initial commit of ebook 39680HEAD main

author: Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org> 2025-10-14 20:13:23 -0700
committer: Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org> 2025-10-14 20:13:23 -0700
commit: ee175181d58d84f38e4309019f15792b63f2c9dc (patch)
tree: d449763f9153acf436616a73c8a91a29fa9a7e31
80 files changed, 40933 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/39680-0.txt b/39680-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0382b34
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9597 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories,
+and Fancies., by Anna Jameson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
+       2nd ed.
+
+Author: Anna Jameson
+
+Release Date: May 12, 2012 [EBook #39680]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COMMONPLACE BOOK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Julia Miller, Turgut Dincer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+   A
+
+   COMMONPLACE BOOK
+
+   OF
+
+   Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   A COMMONPLACE BOOK—
+
+   OF
+
+   Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
+
+   ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
+
+   PART I.—ETHICS AND CHARACTER.
+
+   PART II.—LITERATURE AND ART.
+
+   BY MRS. JAMESON.
+
+   “Un peu de chaque chose, et rien du tout,—à la française!”—MONTAIGNE.
+
+   With Illustrations and Etchings.
+
+   SECOND EDITION, CORRECTED.
+
+   LONDON:
+   LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS.
+   1855.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+I must be allowed to say a few words in explanation of the contents of
+this little volume, which is truly what its name sets forth—a book of
+common-places, and nothing more. If I have never, in any work I have
+ventured to place before the public, aspired to _teach_, (being myself a
+_learner_ in all things,) at least I have hitherto done my best to
+deserve the indulgence I have met with; and it would pain me if it could
+be supposed that such indulgence had rendered me presumptuous or
+careless.
+
+For many years I have been accustomed to make a memorandum of any
+thought which might come across me—(if pen and paper were at hand), and
+to mark (and _remark_) any passage in a book which excited either a
+sympathetic or an antagonistic feeling. This collection of notes
+accumulated insensibly from day to day. The volumes on Shakspeare’s
+Women, on Sacred and Legendary Art, and various other productions,
+sprung from seed thus lightly and casually sown, which, I hardly know
+how, grew up and expanded into a regular, readable form, with a
+beginning, a middle, and an end. But what was to be done with the
+fragments which remained—without beginning, and without end—links of a
+hidden or a broken chain? Whether to preserve them or destroy them
+became a question, and one I could not answer for myself. In allowing a
+portion of them to go forth to the world in their original form, as
+unconnected fragments, I have been guided by the wishes of others, who
+deemed it not wholly uninteresting or profitless to trace the path,
+sometimes devious enough, of an “inquiring spirit,” even by the little
+pebbles dropped as vestiges by the way side.
+
+A book so supremely egotistical and subjective can do good only in one
+way. It may, like conversation with a friend, open up sources of
+sympathy and reflection; excite to argument, agreement, or disagreement;
+and, like every spontaneous utterance of thought out of an earnest mind,
+suggest far higher and better thoughts than any to be found here to
+higher and more productive minds. If I had not the humble hope of such a
+possible result, instead of sending these memoranda to the printer, I
+should have thrown them into the fire; for I lack that creative faculty
+which can work up the teachings of heart-sorrow and world-experience
+into attractive forms of fiction or of art; and having no intention of
+leaving any such memorials to be published after my death, they must
+have gone into the fire as the only alternative left.
+
+The passages from books are not, strictly speaking, _selected_; they are
+not given here on any principle of choice, but simply because that by
+some process of assimilation they became a part of the individual mind.
+They “found _me_,”—to borrow Coleridge’s expression,—“found me in some
+depth of my being;” I did not “find _them_.”
+
+For the rest, all those passages which are marked by inverted commas
+must be regarded as borrowed, though I have not always been able to give
+my authority. All passages not so marked are, I dare not say, original
+or new, but at least the unstudied expression of a free discursive mind.
+Fruits, not advisedly plucked, but which the variable winds have shaken
+from the tree: some ripe, some “harsh and crude.”
+
+Wordsworth’s famous poem of “The Happy Warrior” (of which a new
+application will be found at page 87.), is supposed by Mr. De Quincey to
+have been first suggested by the character of Nelson. It has since been
+applied to Sir Charles Napier (the Indian General), as well as to the
+Duke of Wellington; all which serves to illustrate my position, that the
+lines in question are equally applicable to any man or any woman whose
+moral standard is irrespective of selfishness and expediency.
+
+With regard to the fragment on Sculpture, it may be necessary to state
+that it was written in 1848. The first three paragraphs were inserted in
+the Art Journal for April, 1849. It was intended to enlarge the whole
+into a comprehensive essay on “Subjects fitted for Artistic Treatment;”
+but this being now impossible, the fragment is given as originally
+written; others may think it out, and apply it better than I shall live
+to do.
+
+
+   August, 1854.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+   PART I.
+
+   Ethics and Character.
+
+
+ ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.                                        Page
+
+   Vanity                                                     1
+
+   Truths and Truisms                                         3
+
+   Beauty and Use                                             5
+
+   What is Soul?                                              7
+
+   The Philosophy of Happiness                                9
+
+   Cheerfulness a Virtue                                     10
+
+   Intellect and Sympathy                                    11
+
+   Old Letters                                               12
+
+   The Point of Honour                                       13
+
+   Looking up                                                14
+
+   Authors                                                   14
+
+   Thought and Theory                                        15
+
+   Impulse and Consideration                                 16
+
+   Principle and Expediency                                  16
+
+   Personality of the Evil Principle                         17
+
+   The Catholic Spirit                                       18
+
+   Death-beds                                                19
+
+   Thoughts on a Sermon                                      20
+
+   Love and Fear of God                                      22
+
+   Social Opinion                                            23
+
+   Balzac                                                    23
+
+   Political                                                 24
+
+   Celibacy                                                  25
+
+   Landor’s Wise Sayings                                     26
+
+   Justice and Generosity                                    27
+
+   Roman Catholic Converts                                   28
+
+   Stealing and Borrowing                                    28
+
+   Good and Bad                                              29
+
+   Italian Proverb. Greek Saying                             30
+
+   Silent Grief                                              31
+
+   Past and Future                                           32
+
+   Suicide. Countenance                                      33
+
+   Progress and Progression                                  34
+
+   Happiness in Suffering                                    35
+
+   Life in the Future                                        36
+
+   Strength. Youth                                           38
+
+   Moral Suffering                                           40
+
+   The Secret of Peace                                       41
+
+   Motives and Impulses                                      42
+
+   Principle and Passion                                     43
+
+   Dominant Ideas                                            44
+
+   Absence and Death                                         45
+
+   Sydney Smith. Theodore Hook                               46
+
+   Werther and Childe Harold                                 50
+
+   Money Obligations                                         52
+
+   Charity. Truth                                            53
+
+   Women. Men                                                55
+
+   Compensation for Sorrow                                   57
+
+   Religion. Avarice                                         57
+
+   Genius. Mind                                              59
+
+   Hieroglyphical Colours                                    60
+
+   Character                                                 61
+
+   Value of Words                                            62
+
+   Nature and Art                                            64
+
+   Spirit and Form                                           67
+
+   Penal Retribution. The Church                             68
+
+   Woman’s Patriotism                                        70
+
+   Doubt. Curiosity                                          71
+
+   Tieck. Coleridge                                          71
+
+   Application of a Bon Mot of Talleyrand                    73
+
+   Adverse Individualities                                   75
+
+   Conflict in Love                                          76
+
+   French Expressions                                        77
+
+   Practical and Contemplative Life                          78
+
+   Joanna Baillie. Macaulay’s Ballads                        80
+
+   Cunning                                                   80
+
+   Browning’s Paracelsus                                     81
+
+   Men, Women, and Children                                  84
+
+   Letters                                                  100
+
+   Madame de Staël. Dejà                                    103
+
+   Thought too free                                         105
+
+   Good Qualities, not Virtues                              106
+
+   Sense and Phantasy                                       107
+
+   Use the Present                                          108
+
+   Facts                                                    109
+
+   Wise Sayings                                             111
+
+   Pestilence of Falsehood                                  112
+
+   Signs instead of Words. Relations with the World         113
+
+   Milton’s Adam and Eve                                    115
+
+   Thoughts, sundry                                         116
+
+ A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD                                  117
+
+ THE INDIAN HUNTER AND THE FIRE;
+   an Allegory                                              147
+
+ POETICAL FRAGMENTS                                         152
+
+   Theological.
+
+
+ THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL                                155
+
+   Pandemonium                                              158
+
+   Southey on the Religious Orders                          162
+
+   Forms in Religion—Image Worship                          164
+
+   Religious Differences                                    165
+
+   Expansive Christianity                                   169
+
+ NOTES FROM VARIOUS SERMONS:—
+
+   A Roman Catholic Sermon                                  172
+
+   Another                                                  176
+
+   Church of England Sermon                                 178
+
+   Another                                                  181
+
+   Dissenting Sermon                                        187
+
+   Father Taylor of Boston                                  188
+
+
+   PART II.
+
+   Literature and Art.
+
+
+ NOTES FROM BOOKS:—
+
+   Dr. Arnold                                               198
+
+   Niebuhr                                                  220
+
+   Lord Bacon                                               230
+
+   Chateaubriand                                            240
+
+   Bishop Cumberland                                        247
+
+   Comte’s Philosophy                                       250
+
+   Goethe                                                   261
+
+   Hazlitt’s “Liber Amoris”                                 263
+
+   Francis Horner, “The Nightingale”                        267
+
+   Thackeray’s “English Humourists”                         271
+
+
+ NOTES ON ART:—
+
+   Analogies                                                276
+
+   Definition of Art                                        279
+
+   No Patriotic Art                                         280
+
+   Verse and Colour                                         280
+
+   Dutch Pictures                                           281
+
+   Morals in Art                                            283
+
+   Physiognomy of Hands                                     288
+
+   Mozart and Chopin                                        289
+
+   Music                                                    293
+
+   Rachel, the Actress                                      294
+
+   English and German Actresses                             298
+
+   Character of Imogen                                      303
+
+   Shakspeare Club                                          305
+
+   “Maria Maddalena”                                        305
+
+   The Artistic Nature                                      307
+
+   Woman’s Criticism                                        309
+
+   Artistic Influences                                      310
+
+   The Greek Aphrodite                                      311
+
+   Love, in the Greek Tragedy                               312
+
+   Wilkie’s Life and Letters                                313
+
+   Wilhelm Schadow                                          317
+
+   Artist Life                                              321
+
+   Materialism in Art                                       323
+
+   A Fragment on Sculpture, and on certain Characters in
+     History and Poetry, considered as Subjects for Modern
+     Art                                                    326
+
+     Helen of Troy                                          332
+
+     Penelope—Laodamia                                      336
+
+     Hippolytus                                             339
+
+     Iphigenia                                              343
+
+     Eve                                                    347
+
+     Adam                                                   350
+
+     Angels                                                 351
+
+     Miriam—Ruth                                            354
+
+     Christ—Solomon—David                                   355
+
+     Hagar—Rebecca—Rachel—Queen of Sheba                    356
+
+     Lady Godiva                                            357
+
+     Joan of Arc                                            359
+
+     Characters from Shakspeare                             364
+
+     Characters from Spenser                                366
+
+     From Milton. The Lady—Comus—Satan                      367
+
+     From the Italian and Modern Poets                      370
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ETCHINGS.
+
+
+   1. Fruits and Flowers. After an old drawing.
+
+   2. Out of my garden.
+
+   3. Virgin Martyrs. Thought. Memory. Fancy. After Benedetto
+        da Matera.
+
+   4. La Penserosa. After Ambrogio Lorenzette.
+
+   5. La Fille du Feu. From a sketch by Von Schwind.
+
+   6. Laus Dei. Angel after Hans Hemmeling.
+
+   7. Eve and Cain. After Steinle.
+
+   8. Study. After an old print.
+
+   9. The Parcæ. From a sketch by Carstens.
+
+   10. Antique Owlet. In Goethe’s collection at Weimar.
+
+
+   *** The woodcuts are inserted to divide the
+   paragraphs and subjects, and are ornamental rather than
+   illustrative. Where the same vignette heads several paragraphs
+   consecutively, it is to signify that the _ideas_ expressed
+   stand in relation to each other.
+
+
+PART I.
+
+Ethics and Character.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Ethical Fragments.
+
+
+1.
+
+Bacon says, how wisely! that “there is often as great vanity in
+withdrawing and retiring men’s conceits from the world, as in obtruding
+them.” Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.
+When I see people haunted by the idea of self,—spreading their hands
+before their faces lest they meet the reflection of it in every other
+face, as if the world were to them like a French drawing-room, panelled
+with looking glass,—always fussily putting their obtrusive self behind
+them, or dragging over it a scanty drapery of consciousness, miscalled
+modesty,—always on their defence against compliments, or mistaking
+sympathy for compliment, which is as great an error, and a more vulgar
+one than mistaking flattery for sympathy,—when I see all this, as I have
+seen it, I am inclined to attribute it to the immaturity of the
+character, or to what is worse, a total want of simplicity. To some
+characters fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips,—they do
+well to turn away from it, who fear it will turn their heads. But to
+others, fame is “love disguised,” the love that answers to love, in its
+widest most exalted sense. It seems to me, that we should all bring the
+best that is in us (according to the diversity of gifts which God has
+given us), and lay it a reverend offering on the altar of humanity,—if
+not to burn and enlighten, at least to rise in incense to heaven. So
+will the pure in heart, and the unselfish do; and they will not heed if
+those who _can_ bring nothing or _will_ bring nothing, unless they can
+blaze like a beacon, call out “VANITY!”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+2.
+
+There are truths which, by perpetual repetition, have subsided into
+passive truisms, till, in some moment of feeling or experience, they
+kindle into conviction, start to life and light, and the truism becomes
+again a vital truth.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+3.
+
+It is well that we obtain what we require at the cheapest possible rate;
+yet those who cheapen goods, or beat down the price of a good article,
+or buy in preference to what is good and genuine of its kind an inferior
+article at an inferior price, sometimes do much mischief. Not only do
+they discourage the production of a better article, but if they be
+anxious about the education of the lower classes they undo with one hand
+what they do with the other; they encourage the mere mechanic and the
+production of what may be produced without effort of mind and without
+education, and they discourage and wrong the skilled workman for whom
+education has done much more and whose education has cost much more.
+
+Every work so merely and basely mechanical, that a man can throw into it
+no part of his own life and soul, does, in the long run, degrade the
+human being. It is only by giving him some kind of mental and moral
+interest in the labour of his hands, making it an exercise of his
+understanding, and an object of his sympathy, that we can really elevate
+the workman; and this is not the case with very cheap production of any
+kind. (Southampton, Dec. 1849.)
+
+
+Since this was written the same idea has been carried out, with far more
+eloquent reasoning, in a noble passage which I have just found in Mr.
+Ruskin’s last volume of “The Stones of Venice” (the Sea Stories). As I
+do not _always_ subscribe to his theories of Art, I am the more
+delighted with this anticipation of a moral agreement between us.
+
+“We have much studied and much perfected of late, the great civilised
+invention of the division of labour, only we give it a false name. It is
+not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men:—divided
+into mere segments of men,—broken into small fragments and crumbs of
+life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man
+is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the
+point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now, it is a good and desirable
+thing truly to make many pins in a day, but if we could only see with
+what crystal sand their points are polished—sand of human soul, much to
+be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is,—we should think
+there might be some loss in it also; and the great cry that rises from
+all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace-blast, is all in
+very deed for this,—that we manufacture everything there except men,—we
+blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape
+pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single
+living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages; and all the
+evil to which that cry is urging our myriads, can be met only in one
+way,—not by teaching nor preaching; for to teach them is but to show
+them their misery; and to preach to them—if we do nothing more than
+preach,—is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding on
+the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men,
+raising them and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such
+convenience, or beauty or cheapness, as is to be got only by the
+degradation of the workman, and by equally determined demand for the
+products and results of a healthy and ennobling labour.” ....
+
+“We are always in these days trying to separate the two (intellect and
+work). We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always
+working; and we call one a gentleman and the other an operative;
+whereas, the workman ought to be often thinking, and the thinker often
+working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. It is only by
+labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour
+can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity.”
+
+Wordsworth, however, had said the same thing before either of us:
+
+                     “Our life is turn’d
+   Out of her course wherever man is made
+   An offering or a sacrifice,—a tool
+   Or implement,—a passive thing employed
+   As a brute mean, without acknowledgment
+   Of common right or interest in the end,
+   Used or abused as selfishness may prompt.
+   Say what can follow for a rational soul
+   Perverted thus, but weakness in all good
+   And strength in evil?”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+And this leads us to the consideration of another mistake, analogous
+with the above, but referable in its results chiefly to the higher, or
+what Mr. Ruskin calls the _thinking_, classes of the community.
+
+It is not good for us to have all that we value of worldly material
+things in the form of money. It is the most vulgar form in which value
+can be invested. Not only books, pictures, and all beautiful things are
+better; but even jewels and trinkets are sometimes to be preferred to
+mere hard money. Lands and tenements are good, as involving duties; but
+still what is valuable in the market sense should sometimes take the
+ideal and the beautiful form, and be dear and lovely and valuable for
+its own sake as well as for its convertible worth in hard gold. I think
+the character would be apt to deteriorate when all its material
+possessions take the form of money, and when money becomes valuable for
+its own sake, or as the mere instrument or representative of power.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+4.
+
+We are told in a late account of Laura Bridgeman, the blind, deaf, and
+dumb girl, that her instructor once endeavoured to explain the
+difference between the material and the immaterial, and used the word
+“soul.” She interrupted to ask, “What is soul?”
+
+“That which thinks, feels, hopes, loves,——”
+
+“And _aches_?” she added eagerly.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+5.
+
+I was reading to-day in the Notes to Boswell’s Life of Johnson that “it
+is a theory which every one knows to be _false in fact_, that virtue in
+real life is always productive of happiness, and vice of misery.” I
+should say that all my experience teaches me that the position is not
+false but true: that virtue _does_ produce happiness, and vice _does_
+produce misery. But let us settle the meaning of the words. By
+_happiness_, we do not necessarily mean a state of worldly prosperity.
+By _virtue_, we do not mean a series of good actions which may or may
+not be rewarded, and, if done for reward, lose the essence of virtue.
+Virtue, according to my idea, is the habitual sense of right, and the
+habitual courage to act up to that sense of right, combined with
+benevolent sympathies, the charity which thinketh no evil. This union of
+the highest conscience and the highest sympathy fulfils my notion of
+virtue. Strength is essential to it; weakness incompatible with it.
+Where virtue is, the noblest faculties and the softest feelings are
+predominant; the whole being is in that state of harmony which I call
+happiness. Pain may reach it, passion may disturb it, but there is
+always a glimpse of blue sky above our head; as we ascend in dignity of
+being, we ascend in happiness, which is, in my sense of the word, the
+feeling which connects us with the infinite and with God.
+
+And vice is necessarily misery: for that fluctuation of principle, that
+diseased craving for excitement, that weakness out of which springs
+falsehood, that suspicion of others, that discord with ourselves, with
+the absence of the benevolent propensities,—these constitute misery as a
+state of being. The most miserable person I ever met with in my life had
+12,000_l._ a year; a cunning mind, dexterous to compass its own ends;
+very little conscience, not enough, one would have thought, to vex with
+any retributive pang; but it was the absence of goodness that made the
+misery, obvious and hourly increasing. The perpetual kicking against the
+pricks, the unreasonable _exigéance_ with regard to things, without any
+high standard with regard to persons,—these made the misery. I can speak
+of it as misery who had it daily in my sight for five long years.
+
+I have had arguments, if it be not presumption to call them so, with
+Carlyle on this point. It appeared to me that he confounded happiness
+with pleasure, with self-indulgence. He set aside with a towering scorn
+the idea of living for the sake of happiness, so called: he styled this
+philosophy of happiness, “the philosophy of the frying-pan.” But this
+was like the reasoning of a child, whose idea of happiness is plenty of
+sugar-plums. Pleasure, pleasurable sensation, is, as the world goes,
+something to thank God for. I should be one of the last to undervalue
+it; I hope I am one of the last to live for it; and pain is pain, a
+great evil, which I do not like either to inflict or suffer. But
+happiness lies beyond either pain or pleasure—is as sublime a thing as
+virtue itself, indivisible from it; and under this point of view it
+seems a perilous mistake to separate them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+6.
+
+Dante places in his lowest Hell those who in life were melancholy and
+repining without a cause, thus profaning and darkening God’s blessed
+sunshine—_Tristi fummo nel’ aer dolce_; and in some of the ancient
+Christian systems of virtues and vices, Melancholy is unholy, and a
+vice; Cheerfulness is holy, and a virtue.
+
+Lord Bacon also makes one of the characteristics of moral health and
+goodness to consist in “a constant quick sense of felicity, and a noble
+satisfaction.”
+
+What moments, hours, days of exquisite felicity must Christ, our
+Redeemer, have had, though it has become too customary to place him
+before us only in the attitude of pain and sorrow! Why should he be
+always crowned with thorns, bleeding with wounds, weeping over the world
+he was appointed to heal, to save, to reconcile with God? The radiant
+head of Christ in Raphael’s Transfiguration should rather be our ideal
+of Him who came “to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach the acceptable
+year of the Lord.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+7.
+
+A profound intellect is weakened and narrowed in general power and
+influence by a limited range of sympathies. I think this is especially
+true of C——: excellent, honest, gifted as he is, he does not do half the
+good he might do, because his sympathies are so confined. And then he
+wants gentleness: he does not seem to acknowledge that “the wisdom that
+is from above is _gentle_.” He is a man who carries his bright intellect
+as a light in a dark-lantern; he sees only the objects on which he
+chooses to throw that blaze of light: those he sees vividly, but, as it
+were, exclusively. All other things, though lying near, are dark,
+because perversely he _will_ not throw the light of his mind upon them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+8.
+
+Wilhelm von Humboldt says, “Old letters lose their vitality.”
+
+Not true. It is because they retain their vitality that it is so
+dangerous to keep some letters,—so wicked to burn others.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+9.
+
+A Man thinks himself, and is thought by others to be insulted when
+another man gives him the lie. It is an offence to be retracted at once,
+or only to be effaced in blood. To give a woman the lie is not
+considered in the same unpardonable light by herself or others,—is
+indeed a slight thing. Now, whence this difference? Is not truth as
+dear to a woman as to a man? Is the virtue itself, or the reputation of
+it, less necessary to the woman than to the man? If not, what causes
+this distinction,—one so injurious to the morals of both sexes?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+10.
+
+It is good for us to look up, morally and mentally. If I were tired I
+would get some help to hold my head up, as Moses got some one to hold up
+his arms while he prayed.
+
+“Ce qui est moins que moi m’éteint et m’assomme; ce qui est à côté de
+moi m’ennuie et me fatigue. II n’y a que ce qui est au-dessus de moi qui
+me soutienne et m’arrache à moi-même.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+11.
+
+There is an order of writers who, with characters perverted or hardened
+through long practice of iniquity, yet possess an inherent divine sense
+of the good and the beautiful, and a passion for setting it forth, so
+that men’s hearts glow with the tenderness and the elevation which live
+not in the heart of the writer,—only in his head.
+
+And there is another class of writers who are excellent in the social
+relations of life, and kindly and true in heart, yet who,
+intellectually, have a perverted pleasure in the ridiculous and
+distorted, the cunning, the crooked, the vicious,—who are never weary of
+holding up before us finished representations of folly and rascality.
+
+Now, which is the worst of these? the former, who do mischief by making
+us mistrust the good? or the latter, who degrade us by making us
+familiar with evil?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+12.
+
+“Thought and theory,” said Wordsworth, “must precede all action that
+moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either
+thought or theory.”
+
+Yes, and no. What we _act_ has its consequences on earth. What we
+_think_, its consequences in heaven. It is not without reason that
+action should be preferred before barren thought; but all action which
+in its result is worth any thing, must result from thought. So the old
+rhymester hath it:
+
+  “He that good thinketh good may do,
+   And God will help him there unto;
+   For was never good work wrought,
+   Without beginning of good thought.”
+
+The result of impulse is the positive; the result of consideration the
+negative. The positive is essentially and abstractedly better than the
+negative, though relatively to facts and circumstances it may not be the
+most expedient.
+
+On my observing how often I had had reason to regret not having followed
+the first impulse, O. G. said, “In _good_ minds the first impulses are
+generally right and true, and, when altered or relinquished from regard
+to expediency arising out of complicated relations, I always feel sorry,
+for they remain right. Our first impulses always lean to the positive,
+our second thoughts to the negative; and I have no respect for the
+negative,—it is the vulgar side of every thing.”
+
+On the other hand, it must be conceded, that one who stands endowed with
+great power and with great responsibilities in the midst of a thousand
+duties and interests, can no longer take things in this simple fashion;
+for the good first impulse, in its flow, meets, perhaps, some rock, and
+splits upon it; it recoils on the heart, and becomes abortive. Or the
+impulse to do good _here_ becomes injury _there_, and we are forced to
+calculate results; we cannot trust to them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I have not sought to deduce my principles from conventional notions of
+expediency, but have believed that out of the steady adherence to
+certain fixed principles, the right and the expedient _must_ ensue, and
+I believe it still. The moment one begins to solder right and wrong
+together, one’s conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It requires merely passive courage and strength to resist, and in some
+cases to overcome evil. But it requires more—it needs bravery and
+self-reliance and surpassing faith—to act out the true inspirations of
+your intelligence and the true impulses of your heart.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Out of the attempt to harmonise our actual life with our aspirations,
+our experience with our faith, we make poetry,—or, it may be, religion.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+F—— used the phrase “_stung into heroism_” as Shelley said, “_cradled
+into poetry_,” by wrong.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+13.
+
+Coleridge calls the personal existence of the Evil Principle, “a mere
+fiction, or, at best, an allegory supported by a few popular phrases and
+figures of speech, used incidentally or dramatically by the
+Evangelists.” And he says, that “the existence of a personal,
+intelligent, Evil Being, the counterpart and antagonist of God, is in
+direct contradiction to the most express declarations of Holy Writ.
+‘_Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?_’—Amos,
+iii. 6. ‘_I make peace and create evil._’—Isaiah, xlv. 7. This is the
+deep mystery of the abyss of God.”
+
+Do our theologians go with him here? I think not: yet, as a theologian,
+Coleridge is constantly appealed to by Churchmen.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+14.
+
+“We find (in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians), every where
+instilled as the essence of all well-being and well-doing, (without
+which the wisest public and political constitution is but a lifeless
+formula, and the highest powers of individual endowment profitless or
+pernicious,) the spirit of a divine sympathy with the happiness and
+rights,—with the peculiarities, gifts, graces, and endowments of other
+minds, which alone, whether in the family or in the Church, can impart
+unity and effectual working together for good in the communities of
+men.”
+
+
+“The Christian religion was, in fact, a charter of freedom to the whole
+human race.”—_Thom’s Discourses on St. Paul’s Epistle to the
+Corinthians._
+
+And this is the true Catholic spirit,—the spirit and the teaching of
+Paul,—in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic spirit,—the spirit and
+tendency of Peter, which stands upon forms, which has no respect for
+individuality except in so far as it can imprison this individuality
+within a creed, or use it to a purpose.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+15.
+
+Dr. Baillie once said that “all his observation of death-beds inclined
+him to believe that nature intended that we should go out of the world
+as unconscious as we came into it.” “In all my experience,” he added, “I
+have not seen one instance in fifty to the contrary.”
+
+Yet even in such a large experience the occurrence of “one instance in
+fifty to the contrary” would invalidate the assumption that such was the
+law of nature (or “nature’s intention,” which, if it means any thing,
+means the same).
+
+The moment in which the spirit meets death is perhaps like the moment in
+which it is embraced by sleep. It never, I suppose, happened to any one
+to be conscious of the immediate transition from the waking to the
+sleeping state.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+16.
+
+_Thoughts on a Sermon._
+
+He is really sublime, this man! with his faith in “the religion of
+pain,” and “the deification of sorrow!” But is he therefore right? What
+has he preached to us to-day with all the force of eloquence, all the
+earnestness of conviction? that “pain is the life of God as shown forth
+in Christ;”—“that we are to be crucified to the world and the world to
+us.” This perpetual presence of a crucified God between us and a pitying
+redeeming Christ, leads many a mourner to the belief that this world is
+all a Golgotha of pain, and that we are here to crucify each other. Is
+this the law under which we are to live and strive? The missionary
+Bridaine accused himself of sin in that he had preached fasting,
+penance, and the chastisements of God to wretches steeped in poverty and
+dying of hunger; and is there not a similar cruelty and misuse of power
+in the servants of Him who came to bind up the broken-hearted, when
+they preach the necessity, or at least the theory, of moral pain to
+those whose hearts are aching from moral evil?
+
+Surely there is a great difference between the resignation or the
+endurance of a truthful, faithful, loving, hopeful spirit, and this
+dreadful theology of suffering as the necessary and appointed state of
+things! I, for one, will not accept it. Even while most miserable, I
+will believe in happiness; even while I do or suffer evil, I will
+believe in goodness; even while my eyes see not through tears, I will
+believe in the existence of what I do not see—that God is benign, that
+nature is fair, that the world is not made as a prison or a penance.
+While I stand lost in utter darkness, I will yet wait for the return of
+the unfailing dawn,—even though my soul be amazed into such a blind
+perplexity that I know not on which side to look for it, and ask “where
+is the East? and whence the dayspring?” For the East holds its wonted
+place, and the light is withheld only till its appointed time.
+
+God so strengthen me that I may think of pain and sin only as accidental
+apparent discords in his great harmonious scheme of good! Then I am
+ready—I will take up the cross, and hear it bravely, while I _must_; but
+I will lay it down when I can, and in any case I will never lay it on
+another.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+17.
+
+If I fear God it is because I love him, and believe in his love; I
+cannot conceive myself as standing in fear of any spiritual or human
+being in whose love I do not entirely believe. Of that Impersonation of
+Evil, who goes about seeking whom he may devour, the image brings to me
+no fear, only intense disgust and aversion. Yes, it is because of his
+love for me that I fear to offend against God; it is because of his love
+that his displeasure must be terrible. And with regard to human beings,
+only the being I love has the power to give me pain or inspire me with
+fear; only those in whose love I believe, have the power to injure me.
+Take away my love, and you take away my fear: take away _their_ love,
+and you take away the power to do me any harm which can reach me in the
+sources of life and feeling.
+
+
+18.
+
+Social opinion is like a sharp knife. There are foolish people who
+regard it only with terror, and dare not touch or meddle with it. There
+are more foolish people, who, in rashness or defiance, seize it by the
+blade, and get cut and mangled for their pains. And there are wise
+people, who grasp it discreetly and boldly by the handle, and use it to
+carve out their own purposes.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+19.
+
+While we were discussing Balzac’s celebrity as a romance writer, she (O.
+G.) said, with a shudder: “His laurels are steeped in the tears of
+women,—every truth he tells has been wrung in tortures from some woman’s
+heart.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+20.
+
+Sir Walter Scott, writing in 1831, seems to regard it as a terrible
+misfortune that the whole burgher class in Scotland should be gradually
+preparing for representative reform. “I mean,” he says, “the middle and
+respectable classes: when a borough reform comes, which, perhaps, cannot
+long be delayed, ministers will no longer return a member for Scotland
+from the towns.” “The gentry,” he adds, “will abide longer by _sound_
+principles, for they are needy, and desire advancement for themselves,
+and appointments for their sons and so on. But this is a very hollow
+dependence, and those who sincerely hold ancient opinions are waxing
+old,” &c. &c.
+
+With a great deal more, showing the strange moral confusion which his
+political bias had caused in his otherwise clear head and honest mind.
+The sound principles, then, by which educated people are to abide,—over
+the decay of which he laments,—are such as can only be upheld by the
+most vulgar self-interest! If a man should utter openly such sentiments
+in these days, what should we think of him?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In the order of absolutism lurk the elements of change and destruction.
+In the unrest of freedom the spirit of change and progress.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+21.
+
+“A single life,” said Bacon, “doth well with churchmen, for charity will
+hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool.”
+
+Certainly there are men whose charities are limited, if not dried up, by
+their concentrated domestic anxieties and relations. But there are
+others whose charities are more diffused, as well as healthier and
+warmer, through the strength of their domestic affections.
+
+Wordsworth speaks strongly of the evils of ordaining men as clergymen in
+places where they had been born or brought up, or in the midst of their
+own relatives: “Their habits, their manners, their talk, their
+acquaintanceships, their friendships, and let me say, even their
+domestic affections, naturally draw them one way, while their
+professional obligations point out another.” If this were true
+universally, or even generally, it would be a strong argument in favour
+of the celibacy of the Roman Catholic clergy, which certainly is one
+element, and not the least, of their power.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+22.
+
+Landor says truly: “Love is a secondary passion in those who love most,
+a primary in those who love least: he who is inspired by it in the
+strongest degree is inspired by honour in a greater.”
+
+“Whatever is worthy of being loved for any thing is worthy to be
+preserved.”
+
+Again:—“Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely
+stab or suffocate their own fame, when God hath commanded them to stand
+on high for an example.”
+
+“Weak motives,” he says, “are sufficient for weak minds; whenever we see
+a mind which we believed a stronger than our own moved habitually by
+what appears inadequate, we may be certain that there is—to bring a
+metaphor from the forest—_more top than root_.”
+
+Here is another sentence from the same writer—rich in wise sayings:—
+
+“Plato would make wives common to abolish selfishness; the very mischief
+which, above all others, it would directly and immediately bring forth.
+There is no selfishness where there is a wife and family. There the
+house is lighted up by mutual charities; everything achieved for them is
+a victory; everything endured a triumph. How many vices are suppressed
+that there may be no _bad_ example! How many exertions made to recommend
+and inculcate a _good_ one.”
+
+True: and I have much more confidence in the charity which begins in the
+home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the world-wide
+philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge into
+egotism, of which I could show you many and notable examples.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out
+of a hundred, the safe side and the just side of a question is the
+generous side and the merciful side. This your mere worldly people do
+not seem to know, and therein make the sorriest and the vulgarest of all
+mistakes. “_Pour être assez bon il faut l’être trop_:” we all need more
+mercy than we deserve.
+
+How often in this world the actions that we condemn are the result of
+sentiments that we love and opinions that we admire!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+23.
+
+A.—— observed in reference to some of her friends who had gone over to
+the Roman Catholic Church, “that the peace and comfort which they had
+sought and found in that mode of faith was like the drugged sleep in
+comparison with the natural sleep: necessary, healing perhaps, where
+there is disease and unrest, not otherwise.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+24.
+
+“A poet,” says Coleridge, “ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him
+borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine
+nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to your
+imagination than your memory.”
+
+This advice is even more applicable to the painter, but true perhaps in
+its application to all artists. Raphael and Mozart were, in this sense,
+great borrowers.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+25.
+
+“What is the difference between being good and being bad? the good do
+not yield to temptation and the bad do.”
+
+This is often the distinction between the good and the bad in regard to
+act and deed; but it does not constitute the difference between _being_
+good and _being_ bad.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+26.
+
+The Italians say (in one of their characteristic proverbs) _Sospetto
+licenzia Fede_. Lord Bacon interprets the saying “as if suspicion did
+give a passport to faith,” which is somewhat obscure and ambiguous. It
+means, that suspicion discharges us from the duty of good faith; and in
+this, its original sense, it is, like many of the old Italian proverbs,
+worldly wise and profoundly immoral.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+27.
+
+IT was well said by Themistocles to the King of Persia, that “speech was
+like cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth
+appear in figure, whereas in thoughts they lie but in packs” (_i. e._
+rolled up or packed up). Dryden had evidently this passage in his mind
+when he wrote those beautiful lines:
+
+  “Speech is the light, the morning of the mind;
+   It spreads the beauteous images abroad,
+   Which else lie furled and shrouded in the soul.”
+
+Here the comparison of Themistocles, happy in itself, is expanded into a
+vivid poetical image.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+28.
+
+“Those are the killing griefs that do not speak,” is true of some, not
+all characters. There are natures in which the killing grief finds
+utterance while it kills; moods in which we cry aloud, “as the beast
+crieth, expansive not appealing.” That is my own nature: so in grief or
+in joy, I say as the birds sing:
+
+  “Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt,
+   Gab mir ein Got zu sagen was ich leide!”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+29.
+
+Blessed is the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted _from_
+the world!—yet more blessed and more dear the memory of those who have
+kept themselves unspotted _in_ the world!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+30.
+
+Everything that ever has been, from the beginning of the world till now,
+belongs to us, is ours, is even a part of us. We belong to the future,
+and shall be a part of it. Therefore the sympathies of _all_ are in the
+past; only the poet and the prophet sympathise with the future.
+
+When Tennyson makes Ulysses say, “I am a part of all that I have seen,”
+it ought to be rather the converse,—“What I have seen becomes a part of
+me.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+31.
+
+In what regards policy—government—the interest of the many is sacrificed
+to the few; in what regards society, the morals and happiness of
+individuals are sacrificed to the many.
+
+
+32.
+
+We spoke to-night of the cowardice, the crime of a particular suicide:
+O. G. agreed as to this instance, but added: “There is a different
+aspect under which suicide might be regarded. It is not always, I think,
+from a want of religion, or in a spirit of defiance, or a want of
+confidence in God that we quit life. It is as if we should flee to the
+feet of the Almighty and embrace his knees, and exclaim, ‘O my father!
+take me home! I have endured as long as it was possible; I can endure no
+more, so I come to you!’”
+
+
+Of an amiable man with a disagreeable expressionless face, she said:
+“His countenance always gives me the idea of matter too strong, too hard
+for the soul to pierce through. It is as a plaster mask which I long to
+break (making the gesture with her hand), that I may see the countenance
+of his heart, for that must be beautiful!”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+33.
+
+Carlyle said to me: “I want to see some institution to teach a man the
+truth, the worth, the beauty, the heroism of which his present existence
+is capable; where’s the use of sending him to study what the Greeks and
+Romans did, and said, and wrote? Do ye think the Greeks and Romans would
+have been what they were, if they had just only studied what the
+Phœnicians did before them?” I should have answered, had I dared: “Yet
+perhaps the Greeks and Romans would not have been what they were if the
+Egyptians and Phœnicians had not been before them.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+34.
+
+Can there be _progress_ which is not _progression_—which does not leave
+a past from which to start—on which to rest our foot when we spring
+forward? No wise man kicks the ladder from beneath him, or obliterates
+the traces of the road through which he has travelled, or pulls down the
+memorials he has built by the way side. We cannot _get on_ without
+linking our present and our future with our past. All reaction is
+destructive—all progress conservative. When we have destroyed that
+which the past built up, what reward have we?—we are forced to fall
+back, and have to begin anew. “Novelty,” as Lord Bacon says, “cannot be
+content to add, but it must deface.” For this very reason novelty is not
+progress, as the French would try to persuade themselves and us. We gain
+nothing by defacing and trampling down the idols of the past to set up
+new ones in their places—let it be sufficient to leave them behind us,
+measuring our advance by keeping them in sight.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+35.
+
+E—— was compassionating to-day the old and the invalided; those whose
+life is prolonged in spite of suffering; and she seemed, even out of the
+excess of her pity and sympathy, to wish them fairly out of the world;
+but it is a mistake in reasoning and feeling. She does not know how much
+of happiness may consist with suffering, with physical suffering, and
+even with mental suffering.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+36.
+
+“Renoncez dans votre âme, et renoncez y fermement, une fois pour toutes,
+à vouloir vous connaître au-delà de cette existence passagère qui vous
+est imposée, et vous redeviendrez agréable à Dieu, utile aux autres
+hommes, tranquille avec vous-mêmes.”
+
+This does not mean “renounce hope or faith in the future.” No! But
+renounce that perpetual craving after a selfish interest in the
+unrevealed future life which takes the true relish from the duties and
+the pleasures of this. We can conceive of no future life which is not a
+continuation of this: to anticipate in that _future_ life, _another_
+life, a _different_ life; what is it but to call in doubt our individual
+identity?
+
+If we pray, “O teach us where and what is peace!” would not the answer
+be, “In the grave ye shall have it—not before?” Yet is it not strange
+that those who believe most absolutely in an after-life, yet think of
+the grave as peace? Now, if we carry this life with us—and what other
+life can we carry with us, unless we cease to be ourselves—how shall
+there be peace?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+As to the future, my soul, like Cato’s, “shrinks back upon herself and
+startles at destruction;” but I do not think of my own destruction,
+rather of that which I love. That I should cease to be is not very
+intolerable; but that what I love, and do now in my soul possess, should
+cease to be—there is the pang, the terror! I desire that which I love to
+be immortal, whether I be so myself or not.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Is not the idea which most men entertain of another, of an eternal life,
+merely a continuation of this present existence under pleasanter
+conditions? We cannot conceive another state of existence,—we only fancy
+we do so.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+“I conceive that in all probability we have immortality already. Most
+men seem to divide life and immortality, making them two distinct
+things, when, in fact, they are one and the same. What is immortality
+but a continuation of life—life which is already our own? We have, then,
+begun our immortality even now.”
+
+For the same reason, or, rather, through the same want of reasoning by
+which we make _life_ and _immortality_ two (distinct things), do we make
+_time_ and _eternity_ two, which like the others are really one and the
+same. As immortality is but the continuation of life, so eternity is but
+the continuation of time; and what we call time is only that part of
+eternity in which we exist _now_.—_The New Philosophy._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+37.
+
+Strength does not consist only in the _more_ or the _less_. There are
+different sorts of strength as well as different degrees:—The strength
+of marble to resist; the strength of steel to oppose; the strength of
+the fine gold, which you can twist round your finger, but which can bear
+the force of innumerable pounds without breaking.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+38.
+
+Goethe used to say, that while intellectual attainment is progressive,
+it is difficult to be as good when we are old, as we were when young.
+Dr. Johnson has expressed the same thing.
+
+Then are we to assume, that to _do_ good effectively and wisely is the
+privilege of age and experience? To _be_ good, through faith in
+goodness, the privilege of the young.
+
+To preserve our faith in goodness with an extended knowledge of evil, to
+preserve the tenderness of our pity after long contemplation of pain,
+and the warmth of our charity after long experience of falsehood, is to
+be at once good and wise—to understand and to love each other as the
+angels who look down upon us from heaven.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible
+completely to understand what we do not love.
+
+
+I observe, that in our relations with the people around us, we forgive
+them more readily for what they _do_, which they _can_ help, than for
+what they _are_, which they _cannot_ help.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+39.
+
+“Whence springs the greatest degree of moral suffering?” was a question
+debated this evening, but not settled. It was argued that it would
+depend on the texture of character, its more or less conscientiousness,
+susceptibility, or strength. I thought from two sentiments—from
+_jealousy_, that is, the sense of a wrong endured, in one class of
+characters; from _remorse_, that is, from the sense of a wrong
+inflicted, in another.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+40.
+
+The bread of life is love; the salt of life is work; the sweetness of
+life, poesy; the water of life, faith.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+41.
+
+I have seen triflers attempting to draw out a deep intellect; and they
+reminded me of children throwing pebbles down the well at Carisbrook,
+that they might hear them sound.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+42.
+
+A bond is necessary to complete our being, only we must be careful that
+the bond does not become bondage.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+“The secret of peace,” said A. B., “is the resolution of the lesser into
+the greater;” meaning, perhaps, the due relative appreciation of our
+duties, and the proper placing of our affections: or, did she not rather
+mean, the resolving of the lesser duties and affections into the higher?
+But it is true in either sense.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The love we have for Genius is to common love what the fire on the altar
+is to the fire on the hearth. We cherish it not for warmth or for
+service, but for an offering, as the expression of our worship.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+All love not responded to and accepted is a species of idolatry. It is
+like the worship of a dumb beautiful image we have ourselves set up and
+deified, but cannot inspire with life, nor warm with sympathy.
+No!—though we should consume our own hearts on the altar. Our love of
+God would be idolatry if we did not believe in his love for us—his
+responsive love.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In the same moment that we begin to speculate on the possibility of
+cessation or change in any strong affection that we feel, even from that
+moment we may date its death: it has become the _fetch_ of the living
+love.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+“Motives,” said Coleridge, “imply weakness, and the reasoning powers
+imply the existence of evil and temptation. The angelic nature would act
+from impulse alone.” This is the sort of angel which Angelico da Fiesole
+conceived and represented, and _he_ only.
+
+Again:—“If a man’s conduct can neither be ascribed to the angelic or the
+bestial within him, it must be fiendish. Passion without appetite is
+_fiendish_.”
+
+And, he might have added, appetite without passion, _bestial_. Love in
+which is neither appetite nor passion is _angelic_. The union of all is
+human; and according as one or other predominates, does the human being
+approximate to the fiend, the beast, or the angel.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+43.
+
+I don’t mean to say that principle is not a finer thing than passion;
+but passions existed before principles: they came into the world with
+us; principles are superinduced.
+
+There are bad principles as well as bad passions; and more bad
+principles than bad passions. Good principles derive life, and strength,
+and warmth from high and good passions; but principles do not give life,
+they only bind up life into a consistent whole. One great fault in
+education is, the pains taken to inculcate principles rather than to
+train feelings. It is as if we took it for granted that passions could
+_only_ be bad, and are to be ignored or repressed altogether,—the old
+mischievous monkish doctrine.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+44.
+
+It is easy to be humble where humility is a condescension—easy to
+concede where we know ourselves wronged—easy to forgive where vengeance
+is in our power.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+“You and I,” said H. G., yesterday, “are alike in this:—both of us so
+abhor injustice, that we are ready to fight it with a broomstick if we
+can find nothing better!”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+45.
+
+“The wise only _possess_ ideas—the greater part of mankind are
+_possessed by_ them. When once the mind, in despite of the remonstrating
+conscience, has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse or idea,
+then whatever tends to give depth and vividness to this idea or
+indefinite imagination, increases its despotism, and in the same
+proportion renders the reason and free will ineffectual.” This paragraph
+from Coleridge sounds like a _truism_ until we have felt its _truth_.
+
+
+46.
+
+“La Volonté, en se déréglant, devient passion; cette passion continuée
+se change en habitude, et faute de résister à cette habitude elle se
+transforme en besoin.”—_St. Augustin_. Which may be rendered—“out of the
+unregulated will, springs _passion_, out of passion gratified, _habit_;
+out of habits unresisted, _necessity_.” This, also, is one of the truths
+which become, from the impossibility of disputing or refuting them,
+_truisms_—and little regarded, till the truth makes itself felt.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+47.
+
+I wish I could realise what you call my “_grand_ idea of being
+independent of the absent.” I have not a friend worthy the name, whose
+absence is not pain and dread to me;—death itself is terrible only as it
+is absence. At some moments, if I could, I would cease to love those who
+are absent from me, or to speak more correctly, those whose path in life
+diverges from mine—whose dwelling house is far off;—with whom I am
+united in the strongest bonds of sympathy while separated by duties and
+interests by space and time. The presence of those whom we love is as a
+double life; absence, in its anxious longing, and sense of vacancy, is
+as a foretaste of death.
+
+“La mort de nos amis ne compte pas du moment où ils meurent, mais de
+celui où nous cessons de vivre avec eux;” or, it might rather be said,
+_pour eux_; but I think this arises from a want either of _faith_ or
+_faithfulness_.
+
+“La peur des morts est une abominable faiblesse! c’est la plus commune
+et la plus barbare des profanations; _les mères ne la connaissent
+pas_!”—And why? Because the most _faithful_ love is the love of the
+mother for her child.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+48.
+
+At dinner to-day there was an attempt made by two very clever men to
+place Theodore Hook above Sydney Smith. I fought with all my might
+against both. It seems to me that a mind must be strangely warped that
+could ever place on a par two men with aspirations and purposes so
+different, whether we consider them merely as individuals, or called
+before the bar of the public as writers. I do not take to Sydney Smith
+personally, because my nature feels the want of the artistic and
+imaginative in _his_ nature; but see what he has done for humanity, for
+society, for liberty, for truth,—for us women! What has Theodore Hook
+done that has not perished with him? Even as wits—and I have been in
+company with both—I could not compare them; but they say the wit of
+Theodore Hook was only fitted for the company of men—the strongest proof
+that it was not genuine of its kind, that when most bearable, it was
+most superficial. I set aside the other obvious inference, that it
+required to be excited by stimulants and those of the coarsest, grossest
+kind. The wit of Sydney Smith almost always involved a thought worth
+remembering for its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its
+brilliant vehicle: the value of ten thousand pounds sterling of sense
+concentrated into a cut and polished diamond.
+
+It is not true, as I have heard it said, that after leaving the society
+of Sydney Smith you only remembered how much you had laughed, not the
+good things at which you had laughed. Few men—wits by profession—ever
+said so many memorable things as those recorded of Sydney Smith.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+49.
+
+“When we would show any one that he is mistaken our best course is to
+observe on what side he considers the subject,—for his view of it is
+generally right on _this_ side,—and admit to him that he is right so
+far. He will be satisfied with this acknowledgment, that he was not
+wrong in his judgment, but only inadvertent in not looking at the whole
+of the case.”—_Pascal._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+50.
+
+“We should reflect,” says Jeremy Taylor, preaching against ambition,
+“that whatever tempts the pride and vanity of ambitious persons is not
+so big as the smallest star which we see scattered in disorder and
+unregarded on the pavement of heaven.”
+
+Very beautiful and poetical, but certainly no good argument against the
+sin he denounces. The star is inaccessible, and what tempts our pride or
+our ambition is only that which we consider with hope as _accessible_.
+That we look up to the stars not desiring, not aspiring, but only
+loving—therein lies our hearts’ truest, holiest, safest _devotion_ as
+contrasted with _ambition_.
+
+It is the “_desire_ of the moth for the star,” that leads to its burning
+itself in the candle.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+51.
+
+The brow stamped “with the hieroglyphics of an eternal sorrow,” is a
+strong and beautiful expression of Bishop Taylor’s.
+
+He says truly: “It is seldom that God sends such calamities upon men as
+men bring upon themselves and suffer willingly.” And again: “What will
+not tender women suffer to hide their shame!” What indeed! And again:
+“Nothing is intolerable that is necessary.” And again: “Nothing is to be
+esteemed evil which God and nature have fixed with eternal sanctions.”
+
+There is not one of these ethical sentences which might not be treated
+as a text and expounded, opening into as many “branches” of
+consideration as ever did a Presbyterian sermon. Yet several involve a
+fallacy, as it seems to me;—others a deeper, wider, and more awful
+signification than Taylor himself seems to have contemplated when he
+uttered them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+52.
+
+The same reasons which rendered Goethe’s “Werther” so popular, so
+passionately admired at the time it appeared—just after the seven years’
+war,—helped to render Lord Byron so popular in his time. It was not the
+individuality of “Werther,” nor the individuality of “Childe Harold”
+which produced the effect of making them, for a time, a pervading
+power,—a _part_ of the life of their contemporaries. It was because in
+both cases a chord was struck which was ready to vibrate. A phase of
+feeling preexistent, palpitating at the heart of society, which had
+never found expression in any poetic form since the days of Dante, was
+made visible and audible as if by an electric force; words and forms
+were given to a diffused sentiment of pain and resistance, caused by a
+long period of war, of political and social commotion, and of unhealthy
+moral excitement. “Werther” and “Childe Harold” will never perish;
+because, though they have ceased to be the echo of a wide despair, there
+will always be, unhappily, individual minds and hearts to respond to the
+individuality.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Lord Byron has sometimes, to use his own expression, “curdled” a whole
+world of meaning into the compass of one line:—
+
+   “The starry Galileo and his woes.”
+
+   “The blind old man of Chio’s rocky isle.”
+
+Here every word, almost every syllable, paints an idea. Such lines are
+_picturesque_. And I remember another, from Thomson, I think:—
+
+   “Placed far amid the melancholy main.”
+
+In general, where words are used in description, the objects and ideas
+flow with the words in succession. But in each of these lines the mind
+takes in a wide horizon, comprising a multitude of objects at once, as
+the eye takes in a picture, with scene, and action, and figures,
+fore-ground and background, all at once. That is the reason I call such
+lines _picturesque_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+53.
+
+I have a great admiration for power, a great terror of
+weakness—especially in my own sex,—yet feel that my love is for those
+who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation, through
+excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength; for those
+whose refinement and softness of nature mingling with high intellectual
+power and the capacity for strong passion, present to me a problem to
+solve, which, when solved, I take to my heart. The question is not,
+which of the two diversities of character be the highest and best, but
+which is most sympathetic with my own.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+54.
+
+C—— told me, that some time ago, when poor Bethune the Scotch poet first
+became known, and was in great hardship, C—— himself had collected a
+little sum (about 30_l._), and sent it to him through his publishers.
+Bethune wrote back to refuse it absolutely, and to say that, while he
+had head and hands, he would not accept _charity_. C—— wrote to him in
+answer, still anonymously, arguing against the principle, as founded in
+false pride, &c. Now poor Bethune is dead, and the money is found
+untouched,—left with a friend to be returned to the donors!
+
+This sort of disgust and terror, which all finely constituted minds feel
+with regard to pecuniary obligation,—my own utter repugnance to it, even
+from the hands of those I most love,—makes one sad to think of. It gives
+one such a miserable impression of our social humanity!
+
+Goethe makes the same remark in the “Wilhelm Meister:—“Es ist sonderbar
+welch ein wunderliches Bedenken man sich macht, Geld von Freunden und
+Gönnern anzunehmen, von denen man jede andere Gabe mit Dank und Freude
+empfangen würde.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+55.
+
+“In the celestial hierarchy, according to Dionysius Areopageta, the
+angels of Love hold the first place, the angels of Light the second, and
+the Thrones and Dominations the third. Among terrestrials, the
+Intellects, which act through the imagination upon the heart of man—_i.
+e._ poets and artists—may be accounted first in order; the merely
+scientific intellects the second; and the merely ruling intellects—those
+which apply themselves to the government of mankind, without the aid of
+either science or imagination—will not be disparaged if they are placed
+last.”
+
+All government, all exercise of power—no matter in what form—which is
+not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny. It is not of
+God, and shall not stand.
+
+“A time will come when the operations of charity will no longer be
+carried on by machinery, relentless, ponderous, indiscriminate, but by
+human creatures, watchful, tearful, considerate, and wise.”—_Westminster
+Review._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+56.
+
+“Those writers who never go further into a subject than is compatible
+with making what they say indisputably clear to man, woman, and child,
+may be the lights of _this_ age, but they will not be the lights of
+_another_.”
+
+
+“It is not always necessary that truth should take a bodily form,—a
+material palpable form. It is sometimes better that it should dwell
+around us spiritually, creating harmony,—sounding through the air like
+the solemn sweet tone of a bell.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+57.
+
+Women are inclined to fall in love with priests and physicians, because
+of the help and comfort they derive from both in perilous moral and
+physical maladies. They believe in the presence of real pity, real
+sympathy, where the tone and look of each have become merely habitual
+and conventional,—I may say professional. On the other hand, women are
+inclined to fall in love with criminal and miserable men out of the pity
+which in our sex is akin to love, and out of the power of bestowing
+comfort or love. “Car les femmes out un instinct céleste pour le
+malheur.” So, in the first instance, they love from gratitude or faith;
+in the last, from compassion or hope.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+58.
+
+“Men of all countries,” says Sir James Mackintosh, “appear to be more
+alike in their best qualities than the pride of civilisation would be
+willing to allow.”
+
+And in their _worst_. The distinction between savage and civilised
+humanity lies not in the _qualities_, but the _habits_.
+
+
+59.
+
+Coleridge notices “the increase in modern times of vicious associations
+with things in themselves indifferent,” as a sign of unhealthiness in
+taste, in feeling, in conscience.
+
+The truth of this remark is particularly illustrated in the French
+literature of the last century.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+60.
+
+“And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
+understanding also after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation,
+a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at
+the moment unpaid loss and unpayable, but the sure years reveal the deep
+remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend,
+wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later
+assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates a
+revolution in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or youth
+which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a
+household, or a style of living, and allows the formation of new
+influences that prove of the first importance during the next
+years.”—_Emerson._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+61.
+
+Religion, in its general sense, is properly the comprehension and
+acknowledgment of an unseen spiritual power and the soul’s allegiance
+to it; and CHRISTIANITY, in its particular sense, is the comprehension
+and appreciation of the personal character of Christ, and the heart’s
+allegiance to that.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+62.
+
+Avarice is to the intellect what _sensuality_ is to the morals. It is an
+intellectual form of sensuality, inasmuch as it is the passion for the
+acquisition, the enjoyment in the possession, of a palpable, tangible,
+selfish pleasure; and it would have the same tendency to unspiritualise,
+to degrade, and to harden the higher faculties that a course of grosser
+sensualism would have to corrupt the lower faculties. Both dull the edge
+of all that is fine and tender within us.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+63.
+
+A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an
+artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+As what we call Genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size
+of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonising with
+it the rest of the character.
+
+“Though it burn our house down, who does not venerate fire?” says the
+Hindoo proverb.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+64.
+
+An elegant mind informing a graceful person is like a spirit lamp in an
+alabaster vase, shedding round its own softened radiance and heightening
+the beauty of its medium. An elegant mind in a plain ungraceful person
+is like the same lamp enclosed in a vase of bronze; we may, if we
+approach near enough, rejoice in its influence, though we may not behold
+its radiance.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+65.
+
+Landor, in a passage I was reading to-day, speaks of a language of
+criticism, in which qualities should be graduated by colours; “as, for
+instance, _purple_ might express grandeur and majesty of thought;
+_scarlet_, vigour of expression; _pink_, liveliness; _green_, elegant
+and equable composition, and so on.”
+
+_Blue_, then, might express contemplative power? _yellow_, wit?
+_violet_, tenderness? and so on.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+66.
+
+I quoted to A. the saying of a sceptical philosopher: “The world is but
+one enormous WILL, constantly rushing into life.”
+
+“Is that,” she responded quickly, “another new name for God?”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+67.
+
+A death-bed repentance has become proverbial for its fruitlessness, and
+a death-bed forgiveness equally so. They who wait till their own
+death-bed to make reparation, or till their adversary’s death-bed to
+grant absolution, seem to me much upon a par in regard to the moral, as
+well as the religious, failure.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+68.
+
+A character endued with a large, vivacious, active intellect and a
+limited range of sympathies, generally remains immature. We can grow
+_wise_ only through the experience which reaches us through our
+sympathies and becomes a part of our life. All other experience may be
+gain, but it remains in a manner extraneous, adds to our possessions
+without adding to our strength, and sharpens our implements without
+increasing our capacity to use them.
+
+
+Not always those who have the quickest, keenest, perception of character
+are the best to deal with it, and perhaps for that very reason. Before
+we can influence or deal with mind, contemplation must be lost in
+sympathy, observation must be merged in love.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+69.
+
+Montaigne, in his eloquent tirade against melancholy, observes that the
+Italians have the same word, _Tristezza_, for melancholy and for
+malignity or wickedness. The noun _Tristo_, “a wretch,” has the double
+sense of our English word corresponding with the French noun
+_misérable_. So Judas Iscariot is called _quel tristo_. Our word
+“wretchedness” is not, however, used in the double sense of _tristezza_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+“On ne considère pas assez les paroles comme des faits:” that was well
+said!
+
+Since for the purpose of circulation and intercommunication we are
+obliged to coin truth into words, we should be careful not to adulterate
+the coin, to keep it pure, and up to the original standard of
+significance and value, that it may be reconvertible into the truth it
+represents.
+
+If I use a term in a sense wherein I know it is not understood by the
+person I address, then I am guilty of using words (in so far as they
+represent truth), if not to ensnare intentionally, yet to mislead
+consciously; it is like adulterating coin.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+“Common people,” said Johnson, “do not accurately adapt their words to
+their thoughts, nor their thoughts to the objects;”—that is to say, they
+neither apprehend truly nor speak truly—and in this respect children,
+half-educated women, and ill-educated men, are the “common people.”
+
+It is one of the most serious mistakes in Education that we are not
+sufficiently careful to habituate children to the accurate use of words.
+Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth. If we looked into
+the matter we should probably find that all the varieties and
+modifications of conscious and unconscious lying—as exaggeration,
+equivocation, evasion, misrepresentation—might be traced to the early
+misuse of words; therefore the contemptuous, careless tone in which
+people say sometimes “words—words—mere words!” is unthinking and unwise.
+It tends to debase the value of that which is the only medium of the
+inner life between man and man: “Nous ne sommes hommes, et nous ne
+tenons les uns aux autres, que par la parole,” said Montaigne.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+70.
+
+“We are happy, good, tranquil, in proportion as our inner life is
+accessible to the external life, and in harmony with it. When we become
+dead to the moving life of Nature around us, to the changes of day and
+night (I do not speak here of the sympathetic influences of our
+fellow-creatures), then we may call ourselves philosophical, but we are
+surely either bad or mad.”
+
+“Or perhaps only sad?”
+
+
+There are moments in the life of every contemplative being, when the
+healing power of Nature is felt—even as Wordsworth describes it—felt in
+the blood, in every pulse along the veins. In such moments converse,
+sympathy, the faces, the presence of the dearest, come so near to us,
+they make us shrink; books, pictures, music, anything, any object which
+has passed through the medium of mind, and has been in a manner
+humanised, is felt as an intrusive reflection of the busy, weary,
+thought-worn self within us. Only Nature, speaking through no
+interpreter, gently steals us out of our humanity, giving us a foretaste
+of that more diffused disembodied life which may hereafter be ours.
+Beautiful and genial, and not wholly untrue, were the old superstitions
+which placed a haunting divinity in every grove, and heard a living
+voice responsive in every murmuring stream.
+
+
+This present Sunday I set off with the others to walk to church, but it
+was late; I could not keep up with the pedestrians, and, not to delay
+them, turned back. I wandered down the hill path to the river brink, and
+crossed the little bridge and strolled along, pensive yet with no
+definite or continuous subject of thought. How beautiful it was—how
+tranquil! not a cloud in the blue sky, not a breath of air! “And where
+the dead leaf fell there did it rest;” but so still it was that scarce a
+single leaf did flutter or fall, though the narrow pathway along the
+water’s edge was already encumbered with heaps of decaying foliage.
+Everywhere around, the autumnal tints prevailed, except in one sheltered
+place under the towering cliff, where a single tree, a magnificent
+lime, still flourished in summer luxuriance, with not a leaf turned or
+shed. I stood still opposite, looking on it quietly for a long time. It
+seemed to me a happy tree, so fresh and fair and grand, as if its
+guardian Dryad would not suffer it to be defaced. Then I turned, for
+close beside me sounded the soft, interrupted, half-suppressed warble of
+a bird, sitting on a leafless spray, which seemed to bend with its tiny
+weight. Some lines which I used to love in my childhood came into my
+mind, blending softly with the presences around me.
+
+  “The little bird now to salute the morn
+   Upon the naked branches sets her foot,
+   The leaves still lying at the mossy root,
+   And there a silly chirruping doth keep,
+   As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep;
+   Praising fair summer that too soon is gone,
+   And sad for winter, too soon coming on!” _Drayton._
+
+The river, where I stood, taking an abrupt turn, ran wimpling by; not as
+I had seen it but a few days before,—rolling tumultuously, the dead
+leaves whirling in its eddies, swollen and turbid with the mountain
+torrents, making one think of the kelpies, the water wraiths, and such
+uncanny things,—but gentle, transparent, and flashing in the low
+sunlight; even the barberries, drooping with rich crimson clusters over
+the little pools near the bank, and reflected in them as in a mirror, I
+remember vividly as a part of the exquisite loveliness which seemed to
+melt into my life. For such moments we are grateful: we feel then what
+God _can_ do for us, and what man can not.—_Carolside, November 5th,
+1843._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+71.
+
+“In the early ages of faith, the spirit of Christianity glided into and
+gave a new significance to the forms of heathenism. It was not the forms
+of heathenism which encrusted and overlaid the spirit of Christianity,
+for in that case the spirit would have burst through such extraneous
+formulæ, and set them aside at once and for ever.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+72.
+
+Questions. In the execution of the penal statutes, can the individual
+interest of the convict be reconciled with the interest of society? or
+must the good of the convict and the good of society be considered as
+inevitably and necessarily opposed?—the one sacrificed to the other, and
+at the best only a compromise possible?
+
+This is a question pending at present, and will require wise heads to
+decide it? How would Christ have decided it? When He set the poor
+accused woman free, was He considering the good of the culprit or the
+good of society? and how far are we bound to follow His example? If He
+consigned the wicked to weeping and gnashing of teeth, was it for
+atonement or retribution, punishment or penance? and how far are we
+bound to follow His example?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+73.
+
+I marked the following passage in Montaigne as most curiously applicable
+to the present times, in so far as our religious contests are concerned;
+and I leave it in his quaint old French.
+
+“C’est un effet de la Providence divine de permettre sa saincte Eglise
+être agitée, comme nous la voyons, de tant de troubles et d’orages, pour
+éveiller par ce contraste les âmes pies et les ravoir de l’oisiveté et
+du sommeil ou les avail plongées une si longue tranquillité. Si nous
+contrepèsons la perte que nous avons faite par le nombre de ceux qui se
+sont dévoyés, au gain qui nous vient par nous être remis en haleine,
+ressuscité notre zêle et nos forces à l’occasion de ce combat, je ne
+sais si l’utilité ne surmonte point le dommage.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+74.
+
+“They (the friends of Cassius) were divided in opinion,—some holding
+that servitude was the extreme of evils, and others that tyranny was
+better than civil war.”
+
+Unhappy that nation, wherever it may be, where the question is yet
+pending between servitude and civil war! such a nation might be driven
+to solve the problem after the manner of Cassius—with the dagger’s
+point.
+
+“Surely,” said Moore, “it is wrong for the lovers of liberty to identify
+the principle of resistance to power with such an odious person as the
+devil!”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+75.
+
+“Where the question is of a great deal of good to ensue from a small
+injustice, men must pursue the things which are just in present, and
+leave the future to Divine Providence.”
+
+This so simple rule of right is seldom attended to as a rule of life
+till we are placed in some strait in which it is forced upon us.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+76.
+
+A woman’s patriotism is more of a sentiment than a man’s,—more
+passionate: it is only an extension of the domestic affections, and with
+her _la patrie_ is only an enlargement of _home_. In the same manner, a
+woman’s idea of fame is always a more extended sympathy, and is much
+more of a presence than an anticipation. To her the voice of fame is
+only the echo—fainter and more distant—of the voice of love.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+77.
+
+“La doute s’introduit dans l’âme qui rêve, la foi descend dans l’âme qui
+souffre.”
+
+The reverse is equally true,—and judging from my own experience, I
+should say oftener true.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+78.
+
+“La curiosité est si voisine à la perfidie qu’elle peut enlaidir les
+plus beaux visages.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+79.
+
+When I told Tieck of the death of Coleridge (I had just received the sad
+but not unexpected news in a letter from England), he exclaimed with
+emotion, “A great spirit has passed away from the earth, and has left no
+adequate memorial of its greatness.” Speaking of him afterwards he said,
+“Coleridge possessed the creative and inventive spirit of poetry, not
+the productive; he _thought_ too much to produce,—the analytical power
+interfered with the genius: Others with more active faculties seized and
+worked out his magnificent hints and ideas. Walter Scott and Lord Byron
+borrowed the first idea of the form and spirit of their narrative poems
+from Coleridge’s ‘Christabelle.’” This judgment of one great poet and
+critic passed on another seemed to me worth preserving.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+80.
+
+Coleridge says, “In politics what begins in fear usually ends in folly.”
+
+He might have gone farther, and added: In morals what begins in fear
+usually ends in wickedness. In religion what begins in fear usually ends
+in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning
+of all evil.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In another place he says,—
+
+“Talent lying in the understanding is often inherited; genius, being the
+action of reason and imagination, rarely or never.”
+
+There seems confusion here, for genius lies not in the amount of
+intellect—it is a quality of the intellect apart from quantity. And the
+distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and
+uses; genius combines and creates.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Of Sara Coleridge, Mr. Kenyon said very truly and beautifully, “that
+like her father she had the controversial _intellect_ without the
+controversial _spirit_.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+81.
+
+We all remember the famous _bon mot_ of Talleyrand. When seated between
+Madame de Staël and Madame Récamier, and pouring forth gallantry, first
+at the feet of one, then of the other, Madame de Staël suddenly asked
+him if she and Madame Récamier fell into the river, which of the two he
+would save first? “Madame,” replied Talleyrand, “je crois que vous savez
+nager!” Now we will match this pretty _bon mot_ with one far prettier,
+and founded on it. Prince S., whom I knew formerly, was one day
+loitering on the banks of the Isar, in the English garden at Munich, by
+the side of the beautiful Madame de V., then the object of his devoted
+admiration. For a while he had been speaking to her of his mother, for
+whom, _vaurien_ as he was, he had ever shown the strongest filial love
+and respect. Afterwards, as they wandered on, he began to pour forth his
+soul to the lady of his love with all the eloquence of passion. Suddenly
+she turned and said to him, “If your mother and myself were both to fall
+into this river, whom would you save first?” “My mother!” he instantly
+replied; and then, looking at her expressively, immediately added, “To
+save _you_ first would be as if I were to save _myself_ first!”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+82.
+
+If we were not always bringing ourselves into comparison with others, we
+should know them better.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+83.
+
+There are ways of governing every mind which lies within the circle
+described by our own; the only question is, whether the means required
+be such as we _can_ use? and if so, whether we shall think it right to
+do so?
+
+
+You think I do not know you, or that I mistake you utterly, because I am
+actuated by the impulses of my own nature, rather than by my perception
+of the impulses of yours? It is not so.
+
+
+If we would retain our own consistency, without which there is no moral
+strength, we must stand firm upon our own moral life.
+
+  “Be true unto thyself;
+   And it shall follow as the night to day,
+   Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
+
+But to be true to others as well as ourselves, is not merely to allow to
+them the same independence, but to sympathise with it. Unhappily here
+lies the chief difficulty. There are brains so large that they
+unconsciously swamp all individualities which come in contact or too
+near, and brains so small that they cannot take in the conception of any
+other individuality as a whole, only in part or parts. As in Religion,
+where there is a strong, sincere, definite faith, there is generally
+more or less intolerance; so in character, where there is strong
+individuality, self-assurance, and defined principles of action, there
+is usually something hard and intolerant of the individuality of others.
+In some characters we meet with, toleration is a principle of the
+reason, and intolerance a quality of the mind, and then the whole being
+strikes a discord.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+84.
+
+If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the
+more. It is as if the principle, that conflict is a necessary law of
+progress, were applicable even to love. For there is no love like that
+which has roused up the intensest feelings of our nature,—revealed us to
+ourselves, like lightning suddenly disclosing an abyss,—yet has survived
+all the storm and tumult of such passionate discord and all the terror
+of such a revelation.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+85.
+
+F has much, much to learn! Through power, through passion, through
+feeling we do much, but only through observation, reflection, and
+sympathy we learn much; hence it is that minds highly gifted often
+remain immature. Artist minds especially, so long as they live only or
+chiefly for their art, their faculties bent on creating or representing,
+remain immature on one side—the reasoning and reflecting side of the
+character.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+86.
+
+Said a Frenchman of his adversary, “Il se croit supérieur à moi de toute
+la hauteur de sa bêtise!” There is a mingled felicity, politeness, and
+acrimony, in this phrase quite untranslatable.
+
+
+87.
+
+It is a pity that we have no words to express the French distinction
+between _rêver_ and _rêvasser_. The one implies meditation on a definite
+subject: the other the abandonment of the mind to vague discussion,
+aimless thoughts.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+88.
+
+It seems to me that the conversation of the first converser in the world
+would _tire_ me, _pall_ on me at last, where I am not sure of the
+sincerity. Talk without truth is the hollow brass; talk without love is
+like the tinkling cymbal, and where it does not tinkle it gingles, and
+where it does not gingle, it jars.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+89.
+
+There are few things more striking, more interesting to a thoughtful
+mind, than to trace through all the poetry, literature, and art of the
+Middle Ages that broad ever-present distinction between the practical
+and the contemplative life. This was, no doubt, suggested and kept in
+view by the one grand division of the whole social community into those
+who were devoted to the religious profession (an immense proportion of
+both sexes) and those who were not. All through Dante, all through the
+productions of mediæval art, we find this pervading idea; and we must
+understand it well and keep it in mind, or we shall never be able to
+apprehend the entire beauty and meaning of certain religious groups in
+sculpture and painting, and the significance of the characters
+introduced. Thus, in subjects from the Old Testament, Leah always
+represents the practical, Rachel, the contemplative life. In the New
+Testament, Martha and Mary figure in the same allegorical sense; and
+among the saints we always find St. Catharine and St. Clara patronising
+the religious and contemplative life, while St. Barbara and St. Ursula
+preside over the military or secular existence. It was a part, and a
+very important part, of that beautiful and expressive symbolism through
+which art in all its forms spoke to the popular mind.
+
+For myself, I have the strongest admiration for the _practical_, but the
+strongest sympathy with the _contemplative_ life. I bow to Leah and to
+Martha, but my love is for Rachel and for Mary.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+90.
+
+Bettina does not describe nature, she informs it, with her own life: she
+seems to live in the elements, to exist in the fire, the air, the water,
+like a sylph, a gnome, an elf; she does not contemplate nature, she _is_
+nature; she is like the bird in the air, the fish in the sea, the
+squirrel in the wood. It is one thing to describe nature, and quite
+another unconsciously so to inform nature with a portion of our own
+life.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+91.
+
+Joanna Baillie had a great admiration of Macaulay’s Roman Ballads.
+“But,” said some one, “do you really account them as poetry?” She
+replied, “They _are_ poetry if the sounds of the trumpet be music!”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+92.
+
+All my own experience of life teaches me the _contempt_ of cunning, not
+the _fear_. The phrase “profound cunning” has always seemed to me a
+contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either
+shallow, or on some point diseased. People dissemble sometimes who yet
+hate dissembling, but a “cunning mind” emphatically delights in its own
+cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning. That “pleasure in deceiving
+and aptness to be deceived” usually go together, was one of the wise
+sayings of the wisest of men.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+93.
+
+It was a saying of Paracelsus, that “Those who would understand the
+course of the heavens above must first of all recognise the heaven in
+man:” meaning, I suppose, that all pursuit of knowledge which is not
+accompanied by praise of God and love of our fellow-creatures must turn
+to bitterness, emptiness, foolishness. We must imagine him to have come
+to this conclusion only late in life.
+
+Browning, in that wonderful poem of Paracelsus,—a poem in which there is
+such a profound far-seeing philosophy, set forth with such a luxuriance
+of illustration and imagery, and such a wealth of glorious eloquence,
+that I know nothing to be compared with it since Goethe and
+Wordsworth,—represents his aspiring philosopher as at first impelled
+solely by the appetite to _know_. He asks nothing of men, he despises
+them; but he will serve them, raise them, after a sort of God-like
+fashion, independent of their sympathy, scorning their applause, using
+them like instruments, cheating them like children,—all for their good;
+but it will not do. In Aprile, “who would love infinitely, and be
+beloved,” is figured the type of the poet-nature, desiring only beauty,
+resolving all into beauty; while in Paracelsus we have the type of the
+reflecting, the inquiring mind desiring only knowledge, resolving all
+into knowledge, asking nothing more to crown his being. And both find
+out their mistake; both come to feel that love without knowledge is
+blind and weak, and knowledge without love barren and vain.
+
+
+  “I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE,
+   Excluding love as thou refused’st knowledge;
+   Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake!
+
+          *       *       *       *       *
+
+   Are we not halves of one dissever’d world,
+   Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part?—Never!
+   Till thou, the lover, know, and I, the knower,
+   Love—until both are saved!”
+
+
+After all, perhaps, only the same old world-renowned myth in another
+form—the marriage of Cupid and Psyche; Love and Intelligence long
+parted, long suffering, again embracing, and lighted on by Beauty to an
+immortal union. But to return to our poet. Aprile, exhausted by his own
+aimless, dazzling visions, expires on the bosom of him who knows; and
+Paracelsus, who began with a selfsufficing scorn of his kind, dies a
+baffled and degraded man in the arms of him who loves;—yet wiser in his
+fall than through his aspirations, he dies trusting in the progress of
+humanity so long as humanity is content to be _human_; to _love_ as well
+as to _know_;—to fear, to hope, to worship, as well as to aspire.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+94.
+
+Lord Bacon says: “I like a plantation (in the sense of colony) in a
+_pure_ soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to
+plant in others: for else it is rather an extirpation than a
+plantation.” (Bacon, who wrote this, counselled to James I. the
+plantation of Ulster exactly on the principle he has here deprecated.)
+
+He adds, “It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of
+people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant”
+(_i. e._ colonise). And it is only now that our politicians are
+beginning to discover and act upon this great moral truth and obvious
+fitness of things!—like Bacon, adopting practically, and from mere
+motives of expediency, a principle they would theoretically abjure!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+95.
+
+Because in real life we cannot, or do not, reconcile the high theory
+with the low practice, we use our wit to render the theory ridiculous,
+and our reason to reconcile us to the practice. We ought to do just the
+reverse.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Many would say, if they spoke the truth, that it had cost them a
+life-long effort to unlearn what they had been taught.
+
+For as the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so
+through social conventionalism the conscience becomes blinded to
+positive immorality.
+
+It is fatal in any mind to make the moral standard for men high and the
+moral standard for women low, or _vice versâ_. This has appeared to me
+the very commonest of all mistakes in men and women who have lived much
+in the world, but _fatal_ nevertheless, and in three ways; first, as
+distorting the moral ideal, so far as it exists in the conscience;
+secondly, as perplexing the bounds, practically, of right and wrong;
+thirdly, as being at variance with the spirit and principles of
+Christianity. Admit these premises, and it follows inevitably that such
+a mistake is _fatal_ in the last degree, as disturbing the consistency
+and the elevation of the character, morally, practically, religiously.
+
+
+Akin to this mistake, or identical with it, is the belief that there are
+essential masculine and feminine virtues and vices. It is not, in fact,
+the quality itself, but the modification of the quality, which is
+masculine or feminine: and on the manner or degree in which these are
+balanced and combined in the individual, depends the perfection of that
+individual character—its approximation to that of Christ. I firmly
+believe that as the influences of religion are extended, and as
+civilisation advances, those qualities which are now admired as
+essentially _feminine_ will be considered as essentially _human_, such
+as gentleness, purity, the more unselfish and spiritual sense of duty,
+and the dominance of the affections over the passions. This is, perhaps,
+what Buffon, speaking as a naturalist, meant, when he said that with
+the progress of humanity, “_Les races se féminisent_;” at least I
+understand the phrase in this sense.
+
+
+A man who requires from his own sex manly direct truth, and laughs at
+the cowardly subterfuges and small arts of women as being _feminine_;—a
+woman who requires from her own sex tenderness and purity, and thinks
+ruffianism and sensuality pardonable in a man as being
+_masculine_,—these have repudiated the Christian standard of morals
+which Christ, in his own person, bequeathed to us—that standard which we
+have accepted as Christians—theoretically at least—and which makes no
+distinction between “the highest, holiest manhood,” and the highest,
+holiest womanhood.
+
+I might illustrate this position not only scripturally but
+philosophically, by quoting the axiom of the Greek philosopher
+Antisthenes, the disciple of Socrates,—“The virtue of the man and the
+woman is the same;” which shows a perception of the moral truth, a sort
+of anticipation of the Christian doctrine, even in the pagan times. But
+I prefer an illustration which is at once practical and poetical, and
+plain to the most prejudiced among men or women.
+
+Every reader of Wordsworth will recollect, if he does not know by heart,
+the poem entitled “The Happy Warrior.” It has been quoted often as an
+epitome of every manly, soldierly, and elevated quality. I have heard it
+applied to the Duke of Wellington. Those who make the experiment of
+merely substituting the word _woman_ for the word _warrior_, and
+changing the feminine for the masculine pronoun, will find that it reads
+equally well; that almost from beginning to end it is literally as
+applicable to the one sex as to the other. As thus:—
+
+
+CHARACTER OF THE HAPPY WOMAN.
+
+   Who is the happy _woman_? Who is _she_
+   That every _woman_ born should wish to be?
+   It is the generous spirit, who, when brought
+   Among the tasks of real life, had wrought
+   Upon the plan that pleased _her_ childish thought;
+   Whose high endeavours are an inward light,
+   That make the path before _her_ always bright:
+   Who, with a natural instinct to discern
+   What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;
+   Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,
+   But makes _her_ moral being _her_ prime care;
+   Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
+   And Fear, and Sorrow, miserable train!
+   Turns _that_ necessity to glorious gain;
+   In face of these doth exercise a power
+   Which is our human nature’s highest dower:
+   Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves
+   Of their bad influence, and their good receives;
+   By objects, which might force the soul to abate
+   _Her_ feeling, rendered more compassionate;
+   Is placable—because occasions rise
+   So often that demand such sacrifice;
+   More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure
+   As tempted more; more able to endure,
+   As more exposed to suffering and distress;
+   Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.
+   ’Tis _she_ whose law is reason; who depends
+   Upon that law as on the best of friends;
+   Whence in a state where men are tempted still
+   To evil for a guard against worse ill,
+   And what in quality or act is best,
+   Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,
+   _She_ fixes good on good alone, and owes
+   To virtue every triumph that _she_ knows.
+   Who, if _she_ rise to station of command,
+   Rises by open means; and there will stand
+   On honourable terms, or else retire.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+   Who comprehends _her_ trust, and to the same
+   Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim;
+   And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait
+   For wealth, or honours, or for worldly state;
+   Whom they must follow; on whose head must fall
+   Like showers of manna, if they come at all:
+   Whose powers shed round _her_ in the common strife
+   Or mild concerns of ordinary life,
+   A constant influence, a peculiar grace;
+   But who, if _she_ be called upon to face
+   Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
+   Great issue, good or bad for human kind,
+   Is happy as a lover; and attired
+   With sudden brightness, like to one inspired;
+   And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
+   In calmness made, and sees what _she_ foresaw;
+   Or if an unexpected call succeed,
+   Come when it will, is equal to the need!
+
+
+In all these fifty-six lines there is only one line which cannot be
+feminised in its significance,—that which I have filled up with
+asterisks, and which is totally at variance with our ideal of A HAPPY
+WOMAN. It is the line—
+
+   “And in himself possess his own desire.”
+
+No woman could exist happily or virtuously in such complete independence
+of all external affections as these words express. “Her desire is to her
+husband,”—this is the sort of subjection prophesied for the daughters of
+Eve. A woman doomed to exist without this earthly rest for her
+affections, does not “in herself possess her own desire;” she turns
+towards God; and if she does not make her life a life of worship, she
+makes it a life of charity, (which in itself is worship,) or she dies a
+spiritual and a moral death. Is it much better with the man who
+concentrates his aspirations in himself? I should think not.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Swift, as a man and a writer, is one of those who had least sympathy
+with women; and I have sometimes thought that the exaggeration, even to
+morbidity, of the coarse and the cruel in his character, arose from this
+want of sympathy; but his strong sense showed him the one great moral
+truth as regards the two sexes, and gave him the courage to avow it.
+
+He says, “I am ignorant of any one quality that is amiable in a woman
+which is not equally so in a man. I do not except even modesty and
+gentleness of nature; nor do I know one vice or folly which is not
+equally detestable in both.” Then, remarking that cowardice is an
+_infirmity_ generally allowed to women, he wonders that they should
+fancy it becoming or graceful, or think it worth improving by
+affectation, particularly as it is generally allied to cruelty.
+
+
+Here is a passage from one of Humboldt’s letters, which I have seen
+quoted with sympathy and admiration, as applied to the manly character
+only:—
+
+“Masculine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first
+requisite for the formation of a character of real manly worth. The man
+who suffers himself to be deceived and carried away by his own weakness,
+may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be called a
+good man; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a woman, for
+a truly beautiful and purely feminine nature should be attracted only by
+what is highest and noblest in the character of man.”
+
+
+Now we will take this bit of moral philosophy, and, without the
+slightest alteration of the context, apply it to the female character.
+
+“Feminine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first
+requisite for the formation of a character of real feminine worth. The
+woman who allows herself to be deceived and carried away by her own
+weakness may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be
+called a good woman; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a
+man, for the truly beautiful and purely manly nature should be attracted
+only by what is highest and noblest in the character of woman.”
+
+
+After reading the above extracts, does it not seem clear, that by the
+exclusive or emphatic use of certain phrases and epithets, as more
+applicable to one sex than to the other, we have introduced a most
+un-christian confusion into the conscience, and have prejudiced it early
+against the acceptance of the larger truth?
+
+It might seem, that where we reject the distinction between masculine
+and feminine virtues, one and the same type of perfection should suffice
+for the two sexes; yet it is clear that the moment we come to consider
+the personality, the same type will not suffice: and it is worth
+consideration that when we place before us the highest type of manhood,
+as exemplified in Christ, we do not imagine him as the father, but as
+the son; and if we think of the most perfect type of womanhood, we never
+can exclude the mother.
+
+
+Montaigne deals with the whole question in his own homely
+straightforward fashion:—
+
+“Je dis que les mâles et les fémelles sont jettés en même moule; sauf
+l’institution et l’usage la différence n’y est pas grande. Platon
+appelle indifféremment les uns et les autres à la société de touts
+études, exercises, charges, et vocations guerrières et paisibles en sa
+république, et le philosophe Antisthènes ôtait toute distinction entre
+leur vertu et la nôtre. Il est bien plus aisé d’accuser un sexe que
+d’excuser l’autre: c’est ce qu’on dit, ‘le fourgon se moque de la
+poële.’”
+
+Not that I agree with Plato,—rather would leave all the fighting,
+military and political, if there must be fighting, to the men.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Among the absurdities talked about women, one hears, perhaps, such an
+aphorism as the following quoted with a sort of ludicrous
+complacency,—“The woman’s strength consists in her weakness!” as if it
+were not the weakness of a woman which makes her in her violence at once
+so aggravating and so contemptible, in her dissimulation at once so
+shallow and so dangerous, and in her vengeance at once so cowardly and
+so cruel.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I should not say, from my experience of my own sex, that a woman’s
+nature is flexible and impressible, though her feelings are. I know
+very few instances of a very inferior man ruling the mind of a superior
+woman, whereas I know twenty—fifty—of a very inferior woman ruling a
+superior man. If he love her, the chances are that she will in the end
+weaken and demoralise him. If a superior woman marry a vulgar or
+inferior man he makes her miserable, but he seldom governs her mind, or
+vulgarises her nature, and if there be love on his side the chances are
+that in the end she will elevate and refine him.
+
+The most dangerous man to a woman is a man of high intellectual
+endowments morally perverted; for in a woman’s nature there is such a
+necessity to approve where she admires, and to believe where she
+loves,—a devotion compounded of love and faith is so much a part of her
+being,—that while the instincts remain true and the feelings
+uncorrupted, the conscience and the will may both be led far astray.
+Thus fell “our general mother,”—type of her sex,—overpowered, rather
+than deceived, by the colossal intellect,—half serpent, half angelic.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Coleridge speaks, and with a just indignant scorn, of those who consider
+chastity as if it were a _thing_—a thing which might be lost or kept by
+external accident—a thing of which one might be robbed, instead of a
+state of being. According to law and custom, the chastity of Woman is as
+the property of Man, to whom she is accountable for it, rather than to
+God and her own conscience. Whatever people may say, such is the common,
+the social, the legal view of the case. It is a remnant of Oriental
+barbarism. It tends to much vice, or, at the best, to a low standard of
+morality, in both sexes. This idea of property in the woman survives
+still in our present social state, particularly among the lower orders,
+and is one cause of the ill treatment of wives. All those who are
+particularly acquainted with the manners and condition of the people
+will testify to this; namely, that when a child or any weaker individual
+is ill treated, those standing by will interfere and protect the victim;
+but if the sufferer be _the wife_ of the oppressor, it is a point of
+etiquette to look on, to take no part in the fray, and to leave the
+brute man to do what he likes “with his own.” Even the victim herself,
+if she be not pummelled to death, frequently deprecates such an
+interference with the dignity and the rights of her owner. Like the poor
+woman in the “Médecin malgré lui:”—“Voyez un peu cet impertinent qui
+vent empêcher les maris de battre leurs femmes!—et si je veux qu’il me
+batte, moi?”—and so ends by giving her defender a box on the ear.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+“Au milieu de tous les obstacles que la nature et la société out semés
+sur les pas de la femme, la seule condition de repos pour elle est de
+s’entourer de barrières que les passions ne puissent franchir; incapable
+de s’approprier l’existence, elle est toujours semblable a la Chinoise
+dont les pieds ont été mutilés et pour laquelle toute liberté est un
+leurre, toute espace ouverte une cause de chute. En attendant que
+l’éducation ait donné aux femmes leur véritable place, malheur à celles
+qui brisent les lisses accoutumées! pour elles l’indépendance ne sera,
+comme la gloire, qu’un deuil éclatant du bonheur!”—_B. Constant._
+
+This also is one of those common-places of well-sounding eloquence, in
+which a fallacy is so wrapt up in words we have to dig it out. If this
+be true, it is true only so long as you compress the feet and compress
+the intellect,—no longer.
+
+Here is another:—
+
+“L’expérience lui avait appris que quel que fut leur âge, ou leur
+caractère, toutes les femmes vivaient avec le même rêve, et qu’elles
+avaient toutes au fond du cœur un roman commencé dont elles attendaient
+jusqu’à la mort le héros, comme les juifs attendent le Messie.”
+
+This “roman commencé,” (et qui ne finit jamais), is true as regards
+women who are idle, and who have not replaced dreams by duties. And what
+are the “barrières” which passion cannot overleap, from the moment it
+has subjugated the will? How fine, how true that scene in Calderon’s
+“Magico Prodigioso,” where Justina conquers the fiend only by not
+_consenting_ to ill!
+
+                       ——“This agony
+   Of passion which afflicts my heart and soul
+   May sweep imagination in its storm;
+   The will is firm.”
+
+And the baffled demon shrinks back,—
+
+  “Woman, thou hast subdued me
+   Only by not owning thyself subdued!”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A friend of mine was once using some mincing elegancies of language to
+describe a high degree of moral turpitude, when a man near her
+interposed, with stern sarcasm, “Speak out! Give things their proper
+names! _Half words are the perdition of women!_”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+“I observe,” said Sydney Smith, “that _generally_ about the age of
+forty, women get tired of being virtuous and men of being honest.” This
+was said and received with a laugh as one of his good things; but, like
+many of his good things, how dreadfully true! And why? because,
+_generally_, education has made the virtue of the woman and the honesty
+of the man a matter of external opinion, not a law of the inward life.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Dante, in his lowest hell, has placed those who have betrayed women; and
+in the lowest deep of the lowest deep those who have betrayed trust.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Inveterate sensuality, which has the effect of utterly stupifying and
+brutifying lower minds, gives to natures more sensitively or more
+powerfully organised a horrible dash of ferocity. For there is an awful
+relation between animal blood-thirstiness and the proneness to
+sensuality, and in some sensualists a sort of feline propensity to
+torment and lacerate the prey they have not the appetite to devour.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+“La Chevalerie faisait une tentative qui n’a jamais réussi, quoique
+souvent essayée; la tentative de se servir des passions humaines, et
+particulièrement de l’amour pour conduire l’homme à la vertu. Dans cette
+route l’homme s’arrête toujours en chemin. L’amour inspire beaucoup de
+bons sentiments—le courage, le dévouement, le sacrifice des biens et de
+la vie; mais il ne se sacrifie pas lui-même, et c’est là que la
+faiblesse humaine reprend ses droits.”—_St. Marc-Girardin._
+
+
+I am not sure that this well-sounding remark is true—or, if true, it is
+true of the mere passion, not of love in its highest phase, which is
+self-sacrificing, which has its essence in the capability of
+self-sacrifice.
+
+                                “Love was given,
+     Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end;
+   For this the passion to excess was driven,
+     That _self_ might be annull’d.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear, there is a
+strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell next door to
+hate; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such
+intense haters.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Our present social opinion says to the man, “You may be a vulgar brutal
+sensualist, and use the basest means to attain the basest ends; but so
+long as you do not offend against conventional good manners you shall be
+held blameless.” And to the woman it says, “You shall be guilty of
+nothing but of yielding to the softest impulses of tenderness, of
+relenting pity; but if you cannot add hypocrisy you shall be punished as
+the most desperate criminal.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+96.
+
+“It is worthy of notice that the external expressions appropriated to
+certain feelings undergo change at different periods of life and in
+different constitutions. The child cries and sobs from fear or pain, the
+adult more generally from sudden grief or warm affection, or sympathy
+with the feeling of others.”—_Dr. Holland._
+
+Those who have been accustomed to observe the ways of children will
+doubt the accuracy of this remark, though from the high authority of
+one of the most accomplished physiologists of our time. Children cry
+from grief, and from sympathy with grief, at a very early age. I have
+seen an infant in its mother’s arms, before it could speak, begin to
+whimper and cry when it looked up in her face, which was disturbed and
+bathed with tears; and that has always appeared to me an exquisite touch
+of most truthful nature in Wordsworth’s description of the desolation of
+Margaret:—
+
+                        “Her little child
+   Had from its mother caught the trick of grief,
+   And sighed amid its playthings.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+97.
+
+“LETTERS,” said Sir James Mackintosh, “must not be on a subject. Lady
+Mary Wortley’s letters on her journey to Constantinople are an admirable
+book of travels, but they are not letters. A meeting to discuss a
+question of science is not conversation, nor are papers written to
+another to inform or discuss, letters. Conversation is relaxation, not
+business, and must never appear to be occupation;—nor must letters.”
+
+“A masculine character may be a defect in a female, but a masculine
+genius is still a praise to a writer of whatever sex. The feminine
+graces of Madame de Sevigné’s genius are exquisitely charming, but the
+philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Staël are above the distinctions
+of sex.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+98.
+
+OF the wars between Napoleon and the Holy Alliance, Madame de Staël once
+said with most admirable and prophetic sense:—“It is a contest between a
+_man_ who is the enemy of liberty, and a _system_ which is equally its
+enemy.” But it is easier to get rid of a man than of a system: witness
+the Russians, who assassinate their czars one after another, but cannot
+get rid of their _system_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+99.
+
+The Empress Elizabeth of Russia during the war with Sweden commanded the
+old Hetman of the Cossacks to come to court on his way to Finland. “If
+the Emperor, your father,” said the Hetman, “had taken my advice, your
+Majesty would not now have been annoyed by the Swedes.” “What was your
+advice?” asked the Empress. “To put all the nobility to death, and
+transplant the people into Russia.” “But that,” said the Empress, “would
+have been cruel!” “I do not see that,” he replied quietly; “they are all
+dead now, and they would only have been dead if my advice had been
+taken.”
+
+Something strangely comprehensive and unanswerable in this barbarian
+logic!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+100.
+
+IT was the Abbé Boileau who said of the Jesuits, that they had
+lengthened the Creed and shortened the Decalogue. The same witty
+ecclesiastic being asked why he always wrote in Latin, took a pinch of
+snuff, and answered gravely, “Why, for fear the bishops should read
+me!”
+
+101.
+
+When Talleyrand once visited a certain reprobate friend of his, who was
+ill of cholera, the patient exclaimed in his agony, “Je sens les
+tourmens de l’enfer!”
+
+“Déjà?” said Talleyrand.
+
+Much in a word! I remember seeing a pretty French vaudeville wherein a
+lady is by some accident or contrivance shut up perforce with a lover
+she has rejected. She frets at the _contretemps_. He makes use of the
+occasion to plead his cause. The cruel fair one will not relent. Still
+he pleads—still she turns away. At length they are interrupted.
+
+“Déjà!” exclaims the lady, in an accent we may suppose to be very
+different from that of Talleyrand; and on the intonation of this one
+word, pronounced as only an accomplished French actress could pronounce
+it, depends the _dénouement_ of the piece.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+102.
+
+Louis XVI. sent a distinguished physician over to England to inquire
+into the management of our hospitals. He praised them much, but added,
+“Il y manque deux choses; nos curés et nos hospitalières;” that is, he
+felt the want of the religious element in the official and medical
+treatment of the sick. A want which, I think, is felt at present and
+will be supplied.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+103.
+
+Those who have the largest horizon of thought, the most extended vision
+in regard to the relation of things, are not remarkable for
+self-reliance and ready judgment. A man who sees limitedly and clearly,
+is more sure of himself, and more direct in his dealings with
+circumstances and with others, than a man whose many-sided capacity
+embraces an immense extent of objects and _objections_,—just as, they
+say, a horse with blinkers more surely chooses his path, and is less
+likely to shy.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+104.
+
+What we truly and earnestly aspire _to be_, that in some sense we _are_.
+The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment
+realises itself.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+105.
+
+There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when
+they only feel.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+106.
+
+There are moments when the liberty of the inner life, opposed to the
+trammels of the outer, becomes too oppressive: moments when we wish that
+our mental horizon were less extended, thought less free; when we long
+to put the discursive soul into a narrow path like a railway, and force
+it to run on in a straight line to some determined goal.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+107.
+
+If the deepest and best affections which God has given us sometimes
+brood over the heart like doves of peace,—they sometimes suck out our
+life-blood like vampires.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+108.
+
+To a Frenchman the words that express things seem often to suffice for
+the things themselves, and he pronounces the words _amour_, _grâce_,
+_sensibilité_, as if with a relish in his mouth—as if he tasted them—as
+if he possessed them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+109.
+
+There are many good qualities, and valuable ones too, which hardly
+deserve the name of virtues. The word Virtue was synonymous in the old
+time with valour, and seems to imply contest; not merely passive
+goodness, but active resistance to evil. I wonder sometimes why it is
+that we so continually hear the phrase, “a virtuous woman,” and scarcely
+ever that of a “virtuous man,” except in poetry or from the pulpit.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+110.
+
+A Lie, though it be killed and dead, can sting sometimes,—like a dead
+wasp.
+
+
+111.
+
+“On me dit toute la journée dans le monde, telle opinion, telle idée,
+sont _reçues_. On ne sait donc pas qu’en fait d’opinion, et d’idées
+j’aime beaucoup mieux les choses qui sont rejettées que celles qui sont
+reçues?”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+112.
+
+“Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some
+eighteenpence a day, but for phantasy, planets and solar systems will
+not suffice.” And _thence_ do you infer the superiority of sense over
+phantasy? Shallow reasoning! God who made the soul of man of sufficient
+capacity to embrace whole worlds and systems of worlds, gave us thereby
+a foretaste of our immortality.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+113.
+
+“Faith in the _hereafter_ is as necessary for the intellectual as the
+moral character, and to the man of letters as well as to the Christian,
+the present forms but the slightest portion of his
+existence.”—_Southey._
+
+Goethe did not think so. “Genutzt dem Augenblick,” “_Use_ the present,”
+was _his_ favourite maxim; and always this notion of sacrificing or
+slighting the present seems to me a great mistake. It ought to be the
+most important part of our existence, as it is the only part of it over
+which we have power. It is in the present only that we absolve the past
+and lay the foundation for the future.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+114.
+
+“Je allseitigen, je individueller,” is a beautiful significant phrase,
+quite untranslateable, used, I think, by Rahel (Madame Varnhagen). It
+means that the more the mind can multiply on every side its capacities
+of thinking and feeling, the more individual, the more original, that
+mind becomes.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+115.
+
+“I wonder,” said C., “that facts should be called _stubborn_ things.” I
+wonder, too, seeing you can always oppose a fact with another fact, and
+that nothing is so easy as to twist, pervert, and argue or misrepresent
+a fact into twenty different forms. “Il n’y a rien qui s’arrange aussi
+facilement que les faits,”—Nothing so _tractable_ as facts,—said
+Benjamin Constant. True; so long as facts are only material,—or as one
+should say, mere matter of fact,—you can modify them to a purpose, turn
+them upside down and inside out; but once vivify a fact with a feeling,
+and it stands up before us a living and a very stubborn thing.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+116.
+
+Every human being is born to influence some other human being; or many,
+or all human beings, in proportion to the extent and power of the
+sympathies, rather than of the intellect.
+
+It was said, and very beautifully said, that “one man’s wit becomes all
+men’s wisdom.” Even more true is it that one man’s virtue becomes a
+standard which raises our anticipation of possible goodness in all men.
+
+
+117.
+
+It is curious that the memory, most retentive of images, should yet be
+much more retentive of feelings than of facts: for instance, we remember
+with such intense vividness a period of suffering, that it seems even to
+renew itself through the medium of thought; yet, at the same time, we
+perhaps find difficulty in recalling, with any distinctness, the causes
+of that pain.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+118.
+
+“Truth has never manifested itself to me in such a broad stream of light
+as seems to be poured upon some minds. Truth has appeared to my mental
+eye, like a vivid, yet small and trembling star in a storm, now
+appearing for a moment with a beauty that enraptured, now lost in such
+clouds, as, had I less faith, might make me suspect that the previous
+clear sight had been a delusion.”—_Blanco White._
+
+Very exquisite in the aptness as well as poetry of the comparison! Some
+walk by daylight, some walk by starlight. Those who see the sun do not
+see the stars; those who see the stars do not see the sun.
+
+He says in another place:—
+
+“I am averse to too much activity of the imagination on the future life.
+I hope to die full of confidence that no evil awaits me: but any picture
+of a future life distresses me. I feel as if an eternity of existence
+were already an insupportable burden on my soul.”
+
+How characteristic of that lassitude of the soul and sickness of the
+heart which “asks not happiness, but longs for rest!”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+119.
+
+“Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely stab or
+suffocate their fame when God hath commanded them to stand on high for
+an example.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+120.
+
+Carlyle thus apostrophised a celebrated orator, who abused his gift of
+eloquence to insincere purposes of vanity, self-interest, and
+expediency:—“You blasphemous scoundrel! God gave you that gifted tongue
+of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning
+to us, not to be rattled like a muffin-man’s bell!”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+121.
+
+I think, with Carlyle, that a lie should be trampled on and extinguished
+wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that
+falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me. A. thinks this is too
+_young_ a feeling, and that as the truth is sure to conquer in the end,
+it is not worth while to fight every separate lie, or fling a torch into
+every infected hole. Perhaps not, so far as we are ourselves concerned;
+but we should think of others. While secure in our own antidote, or wise
+in our own caution, we should not leave the miasma to poison the
+healthful, or the briars to entangle the unwary. There is no occasion
+perhaps for truth to sally forth like a knight-errant tilting at every
+vizor, but neither should she sit self-assured in her tower of strength,
+leaving pitfalls outside her gate for the blind to fall into.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+122.
+
+“There is a way to separate memory from imagination—we may narrate
+without painting. I am convinced that the mind can employ certain
+indistinct signs to represent even its most vivid impressions; that
+instead of picture writing, it can use something like algebraic symbols:
+such is the language of the soul when the paroxysm of pain has passed,
+and the wounds it received formerly are skinned over, not healed:—it is
+a language very opposite to that used by the poet and the
+novel-writer.”—_Blanco White._
+
+True; but a language in which the soul can converse only with itself; or
+else a language more conventional than words, and like paper as a tender
+for gold, more capable of being defaced and falsified. There is a
+proverb we have heard quoted: “Speech is silver, silence is golden.” But
+better is the silver diffused than the talent of gold buried.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+123.
+
+However distinguished and gifted, mentally and morally, we find that in
+conduct and in our external relations with, society there is ever a
+levelling influence at work. Seldom in our relations with the world, and
+in the ordinary commerce of life, are the best and highest within us
+brought forth; for the whole system of social intercourse is levelling.
+As it is said that law knows no distinction of persons but that which it
+has itself instituted; so of society it may be said, that it allows of
+no distinction but those which it can recognise—external distinctions.
+
+We hear it said that general society—the _world_, as it is called—and a
+public school, are excellent educators; because in one the man, in the
+other the boy, “finds, as the phrase is, his own level.” He does not; he
+finds the level of others. _That_ may be good for those below
+mediocrity, but for those above it _bad_: and it is for those we should
+most care, for if once brought down in early life by the levelling
+influence of numbers, they seldom rise again, or only partially. Nothing
+so dangerous as to be perpetually measuring ourselves against what is
+beneath us, feeling our superiority to that which we force ourselves to
+assimilate to. This has been the perdition of many a schoolboy and many
+a man.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+124.
+
+“Il me semble que le plus noble rapport entre le ciel et la terre, le
+plus beau don que Dieu ait fait à l’homme, la pensée, l’inspiration, se
+décompose en quelque sorte dès qu’elle est descendue dans son âme. Elle
+y vient simple et désintéressée; il la reproduit corrompue par tous les
+intérêts auxquels il l’associe; elle lui a été confiée pour la
+multiplier à l’avantage de tous; il la publie au profit de son
+amour-propre.”—_Madame de Saint-Aulaire._
+
+There would be much to say about this, for it is not always, nor
+generally, _amour-propre_ or interest; it is the desire of sympathy,
+which impels the artist mind to the utterance in words, or the
+expression in form, of that thought or inspiration which God has sent
+into his soul.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+125.
+
+Milton’s Eve is the type of the masculine standard of perfection in
+woman; a graceful figure, an abundance of fine hair, much “coy
+submission,” and such a degree of unreasoning wilfulness as shall risk
+perdition.
+
+And the woman’s standard for the man is Adam, who rules and demands
+subjection, and is so indulgent that he gives up to blandishment what
+he would refuse to reason, and what his own reason condemns.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+126.
+
+Every subject which excites discussion impels to thought. Every
+expression of a mind humbly seeking truth, not assuming to have found
+it, helps the seeker after truth.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+128.
+
+As a man just released from the rack stands bruised and broken,—bleeding
+at every pore, and dislocated in every limb, and raises his eyes to
+heaven, and says, “God be praised! I suffer no more!” because to that
+past sharp agony the respite comes like peace—like sleep,—so we stand,
+after some great wrench in our best affections, where they have been
+torn up by the root; when the conflict is over, and the tension of the
+heart-strings is relaxed, then comes a sort of rest,—but of what kind?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+129.
+
+To trust religiously, to hope humbly, to desire nobly, to think
+rationally, to will resolutely, and to work earnestly,—may this be
+mine.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD.
+
+(FROM A LETTER.)
+
+
+We are all interested in this great question of popular education; but I
+see others much more sanguine than I am. They hope for some immediate
+good result from all that is thought, written, spoken on the subject day
+after day. I see such results as possible, probable, but far, far off.
+All this talk is of systems and methods, institutions, school houses,
+schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, school books; the ways and the means by
+which we are to instruct, inform, manage, mould, regulate, that which
+lies in most cases beyond our reach—the spirit sent from God. What do we
+know of the mystery of child-nature, child-life? What, indeed, do we
+know of any life? All life we acknowledge to be an awful mystery, but
+child-life we treat as if it were no mystery whatever—just so much
+material placed in our hands to be fashioned to a certain form according
+to our will or our prejudices,—fitted to certain purposes according to
+our notions of expediency. Till we know how to _reverence_ childhood we
+shall do no good. Educators commit the same mistake with regard to
+childhood that theologians commit with regard to our present earthly
+existence; thinking of it, treating of it, as of little value or
+significance in itself, only transient, and preparatory to some
+condition of being which is to follow—as if it were something separate
+from us and to be left behind us as the creature casts its skin. But as
+in the sight of God this life is also something for its own sake, so in
+the estimation of Christ, childhood was something for its own
+sake,—something holy and beautiful in itself, and dear to him. He saw it
+not merely as the germ of something to grow out of it, but as perfect
+and lovely in itself as the flower which precedes the fruit. We
+misunderstand childhood, and we misuse it; we delight in it, and we
+pamper it; we spoil it ingeniously, we neglect it sinfully; at the best
+we trifle with it as a plaything which we can pull to pieces and put
+together at pleasure—ignorant, reckless, presumptuous that we are!
+
+And if we are perpetually making the grossest mistakes in the physical
+and practical management of childhood, how much more in regard to what
+is spiritual! What do we know of that which lies in the minds of
+children? we know only what we put there. The world of instincts,
+perceptions, experiences, pleasures, and pains, lying there without
+self-consciousness,—sometimes helplessly mute, sometimes so imperfectly
+expressed, that we quite mistake the manifestation—what do we know of
+all this? How shall we come at the understanding of it? The child lives,
+and does not contemplate its own life. It can give no account of that
+inward, busy, perpetual activity of the growing faculties and feelings
+which it is of so much importance that we should know. To lead children
+by questionings to think about their own identity, or observe their own
+feelings, is to teach them to be artificial. To waken self-consciousness
+before you awaken conscience is the beginning of incalculable mischief.
+Introspection is always, as a habit, unhealthy: introspection in
+childhood, fatally so. How shall we come at a knowledge of life such as
+it is when it first gushes from its mysterious fountain head? We cannot
+reascend the stream. We all, however we may remember the external scenes
+lived through in our infancy, either do not, or cannot, consult that
+part of our nature which remains indissolubly connected with the inward
+life of that time. We so forget it, that we know not how to deal with
+the child-nature when it comes under our power. We seldom reason about
+children from natural laws, or psychological data. Unconsciously we
+confound our matured experience with our memory: we attribute to
+children what is not possible, exact from them what is
+impossible;—ignore many things which the child has neither words to
+express, nor the will nor the power to manifest. The quickness with
+which children perceive, the keenness with which they suffer, the
+tenacity with which they remember, I have never seen fully appreciated.
+What misery we cause to children, what mischief we do them by bringing
+our own minds, habits, artificial prejudices and senile experiences, to
+bear on their young life, and cramp and overshadow it—it is fearful!
+
+Of all the wrongs and anomalies that afflict our earth, a sinful
+childhood, a suffering childhood, are among the worst.
+
+O ye men! who sit in committees, and are called upon to legislate for
+children,—for children who are the offspring of diseased or degenerate
+humanity, or the victims of a yet more diseased society,—do you, when
+you take evidence from jailors, and policemen, and parish schoolmasters,
+and doctors of divinity, do you ever call up, also, the wise physician,
+the thoughtful physiologist, the experienced mother? You have
+accumulated facts, great blue books full of facts, but till you know in
+what fixed and uniform principles of nature to seek their solution, your
+facts remain a dead letter.
+
+I say nothing here of teaching, though very few in truth understand that
+lowest part of our duty to children. Men, it is generally allowed,
+_teach_ better than women because they have been better taught the
+things they teach. Women _train_ better than men because of their quick
+instinctive perceptions and sympathies, and greater tenderness and
+patience. In schools and in families I would have some things taught by
+men, and some by women: but we will here put aside the art, the act of
+teaching: we will turn aside from the droves of children in national
+schools and reformatory asylums, and turn to the individual child,
+brought up within the guarded circle of a home or a select school,
+watched by an intelligent, a conscientious influence. How shall we deal
+with that spirit which has come out of nature’s hands unless we remember
+what we were ourselves in the past? What sympathy can we have with that
+state of being which we regard as immature, so long as we commit the
+double mistake of sometimes attributing to children motives which could
+only spring from our adult experience, and sometimes denying to them the
+same intuitive tempers and feelings which actuate and agitate our
+maturer life? We do not sufficiently consider that our life is not made
+up of separate parts, but is _one_—is a progressive whole. When we talk
+of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river
+flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+121.
+
+I will here put together some recollections of my own child-life; not
+because it was in any respect an exceptional or remarkable existence,
+but for a reason exactly the reverse, because it was like that of many
+children; at least I have met with many children who throve or suffered
+from the same or similar unseen causes even under external conditions
+and management every way dissimilar. Facts, therefore, which can be
+relied on, may be generally useful as hints towards a theory of conduct
+in education. What I shall say here shall be simply the truth so far as
+it goes; not something between the false and the true, garnished for
+effect,—not something half-remembered, half-imagined,—but plain,
+absolute, matter of fact.
+
+No; certainly I was not an extraordinary child. I have had something to
+do with children, and have met with several more remarkable for
+quickness of talent, and precocity of feeling. If any thing in
+particular, I believe I was particularly naughty,—at least so it was
+said twenty times a day. But looking back now, I do not think I was
+particular even in this respect; I perpetrated not more than the usual
+amount of mischief—so called—which every lively active child perpetrates
+between five and ten years old. I had the usual desire to know, and the
+usual dislike to learn; the usual love of fairy tales, and hatred of
+French exercises. But not of what I learned, but of what I did _not_
+learn; not of what they taught me, but of what they could _not_ teach
+me; not of what was open, apparent, manageable, but of the under
+current, the hidden, the unmanaged or unmanageable, I have to speak, and
+you, my friend, to hear and turn to account, if you will, and how you
+will. As we grow old the experiences of infancy come back upon us with a
+strange vividness. There is a period when the overflowing, tumultuous
+life of our youth rises up between us and those first years; but as the
+torrent subsides in its bed we can look across the impassable gulf to
+that haunted fairy land which we shall never more approach, and never
+more forget!
+
+
+In memory I can go back to a very early age. I perfectly remember being
+sung to sleep, and can remember even the tune which was sung to
+me—blessings on the voice that sang it! I was an affectionate, but not,
+as I now think, a loveable nor an attractive child. I did not, like the
+little Mozart, ask of every one around me, “Do you love me?” The
+instinctive question was, rather, “Can I love you?” Yet certainly I was
+not more than six years old when I suffered from the fear of not being
+loved where I had attached myself, and from the idea that another was
+preferred before me, such anguish as had nearly killed me. Whether those
+around me regarded it as a fit of ill-temper, or a fit of illness, I do
+not know. I could not then have given a name to the pang that fevered
+me. I knew not the cause, but never forgot the suffering. It left a
+deeper impression than childish passions usually do; and the
+recollection was so far salutary, that in after life I guarded myself
+against the approaches of that hateful, deformed, agonising thing which
+men call jealousy, as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera. If
+such self-knowledge has not saved me from the pain, at least it has
+saved me from the demoralising effects of the passion, by a wholesome
+terror, and even a sort of disgust.
+
+With a good temper, there was the capacity of strong, deep, silent
+resentment, and a vindictive spirit of rather a peculiar kind. I
+recollect that when one of those set over me inflicted what then
+appeared a most horrible injury and injustice, the thoughts of vengeance
+haunted my fancy for months: but it was an inverted sort of vengeance. I
+imagined the house of my enemy on fire, and rushed through the flames
+to rescue her. She was drowning, and I leaped into the deep water to
+draw her forth. She was pining in prison, and I forced bars and bolts to
+deliver her. If this were magnanimity, it was not the less vengeance;
+for, observe, I always fancied evil, and shame, and humiliation to my
+adversary; to myself the _rôle_ of superiority and gratified pride. For
+several years this sort of burning resentment against wrong done to
+myself and others, though it took no mean or cruel form, was a source of
+intense, untold suffering. No one was aware of it. I was left to settle
+it; and my mind righted itself I hardly know how: not certainly by
+religious influences—they passed over my mind, and did not at the time
+sink into it,—and as for earthly counsel or comfort, I never had either
+when most needed. And as it fared with me then, so it has been in after
+life; so it has been, _must_ be, with all those who, in fighting out
+alone the pitched battle between principle and passion, will accept no
+intervention between the infinite within them and the infinite above
+them; so it has been, _must_ be, with all strong natures. Will it be
+said that victory in the struggle brings increase of strength? It may be
+so with some who survive the contest; but then, how many sink! how many
+are crippled morally for life! how many, strengthened in some particular
+faculties, suffer in losing the harmony of the character as a whole!
+This is one of the points in which the matured mind may help the
+childish nature at strife with itself. It is impossible to say how far
+this sort of vindictiveness might have penetrated and hardened into the
+character, if I had been of a timid or retiring nature. It was expelled
+at last by no outer influences, but by a growing sense of power and
+self-reliance.
+
+
+In regard to truth—always such a difficulty in education,—I certainly
+had, as a child, and like most children, confused ideas about it. I had
+a more distinct and absolute idea of honour than of truth,—a mistake
+into which our conventional morality leads those who educate and those
+who are educated. I knew very well, in a general way, that to tell a lie
+was _wicked_; to lie for my own profit or pleasure, or to the hurt of
+others, was, according to my infant code of morals, worse than wicked—it
+was _dishonourable_. But I had no compunction about telling
+_fictions_;—inventing scenes and circumstances, which I related as real,
+and with a keen sense of triumphant enjoyment in seeing the listener
+taken in by a most artful and ingenious concatenation of
+impossibilities. In this respect “Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, that liar of
+the first magnitude,” was nothing in comparison to me. I must have been
+twelve years old before my conscience was first awakened up to a sense
+of the necessity of truth as a principle, as well as its holiness as a
+virtue. Afterwards, having to set right the minds of others cleared my
+own mind on this and some other important points.
+
+
+I do not think I was naturally obstinate, but remember going without
+food all day, and being sent hungry and exhausted to bed, because I
+would not do some trifling thing required of me. I think it was to
+recite some lines I knew by heart. I was punished as wilfully obstinate:
+but what no one knew then, and what I know now as the fact, was, that
+after refusing to do what was required, and bearing anger and threats in
+consequence, I lost the power to do it. I became stone: the _will_ was
+petrified, and I absolutely _could_ not comply. They might have hacked
+me in pieces before my lips could have unclosed to utterance. The
+obstinacy was not in the mind, but on the nerves; and I am persuaded
+that what we call obstinacy in children, and grownup people, too, is
+often something of this kind, and that it may be increased, by
+mismanagement, by persistence, or what is called firmness, in the
+controlling power, into disease, or something near to it.
+
+
+There was in my childish mind another cause of suffering besides those I
+have mentioned, less acute, but more permanent and always
+unacknowledged. It was fear—fear of darkness and supernatural
+influences. As long as I can remember anything, I remember these horrors
+of my infancy. How they had been awakened I do not know; they were never
+revealed. I had heard other children ridiculed for such fears, and held
+my peace. At first these haunting, thrilling, stifling terrors were
+vague; afterwards the form varied; but one of the most permanent was the
+ghost in Hamlet. There was a volume of Shakspeare lying about, in which
+was an engraving I have not seen since, but it remains distinct in my
+mind as a picture. On one side stood Hamlet with his hair on end,
+literally “like quills upon the fretful porcupine,” and one hand with
+all the fingers outspread. On the other strided the ghost, encased in
+armour with nodding plumes; one finger pointing forwards, and all
+surrounded with a supernatural light. O that spectre! for three years it
+followed me up and down the dark staircase, or stood by my bed: only the
+blessed light had power to exorcise it. How it was that I knew, while I
+trembled and quaked, that it was unreal, never cried out, never
+expostulated, never confessed, I do not know. The figure of Apollyon
+looming over Christian, which I had found in an old edition of the
+“Pilgrim’s Progress,” was also a great torment. But worse, perhaps, were
+certain phantasms without shape, things like the vision in Job—“_A
+spirit passed before my face; it stood still, but I could not discern
+the form thereof_:”—and if not intelligible voices, there were strange
+unaccountable sounds filling the air around with a sort of mysterious
+life. In daylight I was not only fearless, but audacious, inclined to
+defy all power and brave all danger,—that is, all danger I could see. I
+remember volunteering to lead the way through a herd of cattle (among
+which was a dangerous bull, the terror of the neighbourhood) armed only
+with a little stick; but first I said the Lord’s Prayer fervently. In
+the ghastly night I never prayed; terror stifled prayer. These visionary
+sufferings, in some form or other, pursued me till I was nearly twelve
+years old. If I had not possessed a strong constitution and a strong
+understanding, which rejected and contemned my own fears, even while
+they shook me, I had been destroyed. How much weaker children suffer in
+this way, I have since known; and have known how to bring them help and
+strength, through sympathy and knowledge, the sympathy that soothes and
+does not encourage—the knowledge that dispels, and does not suggest, the
+evil.
+
+
+People, in general, even those who have been much interested in
+education, are not aware of the sacred duty of _truth_, exact truth in
+their intercourse with children. Limit what you tell them according to
+the measure of their faculties; but let what you say be the truth.
+Accuracy not merely as to fact, but well-considered accuracy in the use
+of words, is essential with children. I have read some wise book on the
+treatment of the insane, in which absolute veracity and accuracy in
+speaking is prescribed as a _curative_ principle; and deception for any
+purpose is deprecated as almost fatal to the health of the patient. Now,
+it is a good sanatory principle, that what is curative is preventive;
+and that an unhealthy state of mind, leading to madness, may, in some
+organisations, be induced by that sort of uncertainty and perplexity
+which grows up where the mind has not been accustomed to truth in its
+external relations. It is like breathing for a continuance an impure or
+confined air.
+
+Of the mischief that may be done to a childish mind by a falsehood
+uttered in thoughtless gaiety, I remember an absurd and yet a painful
+instance. A visitor was turning over, for a little girl, some prints,
+one of which represented an Indian widow springing into the fire kindled
+for the funeral pile of her husband. It was thus explained to the child,
+who asked innocently, whether, if her father died, her mother would be
+burned? The person to whom the question was addressed, a lively, amiable
+woman, was probably much amused by the question, and answered, giddily,
+“Oh, of course,—certainly!” and was believed implicitly. But
+thenceforth, for many weary months, the mind of that child was haunted
+and tortured by the image of her mother springing into the devouring
+flames, and consumed by fire, with all the accessories of the picture,
+particularly the drums beating to drown her cries. In a weaker
+organisation, the results might have been permanent and serious. But to
+proceed.
+
+These terrors I have described had an existence external to myself: I
+had no power over them to shape them by my will, and their power over me
+vanished gradually before a more dangerous infatuation,—the propensity
+to reverie. This shaping spirit of imagination began when I was about
+eight or nine years old to haunt my _inner_ life. I can truly say that,
+from ten years old to fourteen or fifteen, I lived a double existence;
+one outward, linking me with the external sensible world, the other
+inward, creating a world to and for itself, conscious to itself only. I
+carried on for whole years a series of actions, scenes, and adventures;
+one springing out of another, and coloured and modified by increasing
+knowledge. This habit grew so upon me, that there were moments—as when I
+came to some crisis in my imaginary adventures,—when I was not more
+awake to outward things than in sleep,—scarcely took cognisance of the
+beings around me. When punished for idleness by being placed in
+solitary confinement (the worst of all punishments for children), the
+intended penance was nothing less than a delight and an emancipation,
+giving me up to my dreams. I had a very strict and very accomplished
+governess, one of the cleverest women I have ever met with in my life;
+but nothing of this was known or even suspected by her, and I exulted in
+possessing something which her power could not reach. My reveries were
+my real life: it was an unhealthy state of things.
+
+Those who are engaged in the training of children will perhaps pause
+here. It may be said, in the first place, How are we to reach those
+recesses of the inner life which the God who made us keeps from every
+eye but his own? As when we walk over the field in spring we are aware
+of a thousand influences and processes at work of which we have no exact
+knowledge or clear perception, yet must watch and use accordingly,—so it
+is with education. And secondly, it may be asked, if such secret
+processes be working unconscious mischief, where the remedy? The remedy
+is in employment. Then the mother or the teacher echoes with
+astonishment, “Employment! the child is employed from morning till
+night; she is learning a dozen sciences and languages; she has masters
+and lessons for every hour of every day: with her pencil, her piano,
+her books, her companions, her birds, her flowers,—what can she want
+more?” An energetic child even at a very early age, and yet farther as
+the physical organisation is developed, wants something more and
+something better; employment which shall bring with it the bond of a
+higher duty than that which centres in self and self-improvement;
+employment which shall not merely cultivate the understanding, but
+strengthen and elevate the conscience; employment for the higher and
+more generous faculties; employment addressed to the sympathies;
+employment which has the aim of utility, not pretended, but real,
+obvious, direct utility. A girl who as a mere child is not always being
+taught or being amused, whose mind is early restrained by the bond of
+definite duty, and thrown out of the limit of self, will not in after
+years be subject to fancies that disturb or to reveries that absorb, and
+the present and the actual will have that power they ought to have as
+combined in due degree with desire and anticipation.
+
+The Roman Catholic priesthood understand this well: employment, which
+enlists with the spiritual the sympathetic part of our being, is a means
+through which they guide both young and adult minds. Physicians who have
+to manage various states of mental and moral disease understand this
+well; they speak of the necessity of employment (not mere amusement) as
+a curative means, but of employment with the direct aim of usefulness,
+apprehended and appreciated by the patient, else it is nothing. It is
+the same with children. Such employment, chosen with reference to
+utility, and in harmony with the faculties, would prove in many cases
+either preventive or curative. In my own case, as I now think, it would
+have been both.
+
+There was a time when it was thought essential that women should know
+something of cookery, something of medicine, something of surgery. If
+all these things are far better understood now than heretofore, is that
+a reason why a well educated woman should be left wholly ignorant of
+them? A knowledge of what people call “common things”—of the elements of
+physiology, of the conditions of health, of the qualities, nutritive or
+remedial, of substances commonly used as food or medicine, and the most
+economical and most beneficial way of applying both,—these should form a
+part of the system of every girls’ school—whether for the higher or the
+lower classes. At present you shall see a girl studying chemistry, and
+attending Faraday’s lectures, who would be puzzled to compound a
+rice-pudding or a cup of barley-water: and a girl who could work quickly
+a complicated sum in the Rule of Three, afterwards wasting a fourth of
+her husband’s wages through want of management.
+
+In my own case, how much of the practical and the sympathetic in my
+nature was exhausted in airy visions!
+
+As to the stuff out of which my waking dreams were composed, I cannot
+tell you much. I have a remembrance that I was always a princess-heroine
+in the disguise of a knight, a sort of Clorinda or Britomart, going
+about to redress the wrongs of the poor, fight giants, and kill dragons;
+or founding a society in some far-off solitude or desolate island, which
+would have rivalled that of Gonsalez, where there were to be no tears,
+no tasks, and no laws,—except those which I made myself,—no caged birds
+nor tormented kittens.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Enough of the pains, and mistakes, and vagaries of childhood; let me
+tell of some of its pleasures equally unguessed and unexpressed. A
+great, and exquisite source of enjoyment arose out of an early,
+instinctive, boundless delight in external beauty. How this went hand in
+hand with my terrors and reveries, how it could coexist with them, I
+cannot tell now—it was so; and if this sympathy with the external,
+living, beautiful world, had been properly, scientifically cultivated,
+and directed to useful definite purposes, it would have been the best
+remedy for much that was morbid: this was not the case, and we were,
+unhappily for me, too early removed from the country to a town
+residence. I can remember, however, that in very early years the
+appearances of nature did truly “haunt me like a passion;” the stars
+were to me as the gates of heaven; the rolling of the wave to the shore,
+the graceful weeds and grasses bending before the breeze as they grew by
+the wayside; the minute and delicate forms of insects; the trembling
+shadows of boughs and leaves dancing on the ground in the highest noon;
+these were to me perfect pleasures of which the imagery now in my mind
+is distinct. Wordsworth’s poem of “The Daffodils,” the one beginning—
+
+   “I wandered lonely as a cloud,”
+
+may appear to some unintelligible or overcharged, but to me it was a
+vivid truth, a simple fact; and if Wordsworth had been then in my hands
+I think I must have loved him. It was this intense sense of beauty which
+gave the first zest to poetry: I love it, not because it told me what I
+did not know, but because it helped me to words in which to clothe my
+own knowledge and perceptions, and reflected back the pictures
+unconsciously hoarded up in my mind. This was what made Thomson’s
+“Seasons” a favourite book when I first began to read for my own
+amusement, and before I could understand one half of it; St. Pierre’s
+“Indian Cottage” (“La Chaumière Indienne”) was also charming, either
+because it reflected my dreams, or gave me new stuff for them in
+pictures of an external world quite different from that I
+inhabited,—palm-trees, elephants, tigers, dark-turbaned men with flowing
+draperies; and the “Arabian Nights” completed my Oriental intoxication,
+which lasted for a long time.
+
+I have said little of the impressions left by books, and of my first
+religious notions. A friend of mine had once the wise idea of collecting
+together a variety of evidence as to the impressions left by certain
+books on childish or immature minds: If carried out, it would have been
+one of the most valuable additions to educational experience ever made.
+For myself I did not much care about the books put into my hands, nor
+imbibe much information from them. I had a great taste, I am sorry to
+say, for forbidden books; yet it was not the forbidden books that did
+the mischief, except in their being read furtively. I remember
+impressions of vice and cruelty from some parts of the Old Testament and
+Goldsmith’s “History of England,” which I shudder to recall. Shakspeare
+was on the forbidden shelf. I had read him all through between seven
+and ten years old. He never did me any moral mischief. He never soiled
+my mind with any disordered image. What was exceptionable and coarse in
+language I passed by without attaching any meaning whatever to it. How
+it might have been if I had read Shakspeare first when I was fifteen or
+sixteen, I do not know; perhaps the occasional coarsenesses and
+obscurities might have shocked the delicacy or puzzled the intelligence
+of that sensitive and inquiring age. But at nine or ten I had no
+comprehension of what was unseemly; what might be obscure in words to
+wordy commentators, was to me lighted up by the idea I found or
+interpreted for myself—right or wrong.
+
+No; I repeat, Shakspeare—bless him!—never did me any moral mischief.
+Though the Witches in Macbeth troubled me,—though the Ghost in Hamlet
+terrified me (the picture that is,—for the spirit in Shakspeare was
+solemn and pathetic, not hideous),—though poor little Arthur cost me an
+ocean of tears,—yet much that was obscure, and all that was painful and
+revolting was merged on the whole in the vivid presence of a new,
+beautiful, vigorous, living world. The plays which I now think the most
+wonderful produced comparatively little effect on my fancy: Romeo and
+Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, struck me then less than the historical plays,
+and far less than the Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cymbeline. It may be
+thought, perhaps, that Falstaff is not a character to strike a child, or
+to be understood by a child:—no; surely not. To me Falstaff was not
+witty and wicked—only irresistibly fat and funny; and I remember lying
+on the ground rolling with laughter over some of the scenes in Henry the
+Fourth,—the mock play, and the seven men in buckram. But The Tempest and
+Cymbeline were the plays I liked best and knew best.
+
+Altogether I should say that in my early years books were known to me,
+not as such, not for their general contents, but for some especial image
+or picture I had picked out of them and assimilated to my own mind and
+mixed up with my own life. For example out of Homer’s Odyssey (lent to
+me by the parish clerk) I had the picture of Nasicaa and her maidens
+going down in their chariots to wash their linen: so that when the first
+time I went to the Pitti Palace, and could hardly see the pictures
+through blinding tears, I saw _that_ picture of Rubens, which all
+remember who have been at Florence, and it flashed delight and
+refreshment through those remembered childish associations. The Syrens
+and Polypheme left also vivid pictures on my fancy. The Iliad, on the
+contrary, wearied me, except the parting of Hector and Andromache, in
+which the child, scared by its father’s dazzling helm and nodding
+crest, remains a vivid image in my mind from that time.
+
+The same parish clerk—a curious fellow in his way—lent me also some
+religious tracts and stories, by Hannah More. It is most certain that
+more moral mischief was done to me by some of these than by all
+Shakspeare’s plays together. These so-called pious tracts first
+introduced me to a knowledge of the vices of vulgar life, and the
+excitements of a vulgar religion,—the fear of being hanged and the fear
+of hell became co-existent in my mind; and the teaching resolved itself
+into this,—that it was not by being naughty, but by being found out,
+that I was to incur the risk of both. My fairy world was better!
+
+About Religion:—I was taught religion as children used to be taught it
+in my younger days, and are taught it still in some cases, I
+believe—through the medium of creeds and catechisms. I read the Bible
+too early, and too indiscriminately, and too irreverently. Even the New
+Testament was too early placed in my hands; too early made a lesson
+book, as the custom then was. The _letter_ of the Scriptures—the
+words—were familiarised to me by sermonising and dogmatising, long
+before I could enter into the _spirit_. Meantime, happily, another
+religion was growing up in my heart, which, strangely enough, seemed to
+me quite apart from that which was taught,—which, indeed, I never in
+any way regarded as the same which I was taught when I stood up wearily
+on a Sunday to repeat the collect and say the catechism. It was quite
+another thing. Not only the taught religion and the sentiment of faith
+and adoration were never combined, but it never for years entered into
+my head to combine them; the first remained extraneous, the latter had
+gradually taken root in my life, even from the moment my mother joined
+my little hands in prayer. The histories out of the Bible (the Parables
+especially) were, however, enchanting to me, though my interpretation of
+them was in some instances the very reverse of correct or orthodox. To
+my infant conception our Lord was a being who had come down from heaven
+to make people good, and to tell them beautiful stories. And though no
+pains were spared to _indoctrinate_ me, and all my pastors and masters
+took it for granted that my ideas were quite satisfactory, nothing could
+be more confused and heterodox.
+
+
+It is a common observation that girls of lively talents are apt to grow
+pert and satirical. I fell into this danger when about ten years old.
+Sallies at the expense of certain people, ill-looking, or ill-dressed,
+or ridiculous, or foolish, had been laughed at and applauded in company,
+until, without being naturally malignant, I ran some risk of becoming
+so from sheer vanity.
+
+The fables which appeal to our higher moral sympathies may sometimes do
+as much for us as the truths of science. So thought our Saviour when he
+taught the multitude in parables.
+
+A good clergyman who lived near us, a famous Persian scholar, took it
+into his head to teach me Persian (I was then about seven years old),
+and I set to work with infinite delight and earnestness. All I learned
+was soon forgotten; but a few years afterwards, happening to stumble on
+a volume of Sir William Jones’s works—his Persian grammar—it revived my
+Orientalism, and I began to study it eagerly. Among the exercises given
+was a Persian fable or poem—one of those traditions of our Lord which
+are preserved in the East. The beautiful apologue of “St. Peter and the
+Cherries,” which Goethe has versified or imitated, is a well known
+example. This fable I allude to was something similar, but I have not
+met with the original these forty years, and must give it here from
+memory.
+
+“Jesus,” says the story, “arrived one evening at the gates of a certain
+city, and he sent his disciples forward to prepare supper, while he
+himself, intent on doing good, walked through the streets into the
+market place.
+
+“And he saw at the corner of the market some people gathered together
+looking at an object on the ground; and he drew near to see what it
+might be. It was a dead dog, with a halter round his neck, by which he
+appeared to have been dragged through the dirt; and a viler, a more
+abject, a more unclean thing, never met the eyes of man.
+
+“And those who stood by looked on with abhorrence.
+
+“‘Faugh!’ said one, stopping his nose; ‘it pollutes the air.’ ‘How
+long,’ said another, ‘shall this foul beast offend our sight?’ ‘Look at
+his torn hide,’ said a third; ‘one could not even cut a shoe out of it.’
+‘And his ears,’ said a fourth, ‘all draggled and bleeding!’ ‘No doubt,’
+said a fifth, ‘he hath been hanged for thieving!’
+
+“And Jesus heard them, and looking down compassionately on the dead
+creature, he said, ‘Pearls are not equal to the whiteness of his teeth!’
+
+“Then the people turned towards him with amazement, and said among
+themselves, ‘Who is this? this must be Jesus of Nazareth, for only HE
+could find something to pity and approve even in a dead dog;’ and being
+ashamed, they bowed their heads before him, and went each on his way.”
+
+I can recall, at this hour, the vivid, yet softening and pathetic
+impression left on my fancy by this old Eastern story. It struck me as
+exquisitely humorous, as well as exquisitely beautiful. It gave me a
+pain in my conscience, for it seemed thenceforward so easy and so vulgar
+to say satirical things, and so much nobler to be benign and merciful,
+and I took the lesson so home, that I was in great danger of falling
+into the opposite extreme,—of seeking the beautiful even in the midst of
+the corrupt and the repulsive. Pity, a large element in my composition,
+might have easily degenerated into weakness, threatening to subvert
+hatred of evil in trying to find excuses for it; and whether my mind has
+ever completely righted itself, I am not sure.
+
+
+Educators are not always aware, I think, how acute are the perceptions,
+and how permanent the memories, of children. I remember experiments
+tried upon my temper and feelings, and how I was made aware of this, by
+their being repeated, and, in some instances, spoken of, before me.
+Music, to which I was early and peculiarly sensitive, was sometimes made
+the medium of these experiments. Discordant sounds were not only
+hateful, but made me turn white and cold, and sent the blood backward to
+my heart; and certain tunes had a curious effect, I cannot now account
+for: for though, when heard for the first time, they had little effect,
+they became intolerable by repetition; they turned up some hidden
+emotion within me too strong to be borne. It could not have been from
+association, which I believe to be a principal element in the _emotion_
+excited by music. I was too young for that. What associations could such
+a baby have had with pleasure or with pain? Or could it be possible that
+associations with some former state of existence awoke up to sound? That
+our life “hath elsewhere its beginning, and cometh from afar,” is a
+belief or at least an instinct, in some minds, which music, and only
+music, seems to thrill into consciousness. At this time, when I was
+about five or six years old, Mrs. Arkwright—she was then Fanny
+Kemble—used to come to our house, and used to entrance me with her
+singing. I had a sort of adoration for her, such as an ecstatic votary
+might have for a Saint Cecilia. I trembled with pleasure when I only
+heard her step. But her voice!—it has charmed hundreds since; whom has
+it ever moved to a more genuine passion of delight than the little child
+that crept silent and tremulous to her side? And she was fond of
+me,—fond of singing to me, and, it must be confessed, fond also of
+playing these experiments on me. The music of “Paul and Virginia” was
+then in vogue, and there was one air—a very simple air—in that opera,
+which, after the first few bars, always made me stop my ears and rush
+out of the room. I became at last aware that this was sometimes done by
+particular desire to please my parents, or amuse and interest others by
+the display of such vehement emotion. My infant conscience became
+perplexed between the reality of the feeling and the exhibition of it.
