind,
the more is that mind predisposed to believe it. In common life we may
constantly see this. If you once make a thing quite clear to a person,
the chances are that you will almost have persuaded him of it. Half the
world only understand what they believe, and always believe what they
understand.
2nd. _Intensity._ This is the main cause why the ideas that flash on
the minds of seers, as in Scott’s description, are believed; they come
mostly when the nerves are exhausted by fasting, watching, and longing;
they have a peculiar brilliancy, and therefore they are believed. To this
cause I trace too my fixed folly as to Bridgwater. The idea of being
member for the town had been so intensely brought home to me by the
excitement of a contest, that I could not eradicate it, and that as soon
as I recalled any circumstances of the contest it always came back in all
its vividness.
3rd. _Constancy._ As a rule, almost everyone does accept the creed of the
place in which he lives, and everyone without exception has a tendency
to do so. There are, it is true, some minds which a mathematician might
describe as minds of ‘contrary flexure,’ whose particular bent it is to
contradict what those around them say. And the reason is that in their
minds the opposite aspect of every subject is always vividly presented.
But even such minds usually accept the _axioms_ of their district, the
tenets which everybody always believes. They only object to the variable
elements; to the inferences and deductions drawn by some, but not by all.
4th. On the _Interestingness_ of the idea, by which I mean the power of
the idea to gratify some wish or want of the mind. The most obvious is
curiosity about something which is important to me. Rumours that gratify
this excite a sort of half-conviction without the least evidence, and
with a very little evidence a full, eager, not to say a bigoted one. If a
person go into a mixed company, and say authoritatively ‘that the Cabinet
is nearly divided on the Russian question, and that it was only decided
by one vote to send Lord Granville’s despatch,’ most of the company will
attach some weight more or less to the story, without asking how the
secret was known. And if the narrator casually add that he has just seen
a subordinate member of the Government, most of the hearers will go away
and repeat the anecdote with grave attention, though it does not in the
least appear that the lesser functionary told the anecdote about the
Cabinet, or that he knew what passed at it.
And the interest is greater when the news falls in with the bent of the
hearer. A sanguine man will believe with scarcely any evidence that good
luck is coming, and a dismal man that bad luck is coming. As far as I can
make out, the professional ‘Bulls’ and ‘Bears’ of the City _do_ believe a
great deal of what they say, though, of course, there are exceptions, and
though neither the most sanguine ‘bull’ nor the most dismal ‘bear’ can
believe _all_ he says.
Of course, I need not say that this ‘quality’ peculiarly attaches to
the greatest problems of human life. The firmest convictions of the
most inconsistent answers to the everlasting questions ‘whence?’ and
‘whither?’ have been generated by this ‘interestingness’ without evidence
on which one would invest a penny.
In one case, these causes of irrational conviction seem contradictory.
Clearness, as we have seen, is one of them; but obscurity, when obscure
things are interesting, is a cause too. But there is no real difficulty
here. Human nature at different times exhibits contrasted impulses. There
is a passion for sensualism, that is, to eat and drink; and a passion for
asceticism, that is, not to eat and drink; so it is quite likely that the
clearness of an idea may sometimes cause a movement of conviction, and
that the obscurity of another idea may at other times cause one too.
These laws, however, are complex—can they be reduced to any simpler
law of human nature? I confess I think that they can, but at the same
time I do not presume to speak with the same confidence about it that
I have upon other points. Hitherto I have been dealing with the common
facts of the adult human mind, as we may see it in others and feel it
in ourselves. But I am now going to deal with the ‘prehistoric’ period
of the mind in early childhood, as to which there is necessarily much
obscurity.
My theory is, that in the first instance a child believes everything.
Some of its states of consciousness are perceptive or presentative,—that
is, they tell it of some heat or cold, some resistance or
non-resistance, then and there present. Other states of consciousness
are representative,—that is, they say that certain sensations could be
felt or certain facts perceived, in time past or in time to come, or at
some place, no matter at what time, then and there out of the reach of
perception and sensation. In mature life, too, we have these presentative
and representative states in every sort of mixture, but we make a
distinction between them. Without remark and without doubt, we believe
the ‘evidence of our senses,’ that is, the facts of present sensation
and perception; but we do not believe at once and instantaneously the
representative states as to what is non-present, whether in time or
space. But I apprehend that this is an acquired distinction, and that in
early childhood every state of consciousness is believed, whether it be
presentative or representative.
Certainly at the beginning of the ‘historic’ period we catch the mind
at a period of extreme credulity. When memory begins, and when speech
and signs suffice to make a child intelligible, belief is almost
omnipresent, and doubt almost never to be found. Childlike credulity is a
phrase of the highest antiquity, and of the greatest present aptness.
So striking, indeed, on certain points, is this impulse to believe,
that philosophers have invented various theories to explain in detail
some of its marked instances. Thus it has been said that children have
an intuitive disposition to believe in ‘testimony’—that is, in the
correctness of statements orally made to them. And that they do so is
certain. Every child believes what the footman tells it, what its nurse
tells it, and what its mother tells it, and probably every one’s memory
will carry him back to the horrid mass of miscellaneous confusion which
he acquired by believing all he heard. But though it is certain that a
child believes all assertions made to it, it is not certain that the
child so believes in consequence of a special intuitive predisposition
restricted to such assertions. It may be that this indiscriminate belief
in all sayings is but a relic of an omnivorous acquiescence in all states
of consciousness, which is only just extinct when childhood is plain
enough to be understood, or old enough to be remembered.
Again, it has been said much more plausibly that we want an intuitive
tendency to account for our belief in memory. But I question whether
it can be shown that a little child _does_ believe in its memories
more confidently than in its imaginations. A child of my acquaintance
corrected its mother, who said that ‘they should never see’ two of
its dead brothers again, and maintained, ‘Oh yes, mamma, we shall; we
shall see them in heaven, and they will be so glad to see us.’ And then
the child cried with disappointment because its mother, though a most
religious lady, did not seem exactly to feel that seeing her children
in that manner was as good as seeing them on earth. Now I doubt if
that child did not believe this expectation quite as confidently as it
believed any past fact, or as it could believe anything at all, and
though the conclusion may be true, plainly the child believed, not
from the efficacy of the external evidence, but from a strong rush of
inward confidence. Why, then, should we want a special intuition to make
children believe past facts when, in truth, they go farther and believe
with no kind of difficulty future facts as well as past?
If on so abstruse a matter I might be allowed a graphic illustration,
I should define doubt as ‘a hesitation produced by collision.’ A child
possessed with the notion that all its fancies are true, finds that
acting on one of them brings its head against the table. This gives it
pain, and makes it hesitate as to the expediency of doing it again. Early
childhood is an incessant education in scepticism, and early youth is
so too. All boys are always knocking their heads against the physical
world, and all young men are constantly knocking their heads against the
social world. And both of them from the same cause—that they are subject
to an eruption of emotion which engenders a strong belief, but which is
as likely to cause a belief in falsehood as in truth. Gradually, under
the tuition of a painful experience, we come to learn that our strongest
convictions may be quite false, that many of our most cherished ones are
and have been false; and this causes us to seek a ‘criterion’ as to which
beliefs are to be trusted and which are not; and so we are beaten back to
the laws of evidence for our guide, though, as Bishop Butler said, in a
similar case, we object to be bound by anything so ‘poor.’
That it is really this contention with the world which destroys
conviction and which causes doubt, is shown by examining the cases where
the mind is secluded from the world. In ‘dreams,’ where we are out of
collision with fact, we accept everything as it comes, believe everything
and doubt nothing. And in violent cases of mania, where the mind is shut
up within itself, and cannot, from impotence, perceive what is without,
it is as sure of the most chance fancy, as in health it would be of the
best proved truths.
And upon this theory we perceive why the four tendencies to irrational
conviction which I have set down, survive, and remain in our adult
hesitating state as vestiges of our primitive all-believing state. They
are all from various causes ‘adhesive’ states—states which it is very
difficult to get rid of, and which, in consequence, have retained their
power of creating belief in the mind, when other states, which once
possessed it too, have quite lost it. _Clear_ ideas are certainly more
difficult to get rid of than obscure ones. Indeed, some obscure ones we
cannot recover, if we once lose them. Everybody, perhaps, has felt all
manner of doubts and difficulties in mastering a mathematical problem. At
the time, the difficulties seemed as real as the problem, but a day or
two after a man has mastered it, he will be wholly unable to imagine or
remember where the difficulties were. The demonstration will be perfectly
clear to him, and he will be unable to comprehend how anyone should fail
to perceive it. For life he will recall the clear ideas, but the obscure
ones he will never recall, though for some hours, perhaps, they were
painful, confused, and oppressive obstructions. _Intense_ ideas are, as
every one will admit, recalled more easily than slight and weak ideas.
_Constantly_ impressed ideas are brought back by the world around us,
and if they are so often, get so tied to our other ideas that we can
hardly wrench them away. _Interesting_ ideas stick in the mind by the
associations which give them interest. All the minor laws of conviction
resolve themselves into this great one: ‘That at first we believe all
which occurs to us—that afterwards we have a tendency to believe that
which we cannot help often occurring to us, and that this tendency is
stronger or weaker in some sort of proportion to our inability to prevent
their recurrence.’ When the inability to prevent the recurrence of the
idea is very great, so that the reason is powerless on the mind, the
consequent ‘conviction’ is an eager, irritable, and ungovernable passion.
If these principles are true, they suggest some lessons which are not now
accepted. They prove:
1. That we should be very careful how we let ourselves believe that
which may turn out to be error. Milton says that ‘error is but opinion,’
meaning true opinion, ‘in the making.’ But when the conviction of
any error is a strong passion, it leaves, like all other passions, a
permanent mark on the mind. We can never be as if we had never felt
it. ‘Once a heretic, always a heretic,’ is thus far true, that a mind
once given over to a passionate conviction is never as fit as it would
otherwise have been to receive the truth on the same subject. Years after
the passion may return upon him, and inevitably small recurrences of it
will irritate his intelligence and disturb its calm. We cannot at once
expel a familiar idea, and so long as the idea remains, its effect will
remain too.
2. That we must always keep an account in our minds of the degree of
evidence on which we hold our convictions, and be most careful that we
do not permanently permit ourselves to feel a stronger conviction than
the evidence justifies. If we do, since evidence is the only criterion of
truth, we may easily get a taint of error that may be hard to clear away.
This may seem obvious, yet, if I do not mistake, Father Newman’s _Grammar
of Assent_ is little else than a systematic treatise designed to deny and
confute it.
3. That if we do, as in life we must sometimes, indulge a ‘provisional
enthusiasm,’ as it may be called, for an idea—for example, if an orator
in the excitement of speaking does not keep his phrases to probability,
and if in the hurry of emotion he quite believes all he says, his plain
duty is on other occasions to watch himself carefully, and to be sure
that he does not as a permanent creed believe what in a peculiar and
temporary state he was led to say he felt and to feel.
Similarly, we are all in our various departments of life in the habit of
assuming various probabilities as if they were certainties. In Lombard
Street the dealers assume that ‘Messrs. Baring’s acceptance at three
months’ date is sure to be paid,’ and that ‘Peel’s Act will always be
suspended in a panic.’ And the familiarity of such ideas makes it nearly
impossible for anyone who spends his day in Lombard Street to doubt of
them. But, nevertheless, a person who takes care of his mind will keep up
the perception that they are not certainties.
Lastly, we should utilise this intense emotion of conviction as far as
we can. Dry minds, which give an intellectual ‘assent’ to conclusions
which feel no strong glow of faith in them, often do not know what their
opinions are. They have every day to go over the arguments again, or to
refer to a note-book to know what they believe. But intense convictions
make a memory for themselves, and if they can be kept to the truths of
which there is good evidence, they give a readiness of intellect, a
confidence in action, a consistency in character, which are not to be
had without them. For a time, indeed, they give these benefits when the
propositions believed are false, but then they spoil the mind for seeing
the truth, and they are very dangerous, because the believer may discover
his error, and a perplexity of intellect, a hesitation in action, and
an inconsistency in character are the sure consequences of an entire
collapse in pervading and passionate conviction.
_THE METAPHYSICAL BASIS OF TOLERATION._[25]
(1874.)
One of the most marked peculiarities of recent times in England is the
increased liberty in the expression of opinion. Things are now said
constantly and without remark, which even ten years ago would have
caused a hubbub, and have drawn upon those who said them much obloquy.
But already I think there are signs of a reaction. In many quarters of
orthodox opinion I observe a disposition to say, ‘Surely this is going
too far; really we cannot allow such things to be said.’ And what is more
curious, some writers, whose pens are just set at liberty, and who would,
not at all long ago, have been turned out of society for the things that
they say, are setting themselves to explain the ‘weakness’ of liberty,
and to extol the advantages of persecution. As it appears to me that the
new practice of this country is a great improvement on its old one, and
as I conceive that the doctrine of Toleration rests on what may be called
a metaphysical basis, I wish shortly to describe what that basis is.
I should say that, except where it is explained to the contrary, I use
the word ‘Toleration’ to mean toleration by law. Toleration by Society of
matters not subject to legal penalty is a kindred subject on which, if
I have room, I will add a few words, but in the main I propose to deal
with the simpler subject,—toleration by law. And by toleration, too, I
mean, when it is not otherwise said, toleration in the public expression
of opinions. Toleration of acts and practices is another allied subject
on which I can, in a paper like this, but barely hope to indicate what
seems to me to be the truth. And I should add, that I deal only with the
discussion of impersonal doctrines. The law of libel, which deals with
accusations of living persons, is a topic requiring consideration by
itself.
Meaning this by ‘toleration,’ I do not think we ought to be surprised
at a reaction against it. What was said long ago of slavery seems to be
equally true of persecution,—it ‘exists by the law of nature.’ It is so
congenial to human nature, that it has arisen everywhere in past times,
as history shows; that the cessation of it is a matter of recent times
in England; that even now, taking the world as a whole, the practice and
the theory of it are in a triumphant majority. Most men have always much
preferred persecution, and do so still; and it is therefore only natural
that it should continually reappear in discussion and argument.
One mode in which it tempts human nature is very obvious. Persons of
strong opinions wish, above all things, to propagate those opinions. They
find close at hand what seems an immense engine for that propagation;
they find the _State_, which has often in history interfered for and
against opinions,—which has had a great and undeniable influence in
helping some and hindering others,—and in their eagerness they can hardly
understand why they should not make use of this great engine to crush
the errors which they hate, and to replace them with the tenets they
approve. So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will
always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is
unwise, and their conscience that it is wrong. They may not gratify their
inclination, but the inclination will not be the less real.
Since the time of Carlyle, ‘earnestness’ has been a favourite virtue
in literature, and it is customary to treat this wish to twist other
people’s belief into ours as if it were a part of the love of truth.
And in the highest minds so it may be. But the mass of mankind have, as
I hold, no such fine motive. Independently of truth or falsehood, the
spectacle of a different belief from ours is disagreeable to us, in the
same way that the spectacle of a different form of dress and manners is
disagreeable. A set of schoolboys will persecute a new boy with a new
sort of jacket; they will hardly let him have a new-shaped penknife.