+People are not always aware of the injury done to children by repeating
+before them things they say, or describing things they do: words and
+actions, spontaneous and unconscious, become thenceforth artificial and
+conscious. I can speak of the injury done to myself, between five and
+eight years old. There was some danger of my becoming a precocious
+actress,—danger of permanent mischief such as I have seen done to other
+children,—but I was saved by the recoil of resistance and resentment
+excited in my mind.
+
+This is enough. All that has been told here refers to a period between
+five and ten years old.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE INDIAN HUNTER AND THE FIRE.
+
+(FROM THE GERMAN.)
+
+
+Once upon a time the lightning from heaven fell upon a tree standing in
+the old primeval forest and kindled it, so that it flamed on high. And
+it happened that a young hunter, who had lost his path in that
+wilderness, beheld the gleam of the flames from a distance, and, forcing
+his way through the thicket, he flung himself down in rapture before the
+blazing tree.
+
+“O divine light and warmth!” he exclaimed, stretching forth his arms.
+“O blessed! O heaven-descended Fire! let me thank thee! let me adore
+thee! Giver of a new existence, quickening thro’ every pulse, how lost,
+how cold, how dark have I dwelt without thee! Restorer of my life!
+remain ever near me, and, through thy benign and celestial influence,
+send love and joy to illuminate my soul!”
+
+And the Fire answered and said to him, “It is true that my birth is from
+heaven, but I am now, through mingling with earthly elements, subdued to
+earthly influences; therefore, beware how you choose me for thy friend,
+without having first studied my twofold nature. O youth! take heed lest
+what appear to thee now a blessing, may be turned, at some future time,
+to fiery pain and death.” And the youth replied, “No! O no! thou blessed
+Fire, this could never be. Am I then so senseless, so inconstant, so
+thankless? O believe it not! Let me stay near thee; let me be thy
+priest, to watch and tend thee truly. Ofttimes in my wild wintry life,
+when the chill darkness encompassed me, and the ice-blast lifted my
+hair, have I dreamed of the soft summer breath,—of the sunshine that
+should light up the world within me and the world around me. But still
+that time came not. It seemed ever far, far off; and I had perished
+utterly before the light and the warmth had reached me, had it not been
+for thee!”
+
+Thus the youth poured forth his soul, and the Fire answered him in
+murmured tones, while her beams with a softer radiance played over his
+cheek and brow: “Be it so then. Yet do thou watch me constantly and
+minister to me carefully; neglect me not, leave me not to myself, lest
+the light and warmth in which thou so delightest fail thee suddenly, and
+there be no redress; and O watch thyself also! beware lest thou too
+ardently stir up my impatient fiery being! beware lest thou heap too
+much fuel upon me; once more beware, lest, instead of life, and love,
+and joy, I bring thee only death and burning pain!” And the youth
+passionately vowed to keep her behest: and in the beginning all went
+well. How often, for hours together, would he lie gazing entranced
+toward the radiant beneficent Fire, basking in her warmth, and throwing
+now a leafy spray, now a fragment of dry wood, anon a handful of odorous
+gums, as incense, upon the flame, which gracefully curling and waving
+upwards, quivering and sparkling, seemed to whisper in return divine
+oracles; or he fancied he beheld, while gazing into the glowing depths,
+marvellous shapes, fairy visions dancing and glancing along. Then he
+would sing to her songs full of love, and she, responding to the song
+she had herself inspired, sometimes replied, in softest whispers, so
+loving and so low, that even the jealous listening woods could not
+overhear; at other times she would shoot up suddenly in rapturous
+splendour, like a pillar of light, and revealed to him all the wonders
+and the beauties which lay around him, hitherto veiled from his sight.
+
+But at length, as he became accustomed to the glory and the warmth, and
+nothing more was left for the fire to bestow, or her light to reveal,
+then he began to weary and to dream again of the morning, and to long
+for the sun-beams; and it was to him as if the fire stood between him
+and the sun’s light, and he reproached her therefore, and he became
+moody and ungrateful; and the fire was no longer the same, but unquiet
+and changeful, sometimes flickering unsteadily, sometimes throwing out a
+lurid glare. And when the youth, forgetful of his ministry, left the
+flame unfed and unsustained, so that ofttimes she drooped and waned, and
+crept in dying gleams along the damp ground, his heart would fail him
+with a sudden remorse, and he would cast on the fuel with such a rough
+and lavish hand that the indignant fire hissed thereat, and burst forth
+in a smoky sullen gleam,—then died away again. Then the youth, half
+sorrowful, half impatient, would remember how bright, how glowing, how
+dazzling was the flame in those former happy days, when it played over
+his chilled and wearied limbs, and shed its warmth upon his brow, and he
+desired eagerly to recall that once inspiring glow. And he stirred up
+the embers violently till they burned him, and then he grew angry, and
+then again he wearied of all the watching and the care which the subtle,
+celestial, tameless element required at his hand: and at length, one day
+in a sullen mood, he snatched up a pitcher of water from the fountain
+and poured it hastily on the yet living flame.——
+
+For one moment it arose blazing towards heaven, shed a last gleam upon
+the pale brow of the youth, and then sank down in darkness extinguished
+for ever!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+PAULINA.
+
+FROM AN UNFINISHED TALE, 1823.
+
+   And think’st thou that the fond o’erflowing love
+     I bear thee in my heart could ever be
+   Repaid by careless smiles that round thee rove,
+     And beam on others as they beam on me?
+
+   Oh, could I speak to thee! could I but tell
+   The nameless thoughts that in my bosom swell,
+   And struggle for expression! or set free
+   From the o’er mastering spirit’s proud control
+   The pain that throbs in silence at my soul,
+   Perhaps—yet no—I will not sue, nor bend,
+   To win a heartless pity—Let it end!
+
+   I have been near thee still at morn, at eve;
+   Have mark’d thee in thy joy, have seen thee grieve;
+   Have seen thee gay with triumph, sick with fears,
+   Radiant in beauty, desolate in tears:
+   And communed with thy heart, till I made mine
+   The echo and the mirror unto thine.
+   And I have sat and looked into thine eyes
+   As men on earth look to the starry skies,
+   That seek to read in Heaven their human destinies!
+
+   Too quickly I read mine,—I knew it well,—
+   I judg’d not of thy heart by all it gave,
+   But all that it withheld; and I could tell
+   The very sea-mark where affection’s wave
+   Would cease to flow, or flow to ebb again,
+   And knew my lavish love was pour’d in vain,
+   As fruitless streams o’er sandy deserts melt,
+   Unrecompensed, unvalued, and unfelt!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+LINES.—1840.
+
+
+   Take me, my mother Earth, to thy cold breast,
+   And fold me there in everlasting rest,
+         The long day is o’er!
+         I’m weary, I would sleep—
+         But deep, deep,
+         Never to waken more!
+
+   I have had joy and sorrow; I have proved
+   What life could give; have lov’d, have been belov’d;
+         I am sick, and heart sore,
+         And weary,—let me sleep!
+         But deep, deep,
+         Never to waken more!
+
+   To thy dark chambers, mother Earth, I come,
+   Prepare my dreamless bed in my last home;
+         Shut down the marble door,
+         And leave me,—let me sleep!
+         But deep, deep,
+         Never to waken more!
+
+   Now I lie down,—I close my aching eyes,
+   If on this night another morn must rise,
+         Wake me not, I implore!
+         I only ask to sleep,
+         And deep, deep,
+         Never to waken more!
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Theological Fragments.
+
+
+1.
+
+THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL.
+
+(A PARABLE, FROM ST. JEROME.)
+
+
+A certain holy anchorite had passed a long life in a cave of the
+Thebaid, remote from all communion with men; and eschewing, as he would
+the gates of Hell, even the very presence of a woman; and he fasted and
+prayed, and performed many and severe penances; and his whole thought
+was how he should make himself of account in the sight of God, that he
+might enter into his paradise.
+
+And having lived this life for three score and ten years he was puffed
+up with the notion of his own great virtue and sanctity, and, like to
+St. Anthony, he besought the Lord to show him what saint he should
+emulate as greater than himself, thinking perhaps, in his heart, that
+the Lord would answer that none was greater or holier. And the same
+night the angel of God appeared to him, and said, “If thou wouldst excel
+all others in virtue and sanctity, thou must strive to be like a certain
+minstrel who goes begging and singing from door to door.”
+
+And the holy man was in great astonishment, and he arose and took his
+staff and ran forth in search of this minstrel; and when he had found
+him he questioned him earnestly, saying, “Tell me, I pray thee, my
+brother, what good works thou hast performed in thy lifetime, and by
+what prayers and penances thou hast made thyself acceptable to God?”
+
+And the man, greatly wondering and ashamed to be so questioned, hung
+down his head as he replied, “I beseech thee, holy father, mock me not!
+I have performed no good works, and as to praying, alas! sinner that I
+am, I am not worthy to pray. I do nothing but go about from door to door
+amusing the people with my viol and my flute.”
+
+And the holy man insisted and said, “Nay, but peradventure in the midst
+of this thy evil life thou hast done some good works?” And the minstrel
+replied, “I know of nothing good that I have done.” And the hermit,
+wondering more and more, said, “How hast thou become a beggar: hast thou
+spent thy substance in riotous living, like most others of thy calling?”
+and the man answering, said, “Nay; but there was a poor woman whom I
+found running hither and thither in distraction, for her husband and her
+children had been sold into slavery to pay a debt. And the woman being
+very fair, certain sons of Belial pursued after her; so I took her home
+to my hut and protected her from them, and I gave her all I possessed to
+redeem her family, and conducted her in safety to the city, where she
+was reunited to her husband and children. But what of that, my father;
+is there a man who would not have done the same?”
+
+And the hermit, hearing the minstrel speak these words, wept bitterly,
+saying, “For my part, I have not done so much good in all my life; and
+yet they call me a man of God, and thou art only a poor minstrel!”
+
+
+At Vienna, some years ago, I saw a picture by Von Schwind, which was
+conceived in the spirit of this old apologue. It exhibited the lives of
+two twin brothers diverging from the cradle. One of them, by profound
+study, becomes a most learned and skilful physician, and ministers to
+the sick; attaining to great riches and honours through his labours and
+his philanthropy. The other brother, who has no turn for study, becomes
+a poor fiddler, and spends his life in consoling, by his music,
+sufferings beyond the reach of the healing art. In the end, the two
+brothers meet at the close of life. He who had been fiddling through the
+world is sick and worn out: his brother prescribes for him, and is seen
+culling simples for his restoration, while the fiddler touches his
+instrument for the solace of his kind physician.
+
+It is in such representations that painting did once speak, and might
+again speak to the hearts of the people.
+
+Another version of the same thought, we find in De Berenger’s pretty
+ballad, “_Les deux Sœurs de Charité_.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+2.
+
+When I was a child, and read Milton for the first time, his Pandemonium
+seemed to me a magnificent place. It struck me more than his Paradise,
+for _that_ was beautiful, but Pandemonium was terrible and beautiful
+too. The wondrous fabric that “from the earth rose like an exhalation
+to the sound of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet,”—the splendid piles
+of architecture sweeping line beyond line, “Cornice and frieze with
+bossy sculptures graven,”—realised a certain picture of Palmyra I had
+once seen, and which had taken possession of my imagination: then the
+throne, outshining the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind,—the flood of light
+streaming from “starry lamps and blazing cressets” quite threw the
+flames of perdition into the shade. As it was said of Erskine, that he
+always spoke of Satan with respect, as of a great statesman out of
+place, a sort of leader of the Opposition; so to me the grand arch-fiend
+was a hero, like my _then_ favourite Greeks and Romans, a Cymon, a
+Curtius, a Decius, devoting himself for the good of his country;—such
+was the moral confusion created in my mind. Pandemonium inspired no
+horror; on the contrary, my fancy revelled in the artistic beauty of the
+creation. I felt that I should like to go and see it; so that, in fact,
+if Milton meant to inspire abhorrence, he has failed, even to the height
+of his sublimity. Dante has succeeded better. Those who dwell with
+complacency on the doctrine of eternal punishments must delight in the
+ferocity and the ingenuity of his grim inventions, worthy of a vengeful
+theology. Wicked latitudinarians may shudder and shiver at the images
+called up—grotesque, abominable, hideous—but then Dante himself would
+sternly rebuke them for making their human sympathies a measure for the
+judgments of God, and compassion only a veil for treason and rebellion:—
+
+  “Chi è piu scellerato di colui
+   Ch’ al giudicio divin passion porta?”
+
+  “Who can show greater wickedness than he
+   Whose passion by the will of God is moved?”
+
+However, it must be said in favour of Dante’s Inferno, that no one ever
+wished to go there.
+
+These be the Christian poets! but they must yield in depth of imagined
+horrors to the Christian Fathers. Tertullian (writing in the second
+century) not only sends the wicked into that dolorous region of despair,
+but makes the endless measureless torture of the doomed a part of the
+joys of the redeemed. The spectacle is to give them the same sort of
+delight as the heathen took in their games, and Pandemonium is to be as
+a vast amphitheatre for the amusement of the New Jerusalem. “How
+magnificent,” exclaims this pious doctor of the Church, “will be the
+scale of that game! With what admiration, what laughter, what glee, what
+triumph, shall I behold so many mighty monarchs, who had been given out
+as received into the skies, moaning in unfathomable gloom! Persecutors
+of the Christians liquefying amid shooting spires of flame! Philosophers
+blushing before their disciples amid those ruddy fires! Then,” he goes
+on, still alluding to the amphitheatre, “then is the time to hear the
+tragedians doubly pathetic, now that they bewail their own agonies! To
+observe actors released by the fierceness of their torments from all
+restraints on their gestures! Then may we admire the charioteer glowing
+all over in his car of torture, and watch the wrestlers struggling, not
+in the gymnasium but with flames!” And he asks exultingly, “What prætor,
+or consul, or questor, or priest, can purchase you by his munificence a
+game of triumph like this?”
+
+And even more terrible are the imaginations of good Bishop Taylor, who
+distils the essence from all sins, all miseries, all sorrows, all
+terrors, all plagues, and mingles them in one chalice of wrath and
+vengeance to be held to the lips and forced down the unwilling throats
+of the doomed “with violence of devils and accursed spirits!” Are these
+mere words? Did any one ever fancy or try to realise what they express?
+
+
+3.
+
+I was surprised to find this passage in one of Southey’s letters:—
+
+
+“A Catholic Establishment would be the best, perhaps the only means of
+civilising Ireland. Jesuits and Benedictines, though they would not
+enlighten the savages, would humanise them and bring the country into
+cultivation. A petition that asked for this, saying plainly, ‘We are
+Papists, and will be so, and this is the best thing that can be done for
+us and you too,’—such a petition I would support, considering what the
+present condition of Ireland is, how wretchedly it has always been
+governed, and how hopeless the prospect.” (1805.)
+
+
+Southey was thinking of what the religious orders had done for Paraguay;
+whether he would have penned the same sentiments twenty or even ten
+years later, is more than doubtful.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+4.
+
+The old monks and penitents—dirty, ugly, emaciated old fellows they
+were!—spent their days in speaking and preaching of their own and
+others’ sinfulness, yet seem to have had ever present before them a
+standard of beauty, brightness, beneficence, aspirations which nothing
+earthly could satisfy, which made their ideas of sinfulness and misery
+_comparative_, and their scale was graduated from themselves _upwards_.
+We philosophers reverse this. We teach and preach the spiritual dignity,
+the lofty capabilities of humanity. Yet, by some mistake, we seem to be
+always speculating on the amount of evil which may or can be endured,
+and on the amount of wickedness which may or must be tolerated; and our
+scale is graduated from ourselves _downwards_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+5.
+
+“So long as the ancient mythology had any separate establishment in the
+empire, the spiritual worship which our religion demands, and so
+essentially implies as only fitting for it, was preserved in its purity
+by means of the salutary contrast; but no sooner had the Church become
+completely triumphant and exclusive, and the parallel of Pagan idolatry
+totally removed, than the old constitutional appetite revived in all its
+original force, and after a short but famous struggle with the
+Iconoclasts, an image worship was established, and consecrated by bulls
+and canons, which, in whatever light it is regarded, differed in no
+respect but the names of its objects from that which had existed for so
+many ages as the chief characteristic of the religious faith of the
+Gentiles.”—_H. Nelson Coleridge._
+
+I think, with submission, that it differed in sentiment; for in the
+mythology of the Pagans the worship was to _beauty_, _immortality_, and
+_power_, and in the Christian mythology—if I may call it so—of the
+Middle Ages, the worship was to _purity_, _self-denial_, and _charity_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+6.
+
+“A narrow half-enlightened reason may easily make sport of all those
+forms in which religious faith has been clothed by human imagination,
+and ask why they are retained, and why one should be preferred to
+another? It is sufficient to reply, that some forms there must be if
+Religion is to endure as a social influence, and that the forms already
+in existence are the best, if they are in unison with human sympathies,
+and express, with the breadth and vagueness which every popular
+utterance must from its nature possess, the interior convictions of the
+general mind. What would become of the most sacred truth if all the
+forms which have harboured it were destroyed at once by an unrelenting
+reason, and it were driven naked and shivering about the earth till some
+clever logician had devised a suitable abode for its reception? It is on
+these outward forms of religion that the spirit of artistic beauty
+descends and moulds them into fitting expressions of the invisible grace
+and majesty of spiritual truth.”—_Prospective Review_, Feb. 24. 1845.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+7.
+
+“Have not Dying Christs taught fortitude to the virtuous sufferer? Have
+not Holy Families cherished and ennobled domestic affections? The tender
+genius of the Christian morality, even in its most degenerate state, has
+made the Mother and her Child the highest objects of affectionate
+superstition. How much has that beautiful superstition by the pencils of
+great artists contributed to humanise mankind?”—_Sir James Mackintosh_,
+writing in 1802.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+8.
+
+I remember once at Merton College Chapel (May, 1844), while Archdeacon
+Manning was preaching an eloquent sermon on the eternity of reward and
+punishment in the future life, I was looking at the row of windows
+opposite, and I saw that there were seven, all different in pattern and
+construction, yet all harmonising with each other and with the building
+of which they formed a part;—a symbol they might have been of
+differences in the Church of Christ. From the varied windows opposite I
+looked down to the faces of the congregation, all upturned to the
+preacher, with expression how different! Faith, hope, fear, in the open
+mouths and expanded eyelids of some; a sort of silent protest in the
+compressed lips and knitted brows of others; a speculative inquiry and
+interest, or merely admiring acquiescence in others; as the high or low,
+the wide or contracted head prevailed; and all this diversity in
+organisation, in habits of thought, in expression, harmonised for the
+time by one predominant object, one feeling! the hungry sheep looking up
+to be fed! When I sigh over apparent disagreement, let me think of those
+windows in Merton College Chapel, and the same light from heaven
+streaming through them all!—and of that assemblage of human faces,
+uplifted with the same aspiration one and all!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+9.
+
+I have just read the article (by Sterling, I believe), in the “Edinburgh
+Review” for July; and as it chanced, this same evening, Dr. Channing’s
+“Discourse on the Church,” and Captain Maconochie’s “Report on Secondary
+Punishments” from Sydney, came before me.
+
+And as I laid them down, one after another, _this_ thought struck
+me:—that about the same time, in three different and far divided regions
+of the globe, three men, one military, the other an ecclesiastic, the
+third a lawyer, and belonging apparently to different religious
+denominations, all gave utterance to nearly the same sentiments in
+regard to a Christian Church. Channing says, “A church destined to
+endure through all ages, to act on all, to blend itself with new forms
+of society, and with the highest improvements of the race, cannot be
+expected to ordain an immutable mode of administration, but must leave
+its modes of worship and communion to conform themselves silently and
+gradually to the wants and progress of humanity. The rites and
+arrangements which suit one period lose their significance or efficiency
+in another; the forms which minister to the mind _now_ may fetter it
+hereafter, and must give place to its free unfolding,” &c., and more to
+the same purpose.
+
+The reviewer says, “We believe that in the judgment of an enlightened
+charity, many Christian societies who are accustomed to denounce each
+others’ errors, will at length come to be regarded as members in common
+of one great and comprehensive Church, in which diversity of forms are
+harmonised by an all-pervading unity of spirit.” And more to the same
+purpose. The soldier and reformer says, “I believe there may be error
+because there must be imperfection in the religious faith of the best
+among us; but that the degree of this error is not vital in any
+Christian denomination seems demonstrable by the best fruits of
+faith—good works—being evidenced by all.”
+
+It is pleasant to see benign spirits divided in opinion, but harmonised
+by faith, thus standing hand in hand upon a shore of peace, and looking
+out together in serene hope for the dawning of a better day, instead of
+rushing forth, each with his own farthing candle, under pretence of
+illuminating the world—every one even more intent on putting out his
+neighbour’s light than on guarding his own.
+
+   (Nov. 15. 1841.)
+
+
+While the idea of possible harmony in the universal Church of Christ (by
+which I mean all who accept His teaching and are glad to bear His name)
+is gaining ground theoretically, _practically_ it seems more and more
+distant; since 1841 (when the above was written) the divergence is
+greater than ever; and, as in politics, moderate opinions appear (since
+1848) to merge on either side into the extremes of ultra conservatism
+and ultra radicalism, as fear of the past or hope of the future
+predominate, so it is in the Church. The sort of dualism which prevails
+in politics and religion might give some colour to Lord Lindsay’s theory
+of “progress through antagonism.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+10.
+
+I Incline to agree with those who think it a great mistake to consider
+the present conditions or conception of Christianity as complete and
+final: like the human soul to which it was fitted by Divine love and
+wisdom, it has an immeasurable capacity of development, and “The Lord
+hath more truth yet to break forth out of his Holy Word.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+11.
+
+The nations of the present age want not _less_ religion, but _more_.
+They do not wish for less community with the Apostolic times, but for
+more; but above all, they want their wounds healed by a Christianity
+showing a life-renewing vitality allied to reason and conscience, and
+ready and able to reform the social relations of life, beginning with
+the domestic and culminating with the political. They want no negations,
+but positive reconstruction—no conventionality, but an honest _bonâ
+fide_ foundation, deep as the human mind, and a structure free and
+organic as nature. In the meantime let no national form be urged as
+identical with divine truth, let no dogmatic formula oppress conscience
+and reason, and let no corporation of priests, no set of dogmatists, sow
+discord and hatred in the sacred communities of domestic and national
+life. This view cannot be obtained without national efforts, Christian
+education, free institutions, and social reforms. Then no zeal will be
+called Christian which is not hallowed by charity,—no faith Christian
+which is not sanctioned by reason.”—_Hippolitus._
+
+“Any author who in our time treats theological and ecclesiastical
+subjects frankly, and therefore with reference to the problems of the
+age, must expect to be ignored, and if that cannot be done, abused and
+reviled.”
+
+The same is true of moral subjects on which strong prejudices (or shall
+I say strong _convictions_?) exist in minds not very strong.
+
+It is not perhaps of so much consequence what we believe, as it is
+important that we believe; that we do not affect to believe, and so
+belie our own souls. Belief is _not_ always in our power, but truth is.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+12.
+
+It seems an arbitrary limitation of the design of Christianity to
+assume, as Priestley does, that “it consists solely in the revelation of
+a future life confirmed by the bodily resurrection of Christ.” This is
+truly a very material view of Christianity. If I were to be sure of
+annihilation I should not be less certain of the truth of Christianity
+as a system of morals exquisitely adapted for the improvement and
+happiness of man as an individual; and equally adapted to conduce to the
+amelioration and progressive happiness of mankind as a species.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+NOTES FROM VARIOUS SERMONS,
+
+MADE ON THE SPOT;
+
+SHOWING SOME THINGS IN WHICH ALL GOOD MEN ARE AGREED.
+
+
+I.
+
+_From a Roman Catholic Sermon._
+
+
+When travelling in Ireland, I stayed over one Sunday in a certain town
+in the north, and rambled out early in the morning. It was cold and wet,
+the streets empty and quiet, but the sound of voices drew me in one
+direction, down a court where was a Roman Catholic chapel. It was so
+crowded that many of the congregation stood round the door. I remarked
+among them a number of soldiers and most miserable-looking women. All
+made way for me with true national courtesy, and I entered at the moment
+the priest was finishing mass, and about to begin his sermon. There was
+no pulpit, and he stood on the step of the altar; a fine-looking man,
+with a bright face, a sonorous voice, and a _very_ strong Irish accent.
+His text was from Matt. v. 43, 44.
+
+He began by explaining what Christ really meant by the words “Love thy
+neighbour.” Then drew a picture in contrast of hatred and dissension,
+commencing with dissension in families, between kindred, and between
+husband and wife. Then made a most touching appeal in behalf of children
+brought up in an atmosphere of contention where no love is. “God help
+them! God pity them! small chance for them of being either good or
+happy! for their young hearts are saddened and soured with strife, and
+they eat their bread in bitterness!”
+
+Then he preached patience to the wives, indulgence to the husbands, and
+denounced scolds and quarrelsome women in a manner that seemed to glance
+at recent events: “When ye are found in the streets vilifying and
+slandering one another, ay, and fighting and tearing each other’s hair,
+do ye think ye’re women? no, ye’re not! ye’re devils incarnate, and
+ye’ll go where the devils will be fit companions for ye!” &c. (Here some
+women near me, with long black hair streaming down, fell upon their
+knees, sobbing with contrition.) He then went on, in the same strain of
+homely eloquence, to the evils of political and religious hatred, and
+quoted the text, “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live
+peaceably with all men.” “I’m a Catholic,” he went on, “and I believe in
+the truth of my own religion above all others. I’m convinced, by long
+study and observation, it’s the best that is; but what then? Do ye think
+I hate my neighbour because he thinks differently? Do ye think I _mane_
+to force my religion down other people’s throats? If I were to preach
+such uncharity to ye, my people, you wouldn’t listen to me, ye oughtn’t
+to listen to me. Did Jesus Christ force His religion down other people’s
+throats? Not He! He endured all, He was kind to all, even to the wicked
+Jews that afterwards crucified Him.” “If you say you can’t love your
+neighbour because he’s your enemy, and has injured you, what does that
+mane? ‘_ye can’t! ye can’t!_’ as if that excuse will serve God? hav’n’t
+ye done more and worse against Him? and didn’t He send His only Son into
+the world to redeem ye? My good people, you’re all sprung from one
+stock, all sons of Adam, all related to one another. When God created
+Eve, mightn’t He have made her out of any thing, a stock or a stone, or
+out of nothing at all, at all? but He took one of Adam’s ribs and
+moulded her out of that, and gave her to him, just to show that we’re
+all from one original, all related together, men and women, Catholics
+and Protestants, Jews and Turks and Christians; all bone of one bone,
+and flesh of one flesh!” He then insisted and demonstrated that all the
+miseries of life, all the sorrows and mistakes of men, women, and
+children; and, in particular, all the disasters of Ireland, the bankrupt
+landlords, the religious dissensions, the fights domestic and political,
+the rich without thought for the poor, and the poor without food or
+work, all arose from nothing but the want of love. “Down on your knees,”
+he exclaimed, “and ask God’s mercy and pardon; and as ye hope to find
+it, ask pardon one of another for every angry word ye have spoken, for
+every uncharitable thought that has come into your minds; and if any man
+or woman have aught against his neighbour, no matter what, let it be
+plucked out of his heart before he laves this place, let it be forgotten
+at the door of this chapel. Let me, your pastor, have no more rason to
+be ashamed of you; as if I were set over wild bastes, instead of
+Christian men and women!”
+
+After more in this fervid strain, which I cannot recollect, he gave his
+blessing in the same earnest heartfelt manner. I never saw a
+congregation more attentive, more reverent, and apparently more touched
+and edified. (1848.)
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+II.
+
+_From another Roman Catholic Sermon, delivered in the private chapel of
+a Nobleman._
+
+This Discourse was preached on the festival of St. John the Baptist, and
+was a summary of his doctrine, life, and character. The text was taken
+from St. Luke, iii. 9. to 14.; in which St. John answers the question of
+the people, “what shall we do then?” by a brief exposition of their
+several duties.
+
+“What is most remarkable in all this,” said the priest, “is truly that
+there is nothing very remarkable in it. The Baptist required from his
+hearers very simple and very familiar duties,—such as he was not the
+first to preach, such as had been recognised as duties by all religions;
+and do you think that those who were neither Jews nor Christians were
+therefore left without any religion? No! never did God leave any of his
+creatures without religion; they could not utter the words _right_,
+_wrong_,—_beautiful_, _hateful_, without recognising a religion written
+by God on their hearts from the beginning—a religion which existed
+before the preaching of John, before the coming of Christ, and of which
+the appearance of John and the doctrine and sacrifice of Christ, were
+but the fulfilment. For Christ came to _fulfil_ the law, not to destroy
+it. Do you ask what law? Not the law of Moses, but the universal law of
+God’s moral truth written in our hearts. It is, my friends, a folly to
+talk of _natural_ religion as of something different from _revealed_
+religion.
+
+“The great proof of the truth of John’s mission lies in its
+comprehensiveness: men and women, artisans and soldiers, the rich and
+the poor, the young and the old, gathered to him in the wilderness; and
+he included all in his teaching, for he was sent to all; and the best
+proof of the truth of his teaching lies in its harmony with that law
+already written in the heart and the conscience of men. When Christ came
+afterwards, he preached a doctrine more sublime, with a more
+authoritative voice; but here, also, the best proof we have of the truth
+of that divine teaching lies in this—that he had prepared from the
+beginning the heart and the conscience of man to harmonise with it.”
+
+
+This was a very curious sermon; quiet, elegant, and learned, with a good
+deal of sacred and profane history introduced in illustration, which I
+am sorry I cannot remember in detail. It made, however, no appeal to
+feeling or to practice; and after listening to it, we all went in to
+luncheon and discussed our newspapers.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+III.
+
+_Fragments of a Sermon (Anglican Church)._
+
+Text, Luke iv., from the 14th to the 18th, but more especially the 18th
+verse. This sermon was extempore.
+
+
+The preacher began by observing, that our Lord’s sermon at Nazareth
+established the second of two principles. By his sermon from the Mount,
+in which he had addressed the multitude in the open air, under the vault
+of the blue heaven alone, he has left to us the principle that all
+places are fitted for the service of God, and that all places may be
+sanctified by the preaching of his truth. While, by his sermon in the
+Synagogue (that which is recorded by St. Luke in this passage), he has
+established the principle, that it is right to set apart a place to
+assemble together in worship and to listen to instruction; and it is
+observable that on this occasion our Saviour taught in the synagogue,
+where there was no sacrifice, no ministry of the priests, as in the
+Temple; but where a portion of the law and the prophets might be read by
+any man; and any man, even a stranger (as he was himself), might be
+called upon to expound.
+
+Then reading impressively the whole of the narrative down to the 32nd
+verse, the preacher closed the sacred volume, and went on to this
+effect:—
+
+“There are two orders of evil in the world—Sin and Crime. Of the second,
+the world takes strict cognisance; of the first, it takes comparatively
+little; yet _that_ is worse in the eyes of God. There are two orders of
+temptation: the temptation which assails our lower nature—our appetites;
+the temptation which assails our higher nature—our intellect. The
+_first_, leading to sin in the body, is punished in the body,—the
+consequence being pain, disease, death. The _second_, leading to sins of
+the soul, as pride chiefly, uncharitableness, selfish sacrifice of
+others to our own interests or purposes,—is punished in the soul—in the
+Hell of the Spirit.”
+
+(All this part of his discourse very beautiful, earnest, eloquent; but I
+regretted that he did not follow out the distinction he began with
+between _sin_ and _crime_, and the views and deductions, religious and
+moral, which that distinction leads to.)
+
+He continued to this effect: “Christ said that it was a part of his
+mission to heal the broken-hearted. What is meant by the phrase ‘a
+broken heart?’” He illustrated it by the story of Eli, and by the wife
+of Phineas, both of whom died broken in heart; “and our Saviour himself
+died on the cross heart-broken by sorrow rather than by physical
+torture.”—
+
+(I lost something here because I was questioning and doubting within
+myself, for I have always had the thought that Christ must have been
+_glad_ to die.)
+
+He went on:—“To heal the broken-hearted is to say to those who are beset
+by the remembrance and the misery of sin, ‘My brother, the past is
+past—think not of it to thy perdition; arise and sin no more.’” (All
+this, and more to the same purpose, wonderfully beautiful! and I became
+all soul—subdued to listen.) “There are two ways of meeting the pressure
+of misery and heart-break: first, by trusting to time” (then followed a
+quotation from Schiller’s “Wallenstein,” in reference to grief, which
+sounded strange, and yet beautiful, from the pulpit, “Was verschmerzte
+nicht der Mensch?”—what cannot man grieve down?); “secondly, by defiance
+and resistance, setting oneself resolutely to endure. But Christ taught
+a different way from either—by _submission_—by the complete surrender of
+our whole being to the will of God.
+
+“The next part of Christ’s mission was to preach deliverance to the
+captives.” (Then followed a most eloquent and beautiful exposition of
+Christian freedom—of who were free; and who were not free, but properly
+spiritual captives.) “To be content within limitations is freedom; to
+desire beyond those limitations is bondage. The bird which is content
+within her cage is free; the bird which can fly from tree to tree, yet
+desires to soar like the eagle,—the eagle which can ascend to the
+mountain peak yet desires to reach the height of that sun on which his
+eye is fixed,—these are in bondage. The man who is not content within
+his sphere of duties and powers, but feels his faculties, his position,
+his profession; a perpetual trammel,—_he_ is spiritually in bondage. The
+only freedom is the freedom of the soul, content within its external
+limitations, and yet elevated spiritually far above them by the inward
+powers and impulses which lift it up to God.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+IV.
+
+_Recollections of another Church of England Sermon preached extempore._
+
+The text was taken from Matt. xii. 42.: “The Queen of the South shall
+rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it,” &c.
+
+
+The preacher began by drawing that distinction between knowledge and
+wisdom which so many comprehend and allow, and so few apply. He then
+described the two parties in the great question of popular education.
+Those who would base all human progress on secular instruction, on
+knowledge in contradistinction to ignorance, as on light opposed to
+darkness;—and the mistake of those who, taking the contrary extreme,
+denounce all secular instruction imparted to the poor as dangerous, or
+contemn it as useless. The error of those who sneer at the triumph of
+intellect he termed a species of idiocy; and the error of those who do
+not see the insufficiency of knowledge, blind presumption. Then he
+contrasted worldly wisdom and spiritual; with a flow of gorgeous
+eloquence he enlarged on the picture of worldly wisdom as exhibited in
+the character of Solomon, and of intellect, and admiration for
+intellect, in the character of the Queen of Sheba. “In what consisted
+the wisdom of Solomon? He made, as the sacred history assures us, three
+thousand proverbs, mostly prudential maxims relating to conduct in life;
+the use and abuse of riches; prosperity and adversity. His acquirements
+in natural philosophy seem to have been confined to the appearances of
+material and visible things; the herbs and trees, the beasts and birds,
+the creeping things and fishes. His political wisdom consisted in
+increasing his wealth, his dominions, and the number of his subjects and
+cities. On his temple he lavished all that art had then accomplished,
+and on his own house a world of riches in gold, and silver, and precious
+things: but all was done for his own glory—nothing for the improvement
+or the happiness of his people, who were ground down by taxes, suffered
+in the midst of all his magnificence, and remained ignorant in spite of
+all his knowledge. Witness the wars, tyrannies, miseries, delusions, and
+idolatries which followed after his death.”
+
+“But the Queen of Sheba came not from the uttermost parts of the earth
+to view the magnificence and wonder at the greatness of the King, she
+came to hear his wisdom. She came not to ask anything from him, but to
+prove him with hard questions. No idea of worldly gain, or selfish
+ambition was in her thoughts; she paid even for the pleasure of hearing
+his wise sayings by rare and costly gifts.”
+
+“Knowledge is power; but he who worships knowledge not for its own sake,
+but for the power it brings, worships power. Knowledge is riches; but he
+who worships knowledge for the sake of all it bestows, worships riches.
+The Queen of Sheba worshipped knowledge solely for its own sake; and the
+truths which she sought from the lips of Solomon she sought for truth’s
+sake. She gave, all she could give, in return, the spicy products of her
+own land, treasures of pure gold, and blessings warm from her heart. The
+man who makes a voyage to the antipodes only to behold the constellation
+of the Southern Cross, the man who sails to the North to see how the
+magnet trembles and varies, these love knowledge for its own sake, and
+are impelled by the same enthusiasm as the Queen of Sheba.” He went on
+to analyse the character of Solomon, and did not treat him, I thought,
+with much reverence either as sage or prophet. He remarked that, “of the
+thousand songs of Solomon one only survives, and that both in this song
+and in his proverbs his meaning has often been mistaken; it is supposed
+to be spiritual, and is interpreted symbolically, when in fact the
+plain, obvious, material significance is the true one.”
+
+He continued to this effect,—but with a power of language and
+illustration which I cannot render. “We see in Solomon’s own description
+of his dominion, his glory, his wealth, his fame, what his boasted
+wisdom achieved; what it could, and what it could not do for him. What
+was the end of all his magnificence? of his worship of the beautiful? of
+his intellectual triumphs? of his political subtlety? of his ships, and
+his commerce, and his chariots, and his horses, and his fame which
+reached to the ends of the earth? All—as it is related—ended in
+feebleness, in scepticism, in disbelief of happiness, in sensualism,
+idolatry, and dotage! The whole ‘Book of Ecclesiastes,’ fine as it is,
+presents a picture of selfishness and epicurism. This was the King of
+the Jews! the King of those that know! (_Il maestro di color chi
+sanno._) Solomon is a type of worldly wisdom, of desire of knowledge for
+the sake of all that knowledge can give. We imitate him when we would
+base the happiness of a people on knowledge. When we have commanded the
+sun to be our painter, and the lightning to run on our errands, what
+reward have we? Not the increase of happiness, nor the increase of
+goodness; nor—what is next to both—our faith in both.”
+
+“It would seem profane to contrast Solomon and Christ had not our
+Saviour himself placed that contrast distinctly before us. He
+consecrated the comparison by applying it—‘Behold a greater than Solomon
+is here.’ In quoting these words we do not presume to bring into
+comparison the two _natures_, but the two intellects—the two aspects of
+truth. Solomon described the external world; Christ taught the moral
+law. Solomon illustrated the aspects of nature; Christ helped the
+aspirations of the spirit. Solomon left as a legacy the saying that ‘in
+much wisdom there is much grief;’ and Christ preached to us the lowly
+wisdom which can consecrate grief; making it lead to the elevation of
+our whole being and to ultimate happiness. The two majesties—the two
+kings—how different! Not till we are old, and have suffered, and have
+laid our experience to heart, do we feel the immeasurable distance
+between the teaching of Christ and the teaching of Solomon!”
+
+Then returning to the Queen of Sheba, he treated the character as the
+type of the intellectual woman. He contrasted her rather favourably with
+Solomon. He described with picturesque felicity, her long and toilsome
+journey to see, to admire, the man whose wisdom had made him
+renowned;—the mixture of enthusiasm and humility which prompted her
+desire to learn, to prove the truth of what rumour had conveyed to her,
+to commune with him of all that was in her heart. And she returned to
+her own country rich in wise sayings. But did the final result of all
+this glory and knowledge reach her there? and did it shake her faith in
+him she had bowed to as the wisest of kings and men?
+
+He then contrasted the character of the Queen of Sheba with that of
+Mary, the mother of our Lord, that feminine type of holiness, of
+tenderness, of long-suffering; of sinless purity in womanhood, wifehood,
+and motherhood: and rising to more than usual eloquence and power, he
+prophesied the regeneration of all human communities through the social
+elevation, the intellect, the purity, and the devotion of Woman.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+V.
+
+_From a Sermon (apparently extempore) by a Dissenting Minister._
+
+
+The ascetics of the old times seem to have had a belief that all sin was
+in the body; that the spirit belonged to God, and the body to his
+adversary the devil; and that to contemn, ill-treat, and degrade by
+every means this frame of ours, so wonderfully, so fearfully, so
+exquisitely made, was to please the Being who made it; and who, for
+gracious ends, no doubt, rendered it capable of such admirable
+development of strength and beauty. Miserable mistake!
+
+To some, this body is as a prison from which we are to rejoice to escape
+by any permitted means: to others, it is as a palace to be luxuriously
+kept up and decorated within and without. But what says Paul (Cor. vi.
+19.),—“Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which
+is in you, which ye have from God, and which is not your own?”
+
+Surely not less than a temple is that form which the Divine Redeemer
+took upon him, and deigned, for a season, to inhabit; which he
+consecrated by his life, sanctified by his death, glorified by his
+transfiguration, hallowed and beautified by his resurrection!
+
+It is because they do not recognise _this_ body as a temple, built up by
+God’s intelligence, as a fitting sanctuary for the immortal Spirit, and
+_this_ life equally with any other form of life as dedicate to Him, that
+men fall into such opposite extremes of sin:—the spiritual sin which
+contemns the body, and the sensual sin which misuses it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+When I was at Boston I made the acquaintance of Father Taylor, the
+founder of the Sailors’ Home in that city. He was considered as the
+apostle of the seamen, and I was full of veneration for him as the
+enthusiastic teacher and philanthropist. But it is not of his virtues or
+his labours that I wish to speak. He struck me in another way, _as a
+poet_; he was a born poet. Until he was five-and-twenty he had never
+learned to read, and his reading afterwards was confined to such books
+as aided him in his ministry. He remained an illiterate man to the last,
+but his mind was teeming with spontaneous imagery, allusion, metaphor.
+One might almost say of him,
+
+             “He could not ope
+   His mouth, but out there flew a trope!”
+
+These images and allusions had a freshness, an originality, and
+sometimes an oddity that was quite startling, and they were generally,
+but not always, borrowed from his former profession—that of a sailor.
+
+
+One day we met him in the street. He told us in a melancholy voice that
+he had been burying a child, and alluded almost with emotion to the
+great number of infants he had buried lately. Then after a pause,
+striking his stick on the ground and looking upwards, he added, “There
+must be something wrong somewhere! there’s a storm brewing, when the
+doves are all flying aloft!”
+
+
+One evening in conversation with me, he compared the English and the
+Americans to Jacob’s vine, which, planted on one side of the wall, grew
+over it and hung its boughs and clusters on the other side,—“but it is
+still the same vine, nourished from the same root!”
+
+
+On one occasion when I attended his chapel, the sermon was preceded by a
+long prayer in behalf of an afflicted family, one of whose members had
+died or been lost in a whaling expedition to the South Seas. In the
+midst of much that was exquisitely pathetic and poetical, refined ears
+were startled by such a sentence as this,—“Grant, O Lord! that this rod
+of chastisement be sanctified, every twig of it, to the edification of
+their souls!”
+
+
+Then immediately afterwards he prayed that the Divine Comforter might be
+near the bereaved father “when his aged heart went forth from his bosom
+to flutter round the far southern grave of his boy!” Praying for others
+of the same family who were on the wide ocean, he exclaimed, stretching
+forth his arms, “O save them! O guard them! thou angel of the deep!”
+
+
+On another occasion, speaking of the insufficiency of the moral
+principles without religious feelings, he exclaimed, “Go heat your ovens
+with snowballs! What! shall I send you to heaven with such an icicle in
+your pocket? I might as well put a millstone round your neck to teach
+you to swim!”
+
+
+He was preaching against violence and cruelty:—“Don’t talk to me,” said
+he, “of the savages! a ruffian in the midst of Christendom is the savage
+of savages. He is as a man freezing in the sun’s heat, groping in the
+sun’s light, a straggler in paradise, an alien in heaven!”
+
+In his chapel all the principal seats in front of the pulpit and down
+the centre aisle were filled by the sailors. We ladies, and gentlemen,
+and strangers, whom curiosity had brought to hear him, were ranged on
+each side; he would on no account allow us to take the best places. On
+one occasion, as he was denouncing hypocrisy, luxury, and vanity, and
+other vices of more civilised life, he said emphatically, “I don’t mean
+_you_ before me here,” looking at the sailors; “I believe you are wicked
+enough, but honest fellows in some sort, for you profess less, not more,
+than you practise; but I mean to touch _starboard_ and _larboard_
+there!” stretching out both hands with the forefinger extended, and
+looking at us on either side till we quailed.
+
+
+He compared the love of God in sending Christ upon earth to that of the
+father of a seaman who sends his eldest and most beloved son, the hope
+of the family, to bring back the younger one, lost on his voyage, and
+missing when his ship returned to port.
+
+
+Alluding to the carelessness of Christians, he used the figure of a
+mariner, steering into port through a narrow dangerous channel, “false
+lights here, rocks there, shifting sand banks on one side, breakers on
+the other; and who, instead of fixing his attention to keep the head of
+his vessel right, and to obey the instructions of the pilot as he sings
+out from the wheel, throws the pilot overboard, lashes down the helm,
+and walks the deck whistling, with his hands in the pockets of his
+jacket.” Here, suiting the action to the word, he put on a true
+sailor-like look of defiant jollity;—changed in a moment to an
+expression of horror as he added, “See! See! she drifts to destruction!”
+
+
+One Sunday he attempted to give to his sailor congregation an idea of
+Redemption. He began with an eloquent description of a terrific storm at
+sea, rising to fury through all its gradations; then, amid the waves, a
+vessel is seen labouring in distress and driving on a lee shore. The
+masts bend and break, and go overboard; the sails are rent, the helm
+unshipped, they spring a leak! the vessel begins to fill, the water
+gains on them; she sinks deeper, deeper, _deeper! deeper!_ He bent over
+the pulpit repeating the last words again and again; his voice became
+low and hollow. The faces of the sailors as they gazed up at him with
+their mouths wide open, and their eyes fixed, I shall never forget.
+Suddenly stopping, and looking to the farthest end of the chapel as into
+space, he exclaimed, with a piercing cry of exultation, “A life boat! a
+life boat!” Then looking down upon his congregation, most of whom had
+sprung to their feet in an ecstasy of suspense, he said in a deep
+impressive tone, and extending his arms, “_Christ is that life boat!_”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+VII.
+
+RELIGION AND SCIENCE.
+
+
+“It is true, that science has not made Nature as expressive of God in
+the first instance, or to the beginner in religion, as it was in earlier
+times. Science reveals a rigid, immutable order; and this to common
+minds looks much like self-subsistence, and does not manifest
+intelligence, which is full of life, variety, and progressive operation.
+Men, in the days of their ignorance, saw an immediate Divinity
+accomplishing an immediate purpose, or expressing an immediate feeling,
+in every sudden, striking change of nature—in a storm, the flight of a
+bird, &c.; and Nature, thus interpreted, became the sign of a present,
+deeply interested Deity. Science undoubtedly brings vast aids, but it is
+to _prepared_ minds, to those who have begun in another school. The
+greatest aid it yields consists in the revelation it makes of the
+Infinite. It aids us not so much by showing us marks of design in this
+or that particular thing as by showing the _Infinite_ in the _finite_.
+Science does this office when it unfolds to us the unity of the
+universe, which thus becomes the sign, the efflux of one unbounded
+intelligence, when it reveals to us in every work of Nature infinite
+connections, the influences of all-pervading laws—when it shows us in
+each created thing unfathomable, unsearchable depths, to which our
+intelligence is altogether unequal. Thus Nature explored by science is a
+witness of the Infinite. It is also a witness to the same truth by its
+beauty; for what is so undefined, so mysterious as beauty?”—_Dr.
+Channing._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+PART II.
+
+Literature and Art.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Notes from Books.
+
+
+1.
+
+“A great advantage is derived from the occasional practice of reading
+together, for each person selects different beauties and starts
+different objections: while the same passage perhaps awakens in each
+mind a different train of associated ideas, or raises different images
+for the purposes of illustration.”—_Francis Horner._
+
+
+2.
+
+“C’est ainsi que je poursuis la communication de quelque esprit fameux,
+non afin qu’il m’enseigne mais afin que je le connaisse, et que le
+connaissant, s’il le faut, je l’imite.”—_Montaigne._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+DR. ARNOLD.
+
+3.
+
+I sat up till half-past two this morning reading Dr. Arnold’s “Life and
+Letters,” and have my soul full of him to-day.
+
+On the whole I cannot say that the perusal of this admirable book has
+changed any notion in my mind, or added greatly to my stock of ideas.
+There was no height of inspiration, or eloquence, or power, to which I
+looked _up_; no profound depth of thought or feeling into which I looked
+_down_; no _new_ lights; no _new_ guides; no absolutely _new_ aspects of
+things human or spiritual.
+
+On the other hand, I never read a book of the kind with a more
+harmonious sense of pleasure and _approbation_,—if the word be not from
+me presumptuous. While I read page after page, the mind which was
+unfolded before me seemed to me a brother’s mind—the spirit, a kindred
+spirit. It was the improved, the elevated, the enlarged, the enriched,
+the every-way superior reflection of my own intelligence, but it was
+certainly _that_. I felt it so from beginning to end. Exactly the
+reverse was the feeling with which I laid down the Life and Letters of
+Southey. I was instructed, amused, interested; I profited and admired;
+but with the _man_ Southey I had no sympathies: my mind stood off from
+his; the poetical intellect attracted, the material of the character
+repelled me. I liked the embroidery, but the texture was disagreeable,
+repugnant. Now with regard to Dr. Arnold, my entire sympathy with the
+character, with the _material_ of the character, did not extend to all
+its manifestations. I liked the texture better than the
+embroidery;—perhaps, because of my feminine organisation.
+
+Nor did my admiration of the intellect extend to the acceptance of _all_
+the opinions which emanated from it; perhaps because from the manner
+these were enunciated, or merely touched upon (in letters chiefly), I
+did not comprehend clearly the reasoning on which they may have been
+founded. Perhaps, if I had done so, I must have respected them more,
+perhaps have been convinced by them; so large, so candid, so rich in
+knowledge, and apparently so logical, was the mind which admitted them.
+
+And yet this excellent, admirable man, seems to have _feared_ God, in
+the common-place sense of the word fear. He considered the Jews as out
+of the pale of equality; he was against their political emancipation
+from a hatred of Judaism. He subscribed to the Athanasian Creed, which
+stuck even in George the Third’s orthodox throat. He believed in what
+Coleridge could not admit, in the existence of the spirit of evil as a
+person. He had an idea that the Church _of God_ may be destroyed by an
+Antichrist; he speaks of such a consummation as possible, as probable,
+as impending; as if any institution really from God could be destroyed
+by an adverse power!—and he thought that a lawyer could not be a
+Christian.
+
+
+4.
+
+Certain passages filled me with astonishment as coming from a churchman,
+particularly what he says of the sacraments (vol. ii. pp. 75. 113.); and
+in another place, where he speaks of “the _pestilent_ distinction
+between clergy and laity;” and where he says, “I hold that one form of
+Church government is exactly as much according to Christ’s will as
+another.” And in another place he speaks of the Anglican Church (with
+reference to Henry VIII. as its father, and Elizabeth as its
+foster-mother), as “the child of regal and aristocratical selfishness
+and unprincipled tyranny, who has never dared to speak boldly to the
+great, but has contented herself with lecturing the poor;” but he forgot
+at the moment the trial of the bishops in James’s time, and their noble
+stand against regal authority.
+
+
+5.
+
+With regard to conservatism (vol. ii. pp. 19. 62.), he seems to mean—as
+I understand the whole passage,—that it is a good _instinct_ but a bad
+_principle_. Yet as a principle is it, as he says, “always wrong?”
+Though as the adversary of progress, it must be always wrong, yet as the
+adversary of change it _may_ be sometimes right.
+
+
+6.
+
+He remarks that most of those who are above sectarianism are in general
+indifferent to Christianity, while almost all who profess to value
+Christianity seem, when they are brought to the test, to care only for
+their own sect. “Now,” he adds, “it is manifest to me, that all our
+education must be Christian, and not be sectarian.” Yet the whole aim of
+education up to this time has been, in this country, eminently
+sectarian, and every statesman who has attempted to place it on a
+broader basis has been either wrecked or stranded.
+
+“All sects,” he says in another place, “have had among them marks of
+Christ’s Catholic Church in the graces of his Spirit and the confession
+of his name,” and he seems to wish that some one would compile a book
+showing side by side what professors of all sects have done for the good
+of Christ’s Church,—the martyrdoms, the missionary labours of
+Catholics, Protestants, Arians, &c.; “a grand field,” he calls it,—and
+so it were; but it lies fallow up to this time.
+
+
+7.
+
+“the philosophy of medicine, I imagine, is at zero; our practice is
+empirical, and seems hardly more than a course of guessing, more or less
+happy.” In another place (vol. ii. p. 72.), he says, “yet I honour
+medicine as the most beneficent of all professions.”
+
+
+8.
+
+He says (vol. ii. p. 42.), “Narrow-mindedness tends to wickedness,
+because it does not extend its watchfulness to every part of our moral
+nature.” “Thus, a man may have one or more virtues, such as are
+according to his favourite ideas, in great perfection; and still be
+nothing, because these ideas are his idols, and, worshipping them with
+all his heart, there is a portion of his heart, more or less
+considerable, left without its proper object, guide, and nourishment;
+and so this portion is left to the dominion of evil,” &c.
+
+(One might ask _how_, if a man worship these ideas with _all_ his heart,
+a portion could be left? but the sense is so excellent, I cannot quarrel
+with a slight inaccuracy in the expression. I never quite understood
+before why it is difficult to subscribe to the truth of the phrase “He
+is a good but a narrow-minded man,” but _felt_ the incompatibility.)
+
+
+9.
+
+He says “the word _useful_ implies the idea of good robbed of its
+nobleness.” Is this true? the _useful_ is the _good_ applied to
+practical purposes; it need not, therefore, be less noble. The nobleness
+lies in the spirit in which it is so applied.
+
+
+10.
+
+Benthamism (what _is_ it?), Puritanism, Judaism, how he hates them! I
+suppose, because he _fears_ God and _fears_ for the Church of God.
+Hatred of all kinds seems to originate in fear.
+
+
+11.
+
+What he says of conscience, very remarkable!
+
+“Men get embarrassed by the common cases of a misguided conscience: but
+a compass may be out of order as well as a conscience; and you can trace
+the deranging influence on the latter quite as surely as on the former.
+The needle may point due south if you hold a powerful magnet in that
+direction; still the compass, generally speaking, is a true and sure
+guide,” &c.; and then he adds, “he who believes his conscience to be
+God’s law, by obeying it obeys God.”
+
+I think there would be much to say about all this passage relating to
+conscience, nor am I sure that I quite understand it. Derangement of the
+intellect is madness; is not derangement of the conscience also madness?
+might it not be induced, as we bring on a morbid state of the other
+faculties, by over use and abuse? by giving it more than its due share
+of power in the commonwealth of the mind? It should preside, not
+tyrannise; rule, not exercise a petty cramping despotism. A healthy
+courageous conscience gives to the powers, instincts, impulses, fair
+play; and having once settled the order of government with a strong
+hand, is not always meddling though always watchful.
+
+Then again, how is conscience “God’s law?” Conscience is not the law,
+but the interpreter of the law; it does not teach the difference between
+right and wrong, it only impels us to do what we believe to be right,
+and smites us when we _think_ we have been wrong. How is it that many
+have done wrong, and every day do wrong for conscience’ sake?—and does
+that sanctify the wrong in the eyes of God, as well as in those of John
+Huss?[1]
+
+
+12.
+
+“Prayer,” he says, “and kindly intercourse with the poor, are the two
+great safeguards of spiritual life—its more than food and raiment.”
+
+True; but there is something higher than this fed and clothed spiritual
+life; something more difficult, yet less conscious.
+
+
+13.
+
+In allusion to Coleridge, he says very truly, that the power of
+contemplation becomes diseased and perverted when it is the main
+employment of life. But to the same great intellect he does beautiful
+justice in another passage. “Coleridge seemed to me to love truth
+really, and, therefore, truth presented herself to him, not negatively,
+as she does to many minds, who can see that the objections against her
+are unfounded, and therefore that she is to be received; but she filled
+him, as it were, heart and mind, imbuing him with her very self, so that
+all his being comprehended her fully, and loved her ardently; and that
+seems to me to be true wisdom.”
+
+
+14.
+
+Very fine is a passage wherein he speaks against meeting what is wrong
+and bad with negatives, with merely proving the wrong to be wrong, and
+the false to be false, without substituting for either the positively
+good and true.
+
+
+15.
+
+He contrasts as the two forms of the present danger to the Church and to
+society, the prevalent epicurean atheism, and the lying and formal
+spirit of priestcraft. He seems to have had an impression that the
+Church of God may be “utterly destroyed”(?), or, he asks, “must we look
+forward for centuries to come to the mere alternations of infidelity and
+superstition, scepticism, and Newmanism?” It is very curious to see two
+such men as Arnold and Carlyle both overwhelmed with a terror of the
+magnitude of the mischiefs they see impending over us. They are
+oppressed with the anticipation of evil as with a sense of personal
+calamity. Something alike, perhaps, in the temperaments of these two
+extraordinary men;—large conscientiousness, large destructiveness, and
+small hope: there was great mutual sympathy and admiration.
+
+
+16.
+
+Very admirable what he says in favour of comprehensive reading, against
+exclusive reading in one line of study. He says, “Preserve proportion in
+your reading, keep your view of men and things extensive, and depend
+upon it a mixed knowledge is not a superficial one; as far as it goes
+the views that it gives are true; but he who reads deeply in one class
+of writers only, gets views which are almost sure to be perverted, and
+which are not only _narrow but false_.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+17.
+
+All his descriptions of natural scenery and beauty show his intense
+sensibility to them, but nowhere is there a trace of the love or the
+comprehension of art, as the reflection from the mind of man of the
+nature and the beauty he so loved. Thus, after dwelling on a scene of
+exquisite natural beauty, he says, “Much more beautiful, because made
+truly after God’s own image, are the forms and colours of kind, and
+wise, and holy thoughts, words, and actions;” that is to say—although he
+knew not or made not the application—ART, in the high sense of the word,
+for that is the embodying in beautiful hues and forms, what is kind,
+wise, and holy; in one word—_good_. In fact, he says himself, art,
+physical science, and natural history, were not included within the
+reach of his mind; the first for want of taste, the second for want of
+time, and the third for want of inclination.
+
+
+18.
+
+He says, “The whole subject of the brute creation is to me one of such
+painful mystery, that I dare not approach it.” This is very striking
+from such a man. How deep, consciously or unconsciously, does this
+feeling lie in many minds!
+
+Bayle had already termed the acts, motives, and feelings of the lower
+order of animals, “un des plus profonds abîmes sur quoi notre raison
+peut s’exerciser.”
+
+There is nothing, as I have sometimes thought, in which men so blindly
+sin as in their appreciation and treatment of the whole lower order of
+creatures. It is affirmed that love and mercy towards animals are not
+inculcated by any direct precept of Christianity, but surely they are
+included in its spirit; yet it has been remarked that cruelty towards
+animals is far more common in Western Christendom than in the East. With
+the Mahometan and Brahminical races humanity to animals, and the
+sacredness of life in all its forms, is much more of a religious
+principle than among ourselves.
+
+Bacon, in his “Advancement of Learning,” does not think it beneath his
+philosophy to point out as a part of human morals, and a condition of
+human improvement, justice and mercy to the lower animals—“the extension
+of a noble and excellent principle of compassion to the creatures
+subject to man.” “The Turks,” he says, “though a cruel and sanguinary
+nation both in descent and discipline, give alms to brutes, and suffer
+them not to be tortured.”
+
+It should seem as if the primitive Christians, by laying so much stress
+upon a future life in contradistinction to this life, and placing the
+lower creatures out of the pale of hope, placed them at the same time
+out of the pale of sympathy, and thus laid the foundation for this utter
+disregard of animals in the light of our fellow creatures. The
+definition of virtue among the early Christians was the same as
+Paley’s—that it was good performed for the sake of ensuring everlasting
+happiness—which of course excluded all the so-called brute creatures.
+Kind, loving, submissive, conscientious, much enduring, we know them to
+be; but because we deprive them of all stake in the future, because they
+have no selfish calculated aim, these are not virtues; yet if we say “a
+_vicious_ horse,” why not say a _virtuous_ horse?
+
+The following passage, bearing curiously enough on the most abstruse
+part of the question, I found in Hallam’s Literature of the Middle
+Ages:—“Few,” he says, “at present, who believe in the immateriality of
+the human soul, would deny the same to an elephant; but it must be owned
+that the discoveries of zoology have pushed this to consequences which
+some might not readily adopt. The spiritual being of a sponge revolts a
+little our prejudices; yet there is no resting-place, and we must admit
+this, or be content to sink ourselves into a mass of medullary fibre.
+Brutes have been as slowly emancipated in philosophy as some classes of
+mankind have been in civil polity; their souls, we see, were almost
+universally disputed to them at the end of the seventeenth century, even
+by those who did not absolutely bring them down to machinery. Even
+within the recollection of many, it was common to deny them any kind of
+reasoning faculty, and to solve their most sagacious actions by the
+vague word instinct. We have come of late years to think better of our
+humble companions; and, as usual in similar cases, the preponderant bias
+seems rather too much of a levelling character.”
+
+When natural philosophers speak of “the higher reason and more limited
+instincts of man,” as compared with animals, do they mean savage man or
+cultivated man? In the savage man the instincts have a power, a range, a
+certitude, like those of animals. As the mental faculties become
+expanded and refined the instincts become subordinate. In tame animals
+are the instincts as strong as in wild animals? Can we not, by a process
+of training, substitute an entirely different set of motives and habits?
+
+Why, in managing animals, do men in general make brutes of themselves to
+address what is most _brute_ in the lower creature, as if it had not
+been demonstrated that in using our higher faculties, our reason and
+benevolence, we develop sympathetically higher powers in _them_, and in
+subduing them through what is best within us, raise them and bring them
+nearer to ourselves?
+
+In general the more we can gather of facts, the nearer we are to the
+elucidation of theoretic truth. But with regard to animals, the
+multiplication of facts only increases our difficulties and puts us to
+confusion.
+
+“Can we otherwise explain animal instincts than by supposing that the
+Deity himself is virtually the active and present moving principle
+within them? If we deny them _soul_, we must admit that they have some
+spirit direct from God, what we call _unerring_ instinct, which holds
+the place of it.” This is the opinion which Newton adopts. Then are we
+to infer that the reason of man removes him further from God than the
+animals, since we cannot offend God in our instincts, only in our
+reason? and that the superiority of the human animal lies in the power
+of sinning? Terrible power! terrible privilege! out of which we deduce
+the law of progress and the necessity for a future life.
+
+The following passage bearing on the subject is from Bentham:—
+
+“The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those
+rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand
+of tyranny. It may come one day to be recognised that the number of
+legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the _os sacrum_,
+are reasons insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice
+of a tormentor. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line?
+is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But
+a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational as well
+as a more conversable animal than an infant of a day, a week, or even a
+month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The
+question is not, ‘can they reason?’ nor ‘can they speak?’ but ‘can they
+suffer?’”
+
+I do not remember ever to have heard the kind and just treatment of
+animals enforced upon Christian principles or made the subject of a
+sermon.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+19.
+
+Once, when I was at Vienna, there was a dread of hydrophobia, and orders
+were given to massacre all the dogs which were found unclaimed or
+uncollared in the city or suburbs. Men were employed for this purpose,
+and they generally carried a short heavy stick, which they flung at the
+poor proscribed animal with such certain aim as either to kill or maim
+it mortally at one blow. It happened one day that, close to the edge of
+the river, near the Ferdinand’s-Brücke, one of these men flung his stick
+at a wretched dog, but with such bad aim that it fell into the river.
+The poor animal, following his instinct or his teaching, immediately
+plunged in, redeemed the stick, and laid it down at the feet of its
+owner, who, snatching it up, dashed out the creature’s brains.
+
+I wonder what the Athenians would have done to such a man? they who
+banished the judge of the Areopagus because he flung away the bird which
+had sought shelter in his bosom?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+20.
+
+I return to Dr. Arnold. He laments the neglect of our cathedrals and the
+absurd confusion in so many men’s minds “between what is really Popery,
+and what is but wisdom and beauty adopted by the Roman Catholics and
+neglected by us.”
+
+
+21.
+
+He says, “Then, only, can opportunities of evil be taken from us, when
+we lose also all opportunity of doing or becoming good.” An obvious,
+even common place thought, well and tersely expressed. The inextricable
+co-relation and apparent antagonism of good and evil were never more
+strongly put.
+
+
+22.
+
+The defeat of Varus by the Germans, and the defeat of the moors by
+Charles Martel, he ranked as the two most important battles in the
+history of the world. I see why. The first, because it decided whether
+the north of Europe was to be completely Latinised; the second, because
+it decided whether all Europe was to be completely Mahomedanised.
+
+
+23.
+
+“How can he who labours hard for his daily bread—hardly and with
+doubtful success—be made wise and good, and therefore how can he be made
+happy? This question undoubtedly the Church was meant to solve; for
+Christ’s kingdom was to undo the evil of Adam’s sin; but the Church has
+not solved it nor attempted to do so, and no one else has gone about it
+rightly. How shall the poor man find time to be educated?”
+
+This question, which “the Church has not yet solved,” men have now set
+their wits to solve for themselves.
+
+
+24.
+
+When in Italy he writes:—“It is almost awful to look at the beauty which
+surrounds me and then think of moral evil. It seems as if heaven and
+hell, instead of being separated by a great gulf from us and from each
+other, were close at hand and on each other’s confines.”
+
+“Might but the sense of moral evil be as strong in me as is my delight
+in external beauty!”
+
+A prayer I echo, Amen! if by the _sense_ he mean the abhorrence of it;
+otherwise, to be perpetually haunted with the perception of moral evil
+were dreadful; yet, on the other hand, I am half ashamed sometimes of a
+conscious shrinking within myself from the sense of moral evil, merely
+as I should shrink from external filth and deformity, as hateful to
+perception and recollection, rather than as hateful to God and
+subversive of goodness.
+
+
+25.
+
+Here is a very striking passage. He says, “A great school is very
+trying; it never can present images of rest and peace; and when the
+spring and activity of youth are altogether unsanctified by anything
+pure and elevated in its desires, it becomes a spectacle that is
+dizzying and almost more morally distressing than the shouts and gambols
+of a set of lunatics. It is very startling to see so much of sin
+combined with so little of sorrow. In a parish, amongst the poor,
+whatever of sin exists there is sure also to be enough of suffering:
+poverty, sickness, and old age are mighty tamers and chastisers. But,
+with boys of the richer classes, one sees nothing but plenty, health,
+and youth; and these are really awful to behold, when one must feel that
+they are unblessed. On the other hand, few things are more beautiful
+than when one does see all holy and noble thoughts and principles, not
+the forced growth of pain, or infirmity, or privation, but springing up
+as by God’s immediate planting, in a sort of garden of all that is fresh
+and beautiful; full of so much hope for this world as well as for
+heaven.”
+
+To this testimony of a schoolmaster let us add the testimony of a
+schoolboy. De Quincey thus describes in himself the transition from
+boyhood to manhood: “Then first and suddenly were brought powerfully
+before me the change which was worked in the aspects of society by the
+presence of woman; woman, pure, thoughtful, noble, coming before me as
+Pandora crowned with perfections. Right over against this ennobling
+spectacle, with equal suddenness, I placed the odious spectacle of
+schoolboy society—no matter in what region of the earth,—schoolboy
+society, so frivolous in the matter of its disputes, often so brutal in
+the manner; so childish and yet so remote from simplicity; so foolishly
+careless, and yet so revoltingly selfish; dedicated ostensibly to
+learning, and yet beyond any section of human beings so conspicuously
+ignorant.”
+
+There is a reverse to this picture, as I hope and believe. If I have met
+with those who looked back on their school-days with horror, as having
+first contaminated them with “evil communication,” I have met with
+others whose remembrances were all of sunshine, of early friendships, of
+joyous sports.
+
+Nor do I think that a large school composed wholly of girls is in any
+respect better. In the low languid tone of mind, the petulant tempers,
+the small spitefulnesses, the cowardly concealments, the compressed or
+ill-directed energies, the precocious vanities and affectations, many
+such congregations of _Femmelettes_ would form a worthy pendant to the
+picture of boyish turbulence and vulgarity drawn by De Quincey.
+
+I am convinced from my own recollections, and from all I have learned
+from experienced teachers in large schools, that one of the most fatal
+mistakes in the training of children has been the too early separation
+of the sexes. I say, _has been_, because I find that everywhere this
+most dangerous prejudice has been giving way before the light of truth
+and a more general acquaintance with that primal law of nature, which
+ought to teach us that the more we can assimilate on a large scale the
+public to the domestic training, the better for all. There exists still,
+the impression—in the higher classes especially—that in early education,
+the mixture of the two sexes would tend to make the girls masculine and
+the boys effeminate, but experience shows us that it is all the other
+way. Boys learn a manly and protecting tenderness, and the girls become
+at once more feminine and more truthful. Where this association has
+begun early enough, that is, before five years old, and has been
+continued till about ten or twelve, it has uniformly worked well; on
+this point the evidence is unanimous and decisive. So long ago as 1812,
+Francis Horner, in describing a school he visited at Enmore, near
+Bridgewater, speaks with approbation of the boys and the girls standing
+up together in the same class: it is the first mention, I find, of this
+innovation on the old collegiate, or charity-school plan,—itself a
+continuation of the monkish discipline. He says, “I liked much the
+placing the boys and girls together at an early age; it gave the boys a
+new spur to emulation.” When I have seen a class of girls stand up
+together, there has been a sort of empty tittering, a vacancy in the
+faces, an inertness, which made it, as I thought, very up-hill work for
+the teacher; so when it was a class of boys, there has been often a
+sluggishness—a tendency to ruffian tricks—requiring perpetual effort on
+the part of the master. In teaching a class of boys and girls,
+accustomed to stand up together, there is little or nothing of this.
+They are brighter, readier, better behaved; there is a kind of mutual
+influence working for good; and if there be emulation, it is not mingled
+with envy or jealousy. Mischief, such as might be apprehended, is in
+this case far less likely to arise than where boys and girls, habitually
+separated from infancy, are first thrown together, just at the age when
+the feelings are first awakened and the association has all the
+excitement of novelty. A very intelligent schoolmaster assured me that
+he had had more trouble with a class of fifty boys, than with a school
+of three hundred boys and girls together (in the midst of whom I found
+him); and that there were no inconveniences resulting which a wise and
+careful and efficient superintendence could not control. “There is,”
+said he, “not only more emulation, more quickness of brain, but
+altogether a superior healthiness of tone, body and mind, where the boys
+and girls are trained together till about ten years old; and it extends
+into their after life:—I should say because it is in accordance with the
+laws of God in forming us with mutual sympathies, moral and
+intellectual, and mutual dependence for help from the very beginning of
+life.”
+
+What is curious enough, I find many people—fathers, mothers,
+teachers,—who are agreed that in the schools for the lower classes, the
+two sexes may be safely and advantageously associated, yet have a sort
+of horror of the idea of such an innovation in schools for the higher
+classes. One would like to know the reason for such a distinction,
+instead of being encountered, as is usual, by a sneer or a vile
+innuendo.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+NIEBUHR.
+
+LIFE AND LETTERS, 1852.
+
+26.
+
+In a letter to a young student in philology there are noble passages in
+which I truly sympathise. He says, among other things: “I wish you had
+less pleasure in satires, not excepting those of Horace. Turn to the
+works which elevate the heart, in which you contemplate great men and
+great events, and live in a higher world. Turn away from those which
+represent the mean and contemptible side of ordinary circumstances and
+degenerate days: they are not suitable for the young, who in ancient
+times would not have been suffered to have them in their hands. Homer,
+Æschylus, Sophocles, Pindar,—these are the poets for youth.” And again:
+“Do not read the ancient authors in order to make æsthetic reflections
+on them, but in order to drink in their spirit and to fill your soul
+with their thoughts; and in order to gain that by reading which you
+would have gained by reverently listening to the discourses of great
+men.”
+
+We should turn to works of art with the same feeling.
+
+On the whole, all my own educational experience has shown me the
+dangerous—in some cases fatal—effects on the childish intellect, where
+precocious criticism was encouraged, and where caricatures and ugly
+disproportioned figures, expressing vile or ridiculous emotions, were
+placed before the eyes of children, as a means of amusement.
+
+If I were a legislator I would forbid travesties and ridiculous
+burlesques of Shakspeare’s finest and most serious dramas to be acted
+in our theatres. That this has been done and recently (as in the case of
+the Merchant of Venice) seems to me a national disgrace.
+
+
+27.
+
+It is strange, confounding, to hear Niebuhr speak thus of Goethe:—
+
+“I am inclined to think that Goethe is utterly destitute of
+susceptibility to impressions from the fine arts.”(!!) He afterwards
+does more justice to Goethe—certainly one of the profoundest critics in
+art who ever lived; although I am inclined to think that his was an
+educated perception rather than a natural sensibility. Niebuhr’s
+criticism on Goethe’s Italian travels,—on Goethe’s want of sympathy with
+the people,—his regarding the whole country and nation simply as a sort
+of bazaar of art and antiquities, an exhibition of beauty and a
+recreation for himself: his habit of surveying all moral and
+intellectual greatness, all that speaks to the heart, with a kind of
+patronising superiority, as if created for his use,—and finding
+amusement in the folly, degeneracy, and corruption of the people;—all
+this appears to me admirable, and so far I had strong sympathy with
+Niebuhr; for I well remember that in reading Goethe’s “Italianische
+Reise,” I had the same perception of the artless and the superficial in
+point of feeling, in the midst of so much that was fine and valuable in
+criticism. It is well to be artistic in art, but not to walk about the
+world _en artiste_, studying humanity, and the deepest human interests,
+as if they were _art_.
+
+Niebuhr afterwards says, in speaking of Rome, “I am sickened here of
+art, as I should be of sweetmeats instead of bread.” So it _must_ be
+where art is separated wholly from morals.
+
+
+28.
+
+He speaks of the “wretched superstition,” and the “utter incapacity for
+piety” in the people of the Roman States.
+
+Superstition and the want of piety go together; and the combination is
+not peculiar to the Italians, nor to the Roman Catholic faith.
+
+
+29.
+
+In speaking of the education of his son, he deprecates the learning by
+rote of hymns. “To a happy child, hymns deploring the misery of human
+life are without meaning.” (And worse.) “So likewise to a good child are
+those expressing self-accusation and contrition.” (He might have added,
+and self-applause.)
+
+I am quite sure, from my own experience of children who have been
+allowed to learn penitential psalms and hymns, that they think of
+wickedness as a sort of thing which gives them self-importance.
+
+
+30.
+
+“Only what the mind takes in willingly can it assimilate with itself,
+and make its own, part of its life.”
+
+A truism of the greatest value in education; but who thinks of it when
+cramming children’s minds with all sorts of distasteful heterogeneous
+things?
+
+
+31.
+
+“When reflection has become too one-sided and too domineering over a
+deeply feeling heart, it is apt to lead us into errors in our treatment
+of others.”
+
+And all that follows—very wise! for the want of this reflection leaves
+us stranded and wrecked through feeling and perception merely.
+
+
+32.
+
+Very curious and interesting, as a trait of character and feeling, is
+the passage in which he represents himself, in the dangerous confinement
+of his second wife, as praying to his first wife for succour. “In my
+terrible anxiety,” he says, “I prayed most earnestly, and entreated my
+Milly, too, for help. I comforted Gretchen by telling her that Milly
+would send help. When she was at the worst, she sighed out, ‘Ah, cannot
+your Amelia send me a blessing?’”
+
+This is curious from a Protestant and a philosopher. It shows that there
+may be something nearly allied to our common nature in the Roman
+Catholic invocation to the saints, and to the souls of the dead.
+
+
+33.
+
+Niebuhr, speaking of a lady (Madame von der Recke, I think,—the “Elise”
+of Goethe) who had patronised him, says, “I will receive roses and
+myrtles from female hands, but no laurels.”
+
+This makes one smile; for most of the laurels which Niebuhr will receive
+in this country will be through female hands—through the admirable
+translation and arrangement of his life and letters by Susanna
+Winkworth.
+
+
+34.
+
+The following I read with cordial agreement:—“While I am ready to adopt
+any well-grounded opinion” (regarding, I suppose, mere facts, or
+speculations as to things), “my inmost soul revolts against receiving
+the judgment of others respecting persons; and whenever I have done so I
+have bitterly repented of it.”
+
+
+35.
+
+He says, “I cannot worship the abstraction of Virtue. She only charms me
+when she addresses herself to my heart, and speaks thus the love from
+which she springs. I really love nothing but what actually exists.”
+
+What _does_ actually exist to us but that which we believe in? and where
+we strongly love do we not believe sometimes in the _unreal_? is it not
+_then_ the existing and the actual to us?
+
+
+36.
+
+“A faculty of a quite peculiar kind, and for which we have no word, is
+the recognition of the incomprehensible. It is something which
+distinguishes the seer from the ordinary learned man.”
+
+But in religion this is _faith_. Does Niebuhr admit this kind of faith,
+“the recognition of the incomprehensible,” in philosophy, and not in
+religion? for he often complains of the want in himself of any faith but
+an historic faith.
+
+
+37.
+
+“In times of good fortune it is easy to appear great—nay, even to act
+greatly; but in misfortune very difficult. The greatest man will commit
+blunders in misfortune, because the want of proportion between his means
+and his ends progressively increases, and his inward strength is
+exhausted in fruitless efforts.”
+
+This is true; but under all extremes of good or evil fortune we are apt
+to commit mistakes, because the tide of the mind does not flow equally,
+but rushes along impetuously in a flood, or brokenly and distractedly in
+a rocky channel, where its strength is exhausted in conflict and pain.
+The extreme pressure of circumstances will produce extremes of feeling
+in minds of a sensitive rather than a firm cast.
+
+
+38.
+
+This next passage is curious as a scholar’s opinion of “free trade” in
+the year 1810; though I believe the phrase “free trade” was not even
+invented at that time—certainly not in use in the statesman’s
+vocabulary.
+
+“I presume you will admit that commerce is a good thing, and the first
+requisite in the life of any nation. It appears to me, that this much
+has now been palpably demonstrated, namely, that an advanced and
+complicated social condition like this in which we live can only be
+maintained by establishing mutual relationships between the most remote
+nations; and that the limitation of commerce would, like the sapping of
+a main pillar, inevitably occasion the fall of the whole edifice; and
+also that commerce is so essentially beneficial and in accordance with
+man’s nature, that the well-being of each nation is an advantage to all
+the nations that stand in connection with it.”
+
+It is strange how long we have been (forty years, and more) in
+recognising these simple principles; and in Germany, where they were
+first enunciated, they are not recognised yet.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CHARACTER OF DEMADES.
+
+(FROM NIEBUHR’s LECTURES.)
+
+
+39.
+
+“By his wit and his talent, and more especially by his gift as an
+improvisatore, he rose so high that he exercised a great influence upon
+the people, and sometimes was more popular even than Demosthenes. With a
+shamelessness amounting to honesty, he bluntly told the people
+everything he felt and what all the populace felt with him. When hearing
+such a man the populace felt at their ease: he gave them the feeling
+that they might be wicked without being disgraced, and this excites with
+such people a feeling of gratitude. There is a remarkable passage in
+Plato, where he shows that those who deliver hollow speeches, without
+being in earnest, have no power or influence; whereas others, who are
+devoid of mental culture, but say in a straightforward manner what they
+think and feel, exercise great power. It was this which in the
+eighteenth century gave the materialist philosophy in France such
+enormous influence with the higher classes; for they were told there was
+no need to be ashamed of the vulgarest sensuality; formerly people had
+been ashamed, but now a man learned that he might be a brutal
+sensualist, provided he did not offend against elegant manners and
+social conventionalism. People rejoiced at hearing a man openly and
+honestly say what they themselves felt. Demades was a remarkable
+character. He was not a bad man; and I like him much better than
+Eschines.”
+
+What an excuse, what a sanction is here for the demagogues who direct
+the worst passions of men to the worst and the most selfish purposes,
+and the most debasing consequences! Demades “not a bad man?” then what
+_is_ a bad man?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+LORD BACON.
+
+(1849.)
+
+
+40.
+
+“It was not the pure knowledge of nature and universality, but it was
+the proud knowledge of good and evil, with an intent in man to give the
+law unto himself, which was the form of the first temptation.”
+
+But, in this sense, the first temptation is only the type of the
+perpetual and ever-present temptation—the temptation into which we are
+to fall through necessity, that we may rise through love.
+
+
+41.
+
+Here is an excellent passage—a severe commentary on the unsound,
+un-christian, unphilosophical distinction between morals and politics in
+government:—
+
+“Although men bred in learning are perhaps to seek in points of
+convenience and reasons of state and accommodations for the present,
+yet, on the other hand, to recompense this they are perfect in those
+same plain grounds of religion, justice, honour, and moral virtue which,
+if they be well and watchfully pursued, there will be seldom use of
+those other expedients, no more than of physic in a sound, well-directed
+body.”
+
+
+42.
+
+“Now (in the time of Lord Bacon, that is,) now sciences are delivered to
+be believed and accepted, and not to be farther discovered; and
+therefore, sciences stand at a clog, and have done for many ages.”
+
+In the present time, this is true only, or especially, of theology as an
+art, and divinity as a science; so made by the schoolmen of former ages,
+and not yet emancipated.
+
+
+43.
+
+“Generally he perceived in men of devout simplicity this opinion, that
+the secrets of nature were the secrets of God, part of that glory into
+which man is not to press too boldly.”
+
+God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given
+us on this side of the grave. But not the less will he keep his own
+secrets from us. Has he not proved it? who has opened that door to the
+knowledge of a future being which it has pleased him to keep shut fast,
+though watched by hope and by faith?
+
+
+44.
+
+The Christian philosophy of these latter times appears to be
+foreshadowed in the following sentence, where he speaks of such as have
+ventured to deduce and confirm the truth of the Christian religion from
+the principles and authorities of philosophers: “Thus with great pomp
+and solemnity celebrating the intermarriage of faith and sense as a
+lawful conjunction, and soothing the minds of men with a pleasing
+variety of matter, though, at the same time, rashly and unequally
+intermixing things divine and things human.”
+
+This last common-place distinction seems to me, however, unworthy of
+Bacon. It should be banished—utterly set aside. Things which are divine
+should be human, and things which are human, divine; not as a mixture,
+“a medley,” in the sense of Bacon’s words, but an interfusion; for
+nothing that we esteem divine can be anything to us but as we make it
+_ours_, _i. e._ humanise it; and our humanity were a poor thing but for
+“the divinity that stirs within us.” We do injury to our own nature—we
+misconceive our relations to the Creator, to his universe, and to each
+other, so long as we separate and studiously keep wide apart the
+_divine_ and the _human_.
+
+
+45.
+
+“Let no man, upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied
+moderation, think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too
+well studied either in the book of God’s word or the book of God’s
+works.” Well advised! But then he goes on to warn men that they do not
+“unwisely mingle or confound their learnings together:” mischievous this
+contradistinction between God’s word and God’s works; since both, if
+emanating from him, must be equally true. And if there be one truth,
+then, to borrow his own words in another place, “the voice of nature
+will consent, whether the voice of man do so or not.”
+
+
+46.
+
+Apropos to education—here is a good illustration: “Were it not better
+for a man in a fair room to set up one great light or branching
+candlestick of lights, than to go about with a rushlight into every dark
+corner?”
+
+And here is another: “It is one thing to set forth what ground lieth
+unmanured, and another to correct ill husbandry in that which _is_
+manured.”
+
+47.
+
+“It is without all controversy that learning doth make the minds of men
+gentle and generous, amiable, and pliant to government, whereas
+ignorance maketh them churlish, thwarting, and mutinous.”
+
+
+48.
+
+“An impatience of doubt and an unadvised haste to assertion without due
+and mature suspension of the judgment, is an error in the conduct of the
+understanding.”
+
+“In contemplation, if a man begin with certainties he shall end in
+doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in
+certainties.” Well said and profoundly true.
+
+This is a celebrated and often-cited passage; an admitted principle in
+theory. I wish it were oftener applied in practice,—more especially in
+education. For it seems to me that in teaching children we ought not to
+be perpetually dogmatising. We ought not to be ever placing before them
+only the known and the definite; but to allow the unknown, the
+uncertain, the indefinite, to be suggested to their minds: it would do
+more for the growth of a truly religious feeling than all the catechisms
+of scientific facts and creeds of theological definitions that ever were
+taught in cut and dried question and answer. Why should not the young
+candid mind be allowed to reflect on the unknown, as such? on the
+doubtful, as such—open to inquiry and liable to discussion? Why will
+teachers suppose that in confessing their own ignorance or admitting
+uncertainties they must diminish the respect of their pupils, or their
+faith in truth? I should say from my own experience that the effect is
+just the reverse. I remember, when a child, hearing a very celebrated
+man profess his ignorance on some particular subject, and I felt
+awe-struck—it gave me a perception of the infinite,—as when looking up
+at the starry sky. What we unadvisedly cram into a child’s mind in the
+same form it has taken in our own, does not always healthily or
+immediately assimilate; it dissolves away in doubts, or it hardens into
+prejudice, instead of mingling with the life as truth ought to do. It is
+the early and habitual surrendering of the mind to authority, which
+makes it afterwards so ready for deception of all kinds.
+
+
+49.
+
+He speaks of “legends and narrations of miracles wrought by martyrs,
+hermits, monks, which, though they have had passage for a time by the
+ignorance of the people, the superstitious simplicity of some, and the
+politic toleration of others, holding them but as divine poesies; yet
+after a time they grew up to be esteemed but as old wives’ fables, to
+the great scandal and detriment of religion.”
+
+Very ambiguous, surely. Does he mean that it was to the great scandal
+and detriment of religion that they existed at all? or that they came to
+be regarded as old wives’ fables?
+
+
+50.
+
+He says, farther on, “though truth and error are carefully to be
+separated, yet rarities and reports that seem incredible are not to be
+suppressed or denied to the memory of men.”
+
+“For it is not yet known in what cases and how far effects attributed to
+superstition do participate of natural causes.”
+
+
+51.
+
+“To be speculative with another man to the end to know how to work him
+or wind him, proceedeth from a heart that is double and cloven, and not
+entire and ingenuous; which, as in friendship, it is a want of
+_integrity_, so towards princes or superiors it is a want of _duty_.”
+(No occasion, surely, for the distinction here drawn; inasmuch as the
+want of integrity involves the want of _every_ duty.)
+
+Then he speaks of “the stooping to points of necessity and convenience
+and outward basenesses,” as to be accounted “submission to the occasion,
+not to the person.” Vile distinction! an excuse to himself for his
+dedication to the King, and his flattery of Carr and Villiers.
+
+
+52.
+
+Our English Universities are only now beginning to show some sign
+(reluctant sign) of submitting to that re-examination which the great
+philosopher recommended two hundred and fifty years ago, when he says:
+“Inasmuch as most of the usages and orders of the universities were
+derived from more obscure times, it is the more requisite they be
+reexamined”—and more to the same purpose.
+
+
+53.
+
+“If that great Workmaster (God) had been of a human disposition, he
+would have cast the stars into some pleasant and beautiful works and
+orders like the frets in the roofs of houses; whereas, one can scarce
+find a posture in square or triangle or straight line amongst such an
+infinite number, so differing an harmony there is between the spirit of
+man and the spirit of nature.”
+
+Perhaps if our human vision could be removed to a sufficient distance to
+contemplate the whole of what we now see in part, what appears disorder
+might appear beautiful order. The stars which now appear as if flung
+about at random, would perhaps be resolved into some exquisitely
+beautiful and regular edifice. The fly on the cornice, “whose feeble ray
+scarce spreads an inch around,” might as well discuss the proportions of
+the Parthenon as we the true figure and frame of God’s universe.
+
+I remember seeing, through Lord Rosse’s telescope, one of those nebulæ
+which have hitherto appeared like small masses of vapour floating about
+in space. I saw it composed of thousands upon thousands of brilliant
+stars, and the effect to the eye—to mine at least—was as if I had had my
+hand full of diamonds, and suddenly unclosing it, and flinging them
+forth, they were dispersed as from a centre, in a kind of partly
+irregular, partly fan-like form; and I had a strange feeling of suspense
+and amazement while I looked, because they did not change their relative
+position, did not fall—though in act to fall—but seemed fixed in the
+very attitude of being flung forth into space;—it was most wondrous and
+beautiful to see!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+54.
+
+It is pleasant to me to think that Bacon’s stupendous intellect believed
+in the moral progress of human societies, because it is my own belief,
+and one that I would not for worlds resign. I indeed believe that each
+human being must here (or hereafter?) work out his own peculiar moral
+life: but also that the whole race has a progressive moral life: just as
+in our solar system every individual planet moves in its own orbit,
+while the whole system moves on together; we know not whither, we know
+not round what centre—“_ma pur si muove!_”
+
+
+55.
+
+Yet he says in another place, with equal wit and sublimity, “Every
+obtaining of a desire hath a _show_ of advancement, as motion in a
+circle hath a _show_ of progression.” Perhaps our movement may be
+_spiral_? and every revolution may bring us nearer and nearer to some
+divine centre in which we may be absorbed at last?
+
+
+56.
+
+He refers in this following passage to that theory of the angelic
+existences which we see expressed in ancient symbolic Art, first by
+variation of colour only, and later, by variety of expression and form.
+He says,—“We find, as far as credit is to be given to the celestial
+hierarchy of that supposed Dionysius, the senator of Athens, that the
+first place or degree is given to the Angels of Love, which are called
+Seraphim; the second to the Angels of Light, which are termed Cherubim;
+and the third, and so following, to Thrones, Principalities, and the
+rest (which are all angels of power and ministry); so as the angels of
+knowledge and illumination are placed before the angels of office and
+domination.”
+
+—But the Angels of LOVE are first and over all. In other words, we have
+here in due order of precedence, 1. LOVE, 2. KNOWLEDGE, 3. POWER,—the
+angelic Trinity, which, in unity, is our idea of GOD.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CHATEAUBRIAND.
+
+(“MEMOIRES D’OUTRE TOMBE.” 1851.)
+
+
+57.
+
+Chateaubriand tells us that when his mother and sisters urged him to
+marry, he resisted strongly—he thought it too early; he says, with a
+peculiar naïveté, “Je ne me sentais aucune qualité de mari: toutes mes
+illusions étaient vivantes, rien n’était épuisé en moi, l’énergie même
+de mon existence avait doublé par mes courses,” &c.
+
+So then the “_existence épuisé_” is to be kept for the wife! “_la vie
+usée_”—“_la jeunesse abusée_,” is good enough to make a husband!
+Chateaubriand, who in many passages of his book piques himself on his
+morality, seems quite unconscious that he has here given utterance to a
+sentiment the most profoundly immoral, the most fatal to both sexes,
+that even his immoral age had ever the effrontery to set forth.
+
+
+58.
+
+“Il paraît qu’on n’apprend pas à mourir en tuant les autres.”
+
+Nor do we learn to suffer by inflicting pain: nothing so patient as
+pity.
+
+
+59.
+
+“Le cynisme des mœurs ramène dans la société, en annihilant le sens
+moral, une sorte de barbares; ces barbares de la civilisation, propres à
+détruire comme les Goths, n’ont pas la puissance de fonder comme eux;
+ceux-ci étaient les énormes enfants d’une nature vierge; ceux-là sont
+les avortons monstrueux d’une nature dépravée.”
+
+We too often make the vulgar mistake that undisciplined or overgrown
+passions are a sign of strength; they are the signs of immaturity, of
+“enormous childhood.”—And the distinction (above) is well drawn and
+true. The real savage is that monstrous, malignant, abject thing,
+generated out of the rottenness and ferment of civilisation. And yet
+extremes meet: I remember seeing on the shores of Lake Huron some
+Indians of a distant tribe of Chippawas, who in appearance were just
+like those fearful abortions of humanity which crawl out of the
+darkness, filth, and ignorance of our great towns, just so miserable, so
+stupid, so cruel,—only, perhaps, less _wicked_.
+
+
+60.
+
+Chateaubriand was always comparing himself with Lord Byron—he hints more
+than once, that Lord Byron owed some of his inspiration to the perusal
+of his works—more especially to Renée. In this he was altogether
+mistaken.
+
+
+61.
+
+“Une intelligence supérieure n’enfante pas le mal sans douleur, parceque
+ce n’est pas son fruit naturel, et qu’elle ne devait pas le porter.”
+
+
+62.
+
+Madame de Coeslin (whom he describes as an impersonation of aristocratic
+_morgue_ and all the pretension and prejudices of the _ancien régime_),
+“lisant dans un journal la mort de plusieurs rois, elle ôta ses lunettes
+et dit en se mouchant, ‘Il y a donc une _épizootie sur ces bêtes à
+couronne_!”
+
+I once counted among my friends an elderly lady of high rank, who had
+spent the whole of a long life in intimacy with royal and princely
+personages. In three different courts she had filled offices of trust
+and offices of dignity. In referring to her experience she never either
+moralised or generalised; but her scorn of “ces bêtes à couronne,” was
+habitually expressed with just such a cool epigrammatic bluntness as
+that of Madame de Coeslin.
+
+
+63.
+
+“L’aristocratie a trois âges successifs; l’âge des supériorités, l’âge
+des priviléges, l’âge des vanités; sortie du premier, elle dégénère dans
+le second et s’éteint dans le dernier.”
+
+In Germany they are still in the first epoch. In England we seem to have
+arrived at the second. In France they are verging on the third.
+
+
+64.
+
+Chateaubriand says of himself:—
+
+“Dans le premier moment d’une offense je la sens à peine; mais elle se
+grave dans ma mémoire; son souvenir au lieu de décroître, s’augmente
+avec le temps. Il dort dans mon cœur des mois, des années entières,
+puis il se réveille à la moindre circonstance avec une force nouvelle,
+et ma blessure devient plus vive que le prémier jour: mais si je ne
+pardonne point à mes ennemis je ne leur fais aucun mal; je suis
+_rancunier_ et ne suis point _vindicatif_.”
+
+A very nice and true distinction in point of feeling and character, yet
+hardly to be expressed in English. We always attach the idea of
+malignity to the word _rancour_, whereas the French words _rancune_,
+_rancunier_, express the relentless without the vengeful or malignant
+spirit.
+
+Such characters make me turn pale, as I have done at sight of a tomb in
+which an offending wretch had been buried alive. There is in them always
+something acute and deep and indomitable in the internal and exciting
+emotion; slow, scrupulous, and timid in the external demonstration.
+Cordelia is such a character.
+
+
+65.
+
+Chateaubriand says of his friend Pelletrie,—“Il n’avait pas précisément
+des vices, mais il était rongé d’une vermine de petits défauts dont on
+ne pouvait l’épurer.” I know such a man; and if he had committed a
+murder every morning, and a highway robbery every night,—if he had
+killed his father and eaten him with any possible sauce, he could not
+be more intolerable, more detestable than he is!
+
+
+66.
+
+“Un homme nous protège par ce qu’il vaut; une femme par ce que vous
+valez: voilà pourquoi de ces deux empires l’un est si odieux, l’autre si
+doux.”
+
+
+67.
+
+He says of Madame Roland, “Elle avait du caractère plutôt que du génie;
+le premier peut donner le second, le second ne peut donner le premier.”
+What does the man mean? this is a mistake surely. What the French call
+_caractère_ never could give genius, nor genius, _caractère_. _Au
+reste_, I am not sure that Madame Roland—admirable creature!—had genius;
+but for talent, and _caractère_—first rate.
+
+
+68.
+
+“Soyons doux si nous voulons être regrettés. La hauteur du génie et les
+qualités supérieures ne sont pleurées que des anges.”
+
+“Veillons bien sur notre caractère. Songeons que nous pouvons avec un
+attachement profond n’en pas moins empoisonner des jours que nous
+rachéterions au prix de tout notre sang. Quand nos amis sont descendus
+dans la tombe, quels moyens avons nous de réparer nos torts? nos
+inutiles regrets, nos vains repentirs, sont ils un remède aux peines que
+nous leurs avons faites? Ils auraient mieux aimé de nous un sourire
+pendant leur vie que toutes nos larmes après leur mort.”
+
+
+69.
+
+“L’amour est si bien la félicité qu’il est poursuivi de la chimère
+d’être toujours; il ne veut prononcer que des serments irrévocables; au
+défaut de ses joies, il cherche à éterniser ses douleurs; ange tombé, il
+parle encore le langage qu’il parlait au séjour incorruptible; son
+espérance est de ne cesser jamais. Dans sa double nature et dans sa
+double illusion, ici-bas il prétend se perpétuer par d’immortelles
+pensées et par des générations intarissables.”
+
+
+70.
+
+Madame d’Houdetot, after the death of Saint Lambert, always before she
+went to bed used to rap three times with her slipper on the floor,
+saying,—“Bon soir, mon ami; bon soir, bon soir!”
+
+So then, she thought of her lover as gone _down_—not _up_?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+BISHOP CUMBERLAND.
+
+BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH IN 1691.
+
+
+71.
+
+Bishop Cumberland founds the law of God, as revealed in the Scriptures,
+upon the general law of nature. He does not attempt to found the laws of
+nature upon the Bible. “We believe,” he says, “in the truth of
+Scripture, because it promotes and illustrates the fundamental laws of
+nature in the government of the world.”
+
+Then does the Bishop mean here that the Bible is not the WORD nor the
+WILL of God, but the exposition of the WORD and the record of the WILL,
+so far as either could be rendered communicable to human comprehension
+through the medium of human language and intelligence?
+
+There is a striking passage in Bunsen’s Hippolytus, which may be
+considered with reference to this opinion of the Bishop.
+
+He (Bunsen) says, that “what relates the history of ‘the word of God’
+in his humanity, and in this world, and what records its teachings, and
+warnings, and promises (that is, the Bible?) was mistaken for ‘the word
+of God’ itself, in its proper sense.”
+
+Does he mean that we deem erroneously the collection of writings we call
+the Bible to be “the word of God;” whereas, in fact, it is “the history,
+the record of the word of God?” that is, of all that God has spoken to
+man—in various revelations—through human life—by human deeds?—because
+this is surely a most important and momentous distinction.
+
+
+72.
+
+According to Bishop Cumberland, _benevolence_, in its large sense,—that
+is, a regard for all GOOD, universal and particular,—is the primary law
+of nature; and _justice_ is one form, and a secondary form, of this law:
+a moral virtue, not a law of nature,—if I understand his meaning
+rightly.
+
+Then which would he place _highest_, the law of nature or the moral law?
+
+If you place them in contradistinction, then are we to conclude that the
+law of nature _precedes_ the moral law, but that the moral law
+_supersedes_ the law of nature? Yet no law of nature (as I understand
+the word) _can_ be superseded, though the moral law may be based upon
+it, and in that sense may be _above_ it.
+
+
+73.
+
+In this following passage the Bishop seems to have anticipated what in
+more modern times has been called the “_greatest happiness principle_.”
+He says:—
+
+“The good of all rational beings is a complex whole, being nothing but
+the aggregate of good enjoyed by each.” “We can only act in our proper
+spheres, labouring to do good, but this labour will be fruitless, or
+rather mischievous, if we do not keep in mind the higher gradations
+which terminate in universal benevolence. Thus, no man must seek his own
+pleasure or advantage otherwise than as his family permits; or provide
+for his family to the detriment of his country; or promote the good of
+his country at the expense of mankind; or serve mankind, if it were
+possible, without regard to the majesty of God.”
+
+
+74.
+
+Paley deems the recognition of a future state so essential that he even
+makes the definition of virtue to consist in this, that it is good
+performed for the sake of everlasting happiness. That is to say, he
+makes it a sort of bargain between God and man, a contract, or a
+covenant, instead of that obedience to a primal law, from which if we
+stray in will, we do so at the necessary expense of our happiness.
+Bishop Cumberland has no reference to this doctrine of Paley’s;—seems,
+indeed, to set it aside altogether, as contrary to the essence of
+virtue.
+
+
+On the whole, this good Bishop appears to have treated ethics not as an
+ecclesiastic, but as Bacon treated natural philosophy;—the pervading
+spirit is the perpetual appeal to experience, and not to authority.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+COMTE’S PHILOSOPHY.
+
+1852.
+
+
+75.
+
+Comte makes out three elements of progress, “les philosophes, les
+prolétaires, et les femmes;”—types of intellect, material activity, and
+sentiment.
+
+From Woman, he says, is to proceed the preponderance of the social
+duties and affections over egotism and ambition. (La prépondérance de la
+sociabilité sur la personalité.) He adds:—“Ce sexe est certainement
+supérieure au notre quant à l’attribut le plus fondamentale de l’espèce
+humaine, la tendence de faire prévaloir la _sociabilité_ sur la_
+personalité_.”
+
+
+76.
+
+“S’il ne fallait _qu’aimer_ comme dans l’Utopie Chrétienne, sur une vie
+future affranchie de toute égoïste necessité matérielle, la femme
+régnerait; mais il faut surtout _agir_ et _penser_ pour combattre contre
+les rigueurs de notre vraie destinée: dès-lors l’homme doit commander
+malgré sa moindre moralité.”
+
+“Malgré?” Sometimes man commands _because_ of the “moindre moralité:”—it
+spares much time in scruples.
+
+
+77.
+
+“L’influence feminine devient l’auxiliaire indispensable de tout pouvoir
+spirituel, comme le moyen âge l’a tant montré.”
+
+
+“Au moyen âge la Catholicisme occidentale ébaucha la systématisation de
+la puissance morale en superposant à l’ordre pratique une libre autorité
+spirituelle, habituellement secondée par les femmes.”
+
+
+78.
+
+“La Force, proprement dite, c’est ce qui régit les actes, sans régler
+les volontés.”
+
+Herein lies a distinction between Force and Power; for Power, properly
+so called, does both.
+
+
+79.
+
+He insists throughout on the predominance of _sociabilité_ over
+_personalité_——and what is that but the Christian law philosophised?
+and again, “Il n’y a de directement morale dans notre nature que
+l’amour.” Where did he get this, if not in the Epistle of St. John?
+
+“Celui qui se croirait indépendant des autres dans ses affections, ses
+pensées, ou ses actes, ne pourrait même formuler un tel blasphème sans
+une contradiction immédiate—puisque son langage même ne lui appartient
+pas.”
+
+
+80.
+
+He says that if the women regret the age of chivalry, it is not for the
+external homage then paid to them, but because “l’élément le plus moral
+de l’humanité” (woman, to wit), “doit préférer à tout autre le seul
+régime qui érigea directement en principe la préponderance de la morale
+sur la politique. Si elles regrettent leur douce influence antérieure,
+c’est surtout comme s’effaçant aujourd’hui sous un grossier égoïsme.
+
+“Leurs vœux spontanés seconderont toujours les efforts directes des
+philosophes et des prolétaires pour transformer enfin les débats
+politiques en transactions sociales en faisant prévaloir les _dévoirs_
+sur les _droits_.”
+
+This is admirable; for we are all inclined to think more about our
+_rights_ (and our wrongs too) than about our _duties_.
+
+
+81.
+
+“Si donc aimer nous satisfait mieux que d’être aimé, cela constate la
+supériorité naturelle des affections désintéressées.”
+
+Meaning—what is true—that the love we bear to another, much more fills
+the whole soul and is more a possession of an actuating principle, than
+the love of another for us:—but both are necessary to the complement of
+our moral life. The first is as the air we breathe; the last is as our
+daily bread.
+
+
+82.
+
+He says that the only true and firm friendship is that between man and
+woman, because it is the only affection “exempte de toute concurrence
+actuelle ou possible.”
+
+In this I am inclined to agree with him, and to regret that our
+conventional morality or immorality, and the too early severance of the
+two sexes in education, place men and women in such a relation to each
+other, socially, as to render such friendships difficult and rare.
+
+
+83.
+
+“En vérité l’amour ne saurait être profond, s’il n’est pas pur.”
+
+Christianity, he says, “a favorisé l’essor de la véritable passion,
+tandisque le polythéisme consacrait surtout les appétits.”
+
+He is speaking here as teacher, philosopher, and legislator, not as poet
+or sentimentalist. Perhaps it will come to be recognised sooner or
+later, that what people are pleased to call the _romance_ of life is
+founded on the deepest and most immutable laws of our being, and that
+any system of ecclesiastical polity, or civil legislation, or moral
+philosophy, which takes no account of the primal instincts and
+affections, which are the springs of life and on which God made the
+continuation of his world to depend, _must_ of necessity fail.
+
+I have just read a volume of Psychological Essays by one of the most
+celebrated of living surgeons, and closed the book with a feeling of
+amazement: a long life spent in physiological experiences, dissecting
+dead bodies, and mending broken bones, has then led him, at last, to
+some of the most obvious, most commonly known facts in mental
+philosophy? So some of our profound politicians, after a long life spent
+in governing and reforming men, may arrive, _at last_, at some of the
+commonest facts in social morals.
+
+
+84.
+
+He contends for the indissolubility of marriage, and against divorce;
+and he thinks that education should be in the hands of women to the age
+of ten or twelve, “Afin que le cœur y prévale toujours sur l’esprit:”
+all very excellent principles, but supposing a _hypothetical_ social and
+moral state, from which we are as yet far removed. What he says,
+however, of the indissolubility of the marriage bond is so beautiful and
+eloquent, and so in accordance with my own moral theories, that I cannot
+help extracting it from a mass of heavy and sometimes unintelligible
+matter. He begins by laying it down as a principle that the
+“amélioration morale de l’homme constitue la principale mission de la
+femme,” and that “une telle destination indique aussitôt que le lien
+conjugal doit être unique et indissoluble, afin que les relations
+domestiques puissent acquérir la plénitude et la fixité qu’exige leur
+efficacité morale.” This, however, supposes the holiest and completest
+of all bonds to be sealed on terms of equality, not that the latter end
+of a man’s life, _la vie usée et la jeunesse épuisée_, are to be tacked
+on to the beginning of a woman’s fresh and innocent existence; for then
+influences are reversed, and instead of the amelioration of the
+masculine, we have the demoralisation of the feminine, nature. He
+supposes the possibility of circumstances which demand a personal
+separation, but even then _sans permettre un nouveau mariage_. In such a
+case his religion imposes on the innocent victim (whether man or woman)
+“une chasteté compatible d’ailleurs avec la plus profonde tendresse. Si
+cette condition lui semble rigoureuse, il doit l’accepter, d’abord, en
+vue de l’ordre général; puis, comme une juste conséquence de son erreur
+primitive.”
+
+There would be much to say upon all this, if it were worth while to
+discuss a theory which it is not possible to reduce to general practice.
+We cannot imagine the possibility of a second marriage where the first,
+though perhaps unhappy or early ruptured, has been, not a personal
+relation only, but an interfusion of our moral being,—of the deepest
+impulses of life—with those of another; _these_ we cannot have a second
+time to surrender to a second object;—but this might be left to Nature
+and her holy instincts to settle. However, he goes on in a strain of
+eloquence and dignity, quite unusual with him, to this effect:—“Ce n’est
+que par l’assurance d’une inaltérable perpetuité que les liens intimes
+peuvent acquérir la consistance et la plénitude indispensable à leur
+efficacité morale. La plus méprisable des sectes éphémères que suscita
+l’anarchie moderne (the Mormons, for instance?) me parait être celle qui
+voulut ériger l’inconstance en condition de bonheur.”.... “Entre deux
+êtres aussi complexes et aussi divers que l’homme et la femme, ce n’est
+pas trop de toute la vie pour se bien connaître et s’aimer dignement.
+Loin de taxer d’illusion la haute idée que deux vrais époux se forment
+souvent l’un de l’autre, je l’ai presque toujours attribuée à
+l’appréciation plus profonde que procure seule une pleine intimité, que
+d’ailleurs développe des qualités inconnues aux indifférents. On doit
+même regarder comme très-honorable pour notre espèce, cette grande
+estime que ses membres s’inspirent mutuellement quand ils s’étudient
+beaucoup. _Car la haine et l’indifférence mériteraient seules le
+reproche d’aveuglement qu’une appréciation superficielle applique à
+l’amour._ Il faut donc juger pleinement conforme à la nature humaine
+l’institution qui prolonge au-delà du tombeau l’indentification de deux
+dignes époux.”
+
+He lays down as one of the primal instincts of human kind “_l’homme doit
+nourrir la femme_.” This may have been, as he says, a universal
+_instinct_; perhaps it ought to be one of our social ordinations;
+perhaps it may be so at some future time; but we know that it is not a
+present fact; that the woman must in many cases maintain herself or
+perish, and she asks nothing more than to be allowed to do so.
+
+However, I agree with Comte that the position of a woman, enriched and
+independent by her own labour, is anomalous and seldom happy. It is a
+remark I have heard somewhere, and it appears to me true, that there
+exists no being so hard, so keen, so calculating, so unscrupulous, so
+merciless in money matters as the wife of a Parisian shopkeeper, where
+she holds the purse and manages the concern, as is generally the case.
+
+
+85.
+
+Here is a passage wherein he attacks that egotism which with many good
+people enters so largely into the notion of another world:—which Paley
+inculcated, and which Coleridge ridiculed, when he spoke of “_this_
+worldliness,” and the “_other_ worldliness.”
+
+“La sagesse sacerdotale, digne organe de l’instinct public, y avait
+intimement rattaché les principales obligations sociales à titre de
+condition indispensable du salut personnel: mais la récompense infinie
+promise ainsi à tous les sacrifices ne pouvait jamais permettre une
+affection pleinement désinteressée.”
+
+This perpetual iteration of a system of future reward and punishment, as
+a principle of our religion and a motive of action, has in some sort
+demoralised Christianity; especially in minds where love is not a chief
+element, and which do not love Christ for his love’s sake, but for his
+power’s sake, and because judgment and punishment are supposed to be in
+his hand.
+
+
+86.
+
+Putting the test of revelation out of the question, and dealing with the
+philosopher philosophically, the best refutation of Comte’s system is
+contained in the following criticism: it seems to me final.
+
+“In limiting religion to the relations in which we stand to each other,
+and towards _Humanity_, Comte omits one very important consideration.
+Even upon his own showing, this _Humanity_ can only be the _supreme
+being_ of _our_ planet, it cannot be the _Supreme Being_ of the
+Universe. Now, although in this our terrestrial sojourn, all we can
+distinctly know must be limited to the sphere of our planet; yet,
+standing on this ball and looking forth into infinitude, we know that it
+is but an atom of the infinitude, and that the humanity we worship
+_here_, cannot extend its dominion _there_. If our relations to humanity
+may be systematised into a cultus, and made a religion as they have
+formerly been made a morality, and if the whole of our practical
+priesthood be limited to this religion, there will, nevertheless remain
+for us, outlying this terrestrial sphere,—the sphere of the infinite, in
+which our thoughts must wander, and our emotions will follow our
+thoughts; so that besides the religion of humanity there must ever be a
+religion of the Universe. Or, to bring this conception within ordinary
+language, there must ever remain the old distinctions between _religion_
+and _morality_, our relations to God, and our relations towards man. The
+only difference being, that in the _old_ theology moral precepts were
+inculcated with a view to a celestial habitat; in the _new_, the moral
+precepts are inculcated with a view to the general progress of the
+race.”—_Westminster Review._
+
+
+In fact the doctrine of the non-plurality of worlds as recently set
+forth by an eminent professor and D. D. would exactly harmonise with
+Comte’s “Culte du Positif,” as not merely limiting our sympathies to
+this one form of intellectual being, but our religious notions to this
+one habitable orb.
+
+But to those who take other views, the argument above contains the
+_philosophical_ objection to Comte’s _system_, as such; and I repeat,
+that it seems to me unanswerable; but there are excellent things in his
+theory, notwithstanding;—things that make us pause and think. In some
+parts it is like Christianity with Christ, as a _personalité_, omitted.
+For Christ the humanised divine, he substitutes an abstract deified
+humanity. 1854.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+GOETHE.
+
+(DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT.)
+
+
+87.
+
+“As a man embraces the determination to become a soldier and go to the
+wars, bravely resolved to bear dangers, and difficulties, and wounds,
+and death itself, but at the same time never anticipating the particular
+form in which those evils may surprise us in an extremely unpleasant
+manner;—just so we rush into authorship!”
+
+
+88.
+
+Goethe says of Lavater, “that the conception of humanity which had been
+formed in himself, and in his own humanity, was so akin to the living
+image of Christ, that it was impossible for him to conceive how a man
+could live and breathe without being a Christian. He had, so to speak, a
+physical affinity with Christianity; it was to him a necessity, not
+only morally, but from organisation.”
+
+Lavater’s individual feeling was, perhaps, but an anticipation of that
+which may become general, universal. As we rise in the scale of being,
+as we become more gentle, spiritualised, refined, and intelligent, will
+not our “physical affinity” with the religion of Christ become more and
+more apparent, till it is less a doctrine than a principle of life? So
+its Divine Author knew, who prepared it for us, and is preparing and
+moulding us through progressive improvement to comprehend and receive
+it.
+
+
+89.
+
+Goethe speaks of “polishing up life with the varnish of fiction;” the
+artistic turn of the man’s mind showed itself in this love of creating
+an effect in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. But what can
+fiction—what can poetry do for life, but present some one or two out of
+the multitudinous aspects of that grand, beautiful, terrible, and
+infinite mystery? or by _life_, does he mean here the mere external
+forms of society?—for it is not clear.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+HAZLITT’S “LIBER AMORIS.”
+
+1827.
+
+
+90.
+
+Is love, like faith, ennobled through its own depth and fervour and
+sincerity? or is it ennobled through the nobility, and degraded through
+the degradation of its object? Is it with love as with worship? Is it a
+_religion_, and holy when the object is pure and good? Is it a
+_superstition_, and unholy when the object is impure and unworthy?
+
+
+Of all the histories I have read of the aberrations of human passion,
+nothing ever so struck me with a sort of amazed and painful pity as
+Hazlitt’s “Liber Amoris.” The man was in love with a servant girl, who
+in the eyes of others possessed no particular charms of mind or person,
+yet did the mighty love of this strong, masculine, and gifted being,
+lift her into a sort of goddess-ship; and make his idolatry in its
+intense earnestness and reality assume something of the sublimity of an
+act of faith, and in its expression take a flight equal to anything that
+poetry or fiction have left us. It was all so terribly real, he sued
+with such a vehemence, he suffered with such resistance, that the
+powerful intellect reeled, tempest-tost, and might have foundered but
+for the gift of expression. He might have said like Tasso—like Goethe
+rather—“Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen was ich leide!” And this faculty of
+utterance, eloquent utterance, was perhaps the only thing which saved
+life, or reason, or both. In such moods of passion, the poor uneducated
+man, dumb in the midst of the strife and the storm, unable to comprehend
+his intolerable pain or make it comprehended, throws himself in a blind
+fury on the cause of his torture, or hangs himself in his neckcloth.
+
+
+91.
+
+Hazlitt takes up his pen, dips it in fire and thus he writes:—
+
+
+“Perfect love has this advantage in it, that it leaves the possessor of
+it nothing farther to desire. There is one object (at least), in which
+the soul finds absolute content;—for which it seeks to live or dares to
+die. The heart has, as it were, filled up the moulds of the
+imagination; the truth of passion keeps pace with, and outvies, the
+extravagance of mere language. There are no words so fine, no flattery
+so soft, that there is not a sentiment beyond them that it is impossible
+to express, at the bottom of the heart where true love is. What idle
+sounds the common phrases _adorable creature_, _divinity_, _angel_, are!
+What a proud reflection it is to have a feeling answering to all these,
+rooted in the breast, unalterable, unutterable, to which all other
+feelings are light and vain! Perfect love reposes on the object of its
+choice, like the halcyon on the wave, and the air of heaven is around
+it!”
+
+
+92.
+
+“She stood (while I pleaded my cause before her with all the earnestness
+and fondness in the world) with the tears trickling from her eye-lashes,
+her head drooping, her attitude fixed, with the finest expression that
+ever was seen of mixed regret, pity, and stubborn resolution, but
+without speaking a word—without altering a feature. _It was like a
+petrifaction of a human face in the softest moment of passion._”
+
+
+93.
+
+“Shall I not love her,” he exclaims, “for herself alone, in spite of
+fickleness and folly? to love her for her regard for me, is not to love
+her but myself. She has robbed me of herself, shall she also rob me of
+my love of her? did I not live on her smile? is it less sweet because it
+is withdrawn from me? Did I not adore her every grace? and does she bend
+less enchantingly because she has turned from me to another? Is my love
+then in the power of fortune or of her caprice? No, I will have it
+lasting as it is pure; and I will make a goddess of her, and build a
+temple to her in my heart, and worship her on indestructible altars, and
+raise statues to her, and my homage shall be unblemished as her
+unrivalled symmetry of form. And when that fails, the memory of it shall
+survive, and my bosom shall be proof to scorn as hers has been to pity;
+and I will pursue her with an unrelenting love, and sue to be her slave
+and tend her steps without notice, and without reward; and serve her
+living, and mourn for her when dead; and thus my love will have shown
+itself superior to her hate, and I shall triumph and then die. This is
+my idea of the only true and heroic love, and such is mine for her.”
+
+
+Hazlitt, when he wrote all this, seemed to himself full of high and calm
+resolve. The hand did not fail, the pen did not stagger over the paper
+in a formless scrawl, yet the brain was reeling like a tower in an
+earthquake. “Passion,” as it has been well said, “when in a state of
+solemn and omnipotent vehemence, always appears to be calmness to him
+whom it domineers;” not unfrequently to others also, as the tide at its
+highest flood looks tranquil, and “neither way inclines.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE NIGHTINGALE.
+
+
+94.
+
+Reading the Life and Letters of Francis Horner, in the midst of a
+correspondence about Statistics and Bullion, and Political Economy, and
+the Balance of Parties, I came upon the following exquisite passage in a
+letter to his friend Mrs. Spencer:—
+
+“I was amused by your interrogatory to me about the Nightingale’s note.
+You meant to put me in a dilemma with my politics on one side and my
+gallantry on the other. Of course you consider it as a plaintive note,
+and you were in hopes that no idolater of Charles Fox would venture to
+agree with that opinion. In this difficulty I must make the best escape
+I can by saying, that it seems to me neither cheerful nor
+melancholy,—but always according to the circumstances in which you hear
+it, the scenery, your own temper of mind, and so on. I settled it so
+with myself early in this month, when I heard them every night and all
+day long at Wells. In daylight, when all the other birds are in active
+concert, the Nightingale only strikes you as the most active, emulous,
+and successful of the whole band. At night, especially if it is a calm
+one, with light enough to give you a wide indistinct view, the solitary
+music of this bird takes quite another character, from all the
+associations of the scene, from the languor one feels at the close of
+the day, and from the stillness of spirits and elevation of mind which
+comes upon one when walking out at that time. But it is not always
+so—different circumstances will vary in every possible way the effect.
+Will the Nightingale’s note sound alike to the man who is going on an
+adventure to meet his mistress (supposing he heeds it at all), and when
+he loiters along upon his return? The last time I heard the Nightingale
+it was an experiment of another sort. It was after a thunderstorm in a
+mild night, while there was silent lightning opening every few minutes,
+first on one side of the heavens then on the other. The careless little
+fellow was piping away in the midst of all this terror. To _me_, there
+was no melancholy in his note, but a sort of sublimity; yet it was the
+same song which I had heard in the morning, and which then seemed
+nothing but bustle.”
+
+And in the same spirit Portia moralises:—
+
+   The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
+   When every goose is cackling, would be thought
+   No better a musician than the wren.
+   How many things by season, seasoned are
+   To their right praise and true perfection!
+
+Nor will Coleridge allow the song of the nightingale to be always
+plaintive,—“most musical, most _melancholy_;” he defies the epithet
+though it be Milton’s.
+
+               ’Tis the _merry_ nightingale,
+   That crowds and hurries and precipitates
+   With thick fast warble his delicious notes,
+   As he were fearful that an April night
+   Would be too short for him to utter forth
+   His love-chaunt, and disburthen his full soul
+   Of all its music.
+
+As a poetical commentary on these beautiful passages, every reader of
+Joanna Baillie will remember the night scene in De Montfort, where the
+cry of the Owl suggests such different feelings and associations to the
+two men who listen to it, under such different circumstances. To De
+Montfort it is the screech-owl, foreboding death and horror,—and he
+stands and shudders at the “instinctive wailing.” To Rezenvelt it is the
+sound which recalls his boyish days, when he merrily mimicked the
+night-bird till it returned him cry for cry,—and he pauses to listen
+with a fanciful delight.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THACKERAY’S LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH HUMORISTS
+
+(1833.)
+
+
+95.
+
+A Lecture should not read like an essay; and, therefore, it surprises me
+that these lectures so carefully prepared, so skilfully adapted to meet
+the requirements of oral delivery, should be such agreeable reading. As
+_lectures_, they wanted only a little more point, and emphasis and
+animation on the part of the speaker: as _essays_, they atone in
+eloquence and earnestness for what they want in finish and purity of
+style.
+
+Genius and sunshine have this in common that they are the two most
+precious gifts of heaven to earth, and are dispensed equally to the just
+and the unjust. What struck me most in these lectures, when I heard
+them, (and it strikes me now in turning over the written pages,) is
+this: we deal here with writers and artists, yet the purpose, from
+beginning to end, is not artistic nor critical, but moral. Thackeray
+tells us himself that he has not assembled his hearers to bring them
+better acquainted with the writings of these writers, or to illustrate
+the wit of these wits, or to enhance the humour of these humourists;—no;
+but to deal justice on the men as _men_—to tell us how _they_ lived, and
+loved, suffered and made suffer, who still have power to pain or to
+please; to settle _their_ claims to our praise or blame, our love or
+hate, whose right to fame was settled long ago, and remains undisputed.
+This is his purpose. Thus then he has laid down and acted on the
+principle that “morals have something to do with art;” that there is a
+moral account to be settled with men of genius; that the power and the
+right remains with us to do justice on those who being dead yet rule our
+spirits from their urns; to try them by a standard which perhaps neither
+themselves, nor those around them, would have admitted. Did Swift when
+he bullied men, lampooned women, trampled over decency and humanity,
+flung round him filth and fire, did he anticipate the time when before a
+company of intellectual men, and thinking, feeling women, in both
+hemispheres, he should be called up to judgment, hands bound,
+tongue-tied? Where be now his gibes? and where his terrors? Thackeray
+turns him forth, a spectacle, a lesson, a warning; probes the lacerated
+self-love, holds up to scorn, or pity more intolerable, the miserable
+egotism, the half-distempered brain. O Stella! O Vanessa! are you not
+avenged?
+
+Then Sterne—how he takes to pieces his feigned originality, his feigned
+benevolence, his feigned misanthropy—all feigned!—the licentious parson,
+the trader in sentiment, the fashionable lion of his day, the man
+without a heart for those who loved him, without a conscience for those
+who trusted him! yet the same man who gave us the pathos of “Le Fevre,”
+and the humours of “Uncle Toby!” Sad is it? ungrateful is it? ungracious
+is it?—well, it cannot be helped; you cannot stifle the conscience of
+humanity. You might as well exclaim against any natural result of any
+natural law. Fancy a hundred years hence some brave, honest,
+human-hearted Thackeray standing up to discourse before our
+great-great-grandchildren in the same spirit, with the same stern truth,
+on the wits, and the poets and the artists of the present time! Hard is
+your fate, O ye men and women of genius! very hard and pitiful, if ye
+must be subjected to the scalpel of such a dissector! You, gifted
+sinner, whoever you may be, walking among us now in all the impunity of
+conventional forbearance, dealing in oracles and sentimentalisms,
+performing great things, teaching good things, you are set up as one of
+the lights of the world:—Lo! another time comes; the torch is taken out
+of your hand, and held up to your face. What! is it a mask, and not a
+face? “Off, off ye lendings!” O God! how much wiser, as well as better,
+not to study how to _seem_, but how to _be_! How much wiser and better,
+not to have to shudder before the truth as it oozes out from a thousand
+unguessed, unguarded apertures, staining your lawn or your ermine; not
+to have to tremble at the thought of that future Thackeray, who “shall
+pluck out the heart of your mystery,” and shall anatomise you, and
+deliver lectures upon you, to illustrate the standard of morals and
+manners in Queen Victoria’s reign!
+
+In these lectures, some fine and feeling and discriminative passages on
+character, make amends for certain offences and inconsistencies in the
+novels; I mean especially in regard to the female portraits. No woman
+resents his Rebecca—inimitable Becky!—no woman but feels and
+acknowledges with a shiver the completeness of that wonderful and
+finished artistic creation; but every woman resents the selfish inane
+Amelia, and would be inclined to quote and to apply the author’s own
+words when speaking of ‘Tom Jones:’—“I can’t say that I think Amelia a
+virtuous character. I can’t say but I think Mr. Thackeray’s evident
+liking and admiration for his Amelia shows that the great humourist’s
+moral sense was blunted by his life, and that here in art and ethics
+there is a great error. If it be right to have a heroine whom we are to
+admire, let us take care at least that she is admirable.”
+
+Laura, in ‘Pendennis,’ is a yet more fatal mistake. She is drawn with
+every generous feeling, every good gift. We do not complain that she
+loves that poor creature Pendennis, for she loved him in her childhood.
+She grew up with that love in her heart; it came between her and the
+perception of his faults; it is a necessity indivisible from her nature.
+Hallowed, through its constancy, therein alone would lie its best
+excuse, its beauty and its truth. But Laura, faithless to that first
+affection; Laura, waked up to the appreciation of a far more manly and
+noble nature, in love with Warrington, and then going back to Pendennis,
+and marrying _him_! Such infirmity might be true of some women, but not
+of such a woman as Laura; we resent the inconsistency, the indelicacy of
+the portrait.
+
+And then Lady Castlewood,—so evidently a favourite of the author, what
+shall we say of her? The virtuous woman, _par excellence_, who “never
+sins and never forgives,” who never resents, nor relents, nor repents;
+the mother, who is the rival of her daughter; the mother, who for years
+is the _confidante_ of a man’s delirious passion for her own child, and
+then consoles him by marrying him herself! O Mr. Thackeray! this will
+never do! such women _may_ exist, but to hold them up as examples of
+excellence, and fit objects of our best sympathies, is a fault, and
+proves a low standard in ethics and in art. “When an author presents to
+us a heroine whom we are called upon to admire, let him at least take
+care that she is admirable.” If in these, and in some other instances,
+Thackeray has given us cause of offence, in the lectures we may thank
+him for some amends: he has shown us what he conceives true womanhood
+and true manliness ought to be; so with this expression of gratitude,
+and a far deeper debt of gratitude left unexpressed, I close his book,
+and say, good night!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Notes on Art.
+
+
+96.
+
+Sometimes, in thoughtful moments, I am struck by those beautiful
+analogies between things apparently dissimilar—those awful
+approximations between things apparently far asunder—which many people
+would call fanciful and imaginary, but they seem to bring all God’s
+creation, spiritual and material, into one comprehensive whole; they
+give me, thus associated, a glimpse, a perception of that overwhelming
+unity which we call the universe, the multitudinous ONE.
+
+Thus the principle of the highest ideal in art, as conceived by the
+Greeks, and unsurpassed in its purity and beauty, lay in considering
+well the characteristics which distinguish the _human_ form from the
+brute form; and then, in rendering the human form, the first aim was to
+soften down, or, if possible, throw out wholly, those characteristics
+which belong to the brute nature, or are common to the brute and the
+man; and the next, to bring into prominence and even enlarge the
+proportions of those manifestations of forms which distinguish humanity;
+till, at last, the _human_ merged into the _divine_, and the God in
+look, in limb, in feature, stood revealed.
+
+Let us now suppose this broad principle which the Greeks applied to
+form, ethically carried out, and made the basis of all education—the
+training of men as a race. Suppose we started with the general axiom
+that all propensities which we have in common with the lower animals are
+to be kept subordinate, and so far as is consistent with the truth of
+nature refined away; and that all the qualities which elevate, all the
+aspirations which ally us with the spiritual, are to be cultivated and
+rendered more and more prominent, till at last the human being, in
+faculties as well as form, approaches the God-like—I only
+say—suppose?——
+
+Again: it has been said of natural philosophy (Zoology) that in order to
+make any real progress in the science, as such, we must more and more
+disregard _differences_, and more and more attend to the obscured but
+essential conditions which are revealed in _resemblances_, in the
+constant and similar relations of primitive structure. Now if the same
+principle were carried out in theology, in morals, in art, as well as in
+science, should we not come nearer to the essential truth in _all_?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+97.
+
+“There is an instinctive sense of propriety and reality in every mind;
+and it is not true, as some great authority has said, that in art we are
+satisfied with contemplating the work without thinking of the artist. On
+the contrary, the artist himself is one great object in the work. It is
+as embodying the energies and excellences of the human mind, as
+exhibiting the efforts of genius, as symbolising high feeling, that we
+most value the creations of art; without design the representations of
+art are merely fantastical, and without the thought of a design acting
+upon fixed principles in accordance with a high standard of goodness and
+truth, half the charm of design is lost.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+98.
+
+“Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture, and
+music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It
+is, therefore, the power of humanising nature, of infusing the thoughts
+and passions of man into everything which is the object of his
+contemplation. Colour, form, motion, sound, are the elements which it
+combines, and it stamps them into unity in the mould of a _moral_ idea.”
+
+This is Coleridge’s definition:—Art then is nature, _humanised_; and in
+proportion as humanity is elevated by the interfusion into our life of
+noble aims and pure affections will art be spiritualised and moralised.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+99.
+
+If faith has elevated art, superstition has everywhere debased it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+100.
+
+Goethe observes that there is no patriotic art and no patriotic
+science—that both are universal.
+
+There is, however, _national_ art, but not _national_ science: we say
+“national art,” “natural science.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+101.
+
+“Verse is in itself music, and the natural symbol of that union of
+passion with thought and pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all
+poetry as contradistinguished from history civil or
+natural.”—_Coleridge._
+
+In the arts of design, colour is to form what verse is to prose—a more
+harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+102.
+
+Subjects and representations in art not elevated nor interesting in
+themselves, become instructive and interesting to higher minds from the
+_manner_ in which they have been treated; perhaps because they have
+passed through the medium of a higher mind in taking form.
+
+This is one reason, though we are not always conscious of it, that the
+Dutch pictures of common and vulgar life give us a pleasure apart from
+their wonderful finish and truth of detail. In the mind of the artist
+there must have been the power to throw himself into a sphere _above_
+what he represents. Adrian Brouwer, for instance, must have been
+something far better than a sot; Ostade something higher than a boor;
+though the habits of both led them into companionship with sots and
+boors. In the most farcical pictures of Jan Steen there is a depth of
+feeling and observation which remind me of the humour of Goldsmith; and
+Teniers, we know, was in his habits a refined gentleman; the brilliant
+elegance of his pencil contrasting with the grotesque vulgarity of his
+subjects. To a thinking mind, some of these Dutch pictures of character
+are full of material for thought, pathetic even where least sympathetic:
+no doubt, because of a latent sympathy with the artist, apart from his
+subject.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+103.
+
+Coleridge says,—“Every human feeling is greater and larger than the
+exciting cause.” (A philosophical way of putting Rochefoucauld’s neatly
+expressed apophthegm: “Nous ne sommes jamais ni si heureux ni si
+malheureux que nous l’imaginons.”) “A proof,” he proceeds, “that man is
+designed for a higher state of existence; and this is deeply implied in
+music, in which there is always something more and beyond the immediate
+expression.”
+
+But not music only, every production of art ought to excite emotions
+greater and thoughts larger than itself. Thoughts and emotions which
+never perhaps were in the mind of the artist, never were anticipated,
+never were intended by him—may be strongly suggested by his work. This
+is an important part of the morals of art, which we must never lose
+sight of. Art is not only for pleasure and profit, but for good and for
+evil.
+
+Goethe (in the _Dichtung und Wahrheit_) describes the reception of Marie
+Antoinette at Strasbourg, where she passed the frontier to enter her new
+kingdom. She was then a lovely girl of sixteen. He relates that on
+visiting before her arrival the reception room on the bridge over the
+Rhine, where her German attendants were to deliver her into the hands of
+the French authorities, he found the walls hung with tapestries
+representing the ominous story of Jason and Medea—of all the marriages
+on record the most fearful, the most tragic in its consequences. “What!”
+he exclaims, his poetical imagination struck with the want of moral
+harmony, “was there among these French architects and decorators no man
+who could perceive that pictures represent things,—that they have a
+meaning in themselves,—that they can impress sense and feeling,—that
+they can awaken presentiments of good or evil?” But, as he tells us, his
+exclamations of horror were met by the mockery of his French companions,
+who assured him that it was not everybody’s concern to look for
+significance in pictures.
+
+These self-same tapestries of the story of Jason and Medea were after
+the Restoration presented by Louis XVIII. to George IV., and at present
+they line the walls of the Ball-room in Windsor Castle. We might repeat,
+with some reason, the question of Goethe; for if pictures have a
+significance, and speak to the imagination, what has the tragedy of
+Jason and Medea to do in a ball-room?
+
+
+Goethe, who thus laid down the principle that works of art speak to the
+feelings and the conscience, and can awaken associations tending to good
+and evil, by some strange inconsistency places art and artists out of
+the sphere of morals. He speaks somewhere with contempt and ridicule of
+those who take their conscience and their morality with them to an opera
+or a picture gallery. Yet surely he is wrong. Why should we not? Are our
+conscience and our morals like articles of dress which we can take off
+and put on again as we fancy it convenient or expedient?—shut up in a
+drawer and leave behind us when we visit a theatre or a gallery of art?
+or are they not rather a part of ourselves—our very life—to graduate the
+worth, to fix the standard of all that mingles with our life? The idea
+that what we call _taste_ in art has something quite distinctive from
+conscience, is one cause that the popular notions concerning the
+productions of art are abandoned to such confusion and uncertainty; that
+simple people regard _taste_ as something forensic, something to be
+learned, as they would learn a language, and mastered by a study of
+rules and a dictionary of epithets; and they look up to a professor of
+taste, just as they would look up to a professor of Greek or of Hebrew.
+Either they listen to judgments lightly and confidently promulgated with
+a sort of puzzled faith and a surrender of their own moral sense, which
+are pitiable; as if art also had its infallible church and its hierarchy
+of dictators!—or they fly into the opposite extreme, and seeing
+themselves deceived and misled, fall away into strange heresies. All
+from ignorance of a few laws simple in their form, yet infinite in their
+application;—_natural_ laws we must call them, though here applied to
+art.
+
+In my younger days I have known men conspicuous for their want of
+elevated principle, and for their dissipated habits, held up as arbiters
+and judges of art; but it was to them only another form of epicurism and
+self-indulgence; and I have seen them led into such absurd and fatal
+mistakes for want of the power to distinguish and to generalise, that I
+have despised their judgment, and have come to the conclusion that a
+really high standard of taste and a low standard of morals are
+incompatible with each other.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+104.
+
+“The fact of the highest artistic genius having manifested itself in a
+polytheistic age, and among a people whose moral views were essentially
+degraded, has, we think, fostered the erroneous notion that the sphere
+of art has no connection with that of morality. The Greeks, with
+penetrative insight, dilated the essential characteristics of man’s
+organism as a vehicle of superior intelligence, while their intense
+sympathy with physical beauty made them alive to its most subtle
+manifestations; and reproducing their impressions through the medium of
+art, they have given birth to models of the human form, which reveal its
+highest possibilities, and the excellence of which depends upon their
+being individual expressions of ideal truth. Thus, too, in their
+descriptions of nature, instead of multiplying insignificant details,
+they seized instinctively upon the characteristic features of her
+varying aspects, and not unfrequently embodied a finished picture in one
+comprehensive and harmonious word. In association with their marvellous
+genius, however, we find a cruelty, a treachery, and a licence which
+would be revolting if it were not for the historical interest which
+attaches to every genuine record of a bygone age. Their low moral
+standard cannot excite surprise when we consider the debasing tendency
+of their worship, the objects of their adoration being nothing more than
+their own degraded passions invested with some of the attributes of
+deity. Now, among the modifications of thought introduced by
+Christianity, there is perhaps none more pregnant with important results
+than the harmony which it has established between religion and
+morality. The great law of right and wrong has acquired a sacred
+character, when viewed as an expression of the divine will; it takes its
+rank among the eternal verities, and to ignore it in our delineations of
+life, or to represent sin otherwise than as treason against the supreme
+ruler, is to retain in modern civilisation one of the degrading elements
+of heathenism. Conscience is as great a fact of our inner life as the
+sense of beauty, and the harmonious action of both these instinctive
+principles is essential to the highest enjoyment of art, for any
+internal dissonance disturbs the repose of the mind, and thereby
+shatters the image mirrored in its depths.”—_A. S._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+105.
+
+“Mais vous autres artistes, vous ne considerez pour la plupart dans les
+œuvres que la beauté ou la singularité de l’exécution, sans vous
+pénétrer de l’idée dont cet œuvre est la forme; ainsi votre intelligence
+adore souvent l’expression d’un sentiment que votre cœur repousserait
+s’il en avait la conscience.”—_George Sand._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+106.
+
+Lavater told Goethe that on a certain occasion when he held the velvet
+bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe
+only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual, the
+shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in
+dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and
+individually characteristic.
+
+What then shall we say of Van Dyck, who painted the hands of his men and
+women, not from individual nature, but from a model hand—his own very
+often?—and every one who considers for a moment will see in Van Dyck’s
+portraits, that, however well painted and elegant the hands, they in
+very few instances harmonise with the _personalité_;—that the position
+is often affected, and as if intended for display,—the display of what
+is in itself a positive fault, and from which some little knowledge of
+comparative physiology would have saved him.
+
+There are hands of various character; the hand to catch, and the hand to
+hold; the hand to clasp, and the hand to grasp. The hand that has
+worked or could work, and the hand that has never done anything but hold
+itself out to be kissed, like that of Joanna of Arragon in Raphael’s
+picture.
+
+Let any one look at the hands in Titian’s portrait of old Paul IV.:
+though exquisitely modelled, they have an expression which reminds us of
+claws; they belong to the face of that grasping old man, and could
+belong to no other.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+107.
+
+Mozart and Chopin, though their genius was differently developed, were
+alike in some things: in nothing more than this, that the artistic
+element in both minds wholly dominated over the social and practical,
+and that their art was the element in which they moved and lived,
+through which they felt and thought. I doubt whether either of them
+could have said, “_D’abord je suis homme et puis je suis artiste_;”
+whereas this could have been said with truth by Mendelsohn and by
+Litzst. In Mendelsohn the enormous creative power was modified by the
+intellect and the conscience. Litzst has no creative power.
+
+Litzst has thus drawn the character of Chopin:—“Rien n’était plus pur et
+plus exalté en même temps que ses pensées; rien n’était plus tenace,
+plus exclusif, et plus minutieusement dévoué que ses affections. Mais
+cet être ne comprenait que ce qui était identique à lui-même:—le reste
+n’existait pour lui que comme une sorte de rêve fâcheux, auquel il
+essayait de se soustraire en vivant au milieu du monde. Toujours perdu
+dans ses rêveries, la réalité lui deplaisait. Enfant il ne pouvait
+toucher à un instrument tranchant sans se blesser; homme il ne pouvait
+se trouver en face d’un homme différent de lui, sans se heurter contre
+cette contradiction vivante.”
+
+“Ce qui le préservait d’un antagonisme perpétuel c’était l’habitude
+volontaire et bientôt invétérée de ne point voir, de ne pas entendre ce
+qui lui deplaisait: en général sans toucher à ses affections
+personelles, les êtres qui ne pensaient pas comme lui devenaient à ses
+yeux comme des espèces de fantômes; et comme il était d’une politesse
+charmante, on pouvait prendre pour une bienveillance courtoise ce qui
+n’était chez lui qu’un froid dédain—une aversion insurmontable.”
+
+
+108.
+
+The father of Mozart was a man of high and strict religious principle.
+He had a conviction—in his case more truly founded than is usual—that
+he was the father of a great, a surpassing genius, and consequently of a
+being unfortunate in this, that he must be in advance of his age,
+exposed to error, to envy, to injustice, to strife; and to do his duty
+to his son demanded large faith and large firmness. But because he _did_
+estimate this sacred trust as a duty to be discharged, not only with
+respect to his gifted son, but to the God who had so endowed him; so, in
+spite of many mistakes, the earnest straightforward endeavour to do
+right in the parent seems to have saved Mozart’s moral life, and to have
+given that completeness to the productions of his genius, which the
+harmony of the moral and creative faculties alone can bestow.
+
+
+“The modifying power of circumstances on Mozart’s style, is an
+interesting consideration. Whatever of striking, of new or beautiful he
+met with in the works of others left its impression on him; and he often
+reproduced these efforts, not servilely, but mingling his own nature and
+feelings with them in a manner not less surprising than delightful.”
+
+This is true equally of Shakespeare and of Raphael, both of whom adapted
+or rather adopted much from their precursors in the way of material to
+work upon; and whose incomparable originality consisted in the
+interfusion of their own great individual genius with every subject
+they touched, so that it became theirs, and could belong to no other.
+
+
+The Figaro was composed at Vienna. The Don Juan and Clemenza di Tito at
+Prague;—which I note because the localities are so characteristic of the
+operas. Cimarosa’s Matrimonio Segreto was composed at Prague; it was on
+the fortification of the Hradschin one morning at sun-rise that he
+composed the _Pria che spunti in ciel l’aurora_.
+
+
+When called upon to describe his method of composing, what Mozart said
+of himself was very striking from its _naïveté_ and truth. “I do not,”
+he said, “aim at originality. I do not know in what my originality
+consists. Why my productions take from my hand that particular form or
+style which makes them _Mozartish_, and different from the works of
+other composers is probably owing to the same cause which makes my nose
+this or that particular shape; makes it, in short, Mozart’s nose, and
+different from other people’s.”
+
+Yet, as a composer, Mozart was as _objective_, as dramatic, as
+Shakspeare and Raphael; Chopin, in comparison, was wholly
+_subjective_,—the Byron of Music.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+109.
+
+Talking once with Adelaide Kemble, after she had been singing in the
+“Figaro,” she compared the music to the bosom of a full blown rose in
+its voluptuous, intoxicating richness. I said that some of Mozart’s
+melodies seemed to me not so much composed, but found—found on some
+sunshiny day in Arcadia, among nymphs and flowers. “Yes,” she replied,
+with ready and felicitous expression, “not _inventions_, but
+_existences_.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+110.
+
+Old George the Third, in his blindness and madness, once insisted on
+making the selection of pieces for the concert of ancient music (May,
+1811),—it was soon after the death of the Princess Amelia. “The
+programme included some of the finest passages in Handel’s ‘Samson,’
+descriptive of blindness; the ‘Lamentation of Jephthah,’ for his
+daughter; Purcel’s ‘Mad Tom,’ and closed with ‘God save the King,’ to
+make sure the application of all that went before.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+111.
+
+Every one who remembers what Madlle. Rachel was seven or eight years
+ago, and who sees her now (1853), will allow that she has made no
+progress in any of the essential excellences of her art:—a certain proof
+that she is not a great artist in the true sense of the word. She is a
+finished actress, but she is nothing more, and nothing better; not
+enough the artist ever to forget or conceal her art; consequently there
+is a want somewhere, which a mind highly toned and of quick perceptions
+feels from beginning to end. The parts in which she once excelled—the
+Phêdre and the Hermione, for instance—have become formalised and hard,
+like studies cast in bronze; and when she plays a new part it has no
+freshness. I always go to see her whenever I can. I admire her as what
+she is—the Parisian actress, practised in every trick of her _métier_. I
+admire what she does, I think how well it is all _done_, and am inclined
+to clap and applaud her drapery, perfect and ostentatiously studied in
+every fold, just with the same feeling that I applaud herself.
+
+As to the last scene of Adrienne Lecouvreur, (which those who are
+_avides de sensation_, athirst for painful emotion, go to see as they
+would drink a dram, and critics laud as a miracle of art,) it is
+altogether a mistake and a failure; it is beyond the just limits of
+terror and pity—beyond the legitimate sphere of _art_. It reminds us of
+the story of Gentil Bellini and the Sultan. The Sultan much admired
+Bellini’s picture of the decollation of John the Baptist, but informed
+him that it was inaccurate—surgically—for the tendons and muscles ought
+to shrink where divided; and then calling for one of his slaves, he drew
+his scimitar, and striking off the head of the wretch, gave the
+horror-struck artist a lesson in practical anatomy. So we might possibly
+learn from Rachel’s imitative representation, (studied in an hospital as
+they say,) how poison acts on the frame, and how the limbs and features
+writhe into death; but if she were a great moral artist she would feel
+that what is allowed to be true in painting, is true in art generally;
+that mere imitation, such as the vulgar delight in, and hold up their
+hands to see, is the vulgarest and easiest aim of the imitative arts,
+and that between the true interpretation of poetry in art and such base
+mechanical means to the lowest ends, there lies an immeasurable
+distance.
+
+I am disposed to think that Rachel has not genius, but talent, and that
+her talent, from what I see year after year, has a downward
+tendency,—there is not sufficient moral seasoning to save it from
+corruption. I remember that when I first saw her in Hermione she
+reminded me of a serpent, and the same impression continues. The long
+meagre form with its graceful undulating movements, the long narrow face
+and features, the contracted jaw, the high brow, the brilliant
+supernatural eyes which seem to glance every way at once; the sinister
+smile; the painted red lips, which look as though they had lapped, or
+could lap, blood; all these bring before me the idea of a Lamia, the
+serpent nature in the woman’s form. In Lydia, and in Athalie, she
+touches the extremes of vice and wickedness with such a masterly
+lightness and precision, that I am full of wondering admiration for the
+actress. There is not a turn of her figure, not an expression in her
+face, not a fold in her gorgeous drapery, that is not a study; but
+withal such a consciousness of her art, and such an ostentation of the
+means she employs, that the power remains always _extraneous_, as it
+were, and exciting only to the senses and the intellect.
+
+Latterly she has become a hard mannerist. Her face, once so flexible,
+has lost the power of expressing the nicer shades and softer gradations
+of feeling; so much so, that they write dramas for her with
+supernaturally wicked and depraved heroines to suit her especial powers.
+I conceive that an artist could not sink lower in degradation. Yet to
+satisfy the taste of a Parisian audience and the ambition of a Parisian
+actress this was not enough, and wickedness required the piquancy of
+immediate approximation with innocence. In the Valeria she played two
+characters, and appeared on the stage alternately as a miracle of vice
+and a miracle of virtue: an abandoned prostitute and a chaste matron.
+There was something in this contrasted impersonation, considered simply
+in relation to the aims and objects of art, so revolting, that I sat in
+silent and deep disgust, which was partly deserved by the audience which
+could endure the exhibition.
+
+It is the entire absence of the high poetic and moral element which
+distinguishes Rachel as an actress, and places her at such an
+immeasurable distance from Mrs. Siddons, that it shocks me to hear them
+named together.
+
+
+112.
+
+It is no reproach to a capital actress to play effectively a very wicked
+character. Mrs. Siddons played the abandoned Milwood as carefully, as
+completely as she played Hermoine and Constance; but if it had required
+a perpetual succession of Calistas and Milwoods to call forth her
+highest powers, what should we think of the woman and the artist?
+
+
+113.
+
+When dramas and characters are invented to suit the particular talent of
+a particular actor or actress, it argues rather a limited range of the
+artistic power; though within that limit the power may be great and the
+talent genuine.
+
+
+Thus for Liston and for Miss O’Neil, so distinguished in their
+respective lines of Comedy and Tragedy, characters were especially
+constructed and plays written, which have not been acted since their
+time.
+
+
+114.
+
+A celebrated German actress (who has quitted the stage for many years)
+speaking of Rachel, said that the reason she must always stop short of
+the highest place in art, is because she is nothing but an actress—that
+only; and has no aims in life, has no duties, feelings, employments,
+sympathies, but those which centre in herself in the interests of her
+art;—which thus ceases to be _art_ and becomes a _métier_.
+
+This reminded me of what Pauline Viardot once said to me:—“D’abord je
+suis _femme_, avec les dévoirs, les affections, les sentiments d’une
+femme; et puis je suis _artiste_.”
+
+
+115.
+
+The same German actress whose opinion I have quoted, told me that the
+Leonora and the Iphigenia of Goethe were the parts she preferred to
+play. The Thekla and the Beatrice of Schiller next. (In all these she
+excelled.) The parts easiest to her, requiring no effort scarcely, were
+Jerta (in Houwald’s Tragedy, “Die Schuld”), and Clärchen in Egmont; of
+the character of Jerta, she said beautifully:—“Ich habe es nicht
+gespielt, Ich habe es gesagt!” (I did not _play_ it, I _uttered_ it.)
+This was extremely characteristic of the woman.
+
+I once asked Mrs. Siddons, which of her great characters she preferred
+to play? She replied, after a moment’s consideration, and in her rich
+deliberate emphatic tones:—“Lady Macbeth is the character I have most
+_studied_.” She afterwards said that she had played the character during
+thirty years, and scarcely acted it once, without carefully reading
+over the part and generally the whole play in the morning; and that she
+never read over the play without finding something new in it;
+“something,” she said, “which had not struck me so much as it _ought_ to
+have struck me.”
+
+
+Of Mrs. Pritchard, who preceded Mrs. Siddons in the part of Lady
+Macbeth, it was well known that she had never read the play. She merely
+studied her own part as written out by the stage-copyist; of the other
+parts she knew nothing but the _cues_.
+
+
+116.
+
+When I asked Mrs. Henry Siddons, which of her characters she preferred
+playing? she said at once “Imogen, in Cymbeline, was the character I
+played with most ease to myself, and most success as regarded the
+public; it cost no effort.”
+
+This was confirmed by others. A very good judge said of her—“In some of
+her best parts, as Juliet, Rosalind, and Lady Townley, she may have been
+approached or equalled. In Viola and Imogen she was never equalled. In
+the grace and simplicity of the first, in the refinement and shy but
+impassioned tenderness of the last, _I_ at least have never seen any one
+to be compared to her. She hardly seemed to _act_ these parts; they came
+naturally to her.”
+
+This reminds me of another anecdote of the same accomplished actress and
+admirable woman. The people of Edinburgh, among whom she lived, had so
+identified her with all that was gentle, refined and noble, that they
+did not like to see her play wicked parts. It happened that Godwin went
+down to Edinburgh with a tragedy in his pocket, which had been accepted
+by the theatre there, and in which Mrs. Henry Siddons was to play the
+principal part—that of a very wicked woman (I forget the name of the
+piece). He was warned that it risked the success of his play, but her
+conception of the part was so just and spirited, that he persisted. At
+the rehearsal she stopped in the midst of one of her speeches and said,
+with great _naïveté_, “I am afraid, Mr. Godwin, the people will not
+endure to hear me say this!” He replied coolly, “My dear, you cannot be
+always young and pretty—you must come to this at last,—go on.” He
+mistook her meaning and the feeling of “the people.” The play failed;
+and the audience took care to discriminate between their disapprobation
+of the piece and their admiration for the actress.
+
+
+117.
+
+Madame Schrœder Devrient told me that she sung with most pleasure to
+herself in the “Fidelio;” and in this part I have never seen her
+equalled.
+
+Fanny Kemble told me the part she had played with most pleasure to
+herself, was Camiola, in Massinger’s “Maid of Honour.” It was an
+exquisite impersonation, but the play itself ineffective and not
+successful, because of the weak and worthless character of the hero.
+
+
+118.
+
+Mrs. Charles Kean told me that she had played with great ease and
+pleasure to herself, the part of Ginevra, in Leigh Hunt’s “Legend of
+Florence.” She _made_ the part (as it is technically termed), and it was
+a very complete and beautiful impersonation.
+
+
+These answers appear to me psychologically, as well as artistically,
+interesting, and worth preserving.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+119.
+
+Mrs. Siddons, when looking over the statues in Lord Lansdowne’s gallery,
+told him that one mode of expressing intensity of feeling was suggested
+to her by the position of some of the Egyptian statues with the arms
+close down at the sides and the hands clenched. This is curious, for the
+attitude in the Egyptian gods is intended to express repose. As the
+expression of intense passion self-controlled, it might be appropriate
+to some characters and not to others. Rachel, as I recollect, uses it in
+the Phêdre:—Madame Rettich uses it in the Medea. It would not be
+characteristic in Constance.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+120.
+
+On a certain occasion when Fanny Kemble was reading Cymbeline, a lady
+next to me remarked that Imogen ought not to utter the words “Senseless
+linen!—happier therein than I!” aloud, and to Pisanio,—that it detracted
+from the strength of the feeling, and that they should have been uttered
+aside, and in a low, intense whisper. “Iachimo,” she added, “might
+easily have won a woman who could have laid her heart so bare to a mere
+attendant!”
+
+On my repeating this criticism to Fanny Kemble, she replied just as I
+had anticipated: “Such criticism is the mere expression of the natural
+emotions or character of the critic. _She_ would have spoken the words
+in a whisper; _I_ should have made the exclamation aloud. If there had
+been a thousand people by, I should not have cared for them—I should not
+have been conscious of their presence. I should have exclaimed before
+them all, ‘Senseless linen!—happier therein than I!’”
+
+And thus the artist fell into the same mistake of which she accused her
+critic—she made Imogen utter the words aloud, because _she_ would have
+done so herself. This sort of subjective criticism in both was quite
+feminine; but the question was not how either A. B. or F. K. would have
+spoken the words, but what would have been most natural in such a woman
+as Imogen?
+
+And most undoubtedly the first criticism was as exquisitely true and
+just as it was delicate. Such a woman as Imogen would _not_ have uttered
+those words aloud. She would have uttered them in a whisper, and turning
+her face from her attendant. With such a woman, the more intense the
+passion, the more conscious and the more veiled the expression.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+121.
+
+I read in the life of Garrick that, “about 1741, a taste for Shakespeare
+had lately been revived by the encouragement of some distinguished
+persons of taste of both sexes; but more especially by the ladies who
+formed themselves into a society, called the ‘Shakespeare Club.’” There
+exists a Shakespeare Society at this present time, but I do not know
+that any ladies are members of it, or allowed to be so.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+122.
+
+The “Maria Maddalena” of Friedrich Hebbel is a domestic tragedy. It
+represents the position of a young girl in the lower class of society-a
+character of quiet goodness and feeling, in a position the most usual,
+circumstances the most common-place. The representation is from the
+life, and set forth with a truth which in its naked simplicity, almost
+hardness, becomes most tragic and terrible. Around this girl, portrayed
+with consummate delicacy, is a group of men. First her father, an honest
+artisan, coarse, harsh, despotic. Then a light-minded, good-natured,
+dissipated brother, and two suitors. All these love her according to
+their masculine individuality. To the men of her own family she is as a
+part of the furniture—something they are accustomed to see—necessary to
+the daily well-being of the house, without whom the fire would not be on
+the hearth, nor the soup on the table; and they are proud of her charms
+and good qualities as belonging to them. By her lovers she is loved as
+an object they desire to possess—and dispute with each other. But no one
+of all these thinks of _her_—of what she thinks, feels, desires,
+suffers, is, or may be. Nor does she seem to think of it herself, until
+the storm falls upon her, enwraps her, overwhelms her. Then she stands
+in the midst of the beings around her, and who are one and all in a kind
+of external relation to her, completely alone. In her grief, in her
+misery, in her amazement, her perplexity, her terror, there is no one to
+take thought for her, no one to help, no one to sympathise. Each is
+self-occupied, self-satisfied. And so she sinks down and perishes, and
+they stand wondering at what they had not the sense to see, wringing
+their hands over the irremediable. It is the Lucy Ashton of vulgar life.
+
+The manners and characters of this play are essentially German; but the
+_stuff_—the material of the piece—the relative position of the
+personages, might be true of any place in this christian, civilised
+Europe. The whole is wonderfully, painfully natural, and strikes home to
+the heart, like Hood’s “Bridge of Sighs.” It was a surprise to me that
+such a piece should have been acted, and with applause, at the Court
+Theatre at Vienna; but I believe it has not been given since 1849.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+123.
+
+Here is a very good analysis of the artistic nature: “Il ressent une
+véritable émotion, mais il s’arrange pour la montrer. Il fait un peu ce
+que faisait cet acteur de l’antiquité qui, venant de perdre son fils
+unique et jouant quelque temps après le rôle d’Electre embrassant l’urne
+d’Oreste, prit entre ses mains l’urne qui contenait les cendres de son
+enfant, et joua sa propre douleur, dit Aulus Gellius, au lieu de jouer
+celle de son rôle. Ce melange de l’émotion naturelle et de l’émotion
+théatrale est plus fréquent qu’on ne croit, surtout à certaines époques
+quand le raffinement de l’Education fait que l’homme ne sent pas
+seulement ses émotions, mais qu’il sent aussi l’effet qu’elles peuvent
+produire. Beaucoup de gens alors, sont naturellement comédiens; c’est à
+dire qu’ils donnent un rôle à leurs passions: ils sentent en dehors au
+lieu de sentir en dedans; leurs émotions sont _en relief_ au lieu d’être
+_en profondeur_.”—_St. Marc Girardin._
+
+I think Margaret Fuller must have had the above passage in her mind when
+she worked out this happy illustration into a more finished form. She
+says:—“The difference between the artistic nature and the unartistic
+nature in the hour of emotion, is this: in the first the feeling is a
+cameo, in the last an intaglio. Raised in relief and shaped _out_ of the
+heart in the first; cut _into_ the heart, and hardly perceptible till
+you take the impression, in the last.”
+
+And to complete this fanciful and beautiful analogy, we might add, that
+because the artistic nature is demonstrative, it is sometimes thought
+insincere; and insincere it _is_ where the form is hollow in proportion
+as it is cast outward, as in the casts and electrotype copies of the
+solid sculpture. And because the unartistic nature is undemonstrative,
+it is sometimes thought cold, unreal; for of this also there are
+imitations; and in passing the touch over certain intaglios, we feel by
+contact that they are not so deep as we supposed.
+
+God defend us from both! from the hollowness that imitates solidity,
+and the shallowness that imitates depth!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+124.
+
+Goethe said of some woman, “She knew something of devotion and love, but
+of the pure admiration for a glorious piece of man’s handiwork—of a mere
+sympathetic veneration for the creation of the human intellect—she could
+form no idea.”
+
+This may have been true of the individual woman referred to; but that
+female critics look for something in a production of art beyond the mere
+handiwork, and that “our sympathetic veneration for a creation of human
+intellect,” is often dependent on our moral associations, is not a
+reproach to us. Nor, if I may presume to say so, does it lessen the
+value of our criticism, where it can be referred to principles. Women
+have a sort of unconscious logic in these matters.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+125.
+
+“When fiction,” says Sir James Mackintosh, “represents a degree of ideal
+excellence superior to any virtue which is observed in real life, the
+effect is perfectly analogous to that of a model of ideal beauty in the
+fine arts.”
+
+That is to say—As the Apollo exalts our idea of possible beauty, in
+form, so the moral ideal of man or woman exalts our idea of possible
+virtue, provided it be _consistent_ as a whole. If we gave the Apollo a
+god-like head and face and left a part of his frame below perfection,
+the elevating effect of the whole would be immediately destroyed, though
+the figure might be more according to the standard of actual nature.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+126.
+
+“In Dante, as in Shakespeare, every man selects by instinct that which
+assimilates with the course of his own previous occupations and
+interests.” (_Merivale._) True, not of Dante and Shakespeare only, but
+of all books worth reading; and not merely of books and authors, but of
+all productions of mind in whatever form which speak to mind; all works
+of art, from which we _imbibe_, as it were, what is sympathetic with our
+individuality. The more universal the sympathies of the writer or the
+artist, the more of such individualities will be included in his domain
+of power.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+127.
+
+The distinction so cleverly and beautifully drawn by the Germans (by
+Lessing first I believe) between “Bildende” and “Redende Kunst” is not
+to be rendered into English without a lengthy paraphrase. It places in
+immediate contradistinction the art which is evolved in _words_, and the
+art which is evolved in _forms_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+128.
+
+Venus, or rather the Greek Aphrodite, in the sublime fragment of
+Eschylus (the Danaïdes) is a grand, severe, and pure conception; the
+principle eternal of beauty, of love, and of fecundity—or the law of the
+continuation of being through beauty and through love. Such a
+conception is no more like the Ovidean Roman Venus than the Venus of
+Milo is like the Venus de Medicis.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+129.
+
+In the Greek tragedy, love figures as one of the laws of nature—not as a
+power, or a passion; these are the aspects given to it by the Christian
+imagination.
+
+Yet this higher idea of love _did_ exist among the ancients—only we must
+not seek it in their poetry, but in their philosophy. Thus we find it in
+Plato, set forth as a beautiful philosophical theory; not as a passion,
+to influence life, nor as a poetic feeling, to adorn and exalt it. Nor
+do we moderns owe this idea of a mystic, elevated, and elevating love to
+the Greek philosophy. I rather agree with those who trace it to the
+mingling of Christianity with the manners of the old Germans, and their
+(almost) superstitious reverence for womanhood. In the Middle Ages,
+where morals were most depraved, and women most helpless and oppressed,
+there still survived the theory formed out of the combination of the
+Christian spirit, and the Germanic customs; and when in the 15th
+century Plato became the fashion, then the theory became a science, and
+what had been religion became again philosophy. This sort of speculative
+love became to real love what theology became to religion; it was a
+thesis to be talked about and argued in universities, sung in sonnets,
+set forth in art; and so being kept as far as possible from all bearings
+on our moral life, it ceased to find consideration either as a primæval
+law of God, or as a moral motive influencing the duties and habits of
+our existence; and thus we find the social code in regard to it
+diverging into all the vagaries of celibacy on one hand, and all the
+vilenesses of profligacy on the other.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+130.
+
+Wilkie’s “Life and Letters” have not helped me much. His opinions and
+criticisms on his own art are sensible, not suggestive. I find, however,
+one or two passages strongly illustrative of the value of _truth_ as a
+principle in art, and the sort of _vitality_ it gives to scenery and
+objects.
+
+He writes, when travelling in Holland, to his friend, Sir George
+Beaumont;—
+
+“One of the first circumstances that struck me wherever I went was what
+you had prepared me for; the resemblance that everything bore to the
+Dutch and Flemish pictures. On leaving Ostend, not only the people,
+houses, trees, but whole tracks of country reminded me of Teniers, and
+on getting further into the country this was only relieved by the
+pictures of Rubens and Wouvermans, or some other masters taking his
+place.
+
+“I thought I could trace the particular districts in Holland where
+Ostade, Cuyp, and Rembrandt had studied, and could almost fancy the spot
+where the pictures of other masters had been painted. Indeed nothing
+seemed new to me in the whole country; and what one could not help
+wondering at, was, that these old masters should have been able to draw
+the materials of so beautiful a variety of art, from so contracted and
+monotonous a theme.”
+
+Their variety arose out of their truthfulness. I had the same feeling
+when travelling in Holland and Belgium. It was to me a perpetual
+succession of reminiscences, and so it has been with others. Rubens and
+Rembrandt (as landscape painters)—Cuyp, Hobbima, were continually in my
+mind; occasionally the yet more poetical Ruysdaal; but who ever thinks
+of Wouvermans, or Bergham, or Karel du Jardin, as national or natural
+painters? their scenery is all _got up_ like the scenery in a ballet,
+and I can conceive nothing more tiresome than a room full of their
+pictures, elegant as they are.
+
+
+131.
+
+Again, writing from Jerusalem, Wilkie says, “Nothing here requires
+revolution in our opinions of the finest works of art: with all their
+discrepancies of detail, they are yet constantly recalled by what is
+here before us. The background of the Heliodorus of Raphael is a Syrian
+building; the figures in the Lazarus of Sebastian del Piombo are a
+Syrian people; and the indescribable tone of Rembrandt is brought to
+mind at every turn, whether in the street, the Synagogue, or the
+Sepulchre.” And again: “The painter we are always referring to, as one
+who has most truly given the eastern people, is Rembrandt.”
+
+He partly contradicts this afterwards, but says, that Venetian art
+reminds him of Syria. Now, the Venetians were in constant communication
+with the East; all their art has a tinge of orientalism. As to
+Rembrandt, he must have been in familiar intercourse with the Jew
+merchants and Jewish families settled in the Dutch commercial towns; he
+painted them frequently as portraits, and they perpetually appear in his
+compositions.
+
+
+132.
+
+In the following passage Wilkie seems unconsciously to have anticipated
+the invention (or rather the _discovery_) of the Daguerreotype, and some
+of its results. He says:—“If by an operation of mechanism, animated
+nature could be copied with the accuracy of a cast in plaster, a tracing
+on a wall, or a reflection in a glass, without modification, and without
+the proprieties and graces of art, all that utility could desire would
+be perfectly attained, but it would be at the expense of almost every
+quality which renders art delightful.”
+
+One reason why the Daguerreotype portraits are in general so
+unsatisfactory may perhaps be traced to a natural law, though I have not
+heard it suggested. It is this: every object that we behold we see not
+with the eye only, but with the soul; and this is especially true of the
+human countenance, which in so far as it is the expression of mind we
+see through the medium of our own individual mind. Thus a portrait is
+satisfactory in so far as the painter has sympathy with his subject, and
+delightful to us in proportion as the resemblance reflected through
+_his_ sympathies is in accordance with _our own_. Now in the
+Daguerreotype there is no such medium, and the face comes before us
+without passing through the human mind and brain to our apprehension.
+This may be the reason why a Daguerreotype, however beautiful and
+accurate, is seldom satisfactory or agreeable, and that while we
+acknowledge its truth as to fact, it always leaves something for the
+sympathies to desire.
+
+
+133.
+
+He says, “One thing alone seems common in all the stages of early art;
+the desire of making all other excellences tributary to the expression
+of thought and sentiment.”
+
+The early painters had _no other_ excellences except those of thought
+and expression; therefore could not sacrifice what they did not possess.
+They drew incorrectly, coloured ineffectively, and were ignorant of
+perspective.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+134.
+
+When at Dusseldorf, I found the President of the Academy, Wilhelm
+Schadow, employed on a church picture in three compartments; Paradise
+in the centre; on the right side, Purgatory; on the left side, Hell. He
+explained to me that he had not attempted to paint the interior of
+Paradise as the sojourn of the blessed, because he could imagine no kind
+of occupation or delight which, prolonged to eternity, would not be
+wearisome. He had therefore represented the exterior of Paradise, where
+Christ, standing on the threshold with outstretched arms, receives and
+welcomes those who enter. (This was better and in finer taste than the
+more common allegory of St. Peter and his keys.) On one side of the
+door, the Virgin Mary and a group of guardian angels encourage those who
+approach. Among these we distinguish a martyr who has died for the
+truth, and a warrior who has fought for it. A care-worn, penitent mother
+is presented by her innocent daughter. Those who were “in the world and
+the world knew them not,” are here acknowledged—and eyes dim with
+weeping, and heads bowed with shame, are here uplifted, and bright with
+the rapturous gleam which shone through the portals of Paradise.
+
+The idea of Purgatory, he told me, was suggested by a vision or dream
+related by St. Catherine of Genoa, in which she beheld a great number of
+men and women shut up in a dark cavern; angels descending from heaven,
+liberate them from time to time, and they are borne away one after
+another from darkness, pain, and penance, into life and light—again to
+behold the face of their Maker—reconciled and healed. In his picture,
+Schadow has represented two angels bearing away a liberated soul. Below
+in the fore-ground groups of sinners are waiting, sadly, humbly, but not
+unhopefully, the term of their bitter penance. Among these he had placed
+a group of artists and poets who, led away by temptation, had abused
+their glorious gifts to wicked or worldly purposes;—Titian, Ariosto,
+and, rather to my surprise, the beautiful, lamenting spirit of Byron.
+Then, what was curious enough, as types of ambition, Lady Macbeth and
+her husband, who, it seems, were to be ultimately saved, I do not know
+why—unless for the love of Shakespeare.
+
+Hell, like all the hells I ever saw, was a failure. There was the usual
+amount of fire and flames, dragons and serpents, ghastly, despairing
+spirits, but nothing of original or powerful conception. When I looked
+in Schadow’s face, so beautiful with benevolence, I wondered _how_ he
+could—but in truth he could _not_—realise to himself the idea of a hell;
+all the materials he had used were borrowed and common-place.
+
+But among his cartoons for pictures already painted, there was one
+charming idea of quite a different kind. It was for an altar, and he
+called it “THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE.” Above, the sacrificed Redeemer lies
+extended in his mother’s arms. The pure abundant Waters of Salvation,
+gushing from the rock beneath their feet, are received into a great
+cistern. Saints, martyrs, teachers of the truth, are standing round,
+drinking or filling their vases, which they present to each other. From
+the cistern flows a stream, at which a family of poor peasants are
+drinking with humble, joyful looks; and as the stream divides and flows
+away through flowery meadows, little sportive children stoop to drink of
+it, scooping up the water in their tiny hands, or sipping it with their
+rosy smiling lips. A beautiful and significant allegory beautifully
+expressed, and as intelligible to the people as any in the “Pilgrim’s
+Progress.”
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+135.
+
+Haydon discussed “High Art” as if it depended solely on the knowledge
+and the appreciation of _form_. In this lay his great mistake. Form is
+but the vehicle of the highest art.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+136.
+
+Southey says that the Franciscan Order “excluded all art, all
+science;—no pictures might profane their churches.” This is a most
+extraordinary instance of ignorance in a man of Southey’s universal
+learning. Did he forget Friar Bacon? had he not heard of that museum of
+divine pictures, the Franciscan church and convent at Assisi? And that
+some of the greatest mathematicians, architects, mosaic workers,
+carvers, and painters, of the 13th and 14th centuries were Franciscan
+friars?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+137.
+
+Wordsworth’s remark on Sir Joshua Reynolds as a painter, that “he lived
+too much for the age and the people among whom he lived,” is hardly
+just; as a portrait-painter he could not well do otherwise; his
+profession was to represent the people among whom he lived. An artist
+who takes the higher, the creative and imaginative walks of art, and who
+thinks he can, at the same time, live for and with the age, and for the
+passing and clashing interests of the world, and the frivolities of
+society, does so at a great risk: there must be perilous discord between
+the inner and the outer life—such discord as wears and irritates the
+whole physical and moral being. Where the original material of the
+character is not strong, the artistic genius will be gradually
+enfeebled and conventionalised, through flattery, through sympathy,
+through misuse. If the material be strong, the result may perhaps be
+worse; the genius may be demoralised and the mind lose its balance. I
+have seen in my time instances of both.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+138.
+
+“The man,” says Coleridge, “who reads a work meant for immediate effect
+on one age, with the notions and feelings of another, may be a refined
+gentleman but a very sorry critic.”
+
+This is especially true with regard to art: but Coleridge should have
+put in the word, _only_, (“only the notions and feelings of another
+age,”) for a very great pleasure lies in the power of throwing ourselves
+into the sentiments and notions of one age, while feeling _with_ them,
+and reflecting _upon_ them, with the riper critical experience which
+belongs to another age.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+139.
+
+A _good_ taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a
+_just_ taste discriminates the degree,—the _poco-più_ and the
+_poco-meno_. A _good_ taste rejects faults; a _just_ taste selects
+excellences. A _good_ taste is often unconscious; a _just_ taste is
+always conscious. A _good_ taste may be lowered or spoilt; a _just_
+taste can only go on refining more and more.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+140.
+
+Artists are interesting to me as men. Their work, as the product of
+mind, should lead us to a knowledge of their own being; else, as I have
+often said and written, our admiration of art is a species of atheism.
+To forget the soul in its highest manifestation is like forgetting God
+in his creation.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+141.
+
+“Les images peints du corps humain, dans les figures où domine par trop
+le savoir anatomique, en révèlant trop clairement à l’homme les secrets
+de sa structure, lui en découvrent aussi par trop ce qu’on pourrait
+appeler le point de vue _matériel_, ou, si l’on veut, _animal_.”
+
+This is the fault of Michal-Angelo; yet I have sometimes thought that
+his very materialism, so grand, and so peculiar in character, may have
+arisen out of his profound religious feeling, his stern morality, his
+lofty conceptions of our _mortal_, as well as _immortal_ destinies. He
+appears to have beheld the human form only in a pure and sublime point
+of view; not as the animal man, but as the habitation, fearfully and
+wondrously constructed, for the spirit of man,—
+
+           “The outward shape,
+   And unpolluted temple of the mind.”
+
+This is the reason that Michal-Angelo’s materialism affects us so
+differently from that of Rubens. In the first, the predominance of form
+attains almost a moral sublimity. In the latter, the predominance of
+flesh and blood is debased into physical grossness. Michal-Angelo
+believed in the resurrection of THE BODY, emphatically; and in his Last
+Judgment the dead rise like Titans, strong to contend and mighty to
+suffer. It is the apotheosis of form. In Ruben’s picture of the same
+subject (at Munich) the bodily presence of resuscitated life is
+revolting, reminding us of the text of St. Paul—“Flesh and blood shall
+_not_ inherit the kingdom of God.” Both pictures are _æsthetically_
+false, but _artistically_ miracles, and should thus be considered and
+appreciated.
+
+I have never looked on those awful figures in the Medici Chapel without
+thinking what stupendous intellects must inhabit such stupendous
+forms—terrible in their quietude; but they are supernatural, rather than
+divine.
+
+   “Heidnische Ruhe und Christliche Milde, sie bleiben Dir fremde;
+    Alt-testamentisch bist Du, Zürnender, wie ist Dein Gott!”
+
+John Edward Taylor, in his profound and beautiful essay “MICHAEL-ANGELO,
+A POET,” says truly that “Dante worshipped the philosophy of religion,
+and Michael-Angelo adored the philosophy of art.” The religion of the
+one and the art of the other were evolved in a strange combination of
+mysticism, materialism, and moral grandeur. The two men were congenial
+in character and in genius.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+A FRAGMENT ON SCULPTURE.
+
+
+AND ON CERTAIN CHARACTERS IN HISTORY AND POETRY CONSIDERED AS
+SUBJECTS OF MODERN ART.
+
+1848.
+
+
+I Should begin by admitting the position laid down by Frederick
+Schlegel, that art and nature are not identical. “Men,” he says,
+“traduce nature, who falsely give her the epithet of artistic;” for
+though nature comprehends all art, art cannot comprehend all nature.
+Nature, in her sources of pleasures and contemplation is infinite; and
+art, as her reflection in human works, finite. Nature is boundless in
+her powers, exhaustless in her variety; the powers of art and its
+capabilities of variety in production are bounded on every side. Nature
+herself, the infinite, has circumscribed the bounds of finite art; the
+one is the divinity; the other, the priestess. And if poetic art in the
+_interpreting_ of nature share in her infinitude, yet in _representing_
+nature through material, form, and colour, she is,—oh, how limited!
+
+
+If each of the forms of poetic art has its law of limitation as
+determined as the musical scale, narrowest of all are the limitations of
+sculpture, to which, notwithstanding, we give the highest place; and it
+is in regard to sculpture, we find most frequently those mistakes which
+arise from a want of knowledge of the true principles of art.
+
+Admitting, then, as necessary and immutable, the limitations of the art
+of sculpture as to the management of the material in giving form and
+expression; its primal laws of repose and simplicity; its rejection of
+the complex and conventional; its bounded capabilities as to choice of
+subject; must we also admit, with some of the most celebrated critics of
+art, that there is but one style of sculpture, the Greek? And that every
+deviation from pure Greek art must be regarded as a depravation and
+perversion of the powers and subjects of sculpture? I do not see that
+this follows.
+
+
+It is absolute that Greek art reached long ago the term of its
+development. In so far as regards the principles of beauty and
+execution, it can go no farther. We may stand and look at the relics of
+the Parthenon in awe and in despair; we can do neither more, nor better.
+But we have not done with Greek sculpture. What in it is purely _ideal_,
+is eternal; what is conventional, is in accordance with the primal
+conditions of all imitative art. Therefore though it may have reached
+the point at which development stops, and though its capability of
+adaptation be limited by necessary laws; still its all-beautiful, its
+immortal imagery is ever near us and around us; still “doth the old
+feeling bring back the old names,” and with the old names, the forms;
+still, in those old familiar forms we continue to clothe all that is
+loveliest in visible nature; still, in all our associations with Greek
+art—
+
+  “’Tis Jupiter who brings whate’er is great,
+   And Venus who brings every thing that’s fair.”
+
+That the supreme beauty of Greek art—that the majestic significance of
+the classical myths—will ever be to the educated mind and eye as things
+indifferent and worn out, I cannot believe.
+
+
+But on the other hand it may well be doubted whether the impersonation
+of the Greek allegories in the purest forms of Greek art will ever give
+intense pleasure to the people, or ever speak home to the hearts of the
+men and women of these times. And this not from the want of an innate
+taste and capacity in the minds of the masses—not because ignorance has
+“frozen the genial current in their souls”—not merely through a vulgar
+preference for mechanical imitation of common and familiar forms; but
+from other causes not transient—not accidental. A classical education is
+not now, as heretofore, the _only_ education given; and through an
+honest and intense sympathy with the life of their own experience, and
+through a dislike to vicious associations, though clothed in classical
+language and classical forms, _thence_ is it that the people have turned
+with a sense of relief from gods and goddesses, Ledas and Antiopes, to
+shepherds and shepherdesses, groups of Charity, and young ladies in the
+character of Innocence,—harmless, picturesque inanities, bearing the
+same relation to classical sculpture that Watts’s hymns bear to Homer
+and Sophocles.
+
+
+Classical attainments of any kind are rare in our English sculptors;
+therefore it is, that we find them often quite familiar with the
+conventional treatment and outward forms of the usual subjects of Greek
+art, without much knowledge of the original poetical conception, its
+derivation, or its significance; and equally without any real
+appreciation of the idea of which the form is but the vehicle. Hence
+they do not seem to be aware how far this original conception is
+capable of being varied, modified, _animated_ as it were, with an
+infusion of fresh life, without deviating from its essential truth, or
+transgressing those narrow limits, within which all sculpture must be
+bounded in respect to action and attitude. To express _character_ within
+these limits is the grand difficulty. We must remember that too much
+value given to the head as the seat of mind, too much expression given
+to the features as the exponents of character, must diminish the
+importance of those parts of the form on which sculpture mainly depends
+for its effect on the imagination. To convey the idea of a complete
+individuality in a single figure, and under these restrictions, is the
+problem to be solved by the sculptor who aims at originality, yet feels
+his aspirations restrained by a fine taste and circumscribed by certain
+inevitable associations.
+
+
+It is therefore a question open to argument and involving considerations
+of infinite delicacy and moment, in morals and in art, whether the old
+Greek legends, endued as they are with an imperishable vitality derived
+from their abstract youth, may not be susceptible of a treatment in
+modern art analogous to that which they have received in modern poetry,
+where the significant myth, or the ideal character, without losing its
+classic grace, has been animated with a purer sentiment, and developed
+into a higher expressiveness. Wordsworth’s Dion and Laodomia; Shelley’s
+version of the Hymn to Mercury; Goethe’s Iphigenia; Lord Byron’s
+Prometheus; Keats’s Hyperion; Barry Cornwall’s Proserpina; are instances
+of what I mean in poetry. To do the same thing in art, requires that our
+sculptors should stand in the same relation to Phidias and Praxiteles,
+that our greatest poets bear to Homer or Euripides; that they should be
+themselves poets and interpreters, not mere translators and imitators.
+
+Further, we all know, that there is often a necessity for conveying
+abstract ideas in the forms of art. We have then recourse to allegory;
+yet allegorical statues are generally cold and conventional and
+addressed to the intellect merely. Now there are occasions, in which an
+abstract quality or thought is far more impressively and intelligibly
+conveyed by an _impersonation_ than by a _personification_. I mean, that
+Aristides might express the idea of justice; Penelope, that of conjugal
+faith; Jonathan and David (or Pylades and Orestes), friendship; Rizpah,
+devotion to the memory of the dead; Iphigenia, the voluntary sacrifice
+for a good cause; and so of many others; and such figures would have
+this advantage, that with the significance of a symbol they would
+combine all the powers of a sympathetic reality.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+HELEN.
+
+I have never seen any statue of Helen, ancient or modern. Treated in the
+right spirit, I can hardly conceive a diviner subject for a sculptor. It
+would be a great mistake to represent the Greek Helen merely as a
+beautiful and alluring woman. This, at least, is not the Homeric
+conception of the character, which has a wonderful and fascinating
+individuality, requiring the utmost delicacy and poetic feeling to
+comprehend, and rare artistic skill to realise. The oft-told story of
+the Grecian painter, who, to create a Helen, assembled some twenty of
+the fairest models he could find, and took from each a limb or a
+feature, in order to compose from their separate beauties an ideal of
+perfection,—this story, if it were true, would only prove that even
+Zeuxis could make a great mistake. Such a combination of heterogeneous
+elements would be psychologically and artistically false, and would
+never give us a Helen.
+
+She has become the ideal type of a fatal, faithless, dissolute woman;
+but according to the Greek myth, she is _predestined_,—at once the
+instrument and the victim of that fiat of the gods which had long before
+decreed the destruction of Troy, and _her_ to be the cause. She must not
+only be supremely beautiful,—“a daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and
+most divinely fair!”—but as the offspring of Zeus (the title by which
+she is so often designated in the Iliad), as the sister of the great
+twin demi-gods Castor and Pollux, she should have the heroic lineaments
+proper to her Olympian descent, touched with a pensive shade; for she
+laments the calamities which her fatal charms have brought on all who
+have loved her, all whom she has loved:—
+
+  “Ah! had I died ere to these shores I fled,
+   False to my country and my nuptial bed!”
+
+She shrinks from the reproachful glances of those whom she has injured;
+and yet, as it is finely intimated, wherever she appears her resistless
+loveliness vanquishes every heart, and changes curses into blessings.
+Priam treats her with paternal tenderness; Hector with a sort of
+chivalrous respect.
+
+  “If some proud brother eyed me with disdain,
+   Or scornful sister with her sweeping train,
+   Thy gentle accents softened all my pain;
+   Nor was it e’er my fate from thee to find
+   A deed ungentle or a word unkind.”
+
+Helen, standing on the walls of Troy, and looking sadly over the battle
+plain, where the heroes of her forfeited country, her kindred and her
+friends, are assembled to fight and bleed for her sake, brings before us
+an image full of melancholy sweetness as well as of consummate beauty.
+Another passage in which she upbraids Venus as the cause of her
+fault—not as a mortal might humbly expostulate with an immortal, but
+almost on terms of equality, and even with bitterness,—is yet more
+characteristic. “For what,” she asks, tauntingly, “am I reserved? To
+what new countries am I destined to carry war and desolation? For what
+new lover must I break a second vow? Let me go hence! and if Paris
+lament my absence, let Venus console him, and for his sake ascend the
+skies no more!” A regretful pathos should mingle with her conscious
+beauty and her half-celestial dignity; and, to render her truly, her
+Greek elegance should be combined with a deeper and more complex
+sentiment than Greek art has usually sought to express.
+
+I am speaking here of Homer’s Helen—the Helen of the Iliad, not the
+Helen of the tragedians—not the Helen who for two thousand years has
+merely served “to point a moral;” and an artist who should think to
+realise the true Homeric conception, should beware of counterfeits, for
+such are abroad.[2]
+
+There is a wild Greek myth that it was not the real Helen, but the
+phantom of Helen, who fled with Paris, and who caused the destruction of
+Troy; while Helen herself was leading, like Penelope, a pattern life at
+Memphis. I must confess I prefer the proud humility, the pathetic
+elegance of Homer’s Helen, to such jugglery.
+
+It may flatter the pride of virtue, or it may move our religious
+sympathies, to look on the forlorn abasement of the Magdalene as the
+emblem of penitence; but there are associations connected with
+Helen—“sad Helen,” as she calls herself, and as I conceive the
+character,—which have a deep tragic significance; and surely there are
+localities for which the impersonation of classical art would be better
+fitted than that of sacred art.
+
+I do not know of any existing statue of Helen. Nicetas mentions among
+the relics of ancient art destroyed when Constantinople was sacked by
+the Latins in 1202, a bronze statue of Helen, with long hair flowing to
+the waist; and there is mention of an Etruscan figure of her, with wings
+(expressive of her celestial origin, for the Etruscans gave all their
+gods and demi-gods wings): in Müller I find these two only. There are
+likewise busts; and the story of Helen, and the various events of her
+life, occur perpetually on the antique gems, bas-reliefs, and painted
+vases. The most frequent subject is her abduction by Paris. A beautiful
+subject for a bas-relief, and one I believe not yet treated, would be
+Helen and Priam mourning over the lifeless form of Hector; yet the
+difficulty of preserving the simple sculptural treatment, and at the
+same time discriminating between this and other similar funereal groups,
+would render it perhaps a better subject for a picture, as admitting
+then of such scenery and accessories as would at once determine the
+signification.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   PENELOPE.        ALCESTIS.        LAODAMIA.
+
+Statues of Penelope and Helen might stand in beautiful and expressive
+contrast; but it is a contrast which no profane or prosaic hand should
+attempt to realise. Penelope is all woman in her tenderness and her
+truth; Helen, half a goddess in the midst of error and remorse.
+
+Nor is Penelope the only character which might stand as a type of
+conjugal fidelity in contrasted companionship with Helen: Alcestis, who
+died for her husband; or, better still, Laodamia, whose intense love
+and longing recalled hers from the shades below, are susceptible of the
+most beautiful statuesque treatment; only we must bear in mind that the
+leading _motif_ in the Alcestis is _duty_, in the Laodamia, _love_.
+
+I remember a bas-relief in the Vatican, which represents Hermes
+restoring Protesilaus to his mourning wife. The interview was granted
+for three hours only; and when the hero was taken from her a second
+time, she died on the threshhold of her palace. This is a frequent and
+appropriate subject for sarcophagi and funereal vases. But there exists,
+I believe, no single statue commemorative of the wife’s passionate
+devotion.
+
+The modern sculptor should penetrate his fancy with the sentiment of
+Wordsworth’s Laodamia.
+
+
+While the pen is in my hand I may remark that two of the stanzas in the
+Laodamia have been altered, and, as it seems to me, not improved, since
+the first edition. Originally the poem opened thus:
+
+  “With sacrifice, before the rising morn
+   Perform’d, my slaughter’d lord have I required;
+   And in thick darkness, amid shades forlorn,
+   Him of the infernal Gods have I desired:
+   Celestial pity I again implore;
+   Restore him to my sight—great Jove, restore!”
+
+Altered thus, and comparatively flat:—
+
+  “With sacrifice before the rising morn
+   Vows have I made, by fruitless hope inspired;
+   And from the infernal Gods, mid shades forlorn
+   Of night, my slaughtered lord have I required:
+   Celestial pity I again implore;
+   Restore him to my sight—great Jove, restore!”
+
+In the early edition the last stanza but one stood thus:—
+
+
+  “Ah! judge her gently who so deeply loved!
+   Her who, in reason’s spite, yet without crime,
+   Was in a trance of passion thus removed;
+   Delivered from the galling yoke of time,
+   And these frail elements,—to gather flowers
+   Of blissful quiet ’mid unfading bowers!”
+
+In the later editions thus altered, and, to my taste, spoiled:—
+
+  “By no weak pity might the Gods be moved;
+   She who thus perish’d not without the crime
+   Of lovers that in Reason’s spite have loved,
+   Was doomed to wander in a grosser clime
+   Apart from happy ghosts, that gather flowers
+   Of blissful quiet ’mid unfading bowers.”
+
+Altered, probably, because Virgil has introduced the shade of Laodamia
+among the criminal and unhappy lovers,—an instance of extraordinary bad
+taste in the Roman poet; whatever may have been her faults, she surely
+deserved to be placed in better company than Phædra and Pasiphäe.
+Wordsworth’s intuitive feeling and taste were true in the first
+instance, and he might have trusted to them. In my own copy of
+Wordsworth I have been careful to mark the original reading in justice
+to the _original_ Laodamia.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+   HIPPOLYTUS.      NEOPTOLEMUS.
+
+I have never met with a statue, ancient or modern, of Hippolytus; the
+finest possible ideal of a Greek youth, touched with some individual
+characteristics which are peculiarly fitted for sculpture. He is a
+hunter, not a warrior; a tamer of horses, not a combatant with spear and
+shield. He should have the slight, agile build of a young Apollo, but
+nothing of the God’s effeminacy; on the contrary, there should be an
+infusion of the severe beauty of his Amazonian mother, with that
+sedateness and modesty which should express the votary and companion of
+Diana; while, as the fated victim of Venus, whom he had contemned, and
+of his stepmother Phædra, whom he had repulsed, there should be a kind
+of melancholy in his averted features. A hound and implements of the
+chase would be the proper accessories, and the figure should be
+undraped, or nearly so.
+
+A sculptor who should be tempted to undertake this fine, and, as I
+think, untried subject—at least as a single figure—must begin by putting
+Racine out of his mind, whose “Seigneur Hippolyte” makes sentimental
+love to the “Princesse Aricie,” and must penetrate his fancy with the
+conception of Euripides.
+
+
+I find in Schlegel’s “Essais littéraires,” a few lines which will assist
+the fancy of the artist, in representing the person and character of
+Hippolytus.
+
+“Quant à l’Hippolyte d’Euripide il a une teinte si divine que pour le
+sentir dignement il faut, pour ainsi dire, être initié dans les mystères
+de la beauté, avoir respiré l’air de la Grèce. Rappelez vous ce que
+l’antiquité nous a transmis de plus accompli parmi les images d’une
+jeunesse héroïque, les Dioscures de Monte-Cavallo, le Méléagre et
+l’Apollon du Vatican. Le caractère d’Hippolyte occupe dans la poësie à
+peu près la même place que ces statues dans la sculpture.” “On peut
+remarquer dans plusieurs beautés idéales de l’antique que les anciens
+voulant créer une image perfectionnée de la nature humaine ont fondu les
+nuances du caractère d’un sexe avec celui de l’autre; que Junon, Pallas,
+Diane, out une majesté, une sévérité mâle; qu’ Apollon, Mercure,
+Bacchus, au contraire, ont quelque chose de la grace et de la douceur
+des femmes. De même nous voyons dans la beauté héroïque et vierge
+d’Hippolyte l’image de sa mère l’Amazone et le reflet de Diane dans un
+mortel.”
+
+(The last lines are especially remarkable, and are an artistic
+commentary on what I have ventured to touch upon ethically at page 85.)
+
+
+The story of Hippolytus is to be found in bas-reliefs and gems; it
+occurs on a particularly fine sarcophagus now preserved in the cathedral
+at Agrigentum, of which there is a cast in the British Museum.
+
+Under the heroic and classical form, Hippolytus conveys the same idea of
+manly chastity and self-control which in sacred art would be suggested
+by the figure of Joseph, the son of Jacob.
+
+A noble companion to the Hippolytus would be Neoptolemus, the son of
+Achilles. He is the young Greek warrior, strong and bold and brave; a
+fine ideal type of generosity and truth. The conception, as I imagine
+it, should be taken from the Philoctetes of Sophocles, where
+Neoptolemus, indignant at the craft of Ulysses, discloses the trick of
+which he had been made the unwilling instrument, and restores the fatal,
+envenomed arrows to Philoctetes. The celebrated lines in the Iliad
+spoken by Achilles—
+
+  “Who dares think one thing and another tell
+   My soul detests him as the gates of hell!”
+
+should give the leading characteristic _motif_ in the figure of his son.
+There should be something of remorseful pity in the very youthful
+features; the form ought to be heroically treated, that is, undraped,
+and he should hold the arrows in his hand.
+
+Neoptolemus, as the savage avenger of his father’s death, slaying the
+grey-haired Priam at the foot of the altar, and carrying off Andromache,
+is, of course, quite a different version of the character. He then
+figures as Pyrrhus—
+
+  “The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
+   Black as his purpose, did the night resemble.”
+
+The fine moral story of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes is figured on the
+Etruscan vases. Of the young, truth-telling, Greek hero I find no single
+statue.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+IPHIGENIA.
+
+I have often been surprised that we have no statue of this eminently
+beautiful subject. We have the story of Iphigenia constantly repeated in
+gems and bas-reliefs; the most celebrated example extant being the
+Medici Vase. But no single figure of Iphigenia, as the Greek ideal of
+heroic maidenhood and self-devotion, exists, I believe, in antique
+sculpture. The small and rather feebly elegant statuette by Christian
+Tieck is the only modern example I have seen.
+
+Iphigenia may be represented under two very different aspects, both
+beautiful.
+
+First, as the Iphigenia in Aulis; the victim sacrificed to obtain a fair
+wind for the Grecian fleet detained on its way to Troy. Extreme youth
+and grace, with a tender resignation not devoid of dignity, should be
+the leading characteristics; for we must bear in mind that Iphigenia,
+while regretting life and the “lamp-bearing day,” and “the beloved
+light,” and her Argive home and her “Mycenian handmaids,” dies
+willingly, as the Greek girl ought to die, for the good of her country.
+She begins, indeed, with a prayer for pity, with lamentations for her
+untimely end, but she resumes her nobler self; and all her sentiments,
+when she is brought forth, crowned for sacrifice, are worthy of the
+daughter of Agamemnon. She even exults that she is called upon to perish
+for the good of Greece, and to avenge the cause of right on the Spartan
+Helen. “I give,” she exclaims, “my life for Greece! sacrifice me—and let
+Troy perish!” When her mother weeps, she reproves those tears: “It is
+not well, O my mother! that I should love life too much. Think that thou
+hast brought me forth for the common good of Greece, not for thyself
+only!” She glories in her anticipated renown, not vainly, since, while
+the world endures, and far as the influences of literature and art
+extend, her story and her name shall live. The scene in Euripides should
+be taken as the basis of the character—the finest scene in his finest
+drama. The tradition that Iphigenia was not really sacrificed, but
+snatched away from the altar by Diana, and a hind substituted in her
+place, should be present to the fancy of the artist, when he sets
+himself to represent the majestic resignation of the consecrated virgin;
+as adding a touch of the marvellous and ideal to the Greek elegance and
+simplicity of the conception.
+
+The _picture_ of Iphigenia as drawn by Tennyson is wonderfully vivid;
+but it wants the Greek dignity and statuesque feeling; it is
+emphatically a picture, all over colour and light, and crowded with
+accessories. He represents her as encountering Helen in the land of
+Shadows, and, turning from her “with sick and scornful looks averse,”
+for she remembers the tragedy at Aulis.
+
+  “My youth (she said) was blasted with a curse:
+     This woman was the cause!
+   I was cut off from hope in that sad place
+     Which yet to name my spirit loathes and fears.
+   My father held his hand upon his face;
+     I, blinded with my tears,
+   Essayed to speak; my voice came thick with sighs
+     As in a dream; dimly I could descry
+   The stern black-bearded kings with wolfish eyes
+     Waiting to see me die.
+   The tall masts quiver’d as they lay afloat,
+     The temples and the people and the shore;
+   One drew a sharp knife thro’ my tender throat
+     Slowly—and nothing more.”
+
+The famous picture of the sacrifice of Iphigenia by Timanthes, the theme
+of admiration and criticism for the last two thousand years, which every
+writer on art deems it proper to mention in praise or in blame, could
+hardly have been more vivid or more terrible than this.
+
+The analogous idea, that of heroic resignation and self-devotion in a
+great cause, would be conveyed in sacred art by the figure of Jephtha’s
+daughter; she too regrets the promises of life, but dies not the less
+willingly. “My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do
+to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch
+as the Lord hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the
+children of Ammon.” And for a single statue, Jephtha’s daughter would be
+a fine subject—one to task the powers of our best sculptors; the
+_sentiment_ would be the same as the Iphigenia, but the _treatment_
+altogether different.
+
+
+For the Iphigenia in Tauris I think the modern sculptor would do well to
+set aside the character as represented by Euripides, and rather keep in
+view the conception of Goethe.[3] In his hand it has lost nothing of its
+statuesque elegance and simplicity, and has gained immeasurably in moral
+dignity and feminine tenderness. The Iphigenia in Tauris is no longer
+young, but she is still the consecrated virgin; no more the victim, but
+herself the priestess of those very rites by which she was once fated to
+perish. While Euripides has depicted her as stern and astute, Goethe has
+made her the impersonation of female devotedness, and mild, but
+unflinching integrity. She is like the young Neoptolemus when she
+disdains to use the stratagem which Pylades had suggested, when
+she dares to speak the truth, and trust to it alone for help and safety.
+The scene in which she is haunted by the recollection of her doomed
+ancestry, and mutters over the song of the Parcæ on that far-off sullen
+shore, is sublime, but incapable of representation in plastic art. It
+should, however, be well studied, as helping the artist to the abstract
+conception of the character as a whole.
+
+Carstens made a design, suggested by this tragedy, of the Three Parcæ
+singing their fatal mysterious song. A model of one of the figures (that
+of Atropos) used to stand in Goethe’s library, and a cast from this is
+before me while I write: every one who sees it takes it for an antique.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+EVE.
+
+I have but a few words to say of Eve. As she is the only undraped figure
+which is allowable in sacred art, the sculptors have multiplied
+representations of her, more or less finely imagined; but what I
+conceive to be the true type has seldom, very seldom, been attained. The
+remarks which follow are, however, suggestive, not critical.
+
+It appears to me—and I speak it with reverence—that the Miltonic type is
+not the highest conceivable, nor the best fitted for sculptural
+treatment. Milton has evidently lavished all his power on this fairest
+of created beings; but he makes her too nymph-like—too goddess-like. In
+one place he compares her to a Wood-nymph, Oread, or Dryad of the
+groves; in another to Diana’s self, “though not, as she, with bow and
+quiver armed.” The scriptural conception of our first parent is not like
+this; it is ampler, grander, nobler far. I fancy her the sublime ideal
+of maternity. It may be said that this idea of her predestined
+motherhood should not predominate in the conception of Eve before the
+Fall: but I think it should.
+
+It is most beautifully imagined by Milton that Eve, separated from her
+mate, her Adam, is weak, and given over to the merely womanish nature,
+for only when linked together and supplying the complement to each
+other’s _moral_ being, can man or woman be strong; but we must also
+remember that the “spirited sly snake,” in tempting Eve, even when he
+finds her alone, uses no vulgar allurements. “Ye shall be as Gods,
+knowing good and evil.” Milton, indeed, seasons his harangue with
+flattery: but for this he has no warrant in Scripture.
+
+As the Eve of Paradise should be majestically sinless, so after the Fall
+she should not cower and wail like a disappointed girl. Her infinite
+fault, her infinite woe, her infinite penitence, should have a touch of
+grandeur. She has paid the inevitable price for that mighty knowledge of
+good and evil she so coveted; that terrible predestined experience—she
+has found it, or it has found her;—and she wears her crown of grief as
+erst her crown of innocence.
+
+I think the noble picture of Eve in Mrs. Browning’s Drama of Exile, as
+that of the Mother of our redemption not less than the Mother of
+suffering humanity, might be read and considered with advantage by a
+modern sculptor.
+
+                             “Rise, woman, rise
+   To thy peculiar and best altitudes
+   Of doing good and of resisting ill!
+   Something thou hast to bear through womanhood;
+   Peculiar suffering answering to the sin,
+   Some pang paid down for each new human life;
+   Some weariness in guarding such a life,
+   Some coldness from the guarded; some mistrust
+   From those thou hast too well served; from those beloved
+   Too loyally, some treason. But go, thy love
+   Shall chant to itself its own beatitudes
+   After its own life-working!
+   I bless thee to the desert and the thorns,
+   To the elemental change and turbulence,
+   And to the solemn dignities of grief;
+   To each one of these ends, and to this end
+   Of Death and the hereafter!
+   _Eve._                     I accept,
+   For me and for my daughters, this high part
+   Which lowly shall be counted!”
+
+The figure of Eve in Raphael’s design (the one engraved by Marc Antonio)
+is exquisitely statuesque as well as exquisitely beautiful. In the
+moment that she presents the apple to Adam she looks—perhaps she ought
+to look—like the _Venus Vincitrice_ of the antique time; but I am not
+sure; and, at all events, the less of the classical sentiment the
+better.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+ADAM.
+
+I have seen no statue of Adam; but surely he is a fine subject, either
+alone or as the companion of Eve; and the Miltonic type is here
+all-sufficient, combining the heroic ideal of Greek art with something
+higher still—
+
+   “Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure,”
+
+whence true authority in men—in fact, essential manliness.
+
+Goethe had the idea that Adam ought to be represented with a spade, as
+the progenitor of all who till the ground, and partially draped with a
+deerskin, that is, after the Fall; which would be well: but he adds that
+Adam should have a child at his feet in the act of strangling a serpent.
+This appears to me objectionable and ambiguous; if admissible at all,
+the accessory figure would be a fitter accompaniment for Eve.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+ANGELS.
+
+Angels, properly speaking, are neither winged men nor winged children.
+Wings, in ancient art, were the symbols of a divine nature; and the
+early Greeks, who humanised their gods and goddesses, and deified
+humanity through the perfection of the forms, at first distinguished the
+divine and the human by giving wings to all the celestial beings; thus
+lifting them above the earth. Our religious idea of angels is altogether
+different. Give to the child-form wings, in other words, give to the
+child-nature, innocent, and pure, the adjuncts of wisdom and power, and
+thus you realise the idea of the angel as Raphael conceived it. It is
+so difficult to imagine in the adult form the union of perfect purity
+and perfect wisdom, the absence of experience and suffering, and the
+capacity of thinking and feeling, a condition of being in which all
+conscious _motive_ is lost in the _impulse_ to good, that it remains a
+problem in art. The angels of Angelico da Fiesole, who are not only
+winged, but convey the idea of movement only by the wings, not by the
+limbs, are exquisite, as fitted to minister to us in heaven, but hardly
+as fitted to keep watch and ward for us on earth—
+
+   “Against foul fiends to aid us militant.”
+
+The feminine element always predominates in the conception of angels,
+though they are supposed to be masculine: I doubt whether it ought to be
+so.
+
+
+While these sheets are going through the press, I find the following
+beautiful passage relative to angels in the last number of “Fraser’s
+Magazine”:—
+
+“It is safer, even, and perhaps more orthodox and scriptural, to
+‘impersonate’ time and space, strength and love, and even the laws of
+nature, than to give us any more angel worlds, which are but dead
+skeletons of Dante’s creations without that awful and living reality
+which they had in his mind; or to fill children’s books, as the High
+Church party are doing now, with pictures and tales of certain winged
+hermaphrodites, in whom one cannot think (even by the extremest stretch
+of charity) that the writers or draughtsmen really believe, while one
+sees them servilely copying mediæval forms, and intermingling them with
+the ornaments of an extinct architecture; thus confessing _naïvely_ to
+every one but themselves, that they accept the whole notion as an
+integral portion of a creed, to which, if they be members of the Church
+of England, they cannot well belong, seeing that it was, happily for us,
+expelled both by law and by conscience at the Reformation.”
+
+This is eloquent and true; but not the less true it is, that if we have
+to represent in art those “spiritual beings who walk this earth unseen,
+both when we sleep and when we wake”—beings, who (as the author of the
+above passage seems to believe) may be intimately connected with the
+phenomena of the universe—we must have a type, a bodily type, under
+which to represent them; and as we cannot do this from knowledge, we
+must do it symbolically. Angels, as we figure them, are _symbols_ of
+moral and spiritual existences elevated above ourselves—we do not
+believe in the forms, we only accept their significance. I should be
+glad to see a better impersonation than the impossible creatures
+represented in art; but till some artist-poet, or poet-artist, has
+invented such an impersonation, we must employ that which is already
+familiarised to the eye and hallowed to the fancy without imposing on
+the understanding.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   MIRIAM.        RUTH.
+
+Both the Old and the New Testament abound in sculptural subjects; but
+fitly to deal with the Old Testament required a Michal-Angelo. Beautiful
+as are the gates of Ghiberti they are hardly what the Germans would call
+“alt-testamentische,” they are so essentially elegant and graceful, and
+the old Hebrew legends and personages are so tremendous. Even Miriam and
+Ruth dilate into a sort of grandeur. In representation I always fancy
+them above life-size.
+
+
+I doubt whether the same artist who could conceive the Prophets would be
+able to represent the Apostles, or that the same hand which gave us
+Moses could give us Christ. Michal-Angelo’s idea of Christ, both in
+painting and sculpture is, to me, revolting.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   CHRIST.      SOLOMON.       DAVID.
+
+I do not like the idea of Moses and Christ placed together. Much finer
+in artistic and moral contrast would be the two teachers,—Christ as the
+divine and spiritual law-giver, Solomon as the type of worldly wisdom.
+They should stand side by side, or be seated each on his throne, a
+crowned King, with book and sceptre—but how different in character!
+
+
+We have multiplied statues of David. I have never seen one which
+realised the finest conception of his character, either as Hero, King,
+Prophet, or Poet. In general he figures as the slayer of Goliath, and is
+always too feeble and boyish. David, singing to his lute before Saul;
+David as the musician and poet, young, beautiful, half-draped,
+heaven-inspired, exorcising by his art the dark spirit of evil which
+possessed the jealous King:—this would be a theme for an artist, and
+would as finely represent the power of sacred song as a figure of St.
+Cecilia. But the sentiment should not be that of a young Apollo, or an
+Orpheus; therein would lie the chief difficulty.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   HAGAR.       REBEKAH.       RACHEL.
+
+I remember to have seen fine statues of Hagar holding her pitcher, of
+Rebekah contemplating her bracelet, and of Rachel as the shepherdess.
+But I would have a different version; Hagar as the poor cast-away,
+driven forth with her boy into the wilderness; Rebekah as the exulting
+bride; and Rachel as the mild, pensive wife. They would represent, in a
+very complete manner, contrasted phases of the destiny of Woman,
+connected together by our religious associations, and appealing to our
+deepest human sympathies.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE QUEEN OF SHEBA.
+
+The Queen of Sheba would be a fine subject for a single statue, as the
+religious type of the queenly, intellectual woman, the treatment being
+kept as far as possible from that of a Pallas or a Muse.
+
+
+The journey of the Queen of the South to visit Solomon would be a
+capital subject for a processional bas-relief, and as a _pendant_ to the
+journey of “the Wise Men of the East,” to visit a greater than Solomon.
+The latter has been perpetually treated from the fourth century. Of the
+journey of the Queen of Sheba I have seen, as yet, no example.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+LADY GODIVA.
+
+With regard to statuesque subjects from modern history and
+poetry,—_Romantic Sculpture_, as it is styled,—the taste both of the
+public and the artist evidently sets in this direction. That the
+treatment of such subjects should not be classical is admitted; but in
+the development of this romantic tendency there is cause to fear that we
+may be inundated with all kinds of picturesque vagaries and violations
+of the just laws and limits of art.
+
+
+I remember, however, a circumstance which makes me hopeful as to the
+progress of feeling; knowledge may come hereafter. I remember about
+twenty years ago proposing the figure and story of Lady Godiva as
+beautiful subjects for sculpture and painting. There were present on
+that occasion, among others, two artists and a poet. The two artists
+laughed outright, and the poet extemporised an epigram upon Peeping Tom.
+If I were to propose Lady Godiva as a subject now[4], I believe it would
+be received with a far different feeling even by those very men. If I
+were Queen of England I would have it painted in Fresco in my council
+chamber. There should be seen the palfrey with its rich housings, and
+near it, as preparing to mount, the noble lady should stand, timid, but
+resolved: her veil should lie on the ground; the drapery just falling
+from her fair limbs and partly sustained by one hand, while with the
+other she loosens her golden tresses. A bevy of waiting-maids, with
+averted faces, disappear hurriedly beneath the massive porch of the
+Saxon palace, which forms the background, with sky and trees seen
+through openings in the heavy architecture. This is the picturesque
+version of the story; but there are many others. As a single statue, the
+figure of Lady Godiva affords an opportunity for the legitimate
+treatment of the undraped female form, sanctified by the purest, the
+most elevated associations;—by woman’s tearful pride and man’s respect
+and gratitude.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+JOAN OF ARC.
+
+Shakspeare, who is so horribly unjust to Joan of Arc, has put a sublime
+speech into her mouth where she answers Burgundy who had accused her of
+sorcery,—
+
+  “Because you want the grace that others have.
+   You judge it straight a thing impossible
+   To compass wonders but by help of devils!”
+
+The whole theory of popular superstition comprised in three lines!
+
+But Joan herself—how at her name the whole heart seems to rise up in
+resentment, not so much against her cowardly executioners as against
+those who have so wronged her memory! Never was a character,
+historically pure, bright, definite, and perfect in every feature and
+outline, so abominably treated in poetry and fiction,—perhaps for this
+reason, that she was in herself so exquisitely wrought, so complete a
+specimen of the heroic, the poetic, the romantic, that she could not be
+touched by art or modified by fancy, without being in some degree
+profaned. As to art, I never saw yet any representation of “Jeanne la
+grande Pastoure,” (except, perhaps, the lovely statue by the Princess of
+Wurtemburg,) which I could endure to look at—and even that gives us the
+contemplative simplicity, but not the power, intellect, and energy,
+which must have formed so large a part of the character. Then as to the
+poets, what shall be said of them? First Shakspeare, writing for the
+English stage, took up the popular idea of the character as it prevailed
+in England in his own time. Into the hypothesis that the greater part of
+Henry VI. is not by Shakspeare, there is no occasion to enter here; the
+original conception of the character of Joan of Arc may not be his, but
+he has left it untouched in its principal features. The English hated
+the memory of the French Heroine because she had caused the loss of
+France and had humiliated us as a nation; and our chroniclers revenged
+themselves and healed their wounded self-love by imputing her victories
+to witchcraft. Shakspeare, giving her the attributes which the
+historians of his time assigned to her, represents her as a warlike,
+arrogant sorceress—a “monstrous woman”—attended and assisted by demons.
+I pass over the depraved and perverse spirit in which Voltaire profaned
+this divine character. A theme which a patriot poet would have
+approached as he would have approached an altar, he has made a vehicle
+for the most licentious parody that ever disgraced a national
+literature. Schiller comes next, and hardly seems to me more excusable.
+Not only has he missed the character, he has deliberately falsified both
+character and fact. His “Johanna” might have been called by any other
+name; and the scene of his tragedy might have been placed anywhere in
+the wide world with just the same probability and truth. Schiller and
+Goethe held a principle that all considerations were to yield before the
+proprieties of art. But Milton speaks somewhere of those “faultless
+proprieties of nature” which never can be violated with impunity: and
+Art can never move freely but in the domain of nature and of truth. All
+the fine writing in Schiller’s “Maid of Orleans” can never reconcile me
+to its absolute and revolting falsehood. The sublime, simple-hearted
+girl who to the last moment regarded herself as set apart by God to do
+His work, he makes the victim of an insane passion for a young
+Englishman. In the love-sick classical heroines of Corneille and Racine
+there is nothing more Frenchified, more absurd, more revolting. Then he
+makes her die victorious on the field of battle defending the
+oriflamme;—far, far more glorious as well as more pathetic her real
+death—but it offended against Schiller’s æsthetic conception of the
+dignity of tragedy.
+
+Lastly, we have Southey’s epic: what shall be said of it?—even what he
+said of the Lusiad of Camoens, “that it is read with little emotion, and
+remembered with little pleasure.” No. I do not wish to see Joan turned
+into a heroine of tragedy or tale, because, as it seems to me, the whole
+life and death of this martyred girl is too near us, and too
+historically distinct, and, I will add, too sacred, to be dressed out in
+romantic prose or verse. What Walter Scott might have made of her I do
+not know—something marvellously picturesque and life-like, no doubt—and
+yet I am glad he did not try his hand on her. But she remains a
+legitimate and most admirable subject for representative art; and as yet
+nothing has been done in sculpture to fix the ideal and heroic in her
+character, nor in painting, worthy of her exploits. There exists no
+contemporary portrait of her except in the brief description of her in
+the old French Chronicle of the Siege of Orleans, where it is said that
+her figure was tall and slender, her bust fine, her hair and eyes black;
+that she wore her hair short, and could never be persuaded to put on a
+head-piece, and farther (and in this respect both Schiller and Southey
+have wronged her), that she had never slain a man, using her consecrated
+sword merely to defend herself. I should like to see a fine equestrian
+statue of her by one of our best English sculptors, set up in a
+conspicuous place among us, as a national expiation.
+
+Southey mentions that in the beginning of the last war, about 1795, when
+popular feeling, excited almost to frenzy, raged against France, a
+pantomime, or ballet, was performed at Covent Garden, from the story of
+Joan of Arc, at the conclusion of which she is carried away by demons,
+like a female Don Juan. This denouement caused such a storm of
+indignation, that the author—one James Cross—was obliged, after the
+first two or three representations, to change the demons into angels,
+and send her straight into Heaven:—an anecdote pleasant to record as
+illustrating the sure ultimate triumph of truth over falsehood; of all
+the better sympathies over prejudice and wrong;—in spite of history,
+and, what is more, in spite of Shakspeare!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CHARACTERS FROM SHAKSPEARE.
+
+Joan of Arc is not, however, a Shakspearian character; and, in fact,
+there are very few of his personages susceptible of sculptural
+treatment. They are too dramatic, too profound, too complex in their
+essential nature where they are tragic; too many-sided and picturesque
+where they are comic.
+
+For instance, the attempt to condense into marble such light,
+evanescent, quaint creations as those in “The Midsummer’s Night’s Dream”
+is better avoided; we feel that a marble fairy must be a heavy
+absurdity. Oberon and Titania might perhaps float along in a bas-relief;
+but we cannot put away the thought that they have reality without
+substantiality, and we do not like to see them, or Ariel, or Caliban
+fixed in the definite forms of sculpture.
+
+There are, however, a few of Shakspeare’s characters which appear to me
+beautifully adapted for statuesque treatment: Perdita holding her
+flowers; Miranda lingering on the shore; might well replace the
+innumerable “Floras” and “Nymphs preparing to bathe,” which people the
+_atéliers_ of our sculptors. Cordelia has something of marble quietude
+about her; and Hermione is a statue ready made. And, by the way, it is
+observable that Shakspeare represents Hermione as a _coloured_ statue.
+Paulina will not allow it to be touched, because “the colour is not yet
+dry.” Again,—
+
+  “Would you not deem those veins
+   Did verily bear blood?
+
+  “The very life seems warm upon her lips,
+   The fixture of her eye hath motion in’t,
+   And we are mocked by Art!
+   The ruddiness upon her lip is wet,
+
+  “You’ll mar it if you kiss it, stain your own
+   With oily painting.”
+
+I think it possible to model small ornamental statuettes and groups from
+some few of the scenes in Shakspeare’s plays; but this is quite
+different from life-size figures of Hamlet, Othello, Shylock, Macbeth,
+which must either have the look of real individual portraiture, or
+become mere idealisations of certain qualities; and Shakspeare’s
+creations are neither the one nor the other.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CHARACTERS FROM SPENSER.
+
+Spenser is so essentially a picturesque poet, he depends for his rich
+effects so much on the combination of colour and imagery, and multiplied
+accessories, that one feels—at least _I_ feel, on laying down a volume
+of the “Fairie Queene” dazzled as if I had been walking in a gallery of
+pictures. His “Masque of Cupid,” for instance, although a procession of
+poetical creations, could not be transferred to a bas-relief without
+completely losing its Spenserian character—its wondrous glow of colour.
+Thus Cupid “uprears himself exulting from the back of the ravenous
+lion;” removes the bandage from his eyes, that he may look round on his
+victims; “shakes the darts which his right hand doth strain full
+dreadfully,” and “claps on high his coloured wings twain.” This
+certainly is not the Greek Cupid, nor the Cupid of sculpture; it is the
+Spenserian Cupid. So of his Una, so of his Britomart, and the Red Cross
+Knight and Sir Guyon: one might make elegant _statuesque_ impersonations
+of the allegories they involve, as of Truth, Chastity, Faith,
+Temperance; but then they would lose immediately their Spenserian
+character and sentiment, and must become something altogether different.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   THE LADY.        COMUS.
+
+It is not so with Milton. The “Lady” in Comus, whether she stands
+listening to the echos of her own sweet voice, or motionless as marble
+under the spell of the “false enchanter,” _looking_ that divine reproof
+which in the poem she _speaks_,—
+
+  “I hate when vice can bolt her arguments,
+   And virtue has no tongue to check her pride”—
+
+is a subject perfectly fitted for sculpture, and never, so far as I
+know, executed. It would be a far more appropriate ornament for a lady’s
+_boudoir_ than French statues of MODESTY, which generally have the
+effect of making one feel very much ashamed.[5]
+
+Sabrina has been beautifully treated by Marshall.
+
+It is difficult to render Comus without making him too like a Bacchus or
+an Apollo. He is neither.
+
+He represents not the beneficent, but the intoxicating and brutifying
+power of wine. His joviality should not be that of a God, but with
+something mischievous, bestial, Faun-like; and he should have, with the
+Dionysian grace, a dash of the cunning and malignity of his Mother
+Circe. These characteristics should be in the mind of the artist. The
+panther’s skin, the coronal of vine leaves, and, instead of the Thyrsus,
+the magician’s wand, are the proper accessories. It is also worth
+notice, that in the antique representations Comus has wings as a
+demigod, and in a picture described by Philostratus (a night scene) he
+lies crouched in a drunken sleep. Little use, however, is made of him in
+the antique myths, and the Miltonic conception is that which should be
+embodied by the modern sculptor.
+
+
+Il Penseroso and L’Allegro, if embodied in sculpture as poetical
+abstractions (either masculine or feminine) of Melancholy and Mirth,
+would cease to be Miltonic, for the conceptions of the poet are
+essentially picturesque, and expressed in both cases by a luxuriant
+accumulation of images and accessories, not to be brought within the
+limits of plastic art without the most tasteless confusion and
+inconsistency.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+SATAN.
+
+The religious idea of a Satan—the impersonation of that mixture of the
+bestial, the malignant, the impious, and the hopeless, which constitute
+THE FIEND, the enemy of all that is human and divine—I conceive to be
+quite unfitted for the purpose of sculpture. Danton’s attempt
+degenerates into grim caricature. Milton’s Satan—“the archangel
+ruined,”—is however a strictly poetical creation, and capable of the
+most poetical statuesque treatment. But we must remember that, if it be
+a gross mistake, religious and artistic, to conceive the Messiah under
+the form of a larger, stronger humanity, with a _physique_ like that of
+a wrestler, (as M. Angelo has done in the Last Judgement) it is equally
+a mistake to conceive the lost angel, our spiritual adversary, under any
+such coarse Herculean lineaments. There can be no image of the Miltonic
+Satan without the elements of beauty, “though changed by pale ire, envy,
+and despair!” Colossal he may be, vast as Mount Athos; but it is not
+necessary to express this that he should be hewn out of Mount Athos, or
+look like the giant Polypheme! His proportions, his figure, his
+features—like his power—are angelic. As the Hero—for he is so—of the
+“Paradise Lost,” the subject is open to poetic treatment; but I am not
+aware that as yet it has been poetically treated.
+
+Of the Italian poetry and history, and all the wondrous and lovely
+shapes which come thronging out of that Elysian land,—I can say nothing
+now,—or only this,—that after all I am not _quite_ sure that I am right
+about Spenser. For, at first view, what poet seems less amenable to
+statuesque treatment than Dante? One would have imagined that only a
+preternatural fusion of Michal-Angelo and Rembrandt could fitly render
+the murky recesses and ghastly and monstrous inhabitants of the Inferno,
+or attempt to shadow forth the dazzling mysteries of the Paradiso. Yet
+see what Flaxman has achieved! His designs are legitimate bas-reliefs,
+not pictures in outline. He has been true to his own art, and all that
+could be done within the limitations of his art he has accomplished. It
+is a translation of Dante’s _ideas_ into sculpture, with every thing
+_peculiarly_ Dantesque in the treatment, set aside.
+
+Now as to our more modern poets.—From amid the long array of beautiful
+subjects which seem to move in succession before the fancy, there are
+two which stand out prominent in their beauty. First, Lord Byron’s
+“Myrrha,” who with her Ionian elegance is susceptible of the purest
+classical treatment. She should hold a torch; but not with the air of a
+Mænad, nor of a Thais about to fire Persepolis. The sentiment should be
+deeper and quieter.
+
+                   “Dost thou think
+   A Greek girl dare not do for love that which
+   An Indian widow does for custom?”
+
+Ion in Talfourd’s Tragedy—the boy-hero, in all the tenderness of extreme
+youth, already self-devoted and touched with a melancholy grace and an
+elevation beyond his years—is so essentially statuesque, that I am
+surprised that no sculptor has attempted it; perhaps because, in this
+instance, as in that of Myrrha, the popular realisation of both
+characters as subjects of formative art has been spoiled by theatrical
+trappings and associations.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] “_Sancta Simplicitas!_” was the exclamation of Huss to the woman
+who, when he was burned at the stake, in her religious zeal brought a
+faggot to light the pile.
+
+[2] Canova’s bust of Helen is such a counterfeit; whereas the Helen of
+Gibson is, for a mere head, singularly characteristic.
+
+[3] There is a fine translation of the German Iphigenia by Miss
+Swanwick. (Dramatic Works of Goethe. Bohn, 1850.)
+
+[4] 1848. At the moment I transcribe this (1854), a very charming statue
+of the Lady Godiva (suggested, I believe, by Tennyson’s poem) stands in
+the Exhibition of the Royal Academy.
+
+[5] For example, the statue of Modesty executed for Josephine’s boudoir.
+
+
+   LONDON:
+   A. and G. A. SPOTTISWOODE,
+   New-street-Square.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Commonplace Book of Thoughts,
+Memories, and Fancies., by Anna Jameson
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COMMONPLACE BOOK ***
+
+***** This file should be named 39680-0.txt or 39680-0.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/9/6/8/39680/
+
+Produced by Julia Miller, Turgut Dincer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/39680-0.zip b/39680-0.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..08d4ba0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-0.zip
diff --git a/39680-8.txt b/39680-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d0e0559
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9596 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories,
+and Fancies., by Anna Jameson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
+       2nd ed.
+
+Author: Anna Jameson
+
+Release Date: May 12, 2012 [EBook #39680]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COMMONPLACE BOOK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Julia Miller, Turgut Dincer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+   A
+
+   COMMONPLACE BOOK
+
+   OF
+
+   Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   A COMMONPLACE BOOK--
+
+   OF
+
+   Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
+
+   ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
+
+   PART I.--ETHICS AND CHARACTER.
+
+   PART II.--LITERATURE AND ART.
+
+   BY MRS. JAMESON.
+
+   "Un peu de chaque chose, et rien du tout,--� la fran�aise!"--MONTAIGNE.
+
+   With Illustrations and Etchings.
+
+   SECOND EDITION, CORRECTED.
+
+   LONDON:
+   LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS.
+   1855.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+I must be allowed to say a few words in explanation of the contents of
+this little volume, which is truly what its name sets forth--a book of
+common-places, and nothing more. If I have never, in any work I have
+ventured to place before the public, aspired to _teach_, (being myself a
+_learner_ in all things,) at least I have hitherto done my best to
+deserve the indulgence I have met with; and it would pain me if it could
+be supposed that such indulgence had rendered me presumptuous or
+careless.
+
+For many years I have been accustomed to make a memorandum of any
+thought which might come across me--(if pen and paper were at hand), and
+to mark (and _remark_) any passage in a book which excited either a
+sympathetic or an antagonistic feeling. This collection of notes
+accumulated insensibly from day to day. The volumes on Shakspeare's
+Women, on Sacred and Legendary Art, and various other productions,
+sprung from seed thus lightly and casually sown, which, I hardly know
+how, grew up and expanded into a regular, readable form, with a
+beginning, a middle, and an end. But what was to be done with the
+fragments which remained--without beginning, and without end--links of a
+hidden or a broken chain? Whether to preserve them or destroy them
+became a question, and one I could not answer for myself. In allowing a
+portion of them to go forth to the world in their original form, as
+unconnected fragments, I have been guided by the wishes of others, who
+deemed it not wholly uninteresting or profitless to trace the path,
+sometimes devious enough, of an "inquiring spirit," even by the little
+pebbles dropped as vestiges by the way side.
+
+A book so supremely egotistical and subjective can do good only in one
+way. It may, like conversation with a friend, open up sources of
+sympathy and reflection; excite to argument, agreement, or disagreement;
+and, like every spontaneous utterance of thought out of an earnest mind,
+suggest far higher and better thoughts than any to be found here to
+higher and more productive minds. If I had not the humble hope of such a
+possible result, instead of sending these memoranda to the printer, I
+should have thrown them into the fire; for I lack that creative faculty
+which can work up the teachings of heart-sorrow and world-experience
+into attractive forms of fiction or of art; and having no intention of
+leaving any such memorials to be published after my death, they must
+have gone into the fire as the only alternative left.
+
+The passages from books are not, strictly speaking, _selected_; they are
+not given here on any principle of choice, but simply because that by
+some process of assimilation they became a part of the individual mind.
+They "found _me_,"--to borrow Coleridge's expression,--"found me in some
+depth of my being;" I did not "find _them_."
+
+For the rest, all those passages which are marked by inverted commas
+must be regarded as borrowed, though I have not always been able to give
+my authority. All passages not so marked are, I dare not say, original
+or new, but at least the unstudied expression of a free discursive mind.
+Fruits, not advisedly plucked, but which the variable winds have shaken
+from the tree: some ripe, some "harsh and crude."
+
+Wordsworth's famous poem of "The Happy Warrior" (of which a new
+application will be found at page 87.), is supposed by Mr. De Quincey to
+have been first suggested by the character of Nelson. It has since been
+applied to Sir Charles Napier (the Indian General), as well as to the
+Duke of Wellington; all which serves to illustrate my position, that the
+lines in question are equally applicable to any man or any woman whose
+moral standard is irrespective of selfishness and expediency.
+
+With regard to the fragment on Sculpture, it may be necessary to state
+that it was written in 1848. The first three paragraphs were inserted in
+the Art Journal for April, 1849. It was intended to enlarge the whole
+into a comprehensive essay on "Subjects fitted for Artistic Treatment;"
+but this being now impossible, the fragment is given as originally
+written; others may think it out, and apply it better than I shall live
+to do.
+
+
+   August, 1854.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+   PART I.
+
+   Ethics and Character.
+
+
+ ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.                                        Page
+
+   Vanity                                                     1
+
+   Truths and Truisms                                         3
+
+   Beauty and Use                                             5
+
+   What is Soul?                                              7
+
+   The Philosophy of Happiness                                9
+
+   Cheerfulness a Virtue                                     10
+
+   Intellect and Sympathy                                    11
+
+   Old Letters                                               12
+
+   The Point of Honour                                       13
+
+   Looking up                                                14
+
+   Authors                                                   14
+
+   Thought and Theory                                        15
+
+   Impulse and Consideration                                 16
+
+   Principle and Expediency                                  16
+
+   Personality of the Evil Principle                         17
+
+   The Catholic Spirit                                       18
+
+   Death-beds                                                19
+
+   Thoughts on a Sermon                                      20
+
+   Love and Fear of God                                      22
+
+   Social Opinion                                            23
+
+   Balzac                                                    23
+
+   Political                                                 24
+
+   Celibacy                                                  25
+
+   Landor's Wise Sayings                                     26
+
+   Justice and Generosity                                    27
+
+   Roman Catholic Converts                                   28
+
+   Stealing and Borrowing                                    28
+
+   Good and Bad                                              29
+
+   Italian Proverb. Greek Saying                             30
+
+   Silent Grief                                              31
+
+   Past and Future                                           32
+
+   Suicide. Countenance                                      33
+
+   Progress and Progression                                  34
+
+   Happiness in Suffering                                    35
+
+   Life in the Future                                        36
+
+   Strength. Youth                                           38
+
+   Moral Suffering                                           40
+
+   The Secret of Peace                                       41
+
+   Motives and Impulses                                      42
+
+   Principle and Passion                                     43
+
+   Dominant Ideas                                            44
+
+   Absence and Death                                         45
+
+   Sydney Smith. Theodore Hook                               46
+
+   Werther and Childe Harold                                 50
+
+   Money Obligations                                         52
+
+   Charity. Truth                                            53
+
+   Women. Men                                                55
+
+   Compensation for Sorrow                                   57
+
+   Religion. Avarice                                         57
+
+   Genius. Mind                                              59
+
+   Hieroglyphical Colours                                    60
+
+   Character                                                 61
+
+   Value of Words                                            62
+
+   Nature and Art                                            64
+
+   Spirit and Form                                           67
+
+   Penal Retribution. The Church                             68
+
+   Woman's Patriotism                                        70
+
+   Doubt. Curiosity                                          71
+
+   Tieck. Coleridge                                          71
+
+   Application of a Bon Mot of Talleyrand                    73
+
+   Adverse Individualities                                   75
+
+   Conflict in Love                                          76
+
+   French Expressions                                        77
+
+   Practical and Contemplative Life                          78
+
+   Joanna Baillie. Macaulay's Ballads                        80
+
+   Cunning                                                   80
+
+   Browning's Paracelsus                                     81
+
+   Men, Women, and Children                                  84
+
+   Letters                                                  100
+
+   Madame de Sta�l. Dej�                                    103
+
+   Thought too free                                         105
+
+   Good Qualities, not Virtues                              106
+
+   Sense and Phantasy                                       107
+
+   Use the Present                                          108
+
+   Facts                                                    109
+
+   Wise Sayings                                             111
+
+   Pestilence of Falsehood                                  112
+
+   Signs instead of Words. Relations with the World         113
+
+   Milton's Adam and Eve                                    115
+
+   Thoughts, sundry                                         116
+
+ A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD                                  117
+
+ THE INDIAN HUNTER AND THE FIRE;
+   an Allegory                                              147
+
+ POETICAL FRAGMENTS                                         152
+
+   Theological.
+
+
+ THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL                                155
+
+   Pandemonium                                              158
+
+   Southey on the Religious Orders                          162
+
+   Forms in Religion--Image Worship                         164
+
+   Religious Differences                                    165
+
+   Expansive Christianity                                   169
+
+ NOTES FROM VARIOUS SERMONS:--
+
+   A Roman Catholic Sermon                                  172
+
+   Another                                                  176
+
+   Church of England Sermon                                 178
+
+   Another                                                  181
+
+   Dissenting Sermon                                        187
+
+   Father Taylor of Boston                                  188
+
+
+   PART II.
+
+   Literature and Art.
+
+
+ NOTES FROM BOOKS:--
+
+   Dr. Arnold                                               198
+
+   Niebuhr                                                  220
+
+   Lord Bacon                                               230
+
+   Chateaubriand                                            240
+
+   Bishop Cumberland                                        247
+
+   Comte's Philosophy                                       250
+
+   Goethe                                                   261
+
+   Hazlitt's "Liber Amoris"                                 263
+
+   Francis Horner, "The Nightingale"                        267
+
+   Thackeray's "English Humourists"                         271
+
+
+ NOTES ON ART:--
+
+   Analogies                                                276
+
+   Definition of Art                                        279
+
+   No Patriotic Art                                         280
+
+   Verse and Colour                                         280
+
+   Dutch Pictures                                           281
+
+   Morals in Art                                            283
+
+   Physiognomy of Hands                                     288
+
+   Mozart and Chopin                                        289
+
+   Music                                                    293
+
+   Rachel, the Actress                                      294
+
+   English and German Actresses                             298
+
+   Character of Imogen                                      303
+
+   Shakspeare Club                                          305
+
+   "Maria Maddalena"                                        305
+
+   The Artistic Nature                                      307
+
+   Woman's Criticism                                        309
+
+   Artistic Influences                                      310
+
+   The Greek Aphrodite                                      311
+
+   Love, in the Greek Tragedy                               312
+
+   Wilkie's Life and Letters                                313
+
+   Wilhelm Schadow                                          317
+
+   Artist Life                                              321
+
+   Materialism in Art                                       323
+
+   A Fragment on Sculpture, and on certain Characters in
+     History and Poetry, considered as Subjects for Modern
+     Art                                                    326
+
+     Helen of Troy                                          332
+
+     Penelope--Laodamia                                     336
+
+     Hippolytus                                             339
+
+     Iphigenia                                              343
+
+     Eve                                                    347
+
+     Adam                                                   350
+
+     Angels                                                 351
+
+     Miriam--Ruth                                           354
+
+     Christ--Solomon--David                                 355
+
+     Hagar--Rebecca--Rachel--Queen of Sheba                 356
+
+     Lady Godiva                                            357
+
+     Joan of Arc                                            359
+
+     Characters from Shakspeare                             364
+
+     Characters from Spenser                                366
+
+     From Milton. The Lady--Comus--Satan                    367
+
+     From the Italian and Modern Poets                      370
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ETCHINGS.
+
+
+   1. Fruits and Flowers. After an old drawing.
+
+   2. Out of my garden.
+
+   3. Virgin Martyrs. Thought. Memory. Fancy. After Benedetto
+        da Matera.
+
+   4. La Penserosa. After Ambrogio Lorenzette.
+
+   5. La Fille du Feu. From a sketch by Von Schwind.
+
+   6. Laus Dei. Angel after Hans Hemmeling.
+
+   7. Eve and Cain. After Steinle.
+
+   8. Study. After an old print.
+
+   9. The Parc�. From a sketch by Carstens.
+
+   10. Antique Owlet. In Goethe's collection at Weimar.
+
+
+   *** The woodcuts are inserted to divide the
+   paragraphs and subjects, and are ornamental rather than
+   illustrative. Where the same vignette heads several paragraphs
+   consecutively, it is to signify that the _ideas_ expressed
+   stand in relation to each other.
+
+
+PART I.
+
+Ethics and Character.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Ethical Fragments.
+
+
+1.
+
+Bacon says, how wisely! that "there is often as great vanity in
+withdrawing and retiring men's conceits from the world, as in obtruding
+them." Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.
+When I see people haunted by the idea of self,--spreading their hands
+before their faces lest they meet the reflection of it in every other
+face, as if the world were to them like a French drawing-room, panelled
+with looking glass,--always fussily putting their obtrusive self behind
+them, or dragging over it a scanty drapery of consciousness, miscalled
+modesty,--always on their defence against compliments, or mistaking
+sympathy for compliment, which is as great an error, and a more vulgar
+one than mistaking flattery for sympathy,--when I see all this, as I have
+seen it, I am inclined to attribute it to the immaturity of the
+character, or to what is worse, a total want of simplicity. To some
+characters fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips,--they do
+well to turn away from it, who fear it will turn their heads. But to
+others, fame is "love disguised," the love that answers to love, in its
+widest most exalted sense. It seems to me, that we should all bring the
+best that is in us (according to the diversity of gifts which God has
+given us), and lay it a reverend offering on the altar of humanity,--if
+not to burn and enlighten, at least to rise in incense to heaven. So
+will the pure in heart, and the unselfish do; and they will not heed if
+those who _can_ bring nothing or _will_ bring nothing, unless they can
+blaze like a beacon, call out "VANITY!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+2.
+
+There are truths which, by perpetual repetition, have subsided into
+passive truisms, till, in some moment of feeling or experience, they
+kindle into conviction, start to life and light, and the truism becomes
+again a vital truth.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+3.
+
+It is well that we obtain what we require at the cheapest possible rate;
+yet those who cheapen goods, or beat down the price of a good article,
+or buy in preference to what is good and genuine of its kind an inferior
+article at an inferior price, sometimes do much mischief. Not only do
+they discourage the production of a better article, but if they be
+anxious about the education of the lower classes they undo with one hand
+what they do with the other; they encourage the mere mechanic and the
+production of what may be produced without effort of mind and without
+education, and they discourage and wrong the skilled workman for whom
+education has done much more and whose education has cost much more.
+
+Every work so merely and basely mechanical, that a man can throw into it
+no part of his own life and soul, does, in the long run, degrade the
+human being. It is only by giving him some kind of mental and moral
+interest in the labour of his hands, making it an exercise of his
+understanding, and an object of his sympathy, that we can really elevate
+the workman; and this is not the case with very cheap production of any
+kind. (Southampton, Dec. 1849.)
+
+
+Since this was written the same idea has been carried out, with far more
+eloquent reasoning, in a noble passage which I have just found in Mr.
+Ruskin's last volume of "The Stones of Venice" (the Sea Stories). As I
+do not _always_ subscribe to his theories of Art, I am the more
+delighted with this anticipation of a moral agreement between us.
+
+"We have much studied and much perfected of late, the great civilised
+invention of the division of labour, only we give it a false name. It is
+not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men:--divided
+into mere segments of men,--broken into small fragments and crumbs of
+life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man
+is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the
+point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now, it is a good and desirable
+thing truly to make many pins in a day, but if we could only see with
+what crystal sand their points are polished--sand of human soul, much to
+be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is,--we should think
+there might be some loss in it also; and the great cry that rises from
+all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace-blast, is all in
+very deed for this,--that we manufacture everything there except men,--we
+blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape
+pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single
+living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages; and all the
+evil to which that cry is urging our myriads, can be met only in one
+way,--not by teaching nor preaching; for to teach them is but to show
+them their misery; and to preach to them--if we do nothing more than
+preach,--is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding on
+the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men,
+raising them and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such
+convenience, or beauty or cheapness, as is to be got only by the
+degradation of the workman, and by equally determined demand for the
+products and results of a healthy and ennobling labour." ....
+
+"We are always in these days trying to separate the two (intellect and
+work). We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always
+working; and we call one a gentleman and the other an operative;
+whereas, the workman ought to be often thinking, and the thinker often
+working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. It is only by
+labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour
+can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity."
+
+Wordsworth, however, had said the same thing before either of us:
+
+                     "Our life is turn'd
+   Out of her course wherever man is made
+   An offering or a sacrifice,--a tool
+   Or implement,--a passive thing employed
+   As a brute mean, without acknowledgment
+   Of common right or interest in the end,
+   Used or abused as selfishness may prompt.
+   Say what can follow for a rational soul
+   Perverted thus, but weakness in all good
+   And strength in evil?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+And this leads us to the consideration of another mistake, analogous
+with the above, but referable in its results chiefly to the higher, or
+what Mr. Ruskin calls the _thinking_, classes of the community.
+
+It is not good for us to have all that we value of worldly material
+things in the form of money. It is the most vulgar form in which value
+can be invested. Not only books, pictures, and all beautiful things are
+better; but even jewels and trinkets are sometimes to be preferred to
+mere hard money. Lands and tenements are good, as involving duties; but
+still what is valuable in the market sense should sometimes take the
+ideal and the beautiful form, and be dear and lovely and valuable for
+its own sake as well as for its convertible worth in hard gold. I think
+the character would be apt to deteriorate when all its material
+possessions take the form of money, and when money becomes valuable for
+its own sake, or as the mere instrument or representative of power.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+4.
+
+We are told in a late account of Laura Bridgeman, the blind, deaf, and
+dumb girl, that her instructor once endeavoured to explain the
+difference between the material and the immaterial, and used the word
+"soul." She interrupted to ask, "What is soul?"
+
+"That which thinks, feels, hopes, loves,----"
+
+"And _aches_?" she added eagerly.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+5.
+
+I was reading to-day in the Notes to Boswell's Life of Johnson that "it
+is a theory which every one knows to be _false in fact_, that virtue in
+real life is always productive of happiness, and vice of misery." I
+should say that all my experience teaches me that the position is not
+false but true: that virtue _does_ produce happiness, and vice _does_
+produce misery. But let us settle the meaning of the words. By
+_happiness_, we do not necessarily mean a state of worldly prosperity.
+By _virtue_, we do not mean a series of good actions which may or may
+not be rewarded, and, if done for reward, lose the essence of virtue.
+Virtue, according to my idea, is the habitual sense of right, and the
+habitual courage to act up to that sense of right, combined with
+benevolent sympathies, the charity which thinketh no evil. This union of
+the highest conscience and the highest sympathy fulfils my notion of
+virtue. Strength is essential to it; weakness incompatible with it.
+Where virtue is, the noblest faculties and the softest feelings are
+predominant; the whole being is in that state of harmony which I call
+happiness. Pain may reach it, passion may disturb it, but there is
+always a glimpse of blue sky above our head; as we ascend in dignity of
+being, we ascend in happiness, which is, in my sense of the word, the
+feeling which connects us with the infinite and with God.
+
+And vice is necessarily misery: for that fluctuation of principle, that
+diseased craving for excitement, that weakness out of which springs
+falsehood, that suspicion of others, that discord with ourselves, with
+the absence of the benevolent propensities,--these constitute misery as a
+state of being. The most miserable person I ever met with in my life had
+12,000_l._ a year; a cunning mind, dexterous to compass its own ends;
+very little conscience, not enough, one would have thought, to vex with
+any retributive pang; but it was the absence of goodness that made the
+misery, obvious and hourly increasing. The perpetual kicking against the
+pricks, the unreasonable _exig�ance_ with regard to things, without any
+high standard with regard to persons,--these made the misery. I can speak
+of it as misery who had it daily in my sight for five long years.
+
+I have had arguments, if it be not presumption to call them so, with
+Carlyle on this point. It appeared to me that he confounded happiness
+with pleasure, with self-indulgence. He set aside with a towering scorn
+the idea of living for the sake of happiness, so called: he styled this
+philosophy of happiness, "the philosophy of the frying-pan." But this
+was like the reasoning of a child, whose idea of happiness is plenty of
+sugar-plums. Pleasure, pleasurable sensation, is, as the world goes,
+something to thank God for. I should be one of the last to undervalue
+it; I hope I am one of the last to live for it; and pain is pain, a
+great evil, which I do not like either to inflict or suffer. But
+happiness lies beyond either pain or pleasure--is as sublime a thing as
+virtue itself, indivisible from it; and under this point of view it
+seems a perilous mistake to separate them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+6.
+
+Dante places in his lowest Hell those who in life were melancholy and
+repining without a cause, thus profaning and darkening God's blessed
+sunshine--_Tristi fummo nel' aer dolce_; and in some of the ancient
+Christian systems of virtues and vices, Melancholy is unholy, and a
+vice; Cheerfulness is holy, and a virtue.
+
+Lord Bacon also makes one of the characteristics of moral health and
+goodness to consist in "a constant quick sense of felicity, and a noble
+satisfaction."
+
+What moments, hours, days of exquisite felicity must Christ, our
+Redeemer, have had, though it has become too customary to place him
+before us only in the attitude of pain and sorrow! Why should he be
+always crowned with thorns, bleeding with wounds, weeping over the world
+he was appointed to heal, to save, to reconcile with God? The radiant
+head of Christ in Raphael's Transfiguration should rather be our ideal
+of Him who came "to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach the acceptable
+year of the Lord."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+7.
+
+A profound intellect is weakened and narrowed in general power and
+influence by a limited range of sympathies. I think this is especially
+true of C----: excellent, honest, gifted as he is, he does not do half the
+good he might do, because his sympathies are so confined. And then he
+wants gentleness: he does not seem to acknowledge that "the wisdom that
+is from above is _gentle_." He is a man who carries his bright intellect
+as a light in a dark-lantern; he sees only the objects on which he
+chooses to throw that blaze of light: those he sees vividly, but, as it
+were, exclusively. All other things, though lying near, are dark,
+because perversely he _will_ not throw the light of his mind upon them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+8.
+
+Wilhelm von Humboldt says, "Old letters lose their vitality."
+
+Not true. It is because they retain their vitality that it is so
+dangerous to keep some letters,--so wicked to burn others.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+9.
+
+A Man thinks himself, and is thought by others to be insulted when
+another man gives him the lie. It is an offence to be retracted at once,
+or only to be effaced in blood. To give a woman the lie is not
+considered in the same unpardonable light by herself or others,--is
+indeed a slight thing. Now, whence this difference? Is not truth as
+dear to a woman as to a man? Is the virtue itself, or the reputation of
+it, less necessary to the woman than to the man? If not, what causes
+this distinction,--one so injurious to the morals of both sexes?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+10.
+
+It is good for us to look up, morally and mentally. If I were tired I
+would get some help to hold my head up, as Moses got some one to hold up
+his arms while he prayed.
+
+"Ce qui est moins que moi m'�teint et m'assomme; ce qui est � c�t� de
+moi m'ennuie et me fatigue. II n'y a que ce qui est au-dessus de moi qui
+me soutienne et m'arrache � moi-m�me."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+11.
+
+There is an order of writers who, with characters perverted or hardened
+through long practice of iniquity, yet possess an inherent divine sense
+of the good and the beautiful, and a passion for setting it forth, so
+that men's hearts glow with the tenderness and the elevation which live
+not in the heart of the writer,--only in his head.
+
+And there is another class of writers who are excellent in the social
+relations of life, and kindly and true in heart, yet who,
+intellectually, have a perverted pleasure in the ridiculous and
+distorted, the cunning, the crooked, the vicious,--who are never weary of
+holding up before us finished representations of folly and rascality.
+
+Now, which is the worst of these? the former, who do mischief by making
+us mistrust the good? or the latter, who degrade us by making us
+familiar with evil?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+12.
+
+"Thought and theory," said Wordsworth, "must precede all action that
+moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either
+thought or theory."
+
+Yes, and no. What we _act_ has its consequences on earth. What we
+_think_, its consequences in heaven. It is not without reason that
+action should be preferred before barren thought; but all action which
+in its result is worth any thing, must result from thought. So the old
+rhymester hath it:
+
+  "He that good thinketh good may do,
+   And God will help him there unto;
+   For was never good work wrought,
+   Without beginning of good thought."
+
+The result of impulse is the positive; the result of consideration the
+negative. The positive is essentially and abstractedly better than the
+negative, though relatively to facts and circumstances it may not be the
+most expedient.
+
+On my observing how often I had had reason to regret not having followed
+the first impulse, O. G. said, "In _good_ minds the first impulses are
+generally right and true, and, when altered or relinquished from regard
+to expediency arising out of complicated relations, I always feel sorry,
+for they remain right. Our first impulses always lean to the positive,
+our second thoughts to the negative; and I have no respect for the
+negative,--it is the vulgar side of every thing."
+
+On the other hand, it must be conceded, that one who stands endowed with
+great power and with great responsibilities in the midst of a thousand
+duties and interests, can no longer take things in this simple fashion;
+for the good first impulse, in its flow, meets, perhaps, some rock, and
+splits upon it; it recoils on the heart, and becomes abortive. Or the
+impulse to do good _here_ becomes injury _there_, and we are forced to
+calculate results; we cannot trust to them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I have not sought to deduce my principles from conventional notions of
+expediency, but have believed that out of the steady adherence to
+certain fixed principles, the right and the expedient _must_ ensue, and
+I believe it still. The moment one begins to solder right and wrong
+together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It requires merely passive courage and strength to resist, and in some
+cases to overcome evil. But it requires more--it needs bravery and
+self-reliance and surpassing faith--to act out the true inspirations of
+your intelligence and the true impulses of your heart.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Out of the attempt to harmonise our actual life with our aspirations,
+our experience with our faith, we make poetry,--or, it may be, religion.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+F---- used the phrase "_stung into heroism_" as Shelley said, "_cradled
+into poetry_," by wrong.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+13.
+
+Coleridge calls the personal existence of the Evil Principle, "a mere
+fiction, or, at best, an allegory supported by a few popular phrases and
+figures of speech, used incidentally or dramatically by the
+Evangelists." And he says, that "the existence of a personal,
+intelligent, Evil Being, the counterpart and antagonist of God, is in
+direct contradiction to the most express declarations of Holy Writ.
+'_Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?_'--Amos,
+iii. 6. '_I make peace and create evil._'--Isaiah, xlv. 7. This is the
+deep mystery of the abyss of God."
+
+Do our theologians go with him here? I think not: yet, as a theologian,
+Coleridge is constantly appealed to by Churchmen.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+14.
+
+"We find (in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians), every where
+instilled as the essence of all well-being and well-doing, (without
+which the wisest public and political constitution is but a lifeless
+formula, and the highest powers of individual endowment profitless or
+pernicious,) the spirit of a divine sympathy with the happiness and
+rights,--with the peculiarities, gifts, graces, and endowments of other
+minds, which alone, whether in the family or in the Church, can impart
+unity and effectual working together for good in the communities of
+men."
+
+
+"The Christian religion was, in fact, a charter of freedom to the whole
+human race."--_Thom's Discourses on St. Paul's Epistle to the
+Corinthians._
+
+And this is the true Catholic spirit,--the spirit and the teaching of
+Paul,--in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic spirit,--the spirit and
+tendency of Peter, which stands upon forms, which has no respect for
+individuality except in so far as it can imprison this individuality
+within a creed, or use it to a purpose.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+15.
+
+Dr. Baillie once said that "all his observation of death-beds inclined
+him to believe that nature intended that we should go out of the world
+as unconscious as we came into it." "In all my experience," he added, "I
+have not seen one instance in fifty to the contrary."
+
+Yet even in such a large experience the occurrence of "one instance in
+fifty to the contrary" would invalidate the assumption that such was the
+law of nature (or "nature's intention," which, if it means any thing,
+means the same).
+
+The moment in which the spirit meets death is perhaps like the moment in
+which it is embraced by sleep. It never, I suppose, happened to any one
+to be conscious of the immediate transition from the waking to the
+sleeping state.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+16.
+
+_Thoughts on a Sermon._
+
+He is really sublime, this man! with his faith in "the religion of
+pain," and "the deification of sorrow!" But is he therefore right? What
+has he preached to us to-day with all the force of eloquence, all the
+earnestness of conviction? that "pain is the life of God as shown forth
+in Christ;"--"that we are to be crucified to the world and the world to
+us." This perpetual presence of a crucified God between us and a pitying
+redeeming Christ, leads many a mourner to the belief that this world is
+all a Golgotha of pain, and that we are here to crucify each other. Is
+this the law under which we are to live and strive? The missionary
+Bridaine accused himself of sin in that he had preached fasting,
+penance, and the chastisements of God to wretches steeped in poverty and
+dying of hunger; and is there not a similar cruelty and misuse of power
+in the servants of Him who came to bind up the broken-hearted, when
+they preach the necessity, or at least the theory, of moral pain to
+those whose hearts are aching from moral evil?
+
+Surely there is a great difference between the resignation or the
+endurance of a truthful, faithful, loving, hopeful spirit, and this
+dreadful theology of suffering as the necessary and appointed state of
+things! I, for one, will not accept it. Even while most miserable, I
+will believe in happiness; even while I do or suffer evil, I will
+believe in goodness; even while my eyes see not through tears, I will
+believe in the existence of what I do not see--that God is benign, that
+nature is fair, that the world is not made as a prison or a penance.
+While I stand lost in utter darkness, I will yet wait for the return of
+the unfailing dawn,--even though my soul be amazed into such a blind
+perplexity that I know not on which side to look for it, and ask "where
+is the East? and whence the dayspring?" For the East holds its wonted
+place, and the light is withheld only till its appointed time.
+
+God so strengthen me that I may think of pain and sin only as accidental
+apparent discords in his great harmonious scheme of good! Then I am
+ready--I will take up the cross, and hear it bravely, while I _must_; but
+I will lay it down when I can, and in any case I will never lay it on
+another.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+17.
+
+If I fear God it is because I love him, and believe in his love; I
+cannot conceive myself as standing in fear of any spiritual or human
+being in whose love I do not entirely believe. Of that Impersonation of
+Evil, who goes about seeking whom he may devour, the image brings to me
+no fear, only intense disgust and aversion. Yes, it is because of his
+love for me that I fear to offend against God; it is because of his love
+that his displeasure must be terrible. And with regard to human beings,
+only the being I love has the power to give me pain or inspire me with
+fear; only those in whose love I believe, have the power to injure me.
+Take away my love, and you take away my fear: take away _their_ love,
+and you take away the power to do me any harm which can reach me in the
+sources of life and feeling.
+
+
+18.
+
+Social opinion is like a sharp knife. There are foolish people who
+regard it only with terror, and dare not touch or meddle with it. There
+are more foolish people, who, in rashness or defiance, seize it by the
+blade, and get cut and mangled for their pains. And there are wise
+people, who grasp it discreetly and boldly by the handle, and use it to
+carve out their own purposes.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+19.
+
+While we were discussing Balzac's celebrity as a romance writer, she (O.
+G.) said, with a shudder: "His laurels are steeped in the tears of
+women,--every truth he tells has been wrung in tortures from some woman's
+heart."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+20.
+
+Sir Walter Scott, writing in 1831, seems to regard it as a terrible
+misfortune that the whole burgher class in Scotland should be gradually
+preparing for representative reform. "I mean," he says, "the middle and
+respectable classes: when a borough reform comes, which, perhaps, cannot
+long be delayed, ministers will no longer return a member for Scotland
+from the towns." "The gentry," he adds, "will abide longer by _sound_
+principles, for they are needy, and desire advancement for themselves,
+and appointments for their sons and so on. But this is a very hollow
+dependence, and those who sincerely hold ancient opinions are waxing
+old," &c. &c.
+
+With a great deal more, showing the strange moral confusion which his
+political bias had caused in his otherwise clear head and honest mind.
+The sound principles, then, by which educated people are to abide,--over
+the decay of which he laments,--are such as can only be upheld by the
+most vulgar self-interest! If a man should utter openly such sentiments
+in these days, what should we think of him?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In the order of absolutism lurk the elements of change and destruction.
+In the unrest of freedom the spirit of change and progress.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+21.
+
+"A single life," said Bacon, "doth well with churchmen, for charity will
+hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool."
+
+Certainly there are men whose charities are limited, if not dried up, by
+their concentrated domestic anxieties and relations. But there are
+others whose charities are more diffused, as well as healthier and
+warmer, through the strength of their domestic affections.
+
+Wordsworth speaks strongly of the evils of ordaining men as clergymen in
+places where they had been born or brought up, or in the midst of their
+own relatives: "Their habits, their manners, their talk, their
+acquaintanceships, their friendships, and let me say, even their
+domestic affections, naturally draw them one way, while their
+professional obligations point out another." If this were true
+universally, or even generally, it would be a strong argument in favour
+of the celibacy of the Roman Catholic clergy, which certainly is one
+element, and not the least, of their power.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+22.
+
+Landor says truly: "Love is a secondary passion in those who love most,
+a primary in those who love least: he who is inspired by it in the
+strongest degree is inspired by honour in a greater."
+
+"Whatever is worthy of being loved for any thing is worthy to be
+preserved."
+
+Again:--"Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely
+stab or suffocate their own fame, when God hath commanded them to stand
+on high for an example."
+
+"Weak motives," he says, "are sufficient for weak minds; whenever we see
+a mind which we believed a stronger than our own moved habitually by
+what appears inadequate, we may be certain that there is--to bring a
+metaphor from the forest--_more top than root_."
+
+Here is another sentence from the same writer--rich in wise sayings:--
+
+"Plato would make wives common to abolish selfishness; the very mischief
+which, above all others, it would directly and immediately bring forth.
+There is no selfishness where there is a wife and family. There the
+house is lighted up by mutual charities; everything achieved for them is
+a victory; everything endured a triumph. How many vices are suppressed
+that there may be no _bad_ example! How many exertions made to recommend
+and inculcate a _good_ one."
+
+True: and I have much more confidence in the charity which begins in the
+home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the world-wide
+philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge into
+egotism, of which I could show you many and notable examples.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out
+of a hundred, the safe side and the just side of a question is the
+generous side and the merciful side. This your mere worldly people do
+not seem to know, and therein make the sorriest and the vulgarest of all
+mistakes. "_Pour �tre assez bon il faut l'�tre trop_:" we all need more
+mercy than we deserve.
+
+How often in this world the actions that we condemn are the result of
+sentiments that we love and opinions that we admire!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+23.
+
+A.---- observed in reference to some of her friends who had gone over to
+the Roman Catholic Church, "that the peace and comfort which they had
+sought and found in that mode of faith was like the drugged sleep in
+comparison with the natural sleep: necessary, healing perhaps, where
+there is disease and unrest, not otherwise."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+24.
+
+"A poet," says Coleridge, "ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him
+borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine
+nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to your
+imagination than your memory."
+
+This advice is even more applicable to the painter, but true perhaps in
+its application to all artists. Raphael and Mozart were, in this sense,
+great borrowers.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+25.
+
+"What is the difference between being good and being bad? the good do
+not yield to temptation and the bad do."
+
+This is often the distinction between the good and the bad in regard to
+act and deed; but it does not constitute the difference between _being_
+good and _being_ bad.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+26.
+
+The Italians say (in one of their characteristic proverbs) _Sospetto
+licenzia Fede_. Lord Bacon interprets the saying "as if suspicion did
+give a passport to faith," which is somewhat obscure and ambiguous. It
+means, that suspicion discharges us from the duty of good faith; and in
+this, its original sense, it is, like many of the old Italian proverbs,
+worldly wise and profoundly immoral.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+27.
+
+IT was well said by Themistocles to the King of Persia, that "speech was
+like cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth
+appear in figure, whereas in thoughts they lie but in packs" (_i. e._
+rolled up or packed up). Dryden had evidently this passage in his mind
+when he wrote those beautiful lines:
+
+  "Speech is the light, the morning of the mind;
+   It spreads the beauteous images abroad,
+   Which else lie furled and shrouded in the soul."
+
+Here the comparison of Themistocles, happy in itself, is expanded into a
+vivid poetical image.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+28.
+
+"Those are the killing griefs that do not speak," is true of some, not
+all characters. There are natures in which the killing grief finds
+utterance while it kills; moods in which we cry aloud, "as the beast
+crieth, expansive not appealing." That is my own nature: so in grief or
+in joy, I say as the birds sing:
+
+  "Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt,
+   Gab mir ein Got zu sagen was ich leide!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+29.
+
+Blessed is the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted _from_
+the world!--yet more blessed and more dear the memory of those who have
+kept themselves unspotted _in_ the world!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+30.
+
+Everything that ever has been, from the beginning of the world till now,
+belongs to us, is ours, is even a part of us. We belong to the future,
+and shall be a part of it. Therefore the sympathies of _all_ are in the
+past; only the poet and the prophet sympathise with the future.
+
+When Tennyson makes Ulysses say, "I am a part of all that I have seen,"
+it ought to be rather the converse,--"What I have seen becomes a part of
+me."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+31.
+
+In what regards policy--government--the interest of the many is sacrificed
+to the few; in what regards society, the morals and happiness of
+individuals are sacrificed to the many.
+
+
+32.
+
+We spoke to-night of the cowardice, the crime of a particular suicide:
+O. G. agreed as to this instance, but added: "There is a different
+aspect under which suicide might be regarded. It is not always, I think,
+from a want of religion, or in a spirit of defiance, or a want of
+confidence in God that we quit life. It is as if we should flee to the
+feet of the Almighty and embrace his knees, and exclaim, 'O my father!
+take me home! I have endured as long as it was possible; I can endure no
+more, so I come to you!'"
+
+
+Of an amiable man with a disagreeable expressionless face, she said:
+"His countenance always gives me the idea of matter too strong, too hard
+for the soul to pierce through. It is as a plaster mask which I long to
+break (making the gesture with her hand), that I may see the countenance
+of his heart, for that must be beautiful!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+33.
+
+Carlyle said to me: "I want to see some institution to teach a man the
+truth, the worth, the beauty, the heroism of which his present existence
+is capable; where's the use of sending him to study what the Greeks and
+Romans did, and said, and wrote? Do ye think the Greeks and Romans would
+have been what they were, if they had just only studied what the
+Phoenicians did before them?" I should have answered, had I dared: "Yet
+perhaps the Greeks and Romans would not have been what they were if the
+Egyptians and Phoenicians had not been before them."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+34.
+
+Can there be _progress_ which is not _progression_--which does not leave
+a past from which to start--on which to rest our foot when we spring
+forward? No wise man kicks the ladder from beneath him, or obliterates
+the traces of the road through which he has travelled, or pulls down the
+memorials he has built by the way side. We cannot _get on_ without
+linking our present and our future with our past. All reaction is
+destructive--all progress conservative. When we have destroyed that
+which the past built up, what reward have we?--we are forced to fall
+back, and have to begin anew. "Novelty," as Lord Bacon says, "cannot be
+content to add, but it must deface." For this very reason novelty is not
+progress, as the French would try to persuade themselves and us. We gain
+nothing by defacing and trampling down the idols of the past to set up
+new ones in their places--let it be sufficient to leave them behind us,
+measuring our advance by keeping them in sight.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+35.
+
+E---- was compassionating to-day the old and the invalided; those whose
+life is prolonged in spite of suffering; and she seemed, even out of the
+excess of her pity and sympathy, to wish them fairly out of the world;
+but it is a mistake in reasoning and feeling. She does not know how much
+of happiness may consist with suffering, with physical suffering, and
+even with mental suffering.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+36.
+
+"Renoncez dans votre �me, et renoncez y fermement, une fois pour toutes,
+� vouloir vous conna�tre au-del� de cette existence passag�re qui vous
+est impos�e, et vous redeviendrez agr�able � Dieu, utile aux autres
+hommes, tranquille avec vous-m�mes."
+
+This does not mean "renounce hope or faith in the future." No! But
+renounce that perpetual craving after a selfish interest in the
+unrevealed future life which takes the true relish from the duties and
+the pleasures of this. We can conceive of no future life which is not a
+continuation of this: to anticipate in that _future_ life, _another_
+life, a _different_ life; what is it but to call in doubt our individual
+identity?
+
+If we pray, "O teach us where and what is peace!" would not the answer
+be, "In the grave ye shall have it--not before?" Yet is it not strange
+that those who believe most absolutely in an after-life, yet think of
+the grave as peace? Now, if we carry this life with us--and what other
+life can we carry with us, unless we cease to be ourselves--how shall
+there be peace?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+As to the future, my soul, like Cato's, "shrinks back upon herself and
+startles at destruction;" but I do not think of my own destruction,
+rather of that which I love. That I should cease to be is not very
+intolerable; but that what I love, and do now in my soul possess, should
+cease to be--there is the pang, the terror! I desire that which I love to
+be immortal, whether I be so myself or not.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Is not the idea which most men entertain of another, of an eternal life,
+merely a continuation of this present existence under pleasanter
+conditions? We cannot conceive another state of existence,--we only fancy
+we do so.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"I conceive that in all probability we have immortality already. Most
+men seem to divide life and immortality, making them two distinct
+things, when, in fact, they are one and the same. What is immortality
+but a continuation of life--life which is already our own? We have, then,
+begun our immortality even now."
+
+For the same reason, or, rather, through the same want of reasoning by
+which we make _life_ and _immortality_ two (distinct things), do we make
+_time_ and _eternity_ two, which like the others are really one and the
+same. As immortality is but the continuation of life, so eternity is but
+the continuation of time; and what we call time is only that part of
+eternity in which we exist _now_.--_The New Philosophy._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+37.
+
+Strength does not consist only in the _more_ or the _less_. There are
+different sorts of strength as well as different degrees:--The strength
+of marble to resist; the strength of steel to oppose; the strength of
+the fine gold, which you can twist round your finger, but which can bear
+the force of innumerable pounds without breaking.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+38.
+
+Goethe used to say, that while intellectual attainment is progressive,
+it is difficult to be as good when we are old, as we were when young.
+Dr. Johnson has expressed the same thing.
+
+Then are we to assume, that to _do_ good effectively and wisely is the
+privilege of age and experience? To _be_ good, through faith in
+goodness, the privilege of the young.
+
+To preserve our faith in goodness with an extended knowledge of evil, to
+preserve the tenderness of our pity after long contemplation of pain,
+and the warmth of our charity after long experience of falsehood, is to
+be at once good and wise--to understand and to love each other as the
+angels who look down upon us from heaven.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible
+completely to understand what we do not love.
+
+
+I observe, that in our relations with the people around us, we forgive
+them more readily for what they _do_, which they _can_ help, than for
+what they _are_, which they _cannot_ help.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+39.
+
+"Whence springs the greatest degree of moral suffering?" was a question
+debated this evening, but not settled. It was argued that it would
+depend on the texture of character, its more or less conscientiousness,
+susceptibility, or strength. I thought from two sentiments--from
+_jealousy_, that is, the sense of a wrong endured, in one class of
+characters; from _remorse_, that is, from the sense of a wrong
+inflicted, in another.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+40.
+
+The bread of life is love; the salt of life is work; the sweetness of
+life, poesy; the water of life, faith.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+41.
+
+I have seen triflers attempting to draw out a deep intellect; and they
+reminded me of children throwing pebbles down the well at Carisbrook,
+that they might hear them sound.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+42.
+
+A bond is necessary to complete our being, only we must be careful that
+the bond does not become bondage.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"The secret of peace," said A. B., "is the resolution of the lesser into
+the greater;" meaning, perhaps, the due relative appreciation of our
+duties, and the proper placing of our affections: or, did she not rather
+mean, the resolving of the lesser duties and affections into the higher?
+But it is true in either sense.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The love we have for Genius is to common love what the fire on the altar
+is to the fire on the hearth. We cherish it not for warmth or for
+service, but for an offering, as the expression of our worship.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+All love not responded to and accepted is a species of idolatry. It is
+like the worship of a dumb beautiful image we have ourselves set up and
+deified, but cannot inspire with life, nor warm with sympathy.
+No!--though we should consume our own hearts on the altar. Our love of
+God would be idolatry if we did not believe in his love for us--his
+responsive love.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In the same moment that we begin to speculate on the possibility of
+cessation or change in any strong affection that we feel, even from that
+moment we may date its death: it has become the _fetch_ of the living
+love.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Motives," said Coleridge, "imply weakness, and the reasoning powers
+imply the existence of evil and temptation. The angelic nature would act
+from impulse alone." This is the sort of angel which Angelico da Fiesole
+conceived and represented, and _he_ only.
+
+Again:--"If a man's conduct can neither be ascribed to the angelic or the
+bestial within him, it must be fiendish. Passion without appetite is
+_fiendish_."
+
+And, he might have added, appetite without passion, _bestial_. Love in
+which is neither appetite nor passion is _angelic_. The union of all is
+human; and according as one or other predominates, does the human being
+approximate to the fiend, the beast, or the angel.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+43.
+
+I don't mean to say that principle is not a finer thing than passion;
+but passions existed before principles: they came into the world with
+us; principles are superinduced.
+
+There are bad principles as well as bad passions; and more bad
+principles than bad passions. Good principles derive life, and strength,
+and warmth from high and good passions; but principles do not give life,
+they only bind up life into a consistent whole. One great fault in
+education is, the pains taken to inculcate principles rather than to
+train feelings. It is as if we took it for granted that passions could
+_only_ be bad, and are to be ignored or repressed altogether,--the old
+mischievous monkish doctrine.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+44.
+
+It is easy to be humble where humility is a condescension--easy to
+concede where we know ourselves wronged--easy to forgive where vengeance
+is in our power.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"You and I," said H. G., yesterday, "are alike in this:--both of us so
+abhor injustice, that we are ready to fight it with a broomstick if we
+can find nothing better!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+45.
+
+"The wise only _possess_ ideas--the greater part of mankind are
+_possessed by_ them. When once the mind, in despite of the remonstrating
+conscience, has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse or idea,
+then whatever tends to give depth and vividness to this idea or
+indefinite imagination, increases its despotism, and in the same
+proportion renders the reason and free will ineffectual." This paragraph
+from Coleridge sounds like a _truism_ until we have felt its _truth_.
+
+
+46.
+
+"La Volont�, en se d�r�glant, devient passion; cette passion continu�e
+se change en habitude, et faute de r�sister � cette habitude elle se
+transforme en besoin."--_St. Augustin_. Which may be rendered--"out of the
+unregulated will, springs _passion_, out of passion gratified, _habit_;
+out of habits unresisted, _necessity_." This, also, is one of the truths
+which become, from the impossibility of disputing or refuting them,
+_truisms_--and little regarded, till the truth makes itself felt.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+47.
+
+I wish I could realise what you call my "_grand_ idea of being
+independent of the absent." I have not a friend worthy the name, whose
+absence is not pain and dread to me;--death itself is terrible only as it
+is absence. At some moments, if I could, I would cease to love those who
+are absent from me, or to speak more correctly, those whose path in life
+diverges from mine--whose dwelling house is far off;--with whom I am
+united in the strongest bonds of sympathy while separated by duties and
+interests by space and time. The presence of those whom we love is as a
+double life; absence, in its anxious longing, and sense of vacancy, is
+as a foretaste of death.
+
+"La mort de nos amis ne compte pas du moment o� ils meurent, mais de
+celui o� nous cessons de vivre avec eux;" or, it might rather be said,
+_pour eux_; but I think this arises from a want either of _faith_ or
+_faithfulness_.
+
+"La peur des morts est une abominable faiblesse! c'est la plus commune
+et la plus barbare des profanations; _les m�res ne la connaissent
+pas_!"--And why? Because the most _faithful_ love is the love of the
+mother for her child.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+48.
+
+At dinner to-day there was an attempt made by two very clever men to
+place Theodore Hook above Sydney Smith. I fought with all my might
+against both. It seems to me that a mind must be strangely warped that
+could ever place on a par two men with aspirations and purposes so
+different, whether we consider them merely as individuals, or called
+before the bar of the public as writers. I do not take to Sydney Smith
+personally, because my nature feels the want of the artistic and
+imaginative in _his_ nature; but see what he has done for humanity, for
+society, for liberty, for truth,--for us women! What has Theodore Hook
+done that has not perished with him? Even as wits--and I have been in
+company with both--I could not compare them; but they say the wit of
+Theodore Hook was only fitted for the company of men--the strongest proof
+that it was not genuine of its kind, that when most bearable, it was
+most superficial. I set aside the other obvious inference, that it
+required to be excited by stimulants and those of the coarsest, grossest
+kind. The wit of Sydney Smith almost always involved a thought worth
+remembering for its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its
+brilliant vehicle: the value of ten thousand pounds sterling of sense
+concentrated into a cut and polished diamond.
+
+It is not true, as I have heard it said, that after leaving the society
+of Sydney Smith you only remembered how much you had laughed, not the
+good things at which you had laughed. Few men--wits by profession--ever
+said so many memorable things as those recorded of Sydney Smith.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+49.
+
+"When we would show any one that he is mistaken our best course is to
+observe on what side he considers the subject,--for his view of it is
+generally right on _this_ side,--and admit to him that he is right so
+far. He will be satisfied with this acknowledgment, that he was not
+wrong in his judgment, but only inadvertent in not looking at the whole
+of the case."--_Pascal._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+50.
+
+"We should reflect," says Jeremy Taylor, preaching against ambition,
+"that whatever tempts the pride and vanity of ambitious persons is not
+so big as the smallest star which we see scattered in disorder and
+unregarded on the pavement of heaven."
+
+Very beautiful and poetical, but certainly no good argument against the
+sin he denounces. The star is inaccessible, and what tempts our pride or
+our ambition is only that which we consider with hope as _accessible_.
+That we look up to the stars not desiring, not aspiring, but only
+loving--therein lies our hearts' truest, holiest, safest _devotion_ as
+contrasted with _ambition_.
+
+It is the "_desire_ of the moth for the star," that leads to its burning
+itself in the candle.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+51.
+
+The brow stamped "with the hieroglyphics of an eternal sorrow," is a
+strong and beautiful expression of Bishop Taylor's.
+
+He says truly: "It is seldom that God sends such calamities upon men as
+men bring upon themselves and suffer willingly." And again: "What will
+not tender women suffer to hide their shame!" What indeed! And again:
+"Nothing is intolerable that is necessary." And again: "Nothing is to be
+esteemed evil which God and nature have fixed with eternal sanctions."
+
+There is not one of these ethical sentences which might not be treated
+as a text and expounded, opening into as many "branches" of
+consideration as ever did a Presbyterian sermon. Yet several involve a
+fallacy, as it seems to me;--others a deeper, wider, and more awful
+signification than Taylor himself seems to have contemplated when he
+uttered them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+52.
+
+The same reasons which rendered Goethe's "Werther" so popular, so
+passionately admired at the time it appeared--just after the seven years'
+war,--helped to render Lord Byron so popular in his time. It was not the
+individuality of "Werther," nor the individuality of "Childe Harold"
+which produced the effect of making them, for a time, a pervading
+power,--a _part_ of the life of their contemporaries. It was because in
+both cases a chord was struck which was ready to vibrate. A phase of
+feeling preexistent, palpitating at the heart of society, which had
+never found expression in any poetic form since the days of Dante, was
+made visible and audible as if by an electric force; words and forms
+were given to a diffused sentiment of pain and resistance, caused by a
+long period of war, of political and social commotion, and of unhealthy
+moral excitement. "Werther" and "Childe Harold" will never perish;
+because, though they have ceased to be the echo of a wide despair, there
+will always be, unhappily, individual minds and hearts to respond to the
+individuality.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Lord Byron has sometimes, to use his own expression, "curdled" a whole
+world of meaning into the compass of one line:--
+
+   "The starry Galileo and his woes."
+
+   "The blind old man of Chio's rocky isle."
+
+Here every word, almost every syllable, paints an idea. Such lines are
+_picturesque_. And I remember another, from Thomson, I think:--
+
+   "Placed far amid the melancholy main."
+
+In general, where words are used in description, the objects and ideas
+flow with the words in succession. But in each of these lines the mind
+takes in a wide horizon, comprising a multitude of objects at once, as
+the eye takes in a picture, with scene, and action, and figures,
+fore-ground and background, all at once. That is the reason I call such
+lines _picturesque_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+53.
+
+I have a great admiration for power, a great terror of
+weakness--especially in my own sex,--yet feel that my love is for those
+who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation, through
+excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength; for those
+whose refinement and softness of nature mingling with high intellectual
+power and the capacity for strong passion, present to me a problem to
+solve, which, when solved, I take to my heart. The question is not,
+which of the two diversities of character be the highest and best, but
+which is most sympathetic with my own.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+54.
+
+C---- told me, that some time ago, when poor Bethune the Scotch poet first
+became known, and was in great hardship, C---- himself had collected a
+little sum (about 30_l._), and sent it to him through his publishers.