Grown-up people are just as bad, except when culture has softened them. A
mob will hoot a foreigner who looks very unlike themselves. Much of the
feeling of ‘earnest believers’ is, I believe, altogether the same. They
wish others to think as they do, not only because they wish to diffuse
doctrinal truth, but also and much more because they cannot bear to hear
the words of a creed different from their own. At any rate, without
further analysing the origin of the persecuting impulse, its deep root in
human nature, and its great power over most men, are evident.
But this natural impulse was not the only motive—perhaps was not the
principal one—of historical persecutions. The main one, or a main one,
was a most ancient political idea which once ruled the world, and of
which deep vestiges are still to be traced on many sides. The most
ancient conception of a State is that of a ‘religious partnership,’ in
which any member may by his acts bring down the wrath of the gods on
the other members, and, so to speak, on the whole company. This danger
was, in the conception of the time, at once unlimited and inherited;
in any generation, partners A, C, D, &c., might suffer loss of life,
or health, or goods—the whole association even might perish, because
in a past generation the ancestors of Z had somehow offended the gods.
Thus the historian of Athens tells us that after a particular act of
sacrilege—a breach of the local privileges of sanctuary—the perpetrators
were compelled ‘to retire into banishment;’ and that those who had died
before the date he is speaking of were ‘disinterred and cast beyond the
borders.’ ‘Yet,’ he adds, ‘their exile continuing, as it did, only for
a time, was not held sufficient to expiate the impiety for which they
had been condemned. The Alkmoônids, one of the most powerful families
in Attica, long continued to be looked upon as a tainted race, and in
cases of public calamity were liable to be singled out as having by their
sacrilege drawn down the judgment of the gods upon their countrymen.’
And as false opinions about the gods have almost always been thought
to be peculiarly odious to them, the misbeliever, the ‘miscreant,’ has
been almost always thought to be likely not only to impair hereafter the
salvation of himself and others in a future world, but also to bring on
his neighbours and his nation grievous calamities immediately in this.
He has been persecuted to stop political danger more than to arrest
intellectual error.
But it will be said,—Put history aside, and come to things now. Why
should not those who are convinced that certain doctrines are errors,
that they are most dangerous, that they may ruin man’s welfare here
and his salvation hereafter, use the power of the State to extirpate
those errors? Experience seems to show that the power of the State can
be put forth in that way effectually. Why, then, should it not be put
forth? If I had room, I should like for a moment to criticise the word
‘effectually.’ I should say that the State, in the cases where it is most
wanted, is not of the use which is thought. I admit that it extirpates
error, but I doubt if it creates belief—at least, if it does so in cases
where the persecuted error is suitable to the place and time. In such
cases, I think the effect has often been to eradicate a heresy among
the few, at the cost of creating a scepticism among the many; to kill
the error, no doubt, but also to ruin the general belief. And this is
the cardinal point, for the propagation of the ‘truth’ is the end of
persecution; all else is only a means. But I have not space to discuss
this, and will come to the main point.
I say that the State power should not be used to arrest discussion,
because the State power may be used equally for truth or error, for
Mohammedanism or Christianity, for belief or no-belief, but in discussion
truth has an advantage. Arguments always tell for truth, as such,
and against error as such; if you let the human mind alone, it has a
preference for good argument over bad; it oftener takes truth than not.
But if you do not let it alone, you give truth no advantage at all; you
substitute a game of force, where all doctrines are equal, for a game of
logic, where the truer have the better chance.
The process by which truth wins in discussion is this,—certain strong
and eager minds embrace original opinions, seldom all wrong, never quite
true, but of a mixed sort, part truth, part error. These they inculcate
on all occasions, and on every side, and gradually bring the cooler sort
of men to a hearing of them. These cooler people serve as quasi-judges,
while the more eager ones are a sort of advocates; a Court of Inquisition
is sitting perpetually, investigating, informally and silently, but not
ineffectually, what, on all great subjects of human interest, is truth
and error. There is no sort of infallibility about the Court; often it
makes great mistakes, most of its decisions are incomplete in thought
and imperfect in expression. Still, on the whole, the force of evidence
keeps it right. The truth has the best of the proof, and therefore wins
most of the judgments. The process is slow, far more tedious than the
worst Chancery suit. Time in it is reckoned not by days, but by years, or
rather by centuries. Yet, on the whole, it creeps along, if you do not
stop it. But all is arrested, if persecution begins—if you have a _coup
d’état_, and let loose soldiers on the Court; for it is perfect chance
which litigant turns them in, or what creed they are used to compel men
to believe.
This argument, however, assumes two things. In the first place, it
presupposes that we are speaking of a state of society in which
discussion is possible. And such societies are not very common.
Uncivilised man is not capable of discussion: savages have been justly
described as having ‘the intellect of children with the passions and
strength of men.’ Before anything like speculative argument can be used
with them, their intellect must be strengthened and their passions
restrained. There was, as it seems to me, a long preliminary period
before human nature, as we now see it, existed, and while it was being
formed. During that preliminary period, persecution, like slavery, played
a most considerable part. Nations mostly became nations by having a
common religion. It was a necessary condition of the passage from a loose
aggregate of savages to a united polity, that they should believe in the
same gods and worship these gods in the same way. What was necessary
was, that they should for a long period—for centuries, perhaps—lead the
same life and conform to the same usages. They believed that the ‘gods
of their fathers’ had commanded these usages. Early law is hardly to
be separated from religious ritual; it is more like the tradition of a
Church than the enactments of a statute-book. It is a thing essentially
immemorial and sacred. It is not conceived of as capable either of
addition or diminution; it is a body of holy customs which no one is
allowed either to break or to impugn. The use of these is to aid in
creating a common national character, which in after-times may be tame
enough to bear discussion, and which may suggest common axioms upon which
discussion can be founded. Till that common character has been formed,
discussion is impossible; it cannot be used to find out truth, for it
cannot exist; it is not that we have to forego its efficacy on purpose,
we have not the choice of it, for its prerequisites cannot be found.
The case of civil liberty is, as I conceive, much the same. Early ages
need a coercive despotism more than they need anything else. The age of
debate comes later. An omnipotent power to enforce the sacred law is
that which is then most required. A constitutional opposition would be
born before its time. It would be dragging the wheel before the horses
were harnessed. The strongest advocates both of Liberty and Toleration
may consistently hold that there were unhappy ages before either became
possible, and when attempts at either would have been pernicious.
The case is analogous to that of education. Every parent wisely teaches
his child his own creed, and till the child has attained a certain age,
it is better that he should not hear too much of any other. His mind will
in the end be better able to weigh arguments, because it does not begin
to weigh them so early. He will hardly comprehend any creed unless he
has been taught some creed. But the restrictions of childhood must be
relaxed in youth, and abandoned in manhood. One object of education is
to train us for discussion, and as that training gradually approaches to
completeness, we should gradually begin to enter into and to take part
in discussion. The restrictions that are useful at nine years old are
pernicious at nineteen.
This analogy would have seemed to me obvious, but there are many most
able persons who turn the matter just the other way. They regard the
discipline of education as a precedent for persecution. They say, ‘I
would no sooner let the nation at large read that bad book than I would
let my children read it.’ They refuse to admit that the age of the
children makes any difference. At heart they think that they are wiser
than the mass of mankind, just as they are wiser than their children, and
would regulate the studies of both unhesitatingly. But experience shows
that no man is on all points so wise as the mass of men are after a good
discussion, and that if the ideas of the very wisest were by miracle to
be fixed on the race, the certain result would be to stereotype monstrous
error. If we fixed the belief of Bacon, we should believe that the earth
went round the sun: if we fixed that of Newton, we should believe ‘that
the Argonautic expedition was a real event, and occurred B.C. 937; that
Hercules was a real person, and delivered Theseus, another real person,
B.C. 936; that in the year 1036 Ceres, a woman of Sicily, in seeking her
daughter who was stolen, came into Attica, and there taught the Greeks to
sow corn.’ And the worst is, that the minds of most would-be persecutors
are themselves unfixed; their opinions are in a perpetual flux; they
would persecute all others for tenets which yesterday they had not heard
of and which they will not believe to-morrow.
But it will be said, the theory of Toleration is not so easy as that
of education. We know by a certain fact when a young man is grown up
and can bear discussion. We judge by his age, as to which every one is
agreed. But we cannot tell by any similar patent fact when a state is
mature enough to bear discussion. There may be two opinions about it.
And I quite agree that the matter of fact is more difficult to discover
in one case than in the other; still it is a matter of fact which the
rulers of the State must decide upon their responsibility, and as best
they can. And the highest sort of rulers will decide it like the English
in India—with no reference to their own belief. For years the English
prohibited the preaching of Christianity in India, though it was their
own religion, because they thought that it could not be tranquilly
listened to. They now permit it, because they find that the population
can bear the discussion. Of course, most Governments are wholly unequal
to so high a morality and so severe a self-command. The Governments of
most countries are composed of persons who wish everybody to believe
as they do, merely because they do. Some here and there, from a higher
motive, so eagerly wish to propagate their opinions, that they are
unequal to consider the problem of toleration impartially. They persecute
till the persecuted become strong enough to make them desist. But the
delicacy of a rule and the unwillingness of Governments to adopt it, do
not prove that it is not the best and the right one. There are already in
inevitable jurisprudence many lines of vital importance just as difficult
to draw. The line between sanity and insanity has necessarily to be
drawn, and it is as nice as anything can be. The competency of people to
bear discussion is not intrinsically more difficult than their competency
to manage their own affairs, though perhaps a Government is less likely
to be impartial and more likely to be biassed in questions of discussion
than in pecuniary ones.
Secondly, the doctrine that rulers are to permit discussion assumes
not only, as we have seen, that discussion is possible, but also that
discussion will not destroy the Government. No Government is bound to
permit a controversy which will annihilate itself. It is a trustee
for many duties, and if possible, it must retain the power to perform
those duties. The controversies which may ruin it are very different in
different countries. The Government of the day must determine in each
case what those questions are. If the Roman Emperors who persecuted
Christianity really did so because they imagined that Christianity would
destroy the Roman Empire, I think they are to be blamed not for their
misconception of duty, but for their mistake of fact. The existence of
Christianity was not really more inconsistent with the existence of the
Empire in the time of Diocletian than in that of Constantine; but if
Diocletian thought that it was inconsistent, it was his duty to preserve
the Empire.
It will be asked, ‘What do you mean by preserving a society? All
societies are in a state of incipient change; the best of them are often
the most changing; what is meant, then, by saying you will “preserve”
any? You admit that you cannot keep them unaltered, what then do you
propose to do?’ I answer that, in this respect, the life of societies is
like the life of the individuals composing them. You cannot interfere
so as to keep a man’s body unaltered; you can interfere so as to keep
him alive. What changes in such cases will be fatal, is a question of
fact. The Government must determine what will, so to say, ‘break up
the whole thing’ and what will not. No doubt it may decide wrong. In
France, the country of experiments, General Cavaignac said, ‘A Government
which allows its principle to be discussed, is a lost Government,’ and
therefore he persecuted on behalf of the Republic, thinking it was
essential to society. Louis Napoleon similarly persecuted on behalf of
the Second Empire; M. Thiers on behalf of the Republic again; the Duc de
Broglie now persecutes on behalf of the existing nondescript. All these
may be mistakes or some of them, or none. Here, as before, the practical
difficulties in the application of a rule do not disprove its being the
true and the only one.
It will be objected that this principle is applicable only to truths
which are gained by discussion. ‘We admit,’ such objectors say, ‘that
where discussion is the best or the only means of proving truth, it
is unadvisable to prohibit that discussion, but there are other means
besides discussion of arriving at truth, which are sometimes better than
discussion even where discussion is applicable, and sometimes go beyond
it and attain regions in which it is inapplicable; and where those more
efficient means are applicable it may be wise to prohibit discussion, for
in these instances discussion may confuse the human mind and impede it
in the use of those higher means. The case is analogous to that of the
eyes. For the most part it is a sound rule to tell persons who want to
see things, that they must necessarily use _both_ their eyes, and rely on
them. But there are cases in which that rule is wrong. If a man wants to
see things too distant for the eyes, as the satellites of Jupiter and the
ring of Saturn, you must tell him, on the contrary, to shut one eye and
look through a telescope with the other. The ordinary mode of using the
common instruments may, in exceptional cases, interfere with the right
use of the supplementary instruments.’ And I quite admit that there are
such exceptional cases and such additional means; but I say that their
existence introduces no new difficulty into the subject, and that it is
no reason for prohibiting discussion except in the cases in which we have
seen already that it was advisable to prohibit it.
Putting the matter in the most favourable way for these objectors, and
making all possible concessions to them, I believe the exceptions which
they contend for must come at last to three.
First, There are certain necessary propositions which the human mind
_will_ think, must think, and cannot help thinking. For example, we
must believe that things which are equal to the same thing are equal
to each other,—that a thing cannot _both_ be and not be,—that it must
_either_ be or not be. These truths are not gained by discussion; on the
contrary, discussion presupposes at least some of them, for you cannot
argue without first principles any more than you can use a lever without
a fulcrum. The prerequisites of reasoning must somehow be recognised by
the human mind before we begin to reason. So much is obvious, but then
it is obvious also that in such cases attempts at discussion cannot do
any harm. If the human mind has in it certain first principles which it
cannot help seeing, and which it accepts of itself, there is no harm in
arguing against those first principles. You may contend as long as you
like, that things which are equal to the same thing are _not_ equal to
each other, or that a thing _can_ both exist and not exist at the same
time, but you will not convince anyone. If you could convince anyone you
would do him irreparable harm, for you would hurt the basis of his mind
and destroy the use of his reason. But happily you cannot convince him.
That which the human mind cannot help thinking it cannot help thinking,
and discussion can no more remove the primary perceptions than it can
produce them. The multiplication table will remain the multiplication
table, neither more nor less, however much we may argue either for it or
against it.
But, though the denial of the real necessary perceptions of the human
mind cannot possibly do any harm, the denial of alleged necessary
perceptions is often essential to the discovery of truth. The human mind,
as experience shows, is apt to manufacture sham self-evidences. The most
obvious case is, that men perpetually ‘do sums’ wrong. If we dwell long
enough and intently enough on the truths of arithmetic they are in each
case self-evident; but, if we are too quick, or let our minds get dull,
we may make any number of mistakes. A certain deliberation and a certain
intensity are both essential to correctness in the matter. Fictitious
necessities of thought will be imposed on us without end unless we are
careful. The greatest minds are not exempt from the risk of such mistakes
even in matters most familiar to them. On the contrary, the history of
science is full of cases in which the ablest men and the most experienced
assumed that it was impossible to think things which are in matter of
fact true, and which it has since been found possible to think quite
easily. The mode in which these sham self-evidences are distinguished
from the real ones is by setting as many minds as possible to try as
often as possible whether they can help thinking the thing or not. But
such trials will never exist without discussion. So far, therefore,
the existence of self-evidences in the human mind is not a reason for
discouraging discussion, but a reason for encouraging it.