+Bethune wrote back to refuse it absolutely, and to say that, while he
+had head and hands, he would not accept _charity_. C---- wrote to him in
+answer, still anonymously, arguing against the principle, as founded in
+false pride, &c. Now poor Bethune is dead, and the money is found
+untouched,--left with a friend to be returned to the donors!
+
+This sort of disgust and terror, which all finely constituted minds feel
+with regard to pecuniary obligation,--my own utter repugnance to it, even
+from the hands of those I most love,--makes one sad to think of. It gives
+one such a miserable impression of our social humanity!
+
+Goethe makes the same remark in the Wilhelm Meister:--"Es ist sonderbar
+welch ein wunderliches Bedenken man sich macht, Geld von Freunden und
+G�nnern anzunehmen, von denen man jede andere Gabe mit Dank und Freude
+empfangen w�rde."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+55.
+
+"In the celestial hierarchy, according to Dionysius Areopageta, the
+angels of Love hold the first place, the angels of Light the second, and
+the Thrones and Dominations the third. Among terrestrials, the
+Intellects, which act through the imagination upon the heart of man--_i.
+e._ poets and artists--may be accounted first in order; the merely
+scientific intellects the second; and the merely ruling intellects--those
+which apply themselves to the government of mankind, without the aid of
+either science or imagination--will not be disparaged if they are placed
+last."
+
+All government, all exercise of power--no matter in what form--which is
+not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny. It is not of
+God, and shall not stand.
+
+"A time will come when the operations of charity will no longer be
+carried on by machinery, relentless, ponderous, indiscriminate, but by
+human creatures, watchful, tearful, considerate, and wise."--_Westminster
+Review._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+56.
+
+"Those writers who never go further into a subject than is compatible
+with making what they say indisputably clear to man, woman, and child,
+may be the lights of _this_ age, but they will not be the lights of
+_another_."
+
+
+"It is not always necessary that truth should take a bodily form,--a
+material palpable form. It is sometimes better that it should dwell
+around us spiritually, creating harmony,--sounding through the air like
+the solemn sweet tone of a bell."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+57.
+
+Women are inclined to fall in love with priests and physicians, because
+of the help and comfort they derive from both in perilous moral and
+physical maladies. They believe in the presence of real pity, real
+sympathy, where the tone and look of each have become merely habitual
+and conventional,--I may say professional. On the other hand, women are
+inclined to fall in love with criminal and miserable men out of the pity
+which in our sex is akin to love, and out of the power of bestowing
+comfort or love. "Car les femmes out un instinct c�leste pour le
+malheur." So, in the first instance, they love from gratitude or faith;
+in the last, from compassion or hope.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+58.
+
+"Men of all countries," says Sir James Mackintosh, "appear to be more
+alike in their best qualities than the pride of civilisation would be
+willing to allow."
+
+And in their _worst_. The distinction between savage and civilised
+humanity lies not in the _qualities_, but the _habits_.
+
+
+59.
+
+Coleridge notices "the increase in modern times of vicious associations
+with things in themselves indifferent," as a sign of unhealthiness in
+taste, in feeling, in conscience.
+
+The truth of this remark is particularly illustrated in the French
+literature of the last century.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+60.
+
+"And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
+understanding also after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation,
+a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at
+the moment unpaid loss and unpayable, but the sure years reveal the deep
+remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend,
+wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later
+assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates a
+revolution in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or youth
+which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a
+household, or a style of living, and allows the formation of new
+influences that prove of the first importance during the next
+years."--_Emerson._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+61.
+
+Religion, in its general sense, is properly the comprehension and
+acknowledgment of an unseen spiritual power and the soul's allegiance
+to it; and CHRISTIANITY, in its particular sense, is the comprehension
+and appreciation of the personal character of Christ, and the heart's
+allegiance to that.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+62.
+
+Avarice is to the intellect what _sensuality_ is to the morals. It is an
+intellectual form of sensuality, inasmuch as it is the passion for the
+acquisition, the enjoyment in the possession, of a palpable, tangible,
+selfish pleasure; and it would have the same tendency to unspiritualise,
+to degrade, and to harden the higher faculties that a course of grosser
+sensualism would have to corrupt the lower faculties. Both dull the edge
+of all that is fine and tender within us.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+63.
+
+A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an
+artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+As what we call Genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size
+of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonising with
+it the rest of the character.
+
+"Though it burn our house down, who does not venerate fire?" says the
+Hindoo proverb.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+64.
+
+An elegant mind informing a graceful person is like a spirit lamp in an
+alabaster vase, shedding round its own softened radiance and heightening
+the beauty of its medium. An elegant mind in a plain ungraceful person
+is like the same lamp enclosed in a vase of bronze; we may, if we
+approach near enough, rejoice in its influence, though we may not behold
+its radiance.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+65.
+
+Landor, in a passage I was reading to-day, speaks of a language of
+criticism, in which qualities should be graduated by colours; "as, for
+instance, _purple_ might express grandeur and majesty of thought;
+_scarlet_, vigour of expression; _pink_, liveliness; _green_, elegant
+and equable composition, and so on."
+
+_Blue_, then, might express contemplative power? _yellow_, wit?
+_violet_, tenderness? and so on.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+66.
+
+I quoted to A. the saying of a sceptical philosopher: "The world is but
+one enormous WILL, constantly rushing into life."
+
+"Is that," she responded quickly, "another new name for God?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+67.
+
+A death-bed repentance has become proverbial for its fruitlessness, and
+a death-bed forgiveness equally so. They who wait till their own
+death-bed to make reparation, or till their adversary's death-bed to
+grant absolution, seem to me much upon a par in regard to the moral, as
+well as the religious, failure.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+68.
+
+A character endued with a large, vivacious, active intellect and a
+limited range of sympathies, generally remains immature. We can grow
+_wise_ only through the experience which reaches us through our
+sympathies and becomes a part of our life. All other experience may be
+gain, but it remains in a manner extraneous, adds to our possessions
+without adding to our strength, and sharpens our implements without
+increasing our capacity to use them.
+
+
+Not always those who have the quickest, keenest, perception of character
+are the best to deal with it, and perhaps for that very reason. Before
+we can influence or deal with mind, contemplation must be lost in
+sympathy, observation must be merged in love.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+69.
+
+Montaigne, in his eloquent tirade against melancholy, observes that the
+Italians have the same word, _Tristezza_, for melancholy and for
+malignity or wickedness. The noun _Tristo_, "a wretch," has the double
+sense of our English word corresponding with the French noun
+_mis�rable_. So Judas Iscariot is called _quel tristo_. Our word
+"wretchedness" is not, however, used in the double sense of _tristezza_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"On ne consid�re pas assez les paroles comme des faits:" that was well
+said!
+
+Since for the purpose of circulation and intercommunication we are
+obliged to coin truth into words, we should be careful not to adulterate
+the coin, to keep it pure, and up to the original standard of
+significance and value, that it may be reconvertible into the truth it
+represents.
+
+If I use a term in a sense wherein I know it is not understood by the
+person I address, then I am guilty of using words (in so far as they
+represent truth), if not to ensnare intentionally, yet to mislead
+consciously; it is like adulterating coin.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Common people," said Johnson, "do not accurately adapt their words to
+their thoughts, nor their thoughts to the objects;"--that is to say, they
+neither apprehend truly nor speak truly--and in this respect children,
+half-educated women, and ill-educated men, are the "common people."
+
+It is one of the most serious mistakes in Education that we are not
+sufficiently careful to habituate children to the accurate use of words.
+Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth. If we looked into
+the matter we should probably find that all the varieties and
+modifications of conscious and unconscious lying--as exaggeration,
+equivocation, evasion, misrepresentation--might be traced to the early
+misuse of words; therefore the contemptuous, careless tone in which
+people say sometimes "words--words--mere words!" is unthinking and unwise.
+It tends to debase the value of that which is the only medium of the
+inner life between man and man: "Nous ne sommes hommes, et nous ne
+tenons les uns aux autres, que par la parole," said Montaigne.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+70.
+
+"We are happy, good, tranquil, in proportion as our inner life is
+accessible to the external life, and in harmony with it. When we become
+dead to the moving life of Nature around us, to the changes of day and
+night (I do not speak here of the sympathetic influences of our
+fellow-creatures), then we may call ourselves philosophical, but we are
+surely either bad or mad."
+
+"Or perhaps only sad?"
+
+
+There are moments in the life of every contemplative being, when the
+healing power of Nature is felt--even as Wordsworth describes it--felt in
+the blood, in every pulse along the veins. In such moments converse,
+sympathy, the faces, the presence of the dearest, come so near to us,
+they make us shrink; books, pictures, music, anything, any object which
+has passed through the medium of mind, and has been in a manner
+humanised, is felt as an intrusive reflection of the busy, weary,
+thought-worn self within us. Only Nature, speaking through no
+interpreter, gently steals us out of our humanity, giving us a foretaste
+of that more diffused disembodied life which may hereafter be ours.
+Beautiful and genial, and not wholly untrue, were the old superstitions
+which placed a haunting divinity in every grove, and heard a living
+voice responsive in every murmuring stream.
+
+
+This present Sunday I set off with the others to walk to church, but it
+was late; I could not keep up with the pedestrians, and, not to delay
+them, turned back. I wandered down the hill path to the river brink, and
+crossed the little bridge and strolled along, pensive yet with no
+definite or continuous subject of thought. How beautiful it was--how
+tranquil! not a cloud in the blue sky, not a breath of air! "And where
+the dead leaf fell there did it rest;" but so still it was that scarce a
+single leaf did flutter or fall, though the narrow pathway along the
+water's edge was already encumbered with heaps of decaying foliage.
+Everywhere around, the autumnal tints prevailed, except in one sheltered
+place under the towering cliff, where a single tree, a magnificent
+lime, still flourished in summer luxuriance, with not a leaf turned or
+shed. I stood still opposite, looking on it quietly for a long time. It
+seemed to me a happy tree, so fresh and fair and grand, as if its
+guardian Dryad would not suffer it to be defaced. Then I turned, for
+close beside me sounded the soft, interrupted, half-suppressed warble of
+a bird, sitting on a leafless spray, which seemed to bend with its tiny
+weight. Some lines which I used to love in my childhood came into my
+mind, blending softly with the presences around me.
+
+  "The little bird now to salute the morn
+   Upon the naked branches sets her foot,
+   The leaves still lying at the mossy root,
+   And there a silly chirruping doth keep,
+   As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep;
+   Praising fair summer that too soon is gone,
+   And sad for winter, too soon coming on!" _Drayton._
+
+The river, where I stood, taking an abrupt turn, ran wimpling by; not as
+I had seen it but a few days before,--rolling tumultuously, the dead
+leaves whirling in its eddies, swollen and turbid with the mountain
+torrents, making one think of the kelpies, the water wraiths, and such
+uncanny things,--but gentle, transparent, and flashing in the low
+sunlight; even the barberries, drooping with rich crimson clusters over
+the little pools near the bank, and reflected in them as in a mirror, I
+remember vividly as a part of the exquisite loveliness which seemed to
+melt into my life. For such moments we are grateful: we feel then what
+God _can_ do for us, and what man can not.--_Carolside, November 5th,
+1843._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+71.
+
+"In the early ages of faith, the spirit of Christianity glided into and
+gave a new significance to the forms of heathenism. It was not the forms
+of heathenism which encrusted and overlaid the spirit of Christianity,
+for in that case the spirit would have burst through such extraneous
+formul�, and set them aside at once and for ever."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+72.
+
+Questions. In the execution of the penal statutes, can the individual
+interest of the convict be reconciled with the interest of society? or
+must the good of the convict and the good of society be considered as
+inevitably and necessarily opposed?--the one sacrificed to the other, and
+at the best only a compromise possible?
+
+This is a question pending at present, and will require wise heads to
+decide it? How would Christ have decided it? When He set the poor
+accused woman free, was He considering the good of the culprit or the
+good of society? and how far are we bound to follow His example? If He
+consigned the wicked to weeping and gnashing of teeth, was it for
+atonement or retribution, punishment or penance? and how far are we
+bound to follow His example?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+73.
+
+I marked the following passage in Montaigne as most curiously applicable
+to the present times, in so far as our religious contests are concerned;
+and I leave it in his quaint old French.
+
+"C'est un effet de la Providence divine de permettre sa saincte Eglise
+�tre agit�e, comme nous la voyons, de tant de troubles et d'orages, pour
+�veiller par ce contraste les �mes pies et les ravoir de l'oisivet� et
+du sommeil ou les avail plong�es une si longue tranquillit�. Si nous
+contrep�sons la perte que nous avons faite par le nombre de ceux qui se
+sont d�voy�s, au gain qui nous vient par nous �tre remis en haleine,
+ressuscit� notre z�le et nos forces � l'occasion de ce combat, je ne
+sais si l'utilit� ne surmonte point le dommage."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+74.
+
+"They (the friends of Cassius) were divided in opinion,--some holding
+that servitude was the extreme of evils, and others that tyranny was
+better than civil war."
+
+Unhappy that nation, wherever it may be, where the question is yet
+pending between servitude and civil war! such a nation might be driven
+to solve the problem after the manner of Cassius--with the dagger's
+point.
+
+"Surely," said Moore, "it is wrong for the lovers of liberty to identify
+the principle of resistance to power with such an odious person as the
+devil!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+75.
+
+"Where the question is of a great deal of good to ensue from a small
+injustice, men must pursue the things which are just in present, and
+leave the future to Divine Providence."
+
+This so simple rule of right is seldom attended to as a rule of life
+till we are placed in some strait in which it is forced upon us.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+76.
+
+A woman's patriotism is more of a sentiment than a man's,--more
+passionate: it is only an extension of the domestic affections, and with
+her _la patrie_ is only an enlargement of _home_. In the same manner, a
+woman's idea of fame is always a more extended sympathy, and is much
+more of a presence than an anticipation. To her the voice of fame is
+only the echo--fainter and more distant--of the voice of love.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+77.
+
+"La doute s'introduit dans l'�me qui r�ve, la foi descend dans l'�me qui
+souffre."
+
+The reverse is equally true,--and judging from my own experience, I
+should say oftener true.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+78.
+
+"La curiosit� est si voisine � la perfidie qu'elle peut enlaidir les
+plus beaux visages."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+79.
+
+When I told Tieck of the death of Coleridge (I had just received the sad
+but not unexpected news in a letter from England), he exclaimed with
+emotion, "A great spirit has passed away from the earth, and has left no
+adequate memorial of its greatness." Speaking of him afterwards he said,
+"Coleridge possessed the creative and inventive spirit of poetry, not
+the productive; he _thought_ too much to produce,--the analytical power
+interfered with the genius: Others with more active faculties seized and
+worked out his magnificent hints and ideas. Walter Scott and Lord Byron
+borrowed the first idea of the form and spirit of their narrative poems
+from Coleridge's 'Christabelle.'" This judgment of one great poet and
+critic passed on another seemed to me worth preserving.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+80.
+
+Coleridge says, "In politics what begins in fear usually ends in folly."
+
+He might have gone farther, and added: In morals what begins in fear
+usually ends in wickedness. In religion what begins in fear usually ends
+in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning
+of all evil.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In another place he says,--
+
+"Talent lying in the understanding is often inherited; genius, being the
+action of reason and imagination, rarely or never."
+
+There seems confusion here, for genius lies not in the amount of
+intellect--it is a quality of the intellect apart from quantity. And the
+distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and
+uses; genius combines and creates.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Of Sara Coleridge, Mr. Kenyon said very truly and beautifully, "that
+like her father she had the controversial _intellect_ without the
+controversial _spirit_."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+81.
+
+We all remember the famous _bon mot_ of Talleyrand. When seated between
+Madame de Sta�l and Madame R�camier, and pouring forth gallantry, first
+at the feet of one, then of the other, Madame de Sta�l suddenly asked
+him if she and Madame R�camier fell into the river, which of the two he
+would save first? "Madame," replied Talleyrand, "je crois que vous savez
+nager!" Now we will match this pretty _bon mot_ with one far prettier,
+and founded on it. Prince S., whom I knew formerly, was one day
+loitering on the banks of the Isar, in the English garden at Munich, by
+the side of the beautiful Madame de V., then the object of his devoted
+admiration. For a while he had been speaking to her of his mother, for
+whom, _vaurien_ as he was, he had ever shown the strongest filial love
+and respect. Afterwards, as they wandered on, he began to pour forth his
+soul to the lady of his love with all the eloquence of passion. Suddenly
+she turned and said to him, "If your mother and myself were both to fall
+into this river, whom would you save first?" "My mother!" he instantly
+replied; and then, looking at her expressively, immediately added, "To
+save _you_ first would be as if I were to save _myself_ first!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+82.
+
+If we were not always bringing ourselves into comparison with others, we
+should know them better.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+83.
+
+There are ways of governing every mind which lies within the circle
+described by our own; the only question is, whether the means required
+be such as we _can_ use? and if so, whether we shall think it right to
+do so?
+
+
+You think I do not know you, or that I mistake you utterly, because I am
+actuated by the impulses of my own nature, rather than by my perception
+of the impulses of yours? It is not so.
+
+
+If we would retain our own consistency, without which there is no moral
+strength, we must stand firm upon our own moral life.
+
+  "Be true unto thyself;
+   And it shall follow as the night to day,
+   Thou canst not then be false to any man."
+
+But to be true to others as well as ourselves, is not merely to allow to
+them the same independence, but to sympathise with it. Unhappily here
+lies the chief difficulty. There are brains so large that they
+unconsciously swamp all individualities which come in contact or too
+near, and brains so small that they cannot take in the conception of any
+other individuality as a whole, only in part or parts. As in Religion,
+where there is a strong, sincere, definite faith, there is generally
+more or less intolerance; so in character, where there is strong
+individuality, self-assurance, and defined principles of action, there
+is usually something hard and intolerant of the individuality of others.
+In some characters we meet with, toleration is a principle of the
+reason, and intolerance a quality of the mind, and then the whole being
+strikes a discord.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+84.
+
+If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the
+more. It is as if the principle, that conflict is a necessary law of
+progress, were applicable even to love. For there is no love like that
+which has roused up the intensest feelings of our nature,--revealed us to
+ourselves, like lightning suddenly disclosing an abyss,--yet has survived
+all the storm and tumult of such passionate discord and all the terror
+of such a revelation.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+85.
+
+F has much, much to learn! Through power, through passion, through
+feeling we do much, but only through observation, reflection, and
+sympathy we learn much; hence it is that minds highly gifted often
+remain immature. Artist minds especially, so long as they live only or
+chiefly for their art, their faculties bent on creating or representing,
+remain immature on one side--the reasoning and reflecting side of the
+character.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+86.
+
+Said a Frenchman of his adversary, "Il se croit sup�rieur � moi de toute
+la hauteur de sa b�tise!" There is a mingled felicity, politeness, and
+acrimony, in this phrase quite untranslatable.
+
+
+87.
+
+It is a pity that we have no words to express the French distinction
+between _r�ver_ and _r�vasser_. The one implies meditation on a definite
+subject: the other the abandonment of the mind to vague discussion,
+aimless thoughts.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+88.
+
+It seems to me that the conversation of the first converser in the world
+would _tire_ me, _pall_ on me at last, where I am not sure of the
+sincerity. Talk without truth is the hollow brass; talk without love is
+like the tinkling cymbal, and where it does not tinkle it gingles, and
+where it does not gingle, it jars.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+89.
+
+There are few things more striking, more interesting to a thoughtful
+mind, than to trace through all the poetry, literature, and art of the
+Middle Ages that broad ever-present distinction between the practical
+and the contemplative life. This was, no doubt, suggested and kept in
+view by the one grand division of the whole social community into those
+who were devoted to the religious profession (an immense proportion of
+both sexes) and those who were not. All through Dante, all through the
+productions of medi�val art, we find this pervading idea; and we must
+understand it well and keep it in mind, or we shall never be able to
+apprehend the entire beauty and meaning of certain religious groups in
+sculpture and painting, and the significance of the characters
+introduced. Thus, in subjects from the Old Testament, Leah always
+represents the practical, Rachel, the contemplative life. In the New
+Testament, Martha and Mary figure in the same allegorical sense; and
+among the saints we always find St. Catharine and St. Clara patronising
+the religious and contemplative life, while St. Barbara and St. Ursula
+preside over the military or secular existence. It was a part, and a
+very important part, of that beautiful and expressive symbolism through
+which art in all its forms spoke to the popular mind.
+
+For myself, I have the strongest admiration for the _practical_, but the
+strongest sympathy with the _contemplative_ life. I bow to Leah and to
+Martha, but my love is for Rachel and for Mary.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+90.
+
+Bettina does not describe nature, she informs it, with her own life: she
+seems to live in the elements, to exist in the fire, the air, the water,
+like a sylph, a gnome, an elf; she does not contemplate nature, she _is_
+nature; she is like the bird in the air, the fish in the sea, the
+squirrel in the wood. It is one thing to describe nature, and quite
+another unconsciously so to inform nature with a portion of our own
+life.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+91.
+
+Joanna Baillie had a great admiration of Macaulay's Roman Ballads.
+"But," said some one, "do you really account them as poetry?" She
+replied, "They _are_ poetry if the sounds of the trumpet be music!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+92.
+
+All my own experience of life teaches me the _contempt_ of cunning, not
+the _fear_. The phrase "profound cunning" has always seemed to me a
+contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either
+shallow, or on some point diseased. People dissemble sometimes who yet
+hate dissembling, but a "cunning mind" emphatically delights in its own
+cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning. That "pleasure in deceiving
+and aptness to be deceived" usually go together, was one of the wise
+sayings of the wisest of men.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+93.
+
+It was a saying of Paracelsus, that "Those who would understand the
+course of the heavens above must first of all recognise the heaven in
+man:" meaning, I suppose, that all pursuit of knowledge which is not
+accompanied by praise of God and love of our fellow-creatures must turn
+to bitterness, emptiness, foolishness. We must imagine him to have come
+to this conclusion only late in life.
+
+Browning, in that wonderful poem of Paracelsus,--a poem in which there is
+such a profound far-seeing philosophy, set forth with such a luxuriance
+of illustration and imagery, and such a wealth of glorious eloquence,
+that I know nothing to be compared with it since Goethe and
+Wordsworth,--represents his aspiring philosopher as at first impelled
+solely by the appetite to _know_. He asks nothing of men, he despises
+them; but he will serve them, raise them, after a sort of God-like
+fashion, independent of their sympathy, scorning their applause, using
+them like instruments, cheating them like children,--all for their good;
+but it will not do. In Aprile, "who would love infinitely, and be
+beloved," is figured the type of the poet-nature, desiring only beauty,
+resolving all into beauty; while in Paracelsus we have the type of the
+reflecting, the inquiring mind desiring only knowledge, resolving all
+into knowledge, asking nothing more to crown his being. And both find
+out their mistake; both come to feel that love without knowledge is
+blind and weak, and knowledge without love barren and vain.
+
+
+  "I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE,
+   Excluding love as thou refused'st knowledge;
+   Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake!
+
+          *       *       *       *       *
+
+  "Are we not halves of one dissever'd world,
+   Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part?--Never!
+   Till thou, the lover, know, and I, the knower,
+   Love--until both are saved!"
+
+
+After all, perhaps, only the same old world-renowned myth in another
+form--the marriage of Cupid and Psyche; Love and Intelligence long
+parted, long suffering, again embracing, and lighted on by Beauty to an
+immortal union. But to return to our poet. Aprile, exhausted by his own
+aimless, dazzling visions, expires on the bosom of him who knows; and
+Paracelsus, who began with a selfsufficing scorn of his kind, dies a
+baffled and degraded man in the arms of him who loves;--yet wiser in his
+fall than through his aspirations, he dies trusting in the progress of
+humanity so long as humanity is content to be _human_; to _love_ as well
+as to _know_;--to fear, to hope, to worship, as well as to aspire.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+94.
+
+Lord Bacon says: "I like a plantation (in the sense of colony) in a
+_pure_ soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to
+plant in others: for else it is rather an extirpation than a
+plantation." (Bacon, who wrote this, counselled to James I. the
+plantation of Ulster exactly on the principle he has here deprecated.)
+
+He adds, "It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of
+people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant"
+(_i. e._ colonise). And it is only now that our politicians are
+beginning to discover and act upon this great moral truth and obvious
+fitness of things!--like Bacon, adopting practically, and from mere
+motives of expediency, a principle they would theoretically abjure!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+95.
+
+Because in real life we cannot, or do not, reconcile the high theory
+with the low practice, we use our wit to render the theory ridiculous,
+and our reason to reconcile us to the practice. We ought to do just the
+reverse.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Many would say, if they spoke the truth, that it had cost them a
+life-long effort to unlearn what they had been taught.
+
+For as the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so
+through social conventionalism the conscience becomes blinded to
+positive immorality.
+
+It is fatal in any mind to make the moral standard for men high and the
+moral standard for women low, or _vice vers�_. This has appeared to me
+the very commonest of all mistakes in men and women who have lived much
+in the world, but _fatal_ nevertheless, and in three ways; first, as
+distorting the moral ideal, so far as it exists in the conscience;
+secondly, as perplexing the bounds, practically, of right and wrong;
+thirdly, as being at variance with the spirit and principles of
+Christianity. Admit these premises, and it follows inevitably that such
+a mistake is _fatal_ in the last degree, as disturbing the consistency
+and the elevation of the character, morally, practically, religiously.
+
+
+Akin to this mistake, or identical with it, is the belief that there are
+essential masculine and feminine virtues and vices. It is not, in fact,
+the quality itself, but the modification of the quality, which is
+masculine or feminine: and on the manner or degree in which these are
+balanced and combined in the individual, depends the perfection of that
+individual character--its approximation to that of Christ. I firmly
+believe that as the influences of religion are extended, and as
+civilisation advances, those qualities which are now admired as
+essentially _feminine_ will be considered as essentially _human_, such
+as gentleness, purity, the more unselfish and spiritual sense of duty,
+and the dominance of the affections over the passions. This is, perhaps,
+what Buffon, speaking as a naturalist, meant, when he said that with
+the progress of humanity, "_Les races se f�minisent_;" at least I
+understand the phrase in this sense.
+
+
+A man who requires from his own sex manly direct truth, and laughs at
+the cowardly subterfuges and small arts of women as being _feminine_;--a
+woman who requires from her own sex tenderness and purity, and thinks
+ruffianism and sensuality pardonable in a man as being
+_masculine_,--these have repudiated the Christian standard of morals
+which Christ, in his own person, bequeathed to us--that standard which we
+have accepted as Christians--theoretically at least--and which makes no
+distinction between "the highest, holiest manhood," and the highest,
+holiest womanhood.
+
+I might illustrate this position not only scripturally but
+philosophically, by quoting the axiom of the Greek philosopher
+Antisthenes, the disciple of Socrates,--"The virtue of the man and the
+woman is the same;" which shows a perception of the moral truth, a sort
+of anticipation of the Christian doctrine, even in the pagan times. But
+I prefer an illustration which is at once practical and poetical, and
+plain to the most prejudiced among men or women.
+
+Every reader of Wordsworth will recollect, if he does not know by heart,
+the poem entitled "The Happy Warrior." It has been quoted often as an
+epitome of every manly, soldierly, and elevated quality. I have heard it
+applied to the Duke of Wellington. Those who make the experiment of
+merely substituting the word _woman_ for the word _warrior_, and
+changing the feminine for the masculine pronoun, will find that it reads
+equally well; that almost from beginning to end it is literally as
+applicable to the one sex as to the other. As thus:--
+
+
+CHARACTER OF THE HAPPY WOMAN.
+
+   Who is the happy _woman_? Who is _she_
+   That every _woman_ born should wish to be?
+   It is the generous spirit, who, when brought
+   Among the tasks of real life, had wrought
+   Upon the plan that pleased _her_ childish thought;
+   Whose high endeavours are an inward light,
+   That make the path before _her_ always bright:
+   Who, with a natural instinct to discern
+   What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;
+   Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,
+   But makes _her_ moral being _her_ prime care;
+   Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
+   And Fear, and Sorrow, miserable train!
+   Turns _that_ necessity to glorious gain;
+   In face of these doth exercise a power
+   Which is our human nature's highest dower:
+   Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves
+   Of their bad influence, and their good receives;
+   By objects, which might force the soul to abate
+   _Her_ feeling, rendered more compassionate;
+   Is placable--because occasions rise
+   So often that demand such sacrifice;
+   More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure
+   As tempted more; more able to endure,
+   As more exposed to suffering and distress;
+   Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.
+   'Tis _she_ whose law is reason; who depends
+   Upon that law as on the best of friends;
+   Whence in a state where men are tempted still
+   To evil for a guard against worse ill,
+   And what in quality or act is best,
+   Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,
+   _She_ fixes good on good alone, and owes
+   To virtue every triumph that _she_ knows.
+   Who, if _she_ rise to station of command,
+   Rises by open means; and there will stand
+   On honourable terms, or else retire.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+   Who comprehends _her_ trust, and to the same
+   Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim;
+   And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait
+   For wealth, or honours, or for worldly state;
+   Whom they must follow; on whose head must fall
+   Like showers of manna, if they come at all:
+   Whose powers shed round _her_ in the common strife
+   Or mild concerns of ordinary life,
+   A constant influence, a peculiar grace;
+   But who, if _she_ be called upon to face
+   Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
+   Great issue, good or bad for human kind,
+   Is happy as a lover; and attired
+   With sudden brightness, like to one inspired;
+   And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
+   In calmness made, and sees what _she_ foresaw;
+   Or if an unexpected call succeed,
+   Come when it will, is equal to the need!
+
+
+In all these fifty-six lines there is only one line which cannot be
+feminised in its significance,--that which I have filled up with
+asterisks, and which is totally at variance with our ideal of A HAPPY
+WOMAN. It is the line--
+
+   "And in himself possess his own desire."
+
+No woman could exist happily or virtuously in such complete independence
+of all external affections as these words express. "Her desire is to her
+husband,"--this is the sort of subjection prophesied for the daughters of
+Eve. A woman doomed to exist without this earthly rest for her
+affections, does not "in herself possess her own desire;" she turns
+towards God; and if she does not make her life a life of worship, she
+makes it a life of charity, (which in itself is worship,) or she dies a
+spiritual and a moral death. Is it much better with the man who
+concentrates his aspirations in himself? I should think not.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Swift, as a man and a writer, is one of those who had least sympathy
+with women; and I have sometimes thought that the exaggeration, even to
+morbidity, of the coarse and the cruel in his character, arose from this
+want of sympathy; but his strong sense showed him the one great moral
+truth as regards the two sexes, and gave him the courage to avow it.
+
+He says, "I am ignorant of any one quality that is amiable in a woman
+which is not equally so in a man. I do not except even modesty and
+gentleness of nature; nor do I know one vice or folly which is not
+equally detestable in both." Then, remarking that cowardice is an
+_infirmity_ generally allowed to women, he wonders that they should
+fancy it becoming or graceful, or think it worth improving by
+affectation, particularly as it is generally allied to cruelty.
+
+
+Here is a passage from one of Humboldt's letters, which I have seen
+quoted with sympathy and admiration, as applied to the manly character
+only:--
+
+"Masculine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first
+requisite for the formation of a character of real manly worth. The man
+who suffers himself to be deceived and carried away by his own weakness,
+may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be called a
+good man; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a woman, for
+a truly beautiful and purely feminine nature should be attracted only by
+what is highest and noblest in the character of man."
+
+
+Now we will take this bit of moral philosophy, and, without the
+slightest alteration of the context, apply it to the female character.
+
+"Feminine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first
+requisite for the formation of a character of real feminine worth. The
+woman who allows herself to be deceived and carried away by her own
+weakness may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be
+called a good woman; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a
+man, for the truly beautiful and purely manly nature should be attracted
+only by what is highest and noblest in the character of woman."
+
+
+After reading the above extracts, does it not seem clear, that by the
+exclusive or emphatic use of certain phrases and epithets, as more
+applicable to one sex than to the other, we have introduced a most
+un-christian confusion into the conscience, and have prejudiced it early
+against the acceptance of the larger truth?
+
+It might seem, that where we reject the distinction between masculine
+and feminine virtues, one and the same type of perfection should suffice
+for the two sexes; yet it is clear that the moment we come to consider
+the personality, the same type will not suffice: and it is worth
+consideration that when we place before us the highest type of manhood,
+as exemplified in Christ, we do not imagine him as the father, but as
+the son; and if we think of the most perfect type of womanhood, we never
+can exclude the mother.
+
+
+Montaigne deals with the whole question in his own homely
+straightforward fashion:--
+
+"Je dis que les m�les et les f�melles sont jett�s en m�me moule; sauf
+l'institution et l'usage la diff�rence n'y est pas grande. Platon
+appelle indiff�remment les uns et les autres � la soci�t� de touts
+�tudes, exercises, charges, et vocations guerri�res et paisibles en sa
+r�publique, et le philosophe Antisth�nes �tait toute distinction entre
+leur vertu et la n�tre. Il est bien plus ais� d'accuser un sexe que
+d'excuser l'autre: c'est ce qu'on dit, 'le fourgon se moque de la
+po�le.'"
+
+Not that I agree with Plato,--rather would leave all the fighting,
+military and political, if there must be fighting, to the men.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Among the absurdities talked about women, one hears, perhaps, such an
+aphorism as the following quoted with a sort of ludicrous
+complacency,--"The woman's strength consists in her weakness!" as if it
+were not the weakness of a woman which makes her in her violence at once
+so aggravating and so contemptible, in her dissimulation at once so
+shallow and so dangerous, and in her vengeance at once so cowardly and
+so cruel.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I should not say, from my experience of my own sex, that a woman's
+nature is flexible and impressible, though her feelings are. I know
+very few instances of a very inferior man ruling the mind of a superior
+woman, whereas I know twenty--fifty--of a very inferior woman ruling a
+superior man. If he love her, the chances are that she will in the end
+weaken and demoralise him. If a superior woman marry a vulgar or
+inferior man he makes her miserable, but he seldom governs her mind, or
+vulgarises her nature, and if there be love on his side the chances are
+that in the end she will elevate and refine him.
+
+The most dangerous man to a woman is a man of high intellectual
+endowments morally perverted; for in a woman's nature there is such a
+necessity to approve where she admires, and to believe where she
+loves,--a devotion compounded of love and faith is so much a part of her
+being,--that while the instincts remain true and the feelings
+uncorrupted, the conscience and the will may both be led far astray.
+Thus fell "our general mother,"--type of her sex,--overpowered, rather
+than deceived, by the colossal intellect,--half serpent, half angelic.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Coleridge speaks, and with a just indignant scorn, of those who consider
+chastity as if it were a _thing_--a thing which might be lost or kept by
+external accident--a thing of which one might be robbed, instead of a
+state of being. According to law and custom, the chastity of Woman is as
+the property of Man, to whom she is accountable for it, rather than to
+God and her own conscience. Whatever people may say, such is the common,
+the social, the legal view of the case. It is a remnant of Oriental
+barbarism. It tends to much vice, or, at the best, to a low standard of
+morality, in both sexes. This idea of property in the woman survives
+still in our present social state, particularly among the lower orders,
+and is one cause of the ill treatment of wives. All those who are
+particularly acquainted with the manners and condition of the people
+will testify to this; namely, that when a child or any weaker individual
+is ill treated, those standing by will interfere and protect the victim;
+but if the sufferer be _the wife_ of the oppressor, it is a point of
+etiquette to look on, to take no part in the fray, and to leave the
+brute man to do what he likes "with his own." Even the victim herself,
+if she be not pummelled to death, frequently deprecates such an
+interference with the dignity and the rights of her owner. Like the poor
+woman in the "M�decin malgr� lui:"--"Voyez un peu cet impertinent qui
+vent emp�cher les maris de battre leurs femmes!--et si je veux qu'il me
+batte, moi?"--and so ends by giving her defender a box on the ear.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Au milieu de tous les obstacles que la nature et la soci�t� out sem�s
+sur les pas de la femme, la seule condition de repos pour elle est de
+s'entourer de barri�res que les passions ne puissent franchir; incapable
+de s'approprier l'existence, elle est toujours semblable a la Chinoise
+dont les pieds ont �t� mutil�s et pour laquelle toute libert� est un
+leurre, toute espace ouverte une cause de chute. En attendant que
+l'�ducation ait donn� aux femmes leur v�ritable place, malheur � celles
+qui brisent les lisses accoutum�es! pour elles l'ind�pendance ne sera,
+comme la gloire, qu'un deuil �clatant du bonheur!"--_B. Constant._
+
+This also is one of those common-places of well-sounding eloquence, in
+which a fallacy is so wrapt up in words we have to dig it out. If this
+be true, it is true only so long as you compress the feet and compress
+the intellect,--no longer.
+
+Here is another:--
+
+"L'exp�rience lui avait appris que quel que fut leur �ge, ou leur
+caract�re, toutes les femmes vivaient avec le m�me r�ve, et qu'elles
+avaient toutes au fond du coeur un roman commenc� dont elles attendaient
+jusqu'� la mort le h�ros, comme les juifs attendent le Messie."
+
+This "roman commenc�," (et qui ne finit jamais), is true as regards
+women who are idle, and who have not replaced dreams by duties. And what
+are the "barri�res" which passion cannot overleap, from the moment it
+has subjugated the will? How fine, how true that scene in Calderon's
+"Magico Prodigioso," where Justina conquers the fiend only by not
+_consenting_ to ill!
+
+                       ----"This agony
+   Of passion which afflicts my heart and soul
+   May sweep imagination in its storm;
+   The will is firm."
+
+And the baffled demon shrinks back,--
+
+  "Woman, thou hast subdued me
+   Only by not owning thyself subdued!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A friend of mine was once using some mincing elegancies of language to
+describe a high degree of moral turpitude, when a man near her
+interposed, with stern sarcasm, "Speak out! Give things their proper
+names! _Half words are the perdition of women!_"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"I observe," said Sydney Smith, "that _generally_ about the age of
+forty, women get tired of being virtuous and men of being honest." This
+was said and received with a laugh as one of his good things; but, like
+many of his good things, how dreadfully true! And why? because,
+_generally_, education has made the virtue of the woman and the honesty
+of the man a matter of external opinion, not a law of the inward life.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Dante, in his lowest hell, has placed those who have betrayed women; and
+in the lowest deep of the lowest deep those who have betrayed trust.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Inveterate sensuality, which has the effect of utterly stupifying and
+brutifying lower minds, gives to natures more sensitively or more
+powerfully organised a horrible dash of ferocity. For there is an awful
+relation between animal blood-thirstiness and the proneness to
+sensuality, and in some sensualists a sort of feline propensity to
+torment and lacerate the prey they have not the appetite to devour.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"La Chevalerie faisait une tentative qui n'a jamais r�ussi, quoique
+souvent essay�e; la tentative de se servir des passions humaines, et
+particuli�rement de l'amour pour conduire l'homme � la vertu. Dans cette
+route l'homme s'arr�te toujours en chemin. L'amour inspire beaucoup de
+bons sentiments--le courage, le d�vouement, le sacrifice des biens et de
+la vie; mais il ne se sacrifie pas lui-m�me, et c'est l� que la
+faiblesse humaine reprend ses droits."--_St. Marc-Girardin._
+
+
+I am not sure that this well-sounding remark is true--or, if true, it is
+true of the mere passion, not of love in its highest phase, which is
+self-sacrificing, which has its essence in the capability of
+self-sacrifice.
+
+                                "Love was given,
+     Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end;
+   For this the passion to excess was driven,
+     That _self_ might be annull'd."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear, there is a
+strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell next door to
+hate; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such
+intense haters.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Our present social opinion says to the man, "You may be a vulgar brutal
+sensualist, and use the basest means to attain the basest ends; but so
+long as you do not offend against conventional good manners you shall be
+held blameless." And to the woman it says, "You shall be guilty of
+nothing but of yielding to the softest impulses of tenderness, of
+relenting pity; but if you cannot add hypocrisy you shall be punished as
+the most desperate criminal."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+96.
+
+"It is worthy of notice that the external expressions appropriated to
+certain feelings undergo change at different periods of life and in
+different constitutions. The child cries and sobs from fear or pain, the
+adult more generally from sudden grief or warm affection, or sympathy
+with the feeling of others."--_Dr. Holland._
+
+Those who have been accustomed to observe the ways of children will
+doubt the accuracy of this remark, though from the high authority of
+one of the most accomplished physiologists of our time. Children cry
+from grief, and from sympathy with grief, at a very early age. I have
+seen an infant in its mother's arms, before it could speak, begin to
+whimper and cry when it looked up in her face, which was disturbed and
+bathed with tears; and that has always appeared to me an exquisite touch
+of most truthful nature in Wordsworth's description of the desolation of
+Margaret:--
+
+                        "Her little child
+   Had from its mother caught the trick of grief,
+   And sighed amid its playthings."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+97.
+
+"LETTERS," said Sir James Mackintosh, "must not be on a subject. Lady
+Mary Wortley's letters on her journey to Constantinople are an admirable
+book of travels, but they are not letters. A meeting to discuss a
+question of science is not conversation, nor are papers written to
+another to inform or discuss, letters. Conversation is relaxation, not
+business, and must never appear to be occupation;--nor must letters."
+
+"A masculine character may be a defect in a female, but a masculine
+genius is still a praise to a writer of whatever sex. The feminine
+graces of Madame de Sevign�'s genius are exquisitely charming, but the
+philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Sta�l are above the distinctions
+of sex."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+98.
+
+OF the wars between Napoleon and the Holy Alliance, Madame de Sta�l once
+said with most admirable and prophetic sense:--"It is a contest between a
+_man_ who is the enemy of liberty, and a _system_ which is equally its
+enemy." But it is easier to get rid of a man than of a system: witness
+the Russians, who assassinate their czars one after another, but cannot
+get rid of their _system_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+99.
+
+The Empress Elizabeth of Russia during the war with Sweden commanded the
+old Hetman of the Cossacks to come to court on his way to Finland. "If
+the Emperor, your father," said the Hetman, "had taken my advice, your
+Majesty would not now have been annoyed by the Swedes." "What was your
+advice?" asked the Empress. "To put all the nobility to death, and
+transplant the people into Russia." "But that," said the Empress, "would
+have been cruel!" "I do not see that," he replied quietly; "they are all
+dead now, and they would only have been dead if my advice had been
+taken."
+
+Something strangely comprehensive and unanswerable in this barbarian
+logic!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+100.
+
+IT was the Abb� Boileau who said of the Jesuits, that they had
+lengthened the Creed and shortened the Decalogue. The same witty
+ecclesiastic being asked why he always wrote in Latin, took a pinch of
+snuff, and answered gravely, "Why, for fear the bishops should read
+me!"
+
+101.
+
+When Talleyrand once visited a certain reprobate friend of his, who was
+ill of cholera, the patient exclaimed in his agony, "Je sens les
+tourmens de l'enfer!"
+
+"D�j�?" said Talleyrand.
+
+Much in a word! I remember seeing a pretty French vaudeville wherein a
+lady is by some accident or contrivance shut up perforce with a lover
+she has rejected. She frets at the _contretemps_. He makes use of the
+occasion to plead his cause. The cruel fair one will not relent. Still
+he pleads--still she turns away. At length they are interrupted.
+
+"D�j�!" exclaims the lady, in an accent we may suppose to be very
+different from that of Talleyrand; and on the intonation of this one
+word, pronounced as only an accomplished French actress could pronounce
+it, depends the _d�nouement_ of the piece.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+102.
+
+Louis XVI. sent a distinguished physician over to England to inquire
+into the management of our hospitals. He praised them much, but added,
+"Il y manque deux choses; nos cur�s et nos hospitali�res;" that is, he
+felt the want of the religious element in the official and medical
+treatment of the sick. A want which, I think, is felt at present and
+will be supplied.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+103.
+
+Those who have the largest horizon of thought, the most extended vision
+in regard to the relation of things, are not remarkable for
+self-reliance and ready judgment. A man who sees limitedly and clearly,
+is more sure of himself, and more direct in his dealings with
+circumstances and with others, than a man whose many-sided capacity
+embraces an immense extent of objects and _objections_,--just as, they
+say, a horse with blinkers more surely chooses his path, and is less
+likely to shy.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+104.
+
+What we truly and earnestly aspire _to be_, that in some sense we _are_.
+The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment
+realises itself.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+105.
+
+There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when
+they only feel.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+106.
+
+There are moments when the liberty of the inner life, opposed to the
+trammels of the outer, becomes too oppressive: moments when we wish that
+our mental horizon were less extended, thought less free; when we long
+to put the discursive soul into a narrow path like a railway, and force
+it to run on in a straight line to some determined goal.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+107.
+
+If the deepest and best affections which God has given us sometimes
+brood over the heart like doves of peace,--they sometimes suck out our
+life-blood like vampires.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+108.
+
+To a Frenchman the words that express things seem often to suffice for
+the things themselves, and he pronounces the words _amour_, _gr�ce_,
+_sensibilit�_, as if with a relish in his mouth--as if he tasted them--as
+if he possessed them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+109.
+
+There are many good qualities, and valuable ones too, which hardly
+deserve the name of virtues. The word Virtue was synonymous in the old
+time with valour, and seems to imply contest; not merely passive
+goodness, but active resistance to evil. I wonder sometimes why it is
+that we so continually hear the phrase, "a virtuous woman," and scarcely
+ever that of a "virtuous man," except in poetry or from the pulpit.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+110.
+
+A Lie, though it be killed and dead, can sting sometimes,--like a dead
+wasp.
+
+
+111.
+
+"On me dit toute la journ�e dans le monde, telle opinion, telle id�e,
+sont _re�ues_. On ne sait donc pas qu'en fait d'opinion, et d'id�es
+j'aime beaucoup mieux les choses qui sont rejett�es que celles qui sont
+re�ues?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+112.
+
+"Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some
+eighteenpence a day, but for phantasy, planets and solar systems will
+not suffice." And _thence_ do you infer the superiority of sense over
+phantasy? Shallow reasoning! God who made the soul of man of sufficient
+capacity to embrace whole worlds and systems of worlds, gave us thereby
+a foretaste of our immortality.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+113.
+
+"Faith in the _hereafter_ is as necessary for the intellectual as the
+moral character, and to the man of letters as well as to the Christian,
+the present forms but the slightest portion of his
+existence."--_Southey._
+
+Goethe did not think so. "Genutzt dem Augenblick," "_Use_ the present,"
+was _his_ favourite maxim; and always this notion of sacrificing or
+slighting the present seems to me a great mistake. It ought to be the
+most important part of our existence, as it is the only part of it over
+which we have power. It is in the present only that we absolve the past
+and lay the foundation for the future.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+114.
+
+"Je allseitigen, je individueller," is a beautiful significant phrase,
+quite untranslateable, used, I think, by Rahel (Madame Varnhagen). It
+means that the more the mind can multiply on every side its capacities
+of thinking and feeling, the more individual, the more original, that
+mind becomes.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+115.
+
+"I wonder," said C., "that facts should be called _stubborn_ things." I
+wonder, too, seeing you can always oppose a fact with another fact, and
+that nothing is so easy as to twist, pervert, and argue or misrepresent
+a fact into twenty different forms. "Il n'y a rien qui s'arrange aussi
+facilement que les faits,"--Nothing so _tractable_ as facts,--said
+Benjamin Constant. True; so long as facts are only material,--or as one
+should say, mere matter of fact,--you can modify them to a purpose, turn
+them upside down and inside out; but once vivify a fact with a feeling,
+and it stands up before us a living and a very stubborn thing.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+116.
+
+Every human being is born to influence some other human being; or many,
+or all human beings, in proportion to the extent and power of the
+sympathies, rather than of the intellect.
+
+It was said, and very beautifully said, that "one man's wit becomes all
+men's wisdom." Even more true is it that one man's virtue becomes a
+standard which raises our anticipation of possible goodness in all men.
+
+
+117.
+
+It is curious that the memory, most retentive of images, should yet be
+much more retentive of feelings than of facts: for instance, we remember
+with such intense vividness a period of suffering, that it seems even to
+renew itself through the medium of thought; yet, at the same time, we
+perhaps find difficulty in recalling, with any distinctness, the causes
+of that pain.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+118.
+
+"Truth has never manifested itself to me in such a broad stream of light
+as seems to be poured upon some minds. Truth has appeared to my mental
+eye, like a vivid, yet small and trembling star in a storm, now
+appearing for a moment with a beauty that enraptured, now lost in such
+clouds, as, had I less faith, might make me suspect that the previous
+clear sight had been a delusion."--_Blanco White._
+
+Very exquisite in the aptness as well as poetry of the comparison! Some
+walk by daylight, some walk by starlight. Those who see the sun do not
+see the stars; those who see the stars do not see the sun.
+
+He says in another place:--
+
+"I am averse to too much activity of the imagination on the future life.
+I hope to die full of confidence that no evil awaits me: but any picture
+of a future life distresses me. I feel as if an eternity of existence
+were already an insupportable burden on my soul."
+
+How characteristic of that lassitude of the soul and sickness of the
+heart which "asks not happiness, but longs for rest!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+119.
+
+"Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely stab or
+suffocate their fame when God hath commanded them to stand on high for
+an example."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+120.
+
+Carlyle thus apostrophised a celebrated orator, who abused his gift of
+eloquence to insincere purposes of vanity, self-interest, and
+expediency:--"You blasphemous scoundrel! God gave you that gifted tongue
+of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning
+to us, not to be rattled like a muffin-man's bell!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+121.
+
+I think, with Carlyle, that a lie should be trampled on and extinguished
+wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that
+falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me. A. thinks this is too
+_young_ a feeling, and that as the truth is sure to conquer in the end,
+it is not worth while to fight every separate lie, or fling a torch into
+every infected hole. Perhaps not, so far as we are ourselves concerned;
+but we should think of others. While secure in our own antidote, or wise
+in our own caution, we should not leave the miasma to poison the
+healthful, or the briars to entangle the unwary. There is no occasion
+perhaps for truth to sally forth like a knight-errant tilting at every
+vizor, but neither should she sit self-assured in her tower of strength,
+leaving pitfalls outside her gate for the blind to fall into.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+122.
+
+"There is a way to separate memory from imagination--we may narrate
+without painting. I am convinced that the mind can employ certain
+indistinct signs to represent even its most vivid impressions; that
+instead of picture writing, it can use something like algebraic symbols:
+such is the language of the soul when the paroxysm of pain has passed,
+and the wounds it received formerly are skinned over, not healed:--it is
+a language very opposite to that used by the poet and the
+novel-writer."--_Blanco White._
+
+True; but a language in which the soul can converse only with itself; or
+else a language more conventional than words, and like paper as a tender
+for gold, more capable of being defaced and falsified. There is a
+proverb we have heard quoted: "Speech is silver, silence is golden." But
+better is the silver diffused than the talent of gold buried.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+123.
+
+However distinguished and gifted, mentally and morally, we find that in
+conduct and in our external relations with, society there is ever a
+levelling influence at work. Seldom in our relations with the world, and
+in the ordinary commerce of life, are the best and highest within us
+brought forth; for the whole system of social intercourse is levelling.
+As it is said that law knows no distinction of persons but that which it
+has itself instituted; so of society it may be said, that it allows of
+no distinction but those which it can recognise--external distinctions.
+
+We hear it said that general society--the _world_, as it is called--and a
+public school, are excellent educators; because in one the man, in the
+other the boy, "finds, as the phrase is, his own level." He does not; he
+finds the level of others. _That_ may be good for those below
+mediocrity, but for those above it _bad_: and it is for those we should
+most care, for if once brought down in early life by the levelling
+influence of numbers, they seldom rise again, or only partially. Nothing
+so dangerous as to be perpetually measuring ourselves against what is
+beneath us, feeling our superiority to that which we force ourselves to
+assimilate to. This has been the perdition of many a schoolboy and many
+a man.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+124.
+
+"Il me semble que le plus noble rapport entre le ciel et la terre, le
+plus beau don que Dieu ait fait � l'homme, la pens�e, l'inspiration, se
+d�compose en quelque sorte d�s qu'elle est descendue dans son �me. Elle
+y vient simple et d�sint�ress�e; il la reproduit corrompue par tous les
+int�r�ts auxquels il l'associe; elle lui a �t� confi�e pour la
+multiplier � l'avantage de tous; il la publie au profit de son
+amour-propre."--_Madame de Saint-Aulaire._
+
+There would be much to say about this, for it is not always, nor
+generally, _amour-propre_ or interest; it is the desire of sympathy,
+which impels the artist mind to the utterance in words, or the
+expression in form, of that thought or inspiration which God has sent
+into his soul.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+125.
+
+Milton's Eve is the type of the masculine standard of perfection in
+woman; a graceful figure, an abundance of fine hair, much "coy
+submission," and such a degree of unreasoning wilfulness as shall risk
+perdition.
+
+And the woman's standard for the man is Adam, who rules and demands
+subjection, and is so indulgent that he gives up to blandishment what
+he would refuse to reason, and what his own reason condemns.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+126.
+
+Every subject which excites discussion impels to thought. Every
+expression of a mind humbly seeking truth, not assuming to have found
+it, helps the seeker after truth.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+128.
+
+As a man just released from the rack stands bruised and broken,--bleeding
+at every pore, and dislocated in every limb, and raises his eyes to
+heaven, and says, "God be praised! I suffer no more!" because to that
+past sharp agony the respite comes like peace--like sleep,--so we stand,
+after some great wrench in our best affections, where they have been
+torn up by the root; when the conflict is over, and the tension of the
+heart-strings is relaxed, then comes a sort of rest,--but of what kind?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+129.
+
+To trust religiously, to hope humbly, to desire nobly, to think
+rationally, to will resolutely, and to work earnestly,--may this be
+mine.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD.
+
+(FROM A LETTER.)
+
+
+We are all interested in this great question of popular education; but I
+see others much more sanguine than I am. They hope for some immediate
+good result from all that is thought, written, spoken on the subject day
+after day. I see such results as possible, probable, but far, far off.
+All this talk is of systems and methods, institutions, school houses,
+schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, school books; the ways and the means by
+which we are to instruct, inform, manage, mould, regulate, that which
+lies in most cases beyond our reach--the spirit sent from God. What do we
+know of the mystery of child-nature, child-life? What, indeed, do we
+know of any life? All life we acknowledge to be an awful mystery, but
+child-life we treat as if it were no mystery whatever--just so much
+material placed in our hands to be fashioned to a certain form according
+to our will or our prejudices,--fitted to certain purposes according to
+our notions of expediency. Till we know how to _reverence_ childhood we
+shall do no good. Educators commit the same mistake with regard to
+childhood that theologians commit with regard to our present earthly
+existence; thinking of it, treating of it, as of little value or
+significance in itself, only transient, and preparatory to some
+condition of being which is to follow--as if it were something separate
+from us and to be left behind us as the creature casts its skin. But as
+in the sight of God this life is also something for its own sake, so in
+the estimation of Christ, childhood was something for its own
+sake,--something holy and beautiful in itself, and dear to him. He saw it
+not merely as the germ of something to grow out of it, but as perfect
+and lovely in itself as the flower which precedes the fruit. We
+misunderstand childhood, and we misuse it; we delight in it, and we
+pamper it; we spoil it ingeniously, we neglect it sinfully; at the best
+we trifle with it as a plaything which we can pull to pieces and put
+together at pleasure--ignorant, reckless, presumptuous that we are!
+
+And if we are perpetually making the grossest mistakes in the physical
+and practical management of childhood, how much more in regard to what
+is spiritual! What do we know of that which lies in the minds of
+children? we know only what we put there. The world of instincts,
+perceptions, experiences, pleasures, and pains, lying there without
+self-consciousness,--sometimes helplessly mute, sometimes so imperfectly
+expressed, that we quite mistake the manifestation--what do we know of
+all this? How shall we come at the understanding of it? The child lives,
+and does not contemplate its own life. It can give no account of that
+inward, busy, perpetual activity of the growing faculties and feelings
+which it is of so much importance that we should know. To lead children
+by questionings to think about their own identity, or observe their own
+feelings, is to teach them to be artificial. To waken self-consciousness
+before you awaken conscience is the beginning of incalculable mischief.
+Introspection is always, as a habit, unhealthy: introspection in
+childhood, fatally so. How shall we come at a knowledge of life such as
+it is when it first gushes from its mysterious fountain head? We cannot
+reascend the stream. We all, however we may remember the external scenes
+lived through in our infancy, either do not, or cannot, consult that
+part of our nature which remains indissolubly connected with the inward
+life of that time. We so forget it, that we know not how to deal with
+the child-nature when it comes under our power. We seldom reason about
+children from natural laws, or psychological data. Unconsciously we
+confound our matured experience with our memory: we attribute to
+children what is not possible, exact from them what is
+impossible;--ignore many things which the child has neither words to
+express, nor the will nor the power to manifest. The quickness with
+which children perceive, the keenness with which they suffer, the
+tenacity with which they remember, I have never seen fully appreciated.
+What misery we cause to children, what mischief we do them by bringing
+our own minds, habits, artificial prejudices and senile experiences, to
+bear on their young life, and cramp and overshadow it--it is fearful!
+
+Of all the wrongs and anomalies that afflict our earth, a sinful
+childhood, a suffering childhood, are among the worst.
+
+O ye men! who sit in committees, and are called upon to legislate for
+children,--for children who are the offspring of diseased or degenerate
+humanity, or the victims of a yet more diseased society,--do you, when
+you take evidence from jailors, and policemen, and parish schoolmasters,
+and doctors of divinity, do you ever call up, also, the wise physician,
+the thoughtful physiologist, the experienced mother? You have
+accumulated facts, great blue books full of facts, but till you know in
+what fixed and uniform principles of nature to seek their solution, your
+facts remain a dead letter.
+
+I say nothing here of teaching, though very few in truth understand that
+lowest part of our duty to children. Men, it is generally allowed,
+_teach_ better than women because they have been better taught the
+things they teach. Women _train_ better than men because of their quick
+instinctive perceptions and sympathies, and greater tenderness and
+patience. In schools and in families I would have some things taught by
+men, and some by women: but we will here put aside the art, the act of
+teaching: we will turn aside from the droves of children in national
+schools and reformatory asylums, and turn to the individual child,
+brought up within the guarded circle of a home or a select school,
+watched by an intelligent, a conscientious influence. How shall we deal
+with that spirit which has come out of nature's hands unless we remember
+what we were ourselves in the past? What sympathy can we have with that
+state of being which we regard as immature, so long as we commit the
+double mistake of sometimes attributing to children motives which could
+only spring from our adult experience, and sometimes denying to them the
+same intuitive tempers and feelings which actuate and agitate our
+maturer life? We do not sufficiently consider that our life is not made
+up of separate parts, but is _one_--is a progressive whole. When we talk
+of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river
+flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+121.
+
+I will here put together some recollections of my own child-life; not
+because it was in any respect an exceptional or remarkable existence,
+but for a reason exactly the reverse, because it was like that of many
+children; at least I have met with many children who throve or suffered
+from the same or similar unseen causes even under external conditions
+and management every way dissimilar. Facts, therefore, which can be
+relied on, may be generally useful as hints towards a theory of conduct
+in education. What I shall say here shall be simply the truth so far as
+it goes; not something between the false and the true, garnished for
+effect,--not something half-remembered, half-imagined,--but plain,
+absolute, matter of fact.
+
+No; certainly I was not an extraordinary child. I have had something to
+do with children, and have met with several more remarkable for
+quickness of talent, and precocity of feeling. If any thing in
+particular, I believe I was particularly naughty,--at least so it was
+said twenty times a day. But looking back now, I do not think I was
+particular even in this respect; I perpetrated not more than the usual
+amount of mischief--so called--which every lively active child perpetrates
+between five and ten years old. I had the usual desire to know, and the
+usual dislike to learn; the usual love of fairy tales, and hatred of
+French exercises. But not of what I learned, but of what I did _not_
+learn; not of what they taught me, but of what they could _not_ teach
+me; not of what was open, apparent, manageable, but of the under
+current, the hidden, the unmanaged or unmanageable, I have to speak, and
+you, my friend, to hear and turn to account, if you will, and how you
+will. As we grow old the experiences of infancy come back upon us with a
+strange vividness. There is a period when the overflowing, tumultuous
+life of our youth rises up between us and those first years; but as the
+torrent subsides in its bed we can look across the impassable gulf to
+that haunted fairy land which we shall never more approach, and never
+more forget!
+
+
+In memory I can go back to a very early age. I perfectly remember being
+sung to sleep, and can remember even the tune which was sung to
+me--blessings on the voice that sang it! I was an affectionate, but not,
+as I now think, a loveable nor an attractive child. I did not, like the
+little Mozart, ask of every one around me, "Do you love me?" The
+instinctive question was, rather, "Can I love you?" Yet certainly I was
+not more than six years old when I suffered from the fear of not being
+loved where I had attached myself, and from the idea that another was
+preferred before me, such anguish as had nearly killed me. Whether those
+around me regarded it as a fit of ill-temper, or a fit of illness, I do
+not know. I could not then have given a name to the pang that fevered
+me. I knew not the cause, but never forgot the suffering. It left a
+deeper impression than childish passions usually do; and the
+recollection was so far salutary, that in after life I guarded myself
+against the approaches of that hateful, deformed, agonising thing which
+men call jealousy, as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera. If
+such self-knowledge has not saved me from the pain, at least it has
+saved me from the demoralising effects of the passion, by a wholesome
+terror, and even a sort of disgust.
+
+With a good temper, there was the capacity of strong, deep, silent
+resentment, and a vindictive spirit of rather a peculiar kind. I
+recollect that when one of those set over me inflicted what then
+appeared a most horrible injury and injustice, the thoughts of vengeance
+haunted my fancy for months: but it was an inverted sort of vengeance. I
+imagined the house of my enemy on fire, and rushed through the flames
+to rescue her. She was drowning, and I leaped into the deep water to
+draw her forth. She was pining in prison, and I forced bars and bolts to
+deliver her. If this were magnanimity, it was not the less vengeance;
+for, observe, I always fancied evil, and shame, and humiliation to my
+adversary; to myself the _r�le_ of superiority and gratified pride. For
+several years this sort of burning resentment against wrong done to
+myself and others, though it took no mean or cruel form, was a source of
+intense, untold suffering. No one was aware of it. I was left to settle
+it; and my mind righted itself I hardly know how: not certainly by
+religious influences--they passed over my mind, and did not at the time
+sink into it,--and as for earthly counsel or comfort, I never had either
+when most needed. And as it fared with me then, so it has been in after
+life; so it has been, _must_ be, with all those who, in fighting out
+alone the pitched battle between principle and passion, will accept no
+intervention between the infinite within them and the infinite above
+them; so it has been, _must_ be, with all strong natures. Will it be
+said that victory in the struggle brings increase of strength? It may be
+so with some who survive the contest; but then, how many sink! how many
+are crippled morally for life! how many, strengthened in some particular
+faculties, suffer in losing the harmony of the character as a whole!
+This is one of the points in which the matured mind may help the
+childish nature at strife with itself. It is impossible to say how far
+this sort of vindictiveness might have penetrated and hardened into the
+character, if I had been of a timid or retiring nature. It was expelled
+at last by no outer influences, but by a growing sense of power and
+self-reliance.
+
+
+In regard to truth--always such a difficulty in education,--I certainly
+had, as a child, and like most children, confused ideas about it. I had
+a more distinct and absolute idea of honour than of truth,--a mistake
+into which our conventional morality leads those who educate and those
+who are educated. I knew very well, in a general way, that to tell a lie
+was _wicked_; to lie for my own profit or pleasure, or to the hurt of
+others, was, according to my infant code of morals, worse than wicked--it
+was _dishonourable_. But I had no compunction about telling
+_fictions_;--inventing scenes and circumstances, which I related as real,
+and with a keen sense of triumphant enjoyment in seeing the listener
+taken in by a most artful and ingenious concatenation of
+impossibilities. In this respect "Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, that liar of
+the first magnitude," was nothing in comparison to me. I must have been
+twelve years old before my conscience was first awakened up to a sense
+of the necessity of truth as a principle, as well as its holiness as a
+virtue. Afterwards, having to set right the minds of others cleared my
+own mind on this and some other important points.
+
+
+I do not think I was naturally obstinate, but remember going without
+food all day, and being sent hungry and exhausted to bed, because I
+would not do some trifling thing required of me. I think it was to
+recite some lines I knew by heart. I was punished as wilfully obstinate:
+but what no one knew then, and what I know now as the fact, was, that
+after refusing to do what was required, and bearing anger and threats in
+consequence, I lost the power to do it. I became stone: the _will_ was
+petrified, and I absolutely _could_ not comply. They might have hacked
+me in pieces before my lips could have unclosed to utterance. The
+obstinacy was not in the mind, but on the nerves; and I am persuaded
+that what we call obstinacy in children, and grownup people, too, is
+often something of this kind, and that it may be increased, by
+mismanagement, by persistence, or what is called firmness, in the
+controlling power, into disease, or something near to it.
+
+
+There was in my childish mind another cause of suffering besides those I
+have mentioned, less acute, but more permanent and always
+unacknowledged. It was fear--fear of darkness and supernatural
+influences. As long as I can remember anything, I remember these horrors
+of my infancy. How they had been awakened I do not know; they were never
+revealed. I had heard other children ridiculed for such fears, and held
+my peace. At first these haunting, thrilling, stifling terrors were
+vague; afterwards the form varied; but one of the most permanent was the
+ghost in Hamlet. There was a volume of Shakspeare lying about, in which
+was an engraving I have not seen since, but it remains distinct in my
+mind as a picture. On one side stood Hamlet with his hair on end,
+literally "like quills upon the fretful porcupine," and one hand with
+all the fingers outspread. On the other strided the ghost, encased in
+armour with nodding plumes; one finger pointing forwards, and all
+surrounded with a supernatural light. O that spectre! for three years it
+followed me up and down the dark staircase, or stood by my bed: only the
+blessed light had power to exorcise it. How it was that I knew, while I
+trembled and quaked, that it was unreal, never cried out, never
+expostulated, never confessed, I do not know. The figure of Apollyon
+looming over Christian, which I had found in an old edition of the
+"Pilgrim's Progress," was also a great torment. But worse, perhaps, were
+certain phantasms without shape, things like the vision in Job--"_A
+spirit passed before my face; it stood still, but I could not discern
+the form thereof_:"--and if not intelligible voices, there were strange
+unaccountable sounds filling the air around with a sort of mysterious
+life. In daylight I was not only fearless, but audacious, inclined to
+defy all power and brave all danger,--that is, all danger I could see. I
+remember volunteering to lead the way through a herd of cattle (among
+which was a dangerous bull, the terror of the neighbourhood) armed only
+with a little stick; but first I said the Lord's Prayer fervently. In
+the ghastly night I never prayed; terror stifled prayer. These visionary
+sufferings, in some form or other, pursued me till I was nearly twelve
+years old. If I had not possessed a strong constitution and a strong
+understanding, which rejected and contemned my own fears, even while
+they shook me, I had been destroyed. How much weaker children suffer in
+this way, I have since known; and have known how to bring them help and
+strength, through sympathy and knowledge, the sympathy that soothes and
+does not encourage--the knowledge that dispels, and does not suggest, the
+evil.
+
+
+People, in general, even those who have been much interested in
+education, are not aware of the sacred duty of _truth_, exact truth in
+their intercourse with children. Limit what you tell them according to
+the measure of their faculties; but let what you say be the truth.
+Accuracy not merely as to fact, but well-considered accuracy in the use
+of words, is essential with children. I have read some wise book on the
+treatment of the insane, in which absolute veracity and accuracy in
+speaking is prescribed as a _curative_ principle; and deception for any
+purpose is deprecated as almost fatal to the health of the patient. Now,
+it is a good sanatory principle, that what is curative is preventive;
+and that an unhealthy state of mind, leading to madness, may, in some
+organisations, be induced by that sort of uncertainty and perplexity
+which grows up where the mind has not been accustomed to truth in its
+external relations. It is like breathing for a continuance an impure or
+confined air.
+
+Of the mischief that may be done to a childish mind by a falsehood
+uttered in thoughtless gaiety, I remember an absurd and yet a painful
+instance. A visitor was turning over, for a little girl, some prints,
+one of which represented an Indian widow springing into the fire kindled
+for the funeral pile of her husband. It was thus explained to the child,
+who asked innocently, whether, if her father died, her mother would be
+burned? The person to whom the question was addressed, a lively, amiable
+woman, was probably much amused by the question, and answered, giddily,
+"Oh, of course,--certainly!" and was believed implicitly. But
+thenceforth, for many weary months, the mind of that child was haunted
+and tortured by the image of her mother springing into the devouring
+flames, and consumed by fire, with all the accessories of the picture,
+particularly the drums beating to drown her cries. In a weaker
+organisation, the results might have been permanent and serious. But to
+proceed.
+
+These terrors I have described had an existence external to myself: I
+had no power over them to shape them by my will, and their power over me
+vanished gradually before a more dangerous infatuation,--the propensity
+to reverie. This shaping spirit of imagination began when I was about
+eight or nine years old to haunt my _inner_ life. I can truly say that,
+from ten years old to fourteen or fifteen, I lived a double existence;
+one outward, linking me with the external sensible world, the other
+inward, creating a world to and for itself, conscious to itself only. I
+carried on for whole years a series of actions, scenes, and adventures;
+one springing out of another, and coloured and modified by increasing
+knowledge. This habit grew so upon me, that there were moments--as when I
+came to some crisis in my imaginary adventures,--when I was not more
+awake to outward things than in sleep,--scarcely took cognisance of the
+beings around me. When punished for idleness by being placed in
+solitary confinement (the worst of all punishments for children), the
+intended penance was nothing less than a delight and an emancipation,
+giving me up to my dreams. I had a very strict and very accomplished
+governess, one of the cleverest women I have ever met with in my life;
+but nothing of this was known or even suspected by her, and I exulted in
+possessing something which her power could not reach. My reveries were
+my real life: it was an unhealthy state of things.
+
+Those who are engaged in the training of children will perhaps pause
+here. It may be said, in the first place, How are we to reach those
+recesses of the inner life which the God who made us keeps from every
+eye but his own? As when we walk over the field in spring we are aware
+of a thousand influences and processes at work of which we have no exact
+knowledge or clear perception, yet must watch and use accordingly,--so it
+is with education. And secondly, it may be asked, if such secret
+processes be working unconscious mischief, where the remedy? The remedy
+is in employment. Then the mother or the teacher echoes with
+astonishment, "Employment! the child is employed from morning till
+night; she is learning a dozen sciences and languages; she has masters
+and lessons for every hour of every day: with her pencil, her piano,
+her books, her companions, her birds, her flowers,--what can she want
+more?" An energetic child even at a very early age, and yet farther as
+the physical organisation is developed, wants something more and
+something better; employment which shall bring with it the bond of a
+higher duty than that which centres in self and self-improvement;
+employment which shall not merely cultivate the understanding, but
+strengthen and elevate the conscience; employment for the higher and
+more generous faculties; employment addressed to the sympathies;
+employment which has the aim of utility, not pretended, but real,
+obvious, direct utility. A girl who as a mere child is not always being
+taught or being amused, whose mind is early restrained by the bond of
+definite duty, and thrown out of the limit of self, will not in after
+years be subject to fancies that disturb or to reveries that absorb, and
+the present and the actual will have that power they ought to have as
+combined in due degree with desire and anticipation.
+
+The Roman Catholic priesthood understand this well: employment, which
+enlists with the spiritual the sympathetic part of our being, is a means
+through which they guide both young and adult minds. Physicians who have
+to manage various states of mental and moral disease understand this
+well; they speak of the necessity of employment (not mere amusement) as
+a curative means, but of employment with the direct aim of usefulness,
+apprehended and appreciated by the patient, else it is nothing. It is
+the same with children. Such employment, chosen with reference to
+utility, and in harmony with the faculties, would prove in many cases
+either preventive or curative. In my own case, as I now think, it would
+have been both.
+
+There was a time when it was thought essential that women should know
+something of cookery, something of medicine, something of surgery. If
+all these things are far better understood now than heretofore, is that
+a reason why a well educated woman should be left wholly ignorant of
+them? A knowledge of what people call "common things"--of the elements of
+physiology, of the conditions of health, of the qualities, nutritive or
+remedial, of substances commonly used as food or medicine, and the most
+economical and most beneficial way of applying both,--these should form a
+part of the system of every girls' school--whether for the higher or the
+lower classes. At present you shall see a girl studying chemistry, and
+attending Faraday's lectures, who would be puzzled to compound a
+rice-pudding or a cup of barley-water: and a girl who could work quickly
+a complicated sum in the Rule of Three, afterwards wasting a fourth of
+her husband's wages through want of management.
+
+In my own case, how much of the practical and the sympathetic in my
+nature was exhausted in airy visions!
+
+As to the stuff out of which my waking dreams were composed, I cannot
+tell you much. I have a remembrance that I was always a princess-heroine
+in the disguise of a knight, a sort of Clorinda or Britomart, going
+about to redress the wrongs of the poor, fight giants, and kill dragons;
+or founding a society in some far-off solitude or desolate island, which
+would have rivalled that of Gonsalez, where there were to be no tears,
+no tasks, and no laws,--except those which I made myself,--no caged birds
+nor tormented kittens.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Enough of the pains, and mistakes, and vagaries of childhood; let me
+tell of some of its pleasures equally unguessed and unexpressed. A
+great, and exquisite source of enjoyment arose out of an early,
+instinctive, boundless delight in external beauty. How this went hand in
+hand with my terrors and reveries, how it could coexist with them, I
+cannot tell now--it was so; and if this sympathy with the external,
+living, beautiful world, had been properly, scientifically cultivated,
+and directed to useful definite purposes, it would have been the best
+remedy for much that was morbid: this was not the case, and we were,
+unhappily for me, too early removed from the country to a town
+residence. I can remember, however, that in very early years the
+appearances of nature did truly "haunt me like a passion;" the stars
+were to me as the gates of heaven; the rolling of the wave to the shore,
+the graceful weeds and grasses bending before the breeze as they grew by
+the wayside; the minute and delicate forms of insects; the trembling
+shadows of boughs and leaves dancing on the ground in the highest noon;
+these were to me perfect pleasures of which the imagery now in my mind
+is distinct. Wordsworth's poem of "The Daffodils," the one beginning--
+
+   "I wandered lonely as a cloud,"
+
+may appear to some unintelligible or overcharged, but to me it was a
+vivid truth, a simple fact; and if Wordsworth had been then in my hands
+I think I must have loved him. It was this intense sense of beauty which
+gave the first zest to poetry: I love it, not because it told me what I
+did not know, but because it helped me to words in which to clothe my
+own knowledge and perceptions, and reflected back the pictures
+unconsciously hoarded up in my mind. This was what made Thomson's
+"Seasons" a favourite book when I first began to read for my own
+amusement, and before I could understand one half of it; St. Pierre's
+"Indian Cottage" ("La Chaumi�re Indienne") was also charming, either
+because it reflected my dreams, or gave me new stuff for them in
+pictures of an external world quite different from that I
+inhabited,--palm-trees, elephants, tigers, dark-turbaned men with flowing
+draperies; and the "Arabian Nights" completed my Oriental intoxication,
+which lasted for a long time.
+
+I have said little of the impressions left by books, and of my first
+religious notions. A friend of mine had once the wise idea of collecting
+together a variety of evidence as to the impressions left by certain
+books on childish or immature minds: If carried out, it would have been
+one of the most valuable additions to educational experience ever made.
+For myself I did not much care about the books put into my hands, nor
+imbibe much information from them. I had a great taste, I am sorry to
+say, for forbidden books; yet it was not the forbidden books that did
+the mischief, except in their being read furtively. I remember
+impressions of vice and cruelty from some parts of the Old Testament and
+Goldsmith's "History of England," which I shudder to recall. Shakspeare
+was on the forbidden shelf. I had read him all through between seven
+and ten years old. He never did me any moral mischief. He never soiled
+my mind with any disordered image. What was exceptionable and coarse in
+language I passed by without attaching any meaning whatever to it. How
+it might have been if I had read Shakspeare first when I was fifteen or
+sixteen, I do not know; perhaps the occasional coarsenesses and
+obscurities might have shocked the delicacy or puzzled the intelligence
+of that sensitive and inquiring age. But at nine or ten I had no
+comprehension of what was unseemly; what might be obscure in words to
+wordy commentators, was to me lighted up by the idea I found or
+interpreted for myself--right or wrong.
+
+No; I repeat, Shakspeare--bless him!--never did me any moral mischief.
+Though the Witches in Macbeth troubled me,--though the Ghost in Hamlet
+terrified me (the picture that is,--for the spirit in Shakspeare was
+solemn and pathetic, not hideous),--though poor little Arthur cost me an
+ocean of tears,--yet much that was obscure, and all that was painful and
+revolting was merged on the whole in the vivid presence of a new,
+beautiful, vigorous, living world. The plays which I now think the most
+wonderful produced comparatively little effect on my fancy: Romeo and
+Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, struck me then less than the historical plays,
+and far less than the Midsummer Night's Dream and Cymbeline. It may be
+thought, perhaps, that Falstaff is not a character to strike a child, or
+to be understood by a child:--no; surely not. To me Falstaff was not
+witty and wicked--only irresistibly fat and funny; and I remember lying
+on the ground rolling with laughter over some of the scenes in Henry the
+Fourth,--the mock play, and the seven men in buckram. But The Tempest and
+Cymbeline were the plays I liked best and knew best.
+
+Altogether I should say that in my early years books were known to me,
+not as such, not for their general contents, but for some especial image
+or picture I had picked out of them and assimilated to my own mind and
+mixed up with my own life. For example out of Homer's Odyssey (lent to
+me by the parish clerk) I had the picture of Nasicaa and her maidens
+going down in their chariots to wash their linen: so that when the first
+time I went to the Pitti Palace, and could hardly see the pictures
+through blinding tears, I saw _that_ picture of Rubens, which all
+remember who have been at Florence, and it flashed delight and
+refreshment through those remembered childish associations. The Syrens
+and Polypheme left also vivid pictures on my fancy. The Iliad, on the
+contrary, wearied me, except the parting of Hector and Andromache, in
+which the child, scared by its father's dazzling helm and nodding
+crest, remains a vivid image in my mind from that time.
+
+The same parish clerk--a curious fellow in his way--lent me also some
+religious tracts and stories, by Hannah More. It is most certain that
+more moral mischief was done to me by some of these than by all
+Shakspeare's plays together. These so-called pious tracts first
+introduced me to a knowledge of the vices of vulgar life, and the
+excitements of a vulgar religion,--the fear of being hanged and the fear
+of hell became co-existent in my mind; and the teaching resolved itself
+into this,--that it was not by being naughty, but by being found out,
+that I was to incur the risk of both. My fairy world was better!
+
+About Religion:--I was taught religion as children used to be taught it
+in my younger days, and are taught it still in some cases, I
+believe--through the medium of creeds and catechisms. I read the Bible
+too early, and too indiscriminately, and too irreverently. Even the New
+Testament was too early placed in my hands; too early made a lesson
+book, as the custom then was. The _letter_ of the Scriptures--the
+words--were familiarised to me by sermonising and dogmatising, long
+before I could enter into the _spirit_. Meantime, happily, another
+religion was growing up in my heart, which, strangely enough, seemed to
+me quite apart from that which was taught,--which, indeed, I never in
+any way regarded as the same which I was taught when I stood up wearily
+on a Sunday to repeat the collect and say the catechism. It was quite
+another thing. Not only the taught religion and the sentiment of faith
+and adoration were never combined, but it never for years entered into
+my head to combine them; the first remained extraneous, the latter had
+gradually taken root in my life, even from the moment my mother joined
+my little hands in prayer. The histories out of the Bible (the Parables
+especially) were, however, enchanting to me, though my interpretation of
+them was in some instances the very reverse of correct or orthodox. To
+my infant conception our Lord was a being who had come down from heaven
+to make people good, and to tell them beautiful stories. And though no
+pains were spared to _indoctrinate_ me, and all my pastors and masters
+took it for granted that my ideas were quite satisfactory, nothing could
+be more confused and heterodox.
+
+
+It is a common observation that girls of lively talents are apt to grow
+pert and satirical. I fell into this danger when about ten years old.
+Sallies at the expense of certain people, ill-looking, or ill-dressed,
+or ridiculous, or foolish, had been laughed at and applauded in company,
+until, without being naturally malignant, I ran some risk of becoming
+so from sheer vanity.
+
+The fables which appeal to our higher moral sympathies may sometimes do
+as much for us as the truths of science. So thought our Saviour when he
+taught the multitude in parables.
+
+A good clergyman who lived near us, a famous Persian scholar, took it
+into his head to teach me Persian (I was then about seven years old),
+and I set to work with infinite delight and earnestness. All I learned
+was soon forgotten; but a few years afterwards, happening to stumble on
+a volume of Sir William Jones's works--his Persian grammar--it revived my
+Orientalism, and I began to study it eagerly. Among the exercises given
+was a Persian fable or poem--one of those traditions of our Lord which
+are preserved in the East. The beautiful apologue of "St. Peter and the
+Cherries," which Goethe has versified or imitated, is a well known
+example. This fable I allude to was something similar, but I have not
+met with the original these forty years, and must give it here from
+memory.
+
+"Jesus," says the story, "arrived one evening at the gates of a certain
+city, and he sent his disciples forward to prepare supper, while he
+himself, intent on doing good, walked through the streets into the
+market place.
+
+"And he saw at the corner of the market some people gathered together
+looking at an object on the ground; and he drew near to see what it
+might be. It was a dead dog, with a halter round his neck, by which he
+appeared to have been dragged through the dirt; and a viler, a more
+abject, a more unclean thing, never met the eyes of man.
+
+"And those who stood by looked on with abhorrence.
+
+"'Faugh!' said one, stopping his nose; 'it pollutes the air.' 'How
+long,' said another, 'shall this foul beast offend our sight?' 'Look at
+his torn hide,' said a third; 'one could not even cut a shoe out of it.'
+'And his ears,' said a fourth, 'all draggled and bleeding!' 'No doubt,'
+said a fifth, 'he hath been hanged for thieving!'
+
+"And Jesus heard them, and looking down compassionately on the dead
+creature, he said, 'Pearls are not equal to the whiteness of his teeth!'
+
+"Then the people turned towards him with amazement, and said among
+themselves, 'Who is this? this must be Jesus of Nazareth, for only HE
+could find something to pity and approve even in a dead dog;' and being
+ashamed, they bowed their heads before him, and went each on his way."
+
+I can recall, at this hour, the vivid, yet softening and pathetic
+impression left on my fancy by this old Eastern story. It struck me as
+exquisitely humorous, as well as exquisitely beautiful. It gave me a
+pain in my conscience, for it seemed thenceforward so easy and so vulgar
+to say satirical things, and so much nobler to be benign and merciful,
+and I took the lesson so home, that I was in great danger of falling
+into the opposite extreme,--of seeking the beautiful even in the midst of
+the corrupt and the repulsive. Pity, a large element in my composition,
+might have easily degenerated into weakness, threatening to subvert
+hatred of evil in trying to find excuses for it; and whether my mind has
+ever completely righted itself, I am not sure.
+
+
+Educators are not always aware, I think, how acute are the perceptions,
+and how permanent the memories, of children. I remember experiments
+tried upon my temper and feelings, and how I was made aware of this, by
+their being repeated, and, in some instances, spoken of, before me.
+Music, to which I was early and peculiarly sensitive, was sometimes made
+the medium of these experiments. Discordant sounds were not only
+hateful, but made me turn white and cold, and sent the blood backward to
+my heart; and certain tunes had a curious effect, I cannot now account
+for: for though, when heard for the first time, they had little effect,
+they became intolerable by repetition; they turned up some hidden
+emotion within me too strong to be borne. It could not have been from
+association, which I believe to be a principal element in the _emotion_
+excited by music. I was too young for that. What associations could such
+a baby have had with pleasure or with pain? Or could it be possible that
+associations with some former state of existence awoke up to sound? That
+our life "hath elsewhere its beginning, and cometh from afar," is a
+belief or at least an instinct, in some minds, which music, and only
+music, seems to thrill into consciousness. At this time, when I was
+about five or six years old, Mrs. Arkwright--she was then Fanny
+Kemble--used to come to our house, and used to entrance me with her
+singing. I had a sort of adoration for her, such as an ecstatic votary
+might have for a Saint Cecilia. I trembled with pleasure when I only
+heard her step. But her voice!--it has charmed hundreds since; whom has
+it ever moved to a more genuine passion of delight than the little child
+that crept silent and tremulous to her side? And she was fond of
+me,--fond of singing to me, and, it must be confessed, fond also of
+playing these experiments on me. The music of "Paul and Virginia" was
+then in vogue, and there was one air--a very simple air--in that opera,
+which, after the first few bars, always made me stop my ears and rush
+out of the room. I became at last aware that this was sometimes done by
+particular desire to please my parents, or amuse and interest others by
+the display of such vehement emotion. My infant conscience became
+perplexed between the reality of the feeling and the exhibition of it.
+People are not always aware of the injury done to children by repeating
+before them things they say, or describing things they do: words and
+actions, spontaneous and unconscious, become thenceforth artificial and
+conscious. I can speak of the injury done to myself, between five and
+eight years old. There was some danger of my becoming a precocious
+actress,--danger of permanent mischief such as I have seen done to other
+children,--but I was saved by the recoil of resistance and resentment
+excited in my mind.
+
+This is enough. All that has been told here refers to a period between
+five and ten years old.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE INDIAN HUNTER AND THE FIRE.
+
+(FROM THE GERMAN.)
+
+
+Once upon a time the lightning from heaven fell upon a tree standing in
+the old primeval forest and kindled it, so that it flamed on high. And
+it happened that a young hunter, who had lost his path in that
+wilderness, beheld the gleam of the flames from a distance, and, forcing
+his way through the thicket, he flung himself down in rapture before the
+blazing tree.
+
+"O divine light and warmth!" he exclaimed, stretching forth his arms.
+"O blessed! O heaven-descended Fire! let me thank thee! let me adore
+thee! Giver of a new existence, quickening thro' every pulse, how lost,
+how cold, how dark have I dwelt without thee! Restorer of my life!
+remain ever near me, and, through thy benign and celestial influence,
+send love and joy to illuminate my soul!"
+
+And the Fire answered and said to him, "It is true that my birth is from
+heaven, but I am now, through mingling with earthly elements, subdued to
+earthly influences; therefore, beware how you choose me for thy friend,
+without having first studied my twofold nature. O youth! take heed lest
+what appear to thee now a blessing, may be turned, at some future time,
+to fiery pain and death." And the youth replied, "No! O no! thou blessed
+Fire, this could never be. Am I then so senseless, so inconstant, so
+thankless? O believe it not! Let me stay near thee; let me be thy
+priest, to watch and tend thee truly. Ofttimes in my wild wintry life,
+when the chill darkness encompassed me, and the ice-blast lifted my
+hair, have I dreamed of the soft summer breath,--of the sunshine that
+should light up the world within me and the world around me. But still
+that time came not. It seemed ever far, far off; and I had perished
+utterly before the light and the warmth had reached me, had it not been
+for thee!"
+
+Thus the youth poured forth his soul, and the Fire answered him in
+murmured tones, while her beams with a softer radiance played over his
+cheek and brow: "Be it so then. Yet do thou watch me constantly and
+minister to me carefully; neglect me not, leave me not to myself, lest
+the light and warmth in which thou so delightest fail thee suddenly, and
+there be no redress; and O watch thyself also! beware lest thou too
+ardently stir up my impatient fiery being! beware lest thou heap too
+much fuel upon me; once more beware, lest, instead of life, and love,
+and joy, I bring thee only death and burning pain!" And the youth
+passionately vowed to keep her behest: and in the beginning all went
+well. How often, for hours together, would he lie gazing entranced
+toward the radiant beneficent Fire, basking in her warmth, and throwing
+now a leafy spray, now a fragment of dry wood, anon a handful of odorous
+gums, as incense, upon the flame, which gracefully curling and waving
+upwards, quivering and sparkling, seemed to whisper in return divine
+oracles; or he fancied he beheld, while gazing into the glowing depths,
+marvellous shapes, fairy visions dancing and glancing along. Then he
+would sing to her songs full of love, and she, responding to the song
+she had herself inspired, sometimes replied, in softest whispers, so
+loving and so low, that even the jealous listening woods could not
+overhear; at other times she would shoot up suddenly in rapturous
+splendour, like a pillar of light, and revealed to him all the wonders
+and the beauties which lay around him, hitherto veiled from his sight.
+
+But at length, as he became accustomed to the glory and the warmth, and
+nothing more was left for the fire to bestow, or her light to reveal,
+then he began to weary and to dream again of the morning, and to long
+for the sun-beams; and it was to him as if the fire stood between him
+and the sun's light, and he reproached her therefore, and he became
+moody and ungrateful; and the fire was no longer the same, but unquiet
+and changeful, sometimes flickering unsteadily, sometimes throwing out a
+lurid glare. And when the youth, forgetful of his ministry, left the
+flame unfed and unsustained, so that ofttimes she drooped and waned, and
+crept in dying gleams along the damp ground, his heart would fail him
+with a sudden remorse, and he would cast on the fuel with such a rough
+and lavish hand that the indignant fire hissed thereat, and burst forth
+in a smoky sullen gleam,--then died away again. Then the youth, half
+sorrowful, half impatient, would remember how bright, how glowing, how
+dazzling was the flame in those former happy days, when it played over
+his chilled and wearied limbs, and shed its warmth upon his brow, and he
+desired eagerly to recall that once inspiring glow. And he stirred up
+the embers violently till they burned him, and then he grew angry, and
+then again he wearied of all the watching and the care which the subtle,
+celestial, tameless element required at his hand: and at length, one day
+in a sullen mood, he snatched up a pitcher of water from the fountain
+and poured it hastily on the yet living flame.----
+
+For one moment it arose blazing towards heaven, shed a last gleam upon
+the pale brow of the youth, and then sank down in darkness extinguished
+for ever!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+PAULINA.
+
+FROM AN UNFINISHED TALE, 1823.
+
+   And think'st thou that the fond o'erflowing love
+     I bear thee in my heart could ever be
+   Repaid by careless smiles that round thee rove,
+     And beam on others as they beam on me?
+
+   Oh, could I speak to thee! could I but tell
+   The nameless thoughts that in my bosom swell,
+   And struggle for expression! or set free
+   From the o'er mastering spirit's proud control
+   The pain that throbs in silence at my soul,
+   Perhaps--yet no--I will not sue, nor bend,
+   To win a heartless pity--Let it end!
+
+   I have been near thee still at morn, at eve;
+   Have mark'd thee in thy joy, have seen thee grieve;
+   Have seen thee gay with triumph, sick with fears,
+   Radiant in beauty, desolate in tears:
+   And communed with thy heart, till I made mine
+   The echo and the mirror unto thine.
+   And I have sat and looked into thine eyes
+   As men on earth look to the starry skies,
+   That seek to read in Heaven their human destinies!
+
+   Too quickly I read mine,--I knew it well,--
+   I judg'd not of thy heart by all it gave,
+   But all that it withheld; and I could tell
+   The very sea-mark where affection's wave
+   Would cease to flow, or flow to ebb again,
+   And knew my lavish love was pour'd in vain,
+   As fruitless streams o'er sandy deserts melt,
+   Unrecompensed, unvalued, and unfelt!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+LINES.--1840.
+
+   Take me, my mother Earth, to thy cold breast,
+   And fold me there in everlasting rest,
+         The long day is o'er!
+         I'm weary, I would sleep--
+         But deep, deep,
+         Never to waken more!
+
+   I have had joy and sorrow; I have proved
+   What life could give; have lov'd, have been belov'd;
+         I am sick, and heart sore,
+         And weary,--let me sleep!
+         But deep, deep,
+         Never to waken more!
+
+   To thy dark chambers, mother Earth, I come,
+   Prepare my dreamless bed in my last home;
+         Shut down the marble door,
+         And leave me,--let me sleep!
+         But deep, deep,
+         Never to waken more!
+
+   Now I lie down,--I close my aching eyes,
+   If on this night another morn must rise,
+         Wake me not, I implore!
+         I only ask to sleep,
+         And deep, deep,
+         Never to waken more!
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Theological Fragments.
+
+
+1.
+
+THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL.
+
+(A PARABLE, FROM ST. JEROME.)
+
+
+A certain holy anchorite had passed a long life in a cave of the
+Thebaid, remote from all communion with men; and eschewing, as he would
+the gates of Hell, even the very presence of a woman; and he fasted and
+prayed, and performed many and severe penances; and his whole thought
+was how he should make himself of account in the sight of God, that he
+might enter into his paradise.
+
+And having lived this life for three score and ten years he was puffed
+up with the notion of his own great virtue and sanctity, and, like to
+St. Anthony, he besought the Lord to show him what saint he should
+emulate as greater than himself, thinking perhaps, in his heart, that
+the Lord would answer that none was greater or holier. And the same
+night the angel of God appeared to him, and said, "If thou wouldst excel
+all others in virtue and sanctity, thou must strive to be like a certain
+minstrel who goes begging and singing from door to door."
+
+And the holy man was in great astonishment, and he arose and took his
+staff and ran forth in search of this minstrel; and when he had found
+him he questioned him earnestly, saying, "Tell me, I pray thee, my
+brother, what good works thou hast performed in thy lifetime, and by
+what prayers and penances thou hast made thyself acceptable to God?"
+
+And the man, greatly wondering and ashamed to be so questioned, hung
+down his head as he replied, "I beseech thee, holy father, mock me not!
+I have performed no good works, and as to praying, alas! sinner that I
+am, I am not worthy to pray. I do nothing but go about from door to door
+amusing the people with my viol and my flute."
+
+And the holy man insisted and said, "Nay, but peradventure in the midst
+of this thy evil life thou hast done some good works?" And the minstrel
+replied, "I know of nothing good that I have done." And the hermit,
+wondering more and more, said, "How hast thou become a beggar: hast thou
+spent thy substance in riotous living, like most others of thy calling?"
+and the man answering, said, "Nay; but there was a poor woman whom I
+found running hither and thither in distraction, for her husband and her
+children had been sold into slavery to pay a debt. And the woman being
+very fair, certain sons of Belial pursued after her; so I took her home
+to my hut and protected her from them, and I gave her all I possessed to
+redeem her family, and conducted her in safety to the city, where she
+was reunited to her husband and children. But what of that, my father;
+is there a man who would not have done the same?"
+
+And the hermit, hearing the minstrel speak these words, wept bitterly,
+saying, "For my part, I have not done so much good in all my life; and
+yet they call me a man of God, and thou art only a poor minstrel!"
+
+
+At Vienna, some years ago, I saw a picture by Von Schwind, which was
+conceived in the spirit of this old apologue. It exhibited the lives of
+two twin brothers diverging from the cradle. One of them, by profound
+study, becomes a most learned and skilful physician, and ministers to
+the sick; attaining to great riches and honours through his labours and
+his philanthropy. The other brother, who has no turn for study, becomes
+a poor fiddler, and spends his life in consoling, by his music,
+sufferings beyond the reach of the healing art. In the end, the two
+brothers meet at the close of life. He who had been fiddling through the
+world is sick and worn out: his brother prescribes for him, and is seen
+culling simples for his restoration, while the fiddler touches his
+instrument for the solace of his kind physician.
+
+It is in such representations that painting did once speak, and might
+again speak to the hearts of the people.
+
+Another version of the same thought, we find in De Berenger's pretty
+ballad, "_Les deux Soeurs de Charit�_."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+2.
+
+When I was a child, and read Milton for the first time, his Pandemonium
+seemed to me a magnificent place. It struck me more than his Paradise,
+for _that_ was beautiful, but Pandemonium was terrible and beautiful
+too. The wondrous fabric that "from the earth rose like an exhalation
+to the sound of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet,"--the splendid piles
+of architecture sweeping line beyond line, "Cornice and frieze with
+bossy sculptures graven,"--realised a certain picture of Palmyra I had
+once seen, and which had taken possession of my imagination: then the
+throne, outshining the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind,--the flood of light
+streaming from "starry lamps and blazing cressets" quite threw the
+flames of perdition into the shade. As it was said of Erskine, that he
+always spoke of Satan with respect, as of a great statesman out of
+place, a sort of leader of the Opposition; so to me the grand arch-fiend
+was a hero, like my _then_ favourite Greeks and Romans, a Cymon, a
+Curtius, a Decius, devoting himself for the good of his country;--such
+was the moral confusion created in my mind. Pandemonium inspired no
+horror; on the contrary, my fancy revelled in the artistic beauty of the
+creation. I felt that I should like to go and see it; so that, in fact,
+if Milton meant to inspire abhorrence, he has failed, even to the height
+of his sublimity. Dante has succeeded better. Those who dwell with
+complacency on the doctrine of eternal punishments must delight in the
+ferocity and the ingenuity of his grim inventions, worthy of a vengeful
+theology. Wicked latitudinarians may shudder and shiver at the images
+called up--grotesque, abominable, hideous--but then Dante himself would
+sternly rebuke them for making their human sympathies a measure for the
+judgments of God, and compassion only a veil for treason and rebellion:--
+
+  "Chi � piu scellerato di colui
+   Ch' al giudicio divin passion porta?"
+
+  "Who can show greater wickedness than he
+   Whose passion by the will of God is moved?"
+
+However, it must be said in favour of Dante's Inferno, that no one ever
+wished to go there.
+
+These be the Christian poets! but they must yield in depth of imagined
+horrors to the Christian Fathers. Tertullian (writing in the second
+century) not only sends the wicked into that dolorous region of despair,
+but makes the endless measureless torture of the doomed a part of the
+joys of the redeemed. The spectacle is to give them the same sort of
+delight as the heathen took in their games, and Pandemonium is to be as
+a vast amphitheatre for the amusement of the New Jerusalem. "How
+magnificent," exclaims this pious doctor of the Church, "will be the
+scale of that game! With what admiration, what laughter, what glee, what
+triumph, shall I behold so many mighty monarchs, who had been given out
+as received into the skies, moaning in unfathomable gloom! Persecutors
+of the Christians liquefying amid shooting spires of flame! Philosophers
+blushing before their disciples amid those ruddy fires! Then," he goes
+on, still alluding to the amphitheatre, "then is the time to hear the
+tragedians doubly pathetic, now that they bewail their own agonies! To
+observe actors released by the fierceness of their torments from all
+restraints on their gestures! Then may we admire the charioteer glowing
+all over in his car of torture, and watch the wrestlers struggling, not
+in the gymnasium but with flames!" And he asks exultingly, "What pr�tor,
+or consul, or questor, or priest, can purchase you by his munificence a
+game of triumph like this?"
+
+And even more terrible are the imaginations of good Bishop Taylor, who
+distils the essence from all sins, all miseries, all sorrows, all
+terrors, all plagues, and mingles them in one chalice of wrath and
+vengeance to be held to the lips and forced down the unwilling throats
+of the doomed "with violence of devils and accursed spirits!" Are these
+mere words? Did any one ever fancy or try to realise what they express?
+
+
+3.
+
+I was surprised to find this passage in one of Southey's letters:--
+
+
+"A Catholic Establishment would be the best, perhaps the only means of
+civilising Ireland. Jesuits and Benedictines, though they would not
+enlighten the savages, would humanise them and bring the country into
+cultivation. A petition that asked for this, saying plainly, 'We are
+Papists, and will be so, and this is the best thing that can be done for
+us and you too,'--such a petition I would support, considering what the
+present condition of Ireland is, how wretchedly it has always been
+governed, and how hopeless the prospect." (1805.)
+
+
+Southey was thinking of what the religious orders had done for Paraguay;
+whether he would have penned the same sentiments twenty or even ten
+years later, is more than doubtful.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+4.
+
+The old monks and penitents--dirty, ugly, emaciated old fellows they
+were!--spent their days in speaking and preaching of their own and
+others' sinfulness, yet seem to have had ever present before them a
+standard of beauty, brightness, beneficence, aspirations which nothing
+earthly could satisfy, which made their ideas of sinfulness and misery
+_comparative_, and their scale was graduated from themselves _upwards_.
+We philosophers reverse this. We teach and preach the spiritual dignity,
+the lofty capabilities of humanity. Yet, by some mistake, we seem to be
+always speculating on the amount of evil which may or can be endured,
+and on the amount of wickedness which may or must be tolerated; and our
+scale is graduated from ourselves _downwards_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+5.
+
+"So long as the ancient mythology had any separate establishment in the
+empire, the spiritual worship which our religion demands, and so
+essentially implies as only fitting for it, was preserved in its purity
+by means of the salutary contrast; but no sooner had the Church become
+completely triumphant and exclusive, and the parallel of Pagan idolatry
+totally removed, than the old constitutional appetite revived in all its
+original force, and after a short but famous struggle with the
+Iconoclasts, an image worship was established, and consecrated by bulls
+and canons, which, in whatever light it is regarded, differed in no
+respect but the names of its objects from that which had existed for so
+many ages as the chief characteristic of the religious faith of the
+Gentiles."--_H. Nelson Coleridge._
+
+I think, with submission, that it differed in sentiment; for in the
+mythology of the Pagans the worship was to _beauty_, _immortality_, and
+_power_, and in the Christian mythology--if I may call it so--of the
+Middle Ages, the worship was to _purity_, _self-denial_, and _charity_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+6.
+
+"A narrow half-enlightened reason may easily make sport of all those
+forms in which religious faith has been clothed by human imagination,
+and ask why they are retained, and why one should be preferred to
+another? It is sufficient to reply, that some forms there must be if
+Religion is to endure as a social influence, and that the forms already
+in existence are the best, if they are in unison with human sympathies,
+and express, with the breadth and vagueness which every popular
+utterance must from its nature possess, the interior convictions of the
+general mind. What would become of the most sacred truth if all the
+forms which have harboured it were destroyed at once by an unrelenting
+reason, and it were driven naked and shivering about the earth till some
+clever logician had devised a suitable abode for its reception? It is on
+these outward forms of religion that the spirit of artistic beauty
+descends and moulds them into fitting expressions of the invisible grace
+and majesty of spiritual truth."--_Prospective Review_, Feb. 24. 1845.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+7.
+
+"Have not Dying Christs taught fortitude to the virtuous sufferer? Have
+not Holy Families cherished and ennobled domestic affections? The tender
+genius of the Christian morality, even in its most degenerate state, has
+made the Mother and her Child the highest objects of affectionate
+superstition. How much has that beautiful superstition by the pencils of
+great artists contributed to humanise mankind?"--_Sir James Mackintosh_,
+writing in 1802.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+8.
+
+I remember once at Merton College Chapel (May, 1844), while Archdeacon
+Manning was preaching an eloquent sermon on the eternity of reward and
+punishment in the future life, I was looking at the row of windows
+opposite, and I saw that there were seven, all different in pattern and
+construction, yet all harmonising with each other and with the building
+of which they formed a part;--a symbol they might have been of
+differences in the Church of Christ. From the varied windows opposite I
+looked down to the faces of the congregation, all upturned to the
+preacher, with expression how different! Faith, hope, fear, in the open
+mouths and expanded eyelids of some; a sort of silent protest in the
+compressed lips and knitted brows of others; a speculative inquiry and
+interest, or merely admiring acquiescence in others; as the high or low,
+the wide or contracted head prevailed; and all this diversity in
+organisation, in habits of thought, in expression, harmonised for the
+time by one predominant object, one feeling! the hungry sheep looking up
+to be fed! When I sigh over apparent disagreement, let me think of those
+windows in Merton College Chapel, and the same light from heaven
+streaming through them all!--and of that assemblage of human faces,
+uplifted with the same aspiration one and all!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+9.
+
+I have just read the article (by Sterling, I believe), in the "Edinburgh
+Review" for July; and as it chanced, this same evening, Dr. Channing's
+"Discourse on the Church," and Captain Maconochie's "Report on Secondary
+Punishments" from Sydney, came before me.
+
+And as I laid them down, one after another, _this_ thought struck
+me:--that about the same time, in three different and far divided regions
+of the globe, three men, one military, the other an ecclesiastic, the
+third a lawyer, and belonging apparently to different religious
+denominations, all gave utterance to nearly the same sentiments in
+regard to a Christian Church. Channing says, "A church destined to
+endure through all ages, to act on all, to blend itself with new forms
+of society, and with the highest improvements of the race, cannot be
+expected to ordain an immutable mode of administration, but must leave
+its modes of worship and communion to conform themselves silently and
+gradually to the wants and progress of humanity. The rites and
+arrangements which suit one period lose their significance or efficiency
+in another; the forms which minister to the mind _now_ may fetter it
+hereafter, and must give place to its free unfolding," &c., and more to
+the same purpose.
+
+The reviewer says, "We believe that in the judgment of an enlightened
+charity, many Christian societies who are accustomed to denounce each
+others' errors, will at length come to be regarded as members in common
+of one great and comprehensive Church, in which diversity of forms are
+harmonised by an all-pervading unity of spirit." And more to the same
+purpose. The soldier and reformer says, "I believe there may be error
+because there must be imperfection in the religious faith of the best
+among us; but that the degree of this error is not vital in any
+Christian denomination seems demonstrable by the best fruits of
+faith--good works--being evidenced by all."
+
+It is pleasant to see benign spirits divided in opinion, but harmonised
+by faith, thus standing hand in hand upon a shore of peace, and looking
+out together in serene hope for the dawning of a better day, instead of
+rushing forth, each with his own farthing candle, under pretence of
+illuminating the world--every one even more intent on putting out his
+neighbour's light than on guarding his own.
+
+   (Nov. 15. 1841.)
+
+
+While the idea of possible harmony in the universal Church of Christ (by
+which I mean all who accept His teaching and are glad to bear His name)
+is gaining ground theoretically, _practically_ it seems more and more
+distant; since 1841 (when the above was written) the divergence is
+greater than ever; and, as in politics, moderate opinions appear (since
+1848) to merge on either side into the extremes of ultra conservatism
+and ultra radicalism, as fear of the past or hope of the future
+predominate, so it is in the Church. The sort of dualism which prevails
+in politics and religion might give some colour to Lord Lindsay's theory
+of "progress through antagonism."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+10.
+
+I Incline to agree with those who think it a great mistake to consider
+the present conditions or conception of Christianity as complete and
+final: like the human soul to which it was fitted by Divine love and
+wisdom, it has an immeasurable capacity of development, and "The Lord
+hath more truth yet to break forth out of his Holy Word."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+11.
+
+The nations of the present age want not _less_ religion, but _more_.
+They do not wish for less community with the Apostolic times, but for
+more; but above all, they want their wounds healed by a Christianity
+showing a life-renewing vitality allied to reason and conscience, and
+ready and able to reform the social relations of life, beginning with
+the domestic and culminating with the political. They want no negations,
+but positive reconstruction--no conventionality, but an honest _bon�
+fide_ foundation, deep as the human mind, and a structure free and
+organic as nature. In the meantime let no national form be urged as
+identical with divine truth, let no dogmatic formula oppress conscience
+and reason, and let no corporation of priests, no set of dogmatists, sow
+discord and hatred in the sacred communities of domestic and national
+life. This view cannot be obtained without national efforts, Christian
+education, free institutions, and social reforms. Then no zeal will be
+called Christian which is not hallowed by charity,--no faith Christian
+which is not sanctioned by reason."--_Hippolitus._
+
+"Any author who in our time treats theological and ecclesiastical
+subjects frankly, and therefore with reference to the problems of the
+age, must expect to be ignored, and if that cannot be done, abused and
+reviled."
+
+The same is true of moral subjects on which strong prejudices (or shall
+I say strong _convictions_?) exist in minds not very strong.
+
+It is not perhaps of so much consequence what we believe, as it is
+important that we believe; that we do not affect to believe, and so
+belie our own souls. Belief is _not_ always in our power, but truth is.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+12.
+
+It seems an arbitrary limitation of the design of Christianity to
+assume, as Priestley does, that "it consists solely in the revelation of
+a future life confirmed by the bodily resurrection of Christ." This is
+truly a very material view of Christianity. If I were to be sure of
+annihilation I should not be less certain of the truth of Christianity
+as a system of morals exquisitely adapted for the improvement and
+happiness of man as an individual; and equally adapted to conduce to the
+amelioration and progressive happiness of mankind as a species.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+NOTES FROM VARIOUS SERMONS,
+
+MADE ON THE SPOT;
+
+SHOWING SOME THINGS IN WHICH ALL GOOD MEN ARE AGREED.
+
+
+I.
+
+_From a Roman Catholic Sermon._
+
+
+When travelling in Ireland, I stayed over one Sunday in a certain town
+in the north, and rambled out early in the morning. It was cold and wet,
+the streets empty and quiet, but the sound of voices drew me in one
+direction, down a court where was a Roman Catholic chapel. It was so
+crowded that many of the congregation stood round the door. I remarked
+among them a number of soldiers and most miserable-looking women. All
+made way for me with true national courtesy, and I entered at the moment
+the priest was finishing mass, and about to begin his sermon. There was
+no pulpit, and he stood on the step of the altar; a fine-looking man,
+with a bright face, a sonorous voice, and a _very_ strong Irish accent.
+His text was from Matt. v. 43, 44.
+
+He began by explaining what Christ really meant by the words "Love thy
+neighbour." Then drew a picture in contrast of hatred and dissension,
+commencing with dissension in families, between kindred, and between
+husband and wife. Then made a most touching appeal in behalf of children
+brought up in an atmosphere of contention where no love is. "God help
+them! God pity them! small chance for them of being either good or
+happy! for their young hearts are saddened and soured with strife, and
+they eat their bread in bitterness!"
+
+Then he preached patience to the wives, indulgence to the husbands, and
+denounced scolds and quarrelsome women in a manner that seemed to glance
+at recent events: "When ye are found in the streets vilifying and
+slandering one another, ay, and fighting and tearing each other's hair,
+do ye think ye're women? no, ye're not! ye're devils incarnate, and
+ye'll go where the devils will be fit companions for ye!" &c. (Here some
+women near me, with long black hair streaming down, fell upon their
+knees, sobbing with contrition.) He then went on, in the same strain of
+homely eloquence, to the evils of political and religious hatred, and
+quoted the text, "If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live
+peaceably with all men." "I'm a Catholic," he went on, "and I believe in
+the truth of my own religion above all others. I'm convinced, by long
+study and observation, it's the best that is; but what then? Do ye think
+I hate my neighbour because he thinks differently? Do ye think I _mane_
+to force my religion down other people's throats? If I were to preach
+such uncharity to ye, my people, you wouldn't listen to me, ye oughtn't
+to listen to me. Did Jesus Christ force His religion down other people's
+throats? Not He! He endured all, He was kind to all, even to the wicked
+Jews that afterwards crucified Him." "If you say you can't love your
+neighbour because he's your enemy, and has injured you, what does that
+mane? '_ye can't! ye can't!_' as if that excuse will serve God? hav'n't
+ye done more and worse against Him? and didn't He send His only Son into
+the world to redeem ye? My good people, you're all sprung from one
+stock, all sons of Adam, all related to one another. When God created
+Eve, mightn't He have made her out of any thing, a stock or a stone, or
+out of nothing at all, at all? but He took one of Adam's ribs and
+moulded her out of that, and gave her to him, just to show that we're
+all from one original, all related together, men and women, Catholics
+and Protestants, Jews and Turks and Christians; all bone of one bone,
+and flesh of one flesh!" He then insisted and demonstrated that all the
+miseries of life, all the sorrows and mistakes of men, women, and
+children; and, in particular, all the disasters of Ireland, the bankrupt
+landlords, the religious dissensions, the fights domestic and political,
+the rich without thought for the poor, and the poor without food or
+work, all arose from nothing but the want of love. "Down on your knees,"
+he exclaimed, "and ask God's mercy and pardon; and as ye hope to find
+it, ask pardon one of another for every angry word ye have spoken, for
+every uncharitable thought that has come into your minds; and if any man
+or woman have aught against his neighbour, no matter what, let it be
+plucked out of his heart before he laves this place, let it be forgotten
+at the door of this chapel. Let me, your pastor, have no more rason to
+be ashamed of you; as if I were set over wild bastes, instead of
+Christian men and women!"
+
+After more in this fervid strain, which I cannot recollect, he gave his
+blessing in the same earnest heartfelt manner. I never saw a
+congregation more attentive, more reverent, and apparently more touched
+and edified. (1848.)
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+II.
+
+_From another Roman Catholic Sermon, delivered in the private chapel of
+a Nobleman._
+
+This Discourse was preached on the festival of St. John the Baptist, and
+was a summary of his doctrine, life, and character. The text was taken
+from St. Luke, iii. 9. to 14.; in which St. John answers the question of
+the people, "what shall we do then?" by a brief exposition of their
+several duties.
+
+"What is most remarkable in all this," said the priest, "is truly that
+there is nothing very remarkable in it. The Baptist required from his
+hearers very simple and very familiar duties,--such as he was not the
+first to preach, such as had been recognised as duties by all religions;
+and do you think that those who were neither Jews nor Christians were
+therefore left without any religion? No! never did God leave any of his
+creatures without religion; they could not utter the words _right_,
+_wrong_,--_beautiful_, _hateful_, without recognising a religion written
+by God on their hearts from the beginning--a religion which existed
+before the preaching of John, before the coming of Christ, and of which
+the appearance of John and the doctrine and sacrifice of Christ, were
+but the fulfilment. For Christ came to _fulfil_ the law, not to destroy
+it. Do you ask what law? Not the law of Moses, but the universal law of
+God's moral truth written in our hearts. It is, my friends, a folly to
+talk of _natural_ religion as of something different from _revealed_
+religion.
+
+"The great proof of the truth of John's mission lies in its
+comprehensiveness: men and women, artisans and soldiers, the rich and
+the poor, the young and the old, gathered to him in the wilderness; and
+he included all in his teaching, for he was sent to all; and the best
+proof of the truth of his teaching lies in its harmony with that law
+already written in the heart and the conscience of men. When Christ came
+afterwards, he preached a doctrine more sublime, with a more
+authoritative voice; but here, also, the best proof we have of the truth
+of that divine teaching lies in this--that he had prepared from the
+beginning the heart and the conscience of man to harmonise with it."
+
+
+This was a very curious sermon; quiet, elegant, and learned, with a good
+deal of sacred and profane history introduced in illustration, which I
+am sorry I cannot remember in detail. It made, however, no appeal to
+feeling or to practice; and after listening to it, we all went in to
+luncheon and discussed our newspapers.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+III.
+
+_Fragments of a Sermon (Anglican Church)._
+
+Text, Luke iv., from the 14th to the 18th, but more especially the 18th
+verse. This sermon was extempore.
+
+
+The preacher began by observing, that our Lord's sermon at Nazareth
+established the second of two principles. By his sermon from the Mount,
+in which he had addressed the multitude in the open air, under the vault
+of the blue heaven alone, he has left to us the principle that all
+places are fitted for the service of God, and that all places may be
+sanctified by the preaching of his truth. While, by his sermon in the
+Synagogue (that which is recorded by St. Luke in this passage), he has
+established the principle, that it is right to set apart a place to
+assemble together in worship and to listen to instruction; and it is
+observable that on this occasion our Saviour taught in the synagogue,
+where there was no sacrifice, no ministry of the priests, as in the
+Temple; but where a portion of the law and the prophets might be read by
+any man; and any man, even a stranger (as he was himself), might be
+called upon to expound.
+
+Then reading impressively the whole of the narrative down to the 32nd
+verse, the preacher closed the sacred volume, and went on to this
+effect:--
+
+"There are two orders of evil in the world--Sin and Crime. Of the second,
+the world takes strict cognisance; of the first, it takes comparatively
+little; yet _that_ is worse in the eyes of God. There are two orders of
+temptation: the temptation which assails our lower nature--our appetites;
+the temptation which assails our higher nature--our intellect. The
+_first_, leading to sin in the body, is punished in the body,--the
+consequence being pain, disease, death. The _second_, leading to sins of
+the soul, as pride chiefly, uncharitableness, selfish sacrifice of
+others to our own interests or purposes,--is punished in the soul--in the
+Hell of the Spirit."
+
+(All this part of his discourse very beautiful, earnest, eloquent; but I
+regretted that he did not follow out the distinction he began with
+between _sin_ and _crime_, and the views and deductions, religious and
+moral, which that distinction leads to.)
+
+He continued to this effect: "Christ said that it was a part of his
+mission to heal the broken-hearted. What is meant by the phrase 'a
+broken heart?'" He illustrated it by the story of Eli, and by the wife
+of Phineas, both of whom died broken in heart; "and our Saviour himself
+died on the cross heart-broken by sorrow rather than by physical
+torture."--
+
+(I lost something here because I was questioning and doubting within
+myself, for I have always had the thought that Christ must have been
+_glad_ to die.)
+
+He went on:--"To heal the broken-hearted is to say to those who are beset
+by the remembrance and the misery of sin, 'My brother, the past is
+past--think not of it to thy perdition; arise and sin no more.'" (All
+this, and more to the same purpose, wonderfully beautiful! and I became
+all soul--subdued to listen.) "There are two ways of meeting the pressure
+of misery and heart-break: first, by trusting to time" (then followed a
+quotation from Schiller's "Wallenstein," in reference to grief, which
+sounded strange, and yet beautiful, from the pulpit, "Was verschmerzte
+nicht der Mensch?"--what cannot man grieve down?); "secondly, by defiance
+and resistance, setting oneself resolutely to endure. But Christ taught
+a different way from either--by _submission_--by the complete surrender of
+our whole being to the will of God.
+
+"The next part of Christ's mission was to preach deliverance to the
+captives." (Then followed a most eloquent and beautiful exposition of
+Christian freedom--of who were free; and who were not free, but properly
+spiritual captives.) "To be content within limitations is freedom; to
+desire beyond those limitations is bondage. The bird which is content
+within her cage is free; the bird which can fly from tree to tree, yet
+desires to soar like the eagle,--the eagle which can ascend to the
+mountain peak yet desires to reach the height of that sun on which his
+eye is fixed,--these are in bondage. The man who is not content within
+his sphere of duties and powers, but feels his faculties, his position,
+his profession; a perpetual trammel,--_he_ is spiritually in bondage. The
+only freedom is the freedom of the soul, content within its external
+limitations, and yet elevated spiritually far above them by the inward
+powers and impulses which lift it up to God."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+IV.
+
+_Recollections of another Church of England Sermon preached extempore._
+
+The text was taken from Matt. xii. 42.: "The Queen of the South shall
+rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it," &c.
+
+
+The preacher began by drawing that distinction between knowledge and
+wisdom which so many comprehend and allow, and so few apply. He then
+described the two parties in the great question of popular education.
+Those who would base all human progress on secular instruction, on
+knowledge in contradistinction to ignorance, as on light opposed to
+darkness;--and the mistake of those who, taking the contrary extreme,
+denounce all secular instruction imparted to the poor as dangerous, or
+contemn it as useless. The error of those who sneer at the triumph of
+intellect he termed a species of idiocy; and the error of those who do
+not see the insufficiency of knowledge, blind presumption. Then he
+contrasted worldly wisdom and spiritual; with a flow of gorgeous
+eloquence he enlarged on the picture of worldly wisdom as exhibited in
+the character of Solomon, and of intellect, and admiration for
+intellect, in the character of the Queen of Sheba. "In what consisted
+the wisdom of Solomon? He made, as the sacred history assures us, three
+thousand proverbs, mostly prudential maxims relating to conduct in life;
+the use and abuse of riches; prosperity and adversity. His acquirements
+in natural philosophy seem to have been confined to the appearances of
+material and visible things; the herbs and trees, the beasts and birds,
+the creeping things and fishes. His political wisdom consisted in
+increasing his wealth, his dominions, and the number of his subjects and
+cities. On his temple he lavished all that art had then accomplished,
+and on his own house a world of riches in gold, and silver, and precious
+things: but all was done for his own glory--nothing for the improvement
+or the happiness of his people, who were ground down by taxes, suffered
+in the midst of all his magnificence, and remained ignorant in spite of
+all his knowledge. Witness the wars, tyrannies, miseries, delusions, and
+idolatries which followed after his death."
+
+"But the Queen of Sheba came not from the uttermost parts of the earth
+to view the magnificence and wonder at the greatness of the King, she
+came to hear his wisdom. She came not to ask anything from him, but to
+prove him with hard questions. No idea of worldly gain, or selfish
+ambition was in her thoughts; she paid even for the pleasure of hearing
+his wise sayings by rare and costly gifts."
+
+"Knowledge is power; but he who worships knowledge not for its own sake,
+but for the power it brings, worships power. Knowledge is riches; but he
+who worships knowledge for the sake of all it bestows, worships riches.
+The Queen of Sheba worshipped knowledge solely for its own sake; and the
+truths which she sought from the lips of Solomon she sought for truth's
+sake. She gave, all she could give, in return, the spicy products of her
+own land, treasures of pure gold, and blessings warm from her heart. The
+man who makes a voyage to the antipodes only to behold the constellation
+of the Southern Cross, the man who sails to the North to see how the
+magnet trembles and varies, these love knowledge for its own sake, and
+are impelled by the same enthusiasm as the Queen of Sheba." He went on
+to analyse the character of Solomon, and did not treat him, I thought,
+with much reverence either as sage or prophet. He remarked that, "of the
+thousand songs of Solomon one only survives, and that both in this song
+and in his proverbs his meaning has often been mistaken; it is supposed
+to be spiritual, and is interpreted symbolically, when in fact the
+plain, obvious, material significance is the true one."
+
+He continued to this effect,--but with a power of language and
+illustration which I cannot render. "We see in Solomon's own description
+of his dominion, his glory, his wealth, his fame, what his boasted
+wisdom achieved; what it could, and what it could not do for him. What
+was the end of all his magnificence? of his worship of the beautiful? of
+his intellectual triumphs? of his political subtlety? of his ships, and
+his commerce, and his chariots, and his horses, and his fame which
+reached to the ends of the earth? All--as it is related--ended in
+feebleness, in scepticism, in disbelief of happiness, in sensualism,
+idolatry, and dotage! The whole 'Book of Ecclesiastes,' fine as it is,
+presents a picture of selfishness and epicurism. This was the King of
+the Jews! the King of those that know! (_Il maestro di color chi
+sanno._) Solomon is a type of worldly wisdom, of desire of knowledge for
+the sake of all that knowledge can give. We imitate him when we would
+base the happiness of a people on knowledge. When we have commanded the
+sun to be our painter, and the lightning to run on our errands, what
+reward have we? Not the increase of happiness, nor the increase of
+goodness; nor--what is next to both--our faith in both."
+
+"It would seem profane to contrast Solomon and Christ had not our
+Saviour himself placed that contrast distinctly before us. He
+consecrated the comparison by applying it--'Behold a greater than Solomon
+is here.' In quoting these words we do not presume to bring into
+comparison the two _natures_, but the two intellects--the two aspects of
+truth. Solomon described the external world; Christ taught the moral
+law. Solomon illustrated the aspects of nature; Christ helped the
+aspirations of the spirit. Solomon left as a legacy the saying that 'in
+much wisdom there is much grief;' and Christ preached to us the lowly
+wisdom which can consecrate grief; making it lead to the elevation of
+our whole being and to ultimate happiness. The two majesties--the two
+kings--how different! Not till we are old, and have suffered, and have
+laid our experience to heart, do we feel the immeasurable distance
+between the teaching of Christ and the teaching of Solomon!"
+
+Then returning to the Queen of Sheba, he treated the character as the
+type of the intellectual woman. He contrasted her rather favourably with
+Solomon. He described with picturesque felicity, her long and toilsome
+journey to see, to admire, the man whose wisdom had made him
+renowned;--the mixture of enthusiasm and humility which prompted her
+desire to learn, to prove the truth of what rumour had conveyed to her,
+to commune with him of all that was in her heart. And she returned to
+her own country rich in wise sayings. But did the final result of all
+this glory and knowledge reach her there? and did it shake her faith in
+him she had bowed to as the wisest of kings and men?
+
+He then contrasted the character of the Queen of Sheba with that of
+Mary, the mother of our Lord, that feminine type of holiness, of
+tenderness, of long-suffering; of sinless purity in womanhood, wifehood,
+and motherhood: and rising to more than usual eloquence and power, he
+prophesied the regeneration of all human communities through the social
+elevation, the intellect, the purity, and the devotion of Woman.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+V.
+
+_From a Sermon (apparently extempore) by a Dissenting Minister._
+
+
+The ascetics of the old times seem to have had a belief that all sin was
+in the body; that the spirit belonged to God, and the body to his
+adversary the devil; and that to contemn, ill-treat, and degrade by
+every means this frame of ours, so wonderfully, so fearfully, so
+exquisitely made, was to please the Being who made it; and who, for
+gracious ends, no doubt, rendered it capable of such admirable
+development of strength and beauty. Miserable mistake!
+
+To some, this body is as a prison from which we are to rejoice to escape
+by any permitted means: to others, it is as a palace to be luxuriously
+kept up and decorated within and without. But what says Paul (Cor. vi.
+19.),--"Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which
+is in you, which ye have from God, and which is not your own?"
+
+Surely not less than a temple is that form which the Divine Redeemer
+took upon him, and deigned, for a season, to inhabit; which he
+consecrated by his life, sanctified by his death, glorified by his
+transfiguration, hallowed and beautified by his resurrection!
+
+It is because they do not recognise _this_ body as a temple, built up by
+God's intelligence, as a fitting sanctuary for the immortal Spirit, and
+_this_ life equally with any other form of life as dedicate to Him, that
+men fall into such opposite extremes of sin:--the spiritual sin which
+contemns the body, and the sensual sin which misuses it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+When I was at Boston I made the acquaintance of Father Taylor, the
+founder of the Sailors' Home in that city. He was considered as the
+apostle of the seamen, and I was full of veneration for him as the
+enthusiastic teacher and philanthropist. But it is not of his virtues or
+his labours that I wish to speak. He struck me in another way, _as a
+poet_; he was a born poet. Until he was five-and-twenty he had never
+learned to read, and his reading afterwards was confined to such books
+as aided him in his ministry. He remained an illiterate man to the last,
+but his mind was teeming with spontaneous imagery, allusion, metaphor.
+One might almost say of him,
+
+             "He could not ope
+   His mouth, but out there flew a trope!"
+
+These images and allusions had a freshness, an originality, and
+sometimes an oddity that was quite startling, and they were generally,
+but not always, borrowed from his former profession--that of a sailor.
+
+
+One day we met him in the street. He told us in a melancholy voice that
+he had been burying a child, and alluded almost with emotion to the
+great number of infants he had buried lately. Then after a pause,
+striking his stick on the ground and looking upwards, he added, "There
+must be something wrong somewhere! there's a storm brewing, when the
+doves are all flying aloft!"
+
+
+One evening in conversation with me, he compared the English and the
+Americans to Jacob's vine, which, planted on one side of the wall, grew
+over it and hung its boughs and clusters on the other side,--"but it is
+still the same vine, nourished from the same root!"
+
+
+On one occasion when I attended his chapel, the sermon was preceded by a
+long prayer in behalf of an afflicted family, one of whose members had
+died or been lost in a whaling expedition to the South Seas. In the
+midst of much that was exquisitely pathetic and poetical, refined ears
+were startled by such a sentence as this,--"Grant, O Lord! that this rod
+of chastisement be sanctified, every twig of it, to the edification of
+their souls!"
+
+
+Then immediately afterwards he prayed that the Divine Comforter might be
+near the bereaved father "when his aged heart went forth from his bosom
+to flutter round the far southern grave of his boy!" Praying for others
+of the same family who were on the wide ocean, he exclaimed, stretching
+forth his arms, "O save them! O guard them! thou angel of the deep!"
+
+
+On another occasion, speaking of the insufficiency of the moral
+principles without religious feelings, he exclaimed, "Go heat your ovens
+with snowballs! What! shall I send you to heaven with such an icicle in
+your pocket? I might as well put a millstone round your neck to teach
+you to swim!"
+
+
+He was preaching against violence and cruelty:--"Don't talk to me," said
+he, "of the savages! a ruffian in the midst of Christendom is the savage
+of savages. He is as a man freezing in the sun's heat, groping in the
+sun's light, a straggler in paradise, an alien in heaven!"
+
+In his chapel all the principal seats in front of the pulpit and down
+the centre aisle were filled by the sailors. We ladies, and gentlemen,
+and strangers, whom curiosity had brought to hear him, were ranged on
+each side; he would on no account allow us to take the best places. On
+one occasion, as he was denouncing hypocrisy, luxury, and vanity, and
+other vices of more civilised life, he said emphatically, "I don't mean
+_you_ before me here," looking at the sailors; "I believe you are wicked
+enough, but honest fellows in some sort, for you profess less, not more,
+than you practise; but I mean to touch _starboard_ and _larboard_
+there!" stretching out both hands with the forefinger extended, and
+looking at us on either side till we quailed.
+
+
+He compared the love of God in sending Christ upon earth to that of the
+father of a seaman who sends his eldest and most beloved son, the hope
+of the family, to bring back the younger one, lost on his voyage, and
+missing when his ship returned to port.
+
+
+Alluding to the carelessness of Christians, he used the figure of a
+mariner, steering into port through a narrow dangerous channel, "false
+lights here, rocks there, shifting sand banks on one side, breakers on
+the other; and who, instead of fixing his attention to keep the head of
+his vessel right, and to obey the instructions of the pilot as he sings
+out from the wheel, throws the pilot overboard, lashes down the helm,
+and walks the deck whistling, with his hands in the pockets of his
+jacket." Here, suiting the action to the word, he put on a true
+sailor-like look of defiant jollity;--changed in a moment to an
+expression of horror as he added, "See! See! she drifts to destruction!"
+
+
+One Sunday he attempted to give to his sailor congregation an idea of
+Redemption. He began with an eloquent description of a terrific storm at
+sea, rising to fury through all its gradations; then, amid the waves, a
+vessel is seen labouring in distress and driving on a lee shore. The
+masts bend and break, and go overboard; the sails are rent, the helm
+unshipped, they spring a leak! the vessel begins to fill, the water
+gains on them; she sinks deeper, deeper, _deeper! deeper!_ He bent over
+the pulpit repeating the last words again and again; his voice became
+low and hollow. The faces of the sailors as they gazed up at him with
+their mouths wide open, and their eyes fixed, I shall never forget.
+Suddenly stopping, and looking to the farthest end of the chapel as into
+space, he exclaimed, with a piercing cry of exultation, "A life boat! a
+life boat!" Then looking down upon his congregation, most of whom had
+sprung to their feet in an ecstasy of suspense, he said in a deep
+impressive tone, and extending his arms, "_Christ is that life boat!_"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+VII.
+
+RELIGION AND SCIENCE.
+
+
+"It is true, that science has not made Nature as expressive of God in
+the first instance, or to the beginner in religion, as it was in earlier
+times. Science reveals a rigid, immutable order; and this to common
+minds looks much like self-subsistence, and does not manifest
+intelligence, which is full of life, variety, and progressive operation.
+Men, in the days of their ignorance, saw an immediate Divinity
+accomplishing an immediate purpose, or expressing an immediate feeling,
+in every sudden, striking change of nature--in a storm, the flight of a
+bird, &c.; and Nature, thus interpreted, became the sign of a present,
+deeply interested Deity. Science undoubtedly brings vast aids, but it is
+to _prepared_ minds, to those who have begun in another school. The
+greatest aid it yields consists in the revelation it makes of the
+Infinite. It aids us not so much by showing us marks of design in this
+or that particular thing as by showing the _Infinite_ in the _finite_.
+Science does this office when it unfolds to us the unity of the
+universe, which thus becomes the sign, the efflux of one unbounded
+intelligence, when it reveals to us in every work of Nature infinite
+connections, the influences of all-pervading laws--when it shows us in
+each created thing unfathomable, unsearchable depths, to which our
+intelligence is altogether unequal. Thus Nature explored by science is a
+witness of the Infinite. It is also a witness to the same truth by its
+beauty; for what is so undefined, so mysterious as beauty?"--_Dr.
+Channing._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+PART II.
+
+Literature and Art.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Notes from Books.
+
+
+1.
+
+"A great advantage is derived from the occasional practice of reading
+together, for each person selects different beauties and starts
+different objections: while the same passage perhaps awakens in each
+mind a different train of associated ideas, or raises different images
+for the purposes of illustration."--_Francis Horner._
+
+
+2.
+
+"C'est ainsi que je poursuis la communication de quelque esprit fameux,
+non afin qu'il m'enseigne mais afin que je le connaisse, et que le
+connaissant, s'il le faut, je l'imite."--_Montaigne._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+DR. ARNOLD.
+
+3.
+
+I sat up till half-past two this morning reading Dr. Arnold's "Life and
+Letters," and have my soul full of him to-day.
+
+On the whole I cannot say that the perusal of this admirable book has
+changed any notion in my mind, or added greatly to my stock of ideas.
+There was no height of inspiration, or eloquence, or power, to which I
+looked _up_; no profound depth of thought or feeling into which I looked
+_down_; no _new_ lights; no _new_ guides; no absolutely _new_ aspects of
+things human or spiritual.
+
+On the other hand, I never read a book of the kind with a more
+harmonious sense of pleasure and _approbation_,--if the word be not from
+me presumptuous. While I read page after page, the mind which was
+unfolded before me seemed to me a brother's mind--the spirit, a kindred
+spirit. It was the improved, the elevated, the enlarged, the enriched,
+the every-way superior reflection of my own intelligence, but it was
+certainly _that_. I felt it so from beginning to end. Exactly the
+reverse was the feeling with which I laid down the Life and Letters of
+Southey. I was instructed, amused, interested; I profited and admired;
+but with the _man_ Southey I had no sympathies: my mind stood off from
+his; the poetical intellect attracted, the material of the character
+repelled me. I liked the embroidery, but the texture was disagreeable,
+repugnant. Now with regard to Dr. Arnold, my entire sympathy with the
+character, with the _material_ of the character, did not extend to all
+its manifestations. I liked the texture better than the
+embroidery;--perhaps, because of my feminine organisation.
+
+Nor did my admiration of the intellect extend to the acceptance of _all_
+the opinions which emanated from it; perhaps because from the manner
+these were enunciated, or merely touched upon (in letters chiefly), I
+did not comprehend clearly the reasoning on which they may have been
+founded. Perhaps, if I had done so, I must have respected them more,
+perhaps have been convinced by them; so large, so candid, so rich in
+knowledge, and apparently so logical, was the mind which admitted them.
+
+And yet this excellent, admirable man, seems to have _feared_ God, in
+the common-place sense of the word fear. He considered the Jews as out
+of the pale of equality; he was against their political emancipation
+from a hatred of Judaism. He subscribed to the Athanasian Creed, which
+stuck even in George the Third's orthodox throat. He believed in what
+Coleridge could not admit, in the existence of the spirit of evil as a
+person. He had an idea that the Church _of God_ may be destroyed by an
+Antichrist; he speaks of such a consummation as possible, as probable,
+as impending; as if any institution really from God could be destroyed
+by an adverse power!--and he thought that a lawyer could not be a
+Christian.
+
+
+4.
+
+Certain passages filled me with astonishment as coming from a churchman,
+particularly what he says of the sacraments (vol. ii. pp. 75. 113.); and
+in another place, where he speaks of "the _pestilent_ distinction
+between clergy and laity;" and where he says, "I hold that one form of
+Church government is exactly as much according to Christ's will as
+another." And in another place he speaks of the Anglican Church (with
+reference to Henry VIII. as its father, and Elizabeth as its
+foster-mother), as "the child of regal and aristocratical selfishness
+and unprincipled tyranny, who has never dared to speak boldly to the
+great, but has contented herself with lecturing the poor;" but he forgot
+at the moment the trial of the bishops in James's time, and their noble
+stand against regal authority.
+
+
+5.
+
+With regard to conservatism (vol. ii. pp. 19. 62.), he seems to mean--as
+I understand the whole passage,--that it is a good _instinct_ but a bad
+_principle_. Yet as a principle is it, as he says, "always wrong?"
+Though as the adversary of progress, it must be always wrong, yet as the
+adversary of change it _may_ be sometimes right.
+
+
+6.
+
+He remarks that most of those who are above sectarianism are in general
+indifferent to Christianity, while almost all who profess to value
+Christianity seem, when they are brought to the test, to care only for
+their own sect. "Now," he adds, "it is manifest to me, that all our
+education must be Christian, and not be sectarian." Yet the whole aim of
+education up to this time has been, in this country, eminently
+sectarian, and every statesman who has attempted to place it on a
+broader basis has been either wrecked or stranded.
+
+"All sects," he says in another place, "have had among them marks of
+Christ's Catholic Church in the graces of his Spirit and the confession
+of his name," and he seems to wish that some one would compile a book
+showing side by side what professors of all sects have done for the good
+of Christ's Church,--the martyrdoms, the missionary labours of
+Catholics, Protestants, Arians, &c.; "a grand field," he calls it,--and
+so it were; but it lies fallow up to this time.
+
+
+7.
+
+"the philosophy of medicine, I imagine, is at zero; our practice is
+empirical, and seems hardly more than a course of guessing, more or less
+happy." In another place (vol. ii. p. 72.), he says, "yet I honour
+medicine as the most beneficent of all professions."