Next, it is certainly true that many conclusions which are by no means
self-evident and which are gradually obtained, nevertheless, are not
the result of discussion. For example, the opinion of a man as to the
characters of his friends and acquaintances is not the result of distinct
argument, but the aggregate of distinct impressions: it is not the result
of an investigation consciously pursued, but the effect of a multiplicity
of facts involuntarily presented; it is a definite thing and has a most
definite influence on the mind, but its origin is indefinite and not to
be traced; it is like a great fund raised in very small subscriptions and
of which the subscribers’ names are lost. But here again, though these
opinions too were not gained by discussion, their existence is a reason
for promoting discussion, not for preventing it. Every-day experience
shows that these opinions as to character are often mistaken in the last
degree. Human character is a most complex thing, and the impressions
which different people form of it are as various as the impressions
which the inhabitants of an impassable mountain have of its shape and
size. Each observer has an aggregate idea derived from certain actions
and certain sayings, but the real man has always or almost always said
a thousand sayings of a kind quite different and in a connection quite
different; he has done a vast variety of actions among ‘other men’ and
‘other minds;’ a mobile person will often seem hardly the same if you
meet him in very different societies. And how, except by discussion, is
the true character of such a person to be decided? Each observer must
bring his contingent to the list of _data_; those data must be arranged
and made use of. The certain and positive facts as to which everyone is
agreed must have their due weight: they must be combined and compared
with the various impressions as to which no two people exactly coincide.
A rough summary must be made of the whole. In no other way is it possible
to arrive at the truth of the matter. Without discussion each mind is
dependent on its own partial observation. A great man is one image—one
thing, so to speak—to his valet, another to his son, another to his wife,
another to his greatest friend. None of these must be stereotyped; all
must be compared. To prohibit discussion is to prohibit the corrective
process.
Lastly, I hold that there are first principles or first perceptions which
are neither the result of constant, though forgotten trials like those
last spoken of, nor common to all the race like the first. The most
obvious seem to me to be the principles of taste. The primary perceptions
of beauty vary much in different persons, and for different persons at
the same time, but no one can say that they are not most real and most
influential parts of human nature. There is hardly a thing made by human
hands which is not affected more or less by the conception of beauty felt
by the maker; and there is hardly a human life which would not have been
different if the idea of beauty in the mind of the man who lived it had
been different.
But certainly it would not answer to exclude subjects of taste from
discussion, and to allow one school of taste-teachers to reign alone,
and to prohibit the teaching of all rival schools. The effect would be
to fix on all ages the particular ideas of one age on a matter which is
beyond most others obscure and difficult to reduce to a satisfactory
theory. The human mind evidently differs at various times immensely in
its conclusions upon it, and there is nothing to show that the era of the
persecutor is wiser than any other era, or that his opinion is better
than anyone else’s.
The case of these variable first principles is much like that of the
‘personal equation,’ as it is called in the theory of observations. Some
observers, it is found, habitually see a given phenomenon, say the star
coming to the meridian, a little sooner than most others; some later; no
two persons exactly coincide. The first thing done when a new man comes
into an observatory for practical work is to determine whether he sees
quick or slow; and this is called the ‘personal equation.’ But, according
to the theory of persecution, the national astronomer in each country
would set up his own mind as the standard; in one country he would be a
quick man, and would not let the slow people contest what he said; in
another he would be a slow man, and would not tolerate the quick people,
or let men speak their minds; and so the astronomical observations—the
astronomical _creeds_ if I may say so—of different countries would
radically differ. But as toleration and discussion are allowed, no such
absurd result follows. The observations of different minds are compared
with those of others, and truth is assumed to lie in the mean between the
errors of the quick people and the errors of the slow ones.
No such accurate result can be expected in more complex matters. The
phenomena of astronomical observation relate only to very simple events,
and to a very simple fact about these events. But perceptions of beauty
have an infinite complexity: they are all subtle aggregates of countless
details, and about each of these details probably every mind in some
degree differs from every other one. But in a rough way the same sort of
agreement is possible. Discussion is only an organised mode, by which
various minds compare their conclusions with those of various others.
Bold and strong minds describe graphic and definite impressions: at
first sight these impressions seem wholly different. Writers of the
last century thought classical architecture altogether inferior to
Gothic; many writers now put it just the other way, and maintain a
mediæval cathedral to be a thing altogether superior in kind and nature
to anything classical. For years the world thought Claude’s landscapes
perfect. Then came Mr. Ruskin, and by his ability and eloquence he has
made a whole generation depredate them, and think Turner’s altogether
superior. The extrication of truth by such discussions is very slow; it
is often retarded; it is often thrown back; it often seems to pause for
ages. But upon the whole it makes progress, and the principle of that
progress is this:—Each mind which is true to itself, and which draws its
own impressions carefully, and which compares those impressions with the
impressions of others, arrives at certain conclusions, which as far as
that mind is concerned are ultimate, and are its highest conclusions.
These it sets down as expressively as it can on paper, or communicates by
word of mouth, and these again form data which other minds can contrast
with their own. In this incessant comparison eccentric minds fall off
on every side; some like Milton, some Wordsworth, some can see nothing
in Dryden, some find Racine intolerably dull, some think Shakespeare
barbarous, others consider the contents of the Iliad ‘battles and
schoolboy stuff.’ With history it is the same; some despise one great
epoch, some another. Each epoch has its violent partisans, who will
listen to nothing else, and who think every other epoch in comparison
mean and wretched. These violent minds are always faulty and sometimes
absurd, but they are almost always useful to mankind. They compel men
to hear neglected truth. They uniformly exaggerate their gospel; but
it generally _is_ a gospel. Carlyle said many years since of the old
Poor Law in England:—‘It being admitted then that outdoor relief should
at once cease, what means did great Nature take to make it cease? She
created various men who thought the cessation of outdoor relief the one
thing needful.’ In the same way, it being desirable that the taste of men
should be improved on some point, Nature’s instrument on that point is
some man of genius, of attractive voice and limited mind, who declaims
and insists, not only that the special improvement is a good thing in
itself, but the best of all things, and the root of all other good
things. Most useful, too, are others less apparent; shrinking, sensitive,
testing minds, of whom often the world knows nothing, but each of whom
is in the circle just near him an authority on taste, and communicates
by personal influence the opinions he has formed. The human mind of a
certain maturity, if left alone, prefers real beauty to sham beauty, and
prefers it the sooner if original men suggest new charms, and quiet men
criticise and judge of them.
But an æsthetical persecution would derange all this, for generally
the compulsive power would be in the hands of the believers in some
tradition. The State represents ‘the rough force of society,’ and is
little likely to be amenable to new charms or new ideas; and therefore
the first victim of the persecution would be the original man who was
proposing that which in the end would most improve mankind; and the next
would be the testing and discerning critic who was examining these ideas
and separating the chaff from the wheat in them. Neither would conform
to the old tradition. The inventor would be too eager; the critic too
scrupulous; and so a heavy code of ancient errors would be chained upon
mankind. Nor would the case be at all the better if by some freak of
events the propounder of the new doctrine were to gain full control,
and to prohibit all he did not like. He would try, and try in vain, to
make the inert mass of men accept or care for his new theory, and his
particular enemy would be the careful critic who went with him a little
way and then refused to go any further. If you allow persecution, the
partisans of the new sort of beauty will, if they can, attack those of
the old sort; and the partisans of the old sort will attack those of the
new sort; while both will turn on the quiet and discriminating person who
is trying to select what is good from each. Some chance taste will be
fixed for ages.
But it will be said, ‘Whoever heard of such nonsense as an æsthetical
persecution? Everybody knows such matters of taste must be left to
take care of themselves; as far as they are concerned, nobody wants to
persecute or prohibit.’ But I have spoken of matters of taste because it
is sometimes best to speak in parables. The case of morals and religion,
in which people have always persecuted and still wish to persecute, is
the very same. If there are (as I myself think there are) ultimate truths
of morals and religion which more or less vary for each mind, some sort
of standard and some kind of agreement can only be arrived at about it
in the very same way. The same comparison of one mind with another is
necessary; the same discussion; the same use of criticising minds; the
same use of original ones. The mode of arriving at truth is the same, and
also the mode of stopping it.
We now see the reason why, as I said before, religious persecution often
extirpates new doctrines, but commonly fails to maintain the belief in
old tenets. You can prevent whole classes of men from hearing of the
religion which is congenial to them, but you cannot make men believe a
religion which is uncongenial. You can prevent the natural admirers of
Gothic architecture from hearing anything of it, or from seeing it; but
you cannot make them admire classical architecture. You may prevent the
admirers of Claude from seeing his pictures, or from praising them; but
you cannot make them admirers of Turner. Just so, you may by persecution
prevent minds prone to be Protestant from being Protestant; but you will
not make men real Catholics: you may prevent naturally Catholic minds
from being Catholic; but you will not make them genuine Protestants.
You will not make those believe your religion who are predisposed by
nature in favour of a different kind of religion; you will make of
them, instead, more or less conscious sceptics. Being denied the sort
of religion of which the roots are in their minds and which they could
believe, they will for ever be conscious of an indefinite want. They will
constantly feel after something which they are never able to attain; they
will never be able to settle upon anything; they will feel an instinctive
repulsion from everything; they will be sceptics at heart, because they
were denied the creed for which their heart craves; they will live as
indifferentists, because they were withheld by force from the only creed
to which they would not be indifferent. Persecution in intellectual
countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an
intense, incessant, implacable doubt.
Upon examination, therefore, the admission that certain truths are not
gained by discussion introduces no new element into the subject. The
discussion of such truths is as necessary as of all other truths. The
only limitations are that men’s minds shall in the particular society be
mature enough to bear the discussion, and that the discussion shall not
destroy the society.
I acknowledge these two limitations to the doctrine that discussion
should be free, but I do not admit another which is often urged. It is
said that those who write against toleration should not be tolerated;
that discussion should not aid the enemies of discussion. But why not?
If there is a strong Government and a people fit for discussion, why
should not the cause be heard? We must not assume that the liberty of
discussion has no case of exception. We have just seen that there are,
in fact, several such. In each instance, let the people decide whether
the particular discussion shall go on or not. Very likely, in some cases,
they may decide wrong; but it is better that they should so decide, than
that we should venture to anticipate all experience, and to make sure
that they cannot possibly be right.
It is plain, too, that the argument, here applied to the toleration of
opinion has no application to that of actions. The human mind, in the
cases supposed, learns by freely hearing all arguments, but in no case
does it learn by trying freely all practices. Society, as we now have
it, cannot exist at all unless certain acts are prohibited. It goes on
much better because many other acts are prohibited also. The Government
must take the responsibility of saying what actions it will allow;
that is its first business, and the allowance of all would be the end
of civilisation. But it must, under the conditions specified, hear all
opinions, for the tranquil discussion of all more than anything else
promotes the progressive knowledge of truth, which is the mainspring of
civilisation.
Nor does the argument that the law should not impose a penalty on the
expression of any opinion equally prove that society should not in
many cases apply a penalty to that expression. Society can deal much
more severely than the law with many kinds of acts, because it need be
far less strict in the evidence it requires. It can take cognisance of
matters of common repute and of things of which everyone is sure, but
which nobody can prove. Particularly, it can fairly well compare the
character of the doctrine with the character of the agent, which law
can do but imperfectly, if at all. And it is certain that opinions are
evidence of the character of those who hold them—not conclusive evidence,
but still presumptive. Experience shows that every opinion is compatible
with what every one would admit to be a life fairly approvable, a
life far higher than that of the mass of men. Great scepticism and
great belief have both been found in characters whom both sceptics and
believers must admire. Still, on the whole, there is a certain kinship
between belief and character; those who disagree with a man’s fundamental
creed will generally disapprove of his habitual character. If, therefore,
society sees a man maintaining opinions which by experience it has been
led to connect with actions such as it discountenances, it is justified
in provisionally discountenancing the man who holds those opinions. Such
a man should be put to the proof to show by his life that the opinions
which he holds are not connected with really pernicious actions, as
society thinks they are. If he is visibly leading a high life, society
should discountenance him no longer; it is then clear that he did not
lead a bad life, and the idea that he did or might lead such a life was
the only reason for so doing. A doubt was suggested, but it also has
been removed. This habit of suspicion does not, on the whole, impair
free discussion; perhaps even it improves it. It keeps out the worst
disputants, men of really bad character, whose opinions are the results
of that character, and who refrain from publishing them, because they
fear what society may say. If the law could similarly distinguish between
good disputants and bad, it might usefully impose penalties on the bad.
But, of course, this is impossible. Law cannot distinguish between the
niceties of character; it must punish the publication of an opinion, if
it punishes at all, no matter whether the publisher is a good man or
whether he is a bad one. In such a matter, society is a discriminating
agent: the law is but a blind one.
To most people I may seem to be slaying the slain, and proving what no
one doubts. People, it will be said, no longer wish to persecute. But
I say, they _do_ wish to persecute. In fact, from their writings, and
still better from their conversation, it is easy to see that very many
believers would persecute sceptics, and that very many sceptics would
persecute believers. Society may be wiser; but most earnest believers and
most earnest unbelievers are not at all wiser.
_THE PUBLIC WORSHIP REGULATION BILL._[26]
(1874.)
If the ‘Public Worship Regulation Bill’ dealt only with subjects
theological or religious, we should not interfere in the discussion; but
it deals also with political questions, on which we do not think it right
to be silent, especially as many whom we much respect have, we think,
selected a policy of which the effect will be the reverse of what they
expect, and the success of which they may hereafter much regret.
All changes in England should be made slowly and after long discussion.
Public opinion should be permitted to ripen upon them. And the reason
is, that all the important English institutions are the relics of a
long past; that they have undergone many transformations; that, like
old houses which have been altered many times, they are full both of
conveniences and inconveniences which at first sight would not be
imagined. Very often a rash alterer would pull down the very part which
makes them habitable, to cure a minor evil or improve a defective outline.
The English Church is one of those among our institutions which, if it is
to be preserved at all, should be touched most anxiously. It is one of
our oldest institutions. Every part of it has a history, which few of us
thoroughly understand, but which we all know to be long and important.
In its political relations it has been altered many times, and each time
under circumstances of considerable complexity. The last settlement was
made more than two hundred years ago, when men’s minds were in a very
different state from what they are now: when Newton had not written, when
Locke had not thought, when physical science, as we now have it, did
not exist, when modern philosophy, for England at least, had not begun.
The railways, the telegraphs, the very common sense of these times,
would have been unintelligible in the year 1660; they would have been
still more unintelligible in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. To attempt to
enforce on us now a settlement made in times so different, is a grave
undertaking; it ought only to be made after the most ample discussion,
and when every competent person has had time to consider the effect.
We have as yet felt little inconvenience from our old law, because we
have dealt with it in a truly English manner. Always refusing to change
it explicitly, always saying that we would never so change it, we were
changing it silently all the while. Year by year this practice was
omitted, or this habit insensibly changed. Each generation differed from
its fathers; and though they might in part utter the same words, they
did not mean the same things; their intellectual life was different.