+
+
+8.
+
+He says (vol. ii. p. 42.), "Narrow-mindedness tends to wickedness,
+because it does not extend its watchfulness to every part of our moral
+nature." "Thus, a man may have one or more virtues, such as are
+according to his favourite ideas, in great perfection; and still be
+nothing, because these ideas are his idols, and, worshipping them with
+all his heart, there is a portion of his heart, more or less
+considerable, left without its proper object, guide, and nourishment;
+and so this portion is left to the dominion of evil," &c.
+
+(One might ask _how_, if a man worship these ideas with _all_ his heart,
+a portion could be left? but the sense is so excellent, I cannot quarrel
+with a slight inaccuracy in the expression. I never quite understood
+before why it is difficult to subscribe to the truth of the phrase "He
+is a good but a narrow-minded man," but _felt_ the incompatibility.)
+
+
+9.
+
+He says "the word _useful_ implies the idea of good robbed of its
+nobleness." Is this true? the _useful_ is the _good_ applied to
+practical purposes; it need not, therefore, be less noble. The nobleness
+lies in the spirit in which it is so applied.
+
+
+10.
+
+Benthamism (what _is_ it?), Puritanism, Judaism, how he hates them! I
+suppose, because he _fears_ God and _fears_ for the Church of God.
+Hatred of all kinds seems to originate in fear.
+
+
+11.
+
+What he says of conscience, very remarkable!
+
+"Men get embarrassed by the common cases of a misguided conscience: but
+a compass may be out of order as well as a conscience; and you can trace
+the deranging influence on the latter quite as surely as on the former.
+The needle may point due south if you hold a powerful magnet in that
+direction; still the compass, generally speaking, is a true and sure
+guide," &c.; and then he adds, "he who believes his conscience to be
+God's law, by obeying it obeys God."
+
+I think there would be much to say about all this passage relating to
+conscience, nor am I sure that I quite understand it. Derangement of the
+intellect is madness; is not derangement of the conscience also madness?
+might it not be induced, as we bring on a morbid state of the other
+faculties, by over use and abuse? by giving it more than its due share
+of power in the commonwealth of the mind? It should preside, not
+tyrannise; rule, not exercise a petty cramping despotism. A healthy
+courageous conscience gives to the powers, instincts, impulses, fair
+play; and having once settled the order of government with a strong
+hand, is not always meddling though always watchful.
+
+Then again, how is conscience "God's law?" Conscience is not the law,
+but the interpreter of the law; it does not teach the difference between
+right and wrong, it only impels us to do what we believe to be right,
+and smites us when we _think_ we have been wrong. How is it that many
+have done wrong, and every day do wrong for conscience' sake?--and does
+that sanctify the wrong in the eyes of God, as well as in those of John
+Huss?[1]
+
+
+12.
+
+"Prayer," he says, "and kindly intercourse with the poor, are the two
+great safeguards of spiritual life--its more than food and raiment."
+
+True; but there is something higher than this fed and clothed spiritual
+life; something more difficult, yet less conscious.
+
+
+13.
+
+In allusion to Coleridge, he says very truly, that the power of
+contemplation becomes diseased and perverted when it is the main
+employment of life. But to the same great intellect he does beautiful
+justice in another passage. "Coleridge seemed to me to love truth
+really, and, therefore, truth presented herself to him, not negatively,
+as she does to many minds, who can see that the objections against her
+are unfounded, and therefore that she is to be received; but she filled
+him, as it were, heart and mind, imbuing him with her very self, so that
+all his being comprehended her fully, and loved her ardently; and that
+seems to me to be true wisdom."
+
+
+14.
+
+Very fine is a passage wherein he speaks against meeting what is wrong
+and bad with negatives, with merely proving the wrong to be wrong, and
+the false to be false, without substituting for either the positively
+good and true.
+
+
+15.
+
+He contrasts as the two forms of the present danger to the Church and to
+society, the prevalent epicurean atheism, and the lying and formal
+spirit of priestcraft. He seems to have had an impression that the
+Church of God may be "utterly destroyed"(?), or, he asks, "must we look
+forward for centuries to come to the mere alternations of infidelity and
+superstition, scepticism, and Newmanism?" It is very curious to see two
+such men as Arnold and Carlyle both overwhelmed with a terror of the
+magnitude of the mischiefs they see impending over us. They are
+oppressed with the anticipation of evil as with a sense of personal
+calamity. Something alike, perhaps, in the temperaments of these two
+extraordinary men;--large conscientiousness, large destructiveness, and
+small hope: there was great mutual sympathy and admiration.
+
+
+16.
+
+Very admirable what he says in favour of comprehensive reading, against
+exclusive reading in one line of study. He says, "Preserve proportion in
+your reading, keep your view of men and things extensive, and depend
+upon it a mixed knowledge is not a superficial one; as far as it goes
+the views that it gives are true; but he who reads deeply in one class
+of writers only, gets views which are almost sure to be perverted, and
+which are not only _narrow but false_."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+17.
+
+All his descriptions of natural scenery and beauty show his intense
+sensibility to them, but nowhere is there a trace of the love or the
+comprehension of art, as the reflection from the mind of man of the
+nature and the beauty he so loved. Thus, after dwelling on a scene of
+exquisite natural beauty, he says, "Much more beautiful, because made
+truly after God's own image, are the forms and colours of kind, and
+wise, and holy thoughts, words, and actions;" that is to say--although he
+knew not or made not the application--ART, in the high sense of the word,
+for that is the embodying in beautiful hues and forms, what is kind,
+wise, and holy; in one word--_good_. In fact, he says himself, art,
+physical science, and natural history, were not included within the
+reach of his mind; the first for want of taste, the second for want of
+time, and the third for want of inclination.
+
+
+18.
+
+He says, "The whole subject of the brute creation is to me one of such
+painful mystery, that I dare not approach it." This is very striking
+from such a man. How deep, consciously or unconsciously, does this
+feeling lie in many minds!
+
+Bayle had already termed the acts, motives, and feelings of the lower
+order of animals, "un des plus profonds ab�mes sur quoi notre raison
+peut s'exerciser."
+
+There is nothing, as I have sometimes thought, in which men so blindly
+sin as in their appreciation and treatment of the whole lower order of
+creatures. It is affirmed that love and mercy towards animals are not
+inculcated by any direct precept of Christianity, but surely they are
+included in its spirit; yet it has been remarked that cruelty towards
+animals is far more common in Western Christendom than in the East. With
+the Mahometan and Brahminical races humanity to animals, and the
+sacredness of life in all its forms, is much more of a religious
+principle than among ourselves.
+
+Bacon, in his "Advancement of Learning," does not think it beneath his
+philosophy to point out as a part of human morals, and a condition of
+human improvement, justice and mercy to the lower animals--"the extension
+of a noble and excellent principle of compassion to the creatures
+subject to man." "The Turks," he says, "though a cruel and sanguinary
+nation both in descent and discipline, give alms to brutes, and suffer
+them not to be tortured."
+
+It should seem as if the primitive Christians, by laying so much stress
+upon a future life in contradistinction to this life, and placing the
+lower creatures out of the pale of hope, placed them at the same time
+out of the pale of sympathy, and thus laid the foundation for this utter
+disregard of animals in the light of our fellow creatures. The
+definition of virtue among the early Christians was the same as
+Paley's--that it was good performed for the sake of ensuring everlasting
+happiness--which of course excluded all the so-called brute creatures.
+Kind, loving, submissive, conscientious, much enduring, we know them to
+be; but because we deprive them of all stake in the future, because they
+have no selfish calculated aim, these are not virtues; yet if we say "a
+_vicious_ horse," why not say a _virtuous_ horse?
+
+The following passage, bearing curiously enough on the most abstruse
+part of the question, I found in Hallam's Literature of the Middle
+Ages:--"Few," he says, "at present, who believe in the immateriality of
+the human soul, would deny the same to an elephant; but it must be owned
+that the discoveries of zoology have pushed this to consequences which
+some might not readily adopt. The spiritual being of a sponge revolts a
+little our prejudices; yet there is no resting-place, and we must admit
+this, or be content to sink ourselves into a mass of medullary fibre.
+Brutes have been as slowly emancipated in philosophy as some classes of
+mankind have been in civil polity; their souls, we see, were almost
+universally disputed to them at the end of the seventeenth century, even
+by those who did not absolutely bring them down to machinery. Even
+within the recollection of many, it was common to deny them any kind of
+reasoning faculty, and to solve their most sagacious actions by the
+vague word instinct. We have come of late years to think better of our
+humble companions; and, as usual in similar cases, the preponderant bias
+seems rather too much of a levelling character."
+
+When natural philosophers speak of "the higher reason and more limited
+instincts of man," as compared with animals, do they mean savage man or
+cultivated man? In the savage man the instincts have a power, a range, a
+certitude, like those of animals. As the mental faculties become
+expanded and refined the instincts become subordinate. In tame animals
+are the instincts as strong as in wild animals? Can we not, by a process
+of training, substitute an entirely different set of motives and habits?
+
+Why, in managing animals, do men in general make brutes of themselves to
+address what is most _brute_ in the lower creature, as if it had not
+been demonstrated that in using our higher faculties, our reason and
+benevolence, we develop sympathetically higher powers in _them_, and in
+subduing them through what is best within us, raise them and bring them
+nearer to ourselves?
+
+In general the more we can gather of facts, the nearer we are to the
+elucidation of theoretic truth. But with regard to animals, the
+multiplication of facts only increases our difficulties and puts us to
+confusion.
+
+"Can we otherwise explain animal instincts than by supposing that the
+Deity himself is virtually the active and present moving principle
+within them? If we deny them _soul_, we must admit that they have some
+spirit direct from God, what we call _unerring_ instinct, which holds
+the place of it." This is the opinion which Newton adopts. Then are we
+to infer that the reason of man removes him further from God than the
+animals, since we cannot offend God in our instincts, only in our
+reason? and that the superiority of the human animal lies in the power
+of sinning? Terrible power! terrible privilege! out of which we deduce
+the law of progress and the necessity for a future life.
+
+The following passage bearing on the subject is from Bentham:--
+
+"The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those
+rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand
+of tyranny. It may come one day to be recognised that the number of
+legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the _os sacrum_,
+are reasons insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice
+of a tormentor. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line?
+is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But
+a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational as well
+as a more conversable animal than an infant of a day, a week, or even a
+month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The
+question is not, 'can they reason?' nor 'can they speak?' but 'can they
+suffer?'"
+
+I do not remember ever to have heard the kind and just treatment of
+animals enforced upon Christian principles or made the subject of a
+sermon.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+19.
+
+Once, when I was at Vienna, there was a dread of hydrophobia, and orders
+were given to massacre all the dogs which were found unclaimed or
+uncollared in the city or suburbs. Men were employed for this purpose,
+and they generally carried a short heavy stick, which they flung at the
+poor proscribed animal with such certain aim as either to kill or maim
+it mortally at one blow. It happened one day that, close to the edge of
+the river, near the Ferdinand's-Br�cke, one of these men flung his stick
+at a wretched dog, but with such bad aim that it fell into the river.
+The poor animal, following his instinct or his teaching, immediately
+plunged in, redeemed the stick, and laid it down at the feet of its
+owner, who, snatching it up, dashed out the creature's brains.
+
+I wonder what the Athenians would have done to such a man? they who
+banished the judge of the Areopagus because he flung away the bird which
+had sought shelter in his bosom?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+20.
+
+I return to Dr. Arnold. He laments the neglect of our cathedrals and the
+absurd confusion in so many men's minds "between what is really Popery,
+and what is but wisdom and beauty adopted by the Roman Catholics and
+neglected by us."
+
+
+21.
+
+He says, "Then, only, can opportunities of evil be taken from us, when
+we lose also all opportunity of doing or becoming good." An obvious,
+even common place thought, well and tersely expressed. The inextricable
+co-relation and apparent antagonism of good and evil were never more
+strongly put.
+
+
+22.
+
+The defeat of Varus by the Germans, and the defeat of the moors by
+Charles Martel, he ranked as the two most important battles in the
+history of the world. I see why. The first, because it decided whether
+the north of Europe was to be completely Latinised; the second, because
+it decided whether all Europe was to be completely Mahomedanised.
+
+
+23.
+
+"How can he who labours hard for his daily bread--hardly and with
+doubtful success--be made wise and good, and therefore how can he be made
+happy? This question undoubtedly the Church was meant to solve; for
+Christ's kingdom was to undo the evil of Adam's sin; but the Church has
+not solved it nor attempted to do so, and no one else has gone about it
+rightly. How shall the poor man find time to be educated?"
+
+This question, which "the Church has not yet solved," men have now set
+their wits to solve for themselves.
+
+
+24.
+
+When in Italy he writes:--"It is almost awful to look at the beauty which
+surrounds me and then think of moral evil. It seems as if heaven and
+hell, instead of being separated by a great gulf from us and from each
+other, were close at hand and on each other's confines."
+
+"Might but the sense of moral evil be as strong in me as is my delight
+in external beauty!"
+
+A prayer I echo, Amen! if by the _sense_ he mean the abhorrence of it;
+otherwise, to be perpetually haunted with the perception of moral evil
+were dreadful; yet, on the other hand, I am half ashamed sometimes of a
+conscious shrinking within myself from the sense of moral evil, merely
+as I should shrink from external filth and deformity, as hateful to
+perception and recollection, rather than as hateful to God and
+subversive of goodness.
+
+
+25.
+
+Here is a very striking passage. He says, "A great school is very
+trying; it never can present images of rest and peace; and when the
+spring and activity of youth are altogether unsanctified by anything
+pure and elevated in its desires, it becomes a spectacle that is
+dizzying and almost more morally distressing than the shouts and gambols
+of a set of lunatics. It is very startling to see so much of sin
+combined with so little of sorrow. In a parish, amongst the poor,
+whatever of sin exists there is sure also to be enough of suffering:
+poverty, sickness, and old age are mighty tamers and chastisers. But,
+with boys of the richer classes, one sees nothing but plenty, health,
+and youth; and these are really awful to behold, when one must feel that
+they are unblessed. On the other hand, few things are more beautiful
+than when one does see all holy and noble thoughts and principles, not
+the forced growth of pain, or infirmity, or privation, but springing up
+as by God's immediate planting, in a sort of garden of all that is fresh
+and beautiful; full of so much hope for this world as well as for
+heaven."
+
+To this testimony of a schoolmaster let us add the testimony of a
+schoolboy. De Quincey thus describes in himself the transition from
+boyhood to manhood: "Then first and suddenly were brought powerfully
+before me the change which was worked in the aspects of society by the
+presence of woman; woman, pure, thoughtful, noble, coming before me as
+Pandora crowned with perfections. Right over against this ennobling
+spectacle, with equal suddenness, I placed the odious spectacle of
+schoolboy society--no matter in what region of the earth,--schoolboy
+society, so frivolous in the matter of its disputes, often so brutal in
+the manner; so childish and yet so remote from simplicity; so foolishly
+careless, and yet so revoltingly selfish; dedicated ostensibly to
+learning, and yet beyond any section of human beings so conspicuously
+ignorant."
+
+There is a reverse to this picture, as I hope and believe. If I have met
+with those who looked back on their school-days with horror, as having
+first contaminated them with "evil communication," I have met with
+others whose remembrances were all of sunshine, of early friendships, of
+joyous sports.
+
+Nor do I think that a large school composed wholly of girls is in any
+respect better. In the low languid tone of mind, the petulant tempers,
+the small spitefulnesses, the cowardly concealments, the compressed or
+ill-directed energies, the precocious vanities and affectations, many
+such congregations of _Femmelettes_ would form a worthy pendant to the
+picture of boyish turbulence and vulgarity drawn by De Quincey.
+
+I am convinced from my own recollections, and from all I have learned
+from experienced teachers in large schools, that one of the most fatal
+mistakes in the training of children has been the too early separation
+of the sexes. I say, _has been_, because I find that everywhere this
+most dangerous prejudice has been giving way before the light of truth
+and a more general acquaintance with that primal law of nature, which
+ought to teach us that the more we can assimilate on a large scale the
+public to the domestic training, the better for all. There exists still,
+the impression--in the higher classes especially--that in early education,
+the mixture of the two sexes would tend to make the girls masculine and
+the boys effeminate, but experience shows us that it is all the other
+way. Boys learn a manly and protecting tenderness, and the girls become
+at once more feminine and more truthful. Where this association has
+begun early enough, that is, before five years old, and has been
+continued till about ten or twelve, it has uniformly worked well; on
+this point the evidence is unanimous and decisive. So long ago as 1812,
+Francis Horner, in describing a school he visited at Enmore, near
+Bridgewater, speaks with approbation of the boys and the girls standing
+up together in the same class: it is the first mention, I find, of this
+innovation on the old collegiate, or charity-school plan,--itself a
+continuation of the monkish discipline. He says, "I liked much the
+placing the boys and girls together at an early age; it gave the boys a
+new spur to emulation." When I have seen a class of girls stand up
+together, there has been a sort of empty tittering, a vacancy in the
+faces, an inertness, which made it, as I thought, very up-hill work for
+the teacher; so when it was a class of boys, there has been often a
+sluggishness--a tendency to ruffian tricks--requiring perpetual effort on
+the part of the master. In teaching a class of boys and girls,
+accustomed to stand up together, there is little or nothing of this.
+They are brighter, readier, better behaved; there is a kind of mutual
+influence working for good; and if there be emulation, it is not mingled
+with envy or jealousy. Mischief, such as might be apprehended, is in
+this case far less likely to arise than where boys and girls, habitually
+separated from infancy, are first thrown together, just at the age when
+the feelings are first awakened and the association has all the
+excitement of novelty. A very intelligent schoolmaster assured me that
+he had had more trouble with a class of fifty boys, than with a school
+of three hundred boys and girls together (in the midst of whom I found
+him); and that there were no inconveniences resulting which a wise and
+careful and efficient superintendence could not control. "There is,"
+said he, "not only more emulation, more quickness of brain, but
+altogether a superior healthiness of tone, body and mind, where the boys
+and girls are trained together till about ten years old; and it extends
+into their after life:--I should say because it is in accordance with the
+laws of God in forming us with mutual sympathies, moral and
+intellectual, and mutual dependence for help from the very beginning of
+life."
+
+What is curious enough, I find many people--fathers, mothers,
+teachers,--who are agreed that in the schools for the lower classes, the
+two sexes may be safely and advantageously associated, yet have a sort
+of horror of the idea of such an innovation in schools for the higher
+classes. One would like to know the reason for such a distinction,
+instead of being encountered, as is usual, by a sneer or a vile
+innuendo.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+NIEBUHR.
+
+LIFE AND LETTERS, 1852.
+
+26.
+
+In a letter to a young student in philology there are noble passages in
+which I truly sympathise. He says, among other things: "I wish you had
+less pleasure in satires, not excepting those of Horace. Turn to the
+works which elevate the heart, in which you contemplate great men and
+great events, and live in a higher world. Turn away from those which
+represent the mean and contemptible side of ordinary circumstances and
+degenerate days: they are not suitable for the young, who in ancient
+times would not have been suffered to have them in their hands. Homer,
+�schylus, Sophocles, Pindar,--these are the poets for youth." And again:
+"Do not read the ancient authors in order to make �sthetic reflections
+on them, but in order to drink in their spirit and to fill your soul
+with their thoughts; and in order to gain that by reading which you
+would have gained by reverently listening to the discourses of great
+men."
+
+We should turn to works of art with the same feeling.
+
+On the whole, all my own educational experience has shown me the
+dangerous--in some cases fatal--effects on the childish intellect, where
+precocious criticism was encouraged, and where caricatures and ugly
+disproportioned figures, expressing vile or ridiculous emotions, were
+placed before the eyes of children, as a means of amusement.
+
+If I were a legislator I would forbid travesties and ridiculous
+burlesques of Shakspeare's finest and most serious dramas to be acted
+in our theatres. That this has been done and recently (as in the case of
+the Merchant of Venice) seems to me a national disgrace.
+
+
+27.
+
+It is strange, confounding, to hear Niebuhr speak thus of Goethe:--
+
+"I am inclined to think that Goethe is utterly destitute of
+susceptibility to impressions from the fine arts."(!!) He afterwards
+does more justice to Goethe--certainly one of the profoundest critics in
+art who ever lived; although I am inclined to think that his was an
+educated perception rather than a natural sensibility. Niebuhr's
+criticism on Goethe's Italian travels,--on Goethe's want of sympathy with
+the people,--his regarding the whole country and nation simply as a sort
+of bazaar of art and antiquities, an exhibition of beauty and a
+recreation for himself: his habit of surveying all moral and
+intellectual greatness, all that speaks to the heart, with a kind of
+patronising superiority, as if created for his use,--and finding
+amusement in the folly, degeneracy, and corruption of the people;--all
+this appears to me admirable, and so far I had strong sympathy with
+Niebuhr; for I well remember that in reading Goethe's "Italianische
+Reise," I had the same perception of the artless and the superficial in
+point of feeling, in the midst of so much that was fine and valuable in
+criticism. It is well to be artistic in art, but not to walk about the
+world _en artiste_, studying humanity, and the deepest human interests,
+as if they were _art_.
+
+Niebuhr afterwards says, in speaking of Rome, "I am sickened here of
+art, as I should be of sweetmeats instead of bread." So it _must_ be
+where art is separated wholly from morals.
+
+
+28.
+
+He speaks of the "wretched superstition," and the "utter incapacity for
+piety" in the people of the Roman States.
+
+Superstition and the want of piety go together; and the combination is
+not peculiar to the Italians, nor to the Roman Catholic faith.
+
+
+29.
+
+In speaking of the education of his son, he deprecates the learning by
+rote of hymns. "To a happy child, hymns deploring the misery of human
+life are without meaning." (And worse.) "So likewise to a good child are
+those expressing self-accusation and contrition." (He might have added,
+and self-applause.)
+
+I am quite sure, from my own experience of children who have been
+allowed to learn penitential psalms and hymns, that they think of
+wickedness as a sort of thing which gives them self-importance.
+
+
+30.
+
+"Only what the mind takes in willingly can it assimilate with itself,
+and make its own, part of its life."
+
+A truism of the greatest value in education; but who thinks of it when
+cramming children's minds with all sorts of distasteful heterogeneous
+things?
+
+
+31.
+
+"When reflection has become too one-sided and too domineering over a
+deeply feeling heart, it is apt to lead us into errors in our treatment
+of others."
+
+And all that follows--very wise! for the want of this reflection leaves
+us stranded and wrecked through feeling and perception merely.
+
+
+32.
+
+Very curious and interesting, as a trait of character and feeling, is
+the passage in which he represents himself, in the dangerous confinement
+of his second wife, as praying to his first wife for succour. "In my
+terrible anxiety," he says, "I prayed most earnestly, and entreated my
+Milly, too, for help. I comforted Gretchen by telling her that Milly
+would send help. When she was at the worst, she sighed out, 'Ah, cannot
+your Amelia send me a blessing?'"
+
+This is curious from a Protestant and a philosopher. It shows that there
+may be something nearly allied to our common nature in the Roman
+Catholic invocation to the saints, and to the souls of the dead.
+
+
+33.
+
+Niebuhr, speaking of a lady (Madame von der Recke, I think,--the "Elise"
+of Goethe) who had patronised him, says, "I will receive roses and
+myrtles from female hands, but no laurels."
+
+This makes one smile; for most of the laurels which Niebuhr will receive
+in this country will be through female hands--through the admirable
+translation and arrangement of his life and letters by Susanna
+Winkworth.
+
+
+34.
+
+The following I read with cordial agreement:--"While I am ready to adopt
+any well-grounded opinion" (regarding, I suppose, mere facts, or
+speculations as to things), "my inmost soul revolts against receiving
+the judgment of others respecting persons; and whenever I have done so I
+have bitterly repented of it."
+
+
+35.
+
+He says, "I cannot worship the abstraction of Virtue. She only charms me
+when she addresses herself to my heart, and speaks thus the love from
+which she springs. I really love nothing but what actually exists."
+
+What _does_ actually exist to us but that which we believe in? and where
+we strongly love do we not believe sometimes in the _unreal_? is it not
+_then_ the existing and the actual to us?
+
+
+36.
+
+"A faculty of a quite peculiar kind, and for which we have no word, is
+the recognition of the incomprehensible. It is something which
+distinguishes the seer from the ordinary learned man."
+
+But in religion this is _faith_. Does Niebuhr admit this kind of faith,
+"the recognition of the incomprehensible," in philosophy, and not in
+religion? for he often complains of the want in himself of any faith but
+an historic faith.
+
+
+37.
+
+"In times of good fortune it is easy to appear great--nay, even to act
+greatly; but in misfortune very difficult. The greatest man will commit
+blunders in misfortune, because the want of proportion between his means
+and his ends progressively increases, and his inward strength is
+exhausted in fruitless efforts."
+
+This is true; but under all extremes of good or evil fortune we are apt
+to commit mistakes, because the tide of the mind does not flow equally,
+but rushes along impetuously in a flood, or brokenly and distractedly in
+a rocky channel, where its strength is exhausted in conflict and pain.
+The extreme pressure of circumstances will produce extremes of feeling
+in minds of a sensitive rather than a firm cast.
+
+
+38.
+
+This next passage is curious as a scholar's opinion of "free trade" in
+the year 1810; though I believe the phrase "free trade" was not even
+invented at that time--certainly not in use in the statesman's
+vocabulary.
+
+"I presume you will admit that commerce is a good thing, and the first
+requisite in the life of any nation. It appears to me, that this much
+has now been palpably demonstrated, namely, that an advanced and
+complicated social condition like this in which we live can only be
+maintained by establishing mutual relationships between the most remote
+nations; and that the limitation of commerce would, like the sapping of
+a main pillar, inevitably occasion the fall of the whole edifice; and
+also that commerce is so essentially beneficial and in accordance with
+man's nature, that the well-being of each nation is an advantage to all
+the nations that stand in connection with it."
+
+It is strange how long we have been (forty years, and more) in
+recognising these simple principles; and in Germany, where they were
+first enunciated, they are not recognised yet.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CHARACTER OF DEMADES.
+
+(FROM NIEBUHR's LECTURES.)
+
+
+39.
+
+"By his wit and his talent, and more especially by his gift as an
+improvisatore, he rose so high that he exercised a great influence upon
+the people, and sometimes was more popular even than Demosthenes. With a
+shamelessness amounting to honesty, he bluntly told the people
+everything he felt and what all the populace felt with him. When hearing
+such a man the populace felt at their ease: he gave them the feeling
+that they might be wicked without being disgraced, and this excites with
+such people a feeling of gratitude. There is a remarkable passage in
+Plato, where he shows that those who deliver hollow speeches, without
+being in earnest, have no power or influence; whereas others, who are
+devoid of mental culture, but say in a straightforward manner what they
+think and feel, exercise great power. It was this which in the
+eighteenth century gave the materialist philosophy in France such
+enormous influence with the higher classes; for they were told there was
+no need to be ashamed of the vulgarest sensuality; formerly people had
+been ashamed, but now a man learned that he might be a brutal
+sensualist, provided he did not offend against elegant manners and
+social conventionalism. People rejoiced at hearing a man openly and
+honestly say what they themselves felt. Demades was a remarkable
+character. He was not a bad man; and I like him much better than
+Eschines."
+
+What an excuse, what a sanction is here for the demagogues who direct
+the worst passions of men to the worst and the most selfish purposes,
+and the most debasing consequences! Demades "not a bad man?" then what
+_is_ a bad man?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+LORD BACON.
+
+(1849.)
+
+
+40.
+
+"It was not the pure knowledge of nature and universality, but it was
+the proud knowledge of good and evil, with an intent in man to give the
+law unto himself, which was the form of the first temptation."
+
+But, in this sense, the first temptation is only the type of the
+perpetual and ever-present temptation--the temptation into which we are
+to fall through necessity, that we may rise through love.
+
+
+41.
+
+Here is an excellent passage--a severe commentary on the unsound,
+un-christian, unphilosophical distinction between morals and politics in
+government:--
+
+"Although men bred in learning are perhaps to seek in points of
+convenience and reasons of state and accommodations for the present,
+yet, on the other hand, to recompense this they are perfect in those
+same plain grounds of religion, justice, honour, and moral virtue which,
+if they be well and watchfully pursued, there will be seldom use of
+those other expedients, no more than of physic in a sound, well-directed
+body."
+
+
+42.
+
+"Now (in the time of Lord Bacon, that is,) now sciences are delivered to
+be believed and accepted, and not to be farther discovered; and
+therefore, sciences stand at a clog, and have done for many ages."
+
+In the present time, this is true only, or especially, of theology as an
+art, and divinity as a science; so made by the schoolmen of former ages,
+and not yet emancipated.
+
+
+43.
+
+"Generally he perceived in men of devout simplicity this opinion, that
+the secrets of nature were the secrets of God, part of that glory into
+which man is not to press too boldly."
+
+God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given
+us on this side of the grave. But not the less will he keep his own
+secrets from us. Has he not proved it? who has opened that door to the
+knowledge of a future being which it has pleased him to keep shut fast,
+though watched by hope and by faith?
+
+
+44.
+
+The Christian philosophy of these latter times appears to be
+foreshadowed in the following sentence, where he speaks of such as have
+ventured to deduce and confirm the truth of the Christian religion from
+the principles and authorities of philosophers: "Thus with great pomp
+and solemnity celebrating the intermarriage of faith and sense as a
+lawful conjunction, and soothing the minds of men with a pleasing
+variety of matter, though, at the same time, rashly and unequally
+intermixing things divine and things human."
+
+This last common-place distinction seems to me, however, unworthy of
+Bacon. It should be banished--utterly set aside. Things which are divine
+should be human, and things which are human, divine; not as a mixture,
+"a medley," in the sense of Bacon's words, but an interfusion; for
+nothing that we esteem divine can be anything to us but as we make it
+_ours_, _i. e._ humanise it; and our humanity were a poor thing but for
+"the divinity that stirs within us." We do injury to our own nature--we
+misconceive our relations to the Creator, to his universe, and to each
+other, so long as we separate and studiously keep wide apart the
+_divine_ and the _human_.
+
+
+45.
+
+"Let no man, upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied
+moderation, think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too
+well studied either in the book of God's word or the book of God's
+works." Well advised! But then he goes on to warn men that they do not
+"unwisely mingle or confound their learnings together:" mischievous this
+contradistinction between God's word and God's works; since both, if
+emanating from him, must be equally true. And if there be one truth,
+then, to borrow his own words in another place, "the voice of nature
+will consent, whether the voice of man do so or not."
+
+
+46.
+
+Apropos to education--here is a good illustration: "Were it not better
+for a man in a fair room to set up one great light or branching
+candlestick of lights, than to go about with a rushlight into every dark
+corner?"
+
+And here is another: "It is one thing to set forth what ground lieth
+unmanured, and another to correct ill husbandry in that which _is_
+manured."
+
+47.
+
+"It is without all controversy that learning doth make the minds of men
+gentle and generous, amiable, and pliant to government, whereas
+ignorance maketh them churlish, thwarting, and mutinous."
+
+
+48.
+
+"An impatience of doubt and an unadvised haste to assertion without due
+and mature suspension of the judgment, is an error in the conduct of the
+understanding."
+
+"In contemplation, if a man begin with certainties he shall end in
+doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in
+certainties." Well said and profoundly true.
+
+This is a celebrated and often-cited passage; an admitted principle in
+theory. I wish it were oftener applied in practice,--more especially in
+education. For it seems to me that in teaching children we ought not to
+be perpetually dogmatising. We ought not to be ever placing before them
+only the known and the definite; but to allow the unknown, the
+uncertain, the indefinite, to be suggested to their minds: it would do
+more for the growth of a truly religious feeling than all the catechisms
+of scientific facts and creeds of theological definitions that ever were
+taught in cut and dried question and answer. Why should not the young
+candid mind be allowed to reflect on the unknown, as such? on the
+doubtful, as such--open to inquiry and liable to discussion? Why will
+teachers suppose that in confessing their own ignorance or admitting
+uncertainties they must diminish the respect of their pupils, or their
+faith in truth? I should say from my own experience that the effect is
+just the reverse. I remember, when a child, hearing a very celebrated
+man profess his ignorance on some particular subject, and I felt
+awe-struck--it gave me a perception of the infinite,--as when looking up
+at the starry sky. What we unadvisedly cram into a child's mind in the
+same form it has taken in our own, does not always healthily or
+immediately assimilate; it dissolves away in doubts, or it hardens into
+prejudice, instead of mingling with the life as truth ought to do. It is
+the early and habitual surrendering of the mind to authority, which
+makes it afterwards so ready for deception of all kinds.
+
+
+49.
+
+He speaks of "legends and narrations of miracles wrought by martyrs,
+hermits, monks, which, though they have had passage for a time by the
+ignorance of the people, the superstitious simplicity of some, and the
+politic toleration of others, holding them but as divine poesies; yet
+after a time they grew up to be esteemed but as old wives' fables, to
+the great scandal and detriment of religion."
+
+Very ambiguous, surely. Does he mean that it was to the great scandal
+and detriment of religion that they existed at all? or that they came to
+be regarded as old wives' fables?
+
+
+50.
+
+He says, farther on, "though truth and error are carefully to be
+separated, yet rarities and reports that seem incredible are not to be
+suppressed or denied to the memory of men."
+
+"For it is not yet known in what cases and how far effects attributed to
+superstition do participate of natural causes."
+
+
+51.
+
+"To be speculative with another man to the end to know how to work him
+or wind him, proceedeth from a heart that is double and cloven, and not
+entire and ingenuous; which, as in friendship, it is a want of
+_integrity_, so towards princes or superiors it is a want of _duty_."
+(No occasion, surely, for the distinction here drawn; inasmuch as the
+want of integrity involves the want of _every_ duty.)
+
+Then he speaks of "the stooping to points of necessity and convenience
+and outward basenesses," as to be accounted "submission to the occasion,
+not to the person." Vile distinction! an excuse to himself for his
+dedication to the King, and his flattery of Carr and Villiers.
+
+
+52.
+
+Our English Universities are only now beginning to show some sign
+(reluctant sign) of submitting to that re-examination which the great
+philosopher recommended two hundred and fifty years ago, when he says:
+"Inasmuch as most of the usages and orders of the universities were
+derived from more obscure times, it is the more requisite they be
+reexamined"--and more to the same purpose.
+
+
+53.
+
+"If that great Workmaster (God) had been of a human disposition, he
+would have cast the stars into some pleasant and beautiful works and
+orders like the frets in the roofs of houses; whereas, one can scarce
+find a posture in square or triangle or straight line amongst such an
+infinite number, so differing an harmony there is between the spirit of
+man and the spirit of nature."
+
+Perhaps if our human vision could be removed to a sufficient distance to
+contemplate the whole of what we now see in part, what appears disorder
+might appear beautiful order. The stars which now appear as if flung
+about at random, would perhaps be resolved into some exquisitely
+beautiful and regular edifice. The fly on the cornice, "whose feeble ray
+scarce spreads an inch around," might as well discuss the proportions of
+the Parthenon as we the true figure and frame of God's universe.
+
+I remember seeing, through Lord Rosse's telescope, one of those nebul�
+which have hitherto appeared like small masses of vapour floating about
+in space. I saw it composed of thousands upon thousands of brilliant
+stars, and the effect to the eye--to mine at least--was as if I had had my
+hand full of diamonds, and suddenly unclosing it, and flinging them
+forth, they were dispersed as from a centre, in a kind of partly
+irregular, partly fan-like form; and I had a strange feeling of suspense
+and amazement while I looked, because they did not change their relative
+position, did not fall--though in act to fall--but seemed fixed in the
+very attitude of being flung forth into space;--it was most wondrous and
+beautiful to see!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+54.
+
+It is pleasant to me to think that Bacon's stupendous intellect believed
+in the moral progress of human societies, because it is my own belief,
+and one that I would not for worlds resign. I indeed believe that each
+human being must here (or hereafter?) work out his own peculiar moral
+life: but also that the whole race has a progressive moral life: just as
+in our solar system every individual planet moves in its own orbit,
+while the whole system moves on together; we know not whither, we know
+not round what centre--"_ma pur si muove!_"
+
+
+55.
+
+Yet he says in another place, with equal wit and sublimity, "Every
+obtaining of a desire hath a _show_ of advancement, as motion in a
+circle hath a _show_ of progression." Perhaps our movement may be
+_spiral_? and every revolution may bring us nearer and nearer to some
+divine centre in which we may be absorbed at last?
+
+
+56.
+
+He refers in this following passage to that theory of the angelic
+existences which we see expressed in ancient symbolic Art, first by
+variation of colour only, and later, by variety of expression and form.
+He says,--"We find, as far as credit is to be given to the celestial
+hierarchy of that supposed Dionysius, the senator of Athens, that the
+first place or degree is given to the Angels of Love, which are called
+Seraphim; the second to the Angels of Light, which are termed Cherubim;
+and the third, and so following, to Thrones, Principalities, and the
+rest (which are all angels of power and ministry); so as the angels of
+knowledge and illumination are placed before the angels of office and
+domination."
+
+--But the Angels of LOVE are first and over all. In other words, we have
+here in due order of precedence, 1. LOVE, 2. KNOWLEDGE, 3. POWER,--the
+angelic Trinity, which, in unity, is our idea of GOD.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CHATEAUBRIAND.
+
+("MEMOIRES D'OUTRE TOMBE." 1851.)
+
+
+57.
+
+Chateaubriand tells us that when his mother and sisters urged him to
+marry, he resisted strongly--he thought it too early; he says, with a
+peculiar na�vet�, "Je ne me sentais aucune qualit� de mari: toutes mes
+illusions �taient vivantes, rien n'�tait �puis� en moi, l'�nergie m�me
+de mon existence avait doubl� par mes courses," &c.
+
+So then the "_existence �puis�_" is to be kept for the wife! "_la vie
+us�e_"--"_la jeunesse abus�e_," is good enough to make a husband!
+Chateaubriand, who in many passages of his book piques himself on his
+morality, seems quite unconscious that he has here given utterance to a
+sentiment the most profoundly immoral, the most fatal to both sexes,
+that even his immoral age had ever the effrontery to set forth.
+
+
+58.
+
+"Il para�t qu'on n'apprend pas � mourir en tuant les autres."
+
+Nor do we learn to suffer by inflicting pain: nothing so patient as
+pity.
+
+
+59.
+
+"Le cynisme des moeurs ram�ne dans la soci�t�, en annihilant le sens
+moral, une sorte de barbares; ces barbares de la civilisation, propres �
+d�truire comme les Goths, n'ont pas la puissance de fonder comme eux;
+ceux-ci �taient les �normes enfants d'une nature vierge; ceux-l� sont
+les avortons monstrueux d'une nature d�prav�e."
+
+We too often make the vulgar mistake that undisciplined or overgrown
+passions are a sign of strength; they are the signs of immaturity, of
+"enormous childhood."--And the distinction (above) is well drawn and
+true. The real savage is that monstrous, malignant, abject thing,
+generated out of the rottenness and ferment of civilisation. And yet
+extremes meet: I remember seeing on the shores of Lake Huron some
+Indians of a distant tribe of Chippawas, who in appearance were just
+like those fearful abortions of humanity which crawl out of the
+darkness, filth, and ignorance of our great towns, just so miserable, so
+stupid, so cruel,--only, perhaps, less _wicked_.
+
+
+60.
+
+Chateaubriand was always comparing himself with Lord Byron--he hints more
+than once, that Lord Byron owed some of his inspiration to the perusal
+of his works--more especially to Ren�e. In this he was altogether
+mistaken.
+
+
+61.
+
+"Une intelligence sup�rieure n'enfante pas le mal sans douleur, parceque
+ce n'est pas son fruit naturel, et qu'elle ne devait pas le porter."
+
+
+62.
+
+Madame de Coeslin (whom he describes as an impersonation of aristocratic
+_morgue_ and all the pretension and prejudices of the _ancien r�gime_),
+"lisant dans un journal la mort de plusieurs rois, elle �ta ses lunettes
+et dit en se mouchant, 'Il y a donc une _�pizootie sur ces b�tes �
+couronne_!"
+
+I once counted among my friends an elderly lady of high rank, who had
+spent the whole of a long life in intimacy with royal and princely
+personages. In three different courts she had filled offices of trust
+and offices of dignity. In referring to her experience she never either
+moralised or generalised; but her scorn of "ces b�tes � couronne," was
+habitually expressed with just such a cool epigrammatic bluntness as
+that of Madame de Coeslin.
+
+
+63.
+
+"L'aristocratie a trois �ges successifs; l'�ge des sup�riorit�s, l'�ge
+des privil�ges, l'�ge des vanit�s; sortie du premier, elle d�g�n�re dans
+le second et s'�teint dans le dernier."
+
+In Germany they are still in the first epoch. In England we seem to have
+arrived at the second. In France they are verging on the third.
+
+
+64.
+
+Chateaubriand says of himself:--
+
+"Dans le premier moment d'une offense je la sens � peine; mais elle se
+grave dans ma m�moire; son souvenir au lieu de d�cro�tre, s'augmente
+avec le temps. Il dort dans mon coeur des mois, des ann�es enti�res,
+puis il se r�veille � la moindre circonstance avec une force nouvelle,
+et ma blessure devient plus vive que le pr�mier jour: mais si je ne
+pardonne point � mes ennemis je ne leur fais aucun mal; je suis
+_rancunier_ et ne suis point _vindicatif_."
+
+A very nice and true distinction in point of feeling and character, yet
+hardly to be expressed in English. We always attach the idea of
+malignity to the word _rancour_, whereas the French words _rancune_,
+_rancunier_, express the relentless without the vengeful or malignant
+spirit.
+
+Such characters make me turn pale, as I have done at sight of a tomb in
+which an offending wretch had been buried alive. There is in them always
+something acute and deep and indomitable in the internal and exciting
+emotion; slow, scrupulous, and timid in the external demonstration.
+Cordelia is such a character.
+
+
+65.
+
+Chateaubriand says of his friend Pelletrie,--"Il n'avait pas pr�cis�ment
+des vices, mais il �tait rong� d'une vermine de petits d�fauts dont on
+ne pouvait l'�purer." I know such a man; and if he had committed a
+murder every morning, and a highway robbery every night,--if he had
+killed his father and eaten him with any possible sauce, he could not
+be more intolerable, more detestable than he is!
+
+
+66.
+
+"Un homme nous prot�ge par ce qu'il vaut; une femme par ce que vous
+valez: voil� pourquoi de ces deux empires l'un est si odieux, l'autre si
+doux."
+
+
+67.
+
+He says of Madame Roland, "Elle avait du caract�re plut�t que du g�nie;
+le premier peut donner le second, le second ne peut donner le premier."
+What does the man mean? this is a mistake surely. What the French call
+_caract�re_ never could give genius, nor genius, _caract�re_. _Au
+reste_, I am not sure that Madame Roland--admirable creature!--had genius;
+but for talent, and _caract�re_--first rate.
+
+
+68.
+
+"Soyons doux si nous voulons �tre regrett�s. La hauteur du g�nie et les
+qualit�s sup�rieures ne sont pleur�es que des anges."
+
+"Veillons bien sur notre caract�re. Songeons que nous pouvons avec un
+attachement profond n'en pas moins empoisonner des jours que nous
+rach�terions au prix de tout notre sang. Quand nos amis sont descendus
+dans la tombe, quels moyens avons nous de r�parer nos torts? nos
+inutiles regrets, nos vains repentirs, sont ils un rem�de aux peines que
+nous leurs avons faites? Ils auraient mieux aim� de nous un sourire
+pendant leur vie que toutes nos larmes apr�s leur mort."
+
+
+69.
+
+"L'amour est si bien la f�licit� qu'il est poursuivi de la chim�re
+d'�tre toujours; il ne veut prononcer que des serments irr�vocables; au
+d�faut de ses joies, il cherche � �terniser ses douleurs; ange tomb�, il
+parle encore le langage qu'il parlait au s�jour incorruptible; son
+esp�rance est de ne cesser jamais. Dans sa double nature et dans sa
+double illusion, ici-bas il pr�tend se perp�tuer par d'immortelles
+pens�es et par des g�n�rations intarissables."
+
+
+70.
+
+Madame d'Houdetot, after the death of Saint Lambert, always before she
+went to bed used to rap three times with her slipper on the floor,
+saying,--"Bon soir, mon ami; bon soir, bon soir!"
+
+So then, she thought of her lover as gone _down_--not _up_?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+BISHOP CUMBERLAND.
+
+BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH IN 1691.
+
+
+71.
+
+Bishop Cumberland founds the law of God, as revealed in the Scriptures,
+upon the general law of nature. He does not attempt to found the laws of
+nature upon the Bible. "We believe," he says, "in the truth of
+Scripture, because it promotes and illustrates the fundamental laws of
+nature in the government of the world."
+
+Then does the Bishop mean here that the Bible is not the WORD nor the
+WILL of God, but the exposition of the WORD and the record of the WILL,
+so far as either could be rendered communicable to human comprehension
+through the medium of human language and intelligence?
+
+There is a striking passage in Bunsen's Hippolytus, which may be
+considered with reference to this opinion of the Bishop.
+
+He (Bunsen) says, that "what relates the history of 'the word of God'
+in his humanity, and in this world, and what records its teachings, and
+warnings, and promises (that is, the Bible?) was mistaken for 'the word
+of God' itself, in its proper sense."
+
+Does he mean that we deem erroneously the collection of writings we call
+the Bible to be "the word of God;" whereas, in fact, it is "the history,
+the record of the word of God?" that is, of all that God has spoken to
+man--in various revelations--through human life--by human deeds?--because
+this is surely a most important and momentous distinction.
+
+
+72.
+
+According to Bishop Cumberland, _benevolence_, in its large sense,--that
+is, a regard for all GOOD, universal and particular,--is the primary law
+of nature; and _justice_ is one form, and a secondary form, of this law:
+a moral virtue, not a law of nature,--if I understand his meaning
+rightly.
+
+Then which would he place _highest_, the law of nature or the moral law?
+
+If you place them in contradistinction, then are we to conclude that the
+law of nature _precedes_ the moral law, but that the moral law
+_supersedes_ the law of nature? Yet no law of nature (as I understand
+the word) _can_ be superseded, though the moral law may be based upon
+it, and in that sense may be _above_ it.
+
+
+73.
+
+In this following passage the Bishop seems to have anticipated what in
+more modern times has been called the "_greatest happiness principle_."
+He says:--
+
+"The good of all rational beings is a complex whole, being nothing but
+the aggregate of good enjoyed by each." "We can only act in our proper
+spheres, labouring to do good, but this labour will be fruitless, or
+rather mischievous, if we do not keep in mind the higher gradations
+which terminate in universal benevolence. Thus, no man must seek his own
+pleasure or advantage otherwise than as his family permits; or provide
+for his family to the detriment of his country; or promote the good of
+his country at the expense of mankind; or serve mankind, if it were
+possible, without regard to the majesty of God."
+
+
+74.
+
+Paley deems the recognition of a future state so essential that he even
+makes the definition of virtue to consist in this, that it is good
+performed for the sake of everlasting happiness. That is to say, he
+makes it a sort of bargain between God and man, a contract, or a
+covenant, instead of that obedience to a primal law, from which if we
+stray in will, we do so at the necessary expense of our happiness.
+Bishop Cumberland has no reference to this doctrine of Paley's;--seems,
+indeed, to set it aside altogether, as contrary to the essence of
+virtue.
+
+
+On the whole, this good Bishop appears to have treated ethics not as an
+ecclesiastic, but as Bacon treated natural philosophy;--the pervading
+spirit is the perpetual appeal to experience, and not to authority.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY.
+
+1852.
+
+
+75.
+
+Comte makes out three elements of progress, "les philosophes, les
+prol�taires, et les femmes;"--types of intellect, material activity, and
+sentiment.
+
+From Woman, he says, is to proceed the preponderance of the social
+duties and affections over egotism and ambition. (La pr�pond�rance de la
+sociabilit� sur la personalit�.) He adds:--"Ce sexe est certainement
+sup�rieure au notre quant � l'attribut le plus fondamentale de l'esp�ce
+humaine, la tendence de faire pr�valoir la _sociabilit�_ sur la_
+personalit�_."
+
+
+76.
+
+"S'il ne fallait _qu'aimer_ comme dans l'Utopie Chr�tienne, sur une vie
+future affranchie de toute �go�ste necessit� mat�rielle, la femme
+r�gnerait; mais il faut surtout _agir_ et _penser_ pour combattre contre
+les rigueurs de notre vraie destin�e: d�s-lors l'homme doit commander
+malgr� sa moindre moralit�."
+
+"Malgr�?" Sometimes man commands _because_ of the "moindre moralit�:"--it
+spares much time in scruples.
+
+
+77.
+
+"L'influence feminine devient l'auxiliaire indispensable de tout pouvoir
+spirituel, comme le moyen �ge l'a tant montr�."
+
+
+"Au moyen �ge la Catholicisme occidentale �baucha la syst�matisation de
+la puissance morale en superposant � l'ordre pratique une libre autorit�
+spirituelle, habituellement second�e par les femmes."
+
+
+78.
+
+"La Force, proprement dite, c'est ce qui r�git les actes, sans r�gler
+les volont�s."
+
+Herein lies a distinction between Force and Power; for Power, properly
+so called, does both.
+
+
+79.
+
+He insists throughout on the predominance of _sociabilit�_ over
+_personalit�_--and what is that but the Christian law philosophised?
+and again, "Il n'y a de directement morale dans notre nature que
+l'amour." Where did he get this, if not in the Epistle of St. John?
+
+"Celui qui se croirait ind�pendant des autres dans ses affections, ses
+pens�es, ou ses actes, ne pourrait m�me formuler un tel blasph�me sans
+une contradiction imm�diate--puisque son langage m�me ne lui appartient
+pas."
+
+
+80.
+
+He says that if the women regret the age of chivalry, it is not for the
+external homage then paid to them, but because "l'�l�ment le plus moral
+de l'humanit�" (woman, to wit), "doit pr�f�rer � tout autre le seul
+r�gime qui �rigea directement en principe la pr�ponderance de la morale
+sur la politique. Si elles regrettent leur douce influence ant�rieure,
+c'est surtout comme s'effa�ant aujourd'hui sous un grossier �go�sme.
+
+"Leurs voeux spontan�s seconderont toujours les efforts directes des
+philosophes et des prol�taires pour transformer enfin les d�bats
+politiques en transactions sociales en faisant pr�valoir les _d�voirs_
+sur les _droits_."
+
+This is admirable; for we are all inclined to think more about our
+_rights_ (and our wrongs too) than about our _duties_.
+
+
+81.
+
+"Si donc aimer nous satisfait mieux que d'�tre aim�, cela constate la
+sup�riorit� naturelle des affections d�sint�ress�es."
+
+Meaning--what is true--that the love we bear to another, much more fills
+the whole soul and is more a possession of an actuating principle, than
+the love of another for us:--but both are necessary to the complement of
+our moral life. The first is as the air we breathe; the last is as our
+daily bread.
+
+
+82.
+
+He says that the only true and firm friendship is that between man and
+woman, because it is the only affection "exempte de toute concurrence
+actuelle ou possible."
+
+In this I am inclined to agree with him, and to regret that our
+conventional morality or immorality, and the too early severance of the
+two sexes in education, place men and women in such a relation to each
+other, socially, as to render such friendships difficult and rare.
+
+
+83.
+
+"En v�rit� l'amour ne saurait �tre profond, s'il n'est pas pur."
+
+Christianity, he says, "a favoris� l'essor de la v�ritable passion,
+tandisque le polyth�isme consacrait surtout les app�tits."
+
+He is speaking here as teacher, philosopher, and legislator, not as poet
+or sentimentalist. Perhaps it will come to be recognised sooner or
+later, that what people are pleased to call the _romance_ of life is
+founded on the deepest and most immutable laws of our being, and that
+any system of ecclesiastical polity, or civil legislation, or moral
+philosophy, which takes no account of the primal instincts and
+affections, which are the springs of life and on which God made the
+continuation of his world to depend, _must_ of necessity fail.
+
+I have just read a volume of Psychological Essays by one of the most
+celebrated of living surgeons, and closed the book with a feeling of
+amazement: a long life spent in physiological experiences, dissecting
+dead bodies, and mending broken bones, has then led him, at last, to
+some of the most obvious, most commonly known facts in mental
+philosophy? So some of our profound politicians, after a long life spent
+in governing and reforming men, may arrive, _at last_, at some of the
+commonest facts in social morals.
+
+
+84.
+
+He contends for the indissolubility of marriage, and against divorce;
+and he thinks that education should be in the hands of women to the age
+of ten or twelve, "Afin que le coeur y pr�vale toujours sur l'esprit:"
+all very excellent principles, but supposing a _hypothetical_ social and
+moral state, from which we are as yet far removed. What he says,
+however, of the indissolubility of the marriage bond is so beautiful and
+eloquent, and so in accordance with my own moral theories, that I cannot
+help extracting it from a mass of heavy and sometimes unintelligible
+matter. He begins by laying it down as a principle that the
+"am�lioration morale de l'homme constitue la principale mission de la
+femme," and that "une telle destination indique aussit�t que le lien
+conjugal doit �tre unique et indissoluble, afin que les relations
+domestiques puissent acqu�rir la pl�nitude et la fixit� qu'exige leur
+efficacit� morale." This, however, supposes the holiest and completest
+of all bonds to be sealed on terms of equality, not that the latter end
+of a man's life, _la vie us�e et la jeunesse �puis�e_, are to be tacked
+on to the beginning of a woman's fresh and innocent existence; for then
+influences are reversed, and instead of the amelioration of the
+masculine, we have the demoralisation of the feminine, nature. He
+supposes the possibility of circumstances which demand a personal
+separation, but even then _sans permettre un nouveau mariage_. In such a
+case his religion imposes on the innocent victim (whether man or woman)
+"une chastet� compatible d'ailleurs avec la plus profonde tendresse. Si
+cette condition lui semble rigoureuse, il doit l'accepter, d'abord, en
+vue de l'ordre g�n�ral; puis, comme une juste cons�quence de son erreur
+primitive."
+
+There would be much to say upon all this, if it were worth while to
+discuss a theory which it is not possible to reduce to general practice.
+We cannot imagine the possibility of a second marriage where the first,
+though perhaps unhappy or early ruptured, has been, not a personal
+relation only, but an interfusion of our moral being,--of the deepest
+impulses of life--with those of another; _these_ we cannot have a second
+time to surrender to a second object;--but this might be left to Nature
+and her holy instincts to settle. However, he goes on in a strain of
+eloquence and dignity, quite unusual with him, to this effect:--"Ce n'est
+que par l'assurance d'une inalt�rable perpetuit� que les liens intimes
+peuvent acqu�rir la consistance et la pl�nitude indispensable � leur
+efficacit� morale. La plus m�prisable des sectes �ph�m�res que suscita
+l'anarchie moderne (the Mormons, for instance?) me parait �tre celle qui
+voulut �riger l'inconstance en condition de bonheur.".... "Entre deux
+�tres aussi complexes et aussi divers que l'homme et la femme, ce n'est
+pas trop de toute la vie pour se bien conna�tre et s'aimer dignement.
+Loin de taxer d'illusion la haute id�e que deux vrais �poux se forment
+souvent l'un de l'autre, je l'ai presque toujours attribu�e �
+l'appr�ciation plus profonde que procure seule une pleine intimit�, que
+d'ailleurs d�veloppe des qualit�s inconnues aux indiff�rents. On doit
+m�me regarder comme tr�s-honorable pour notre esp�ce, cette grande
+estime que ses membres s'inspirent mutuellement quand ils s'�tudient
+beaucoup. _Car la haine et l'indiff�rence m�riteraient seules le
+reproche d'aveuglement qu'une appr�ciation superficielle applique �
+l'amour._ Il faut donc juger pleinement conforme � la nature humaine
+l'institution qui prolonge au-del� du tombeau l'indentification de deux
+dignes �poux."
+
+He lays down as one of the primal instincts of human kind "_l'homme doit
+nourrir la femme_." This may have been, as he says, a universal
+_instinct_; perhaps it ought to be one of our social ordinations;
+perhaps it may be so at some future time; but we know that it is not a
+present fact; that the woman must in many cases maintain herself or
+perish, and she asks nothing more than to be allowed to do so.
+
+However, I agree with Comte that the position of a woman, enriched and
+independent by her own labour, is anomalous and seldom happy. It is a
+remark I have heard somewhere, and it appears to me true, that there
+exists no being so hard, so keen, so calculating, so unscrupulous, so
+merciless in money matters as the wife of a Parisian shopkeeper, where
+she holds the purse and manages the concern, as is generally the case.
+
+
+85.
+
+Here is a passage wherein he attacks that egotism which with many good
+people enters so largely into the notion of another world:--which Paley
+inculcated, and which Coleridge ridiculed, when he spoke of "_this_
+worldliness," and the "_other_ worldliness."
+
+"La sagesse sacerdotale, digne organe de l'instinct public, y avait
+intimement rattach� les principales obligations sociales � titre de
+condition indispensable du salut personnel: mais la r�compense infinie
+promise ainsi � tous les sacrifices ne pouvait jamais permettre une
+affection pleinement d�sinteress�e."
+
+This perpetual iteration of a system of future reward and punishment, as
+a principle of our religion and a motive of action, has in some sort
+demoralised Christianity; especially in minds where love is not a chief
+element, and which do not love Christ for his love's sake, but for his
+power's sake, and because judgment and punishment are supposed to be in
+his hand.
+
+
+86.
+
+Putting the test of revelation out of the question, and dealing with the
+philosopher philosophically, the best refutation of Comte's system is
+contained in the following criticism: it seems to me final.
+
+"In limiting religion to the relations in which we stand to each other,
+and towards _Humanity_, Comte omits one very important consideration.
+Even upon his own showing, this _Humanity_ can only be the _supreme
+being_ of _our_ planet, it cannot be the _Supreme Being_ of the
+Universe. Now, although in this our terrestrial sojourn, all we can
+distinctly know must be limited to the sphere of our planet; yet,
+standing on this ball and looking forth into infinitude, we know that it
+is but an atom of the infinitude, and that the humanity we worship
+_here_, cannot extend its dominion _there_. If our relations to humanity
+may be systematised into a cultus, and made a religion as they have
+formerly been made a morality, and if the whole of our practical
+priesthood be limited to this religion, there will, nevertheless remain
+for us, outlying this terrestrial sphere,--the sphere of the infinite, in
+which our thoughts must wander, and our emotions will follow our
+thoughts; so that besides the religion of humanity there must ever be a
+religion of the Universe. Or, to bring this conception within ordinary
+language, there must ever remain the old distinctions between _religion_
+and _morality_, our relations to God, and our relations towards man. The
+only difference being, that in the _old_ theology moral precepts were
+inculcated with a view to a celestial habitat; in the _new_, the moral
+precepts are inculcated with a view to the general progress of the
+race."--_Westminster Review._
+
+
+In fact the doctrine of the non-plurality of worlds as recently set
+forth by an eminent professor and D. D. would exactly harmonise with
+Comte's "Culte du Positif," as not merely limiting our sympathies to
+this one form of intellectual being, but our religious notions to this
+one habitable orb.
+
+But to those who take other views, the argument above contains the
+_philosophical_ objection to Comte's _system_, as such; and I repeat,
+that it seems to me unanswerable; but there are excellent things in his
+theory, notwithstanding;--things that make us pause and think. In some
+parts it is like Christianity with Christ, as a _personalit�_, omitted.
+For Christ the humanised divine, he substitutes an abstract deified
+humanity. 1854.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+GOETHE.
+
+(DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT.)
+
+
+87.
+
+"As a man embraces the determination to become a soldier and go to the
+wars, bravely resolved to bear dangers, and difficulties, and wounds,
+and death itself, but at the same time never anticipating the particular
+form in which those evils may surprise us in an extremely unpleasant
+manner;--just so we rush into authorship!"
+
+
+88.
+
+Goethe says of Lavater, "that the conception of humanity which had been
+formed in himself, and in his own humanity, was so akin to the living
+image of Christ, that it was impossible for him to conceive how a man
+could live and breathe without being a Christian. He had, so to speak, a
+physical affinity with Christianity; it was to him a necessity, not
+only morally, but from organisation."
+
+Lavater's individual feeling was, perhaps, but an anticipation of that
+which may become general, universal. As we rise in the scale of being,
+as we become more gentle, spiritualised, refined, and intelligent, will
+not our "physical affinity" with the religion of Christ become more and
+more apparent, till it is less a doctrine than a principle of life? So
+its Divine Author knew, who prepared it for us, and is preparing and
+moulding us through progressive improvement to comprehend and receive
+it.
+
+
+89.
+
+Goethe speaks of "polishing up life with the varnish of fiction;" the
+artistic turn of the man's mind showed itself in this love of creating
+an effect in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. But what can
+fiction--what can poetry do for life, but present some one or two out of
+the multitudinous aspects of that grand, beautiful, terrible, and
+infinite mystery? or by _life_, does he mean here the mere external
+forms of society?--for it is not clear.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+HAZLITT'S "LIBER AMORIS."
+
+1827.
+
+
+90.
+
+Is love, like faith, ennobled through its own depth and fervour and
+sincerity? or is it ennobled through the nobility, and degraded through
+the degradation of its object? Is it with love as with worship? Is it a
+_religion_, and holy when the object is pure and good? Is it a
+_superstition_, and unholy when the object is impure and unworthy?
+
+
+Of all the histories I have read of the aberrations of human passion,
+nothing ever so struck me with a sort of amazed and painful pity as
+Hazlitt's "Liber Amoris." The man was in love with a servant girl, who
+in the eyes of others possessed no particular charms of mind or person,
+yet did the mighty love of this strong, masculine, and gifted being,
+lift her into a sort of goddess-ship; and make his idolatry in its
+intense earnestness and reality assume something of the sublimity of an
+act of faith, and in its expression take a flight equal to anything that
+poetry or fiction have left us. It was all so terribly real, he sued
+with such a vehemence, he suffered with such resistance, that the
+powerful intellect reeled, tempest-tost, and might have foundered but
+for the gift of expression. He might have said like Tasso--like Goethe
+rather--"Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen was ich leide!" And this faculty of
+utterance, eloquent utterance, was perhaps the only thing which saved
+life, or reason, or both. In such moods of passion, the poor uneducated
+man, dumb in the midst of the strife and the storm, unable to comprehend
+his intolerable pain or make it comprehended, throws himself in a blind
+fury on the cause of his torture, or hangs himself in his neckcloth.
+
+
+91.
+
+Hazlitt takes up his pen, dips it in fire and thus he writes:--
+
+
+"Perfect love has this advantage in it, that it leaves the possessor of
+it nothing farther to desire. There is one object (at least), in which
+the soul finds absolute content;--for which it seeks to live or dares to
+die. The heart has, as it were, filled up the moulds of the
+imagination; the truth of passion keeps pace with, and outvies, the
+extravagance of mere language. There are no words so fine, no flattery
+so soft, that there is not a sentiment beyond them that it is impossible
+to express, at the bottom of the heart where true love is. What idle
+sounds the common phrases _adorable creature_, _divinity_, _angel_, are!
+What a proud reflection it is to have a feeling answering to all these,
+rooted in the breast, unalterable, unutterable, to which all other
+feelings are light and vain! Perfect love reposes on the object of its
+choice, like the halcyon on the wave, and the air of heaven is around
+it!"
+
+
+92.
+
+"She stood (while I pleaded my cause before her with all the earnestness
+and fondness in the world) with the tears trickling from her eye-lashes,
+her head drooping, her attitude fixed, with the finest expression that
+ever was seen of mixed regret, pity, and stubborn resolution, but
+without speaking a word--without altering a feature. _It was like a
+petrifaction of a human face in the softest moment of passion._"
+
+
+93.
+
+"Shall I not love her," he exclaims, "for herself alone, in spite of
+fickleness and folly? to love her for her regard for me, is not to love
+her but myself. She has robbed me of herself, shall she also rob me of
+my love of her? did I not live on her smile? is it less sweet because it
+is withdrawn from me? Did I not adore her every grace? and does she bend
+less enchantingly because she has turned from me to another? Is my love
+then in the power of fortune or of her caprice? No, I will have it
+lasting as it is pure; and I will make a goddess of her, and build a
+temple to her in my heart, and worship her on indestructible altars, and
+raise statues to her, and my homage shall be unblemished as her
+unrivalled symmetry of form. And when that fails, the memory of it shall
+survive, and my bosom shall be proof to scorn as hers has been to pity;
+and I will pursue her with an unrelenting love, and sue to be her slave
+and tend her steps without notice, and without reward; and serve her
+living, and mourn for her when dead; and thus my love will have shown
+itself superior to her hate, and I shall triumph and then die. This is
+my idea of the only true and heroic love, and such is mine for her."
+
+
+Hazlitt, when he wrote all this, seemed to himself full of high and calm
+resolve. The hand did not fail, the pen did not stagger over the paper
+in a formless scrawl, yet the brain was reeling like a tower in an
+earthquake. "Passion," as it has been well said, "when in a state of
+solemn and omnipotent vehemence, always appears to be calmness to him
+whom it domineers;" not unfrequently to others also, as the tide at its
+highest flood looks tranquil, and "neither way inclines."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE NIGHTINGALE.
+
+
+94.
+
+Reading the Life and Letters of Francis Horner, in the midst of a
+correspondence about Statistics and Bullion, and Political Economy, and
+the Balance of Parties, I came upon the following exquisite passage in a
+letter to his friend Mrs. Spencer:--
+
+"I was amused by your interrogatory to me about the Nightingale's note.
+You meant to put me in a dilemma with my politics on one side and my
+gallantry on the other. Of course you consider it as a plaintive note,
+and you were in hopes that no idolater of Charles Fox would venture to
+agree with that opinion. In this difficulty I must make the best escape
+I can by saying, that it seems to me neither cheerful nor
+melancholy,--but always according to the circumstances in which you hear
+it, the scenery, your own temper of mind, and so on. I settled it so
+with myself early in this month, when I heard them every night and all
+day long at Wells. In daylight, when all the other birds are in active
+concert, the Nightingale only strikes you as the most active, emulous,
+and successful of the whole band. At night, especially if it is a calm
+one, with light enough to give you a wide indistinct view, the solitary
+music of this bird takes quite another character, from all the
+associations of the scene, from the languor one feels at the close of
+the day, and from the stillness of spirits and elevation of mind which
+comes upon one when walking out at that time. But it is not always
+so--different circumstances will vary in every possible way the effect.
+Will the Nightingale's note sound alike to the man who is going on an
+adventure to meet his mistress (supposing he heeds it at all), and when
+he loiters along upon his return? The last time I heard the Nightingale
+it was an experiment of another sort. It was after a thunderstorm in a
+mild night, while there was silent lightning opening every few minutes,
+first on one side of the heavens then on the other. The careless little
+fellow was piping away in the midst of all this terror. To _me_, there
+was no melancholy in his note, but a sort of sublimity; yet it was the
+same song which I had heard in the morning, and which then seemed
+nothing but bustle."
+
+And in the same spirit Portia moralises:--
+
+   The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
+   When every goose is cackling, would be thought
+   No better a musician than the wren.
+   How many things by season, seasoned are
+   To their right praise and true perfection!
+
+Nor will Coleridge allow the song of the nightingale to be always
+plaintive,--"most musical, most _melancholy_;" he defies the epithet
+though it be Milton's.
+
+               'Tis the _merry_ nightingale,
+   That crowds and hurries and precipitates
+   With thick fast warble his delicious notes,
+   As he were fearful that an April night
+   Would be too short for him to utter forth
+   His love-chaunt, and disburthen his full soul
+   Of all its music.
+
+As a poetical commentary on these beautiful passages, every reader of
+Joanna Baillie will remember the night scene in De Montfort, where the
+cry of the Owl suggests such different feelings and associations to the
+two men who listen to it, under such different circumstances. To De
+Montfort it is the screech-owl, foreboding death and horror,--and he
+stands and shudders at the "instinctive wailing." To Rezenvelt it is the
+sound which recalls his boyish days, when he merrily mimicked the
+night-bird till it returned him cry for cry,--and he pauses to listen
+with a fanciful delight.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THACKERAY'S LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH HUMORISTS
+
+(1833.)
+
+
+95.
+
+A Lecture should not read like an essay; and, therefore, it surprises me
+that these lectures so carefully prepared, so skilfully adapted to meet
+the requirements of oral delivery, should be such agreeable reading. As
+_lectures_, they wanted only a little more point, and emphasis and
+animation on the part of the speaker: as _essays_, they atone in
+eloquence and earnestness for what they want in finish and purity of
+style.
+
+Genius and sunshine have this in common that they are the two most
+precious gifts of heaven to earth, and are dispensed equally to the just
+and the unjust. What struck me most in these lectures, when I heard
+them, (and it strikes me now in turning over the written pages,) is
+this: we deal here with writers and artists, yet the purpose, from
+beginning to end, is not artistic nor critical, but moral. Thackeray
+tells us himself that he has not assembled his hearers to bring them
+better acquainted with the writings of these writers, or to illustrate
+the wit of these wits, or to enhance the humour of these humourists;--no;
+but to deal justice on the men as _men_--to tell us how _they_ lived, and
+loved, suffered and made suffer, who still have power to pain or to
+please; to settle _their_ claims to our praise or blame, our love or
+hate, whose right to fame was settled long ago, and remains undisputed.
+This is his purpose. Thus then he has laid down and acted on the
+principle that "morals have something to do with art;" that there is a
+moral account to be settled with men of genius; that the power and the
+right remains with us to do justice on those who being dead yet rule our
+spirits from their urns; to try them by a standard which perhaps neither
+themselves, nor those around them, would have admitted. Did Swift when
+he bullied men, lampooned women, trampled over decency and humanity,
+flung round him filth and fire, did he anticipate the time when before a
+company of intellectual men, and thinking, feeling women, in both
+hemispheres, he should be called up to judgment, hands bound,
+tongue-tied? Where be now his gibes? and where his terrors? Thackeray
+turns him forth, a spectacle, a lesson, a warning; probes the lacerated
+self-love, holds up to scorn, or pity more intolerable, the miserable
+egotism, the half-distempered brain. O Stella! O Vanessa! are you not
+avenged?
+
+Then Sterne--how he takes to pieces his feigned originality, his feigned
+benevolence, his feigned misanthropy--all feigned!--the licentious parson,
+the trader in sentiment, the fashionable lion of his day, the man
+without a heart for those who loved him, without a conscience for those
+who trusted him! yet the same man who gave us the pathos of "Le Fevre,"
+and the humours of "Uncle Toby!" Sad is it? ungrateful is it? ungracious
+is it?--well, it cannot be helped; you cannot stifle the conscience of
+humanity. You might as well exclaim against any natural result of any
+natural law. Fancy a hundred years hence some brave, honest,
+human-hearted Thackeray standing up to discourse before our
+great-great-grandchildren in the same spirit, with the same stern truth,
+on the wits, and the poets and the artists of the present time! Hard is
+your fate, O ye men and women of genius! very hard and pitiful, if ye
+must be subjected to the scalpel of such a dissector! You, gifted
+sinner, whoever you may be, walking among us now in all the impunity of
+conventional forbearance, dealing in oracles and sentimentalisms,
+performing great things, teaching good things, you are set up as one of
+the lights of the world:--Lo! another time comes; the torch is taken out
+of your hand, and held up to your face. What! is it a mask, and not a
+face? "Off, off ye lendings!" O God! how much wiser, as well as better,
+not to study how to _seem_, but how to _be_! How much wiser and better,
+not to have to shudder before the truth as it oozes out from a thousand
+unguessed, unguarded apertures, staining your lawn or your ermine; not
+to have to tremble at the thought of that future Thackeray, who "shall
+pluck out the heart of your mystery," and shall anatomise you, and
+deliver lectures upon you, to illustrate the standard of morals and
+manners in Queen Victoria's reign!
+
+In these lectures, some fine and feeling and discriminative passages on
+character, make amends for certain offences and inconsistencies in the
+novels; I mean especially in regard to the female portraits. No woman
+resents his Rebecca--inimitable Becky!--no woman but feels and
+acknowledges with a shiver the completeness of that wonderful and
+finished artistic creation; but every woman resents the selfish inane
+Amelia, and would be inclined to quote and to apply the author's own
+words when speaking of 'Tom Jones:'--"I can't say that I think Amelia a
+virtuous character. I can't say but I think Mr. Thackeray's evident
+liking and admiration for his Amelia shows that the great humourist's
+moral sense was blunted by his life, and that here in art and ethics
+there is a great error. If it be right to have a heroine whom we are to
+admire, let us take care at least that she is admirable."
+
+Laura, in 'Pendennis,' is a yet more fatal mistake. She is drawn with
+every generous feeling, every good gift. We do not complain that she
+loves that poor creature Pendennis, for she loved him in her childhood.
+She grew up with that love in her heart; it came between her and the
+perception of his faults; it is a necessity indivisible from her nature.
+Hallowed, through its constancy, therein alone would lie its best
+excuse, its beauty and its truth. But Laura, faithless to that first
+affection; Laura, waked up to the appreciation of a far more manly and
+noble nature, in love with Warrington, and then going back to Pendennis,
+and marrying _him_! Such infirmity might be true of some women, but not
+of such a woman as Laura; we resent the inconsistency, the indelicacy of
+the portrait.
+
+And then Lady Castlewood,--so evidently a favourite of the author, what
+shall we say of her? The virtuous woman, _par excellence_, who "never
+sins and never forgives," who never resents, nor relents, nor repents;
+the mother, who is the rival of her daughter; the mother, who for years
+is the _confidante_ of a man's delirious passion for her own child, and
+then consoles him by marrying him herself! O Mr. Thackeray! this will
+never do! such women _may_ exist, but to hold them up as examples of
+excellence, and fit objects of our best sympathies, is a fault, and
+proves a low standard in ethics and in art. "When an author presents to
+us a heroine whom we are called upon to admire, let him at least take
+care that she is admirable." If in these, and in some other instances,
+Thackeray has given us cause of offence, in the lectures we may thank
+him for some amends: he has shown us what he conceives true womanhood
+and true manliness ought to be; so with this expression of gratitude,
+and a far deeper debt of gratitude left unexpressed, I close his book,
+and say, good night!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Notes on Art.
+
+
+96.
+
+Sometimes, in thoughtful moments, I am struck by those beautiful
+analogies between things apparently dissimilar--those awful
+approximations between things apparently far asunder--which many people
+would call fanciful and imaginary, but they seem to bring all God's
+creation, spiritual and material, into one comprehensive whole; they
+give me, thus associated, a glimpse, a perception of that overwhelming
+unity which we call the universe, the multitudinous ONE.
+
+Thus the principle of the highest ideal in art, as conceived by the
+Greeks, and unsurpassed in its purity and beauty, lay in considering
+well the characteristics which distinguish the _human_ form from the
+brute form; and then, in rendering the human form, the first aim was to
+soften down, or, if possible, throw out wholly, those characteristics
+which belong to the brute nature, or are common to the brute and the
+man; and the next, to bring into prominence and even enlarge the
+proportions of those manifestations of forms which distinguish humanity;
+till, at last, the _human_ merged into the _divine_, and the God in
+look, in limb, in feature, stood revealed.
+
+Let us now suppose this broad principle which the Greeks applied to
+form, ethically carried out, and made the basis of all education--the
+training of men as a race. Suppose we started with the general axiom
+that all propensities which we have in common with the lower animals are
+to be kept subordinate, and so far as is consistent with the truth of
+nature refined away; and that all the qualities which elevate, all the
+aspirations which ally us with the spiritual, are to be cultivated and
+rendered more and more prominent, till at last the human being, in
+faculties as well as form, approaches the God-like--I only
+say--suppose?----
+
+Again: it has been said of natural philosophy (Zoology) that in order to
+make any real progress in the science, as such, we must more and more
+disregard _differences_, and more and more attend to the obscured but
+essential conditions which are revealed in _resemblances_, in the
+constant and similar relations of primitive structure. Now if the same
+principle were carried out in theology, in morals, in art, as well as in
+science, should we not come nearer to the essential truth in _all_?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+97.
+
+"There is an instinctive sense of propriety and reality in every mind;
+and it is not true, as some great authority has said, that in art we are
+satisfied with contemplating the work without thinking of the artist. On
+the contrary, the artist himself is one great object in the work. It is
+as embodying the energies and excellences of the human mind, as
+exhibiting the efforts of genius, as symbolising high feeling, that we
+most value the creations of art; without design the representations of
+art are merely fantastical, and without the thought of a design acting
+upon fixed principles in accordance with a high standard of goodness and
+truth, half the charm of design is lost."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+98.
+
+"Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture, and
+music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It
+is, therefore, the power of humanising nature, of infusing the thoughts
+and passions of man into everything which is the object of his
+contemplation. Colour, form, motion, sound, are the elements which it
+combines, and it stamps them into unity in the mould of a _moral_ idea."
+
+This is Coleridge's definition:--Art then is nature, _humanised_; and in
+proportion as humanity is elevated by the interfusion into our life of
+noble aims and pure affections will art be spiritualised and moralised.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+99.
+
+If faith has elevated art, superstition has everywhere debased it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+100.
+
+Goethe observes that there is no patriotic art and no patriotic
+science--that both are universal.
+
+There is, however, _national_ art, but not _national_ science: we say
+"national art," "natural science."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+101.
+
+"Verse is in itself music, and the natural symbol of that union of
+passion with thought and pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all
+poetry as contradistinguished from history civil or
+natural."--_Coleridge._
+
+In the arts of design, colour is to form what verse is to prose--a more
+harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+102.
+
+Subjects and representations in art not elevated nor interesting in
+themselves, become instructive and interesting to higher minds from the
+_manner_ in which they have been treated; perhaps because they have
+passed through the medium of a higher mind in taking form.
+
+This is one reason, though we are not always conscious of it, that the
+Dutch pictures of common and vulgar life give us a pleasure apart from
+their wonderful finish and truth of detail. In the mind of the artist
+there must have been the power to throw himself into a sphere _above_
+what he represents. Adrian Brouwer, for instance, must have been
+something far better than a sot; Ostade something higher than a boor;
+though the habits of both led them into companionship with sots and
+boors. In the most farcical pictures of Jan Steen there is a depth of
+feeling and observation which remind me of the humour of Goldsmith; and
+Teniers, we know, was in his habits a refined gentleman; the brilliant
+elegance of his pencil contrasting with the grotesque vulgarity of his
+subjects. To a thinking mind, some of these Dutch pictures of character
+are full of material for thought, pathetic even where least sympathetic:
+no doubt, because of a latent sympathy with the artist, apart from his
+subject.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+103.
+
+Coleridge says,--"Every human feeling is greater and larger than the
+exciting cause." (A philosophical way of putting Rochefoucauld's neatly
+expressed apophthegm: "Nous ne sommes jamais ni si heureux ni si
+malheureux que nous l'imaginons.") "A proof," he proceeds, "that man is
+designed for a higher state of existence; and this is deeply implied in
+music, in which there is always something more and beyond the immediate
+expression."
+
+But not music only, every production of art ought to excite emotions
+greater and thoughts larger than itself. Thoughts and emotions which
+never perhaps were in the mind of the artist, never were anticipated,
+never were intended by him--may be strongly suggested by his work. This
+is an important part of the morals of art, which we must never lose
+sight of. Art is not only for pleasure and profit, but for good and for
+evil.
+
+Goethe (in the _Dichtung und Wahrheit_) describes the reception of Marie
+Antoinette at Strasbourg, where she passed the frontier to enter her new
+kingdom. She was then a lovely girl of sixteen. He relates that on
+visiting before her arrival the reception room on the bridge over the
+Rhine, where her German attendants were to deliver her into the hands of
+the French authorities, he found the walls hung with tapestries
+representing the ominous story of Jason and Medea--of all the marriages
+on record the most fearful, the most tragic in its consequences. "What!"
+he exclaims, his poetical imagination struck with the want of moral
+harmony, "was there among these French architects and decorators no man
+who could perceive that pictures represent things,--that they have a
+meaning in themselves,--that they can impress sense and feeling,--that
+they can awaken presentiments of good or evil?" But, as he tells us, his
+exclamations of horror were met by the mockery of his French companions,
+who assured him that it was not everybody's concern to look for
+significance in pictures.
+
+These self-same tapestries of the story of Jason and Medea were after
+the Restoration presented by Louis XVIII. to George IV., and at present
+they line the walls of the Ball-room in Windsor Castle. We might repeat,
+with some reason, the question of Goethe; for if pictures have a
+significance, and speak to the imagination, what has the tragedy of
+Jason and Medea to do in a ball-room?
+
+
+Goethe, who thus laid down the principle that works of art speak to the
+feelings and the conscience, and can awaken associations tending to good
+and evil, by some strange inconsistency places art and artists out of
+the sphere of morals. He speaks somewhere with contempt and ridicule of
+those who take their conscience and their morality with them to an opera
+or a picture gallery. Yet surely he is wrong. Why should we not? Are our
+conscience and our morals like articles of dress which we can take off
+and put on again as we fancy it convenient or expedient?--shut up in a
+drawer and leave behind us when we visit a theatre or a gallery of art?
+or are they not rather a part of ourselves--our very life--to graduate the
+worth, to fix the standard of all that mingles with our life? The idea
+that what we call _taste_ in art has something quite distinctive from
+conscience, is one cause that the popular notions concerning the
+productions of art are abandoned to such confusion and uncertainty; that
+simple people regard _taste_ as something forensic, something to be
+learned, as they would learn a language, and mastered by a study of
+rules and a dictionary of epithets; and they look up to a professor of
+taste, just as they would look up to a professor of Greek or of Hebrew.
+Either they listen to judgments lightly and confidently promulgated with
+a sort of puzzled faith and a surrender of their own moral sense, which
+are pitiable; as if art also had its infallible church and its hierarchy
+of dictators!--or they fly into the opposite extreme, and seeing
+themselves deceived and misled, fall away into strange heresies. All
+from ignorance of a few laws simple in their form, yet infinite in their
+application;--_natural_ laws we must call them, though here applied to
+art.
+
+In my younger days I have known men conspicuous for their want of
+elevated principle, and for their dissipated habits, held up as arbiters
+and judges of art; but it was to them only another form of epicurism and
+self-indulgence; and I have seen them led into such absurd and fatal
+mistakes for want of the power to distinguish and to generalise, that I
+have despised their judgment, and have come to the conclusion that a
+really high standard of taste and a low standard of morals are
+incompatible with each other.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+104.
+
+"The fact of the highest artistic genius having manifested itself in a
+polytheistic age, and among a people whose moral views were essentially
+degraded, has, we think, fostered the erroneous notion that the sphere
+of art has no connection with that of morality. The Greeks, with
+penetrative insight, dilated the essential characteristics of man's
+organism as a vehicle of superior intelligence, while their intense
+sympathy with physical beauty made them alive to its most subtle
+manifestations; and reproducing their impressions through the medium of
+art, they have given birth to models of the human form, which reveal its
+highest possibilities, and the excellence of which depends upon their
+being individual expressions of ideal truth. Thus, too, in their
+descriptions of nature, instead of multiplying insignificant details,
+they seized instinctively upon the characteristic features of her
+varying aspects, and not unfrequently embodied a finished picture in one
+comprehensive and harmonious word. In association with their marvellous
+genius, however, we find a cruelty, a treachery, and a licence which
+would be revolting if it were not for the historical interest which
+attaches to every genuine record of a bygone age. Their low moral
+standard cannot excite surprise when we consider the debasing tendency
+of their worship, the objects of their adoration being nothing more than
+their own degraded passions invested with some of the attributes of
+deity. Now, among the modifications of thought introduced by
+Christianity, there is perhaps none more pregnant with important results
+than the harmony which it has established between religion and
+morality. The great law of right and wrong has acquired a sacred
+character, when viewed as an expression of the divine will; it takes its
+rank among the eternal verities, and to ignore it in our delineations of
+life, or to represent sin otherwise than as treason against the supreme
+ruler, is to retain in modern civilisation one of the degrading elements
+of heathenism. Conscience is as great a fact of our inner life as the
+sense of beauty, and the harmonious action of both these instinctive
+principles is essential to the highest enjoyment of art, for any
+internal dissonance disturbs the repose of the mind, and thereby
+shatters the image mirrored in its depths."--_A. S._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+105.
+
+"Mais vous autres artistes, vous ne considerez pour la plupart dans les
+oeuvres que la beaut� ou la singularit� de l'ex�cution, sans vous
+p�n�trer de l'id�e dont cet oeuvre est la forme; ainsi votre intelligence
+adore souvent l'expression d'un sentiment que votre coeur repousserait
+s'il en avait la conscience."--_George Sand._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+106.
+
+Lavater told Goethe that on a certain occasion when he held the velvet
+bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe
+only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual, the
+shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in
+dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and
+individually characteristic.
+
+What then shall we say of Van Dyck, who painted the hands of his men and
+women, not from individual nature, but from a model hand--his own very
+often?--and every one who considers for a moment will see in Van Dyck's
+portraits, that, however well painted and elegant the hands, they in
+very few instances harmonise with the _personalit�_;--that the position
+is often affected, and as if intended for display,--the display of what
+is in itself a positive fault, and from which some little knowledge of
+comparative physiology would have saved him.
+
+There are hands of various character; the hand to catch, and the hand to
+hold; the hand to clasp, and the hand to grasp. The hand that has
+worked or could work, and the hand that has never done anything but hold
+itself out to be kissed, like that of Joanna of Arragon in Raphael's
+picture.
+
+Let any one look at the hands in Titian's portrait of old Paul IV.:
+though exquisitely modelled, they have an expression which reminds us of
+claws; they belong to the face of that grasping old man, and could
+belong to no other.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+107.
+
+Mozart and Chopin, though their genius was differently developed, were
+alike in some things: in nothing more than this, that the artistic
+element in both minds wholly dominated over the social and practical,
+and that their art was the element in which they moved and lived,
+through which they felt and thought. I doubt whether either of them
+could have said, "_D'abord je suis homme et puis je suis artiste_;"
+whereas this could have been said with truth by Mendelsohn and by
+Litzst. In Mendelsohn the enormous creative power was modified by the
+intellect and the conscience. Litzst has no creative power.
+
+Litzst has thus drawn the character of Chopin:--"Rien n'�tait plus pur et
+plus exalt� en m�me temps que ses pens�es; rien n'�tait plus tenace,
+plus exclusif, et plus minutieusement d�vou� que ses affections. Mais
+cet �tre ne comprenait que ce qui �tait identique � lui-m�me:--le reste
+n'existait pour lui que comme une sorte de r�ve f�cheux, auquel il
+essayait de se soustraire en vivant au milieu du monde. Toujours perdu
+dans ses r�veries, la r�alit� lui deplaisait. Enfant il ne pouvait
+toucher � un instrument tranchant sans se blesser; homme il ne pouvait
+se trouver en face d'un homme diff�rent de lui, sans se heurter contre
+cette contradiction vivante."
+
+"Ce qui le pr�servait d'un antagonisme perp�tuel c'�tait l'habitude
+volontaire et bient�t inv�t�r�e de ne point voir, de ne pas entendre ce
+qui lui deplaisait: en g�n�ral sans toucher � ses affections
+personelles, les �tres qui ne pensaient pas comme lui devenaient � ses
+yeux comme des esp�ces de fant�mes; et comme il �tait d'une politesse
+charmante, on pouvait prendre pour une bienveillance courtoise ce qui
+n'�tait chez lui qu'un froid d�dain--une aversion insurmontable."
+
+
+108.
+
+The father of Mozart was a man of high and strict religious principle.
+He had a conviction--in his case more truly founded than is usual--that
+he was the father of a great, a surpassing genius, and consequently of a
+being unfortunate in this, that he must be in advance of his age,
+exposed to error, to envy, to injustice, to strife; and to do his duty
+to his son demanded large faith and large firmness. But because he _did_
+estimate this sacred trust as a duty to be discharged, not only with
+respect to his gifted son, but to the God who had so endowed him; so, in
+spite of many mistakes, the earnest straightforward endeavour to do
+right in the parent seems to have saved Mozart's moral life, and to have
+given that completeness to the productions of his genius, which the
+harmony of the moral and creative faculties alone can bestow.
+
+
+"The modifying power of circumstances on Mozart's style, is an
+interesting consideration. Whatever of striking, of new or beautiful he
+met with in the works of others left its impression on him; and he often
+reproduced these efforts, not servilely, but mingling his own nature and
+feelings with them in a manner not less surprising than delightful."
+
+This is true equally of Shakespeare and of Raphael, both of whom adapted
+or rather adopted much from their precursors in the way of material to
+work upon; and whose incomparable originality consisted in the
+interfusion of their own great individual genius with every subject
+they touched, so that it became theirs, and could belong to no other.
+
+
+The Figaro was composed at Vienna. The Don Juan and Clemenza di Tito at
+Prague;--which I note because the localities are so characteristic of the
+operas. Cimarosa's Matrimonio Segreto was composed at Prague; it was on
+the fortification of the Hradschin one morning at sun-rise that he
+composed the _Pria che spunti in ciel l'aurora_.
+
+
+When called upon to describe his method of composing, what Mozart said
+of himself was very striking from its _na�vet�_ and truth. "I do not,"
+he said, "aim at originality. I do not know in what my originality
+consists. Why my productions take from my hand that particular form or
+style which makes them _Mozartish_, and different from the works of
+other composers is probably owing to the same cause which makes my nose
+this or that particular shape; makes it, in short, Mozart's nose, and
+different from other people's."
+
+Yet, as a composer, Mozart was as _objective_, as dramatic, as
+Shakspeare and Raphael; Chopin, in comparison, was wholly
+_subjective_,--the Byron of Music.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+109.
+
+Talking once with Adelaide Kemble, after she had been singing in the
+"Figaro," she compared the music to the bosom of a full blown rose in
+its voluptuous, intoxicating richness. I said that some of Mozart's
+melodies seemed to me not so much composed, but found--found on some
+sunshiny day in Arcadia, among nymphs and flowers. "Yes," she replied,
+with ready and felicitous expression, "not _inventions_, but
+_existences_."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+110.
+
+Old George the Third, in his blindness and madness, once insisted on
+making the selection of pieces for the concert of ancient music (May,
+1811),--it was soon after the death of the Princess Amelia. "The
+programme included some of the finest passages in Handel's 'Samson,'
+descriptive of blindness; the 'Lamentation of Jephthah,' for his
+daughter; Purcel's 'Mad Tom,' and closed with 'God save the King,' to
+make sure the application of all that went before."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+111.
+
+Every one who remembers what Madlle. Rachel was seven or eight years
+ago, and who sees her now (1853), will allow that she has made no
+progress in any of the essential excellences of her art:--a certain proof
+that she is not a great artist in the true sense of the word. She is a
+finished actress, but she is nothing more, and nothing better; not
+enough the artist ever to forget or conceal her art; consequently there
+is a want somewhere, which a mind highly toned and of quick perceptions
+feels from beginning to end. The parts in which she once excelled--the
+Ph�dre and the Hermione, for instance--have become formalised and hard,
+like studies cast in bronze; and when she plays a new part it has no
+freshness. I always go to see her whenever I can. I admire her as what
+she is--the Parisian actress, practised in every trick of her _m�tier_. I
+admire what she does, I think how well it is all _done_, and am inclined
+to clap and applaud her drapery, perfect and ostentatiously studied in
+every fold, just with the same feeling that I applaud herself.
+
+As to the last scene of Adrienne Lecouvreur, (which those who are
+_avides de sensation_, athirst for painful emotion, go to see as they
+would drink a dram, and critics laud as a miracle of art,) it is
+altogether a mistake and a failure; it is beyond the just limits of
+terror and pity--beyond the legitimate sphere of _art_. It reminds us of
+the story of Gentil Bellini and the Sultan. The Sultan much admired
+Bellini's picture of the decollation of John the Baptist, but informed
+him that it was inaccurate--surgically--for the tendons and muscles ought
+to shrink where divided; and then calling for one of his slaves, he drew
+his scimitar, and striking off the head of the wretch, gave the
+horror-struck artist a lesson in practical anatomy. So we might possibly
+learn from Rachel's imitative representation, (studied in an hospital as
+they say,) how poison acts on the frame, and how the limbs and features
+writhe into death; but if she were a great moral artist she would feel
+that what is allowed to be true in painting, is true in art generally;
+that mere imitation, such as the vulgar delight in, and hold up their
+hands to see, is the vulgarest and easiest aim of the imitative arts,
+and that between the true interpretation of poetry in art and such base
+mechanical means to the lowest ends, there lies an immeasurable
+distance.
+
+I am disposed to think that Rachel has not genius, but talent, and that
+her talent, from what I see year after year, has a downward
+tendency,--there is not sufficient moral seasoning to save it from
+corruption. I remember that when I first saw her in Hermione she
+reminded me of a serpent, and the same impression continues. The long
+meagre form with its graceful undulating movements, the long narrow face
+and features, the contracted jaw, the high brow, the brilliant
+supernatural eyes which seem to glance every way at once; the sinister
+smile; the painted red lips, which look as though they had lapped, or
+could lap, blood; all these bring before me the idea of a Lamia, the
+serpent nature in the woman's form. In Lydia, and in Athalie, she
+touches the extremes of vice and wickedness with such a masterly
+lightness and precision, that I am full of wondering admiration for the
+actress. There is not a turn of her figure, not an expression in her
+face, not a fold in her gorgeous drapery, that is not a study; but
+withal such a consciousness of her art, and such an ostentation of the
+means she employs, that the power remains always _extraneous_, as it
+were, and exciting only to the senses and the intellect.
+
+Latterly she has become a hard mannerist. Her face, once so flexible,
+has lost the power of expressing the nicer shades and softer gradations
+of feeling; so much so, that they write dramas for her with
+supernaturally wicked and depraved heroines to suit her especial powers.
+I conceive that an artist could not sink lower in degradation. Yet to
+satisfy the taste of a Parisian audience and the ambition of a Parisian
+actress this was not enough, and wickedness required the piquancy of
+immediate approximation with innocence. In the Valeria she played two
+characters, and appeared on the stage alternately as a miracle of vice
+and a miracle of virtue: an abandoned prostitute and a chaste matron.
+There was something in this contrasted impersonation, considered simply
+in relation to the aims and objects of art, so revolting, that I sat in
+silent and deep disgust, which was partly deserved by the audience which
+could endure the exhibition.
+
+It is the entire absence of the high poetic and moral element which
+distinguishes Rachel as an actress, and places her at such an
+immeasurable distance from Mrs. Siddons, that it shocks me to hear them
+named together.
+
+
+112.
+
+It is no reproach to a capital actress to play effectively a very wicked
+character. Mrs. Siddons played the abandoned Milwood as carefully, as
+completely as she played Hermoine and Constance; but if it had required
+a perpetual succession of Calistas and Milwoods to call forth her
+highest powers, what should we think of the woman and the artist?
+
+
+113.
+
+When dramas and characters are invented to suit the particular talent of
+a particular actor or actress, it argues rather a limited range of the
+artistic power; though within that limit the power may be great and the
+talent genuine.
+
+
+Thus for Liston and for Miss O'Neil, so distinguished in their
+respective lines of Comedy and Tragedy, characters were especially
+constructed and plays written, which have not been acted since their
+time.
+
+
+114.
+
+A celebrated German actress (who has quitted the stage for many years)
+speaking of Rachel, said that the reason she must always stop short of
+the highest place in art, is because she is nothing but an actress--that
+only; and has no aims in life, has no duties, feelings, employments,
+sympathies, but those which centre in herself in the interests of her
+art;--which thus ceases to be _art_ and becomes a _m�tier_.
+
+This reminded me of what Pauline Viardot once said to me:--"D'abord je
+suis _femme_, avec les d�voirs, les affections, les sentiments d'une
+femme; et puis je suis _artiste_."
+
+
+115.
+
+The same German actress whose opinion I have quoted, told me that the
+Leonora and the Iphigenia of Goethe were the parts she preferred to
+play. The Thekla and the Beatrice of Schiller next. (In all these she
+excelled.) The parts easiest to her, requiring no effort scarcely, were
+Jerta (in Houwald's Tragedy, "Die Schuld"), and Cl�rchen in Egmont; of
+the character of Jerta, she said beautifully:--"Ich habe es nicht
+gespielt, Ich habe es gesagt!" (I did not _play_ it, I _uttered_ it.)
+This was extremely characteristic of the woman.
+
+I once asked Mrs. Siddons, which of her great characters she preferred
+to play? She replied, after a moment's consideration, and in her rich
+deliberate emphatic tones:--"Lady Macbeth is the character I have most
+_studied_." She afterwards said that she had played the character during
+thirty years, and scarcely acted it once, without carefully reading
+over the part and generally the whole play in the morning; and that she
+never read over the play without finding something new in it;
+"something," she said, "which had not struck me so much as it _ought_ to
+have struck me."
+
+
+Of Mrs. Pritchard, who preceded Mrs. Siddons in the part of Lady
+Macbeth, it was well known that she had never read the play. She merely
+studied her own part as written out by the stage-copyist; of the other
+parts she knew nothing but the _cues_.
+
+
+116.
+
+When I asked Mrs. Henry Siddons, which of her characters she preferred
+playing? she said at once "Imogen, in Cymbeline, was the character I
+played with most ease to myself, and most success as regarded the
+public; it cost no effort."
+
+This was confirmed by others. A very good judge said of her--"In some of
+her best parts, as Juliet, Rosalind, and Lady Townley, she may have been
+approached or equalled. In Viola and Imogen she was never equalled. In
+the grace and simplicity of the first, in the refinement and shy but
+impassioned tenderness of the last, _I_ at least have never seen any one
+to be compared to her. She hardly seemed to _act_ these parts; they came
+naturally to her."
+
+This reminds me of another anecdote of the same accomplished actress and
+admirable woman. The people of Edinburgh, among whom she lived, had so
+identified her with all that was gentle, refined and noble, that they
+did not like to see her play wicked parts. It happened that Godwin went
+down to Edinburgh with a tragedy in his pocket, which had been accepted
+by the theatre there, and in which Mrs. Henry Siddons was to play the
+principal part--that of a very wicked woman (I forget the name of the
+piece). He was warned that it risked the success of his play, but her
+conception of the part was so just and spirited, that he persisted. At
+the rehearsal she stopped in the midst of one of her speeches and said,
+with great _na�vet�_, "I am afraid, Mr. Godwin, the people will not
+endure to hear me say this!" He replied coolly, "My dear, you cannot be
+always young and pretty--you must come to this at last,--go on." He
+mistook her meaning and the feeling of "the people." The play failed;
+and the audience took care to discriminate between their disapprobation
+of the piece and their admiration for the actress.
+
+
+117.
+
+Madame Schroeder Devrient told me that she sung with most pleasure to
+herself in the "Fidelio;" and in this part I have never seen her
+equalled.
+
+Fanny Kemble told me the part she had played with most pleasure to
+herself, was Camiola, in Massinger's "Maid of Honour." It was an
+exquisite impersonation, but the play itself ineffective and not
+successful, because of the weak and worthless character of the hero.
+
+
+118.
+
+Mrs. Charles Kean told me that she had played with great ease and
+pleasure to herself, the part of Ginevra, in Leigh Hunt's "Legend of
+Florence." She _made_ the part (as it is technically termed), and it was
+a very complete and beautiful impersonation.
+
+
+These answers appear to me psychologically, as well as artistically,
+interesting, and worth preserving.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+119.
+
+Mrs. Siddons, when looking over the statues in Lord Lansdowne's gallery,
+told him that one mode of expressing intensity of feeling was suggested
+to her by the position of some of the Egyptian statues with the arms
+close down at the sides and the hands clenched. This is curious, for the
+attitude in the Egyptian gods is intended to express repose. As the
+expression of intense passion self-controlled, it might be appropriate
+to some characters and not to others. Rachel, as I recollect, uses it in
+the Ph�dre:--Madame Rettich uses it in the Medea. It would not be
+characteristic in Constance.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+120.
+
+On a certain occasion when Fanny Kemble was reading Cymbeline, a lady
+next to me remarked that Imogen ought not to utter the words "Senseless
+linen!--happier therein than I!" aloud, and to Pisanio,--that it detracted
+from the strength of the feeling, and that they should have been uttered
+aside, and in a low, intense whisper. "Iachimo," she added, "might
+easily have won a woman who could have laid her heart so bare to a mere
+attendant!"
+
+On my repeating this criticism to Fanny Kemble, she replied just as I
+had anticipated: "Such criticism is the mere expression of the natural
+emotions or character of the critic. _She_ would have spoken the words
+in a whisper; _I_ should have made the exclamation aloud. If there had
+been a thousand people by, I should not have cared for them--I should not
+have been conscious of their presence. I should have exclaimed before
+them all, 'Senseless linen!--happier therein than I!'"
+
+And thus the artist fell into the same mistake of which she accused her
+critic--she made Imogen utter the words aloud, because _she_ would have
+done so herself. This sort of subjective criticism in both was quite
+feminine; but the question was not how either A. B. or F. K. would have
+spoken the words, but what would have been most natural in such a woman
+as Imogen?
+
+And most undoubtedly the first criticism was as exquisitely true and
+just as it was delicate. Such a woman as Imogen would _not_ have uttered
+those words aloud. She would have uttered them in a whisper, and turning
+her face from her attendant. With such a woman, the more intense the
+passion, the more conscious and the more veiled the expression.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+121.
+
+I read in the life of Garrick that, "about 1741, a taste for Shakespeare
+had lately been revived by the encouragement of some distinguished
+persons of taste of both sexes; but more especially by the ladies who
+formed themselves into a society, called the 'Shakespeare Club.'" There
+exists a Shakespeare Society at this present time, but I do not know
+that any ladies are members of it, or allowed to be so.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+122.
+
+The "Maria Maddalena" of Friedrich Hebbel is a domestic tragedy. It
+represents the position of a young girl in the lower class of society-a
+character of quiet goodness and feeling, in a position the most usual,
+circumstances the most common-place. The representation is from the
+life, and set forth with a truth which in its naked simplicity, almost
+hardness, becomes most tragic and terrible. Around this girl, portrayed
+with consummate delicacy, is a group of men. First her father, an honest
+artisan, coarse, harsh, despotic. Then a light-minded, good-natured,
+dissipated brother, and two suitors. All these love her according to
+their masculine individuality. To the men of her own family she is as a
+part of the furniture--something they are accustomed to see--necessary to
+the daily well-being of the house, without whom the fire would not be on
+the hearth, nor the soup on the table; and they are proud of her charms
+and good qualities as belonging to them. By her lovers she is loved as
+an object they desire to possess--and dispute with each other. But no one
+of all these thinks of _her_--of what she thinks, feels, desires,
+suffers, is, or may be. Nor does she seem to think of it herself, until
+the storm falls upon her, enwraps her, overwhelms her. Then she stands
+in the midst of the beings around her, and who are one and all in a kind
+of external relation to her, completely alone. In her grief, in her
+misery, in her amazement, her perplexity, her terror, there is no one to
+take thought for her, no one to help, no one to sympathise. Each is
+self-occupied, self-satisfied. And so she sinks down and perishes, and
+they stand wondering at what they had not the sense to see, wringing
+their hands over the irremediable. It is the Lucy Ashton of vulgar life.
+
+The manners and characters of this play are essentially German; but the
+_stuff_--the material of the piece--the relative position of the
+personages, might be true of any place in this christian, civilised
+Europe. The whole is wonderfully, painfully natural, and strikes home to
+the heart, like Hood's "Bridge of Sighs." It was a surprise to me that
+such a piece should have been acted, and with applause, at the Court
+Theatre at Vienna; but I believe it has not been given since 1849.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+123.
+
+Here is a very good analysis of the artistic nature: "Il ressent une
+v�ritable �motion, mais il s'arrange pour la montrer. Il fait un peu ce
+que faisait cet acteur de l'antiquit� qui, venant de perdre son fils
+unique et jouant quelque temps apr�s le r�le d'Electre embrassant l'urne
+d'Oreste, prit entre ses mains l'urne qui contenait les cendres de son
+enfant, et joua sa propre douleur, dit Aulus Gellius, au lieu de jouer
+celle de son r�le. Ce melange de l'�motion naturelle et de l'�motion
+th�atrale est plus fr�quent qu'on ne croit, surtout � certaines �poques
+quand le raffinement de l'Education fait que l'homme ne sent pas
+seulement ses �motions, mais qu'il sent aussi l'effet qu'elles peuvent
+produire. Beaucoup de gens alors, sont naturellement com�diens; c'est �
+dire qu'ils donnent un r�le � leurs passions: ils sentent en dehors au
+lieu de sentir en dedans; leurs �motions sont _en relief_ au lieu d'�tre
+_en profondeur_."--_St. Marc Girardin._
+
+I think Margaret Fuller must have had the above passage in her mind when
+she worked out this happy illustration into a more finished form. She
+says:--"The difference between the artistic nature and the unartistic
+nature in the hour of emotion, is this: in the first the feeling is a
+cameo, in the last an intaglio. Raised in relief and shaped _out_ of the
+heart in the first; cut _into_ the heart, and hardly perceptible till
+you take the impression, in the last."
+
+And to complete this fanciful and beautiful analogy, we might add, that
+because the artistic nature is demonstrative, it is sometimes thought
+insincere; and insincere it _is_ where the form is hollow in proportion
+as it is cast outward, as in the casts and electrotype copies of the
+solid sculpture. And because the unartistic nature is undemonstrative,
+it is sometimes thought cold, unreal; for of this also there are
+imitations; and in passing the touch over certain intaglios, we feel by
+contact that they are not so deep as we supposed.
+
+God defend us from both! from the hollowness that imitates solidity,
+and the shallowness that imitates depth!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+124.
+
+Goethe said of some woman, "She knew something of devotion and love, but
+of the pure admiration for a glorious piece of man's handiwork--of a mere
+sympathetic veneration for the creation of the human intellect--she could
+form no idea."
+
+This may have been true of the individual woman referred to; but that
+female critics look for something in a production of art beyond the mere
+handiwork, and that "our sympathetic veneration for a creation of human
+intellect," is often dependent on our moral associations, is not a
+reproach to us. Nor, if I may presume to say so, does it lessen the
+value of our criticism, where it can be referred to principles. Women
+have a sort of unconscious logic in these matters.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+125.
+
+"When fiction," says Sir James Mackintosh, "represents a degree of ideal
+excellence superior to any virtue which is observed in real life, the
+effect is perfectly analogous to that of a model of ideal beauty in the
+fine arts."
+
+That is to say--As the Apollo exalts our idea of possible beauty, in
+form, so the moral ideal of man or woman exalts our idea of possible
+virtue, provided it be _consistent_ as a whole. If we gave the Apollo a
+god-like head and face and left a part of his frame below perfection,
+the elevating effect of the whole would be immediately destroyed, though
+the figure might be more according to the standard of actual nature.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+126.
+
+"In Dante, as in Shakespeare, every man selects by instinct that which
+assimilates with the course of his own previous occupations and
+interests." (_Merivale._) True, not of Dante and Shakespeare only, but
+of all books worth reading; and not merely of books and authors, but of
+all productions of mind in whatever form which speak to mind; all works
+of art, from which we _imbibe_, as it were, what is sympathetic with our
+individuality. The more universal the sympathies of the writer or the
+artist, the more of such individualities will be included in his domain
+of power.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+127.
+
+The distinction so cleverly and beautifully drawn by the Germans (by
+Lessing first I believe) between "Bildende" and "Redende Kunst" is not
+to be rendered into English without a lengthy paraphrase. It places in
+immediate contradistinction the art which is evolved in _words_, and the
+art which is evolved in _forms_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+128.
+
+Venus, or rather the Greek Aphrodite, in the sublime fragment of
+Eschylus (the Dana�des) is a grand, severe, and pure conception; the
+principle eternal of beauty, of love, and of fecundity--or the law of the
+continuation of being through beauty and through love. Such a
+conception is no more like the Ovidean Roman Venus than the Venus of
+Milo is like the Venus de Medicis.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+129.
+
+In the Greek tragedy, love figures as one of the laws of nature--not as a
+power, or a passion; these are the aspects given to it by the Christian
+imagination.
+
+Yet this higher idea of love _did_ exist among the ancients--only we must
+not seek it in their poetry, but in their philosophy. Thus we find it in
+Plato, set forth as a beautiful philosophical theory; not as a passion,
+to influence life, nor as a poetic feeling, to adorn and exalt it. Nor
+do we moderns owe this idea of a mystic, elevated, and elevating love to
+the Greek philosophy. I rather agree with those who trace it to the
+mingling of Christianity with the manners of the old Germans, and their
+(almost) superstitious reverence for womanhood. In the Middle Ages,
+where morals were most depraved, and women most helpless and oppressed,
+there still survived the theory formed out of the combination of the
+Christian spirit, and the Germanic customs; and when in the 15th
+century Plato became the fashion, then the theory became a science, and
+what had been religion became again philosophy. This sort of speculative
+love became to real love what theology became to religion; it was a
+thesis to be talked about and argued in universities, sung in sonnets,
+set forth in art; and so being kept as far as possible from all bearings
+on our moral life, it ceased to find consideration either as a prim�val
+law of God, or as a moral motive influencing the duties and habits of
+our existence; and thus we find the social code in regard to it
+diverging into all the vagaries of celibacy on one hand, and all the
+vilenesses of profligacy on the other.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+130.
+
+Wilkie's "Life and Letters" have not helped me much. His opinions and
+criticisms on his own art are sensible, not suggestive. I find, however,
+one or two passages strongly illustrative of the value of _truth_ as a
+principle in art, and the sort of _vitality_ it gives to scenery and
+objects.
+
+He writes, when travelling in Holland, to his friend, Sir George
+Beaumont;--
+
+"One of the first circumstances that struck me wherever I went was what
+you had prepared me for; the resemblance that everything bore to the
+Dutch and Flemish pictures. On leaving Ostend, not only the people,
+houses, trees, but whole tracks of country reminded me of Teniers, and
+on getting further into the country this was only relieved by the
+pictures of Rubens and Wouvermans, or some other masters taking his
+place.
+
+"I thought I could trace the particular districts in Holland where
+Ostade, Cuyp, and Rembrandt had studied, and could almost fancy the spot
+where the pictures of other masters had been painted. Indeed nothing
+seemed new to me in the whole country; and what one could not help
+wondering at, was, that these old masters should have been able to draw
+the materials of so beautiful a variety of art, from so contracted and
+monotonous a theme."
+
+Their variety arose out of their truthfulness. I had the same feeling
+when travelling in Holland and Belgium. It was to me a perpetual
+succession of reminiscences, and so it has been with others. Rubens and
+Rembrandt (as landscape painters)--Cuyp, Hobbima, were continually in my
+mind; occasionally the yet more poetical Ruysdaal; but who ever thinks
+of Wouvermans, or Bergham, or Karel du Jardin, as national or natural
+painters? their scenery is all _got up_ like the scenery in a ballet,
+and I can conceive nothing more tiresome than a room full of their
+pictures, elegant as they are.
+
+
+131.
+
+Again, writing from Jerusalem, Wilkie says, "Nothing here requires
+revolution in our opinions of the finest works of art: with all their
+discrepancies of detail, they are yet constantly recalled by what is
+here before us. The background of the Heliodorus of Raphael is a Syrian
+building; the figures in the Lazarus of Sebastian del Piombo are a
+Syrian people; and the indescribable tone of Rembrandt is brought to
+mind at every turn, whether in the street, the Synagogue, or the
+Sepulchre." And again: "The painter we are always referring to, as one
+who has most truly given the eastern people, is Rembrandt."
+
+He partly contradicts this afterwards, but says, that Venetian art
+reminds him of Syria. Now, the Venetians were in constant communication
+with the East; all their art has a tinge of orientalism. As to
+Rembrandt, he must have been in familiar intercourse with the Jew
+merchants and Jewish families settled in the Dutch commercial towns; he
+painted them frequently as portraits, and they perpetually appear in his
+compositions.
+
+
+132.
+
+In the following passage Wilkie seems unconsciously to have anticipated
+the invention (or rather the _discovery_) of the Daguerreotype, and some
+of its results. He says:--"If by an operation of mechanism, animated
+nature could be copied with the accuracy of a cast in plaster, a tracing
+on a wall, or a reflection in a glass, without modification, and without
+the proprieties and graces of art, all that utility could desire would
+be perfectly attained, but it would be at the expense of almost every
+quality which renders art delightful."
+
+One reason why the Daguerreotype portraits are in general so
+unsatisfactory may perhaps be traced to a natural law, though I have not
+heard it suggested. It is this: every object that we behold we see not
+with the eye only, but with the soul; and this is especially true of the
+human countenance, which in so far as it is the expression of mind we
+see through the medium of our own individual mind. Thus a portrait is
+satisfactory in so far as the painter has sympathy with his subject, and
+delightful to us in proportion as the resemblance reflected through
+_his_ sympathies is in accordance with _our own_. Now in the
+Daguerreotype there is no such medium, and the face comes before us
+without passing through the human mind and brain to our apprehension.
+This may be the reason why a Daguerreotype, however beautiful and
+accurate, is seldom satisfactory or agreeable, and that while we
+acknowledge its truth as to fact, it always leaves something for the
+sympathies to desire.
+
+
+133.
+
+He says, "One thing alone seems common in all the stages of early art;
+the desire of making all other excellences tributary to the expression
+of thought and sentiment."
+
+The early painters had _no other_ excellences except those of thought
+and expression; therefore could not sacrifice what they did not possess.
+They drew incorrectly, coloured ineffectively, and were ignorant of
+perspective.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+134.
+
+When at Dusseldorf, I found the President of the Academy, Wilhelm
+Schadow, employed on a church picture in three compartments; Paradise
+in the centre; on the right side, Purgatory; on the left side, Hell. He
+explained to me that he had not attempted to paint the interior of
+Paradise as the sojourn of the blessed, because he could imagine no kind
+of occupation or delight which, prolonged to eternity, would not be
+wearisome. He had therefore represented the exterior of Paradise, where
+Christ, standing on the threshold with outstretched arms, receives and
+welcomes those who enter. (This was better and in finer taste than the
+more common allegory of St. Peter and his keys.) On one side of the
+door, the Virgin Mary and a group of guardian angels encourage those who
+approach. Among these we distinguish a martyr who has died for the
+truth, and a warrior who has fought for it. A care-worn, penitent mother
+is presented by her innocent daughter. Those who were "in the world and
+the world knew them not," are here acknowledged--and eyes dim with
+weeping, and heads bowed with shame, are here uplifted, and bright with
+the rapturous gleam which shone through the portals of Paradise.
+
+The idea of Purgatory, he told me, was suggested by a vision or dream
+related by St. Catherine of Genoa, in which she beheld a great number of
+men and women shut up in a dark cavern; angels descending from heaven,
+liberate them from time to time, and they are borne away one after
+another from darkness, pain, and penance, into life and light--again to
+behold the face of their Maker--reconciled and healed. In his picture,
+Schadow has represented two angels bearing away a liberated soul. Below
+in the fore-ground groups of sinners are waiting, sadly, humbly, but not
+unhopefully, the term of their bitter penance. Among these he had placed
+a group of artists and poets who, led away by temptation, had abused
+their glorious gifts to wicked or worldly purposes;--Titian, Ariosto,
+and, rather to my surprise, the beautiful, lamenting spirit of Byron.
+Then, what was curious enough, as types of ambition, Lady Macbeth and
+her husband, who, it seems, were to be ultimately saved, I do not know
+why--unless for the love of Shakespeare.
+
+Hell, like all the hells I ever saw, was a failure. There was the usual
+amount of fire and flames, dragons and serpents, ghastly, despairing
+spirits, but nothing of original or powerful conception. When I looked
+in Schadow's face, so beautiful with benevolence, I wondered _how_ he
+could--but in truth he could _not_--realise to himself the idea of a hell;
+all the materials he had used were borrowed and common-place.
+
+But among his cartoons for pictures already painted, there was one
+charming idea of quite a different kind. It was for an altar, and he
+called it "THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE." Above, the sacrificed Redeemer lies
+extended in his mother's arms. The pure abundant Waters of Salvation,
+gushing from the rock beneath their feet, are received into a great
+cistern. Saints, martyrs, teachers of the truth, are standing round,
+drinking or filling their vases, which they present to each other. From
+the cistern flows a stream, at which a family of poor peasants are
+drinking with humble, joyful looks; and as the stream divides and flows
+away through flowery meadows, little sportive children stoop to drink of
+it, scooping up the water in their tiny hands, or sipping it with their
+rosy smiling lips. A beautiful and significant allegory beautifully
+expressed, and as intelligible to the people as any in the "Pilgrim's
+Progress."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+135.
+
+Haydon discussed "High Art" as if it depended solely on the knowledge
+and the appreciation of _form_. In this lay his great mistake. Form is
+but the vehicle of the highest art.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+136.
+
+Southey says that the Franciscan Order "excluded all art, all
+science;--no pictures might profane their churches." This is a most
+extraordinary instance of ignorance in a man of Southey's universal
+learning. Did he forget Friar Bacon? had he not heard of that museum of
+divine pictures, the Franciscan church and convent at Assisi? And that
+some of the greatest mathematicians, architects, mosaic workers,
+carvers, and painters, of the 13th and 14th centuries were Franciscan
+friars?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+137.
+
+Wordsworth's remark on Sir Joshua Reynolds as a painter, that "he lived
+too much for the age and the people among whom he lived," is hardly
+just; as a portrait-painter he could not well do otherwise; his
+profession was to represent the people among whom he lived. An artist
+who takes the higher, the creative and imaginative walks of art, and who
+thinks he can, at the same time, live for and with the age, and for the
+passing and clashing interests of the world, and the frivolities of
+society, does so at a great risk: there must be perilous discord between
+the inner and the outer life--such discord as wears and irritates the
+whole physical and moral being. Where the original material of the
+character is not strong, the artistic genius will be gradually
+enfeebled and conventionalised, through flattery, through sympathy,
+through misuse. If the material be strong, the result may perhaps be
+worse; the genius may be demoralised and the mind lose its balance. I
+have seen in my time instances of both.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+138.
+
+"The man," says Coleridge, "who reads a work meant for immediate effect
+on one age, with the notions and feelings of another, may be a refined
+gentleman but a very sorry critic."
+
+This is especially true with regard to art: but Coleridge should have
+put in the word, _only_, ("only the notions and feelings of another
+age,") for a very great pleasure lies in the power of throwing ourselves
+into the sentiments and notions of one age, while feeling _with_ them,
+and reflecting _upon_ them, with the riper critical experience which
+belongs to another age.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+139.
+
+A _good_ taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a
+_just_ taste discriminates the degree,--the _poco-pi�_ and the
+_poco-meno_. A _good_ taste rejects faults; a _just_ taste selects
+excellences. A _good_ taste is often unconscious; a _just_ taste is
+always conscious. A _good_ taste may be lowered or spoilt; a _just_
+taste can only go on refining more and more.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+140.
+
+Artists are interesting to me as men. Their work, as the product of
+mind, should lead us to a knowledge of their own being; else, as I have
+often said and written, our admiration of art is a species of atheism.
+To forget the soul in its highest manifestation is like forgetting God
+in his creation.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+141.
+
+"Les images peints du corps humain, dans les figures o� domine par trop
+le savoir anatomique, en r�v�lant trop clairement � l'homme les secrets
+de sa structure, lui en d�couvrent aussi par trop ce qu'on pourrait
+appeler le point de vue _mat�riel_, ou, si l'on veut, _animal_."
+
+This is the fault of Michal-Angelo; yet I have sometimes thought that
+his very materialism, so grand, and so peculiar in character, may have
+arisen out of his profound religious feeling, his stern morality, his
+lofty conceptions of our _mortal_, as well as _immortal_ destinies. He
+appears to have beheld the human form only in a pure and sublime point
+of view; not as the animal man, but as the habitation, fearfully and
+wondrously constructed, for the spirit of man,--
+
+           "The outward shape,
+   And unpolluted temple of the mind."
+
+This is the reason that Michal-Angelo's materialism affects us so
+differently from that of Rubens. In the first, the predominance of form
+attains almost a moral sublimity. In the latter, the predominance of
+flesh and blood is debased into physical grossness. Michal-Angelo
+believed in the resurrection of THE BODY, emphatically; and in his Last
+Judgment the dead rise like Titans, strong to contend and mighty to
+suffer. It is the apotheosis of form. In Ruben's picture of the same
+subject (at Munich) the bodily presence of resuscitated life is
+revolting, reminding us of the text of St. Paul--"Flesh and blood shall
+_not_ inherit the kingdom of God." Both pictures are _�sthetically_
+false, but _artistically_ miracles, and should thus be considered and
+appreciated.
+
+I have never looked on those awful figures in the Medici Chapel without
+thinking what stupendous intellects must inhabit such stupendous
+forms--terrible in their quietude; but they are supernatural, rather than
+divine.
+
+   "Heidnische Ruhe und Christliche Milde, sie bleiben Dir fremde;
+    Alt-testamentisch bist Du, Z�rnender, wie ist Dein Gott!"
+
+John Edward Taylor, in his profound and beautiful essay "MICHAEL-ANGELO,
+A POET," says truly that "Dante worshipped the philosophy of religion,
+and Michael-Angelo adored the philosophy of art." The religion of the
+one and the art of the other were evolved in a strange combination of
+mysticism, materialism, and moral grandeur. The two men were congenial
+in character and in genius.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+A FRAGMENT ON SCULPTURE.
+
+
+AND ON CERTAIN CHARACTERS IN HISTORY AND POETRY CONSIDERED AS
+SUBJECTS OF MODERN ART.
+
+1848.
+
+
+I Should begin by admitting the position laid down by Frederick
+Schlegel, that art and nature are not identical. "Men," he says,
+"traduce nature, who falsely give her the epithet of artistic;" for
+though nature comprehends all art, art cannot comprehend all nature.
+Nature, in her sources of pleasures and contemplation is infinite; and
+art, as her reflection in human works, finite. Nature is boundless in
+her powers, exhaustless in her variety; the powers of art and its
+capabilities of variety in production are bounded on every side. Nature
+herself, the infinite, has circumscribed the bounds of finite art; the
+one is the divinity; the other, the priestess. And if poetic art in the
+_interpreting_ of nature share in her infinitude, yet in _representing_
+nature through material, form, and colour, she is,--oh, how limited!
+
+
+If each of the forms of poetic art has its law of limitation as
+determined as the musical scale, narrowest of all are the limitations of
+sculpture, to which, notwithstanding, we give the highest place; and it
+is in regard to sculpture, we find most frequently those mistakes which
+arise from a want of knowledge of the true principles of art.
+
+Admitting, then, as necessary and immutable, the limitations of the art
+of sculpture as to the management of the material in giving form and
+expression; its primal laws of repose and simplicity; its rejection of
+the complex and conventional; its bounded capabilities as to choice of
+subject; must we also admit, with some of the most celebrated critics of
+art, that there is but one style of sculpture, the Greek? And that every
+deviation from pure Greek art must be regarded as a depravation and
+perversion of the powers and subjects of sculpture? I do not see that
+this follows.
+
+
+It is absolute that Greek art reached long ago the term of its
+development. In so far as regards the principles of beauty and
+execution, it can go no farther. We may stand and look at the relics of
+the Parthenon in awe and in despair; we can do neither more, nor better.
+But we have not done with Greek sculpture. What in it is purely _ideal_,
+is eternal; what is conventional, is in accordance with the primal
+conditions of all imitative art. Therefore though it may have reached
+the point at which development stops, and though its capability of
+adaptation be limited by necessary laws; still its all-beautiful, its
+immortal imagery is ever near us and around us; still "doth the old
+feeling bring back the old names," and with the old names, the forms;
+still, in those old familiar forms we continue to clothe all that is
+loveliest in visible nature; still, in all our associations with Greek
+art--
+
+  "'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great,
+   And Venus who brings every thing that's fair."
+
+That the supreme beauty of Greek art--that the majestic significance of
+the classical myths--will ever be to the educated mind and eye as things
+indifferent and worn out, I cannot believe.
+
+
+But on the other hand it may well be doubted whether the impersonation
+of the Greek allegories in the purest forms of Greek art will ever give
+intense pleasure to the people, or ever speak home to the hearts of the
+men and women of these times. And this not from the want of an innate
+taste and capacity in the minds of the masses--not because ignorance has
+"frozen the genial current in their souls"--not merely through a vulgar
+preference for mechanical imitation of common and familiar forms; but
+from other causes not transient--not accidental. A classical education is
+not now, as heretofore, the _only_ education given; and through an
+honest and intense sympathy with the life of their own experience, and
+through a dislike to vicious associations, though clothed in classical
+language and classical forms, _thence_ is it that the people have turned
+with a sense of relief from gods and goddesses, Ledas and Antiopes, to
+shepherds and shepherdesses, groups of Charity, and young ladies in the
+character of Innocence,--harmless, picturesque inanities, bearing the
+same relation to classical sculpture that Watts's hymns bear to Homer
+and Sophocles.
+
+
+Classical attainments of any kind are rare in our English sculptors;
+therefore it is, that we find them often quite familiar with the
+conventional treatment and outward forms of the usual subjects of Greek
+art, without much knowledge of the original poetical conception, its
+derivation, or its significance; and equally without any real
+appreciation of the idea of which the form is but the vehicle. Hence
+they do not seem to be aware how far this original conception is
+capable of being varied, modified, _animated_ as it were, with an
+infusion of fresh life, without deviating from its essential truth, or
+transgressing those narrow limits, within which all sculpture must be
+bounded in respect to action and attitude. To express _character_ within
+these limits is the grand difficulty. We must remember that too much
+value given to the head as the seat of mind, too much expression given
+to the features as the exponents of character, must diminish the
+importance of those parts of the form on which sculpture mainly depends
+for its effect on the imagination. To convey the idea of a complete
+individuality in a single figure, and under these restrictions, is the
+problem to be solved by the sculptor who aims at originality, yet feels
+his aspirations restrained by a fine taste and circumscribed by certain
+inevitable associations.
+
+
+It is therefore a question open to argument and involving considerations
+of infinite delicacy and moment, in morals and in art, whether the old
+Greek legends, endued as they are with an imperishable vitality derived
+from their abstract youth, may not be susceptible of a treatment in
+modern art analogous to that which they have received in modern poetry,
+where the significant myth, or the ideal character, without losing its
+classic grace, has been animated with a purer sentiment, and developed
+into a higher expressiveness. Wordsworth's Dion and Laodomia; Shelley's
+version of the Hymn to Mercury; Goethe's Iphigenia; Lord Byron's
+Prometheus; Keats's Hyperion; Barry Cornwall's Proserpina; are instances
+of what I mean in poetry. To do the same thing in art, requires that our
+sculptors should stand in the same relation to Phidias and Praxiteles,
+that our greatest poets bear to Homer or Euripides; that they should be
+themselves poets and interpreters, not mere translators and imitators.
+
+Further, we all know, that there is often a necessity for conveying
+abstract ideas in the forms of art. We have then recourse to allegory;
+yet allegorical statues are generally cold and conventional and
+addressed to the intellect merely. Now there are occasions, in which an
+abstract quality or thought is far more impressively and intelligibly
+conveyed by an _impersonation_ than by a _personification_. I mean, that
+Aristides might express the idea of justice; Penelope, that of conjugal
+faith; Jonathan and David (or Pylades and Orestes), friendship; Rizpah,
+devotion to the memory of the dead; Iphigenia, the voluntary sacrifice
+for a good cause; and so of many others; and such figures would have
+this advantage, that with the significance of a symbol they would
+combine all the powers of a sympathetic reality.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+HELEN.
+
+I have never seen any statue of Helen, ancient or modern. Treated in the
+right spirit, I can hardly conceive a diviner subject for a sculptor. It
+would be a great mistake to represent the Greek Helen merely as a
+beautiful and alluring woman. This, at least, is not the Homeric
+conception of the character, which has a wonderful and fascinating
+individuality, requiring the utmost delicacy and poetic feeling to
+comprehend, and rare artistic skill to realise. The oft-told story of
+the Grecian painter, who, to create a Helen, assembled some twenty of
+the fairest models he could find, and took from each a limb or a
+feature, in order to compose from their separate beauties an ideal of
+perfection,--this story, if it were true, would only prove that even
+Zeuxis could make a great mistake. Such a combination of heterogeneous
+elements would be psychologically and artistically false, and would
+never give us a Helen.
+
+She has become the ideal type of a fatal, faithless, dissolute woman;
+but according to the Greek myth, she is _predestined_,--at once the
+instrument and the victim of that fiat of the gods which had long before
+decreed the destruction of Troy, and _her_ to be the cause. She must not
+only be supremely beautiful,--"a daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and
+most divinely fair!"--but as the offspring of Zeus (the title by which
+she is so often designated in the Iliad), as the sister of the great
+twin demi-gods Castor and Pollux, she should have the heroic lineaments
+proper to her Olympian descent, touched with a pensive shade; for she
+laments the calamities which her fatal charms have brought on all who
+have loved her, all whom she has loved:--
+
+  "Ah! had I died ere to these shores I fled,
+   False to my country and my nuptial bed!"
+
+She shrinks from the reproachful glances of those whom she has injured;
+and yet, as it is finely intimated, wherever she appears her resistless
+loveliness vanquishes every heart, and changes curses into blessings.
+Priam treats her with paternal tenderness; Hector with a sort of
+chivalrous respect.
+
+  "If some proud brother eyed me with disdain,
+   Or scornful sister with her sweeping train,
+   Thy gentle accents softened all my pain;
+   Nor was it e'er my fate from thee to find
+   A deed ungentle or a word unkind."
+
+Helen, standing on the walls of Troy, and looking sadly over the battle
+plain, where the heroes of her forfeited country, her kindred and her
+friends, are assembled to fight and bleed for her sake, brings before us
+an image full of melancholy sweetness as well as of consummate beauty.
+Another passage in which she upbraids Venus as the cause of her
+fault--not as a mortal might humbly expostulate with an immortal, but
+almost on terms of equality, and even with bitterness,--is yet more
+characteristic. "For what," she asks, tauntingly, "am I reserved? To
+what new countries am I destined to carry war and desolation? For what
+new lover must I break a second vow? Let me go hence! and if Paris
+lament my absence, let Venus console him, and for his sake ascend the
+skies no more!" A regretful pathos should mingle with her conscious
+beauty and her half-celestial dignity; and, to render her truly, her
+Greek elegance should be combined with a deeper and more complex
+sentiment than Greek art has usually sought to express.
+
+I am speaking here of Homer's Helen--the Helen of the Iliad, not the
+Helen of the tragedians--not the Helen who for two thousand years has
+merely served "to point a moral;" and an artist who should think to
+realise the true Homeric conception, should beware of counterfeits, for
+such are abroad.[2]
+
+There is a wild Greek myth that it was not the real Helen, but the
+phantom of Helen, who fled with Paris, and who caused the destruction of
+Troy; while Helen herself was leading, like Penelope, a pattern life at
+Memphis. I must confess I prefer the proud humility, the pathetic
+elegance of Homer's Helen, to such jugglery.
+
+It may flatter the pride of virtue, or it may move our religious
+sympathies, to look on the forlorn abasement of the Magdalene as the
+emblem of penitence; but there are associations connected with
+Helen--"sad Helen," as she calls herself, and as I conceive the
+character,--which have a deep tragic significance; and surely there are
+localities for which the impersonation of classical art would be better
+fitted than that of sacred art.
+
+I do not know of any existing statue of Helen. Nicetas mentions among
+the relics of ancient art destroyed when Constantinople was sacked by
+the Latins in 1202, a bronze statue of Helen, with long hair flowing to
+the waist; and there is mention of an Etruscan figure of her, with wings
+(expressive of her celestial origin, for the Etruscans gave all their
+gods and demi-gods wings): in M�ller I find these two only. There are
+likewise busts; and the story of Helen, and the various events of her
+life, occur perpetually on the antique gems, bas-reliefs, and painted
+vases. The most frequent subject is her abduction by Paris. A beautiful
+subject for a bas-relief, and one I believe not yet treated, would be
+Helen and Priam mourning over the lifeless form of Hector; yet the
+difficulty of preserving the simple sculptural treatment, and at the
+same time discriminating between this and other similar funereal groups,
+would render it perhaps a better subject for a picture, as admitting
+then of such scenery and accessories as would at once determine the
+signification.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   PENELOPE.        ALCESTIS.        LAODAMIA.
+
+Statues of Penelope and Helen might stand in beautiful and expressive
+contrast; but it is a contrast which no profane or prosaic hand should
+attempt to realise. Penelope is all woman in her tenderness and her
+truth; Helen, half a goddess in the midst of error and remorse.
+
+Nor is Penelope the only character which might stand as a type of
+conjugal fidelity in contrasted companionship with Helen: Alcestis, who
+died for her husband; or, better still, Laodamia, whose intense love
+and longing recalled hers from the shades below, are susceptible of the
+most beautiful statuesque treatment; only we must bear in mind that the
+leading _motif_ in the Alcestis is _duty_, in the Laodamia, _love_.
+
+I remember a bas-relief in the Vatican, which represents Hermes
+restoring Protesilaus to his mourning wife. The interview was granted
+for three hours only; and when the hero was taken from her a second
+time, she died on the threshhold of her palace. This is a frequent and
+appropriate subject for sarcophagi and funereal vases. But there exists,
+I believe, no single statue commemorative of the wife's passionate
+devotion.
+
+The modern sculptor should penetrate his fancy with the sentiment of
+Wordsworth's Laodamia.
+
+
+While the pen is in my hand I may remark that two of the stanzas in the
+Laodamia have been altered, and, as it seems to me, not improved, since
+the first edition. Originally the poem opened thus:
+
+  "With sacrifice, before the rising morn
+   Perform'd, my slaughter'd lord have I required;
+   And in thick darkness, amid shades forlorn,
+   Him of the infernal Gods have I desired:
+   Celestial pity I again implore;
+   Restore him to my sight--great Jove, restore!"
+
+Altered thus, and comparatively flat:--
+
+  "With sacrifice before the rising morn
+   Vows have I made, by fruitless hope inspired;
+   And from the infernal Gods, mid shades forlorn
+   Of night, my slaughtered lord have I required:
+   Celestial pity I again implore;
+   Restore him to my sight--great Jove, restore!"
+
+In the early edition the last stanza but one stood thus:--
+
+
+  "Ah! judge her gently who so deeply loved!
+   Her who, in reason's spite, yet without crime,
+   Was in a trance of passion thus removed;
+   Delivered from the galling yoke of time,
+   And these frail elements,--to gather flowers
+   Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers!"
+
+In the later editions thus altered, and, to my taste, spoiled:--
+
+  "By no weak pity might the Gods be moved;
+   She who thus perish'd not without the crime
+   Of lovers that in Reason's spite have loved,
+   Was doomed to wander in a grosser clime
+   Apart from happy ghosts, that gather flowers
+   Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers."
+
+Altered, probably, because Virgil has introduced the shade of Laodamia
+among the criminal and unhappy lovers,--an instance of extraordinary bad
+taste in the Roman poet; whatever may have been her faults, she surely
+deserved to be placed in better company than Ph�dra and Pasiph�e.
+Wordsworth's intuitive feeling and taste were true in the first
+instance, and he might have trusted to them. In my own copy of
+Wordsworth I have been careful to mark the original reading in justice
+to the _original_ Laodamia.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+   HIPPOLYTUS.      NEOPTOLEMUS.
+
+I have never met with a statue, ancient or modern, of Hippolytus; the
+finest possible ideal of a Greek youth, touched with some individual
+characteristics which are peculiarly fitted for sculpture. He is a
+hunter, not a warrior; a tamer of horses, not a combatant with spear and
+shield. He should have the slight, agile build of a young Apollo, but
+nothing of the God's effeminacy; on the contrary, there should be an
+infusion of the severe beauty of his Amazonian mother, with that
+sedateness and modesty which should express the votary and companion of
+Diana; while, as the fated victim of Venus, whom he had contemned, and
+of his stepmother Ph�dra, whom he had repulsed, there should be a kind
+of melancholy in his averted features. A hound and implements of the
+chase would be the proper accessories, and the figure should be
+undraped, or nearly so.
+
+A sculptor who should be tempted to undertake this fine, and, as I
+think, untried subject--at least as a single figure--must begin by putting
+Racine out of his mind, whose "Seigneur Hippolyte" makes sentimental
+love to the "Princesse Aricie," and must penetrate his fancy with the
+conception of Euripides.
+
+
+I find in Schlegel's "Essais litt�raires," a few lines which will assist
+the fancy of the artist, in representing the person and character of
+Hippolytus.
+
+"Quant � l'Hippolyte d'Euripide il a une teinte si divine que pour le
+sentir dignement il faut, pour ainsi dire, �tre initi� dans les myst�res
+de la beaut�, avoir respir� l'air de la Gr�ce. Rappelez vous ce que
+l'antiquit� nous a transmis de plus accompli parmi les images d'une
+jeunesse h�ro�que, les Dioscures de Monte-Cavallo, le M�l�agre et
+l'Apollon du Vatican. Le caract�re d'Hippolyte occupe dans la po�sie �
+peu pr�s la m�me place que ces statues dans la sculpture." "On peut
+remarquer dans plusieurs beaut�s id�ales de l'antique que les anciens
+voulant cr�er une image perfectionn�e de la nature humaine ont fondu les
+nuances du caract�re d'un sexe avec celui de l'autre; que Junon, Pallas,
+Diane, out une majest�, une s�v�rit� m�le; qu' Apollon, Mercure,
+Bacchus, au contraire, ont quelque chose de la grace et de la douceur
+des femmes. De m�me nous voyons dans la beaut� h�ro�que et vierge
+d'Hippolyte l'image de sa m�re l'Amazone et le reflet de Diane dans un
+mortel."
+
+(The last lines are especially remarkable, and are an artistic
+commentary on what I have ventured to touch upon ethically at page 85.)
+
+
+The story of Hippolytus is to be found in bas-reliefs and gems; it
+occurs on a particularly fine sarcophagus now preserved in the cathedral
+at Agrigentum, of which there is a cast in the British Museum.
+
+Under the heroic and classical form, Hippolytus conveys the same idea of
+manly chastity and self-control which in sacred art would be suggested
+by the figure of Joseph, the son of Jacob.
+
+A noble companion to the Hippolytus would be Neoptolemus, the son of
+Achilles. He is the young Greek warrior, strong and bold and brave; a
+fine ideal type of generosity and truth. The conception, as I imagine
+it, should be taken from the Philoctetes of Sophocles, where
+Neoptolemus, indignant at the craft of Ulysses, discloses the trick of
+which he had been made the unwilling instrument, and restores the fatal,
+envenomed arrows to Philoctetes. The celebrated lines in the Iliad
+spoken by Achilles--
+
+  "Who dares think one thing and another tell
+   My soul detests him as the gates of hell!"
+
+should give the leading characteristic _motif_ in the figure of his son.
+There should be something of remorseful pity in the very youthful
+features; the form ought to be heroically treated, that is, undraped,
+and he should hold the arrows in his hand.
+
+Neoptolemus, as the savage avenger of his father's death, slaying the
+grey-haired Priam at the foot of the altar, and carrying off Andromache,
+is, of course, quite a different version of the character. He then
+figures as Pyrrhus--
+
+  "The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
+   Black as his purpose, did the night resemble."
+
+The fine moral story of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes is figured on the
+Etruscan vases. Of the young, truth-telling, Greek hero I find no single
+statue.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+IPHIGENIA.
+
+I have often been surprised that we have no statue of this eminently
+beautiful subject. We have the story of Iphigenia constantly repeated in
+gems and bas-reliefs; the most celebrated example extant being the
+Medici Vase. But no single figure of Iphigenia, as the Greek ideal of
+heroic maidenhood and self-devotion, exists, I believe, in antique
+sculpture. The small and rather feebly elegant statuette by Christian
+Tieck is the only modern example I have seen.
+
+Iphigenia may be represented under two very different aspects, both
+beautiful.
+
+First, as the Iphigenia in Aulis; the victim sacrificed to obtain a fair
+wind for the Grecian fleet detained on its way to Troy. Extreme youth
+and grace, with a tender resignation not devoid of dignity, should be
+the leading characteristics; for we must bear in mind that Iphigenia,
+while regretting life and the "lamp-bearing day," and "the beloved
+light," and her Argive home and her "Mycenian handmaids," dies
+willingly, as the Greek girl ought to die, for the good of her country.
+She begins, indeed, with a prayer for pity, with lamentations for her
+untimely end, but she resumes her nobler self; and all her sentiments,
+when she is brought forth, crowned for sacrifice, are worthy of the
+daughter of Agamemnon. She even exults that she is called upon to perish
+for the good of Greece, and to avenge the cause of right on the Spartan
+Helen. "I give," she exclaims, "my life for Greece! sacrifice me--and let
+Troy perish!" When her mother weeps, she reproves those tears: "It is
+not well, O my mother! that I should love life too much. Think that thou
+hast brought me forth for the common good of Greece, not for thyself
+only!" She glories in her anticipated renown, not vainly, since, while
+the world endures, and far as the influences of literature and art
+extend, her story and her name shall live. The scene in Euripides should
+be taken as the basis of the character--the finest scene in his finest
+drama. The tradition that Iphigenia was not really sacrificed, but
+snatched away from the altar by Diana, and a hind substituted in her
+place, should be present to the fancy of the artist, when he sets
+himself to represent the majestic resignation of the consecrated virgin;
+as adding a touch of the marvellous and ideal to the Greek elegance and
+simplicity of the conception.
+
+The _picture_ of Iphigenia as drawn by Tennyson is wonderfully vivid;
+but it wants the Greek dignity and statuesque feeling; it is
+emphatically a picture, all over colour and light, and crowded with
+accessories. He represents her as encountering Helen in the land of
+Shadows, and, turning from her "with sick and scornful looks averse,"
+for she remembers the tragedy at Aulis.
+
+  "My youth (she said) was blasted with a curse:
+     This woman was the cause!
+   I was cut off from hope in that sad place
+     Which yet to name my spirit loathes and fears.
+   My father held his hand upon his face;
+     I, blinded with my tears,
+   Essayed to speak; my voice came thick with sighs
+     As in a dream; dimly I could descry
+   The stern black-bearded kings with wolfish eyes
+     Waiting to see me die.
+   The tall masts quiver'd as they lay afloat,
+     The temples and the people and the shore;
+   One drew a sharp knife thro' my tender throat
+     Slowly--and nothing more."
+
+The famous picture of the sacrifice of Iphigenia by Timanthes, the theme
+of admiration and criticism for the last two thousand years, which every
+writer on art deems it proper to mention in praise or in blame, could
+hardly have been more vivid or more terrible than this.
+
+The analogous idea, that of heroic resignation and self-devotion in a
+great cause, would be conveyed in sacred art by the figure of Jephtha's
+daughter; she too regrets the promises of life, but dies not the less
+willingly. "My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do
+to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch
+as the Lord hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the
+children of Ammon." And for a single statue, Jephtha's daughter would be
+a fine subject--one to task the powers of our best sculptors; the
+_sentiment_ would be the same as the Iphigenia, but the _treatment_
+altogether different.
+
+
+For the Iphigenia in Tauris I think the modern sculptor would do well to
+set aside the character as represented by Euripides, and rather keep in
+view the conception of Goethe.[3] In his hand it has lost nothing of its
+statuesque elegance and simplicity, and has gained immeasurably in moral
+dignity and feminine tenderness. The Iphigenia in Tauris is no longer
+young, but she is still the consecrated virgin; no more the victim, but
+herself the priestess of those very rites by which she was once fated to
+perish. While Euripides has depicted her as stern and astute, Goethe has
+made her the impersonation of female devotedness, and mild, but
+unflinching integrity. She is like the young Neoptolemus when she
+disdains to use the stratagem which Pylades had suggested, when
+she dares to speak the truth, and trust to it alone for help and safety.
+The scene in which she is haunted by the recollection of her doomed
+ancestry, and mutters over the song of the Parc� on that far-off sullen
+shore, is sublime, but incapable of representation in plastic art. It
+should, however, be well studied, as helping the artist to the abstract
+conception of the character as a whole.
+
+Carstens made a design, suggested by this tragedy, of the Three Parc�
+singing their fatal mysterious song. A model of one of the figures (that
+of Atropos) used to stand in Goethe's library, and a cast from this is
+before me while I write: every one who sees it takes it for an antique.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+EVE.
+
+I have but a few words to say of Eve. As she is the only undraped figure
+which is allowable in sacred art, the sculptors have multiplied
+representations of her, more or less finely imagined; but what I
+conceive to be the true type has seldom, very seldom, been attained. The
+remarks which follow are, however, suggestive, not critical.
+
+It appears to me--and I speak it with reverence--that the Miltonic type is
+not the highest conceivable, nor the best fitted for sculptural
+treatment. Milton has evidently lavished all his power on this fairest
+of created beings; but he makes her too nymph-like--too goddess-like. In
+one place he compares her to a Wood-nymph, Oread, or Dryad of the
+groves; in another to Diana's self, "though not, as she, with bow and
+quiver armed." The scriptural conception of our first parent is not like
+this; it is ampler, grander, nobler far. I fancy her the sublime ideal
+of maternity. It may be said that this idea of her predestined
+motherhood should not predominate in the conception of Eve before the
+Fall: but I think it should.
+
+It is most beautifully imagined by Milton that Eve, separated from her
+mate, her Adam, is weak, and given over to the merely womanish nature,
+for only when linked together and supplying the complement to each
+other's _moral_ being, can man or woman be strong; but we must also
+remember that the "spirited sly snake," in tempting Eve, even when he
+finds her alone, uses no vulgar allurements. "Ye shall be as Gods,
+knowing good and evil." Milton, indeed, seasons his harangue with
+flattery: but for this he has no warrant in Scripture.
+
+As the Eve of Paradise should be majestically sinless, so after the Fall
+she should not cower and wail like a disappointed girl. Her infinite
+fault, her infinite woe, her infinite penitence, should have a touch of
+grandeur. She has paid the inevitable price for that mighty knowledge of
+good and evil she so coveted; that terrible predestined experience--she
+has found it, or it has found her;--and she wears her crown of grief as
+erst her crown of innocence.
+
+I think the noble picture of Eve in Mrs. Browning's Drama of Exile, as
+that of the Mother of our redemption not less than the Mother of
+suffering humanity, might be read and considered with advantage by a
+modern sculptor.
+
+                             "Rise, woman, rise
+   To thy peculiar and best altitudes
+   Of doing good and of resisting ill!
+   Something thou hast to bear through womanhood;
+   Peculiar suffering answering to the sin,
+   Some pang paid down for each new human life;
+   Some weariness in guarding such a life,
+   Some coldness from the guarded; some mistrust
+   From those thou hast too well served; from those beloved
+   Too loyally, some treason. But go, thy love
+   Shall chant to itself its own beatitudes
+   After its own life-working!
+   I bless thee to the desert and the thorns,
+   To the elemental change and turbulence,
+   And to the solemn dignities of grief;
+   To each one of these ends, and to this end
+   Of Death and the hereafter!
+   _Eve._                     I accept,
+   For me and for my daughters, this high part
+   Which lowly shall be counted!"
+
+The figure of Eve in Raphael's design (the one engraved by Marc Antonio)
+is exquisitely statuesque as well as exquisitely beautiful. In the
+moment that she presents the apple to Adam she looks--perhaps she ought
+to look--like the _Venus Vincitrice_ of the antique time; but I am not
+sure; and, at all events, the less of the classical sentiment the
+better.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+ADAM.
+
+I have seen no statue of Adam; but surely he is a fine subject, either
+alone or as the companion of Eve; and the Miltonic type is here
+all-sufficient, combining the heroic ideal of Greek art with something
+higher still--
+
+   "Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure,"
+
+whence true authority in men--in fact, essential manliness.
+
+Goethe had the idea that Adam ought to be represented with a spade, as
+the progenitor of all who till the ground, and partially draped with a
+deerskin, that is, after the Fall; which would be well: but he adds that
+Adam should have a child at his feet in the act of strangling a serpent.
+This appears to me objectionable and ambiguous; if admissible at all,
+the accessory figure would be a fitter accompaniment for Eve.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+ANGELS.
+
+Angels, properly speaking, are neither winged men nor winged children.
+Wings, in ancient art, were the symbols of a divine nature; and the
+early Greeks, who humanised their gods and goddesses, and deified
+humanity through the perfection of the forms, at first distinguished the
+divine and the human by giving wings to all the celestial beings; thus
+lifting them above the earth. Our religious idea of angels is altogether
+different. Give to the child-form wings, in other words, give to the
+child-nature, innocent, and pure, the adjuncts of wisdom and power, and
+thus you realise the idea of the angel as Raphael conceived it. It is
+so difficult to imagine in the adult form the union of perfect purity
+and perfect wisdom, the absence of experience and suffering, and the
+capacity of thinking and feeling, a condition of being in which all
+conscious _motive_ is lost in the _impulse_ to good, that it remains a
+problem in art. The angels of Angelico da Fiesole, who are not only
+winged, but convey the idea of movement only by the wings, not by the
+limbs, are exquisite, as fitted to minister to us in heaven, but hardly
+as fitted to keep watch and ward for us on earth--
+
+   "Against foul fiends to aid us militant."
+
+The feminine element always predominates in the conception of angels,
+though they are supposed to be masculine: I doubt whether it ought to be
+so.
+
+
+While these sheets are going through the press, I find the following
+beautiful passage relative to angels in the last number of "Fraser's
+Magazine":--
+
+"It is safer, even, and perhaps more orthodox and scriptural, to
+'impersonate' time and space, strength and love, and even the laws of
+nature, than to give us any more angel worlds, which are but dead
+skeletons of Dante's creations without that awful and living reality
+which they had in his mind; or to fill children's books, as the High
+Church party are doing now, with pictures and tales of certain winged
+hermaphrodites, in whom one cannot think (even by the extremest stretch
+of charity) that the writers or draughtsmen really believe, while one
+sees them servilely copying medi�val forms, and intermingling them with
+the ornaments of an extinct architecture; thus confessing _na�vely_ to
+every one but themselves, that they accept the whole notion as an
+integral portion of a creed, to which, if they be members of the Church
+of England, they cannot well belong, seeing that it was, happily for us,
+expelled both by law and by conscience at the Reformation."
+
+This is eloquent and true; but not the less true it is, that if we have
+to represent in art those "spiritual beings who walk this earth unseen,
+both when we sleep and when we wake"--beings, who (as the author of the
+above passage seems to believe) may be intimately connected with the
+phenomena of the universe--we must have a type, a bodily type, under
+which to represent them; and as we cannot do this from knowledge, we
+must do it symbolically. Angels, as we figure them, are _symbols_ of
+moral and spiritual existences elevated above ourselves--we do not
+believe in the forms, we only accept their significance. I should be
+glad to see a better impersonation than the impossible creatures
+represented in art; but till some artist-poet, or poet-artist, has
+invented such an impersonation, we must employ that which is already
+familiarised to the eye and hallowed to the fancy without imposing on
+the understanding.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   MIRIAM.        RUTH.
+
+Both the Old and the New Testament abound in sculptural subjects; but
+fitly to deal with the Old Testament required a Michal-Angelo. Beautiful
+as are the gates of Ghiberti they are hardly what the Germans would call
+"alt-testamentische," they are so essentially elegant and graceful, and
+the old Hebrew legends and personages are so tremendous. Even Miriam and
+Ruth dilate into a sort of grandeur. In representation I always fancy
+them above life-size.
+
+
+I doubt whether the same artist who could conceive the Prophets would be
+able to represent the Apostles, or that the same hand which gave us
+Moses could give us Christ. Michal-Angelo's idea of Christ, both in
+painting and sculpture is, to me, revolting.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   CHRIST.      SOLOMON.       DAVID.
+
+I do not like the idea of Moses and Christ placed together. Much finer
+in artistic and moral contrast would be the two teachers,--Christ as the
+divine and spiritual law-giver, Solomon as the type of worldly wisdom.
+They should stand side by side, or be seated each on his throne, a
+crowned King, with book and sceptre--but how different in character!
+
+
+We have multiplied statues of David. I have never seen one which
+realised the finest conception of his character, either as Hero, King,
+Prophet, or Poet. In general he figures as the slayer of Goliath, and is
+always too feeble and boyish. David, singing to his lute before Saul;
+David as the musician and poet, young, beautiful, half-draped,
+heaven-inspired, exorcising by his art the dark spirit of evil which
+possessed the jealous King:--this would be a theme for an artist, and
+would as finely represent the power of sacred song as a figure of St.
+Cecilia. But the sentiment should not be that of a young Apollo, or an
+Orpheus; therein would lie the chief difficulty.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   HAGAR.       REBEKAH.       RACHEL.
+
+I remember to have seen fine statues of Hagar holding her pitcher, of
+Rebekah contemplating her bracelet, and of Rachel as the shepherdess.
+But I would have a different version; Hagar as the poor cast-away,
+driven forth with her boy into the wilderness; Rebekah as the exulting
+bride; and Rachel as the mild, pensive wife. They would represent, in a
+very complete manner, contrasted phases of the destiny of Woman,
+connected together by our religious associations, and appealing to our
+deepest human sympathies.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE QUEEN OF SHEBA.
+
+The Queen of Sheba would be a fine subject for a single statue, as the
+religious type of the queenly, intellectual woman, the treatment being
+kept as far as possible from that of a Pallas or a Muse.
+
+
+The journey of the Queen of the South to visit Solomon would be a
+capital subject for a processional bas-relief, and as a _pendant_ to the
+journey of "the Wise Men of the East," to visit a greater than Solomon.
+The latter has been perpetually treated from the fourth century. Of the
+journey of the Queen of Sheba I have seen, as yet, no example.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+LADY GODIVA.
+
+With regard to statuesque subjects from modern history and
+poetry,--_Romantic Sculpture_, as it is styled,--the taste both of the
+public and the artist evidently sets in this direction. That the
+treatment of such subjects should not be classical is admitted; but in
+the development of this romantic tendency there is cause to fear that we
+may be inundated with all kinds of picturesque vagaries and violations
+of the just laws and limits of art.
+
+
+I remember, however, a circumstance which makes me hopeful as to the
+progress of feeling; knowledge may come hereafter. I remember about
+twenty years ago proposing the figure and story of Lady Godiva as
+beautiful subjects for sculpture and painting. There were present on
+that occasion, among others, two artists and a poet. The two artists
+laughed outright, and the poet extemporised an epigram upon Peeping Tom.
+If I were to propose Lady Godiva as a subject now[4], I believe it would
+be received with a far different feeling even by those very men. If I
+were Queen of England I would have it painted in Fresco in my council
+chamber. There should be seen the palfrey with its rich housings, and
+near it, as preparing to mount, the noble lady should stand, timid, but
+resolved: her veil should lie on the ground; the drapery just falling
+from her fair limbs and partly sustained by one hand, while with the
+other she loosens her golden tresses. A bevy of waiting-maids, with
+averted faces, disappear hurriedly beneath the massive porch of the
+Saxon palace, which forms the background, with sky and trees seen
+through openings in the heavy architecture. This is the picturesque
+version of the story; but there are many others. As a single statue, the
+figure of Lady Godiva affords an opportunity for the legitimate
+treatment of the undraped female form, sanctified by the purest, the
+most elevated associations;--by woman's tearful pride and man's respect
+and gratitude.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+JOAN OF ARC.
+
+Shakspeare, who is so horribly unjust to Joan of Arc, has put a sublime
+speech into her mouth where she answers Burgundy who had accused her of
+sorcery,--
+
+  "Because you want the grace that others have.
+   You judge it straight a thing impossible
+   To compass wonders but by help of devils!"
+
+The whole theory of popular superstition comprised in three lines!
+
+But Joan herself--how at her name the whole heart seems to rise up in
+resentment, not so much against her cowardly executioners as against
+those who have so wronged her memory! Never was a character,
+historically pure, bright, definite, and perfect in every feature and
+outline, so abominably treated in poetry and fiction,--perhaps for this
+reason, that she was in herself so exquisitely wrought, so complete a
+specimen of the heroic, the poetic, the romantic, that she could not be
+touched by art or modified by fancy, without being in some degree
+profaned. As to art, I never saw yet any representation of "Jeanne la
+grande Pastoure," (except, perhaps, the lovely statue by the Princess of
+Wurtemburg,) which I could endure to look at--and even that gives us the
+contemplative simplicity, but not the power, intellect, and energy,
+which must have formed so large a part of the character. Then as to the
+poets, what shall be said of them? First Shakspeare, writing for the
+English stage, took up the popular idea of the character as it prevailed
+in England in his own time. Into the hypothesis that the greater part of
+Henry VI. is not by Shakspeare, there is no occasion to enter here; the
+original conception of the character of Joan of Arc may not be his, but
+he has left it untouched in its principal features. The English hated
+the memory of the French Heroine because she had caused the loss of
+France and had humiliated us as a nation; and our chroniclers revenged
+themselves and healed their wounded self-love by imputing her victories
+to witchcraft. Shakspeare, giving her the attributes which the
+historians of his time assigned to her, represents her as a warlike,
+arrogant sorceress--a "monstrous woman"--attended and assisted by demons.
+I pass over the depraved and perverse spirit in which Voltaire profaned
+this divine character. A theme which a patriot poet would have
+approached as he would have approached an altar, he has made a vehicle
+for the most licentious parody that ever disgraced a national
+literature. Schiller comes next, and hardly seems to me more excusable.
+Not only has he missed the character, he has deliberately falsified both
+character and fact. His "Johanna" might have been called by any other
+name; and the scene of his tragedy might have been placed anywhere in
+the wide world with just the same probability and truth. Schiller and
+Goethe held a principle that all considerations were to yield before the
+proprieties of art. But Milton speaks somewhere of those "faultless
+proprieties of nature" which never can be violated with impunity: and
+Art can never move freely but in the domain of nature and of truth. All
+the fine writing in Schiller's "Maid of Orleans" can never reconcile me
+to its absolute and revolting falsehood. The sublime, simple-hearted
+girl who to the last moment regarded herself as set apart by God to do
+His work, he makes the victim of an insane passion for a young
+Englishman. In the love-sick classical heroines of Corneille and Racine
+there is nothing more Frenchified, more absurd, more revolting. Then he
+makes her die victorious on the field of battle defending the
+oriflamme;--far, far more glorious as well as more pathetic her real
+death--but it offended against Schiller's �sthetic conception of the
+dignity of tragedy.
+
+Lastly, we have Southey's epic: what shall be said of it?--even what he
+said of the Lusiad of Camoens, "that it is read with little emotion, and
+remembered with little pleasure." No. I do not wish to see Joan turned
+into a heroine of tragedy or tale, because, as it seems to me, the whole
+life and death of this martyred girl is too near us, and too
+historically distinct, and, I will add, too sacred, to be dressed out in
+romantic prose or verse. What Walter Scott might have made of her I do
+not know--something marvellously picturesque and life-like, no doubt--and
+yet I am glad he did not try his hand on her. But she remains a
+legitimate and most admirable subject for representative art; and as yet
+nothing has been done in sculpture to fix the ideal and heroic in her
+character, nor in painting, worthy of her exploits. There exists no
+contemporary portrait of her except in the brief description of her in
+the old French Chronicle of the Siege of Orleans, where it is said that
+her figure was tall and slender, her bust fine, her hair and eyes black;
+that she wore her hair short, and could never be persuaded to put on a
+head-piece, and farther (and in this respect both Schiller and Southey
+have wronged her), that she had never slain a man, using her consecrated
+sword merely to defend herself. I should like to see a fine equestrian
+statue of her by one of our best English sculptors, set up in a
+conspicuous place among us, as a national expiation.
+
+Southey mentions that in the beginning of the last war, about 1795, when
+popular feeling, excited almost to frenzy, raged against France, a
+pantomime, or ballet, was performed at Covent Garden, from the story of
+Joan of Arc, at the conclusion of which she is carried away by demons,
+like a female Don Juan. This denouement caused such a storm of
+indignation, that the author--one James Cross--was obliged, after the
+first two or three representations, to change the demons into angels,
+and send her straight into Heaven:--an anecdote pleasant to record as
+illustrating the sure ultimate triumph of truth over falsehood; of all
+the better sympathies over prejudice and wrong;--in spite of history,
+and, what is more, in spite of Shakspeare!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CHARACTERS FROM SHAKSPEARE.
+
+Joan of Arc is not, however, a Shakspearian character; and, in fact,
+there are very few of his personages susceptible of sculptural
+treatment. They are too dramatic, too profound, too complex in their
+essential nature where they are tragic; too many-sided and picturesque
+where they are comic.
+
+For instance, the attempt to condense into marble such light,
+evanescent, quaint creations as those in "The Midsummer's Night's Dream"
+is better avoided; we feel that a marble fairy must be a heavy
+absurdity. Oberon and Titania might perhaps float along in a bas-relief;
+but we cannot put away the thought that they have reality without
+substantiality, and we do not like to see them, or Ariel, or Caliban
+fixed in the definite forms of sculpture.
+
+There are, however, a few of Shakspeare's characters which appear to me
+beautifully adapted for statuesque treatment: Perdita holding her
+flowers; Miranda lingering on the shore; might well replace the
+innumerable "Floras" and "Nymphs preparing to bathe," which people the
+_at�liers_ of our sculptors. Cordelia has something of marble quietude
+about her; and Hermione is a statue ready made. And, by the way, it is
+observable that Shakspeare represents Hermione as a _coloured_ statue.
+Paulina will not allow it to be touched, because "the colour is not yet
+dry." Again,--
+
+  "Would you not deem those veins
+   Did verily bear blood?
+
+  "The very life seems warm upon her lips,
+   The fixture of her eye hath motion in't,
+   And we are mocked by Art!
+   The ruddiness upon her lip is wet,
+
+  "You'll mar it if you kiss it, stain your own
+   With oily painting."
+
+I think it possible to model small ornamental statuettes and groups from
+some few of the scenes in Shakspeare's plays; but this is quite
+different from life-size figures of Hamlet, Othello, Shylock, Macbeth,
+which must either have the look of real individual portraiture, or
+become mere idealisations of certain qualities; and Shakspeare's
+creations are neither the one nor the other.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CHARACTERS FROM SPENSER.
+
+Spenser is so essentially a picturesque poet, he depends for his rich
+effects so much on the combination of colour and imagery, and multiplied
+accessories, that one feels--at least _I_ feel, on laying down a volume
+of the "Fairie Queene" dazzled as if I had been walking in a gallery of
+pictures. His "Masque of Cupid," for instance, although a procession of
+poetical creations, could not be transferred to a bas-relief without
+completely losing its Spenserian character--its wondrous glow of colour.
+Thus Cupid "uprears himself exulting from the back of the ravenous
+lion;" removes the bandage from his eyes, that he may look round on his
+victims; "shakes the darts which his right hand doth strain full
+dreadfully," and "claps on high his coloured wings twain." This
+certainly is not the Greek Cupid, nor the Cupid of sculpture; it is the
+Spenserian Cupid. So of his Una, so of his Britomart, and the Red Cross
+Knight and Sir Guyon: one might make elegant _statuesque_ impersonations
+of the allegories they involve, as of Truth, Chastity, Faith,
+Temperance; but then they would lose immediately their Spenserian
+character and sentiment, and must become something altogether different.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   THE LADY.        COMUS.
+
+It is not so with Milton. The "Lady" in Comus, whether she stands
+listening to the echos of her own sweet voice, or motionless as marble
+under the spell of the "false enchanter," _looking_ that divine reproof
+which in the poem she _speaks_,--
+
+  "I hate when vice can bolt her arguments,
+   And virtue has no tongue to check her pride"--
+
+is a subject perfectly fitted for sculpture, and never, so far as I
+know, executed. It would be a far more appropriate ornament for a lady's
+_boudoir_ than French statues of MODESTY, which generally have the
+effect of making one feel very much ashamed.[5]
+
+Sabrina has been beautifully treated by Marshall.
+
+It is difficult to render Comus without making him too like a Bacchus or
+an Apollo. He is neither.
+
+He represents not the beneficent, but the intoxicating and brutifying
+power of wine. His joviality should not be that of a God, but with
+something mischievous, bestial, Faun-like; and he should have, with the
+Dionysian grace, a dash of the cunning and malignity of his Mother
+Circe. These characteristics should be in the mind of the artist. The
+panther's skin, the coronal of vine leaves, and, instead of the Thyrsus,
+the magician's wand, are the proper accessories. It is also worth
+notice, that in the antique representations Comus has wings as a
+demigod, and in a picture described by Philostratus (a night scene) he
+lies crouched in a drunken sleep. Little use, however, is made of him in
+the antique myths, and the Miltonic conception is that which should be
+embodied by the modern sculptor.
+
+
+Il Penseroso and L'Allegro, if embodied in sculpture as poetical
+abstractions (either masculine or feminine) of Melancholy and Mirth,
+would cease to be Miltonic, for the conceptions of the poet are
+essentially picturesque, and expressed in both cases by a luxuriant
+accumulation of images and accessories, not to be brought within the
+limits of plastic art without the most tasteless confusion and
+inconsistency.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+SATAN.
+
+The religious idea of a Satan--the impersonation of that mixture of the
+bestial, the malignant, the impious, and the hopeless, which constitute
+THE FIEND, the enemy of all that is human and divine--I conceive to be
+quite unfitted for the purpose of sculpture. Danton's attempt
+degenerates into grim caricature. Milton's Satan--"the archangel
+ruined,"--is however a strictly poetical creation, and capable of the
+most poetical statuesque treatment. But we must remember that, if it be
+a gross mistake, religious and artistic, to conceive the Messiah under
+the form of a larger, stronger humanity, with a _physique_ like that of
+a wrestler, (as M. Angelo has done in the Last Judgement) it is equally
+a mistake to conceive the lost angel, our spiritual adversary, under any
+such coarse Herculean lineaments. There can be no image of the Miltonic
+Satan without the elements of beauty, "though changed by pale ire, envy,
+and despair!" Colossal he may be, vast as Mount Athos; but it is not
+necessary to express this that he should be hewn out of Mount Athos, or
+look like the giant Polypheme! His proportions, his figure, his
+features--like his power--are angelic. As the Hero--for he is so--of the
+"Paradise Lost," the subject is open to poetic treatment; but I am not
+aware that as yet it has been poetically treated.
+
+Of the Italian poetry and history, and all the wondrous and lovely
+shapes which come thronging out of that Elysian land,--I can say nothing
+now,--or only this,--that after all I am not _quite_ sure that I am right
+about Spenser. For, at first view, what poet seems less amenable to
+statuesque treatment than Dante? One would have imagined that only a
+preternatural fusion of Michal-Angelo and Rembrandt could fitly render
+the murky recesses and ghastly and monstrous inhabitants of the Inferno,
+or attempt to shadow forth the dazzling mysteries of the Paradiso. Yet
+see what Flaxman has achieved! His designs are legitimate bas-reliefs,
+not pictures in outline. He has been true to his own art, and all that
+could be done within the limitations of his art he has accomplished. It
+is a translation of Dante's _ideas_ into sculpture, with every thing
+_peculiarly_ Dantesque in the treatment, set aside.
+
+Now as to our more modern poets.--From amid the long array of beautiful
+subjects which seem to move in succession before the fancy, there are
+two which stand out prominent in their beauty. First, Lord Byron's
+"Myrrha," who with her Ionian elegance is susceptible of the purest
+classical treatment. She should hold a torch; but not with the air of a
+M�nad, nor of a Thais about to fire Persepolis. The sentiment should be
+deeper and quieter.
+
+                   "Dost thou think
+   A Greek girl dare not do for love that which
+   An Indian widow does for custom?"
+
+Ion in Talfourd's Tragedy--the boy-hero, in all the tenderness of extreme
+youth, already self-devoted and touched with a melancholy grace and an
+elevation beyond his years--is so essentially statuesque, that I am
+surprised that no sculptor has attempted it; perhaps because, in this
+instance, as in that of Myrrha, the popular realisation of both
+characters as subjects of formative art has been spoiled by theatrical
+trappings and associations.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] "_Sancta Simplicitas!_" was the exclamation of Huss to the woman
+who, when he was burned at the stake, in her religious zeal brought a
+faggot to light the pile.
+
+[2] Canova's bust of Helen is such a counterfeit; whereas the Helen of
+Gibson is, for a mere head, singularly characteristic.
+
+[3] There is a fine translation of the German Iphigenia by Miss
+Swanwick. (Dramatic Works of Goethe. Bohn, 1850.)
+
+[4] 1848. At the moment I transcribe this (1854), a very charming statue
+of the Lady Godiva (suggested, I believe, by Tennyson's poem) stands in
+the Exhibition of the Royal Academy.
+
+[5] For example, the statue of Modesty executed for Josephine's boudoir.
+
+
+   LONDON:
+   A. and G. A. SPOTTISWOODE,
+   New-street-Square.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Commonplace Book of Thoughts,
+Memories, and Fancies., by Anna Jameson
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COMMONPLACE BOOK ***
+
+***** This file should be named 39680-8.txt or 39680-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/9/6/8/39680/
+
+Produced by Julia Miller, Turgut Dincer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/39680-8.zip b/39680-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cbd99ce
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-8.zip
diff --git a/39680-h.zip b/39680-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..959599d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h.zip
diff --git a/39680-h/39680-h.htm b/39680-h/39680-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..553dfa0
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/39680-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,12128 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" />
+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies, by Mrs. Jameson.
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css">
+
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    p.indent {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify; margin-left: 2em; text-indent: -2em;
+         margin-bottom: .75em; font-size: .9em;
+         }
+
+    p.name {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: right; padding-right: 2em;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+
+    p.tb {  margin-top: 1.50em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both; font-weight: normal;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+	 margin-top: 2em;
+	 margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+    .gesperrt {letter-spacing: 3em; text-align: center;}
+
+    .dropcap {float: left; font-size: 2.5em; line-height: 83%; margin-right: .1em;}
+
+    .oldtype {font-family: "Old English Text MT", fantasy, sans-serif; font-size: 1.1em;}
+
+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;}
+    .box {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; border: 1px solid black;}
+    td.right2 {text-align: right; vertical-align: top;}
+
+    td.right {text-align: right; vertical-align: bottom;}
+    td.left {text-align: left;}
+    td.left2 {text-align: left; width: 10%;}
+    td.poem {padding: 0em;}
+
+    .padl1 { padding-left: 1em; }
+    .padt05 { padding-top: .5em; }
+    .padb05 { padding-bottom: .5em; }
+    .padl3 { padding-left: 3em; }
+    .top {vertical-align: top;}
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+    .pagenum  { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+            /*  visibility: hidden;  */
+                position: absolute;
+                left: 94%;
+                font-size: .7em;
+                text-align: right;
+              } /* page numbers */
+
+    .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .padb07    {padding-bottom: .7em;}
+     small {font-size: .9em;}
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+
+    .figcenter   {margin: auto; text-align: center;}
+
+    .footnote         {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}
+    .footnote .label  {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;}
+    .fnanchor         {vertical-align: super; font-size: .8em; text-decoration: none;}
+
+    .poem             { margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; font-size: .9em; text-align: left;}
+    .poem2             { margin-left: 2%; margin-right: 15%; font-size: .9em; text-align: left;}
+    .poem2 .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem2 span.i05     {display: block; margin-left: -0.4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+
+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem span.i05     {display: block; margin-left: -0.4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i0     {display: block; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i3     {display: block; margin-left: 3em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i5     {display: block; margin-left: 5em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i6     {display: block; margin-left: 6em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i8     {display: block; margin-left: 8em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i9     {display: block; margin-left: 9em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i10     {display: block; margin-left: 10em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i12     {display: block; margin-left: 12em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i13     {display: block; margin-left: 13em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem2 span.i0     {display: block; margin-left: 0em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem2 span.i1     {display: block; margin-left: 1em; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+
+    </style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories,
+and Fancies., by Anna Jameson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
+       2nd ed.
+
+Author: Anna Jameson
+
+Release Date: May 12, 2012 [EBook #39680]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COMMONPLACE BOOK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Julia Miller, Turgut Dincer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_i" id="Page_i">i</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>A</h5>
+
+<h2>COMMONPLACE BOOK</h2>
+
+<h5>OF</h5>
+
+<h2><span class="oldtype">Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.</span></h2>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/frontispiece.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="675" width="500" /></div>
+
+<h2>A COMMONPLACE BOOK</h2>
+
+<h5>OF</h5>
+
+<h2><span class="oldtype">Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.</span></h2>
+
+<h4>ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.</h4>
+
+<h5>PART I.&mdash;ETHICS AND CHARACTER.<br />
+
+PART II.&mdash;LITERATURE AND ART.</h5>
+
+<h3>BY MRS. JAMESON.</h3>
+
+<h5>&#8220;Un peu de chaque chose, et rien du tout,&mdash;&agrave; la fran&ccedil;aise!&#8221;&mdash;<span class="smcap">Montaigne.</span></h5>
+
+<h4><span class="oldtype">With Illustrations and Etchings.</span></h4>
+
+<h5>SECOND EDITION, CORRECTED.</h5>
+
+<h4>LONDON:<br />
+LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS.<br />
+1855.</h4>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-iv.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="264" width="500" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_v" id="Page_v">v</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>PREFACE.</h3>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">must</span> be allowed to say a few words in explanation
+of the contents of this little volume, which is truly
+what its name sets forth&mdash;a book of common-places, and
+nothing more. If I have never, in any work I have
+ventured to place before the public, aspired to <i>teach</i>,
+(being myself a <i>learner</i> in all things,) at least I have
+hitherto done my best to deserve the indulgence I have
+met with; and it would pain me if it could be supposed
+that such indulgence had rendered me presumptuous or
+careless.</p>
+
+<p>For many years I have been accustomed to make a
+memorandum of any thought which might come across
+me&mdash;(if pen and paper were at hand), and to mark (and
+<i>remark</i>) any passage in a book which excited either a
+sympathetic or an antagonistic feeling. This collection
+of notes accumulated insensibly from day to day. The
+volumes on Shakspeare&#8217;s Women, on Sacred and Legendary
+Art, and various other productions, sprung from seed thus
+lightly and casually sown, which, I hardly know how,
+grew up and expanded into a regular, readable form, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vi" id="Page_vi">vi</a></span>
+a beginning, a middle, and an end. But what was to be
+done with the fragments which remained&mdash;without beginning,
+and without end&mdash;links of a hidden or a broken
+chain? Whether to preserve them or destroy them became
+a question, and one I could not answer for myself.
+In allowing a portion of them to go forth to the world in
+their original form, as unconnected fragments, I have
+been guided by the wishes of others, who deemed it not
+wholly uninteresting or profitless to trace the path, sometimes
+devious enough, of an &#8220;inquiring spirit,&#8221; even by
+the little pebbles dropped as vestiges by the way side.</p>
+
+<p>A book so supremely egotistical and subjective can do
+good only in one way. It may, like conversation with
+a friend, open up sources of sympathy and reflection; excite
+to argument, agreement, or disagreement; and, like
+every spontaneous utterance of thought out of an earnest
+mind, suggest far higher and better thoughts than any to
+be found here to higher and more productive minds. If
+I had not the humble hope of such a possible result,
+instead of sending these memoranda to the printer, I
+should have thrown them into the fire; for I lack that
+creative faculty which can work up the teachings of
+heart-sorrow and world-experience into attractive forms
+of fiction or of art; and having no intention of leaving
+any such memorials to be published after my death, they
+must have gone into the fire as the only alternative left.</p>
+
+<p>The passages from books are not, strictly speaking,
+<i>selected</i>; they are not given here on any principle of
+choice, but simply because that by some process of assimilation
+they became a part of the individual mind. They
+&#8220;found <i>me</i>,&#8221;&mdash;to borrow Coleridge&#8217;s expression,&mdash;&#8220;found
+me in some depth of my being;&#8221; I did not &#8220;find <i>them</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">vii</a></span></p>
+
+<p>For the rest, all those passages which are marked by
+inverted commas must be regarded as borrowed, though I
+have not always been able to give my authority. All
+passages not so marked are, I dare not say, original or
+new, but at least the unstudied expression of a free discursive
+mind. Fruits, not advisedly plucked, but which
+the variable winds have shaken from the tree: some ripe,
+some &#8220;harsh and crude.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth&#8217;s famous poem of &#8220;The Happy Warrior&#8221;
+(of which a new application will be found at page 87.),
+is supposed by Mr. De Quincey to have been first
+suggested by the character of Nelson. It has since been
+applied to Sir Charles Napier (the Indian General), as
+well as to the Duke of Wellington; all which serves
+to illustrate my position, that the lines in question are
+equally applicable to any man or any woman whose moral
+standard is irrespective of selfishness and expediency.</p>
+
+<p>With regard to the fragment on Sculpture, it may be
+necessary to state that it was written in 1848. The first
+three paragraphs were inserted in the Art Journal for
+April, 1849. It was intended to enlarge the whole into
+a comprehensive essay on &#8220;Subjects fitted for Artistic
+Treatment;&#8221; but this being now impossible, the fragment
+is given as originally written; others may think
+it out, and apply it better than I shall live to do.</p>
+
+<p><small>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;August, 1854.</small></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">viii</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-viii.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="618" width="500" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">ix</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-ix.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="152" width="500" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>CONTENTS.</h3>
+
+<h4>PART I.</h4>
+
+<h4><span class="oldtype">Ethics and Character.</span></h4>
+
+<table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Ethical Fragments.</span></td>
+<td class="right">Page</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2" rowspan="80">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="left">Vanity</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Truths and Truisms</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Beauty and Use</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_5">5</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">What is Soul?</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_7">7</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">The Philosophy of Happiness</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_9">9</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Cheerfulness a Virtue</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_10">10</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Intellect and Sympathy</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_11">11</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Old Letters</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_12">12</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">The Point of Honour</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_13">13</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Looking up</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_14">14</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Authors</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_14">14</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Thought and Theory</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_15">15</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Impulse and Consideration</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Principle and Expediency</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_16">16</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Personality of the Evil Principle</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_17">17</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">The Catholic Spirit</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_18">18</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Death-beds</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_19">19</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">x</a></span>
+Thoughts on a Sermon</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_20">20</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Love and Fear of God</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_22">22</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Social Opinion</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_23">23</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Balzac</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_23">23</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Political</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_24">24</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Celibacy</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_25">25</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Landor&#8217;s Wise Sayings</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_26">26</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Justice and Generosity</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Roman Catholic Converts</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_28">28</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Stealing and Borrowing</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_28">28</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Good and Bad</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_29">29</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Italian Proverb. Greek Saying</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_30">30</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Silent Grief</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_31">31</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Past and Futur</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_32">32</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Suicide. Countenance</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_33">33</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Progress and Progression</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_34">34</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Happiness in Suffering</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_35">35</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Life in the Future</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_36">36</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Strength. Youth</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_38">38</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Moral Suffering</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_40">40</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">The Secret of Peace</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_41">41</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Motives and Impulses</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_42">42</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Principle and Passion</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_43">43</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Dominant Ideas</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_44">44</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Absence and Death</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_45">45</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Sydney Smith. Theodore Hook</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_46">46</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Werther and Childe Harold</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_50">50</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Money Obligations</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_52">52</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Charity. Truth</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_53">53</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Women. Men</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_55">55</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Compensation for Sorrow</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_57">57</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Religion. Avarice</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_57">57</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Genius. Mind</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_59">59</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Hieroglyphical Colours</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_60">60</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">xi</a></span>
+Character</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_61">61</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Value of Words</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_62">62</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Nature and Art</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_64">64</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Spirit and Form</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Penal Retribution. The Church</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_68">68</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Woman&#8217;s Patriotism</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_70">70</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Doubt. Curiosity</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_71">71</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Tieck. Coleridge</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_71">71</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Application of a Bon Mot of Talleyrand</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_73">73</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Adverse Individualities</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_75">75</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Conflict in Love</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_76">76</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">French Expressions</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_77">77</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Practical and Contemplative Life</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_78">78</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Joanna Baillie. Macaulay&#8217;s Ballads</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_80">80</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Cunning</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_80">80</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Browning&#8217;s Paracelsus</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Men, Women, and Children</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_84">84</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Letters</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_100">100</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Madame de Sta&euml;l. Dej&agrave;</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_103">103</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Thought too free</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_105">105</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Good Qualities, not Virtues</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_106">106</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Sense and Phantasy</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_107">107</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Use the Present</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_108">108</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Facts</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_109">109</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Wise Sayings</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Pestilence of Falsehood</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_112">112</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Signs instead of Words. Relations with the World</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_113">113</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Milton&#8217;s Adam and Eve</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_115">115</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Thoughts, sundry</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_116">116</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">A Revelation of Childhood</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_117">117</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">The Indian Hunter and the Fire</span>; an Allegory</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Poetical Fragments</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_152">152</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">xii</a></span></p>
+
+<h4><span class="oldtype">Theological.</span></h4>
+
+<table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">The Hermit and the Minstrel</span></td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_155">155</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2" rowspan="5">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="left">Pandemonium</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_158">158</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Southey on the Religious Orders</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_162">162</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Forms in Religion&mdash;Image Worship</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_164">164</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Religious Differences</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_165">165</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Expansive Christianity</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_169">169</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left" colspan="3"><span class="smcap">Notes from various Sermons</span>:&mdash;</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2" rowspan="6">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="left">A Roman Catholic Sermon</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_172">172</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Another</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_176">176</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Church of England Sermon</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_178">178</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Another</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_181">181</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Dissenting Sermon</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_187">187</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Father Taylor of Boston</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_188">188</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<h4>PART II.</h4>
+
+<h4><span class="oldtype">Literature and Art.</span></h4>
+
+<table width="100%" summary="contents" border="0">
+<tr>
+<td class="left" colspan="3"><span class="smcap">Notes from Books</span>:&mdash;</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2" rowspan="10">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="left">Dr. Arnold</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_198">198</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Niebuhr</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_220">220</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Lord Bacon</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_230">230</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Chateaubriand</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_240">240</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Bishop Cumberland</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_247">247</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Comte&#8217;s Philosophy</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_250">250</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Goethe</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_261">261</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Hazlitt&#8217;s &#8220;Liber Amoris&#8221;</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_263">263</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Francis Horner, &#8220;The Nightingale&#8221;</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_267">267</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Thackeray&#8217;s &#8220;English Humourists&#8221;</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_271">271</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left" colspan="3"><span class="smcap">Notes on Art</span>:&mdash;</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2" rowspan="24">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="left">Analogies</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_276">276</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">xiii</a></span>
+Definition of Art</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_279">279</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">No Patriotic Art</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_280">280</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Verse and Colour</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_280">280</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Dutch Pictures</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_281">281</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Morals in Art</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_283">283</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Physiognomy of Hands</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_288">288</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Mozart and Chopin</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_289">289</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Music</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_293">293</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Rachel, the Actress</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_294">294</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">English and German Actresses</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_298">298</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Character of Imogen</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_303">303</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Shakspeare Club</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_305">305</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">&#8220;Maria Maddalena&#8221;</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_305">305</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">The Artistic Nature</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_307">307</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Woman&#8217;s Criticism</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_309">309</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Artistic Influences</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_310">310</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">The Greek Aphrodite</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_311">311</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Love, in the Greek Tragedy</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_312">312</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Wilkie&#8217;s Life and Letters</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_313">313</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Wilhelm Schadow</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_317">317</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Artist Life</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_321">321</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left">Materialism in Art</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_323">323</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left" colspan="1">A Fragment on Sculpture, and on certain Characters in
+History and Poetry, considered as Subjects for Modern
+Art</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_326">326</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left2" rowspan="16">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="left padl3">Helen of Troy</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_332">332</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">Penelope&mdash;Laodamia</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_336">336</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">Hippolytus</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_339">339</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">Iphigenia</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_343">343</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">Eve</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_347">347</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">Adam</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_350">350</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">Angels</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_351">351</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">Miriam&mdash;Ruth</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_354">354</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">Christ&mdash;Solomon&mdash;David</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_355">355</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">xiv</a></span>
+Hagar&mdash;Rebecca&mdash;Rachel&mdash;Queen of Sheba</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_356">356</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">Lady Godiva</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_357">357</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">Joan of Arc</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_359">359</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">Characters from Shakspeare</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_364">364</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">Characters from Spenser</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_366">366</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">From Milton. The Lady&mdash;Comus&mdash;Satan</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_367">367</a></td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="left padl3">From the Italian and Modern Poets</td>
+<td class="right"><a href="#Page_370">370</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h3>LIST OF ETCHINGS.</h3>
+
+<table width="100%" summary="etchings">
+<tr>
+<td class="right2">1.</td>
+<td class="left">Fruits and Flowers. After an old drawing.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right2">2.</td>
+<td class="left">Out of my garden.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right2">3.</td>
+<td class="left">Virgin Martyrs. Thought. Memory. Fancy. After Benedetto</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right2">4.</td>
+<td class="left">La Penserosa. After Ambrogio Lorenzette.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right2">5.</td>
+<td class="left">La Fille du Feu. From a sketch by Von Schwind.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right2">6.</td>
+<td class="left">Laus Dei. Angel after Hans Hemmeling.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right2">7.</td>
+<td class="left">Eve and Cain. After Steinle.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right2">8.</td>
+<td class="left">Study. After an old print.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right2">9.</td>
+<td class="left">The Parc&aelig;. From a sketch by Carstens.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right2">10.</td>
+<td class="left">Antique Owlet. In Goethe&#8217;s collection at Weimar.</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right2">&nbsp;</td>
+<td class="left">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr><tr>
+<td class="right2"><small><sup>*</sup><sub>*</sub><sup>*</sup></small></td>
+<td class="left">The woodcuts are inserted to divide the paragraphs and subjects,
+and are ornamental rather than illustrative. Where the
+same vignette heads several paragraphs consecutively, it is to signify
+that the <i>ideas</i> expressed stand in relation to each other.</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h4>PART I.</h4>
+
+<h4><span class="oldtype">Ethics and Character.</span></h4>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-028-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="208" width="400" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">1</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-001.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="574" width="500" /></div>
+
+<h4><span class="oldtype">Ethical Fragments.</span></h4>
+
+<h5>1.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">B</span><span class="smcap">acon</span> says, how wisely! that &#8220;there is often as
+great vanity in withdrawing and retiring men&#8217;s
+conceits from the world, as in obtruding them.&#8221;
+Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of
+ultra modesty. When I see people haunted by the
+idea of self,&mdash;spreading their hands before their
+faces lest they meet the reflection of it in every
+other face, as if the world were to them like a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">2</a></span>
+French drawing-room, panelled with looking glass,&mdash;always
+fussily putting their obtrusive self behind
+them, or dragging over it a scanty drapery of consciousness,
+miscalled modesty,&mdash;always on their
+defence against compliments, or mistaking sympathy
+for compliment, which is as great an error, and a
+more vulgar one than mistaking flattery for sympathy,&mdash;when
+I see all this, as I have seen it, I am
+inclined to attribute it to the immaturity of the
+character, or to what is worse, a total want of simplicity.
+To some characters fame is like an intoxicating
+cup placed to the lips,&mdash;they do well to turn
+away from it, who fear it will turn their heads. But
+to others, fame is &#8220;love disguised,&#8221; the love that
+answers to love, in its widest most exalted sense. It
+seems to me, that we should all bring the best that
+is in us (according to the diversity of gifts which
+God has given us), and lay it a reverend offering on
+the altar of humanity,&mdash;if not to burn and enlighten,
+at least to rise in incense to heaven. So will the
+pure in heart, and the unselfish do; and they will
+not heed if those who <i>can</i> bring nothing or <i>will</i>
+bring nothing, unless they can blaze like a beacon,
+call out &#8220;<span class="smcap">VANITY!</span>&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-002.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="163" width="300" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">3</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>2.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">here</span>
+are truths which, by perpetual repetition,
+have subsided into passive truisms, till, in some
+moment of feeling or experience, they kindle into
+conviction, start to life and light, and the truism
+becomes again a vital truth.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-023-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="124" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>3.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span>
+It is well that we obtain what we require at the
+cheapest possible rate; yet those who cheapen
+goods, or beat down the price of a good article, or buy
+in preference to what is good and genuine of its kind
+an inferior article at an inferior price, sometimes do
+much mischief. Not only do they discourage the
+production of a better article, but if they be anxious
+about the education of the lower classes they undo
+with one hand what they do with the other; they
+encourage the mere mechanic and the production of
+what may be produced without effort of mind and
+without education, and they discourage and wrong
+the skilled workman for whom education has done
+much more and whose education has cost much more.</p>
+
+<p>Every work so merely and basely mechanical,
+that a man can throw into it no part of his own life
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">4</a></span>
+and soul, does, in the long run, degrade the human
+being. It is only by giving him some kind of mental
+and moral interest in the labour of his hands, making
+it an exercise of his understanding, and an object of
+his sympathy, that we can really elevate the workman;
+and this is not the case with very cheap production
+of any kind. <small>(Southampton, Dec. 1849.)</small></p>
+
+<p class="tb">Since this was written the same idea has been
+carried out, with far more eloquent reasoning, in a
+noble passage which I have just found in Mr. Ruskin&#8217;s
+last volume of &#8220;The Stones of Venice&#8221; (the
+Sea Stories). As I do not <i>always</i> subscribe to his
+theories of Art, I am the more delighted with this
+anticipation of a moral agreement between us.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We have much studied and much perfected of
+late, the great civilised invention of the division of
+labour, only we give it a false name. It is not, truly
+speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men:&mdash;divided
+into mere segments of men,&mdash;broken into
+small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the
+little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not
+enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself
+in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.
+Now, it is a good and desirable thing truly to make
+many pins in a day, but if we could only see with
+what crystal sand their points are polished&mdash;sand of
+human soul, much to be magnified before it can be
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">5</a></span>
+discerned for what it is,&mdash;we should think there
+might be some loss in it also; and the great cry that
+rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than
+their furnace-blast, is all in very deed for this,&mdash;that
+we manufacture everything there except men,&mdash;we
+blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine
+sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to
+strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit,
+never enters into our estimate of advantages; and
+all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads,
+can be met only in one way,&mdash;not by teaching nor
+preaching; for to teach them is but to show them
+their misery; and to preach to them&mdash;if we do
+nothing more than preach,&mdash;is to mock at it. It
+can be met only by a right understanding on the
+part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good
+for men, raising them and making them happy; by
+a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty
+or cheapness, as is to be got only by the degradation
+of the workman, and by equally determined demand
+for the products and results of a healthy and ennobling
+labour.&#8221; ...</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;We are always in these days trying to separate
+the two (intellect and work). We want one man
+to be always thinking, and another to be always
+working; and we call one a gentleman and the
+other an operative; whereas, the workman ought to
+be often thinking, and the thinker often working,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">6</a></span>
+and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. It
+is only by labour that thought can be made healthy,
+and only by thought that labour can be made
+happy; and the two cannot be separated with
+impunity.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth, however, had said the same thing
+before either of us:</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">&#8220;Our life is turn&#8217;d</span>
+<span class="i0">Out of her course wherever man is made</span>
+<span class="i0">An offering or a sacrifice,&mdash;a tool</span>
+<span class="i0">Or implement,&mdash;a passive thing employed</span>
+<span class="i0">As a brute mean, without acknowledgment</span>
+<span class="i0">Of common right or interest in the end,</span>
+<span class="i0">Used or abused as selfishness may prompt.</span>
+<span class="i0">Say what can follow for a rational soul</span>
+<span class="i0">Perverted thus, but weakness in all good</span>
+<span class="i0">And strength in evil?&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-006.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="119" width="300" /></div>
+
+<p>And this leads us to the consideration of another
+mistake, analogous with the above, but referable in
+its results chiefly to the higher, or what Mr. Ruskin
+calls the <i>thinking</i>, classes of the community.</p>
+
+<p>It is not good for us to have all that we value
+of worldly material things in the form of money.
+It is the most vulgar form in which value can be invested.
+Not only books, pictures, and all beautiful
+things are better; but even jewels and trinkets are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">7</a></span>
+sometimes to be preferred to mere hard money. Lands
+and tenements are good, as involving duties; but
+still what is valuable in the market sense should
+sometimes take the ideal and the beautiful form, and
+be dear and lovely and valuable for its own sake as
+well as for its convertible worth in hard gold. I
+think the character would be apt to deteriorate when
+all its material possessions take the form of money,
+and when money becomes valuable for its own
+sake, or as the mere instrument or representative
+of power.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-007.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="265" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h5>4.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">e</span>
+are told in a late account of Laura Bridgeman,
+the blind, deaf, and dumb girl, that her
+instructor once endeavoured to explain the difference
+between the material and the immaterial, and used
+the word &#8220;soul.&#8221; She interrupted to ask, &#8220;What
+is soul?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;That which thinks, feels, hopes, loves,&mdash;&mdash;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And <i>aches</i>?&#8221; she added eagerly.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">8</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>5.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap"> was</span>
+reading to-day in the Notes to Boswell&#8217;s
+Life of Johnson that &#8220;it is a theory which every
+one knows to be <i>false in fact</i>, that virtue in real life
+is always productive of happiness, and vice of misery.&#8221;
+I should say that all my experience teaches me that
+the position is not false but true: that virtue <i>does</i>
+produce happiness, and vice <i>does</i> produce misery.
+But let us settle the meaning of the words. By
+<i>happiness</i>, we do not necessarily mean a state of
+worldly prosperity. By <i>virtue</i>, we do not mean a
+series of good actions which may or may not be rewarded,
+and, if done for reward, lose the essence of
+virtue. Virtue, according to my idea, is the habitual
+sense of right, and the habitual courage to act up to
+that sense of right, combined with benevolent sympathies,
+the charity which thinketh no evil. This
+union of the highest conscience and the highest sympathy
+fulfils my notion of virtue. Strength is essential
+to it; weakness incompatible with it. Where
+virtue is, the noblest faculties and the softest feelings
+are predominant; the whole being is in that state of
+harmony which I call happiness. Pain may reach it,
+passion may disturb it, but there is always a glimpse
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">9</a></span>
+of blue sky above our head; as we ascend in dignity
+of being, we ascend in happiness, which is, in my
+sense of the word, the feeling which connects us
+with the infinite and with God.</p>
+
+<p>And vice is necessarily misery: for that fluctuation
+of principle, that diseased craving for excitement,
+that weakness out of which springs falsehood, that
+suspicion of others, that discord with ourselves, with
+the absence of the benevolent propensities,&mdash;these
+constitute misery as a state of being. The most
+miserable person I ever met with in my life had
+12,000<i>l.</i> a year; a cunning mind, dexterous to compass
+its own ends; very little conscience, not enough,
+one would have thought, to vex with any retributive
+pang; but it was the absence of goodness that made
+the misery, obvious and hourly increasing. The
+perpetual kicking against the pricks, the unreasonable
+<i>exig&eacute;ance</i> with regard to things, without any high
+standard with regard to persons,&mdash;these made the
+misery. I can speak of it as misery who had it daily
+in my sight for five long years.</p>
+
+<p>I have had arguments, if it be not presumption to
+call them so, with Carlyle on this point. It appeared
+to me that he confounded happiness with pleasure,
+with self-indulgence. He set aside with a towering
+scorn the idea of living for the sake of happiness, so
+called: he styled this philosophy of happiness, &#8220;the
+philosophy of the frying-pan.&#8221; But this was like
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">10</a></span>
+the reasoning of a child, whose idea of happiness is
+plenty of sugar-plums. Pleasure, pleasurable sensation,
+is, as the world goes, something to thank God
+for. I should be one of the last to undervalue it;
+I hope I am one of the last to live for it; and pain
+is pain, a great evil, which I do not like either to
+inflict or suffer. But happiness lies beyond either
+pain or pleasure&mdash;is as sublime a thing as virtue
+itself, indivisible from it; and under this point of
+view it seems a perilous mistake to separate them.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-010.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="95" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>6.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">D</span><span class="smcap">ante</span>
+places in his lowest Hell those who in life
+were melancholy and repining without a cause,
+thus profaning and darkening God&#8217;s blessed sunshine&mdash;<i>Tristi
+fummo nel&#8217; aer dolce</i>; and in some of
+the ancient Christian systems of virtues and vices,
+Melancholy is unholy, and a vice; Cheerfulness is
+holy, and a virtue.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Bacon also makes one of the characteristics
+of moral health and goodness to consist in &#8220;a constant
+quick sense of felicity, and a noble satisfaction.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>What moments, hours, days of exquisite felicity
+must Christ, our Redeemer, have had, though it has
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">11</a></span>
+become too customary to place him before us only in
+the attitude of pain and sorrow! Why should he be
+always crowned with thorns, bleeding with wounds,
+weeping over the world he was appointed to heal, to
+save, to reconcile with God? The radiant head of
+Christ in Raphael&#8217;s Transfiguration should rather
+be our ideal of Him who came &#8220;to bind up the
+broken-hearted, to preach the acceptable year of the
+Lord.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-011.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="203" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>7.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="smcap"> profound</span>
+intellect is weakened and narrowed in
+general power and influence by a limited range of
+sympathies. I think this is especially true of C&mdash;&mdash;:
+excellent, honest, gifted as he is, he does not do half
+the good he might do, because his sympathies are so
+confined. And then he wants gentleness: he does
+not seem to acknowledge that &#8220;the wisdom that is
+from above is <i>gentle</i>.&#8221; He is a man who carries his
+bright intellect as a light in a dark-lantern; he sees
+only the objects on which he chooses to throw that
+blaze of light: those he sees vividly, but, as it were,
+exclusively. All other things, though lying near,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">12</a></span>
+are dark, because perversely he <i>will</i> not throw the
+light of his mind upon them.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-012-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="125" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>8.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">ilhelm von humboldt</span>
+says, &#8220;Old letters
+lose their vitality.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Not true. It is because they retain their vitality
+that it is so dangerous to keep some letters,&mdash;so
+wicked to burn others.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-012-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="228" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>9.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="smcap"> man</span>
+thinks himself, and is thought by others
+to be insulted when another man gives him the
+lie. It is an offence to be retracted at once, or only to
+be effaced in blood. To give a woman the lie is not
+considered in the same unpardonable light by herself
+or others,&mdash;is indeed a slight thing. Now, whence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">13</a></span>
+this difference? Is not truth as dear to a woman as
+to a man? Is the virtue itself, or the reputation of
+it, less necessary to the woman than to the man?
+If not, what causes this distinction,&mdash;one so injurious
+to the morals of both sexes?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-013-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="112" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>10.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> is good for us to look up, morally and mentally.
+If I were tired I would get some help to hold my
+head up, as Moses got some one to hold up his arms
+while he prayed.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;<span class="smcap">Ce</span> qui est moins que moi m&#8217;&eacute;teint et m&#8217;assomme;
+ce qui est &agrave; c&ocirc;t&eacute; de moi m&#8217;ennuie et me fatigue. II
+n&#8217;y a que ce qui est au-dessus de moi qui me soutienne
+et m&#8217;arrache &agrave; moi-m&ecirc;me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-013-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="185" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>11.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">here</span> is an order of writers who, with characters
+perverted or hardened through long practice of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">14</a></span>
+iniquity, yet possess an inherent divine sense of the
+good and the beautiful, and a passion for setting it
+forth, so that men&#8217;s hearts glow with the tenderness
+and the elevation which live not in the heart of the
+writer,&mdash;only in his head.</p>
+
+<p>And there is another class of writers who are excellent
+in the social relations of life, and kindly and
+true in heart, yet who, intellectually, have a perverted
+pleasure in the ridiculous and distorted, the cunning,
+the crooked, the vicious,&mdash;who are never weary of
+holding up before us finished representations of folly
+and rascality.</p>
+
+<p>Now, which is the worst of these? the former,
+who do mischief by making us mistrust the good?
+or the latter, who degrade us by making us familiar
+with evil?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-017-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="134" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>12.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;T</span><span class="smcap">hought</span> and theory,&#8221; said Wordsworth, &#8220;must
+precede all action that moves to salutary purposes.
+Yet action is nobler in itself than either
+thought or theory.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">15</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Yes, and no. What we <i>act</i> has its consequences
+on earth. What we <i>think</i>, its consequences in heaven.
+It is not without reason that action should
+be preferred before barren thought; but all action
+which in its result is worth any thing, must result
+from thought. So the old rhymester hath it:</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;He that good thinketh good may do,</span>
+<span class="i0">And God will help him there unto;</span>
+<span class="i0">For was never good work wrought,</span>
+<span class="i0">Without beginning of good thought.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>The result of impulse is the positive; the result
+of consideration the negative. The positive is essentially
+and abstractedly better than the negative,
+though relatively to facts and circumstances it may
+not be the most expedient.</p>
+
+<p>On my observing how often I had had reason to regret
+not having followed the first impulse, <span class="smcap">O. G.</span> said,
+&#8220;In <i>good</i> minds the first impulses are generally
+right and true, and, when altered or relinquished
+from regard to expediency arising out of complicated
+relations, I always feel sorry, for they remain right.
+Our first impulses always lean to the positive, our
+second thoughts to the negative; and I have no
+respect for the negative,&mdash;it is the vulgar side of
+every thing.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, it must be conceded, that one
+who stands endowed with great power and with great
+responsibilities in the midst of a thousand duties and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">16</a></span>
+interests, can no longer take things in this simple
+fashion; for the good first impulse, in its flow, meets,
+perhaps, some rock, and splits upon it; it recoils on
+the heart, and becomes abortive. Or the impulse
+to do good <i>here</i> becomes injury <i>there</i>, and we are
+forced to calculate results; we cannot trust to them.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap"> have</span>
+not sought to deduce my principles from
+conventional notions of expediency, but have believed
+that out of the steady adherence to certain
+fixed principles, the right and the expedient <i>must</i>
+ensue, and I believe it still. The moment one begins
+to solder right and wrong together, one&#8217;s conscience
+becomes like a piece of plated goods.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span>
+requires merely passive courage and strength
+to resist, and in some cases to overcome evil. But
+it requires more&mdash;it needs bravery and self-reliance
+and surpassing faith&mdash;to act out the true inspirations
+of your intelligence and the true impulses of your
+heart.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">O</span><span class="smcap">ut</span>
+of the attempt to harmonise our actual life<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">17</a></span>
+with our aspirations, our experience with our faith,
+we make poetry,&mdash;or, it may be, religion.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>F&mdash;&mdash; used the phrase &#8220;<i>stung into heroism</i>&#8221; as
+Shelley said, &#8220;<i>cradled into poetry</i>,&#8221; by wrong.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-017-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="134" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>13.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span><span class="smcap">oleridge</span>
+calls the personal existence of the
+Evil Principle, &#8220;a mere fiction, or, at best,
+an allegory supported by a few popular phrases and
+figures of speech, used incidentally or dramatically
+by the Evangelists.&#8221; And he says, that &#8220;the existence
+of a personal, intelligent, Evil Being, the
+counterpart and antagonist of God, is in direct contradiction
+to the most express declarations of Holy
+Writ. &#8216;<i>Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord
+hath not done it?</i>&#8217;&mdash;Amos, iii. 6. &#8216;<i>I make peace and
+create evil.</i>&#8217;&mdash;Isaiah, xlv. 7. This is the deep mystery
+of the abyss of God.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Do our theologians go with him here? I think
+not: yet, as a theologian, Coleridge is constantly
+appealed to by Churchmen.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">18</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-018.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="184" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>14.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;W</span><span class="smcap">e</span> find (in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians),
+every where instilled as the essence
+of all well-being and well-doing, (without
+which the wisest public and political constitution is
+but a lifeless formula, and the highest powers of
+individual endowment profitless or pernicious,) the
+spirit of a divine sympathy with the happiness and
+rights,&mdash;with the peculiarities, gifts, graces, and endowments
+of other minds, which alone, whether in
+the family or in the Church, can impart unity and
+effectual working together for good in the communities
+of men.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">&#8220;The Christian religion was, in fact, a charter of
+freedom to the whole human race.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Thom&#8217;s Discourses
+on St. Paul&#8217;s Epistle to the Corinthians.</i></p>
+
+<p>And this is the true Catholic spirit,&mdash;the spirit
+and the teaching of Paul,&mdash;in contradistinction to
+the Roman Catholic spirit,&mdash;the spirit and tendency
+of Peter, which stands upon forms, which has no
+respect for individuality except in so far as it can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">19</a></span>
+imprison this individuality within a creed, or use it
+to a purpose.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-019.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="225" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>15.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">D</span><span class="smcap">r. Baillie</span>
+once said that &#8220;all his observation of
+death-beds inclined him to believe that nature intended
+that we should go out of the world as unconscious
+as we came into it.&#8221; &#8220;In all my experience,&#8221;
+he added, &#8220;I have not seen one instance in fifty to
+the contrary.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Yet even in such a large experience the occurrence
+of &#8220;one instance in fifty to the contrary&#8221;
+would invalidate the assumption that such was the
+law of nature (or &#8220;nature&#8217;s intention,&#8221; which, if it
+means any thing, means the same).</p>
+
+<p>The moment in which the spirit meets death is
+perhaps like the moment in which it is embraced by
+sleep. It never, I suppose, happened to any one
+to be conscious of the immediate transition from the
+waking to the sleeping state.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">20</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-020.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="183" width="500" /></div>
+
+<h5>16.</h5>
+
+<h5><i>Thoughts on a Sermon.</i></h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span>
+is really sublime, this man! with his faith in
+&#8220;the religion of pain,&#8221; and &#8220;the deification of
+sorrow!&#8221; But is he therefore right? What has he
+preached to us to-day with all the force of eloquence,
+all the earnestness of conviction? that &#8220;pain is the
+life of God as shown forth in Christ;&#8221;&mdash;&#8220;that we
+are to be crucified to the world and the world to
+us.&#8221; This perpetual presence of a crucified God
+between us and a pitying redeeming Christ, leads
+many a mourner to the belief that this world is all a
+Golgotha of pain, and that we are here to crucify
+each other. Is this the law under which we are to
+live and strive? The missionary Bridaine accused
+himself of sin in that he had preached fasting,
+penance, and the chastisements of God to wretches
+steeped in poverty and dying of hunger; and is
+there not a similar cruelty and misuse of power in
+the servants of Him who came to bind up the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">21</a></span>
+broken-hearted, when they preach the necessity, or
+at least the theory, of moral pain to those whose
+hearts are aching from moral evil?</p>
+
+<p>Surely there is a great difference between the
+resignation or the endurance of a truthful, faithful,
+loving, hopeful spirit, and this dreadful theology of
+suffering as the necessary and appointed state of
+things! I, for one, will not accept it. Even while
+most miserable, I will believe in happiness; even
+while I do or suffer evil, I will believe in goodness;
+even while my eyes see not through tears, I will believe
+in the existence of what I do not see&mdash;that
+God is benign, that nature is fair, that the world is
+not made as a prison or a penance. While I stand
+lost in utter darkness, I will yet wait for the return
+of the unfailing dawn,&mdash;even though my soul be
+amazed into such a blind perplexity that I know not
+on which side to look for it, and ask &#8220;where is the
+East? and whence the dayspring?&#8221; For the East
+holds its wonted place, and the light is withheld only
+till its appointed time.</p>
+
+<p>God so strengthen me that I may think of pain
+and sin only as accidental apparent discords in his
+great harmonious scheme of good! Then I am ready&mdash;I
+will take up the cross, and hear it bravely, while
+I <i>must</i>; but I will lay it down when I can, and in
+any case I will never lay it on another.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">22</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-022-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="214" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>17.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">f</span>
+I fear God it is because I love him, and believe
+in his love; I cannot conceive myself as standing
+in fear of any spiritual or human being in whose
+love I do not entirely believe. Of that Impersonation
+of Evil, who goes about seeking whom he may
+devour, the image brings to me no fear, only intense
+disgust and aversion. Yes, it is because of his love
+for me that I fear to offend against God; it is because
+of his love that his displeasure must be terrible.
+And with regard to human beings, only the
+being I love has the power to give me pain or
+inspire me with fear; only those in whose love I
+believe, have the power to injure me. Take away
+my love, and you take away my fear: take away
+<i>their</i> love, and you take away the power to do me
+any harm which can reach me in the sources of life
+and feeling.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-022-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="105" width="400" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">23</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>18.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">S</span><span class="smcap">ocial</span>
+opinion is like a sharp knife. There are
+foolish people who regard it only with terror,
+and dare not touch or meddle with it. There are
+more foolish people, who, in rashness or defiance,
+seize it by the blade, and get cut and mangled for
+their pains. And there are wise people, who grasp
+it discreetly and boldly by the handle, and use it to
+carve out their own purposes.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-023-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="138" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>19.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">hile</span>
+we were discussing Balzac&#8217;s celebrity as
+a romance writer, she (<span class="smcap">O. G.</span>) said, with a
+shudder: &#8220;His laurels are steeped in the tears of
+women,&mdash;every truth he tells has been wrung in
+tortures from some woman&#8217;s heart.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-023-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="124" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">24</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>20.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">S</span><span class="smcap">ir Walter Scott,</span>
+writing in 1831, seems to
+regard it as a terrible misfortune that the whole
+burgher class in Scotland should be gradually preparing
+for representative reform. &#8220;I mean,&#8221; he
+says, &#8220;the middle and respectable classes: when
+a borough reform comes, which, perhaps, cannot
+long be delayed, ministers will no longer return a
+member for Scotland from the towns.&#8221; &#8220;The gentry,&#8221;
+he adds, &#8220;will abide longer by <i>sound</i> principles, for
+they are needy, and desire advancement for themselves,
+and appointments for their sons and so on. But
+this is a very hollow dependence, and those who sincerely
+hold ancient opinions are waxing old,&#8221; &amp;c. &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>With a great deal more, showing the strange
+moral confusion which his political bias had caused
+in his otherwise clear head and honest mind. The
+sound principles, then, by which educated people are
+to abide,&mdash;over the decay of which he laments,&mdash;are
+such as can only be upheld by the most vulgar self-interest!
+If a man should utter openly such sentiments
+in these days, what should we think of him?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-024.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="87" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">n</span>
+the order of absolutism lurk the elements of
+change and destruction. In the unrest of freedom
+the spirit of change and progress.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">25</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-025.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="170" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>21.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;A</span><span class="smcap"> single</span>
+life,&#8221; said Bacon, &#8220;doth well with
+churchmen, for charity will hardly water the
+ground where it must first fill a pool.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Certainly there are men whose charities are
+limited, if not dried up, by their concentrated domestic
+anxieties and relations. But there are others
+whose charities are more diffused, as well as healthier
+and warmer, through the strength of their domestic
+affections.</p>
+
+<p>Wordsworth speaks strongly of the evils of ordaining
+men as clergymen in places where they had been
+born or brought up, or in the midst of their own
+relatives: &#8220;Their habits, their manners, their talk,
+their acquaintanceships, their friendships, and let me
+say, even their domestic affections, naturally draw
+them one way, while their professional obligations
+point out another.&#8221; If this were true universally, or
+even generally, it would be a strong argument in
+favour of the celibacy of the Roman Catholic clergy,
+which certainly is one element, and not the least, of
+their power.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">26</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-026.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="188" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>22.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">L</span><span class="smcap">andor</span> says truly: &#8220;Love is a secondary passion
+in those who love most, a primary in those who
+love least: he who is inspired by it in the strongest
+degree is inspired by honour in a greater.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Whatever is worthy of being loved for any
+thing is worthy to be preserved.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Again:&mdash;&#8220;Those are the worst of suicides who
+voluntarily and prepensely stab or suffocate their
+own fame, when God hath commanded them to
+stand on high for an example.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Weak motives,&#8221; he says, &#8220;are sufficient for
+weak minds; whenever we see a mind which we
+believed a stronger than our own moved habitually
+by what appears inadequate, we may be certain that
+there is&mdash;to bring a metaphor from the forest&mdash;<i>more
+top than root</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Here is another sentence from the same writer&mdash;rich
+in wise sayings:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">27</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Plato would make wives common to abolish
+selfishness; the very mischief which, above all others,
+it would directly and immediately bring forth. There
+is no selfishness where there is a wife and family.
+There the house is lighted up by mutual charities;
+everything achieved for them is a victory; everything
+endured a triumph. How many vices are suppressed
+that there may be no <i>bad</i> example! How
+many exertions made to recommend and inculcate
+a <i>good</i> one.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>True: and I have much more confidence in the
+charity which begins in the home and diverges into a
+large humanity, than in the world-wide philanthropy
+which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge
+into egotism, of which I could show you many
+and notable examples.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-027.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="132" width="400" /></div>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="smcap">ll</span> my experience of the world teaches me that in
+ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the safe side
+and the just side of a question is the generous side
+and the merciful side. This your mere worldly
+people do not seem to know, and therein make the
+sorriest and the vulgarest of all mistakes. &#8220;<i>Pour
+&ecirc;tre assez bon il faut l&#8217;&ecirc;tre trop</i>:&#8221; we all need more
+mercy than we deserve.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">28</a></span></p>
+
+<p>How often in this world the actions that we condemn
+are the result of sentiments that we love and
+opinions that we admire!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-017-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="134" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>23.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>.&mdash;&mdash; observed in reference to some of her
+friends who had gone over to the Roman Catholic
+Church, &#8220;that the peace and comfort which
+they had sought and found in that mode of faith was
+like the drugged sleep in comparison with the natural
+sleep: necessary, healing perhaps, where there is
+disease and unrest, not otherwise.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-028-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="208" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h5>24.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;A</span><span class="smcap"> poet,</span>&#8221; says Coleridge, &#8220;ought not to pick
+nature&#8217;s pocket. Let him borrow, and so
+borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">29</a></span>
+Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection,
+and trust more to your imagination than your
+memory.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This advice is even more applicable to the painter,
+but true perhaps in its application to all artists.
+Raphael and Mozart were, in this sense, great
+borrowers.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-029-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="136" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>25.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;W</span><span class="smcap">hat</span> is the difference between being good and
+being bad? the good do not yield to temptation
+and the bad do.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This is often the distinction between the good and
+the bad in regard to act and deed; but it does not
+constitute the difference between <i>being</i> good and
+<i>being</i> bad.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-048.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="274" width="400" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">30</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>26.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> Italians say (in one of their characteristic
+proverbs) <i>Sospetto licenzia Fede</i>. Lord Bacon
+interprets the saying &#8220;as if suspicion did give a passport
+to faith,&#8221; which is somewhat obscure and ambiguous.
+It means, that suspicion discharges us from
+the duty of good faith; and in this, its original sense,
+it is, like many of the old Italian proverbs, worldly
+wise and profoundly immoral.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-013-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="112" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>27.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> was well said by Themistocles to the King of
+Persia, that &#8220;speech was like cloth of arras
+opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth
+appear in figure, whereas in thoughts they lie but in
+packs&#8221; (<i>i. e.</i> rolled up or packed up). Dryden had
+evidently this passage in his mind when he wrote
+those beautiful lines:</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Speech is the light, the morning of the mind;</span>
+<span class="i0">It spreads the beauteous images abroad,</span>
+<span class="i0">Which else lie furled and shrouded in the soul.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Here the comparison of Themistocles, happy in itself,
+is expanded into a vivid poetical image.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">31</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-031-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="165" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>28.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;T</span><span class="smcap">hose</span> are the killing griefs that do not speak,&#8221;
+is true of some, not all characters. There are
+natures in which the killing grief finds utterance
+while it kills; moods in which we cry aloud, &#8220;as the
+beast crieth, expansive not appealing.&#8221; That is my
+own nature: so in grief or in joy, I say as the birds
+sing:</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt,</span>
+<span class="i0">Gab mir ein Got zu sagen was ich leide!&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-031-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="133" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>29.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">B</span><span class="smcap">lessed</span> is the memory of those who have kept
+themselves unspotted <i>from</i> the world!&mdash;yet
+more blessed and more dear the memory of those who
+have kept themselves unspotted <i>in</i> the world!</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">32</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-032-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="207" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>30.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">E</span><span class="smcap">verything</span> that ever has been, from the beginning
+of the world till now, belongs to us, is
+ours, is even a part of us. We belong to the future,
+and shall be a part of it. Therefore the sympathies
+of <i>all</i> are in the past; only the poet and the prophet
+sympathise with the future.</p>
+
+<p>When Tennyson makes Ulysses say, &#8220;I am a
+part of all that I have seen,&#8221; it ought to be rather
+the converse,&mdash;&#8220;What I have seen becomes a part
+of me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-032-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="138" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>31.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">n</span> what regards policy&mdash;government&mdash;the interest
+of the many is sacrificed to the few; in what
+regards society, the morals and happiness of individuals
+are sacrificed to the many.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">33</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>32.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">e </span>spoke to-night of the cowardice, the crime of
+a particular suicide: <span class="smcap">O. G.</span> agreed as to this
+instance, but added: &#8220;There is a different aspect
+under which suicide might be regarded. It is not
+always, I think, from a want of religion, or in a spirit
+of defiance, or a want of confidence in God that we
+quit life. It is as if we should flee to the feet of
+the Almighty and embrace his knees, and exclaim,
+&#8216;O my father! take me home! I have endured as
+long as it was possible; I can endure no more, so I
+come to you!&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Of an amiable man with a disagreeable expressionless
+face, she said: &#8220;His countenance always gives
+me the idea of matter too strong, too hard for the
+soul to pierce through. It is as a plaster mask
+which I long to break (making the gesture with her
+hand), that I may see the countenance of his heart,
+for that must be beautiful!&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-iv.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="264" width="500" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">34</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>33.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span><span class="smcap">arlyle</span> said to me: &#8220;I want to see some institution
+to teach a man the truth, the worth, the
+beauty, the heroism of which his present existence is
+capable; where&#8217;s the use of sending him to study
+what the Greeks and Romans did, and said, and
+wrote? Do ye think the Greeks and Romans would
+have been what they were, if they had just only
+studied what the Ph&oelig;nicians did before them?&#8221; I
+should have answered, had I dared: &#8220;Yet perhaps
+the Greeks and Romans would not have been what
+they were if the Egyptians and Ph&oelig;nicians had not
+been before them.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-034.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="141" width="200" /></div>
+
+<h5>34.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span><span class="smcap">an</span> there be <i>progress</i> which is not <i>progression</i>&mdash;which
+does not leave a past from which to start&mdash;on
+which to rest our foot when we spring forward?
+No wise man kicks the ladder from beneath him, or
+obliterates the traces of the road through which he
+has travelled, or pulls down the memorials he has
+built by the way side. We cannot <i>get on</i> without
+linking our present and our future with our past. All
+reaction is destructive&mdash;all progress conservative.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">35</a></span>
+When we have destroyed that which the past built
+up, what reward have we?&mdash;we are forced to fall
+back, and have to begin anew. &#8220;Novelty,&#8221; as Lord
+Bacon says, &#8220;cannot be content to add, but it must
+deface.&#8221; For this very reason novelty is not progress,
+as the French would try to persuade themselves and
+us. We gain nothing by defacing and trampling
+down the idols of the past to set up new ones in their
+places&mdash;let it be sufficient to leave them behind us,
+measuring our advance by keeping them in sight.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-035-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="115" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>35.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">E</span>&mdash;&mdash; was compassionating to-day the old and the
+invalided; those whose life is prolonged in spite
+of suffering; and she seemed, even out of the excess
+of her pity and sympathy, to wish them fairly out of
+the world; but it is a mistake in reasoning and feeling.
+She does not know how much of happiness may
+consist with suffering, with physical suffering, and
+even with mental suffering.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-027.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="132" width="400" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">36</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>36.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;R</span><span class="smcap">enoncez</span> dans votre &acirc;me, et renoncez y fermement,
+une fois pour toutes, &agrave; vouloir vous
+conna&icirc;tre au-del&agrave; de cette existence passag&egrave;re qui
+vous est impos&eacute;e, et vous redeviendrez agr&eacute;able &agrave;
+Dieu, utile aux autres hommes, tranquille avec vous-m&ecirc;mes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This does not mean &#8220;renounce hope or faith in the
+future.&#8221; No! But renounce that perpetual craving
+after a selfish interest in the unrevealed future life
+which takes the true relish from the duties and the
+pleasures of this. We can conceive of no future life
+which is not a continuation of this: to anticipate in
+that <i>future</i> life, <i>another</i> life, a <i>different</i> life; what is
+it but to call in doubt our individual identity?</p>
+
+<p>If we pray, &#8220;O teach us where and what is
+peace!&#8221; would not the answer be, &#8220;In the grave ye
+shall have it&mdash;not before?&#8221; Yet is it not strange
+that those who believe most absolutely in an after-life,
+yet think of the grave as peace? Now, if we
+carry this life with us&mdash;and what other life can we
+carry with us, unless we cease to be ourselves&mdash;how
+shall there be peace?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-024.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="87" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>As to the future, my soul, like Cato&#8217;s, &#8220;shrinks
+back upon herself and startles at destruction;&#8221; but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">37</a></span>
+I do not think of my own destruction, rather of that
+which I love. That I should cease to be is not very
+intolerable; but that what I love, and do now in my
+soul possess, should cease to be&mdash;there is the pang,
+the terror! I desire that which I love to be immortal,
+whether I be so myself or not.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-024.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="87" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>Is not the idea which most men entertain of
+another, of an eternal life, merely a continuation of
+this present existence under pleasanter conditions?
+We cannot conceive another state of existence,&mdash;we
+only fancy we do so.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-024.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="87" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>&#8220;I conceive that in all probability we have
+immortality already. Most men seem to divide life
+and immortality, making them two distinct things,
+when, in fact, they are one and the same. What is
+immortality but a continuation of life&mdash;life which is
+already our own? We have, then, begun our immortality
+even now.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>For the same reason, or, rather, through the
+same want of reasoning by which we make <i>life</i> and
+<i>immortality</i> two (distinct things), do we make <i>time</i>
+and <i>eternity</i> two, which like the others are really one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">38</a></span>
+and the same. As immortality is but the continuation
+of life, so eternity is but the continuation of
+time; and what we call time is only that part of
+eternity in which we exist <i>now</i>.&mdash;<i>The New Philosophy.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-079.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="134" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>37.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">S</span><span class="smcap">trength</span> does not consist only in the <i>more</i> or the
+<i>less</i>. There are different sorts of strength as
+well as different degrees:&mdash;The strength of marble
+to resist; the strength of steel to oppose; the strength
+of the fine gold, which you can twist round your
+finger, but which can bear the force of innumerable
+pounds without breaking.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-038-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="186" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>38.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">G</span><span class="smcap">oethe</span> used to say, that while intellectual attainment
+is progressive, it is difficult to be as good
+when we are old, as we were when young. Dr.
+Johnson has expressed the same thing.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">39</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Then are we to assume, that to <i>do</i> good effectively
+and wisely is the privilege of age and experience?
+To <i>be</i> good, through faith in goodness, the privilege
+of the young.</p>
+
+<p>To preserve our faith in goodness with an extended
+knowledge of evil, to preserve the tenderness
+of our pity after long contemplation of pain, and the
+warmth of our charity after long experience of falsehood,
+is to be at once good and wise&mdash;to understand
+and to love each other as the angels who look down
+upon us from heaven.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>We can sometimes love what we do not understand,
+but it is impossible completely to understand
+what we do not love.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">I observe, that in our relations with the people
+around us, we forgive them more readily for what
+they <i>do</i>, which they <i>can</i> help, than for what they <i>are</i>,
+which they <i>cannot</i> help.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-039-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="145" width="300" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">40</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>39.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;W</span><span class="smcap">hence</span> springs the greatest degree of moral
+suffering?&#8221; was a question debated this
+evening, but not settled. It was argued that it
+would depend on the texture of character, its more
+or less conscientiousness, susceptibility, or strength.
+I thought from two sentiments&mdash;from <i>jealousy</i>, that
+is, the sense of a wrong endured, in one class of
+characters; from <i>remorse</i>, that is, from the sense of a
+wrong inflicted, in another.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-025.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="170" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>40.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> bread of life is love; the salt of life is work;
+the sweetness of life, poesy; the water of life,
+faith.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-040-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="149" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>41.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">have</span> seen triflers attempting to draw out a deep
+intellect; and they reminded me of children
+throwing pebbles down the well at Carisbrook, that
+they might hear them sound.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">41</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-018.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="184" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>42.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span> <span class="smcap">bond</span> is necessary to complete our being, only
+we must be careful that the bond does not become
+bondage.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<p>&#8220;The secret of peace,&#8221; said <span class="smcap">A. B.</span>, &#8220;is the resolution
+of the lesser into the greater;&#8221; meaning,
+perhaps, the due relative appreciation of our duties,
+and the proper placing of our affections: or, did she
+not rather mean, the resolving of the lesser duties
+and affections into the higher? But it is true in
+either sense.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<p>The love we have for Genius is to common love
+what the fire on the altar is to the fire on the hearth.
+We cherish it not for warmth or for service, but for
+an offering, as the expression of our worship.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<p>All love not responded to and accepted is a species
+of idolatry. It is like the worship of a dumb
+beautiful image we have ourselves set up and deified,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">42</a></span>
+but cannot inspire with life, nor warm with sympathy.
+No!&mdash;though we should consume our own
+hearts on the altar. Our love of God would be idolatry
+if we did not believe in his love for us&mdash;his
+responsive love.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<p>In the same moment that we begin to speculate
+on the possibility of cessation or change in any strong
+affection that we feel, even from that moment we
+may date its death: it has become the <i>fetch</i> of the
+living love.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<p>&#8220;Motives,&#8221; said Coleridge, &#8220;imply weakness,
+and the reasoning powers imply the existence
+of evil and temptation. The angelic nature would
+act from impulse alone.&#8221; This is the sort of
+angel which Angelico da Fiesole conceived and
+represented, and <i>he</i> only.</p>
+
+<p>Again:&mdash;&#8220;If a man&#8217;s conduct can neither be
+ascribed to the angelic or the bestial within him, it
+must be fiendish. Passion without appetite is
+<i>fiendish</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And, he might have added, appetite without
+passion, <i>bestial</i>. Love in which is neither appetite
+nor passion is <i>angelic</i>. The union of all is human;
+and according as one or other predominates, does the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">43</a></span>
+human being approximate to the fiend, the beast, or
+the angel.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-013-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="112" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>43.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">don&#8217;t</span> mean to say that principle is not a finer
+thing than passion; but passions existed before
+principles: they came into the world with us; principles
+are superinduced.</p>
+
+<p>There are bad principles as well as bad passions;
+and more bad principles than bad passions. Good
+principles derive life, and strength, and warmth from
+high and good passions; but principles do not give
+life, they only bind up life into a consistent whole.
+One great fault in education is, the pains taken to
+inculcate principles rather than to train feelings.
+It is as if we took it for granted that passions could
+<i>only</i> be bad, and are to be ignored or repressed altogether,&mdash;the
+old mischievous monkish doctrine.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-012-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="228" width="300" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">44</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>44.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> is easy to be humble where humility is a condescension&mdash;easy
+to concede where we know
+ourselves wronged&mdash;easy to forgive where vengeance
+is in our power.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>&#8220;You and I,&#8221; said <span class="smcap">H. G.</span>, yesterday, &#8220;are alike in
+this:&mdash;both of us so abhor injustice, that we are
+ready to fight it with a broomstick if we can find
+nothing better!&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-031-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="165" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>45.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> wise only <i>possess</i> ideas&mdash;the greater part of
+mankind are <i>possessed by</i> them. When once
+the mind, in despite of the remonstrating conscience,
+has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse
+or idea, then whatever tends to give depth and vividness
+to this idea or indefinite imagination, increases
+its despotism, and in the same proportion renders the
+reason and free will ineffectual.&#8221; This paragraph
+from Coleridge sounds like a <i>truism</i> until we have
+felt its <i>truth</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">45</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>46.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;L</span><span class="smcap">a</span> Volont&eacute;, en se d&eacute;r&eacute;glant, devient passion;
+cette passion continu&eacute;e se change en habitude,
+et faute de r&eacute;sister &agrave; cette habitude elle se transforme
+en besoin.&#8221;&mdash;<i>St. Augustin</i>. Which may be rendered&mdash;&#8220;out
+of the unregulated will, springs <i>passion</i>,
+out of passion gratified, <i>habit</i>; out of habits
+unresisted, <i>necessity</i>.&#8221; This, also, is one of the truths
+which become, from the impossibility of disputing
+or refuting them, <i>truisms</i>&mdash;and little regarded, till
+the truth makes itself felt.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-045.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="136" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>47.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">wish</span> I could realise what you call my &#8220;<i>grand</i>
+idea of being independent of the absent.&#8221; I have
+not a friend worthy the name, whose absence is not
+pain and dread to me;&mdash;death itself is terrible only
+as it is absence. At some moments, if I could, I
+would cease to love those who are absent from me,
+or to speak more correctly, those whose path in life
+diverges from mine&mdash;whose dwelling house is far
+off;&mdash;with whom I am united in the strongest bonds
+of sympathy while separated by duties and interests
+by space and time. The presence of those whom we
+love is as a double life; absence, in its anxious<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">46</a></span>
+longing, and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of
+death.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;La mort de nos amis ne compte pas du moment
+o&ugrave; ils meurent, mais de celui o&ugrave; nous cessons de vivre
+avec eux;&#8221; or, it might rather be said, <i>pour eux</i>;
+but I think this arises from a want either of <i>faith</i> or
+<i>faithfulness</i>.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;La peur des morts est une abominable faiblesse!
+c&#8217;est la plus commune et la plus barbare des profanations;
+<i>les m&egrave;res ne la connaissent pas</i>!&#8221;&mdash;And why?
+Because the most <i>faithful</i> love is the love of the
+mother for her child.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-046.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="181" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>48.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="smcap">t</span> dinner to-day there was an attempt made
+by two very clever men to place Theodore Hook
+above Sydney Smith. I fought with all my might
+against both. It seems to me that a mind must be
+strangely warped that could ever place on a par
+two men with aspirations and purposes so different,
+whether we consider them merely as individuals, or
+called before the bar of the public as writers. I
+do not take to Sydney Smith personally, because
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">47</a></span>
+my nature feels the want of the artistic and imaginative
+in <i>his</i> nature; but see what he has done for
+humanity, for society, for liberty, for truth,&mdash;for
+us women! What has Theodore Hook done that
+has not perished with him? Even as wits&mdash;and
+I have been in company with both&mdash;I could not
+compare them; but they say the wit of Theodore
+Hook was only fitted for the company of men&mdash;the
+strongest proof that it was not genuine of its kind,
+that when most bearable, it was most superficial. I
+set aside the other obvious inference, that it required
+to be excited by stimulants and those of the coarsest,
+grossest kind. The wit of Sydney Smith almost
+always involved a thought worth remembering for
+its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its
+brilliant vehicle: the value of ten thousand pounds
+sterling of sense concentrated into a cut and polished
+diamond.</p>
+
+<p>It is not true, as I have heard it said, that after
+leaving the society of Sydney Smith you only remembered
+how much you had laughed, not the good
+things at which you had laughed. Few men&mdash;wits
+by profession&mdash;ever said so many memorable things
+as those recorded of Sydney Smith.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-047.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="143" width="400" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">48</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>49.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;W</span><span class="smcap">hen</span> we would show any one that he is mistaken
+our best course is to observe on what
+side he considers the subject,&mdash;for his view of it is
+generally right on <i>this</i> side,&mdash;and admit to him
+that he is right so far. He will be satisfied with
+this acknowledgment, that he was not wrong in
+his judgment, but only inadvertent in not looking
+at the whole of the case.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Pascal.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-048.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="274" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h5>50.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;W</span><span class="smcap">e</span> should reflect,&#8221; says Jeremy Taylor,
+preaching against ambition, &#8220;that whatever
+tempts the pride and vanity of ambitious
+persons is not so big as the smallest star which we
+see scattered in disorder and unregarded on the
+pavement of heaven.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Very beautiful and poetical, but certainly no good
+argument against the sin he denounces. The star is
+inaccessible, and what tempts our pride or our ambi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">49</a></span>tion
+is only that which we consider with hope as <i>accessible</i>.
+That we look up to the stars not desiring,
+not aspiring, but only loving&mdash;therein lies our
+hearts&#8217; truest, holiest, safest <i>devotion</i> as contrasted
+with <i>ambition</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is the &#8220;<i>desire</i> of the moth for the star,&#8221; that
+leads to its burning itself in the candle.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-049.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="126" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>51.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> brow stamped &#8220;with the hieroglyphics of an
+eternal sorrow,&#8221; is a strong and beautiful expression
+of Bishop Taylor&#8217;s.</p>
+
+<p>He says truly: &#8220;It is seldom that God sends
+such calamities upon men as men bring upon themselves
+and suffer willingly.&#8221; And again: &#8220;What
+will not tender women suffer to hide their shame!&#8221;
+What indeed! And again: &#8220;Nothing is intolerable
+that is necessary.&#8221; And again: &#8220;Nothing is to be
+esteemed evil which God and nature have fixed with
+eternal sanctions.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There is not one of these ethical sentences which
+might not be treated as a text and expounded, opening
+into as many &#8220;branches&#8221; of consideration as ever
+did a Presbyterian sermon. Yet several involve a
+fallacy, as it seems to me;&mdash;others a deeper, wider,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">50</a></span>
+and more awful signification than Taylor himself
+seems to have contemplated when he uttered them.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-050.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="107" width="200" /></div>
+
+<h5>52.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> same reasons which rendered Goethe&#8217;s &#8220;Werther&#8221;
+so popular, so passionately admired at the
+time it appeared&mdash;just after the seven years&#8217; war,&mdash;helped
+to render Lord Byron so popular in his time.
+It was not the individuality of &#8220;Werther,&#8221; nor the
+individuality of &#8220;Childe Harold&#8221; which produced
+the effect of making them, for a time, a pervading
+power,&mdash;a <i>part</i> of the life of their contemporaries.
+It was because in both cases a chord was struck
+which was ready to vibrate. A phase of feeling preexistent,
+palpitating at the heart of society, which
+had never found expression in any poetic form since
+the days of Dante, was made visible and audible as
+if by an electric force; words and forms were given
+to a diffused sentiment of pain and resistance, caused
+by a long period of war, of political and social
+commotion, and of unhealthy moral excitement.
+&#8220;Werther&#8221; and &#8220;Childe Harold&#8221; will never perish;
+because, though they have ceased to be the echo
+of a wide despair, there will always be, unhappily,
+individual minds and hearts to respond to the individuality.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">51</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>Lord Byron has sometimes, to use his own expression,
+&#8220;curdled&#8221; a whole world of meaning into
+the compass of one line:&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0 padb07">&#8220;The starry Galileo and his woes.&#8221;</span>
+<span class="i0">&#8220;The blind old man of Chio&#8217;s rocky isle.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Here every word, almost every syllable, paints an
+idea. Such lines are <i>picturesque</i>. And I remember
+another, from Thomson, I think:&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Placed far amid the melancholy main.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>In general, where words are used in description,
+the objects and ideas flow with the words in succession.
+But in each of these lines the mind takes in a
+wide horizon, comprising a multitude of objects at
+once, as the eye takes in a picture, with scene, and
+action, and figures, fore-ground and background, all
+at once. That is the reason I call such lines <i>picturesque</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-026.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="188" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">52</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>53.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">have</span> a great admiration for power, a great terror
+of weakness&mdash;especially in my own sex,&mdash;yet
+feel that my love is for those who overcome the
+mental and moral suffering and temptation, through
+excess of tenderness rather than through excess of
+strength; for those whose refinement and softness of
+nature mingling with high intellectual power and the
+capacity for strong passion, present to me a problem
+to solve, which, when solved, I take to my
+heart. The question is not, which of the two diversities
+of character be the highest and best, but
+which is most sympathetic with my own.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-035-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="115" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>54.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span>&mdash;&mdash; told me, that some time ago, when poor
+Bethune the Scotch poet first became known,
+and was in great hardship, C&mdash;&mdash; himself had collected
+a little sum (about 30<i>l.</i>), and sent it to him
+through his publishers. Bethune wrote back to
+refuse it absolutely, and to say that, while he had
+head and hands, he would not accept <i>charity</i>. C&mdash;&mdash;
+wrote to him in answer, still anonymously, arguing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">53</a></span>
+against the principle, as founded in false pride, &amp;c.
+Now poor Bethune is dead, and the money is found
+untouched,&mdash;left with a friend to be returned to the
+donors!</p>
+
+<p>This sort of disgust and terror, which all finely
+constituted minds feel with regard to pecuniary obligation,&mdash;my
+own utter repugnance to it, even from
+the hands of those I most love,&mdash;makes one sad to
+think of. It gives one such a miserable impression
+of our social humanity!</p>
+
+<p>Goethe makes the same remark in the Wilhelm
+Meister:&mdash;&#8220;Es ist sonderbar welch ein wunderliches
+Bedenken man sich macht, Geld von Freunden
+und G&ouml;nnern anzunehmen, von denen man jede
+andere Gabe mit Dank und Freude empfangen
+w&uuml;rde.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-020.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="183" width="500" /></div>
+
+<h5>55.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;I</span><span class="smcap">n</span> the celestial hierarchy, according to Dionysius
+Areopageta, the angels of Love hold the first
+place, the angels of Light the second, and the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">54</a></span>
+Thrones and Dominations the third. Among terrestrials,
+the Intellects, which act through the imagination
+upon the heart of man&mdash;<i>i. e.</i> poets and
+artists&mdash;may be accounted first in order; the merely
+scientific intellects the second; and the merely
+ruling intellects&mdash;those which apply themselves to
+the government of mankind, without the aid of
+either science or imagination&mdash;will not be disparaged
+if they are placed last.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>All government, all exercise of power&mdash;no matter
+in what form&mdash;which is not based in love and
+directed by knowledge, is a tyranny. It is not of
+God, and shall not stand.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A time will come when the operations of
+charity will no longer be carried on by machinery,
+relentless, ponderous, indiscriminate, but by human
+creatures, watchful, tearful, considerate, and wise.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Westminster
+Review.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-054.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="126" width="200" /></div>
+
+<h5>56.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;T</span><span class="smcap">hose</span> writers who never go further into a subject
+than is compatible with making what they say
+indisputably clear to man, woman, and child, may be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">55</a></span>
+the lights of <i>this</i> age, but they will not be the lights
+of <i>another</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">&#8220;It is not always necessary that truth should
+take a bodily form,&mdash;a material palpable form. It is
+sometimes better that it should dwell around us
+spiritually, creating harmony,&mdash;sounding through
+the air like the solemn sweet tone of a bell.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-055.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="210" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>57.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">omen</span> are inclined to fall in love with priests
+and physicians, because of the help and comfort
+they derive from both in perilous moral and
+physical maladies. They believe in the presence of
+real pity, real sympathy, where the tone and look of
+each have become merely habitual and conventional,&mdash;I
+may say professional. On the other hand,
+women are inclined to fall in love with criminal and
+miserable men out of the pity which in our sex is
+akin to love, and out of the power of bestowing
+comfort or love. &#8220;Car les femmes out un instinct
+c&eacute;leste pour le malheur.&#8221; So, in the first instance,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">56</a></span>
+they love from gratitude or faith; in the last, from
+compassion or hope.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-056-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="150" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>58.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;M</span><span class="smcap">en</span> of all countries,&#8221; says Sir James Mackintosh,
+&#8220;appear to be more alike in their
+best qualities than the pride of civilisation would be
+willing to allow.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And in their <i>worst</i>. The distinction between
+savage and civilised humanity lies not in the <i>qualities</i>,
+but the <i>habits</i>.</p>
+
+<h5>59.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span><span class="smcap">oleridge</span> notices &#8220;the increase in modern times
+of vicious associations with things in themselves indifferent,&#8221;
+as a sign of unhealthiness in taste, in feeling,
+in conscience.</p>
+
+<p>The truth of this remark is particularly illustrated
+in the French literature of the last century.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-022-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="105" width="400" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">57</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>60.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;A</span><span class="smcap">nd</span> yet the compensations of calamity are made
+apparent to the understanding also after long
+intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel
+disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends,
+seems at the moment unpaid loss and unpayable, but
+the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that
+underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife,
+brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation,
+somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or
+genius; for it commonly operates a revolution in
+our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or
+youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up
+a wonted occupation, or a household, or a style of
+living, and allows the formation of new influences
+that prove of the first importance during the next
+years.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Emerson.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-022-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="214" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>61.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">R</span><span class="smcap">eligion</span>, in its general sense, is properly the
+comprehension and acknowledgment of an
+unseen spiritual power and the soul&#8217;s allegiance to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">58</a></span>
+it; and <span class="smcap">Christianity</span>, in its particular sense, is
+the comprehension and appreciation of the personal
+character of Christ, and the heart&#8217;s allegiance to
+that.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-025.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="170" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>62.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="smcap">varice</span> is to the intellect what <i>sensuality</i> is to the
+morals. It is an intellectual form of sensuality,
+inasmuch as it is the passion for the acquisition, the
+enjoyment in the possession, of a palpable, tangible,
+selfish pleasure; and it would have the same
+tendency to unspiritualise, to degrade, and to harden
+the higher faculties that a course of grosser sensualism
+would have to corrupt the lower faculties.
+Both dull the edge of all that is fine and tender
+within us.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-013-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="112" width="300" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">59</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>63.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span> <span class="smcap">king</span> or a prince becomes by accident a part of
+history. A poet or an artist becomes by
+nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-059-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="89" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>As what we call Genius arises out of the disproportionate
+power and size of a certain faculty, so the
+great difficulty lies in harmonising with it the rest of
+the character.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Though it burn our house down, who does not
+venerate fire?&#8221; says the Hindoo proverb.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-059-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="89" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>64.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="smcap">n</span> elegant mind informing a graceful person is
+like a spirit lamp in an alabaster vase, shedding
+round its own softened radiance and heightening the
+beauty of its medium. An elegant mind in a plain
+ungraceful person is like the same lamp enclosed in a
+vase of bronze; we may, if we approach near enough,
+rejoice in its influence, though we may not behold
+its radiance.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">60</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>65.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">L</span><span class="smcap">andor</span>, in a passage I was reading to-day, speaks
+of a language of criticism, in which qualities
+should be graduated by colours; &#8220;as, for instance,
+<i>purple</i> might express grandeur and majesty of
+thought; <i>scarlet</i>, vigour of expression; <i>pink</i>, liveliness;
+<i>green</i>, elegant and equable composition, and
+so on.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><i>Blue</i>, then, might express contemplative power?
+<i>yellow</i>, wit? <i>violet</i>, tenderness? and so on.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-060-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="109" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>66.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">quoted</span> to <span class="smcap">A.</span> the saying of a sceptical philosopher:
+&#8220;The world is but one enormous <span class="smcap">WILL</span>,
+constantly rushing into life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Is that,&#8221; she responded quickly, &#8220;another new
+name for God?&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-060-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="151" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>67.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span> <span class="smcap">death-bed</span> repentance has become proverbial
+for its fruitlessness, and a death-bed forgiveness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">61</a></span>
+equally so. They who wait till their own death-bed
+to make reparation, or till their adversary&#8217;s death-bed
+to grant absolution, seem to me much upon a
+par in regard to the moral, as well as the religious,
+failure.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-018.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="184" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>68.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span> <span class="smcap">character</span> endued with a large, vivacious, active
+intellect and a limited range of sympathies,
+generally remains immature. We can grow <i>wise</i>
+only through the experience which reaches us
+through our sympathies and becomes a part of our
+life. All other experience may be gain, but it
+remains in a manner extraneous, adds to our
+possessions without adding to our strength, and
+sharpens our implements without increasing our
+capacity to use them.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Not always those who have the quickest, keenest,
+perception of character are the best to deal with it,
+and perhaps for that very reason. Before we can
+influence or deal with mind, contemplation must be
+lost in sympathy, observation must be merged in
+love.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">62</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-017-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="134" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>69.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">M</span><span class="smcap">ontaigne</span>, in his eloquent tirade against melancholy,
+observes that the Italians have the same
+word, <i>Tristezza</i>, for melancholy and for malignity or
+wickedness. The noun <i>Tristo</i>, &#8220;a wretch,&#8221; has the
+double sense of our English word corresponding with
+the French noun <i>mis&eacute;rable</i>. So Judas Iscariot is
+called <i>quel tristo</i>. Our word &#8220;wretchedness&#8221; is not,
+however, used in the double sense of <i>tristezza</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>&#8220;On ne consid&egrave;re pas assez les paroles comme des
+faits:&#8221; that was well said!</p>
+
+<p>Since for the purpose of circulation and intercommunication
+we are obliged to coin truth into
+words, we should be careful not to adulterate the
+coin, to keep it pure, and up to the original standard
+of significance and value, that it may be reconvertible
+into the truth it represents.</p>
+
+<p>If I use a term in a sense wherein I know it is
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">63</a></span>
+not understood by the person I address, then I am
+guilty of using words (in so far as they represent
+truth), if not to ensnare intentionally, yet to mislead
+consciously; it is like adulterating coin.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>&#8220;Common people,&#8221; said Johnson, &#8220;do not accurately
+adapt their words to their thoughts, nor their
+thoughts to the objects;&#8221;&mdash;that is to say, they
+neither apprehend truly nor speak truly&mdash;and in
+this respect children, half-educated women, and ill-educated
+men, are the &#8220;common people.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It is one of the most serious mistakes in Education
+that we are not sufficiently careful to habituate children
+to the accurate use of words. Accuracy of
+language is one of the bulwarks of truth. If we
+looked into the matter we should probably find that
+all the varieties and modifications of conscious and
+unconscious lying&mdash;as exaggeration, equivocation,
+evasion, misrepresentation&mdash;might be traced to the
+early misuse of words; therefore the contemptuous,
+careless tone in which people say sometimes &#8220;words&mdash;words&mdash;mere
+words!&#8221; is unthinking and unwise.
+It tends to debase the value of that which is the only
+medium of the inner life between man and man:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">64</a></span> &#8220;Nous
+ne sommes hommes, et nous ne tenons les
+uns aux autres, que par la parole,&#8221; said Montaigne.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-064.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="258" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h5>70.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;W</span><span class="smcap">e</span> are happy, good, tranquil, in proportion as
+our inner life is accessible to the external life,
+and in harmony with it. When we become dead to
+the moving life of Nature around us, to the changes
+of day and night (I do not speak here of the sympathetic
+influences of our fellow-creatures), then we
+may call ourselves philosophical, but we are surely
+either bad or mad.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Or perhaps only sad?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">There are moments in the life of every contemplative
+being, when the healing power of Nature
+is felt&mdash;even as Wordsworth describes it&mdash;felt in
+the blood, in every pulse along the veins. In such
+moments converse, sympathy, the faces, the presence
+of the dearest, come so near to us, they make us
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">65</a></span>
+shrink; books, pictures, music, anything, any object
+which has passed through the medium of mind, and
+has been in a manner humanised, is felt as an intrusive
+reflection of the busy, weary, thought-worn
+self within us. Only Nature, speaking through no
+interpreter, gently steals us out of our humanity,
+giving us a foretaste of that more diffused disembodied
+life which may hereafter be ours. Beautiful
+and genial, and not wholly untrue, were the old
+superstitions which placed a haunting divinity in
+every grove, and heard a living voice responsive in
+every murmuring stream.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">This present Sunday I set off with the others to
+walk to church, but it was late; I could not keep
+up with the pedestrians, and, not to delay them,
+turned back. I wandered down the hill path to the
+river brink, and crossed the little bridge and strolled
+along, pensive yet with no definite or continuous
+subject of thought. How beautiful it was&mdash;how
+tranquil! not a cloud in the blue sky, not a breath
+of air! &#8220;And where the dead leaf fell there did it
+rest;&#8221; but so still it was that scarce a single leaf did
+flutter or fall, though the narrow pathway along the
+water&#8217;s edge was already encumbered with heaps of
+decaying foliage. Everywhere around, the autumnal
+tints prevailed, except in one sheltered place under
+the towering cliff, where a single tree, a magnificent
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">66</a></span>
+lime, still flourished in summer luxuriance, with not
+a leaf turned or shed. I stood still opposite, looking
+on it quietly for a long time. It seemed to me a
+happy tree, so fresh and fair and grand, as if its
+guardian Dryad would not suffer it to be defaced.
+Then I turned, for close beside me sounded the soft,
+interrupted, half-suppressed warble of a bird, sitting
+on a leafless spray, which seemed to bend with its
+tiny weight. Some lines which I used to love in
+my childhood came into my mind, blending softly
+with the presences around me.</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;The little bird now to salute the morn</span>
+<span class="i0">Upon the naked branches sets her foot,</span>
+<span class="i0">The leaves still lying at the mossy root,</span>
+<span class="i0">And there a silly chirruping doth keep,</span>
+<span class="i0">As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep;</span>
+<span class="i0">Praising fair summer that too soon is gone,</span>
+<span class="i0">And sad for winter, too soon coming on!&#8221;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>Drayton.</i></span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>The river, where I stood, taking an abrupt turn,
+ran wimpling by; not as I had seen it but a few
+days before,&mdash;rolling tumultuously, the dead leaves
+whirling in its eddies, swollen and turbid with the
+mountain torrents, making one think of the kelpies,
+the water wraiths, and such uncanny things,&mdash;but
+gentle, transparent, and flashing in the low sunlight;
+even the barberries, drooping with rich crimson
+clusters over the little pools near the bank, and reflected
+in them as in a mirror, I remember vividly as
+a part of the exquisite loveliness which seemed to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">67</a></span>
+melt into my life. For such moments we are grateful:
+we feel then what God <i>can</i> do for us, and what
+man can not.&mdash;<i>Carolside, November 5th, 1843.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-013-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="112" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>71.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;I</span><span class="smcap">n</span> the early ages of faith, the spirit of Christianity
+glided into and gave a new significance
+to the forms of heathenism. It was not the forms of
+heathenism which encrusted and overlaid the spirit of
+Christianity, for in that case the spirit would have
+burst through such extraneous formul&aelig;, and set them
+aside at once and for ever.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-038-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="186" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>72.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">Q</span><span class="smcap">uestions</span>. In the execution of the penal statutes,
+can the individual interest of the convict be re<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">68</a></span>conciled
+with the interest of society? or must the
+good of the convict and the good of society be considered
+as inevitably and necessarily opposed?&mdash;the
+one sacrificed to the other, and at the best only a
+compromise possible?</p>
+
+<p>This is a question pending at present, and will
+require wise heads to decide it? How would Christ
+have decided it? When He set the poor accused
+woman free, was He considering the good of the culprit
+or the good of society? and how far are we
+bound to follow His example? If He consigned
+the wicked to weeping and gnashing of teeth, was it
+for atonement or retribution, punishment or penance?
+and how far are we bound to follow His example?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-023-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="138" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>73.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">marked</span> the following passage in Montaigne as
+most curiously applicable to the present times, in
+so far as our religious contests are concerned; and I
+leave it in his quaint old French.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;C&#8217;est un effet de la Providence divine de permettre
+sa saincte Eglise &ecirc;tre agit&eacute;e, comme nous la
+voyons, de tant de troubles et d&#8217;orages, pour &eacute;veiller<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">69</a></span>
+par ce contraste les &acirc;mes pies et les ravoir de
+l&#8217;oisivet&eacute; et du sommeil ou les avail plong&eacute;es une si
+longue tranquillit&eacute;. Si nous contrep&egrave;sons la perte
+que nous avons faite par le nombre de ceux qui se
+sont d&eacute;voy&eacute;s, au gain qui nous vient par nous &ecirc;tre
+remis en haleine, ressuscit&eacute; notre z&ecirc;le et nos forces &agrave;
+l&#8217;occasion de ce combat, je ne sais si l&#8217;utilit&eacute; ne surmonte
+point le dommage.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-059-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="89" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>74.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;T</span><span class="smcap">hey</span> (the friends of Cassius) were divided in
+opinion,&mdash;some holding that servitude was
+the extreme of evils, and others that tyranny was
+better than civil war.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Unhappy that nation, wherever it may be, where
+the question is yet pending between servitude and
+civil war! such a nation might be driven to solve
+the problem after the manner of Cassius&mdash;with the
+dagger&#8217;s point.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Surely,&#8221; said Moore, &#8220;it is wrong for the lovers
+of liberty to identify the principle of resistance to
+power with such an odious person as the devil!&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-027.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="132" width="400" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">70</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>75.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;W</span><span class="smcap">here</span> the the question is of a great deal of good
+to ensue from a small injustice, men must
+pursue the things which are just in present, and leave
+the future to Divine Providence.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This so simple rule of right is seldom attended to
+as a rule of life till we are placed in some strait in
+which it is forced upon us.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-011.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="203" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>76.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span> <span class="smcap">woman&#8217;s</span> patriotism is more of a sentiment than
+a man&#8217;s,&mdash;more passionate: it is only an extension
+of the domestic affections, and with her <i>la
+patrie</i> is only an enlargement of <i>home</i>. In the same
+manner, a woman&#8217;s idea of fame is always a more
+extended sympathy, and is much more of a presence
+than an anticipation. To her the voice of fame is
+only the echo&mdash;fainter and more distant&mdash;of the
+voice of love.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-023-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="124" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">71</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>77.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;L</span><span class="smcap">a</span> doute s&#8217;introduit dans l&#8217;&acirc;me qui r&ecirc;ve, la foi
+descend dans l&#8217;&acirc;me qui souffre.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The reverse is equally true,&mdash;and judging from
+my own experience, I should say oftener true.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-049.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="126" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>78.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;L</span><span class="smcap">a</span> curiosit&eacute; est si voisine &agrave; la perfidie qu&#8217;elle
+peut enlaidir les plus beaux visages.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-012-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="228" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>79.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">hen</span> I told Tieck of the death of Coleridge (I
+had just received the sad but not unexpected
+news in a letter from England), he exclaimed with
+emotion, &#8220;A great spirit has passed away from the
+earth, and has left no adequate memorial of its greatness.&#8221;
+Speaking of him afterwards he said, &#8220;Coleridge
+possessed the creative and inventive spirit of
+poetry, not the productive; he <i>thought</i> too much to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">72</a></span>
+produce,&mdash;the analytical power interfered with the
+genius: Others with more active faculties seized and
+worked out his magnificent hints and ideas. Walter
+Scott and Lord Byron borrowed the first idea of the
+form and spirit of their narrative poems from
+Coleridge&#8217;s &#8216;Christabelle.&#8217;&#8221; This judgment of one
+great poet and critic passed on another seemed to me
+worth preserving.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-032-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="207" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>80.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span><span class="smcap">oleridge</span> says, &#8220;In politics what begins in fear
+usually ends in folly.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He might have gone farther, and added: In morals
+what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness. In
+religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism.
+Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the
+beginning of all evil.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>In another place he says,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Talent lying in the understanding is often inherited;
+genius, being the action of reason and
+imagination, rarely or never.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">73</a></span></p>
+
+<p>There seems confusion here, for genius lies not
+in the amount of intellect&mdash;it is a quality of the
+intellect apart from quantity. And the distinction
+between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines
+and uses; genius combines and creates.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>Of Sara Coleridge, Mr. Kenyon said very truly
+and beautifully, &#8220;that like her father she had
+the controversial <i>intellect</i> without the controversial
+<i>spirit</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-073-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="226" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h5>81.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">e</span> all remember the famous <i>bon mot</i> of Talleyrand.
+When seated between Madame de Sta&euml;l and
+Madame R&eacute;camier, and pouring forth gallantry, first
+at the feet of one, then of the other, Madame de Sta&euml;l
+suddenly asked him if she and Madame R&eacute;camier
+fell into the river, which of the two he would save
+first? &#8220;Madame,&#8221; replied Talleyrand, &#8220;je crois que
+vous savez nager!&#8221; Now we will match this
+pretty <i>bon mot</i> with one far prettier, and founded on
+it. Prince S., whom I knew formerly, was one day<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">74</a></span>
+loitering on the banks of the Isar, in the English
+garden at Munich, by the side of the beautiful
+Madame de V., then the object of his devoted admiration.
+For a while he had been speaking to her
+of his mother, for whom, <i>vaurien</i> as he was, he
+had ever shown the strongest filial love and respect.
+Afterwards, as they wandered on, he began to pour
+forth his soul to the lady of his love with all the
+eloquence of passion. Suddenly she turned and said
+to him, &#8220;If your mother and myself were both to
+fall into this river, whom would you save first?&#8221;
+&#8220;My mother!&#8221; he instantly replied; and then, looking
+at her expressively, immediately added, &#8220;To
+save <i>you</i> first would be as if I were to save <i>myself</i>
+first!&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>82.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">f</span> we were not always bringing ourselves into
+comparison with others, we should know them
+better.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-013-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="185" width="300" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">75</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>83.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">here</span> are ways of governing every mind which
+lies within the circle described by our own;
+the only question is, whether the means required be
+such as we <i>can</i> use? and if so, whether we shall
+think it right to do so?</p>
+
+<p class="tb">You think I do not know you, or that I mistake
+you utterly, because I am actuated by the impulses
+of my own nature, rather than by my perception of
+the impulses of yours? It is not so.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">If we would retain our own consistency, without
+which there is no moral strength, we must stand
+firm upon our own moral life.</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Be true unto thyself;</span>
+<span class="i05">And it shall follow as the night to day,</span>
+<span class="i05">Thou canst not then be false to any man.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>But to be true to others as well as ourselves, is
+not merely to allow to them the same independence,
+but to sympathise with it. Unhappily here lies the
+chief difficulty. There are brains so large that they
+unconsciously swamp all individualities which come
+in contact or too near, and brains so small that they
+cannot take in the conception of any other individuality
+as a whole, only in part or parts. As in
+Religion, where there is a strong, sincere, definite
+faith, there is generally more or less intolerance; so
+in character, where there is strong individuality,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">76</a></span>
+self-assurance, and defined principles of action, there
+is usually something hard and intolerant of the individuality
+of others. In some characters we meet
+with, toleration is a principle of the reason, and
+intolerance a quality of the mind, and then the
+whole being strikes a discord.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-012-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="125" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>84.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">f</span> we can still love those who have made us suffer,
+we love them all the more. It is as if the principle,
+that conflict is a necessary law of progress,
+were applicable even to love. For there is no love
+like that which has roused up the intensest feelings
+of our nature,&mdash;revealed us to ourselves, like lightning
+suddenly disclosing an abyss,&mdash;yet has survived
+all the storm and tumult of such passionate discord
+and all the terror of such a revelation.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-029-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="136" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>85.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">F</span> <span class="smcap">has</span> much, much to learn! Through power,
+through passion, through feeling we do much, but
+only through observation, reflection, and sympathy
+we learn much; hence it is that minds highly gifted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">77</a></span>
+often remain immature. Artist minds especially, so
+long as they live only or chiefly for their art, their
+faculties bent on creating or representing, remain
+immature on one side&mdash;the reasoning and reflecting
+side of the character.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-002.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="163" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>86.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">S</span><span class="smcap">aid</span> a Frenchman of his adversary, &#8220;Il se croit
+sup&eacute;rieur &agrave; moi de toute la hauteur de sa b&ecirc;tise!&#8221;
+There is a mingled felicity, politeness, and acrimony,
+in this phrase quite untranslatable.</p>
+
+<h5>87.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> is a pity that we have no words to express the
+French distinction between <i>r&ecirc;ver</i> and <i>r&ecirc;vasser</i>.
+The one implies meditation on a definite subject: the
+other the abandonment of the mind to vague discussion,
+aimless thoughts.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"><img src="images/illus-077-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="213" width="450" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">78</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>88.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> seems to me that the conversation of the first
+converser in the world would <i>tire</i> me, <i>pall</i> on me
+at last, where I am not sure of the sincerity. Talk
+without truth is the hollow brass; talk without love
+is like the tinkling cymbal, and where it does not
+tinkle it gingles, and where it does not gingle, it jars.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-078.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="215" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>89.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">here</span> are few things more striking, more interesting
+to a thoughtful mind, than to trace
+through all the poetry, literature, and art of the
+Middle Ages that broad ever-present distinction between
+the practical and the contemplative life. This
+was, no doubt, suggested and kept in view by the one
+grand division of the whole social community into
+those who were devoted to the religious profession
+(an immense proportion of both sexes) and those who
+were not. All through Dante, all through the
+productions of medi&aelig;val art, we find this pervading
+idea; and we must understand it well and keep
+it in mind, or we shall never be able to apprehend
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">79</a></span>
+the entire beauty and meaning of certain
+religious groups in sculpture and painting, and the
+significance of the characters introduced. Thus,
+in subjects from the Old Testament, Leah always
+represents the practical, Rachel, the contemplative
+life. In the New Testament, Martha and Mary
+figure in the same allegorical sense; and among
+the saints we always find St. Catharine and St.
+Clara patronising the religious and contemplative
+life, while St. Barbara and St. Ursula preside
+over the military or secular existence. It was
+a part, and a very important part, of that beautiful
+and expressive symbolism through which art in all
+its forms spoke to the popular mind.</p>
+
+<p>For myself, I have the strongest admiration for
+the <i>practical</i>, but the strongest sympathy with the
+<i>contemplative</i> life. I bow to Leah and to Martha,
+but my love is for Rachel and for Mary.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-079.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="134" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>90.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">B</span><span class="smcap">ettina</span> does not describe nature, she informs it,
+with her own life: she seems to live in the elements,
+to exist in the fire, the air, the water, like a
+sylph, a gnome, an elf; she does not contemplate
+nature, she <i>is</i> nature; she is like the bird in the air,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">80</a></span>
+the fish in the sea, the squirrel in the wood. It is
+one thing to describe nature, and quite another unconsciously
+so to inform nature with a portion of our
+own life.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-022-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="105" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h5>91.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">J</span><span class="smcap">oanna Baillie</span> had a great admiration of Macaulay&#8217;s
+Roman Ballads. &#8220;But,&#8221; said some
+one, &#8220;do you really account them as poetry?&#8221; She
+replied, &#8220;They <i>are</i> poetry if the sounds of the
+trumpet be music!&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-024.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="87" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>92.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="smcap">ll</span> my own experience of life teaches me the
+<i>contempt</i> of cunning, not the <i>fear</i>. The phrase
+&#8220;profound cunning&#8221; has always seemed to me a
+contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning
+mind which was not either shallow, or on some point
+diseased. People dissemble sometimes who yet hate
+dissembling, but a &#8220;cunning mind&#8221; emphatically
+delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey
+of cunning. That &#8220;pleasure in deceiving and aptness
+to be deceived&#8221; usually go together, was one of
+the wise sayings of the wisest of men.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">81</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-007.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="265" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h5>93.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> was a saying of Paracelsus, that &#8220;Those who
+would understand the course of the heavens above
+must first of all recognise the heaven in man:&#8221;
+meaning, I suppose, that all pursuit of knowledge
+which is not accompanied by praise of God and love
+of our fellow-creatures must turn to bitterness,
+emptiness, foolishness. We must imagine him to
+have come to this conclusion only late in life.</p>
+
+<p>Browning, in that wonderful poem of Paracelsus,&mdash;a
+poem in which there is such a profound
+far-seeing philosophy, set forth with such a luxuriance
+of illustration and imagery, and such a wealth
+of glorious eloquence, that I know nothing to be
+compared with it since Goethe and Wordsworth,&mdash;represents
+his aspiring philosopher as at first impelled
+solely by the appetite to <i>know</i>. He asks
+nothing of men, he despises them; but he will serve
+them, raise them, after a sort of God-like fashion,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">82</a></span>
+independent of their sympathy, scorning their applause,
+using them like instruments, cheating them
+like children,&mdash;all for their good; but it will not do.
+In Aprile, &#8220;who would love infinitely, and be beloved,&#8221;
+is figured the type of the poet-nature, desiring
+only beauty, resolving all into beauty; while
+in Paracelsus we have the type of the reflecting, the
+inquiring mind desiring only knowledge, resolving
+all into knowledge, asking nothing more to crown
+his being. And both find out their mistake; both
+come to feel that love without knowledge is blind
+and weak, and knowledge without love barren and
+vain.</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;I too have sought to <span class="smcap">know</span> as thou to <span class="smcap">LOVE</span>,</span>
+<span class="i0">Excluding love as thou refused&#8217;st knowledge;</span>
+<span class="i0">Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake!</span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="gesperrt"><sub>&nbsp;*****</sub></span></span>
+<span class="i0">&#8220;Are we not halves of one dissever&#8217;d world,</span>
+<span class="i0">Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part?&mdash;Never!</span>
+<span class="i0">Till thou, the lover, know, and I, the knower,</span>
+<span class="i0">Love&mdash;until both are saved!&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>After all, perhaps, only the same old world-renowned
+myth in another form&mdash;the marriage of
+Cupid and Psyche; Love and Intelligence long
+parted, long suffering, again embracing, and lighted
+on by Beauty to an immortal union. But to return
+to our poet. Aprile, exhausted by his own aimless,
+dazzling visions, expires on the bosom of him who
+knows; and Paracelsus, who began with a self
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">83</a></span>
+sufficing scorn of his kind, dies a baffled and degraded
+man in the arms of him who loves;&mdash;yet
+wiser in his fall than through his aspirations, he dies
+trusting in the progress of humanity so long as
+humanity is content to be <i>human</i>; to <i>love</i> as well
+as to <i>know</i>;&mdash;to fear, to hope, to worship, as well as
+to aspire.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-048.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="274" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h5>94.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">L</span><span class="smcap">ord Bacon</span> says: &#8220;I like a plantation (in the
+sense of colony) in a <i>pure</i> soil; that is, where
+people are not displanted to the end to plant in
+others: for else it is rather an extirpation than a
+plantation.&#8221; (Bacon, who wrote this, counselled to
+James I. the plantation of Ulster exactly on the
+principle he has here deprecated.)</p>
+
+<p>He adds, &#8220;It is a shameful and unblessed thing to
+take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men,
+to be the people with whom you plant&#8221; (<i>i. e.</i> colonise).
+And it is only now that our politicians are
+beginning to discover and act upon this great moral<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">84</a></span>
+truth and obvious fitness of things!&mdash;like Bacon,
+adopting practically, and from mere motives of expediency,
+a principle they would theoretically abjure!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-013-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="185" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>95.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">B</span><span class="smcap">ecause</span> in real life we cannot, or do not, reconcile
+the high theory with the low practice,
+we use our wit to render the theory ridiculous, and
+our reason to reconcile us to the practice. We ought
+to do just the reverse.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>Many would say, if they spoke the truth, that it
+had cost them a life-long effort to unlearn what they
+had been taught.</p>
+
+<p>For as the eye becomes blinded by fashion to
+positive deformity, so through social conventionalism
+the conscience becomes blinded to positive
+immorality.</p>
+
+<p>It is fatal in any mind to make the moral standard
+for men high and the moral standard for women low,
+or <i>vice vers&acirc;</i>. This has appeared to me the very<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">85</a></span>
+commonest of all mistakes in men and women who
+have lived much in the world, but <i>fatal</i> nevertheless,
+and in three ways; first, as distorting the moral
+ideal, so far as it exists in the conscience; secondly,
+as perplexing the bounds, practically, of right and
+wrong; thirdly, as being at variance with the spirit
+and principles of Christianity. Admit these premises,
+and it follows inevitably that such a mistake
+is <i>fatal</i> in the last degree, as disturbing the consistency
+and the elevation of the character, morally,
+practically, religiously.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Akin to this mistake, or identical with it, is the
+belief that there are essential masculine and feminine
+virtues and vices. It is not, in fact, the quality
+itself, but the modification of the quality, which is
+masculine or feminine: and on the manner or degree
+in which these are balanced and combined in the
+individual, depends the perfection of that individual
+character&mdash;its approximation to that of Christ.