Incessant changes in science, in literature, in art, and in politics—in
all that forms thinking minds—have made it impossible that really and in
fact we should think the same things in 1874 as our ancestors in 1674 or
1774. Just as in legal theory Queen Victoria has pretty much the same
prerogative as Queen Elizabeth, so too in legal theory the English Church
may be identical with that of two hundred years ago; but the Church is
not a legal theory, it is ‘a congregation of faithful men;’ and no one of
these is in a state of mind identical, or nearly identical, with those of
two hundred years ago.
Many Continental statesmen would be much puzzled at this insensible
alteration; they would have a difficulty in imagining a law which was a
law in theory but not a law in practice, which no one would alter in word
and no one enforce in reality. But the English are very practised in this
sort of arrangement—they have a kind of genius for the compensation of
errors. For many years we had probably the worst and most bloody penal
law in Europe; it is awful to read the old statutes which fix death
as the penalty for minor acts altogether undeserving of it. But these
statutes did not work nearly so much evil as might have been expected.
There was besides a complex system of indictments which let off very
many culprits upon trifling flaws, and there was also an absurd system
of incessant remissions and pardons; the worst evils of an excessively
bad law were exceedingly mitigated by a very bad mode of applying it.
Speaking roughly, and subject to minor criticism, the history has been
the same in the Church; in it, too, an imperfect law has been remedied by
an imperfect mode of procedure. The Church has been allowed to change
in this and that because it has been exceedingly difficult to interfere
with it. The legal penalty against change has been distant, costly,
and uncertain; and therefore it has not been applied. Change has been
possible because the punishment of change was difficult. But the essence
of the ‘Public Worship Regulation Bill’ is to make that punishment easy.
‘If the Rubric says so,’ say its supporters, ‘the Rubric ought to be
enforced.’ This is as if Sir Samuel Romilly had attacked, not our bad
penal code, but our bad penal procedure. If, by the historical growth of
approximate equivalents, _A_ mitigates _B_, you will deteriorate, not
improve the world, if you change _A_ without changing _B_, though both
may be evils.
The analogy, indeed, very imperfectly expresses the truth. In the recent
history of the Church, the English have conspicuously shown another of
their predominant peculiarities—indifference to abstract truth. When a
quarter of a century ago English lawyers in the Court of Privy Council
were first required to decide theological questions, they did so in a
way which astonished theologians. They declined to supply any abstract
proposition. If the enacted formularies contained such and such words,
no clergyman of the Church could, according to them, contradict those
words, but they allowed the clergy to say anything else. We cannot
use theological terms here; but suppose, by an economical analogy,
the formulary had said that ‘Free trade was beneficial to mankind,’
the lawyers would have decided that no clergyman could say that free
trade was not beneficial; but they would have allowed him to say that
‘Commercial liberty was inexpressibly disastrous to mankind,’ because as
lawyers they would not undertake to say that ‘free trade’ and ‘commercial
liberty’ meant the same thing, or that in an abstract subject the two
phrases might not in some way and to some minds seem consistent. In mere
description this kind of decision may not seem very sensible, and it is
utterly contrary to any which a theologian would ever have adopted; but
in practice it preserved the Church Establishment. It was first applied
in the Gorham case, and retained the Evangelical clergy in the Church;
then, in the _Essays and Reviews_ case, it retained the Broad Church;
and lastly, in Mr. Bennett’s case, it retained the High Church. If the
Establishment was to be maintained, it was necessary that all these
parties should be kept side by side within it, and by this system of
interpretation they were thus kept.
Unfortunately, the courts of law have not been able to apply the same
sort of judicial decision to the practical directions for the public
worship of the Church which they applied to her theoretical teachings.
There is inevitably something more distinct and clear about acts which
are required to be done at a given time and place, than in statements of
abstract doctrine. When the courts have been appealed to, it has not been
possible to apply to ritual the same comprehensiveness which has had such
excellent political effects in the case of doctrine. But, nevertheless,
there is exactly the same necessity for it. Almost every party in the
Church is harassed by some of her rules, just as it is hampered by
some of her words. The Broad Church dislikes the Athanasian creed, and
avoids the use of it. The Low Church and the High Church are in vital
and necessary opposition as to the mode of conducting the Sacramental
services. In every characteristic Church every party thinks probably
something is done which the strict Rubric would forbid, or something
omitted which it would prescribe. Until now this difficulty has not been
very acutely felt. As we have explained, the imperfection of the law was
cured by the imperfection of the procedure. No doubt the rubrics were
framed in other days; no doubt they took no notice of the wants of the
present day; no doubt a strict adherence to them would expel from the
Church very many whose doctrines had been decided to be consistent with
hers. But then, to enforce the observance of the Rubric was difficult,
costly, and dubious, and so the natural evil did not happen. The wants
of various minds were variously met by various deviations from the law,
which in theory were liable to penalties, but which in practice were
unpunished.
The scope of the ‘Public Worship Regulation Bill’ is to destroy this
variety. It is a new Act of Uniformity as far as ‘public worship’ is
concerned. A short and simple process—which has been so often stated that
we need not here describe it—is prescribed which will enable objectors to
enforce any rubric, and which no doubt will cause them to be so enforced.
The proposers of the Bill have not enough considered the applicability of
this primary assumption: no Church can have only a single form of public
worship unless it has also a single creed. An apparent uniformity may
be maintained in specified details; but in spirit, in feeling, in its
deepest consequences on those who habitually hear and see, the effect
will be different. A service conducted by a Broad Churchman, explained in
his sermon, and commented upon in his manner, will be very unlike what it
would be if that service is conducted by a _bonâ fide_ dogmatic believer.
No mere Act of Uniformity can prevent this. Still less can it efface the
inevitable difference between a Sacramental service in the hands of a
High Church clergyman and in those of a Low Church. The two belong to
separate and unlike species. The one believes that the service contains a
supernatural act, the other that it is an edifying rite; the one regards
it as an invisible miracle, the other as a conspicuous exhortation.
Make what laws you like, how can the two perform these services with
the same tone of mind, the same kind of thought, the same effect on the
congregation? You may dress two men up in the same clothes, but they
will be two men for all that. If once you permit two or more faiths in a
Church, you in truth permit two or more Rituals. The various feelings and
the various creeds will somehow find a means of bringing themselves into
contact with the minds with which they wish to be in contact. You have
‘swallowed the camel’ when you permitted the creed, and it is useless to
strain at the gnat and forbid the expression of it.
This is to be especially borne in mind by those who think that there
is a party in the Church that desires to introduce Romanism, and who
approve of this Bill because they think it will counteract that party.
The essence of Romanism is not in its ceremonies, but in its doctrines.
As was explained to the House of Commons on Wednesday, nothing could be
simpler than the mode in which Mr. Newman used to conduct his services
at Oxford; and yet he then held ‘Roman’ doctrine, and penetrated half
the young men about him with a deep faith in the highest sacramental
principle. Unless you reverse the decision in the Bennett case, a
doctrine which no common person will distinguish from Romanism will
continue to be, and must be, taught in the Church of England. We do not
believe it will lose in strength by being denied this or that form of
Ritual. It will attract in any case the minds to whom it is congenial,
and it will rather gain than lose in _éclat_ by seeming to be persecuted.
We shall be told that this argument proves too much; for that it proves
that this Bill will do nothing at all, and that therefore at least it
will do no harm. But it will, we think, do great harm—at least, if it be
good to keep the Establishment, and if it does harm to weaken it. The
real danger of the Establishment is from within, not from without. The
manner in which its sections have been retained within its limits has in
part developed, and as time goes on is still developing more largely,
a great evil. Specially the Low Church, specially the Broad Church,
and specially the High Church, have all been kept in her communion
because the judges refused to draw certain logical inferences from her
formularies; as lawyers they declined to draw them. But intellectual
young men, who are thinking of becoming clergymen, do not like this
reasoning. They say: ‘The courts of law may not like to draw these
inferences, but I must. I have spent my youth in a mental training which
has prepared me to draw them, and which compels me to do so. Educated as
I have been, I cannot take half an argument and leave it; I must work
it out to the end. That end seems to me inconsistent with this or that
of the formularies of the Church. Others say it is not, but I am not
sure that it is not; at any rate, I do not like to risk the happiness of
my life upon its being consistent. If in after years my investigation
should run counter to a vast collection of assertions framed by various
men, in various ages, of various minds, what will be my fate? I must
either sacrifice the profession by which I live, or the creed in which
I believe. The lawyers probably might not turn me out indeed; but my
conscience was not made by lawyers—I shall have to turn myself out.’
This is the sort of thought which more and more prevents intellectual
young men from taking orders, and we are beginning to see the effect.
The moral excellence and the practical piety of the clergy are as good
as ever; but they want individuality of thought and originality of mind.
They have too universal a conformity to commonplace opinion. They are
not only conscientious, but indecisive; more and more they belong to
the most puzzling class to argue with, for more and more they ‘candidly
confess’ that they must admit your premises, but, on ‘account of the
obscurity of the subject,’ must decline to draw the inevitable inference.
Already this intellectual poorness is beginning to be felt; and if it
should augment, it will destroy the Establishment. She will not have in
her ranks arguers who can maintain her position either against those
who believe more or against those who believe less. Scepticism sends
trained and logical minds to the intellectual conflict; Romanism does
so also; but the Established Church refuses them—refuses them silently
and indirectly, but still effectually. The Public Worship Bill will, we
conceive, augment this difficulty almost at the very point at which its
being augmented will be most calamitous. Many young men who are acutely
conscious of the restraints of the Establishment in speculation, are
attracted by its freedom in practice. ‘I may be cramped in metaphysics,’
they think at heart, ‘but I shall be free in action.’ But this Bill will
be a measure—for aught young men can tell, the first of a series—which
will limit the freedom of their lives, and cramp them on the side of
practice as they already are on the side of thought. The most malevolent
enemy of the Established Church could deal her no acuter wound.
Upon the whole, we can conceive nothing clearer than that this Bill
should not pass this year. We are certain that members of Parliament have
not considered the necessary arguments, and that the nation has not done
so either.
THE END.
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
FOOTNOTES
[1] _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire._ By Edward
Gibbon, Esq. With Notes by Dean Milman and M. Guizot. Edited, with
additional Notes, by William Smith, LL.D. In Eight Volumes. London, 1855.
Murray.
[2] _Some Remains (hitherto unpublished) of Joseph Butler, LL.D., some
time Lord Bishop of Durham._
_Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. VI. Part II. Article, Joseph Butler._ By
Henry Rogers, Author of the ‘Eclipse of Faith.’ Eighth edition.
[3] Trench, _On the Synonyms of the New Testament_ (p. 191).
[4] Trench, _ubi supra_.
[5] _The Prospective Review._
[6] Professor Rogers’s _Defence of the ‘Eclipse of Faith’_, p. 43. It
is to be observed, we are not at all speaking of the facts of the Old
Testament; we are but limiting the considerations on which the above
writer has rested its defence. These refined reasonings but weaken the
case they are brought to support. ‘I did not know,’ said George the
Third, ‘that the Bible needed an apology.’
[7] We doubt, however, if Butler would at all have accepted Mr.
Rogers’s statement of his view, though it is perhaps the most common
interpretation of him. Probably, he really meant no more than what we
contend for, though his language is not always so limited in terms.
[8] _The Life of Laurence Sterne._ By Percy Fitzgerald, M.A., M.R.I.A. In
two volumes. Chapman and Hall.
_Thackeray the Humourist and the Man of Letters._ By Theodore Taylor,
Esq. London: John Camden Hotten.
[9] _Library Edition._ Illustrated by upwards of Two Hundred Engravings
on Steel, after Drawings by Turner, Landseer, Wilkie, Stanfield, Roberts,
&c. including Portraits of the Historical Personages described in the
Novels. 25 vols. demy 8vo.
_Abbotsford Edition._ With One Hundred and Twenty Engravings on Steel,
and nearly Two Thousand on Wood. 12 vols. super-royal 8vo.
_Author’s favourite Edition._ 48 vols. post 8vo.
_Cabinet Edition._ 25 vols. foolscap 8vo.
_Railway Edition._ Now publishing, and to be completed in 25 portable
volumes, large type.
_People’s Edition._ 5 large volumes royal 8vo.
[10] _Cheap Edition of the Works of Mr. Charles Dickens. The Pickwick
Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, &c._ London, 1857-8. Chapman and Hall.
[11] _The History of England from the Accession of James the Second._ By
Thomas Babington Macaulay. Longmans.
[12] _Œuvres complètes de_ C.-J. de Béranger. _Nouvelle édition revue par
l’Auteur, contenant les Dix Chansons nouvelles, le facsimile d’une Lettre
de_ Béranger; _illustrée de cinquante-deux gravures sur acier, d’après_
Charlet, D’Aubigny, Johannot Grenier, De Lemud, Pauquet, Penguilly,
Raffet, Sandoz, _exécutées par les artistes les plus distingués, et d’un
beau portrait d’après nature par_ Sandoz. 2 vols. 8vo. 1855.
[13] We have been obliged to abridge the above extract, and in so doing
have left out the humour of it.
[14] _Poems._ By Arthur Hugh Clough, sometime Fellow of Oriel College,
Oxford. With a Memoir. Macmillan.
[15]
‘——domus Albuneæ resonantis,
Et præceps Anio, et Tiburni lucus, et uda
Mobilibus pomaria rivis.’
[16] _Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson,
Barrister-at-Law, F.S.A._ Selected and Edited by Thomas Sadler, Ph.D. In
Three Volumes. London, 1869.
[17] ‘Since writing the above, Baron Rolfe has verified my prediction
more strikingly by being created a peer, by the title of Lord Cranworth,
and appointed a Vice-Chancellor. Soon after his appointment, he called
on me, and I dined with him. I related to Lady Cranworth the anecdote
given above, of my conversation with my brother, with which she was
evidently pleased. Lady Cranworth was the daughter of Mr. Carr, Solicitor
to the Excise, whom I formerly used to visit, and ought soon to find some
mention of in my journals. Lord Cranworth continues to enjoy universal
respect.—H. C. R. 1851.’
[18] _Enoch Arden, &c._ By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate.
_Dramatis Personæ._ By Robert Browning.
[19] The first words in Lord Jeffrey’s celebrated review of the
_Excursion_ were, ‘This will never do.’
[20] ‘A curious physiologico-botanical theory by Goethe, which appears to
be entirely unknown in this country: though several eminent continental
botanists have noticed it with commendation. It is explained at
considerable length, in this same _Morphologie_.’
[21] _The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough_, vol. ii. p. 472.
[22] _Science in Theology._ Sermons preached before the University of
Oxford. By the Rev. Adam S. Farrar. Longmans.
[23] _Contemporary Review_ for April 1871.
[24] It should be stated that this essay was originally read as a paper
before a society which discusses subjects of a metaphysical nature.
[25] _Contemporary Review_ for April 1874.
[26] [This paper originally appeared in the _Economist_ on the occasion
of the adoption by the Government of the late Mr. Russell Gurney’s Public
Worship Regulation Bill. It is here included as a telling practical
illustration of the teaching of the previous essay.—EDITOR.]
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