+I firmly believe that as the influences of religion are
+extended, and as civilisation advances, those qualities
+which are now admired as essentially <i>feminine</i> will be
+considered as essentially <i>human</i>, such as gentleness,
+purity, the more unselfish and spiritual sense of
+duty, and the dominance of the affections over the
+passions. This is, perhaps, what Buffon, speaking
+as a naturalist, meant, when he said that with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">86</a></span>
+progress of humanity, &#8220;<i>Les races se f&eacute;minisent</i>;&#8221;
+at least I understand the phrase in this sense.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">A man who requires from his own sex manly
+direct truth, and laughs at the cowardly subterfuges
+and small arts of women as being <i>feminine</i>;&mdash;a
+woman who requires from her own sex tenderness
+and purity, and thinks ruffianism and sensuality
+pardonable in a man as being <i>masculine</i>,&mdash;these
+have repudiated the Christian standard of morals
+which Christ, in his own person, bequeathed to us&mdash;that
+standard which we have accepted as Christians&mdash;theoretically
+at least&mdash;and which makes no distinction
+between &#8220;the highest, holiest manhood,&#8221;
+and the highest, holiest womanhood.</p>
+
+<p>I might illustrate this position not only scripturally
+but philosophically, by quoting the axiom of
+the Greek philosopher Antisthenes, the disciple of
+Socrates,&mdash;&#8220;The virtue of the man and the woman
+is the same;&#8221; which shows a perception of the moral
+truth, a sort of anticipation of the Christian doctrine,
+even in the pagan times. But I prefer an
+illustration which is at once practical and poetical,
+and plain to the most prejudiced among men or
+women.</p>
+
+<p>Every reader of Wordsworth will recollect, if he
+does not know by heart, the poem entitled &#8220;The
+Happy Warrior.&#8221; It has been quoted often as an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">87</a></span>
+epitome of every manly, soldierly, and elevated
+quality. I have heard it applied to the Duke of
+Wellington. Those who make the experiment of
+merely substituting the word <i>woman</i> for the word
+<i>warrior</i>, and changing the feminine for the masculine
+pronoun, will find that it reads equally well;
+that almost from beginning to end it is literally
+as applicable to the one sex as to the other. As
+thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0 padl1">CHARACTER OF THE HAPPY WOMAN.</span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;</span>
+<span class="i0">Who is the happy <i>woman</i>? Who is <i>she</i></span>
+<span class="i0">That every <i>woman</i> born should wish to be?</span>
+<span class="i0">It is the generous spirit, who, when brought</span>
+<span class="i0">Among the tasks of real life, had wrought</span>
+<span class="i0">Upon the plan that pleased <i>her</i> childish thought;</span>
+<span class="i0">Whose high endeavours are an inward light,</span>
+<span class="i0">That make the path before <i>her</i> always bright:</span>
+<span class="i0">Who, with a natural instinct to discern</span>
+<span class="i0">What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;</span>
+<span class="i0">Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,</span>
+<span class="i0">But makes <i>her</i> moral being <i>her</i> prime care;</span>
+<span class="i0">Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,</span>
+<span class="i0">And Fear, and Sorrow, miserable train!</span>
+<span class="i0">Turns <i>that</i> necessity to glorious gain;</span>
+<span class="i0">In face of these doth exercise a power</span>
+<span class="i0">Which is our human nature&#8217;s highest dower:</span>
+<span class="i0">Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves</span>
+<span class="i0">Of their bad influence, and their good receives;</span>
+<span class="i0">By objects, which might force the soul to abate</span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Her</i> feeling, rendered more compassionate;</span>
+<span class="i0">Is placable&mdash;because occasions rise</span>
+<span class="i0">So often that demand such sacrifice;</span>
+<span class="i0">More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure</span>
+<span class="i0">As tempted more; more able to endure,</span>
+<span class="i0"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">88</a></span></span>
+<span class="i0">As more exposed to suffering and distress;</span>
+<span class="i0">Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.</span>
+<span class="i0">&#8217;Tis <i>she</i> whose law is reason; who depends</span>
+<span class="i0">Upon that law as on the best of friends;</span>
+<span class="i0">Whence in a state where men are tempted still</span>
+<span class="i0">To evil for a guard against worse ill,</span>
+<span class="i0">And what in quality or act is best,</span>
+<span class="i0">Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,</span>
+<span class="i0"><i>She</i> fixes good on good alone, and owes</span>
+<span class="i0">To virtue every triumph that <i>she</i> knows.</span>
+<span class="i0">Who, if <i>she</i> rise to station of command,</span>
+<span class="i0">Rises by open means; and there will stand</span>
+<span class="i0">On honourable terms, or else retire.</span>
+<span class="i0 padt05"><span class="gesperrt">&nbsp;*****</span></span>
+<span class="i0">Who comprehends <i>her</i> trust, and to the same</span>
+<span class="i0">Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim;</span>
+<span class="i0">And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait</span>
+<span class="i0">For wealth, or honours, or for worldly state;</span>
+<span class="i0">Whom they must follow; on whose head must fall</span>
+<span class="i0">Like showers of manna, if they come at all:</span>
+<span class="i0">Whose powers shed round <i>her</i> in the common strife</span>
+<span class="i0">Or mild concerns of ordinary life,</span>
+<span class="i0">A constant influence, a peculiar grace;</span>
+<span class="i0">But who, if <i>she</i> be called upon to face</span>
+<span class="i0">Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined</span>
+<span class="i0">Great issue, good or bad for human kind,</span>
+<span class="i0">Is happy as a lover; and attired</span>
+<span class="i0">With sudden brightness, like to one inspired;</span>
+<span class="i0">And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law</span>
+<span class="i0">In calmness made, and sees what <i>she</i> foresaw;</span>
+<span class="i0">Or if an unexpected call succeed,</span>
+<span class="i0">Come when it will, is equal to the need!</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>In all these fifty-six lines there is only one line
+which cannot be feminised in its significance,&mdash;that
+which I have filled up with asterisks, and which is
+totally at variance with our ideal of <span class="smcap">A Happy
+Woman</span>. It is the line&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">89</a></span></p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;And in himself possess his own desire.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>No woman could exist happily or virtuously in
+such complete independence of all external affections
+as these words express. &#8220;Her desire is to her husband,&#8221;&mdash;this
+is the sort of subjection prophesied for
+the daughters of Eve. A woman doomed to exist
+without this earthly rest for her affections, does not
+&#8220;in herself possess her own desire;&#8221; she turns
+towards God; and if she does not make her life a
+life of worship, she makes it a life of charity, (which
+in itself is worship,) or she dies a spiritual and a
+moral death. Is it much better with the man who
+concentrates his aspirations in himself? I should
+think not.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>Swift, as a man and a writer, is one of those who
+had least sympathy with women; and I have sometimes
+thought that the exaggeration, even to morbidity,
+of the coarse and the cruel in his character,
+arose from this want of sympathy; but his strong
+sense showed him the one great moral truth as
+regards the two sexes, and gave him the courage to
+avow it.</p>
+
+<p>He says, &#8220;I am ignorant of any one quality that
+is amiable in a woman which is not equally so in a
+man. I do not except even modesty and gentleness
+of nature; nor do I know one vice or folly which is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">90</a></span>
+not equally detestable in both.&#8221; Then, remarking
+that cowardice is an <i>infirmity</i> generally allowed to
+women, he wonders that they should fancy it becoming
+or graceful, or think it worth improving by
+affectation, particularly as it is generally allied to
+cruelty.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Here is a passage from one of Humboldt&#8217;s letters,
+which I have seen quoted with sympathy and admiration,
+as applied to the manly character only:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Masculine independence of mind I hold to be
+in reality the first requisite for the formation of a
+character of real manly worth. The man who suffers
+himself to be deceived and carried away by his own
+weakness, may be a very amiable person in other
+respects, but cannot be called a good man; such
+beings should not find favour in the eyes of a woman,
+for a truly beautiful and purely feminine nature
+should be attracted only by what is highest and
+noblest in the character of man.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Now we will take this bit of moral philosophy,
+and, without the slightest alteration of the context,
+apply it to the female character.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Feminine independence of mind I hold to be
+in reality the first requisite for the formation of a
+character of real feminine worth. The woman who
+allows herself to be deceived and carried away by
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">91</a></span>
+her own weakness may be a very amiable person in
+other respects, but cannot be called a good woman;
+such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a
+man, for the truly beautiful and purely manly nature
+should be attracted only by what is highest and
+noblest in the character of woman.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">After reading the above extracts, does it not seem
+clear, that by the exclusive or emphatic use of certain
+phrases and epithets, as more applicable to one sex
+than to the other, we have introduced a most un-christian
+confusion into the conscience, and have
+prejudiced it early against the acceptance of the
+larger truth?</p>
+
+<p>It might seem, that where we reject the distinction
+between masculine and feminine virtues, one
+and the same type of perfection should suffice for
+the two sexes; yet it is clear that the moment we
+come to consider the personality, the same type will
+not suffice: and it is worth consideration that when
+we place before us the highest type of manhood, as
+exemplified in Christ, we do not imagine him as the
+father, but as the son; and if we think of the most
+perfect type of womanhood, we never can exclude
+the mother.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Montaigne deals with the whole question in his
+own homely straightforward fashion:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">92</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Je dis que les m&acirc;les et les f&eacute;melles sont jett&eacute;s en
+m&ecirc;me moule; sauf l&#8217;institution et l&#8217;usage la diff&eacute;rence
+n&#8217;y est pas grande. Platon appelle indiff&eacute;remment
+les uns et les autres &agrave; la soci&eacute;t&eacute; de touts &eacute;tudes,
+exercises, charges, et vocations guerri&egrave;res et paisibles
+en sa r&eacute;publique, et le philosophe Antisth&egrave;nes &ocirc;tait
+toute distinction entre leur vertu et la n&ocirc;tre. Il est
+bien plus ais&eacute; d&#8217;accuser un sexe que d&#8217;excuser
+l&#8217;autre: c&#8217;est ce qu&#8217;on dit, &#8216;le fourgon se moque de
+la po&euml;le.&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Not that I agree with Plato,&mdash;rather would
+leave all the fighting, military and political, if there
+must be fighting, to the men.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>Among the absurdities talked about women, one
+hears, perhaps, such an aphorism as the following
+quoted with a sort of ludicrous complacency,&mdash;&#8220;The
+woman&#8217;s strength consists in her weakness!&#8221; as if it
+were not the weakness of a woman which makes her
+in her violence at once so aggravating and so contemptible,
+in her dissimulation at once so shallow
+and so dangerous, and in her vengeance at once so
+cowardly and so cruel.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>I should not say, from my experience of my own
+sex, that a woman&#8217;s nature is flexible and impressible,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">93</a></span>
+though her feelings are. I know very few instances
+of a very inferior man ruling the mind of a superior
+woman, whereas I know twenty&mdash;fifty&mdash;of a very
+inferior woman ruling a superior man. If he love
+her, the chances are that she will in the end weaken
+and demoralise him. If a superior woman marry a
+vulgar or inferior man he makes her miserable, but
+he seldom governs her mind, or vulgarises her
+nature, and if there be love on his side the chances
+are that in the end she will elevate and refine him.</p>
+
+<p>The most dangerous man to a woman is a man of
+high intellectual endowments morally perverted; for
+in a woman&#8217;s nature there is such a necessity to
+approve where she admires, and to believe where
+she loves,&mdash;a devotion compounded of love and
+faith is so much a part of her being,&mdash;that while
+the instincts remain true and the feelings uncorrupted,
+the conscience and the will may both be led
+far astray. Thus fell &#8220;our general mother,&#8221;&mdash;type
+of her sex,&mdash;overpowered, rather than deceived, by
+the colossal intellect,&mdash;half serpent, half angelic.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p>Coleridge speaks, and with a just indignant
+scorn, of those who consider chastity as if it were a
+<i>thing</i>&mdash;a thing which might be lost or kept by
+external accident&mdash;a thing of which one might be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">94</a></span>
+robbed, instead of a state of being. According to
+law and custom, the chastity of Woman is as the
+property of Man, to whom she is accountable for it,
+rather than to God and her own conscience. Whatever
+people may say, such is the common, the social,
+the legal view of the case. It is a remnant of
+Oriental barbarism. It tends to much vice, or, at
+the best, to a low standard of morality, in both
+sexes. This idea of property in the woman survives
+still in our present social state, particularly among
+the lower orders, and is one cause of the ill treatment
+of wives. All those who are particularly
+acquainted with the manners and condition of the
+people will testify to this; namely, that when a
+child or any weaker individual is ill treated, those
+standing by will interfere and protect the victim;
+but if the sufferer be <i>the wife</i> of the oppressor, it is a
+point of etiquette to look on, to take no part in the
+fray, and to leave the brute man to do what he likes
+&#8220;with his own.&#8221; Even the victim herself, if she be
+not pummelled to death, frequently deprecates such
+an interference with the dignity and the rights of
+her owner. Like the poor woman in the &#8220;M&eacute;decin
+malgr&eacute; lui:&#8221;&mdash;&#8220;Voyez un peu cet impertinent qui
+vent emp&ecirc;cher les maris de battre leurs femmes!&mdash;et
+si je veux qu&#8217;il me batte, moi?&#8221;&mdash;and so ends by
+giving her defender a box on the ear.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">95</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Au milieu de tous les obstacles que la nature et
+la soci&eacute;t&eacute; out sem&eacute;s sur les pas de la femme, la seule
+condition de repos pour elle est de s&#8217;entourer de
+barri&egrave;res que les passions ne puissent franchir; incapable
+de s&#8217;approprier l&#8217;existence, elle est toujours
+semblable a la Chinoise dont les pieds ont &eacute;t&eacute; mutil&eacute;s
+et pour laquelle toute libert&eacute; est un leurre, toute
+espace ouverte une cause de chute. En attendant
+que l&#8217;&eacute;ducation ait donn&eacute; aux femmes leur v&eacute;ritable
+place, malheur &agrave; celles qui brisent les lisses accoutum&eacute;es!
+pour elles l&#8217;ind&eacute;pendance ne sera, comme la
+gloire, qu&#8217;un deuil &eacute;clatant du bonheur!&#8221;&mdash;<i>B.
+Constant.</i></p>
+
+<p>This also is one of those common-places of well-sounding
+eloquence, in which a fallacy is so wrapt
+up in words we have to dig it out. If this be true,
+it is true only so long as you compress the feet and
+compress the intellect,&mdash;no longer.</p>
+
+<p>Here is another:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;L&#8217;exp&eacute;rience lui avait appris que quel que fut
+leur &acirc;ge, ou leur caract&egrave;re, toutes les femmes vivaient
+avec le m&ecirc;me r&ecirc;ve, et qu&#8217;elles avaient toutes au fond
+du c&oelig;ur un roman commenc&eacute; dont elles attendaient
+jusqu&#8217;&agrave; la mort le h&eacute;ros, comme les juifs attendent
+le Messie.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This &#8220;roman commenc&eacute;,&#8221; (et qui ne finit jamais),
+is true as regards women who are idle, and who have
+not replaced dreams by duties. And what are the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">96</a></span>
+&#8220;barri&egrave;res&#8221; which passion cannot overleap, from the
+moment it has subjugated the will? How fine, how
+true that scene in Calderon&#8217;s &#8220;Magico Prodigioso,&#8221;
+where Justina conquers the fiend only by not <i>consenting</i>
+to ill!</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">&mdash;&mdash;&#8220;This agony</span>
+<span class="i0">Of passion which afflicts my heart and soul</span>
+<span class="i0">May sweep imagination in its storm;</span>
+<span class="i0">The will is firm.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>And the baffled demon shrinks back,&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Woman, thou hast subdued me</span>
+<span class="i0">Only by not owning thyself subdued!&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-011.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="203" width="300" /></div>
+
+<p>A friend of mine was once using some mincing
+elegancies of language to describe a high degree of
+moral turpitude, when a man near her interposed,
+with stern sarcasm, &#8220;Speak out! Give things their
+proper names! <i>Half words are the perdition of
+women!</i>&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<p>&#8220;I observe,&#8221; said Sydney Smith, &#8220;that <i>generally</i>
+about the age of forty, women get tired of being<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">97</a></span>
+virtuous and men of being honest.&#8221; This was said
+and received with a laugh as one of his good things;
+but, like many of his good things, how dreadfully
+true! And why? because, <i>generally</i>, education has
+made the virtue of the woman and the honesty of the
+man a matter of external opinion, not a law of the
+inward life.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<p>Dante, in his lowest hell, has placed those who
+have betrayed women; and in the lowest deep of the
+lowest deep those who have betrayed trust.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<p>Inveterate sensuality, which has the effect of
+utterly stupifying and brutifying lower minds, gives
+to natures more sensitively or more powerfully organised
+a horrible dash of ferocity. For there is
+an awful relation between animal blood-thirstiness
+and the proneness to sensuality, and in some sensualists
+a sort of feline propensity to torment and
+lacerate the prey they have not the appetite to
+devour.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">98</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;La Chevalerie faisait une tentative qui n&#8217;a
+jamais r&eacute;ussi, quoique souvent essay&eacute;e; la tentative
+de se servir des passions humaines, et particuli&egrave;rement
+de l&#8217;amour pour conduire l&#8217;homme &agrave; la vertu.
+Dans cette route l&#8217;homme s&#8217;arr&ecirc;te toujours en chemin.
+L&#8217;amour inspire beaucoup de bons sentiments&mdash;le
+courage, le d&eacute;vouement, le sacrifice des biens et de la
+vie; mais il ne se sacrifie pas lui-m&ecirc;me, et c&#8217;est l&agrave;
+que la faiblesse humaine reprend ses droits.&#8221;&mdash;<i>St.
+Marc-Girardin.</i></p>
+
+<p class="tb">I am not sure that this well-sounding remark is
+true&mdash;or, if true, it is true of the mere passion,
+not of love in its highest phase, which is self-sacrificing,
+which has its essence in the capability of
+self-sacrifice.</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12">&#8220;Love was given,</span>
+<span class="i1">Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end;</span>
+<span class="i0">For this the passion to excess was driven,</span>
+<span class="i1">That <i>self</i> might be annull&#8217;d.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<p>In every mind where there is a strong tendency
+to fear, there is a strong capacity to hate. Those
+who dwell in fear dwell next door to hate; and I
+think it is the cowardice of women which makes
+them such intense haters.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">99</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<p>Our present social opinion says to the man, &#8220;You
+may be a vulgar brutal sensualist, and use the basest
+means to attain the basest ends; but so long as you
+do not offend against conventional good manners you
+shall be held blameless.&#8221; And to the woman it says,
+&#8220;You shall be guilty of nothing but of yielding to
+the softest impulses of tenderness, of relenting pity;
+but if you cannot add hypocrisy you shall be
+punished as the most desperate criminal.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-055.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="210" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>96.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> is worthy of notice that the external expressions
+appropriated to certain feelings undergo change
+at different periods of life and in different constitutions.
+The child cries and sobs from fear or pain,
+the adult more generally from sudden grief or warm
+affection, or sympathy with the feeling of others.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Dr.
+Holland.</i></p>
+
+<p>Those who have been accustomed to observe the
+ways of children will doubt the accuracy of this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">100</a></span>
+remark, though from the high authority of one of
+the most accomplished physiologists of our time.
+Children cry from grief, and from sympathy with
+grief, at a very early age. I have seen an infant in
+its mother&#8217;s arms, before it could speak, begin to
+whimper and cry when it looked up in her face,
+which was disturbed and bathed with tears; and that
+has always appeared to me an exquisite touch of
+most truthful nature in Wordsworth&#8217;s description of
+the desolation of Margaret:&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">&#8220;Her little child</span>
+<span class="i0">Had from its mother caught the trick of grief,</span>
+<span class="i0">And sighed amid its playthings.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-060-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="151" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>97.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;L</span><span class="smcap">etters,&#8221;</span> said Sir James Mackintosh, &#8220;must
+not be on a subject. Lady Mary Wortley&#8217;s
+letters on her journey to Constantinople are an admirable
+book of travels, but they are not letters. A
+meeting to discuss a question of science is not conversation,
+nor are papers written to another to
+inform or discuss, letters. Conversation is relaxation,
+not business, and must never appear to be occupation;&mdash;nor
+must letters.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">101</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;A masculine character may be a defect in a
+female, but a masculine genius is still a praise to a
+writer of whatever sex. The feminine graces of
+Madame de Sevign&eacute;&#8217;s genius are exquisitely charming,
+but the philosophy and eloquence of Madame de
+Sta&euml;l are above the distinctions of sex.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-046.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="181" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>98.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">O</span><span class="smcap">f</span> the wars between Napoleon and the Holy
+Alliance, Madame de Sta&euml;l once said with most
+admirable and prophetic sense:&mdash;&#8220;It is a contest
+between a <i>man</i> who is the enemy of liberty, and a
+<i>system</i> which is equally its enemy.&#8221; But it is easier
+to get rid of a man than of a system: witness the
+Russians, who assassinate their czars one after another,
+but cannot get rid of their <i>system</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-023-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="138" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>99.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> Empress Elizabeth of Russia during the war
+with Sweden commanded the old Hetman of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">102</a></span>
+the Cossacks to come to court on his way to Finland.
+&#8220;If the Emperor, your father,&#8221; said the Hetman,
+&#8220;had taken my advice, your Majesty would not now
+have been annoyed by the Swedes.&#8221; &#8220;What was
+your advice?&#8221; asked the Empress. &#8220;To put all the
+nobility to death, and transplant the people into
+Russia.&#8221; &#8220;But that,&#8221; said the Empress, &#8220;would
+have been cruel!&#8221; &#8220;I do not see that,&#8221; he replied
+quietly; &#8220;they are all dead now, and they would
+only have been dead if my advice had been taken.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Something strangely comprehensive and unanswerable
+in this barbarian logic!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-002.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="163" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>100.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> was the Abb&eacute; Boileau who said of the Jesuits,
+that they had lengthened the Creed and shortened
+the Decalogue. The same witty ecclesiastic
+being asked why he always wrote in Latin, took a
+pinch of snuff, and answered gravely, &#8220;Why, for
+fear the bishops should read me!&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-024.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="87" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">103</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>101.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">hen</span> Talleyrand once visited a certain reprobate
+friend of his, who was ill of cholera, the
+patient exclaimed in his agony, &#8220;Je sens les tourmens
+de l&#8217;enfer!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;D&eacute;j&agrave;?&#8221; said Talleyrand.</p>
+
+<p>Much in a word! I remember seeing a pretty
+French vaudeville wherein a lady is by some accident
+or contrivance shut up perforce with a lover she has
+rejected. She frets at the <i>contretemps</i>. He makes
+use of the occasion to plead his cause. The cruel
+fair one will not relent. Still he pleads&mdash;still she
+turns away. At length they are interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;D&eacute;j&agrave;!&#8221; exclaims the lady, in an accent we may
+suppose to be very different from that of Talleyrand;
+and on the intonation of this one word, pronounced
+as only an accomplished French actress could pronounce
+it, depends the <i>d&eacute;nouement</i> of the piece.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-029-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="136" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>102.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">L</span><span class="smcap">ouis XVI</span>. sent a distinguished physician over
+to England to inquire into the management of
+our hospitals. He praised them much, but added,
+&#8220;Il y manque deux choses; nos cur&eacute;s et nos
+hospitali&egrave;res;&#8221; that is, he felt the want of the re<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">104</a></span>ligious
+element in the official and medical treatment
+of the sick. A want which, I think, is felt at
+present and will be supplied.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-012-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="125" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>103.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">hose</span> who have the largest horizon of thought,
+the most extended vision in regard to the
+relation of things, are not remarkable for self-reliance
+and ready judgment. A man who sees limitedly
+and clearly, is more sure of himself, and more direct
+in his dealings with circumstances and with others,
+than a man whose many-sided capacity embraces an
+immense extent of objects and <i>objections</i>,&mdash;just as,
+they say, a horse with blinkers more surely chooses
+his path, and is less likely to shy.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-056-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="150" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>104.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">hat</span> we truly and earnestly aspire <i>to be</i>, that in
+some sense we <i>are</i>. The mere aspiration, by
+changing the frame of the mind, for the moment
+realises itself.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">105</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<h5>105.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">here</span> are no such self-deceivers as those who
+think they reason when they only feel.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-054.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="126" width="200" /></div>
+
+<h5>106.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">here</span> are moments when the liberty of the inner
+life, opposed to the trammels of the outer, becomes
+too oppressive: moments when we wish that
+our mental horizon were less extended, thought less
+free; when we long to put the discursive soul into a
+narrow path like a railway, and force it to run on in
+a straight line to some determined goal.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-011.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="203" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>107.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">f</span> the deepest and best affections which God has
+given us sometimes brood over the heart like
+doves of peace,&mdash;they sometimes suck out our life-blood
+like vampires.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">106</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>108.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">o</span> a Frenchman the words that express things
+seem often to suffice for the things themselves,
+and he pronounces the words <i>amour</i>, <i>gr&acirc;ce</i>, <i>sensibilit&eacute;</i>,
+as if with a relish in his mouth&mdash;as if he tasted them&mdash;as
+if he possessed them.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-024.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="87" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">107</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>109.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">here</span> are many good qualities, and valuable ones
+too, which hardly deserve the name of virtues.
+The word Virtue was synonymous in the old time
+with valour, and seems to imply contest; not merely
+passive goodness, but active resistance to evil. I
+wonder sometimes why it is that we so continually
+hear the phrase, &#8220;a virtuous woman,&#8221; and scarcely
+ever that of a &#8220;virtuous man,&#8221; except in poetry or
+from the pulpit.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-039-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="145" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>110.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span> <span class="smcap">lie</span>, though it be killed and dead, can sting sometimes,&mdash;like
+a dead wasp.</p>
+
+<h5>111.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;O</span><span class="smcap">n</span> me dit toute la journ&eacute;e dans le monde, telle
+opinion, telle id&eacute;e, sont <i>re&ccedil;ues</i>. On ne sait
+donc pas qu&#8217;en fait d&#8217;opinion, et d&#8217;id&eacute;es j&#8217;aime beaucoup
+mieux les choses qui sont rejett&eacute;es que celles
+qui sont re&ccedil;ues?&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-013-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="112" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>112.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;S</span><span class="smcap">ense</span> can support herself handsomely in most
+countries on some eighteenpence a day, but for
+phantasy, planets and solar systems will not suffice.&#8221;
+And <i>thence</i> do you infer the superiority of sense
+over phantasy? Shallow reasoning! God who made
+the soul of man of sufficient capacity to embrace
+whole worlds and systems of worlds, gave us thereby
+a foretaste of our immortality.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-028-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="208" width="400" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">108</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>113.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;F</span><span class="smcap">aith</span> in the <i>hereafter</i> is as necessary for the
+intellectual as the moral character, and to the
+man of letters as well as to the Christian, the present
+forms but the slightest portion of his existence.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Southey.</i></p>
+
+<p>Goethe did not think so. &#8220;Genutzt dem Augenblick,&#8221;
+&#8220;<i>Use</i> the present,&#8221; was <i>his</i> favourite maxim;
+and always this notion of sacrificing or slighting the
+present seems to me a great mistake. It ought to be
+the most important part of our existence, as it is the
+only part of it over which we have power. It is in
+the present only that we absolve the past and lay the
+foundation for the future.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-064.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="258" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h5>114.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;J</span><span class="smcap">e</span> allseitigen, je individueller,&#8221; is a beautiful
+significant phrase, quite untranslateable, used,
+I think, by Rahel (Madame Varnhagen). It means
+that the more the mind can multiply on every side
+its capacities of thinking and feeling, the more individual,
+the more original, that mind becomes.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">109</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>115.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;I</span> <span class="smcap">wonder,&#8221;</span> said C., &#8220;that facts should be
+called <i>stubborn</i> things.&#8221; I wonder, too, seeing
+you can always oppose a fact with another fact, and
+that nothing is so easy as to twist, pervert, and argue
+or misrepresent a fact into twenty different forms.
+&#8220;Il n&#8217;y a rien qui s&#8217;arrange aussi facilement que les
+faits,&#8221;&mdash;Nothing so <i>tractable</i> as facts,&mdash;said Benjamin
+Constant. True; so long as facts are only material,&mdash;or
+as one should say, mere matter of fact,&mdash;you
+can modify them to a purpose, turn them upside
+down and inside out; but once vivify a fact with a
+feeling, and it stands up before us a living and a very
+stubborn thing.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>116.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">E</span><span class="smcap">very</span> human being is born to influence some
+other human being; or many, or all human
+beings, in proportion to the extent and power of the
+sympathies, rather than of the intellect.</p>
+
+<p>It was said, and very beautifully said, that &#8220;one
+man&#8217;s wit becomes all men&#8217;s wisdom.&#8221; Even more
+true is it that one man&#8217;s virtue becomes a standard
+which raises our anticipation of possible goodness
+in all men.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">110</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>117.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> is curious that the memory, most retentive of
+images, should yet be much more retentive of
+feelings than of facts: for instance, we remember with
+such intense vividness a period of suffering, that it
+seems even to renew itself through the medium of
+thought; yet, at the same time, we perhaps find
+difficulty in recalling, with any distinctness, the
+causes of that pain.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-007.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="265" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h5>118.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;T</span><span class="smcap">ruth</span> has never manifested itself to me in such
+a broad stream of light as seems to be poured
+upon some minds. Truth has appeared to my
+mental eye, like a vivid, yet small and trembling star
+in a storm, now appearing for a moment with a
+beauty that enraptured, now lost in such clouds, as,
+had I less faith, might make me suspect that the previous
+clear sight had been a delusion.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Blanco
+White.</i></p>
+
+<p>Very exquisite in the aptness as well as poetry of
+the comparison! Some walk by daylight, some<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">111</a></span>
+walk by starlight. Those who see the sun do not
+see the stars; those who see the stars do not see the
+sun.</p>
+
+<p>He says in another place:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am averse to too much activity of the imagination
+on the future life. I hope to die full of confidence
+that no evil awaits me: but any picture of a
+future life distresses me. I feel as if an eternity of
+existence were already an insupportable burden on
+my soul.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>How characteristic of that lassitude of the soul and
+sickness of the heart which &#8220;asks not happiness, but
+longs for rest!&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-060-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="151" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>119.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;T</span><span class="smcap">hose</span> are the worst of suicides who voluntarily
+and prepensely stab or suffocate their fame
+when God hath commanded them to stand on high
+for an example.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-050.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="107" width="200" /></div>
+
+<h5>120.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span><span class="smcap">arlyle</span> thus apostrophised a celebrated orator,
+who abused his gift of eloquence to insincere
+purposes of vanity, self-interest, and expediency:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">112</a></span>&mdash;&#8220;You
+blasphemous scoundrel! God gave you that
+gifted tongue of yours, and set it between your teeth,
+to make known your true meaning to us, not to be
+rattled like a muffin-man&#8217;s bell!&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-050.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="107" width="200" /></div>
+
+<h5>121.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">think</span>, with Carlyle, that a lie should be trampled
+on and extinguished wherever found. I am for
+fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that falsehood,
+like pestilence, breathes around me. A. thinks
+this is too <i>young</i> a feeling, and that as the truth is
+sure to conquer in the end, it is not worth while
+to fight every separate lie, or fling a torch into every
+infected hole. Perhaps not, so far as we are ourselves
+concerned; but we should think of others.
+While secure in our own antidote, or wise in our
+own caution, we should not leave the miasma to
+poison the healthful, or the briars to entangle the
+unwary. There is no occasion perhaps for truth to
+sally forth like a knight-errant tilting at every vizor,
+but neither should she sit self-assured in her tower
+of strength, leaving pitfalls outside her gate for the
+blind to fall into.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-079.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="134" width="300" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">113</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>122.</h5>
+
+<p>&#8220;There is a way to separate memory from imagination&mdash;we
+may narrate without painting.
+I am convinced that the mind can employ certain
+indistinct signs to represent even its most vivid
+impressions; that instead of picture writing, it can
+use something like algebraic symbols: such is the
+language of the soul when the paroxysm of pain has
+passed, and the wounds it received formerly are
+skinned over, not healed:&mdash;it is a language very
+opposite to that used by the poet and the novel-writer.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Blanco
+White.</i></p>
+
+<p>True; but a language in which the soul can converse
+only with itself; or else a language more conventional
+than words, and like paper as a tender for
+gold, more capable of being defaced and falsified.
+There is a proverb we have heard quoted: &#8220;Speech
+is silver, silence is golden.&#8221; But better is the silver
+diffused than the talent of gold buried.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-032-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="207" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>123.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">owever</span> distinguished and gifted, mentally and
+morally, we find that in conduct and in our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">114</a></span>
+external relations with, society there is ever a levelling
+influence at work. Seldom in our relations with the
+world, and in the ordinary commerce of life, are the
+best and highest within us brought forth; for the
+whole system of social intercourse is levelling. As
+it is said that law knows no distinction of persons
+but that which it has itself instituted; so of society
+it may be said, that it allows of no distinction but
+those which it can recognise&mdash;external distinctions.</p>
+
+<p>We hear it said that general society&mdash;the <i>world</i>,
+as it is called&mdash;and a public school, are excellent
+educators; because in one the man, in the other the
+boy, &#8220;finds, as the phrase is, his own level.&#8221; He
+does not; he finds the level of others. <i>That</i> may
+be good for those below mediocrity, but for those
+above it <i>bad</i>: and it is for those we should most
+care, for if once brought down in early life by the
+levelling influence of numbers, they seldom rise
+again, or only partially. Nothing so dangerous as
+to be perpetually measuring ourselves against what
+is beneath us, feeling our superiority to that which
+we force ourselves to assimilate to. This has been
+the perdition of many a schoolboy and many a man.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"><img src="images/illus-114.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="212" width="450" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">115</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>124.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;I</span><span class="smcap">l</span> me semble que le plus noble rapport entre le
+ciel et la terre, le plus beau don que Dieu ait fait
+&agrave; l&#8217;homme, la pens&eacute;e, l&#8217;inspiration, se d&eacute;compose en
+quelque sorte d&egrave;s qu&#8217;elle est descendue dans son &acirc;me.
+Elle y vient simple et d&eacute;sint&eacute;ress&eacute;e; il la reproduit
+corrompue par tous les int&eacute;r&ecirc;ts auxquels il l&#8217;associe;
+elle lui a &eacute;t&eacute; confi&eacute;e pour la multiplier &agrave; l&#8217;avantage
+de tous; il la publie au profit de son amour-propre.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Madame
+de Saint-Aulaire.</i></p>
+
+<p>There would be much to say about this, for it is
+not always, nor generally, <i>amour-propre</i> or interest;
+it is the desire of sympathy, which impels the artist
+mind to the utterance in words, or the expression in
+form, of that thought or inspiration which God has
+sent into his soul.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<h5>125.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">M</span><span class="smcap">ilton&#8217;s</span> Eve is the type of the masculine standard
+of perfection in woman; a graceful figure,
+an abundance of fine hair, much &#8220;coy submission,&#8221;
+and such a degree of unreasoning wilfulness as shall
+risk perdition.</p>
+
+<p>And the woman&#8217;s standard for the man is Adam,
+who rules and demands subjection, and is so indulgent
+that he gives up to blandishment what he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">116</a></span>
+would refuse to reason, and what his own reason
+condemns.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<h5>126.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">E</span><span class="smcap">very</span> subject which excites discussion impels to
+thought. Every expression of a mind humbly
+seeking truth, not assuming to have found it, helps
+the seeker after truth.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<h5>128.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="smcap">s</span> a man just released from the rack stands
+bruised and broken,&mdash;bleeding at every pore,
+and dislocated in every limb, and raises his eyes to
+heaven, and says, &#8220;God be praised! I suffer no
+more!&#8221; because to that past sharp agony the respite
+comes like peace&mdash;like sleep,&mdash;so we stand, after
+some great wrench in our best affections, where they
+have been torn up by the root; when the conflict is
+over, and the tension of the heart-strings is relaxed,
+then comes a sort of rest,&mdash;but of what kind?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<h5>129.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">o</span> trust religiously, to hope humbly, to desire
+nobly, to think rationally, to will resolutely,
+and to work earnestly,&mdash;may this be mine.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">117</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"><img src="images/illus-114.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="212" width="450" /></div>
+
+<h4>A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD.</h4>
+
+<h5>(FROM A LETTER.)</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">e</span> are all interested in this great question of
+popular education; but I see others much
+more sanguine than I am. They hope for some immediate
+good result from all that is thought, written,
+spoken on the subject day after day. I see such
+results as possible, probable, but far, far off. All
+this talk is of systems and methods, institutions,
+school houses, schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, school
+books; the ways and the means by which we are to
+instruct, inform, manage, mould, regulate, that
+which lies in most cases beyond our reach&mdash;the
+spirit sent from God. What do we know of the
+mystery of child-nature, child-life? What, indeed,
+do we know of any life? All life we acknowledge
+to be an awful mystery, but child-life we treat as if
+it were no mystery whatever&mdash;just so much material
+placed in our hands to be fashioned to a certain
+form according to our will or our prejudices,&mdash;fitted<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">118</a></span>
+to certain purposes according to our notions of expediency.
+Till we know how to <i>reverence</i> childhood we
+shall do no good. Educators commit the same mistake
+with regard to childhood that theologians
+commit with regard to our present earthly existence;
+thinking of it, treating of it, as of little value or
+significance in itself, only transient, and preparatory
+to some condition of being which is to follow&mdash;as if
+it were something separate from us and to be left
+behind us as the creature casts its skin. But as in
+the sight of God this life is also something for its
+own sake, so in the estimation of Christ, childhood
+was something for its own sake,&mdash;something holy
+and beautiful in itself, and dear to him. He saw it
+not merely as the germ of something to grow out of
+it, but as perfect and lovely in itself as the flower
+which precedes the fruit. We misunderstand childhood,
+and we misuse it; we delight in it, and we
+pamper it; we spoil it ingeniously, we neglect it
+sinfully; at the best we trifle with it as a plaything
+which we can pull to pieces and put together at
+pleasure&mdash;ignorant, reckless, presumptuous that we
+are!</p>
+
+<p>And if we are perpetually making the grossest
+mistakes in the physical and practical management
+of childhood, how much more in regard to what is
+spiritual! What do we know of that which lies in
+the minds of children? we know only what we put<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">119</a></span>
+there. The world of instincts, perceptions, experiences,
+pleasures, and pains, lying there without self-consciousness,&mdash;sometimes
+helplessly mute, sometimes
+so imperfectly expressed, that we quite
+mistake the manifestation&mdash;what do we know of all
+this? How shall we come at the understanding of
+it? The child lives, and does not contemplate its
+own life. It can give no account of that inward,
+busy, perpetual activity of the growing faculties and
+feelings which it is of so much importance that we
+should know. To lead children by questionings to
+think about their own identity, or observe their own
+feelings, is to teach them to be artificial. To waken
+self-consciousness before you awaken conscience is
+the beginning of incalculable mischief. Introspection
+is always, as a habit, unhealthy: introspection
+in childhood, fatally so. How shall we come at a
+knowledge of life such as it is when it first gushes
+from its mysterious fountain head? We cannot reascend
+the stream. We all, however we may remember
+the external scenes lived through in our
+infancy, either do not, or cannot, consult that part
+of our nature which remains indissolubly connected
+with the inward life of that time. We so forget it,
+that we know not how to deal with the child-nature
+when it comes under our power. We seldom reason
+about children from natural laws, or psychological
+data. Unconsciously we confound our matured<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">120</a></span>
+experience with our memory: we attribute to children
+what is not possible, exact from them what is
+impossible;&mdash;ignore many things which the child
+has neither words to express, nor the will nor the
+power to manifest. The quickness with which children
+perceive, the keenness with which they suffer,
+the tenacity with which they remember, I have
+never seen fully appreciated. What misery we
+cause to children, what mischief we do them by
+bringing our own minds, habits, artificial prejudices
+and senile experiences, to bear on their young life,
+and cramp and overshadow it&mdash;it is fearful!</p>
+
+<p>Of all the wrongs and anomalies that afflict our
+earth, a sinful childhood, a suffering childhood, are
+among the worst.</p>
+
+<p>O ye men! who sit in committees, and are called
+upon to legislate for children,&mdash;for children who are
+the offspring of diseased or degenerate humanity,
+or the victims of a yet more diseased society,&mdash;do
+you, when you take evidence from jailors, and policemen,
+and parish schoolmasters, and doctors of divinity,
+do you ever call up, also, the wise physician,
+the thoughtful physiologist, the experienced mother?
+You have accumulated facts, great blue books full of
+facts, but till you know in what fixed and uniform
+principles of nature to seek their solution, your facts
+remain a dead letter.</p>
+
+<p>I say nothing here of teaching, though very few
+in truth understand that lowest part of our duty to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">121</a></span>
+children. Men, it is generally allowed, <i>teach</i> better
+than women because they have been better taught
+the things they teach. Women <i>train</i> better than
+men because of their quick instinctive perceptions
+and sympathies, and greater tenderness and patience.
+In schools and in families I would have some things
+taught by men, and some by women: but we will
+here put aside the art, the act of teaching: we will
+turn aside from the droves of children in national
+schools and reformatory asylums, and turn to the
+individual child, brought up within the guarded
+circle of a home or a select school, watched by an
+intelligent, a conscientious influence. How shall we
+deal with that spirit which has come out of nature&#8217;s
+hands unless we remember what we were ourselves
+in the past? What sympathy can we have with
+that state of being which we regard as immature,
+so long as we commit the double mistake of sometimes
+attributing to children motives which could
+only spring from our adult experience, and sometimes
+denying to them the same intuitive tempers and
+feelings which actuate and agitate our maturer life?
+We do not sufficiently consider that our life is not
+made up of separate parts, but is <i>one</i>&mdash;is a progressive
+whole. When we talk of leaving our
+childhood behind us, we might as well say that the
+river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain
+behind.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">122</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-028-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="208" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h5>121.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">will</span> here put together some recollections of my
+own child-life; not because it was in any respect
+an exceptional or remarkable existence, but
+for a reason exactly the reverse, because it was like
+that of many children; at least I have met with
+many children who throve or suffered from the same
+or similar unseen causes even under external conditions
+and management every way dissimilar.
+Facts, therefore, which can be relied on, may be
+generally useful as hints towards a theory of conduct
+in education. What I shall say here shall be simply
+the truth so far as it goes; not something between
+the false and the true, garnished for effect,&mdash;not
+something half-remembered, half-imagined,&mdash;but
+plain, absolute, matter of fact.</p>
+
+<p>No; certainly I was not an extraordinary child.
+I have had something to do with children, and have
+met with several more remarkable for quickness of
+talent, and precocity of feeling. If any thing in
+particular, I believe I was particularly naughty,&mdash;at
+least so it was said twenty times a day. But
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">123</a></span>
+looking back now, I do not think I was particular
+even in this respect; I perpetrated not more than
+the usual amount of mischief&mdash;so called&mdash;which
+every lively active child perpetrates between five
+and ten years old. I had the usual desire to know,
+and the usual dislike to learn; the usual love of
+fairy tales, and hatred of French exercises. But
+not of what I learned, but of what I did <i>not</i> learn;
+not of what they taught me, but of what they could
+<i>not</i> teach me; not of what was open, apparent,
+manageable, but of the under current, the hidden,
+the unmanaged or unmanageable, I have to speak,
+and you, my friend, to hear and turn to account, if
+you will, and how you will. As we grow old the
+experiences of infancy come back upon us with a
+strange vividness. There is a period when the overflowing,
+tumultuous life of our youth rises up
+between us and those first years; but as the torrent
+subsides in its bed we can look across the impassable
+gulf to that haunted fairy land which we shall never
+more approach, and never more forget!</p>
+
+<p class="tb">In memory I can go back to a very early age.
+I perfectly remember being sung to sleep, and can
+remember even the tune which was sung to me&mdash;blessings
+on the voice that sang it! I was an affectionate,
+but not, as I now think, a loveable nor an
+attractive child. I did not, like the little Mozart,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">124</a></span>
+ask of every one around me, &#8220;Do you love me?&#8221;
+The instinctive question was, rather, &#8220;Can I love
+you?&#8221; Yet certainly I was not more than six years
+old when I suffered from the fear of not being loved
+where I had attached myself, and from the idea that
+another was preferred before me, such anguish as had
+nearly killed me. Whether those around me regarded
+it as a fit of ill-temper, or a fit of illness, I do
+not know. I could not then have given a name to
+the pang that fevered me. I knew not the cause,
+but never forgot the suffering. It left a deeper impression
+than childish passions usually do; and the
+recollection was so far salutary, that in after life I
+guarded myself against the approaches of that hateful,
+deformed, agonising thing which men call jealousy,
+as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera.
+If such self-knowledge has not saved me from the
+pain, at least it has saved me from the demoralising
+effects of the passion, by a wholesome terror, and
+even a sort of disgust.</p>
+
+<p>With a good temper, there was the capacity of
+strong, deep, silent resentment, and a vindictive
+spirit of rather a peculiar kind. I recollect that
+when one of those set over me inflicted what
+then appeared a most horrible injury and injustice,
+the thoughts of vengeance haunted my fancy
+for months: but it was an inverted sort of vengeance.
+I imagined the house of my enemy on fire,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">125</a></span>
+and rushed through the flames to rescue her. She
+was drowning, and I leaped into the deep water to
+draw her forth. She was pining in prison, and I
+forced bars and bolts to deliver her. If this were
+magnanimity, it was not the less vengeance; for,
+observe, I always fancied evil, and shame, and humiliation
+to my adversary; to myself the <i>r&ocirc;le</i> of superiority
+and gratified pride. For several years this
+sort of burning resentment against wrong done to
+myself and others, though it took no mean or cruel
+form, was a source of intense, untold suffering. No
+one was aware of it. I was left to settle it; and
+my mind righted itself I hardly know how: not
+certainly by religious influences&mdash;they passed over
+my mind, and did not at the time sink into it,&mdash;and
+as for earthly counsel or comfort, I never had either
+when most needed. And as it fared with me then,
+so it has been in after life; so it has been, <i>must</i> be,
+with all those who, in fighting out alone the pitched
+battle between principle and passion, will accept no
+intervention between the infinite within them and
+the infinite above them; so it has been, <i>must</i> be, with
+all strong natures. Will it be said that victory in
+the struggle brings increase of strength? It may
+be so with some who survive the contest; but then,
+how many sink! how many are crippled morally
+for life! how many, strengthened in some particular
+faculties, suffer in losing the harmony of the character
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">126</a></span>
+as a whole! This is one of the points in which the
+matured mind may help the childish nature at strife
+with itself. It is impossible to say how far this sort
+of vindictiveness might have penetrated and hardened
+into the character, if I had been of a timid or retiring
+nature. It was expelled at last by no outer
+influences, but by a growing sense of power and self-reliance.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">In regard to truth&mdash;always such a difficulty in
+education,&mdash;I certainly had, as a child, and like
+most children, confused ideas about it. I had a more
+distinct and absolute idea of honour than of truth,&mdash;a
+mistake into which our conventional morality
+leads those who educate and those who are educated.
+I knew very well, in a general way, that to tell a lie
+was <i>wicked</i>; to lie for my own profit or pleasure, or
+to the hurt of others, was, according to my infant
+code of morals, worse than wicked&mdash;it was <i>dishonourable</i>.
+But I had no compunction about
+telling <i>fictions</i>;&mdash;inventing scenes and circumstances,
+which I related as real, and with a keen
+sense of triumphant enjoyment in seeing the listener
+taken in by a most artful and ingenious concatenation
+of impossibilities. In this respect &#8220;Ferdinand
+Mendez Pinto, that liar of the first magnitude,&#8221; was
+nothing in comparison to me. I must have been
+twelve years old before my conscience was first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">127</a></span>
+awakened up to a sense of the necessity of truth as a
+principle, as well as its holiness as a virtue. Afterwards,
+having to set right the minds of others cleared
+my own mind on this and some other important
+points.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">I do not think I was naturally obstinate, but remember
+going without food all day, and being sent
+hungry and exhausted to bed, because I would not
+do some trifling thing required of me. I think it
+was to recite some lines I knew by heart. I was
+punished as wilfully obstinate: but what no one
+knew then, and what I know now as the fact, was,
+that after refusing to do what was required, and
+bearing anger and threats in consequence, I lost the
+power to do it. I became stone: the <i>will</i> was petrified,
+and I absolutely <i>could</i> not comply. They might
+have hacked me in pieces before my lips could have
+unclosed to utterance. The obstinacy was not in
+the mind, but on the nerves; and I am persuaded
+that what we call obstinacy in children, and grownup
+people, too, is often something of this kind, and
+that it may be increased, by mismanagement, by
+persistence, or what is called firmness, in the controlling
+power, into disease, or something near to it.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">There was in my childish mind another cause of
+suffering besides those I have mentioned, less acute,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">128</a></span>
+but more permanent and always unacknowledged.
+It was fear&mdash;fear of darkness and supernatural influences.
+As long as I can remember anything, I
+remember these horrors of my infancy. How they
+had been awakened I do not know; they were never
+revealed. I had heard other children ridiculed for
+such fears, and held my peace. At first these
+haunting, thrilling, stifling terrors were vague; afterwards
+the form varied; but one of the most permanent
+was the ghost in Hamlet. There was a volume
+of Shakspeare lying about, in which was an engraving
+I have not seen since, but it remains distinct
+in my mind as a picture. On one side stood
+Hamlet with his hair on end, literally &#8220;like quills
+upon the fretful porcupine,&#8221; and one hand with all
+the fingers outspread. On the other strided the
+ghost, encased in armour with nodding plumes; one
+finger pointing forwards, and all surrounded with a
+supernatural light. O that spectre! for three years
+it followed me up and down the dark staircase, or
+stood by my bed: only the blessed light had power
+to exorcise it. How it was that I knew, while I
+trembled and quaked, that it was unreal, never cried
+out, never expostulated, never confessed, I do not
+know. The figure of Apollyon looming over Christian,
+which I had found in an old edition of the &#8220;Pilgrim&#8217;s
+Progress,&#8221; was also a great torment. But worse,
+perhaps, were certain phantasms without shape,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">129</a></span>
+things like the vision in Job&mdash;&#8220;<i>A spirit passed before
+my face; it stood still, but I could not discern the
+form thereof</i>:&#8221;&mdash;and if not intelligible voices, there
+were strange unaccountable sounds filling the air
+around with a sort of mysterious life. In daylight
+I was not only fearless, but audacious, inclined to
+defy all power and brave all danger,&mdash;that is, all
+danger I could see. I remember volunteering to
+lead the way through a herd of cattle (among which
+was a dangerous bull, the terror of the neighbourhood)
+armed only with a little stick; but first I said
+the Lord&#8217;s Prayer fervently. In the ghastly night
+I never prayed; terror stifled prayer. These visionary
+sufferings, in some form or other, pursued me
+till I was nearly twelve years old. If I had not
+possessed a strong constitution and a strong understanding,
+which rejected and contemned my own
+fears, even while they shook me, I had been destroyed.
+How much weaker children suffer in this way, I have
+since known; and have known how to bring them
+help and strength, through sympathy and knowledge,
+the sympathy that soothes and does not encourage&mdash;the
+knowledge that dispels, and does not suggest,
+the evil.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">People, in general, even those who have been
+much interested in education, are not aware of the
+sacred duty of <i>truth</i>, exact truth in their intercourse
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">130</a></span>
+with children. Limit what you tell them according
+to the measure of their faculties; but let what you
+say be the truth. Accuracy not merely as to fact,
+but well-considered accuracy in the use of words, is
+essential with children. I have read some wise book
+on the treatment of the insane, in which absolute
+veracity and accuracy in speaking is prescribed
+as a <i>curative</i> principle; and deception for any purpose
+is deprecated as almost fatal to the health
+of the patient. Now, it is a good sanatory principle,
+that what is curative is preventive; and
+that an unhealthy state of mind, leading to madness,
+may, in some organisations, be induced by that sort
+of uncertainty and perplexity which grows up where
+the mind has not been accustomed to truth in its
+external relations. It is like breathing for a continuance
+an impure or confined air.</p>
+
+<p>Of the mischief that may be done to a childish mind
+by a falsehood uttered in thoughtless gaiety, I remember
+an absurd and yet a painful instance. A
+visitor was turning over, for a little girl, some prints,
+one of which represented an Indian widow springing
+into the fire kindled for the funeral pile of her husband.
+It was thus explained to the child, who
+asked innocently, whether, if her father died, her
+mother would be burned? The person to whom
+the question was addressed, a lively, amiable woman,
+was probably much amused by the question, and an
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">131</a></span>swered,
+giddily, &#8220;Oh, of course,&mdash;certainly!&#8221; and
+was believed implicitly. But thenceforth, for many
+weary months, the mind of that child was haunted
+and tortured by the image of her mother springing
+into the devouring flames, and consumed by fire, with
+all the accessories of the picture, particularly the
+drums beating to drown her cries. In a weaker organisation,
+the results might have been permanent
+and serious. But to proceed.</p>
+
+<p>These terrors I have described had an existence
+external to myself: I had no power over them
+to shape them by my will, and their power over
+me vanished gradually before a more dangerous
+infatuation,&mdash;the propensity to reverie. This
+shaping spirit of imagination began when I was
+about eight or nine years old to haunt my <i>inner</i>
+life. I can truly say that, from ten years old to
+fourteen or fifteen, I lived a double existence; one
+outward, linking me with the external sensible world,
+the other inward, creating a world to and for itself,
+conscious to itself only. I carried on for whole
+years a series of actions, scenes, and adventures;
+one springing out of another, and coloured and modified
+by increasing knowledge. This habit grew so
+upon me, that there were moments&mdash;as when I came
+to some crisis in my imaginary adventures,&mdash;when I
+was not more awake to outward things than in sleep,&mdash;scarcely
+took cognisance of the beings around me.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">132</a></span>
+When punished for idleness by being placed in solitary
+confinement (the worst of all punishments for
+children), the intended penance was nothing less than
+a delight and an emancipation, giving me up to my
+dreams. I had a very strict and very accomplished
+governess, one of the cleverest women I have ever
+met with in my life; but nothing of this was known
+or even suspected by her, and I exulted in possessing
+something which her power could not reach. My
+reveries were my real life: it was an unhealthy state
+of things.</p>
+
+<p>Those who are engaged in the training of children
+will perhaps pause here. It may be said, in the first
+place, How are we to reach those recesses of the
+inner life which the God who made us keeps from
+every eye but his own? As when we walk over
+the field in spring we are aware of a thousand
+influences and processes at work of which we
+have no exact knowledge or clear perception, yet
+must watch and use accordingly,&mdash;so it is with
+education. And secondly, it may be asked, if
+such secret processes be working unconscious mischief,
+where the remedy? The remedy is in employment.
+Then the mother or the teacher echoes
+with astonishment, &#8220;Employment! the child is employed
+from morning till night; she is learning a
+dozen sciences and languages; she has masters and
+lessons for every hour of every day: with her pencil,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">133</a></span>
+her piano, her books, her companions, her birds, her
+flowers,&mdash;what can she want more?&#8221; An energetic
+child even at a very early age, and yet farther as the
+physical organisation is developed, wants something
+more and something better; employment which
+shall bring with it the bond of a higher duty than
+that which centres in self and self-improvement;
+employment which shall not merely cultivate the
+understanding, but strengthen and elevate the conscience;
+employment for the higher and more generous
+faculties; employment addressed to the sympathies;
+employment which has the aim of utility, not
+pretended, but real, obvious, direct utility. A girl
+who as a mere child is not always being taught or
+being amused, whose mind is early restrained by the
+bond of definite duty, and thrown out of the limit of
+self, will not in after years be subject to fancies that
+disturb or to reveries that absorb, and the present
+and the actual will have that power they ought to
+have as combined in due degree with desire and
+anticipation.</p>
+
+<p>The Roman Catholic priesthood understand this
+well: employment, which enlists with the spiritual
+the sympathetic part of our being, is a means through
+which they guide both young and adult minds.
+Physicians who have to manage various states of
+mental and moral disease understand this well; they
+speak of the necessity of employment (not mere
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">134</a></span>
+amusement) as a curative means, but of employment
+with the direct aim of usefulness, apprehended
+and appreciated by the patient, else it is nothing.
+It is the same with children. Such employment,
+chosen with reference to utility, and in harmony
+with the faculties, would prove in many cases either
+preventive or curative. In my own case, as I now
+think, it would have been both.</p>
+
+<p>There was a time when it was thought essential
+that women should know something of cookery,
+something of medicine, something of surgery. If
+all these things are far better understood now than
+heretofore, is that a reason why a well educated
+woman should be left wholly ignorant of them? A
+knowledge of what people call &#8220;common things&#8221;&mdash;of
+the elements of physiology, of the conditions of
+health, of the qualities, nutritive or remedial, of substances
+commonly used as food or medicine, and the
+most economical and most beneficial way of applying
+both,&mdash;these should form a part of the system of
+every girls&#8217; school&mdash;whether for the higher or the
+lower classes. At present you shall see a girl studying
+chemistry, and attending Faraday&#8217;s lectures, who
+would be puzzled to compound a rice-pudding or a
+cup of barley-water: and a girl who could work
+quickly a complicated sum in the Rule of Three,
+afterwards wasting a fourth of her husband&#8217;s wages
+through want of management.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">135</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In my own case, how much of the practical and
+the sympathetic in my nature was exhausted in airy
+visions!</p>
+
+<p>As to the stuff out of which my waking dreams
+were composed, I cannot tell you much. I have a
+remembrance that I was always a princess-heroine
+in the disguise of a knight, a sort of Clorinda or
+Britomart, going about to redress the wrongs of the
+poor, fight giants, and kill dragons; or founding a
+society in some far-off solitude or desolate island,
+which would have rivalled that of Gonsalez, where
+there were to be no tears, no tasks, and no laws,&mdash;except
+those which I made myself,&mdash;no caged
+birds nor tormented kittens.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-039-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="145" width="300" /></div>
+
+<p>Enough of the pains, and mistakes, and vagaries
+of childhood; let me tell of some of its pleasures
+equally unguessed and unexpressed. A great, and
+exquisite source of enjoyment arose out of an early,
+instinctive, boundless delight in external beauty.
+How this went hand in hand with my terrors and
+reveries, how it could coexist with them, I cannot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">136</a></span>
+tell now&mdash;it was so; and if this sympathy with the
+external, living, beautiful world, had been properly,
+scientifically cultivated, and directed to useful definite
+purposes, it would have been the best remedy
+for much that was morbid: this was not the case,
+and we were, unhappily for me, too early removed
+from the country to a town residence. I can remember,
+however, that in very early years the appearances
+of nature did truly &#8220;haunt me like a
+passion;&#8221; the stars were to me as the gates of heaven;
+the rolling of the wave to the shore, the graceful
+weeds and grasses bending before the breeze as they
+grew by the wayside; the minute and delicate forms
+of insects; the trembling shadows of boughs and
+leaves dancing on the ground in the highest noon;
+these were to me perfect pleasures of which the
+imagery now in my mind is distinct. Wordsworth&#8217;s
+poem of &#8220;The Daffodils,&#8221; the one beginning&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;I wandered lonely as a cloud,&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>may appear to some unintelligible or overcharged,
+but to me it was a vivid truth, a simple fact; and if
+Wordsworth had been then in my hands I think I
+must have loved him. It was this intense sense of
+beauty which gave the first zest to poetry: I love
+it, not because it told me what I did not know, but
+because it helped me to words in which to clothe my
+own knowledge and perceptions, and reflected back
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">137</a></span>
+the pictures unconsciously hoarded up in my mind.
+This was what made Thomson&#8217;s &#8220;Seasons&#8221; a favourite
+book when I first began to read for my own amusement,
+and before I could understand one half of it;
+St. Pierre&#8217;s &#8220;Indian Cottage&#8221; (&#8220;La Chaumi&egrave;re Indienne&#8221;)
+was also charming, either because it reflected
+my dreams, or gave me new stuff for them in
+pictures of an external world quite different from
+that I inhabited,&mdash;palm-trees, elephants, tigers,
+dark-turbaned men with flowing draperies; and the
+&#8220;Arabian Nights&#8221; completed my Oriental intoxication,
+which lasted for a long time.</p>
+
+<p>I have said little of the impressions left by
+books, and of my first religious notions. A friend
+of mine had once the wise idea of collecting together
+a variety of evidence as to the impressions left by
+certain books on childish or immature minds: If
+carried out, it would have been one of the most
+valuable additions to educational experience ever
+made. For myself I did not much care about the
+books put into my hands, nor imbibe much information
+from them. I had a great taste, I am sorry to
+say, for forbidden books; yet it was not the forbidden
+books that did the mischief, except in their being
+read furtively. I remember impressions of vice
+and cruelty from some parts of the Old Testament
+and Goldsmith&#8217;s &#8220;History of England,&#8221; which I
+shudder to recall. Shakspeare was on the forbidden
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">138</a></span>
+shelf. I had read him all through between seven
+and ten years old. He never did me any moral
+mischief. He never soiled my mind with any disordered
+image. What was exceptionable and coarse
+in language I passed by without attaching any meaning
+whatever to it. How it might have been if
+I had read Shakspeare first when I was fifteen
+or sixteen, I do not know; perhaps the occasional
+coarsenesses and obscurities might have shocked the
+delicacy or puzzled the intelligence of that sensitive
+and inquiring age. But at nine or ten I had
+no comprehension of what was unseemly; what might
+be obscure in words to wordy commentators, was to
+me lighted up by the idea I found or interpreted for
+myself&mdash;right or wrong.</p>
+
+<p>No; I repeat, Shakspeare&mdash;bless him!&mdash;never
+did me any moral mischief. Though the Witches in
+Macbeth troubled me,&mdash;though the Ghost in Hamlet
+terrified me (the picture that is,&mdash;for the spirit in
+Shakspeare was solemn and pathetic, not hideous),&mdash;though
+poor little Arthur cost me an ocean of
+tears,&mdash;yet much that was obscure, and all that was
+painful and revolting was merged on the whole in
+the vivid presence of a new, beautiful, vigorous, living
+world. The plays which I now think the most
+wonderful produced comparatively little effect on my
+fancy: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, struck
+me then less than the historical plays, and far less
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">139</a></span>
+than the Midsummer Night&#8217;s Dream and Cymbeline.
+It may be thought, perhaps, that Falstaff is not a
+character to strike a child, or to be understood by
+a child:&mdash;no; surely not. To me Falstaff was not
+witty and wicked&mdash;only irresistibly fat and funny;
+and I remember lying on the ground rolling with
+laughter over some of the scenes in Henry the
+Fourth,&mdash;the mock play, and the seven men in
+buckram. But The Tempest and Cymbeline were
+the plays I liked best and knew best.</p>
+
+<p>Altogether I should say that in my early years
+books were known to me, not as such, not for their
+general contents, but for some especial image or
+picture I had picked out of them and assimilated to
+my own mind and mixed up with my own life. For
+example out of Homer&#8217;s Odyssey (lent to me by
+the parish clerk) I had the picture of Nasicaa and
+her maidens going down in their chariots to wash
+their linen: so that when the first time I went
+to the Pitti Palace, and could hardly see the
+pictures through blinding tears, I saw <i>that</i> picture
+of Rubens, which all remember who have been at
+Florence, and it flashed delight and refreshment
+through those remembered childish associations.
+The Syrens and Polypheme left also vivid pictures
+on my fancy. The Iliad, on the contrary,
+wearied me, except the parting of Hector and Andromache,
+in which the child, scared by its father&#8217;s
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">140</a></span>
+dazzling helm and nodding crest, remains a vivid
+image in my mind from that time.</p>
+
+<p>The same parish clerk&mdash;a curious fellow in his
+way&mdash;lent me also some religious tracts and stories,
+by Hannah More. It is most certain that more
+moral mischief was done to me by some of these
+than by all Shakspeare&#8217;s plays together. These so-called
+pious tracts first introduced me to a knowledge
+of the vices of vulgar life, and the excitements of a
+vulgar religion,&mdash;the fear of being hanged and the
+fear of hell became co-existent in my mind; and
+the teaching resolved itself into this,&mdash;that it was
+not by being naughty, but by being found out, that
+I was to incur the risk of both. My fairy world
+was better!</p>
+
+<p>About Religion:&mdash;I was taught religion as children
+used to be taught it in my younger days, and
+are taught it still in some cases, I believe&mdash;through
+the medium of creeds and catechisms. I read the
+Bible too early, and too indiscriminately, and too
+irreverently. Even the New Testament was too
+early placed in my hands; too early made a lesson
+book, as the custom then was. The <i>letter</i> of the
+Scriptures&mdash;the words&mdash;were familiarised to me by
+sermonising and dogmatising, long before I could
+enter into the <i>spirit</i>. Meantime, happily, another
+religion was growing up in my heart, which,
+strangely enough, seemed to me quite apart from
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">141</a></span>
+that which was taught,&mdash;which, indeed, I never in
+any way regarded as the same which I was taught
+when I stood up wearily on a Sunday to repeat the
+collect and say the catechism. It was quite another
+thing. Not only the taught religion and the sentiment
+of faith and adoration were never combined,
+but it never for years entered into my head to combine
+them; the first remained extraneous, the latter
+had gradually taken root in my life, even from the
+moment my mother joined my little hands in prayer.
+The histories out of the Bible (the Parables especially)
+were, however, enchanting to me, though my
+interpretation of them was in some instances the
+very reverse of correct or orthodox. To my infant
+conception our Lord was a being who had come
+down from heaven to make people good, and to tell
+them beautiful stories. And though no pains were
+spared to <i>indoctrinate</i> me, and all my pastors and
+masters took it for granted that my ideas were quite
+satisfactory, nothing could be more confused and
+heterodox.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">It is a common observation that girls of lively
+talents are apt to grow pert and satirical. I fell
+into this danger when about ten years old. Sallies
+at the expense of certain people, ill-looking, or ill-dressed,
+or ridiculous, or foolish, had been laughed
+at and applauded in company, until, without being
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">142</a></span>
+naturally malignant, I ran some risk of becoming so
+from sheer vanity.</p>
+
+<p>The fables which appeal to our higher moral sympathies
+may sometimes do as much for us as the
+truths of science. So thought our Saviour when he
+taught the multitude in parables.</p>
+
+<p>A good clergyman who lived near us, a famous
+Persian scholar, took it into his head to teach me
+Persian (I was then about seven years old), and I
+set to work with infinite delight and earnestness.
+All I learned was soon forgotten; but a few years
+afterwards, happening to stumble on a volume of
+Sir William Jones&#8217;s works&mdash;his Persian grammar&mdash;it
+revived my Orientalism, and I began to study it
+eagerly. Among the exercises given was a Persian
+fable or poem&mdash;one of those traditions of our Lord
+which are preserved in the East. The beautiful
+apologue of &#8220;St. Peter and the Cherries,&#8221; which
+Goethe has versified or imitated, is a well known
+example. This fable I allude to was something
+similar, but I have not met with the original these
+forty years, and must give it here from memory.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Jesus,&#8221; says the story, &#8220;arrived one evening at
+the gates of a certain city, and he sent his disciples
+forward to prepare supper, while he himself, intent
+on doing good, walked through the streets into the
+market place.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And he saw at the corner of the market some
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">143</a></span>
+people gathered together looking at an object on the
+ground; and he drew near to see what it might be.
+It was a dead dog, with a halter round his neck,
+by which he appeared to have been dragged through
+the dirt; and a viler, a more abject, a more unclean
+thing, never met the eyes of man.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And those who stood by looked on with abhorrence.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;&#8216;Faugh!&#8217; said one, stopping his nose; &#8216;it pollutes
+the air.&#8217; &#8216;How long,&#8217; said another, &#8216;shall this
+foul beast offend our sight?&#8217; &#8216;Look at his torn
+hide,&#8217; said a third; &#8216;one could not even cut a shoe
+out of it.&#8217; &#8216;And his ears,&#8217; said a fourth, &#8216;all draggled
+and bleeding!&#8217; &#8216;No doubt,&#8217; said a fifth, &#8216;he
+hath been hanged for thieving!&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;And Jesus heard them, and looking down compassionately
+on the dead creature, he said, &#8216;Pearls
+are not equal to the whiteness of his teeth!&#8217;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Then the people turned towards him with
+amazement, and said among themselves, &#8216;Who is
+this? this must be Jesus of Nazareth, for only <span class="smcap">He</span>
+could find something to pity and approve even in a
+dead dog;&#8217; and being ashamed, they bowed their
+heads before him, and went each on his way.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I can recall, at this hour, the vivid, yet softening
+and pathetic impression left on my fancy by this old
+Eastern story. It struck me as exquisitely humorous,
+as well as exquisitely beautiful. It gave me
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">144</a></span>
+a pain in my conscience, for it seemed thenceforward
+so easy and so vulgar to say satirical things, and so
+much nobler to be benign and merciful, and I took
+the lesson so home, that I was in great danger of
+falling into the opposite extreme,&mdash;of seeking the
+beautiful even in the midst of the corrupt and the
+repulsive. Pity, a large element in my composition,
+might have easily degenerated into weakness,
+threatening to subvert hatred of evil in trying to
+find excuses for it; and whether my mind has ever
+completely righted itself, I am not sure.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Educators are not always aware, I think, how acute
+are the perceptions, and how permanent the memories,
+of children. I remember experiments tried upon
+my temper and feelings, and how I was made aware
+of this, by their being repeated, and, in some instances,
+spoken of, before me. Music, to which I
+was early and peculiarly sensitive, was sometimes
+made the medium of these experiments. Discordant
+sounds were not only hateful, but made me turn
+white and cold, and sent the blood backward to my
+heart; and certain tunes had a curious effect, I
+cannot now account for: for though, when heard
+for the first time, they had little effect, they became
+intolerable by repetition; they turned up some
+hidden emotion within me too strong to be borne. It
+could not have been from association, which I believe
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">145</a></span>
+to be a principal element in the <i>emotion</i> excited by
+music. I was too young for that. What associations
+could such a baby have had with pleasure or with
+pain? Or could it be possible that associations with
+some former state of existence awoke up to sound?
+That our life &#8220;hath elsewhere its beginning, and
+cometh from afar,&#8221; is a belief or at least an instinct,
+in some minds, which music, and only music, seems
+to thrill into consciousness. At this time, when I was
+about five or six years old, Mrs. Arkwright&mdash;she was
+then Fanny Kemble&mdash;used to come to our house,
+and used to entrance me with her singing. I had a
+sort of adoration for her, such as an ecstatic votary
+might have for a Saint Cecilia. I trembled with
+pleasure when I only heard her step. But her
+voice!&mdash;it has charmed hundreds since; whom has
+it ever moved to a more genuine passion of delight
+than the little child that crept silent and tremulous
+to her side? And she was fond of me,&mdash;fond of
+singing to me, and, it must be confessed, fond also
+of playing these experiments on me. The music of
+&#8220;Paul and Virginia&#8221; was then in vogue, and there
+was one air&mdash;a very simple air&mdash;in that opera,
+which, after the first few bars, always made me stop
+my ears and rush out of the room. I became at last
+aware that this was sometimes done by particular
+desire to please my parents, or amuse and interest
+others by the display of such vehement emotion.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">146</a></span>
+My infant conscience became perplexed between the
+reality of the feeling and the exhibition of it. People
+are not always aware of the injury done to children
+by repeating before them things they say, or describing
+things they do: words and actions, spontaneous
+and unconscious, become thenceforth artificial
+and conscious. I can speak of the injury done
+to myself, between five and eight years old. There
+was some danger of my becoming a precocious actress,&mdash;danger
+of permanent mischief such as I have seen
+done to other children,&mdash;but I was saved by the
+recoil of resistance and resentment excited in my
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>This is enough. All that has been told here
+refers to a period between five and ten years old.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-146.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="300" width="500" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">147</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-147.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="556" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h4>THE INDIAN HUNTER AND THE FIRE.</h4>
+
+<h5>(FROM THE GERMAN.)</h5>
+
+<p>Once upon a time the lightning from heaven fell
+upon a tree standing in the old primeval forest and
+kindled it, so that it flamed on high. And it happened
+that a young hunter, who had lost his path in that
+wilderness, beheld the gleam of the flames from a
+distance, and, forcing his way through the thicket, he
+flung himself down in rapture before the blazing tree.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;O divine light and warmth!&#8221; he exclaimed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">148</a></span>
+stretching forth his arms. &#8220;O blessed! O heaven-descended
+Fire! let me thank thee! let me adore
+thee! Giver of a new existence, quickening thro&#8217;
+every pulse, how lost, how cold, how dark have I
+dwelt without thee! Restorer of my life! remain
+ever near me, and, through thy benign and celestial
+influence, send love and joy to illuminate my soul!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And the Fire answered and said to him, &#8220;It is true
+that my birth is from heaven, but I am now, through
+mingling with earthly elements, subdued to earthly
+influences; therefore, beware how you choose me
+for thy friend, without having first studied my twofold
+nature. O youth! take heed lest what appear to
+thee now a blessing, may be turned, at some future
+time, to fiery pain and death.&#8221; And the youth replied,
+&#8220;No! O no! thou blessed Fire, this could
+never be. Am I then so senseless, so inconstant, so
+thankless? O believe it not! Let me stay near thee;
+let me be thy priest, to watch and tend thee truly.
+Ofttimes in my wild wintry life, when the chill darkness
+encompassed me, and the ice-blast lifted my hair,
+have I dreamed of the soft summer breath,&mdash;of the
+sunshine that should light up the world within me and
+the world around me. But still that time came not.
+It seemed ever far, far off; and I had perished utterly
+before the light and the warmth had reached me, had
+it not been for thee!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Thus the youth poured forth his soul, and the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">149</a></span>
+Fire answered him in murmured tones, while her
+beams with a softer radiance played over his cheek
+and brow: &#8220;Be it so then. Yet do thou watch
+me constantly and minister to me carefully; neglect
+me not, leave me not to myself, lest the light and
+warmth in which thou so delightest fail thee suddenly,
+and there be no redress; and O watch thyself
+also! beware lest thou too ardently stir up my
+impatient fiery being! beware lest thou heap too
+much fuel upon me; once more beware, lest, instead
+of life, and love, and joy, I bring thee only death
+and burning pain!&#8221; And the youth passionately
+vowed to keep her behest: and in the beginning all
+went well. How often, for hours together, would
+he lie gazing entranced toward the radiant beneficent
+Fire, basking in her warmth, and throwing now a
+leafy spray, now a fragment of dry wood, anon a
+handful of odorous gums, as incense, upon the flame,
+which gracefully curling and waving upwards, quivering
+and sparkling, seemed to whisper in return divine
+oracles; or he fancied he beheld, while gazing into
+the glowing depths, marvellous shapes, fairy visions
+dancing and glancing along. Then he would sing to
+her songs full of love, and she, responding to the
+song she had herself inspired, sometimes replied, in
+softest whispers, so loving and so low, that even the
+jealous listening woods could not overhear; at other
+times she would shoot up suddenly in rapturous
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">150</a></span>
+splendour, like a pillar of light, and revealed to him
+all the wonders and the beauties which lay around
+him, hitherto veiled from his sight.</p>
+
+<p>But at length, as he became accustomed to the
+glory and the warmth, and nothing more was left for
+the fire to bestow, or her light to reveal, then he
+began to weary and to dream again of the morning,
+and to long for the sun-beams; and it was to him as
+if the fire stood between him and the sun&#8217;s light, and
+he reproached her therefore, and he became moody
+and ungrateful; and the fire was no longer the same,
+but unquiet and changeful, sometimes flickering unsteadily,
+sometimes throwing out a lurid glare. And
+when the youth, forgetful of his ministry, left the
+flame unfed and unsustained, so that ofttimes she
+drooped and waned, and crept in dying gleams along
+the damp ground, his heart would fail him with a
+sudden remorse, and he would cast on the fuel with
+such a rough and lavish hand that the indignant fire
+hissed thereat, and burst forth in a smoky sullen
+gleam,&mdash;then died away again. Then the youth,
+half sorrowful, half impatient, would remember how
+bright, how glowing, how dazzling was the flame in
+those former happy days, when it played over his
+chilled and wearied limbs, and shed its warmth upon
+his brow, and he desired eagerly to recall that once
+inspiring glow. And he stirred up the embers violently
+till they burned him, and then he grew angry,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">151</a></span>
+and then again he wearied of all the watching and
+the care which the subtle, celestial, tameless element
+required at his hand: and at length, one day in a
+sullen mood, he snatched up a pitcher of water from
+the fountain and poured it hastily on the yet living
+flame.&mdash;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>For one moment it arose blazing towards heaven,
+shed a last gleam upon the pale brow of the youth,
+and then sank down in darkness extinguished for
+ever!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-007.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="265" width="400" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">152</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-022-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="105" width="400" /></div>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">PAULINA.</span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;</span>
+<span class="i4"><span class="smcap">from an unfinished tale, 1823.</span></span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;</span>
+<span class="i0">And think&#8217;st thou that the fond o&#8217;erflowing love</span>
+<span class="i1">I bear thee in my heart could ever be</span>
+<span class="i0">Repaid by careless smiles that round thee rove,</span>
+<span class="i1">And beam on others as they beam on me?</span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;</span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, could I speak to thee! could I but tell</span>
+<span class="i0">The nameless thoughts that in my bosom swell,</span>
+<span class="i0">And struggle for expression! or set free</span>
+<span class="i0">From the o&#8217;er mastering spirit&#8217;s proud control</span>
+<span class="i0">The pain that throbs in silence at my soul,</span>
+<span class="i0">Perhaps&mdash;yet no&mdash;I will not sue, nor bend,</span>
+<span class="i0">To win a heartless pity&mdash;Let it end!</span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;</span>
+<span class="i0">I have been near thee still at morn, at eve;</span>
+<span class="i0">Have mark&#8217;d thee in thy joy, have seen thee grieve;</span>
+<span class="i0">Have seen thee gay with triumph, sick with fears,</span>
+<span class="i0">Radiant in beauty, desolate in tears:</span>
+<span class="i0">And communed with thy heart, till I made mine</span>
+<span class="i0">The echo and the mirror unto thine.</span>
+<span class="i0">And I have sat and looked into thine eyes</span>
+<span class="i0">As men on earth look to the starry skies,</span>
+<span class="i0">That seek to read in Heaven their human destinies!</span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;</span>
+<span class="i0">Too quickly I read mine,&mdash;I knew it well,&mdash;</span>
+<span class="i0">I judg&#8217;d not of thy heart by all it gave,</span>
+<span class="i0">But all that it withheld; and I could tell</span>
+<span class="i0">The very sea-mark where affection&#8217;s wave</span>
+<span class="i0">Would cease to flow, or flow to ebb again,</span>
+<span class="i0">And knew my lavish love was pour&#8217;d in vain,</span>
+<span class="i0">As fruitless streams o&#8217;er sandy deserts melt,</span>
+<span class="i0">Unrecompensed, unvalued, and unfelt!</span>
+<span class="i0 padt05"><span class="gesperrt">&nbsp;****</span></span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p class="tb"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">153</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-017-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="134" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h4>LINES.&mdash;1840.</h4>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Take me, my mother Earth, to thy cold breast,</span>
+<span class="i0">And fold me there in everlasting rest,</span>
+<span class="i3">The long day is o&#8217;er!</span>
+<span class="i3">I&#8217;m weary, I would sleep&mdash;</span>
+<span class="i3">But deep, deep,</span>
+<span class="i3">Never to waken more!</span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;</span>
+<span class="i0">I have had joy and sorrow; I have proved</span>
+<span class="i0">What life could give; have lov&#8217;d, have been belov&#8217;d;</span>
+<span class="i3">I am sick, and heart sore,</span>
+<span class="i3">And weary,&mdash;let me sleep!</span>
+<span class="i3">But deep, deep,</span>
+<span class="i3">Never to waken more!</span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;</span>
+<span class="i0">To thy dark chambers, mother Earth, I come,</span>
+<span class="i0">Prepare my dreamless bed in my last home;</span>
+<span class="i3">Shut down the marble door,</span>
+<span class="i3">And leave me,&mdash;let me sleep!</span>
+<span class="i3">But deep, deep,</span>
+<span class="i3">Never to waken more!</span>
+<span class="i0">&nbsp;</span>
+<span class="i0">Now I lie down,&mdash;I close my aching eyes,</span>
+<span class="i0">If on this night another morn must rise,</span>
+<span class="i3">Wake me not, I implore!</span>
+<span class="i3">I only ask to sleep,</span>
+<span class="i3">And deep, deep,</span>
+<span class="i3">Never to waken more!</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">154</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-146.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="300" width="500" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">155</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-155.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="386" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h3><span class="oldtype">Theological Fragments.</span></h3>
+
+<h5>1.</h5>
+
+<h4>THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL.</h4>
+
+<h5>(A PARABLE, FROM ST. JEROME.)</h5>
+
+<p>A certain holy anchorite had passed a long life in
+a cave of the Thebaid, remote from all communion
+with men; and eschewing, as he would the gates of
+Hell, even the very presence of a woman; and he
+fasted and prayed, and performed many and severe
+penances; and his whole thought was how he should
+make himself of account in the sight of God, that he
+might enter into his paradise.</p>
+
+<p>And having lived this life for three score and ten<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">156</a></span>
+years he was puffed up with the notion of his own
+great virtue and sanctity, and, like to St. Anthony,
+he besought the Lord to show him what saint he
+should emulate as greater than himself, thinking
+perhaps, in his heart, that the Lord would answer
+that none was greater or holier. And the same
+night the angel of God appeared to him, and said,
+&#8220;If thou wouldst excel all others in virtue and
+sanctity, thou must strive to be like a certain minstrel
+who goes begging and singing from door to door.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And the holy man was in great astonishment, and
+he arose and took his staff and ran forth in search of
+this minstrel; and when he had found him he questioned
+him earnestly, saying, &#8220;Tell me, I pray thee,
+my brother, what good works thou hast performed
+in thy lifetime, and by what prayers and penances
+thou hast made thyself acceptable to God?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And the man, greatly wondering and ashamed to
+be so questioned, hung down his head as he replied,
+&#8220;I beseech thee, holy father, mock me not! I have
+performed no good works, and as to praying, alas!
+sinner that I am, I am not worthy to pray. I do
+nothing but go about from door to door amusing the
+people with my viol and my flute.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And the holy man insisted and said, &#8220;Nay, but
+peradventure in the midst of this thy evil life thou
+hast done some good works?&#8221; And the minstrel
+replied, &#8220;I know of nothing good that I have done.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">157</a></span>&#8221;
+And the hermit, wondering more and more, said,
+&#8220;How hast thou become a beggar: hast thou spent
+thy substance in riotous living, like most others of
+thy calling?&#8221; and the man answering, said, &#8220;Nay;
+but there was a poor woman whom I found running
+hither and thither in distraction, for her husband and
+her children had been sold into slavery to pay a debt.
+And the woman being very fair, certain sons of
+Belial pursued after her; so I took her home to my
+hut and protected her from them, and I gave her all
+I possessed to redeem her family, and conducted her
+in safety to the city, where she was reunited to her
+husband and children. But what of that, my father;
+is there a man who would not have done the same?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And the hermit, hearing the minstrel speak these
+words, wept bitterly, saying, &#8220;For my part, I have
+not done so much good in all my life; and yet they
+call me a man of God, and thou art only a poor minstrel!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">At Vienna, some years ago, I saw a picture by
+Von Schwind, which was conceived in the spirit
+of this old apologue. It exhibited the lives of two
+twin brothers diverging from the cradle. One of
+them, by profound study, becomes a most learned
+and skilful physician, and ministers to the sick; attaining
+to great riches and honours through his
+labours and his philanthropy. The other brother,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">158</a></span>
+who has no turn for study, becomes a poor fiddler,
+and spends his life in consoling, by his music, sufferings
+beyond the reach of the healing art. In the
+end, the two brothers meet at the close of life. He
+who had been fiddling through the world is sick and
+worn out: his brother prescribes for him, and is seen
+culling simples for his restoration, while the fiddler
+touches his instrument for the solace of his kind
+physician.</p>
+
+<p>It is in such representations that painting did once
+speak, and might again speak to the hearts of the
+people.</p>
+
+<p>Another version of the same thought, we find in
+De Berenger&#8217;s pretty ballad, &#8220;<i>Les deux S&oelig;urs de
+Charit&eacute;</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-032-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="207" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>2.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">hen</span> I was a child, and read Milton for the first
+time, his Pandemonium seemed to me a magnificent
+place. It struck me more than his Paradise,
+for <i>that</i> was beautiful, but Pandemonium was terrible
+and beautiful too. The wondrous fabric that &#8220;from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">159</a></span>
+the earth rose like an exhalation to the sound of
+dulcet symphonies and voices sweet,&#8221;&mdash;the splendid
+piles of architecture sweeping line beyond line,
+&#8220;Cornice and frieze with bossy sculptures graven,&#8221;&mdash;realised
+a certain picture of Palmyra I had once
+seen, and which had taken possession of my imagination:
+then the throne, outshining the wealth of Ormuz
+and of Ind,&mdash;the flood of light streaming from &#8220;starry
+lamps and blazing cressets&#8221; quite threw the flames of
+perdition into the shade. As it was said of Erskine,
+that he always spoke of Satan with respect, as of a
+great statesman out of place, a sort of leader of the
+Opposition; so to me the grand arch-fiend was a hero,
+like my <i>then</i> favourite Greeks and Romans, a Cymon,
+a Curtius, a Decius, devoting himself for the good of
+his country;&mdash;such was the moral confusion created
+in my mind. Pandemonium inspired no horror; on
+the contrary, my fancy revelled in the artistic
+beauty of the creation. I felt that I should like to
+go and see it; so that, in fact, if Milton meant to
+inspire abhorrence, he has failed, even to the height
+of his sublimity. Dante has succeeded better.
+Those who dwell with complacency on the doctrine
+of eternal punishments must delight in the ferocity
+and the ingenuity of his grim inventions, worthy of
+a vengeful theology. Wicked latitudinarians may
+shudder and shiver at the images called up&mdash;grotesque,
+abominable, hideous&mdash;but then Dante him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">160</a></span>self
+would sternly rebuke them for making their
+human sympathies a measure for the judgments of
+God, and compassion only a veil for treason and
+rebellion:&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Chi &egrave; piu scellerato di colui</span>
+<span class="i0">Ch&#8217; al giudicio divin passion porta?&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Who can show greater wickedness than he</span>
+<span class="i0">Whose passion by the will of God is moved?&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>However, it must be said in favour of Dante&#8217;s
+Inferno, that no one ever wished to go there.</p>
+
+<p>These be the Christian poets! but they must
+yield in depth of imagined horrors to the Christian
+Fathers. Tertullian (writing in the second century)
+not only sends the wicked into that dolorous region
+of despair, but makes the endless measureless torture
+of the doomed a part of the joys of the redeemed.
+The spectacle is to give them the same sort of
+delight as the heathen took in their games, and
+Pandemonium is to be as a vast amphitheatre for the
+amusement of the New Jerusalem. &#8220;How magnificent,&#8221;
+exclaims this pious doctor of the Church,
+&#8220;will be the scale of that game! With what
+admiration, what laughter, what glee, what triumph,
+shall I behold so many mighty monarchs, who had
+been given out as received into the skies, moaning in
+unfathomable gloom! Persecutors of the Christians
+liquefying amid shooting spires of flame! Philosophers
+blushing before their disciples amid those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">161</a></span>
+ruddy fires! Then,&#8221; he goes on, still alluding to the
+amphitheatre, &#8220;then is the time to hear the tragedians
+doubly pathetic, now that they bewail their own
+agonies! To observe actors released by the fierceness
+of their torments from all restraints on their
+gestures! Then may we admire the charioteer
+glowing all over in his car of torture, and watch the
+wrestlers struggling, not in the gymnasium but with
+flames!&#8221; And he asks exultingly, &#8220;What pr&aelig;tor,
+or consul, or questor, or priest, can purchase you by
+his munificence a game of triumph like this?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And even more terrible are the imaginations of
+good Bishop Taylor, who distils the essence from all
+sins, all miseries, all sorrows, all terrors, all plagues,
+and mingles them in one chalice of wrath and
+vengeance to be held to the lips and forced down
+the unwilling throats of the doomed &#8220;with violence
+of devils and accursed spirits!&#8221; Are these mere
+words? Did any one ever fancy or try to realise
+what they express?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"><img src="images/illus-114.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="212" width="450" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">162</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>3.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">was</span> surprised to find this passage in one of
+Southey&#8217;s letters:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">&#8220;A Catholic Establishment would be the best,
+perhaps the only means of civilising Ireland. Jesuits
+and Benedictines, though they would not enlighten
+the savages, would humanise them and bring the
+country into cultivation. A petition that asked for
+this, saying plainly, &#8216;We are Papists, and will be so,
+and this is the best thing that can be done for us and
+you too,&#8217;&mdash;such a petition I would support, considering
+what the present condition of Ireland is, how
+wretchedly it has always been governed, and how
+hopeless the prospect.&#8221; (1805.)</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Southey was thinking of what the religious orders
+had done for Paraguay; whether he would have
+penned the same sentiments twenty or even ten
+years later, is more than doubtful.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>4.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> old monks and penitents&mdash;dirty, ugly, emaciated
+old fellows they were!&mdash;spent their days
+in speaking and preaching of their own and others&#8217;
+sinfulness, yet seem to have had ever present before
+them a standard of beauty, brightness, beneficence,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">163</a></span>
+aspirations which nothing earthly could satisfy,
+which made their ideas of sinfulness and misery
+<i>comparative</i>, and their scale was graduated from
+themselves <i>upwards</i>. We philosophers reverse this.
+We teach and preach the spiritual dignity, the lofty
+capabilities of humanity. Yet, by some mistake, we
+seem to be always speculating on the amount of evil
+which may or can be endured, and on the amount of
+wickedness which may or must be tolerated; and our
+scale is graduated from ourselves <i>downwards</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>5.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;S</span><span class="smcap">o</span> long as the ancient mythology had any separate
+establishment in the empire, the spiritual
+worship which our religion demands, and so essentially
+implies as only fitting for it, was preserved in its
+purity by means of the salutary contrast; but no
+sooner had the Church become completely triumphant
+and exclusive, and the parallel of Pagan
+idolatry totally removed, than the old constitutional
+appetite revived in all its original force, and after a
+short but famous struggle with the Iconoclasts, an
+image worship was established, and consecrated by
+bulls and canons, which, in whatever light it is
+regarded, differed in no respect but the names of its
+objects from that which had existed for so many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">164</a></span>
+ages as the chief characteristic of the religious faith
+of the Gentiles.&#8221;&mdash;<i>H. Nelson Coleridge.</i></p>
+
+<p>I think, with submission, that it differed in sentiment;
+for in the mythology of the Pagans the worship
+was to <i>beauty</i>, <i>immortality</i>, and <i>power</i>, and in
+the Christian mythology&mdash;if I may call it so&mdash;of
+the Middle Ages, the worship was to <i>purity</i>, <i>self-denial</i>,
+and <i>charity</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>6.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;A</span> <span class="smcap">narrow</span> half-enlightened reason may easily
+make sport of all those forms in which religious
+faith has been clothed by human imagination,
+and ask why they are retained, and why one should
+be preferred to another? It is sufficient to reply,
+that some forms there must be if Religion is to endure
+as a social influence, and that the forms already
+in existence are the best, if they are in unison with
+human sympathies, and express, with the breadth
+and vagueness which every popular utterance must
+from its nature possess, the interior convictions of
+the general mind. What would become of the most
+sacred truth if all the forms which have harboured it
+were destroyed at once by an unrelenting reason,
+and it were driven naked and shivering about the
+earth till some clever logician had devised a suitable
+abode for its reception? It is on these outward<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">165</a></span>
+forms of religion that the spirit of artistic beauty
+descends and moulds them into fitting expressions of
+the invisible grace and majesty of spiritual truth.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Prospective
+Review</i>, Feb. 24. 1845.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>7.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;H</span><span class="smcap">ave</span> not Dying Christs taught fortitude to the
+virtuous sufferer? Have not Holy Families
+cherished and ennobled domestic affections? The
+tender genius of the Christian morality, even in its
+most degenerate state, has made the Mother and her
+Child the highest objects of affectionate superstition.
+How much has that beautiful superstition by the
+pencils of great artists contributed to humanise mankind?&#8221;&mdash;<i>Sir
+James Mackintosh</i>, writing in 1802.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>8.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">remember</span> once at Merton College Chapel (May,
+1844), while Archdeacon Manning was preaching
+an eloquent sermon on the eternity of reward and
+punishment in the future life, I was looking at the
+row of windows opposite, and I saw that there were
+seven, all different in pattern and construction, yet
+all harmonising with each other and with the building
+of which they formed a part;&mdash;a symbol they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">166</a></span>
+might have been of differences in the Church of
+Christ. From the varied windows opposite I looked
+down to the faces of the congregation, all upturned
+to the preacher, with expression how different!
+Faith, hope, fear, in the open mouths and expanded
+eyelids of some; a sort of silent protest in the compressed
+lips and knitted brows of others; a speculative
+inquiry and interest, or merely admiring acquiescence
+in others; as the high or low, the wide or
+contracted head prevailed; and all this diversity in
+organisation, in habits of thought, in expression, harmonised
+for the time by one predominant object, one
+feeling! the hungry sheep looking up to be fed!
+When I sigh over apparent disagreement, let me
+think of those windows in Merton College Chapel,
+and the same light from heaven streaming through
+them all!&mdash;and of that assemblage of human faces,
+uplifted with the same aspiration one and all!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-020.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="183" width="500" /></div>
+
+<h5>9.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">have</span> just read the article (by Sterling, I believe),
+in the &#8220;Edinburgh Review&#8221; for July; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">167</a></span>
+as it chanced, this same evening, Dr. Channing&#8217;s
+&#8220;Discourse on the Church,&#8221; and Captain Maconochie&#8217;s
+&#8220;Report on Secondary Punishments&#8221; from
+Sydney, came before me.</p>
+
+<p>And as I laid them down, one after another, <i>this</i>
+thought struck me:&mdash;that about the same time, in
+three different and far divided regions of the globe,
+three men, one military, the other an ecclesiastic, the
+third a lawyer, and belonging apparently to different
+religious denominations, all gave utterance to nearly
+the same sentiments in regard to a Christian Church.
+Channing says, &#8220;A church destined to endure
+through all ages, to act on all, to blend itself with
+new forms of society, and with the highest improvements
+of the race, cannot be expected to ordain an
+immutable mode of administration, but must leave its
+modes of worship and communion to conform themselves
+silently and gradually to the wants and progress
+of humanity. The rites and arrangements
+which suit one period lose their significance or efficiency
+in another; the forms which minister to the
+mind <i>now</i> may fetter it hereafter, and must give
+place to its free unfolding,&#8221; &amp;c., and more to the
+same purpose.</p>
+
+<p>The reviewer says, &#8220;We believe that in the
+judgment of an enlightened charity, many Christian
+societies who are accustomed to denounce each others&#8217;
+errors, will at length come to be regarded as members<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">168</a></span>
+in common of one great and comprehensive Church,
+in which diversity of forms are harmonised by an all-pervading
+unity of spirit.&#8221; And more to the same
+purpose. The soldier and reformer says, &#8220;I believe
+there may be error because there must be imperfection
+in the religious faith of the best among us;
+but that the degree of this error is not vital in any
+Christian denomination seems demonstrable by the
+best fruits of faith&mdash;good works&mdash;being evidenced
+by all.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>It is pleasant to see benign spirits divided in
+opinion, but harmonised by faith, thus standing hand
+in hand upon a shore of peace, and looking out together
+in serene hope for the dawning of a better
+day, instead of rushing forth, each with his own
+farthing candle, under pretence of illuminating the
+world&mdash;every one even more intent on putting out
+his neighbour&#8217;s light than on guarding his own.</p>
+
+<p class="name">(Nov. 15. 1841.)</p>
+
+<p class="tb">While the idea of possible harmony in the universal
+Church of Christ (by which I mean all who
+accept His teaching and are glad to bear His name)
+is gaining ground theoretically, <i>practically</i> it seems
+more and more distant; since 1841 (when the above
+was written) the divergence is greater than ever;
+and, as in politics, moderate opinions appear (since
+1848) to merge on either side into the extremes of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">169</a></span>
+ultra conservatism and ultra radicalism, as fear of
+the past or hope of the future predominate, so it is
+in the Church. The sort of dualism which prevails
+in politics and religion might give some colour to
+Lord Lindsay&#8217;s theory of &#8220;progress through antagonism.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-045.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="136" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>10.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">incline</span> to agree with those who think it a great
+mistake to consider the present conditions or
+conception of Christianity as complete and final:
+like the human soul to which it was fitted by Divine
+love and wisdom, it has an immeasurable capacity of
+development, and &#8220;The Lord hath more truth yet
+to break forth out of his Holy Word.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-022-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="214" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>11.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> nations of the present age want not <i>less</i> religion,
+but <i>more</i>. They do not wish for less com<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">170</a></span>munity
+with the Apostolic times, but for more; but
+above all, they want their wounds healed by a
+Christianity showing a life-renewing vitality allied
+to reason and conscience, and ready and able to
+reform the social relations of life, beginning with the
+domestic and culminating with the political. They
+want no negations, but positive reconstruction&mdash;no
+conventionality, but an honest <i>bon&acirc; fide</i> foundation,
+deep as the human mind, and a structure free and
+organic as nature. In the meantime let no national
+form be urged as identical with divine truth, let no
+dogmatic formula oppress conscience and reason, and
+let no corporation of priests, no set of dogmatists,
+sow discord and hatred in the sacred communities of
+domestic and national life. This view cannot be obtained
+without national efforts, Christian education,
+free institutions, and social reforms. Then no zeal
+will be called Christian which is not hallowed by
+charity,&mdash;no faith Christian which is not sanctioned
+by reason.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Hippolitus.</i></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Any author who in our time treats theological
+and ecclesiastical subjects frankly, and therefore with
+reference to the problems of the age, must expect to
+be ignored, and if that cannot be done, abused and
+reviled.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The same is true of moral subjects on which strong
+prejudices (or shall I say strong <i>convictions</i>?) exist in
+minds not very strong.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">171</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is not perhaps of so much consequence what we
+believe, as it is important that we believe; that we
+do not affect to believe, and so belie our own souls.
+Belief is <i>not</i> always in our power, but truth is.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-050.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="107" width="200" /></div>
+
+<h5>12.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> seems an arbitrary limitation of the design of
+Christianity to assume, as Priestley does, that &#8220;it
+consists solely in the revelation of a future life confirmed
+by the bodily resurrection of Christ.&#8221; This
+is truly a very material view of Christianity. If I
+were to be sure of annihilation I should not be less
+certain of the truth of Christianity as a system of
+morals exquisitely adapted for the improvement and
+happiness of man as an individual; and equally
+adapted to conduce to the amelioration and progressive
+happiness of mankind as a species.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-iv.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="264" width="500" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">172</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-018.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="184" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h4>NOTES FROM VARIOUS SERMONS,</h4>
+
+<h5>MADE ON THE SPOT;</h5>
+
+<h5>SHOWING SOME THINGS IN WHICH ALL GOOD MEN ARE AGREED.</h5>
+
+<h4>I.</h4>
+
+<h4><i>From a Roman Catholic Sermon.</i></h4>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">hen</span> travelling in Ireland, I stayed over one
+Sunday in a certain town in the north, and
+rambled out early in the morning. It was cold and
+wet, the streets empty and quiet, but the sound of
+voices drew me in one direction, down a court where
+was a Roman Catholic chapel. It was so crowded
+that many of the congregation stood round the door.
+I remarked among them a number of soldiers and
+most miserable-looking women. All made way for
+me with true national courtesy, and I entered at the
+moment the priest was finishing mass, and about to
+begin his sermon. There was no pulpit, and he
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">173</a></span>
+stood on the step of the altar; a fine-looking man,
+with a bright face, a sonorous voice, and a <i>very</i>
+strong Irish accent. His text was from Matt. v.
+43, 44.</p>
+
+<p>He began by explaining what Christ really meant
+by the words &#8220;Love thy neighbour.&#8221; Then drew a
+picture in contrast of hatred and dissension, commencing
+with dissension in families, between kindred,
+and between husband and wife. Then made a
+most touching appeal in behalf of children brought
+up in an atmosphere of contention where no love is.
+&#8220;God help them! God pity them! small chance for
+them of being either good or happy! for their young
+hearts are saddened and soured with strife, and they
+eat their bread in bitterness!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then he preached patience to the wives, indulgence
+to the husbands, and denounced scolds and
+quarrelsome women in a manner that seemed to
+glance at recent events: &#8220;When ye are found in the
+streets vilifying and slandering one another, ay, and
+fighting and tearing each other&#8217;s hair, do ye think
+ye&#8217;re women? no, ye&#8217;re not! ye&#8217;re devils incarnate,
+and ye&#8217;ll go where the devils will be fit companions
+for ye!&#8221; &amp;c. (Here some women near me, with
+long black hair streaming down, fell upon their
+knees, sobbing with contrition.) He then went on,
+in the same strain of homely eloquence, to the evils
+of political and religious hatred, and quoted the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">174</a></span>
+text, &#8220;If it be possible, as much as lieth in you,
+live peaceably with all men.&#8221; &#8220;I&#8217;m a Catholic,&#8221; he
+went on, &#8220;and I believe in the truth of my own
+religion above all others. I&#8217;m convinced, by long
+study and observation, it&#8217;s the best that is; but
+what then? Do ye think I hate my neighbour because
+he thinks differently? Do ye think I <i>mane</i> to
+force my religion down other people&#8217;s throats? If I
+were to preach such uncharity to ye, my people,
+you wouldn&#8217;t listen to me, ye oughtn&#8217;t to listen to
+me. Did Jesus Christ force His religion down other
+people&#8217;s throats? Not He! He endured all, He was
+kind to all, even to the wicked Jews that afterwards
+crucified Him.&#8221; &#8220;If you say you can&#8217;t love your
+neighbour because he&#8217;s your enemy, and has injured
+you, what does that mane? &#8216;<i>ye can&#8217;t! ye can&#8217;t!</i>&#8217; as
+if that excuse will serve God? hav&#8217;n&#8217;t ye done more
+and worse against Him? and didn&#8217;t He send His
+only Son into the world to redeem ye? My good
+people, you&#8217;re all sprung from one stock, all sons of
+Adam, all related to one another. When God
+created Eve, mightn&#8217;t He have made her out of any
+thing, a stock or a stone, or out of nothing at all,
+at all? but He took one of Adam&#8217;s ribs and moulded
+her out of that, and gave her to him, just to show
+that we&#8217;re all from one original, all related together,
+men and women, Catholics and Protestants, Jews
+and Turks and Christians; all bone of one bone, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">175</a></span>
+flesh of one flesh!&#8221; He then insisted and demonstrated
+that all the miseries of life, all the sorrows
+and mistakes of men, women, and children; and, in
+particular, all the disasters of Ireland, the bankrupt
+landlords, the religious dissensions, the fights domestic
+and political, the rich without thought for the
+poor, and the poor without food or work, all arose
+from nothing but the want of love. &#8220;Down on
+your knees,&#8221; he exclaimed, &#8220;and ask God&#8217;s mercy
+and pardon; and as ye hope to find it, ask pardon
+one of another for every angry word ye have spoken,
+for every uncharitable thought that has come into
+your minds; and if any man or woman have aught
+against his neighbour, no matter what, let it be
+plucked out of his heart before he laves this place,
+let it be forgotten at the door of this chapel. Let
+me, your pastor, have no more rason to be ashamed
+of you; as if I were set over wild bastes, instead of
+Christian men and women!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>After more in this fervid strain, which I cannot
+recollect, he gave his blessing in the same earnest
+heartfelt manner. I never saw a congregation more
+attentive, more reverent, and apparently more touched
+and edified. (1848.)</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-024.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="87" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">176</a></span></p>
+
+<h4>II.</h4>
+
+<h4><i>From another Roman Catholic Sermon, delivered in
+the private chapel of a Nobleman.</i></h4>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">his</span> Discourse was preached on the festival of
+St. John the Baptist, and was a summary of his
+doctrine, life, and character. The text was taken
+from St. Luke, iii. 9. to 14.; in which St. John
+answers the question of the people, &#8220;what shall we
+do then?&#8221; by a brief exposition of their several
+duties.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;What is most remarkable in all this,&#8221; said the
+priest, &#8220;is truly that there is nothing very remarkable
+in it. The Baptist required from his hearers
+very simple and very familiar duties,&mdash;such as he
+was not the first to preach, such as had been recognised
+as duties by all religions; and do you think
+that those who were neither Jews nor Christians
+were therefore left without any religion? No! never
+did God leave any of his creatures without religion;
+they could not utter the words <i>right</i>, <i>wrong</i>,&mdash;<i>beautiful</i>,
+<i>hateful</i>, without recognising a religion written
+by God on their hearts from the beginning&mdash;a
+religion which existed before the preaching of John,
+before the coming of Christ, and of which the appearance
+of John and the doctrine and sacrifice of Christ,
+were but the fulfilment. For Christ came to <i>fulfil</i>
+the law, not to destroy it. Do you ask what law?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">177</a></span>
+Not the law of Moses, but the universal law of God&#8217;s
+moral truth written in our hearts. It is, my friends,
+a folly to talk of <i>natural</i> religion as of something
+different from <i>revealed</i> religion.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The great proof of the truth of John&#8217;s mission
+lies in its comprehensiveness: men and women, artisans
+and soldiers, the rich and the poor, the young
+and the old, gathered to him in the wilderness;
+and he included all in his teaching, for he was
+sent to all; and the best proof of the truth of his
+teaching lies in its harmony with that law already
+written in the heart and the conscience of men.
+When Christ came afterwards, he preached a doctrine
+more sublime, with a more authoritative voice; but
+here, also, the best proof we have of the truth of
+that divine teaching lies in this&mdash;that he had prepared
+from the beginning the heart and the conscience
+of man to harmonise with it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">This was a very curious sermon; quiet, elegant,
+and learned, with a good deal of sacred and profane
+history introduced in illustration, which I am sorry
+I cannot remember in detail. It made, however, no
+appeal to feeling or to practice; and after listening
+to it, we all went in to luncheon and discussed our
+newspapers.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-024.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="87" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">178</a></span></p>
+
+<h4>III.</h4>
+
+<h4><i>Fragments of a Sermon (Anglican Church).</i></h4>
+
+<p>Text, Luke iv., from the 14th to the 18th, but more
+especially the 18th verse. This sermon was extempore.</p>
+
+<p class="tb"><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> preacher began by observing, that our Lord&#8217;s
+sermon at Nazareth established the second of two
+principles. By his sermon from the Mount, in which
+he had addressed the multitude in the open air, under
+the vault of the blue heaven alone, he has left to us
+the principle that all places are fitted for the service
+of God, and that all places may be sanctified by the
+preaching of his truth. While, by his sermon in the
+Synagogue (that which is recorded by St. Luke in
+this passage), he has established the principle, that it
+is right to set apart a place to assemble together in
+worship and to listen to instruction; and it is observable
+that on this occasion our Saviour taught in
+the synagogue, where there was no sacrifice, no
+ministry of the priests, as in the Temple; but where
+a portion of the law and the prophets might be read
+by any man; and any man, even a stranger (as he
+was himself), might be called upon to expound.</p>
+
+<p>Then reading impressively the whole of the narrative
+down to the 32nd verse, the preacher closed
+the sacred volume, and went on to this effect:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">179</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;There are two orders of evil in the world&mdash;Sin
+and Crime. Of the second, the world takes strict
+cognisance; of the first, it takes comparatively little;
+yet <i>that</i> is worse in the eyes of God. There are two
+orders of temptation: the temptation which assails
+our lower nature&mdash;our appetites; the temptation
+which assails our higher nature&mdash;our intellect. The
+<i>first</i>, leading to sin in the body, is punished in the
+body,&mdash;the consequence being pain, disease, death.
+The <i>second</i>, leading to sins of the soul, as pride
+chiefly, uncharitableness, selfish sacrifice of others to
+our own interests or purposes,&mdash;is punished in the
+soul&mdash;in the <span class="smcap">Hell of the Spirit.&#8221;</span></p>
+
+<p>(All this part of his discourse very beautiful,
+earnest, eloquent; but I regretted that he did not
+follow out the distinction he began with between <i>sin</i>
+and <i>crime</i>, and the views and deductions, religious
+and moral, which that distinction leads to.)</p>
+
+<p>He continued to this effect: &#8220;Christ said that it
+was a part of his mission to heal the broken-hearted.
+What is meant by the phrase &#8216;a broken heart?&#8217;&#8221; He
+illustrated it by the story of Eli, and by the wife of
+Phineas, both of whom died broken in heart; &#8220;and
+our Saviour himself died on the cross heart-broken
+by sorrow rather than by physical torture.&#8221;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>(I lost something here because I was questioning
+and doubting within myself, for I have always had
+the thought that Christ must have been <i>glad</i> to die.)</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">180</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He went on:&mdash;&#8220;To heal the broken-hearted is
+to say to those who are beset by the remembrance
+and the misery of sin, &#8216;My brother, the past is
+past&mdash;think not of it to thy perdition; arise and
+sin no more.&#8217;&#8221; (All this, and more to the same
+purpose, wonderfully beautiful! and I became all
+soul&mdash;subdued to listen.) &#8220;There are two ways of
+meeting the pressure of misery and heart-break:
+first, by trusting to time&#8221; (then followed a quotation
+from Schiller&#8217;s &#8220;Wallenstein,&#8221; in reference to grief,
+which sounded strange, and yet beautiful, from the
+pulpit, &#8220;Was verschmerzte nicht der Mensch?&#8221;&mdash;what
+cannot man grieve down?); &#8220;secondly, by
+defiance and resistance, setting oneself resolutely to
+endure. But Christ taught a different way from
+either&mdash;by <i>submission</i>&mdash;by the complete surrender
+of our whole being to the will of God.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The next part of Christ&#8217;s mission was to preach
+deliverance to the captives.&#8221; (Then followed a most
+eloquent and beautiful exposition of Christian freedom&mdash;of
+who were free; and who were not free, but
+properly spiritual captives.) &#8220;To be content within
+limitations is freedom; to desire beyond those limitations
+is bondage. The bird which is content within
+her cage is free; the bird which can fly from tree to
+tree, yet desires to soar like the eagle,&mdash;the eagle
+which can ascend to the mountain peak yet desires
+to reach the height of that sun on which his eye is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">181</a></span>
+fixed,&mdash;these are in bondage. The man who is not
+content within his sphere of duties and powers, but
+feels his faculties, his position, his profession; a perpetual
+trammel,&mdash;<i>he</i> is spiritually in bondage. The
+only freedom is the freedom of the soul, content
+within its external limitations, and yet elevated spiritually
+far above them by the inward powers and
+impulses which lift it up to God.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-024.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="87" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h4>IV.</h4>
+
+<p><i>Recollections of another Church of England Sermon
+preached extempore.</i></p>
+
+<p class="indent">The text was taken from Matt. xii. 42.: &#8220;The Queen of
+the South shall rise up in the judgment with this generation,
+and shall condemn it,&#8221; &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> preacher began by drawing that distinction
+between knowledge and wisdom which so many
+comprehend and allow, and so few apply. He then
+described the two parties in the great question of
+popular education. Those who would base all human
+progress on secular instruction, on knowledge in
+contradistinction to ignorance, as on light opposed to
+darkness;&mdash;and the mistake of those who, taking the
+contrary extreme, denounce all secular instruction
+imparted to the poor as dangerous, or contemn it as
+useless. The error of those who sneer at the triumph
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">182</a></span>
+of intellect he termed a species of idiocy; and the
+error of those who do not see the insufficiency of
+knowledge, blind presumption. Then he contrasted
+worldly wisdom and spiritual; with a flow of gorgeous
+eloquence he enlarged on the picture of worldly
+wisdom as exhibited in the character of Solomon, and
+of intellect, and admiration for intellect, in the character
+of the Queen of Sheba. &#8220;In what consisted
+the wisdom of Solomon? He made, as the sacred
+history assures us, three thousand proverbs, mostly
+prudential maxims relating to conduct in life; the
+use and abuse of riches; prosperity and adversity.
+His acquirements in natural philosophy seem to
+have been confined to the appearances of material
+and visible things; the herbs and trees, the beasts
+and birds, the creeping things and fishes. His
+political wisdom consisted in increasing his wealth, his
+dominions, and the number of his subjects and cities.
+On his temple he lavished all that art had then
+accomplished, and on his own house a world of riches
+in gold, and silver, and precious things: but all was
+done for his own glory&mdash;nothing for the improvement
+or the happiness of his people, who were ground
+down by taxes, suffered in the midst of all his magnificence,
+and remained ignorant in spite of all his
+knowledge. Witness the wars, tyrannies, miseries,
+delusions, and idolatries which followed after his
+death.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">183</a></span></p>
+
+<p>&#8220;But the Queen of Sheba came not from the
+uttermost parts of the earth to view the magnificence
+and wonder at the greatness of the King, she came
+to hear his wisdom. She came not to ask anything
+from him, but to prove him with hard questions.
+No idea of worldly gain, or selfish ambition was
+in her thoughts; she paid even for the pleasure of
+hearing his wise sayings by rare and costly gifts.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Knowledge is power; but he who worships
+knowledge not for its own sake, but for the power it
+brings, worships power. Knowledge is riches; but
+he who worships knowledge for the sake of all it
+bestows, worships riches. The Queen of Sheba
+worshipped knowledge solely for its own sake; and
+the truths which she sought from the lips of Solomon
+she sought for truth&#8217;s sake. She gave, all she could
+give, in return, the spicy products of her own land,
+treasures of pure gold, and blessings warm from her
+heart. The man who makes a voyage to the antipodes
+only to behold the constellation of the Southern
+Cross, the man who sails to the North to see how the
+magnet trembles and varies, these love knowledge
+for its own sake, and are impelled by the same enthusiasm
+as the Queen of Sheba.&#8221; He went on to
+analyse the character of Solomon, and did not treat
+him, I thought, with much reverence either as sage
+or prophet. He remarked that, &#8220;of the thousand
+songs of Solomon one only survives, and that both
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">184</a></span>
+in this song and in his proverbs his meaning has
+often been mistaken; it is supposed to be spiritual,
+and is interpreted symbolically, when in fact the
+plain, obvious, material significance is the true one.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He continued to this effect,&mdash;but with a power
+of language and illustration which I cannot render.
+&#8220;We see in Solomon&#8217;s own description of his dominion,
+his glory, his wealth, his fame, what his
+boasted wisdom achieved; what it could, and what it
+could not do for him. What was the end of all his
+magnificence? of his worship of the beautiful? of
+his intellectual triumphs? of his political subtlety?
+of his ships, and his commerce, and his chariots, and
+his horses, and his fame which reached to the ends
+of the earth? All&mdash;as it is related&mdash;ended in feebleness,
+in scepticism, in disbelief of happiness, in
+sensualism, idolatry, and dotage! The whole &#8216;Book
+of Ecclesiastes,&#8217; fine as it is, presents a picture of
+selfishness and epicurism. This was the King of
+the Jews! the King of those that know! (<i>Il maestro
+di color chi sanno.</i>) Solomon is a type of worldly
+wisdom, of desire of knowledge for the sake of all
+that knowledge can give. We imitate him when
+we would base the happiness of a people on knowledge.
+When we have commanded the sun to be
+our painter, and the lightning to run on our errands,
+what reward have we? Not the increase of happiness,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">185</a></span>
+nor the increase of goodness; nor&mdash;what is
+next to both&mdash;our faith in both.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It would seem profane to contrast Solomon and
+Christ had not our Saviour himself placed that
+contrast distinctly before us. He consecrated the
+comparison by applying it&mdash;&#8216;Behold a greater than
+Solomon is here.&#8217; In quoting these words we do
+not presume to bring into comparison the two
+<i>natures</i>, but the two intellects&mdash;the two aspects
+of truth. Solomon described the external world;
+Christ taught the moral law. Solomon illustrated
+the aspects of nature; Christ helped the aspirations
+of the spirit. Solomon left as a legacy the saying
+that &#8216;in much wisdom there is much grief;&#8217; and
+Christ preached to us the lowly wisdom which can
+consecrate grief; making it lead to the elevation of
+our whole being and to ultimate happiness. The
+two majesties&mdash;the two kings&mdash;how different! Not
+till we are old, and have suffered, and have laid
+our experience to heart, do we feel the immeasurable
+distance between the teaching of Christ and the
+teaching of Solomon!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then returning to the Queen of Sheba, he treated
+the character as the type of the intellectual woman.
+He contrasted her rather favourably with Solomon.
+He described with picturesque felicity, her long and
+toilsome journey to see, to admire, the man whose
+wisdom had made him renowned;&mdash;the mixture of
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">186</a></span>
+enthusiasm and humility which prompted her desire
+to learn, to prove the truth of what rumour had
+conveyed to her, to commune with him of all that
+was in her heart. And she returned to her own
+country rich in wise sayings. But did the final
+result of all this glory and knowledge reach her
+there? and did it shake her faith in him she had
+bowed to as the wisest of kings and men?</p>
+
+<p>He then contrasted the character of the Queen of
+Sheba with that of Mary, the mother of our Lord,
+that feminine type of holiness, of tenderness, of long-suffering;
+of sinless purity in womanhood, wifehood,
+and motherhood: and rising to more than usual
+eloquence and power, he prophesied the regeneration
+of all human communities through the social elevation,
+the intellect, the purity, and the devotion of
+Woman.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-026.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="188" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">187</a></span></p>
+
+<h4>V.</h4>
+
+<h4><i>From a Sermon (apparently extempore) by a Dissenting
+Minister.</i></h4>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> ascetics of the old times seem to have had a
+belief that all sin was in the body; that the spirit
+belonged to God, and the body to his adversary the
+devil; and that to contemn, ill-treat, and degrade by
+every means this frame of ours, so wonderfully, so
+fearfully, so exquisitely made, was to please the
+Being who made it; and who, for gracious ends, no
+doubt, rendered it capable of such admirable development
+of strength and beauty. Miserable mistake!</p>
+
+<p>To some, this body is as a prison from which we
+are to rejoice to escape by any permitted means: to
+others, it is as a palace to be luxuriously kept up and
+decorated within and without. But what says Paul
+(Cor. vi. 19.),&mdash;&#8220;Know ye not that your body is
+the temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which
+ye have from God, and which is not your own?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Surely not less than a temple is that form which
+the Divine Redeemer took upon him, and deigned,
+for a season, to inhabit; which he consecrated by his
+life, sanctified by his death, glorified by his transfiguration,
+hallowed and beautified by his resurrection!</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">188</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is because they do not recognise <i>this</i> body as a
+temple, built up by God&#8217;s intelligence, as a fitting
+sanctuary for the immortal Spirit, and <i>this</i> life equally
+with any other form of life as dedicate to Him, that
+men fall into such opposite extremes of sin:&mdash;the
+spiritual sin which contemns the body, and the sensual
+sin which misuses it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-073-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="226" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h4>VI.</h4>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">hen</span> I was at Boston I made the acquaintance
+of Father Taylor, the founder of the Sailors&#8217;
+Home in that city. He was considered as the apostle
+of the seamen, and I was full of veneration for him as
+the enthusiastic teacher and philanthropist. But it
+is not of his virtues or his labours that I wish to
+speak. He struck me in another way, <i>as a poet</i>;
+he was a born poet. Until he was five-and-twenty
+he had never learned to read, and his reading afterwards
+was confined to such books as aided him in
+his ministry. He remained an illiterate man to the
+last, but his mind was teeming with spontaneous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">189</a></span>
+imagery, allusion, metaphor. One might almost say
+of him,</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">&#8220;He could not ope</span>
+<span class="i0">His mouth, but out there flew a trope!&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>These images and allusions had a freshness, an originality,
+and sometimes an oddity that was quite startling,
+and they were generally, but not always, borrowed
+from his former profession&mdash;that of a sailor.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">One day we met him in the street. He told us
+in a melancholy voice that he had been burying a
+child, and alluded almost with emotion to the great
+number of infants he had buried lately. Then after
+a pause, striking his stick on the ground and looking
+upwards, he added, &#8220;There must be something wrong
+somewhere! there&#8217;s a storm brewing, when the doves
+are all flying aloft!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">One evening in conversation with me, he compared
+the English and the Americans to Jacob&#8217;s vine, which,
+planted on one side of the wall, grew over it and
+hung its boughs and clusters on the other side,&mdash;&#8220;but
+it is still the same vine, nourished from the same
+root!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">On one occasion when I attended his chapel, the
+sermon was preceded by a long prayer in behalf of
+an afflicted family, one of whose members had died<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">190</a></span>
+or been lost in a whaling expedition to the South
+Seas. In the midst of much that was exquisitely
+pathetic and poetical, refined ears were startled by
+such a sentence as this,&mdash;&#8220;Grant, O Lord! that this
+rod of chastisement be sanctified, every twig of it, to
+the edification of their souls!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Then immediately afterwards he prayed that the
+Divine Comforter might be near the bereaved father
+&#8220;when his aged heart went forth from his bosom to
+flutter round the far southern grave of his boy!&#8221;
+Praying for others of the same family who were on
+the wide ocean, he exclaimed, stretching forth his
+arms, &#8220;O save them! O guard them! thou angel
+of the deep!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">On another occasion, speaking of the insufficiency
+of the moral principles without religious feelings, he
+exclaimed, &#8220;Go heat your ovens with snowballs!
+What! shall I send you to heaven with such an
+icicle in your pocket? I might as well put a millstone
+round your neck to teach you to swim!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">He was preaching against violence and cruelty:&mdash;&#8220;Don&#8217;t
+talk to me,&#8221; said he, &#8220;of the savages! a
+ruffian in the midst of Christendom is the savage of
+savages. He is as a man freezing in the sun&#8217;s heat,
+groping in the sun&#8217;s light, a straggler in paradise, an
+alien in heaven!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">191</a></span></p>
+
+<p>In his chapel all the principal seats in front of the
+pulpit and down the centre aisle were filled by the
+sailors. We ladies, and gentlemen, and strangers,
+whom curiosity had brought to hear him, were ranged
+on each side; he would on no account allow us to
+take the best places. On one occasion, as he was denouncing
+hypocrisy, luxury, and vanity, and other
+vices of more civilised life, he said emphatically, &#8220;I
+don&#8217;t mean <i>you</i> before me here,&#8221; looking at the sailors;
+&#8220;I believe you are wicked enough, but honest fellows
+in some sort, for you profess less, not more,
+than you practise; but I mean to touch <i>starboard</i> and
+<i>larboard</i> there!&#8221; stretching out both hands with
+the forefinger extended, and looking at us on either
+side till we quailed.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">He compared the love of God in sending Christ
+upon earth to that of the father of a seaman who
+sends his eldest and most beloved son, the hope of
+the family, to bring back the younger one, lost on his
+voyage, and missing when his ship returned to port.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Alluding to the carelessness of Christians, he used
+the figure of a mariner, steering into port through a
+narrow dangerous channel, &#8220;false lights here, rocks
+there, shifting sand banks on one side, breakers on
+the other; and who, instead of fixing his attention to
+keep the head of his vessel right, and to obey the
+instructions of the pilot as he sings out from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">192</a></span>
+wheel, throws the pilot overboard, lashes down the
+helm, and walks the deck whistling, with his hands
+in the pockets of his jacket.&#8221; Here, suiting the action
+to the word, he put on a true sailor-like look of defiant
+jollity;&mdash;changed in a moment to an expression
+of horror as he added, &#8220;See! See! she drifts
+to destruction!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">One Sunday he attempted to give to his sailor congregation
+an idea of Redemption. He began with an
+eloquent description of a terrific storm at sea, rising
+to fury through all its gradations; then, amid the
+waves, a vessel is seen labouring in distress and
+driving on a lee shore. The masts bend and break,
+and go overboard; the sails are rent, the helm unshipped,
+they spring a leak! the vessel begins to fill,
+the water gains on them; she sinks deeper, deeper,
+<i>deeper! deeper!</i> He bent over the pulpit repeating
+the last words again and again; his voice became low
+and hollow. The faces of the sailors as they gazed
+up at him with their mouths wide open, and their
+eyes fixed, I shall never forget. Suddenly stopping,
+and looking to the farthest end of the chapel as into
+space, he exclaimed, with a piercing cry of exultation,
+&#8220;A life boat! a life boat!&#8221; Then looking down
+upon his congregation, most of whom had sprung to
+their feet in an ecstasy of suspense, he said in a deep
+impressive tone, and extending his arms, &#8220;<i>Christ is
+that life boat!</i>&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">193</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-027.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="132" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h4>VII.</h4>
+
+<h5>RELIGION AND SCIENCE.</h5>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is true, that science has not made Nature as
+expressive of God in the first instance, or to the beginner
+in religion, as it was in earlier times. Science
+reveals a rigid, immutable order; and this to common
+minds looks much like self-subsistence, and does not
+manifest intelligence, which is full of life, variety,
+and progressive operation. Men, in the days of
+their ignorance, saw an immediate Divinity accomplishing
+an immediate purpose, or expressing an immediate
+feeling, in every sudden, striking change of
+nature&mdash;in a storm, the flight of a bird, &amp;c.; and
+Nature, thus interpreted, became the sign of a present,
+deeply interested Deity. Science undoubtedly
+brings vast aids, but it is to <i>prepared</i> minds, to those
+who have begun in another school. The greatest aid
+it yields consists in the revelation it makes of the
+Infinite. It aids us not so much by showing us
+marks of design in this or that particular thing as by
+showing the <i>Infinite</i> in the <i>finite</i>. Science does this
+office when it unfolds to us the unity of the universe,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">194</a></span>
+which thus becomes the sign, the efflux of one unbounded
+intelligence, when it reveals to us in every
+work of Nature infinite connections, the influences of
+all-pervading laws&mdash;when it shows us in each created
+thing unfathomable, unsearchable depths, to which
+our intelligence is altogether unequal. Thus Nature
+explored by science is a witness of the Infinite. It
+is also a witness to the same truth by its beauty; for
+what is so undefined, so mysterious as beauty?&#8221;&mdash;<i>Dr.
+Channing.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-194.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="458" width="400" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">195</a></span></p>
+
+<h4>PART II.</h4>
+
+<h4><span class="oldtype">Literature and Art.</span></h4>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">196</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-196.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="416" width="500" /></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">197</a></span></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-013-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="185" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h4><span class="oldtype">Notes from Books.</span></h4>
+
+<h5>1.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;A</span> <span class="smcap">great</span> advantage is derived from the occasional
+practice of reading together, for each person
+selects different beauties and starts different objections:
+while the same passage perhaps awakens in each
+mind a different train of associated ideas, or raises
+different images for the purposes of illustration.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Francis
+Horner.</i></p>
+
+<h5>2.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;C</span><span class="smcap">&#8217;est</span> ainsi que je poursuis la communication de
+quelque esprit fameux, non afin qu&#8217;il m&#8217;enseigne
+mais afin que je le connaisse, et que le connaissant,
+s&#8217;il le faut, je l&#8217;imite.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Montaigne.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">198</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-060-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="151" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h4>DR. ARNOLD.</h4>
+
+<h5>3.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">sat</span> up till half-past two this morning reading
+Dr. Arnold&#8217;s &#8220;Life and Letters,&#8221; and have my
+soul full of him to-day.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole I cannot say that the perusal of this
+admirable book has changed any notion in my mind,
+or added greatly to my stock of ideas. There was
+no height of inspiration, or eloquence, or power, to
+which I looked <i>up</i>; no profound depth of thought
+or feeling into which I looked <i>down</i>; no <i>new</i> lights;
+no <i>new</i> guides; no absolutely <i>new</i> aspects of things
+human or spiritual.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, I never read a book of the
+kind with a more harmonious sense of pleasure and
+<i>approbation</i>,&mdash;if the word be not from me presumptuous.
+While I read page after page, the
+mind which was unfolded before me seemed to me a
+brother&#8217;s mind&mdash;the spirit, a kindred spirit. It was
+the improved, the elevated, the enlarged, the enriched,
+the every-way superior reflection of my own
+intelligence, but it was certainly <i>that</i>. I felt it so
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">199</a></span>
+from beginning to end. Exactly the reverse was the
+feeling with which I laid down the Life and Letters
+of Southey. I was instructed, amused, interested;
+I profited and admired; but with the <i>man</i> Southey
+I had no sympathies: my mind stood off from his;
+the poetical intellect attracted, the material of the
+character repelled me. I liked the embroidery, but
+the texture was disagreeable, repugnant. Now with
+regard to Dr. Arnold, my entire sympathy with
+the character, with the <i>material</i> of the character, did
+not extend to all its manifestations. I liked the texture
+better than the embroidery;&mdash;perhaps, because
+of my feminine organisation.</p>
+
+<p>Nor did my admiration of the intellect extend to
+the acceptance of <i>all</i> the opinions which emanated
+from it; perhaps because from the manner these
+were enunciated, or merely touched upon (in letters
+chiefly), I did not comprehend clearly the reasoning
+on which they may have been founded. Perhaps, if
+I had done so, I must have respected them more,
+perhaps have been convinced by them; so large, so
+candid, so rich in knowledge, and apparently so
+logical, was the mind which admitted them.</p>
+
+<p>And yet this excellent, admirable man, seems to
+have <i>feared</i> God, in the common-place sense of the
+word fear. He considered the Jews as out of the pale
+of equality; he was against their political emancipation
+from a hatred of Judaism. He subscribed to the
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">200</a></span>
+Athanasian Creed, which stuck even in George the
+Third&#8217;s orthodox throat. He believed in what Coleridge
+could not admit, in the existence of the spirit
+of evil as a person. He had an idea that the Church
+<i>of God</i> may be destroyed by an Antichrist; he speaks
+of such a consummation as possible, as probable,
+as impending; as if any institution really from God
+could be destroyed by an adverse power!&mdash;and he
+thought that a lawyer could not be a Christian.</p>
+
+<h5>4.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span><span class="smcap">ertain</span> passages filled me with astonishment as
+coming from a churchman, particularly what he
+says of the sacraments (vol. ii. pp. 75. 113.); and in
+another place, where he speaks of &#8220;the <i>pestilent</i> distinction
+between clergy and laity;&#8221; and where he says,
+&#8220;I hold that one form of Church government is exactly
+as much according to Christ&#8217;s will as another.&#8221; And
+in another place he speaks of the Anglican Church
+(with reference to Henry VIII. as its father, and
+Elizabeth as its foster-mother), as &#8220;the child of regal
+and aristocratical selfishness and unprincipled tyranny,
+who has never dared to speak boldly to the great,
+but has contented herself with lecturing the poor;&#8221;
+but he forgot at the moment the trial of the bishops
+in James&#8217;s time, and their noble stand against regal
+authority.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">201</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>5.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">ith</span> regard to conservatism (vol. ii. pp. 19. 62.),
+he seems to mean&mdash;as I understand the whole
+passage,&mdash;that it is a good <i>instinct</i> but a bad <i>principle</i>.
+Yet as a principle is it, as he says, &#8220;always wrong?&#8221;
+Though as the adversary of progress, it must be
+always wrong, yet as the adversary of change it <i>may</i>
+be sometimes right.</p>
+
+<h5>6.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> remarks that most of those who are above
+sectarianism are in general indifferent to Christianity,
+while almost all who profess to value Christianity
+seem, when they are brought to the test, to
+care only for their own sect. &#8220;Now,&#8221; he adds, &#8220;it
+is manifest to me, that all our education must be
+Christian, and not be sectarian.&#8221; Yet the whole aim
+of education up to this time has been, in this country,
+eminently sectarian, and every statesman who has attempted
+to place it on a broader basis has been either
+wrecked or stranded.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;All sects,&#8221; he says in another place, &#8220;have had
+among them marks of Christ&#8217;s Catholic Church in the
+graces of his Spirit and the confession of his name,&#8221;
+and he seems to wish that some one would compile a
+book showing side by side what professors of all sects
+have done for the good of Christ&#8217;s Church,&mdash;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">202</a></span>
+martyrdoms, the missionary labours of Catholics,
+Protestants, Arians, &amp;c.; &#8220;a grand field,&#8221; he calls
+it,&mdash;and so it were; but it lies fallow up to this
+time.</p>
+
+<h5>7.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> philosophy of medicine, I imagine, is at zero;
+our practice is empirical, and seems hardly more
+than a course of guessing, more or less happy.&#8221; In
+another place (vol. ii. p. 72.), he says, &#8220;yet I honour
+medicine as the most beneficent of all professions.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>8.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> says (vol. ii. p. 42.), &#8220;Narrow-mindedness tends
+to wickedness, because it does not extend its
+watchfulness to every part of our moral nature.&#8221;
+&#8220;Thus, a man may have one or more virtues, such
+as are according to his favourite ideas, in great perfection;
+and still be nothing, because these ideas are
+his idols, and, worshipping them with all his heart,
+there is a portion of his heart, more or less considerable,
+left without its proper object, guide, and
+nourishment; and so this portion is left to the
+dominion of evil,&#8221; &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>(One might ask <i>how</i>, if a man worship these ideas
+with <i>all</i> his heart, a portion could be left? but the
+sense is so excellent, I cannot quarrel with a slight
+inaccuracy in the expression. I never quite understood
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">203</a></span>
+before why it is difficult to subscribe to the
+truth of the phrase &#8220;He is a good but a narrow-minded
+man,&#8221; but <i>felt</i> the incompatibility.)</p>
+
+<h5>9.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> says &#8220;the word <i>useful</i> implies the idea of good
+robbed of its nobleness.&#8221; Is this true? the <i>useful</i>
+is the <i>good</i> applied to practical purposes; it need not,
+therefore, be less noble. The nobleness lies in the
+spirit in which it is so applied.</p>
+
+<h5>10.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">B</span><span class="smcap">enthamism</span> (what <i>is</i> it?), Puritanism, Judaism,
+how he hates them! I suppose, because he
+<i>fears</i> God and <i>fears</i> for the Church of God. Hatred
+of all kinds seems to originate in fear.</p>
+
+<h5>11.</h5>
+
+<p>What he says of conscience, very remarkable!</p>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;M</span><span class="smcap">en</span> get embarrassed by the common cases
+of a misguided conscience: but a compass may be out
+of order as well as a conscience; and you can trace
+the deranging influence on the latter quite as surely
+as on the former. The needle may point due south
+if you hold a powerful magnet in that direction; still
+the compass, generally speaking, is a true and sure
+guide,&#8221; &amp;c.; and then he adds, &#8220;he who believes his
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">204</a></span>
+conscience to be God&#8217;s law, by obeying it obeys
+God.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I think there would be much to say about all this
+passage relating to conscience, nor am I sure that I
+quite understand it. Derangement of the intellect
+is madness; is not derangement of the conscience
+also madness? might it not be induced, as we bring
+on a morbid state of the other faculties, by over use
+and abuse? by giving it more than its due share of
+power in the commonwealth of the mind? It should
+preside, not tyrannise; rule, not exercise a petty
+cramping despotism. A healthy courageous conscience
+gives to the powers, instincts, impulses, fair
+play; and having once settled the order of government
+with a strong hand, is not always meddling
+though always watchful.</p>
+
+<p>Then again, how is conscience &#8220;God&#8217;s law?&#8221;
+Conscience is not the law, but the interpreter of the
+law; it does not teach the difference between right
+and wrong, it only impels us to do what we believe
+to be right, and smites us when we <i>think</i> we have
+been wrong. How is it that many have done wrong,
+and every day do wrong for conscience&#8217; sake?&mdash;and
+does that sanctify the wrong in the eyes of God, as
+well as in those of John Huss?<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">1</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">205</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>12.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;P</span><span class="smcap">rayer,&#8221;</span> he says, &#8220;and kindly intercourse with
+the poor, are the two great safeguards of
+spiritual life&mdash;its more than food and raiment.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>True; but there is something higher than this fed
+and clothed spiritual life; something more difficult,
+yet less conscious.</p>
+
+<h5>13.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">n</span> allusion to Coleridge, he says very truly, that
+the power of contemplation becomes diseased
+and perverted when it is the main employment of
+life. But to the same great intellect he does beautiful
+justice in another passage. &#8220;Coleridge seemed
+to me to love truth really, and, therefore, truth presented
+herself to him, not negatively, as she does
+to many minds, who can see that the objections
+against her are unfounded, and therefore that she is
+to be received; but she filled him, as it were, heart
+and mind, imbuing him with her very self, so that
+all his being comprehended her fully, and loved her
+ardently; and that seems to me to be true wisdom.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>14.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">V</span><span class="smcap">ery</span> fine is a passage wherein he speaks against
+meeting what is wrong and bad with negatives,
+with merely proving the wrong to be wrong, and the
+false to be false, without substituting for either the
+positively good and true.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">206</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>15.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> contrasts as the two forms of the present danger
+to the Church and to society, the prevalent
+epicurean atheism, and the lying and formal spirit of
+priestcraft. He seems to have had an impression that
+the Church of God may be &#8220;utterly destroyed&#8221;(?),
+or, he asks, &#8220;must we look forward for centuries to
+come to the mere alternations of infidelity and superstition,
+scepticism, and Newmanism?&#8221; It is very
+curious to see two such men as Arnold and Carlyle
+both overwhelmed with a terror of the magnitude of
+the mischiefs they see impending over us. They are
+oppressed with the anticipation of evil as with a sense
+of personal calamity. Something alike, perhaps, in
+the temperaments of these two extraordinary men;&mdash;large
+conscientiousness, large destructiveness, and
+small hope: there was great mutual sympathy and
+admiration.</p>
+
+<h5>16.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">V</span><span class="smcap">ery</span> admirable what he says in favour of comprehensive
+reading, against exclusive reading in one
+line of study. He says, &#8220;Preserve proportion in
+your reading, keep your view of men and things extensive,
+and depend upon it a mixed knowledge is
+not a superficial one; as far as it goes the views that
+it gives are true; but he who reads deeply in one
+class of writers only, gets views which are almost
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">207</a></span>
+sure to be perverted, and which are not only <i>narrow
+but false</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-029-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="136" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>17.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="smcap">ll</span> his descriptions of natural scenery and beauty
+show his intense sensibility to them, but nowhere
+is there a trace of the love or the comprehension
+of art, as the reflection from the mind of man
+of the nature and the beauty he so loved. Thus,
+after dwelling on a scene of exquisite natural
+beauty, he says, &#8220;Much more beautiful, because
+made truly after God&#8217;s own image, are the forms and
+colours of kind, and wise, and holy thoughts, words,
+and actions;&#8221; that is to say&mdash;although he knew not
+or made not the application&mdash;<span class="smcap">Art</span>, in the high
+sense of the word, for that is the embodying in beautiful
+hues and forms, what is kind, wise, and holy;
+in one word&mdash;<i>good</i>. In fact, he says himself, art,
+physical science, and natural history, were not included
+within the reach of his mind; the first for
+want of taste, the second for want of time, and the
+third for want of inclination.</p>
+
+<h5>18.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> says, &#8220;The whole subject of the brute creation
+is to me one of such painful mystery, that I dare<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">208</a></span>
+not approach it.&#8221; This is very striking from such a
+man. How deep, consciously or unconsciously, does
+this feeling lie in many minds!</p>
+
+<p>Bayle had already termed the acts, motives, and
+feelings of the lower order of animals, &#8220;un des
+plus profonds ab&icirc;mes sur quoi notre raison peut
+s&#8217;exerciser.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing, as I have sometimes thought, in
+which men so blindly sin as in their appreciation and
+treatment of the whole lower order of creatures. It
+is affirmed that love and mercy towards animals are
+not inculcated by any direct precept of Christianity,
+but surely they are included in its spirit; yet it has
+been remarked that cruelty towards animals is far
+more common in Western Christendom than in the
+East. With the Mahometan and Brahminical races
+humanity to animals, and the sacredness of life in all
+its forms, is much more of a religious principle than
+among ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>Bacon, in his &#8220;Advancement of Learning,&#8221; does
+not think it beneath his philosophy to point out as a
+part of human morals, and a condition of human improvement,
+justice and mercy to the lower animals&mdash;&#8220;the
+extension of a noble and excellent principle of
+compassion to the creatures subject to man.&#8221; &#8220;The
+Turks,&#8221; he says, &#8220;though a cruel and sanguinary
+nation both in descent and discipline, give alms to
+brutes, and suffer them not to be tortured.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">209</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It should seem as if the primitive Christians, by
+laying so much stress upon a future life in contradistinction
+to this life, and placing the lower
+creatures out of the pale of hope, placed them at the
+same time out of the pale of sympathy, and thus laid
+the foundation for this utter disregard of animals in
+the light of our fellow creatures. The definition of
+virtue among the early Christians was the same as
+Paley&#8217;s&mdash;that it was good performed for the sake of
+ensuring everlasting happiness&mdash;which of course
+excluded all the so-called brute creatures. Kind,
+loving, submissive, conscientious, much enduring, we
+know them to be; but because we deprive them of
+all stake in the future, because they have no selfish
+calculated aim, these are not virtues; yet if we say
+&#8220;a <i>vicious</i> horse,&#8221; why not say a <i>virtuous</i> horse?</p>
+
+<p>The following passage, bearing curiously enough
+on the most abstruse part of the question, I found in
+Hallam&#8217;s Literature of the Middle Ages:&mdash;&#8220;Few,&#8221;
+he says, &#8220;at present, who believe in the immateriality
+of the human soul, would deny the same to
+an elephant; but it must be owned that the discoveries
+of zoology have pushed this to consequences
+which some might not readily adopt. The spiritual
+being of a sponge revolts a little our prejudices; yet
+there is no resting-place, and we must admit this, or
+be content to sink ourselves into a mass of medullary
+fibre. Brutes have been as slowly emancipated in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">210</a></span>
+philosophy as some classes of mankind have been in
+civil polity; their souls, we see, were almost universally
+disputed to them at the end of the seventeenth
+century, even by those who did not absolutely
+bring them down to machinery. Even within the
+recollection of many, it was common to deny them
+any kind of reasoning faculty, and to solve their
+most sagacious actions by the vague word instinct.
+We have come of late years to think better of our
+humble companions; and, as usual in similar cases,
+the preponderant bias seems rather too much of a
+levelling character.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>When natural philosophers speak of &#8220;the higher
+reason and more limited instincts of man,&#8221; as compared
+with animals, do they mean savage man or
+cultivated man? In the savage man the instincts
+have a power, a range, a certitude, like those of
+animals. As the mental faculties become expanded
+and refined the instincts become subordinate. In
+tame animals are the instincts as strong as in wild
+animals? Can we not, by a process of training, substitute
+an entirely different set of motives and
+habits?</p>
+
+<p>Why, in managing animals, do men in general
+make brutes of themselves to address what is most
+<i>brute</i> in the lower creature, as if it had not been
+demonstrated that in using our higher faculties, our
+reason and benevolence, we develop sympathetically
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">211</a></span>
+higher powers in <i>them</i>, and in subduing them through
+what is best within us, raise them and bring them
+nearer to ourselves?</p>
+
+<p>In general the more we can gather of facts, the
+nearer we are to the elucidation of theoretic truth.
+But with regard to animals, the multiplication of
+facts only increases our difficulties and puts us to
+confusion.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Can we otherwise explain animal instincts than
+by supposing that the Deity himself is virtually the
+active and present moving principle within them?
+If we deny them <i>soul</i>, we must admit that they have
+some spirit direct from God, what we call <i>unerring</i>
+instinct, which holds the place of it.&#8221; This is the
+opinion which Newton adopts. Then are we to
+infer that the reason of man removes him further
+from God than the animals, since we cannot offend
+God in our instincts, only in our reason? and that
+the superiority of the human animal lies in the power
+of sinning? Terrible power! terrible privilege! out
+of which we deduce the law of progress and the
+necessity for a future life.</p>
+
+<p>The following passage bearing on the subject is
+from Bentham:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The day may come when the rest of the animal
+creation may acquire those rights which never could
+have been withholden from them but by the hand of
+tyranny. It may come one day to be recognised
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">212</a></span>
+that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or
+the termination of the <i>os sacrum</i>, are reasons insufficient
+for abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice
+of a tormentor. What else is it that should trace
+the insuperable line? is it the faculty of reason, or,
+perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown
+horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational as
+well as a more conversable animal than an infant of
+a day, a week, or even a month old. But suppose
+the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The
+question is not, &#8216;can they reason?&#8217; nor &#8216;can they
+speak?&#8217; but &#8216;can they suffer?&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I do not remember ever to have heard the kind
+and just treatment of animals enforced upon Christian
+principles or made the subject of a sermon.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 450px;"><img src="images/illus-077-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="213" width="450" /></div>
+
+<h5>19.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">O</span><span class="smcap">nce</span>, when I was at Vienna, there was a dread
+of hydrophobia, and orders were given to
+massacre all the dogs which were found unclaimed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">213</a></span>
+or uncollared in the city or suburbs. Men were employed
+for this purpose, and they generally carried
+a short heavy stick, which they flung at the poor
+proscribed animal with such certain aim as either
+to kill or maim it mortally at one blow. It
+happened one day that, close to the edge of the river,
+near the Ferdinand&#8217;s-Br&uuml;cke, one of these men
+flung his stick at a wretched dog, but with such bad
+aim that it fell into the river. The poor animal,
+following his instinct or his teaching, immediately
+plunged in, redeemed the stick, and laid it down at
+the feet of its owner, who, snatching it up, dashed
+out the creature&#8217;s brains.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder what the Athenians would have done to
+such a man? they who banished the judge of the
+Areopagus because he flung away the bird which
+had sought shelter in his bosom?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-040-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="149" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>20.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">return</span> to Dr. Arnold. He laments the neglect
+of our cathedrals and the absurd confusion in
+so many men&#8217;s minds &#8220;between what is really<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">214</a></span>
+Popery, and what is but wisdom and beauty adopted
+by the Roman Catholics and neglected by us.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>21.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> says, &#8220;Then, only, can opportunities of evil
+be taken from us, when we lose also all opportunity
+of doing or becoming good.&#8221; An obvious,
+even common place thought, well and tersely expressed.
+The inextricable co-relation and apparent
+antagonism of good and evil were never more
+strongly put.</p>
+
+<h5>22.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> defeat of Varus by the Germans, and the defeat
+of the moors by Charles Martel, he ranked
+as the two most important battles in the history of
+the world. I see why. The first, because it decided
+whether the north of Europe was to be completely
+Latinised; the second, because it decided
+whether all Europe was to be completely Mahomedanised.</p>
+
+<h5>23.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;H</span><span class="smcap">ow</span> can he who labours hard for his daily
+bread&mdash;hardly and with doubtful success&mdash;be
+made wise and good, and therefore how can
+he be made happy? This question undoubtedly the
+Church was meant to solve; for Christ&#8217;s kingdom
+was to undo the evil of Adam&#8217;s sin; but the Church
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">215</a></span>
+has not solved it nor attempted to do so, and no one
+else has gone about it rightly. How shall the poor
+man find time to be educated?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This question, which &#8220;the Church has not yet
+solved,&#8221; men have now set their wits to solve for
+themselves.</p>
+
+<h5>24.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">hen</span> in Italy he writes:&mdash;&#8220;It is almost awful
+to look at the beauty which surrounds me and
+then think of moral evil. It seems as if heaven and
+hell, instead of being separated by a great gulf from
+us and from each other, were close at hand and on
+each other&#8217;s confines.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Might but the sense of moral evil be as strong
+in me as is my delight in external beauty!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A prayer I echo, Amen! if by the <i>sense</i> he mean
+the abhorrence of it; otherwise, to be perpetually
+haunted with the perception of moral evil were
+dreadful; yet, on the other hand, I am half ashamed
+sometimes of a conscious shrinking within myself
+from the sense of moral evil, merely as I should
+shrink from external filth and deformity, as hateful
+to perception and recollection, rather than as hateful
+to God and subversive of goodness.</p>
+
+<h5>25.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">ere</span> is a very striking passage. He says, &#8220;A
+great school is very trying; it never can pre<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">216</a></span>sent
+images of rest and peace; and when the spring
+and activity of youth are altogether unsanctified by
+anything pure and elevated in its desires, it becomes
+a spectacle that is dizzying and almost more morally
+distressing than the shouts and gambols of a set of
+lunatics. It is very startling to see so much of sin
+combined with so little of sorrow. In a parish,
+amongst the poor, whatever of sin exists there is sure
+also to be enough of suffering: poverty, sickness, and
+old age are mighty tamers and chastisers. But, with
+boys of the richer classes, one sees nothing but
+plenty, health, and youth; and these are really awful
+to behold, when one must feel that they are unblessed.
+On the other hand, few things are more
+beautiful than when one does see all holy and noble
+thoughts and principles, not the forced growth of
+pain, or infirmity, or privation, but springing up as
+by God&#8217;s immediate planting, in a sort of garden of
+all that is fresh and beautiful; full of so much hope
+for this world as well as for heaven.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>To this testimony of a schoolmaster let us add the
+testimony of a schoolboy. De Quincey thus describes
+in himself the transition from boyhood to manhood:
+&#8220;Then first and suddenly were brought powerfully
+before me the change which was worked in the
+aspects of society by the presence of woman; woman,
+pure, thoughtful, noble, coming before me as Pandora
+crowned with perfections. Right over against this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">217</a></span>
+ennobling spectacle, with equal suddenness, I placed
+the odious spectacle of schoolboy society&mdash;no matter
+in what region of the earth,&mdash;schoolboy society, so
+frivolous in the matter of its disputes, often so
+brutal in the manner; so childish and yet so remote
+from simplicity; so foolishly careless, and yet so
+revoltingly selfish; dedicated ostensibly to learning,
+and yet beyond any section of human beings so conspicuously
+ignorant.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There is a reverse to this picture, as I hope and
+believe. If I have met with those who looked back
+on their school-days with horror, as having first contaminated
+them with &#8220;evil communication,&#8221; I have
+met with others whose remembrances were all of
+sunshine, of early friendships, of joyous sports.</p>
+
+<p>Nor do I think that a large school composed
+wholly of girls is in any respect better. In the low
+languid tone of mind, the petulant tempers, the
+small spitefulnesses, the cowardly concealments, the
+compressed or ill-directed energies, the precocious
+vanities and affectations, many such congregations of
+<i>Femmelettes</i> would form a worthy pendant to the picture
+of boyish turbulence and vulgarity drawn by
+De Quincey.</p>
+
+<p>I am convinced from my own recollections, and
+from all I have learned from experienced teachers in
+large schools, that one of the most fatal mistakes in
+the training of children has been the too early separation
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">218</a></span>
+of the sexes. I say, <i>has been</i>, because I find
+that everywhere this most dangerous prejudice has
+been giving way before the light of truth and a more
+general acquaintance with that primal law of nature,
+which ought to teach us that the more we can assimilate
+on a large scale the public to the domestic training,
+the better for all. There exists still, the impression&mdash;in
+the higher classes especially&mdash;that in
+early education, the mixture of the two sexes would
+tend to make the girls masculine and the boys effeminate,
+but experience shows us that it is all the
+other way. Boys learn a manly and protecting tenderness,
+and the girls become at once more feminine
+and more truthful. Where this association has
+begun early enough, that is, before five years old,
+and has been continued till about ten or twelve, it
+has uniformly worked well; on this point the evidence
+is unanimous and decisive. So long ago as
+1812, Francis Horner, in describing a school he
+visited at Enmore, near Bridgewater, speaks with
+approbation of the boys and the girls standing up
+together in the same class: it is the first mention, I
+find, of this innovation on the old collegiate, or
+charity-school plan,&mdash;itself a continuation of the
+monkish discipline. He says, &#8220;I liked much the
+placing the boys and girls together at an early age;
+it gave the boys a new spur to emulation.&#8221; When
+I have seen a class of girls stand up together, there
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">219</a></span>
+has been a sort of empty tittering, a vacancy in the
+faces, an inertness, which made it, as I thought, very
+up-hill work for the teacher; so when it was a class
+of boys, there has been often a sluggishness&mdash;a tendency
+to ruffian tricks&mdash;requiring perpetual effort on
+the part of the master. In teaching a class of boys
+and girls, accustomed to stand up together, there is
+little or nothing of this. They are brighter, readier,
+better behaved; there is a kind of mutual influence
+working for good; and if there be emulation, it is
+not mingled with envy or jealousy. Mischief, such
+as might be apprehended, is in this case far less
+likely to arise than where boys and girls, habitually
+separated from infancy, are first thrown together,
+just at the age when the feelings are first awakened
+and the association has all the excitement of novelty.
+A very intelligent schoolmaster assured me that he
+had had more trouble with a class of fifty boys, than
+with a school of three hundred boys and girls together
+(in the midst of whom I found him); and that
+there were no inconveniences resulting which a wise
+and careful and efficient superintendence could not
+control. &#8220;There is,&#8221; said he, &#8220;not only more emulation,
+more quickness of brain, but altogether a
+superior healthiness of tone, body and mind, where
+the boys and girls are trained together till about ten
+years old; and it extends into their after life:&mdash;I
+should say because it is in accordance with the laws
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">220</a></span>
+of God in forming us with mutual sympathies, moral
+and intellectual, and mutual dependence for help
+from the very beginning of life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>What is curious enough, I find many people&mdash;fathers,
+mothers, teachers,&mdash;who are agreed that in
+the schools for the lower classes, the two sexes may
+be safely and advantageously associated, yet have a
+sort of horror of the idea of such an innovation in
+schools for the higher classes. One would like to
+know the reason for such a distinction, instead of
+being encountered, as is usual, by a sneer or a vile
+innuendo.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-064.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="258" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h4>NIEBUHR.</h4>
+
+<h5>LIFE AND LETTERS, 1852.</h5>
+
+<h5>26.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">n</span> a letter to a young student in philology there are
+noble passages in which I truly sympathise. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">221</a></span>
+says, among other things: &#8220;I wish you had less
+pleasure in satires, not excepting those of Horace.
+Turn to the works which elevate the heart, in which
+you contemplate great men and great events, and
+live in a higher world. Turn away from those which
+represent the mean and contemptible side of ordinary
+circumstances and degenerate days: they are not
+suitable for the young, who in ancient times would
+not have been suffered to have them in their hands.
+Homer, &AElig;schylus, Sophocles, Pindar,&mdash;these are
+the poets for youth.&#8221; And again: &#8220;Do not read
+the ancient authors in order to make &aelig;sthetic reflections
+on them, but in order to drink in their spirit
+and to fill your soul with their thoughts; and in
+order to gain that by reading which you would have
+gained by reverently listening to the discourses of
+great men.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>We should turn to works of art with the same
+feeling.</p>
+
+<p>On the whole, all my own educational experience
+has shown me the dangerous&mdash;in some cases fatal&mdash;effects
+on the childish intellect, where precocious
+criticism was encouraged, and where caricatures and
+ugly disproportioned figures, expressing vile or ridiculous
+emotions, were placed before the eyes of
+children, as a means of amusement.</p>
+
+<p>If I were a legislator I would forbid travesties and
+ridiculous burlesques of Shakspeare&#8217;s finest and most
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">222</a></span>
+serious dramas to be acted in our theatres. That
+this has been done and recently (as in the case of the
+Merchant of Venice) seems to me a national disgrace.</p>
+
+<h5>27.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> is strange, confounding, to hear Niebuhr speak
+thus of Goethe:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I am inclined to think that Goethe is utterly
+destitute of susceptibility to impressions from the fine
+arts.&#8221;(!!) He afterwards does more justice to Goethe&mdash;certainly
+one of the profoundest critics in art who
+ever lived; although I am inclined to think that
+his was an educated perception rather than a natural
+sensibility. Niebuhr&#8217;s criticism on Goethe&#8217;s Italian
+travels,&mdash;on Goethe&#8217;s want of sympathy with the
+people,&mdash;his regarding the whole country and nation
+simply as a sort of bazaar of art and antiquities,
+an exhibition of beauty and a recreation for himself:
+his habit of surveying all moral and intellectual greatness,
+all that speaks to the heart, with a kind of
+patronising superiority, as if created for his use,&mdash;and
+finding amusement in the folly, degeneracy, and
+corruption of the people;&mdash;all this appears to me
+admirable, and so far I had strong sympathy with
+Niebuhr; for I well remember that in reading
+Goethe&#8217;s &#8220;Italianische Reise,&#8221; I had the same perception
+of the artless and the superficial in point
+of feeling, in the midst of so much that was fine and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">223</a></span>
+valuable in criticism. It is well to be artistic in art,
+but not to walk about the world <i>en artiste</i>, studying
+humanity, and the deepest human interests, as if they
+were <i>art</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Niebuhr afterwards says, in speaking of Rome,
+&#8220;I am sickened here of art, as I should be of sweetmeats
+instead of bread.&#8221; So it <i>must</i> be where art is
+separated wholly from morals.</p>
+
+<h5>28.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> speaks of the &#8220;wretched superstition,&#8221; and the
+&#8220;utter incapacity for piety&#8221; in the people of
+the Roman States.</p>
+
+<p>Superstition and the want of piety go together;
+and the combination is not peculiar to the Italians,
+nor to the Roman Catholic faith.</p>
+
+<h5>29.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">n</span> speaking of the education of his son, he deprecates
+the learning by rote of hymns. &#8220;To a
+happy child, hymns deploring the misery of human
+life are without meaning.&#8221; (And worse.) &#8220;So likewise
+to a good child are those expressing self-accusation
+and contrition.&#8221; (He might have added, and
+self-applause.)</p>
+
+<p>I am quite sure, from my own experience of
+children who have been allowed to learn penitential<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">224</a></span>
+psalms and hymns, that they think of wickedness as
+a sort of thing which gives them self-importance.</p>
+
+<h5>30.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;O</span><span class="smcap">nly</span> what the mind takes in willingly can it
+assimilate with itself, and make its own, part
+of its life.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A truism of the greatest value in education; but
+who thinks of it when cramming children&#8217;s minds
+with all sorts of distasteful heterogeneous things?</p>
+
+<h5>31.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;W</span><span class="smcap">hen</span> reflection has become too one-sided and
+too domineering over a deeply feeling heart,
+it is apt to lead us into errors in our treatment of
+others.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And all that follows&mdash;very wise! for the want of
+this reflection leaves us stranded and wrecked through
+feeling and perception merely.</p>
+
+<h5>32.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">V</span><span class="smcap">ery</span> curious and interesting, as a trait of character
+and feeling, is the passage in which he
+represents himself, in the dangerous confinement of
+his second wife, as praying to his first wife for
+succour. &#8220;In my terrible anxiety,&#8221; he says, &#8220;I
+prayed most earnestly, and entreated my Milly, too,
+for help. I comforted Gretchen by telling her that
+Milly would send help. When she was at the worst,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">225</a></span>
+she sighed out, &#8216;Ah, cannot your Amelia send me a
+blessing?&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This is curious from a Protestant and a philosopher.
+It shows that there may be something
+nearly allied to our common nature in the Roman
+Catholic invocation to the saints, and to the souls of
+the dead.</p>
+
+<h5>33.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">N</span><span class="smcap">iebuhr</span>, speaking of a lady (Madame von der
+Recke, I think,&mdash;the &#8220;Elise&#8221; of Goethe) who
+had patronised him, says, &#8220;I will receive roses
+and myrtles from female hands, but no laurels.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This makes one smile; for most of the laurels
+which Niebuhr will receive in this country will be
+through female hands&mdash;through the admirable translation
+and arrangement of his life and letters by
+Susanna Winkworth.</p>
+
+<h5>34.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> following I read with cordial agreement:&mdash;&#8220;While
+I am ready to adopt any well-grounded
+opinion&#8221; (regarding, I suppose, mere facts,
+or speculations as to things), &#8220;my inmost soul revolts
+against receiving the judgment of others respecting
+persons; and whenever I have done so I
+have bitterly repented of it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>35.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> says, &#8220;I cannot worship the abstraction of
+Virtue. She only charms me when she ad<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">226</a></span>dresses
+herself to my heart, and speaks thus the love
+from which she springs. I really love nothing but
+what actually exists.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>What <i>does</i> actually exist to us but that which we
+believe in? and where we strongly love do we not
+believe sometimes in the <i>unreal</i>? is it not <i>then</i> the
+existing and the actual to us?</p>
+
+<h5>36.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;A</span> <span class="smcap">faculty</span> of a quite peculiar kind, and for which
+we have no word, is the recognition of the
+incomprehensible. It is something which distinguishes
+the seer from the ordinary learned man.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But in religion this is <i>faith</i>. Does Niebuhr admit
+this kind of faith, &#8220;the recognition of the incomprehensible,&#8221;
+in philosophy, and not in religion? for he
+often complains of the want in himself of any faith
+but an historic faith.</p>
+
+<h5>37.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;I</span><span class="smcap">n</span> times of good fortune it is easy to appear
+great&mdash;nay, even to act greatly; but in
+misfortune very difficult. The greatest man will
+commit blunders in misfortune, because the want of
+proportion between his means and his ends progressively
+increases, and his inward strength is
+exhausted in fruitless efforts.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This is true; but under all extremes of good or
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">227</a></span>
+evil fortune we are apt to commit mistakes, because
+the tide of the mind does not flow equally, but rushes
+along impetuously in a flood, or brokenly and distractedly
+in a rocky channel, where its strength is
+exhausted in conflict and pain. The extreme pressure
+of circumstances will produce extremes of feeling in
+minds of a sensitive rather than a firm cast.</p>
+
+<h5>38.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">his</span> next passage is curious as a scholar&#8217;s opinion
+of &#8220;free trade&#8221; in the year 1810; though I believe
+the phrase &#8220;free trade&#8221; was not even invented at
+that time&mdash;certainly not in use in the statesman&#8217;s
+vocabulary.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I presume you will admit that commerce is a
+good thing, and the first requisite in the life of any
+nation. It appears to me, that this much has now
+been palpably demonstrated, namely, that an advanced
+and complicated social condition like this in which we
+live can only be maintained by establishing mutual
+relationships between the most remote nations; and
+that the limitation of commerce would, like the
+sapping of a main pillar, inevitably occasion the fall
+of the whole edifice; and also that commerce is so
+essentially beneficial and in accordance with man&#8217;s
+nature, that the well-being of each nation is an
+advantage to all the nations that stand in connection
+with it.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">228</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It is strange how long we have been (forty years,
+and more) in recognising these simple principles;
+and in Germany, where they were first enunciated,
+they are not recognised yet.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-023-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="124" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h4>CHARACTER OF DEMADES.</h4>
+
+<h5>(FROM NIEBUHR&#8217;s LECTURES.)</h5>
+
+<h5>39.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;B</span><span class="smcap">y</span> his wit and his talent, and more especially by
+his gift as an improvisatore, he rose so high that
+he exercised a great influence upon the people, and
+sometimes was more popular even than Demosthenes.
+With a shamelessness amounting to honesty,
+he bluntly told the people everything he felt and what
+all the populace felt with him. When hearing such
+a man the populace felt at their ease: he gave
+them the feeling that they might be wicked without
+being disgraced, and this excites with such people a
+feeling of gratitude. There is a remarkable passage
+in Plato, where he shows that those who deliver
+hollow speeches, without being in earnest, have no
+power or influence; whereas others, who are devoid
+of mental culture, but say in a straightforward
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">229</a></span>
+manner what they think and feel, exercise great
+power. It was this which in the eighteenth century
+gave the materialist philosophy in France such enormous
+influence with the higher classes; for they were
+told there was no need to be ashamed of the vulgarest
+sensuality; formerly people had been ashamed,
+but now a man learned that he might be a brutal
+sensualist, provided he did not offend against elegant
+manners and social conventionalism. People rejoiced
+at hearing a man openly and honestly say what they
+themselves felt. Demades was a remarkable character.
+He was not a bad man; and I like him much
+better than Eschines.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>What an excuse, what a sanction is here for the
+demagogues who direct the worst passions of men
+to the worst and the most selfish purposes, and the
+most debasing consequences! Demades &#8220;not a bad
+man?&#8221; then what <i>is</i> a bad man?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-023-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="138" width="300" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">230</a></span></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-048.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="274" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h4>LORD BACON.</h4>
+
+<h5>(1849.)</h5>
+
+<h5>40.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> was not the pure knowledge of nature and
+universality, but it was the proud knowledge
+of good and evil, with an intent in man to give the
+law unto himself, which was the form of the first
+temptation.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But, in this sense, the first temptation is only the
+type of the perpetual and ever-present temptation&mdash;the
+temptation into which we are to fall through
+necessity, that we may rise through love.</p>
+
+<h5>41.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">ere</span> is an excellent passage&mdash;a severe commentary
+on the unsound, un-christian, unphilosophical
+distinction between morals and politics in government:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">231</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Although men bred in learning are perhaps to
+seek in points of convenience and reasons of state
+and accommodations for the present, yet, on the
+other hand, to recompense this they are perfect in
+those same plain grounds of religion, justice, honour,
+and moral virtue which, if they be well and watchfully
+pursued, there will be seldom use of those other
+expedients, no more than of physic in a sound, well-directed
+body.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>42.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;N</span><span class="smcap">ow</span> (in the time of Lord Bacon, that is,) now
+sciences are delivered to be believed and accepted,
+and not to be farther discovered; and therefore,
+sciences stand at a clog, and have done for many
+ages.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In the present time, this is true only, or especially,
+of theology as an art, and divinity as a science;
+so made by the schoolmen of former ages, and not
+yet emancipated.</p>
+
+<h5>43.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;G</span><span class="smcap">enerally</span> he perceived in men of devout simplicity
+this opinion, that the secrets of nature
+were the secrets of God, part of that glory into which
+man is not to press too boldly.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>God has placed no limits to the exercise of the
+intellect he has given us on this side of the grave.
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">232</a></span>
+But not the less will he keep his own secrets from
+us. Has he not proved it? who has opened that
+door to the knowledge of a future being which it
+has pleased him to keep shut fast, though watched
+by hope and by faith?</p>
+
+<h5>44.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> Christian philosophy of these latter times
+appears to be foreshadowed in the following
+sentence, where he speaks of such as have ventured
+to deduce and confirm the truth of the Christian
+religion from the principles and authorities of philosophers:
+&#8220;Thus with great pomp and solemnity
+celebrating the intermarriage of faith and sense as a
+lawful conjunction, and soothing the minds of men
+with a pleasing variety of matter, though, at the same
+time, rashly and unequally intermixing things divine
+and things human.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This last common-place distinction seems to me,
+however, unworthy of Bacon. It should be banished&mdash;utterly
+set aside. Things which are divine should
+be human, and things which are human, divine; not
+as a mixture, &#8220;a medley,&#8221; in the sense of Bacon&#8217;s
+words, but an interfusion; for nothing that we
+esteem divine can be anything to us but as we make
+it <i>ours</i>, <i>i. e.</i> humanise it; and our humanity were a
+poor thing but for &#8220;the divinity that stirs within
+us.&#8221; We do injury to our own nature&mdash;we miscon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">233</a></span>ceive
+our relations to the Creator, to his universe,
+and to each other, so long as we separate and studiously
+keep wide apart the <i>divine</i> and the <i>human</i>.</p>
+
+<h5>45.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;L</span><span class="smcap">et</span> no man, upon a weak conceit of sobriety or
+an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain
+that a man can search too far or be too well studied
+either in the book of God&#8217;s word or the book of God&#8217;s
+works.&#8221; Well advised! But then he goes on to
+warn men that they do not &#8220;unwisely mingle or
+confound their learnings together:&#8221; mischievous this
+contradistinction between God&#8217;s word and God&#8217;s
+works; since both, if emanating from him, must be
+equally true. And if there be one truth, then, to
+borrow his own words in another place, &#8220;the voice
+of nature will consent, whether the voice of man do
+so or not.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>46.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="smcap">propos</span> to education&mdash;here is a good illustration:
+&#8220;Were it not better for a man in a fair room to
+set up one great light or branching candlestick of
+lights, than to go about with a rushlight into every
+dark corner?&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And here is another: &#8220;It is one thing to set
+forth what ground lieth unmanured, and another to
+correct ill husbandry in that which <i>is</i> manured.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">234</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>47.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> is without all controversy that learning doth
+make the minds of men gentle and generous,
+amiable, and pliant to government, whereas ignorance
+maketh them churlish, thwarting, and mutinous.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>48.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;A</span><span class="smcap">n</span> impatience of doubt and an unadvised haste to
+assertion without due and mature suspension
+of the judgment, is an error in the conduct of the
+understanding.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In contemplation, if a man begin with certainties
+he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to
+begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.&#8221; Well
+said and profoundly true.</p>
+
+<p>This is a celebrated and often-cited passage; an
+admitted principle in theory. I wish it were oftener
+applied in practice,&mdash;more especially in education.
+For it seems to me that in teaching children we
+ought not to be perpetually dogmatising. We ought
+not to be ever placing before them only the known
+and the definite; but to allow the unknown, the
+uncertain, the indefinite, to be suggested to their
+minds: it would do more for the growth of a truly
+religious feeling than all the catechisms of scientific
+facts and creeds of theological definitions that
+ever were taught in cut and dried question and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">235</a></span>
+answer. Why should not the young candid mind
+be allowed to reflect on the unknown, as such?
+on the doubtful, as such&mdash;open to inquiry and
+liable to discussion? Why will teachers suppose that
+in confessing their own ignorance or admitting uncertainties
+they must diminish the respect of their
+pupils, or their faith in truth? I should say from my
+own experience that the effect is just the reverse.
+I remember, when a child, hearing a very celebrated
+man profess his ignorance on some particular
+subject, and I felt awe-struck&mdash;it gave me a perception
+of the infinite,&mdash;as when looking up at the
+starry sky. What we unadvisedly cram into a child&#8217;s
+mind in the same form it has taken in our own, does
+not always healthily or immediately assimilate; it
+dissolves away in doubts, or it hardens into prejudice,
+instead of mingling with the life as truth ought to
+do. It is the early and habitual surrendering of the
+mind to authority, which makes it afterwards so
+ready for deception of all kinds.</p>
+
+<h5>49.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> speaks of &#8220;legends and narrations of miracles
+wrought by martyrs, hermits, monks, which,
+though they have had passage for a time by the ignorance
+of the people, the superstitious simplicity
+of some, and the politic toleration of others, holding
+them but as divine poesies; yet after a time they
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">236</a></span>
+grew up to be esteemed but as old wives&#8217; fables, to
+the great scandal and detriment of religion.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Very ambiguous, surely. Does he mean that it
+was to the great scandal and detriment of religion
+that they existed at all? or that they came to be
+regarded as old wives&#8217; fables?</p>
+
+<h5>50.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> says, farther on, &#8220;though truth and error are
+carefully to be separated, yet rarities and reports
+that seem incredible are not to be suppressed
+or denied to the memory of men.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;For it is not yet known in what cases and how
+far effects attributed to superstition do participate
+of natural causes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>51.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;T</span><span class="smcap">o</span> be speculative with another man to the end
+to know how to work him or wind him, proceedeth
+from a heart that is double and cloven, and
+not entire and ingenuous; which, as in friendship, it
+is a want of <i>integrity</i>, so towards princes or superiors
+it is a want of <i>duty</i>.&#8221; (No occasion, surely, for the
+distinction here drawn; inasmuch as the want of
+integrity involves the want of <i>every</i> duty.)</p>
+
+<p>Then he speaks of &#8220;the stooping to points of necessity
+and convenience and outward basenesses,&#8221; as to
+be accounted &#8220;submission to the occasion, not to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">237</a></span>
+person.&#8221; Vile distinction! an excuse to himself for
+his dedication to the King, and his flattery of Carr
+and Villiers.</p>
+
+<h5>52.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">O</span><span class="smcap">ur</span> English Universities are only now beginning
+to show some sign (reluctant sign) of submitting
+to that re-examination which the great philosopher
+recommended two hundred and fifty years ago, when
+he says: &#8220;Inasmuch as most of the usages and
+orders of the universities were derived from more
+obscure times, it is the more requisite they be reexamined&#8221;&mdash;and
+more to the same purpose.</p>
+
+<h5>53.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;I</span><span class="smcap">f</span> that great Workmaster (God) had been of a
+human disposition, he would have cast the
+stars into some pleasant and beautiful works and
+orders like the frets in the roofs of houses; whereas,
+one can scarce find a posture in square or triangle
+or straight line amongst such an infinite number, so
+differing an harmony there is between the spirit of
+man and the spirit of nature.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps if our human vision could be removed to
+a sufficient distance to contemplate the whole of
+what we now see in part, what appears disorder
+might appear beautiful order. The stars which now
+appear as if flung about at random, would perhaps be
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">238</a></span>
+resolved into some exquisitely beautiful and regular
+edifice. The fly on the cornice, &#8220;whose feeble ray
+scarce spreads an inch around,&#8221; might as well discuss
+the proportions of the Parthenon as we the
+true figure and frame of God&#8217;s universe.</p>
+
+<p>I remember seeing, through Lord Rosse&#8217;s telescope,
+one of those nebul&aelig; which have hitherto appeared
+like small masses of vapour floating about in space.
+I saw it composed of thousands upon thousands of
+brilliant stars, and the effect to the eye&mdash;to mine at
+least&mdash;was as if I had had my hand full of diamonds,
+and suddenly unclosing it, and flinging them forth,
+they were dispersed as from a centre, in a kind of
+partly irregular, partly fan-like form; and I had a
+strange feeling of suspense and amazement while
+I looked, because they did not change their relative
+position, did not fall&mdash;though in act to fall&mdash;but
+seemed fixed in the very attitude of being flung forth
+into space;&mdash;it was most wondrous and beautiful
+to see!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-055.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="210" width="300" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">239</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>54.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> is pleasant to me to think that Bacon&#8217;s
+stupendous intellect believed in the moral progress
+of human societies, because it is my own belief,
+and one that I would not for worlds resign. I indeed
+believe that each human being must here (or hereafter?)
+work out his own peculiar moral life: but
+also that the whole race has a progressive moral life:
+just as in our solar system every individual planet
+moves in its own orbit, while the whole system
+moves on together; we know not whither, we know
+not round what centre&mdash;&#8220;<i>ma pur si muove!</i>&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>55.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">Y</span><span class="smcap">et</span> he says in another place, with equal wit and
+sublimity, &#8220;Every obtaining of a desire hath a
+<i>show</i> of advancement, as motion in a circle hath a
+<i>show</i> of progression.&#8221; Perhaps our movement may
+be <i>spiral</i>? and every revolution may bring us nearer
+and nearer to some divine centre in which we may
+be absorbed at last?</p>
+
+<h5>56.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> refers in this following passage to that theory
+of the angelic existences which we see expressed
+in ancient symbolic Art, first by variation of
+colour only, and later, by variety of expression and
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">240</a></span>
+form. He says,&mdash;&#8220;We find, as far as credit is to
+be given to the celestial hierarchy of that supposed
+Dionysius, the senator of Athens, that the first place
+or degree is given to the Angels of Love, which are
+called Seraphim; the second to the Angels of Light,
+which are termed Cherubim; and the third, and so
+following, to Thrones, Principalities, and the rest
+(which are all angels of power and ministry); so as
+the angels of knowledge and illumination are placed
+before the angels of office and domination.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;But the Angels of <span class="smcap">Love</span> are first and over all.
+In other words, we have here in due order of precedence,
+1. <span class="smcap">Love</span>, 2. <span class="smcap">Knowledge</span>, 3. <span class="smcap">Power</span>,&mdash;the
+angelic Trinity, which, in unity, is our idea of <span class="smcap">God</span>.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-078.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="215" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h4>CHATEAUBRIAND.</h4>
+
+<h5>(&#8220;MEMOIRES D&#8217;OUTRE TOMBE.&#8221; 1851.)</h5>
+
+<h5>57.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span><span class="smcap">hateaubriand</span> tells us that when his mother and
+sisters urged him to marry, he resisted
+strongly&mdash;he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">241</a></span>
+thought it too early; he says, with a peculiar
+na&iuml;vet&eacute;, &#8220;Je ne me sentais aucune qualit&eacute; de mari:
+toutes mes illusions &eacute;taient vivantes, rien n&#8217;&eacute;tait
+&eacute;puis&eacute; en moi, l&#8217;&eacute;nergie m&ecirc;me de mon existence
+avait doubl&eacute; par mes courses,&#8221; &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>So then the &#8220;<i>existence &eacute;puis&eacute;</i>&#8221; is to be kept for
+the wife! &#8220;<i>la vie us&eacute;e</i>&#8221;&mdash;&#8220;<i>la jeunesse abus&eacute;e</i>,&#8221; is
+good enough to make a husband! Chateaubriand,
+who in many passages of his book piques himself on
+his morality, seems quite unconscious that he has
+here given utterance to a sentiment the most profoundly
+immoral, the most fatal to both sexes, that
+even his immoral age had ever the effrontery to set
+forth.</p>
+
+<h5>58.</h5>
+
+<p>&#8220;Il para&icirc;t qu&#8217;on n&#8217;apprend pas &agrave; mourir en tuant
+les autres.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Nor do we learn to suffer by inflicting pain:
+nothing so patient as pity.</p>
+
+<h5>59.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;L</span><span class="smcap">e</span> cynisme des m&oelig;urs ram&egrave;ne dans la soci&eacute;t&eacute;, en
+annihilant le sens moral, une sorte de barbares;
+ces barbares de la civilisation, propres &agrave; d&eacute;truire
+comme les Goths, n&#8217;ont pas la puissance de fonder
+comme eux; ceux-ci &eacute;taient les &eacute;normes enfants
+d&#8217;une nature vierge; ceux-l&agrave; sont les avortons monstrueux
+d&#8217;une nature d&eacute;prav&eacute;e.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">242</a></span></p>
+
+<p>We too often make the vulgar mistake that
+undisciplined or overgrown passions are a sign of
+strength; they are the signs of immaturity, of
+&#8220;enormous childhood.&#8221;&mdash;And the distinction (above)
+is well drawn and true. The real savage is that
+monstrous, malignant, abject thing, generated out of
+the rottenness and ferment of civilisation. And yet
+extremes meet: I remember seeing on the shores of
+Lake Huron some Indians of a distant tribe of Chippawas,
+who in appearance were just like those
+fearful abortions of humanity which crawl out of
+the darkness, filth, and ignorance of our great towns,
+just so miserable, so stupid, so cruel,&mdash;only, perhaps,
+less <i>wicked</i>.</p>
+
+<h5>60.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span><span class="smcap">hateaubriand</span> was always comparing himself
+with Lord Byron&mdash;he hints more than once,
+that Lord Byron owed some of his inspiration to the
+perusal of his works&mdash;more especially to Ren&eacute;e. In
+this he was altogether mistaken.</p>
+
+<h5>61.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;U</span><span class="smcap">ne</span> intelligence sup&eacute;rieure n&#8217;enfante pas le mal
+sans douleur, parceque ce n&#8217;est pas son fruit
+naturel, et qu&#8217;elle ne devait pas le porter.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>62.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">M</span><span class="smcap">adame de Coeslin</span> (whom he describes as an
+impersonation of aristocratic <i>morgue</i> and all<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">243</a></span>
+the pretension and prejudices of the <i>ancien r&eacute;gime</i>),
+&#8220;lisant dans un journal la mort de plusieurs rois, elle
+&ocirc;ta ses lunettes et dit en se mouchant, &#8216;Il y a donc
+une <i>&eacute;pizootie sur ces b&ecirc;tes &agrave; couronne</i>!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>I once counted among my friends an elderly lady
+of high rank, who had spent the whole of a long life
+in intimacy with royal and princely personages. In
+three different courts she had filled offices of trust
+and offices of dignity. In referring to her experience
+she never either moralised or generalised; but her
+scorn of &#8220;ces b&ecirc;tes &agrave; couronne,&#8221; was habitually
+expressed with just such a cool epigrammatic bluntness
+as that of Madame de Coeslin.</p>
+
+<h5>63.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;L</span><span class="smcap">&#8217;aristocratie</span> a trois &acirc;ges successifs; l&#8217;&acirc;ge des
+sup&eacute;riorit&eacute;s, l&#8217;&acirc;ge des privil&eacute;ges, l&#8217;&acirc;ge des
+vanit&eacute;s; sortie du premier, elle d&eacute;g&eacute;n&egrave;re dans le
+second et s&#8217;&eacute;teint dans le dernier.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In Germany they are still in the first epoch. In
+England we seem to have arrived at the second. In
+France they are verging on the third.</p>
+
+<h5>64.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span><span class="smcap">hateaubriand</span> says of himself:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Dans le premier moment d&#8217;une offense je la
+sens &agrave; peine; mais elle se grave dans ma m&eacute;moire;
+son souvenir au lieu de d&eacute;cro&icirc;tre, s&#8217;augmente avec le<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">244</a></span>
+temps. Il dort dans mon c&oelig;ur des mois, des ann&eacute;es
+enti&egrave;res, puis il se r&eacute;veille &agrave; la moindre circonstance
+avec une force nouvelle, et ma blessure devient plus
+vive que le pr&eacute;mier jour: mais si je ne pardonne
+point &agrave; mes ennemis je ne leur fais aucun mal; je
+suis <i>rancunier</i> et ne suis point <i>vindicatif</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>A very nice and true distinction in point of feeling
+and character, yet hardly to be expressed in
+English. We always attach the idea of malignity
+to the word <i>rancour</i>, whereas the French words
+<i>rancune</i>, <i>rancunier</i>, express the relentless without
+the vengeful or malignant spirit.</p>
+
+<p>Such characters make me turn pale, as I have done
+at sight of a tomb in which an offending wretch had
+been buried alive. There is in them always something
+acute and deep and indomitable in the internal
+and exciting emotion; slow, scrupulous, and timid
+in the external demonstration. Cordelia is such a
+character.</p>
+
+<h5>65.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span><span class="smcap">hateaubriand</span> says of his friend Pelletrie,&mdash;&#8220;Il
+n&#8217;avait pas pr&eacute;cis&eacute;ment des vices, mais il
+&eacute;tait rong&eacute; d&#8217;une vermine de petits d&eacute;fauts dont on
+ne pouvait l&#8217;&eacute;purer.&#8221; I know such a man; and if he
+had committed a murder every morning, and a highway
+robbery every night,&mdash;if he had killed his
+father and eaten him with any possible sauce, he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">245</a></span>
+could not be more intolerable, more detestable than
+he is!</p>
+
+<h5>66.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;U</span><span class="smcap">n</span> homme nous prot&egrave;ge par ce qu&#8217;il vaut; une
+femme par ce que vous valez: voil&agrave; pourquoi
+de ces deux empires l&#8217;un est si odieux, l&#8217;autre si
+doux.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>67.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> says of Madame Roland, &#8220;Elle avait du caract&egrave;re
+plut&ocirc;t que du g&eacute;nie; le premier peut
+donner le second, le second ne peut donner le premier.&#8221;
+What does the man mean? this is a mistake
+surely. What the French call <i>caract&egrave;re</i> never
+could give genius, nor genius, <i>caract&egrave;re</i>. <i>Au reste</i>,
+I am not sure that Madame Roland&mdash;admirable creature!&mdash;had
+genius; but for talent, and <i>caract&egrave;re</i>&mdash;first
+rate.</p>
+
+<h5>68.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;S</span><span class="smcap">oyons</span> doux si nous voulons &ecirc;tre regrett&eacute;s. La
+hauteur du g&eacute;nie et les qualit&eacute;s sup&eacute;rieures ne
+sont pleur&eacute;es que des anges.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Veillons bien sur notre caract&egrave;re. Songeons
+que nous pouvons avec un attachement profond n&#8217;en
+pas moins empoisonner des jours que nous rach&eacute;terions
+au prix de tout notre sang. Quand nos amis
+sont descendus dans la tombe, quels moyens avons<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">246</a></span>
+nous de r&eacute;parer nos torts? nos inutiles regrets, nos
+vains repentirs, sont ils un rem&egrave;de aux peines que
+nous leurs avons faites? Ils auraient mieux aim&eacute; de
+nous un sourire pendant leur vie que toutes nos
+larmes apr&egrave;s leur mort.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>69.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;L</span><span class="smcap">&#8217;amour</span> est si bien la f&eacute;licit&eacute; qu&#8217;il est poursuivi
+de la chim&egrave;re d&#8217;&ecirc;tre toujours; il ne veut prononcer
+que des serments irr&eacute;vocables; au d&eacute;faut de
+ses joies, il cherche &agrave; &eacute;terniser ses douleurs; ange
+tomb&eacute;, il parle encore le langage qu&#8217;il parlait au
+s&eacute;jour incorruptible; son esp&eacute;rance est de ne cesser
+jamais. Dans sa double nature et dans sa double
+illusion, ici-bas il pr&eacute;tend se perp&eacute;tuer par d&#8217;immortelles
+pens&eacute;es et par des g&eacute;n&eacute;rations intarissables.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>70.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">M</span><span class="smcap">adame d&#8217;Houdetot</span>, after the death of Saint
+Lambert, always before she went to bed used
+to rap three times with her slipper on the floor, saying,&mdash;&#8220;Bon
+soir, mon ami; bon soir, bon soir!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>So then, she thought of her lover as gone <i>down</i>&mdash;not
+<i>up</i>?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">247</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-031-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="133" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h4>BISHOP CUMBERLAND.</h4>
+
+<h5>BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH IN 1691.</h5>
+
+<h5>71.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">B</span><span class="smcap">ishop Cumberland</span> founds the law of God,
+as revealed in the Scriptures, upon the general
+law of nature. He does not attempt to found the
+laws of nature upon the Bible. &#8220;We believe,&#8221; he
+says, &#8220;in the truth of Scripture, because it promotes
+and illustrates the fundamental laws of nature in the
+government of the world.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Then does the Bishop mean here that the Bible is
+not the <span class="smcap">WORD</span> nor the <span class="smcap">WILL</span> of God, but the exposition
+of the <span class="smcap">WORD</span> and the record of the <span class="smcap">WILL</span>, so far
+as either could be rendered communicable to human
+comprehension through the medium of human language
+and intelligence?</p>
+
+<p>There is a striking passage in Bunsen&#8217;s Hippolytus,
+which may be considered with reference to this
+opinion of the Bishop.</p>
+
+<p>He (Bunsen) says, that &#8220;what relates the history<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">248</a></span>
+of &#8216;the word of God&#8217; in his humanity, and in this
+world, and what records its teachings, and warnings,
+and promises (that is, the Bible?) was mistaken
+for &#8216;the word of God&#8217; itself, in its proper sense.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Does he mean that we deem erroneously the collection
+of writings we call the Bible to be &#8220;the word
+of God;&#8221; whereas, in fact, it is &#8220;the history, the
+record of the word of God?&#8221; that is, of all that God
+has spoken to man&mdash;in various revelations&mdash;through
+human life&mdash;by human deeds?&mdash;because this is
+surely a most important and momentous distinction.</p>
+
+<h5>72.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="smcap">ccording</span> to Bishop Cumberland, <i>benevolence</i>, in
+its large sense,&mdash;that is, a regard for all <span class="smcap">GOOD</span>,
+universal and particular,&mdash;is the primary law of
+nature; and <i>justice</i> is one form, and a secondary
+form, of this law: a moral virtue, not a law of nature,&mdash;if
+I understand his meaning rightly.</p>
+
+<p>Then which would he place <i>highest</i>, the law of
+nature or the moral law?</p>
+
+<p>If you place them in contradistinction, then are
+we to conclude that the law of nature <i>precedes</i> the
+moral law, but that the moral law <i>supersedes</i> the law
+of nature? Yet no law of nature (as I understand
+the word) <i>can</i> be superseded, though the moral law
+may be based upon it, and in that sense may be
+<i>above</i> it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">249</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>73.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">n</span> this following passage the Bishop seems to have
+anticipated what in more modern times has
+been called the &#8220;<i>greatest happiness principle</i>.&#8221; He
+says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;The good of all rational beings is a complex
+whole, being nothing but the aggregate of good enjoyed
+by each.&#8221; &#8220;We can only act in our proper
+spheres, labouring to do good, but this labour will
+be fruitless, or rather mischievous, if we do not keep
+in mind the higher gradations which terminate in
+universal benevolence. Thus, no man must seek his
+own pleasure or advantage otherwise than as his
+family permits; or provide for his family to the
+detriment of his country; or promote the good of his
+country at the expense of mankind; or serve mankind,
+if it were possible, without regard to the
+majesty of God.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>74.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">P</span><span class="smcap">aley</span> deems the recognition of a future state so
+essential that he even makes the definition of
+virtue to consist in this, that it is good performed for
+the sake of everlasting happiness. That is to say, he
+makes it a sort of bargain between God and man, a
+contract, or a covenant, instead of that obedience to
+a primal law, from which if we stray in will, we do
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">250</a></span>
+so at the necessary expense of our happiness. Bishop
+Cumberland has no reference to this doctrine of
+Paley&#8217;s;&mdash;seems, indeed, to set it aside altogether,
+as contrary to the essence of virtue.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">On the whole, this good Bishop appears to have
+treated ethics not as an ecclesiastic, but as Bacon
+treated natural philosophy;&mdash;the pervading spirit
+is the perpetual appeal to experience, and not to
+authority.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-002.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="163" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h4>COMTE&#8217;S PHILOSOPHY.</h4>
+
+<h5>1852.</h5>
+
+<h5>75.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span><span class="smcap">omte</span> makes out three elements of progress,
+&#8220;les philosophes, les prol&eacute;taires, et les femmes;&#8221;&mdash;types
+of intellect, material activity, and sentiment.</p>
+
+<p>From Woman, he says, is to proceed the preponderance
+of the social duties and affections over egotism
+and ambition. (La pr&eacute;pond&eacute;rance de la sociabilit&eacute;
+sur la personalit&eacute;.) He adds:&mdash;&#8220;Ce sexe est certainement
+sup&eacute;rieure au notre quant &agrave; l&#8217;attribut le<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">251</a></span>
+plus fondamentale de l&#8217;esp&egrave;ce humaine, la tendence
+de faire pr&eacute;valoir la <i>sociabilit&eacute;</i> sur la<i> personalit&eacute;</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>76.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;S</span><span class="smcap">&#8217;il</span> ne fallait <i>qu&#8217;aimer</i> comme dans l&#8217;Utopie
+Chr&eacute;tienne, sur une vie future affranchie de
+toute &eacute;go&iuml;ste necessit&eacute; mat&eacute;rielle, la femme r&eacute;gnerait;
+mais il faut surtout <i>agir</i> et <i>penser</i> pour combattre
+contre les rigueurs de notre vraie destin&eacute;e: d&egrave;s-lors
+l&#8217;homme doit commander malgr&eacute; sa moindre moralit&eacute;.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Malgr&eacute;?&#8221; Sometimes man commands <i>because</i> of
+the &#8220;moindre moralit&eacute;:&#8221;&mdash;it spares much time in
+scruples.</p>
+
+<h5>77.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;L</span><span class="smcap">&#8217;influence</span> feminine devient l&#8217;auxiliaire indispensable
+de tout pouvoir spirituel, comme le
+moyen &acirc;ge l&#8217;a tant montr&eacute;.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">&#8220;Au moyen &acirc;ge la Catholicisme occidentale
+&eacute;baucha la syst&eacute;matisation de la puissance morale en
+superposant &agrave; l&#8217;ordre pratique une libre autorit&eacute;
+spirituelle, habituellement second&eacute;e par les femmes.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>78.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;L</span><span class="smcap">a</span> Force, proprement dite, c&#8217;est ce qui r&eacute;git les
+actes, sans r&eacute;gler les volont&eacute;s.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Herein lies a distinction between Force and
+Power; for Power, properly so called, does both.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">252</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>79.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> insists throughout on the predominance of <i>sociabilit&eacute;</i>
+over <i>personalit&eacute;</i>&mdash;and what is that but
+the Christian law philosophised? and again, &#8220;Il n&#8217;y
+a de directement morale dans notre nature que
+l&#8217;amour.&#8221; Where did he get this, if not in the
+Epistle of St. John?</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Celui qui se croirait ind&eacute;pendant des autres dans
+ses affections, ses pens&eacute;es, ou ses actes, ne pourrait
+m&ecirc;me formuler un tel blasph&egrave;me sans une contradiction
+imm&eacute;diate&mdash;puisque son langage m&ecirc;me ne lui
+appartient pas.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>80.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> says that if the women regret the age of
+chivalry, it is not for the external homage then
+paid to them, but because &#8220;l&#8217;&eacute;l&eacute;ment le plus moral
+de l&#8217;humanit&eacute;&#8221; (woman, to wit), &#8220;doit pr&eacute;f&eacute;rer &agrave; tout
+autre le seul r&eacute;gime qui &eacute;rigea directement en principe
+la pr&eacute;ponderance de la morale sur la politique.
+Si elles regrettent leur douce influence ant&eacute;rieure,
+c&#8217;est surtout comme s&#8217;effa&ccedil;ant aujourd&#8217;hui sous un
+grossier &eacute;go&iuml;sme.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Leurs v&oelig;ux spontan&eacute;s seconderont toujours les
+efforts directes des philosophes et des prol&eacute;taires
+pour transformer enfin les d&eacute;bats politiques en
+transactions sociales en faisant pr&eacute;valoir les <i>d&eacute;voirs</i>
+sur les <i>droits</i>.&#8221;</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">253</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This is admirable; for we are all inclined to think
+more about our <i>rights</i> (and our wrongs too) than
+about our <i>duties</i>.</p>
+
+<h5>81.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;S</span><span class="smcap">i</span> donc aimer nous satisfait mieux que d&#8217;&ecirc;tre
+aim&eacute;, cela constate la sup&eacute;riorit&eacute; naturelle des
+affections d&eacute;sint&eacute;ress&eacute;es.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Meaning&mdash;what is true&mdash;that the love we bear to
+another, much more fills the whole soul and is more
+a possession of an actuating principle, than the love
+of another for us:&mdash;but both are necessary to the
+complement of our moral life. The first is as the
+air we breathe; the last is as our daily bread.</p>
+
+<h5>82.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> says that the only true and firm friendship is
+that between man and woman, because it is the
+only affection &#8220;exempte de toute concurrence actuelle
+ou possible.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>In this I am inclined to agree with him, and to
+regret that our conventional morality or immorality,
+and the too early severance of the two sexes in education,
+place men and women in such a relation to
+each other, socially, as to render such friendships
+difficult and rare.</p>
+
+<h5>83.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;E</span><span class="smcap">n</span> v&eacute;rit&eacute; l&#8217;amour ne saurait &ecirc;tre profond, s&#8217;il
+n&#8217;est pas pur.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">254</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Christianity, he says, &#8220;a favoris&eacute; l&#8217;essor de la
+v&eacute;ritable passion, tandisque le polyth&eacute;isme consacrait
+surtout les app&eacute;tits.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He is speaking here as teacher, philosopher, and
+legislator, not as poet or sentimentalist. Perhaps it
+will come to be recognised sooner or later, that what
+people are pleased to call the <i>romance</i> of life is
+founded on the deepest and most immutable laws of
+our being, and that any system of ecclesiastical
+polity, or civil legislation, or moral philosophy, which
+takes no account of the primal instincts and affections,
+which are the springs of life and on which
+God made the continuation of his world to depend,
+<i>must</i> of necessity fail.</p>
+
+<p>I have just read a volume of Psychological Essays
+by one of the most celebrated of living surgeons, and
+closed the book with a feeling of amazement: a long
+life spent in physiological experiences, dissecting dead
+bodies, and mending broken bones, has then led him,
+at last, to some of the most obvious, most commonly
+known facts in mental philosophy? So some of our
+profound politicians, after a long life spent in governing
+and reforming men, may arrive, <i>at last</i>, at some
+of the commonest facts in social morals.</p>
+
+<h5>84.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">e</span> contends for the indissolubility of marriage, and
+against divorce; and he thinks that education<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">255</a></span>
+should be in the hands of women to the age of ten or
+twelve, &#8220;Afin que le c&oelig;ur y pr&eacute;vale toujours sur
+l&#8217;esprit:&#8221; all very excellent principles, but supposing
+a <i>hypothetical</i> social and moral state, from which we
+are as yet far removed. What he says, however, of
+the indissolubility of the marriage bond is so beautiful
+and eloquent, and so in accordance with my own
+moral theories, that I cannot help extracting it from
+a mass of heavy and sometimes unintelligible matter.
+He begins by laying it down as a principle that the
+&#8220;am&eacute;lioration morale de l&#8217;homme constitue la principale
+mission de la femme,&#8221; and that &#8220;une telle destination
+indique aussit&ocirc;t que le lien conjugal doit
+&ecirc;tre unique et indissoluble, afin que les relations
+domestiques puissent acqu&eacute;rir la pl&eacute;nitude et la
+fixit&eacute; qu&#8217;exige leur efficacit&eacute; morale.&#8221; This, however,
+supposes the holiest and completest of all bonds
+to be sealed on terms of equality, not that the latter
+end of a man&#8217;s life, <i>la vie us&eacute;e et la jeunesse &eacute;puis&eacute;e</i>,
+are to be tacked on to the beginning of a woman&#8217;s
+fresh and innocent existence; for then influences are
+reversed, and instead of the amelioration of the masculine,
+we have the demoralisation of the feminine,
+nature. He supposes the possibility of circumstances
+which demand a personal separation, but even
+then <i>sans permettre un nouveau mariage</i>. In such
+a case his religion imposes on the innocent victim<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">256</a></span>
+(whether man or woman) &#8220;une chastet&eacute; compatible
+d&#8217;ailleurs avec la plus profonde tendresse. Si cette
+condition lui semble rigoureuse, il doit l&#8217;accepter,
+d&#8217;abord, en vue de l&#8217;ordre g&eacute;n&eacute;ral; puis, comme une
+juste cons&eacute;quence de son erreur primitive.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>There would be much to say upon all this, if it
+were worth while to discuss a theory which it is not
+possible to reduce to general practice. We cannot
+imagine the possibility of a second marriage where
+the first, though perhaps unhappy or early ruptured,
+has been, not a personal relation only, but an interfusion
+of our moral being,&mdash;of the deepest impulses of
+life&mdash;with those of another; <i>these</i> we cannot have a
+second time to surrender to a second object;&mdash;but
+this might be left to Nature and her holy instincts to
+settle. However, he goes on in a strain of eloquence
+and dignity, quite unusual with him, to this effect:&mdash;&#8220;Ce
+n&#8217;est que par l&#8217;assurance d&#8217;une inalt&eacute;rable perpetuit&eacute;
+que les liens intimes peuvent acqu&eacute;rir la
+consistance et la pl&eacute;nitude indispensable &agrave; leur efficacit&eacute;
+morale. La plus m&eacute;prisable des sectes &eacute;ph&eacute;m&egrave;res
+que suscita l&#8217;anarchie moderne (the Mormons, for instance?)
+me parait &ecirc;tre celle qui voulut &eacute;riger l&#8217;inconstance
+en condition de bonheur.&#8221;.... &#8220;Entre deux
+&ecirc;tres aussi complexes et aussi divers que l&#8217;homme et
+la femme, ce n&#8217;est pas trop de toute la vie pour se
+bien conna&icirc;tre et s&#8217;aimer dignement. Loin de taxer
+d&#8217;illusion la haute id&eacute;e que deux vrais &eacute;poux se<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">257</a></span>
+forment souvent l&#8217;un de l&#8217;autre, je l&#8217;ai presque
+toujours attribu&eacute;e &agrave; l&#8217;appr&eacute;ciation plus profonde que
+procure seule une pleine intimit&eacute;, que d&#8217;ailleurs d&eacute;veloppe
+des qualit&eacute;s inconnues aux indiff&eacute;rents. On
+doit m&ecirc;me regarder comme tr&egrave;s-honorable pour
+notre esp&egrave;ce, cette grande estime que ses membres
+s&#8217;inspirent mutuellement quand ils s&#8217;&eacute;tudient beaucoup.
+<i>Car la haine et l&#8217;indiff&eacute;rence m&eacute;riteraient
+seules le reproche d&#8217;aveuglement qu&#8217;une appr&eacute;ciation
+superficielle applique &agrave; l&#8217;amour.</i> Il faut donc juger
+pleinement conforme &agrave; la nature humaine l&#8217;institution
+qui prolonge au-del&agrave; du tombeau l&#8217;indentification de
+deux dignes &eacute;poux.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He lays down as one of the primal instincts of
+human kind &#8220;<i>l&#8217;homme doit nourrir la femme</i>.&#8221; This
+may have been, as he says, a universal <i>instinct</i>;
+perhaps it ought to be one of our social ordinations;
+perhaps it may be so at some future time;
+but we know that it is not a present fact; that the
+woman must in many cases maintain herself or
+perish, and she asks nothing more than to be allowed
+to do so.</p>
+
+<p>However, I agree with Comte that the position
+of a woman, enriched and independent by her own
+labour, is anomalous and seldom happy. It is a
+remark I have heard somewhere, and it appears to
+me true, that there exists no being so hard, so
+keen, so calculating, so unscrupulous, so merciless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">258</a></span>
+in money matters as the wife of a Parisian shopkeeper,
+where she holds the purse and manages the
+concern, as is generally the case.</p>
+
+<h5>85.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">ere</span> is a passage wherein he attacks that egotism
+which with many good people enters so largely
+into the notion of another world:&mdash;which Paley inculcated,
+and which Coleridge ridiculed, when he
+spoke of &#8220;<i>this</i> worldliness,&#8221; and the &#8220;<i>other</i> worldliness.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;La sagesse sacerdotale, digne organe de l&#8217;instinct
+public, y avait intimement rattach&eacute; les principales
+obligations sociales &agrave; titre de condition indispensable
+du salut personnel: mais la r&eacute;compense infinie promise
+ainsi &agrave; tous les sacrifices ne pouvait jamais
+permettre une affection pleinement d&eacute;sinteress&eacute;e.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This perpetual iteration of a system of future
+reward and punishment, as a principle of our religion
+and a motive of action, has in some sort demoralised
+Christianity; especially in minds where love is not a
+chief element, and which do not love Christ for his
+love&#8217;s sake, but for his power&#8217;s sake, and because
+judgment and punishment are supposed to be in his
+hand.</p>
+
+<h5>86.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">P</span><span class="smcap">utting</span> the test of revelation out of the question,
+and dealing with the philosopher philosophically,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">259</a></span>
+the best refutation of Comte&#8217;s system is contained in
+the following criticism: it seems to me final.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;In limiting religion to the relations in which we
+stand to each other, and towards <i>Humanity</i>, Comte
+omits one very important consideration. Even upon
+his own showing, this <i>Humanity</i> can only be the
+<i>supreme being</i> of <i>our</i> planet, it cannot be the <i>Supreme
+Being</i> of the Universe. Now, although in this our
+terrestrial sojourn, all we can distinctly know must
+be limited to the sphere of our planet; yet, standing
+on this ball and looking forth into infinitude, we
+know that it is but an atom of the infinitude, and
+that the humanity we worship <i>here</i>, cannot extend
+its dominion <i>there</i>. If our relations to humanity
+may be systematised into a cultus, and made a religion
+as they have formerly been made a morality,
+and if the whole of our practical priesthood be
+limited to this religion, there will, nevertheless
+remain for us, outlying this terrestrial sphere,&mdash;the
+sphere of the infinite, in which our thoughts must
+wander, and our emotions will follow our thoughts;
+so that besides the religion of humanity there must
+ever be a religion of the Universe. Or, to bring
+this conception within ordinary language, there must
+ever remain the old distinctions between <i>religion</i> and
+<i>morality</i>, our relations to God, and our relations
+towards man. The only difference being, that in
+the <i>old</i> theology moral precepts were inculcated with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">260</a></span>
+a view to a celestial habitat; in the <i>new</i>, the moral
+precepts are inculcated with a view to the general
+progress of the race.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Westminster Review.</i></p>
+
+<p class="tb">In fact the doctrine of the non-plurality of worlds
+as recently set forth by an eminent professor and
+D. D. would exactly harmonise with Comte&#8217;s &#8220;Culte
+du Positif,&#8221; as not merely limiting our sympathies
+to this one form of intellectual being, but our religious
+notions to this one habitable orb.</p>
+
+<p>But to those who take other views, the argument
+above contains the <i>philosophical</i> objection to Comte&#8217;s
+<i>system</i>, as such; and I repeat, that it seems to me unanswerable;
+but there are excellent things in his
+theory, notwithstanding;&mdash;things that make us pause
+and think. In some parts it is like Christianity with
+Christ, as a <i>personalit&eacute;</i>, omitted. For Christ the
+humanised divine, he substitutes an abstract deified
+humanity. 1854.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-038-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="186" width="300" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">261</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-028-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="208" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h4>GOETHE.</h4>
+
+<h5>(DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT.)</h5>
+
+<h5>87.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;A</span><span class="smcap">s</span> a man embraces the determination to become
+a soldier and go to the wars, bravely resolved
+to bear dangers, and difficulties, and wounds, and
+death itself, but at the same time never anticipating
+the particular form in which those evils may surprise
+us in an extremely unpleasant manner;&mdash;just so we
+rush into authorship!&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>88.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">G</span><span class="smcap">oethe</span> says of Lavater, &#8220;that the conception of
+humanity which had been formed in himself,
+and in his own humanity, was so akin to the living
+image of Christ, that it was impossible for him to
+conceive how a man could live and breathe without
+being a Christian. He had, so to speak, a physical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">262</a></span>
+affinity with Christianity; it was to him a necessity,
+not only morally, but from organisation.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Lavater&#8217;s individual feeling was, perhaps, but an
+anticipation of that which may become general, universal.
+As we rise in the scale of being, as we
+become more gentle, spiritualised, refined, and intelligent,
+will not our &#8220;physical affinity&#8221; with the
+religion of Christ become more and more apparent,
+till it is less a doctrine than a principle of life? So
+its Divine Author knew, who prepared it for us, and
+is preparing and moulding us through progressive
+improvement to comprehend and receive it.</p>
+
+<h5>89.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">G</span><span class="smcap">oethe</span> speaks of &#8220;polishing up life with the
+varnish of fiction;&#8221; the artistic turn of the man&#8217;s
+mind showed itself in this love of creating an effect
+in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. But what
+can fiction&mdash;what can poetry do for life, but present
+some one or two out of the multitudinous aspects of
+that grand, beautiful, terrible, and infinite mystery?
+or by <i>life</i>, does he mean here the mere external forms
+of society?&mdash;for it is not clear.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">263</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-007.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="265" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h4>HAZLITT&#8217;S &#8220;LIBER AMORIS.&#8221;</h4>
+
+<h5>1827.</h5>
+
+<h5>90.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">s</span> love, like faith, ennobled through its own depth
+and fervour and sincerity? or is it ennobled
+through the nobility, and degraded through the
+degradation of its object? Is it with love as with
+worship? Is it a <i>religion</i>, and holy when the object
+is pure and good? Is it a <i>superstition</i>, and unholy
+when the object is impure and unworthy?</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Of all the histories I have read of the aberrations
+of human passion, nothing ever so struck me with a
+sort of amazed and painful pity as Hazlitt&#8217;s &#8220;Liber
+Amoris.&#8221; The man was in love with a servant girl,
+who in the eyes of others possessed no particular
+charms of mind or person, yet did the mighty love of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">264</a></span>
+this strong, masculine, and gifted being, lift her into
+a sort of goddess-ship; and make his idolatry in its
+intense earnestness and reality assume something of
+the sublimity of an act of faith, and in its expression
+take a flight equal to anything that poetry or fiction
+have left us. It was all so terribly real, he sued with
+such a vehemence, he suffered with such resistance,
+that the powerful intellect reeled, tempest-tost, and
+might have foundered but for the gift of expression.
+He might have said like Tasso&mdash;like Goethe rather&mdash;&#8220;Gab
+mir ein Gott zu sagen was ich leide!&#8221;
+And this faculty of utterance, eloquent utterance,
+was perhaps the only thing which saved life, or reason,
+or both. In such moods of passion, the poor uneducated
+man, dumb in the midst of the strife and the
+storm, unable to comprehend his intolerable pain or
+make it comprehended, throws himself in a blind
+fury on the cause of his torture, or hangs himself in
+his neckcloth.</p>
+
+<h5>91.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">azlitt</span> takes up his pen, dips it in fire and thus
+he writes:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Perfect love has this advantage in it, that it leaves
+the possessor of it nothing farther to desire. There
+is one object (at least), in which the soul finds absolute
+content;&mdash;for which it seeks to live or dares to
+die. The heart has, as it were, filled up the moulds
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">265</a></span>
+of the imagination; the truth of passion keeps pace
+with, and outvies, the extravagance of mere language.
+There are no words so fine, no flattery so soft, that
+there is not a sentiment beyond them that it is impossible
+to express, at the bottom of the heart where
+true love is. What idle sounds the common phrases
+<i>adorable creature</i>, <i>divinity</i>, <i>angel</i>, are! What a proud
+reflection it is to have a feeling answering to all
+these, rooted in the breast, unalterable, unutterable,
+to which all other feelings are light and vain! Perfect
+love reposes on the object of its choice, like the
+halcyon on the wave, and the air of heaven is around
+it!&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>92.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;S</span><span class="smcap">he</span> stood (while I pleaded my cause before her
+with all the earnestness and fondness in the
+world) with the tears trickling from her eye-lashes,
+her head drooping, her attitude fixed, with the finest
+expression that ever was seen of mixed regret, pity,
+and stubborn resolution, but without speaking a word&mdash;without
+altering a feature. <i>It was like a petrifaction
+of a human face in the softest moment of passion.</i>&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>93.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;S</span><span class="smcap">hall</span> I not love her,&#8221; he exclaims, &#8220;for herself
+alone, in spite of fickleness and folly? to love
+her for her regard for me, is not to love her but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">266</a></span>
+myself. She has robbed me of herself, shall she also
+rob me of my love of her? did I not live on her
+smile? is it less sweet because it is withdrawn from
+me? Did I not adore her every grace? and does she
+bend less enchantingly because she has turned from
+me to another? Is my love then in the power of
+fortune or of her caprice? No, I will have it lasting
+as it is pure; and I will make a goddess of her, and
+build a temple to her in my heart, and worship her
+on indestructible altars, and raise statues to her, and
+my homage shall be unblemished as her unrivalled
+symmetry of form. And when that fails, the memory
+of it shall survive, and my bosom shall be proof to
+scorn as hers has been to pity; and I will pursue her
+with an unrelenting love, and sue to be her slave and
+tend her steps without notice, and without reward;
+and serve her living, and mourn for her when dead;
+and thus my love will have shown itself superior to
+her hate, and I shall triumph and then die. This is
+my idea of the only true and heroic love, and such is
+mine for her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Hazlitt, when he wrote all this, seemed to himself
+full of high and calm resolve. The hand did not
+fail, the pen did not stagger over the paper in a
+formless scrawl, yet the brain was reeling like a
+tower in an earthquake. &#8220;Passion,&#8221; as it has been
+well said, &#8220;when in a state of solemn and omni<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">267</a></span>potent
+vehemence, always appears to be calmness to
+him whom it domineers;&#8221; not unfrequently to others
+also, as the tide at its highest flood looks tranquil,
+and &#8220;neither way inclines.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-046.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="181" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h4>THE NIGHTINGALE.</h4>
+
+<h5>94.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">R</span><span class="smcap">eading</span> the Life and Letters of Francis Horner,
+in the midst of a correspondence about Statistics
+and Bullion, and Political Economy, and the Balance
+of Parties, I came upon the following exquisite passage
+in a letter to his friend Mrs. Spencer:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I was amused by your interrogatory to me about
+the Nightingale&#8217;s note. You meant to put me in a
+dilemma with my politics on one side and my gallantry
+on the other. Of course you consider it as a
+plaintive note, and you were in hopes that no idolater
+of Charles Fox would venture to agree with that
+opinion. In this difficulty I must make the best
+escape I can by saying, that it seems to me neither
+cheerful nor melancholy,&mdash;but always according to
+the circumstances in which you hear it, the scenery,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">268</a></span>
+your own temper of mind, and so on. I settled it so
+with myself early in this month, when I heard them
+every night and all day long at Wells. In daylight,
+when all the other birds are in active concert, the
+Nightingale only strikes you as the most active, emulous,
+and successful of the whole band. At night,
+especially if it is a calm one, with light enough to
+give you a wide indistinct view, the solitary music of
+this bird takes quite another character, from all the
+associations of the scene, from the languor one feels
+at the close of the day, and from the stillness of spirits
+and elevation of mind which comes upon one when
+walking out at that time. But it is not always so&mdash;different
+circumstances will vary in every possible
+way the effect. Will the Nightingale&#8217;s note sound
+alike to the man who is going on an adventure to
+meet his mistress (supposing he heeds it at all), and
+when he loiters along upon his return? The last
+time I heard the Nightingale it was an experiment
+of another sort. It was after a thunderstorm
+in a mild night, while there was silent
+lightning opening every few minutes, first on one
+side of the heavens then on the other. The careless
+little fellow was piping away in the midst of
+all this terror. To <i>me</i>, there was no melancholy in
+his note, but a sort of sublimity; yet it was the same
+song which I had heard in the morning, and which
+then seemed nothing but bustle.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">269</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And in the same spirit Portia moralises:&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The nightingale, if she should sing by day,</span>
+<span class="i0">When every goose is cackling, would be thought</span>
+<span class="i0">No better a musician than the wren.</span>
+<span class="i0">How many things by season, seasoned are</span>
+<span class="i0">To their right praise and true perfection!</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Nor will Coleridge allow the song of the nightingale
+to be always plaintive,&mdash;&#8220;most musical, most
+<i>melancholy</i>;&#8221; he defies the epithet though it be
+Milton&#8217;s.</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">&#8217;Tis the <i>merry</i> nightingale,</span>
+<span class="i0">That crowds and hurries and precipitates</span>
+<span class="i0">With thick fast warble his delicious notes,</span>
+<span class="i0">As he were fearful that an April night</span>
+<span class="i0">Would be too short for him to utter forth</span>
+<span class="i0">His love-chaunt, and disburthen his full soul</span>
+<span class="i0">Of all its music.</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>As a poetical commentary on these beautiful
+passages, every reader of Joanna Baillie will remember
+the night scene in De Montfort, where the cry of
+the Owl suggests such different feelings and associations
+to the two men who listen to it, under such
+different circumstances. To De Montfort it is the
+screech-owl, foreboding death and horror,&mdash;and he
+stands and shudders at the &#8220;instinctive wailing.&#8221;
+To Rezenvelt it is the sound which recalls his boyish
+days, when he merrily mimicked the night-bird till it
+returned him cry for cry,&mdash;and he pauses to listen
+with a fanciful delight.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">270</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-012-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="228" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h4>THACKERAY&#8217;S LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH HUMORISTS</h4>
+
+<h5>(1833.)</h5>
+
+<h5>95.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span> <span class="smcap">lecture</span> should not read like an essay; and,
+therefore, it surprises me that these lectures so
+carefully prepared, so skilfully adapted to meet the
+requirements of oral delivery, should be such agreeable
+reading. As <i>lectures</i>, they wanted only a little
+more point, and emphasis and animation on the part
+of the speaker: as <i>essays</i>, they atone in eloquence
+and earnestness for what they want in finish and
+purity of style.</p>
+
+<p>Genius and sunshine have this in common that
+they are the two most precious gifts of heaven to
+earth, and are dispensed equally to the just and the
+unjust. What struck me most in these lectures, when
+I heard them, (and it strikes me now in turning over
+the written pages,) is this: we deal here with writers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">271</a></span>
+and artists, yet the purpose, from beginning to end,
+is not artistic nor critical, but moral. Thackeray
+tells us himself that he has not assembled his hearers
+to bring them better acquainted with the writings of
+these writers, or to illustrate the wit of these wits,
+or to enhance the humour of these humourists;&mdash;no;
+but to deal justice on the men as <i>men</i>&mdash;to tell
+us how <i>they</i> lived, and loved, suffered and made
+suffer, who still have power to pain or to please;
+to settle <i>their</i> claims to our praise or blame, our
+love or hate, whose right to fame was settled long
+ago, and remains undisputed. This is his purpose.
+Thus then he has laid down and acted on the principle
+that &#8220;morals have something to do with art;&#8221;
+that there is a moral account to be settled with
+men of genius; that the power and the right remains
+with us to do justice on those who being
+dead yet rule our spirits from their urns; to try
+them by a standard which perhaps neither themselves,
+nor those around them, would have admitted.
+Did Swift when he bullied men, lampooned women,
+trampled over decency and humanity, flung round
+him filth and fire, did he anticipate the time when
+before a company of intellectual men, and thinking,
+feeling women, in both hemispheres, he should be
+called up to judgment, hands bound, tongue-tied?
+Where be now his gibes? and where his terrors?
+Thackeray turns him forth, a spectacle, a lesson, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">272</a></span>
+warning; probes the lacerated self-love, holds up to
+scorn, or pity more intolerable, the miserable egotism,
+the half-distempered brain. O Stella! O
+Vanessa! are you not avenged?</p>
+
+<p>Then Sterne&mdash;how he takes to pieces his feigned
+originality, his feigned benevolence, his feigned misanthropy&mdash;all
+feigned!&mdash;the licentious parson, the
+trader in sentiment, the fashionable lion of his day,
+the man without a heart for those who loved him,
+without a conscience for those who trusted him! yet
+the same man who gave us the pathos of &#8220;Le Fevre,&#8221;
+and the humours of &#8220;Uncle Toby!&#8221; Sad is it? ungrateful
+is it? ungracious is it?&mdash;well, it cannot be
+helped; you cannot stifle the conscience of humanity.
+You might as well exclaim against any natural result
+of any natural law. Fancy a hundred years
+hence some brave, honest, human-hearted Thackeray
+standing up to discourse before our great-great-grandchildren
+in the same spirit, with the same
+stern truth, on the wits, and the poets and the
+artists of the present time! Hard is your fate,
+O ye men and women of genius! very hard and
+pitiful, if ye must be subjected to the scalpel of
+such a dissector! You, gifted sinner, whoever you
+may be, walking among us now in all the impunity
+of conventional forbearance, dealing in oracles and
+sentimentalisms, performing great things, teaching
+good things, you are set up as one of the lights of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">273</a></span>
+world:&mdash;Lo! another time comes; the torch is taken
+out of your hand, and held up to your face. What!
+is it a mask, and not a face? &#8220;Off, off ye lendings!&#8221;
+O God! how much wiser, as well as better, not to
+study how to <i>seem</i>, but how to <i>be</i>! How much
+wiser and better, not to have to shudder before
+the truth as it oozes out from a thousand unguessed,
+unguarded apertures, staining your lawn or your
+ermine; not to have to tremble at the thought of
+that future Thackeray, who &#8220;shall pluck out the
+heart of your mystery,&#8221; and shall anatomise you, and
+deliver lectures upon you, to illustrate the standard
+of morals and manners in Queen Victoria&#8217;s reign!</p>
+
+<p>In these lectures, some fine and feeling and discriminative
+passages on character, make amends for
+certain offences and inconsistencies in the novels; I
+mean especially in regard to the female portraits. No
+woman resents his Rebecca&mdash;inimitable Becky!&mdash;no
+woman but feels and acknowledges with a shiver
+the completeness of that wonderful and finished artistic
+creation; but every woman resents the selfish
+inane Amelia, and would be inclined to quote and
+to apply the author&#8217;s own words when speaking of
+&#8216;Tom Jones:&#8217;&mdash;&#8220;I can&#8217;t say that I think Amelia a
+virtuous character. I can&#8217;t say but I think Mr.
+Thackeray&#8217;s evident liking and admiration for his
+Amelia shows that the great humourist&#8217;s moral sense
+was blunted by his life, and that here in art and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">274</a></span>
+ethics there is a great error. If it be right to have
+a heroine whom we are to admire, let us take care at
+least that she is admirable.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Laura, in &#8216;Pendennis,&#8217; is a yet more fatal mistake.
+She is drawn with every generous feeling, every good
+gift. We do not complain that she loves that poor
+creature Pendennis, for she loved him in her childhood.
+She grew up with that love in her heart; it
+came between her and the perception of his faults; it
+is a necessity indivisible from her nature. Hallowed,
+through its constancy, therein alone would lie its best
+excuse, its beauty and its truth. But Laura, faithless
+to that first affection; Laura, waked up to the
+appreciation of a far more manly and noble nature,
+in love with Warrington, and then going back to
+Pendennis, and marrying <i>him</i>! Such infirmity might
+be true of some women, but not of such a woman
+as Laura; we resent the inconsistency, the indelicacy
+of the portrait.</p>
+
+<p>And then Lady Castlewood,&mdash;so evidently a
+favourite of the author, what shall we say of her?
+The virtuous woman, <i>par excellence</i>, who &#8220;never
+sins and never forgives,&#8221; who never resents, nor
+relents, nor repents; the mother, who is the rival of
+her daughter; the mother, who for years is the <i>confidante</i>
+of a man&#8217;s delirious passion for her own child,
+and then consoles him by marrying him herself! O
+Mr. Thackeray! this will never do! such women <i>may</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">275</a></span>
+exist, but to hold them up as examples of excellence,
+and fit objects of our best sympathies, is a fault, and
+proves a low standard in ethics and in art. &#8220;When an
+author presents to us a heroine whom we are called
+upon to admire, let him at least take care that she is
+admirable.&#8221; If in these, and in some other instances,
+Thackeray has given us cause of offence, in the
+lectures we may thank him for some amends: he has
+shown us what he conceives true womanhood and
+true manliness ought to be; so with this expression
+of gratitude, and a far deeper debt of gratitude left
+unexpressed, I close his book, and say, good night!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-275.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="513" width="500" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">276</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-276.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="442" width="500" /></div>
+
+<h4><span class="oldtype">Notes on Art.</span></h4>
+
+<h5>96.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">S</span><span class="smcap">ometimes</span>, in thoughtful moments, I am struck
+by those beautiful analogies between things
+apparently dissimilar&mdash;those awful approximations
+between things apparently far asunder&mdash;which many
+people would call fanciful and imaginary, but they
+seem to bring all God&#8217;s creation, spiritual and material,
+into one comprehensive whole; they give me,
+thus associated, a glimpse, a perception of that over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">277</a></span>whelming
+unity which we call the universe, the
+multitudinous <span class="smcap">ONE</span>.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the principle of the highest ideal in art,
+as conceived by the Greeks, and unsurpassed in its
+purity and beauty, lay in considering well the characteristics
+which distinguish the <i>human</i> form from
+the brute form; and then, in rendering the human
+form, the first aim was to soften down, or, if possible,
+throw out wholly, those characteristics which
+belong to the brute nature, or are common to the
+brute and the man; and the next, to bring into prominence
+and even enlarge the proportions of those
+manifestations of forms which distinguish humanity;
+till, at last, the <i>human</i> merged into the <i>divine</i>, and
+the God in look, in limb, in feature, stood revealed.</p>
+
+<p>Let us now suppose this broad principle which the
+Greeks applied to form, ethically carried out, and
+made the basis of all education&mdash;the training of men
+as a race. Suppose we started with the general
+axiom that all propensities which we have in common
+with the lower animals are to be kept subordinate,
+and so far as is consistent with the truth of nature
+refined away; and that all the qualities which elevate,
+all the aspirations which ally us with the spiritual, are
+to be cultivated and rendered more and more prominent,
+till at last the human being, in faculties as well
+as form, approaches the God-like&mdash;I only say&mdash;suppose?&mdash;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">278</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Again: it has been said of natural philosophy (Zoology)
+that in order to make any real progress in the
+science, as such, we must more and more disregard
+<i>differences</i>, and more and more attend to the obscured
+but essential conditions which are revealed in <i>resemblances</i>,
+in the constant and similar relations of primitive
+structure. Now if the same principle were
+carried out in theology, in morals, in art, as well as
+in science, should we not come nearer to the essential
+truth in <i>all</i>?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-079.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="134" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>97.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;T</span><span class="smcap">here</span> is an instinctive sense of propriety and
+reality in every mind; and it is not true, as
+some great authority has said, that in art we are
+satisfied with contemplating the work without thinking
+of the artist. On the contrary, the artist himself
+is one great object in the work. It is as embodying
+the energies and excellences of the human mind, as
+exhibiting the efforts of genius, as symbolising high
+feeling, that we most value the creations of art;
+without design the representations of art are merely
+fantastical, and without the thought of a design act<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">279</a></span>ing
+upon fixed principles in accordance with a high
+standard of goodness and truth, half the charm of
+design is lost.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-049.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="126" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>98.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;A</span><span class="smcap">rt</span>, used collectively for painting, sculpture,
+architecture, and music, is the mediatress
+between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is,
+therefore, the power of humanising nature, of infusing
+the thoughts and passions of man into everything
+which is the object of his contemplation. Colour,
+form, motion, sound, are the elements which it
+combines, and it stamps them into unity in the
+mould of a <i>moral</i> idea.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This is Coleridge&#8217;s definition:&mdash;Art then is nature,
+<i>humanised</i>; and in proportion as humanity is elevated
+by the interfusion into our life of noble aims and pure
+affections will art be spiritualised and moralised.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-024.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="87" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>99.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">f</span> faith has elevated art, superstition has everywhere
+debased it.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">280</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>100.</h5>
+
+<p>Goethe observes that there is no patriotic art and
+no patriotic science&mdash;that both are universal.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, <i>national</i> art, but not <i>national</i>
+science: we say &#8220;national art,&#8221; &#8220;natural science.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-014.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="179" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>101.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;V</span><span class="smcap">erse</span> is in itself music, and the natural symbol
+of that union of passion with thought and
+pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all poetry
+as contradistinguished from history civil or natural.&#8221;&mdash;<i>Coleridge.</i></p>
+
+<p>In the arts of design, colour is to form what verse
+is to prose&mdash;a more harmonious and luminous vehicle
+of the thought.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-024.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="87" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">281</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>102.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">S</span><span class="smcap">ubjects</span> and representations in art not elevated
+nor interesting in themselves, become instructive
+and interesting to higher minds from the <i>manner</i>
+in which they have been treated; perhaps because
+they have passed through the medium of a higher
+mind in taking form.</p>
+
+<p>This is one reason, though we are not always conscious
+of it, that the Dutch pictures of common and
+vulgar life give us a pleasure apart from their wonderful
+finish and truth of detail. In the mind of
+the artist there must have been the power to throw
+himself into a sphere <i>above</i> what he represents.
+Adrian Brouwer, for instance, must have been
+something far better than a sot; Ostade something
+higher than a boor; though the habits of both led
+them into companionship with sots and boors. In
+the most farcical pictures of Jan Steen there is a
+depth of feeling and observation which remind me
+of the humour of Goldsmith; and Teniers, we
+know, was in his habits a refined gentleman; the
+brilliant elegance of his pencil contrasting with the
+grotesque vulgarity of his subjects. To a thinking
+mind, some of these Dutch pictures of character are
+full of material for thought, pathetic even where
+least sympathetic: no doubt, because of a latent
+sympathy with the artist, apart from his subject.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">282</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-012-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="125" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>103.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">C</span><span class="smcap">oleridge</span> says,&mdash;&#8220;Every human feeling is greater
+and larger than the exciting cause.&#8221; (A philosophical
+way of putting Rochefoucauld&#8217;s neatly
+expressed apophthegm: &#8220;Nous ne sommes jamais ni
+si heureux ni si malheureux que nous l&#8217;imaginons.&#8221;)
+&#8220;A proof,&#8221; he proceeds, &#8220;that man is designed for a
+higher state of existence; and this is deeply implied
+in music, in which there is always something more
+and beyond the immediate expression.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>But not music only, every production of art
+ought to excite emotions greater and thoughts larger
+than itself. Thoughts and emotions which never
+perhaps were in the mind of the artist, never were
+anticipated, never were intended by him&mdash;may be
+strongly suggested by his work. This is an important
+part of the morals of art, which we must never
+lose sight of. Art is not only for pleasure and profit,
+but for good and for evil.</p>
+
+<p>Goethe (in the <i>Dichtung und Wahrheit</i>) describes
+the reception of Marie Antoinette at Strasbourg,
+where she passed the frontier to enter her new kingdom.
+She was then a lovely girl of sixteen. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">283</a></span>
+relates that on visiting before her arrival the reception
+room on the bridge over the Rhine, where her German
+attendants were to deliver her into the hands of
+the French authorities, he found the walls hung with
+tapestries representing the ominous story of Jason
+and Medea&mdash;of all the marriages on record the most
+fearful, the most tragic in its consequences. &#8220;What!&#8221;
+he exclaims, his poetical imagination struck with the
+want of moral harmony, &#8220;was there among these
+French architects and decorators no man who could
+perceive that pictures represent things,&mdash;that they
+have a meaning in themselves,&mdash;that they can impress
+sense and feeling,&mdash;that they can awaken presentiments
+of good or evil?&#8221; But, as he tells us, his
+exclamations of horror were met by the mockery of
+his French companions, who assured him that it was
+not everybody&#8217;s concern to look for significance in
+pictures.</p>
+
+<p>These self-same tapestries of the story of Jason
+and Medea were after the Restoration presented by
+Louis XVIII. to George IV., and at present they
+line the walls of the Ball-room in Windsor Castle.
+We might repeat, with some reason, the question of
+Goethe; for if pictures have a significance, and speak
+to the imagination, what has the tragedy of Jason
+and Medea to do in a ball-room?</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Goethe, who thus laid down the principle that works<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">284</a></span>
+of art speak to the feelings and the conscience, and
+can awaken associations tending to good and evil, by
+some strange inconsistency places art and artists
+out of the sphere of morals. He speaks somewhere
+with contempt and ridicule of those who
+take their conscience and their morality with them
+to an opera or a picture gallery. Yet surely he
+is wrong. Why should we not? Are our conscience
+and our morals like articles of dress which
+we can take off and put on again as we fancy
+it convenient or expedient?&mdash;shut up in a drawer
+and leave behind us when we visit a theatre or
+a gallery of art? or are they not rather a part of
+ourselves&mdash;our very life&mdash;to graduate the worth, to
+fix the standard of all that mingles with our life?
+The idea that what we call <i>taste</i> in art has something
+quite distinctive from conscience, is one cause that
+the popular notions concerning the productions of
+art are abandoned to such confusion and uncertainty;
+that simple people regard <i>taste</i> as something
+forensic, something to be learned, as they would
+learn a language, and mastered by a study of rules
+and a dictionary of epithets; and they look up to
+a professor of taste, just as they would look up to
+a professor of Greek or of Hebrew. Either they
+listen to judgments lightly and confidently promulgated
+with a sort of puzzled faith and a surrender
+of their own moral sense, which are pitiable;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">285</a></span>
+as if art also had its infallible church and its hierarchy
+of dictators!&mdash;or they fly into the opposite
+extreme, and seeing themselves deceived and misled,
+fall away into strange heresies. All from ignorance
+of a few laws simple in their form, yet infinite
+in their application;&mdash;<i>natural</i> laws we must call
+them, though here applied to art.</p>
+
+<p>In my younger days I have known men conspicuous
+for their want of elevated principle, and for their
+dissipated habits, held up as arbiters and judges of
+art; but it was to them only another form of
+epicurism and self-indulgence; and I have seen
+them led into such absurd and fatal mistakes for
+want of the power to distinguish and to generalise,
+that I have despised their judgment, and have come
+to the conclusion that a really high standard of taste
+and a low standard of morals are incompatible with
+each other.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-060-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="109" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>104.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> fact of the highest artistic genius having
+manifested itself in a polytheistic age, and
+among a people whose moral views were essentially
+degraded, has, we think, fostered the erroneous notion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">286</a></span>
+that the sphere of art has no connection with that of
+morality. The Greeks, with penetrative insight,
+dilated the essential characteristics of man&#8217;s organism
+as a vehicle of superior intelligence, while their
+intense sympathy with physical beauty made them
+alive to its most subtle manifestations; and reproducing
+their impressions through the medium of art,
+they have given birth to models of the human form,
+which reveal its highest possibilities, and the excellence
+of which depends upon their being individual
+expressions of ideal truth. Thus, too, in their descriptions
+of nature, instead of multiplying insignificant
+details, they seized instinctively upon the
+characteristic features of her varying aspects, and not
+unfrequently embodied a finished picture in one
+comprehensive and harmonious word. In association
+with their marvellous genius, however, we find a
+cruelty, a treachery, and a licence which would be
+revolting if it were not for the historical interest
+which attaches to every genuine record of a bygone
+age. Their low moral standard cannot excite surprise
+when we consider the debasing tendency of
+their worship, the objects of their adoration being
+nothing more than their own degraded passions invested
+with some of the attributes of deity. Now,
+among the modifications of thought introduced by
+Christianity, there is perhaps none more pregnant
+with important results than the harmony which it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">287</a></span>
+has established between religion and morality. The
+great law of right and wrong has acquired a sacred
+character, when viewed as an expression of the divine
+will; it takes its rank among the eternal verities, and
+to ignore it in our delineations of life, or to represent
+sin otherwise than as treason against the supreme
+ruler, is to retain in modern civilisation one of the
+degrading elements of heathenism. Conscience is as
+great a fact of our inner life as the sense of beauty,
+and the harmonious action of both these instinctive
+principles is essential to the highest enjoyment of
+art, for any internal dissonance disturbs the repose
+of the mind, and thereby shatters the image mirrored
+in its depths.&#8221;&mdash;<i>A. S.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-056-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="150" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>105.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;M</span><span class="smcap">ais</span> vous autres artistes, vous ne considerez
+pour la plupart dans les &oelig;uvres que la
+beaut&eacute; ou la singularit&eacute; de l&#8217;ex&eacute;cution, sans vous
+p&eacute;n&eacute;trer de l&#8217;id&eacute;e dont cet &oelig;uvre est la forme;
+ainsi votre intelligence adore souvent l&#8217;expression
+d&#8217;un sentiment que votre c&oelig;ur repousserait s&#8217;il en
+avait la conscience.&#8221;&mdash;<i>George Sand.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">288</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-013-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="112" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>106.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">L</span><span class="smcap">avater</span> told Goethe that on a certain occasion
+when he held the velvet bag in the church as
+collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the
+hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual,
+the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the
+action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the
+bag, were distinctly different and individually characteristic.</p>
+
+<p>What then shall we say of Van Dyck, who painted
+the hands of his men and women, not from individual
+nature, but from a model hand&mdash;his own
+very often?&mdash;and every one who considers for a moment
+will see in Van Dyck&#8217;s portraits, that, however
+well painted and elegant the hands, they in very few
+instances harmonise with the <i>personalit&eacute;</i>;&mdash;that the
+position is often affected, and as if intended for display,&mdash;the
+display of what is in itself a positive fault,
+and from which some little knowledge of comparative
+physiology would have saved him.</p>
+
+<p>There are hands of various character; the hand to
+catch, and the hand to hold; the hand to clasp, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">289</a></span>
+the hand to grasp. The hand that has worked or
+could work, and the hand that has never done anything
+but hold itself out to be kissed, like that of
+Joanna of Arragon in Raphael&#8217;s picture.</p>
+
+<p>Let any one look at the hands in Titian&#8217;s portrait
+of old Paul IV.: though exquisitely modelled, they
+have an expression which reminds us of claws; they
+belong to the face of that grasping old man, and
+could belong to no other.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-078.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="215" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>107.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">M</span><span class="smcap">ozart</span> and Chopin, though their genius was differently
+developed, were alike in some things:
+in nothing more than this, that the artistic element in
+both minds wholly dominated over the social and
+practical, and that their art was the element in which
+they moved and lived, through which they felt and
+thought. I doubt whether either of them could have
+said, &#8220;<i>D&#8217;abord je suis homme et puis je suis artiste</i>;&#8221;
+whereas this could have been said with truth by
+Mendelsohn and by Litzst. In Mendelsohn the
+enormous creative power was modified by the intellect
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">290</a></span>
+and the conscience. Litzst has no creative
+power.</p>
+
+<p>Liszt has thus drawn the character of Chopin:&mdash;&#8220;Rien
+n&#8217;&eacute;tait plus pur et plus exalt&eacute; en m&ecirc;me temps
+que ses pens&eacute;es; rien n&#8217;&eacute;tait plus tenace, plus exclusif,
+et plus minutieusement d&eacute;vou&eacute; que ses affections.
+Mais cet &ecirc;tre ne comprenait que ce qui &eacute;tait identique
+&agrave; lui-m&ecirc;me:&mdash;le reste n&#8217;existait pour lui que
+comme une sorte de r&ecirc;ve f&acirc;cheux, auquel il essayait
+de se soustraire en vivant au milieu du monde.
+Toujours perdu dans ses r&ecirc;veries, la r&eacute;alit&eacute; lui deplaisait.
+Enfant il ne pouvait toucher &agrave; un instrument
+tranchant sans se blesser; homme il ne pouvait se
+trouver en face d&#8217;un homme diff&eacute;rent de lui, sans se
+heurter contre cette contradiction vivante.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Ce qui le pr&eacute;servait d&#8217;un antagonisme perp&eacute;tuel
+c&#8217;&eacute;tait l&#8217;habitude volontaire et bient&ocirc;t inv&eacute;t&eacute;r&eacute;e de
+ne point voir, de ne pas entendre ce qui lui deplaisait:
+en g&eacute;n&eacute;ral sans toucher &agrave; ses affections personelles,
+les &ecirc;tres qui ne pensaient pas comme lui
+devenaient &agrave; ses yeux comme des esp&egrave;ces de fant&ocirc;mes;
+et comme il &eacute;tait d&#8217;une politesse charmante, on pouvait
+prendre pour une bienveillance courtoise ce qui
+n&#8217;&eacute;tait chez lui qu&#8217;un froid d&eacute;dain&mdash;une aversion
+insurmontable.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>108.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> father of Mozart was a man of high and strict
+religious principle. He had a conviction&mdash;in his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">291</a></span>
+case more truly founded than is usual&mdash;that he was
+the father of a great, a surpassing genius, and consequently
+of a being unfortunate in this, that he
+must be in advance of his age, exposed to error, to
+envy, to injustice, to strife; and to do his duty to his
+son demanded large faith and large firmness. But
+because he <i>did</i> estimate this sacred trust as a duty to
+be discharged, not only with respect to his gifted son,
+but to the God who had so endowed him; so, in spite
+of many mistakes, the earnest straightforward endeavour
+to do right in the parent seems to have saved
+Mozart&#8217;s moral life, and to have given that completeness
+to the productions of his genius, which the harmony
+of the moral and creative faculties alone can
+bestow.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">&#8220;The modifying power of circumstances on Mozart&#8217;s
+style, is an interesting consideration. Whatever
+of striking, of new or beautiful he met with in
+the works of others left its impression on him; and
+he often reproduced these efforts, not servilely, but
+mingling his own nature and feelings with them in
+a manner not less surprising than delightful.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This is true equally of Shakespeare and of Raphael,
+both of whom adapted or rather adopted much from
+their precursors in the way of material to work
+upon; and whose incomparable originality consisted
+in the interfusion of their own great individual genius<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">292</a></span>
+with every subject they touched, so that it became
+theirs, and could belong to no other.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">The Figaro was composed at Vienna. The Don
+Juan and Clemenza di Tito at Prague;&mdash;which I
+note because the localities are so characteristic of the
+operas. Cimarosa&#8217;s Matrimonio Segreto was composed
+at Prague; it was on the fortification of the Hradschin
+one morning at sun-rise that he composed the
+<i>Pria che spunti in ciel l&#8217;aurora</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">When called upon to describe his method of composing,
+what Mozart said of himself was very striking
+from its <i>na&iuml;vet&eacute;</i> and truth. &#8220;I do not,&#8221; he said,
+&#8220;aim at originality. I do not know in what my originality
+consists. Why my productions take from
+my hand that particular form or style which makes
+them <i>Mozartish</i>, and different from the works of
+other composers is probably owing to the same cause
+which makes my nose this or that particular shape;
+makes it, in short, Mozart&#8217;s nose, and different from
+other people&#8217;s.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Yet, as a composer, Mozart was as <i>objective</i>, as
+dramatic, as Shakspeare and Raphael; Chopin, in
+comparison, was wholly <i>subjective</i>,&mdash;the Byron of
+Music.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">293</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-032-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="138" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>109.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">alking</span> once with Adelaide Kemble, after she had
+been singing in the &#8220;Figaro,&#8221; she compared the
+music to the bosom of a full blown rose in its voluptuous,
+intoxicating richness. I said that some of
+Mozart&#8217;s melodies seemed to me not so much composed,
+but found&mdash;found on some sunshiny day in
+Arcadia, among nymphs and flowers. &#8220;Yes,&#8221; she
+replied, with ready and felicitous expression, &#8220;not
+<i>inventions</i>, but <i>existences</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-022-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="214" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>110.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">O</span><span class="smcap">ld</span> George the Third, in his blindness and madness,
+once insisted on making the selection of
+pieces for the concert of ancient music (May, 1811),&mdash;it
+was soon after the death of the Princess Amelia.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">294</a></span>
+&#8220;The programme included some of the finest passages
+in Handel&#8217;s &#8216;Samson,&#8217; descriptive of blindness; the
+&#8216;Lamentation of Jephthah,&#8217; for his daughter; Purcel&#8217;s
+&#8216;Mad Tom,&#8217; and closed with &#8216;God save the
+King,&#8217; to make sure the application of all that went
+before.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-038-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="186" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>111.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">E</span><span class="smcap">very</span> one who remembers what Madlle. Rachel
+was seven or eight years ago, and who sees
+her now (1853), will allow that she has made no progress
+in any of the essential excellences of her art:&mdash;a
+certain proof that she is not a great artist in the
+true sense of the word. She is a finished actress,
+but she is nothing more, and nothing better; not
+enough the artist ever to forget or conceal her art;
+consequently there is a want somewhere, which a
+mind highly toned and of quick perceptions feels from
+beginning to end. The parts in which she once excelled&mdash;the
+Ph&ecirc;dre and the Hermione, for instance&mdash;have
+become formalised and hard, like studies cast
+in bronze; and when she plays a new part it has no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">295</a></span>
+freshness. I always go to see her whenever I can.
+I admire her as what she is&mdash;the Parisian actress,
+practised in every trick of her <i>m&eacute;tier</i>. I admire what
+she does, I think how well it is all <i>done</i>, and am
+inclined to clap and applaud her drapery, perfect and
+ostentatiously studied in every fold, just with the
+same feeling that I applaud herself.</p>
+
+<p>As to the last scene of Adrienne Lecouvreur,
+(which those who are <i>avides de sensation</i>, athirst for
+painful emotion, go to see as they would drink a
+dram, and critics laud as a miracle of art,) it is
+altogether a mistake and a failure; it is beyond the
+just limits of terror and pity&mdash;beyond the legitimate
+sphere of <i>art</i>. It reminds us of the story of Gentil
+Bellini and the Sultan. The Sultan much admired
+Bellini&#8217;s picture of the decollation of John the Baptist,
+but informed him that it was inaccurate&mdash;surgically&mdash;for
+the tendons and muscles ought to shrink
+where divided; and then calling for one of his slaves,
+he drew his scimitar, and striking off the head of the
+wretch, gave the horror-struck artist a lesson in
+practical anatomy. So we might possibly learn from
+Rachel&#8217;s imitative representation, (studied in an hospital
+as they say,) how poison acts on the frame, and
+how the limbs and features writhe into death; but if
+she were a great moral artist she would feel that
+what is allowed to be true in painting, is true in art
+generally; that mere imitation, such as the vulgar<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">296</a></span>
+delight in, and hold up their hands to see, is the
+vulgarest and easiest aim of the imitative arts, and
+that between the true interpretation of poetry in art
+and such base mechanical means to the lowest ends,
+there lies an immeasurable distance.</p>
+
+<p>I am disposed to think that Rachel has not genius,
+but talent, and that her talent, from what I see year
+after year, has a downward tendency,&mdash;there is not
+sufficient moral seasoning to save it from corruption.
+I remember that when I first saw her in Hermione
+she reminded me of a serpent, and the same impression
+continues. The long meagre form with its
+graceful undulating movements, the long narrow face
+and features, the contracted jaw, the high brow, the
+brilliant supernatural eyes which seem to glance every
+way at once; the sinister smile; the painted red lips,
+which look as though they had lapped, or could lap,
+blood; all these bring before me the idea of a Lamia,
+the serpent nature in the woman&#8217;s form. In Lydia,
+and in Athalie, she touches the extremes of vice and
+wickedness with such a masterly lightness and precision,
+that I am full of wondering admiration for
+the actress. There is not a turn of her figure, not an
+expression in her face, not a fold in her gorgeous
+drapery, that is not a study; but withal such a
+consciousness of her art, and such an ostentation of
+the means she employs, that the power remains<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">297</a></span>
+always <i>extraneous</i>, as it were, and exciting only to
+the senses and the intellect.</p>
+
+<p>Latterly she has become a hard mannerist. Her
+face, once so flexible, has lost the power of expressing
+the nicer shades and softer gradations of feeling; so
+much so, that they write dramas for her with supernaturally
+wicked and depraved heroines to suit her
+especial powers. I conceive that an artist could not
+sink lower in degradation. Yet to satisfy the taste of
+a Parisian audience and the ambition of a Parisian
+actress this was not enough, and wickedness required
+the piquancy of immediate approximation with
+innocence. In the Valeria she played two characters,
+and appeared on the stage alternately as a miracle of
+vice and a miracle of virtue: an abandoned prostitute
+and a chaste matron. There was something in this
+contrasted impersonation, considered simply in relation
+to the aims and objects of art, so revolting, that
+I sat in silent and deep disgust, which was partly
+deserved by the audience which could endure the
+exhibition.</p>
+
+<p>It is the entire absence of the high poetic and
+moral element which distinguishes Rachel as an
+actress, and places her at such an immeasurable distance
+from Mrs. Siddons, that it shocks me to hear
+them named together.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">298</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>112.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">t</span> is no reproach to a capital actress to play effectively
+a very wicked character. Mrs. Siddons
+played the abandoned Milwood as carefully, as completely
+as she played Hermoine and Constance; but
+if it had required a perpetual succession of Calistas
+and Milwoods to call forth her highest powers, what
+should we think of the woman and the artist?</p>
+
+<h5>113.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">hen</span> dramas and characters are invented to suit
+the particular talent of a particular actor or
+actress, it argues rather a limited range of the artistic
+power; though within that limit the power may be
+great and the talent genuine.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Thus for Liston and for Miss O&#8217;Neil, so distinguished
+in their respective lines of Comedy and
+Tragedy, characters were especially constructed and
+plays written, which have not been acted since their
+time.</p>
+
+<h5>114.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span> <span class="smcap">celebrated</span> German actress (who has quitted
+the stage for many years) speaking of Rachel,
+said that the reason she must always stop short of
+the highest place in art, is because she is nothing but
+an actress&mdash;that only; and has no aims in life, has<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">299</a></span>
+no duties, feelings, employments, sympathies, but
+those which centre in herself in the interests of her
+art;&mdash;which thus ceases to be <i>art</i> and becomes a
+<i>m&eacute;tier</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This reminded me of what Pauline Viardot once
+said to me:&mdash;&#8220;D&#8217;abord je suis <i>femme</i>, avec les d&eacute;voirs,
+les affections, les sentiments d&#8217;une femme; et
+puis je suis <i>artiste</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<h5>115.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> same German actress whose opinion I have
+quoted, told me that the Leonora and the Iphigenia
+of Goethe were the parts she preferred to play.
+The Thekla and the Beatrice of Schiller next. (In
+all these she excelled.) The parts easiest to her,
+requiring no effort scarcely, were Jerta (in Houwald&#8217;s
+Tragedy, &#8220;Die Schuld&#8221;), and Cl&auml;rchen in Egmont;
+of the character of Jerta, she said beautifully:&mdash;&#8220;Ich
+habe es nicht gespielt, Ich habe es gesagt!&#8221; (I
+did not <i>play</i> it, I <i>uttered</i> it.) This was extremely
+characteristic of the woman.</p>
+
+<p>I once asked Mrs. Siddons, which of her great
+characters she preferred to play? She replied, after
+a moment&#8217;s consideration, and in her rich deliberate
+emphatic tones:&mdash;&#8220;Lady Macbeth is the character
+I have most <i>studied</i>.&#8221; She afterwards said that she
+had played the character during thirty years, and
+scarcely acted it once, without carefully reading over<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">300</a></span>
+the part and generally the whole play in the morning;
+and that she never read over the play without
+finding something new in it; &#8220;something,&#8221; she said,
+&#8220;which had not struck me so much as it <i>ought</i> to
+have struck me.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Of Mrs. Pritchard, who preceded Mrs. Siddons in
+the part of Lady Macbeth, it was well known that
+she had never read the play. She merely studied
+her own part as written out by the stage-copyist; of
+the other parts she knew nothing but the <i>cues</i>.</p>
+
+<h5>116.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">hen</span> I asked Mrs. Henry Siddons, which of her
+characters she preferred playing? she said at
+once &#8220;Imogen, in Cymbeline, was the character I
+played with most ease to myself, and most success as
+regarded the public; it cost no effort.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This was confirmed by others. A very good
+judge said of her&mdash;&#8220;In some of her best parts, as
+Juliet, Rosalind, and Lady Townley, she may have
+been approached or equalled. In Viola and Imogen
+she was never equalled. In the grace and simplicity
+of the first, in the refinement and shy but impassioned
+tenderness of the last, <i>I</i> at least have never
+seen any one to be compared to her. She hardly
+seemed to <i>act</i> these parts; they came naturally to
+her.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">301</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This reminds me of another anecdote of the same
+accomplished actress and admirable woman. The
+people of Edinburgh, among whom she lived, had so
+identified her with all that was gentle, refined and
+noble, that they did not like to see her play wicked
+parts. It happened that Godwin went down to
+Edinburgh with a tragedy in his pocket, which had
+been accepted by the theatre there, and in which
+Mrs. Henry Siddons was to play the principal part&mdash;that
+of a very wicked woman (I forget the name
+of the piece). He was warned that it risked the
+success of his play, but her conception of the part
+was so just and spirited, that he persisted. At the
+rehearsal she stopped in the midst of one of her
+speeches and said, with great <i>na&iuml;vet&eacute;</i>, &#8220;I am afraid,
+Mr. Godwin, the people will not endure to hear me
+say this!&#8221; He replied coolly, &#8220;My dear, you cannot
+be always young and pretty&mdash;you must come to this
+at last,&mdash;go on.&#8221; He mistook her meaning and the
+feeling of &#8220;the people.&#8221; The play failed; and the
+audience took care to discriminate between their
+disapprobation of the piece and their admiration for
+the actress.</p>
+
+<h5>117.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">M</span><span class="smcap">adame Schr&oelig;der Devrient</span> told me that she
+sung with most pleasure to herself in the
+&#8220;Fidelio;&#8221; and in this part I have never seen her
+equalled.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">302</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Fanny Kemble told me the part she had played
+with most pleasure to herself, was Camiola, in Massinger&#8217;s
+&#8220;Maid of Honour.&#8221; It was an exquisite
+impersonation, but the play itself ineffective and
+not successful, because of the weak and worthless
+character of the hero.</p>
+
+<h5>118.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">M</span><span class="smcap">rs. Charles Kean</span> told me that she had played
+with great ease and pleasure to herself, the part
+of Ginevra, in Leigh Hunt&#8217;s &#8220;Legend of Florence.&#8221;
+She <i>made</i> the part (as it is technically termed), and
+it was a very complete and beautiful impersonation.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">These answers appear to me psychologically, as
+well as artistically, interesting, and worth preserving.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-013-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="185" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>119.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">M</span><span class="smcap">rs. Siddons</span>, when looking over the statues in
+Lord Lansdowne&#8217;s gallery, told him that one
+mode of expressing intensity of feeling was suggested<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">303</a></span>
+to her by the position of some of the Egyptian statues
+with the arms close down at the sides and the hands
+clenched. This is curious, for the attitude in the
+Egyptian gods is intended to express repose. As the
+expression of intense passion self-controlled, it might
+be appropriate to some characters and not to others.
+Rachel, as I recollect, uses it in the Ph&ecirc;dre:&mdash;Madame
+Rettich uses it in the Medea. It would not
+be characteristic in Constance.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-060-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="151" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>120.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">O</span><span class="smcap">n</span> a certain occasion when Fanny Kemble was
+reading Cymbeline, a lady next to me remarked
+that Imogen ought not to utter the words &#8220;Senseless
+linen!&mdash;happier therein than I!&#8221; aloud, and to
+Pisanio,&mdash;that it detracted from the strength of the
+feeling, and that they should have been uttered aside,
+and in a low, intense whisper. &#8220;Iachimo,&#8221; she
+added, &#8220;might easily have won a woman who could
+have laid her heart so bare to a mere attendant!&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>On my repeating this criticism to Fanny Kemble,
+she replied just as I had anticipated: &#8220;Such criticism<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">304</a></span>
+is the mere expression of the natural emotions or
+character of the critic. <i>She</i> would have spoken the
+words in a whisper; <i>I</i> should have made the exclamation
+aloud. If there had been a thousand people by,
+I should not have cared for them&mdash;I should not have
+been conscious of their presence. I should have
+exclaimed before them all, &#8216;Senseless linen!&mdash;happier
+therein than I!&#8217;&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And thus the artist fell into the same mistake of
+which she accused her critic&mdash;she made Imogen utter
+the words aloud, because <i>she</i> would have done so herself.
+This sort of subjective criticism in both was
+quite feminine; but the question was not how either
+A. B. or F. K. would have spoken the words, but
+what would have been most natural in such a woman
+as Imogen?</p>
+
+<p>And most undoubtedly the first criticism was as
+exquisitely true and just as it was delicate. Such a
+woman as Imogen would <i>not</i> have uttered those words
+aloud. She would have uttered them in a whisper,
+and turning her face from her attendant. With such
+a woman, the more intense the passion, the more
+conscious and the more veiled the expression.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-022-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="105" width="400" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">305</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>121.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">read</span> in the life of Garrick that, &#8220;about 1741, a
+taste for Shakespeare had lately been revived by
+the encouragement of some distinguished persons of
+taste of both sexes; but more especially by the
+ladies who formed themselves into a society, called
+the &#8216;Shakespeare Club.&#8217;&#8221; There exists a Shakespeare
+Society at this present time, but I do not
+know that any ladies are members of it, or allowed
+to be so.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-007.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="265" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h5>122.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> &#8220;Maria Maddalena&#8221; of Friedrich Hebbel is a
+domestic tragedy. It represents the position of a
+young girl in the lower class of society&mdash;a character
+of quiet goodness and feeling, in a position the most
+usual, circumstances the most common-place. The
+representation is from the life, and set forth with a
+truth which in its naked simplicity, almost hardness,
+becomes most tragic and terrible. Around this girl,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">306</a></span>
+portrayed with consummate delicacy, is a group of
+men. First her father, an honest artisan, coarse,
+harsh, despotic. Then a light-minded, good-natured,
+dissipated brother, and two suitors. All these love
+her according to their masculine individuality. To
+the men of her own family she is as a part of the
+furniture&mdash;something they are accustomed to see&mdash;necessary
+to the daily well-being of the house, without
+whom the fire would not be on the hearth, nor
+the soup on the table; and they are proud of her
+charms and good qualities as belonging to them. By
+her lovers she is loved as an object they desire to
+possess&mdash;and dispute with each other. But no one
+of all these thinks of <i>her</i>&mdash;of what she thinks, feels,
+desires, suffers, is, or may be. Nor does she seem to
+think of it herself, until the storm falls upon her,
+enwraps her, overwhelms her. Then she stands in
+the midst of the beings around her, and who are one
+and all in a kind of external relation to her, completely
+alone. In her grief, in her misery, in her
+amazement, her perplexity, her terror, there is no one
+to take thought for her, no one to help, no one to
+sympathise. Each is self-occupied, self-satisfied.
+And so she sinks down and perishes, and they stand
+wondering at what they had not the sense to see,
+wringing their hands over the irremediable. It is
+the Lucy Ashton of vulgar life.</p>
+
+<p>The manners and characters of this play are essen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">307</a></span>tially
+German; but the <i>stuff</i>&mdash;the material of the
+piece&mdash;the relative position of the personages, might
+be true of any place in this christian, civilised
+Europe. The whole is wonderfully, painfully
+natural, and strikes home to the heart, like Hood&#8217;s
+&#8220;Bridge of Sighs.&#8221; It was a surprise to me that
+such a piece should have been acted, and with applause,
+at the Court Theatre at Vienna; but I believe
+it has not been given since 1849.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-026.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="188" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>123.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">ere</span> is a very good analysis of the artistic nature:
+&#8220;Il ressent une v&eacute;ritable &eacute;motion, mais il
+s&#8217;arrange pour la montrer. Il fait un peu ce que
+faisait cet acteur de l&#8217;antiquit&eacute; qui, venant de perdre
+son fils unique et jouant quelque temps apr&egrave;s le r&ocirc;le
+d&#8217;Electre embrassant l&#8217;urne d&#8217;Oreste, prit entre ses
+mains l&#8217;urne qui contenait les cendres de son enfant,
+et joua sa propre douleur, dit Aulus Gellius, au lieu
+de jouer celle de son r&ocirc;le. Ce melange de l&#8217;&eacute;motion
+naturelle et de l&#8217;&eacute;motion th&eacute;atrale est plus fr&eacute;quent
+qu&#8217;on ne croit, surtout &agrave; certaines &eacute;poques quand le
+raffinement de l&#8217;Education fait que l&#8217;homme ne sent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">308</a></span>
+pas seulement ses &eacute;motions, mais qu&#8217;il sent aussi
+l&#8217;effet qu&#8217;elles peuvent produire. Beaucoup de gens
+alors, sont naturellement com&eacute;diens; c&#8217;est &agrave; dire qu&#8217;ils
+donnent un r&ocirc;le &agrave; leurs passions: ils sentent en dehors
+au lieu de sentir en dedans; leurs &eacute;motions sont
+<i>en relief</i> au lieu d&#8217;&ecirc;tre <i>en profondeur</i>.&#8221;&mdash;<i>St. Marc
+Girardin.</i></p>
+
+<p>I think Margaret Fuller must have had the above
+passage in her mind when she worked out this happy
+illustration into a more finished form. She says:&mdash;&#8220;The
+difference between the artistic nature and the
+unartistic nature in the hour of emotion, is this: in
+the first the feeling is a cameo, in the last an intaglio.
+Raised in relief and shaped <i>out</i> of the heart in the
+first; cut <i>into</i> the heart, and hardly perceptible till
+you take the impression, in the last.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>And to complete this fanciful and beautiful analogy,
+we might add, that because the artistic nature
+is demonstrative, it is sometimes thought insincere;
+and insincere it <i>is</i> where the form is hollow in
+proportion as it is cast outward, as in the casts
+and electrotype copies of the solid sculpture. And
+because the unartistic nature is undemonstrative,
+it is sometimes thought cold, unreal; for of this also
+there are imitations; and in passing the touch over
+certain intaglios, we feel by contact that they are
+not so deep as we supposed.</p>
+
+<p>God defend us from both! from the hollowness<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">309</a></span>
+that imitates solidity, and the shallowness that
+imitates depth!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-055.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="210" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>124.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">G</span><span class="smcap">oethe</span> said of some woman, &#8220;She knew something
+of devotion and love, but of the pure
+admiration for a glorious piece of man&#8217;s handiwork&mdash;of
+a mere sympathetic veneration for the creation of
+the human intellect&mdash;she could form no idea.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This may have been true of the individual woman
+referred to; but that female critics look for something
+in a production of art beyond the mere handiwork,
+and that &#8220;our sympathetic veneration for a creation
+of human intellect,&#8221; is often dependent on our moral
+associations, is not a reproach to us. Nor, if I may
+presume to say so, does it lessen the value of our
+criticism, where it can be referred to principles.
+Women have a sort of unconscious logic in these
+matters.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">310</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>125.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;W</span><span class="smcap">hen</span> fiction,&#8221; says Sir James Mackintosh,
+&#8220;represents a degree of ideal excellence
+superior to any virtue which is observed in real life,
+the effect is perfectly analogous to that of a model of
+ideal beauty in the fine arts.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>That is to say&mdash;As the Apollo exalts our idea of
+possible beauty, in form, so the moral ideal of man
+or woman exalts our idea of possible virtue, provided
+it be <i>consistent</i> as a whole. If we gave the Apollo a
+god-like head and face and left a part of his frame
+below perfection, the elevating effect of the whole
+would be immediately destroyed, though the figure
+might be more according to the standard of actual
+nature.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-008.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="99" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>126.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;I</span><span class="smcap">n</span> Dante, as in Shakespeare, every man selects
+by instinct that which assimilates with the
+course of his own previous occupations and interests.&#8221;
+(<i>Merivale.</i>) True, not of Dante and Shakespeare
+only, but of all books worth reading; and not merely
+of books and authors, but of all productions of mind
+in whatever form which speak to mind; all works of
+art, from which we <i>imbibe</i>, as it were, what is sympathetic
+with our individuality. The more universal the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">311</a></span>
+sympathies of the writer or the artist, the more of
+such individualities will be included in his domain of
+power.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-059-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="89" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>127.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> distinction so cleverly and beautifully drawn
+by the Germans (by Lessing first I believe)
+between &#8220;Bildende&#8221; and &#8220;Redende Kunst&#8221; is not
+to be rendered into English without a lengthy paraphrase.
+It places in immediate contradistinction the
+art which is evolved in <i>words</i>, and the art which is
+evolved in <i>forms</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-028-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="208" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h5>128.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">V</span><span class="smcap">enus</span>, or rather the Greek Aphrodite, in the sublime
+fragment of Eschylus (the Dana&iuml;des) is a
+grand, severe, and pure conception; the principle
+eternal of beauty, of love, and of fecundity&mdash;or the
+law of the continuation of being through beauty and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">312</a></span>
+through love. Such a conception is no more like the
+Ovidean Roman Venus than the Venus of Milo is
+like the Venus de Medicis.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-012-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="125" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>129.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">n</span> the Greek tragedy, love figures as one of the
+laws of nature&mdash;not as a power, or a passion;
+these are the aspects given to it by the Christian
+imagination.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this higher idea of love <i>did</i> exist among the
+ancients&mdash;only we must not seek it in their poetry,
+but in their philosophy. Thus we find it in Plato,
+set forth as a beautiful philosophical theory; not as
+a passion, to influence life, nor as a poetic feeling, to
+adorn and exalt it. Nor do we moderns owe this idea
+of a mystic, elevated, and elevating love to the Greek
+philosophy. I rather agree with those who trace it
+to the mingling of Christianity with the manners of
+the old Germans, and their (almost) superstitious
+reverence for womanhood. In the Middle Ages,
+where morals were most depraved, and women most
+helpless and oppressed, there still survived the theory
+formed out of the combination of the Christian spirit,
+and the Germanic customs; and when in the 15th<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">313</a></span>
+century Plato became the fashion, then the theory
+became a science, and what had been religion became
+again philosophy. This sort of speculative love became
+to real love what theology became to religion;
+it was a thesis to be talked about and argued in universities,
+sung in sonnets, set forth in art; and so
+being kept as far as possible from all bearings on
+our moral life, it ceased to find consideration either
+as a prim&aelig;val law of God, or as a moral motive
+influencing the duties and habits of our existence;
+and thus we find the social code in regard to it
+diverging into all the vagaries of celibacy on one
+hand, and all the vilenesses of profligacy on the
+other.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-012-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="228" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>130.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">ilkie&#8217;s</span> &#8220;Life and Letters&#8221; have not helped me
+much. His opinions and criticisms on his own
+art are sensible, not suggestive. I find, however, one
+or two passages strongly illustrative of the value of
+<i>truth</i> as a principle in art, and the sort of <i>vitality</i> it
+gives to scenery and objects.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">314</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He writes, when travelling in Holland, to his
+friend, Sir George Beaumont;&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;One of the first circumstances that struck me
+wherever I went was what you had prepared me for;
+the resemblance that everything bore to the Dutch
+and Flemish pictures. On leaving Ostend, not only
+the people, houses, trees, but whole tracks of country
+reminded me of Teniers, and on getting further
+into the country this was only relieved by the pictures
+of Rubens and Wouvermans, or some other masters
+taking his place.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;I thought I could trace the particular districts in
+Holland where Ostade, Cuyp, and Rembrandt had
+studied, and could almost fancy the spot where the
+pictures of other masters had been painted. Indeed
+nothing seemed new to me in the whole country; and
+what one could not help wondering at, was, that
+these old masters should have been able to draw the
+materials of so beautiful a variety of art, from so
+contracted and monotonous a theme.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>Their variety arose out of their truthfulness. I
+had the same feeling when travelling in Holland and
+Belgium. It was to me a perpetual succession of
+reminiscences, and so it has been with others.
+Rubens and Rembrandt (as landscape painters)&mdash;Cuyp,
+Hobbima, were continually in my mind;
+occasionally the yet more poetical Ruysdaal; but
+who ever thinks of Wouvermans, or Bergham, or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">315</a></span>
+Karel du Jardin, as national or natural painters?
+their scenery is all <i>got up</i> like the scenery in a ballet,
+and I can conceive nothing more tiresome than a
+room full of their pictures, elegant as they are.</p>
+
+<h5>131.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="smcap">gain</span>, writing from Jerusalem, Wilkie says,
+&#8220;Nothing here requires revolution in our
+opinions of the finest works of art: with all their
+discrepancies of detail, they are yet constantly recalled
+by what is here before us. The background
+of the Heliodorus of Raphael is a Syrian building;
+the figures in the Lazarus of Sebastian del Piombo
+are a Syrian people; and the indescribable tone of
+Rembrandt is brought to mind at every turn, whether
+in the street, the Synagogue, or the Sepulchre.&#8221;
+And again: &#8220;The painter we are always referring
+to, as one who has most truly given the eastern
+people, is Rembrandt.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>He partly contradicts this afterwards, but says,
+that Venetian art reminds him of Syria. Now, the
+Venetians were in constant communication with the
+East; all their art has a tinge of orientalism. As to
+Rembrandt, he must have been in familiar intercourse
+with the Jew merchants and Jewish families
+settled in the Dutch commercial towns; he painted
+them frequently as portraits, and they perpetually
+appear in his compositions.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">316</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>132.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span><span class="smcap">n</span> the following passage Wilkie seems unconsciously
+to have anticipated the invention (or
+rather the <i>discovery</i>) of the Daguerreotype, and some
+of its results. He says:&mdash;&#8220;If by an operation of
+mechanism, animated nature could be copied with
+the accuracy of a cast in plaster, a tracing on a wall,
+or a reflection in a glass, without modification, and
+without the proprieties and graces of art, all that
+utility could desire would be perfectly attained, but
+it would be at the expense of almost every quality
+which renders art delightful.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>One reason why the Daguerreotype portraits are
+in general so unsatisfactory may perhaps be traced to
+a natural law, though I have not heard it suggested.
+It is this: every object that we behold we see not
+with the eye only, but with the soul; and this is
+especially true of the human countenance, which in
+so far as it is the expression of mind we see through
+the medium of our own individual mind. Thus a
+portrait is satisfactory in so far as the painter has
+sympathy with his subject, and delightful to us in
+proportion as the resemblance reflected through <i>his</i>
+sympathies is in accordance with <i>our own</i>. Now in the
+Daguerreotype there is no such medium, and the face
+comes before us without passing through the human
+mind and brain to our apprehension. This may be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">317</a></span>
+the reason why a Daguerreotype, however beautiful
+and accurate, is seldom satisfactory or agreeable, and
+that while we acknowledge its truth as to fact, it
+always leaves something for the sympathies to desire.</p>
+
+<h5>133.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span>e says, &#8220;One thing alone seems common in all
+the stages of early art; the desire of making
+all other excellences tributary to the expression of
+thought and sentiment.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>The early painters had <i>no other</i> excellences except
+those of thought and expression; therefore could
+not sacrifice what they did not possess. They drew
+incorrectly, coloured ineffectively, and were ignorant
+of perspective.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-146.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="300" width="500" /></div>
+
+<h5>134.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">hen</span> at Dusseldorf, I found the President of the
+Academy, Wilhelm Schadow, employed on a
+church picture in three compartments; Paradise in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">318</a></span>
+the centre; on the right side, Purgatory; on the left
+side, Hell. He explained to me that he had not
+attempted to paint the interior of Paradise as the
+sojourn of the blessed, because he could imagine no
+kind of occupation or delight which, prolonged to
+eternity, would not be wearisome. He had therefore
+represented the exterior of Paradise, where
+Christ, standing on the threshold with outstretched
+arms, receives and welcomes those who enter. (This
+was better and in finer taste than the more common
+allegory of St. Peter and his keys.) On one side of
+the door, the Virgin Mary and a group of guardian
+angels encourage those who approach. Among these
+we distinguish a martyr who has died for the truth,
+and a warrior who has fought for it. A care-worn,
+penitent mother is presented by her innocent daughter.
+Those who were &#8220;in the world and the world
+knew them not,&#8221; are here acknowledged&mdash;and eyes
+dim with weeping, and heads bowed with shame, are
+here uplifted, and bright with the rapturous gleam
+which shone through the portals of Paradise.</p>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> idea of Purgatory, he told me, was suggested
+by a vision or dream related by St. Catherine of
+Genoa, in which she beheld a great number of men
+and women shut up in a dark cavern; angels descending
+from heaven, liberate them from time to
+time, and they are borne away one after another
+from darkness, pain, and penance, into life and light&mdash;again
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">319</a></span>
+to behold the face of their Maker&mdash;reconciled
+and healed. In his picture, Schadow has represented
+two angels bearing away a liberated soul.
+Below in the fore-ground groups of sinners are waiting,
+sadly, humbly, but not unhopefully, the term of
+their bitter penance. Among these he had placed a
+group of artists and poets who, led away by temptation,
+had abused their glorious gifts to wicked or
+worldly purposes;&mdash;Titian, Ariosto, and, rather to
+my surprise, the beautiful, lamenting spirit of Byron.
+Then, what was curious enough, as types of ambition,
+Lady Macbeth and her husband, who, it seems, were
+to be ultimately saved, I do not know why&mdash;unless
+for the love of Shakespeare.</p>
+
+<p>Hell, like all the hells I ever saw, was a failure.
+There was the usual amount of fire and flames,
+dragons and serpents, ghastly, despairing spirits, but
+nothing of original or powerful conception. When
+I looked in Schadow&#8217;s face, so beautiful with benevolence,
+I wondered <i>how</i> he could&mdash;but in truth he
+could <i>not</i>&mdash;realise to himself the idea of a hell; all
+the materials he had used were borrowed and common-place.</p>
+
+<p>But among his cartoons for pictures already
+painted, there was one charming idea of quite a
+different kind. It was for an altar, and he called it
+&#8220;<span class="smcap">The Fountain of Life</span>.&#8221; Above, the sacrificed
+Redeemer lies extended in his mother&#8217;s arms. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">320</a></span>
+pure abundant Waters of Salvation, gushing from
+the rock beneath their feet, are received into a great
+cistern. Saints, martyrs, teachers of the truth, are
+standing round, drinking or filling their vases, which
+they present to each other. From the cistern flows
+a stream, at which a family of poor peasants are
+drinking with humble, joyful looks; and as the
+stream divides and flows away through flowery meadows,
+little sportive children stoop to drink of it,
+scooping up the water in their tiny hands, or sipping
+it with their rosy smiling lips. A beautiful and
+significant allegory beautifully expressed, and as
+intelligible to the people as any in the &#8220;Pilgrim&#8217;s
+Progress.&#8221;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-045.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="136" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h5>135.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">H</span><span class="smcap">aydon</span> discussed &#8220;High Art&#8221; as if it depended
+solely on the knowledge and the appreciation
+of <i>form</i>. In this lay his great mistake. Form is but
+the vehicle of the highest art.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-059-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="89" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>136.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">S</span><span class="smcap">outhey</span> says that the Franciscan Order &#8220;excluded
+all art, all science;&mdash;no pictures might<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">321</a></span>
+profane their churches.&#8221; This is a most extraordinary
+instance of ignorance in a man of Southey&#8217;s universal
+learning. Did he forget Friar Bacon? had
+he not heard of that museum of divine pictures, the
+Franciscan church and convent at Assisi? And
+that some of the greatest mathematicians, architects,
+mosaic workers, carvers, and painters, of the 13th
+and 14th centuries were Franciscan friars?</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<h5>137.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">W</span><span class="smcap">ordsworth&#8217;s</span> remark on Sir Joshua Reynolds
+as a painter, that &#8220;he lived too much for the
+age and the people among whom he lived,&#8221; is hardly
+just; as a portrait-painter he could not well do
+otherwise; his profession was to represent the people
+among whom he lived. An artist who takes the
+higher, the creative and imaginative walks of art, and
+who thinks he can, at the same time, live for and
+with the age, and for the passing and clashing interests
+of the world, and the frivolities of society,
+does so at a great risk: there must be perilous discord
+between the inner and the outer life&mdash;such
+discord as wears and irritates the whole physical and
+moral being. Where the original material of the
+character is not strong, the artistic genius will be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">322</a></span>
+gradually enfeebled and conventionalised, through
+flattery, through sympathy, through misuse. If the
+material be strong, the result may perhaps be worse;
+the genius may be demoralised and the mind lose its
+balance. I have seen in my time instances of both.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-018.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="184" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>138.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;T</span><span class="smcap">he</span> man,&#8221; says Coleridge, &#8220;who reads a work
+meant for immediate effect on one age, with
+the notions and feelings of another, may be a refined
+gentleman but a very sorry critic.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This is especially true with regard to art: but
+Coleridge should have put in the word, <i>only</i>, (&#8220;only
+the notions and feelings of another age,&#8221;) for a very
+great pleasure lies in the power of throwing ourselves
+into the sentiments and notions of one age,
+while feeling <i>with</i> them, and reflecting <i>upon</i> them,
+with the riper critical experience which belongs to
+another age.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">323</a></span></p>
+
+<h5>139.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span> <i>good</i> taste in art feels the presence or the
+absence of merit; a <i>just</i> taste discriminates the
+degree,&mdash;the <i>poco-pi&ugrave;</i> and the <i>poco-meno</i>. A <i>good</i>
+taste rejects faults; a <i>just</i> taste selects excellences.
+A <i>good</i> taste is often unconscious; a <i>just</i> taste is
+always conscious. A <i>good</i> taste may be lowered or
+spoilt; a <i>just</i> taste can only go on refining more and
+more.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-079.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="134" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h5>140.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span><span class="smcap">rtists</span> are interesting to me as men. Their work,
+as the product of mind, should lead us to a
+knowledge of their own being; else, as I have often
+said and written, our admiration of art is a species of
+atheism. To forget the soul in its highest manifestation
+is like forgetting God in his creation.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-039-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="81" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h5>141.</h5>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">&#8220;L</span><span class="smcap">es</span> images peints du corps humain, dans les figures
+o&ugrave; domine par trop le savoir anatomique, en
+r&eacute;v&egrave;lant trop clairement &agrave; l&#8217;homme les secrets de sa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">324</a></span>
+structure, lui en d&eacute;couvrent aussi par trop ce qu&#8217;on
+pourrait appeler le point de vue <i>mat&eacute;riel</i>, ou, si l&#8217;on
+veut, <i>animal</i>.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This is the fault of Michal-Angelo; yet I have
+sometimes thought that his very materialism, so
+grand, and so peculiar in character, may have arisen
+out of his profound religious feeling, his stern
+morality, his lofty conceptions of our <i>mortal</i>, as well
+as <i>immortal</i> destinies. He appears to have beheld
+the human form only in a pure and sublime point of
+view; not as the animal man, but as the habitation,
+fearfully and wondrously constructed, for the spirit
+of man,&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">&#8220;The outward shape,</span>
+<span class="i0">And unpolluted temple of the mind.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>This is the reason that Michal-Angelo&#8217;s materialism
+affects us so differently from that of Rubens. In
+the first, the predominance of form attains almost a
+moral sublimity. In the latter, the predominance of
+flesh and blood is debased into physical grossness.
+Michal-Angelo believed in the resurrection of <span class="smcap">THE
+BODY</span>, emphatically; and in his Last Judgment the
+dead rise like Titans, strong to contend and mighty
+to suffer. It is the apotheosis of form. In Ruben&#8217;s
+picture of the same subject (at Munich) the bodily
+presence of resuscitated life is revolting, reminding
+us of the text of St. Paul&mdash;&#8220;Flesh and blood shall
+<i>not</i> inherit the kingdom of God.&#8221; Both pictures are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">325</a></span>
+<i>&aelig;sthetically</i> false, but <i>artistically</i> miracles, and should
+thus be considered and appreciated.</p>
+
+<p>I have never looked on those awful figures in the
+Medici Chapel without thinking what stupendous
+intellects must inhabit such stupendous forms&mdash;terrible
+in their quietude; but they are supernatural,
+rather than divine.</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem2">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Heidnische Ruhe und Christliche Milde, sie bleiben Dir fremde;</span>
+<span class="i0">Alt-testamentisch bist Du, Z&uuml;rnender, wie ist Dein Gott!&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>John Edward Taylor, in his profound and beautiful
+essay &#8220;<span class="smcap">Michael-Angelo, a Poet</span>,&#8221; says
+truly that &#8220;Dante worshipped the philosophy of
+religion, and Michael-Angelo adored the philosophy
+of art.&#8221; The religion of the one and the art of the
+other were evolved in a strange combination of mysticism,
+materialism, and moral grandeur. The two
+men were congenial in character and in genius.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-iv.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="264" width="500" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">326</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-326.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="380" width="500" /></div>
+
+<h4>A FRAGMENT ON SCULPTURE.</h4>
+
+<h5>AND ON CERTAIN CHARACTERS IN HISTORY AND POETRY CONSIDERED
+AS SUBJECTS OF MODERN ART.</h5>
+
+<h5>1848.</h5>
+
+<p>I Should begin by admitting the position laid down
+by Frederick Schlegel, that art and nature are not
+identical. &#8220;Men,&#8221; he says, &#8220;traduce nature, who
+falsely give her the epithet of artistic;&#8221; for though
+nature comprehends all art, art cannot comprehend
+all nature. Nature, in her sources of pleasures and
+contemplation is infinite; and art, as her reflection
+in human works, finite. Nature is boundless in her
+powers, exhaustless in her variety; the powers of
+art and its capabilities of variety in production are
+bounded on every side. Nature herself, the infinite,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">327</a></span>
+has circumscribed the bounds of finite art; the one
+is the divinity; the other, the priestess. And if
+poetic art in the <i>interpreting</i> of nature share in her
+infinitude, yet in <i>representing</i> nature through material,
+form, and colour, she is,&mdash;oh, how limited!</p>
+
+<p class="tb">If each of the forms of poetic art has its law of
+limitation as determined as the musical scale, narrowest
+of all are the limitations of sculpture, to
+which, notwithstanding, we give the highest place;
+and it is in regard to sculpture, we find most frequently
+those mistakes which arise from a want of
+knowledge of the true principles of art.</p>
+
+<p>Admitting, then, as necessary and immutable, the
+limitations of the art of sculpture as to the management
+of the material in giving form and expression;
+its primal laws of repose and simplicity; its rejection
+of the complex and conventional; its bounded capabilities
+as to choice of subject; must we also admit,
+with some of the most celebrated critics of art, that
+there is but one style of sculpture, the Greek? And
+that every deviation from pure Greek art must be
+regarded as a depravation and perversion of the
+powers and subjects of sculpture? I do not see that
+this follows.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">It is absolute that Greek art reached long ago the
+term of its development. In so far as regards the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">328</a></span>
+principles of beauty and execution, it can go no farther.
+We may stand and look at the relics of the
+Parthenon in awe and in despair; we can do neither
+more, nor better. But we have not done with Greek
+sculpture. What in it is purely <i>ideal</i>, is eternal;
+what is conventional, is in accordance with the primal
+conditions of all imitative art. Therefore though
+it may have reached the point at which development
+stops, and though its capability of adaptation
+be limited by necessary laws; still its all-beautiful,
+its immortal imagery is ever near us and around
+us; still &#8220;doth the old feeling bring back the
+old names,&#8221; and with the old names, the forms; still,
+in those old familiar forms we continue to clothe all
+that is loveliest in visible nature; still, in all our
+associations with Greek art&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;&#8217;Tis Jupiter who brings whate&#8217;er is great,</span>
+<span class="i0">And Venus who brings every thing that&#8217;s fair.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>That the supreme beauty of Greek art&mdash;that the
+majestic significance of the classical myths&mdash;will ever
+be to the educated mind and eye as things indifferent
+and worn out, I cannot believe.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">But on the other hand it may well be doubted
+whether the impersonation of the Greek allegories
+in the purest forms of Greek art will ever give
+intense pleasure to the people, or ever speak home<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">329</a></span>
+to the hearts of the men and women of these times.
+And this not from the want of an innate taste and
+capacity in the minds of the masses&mdash;not because
+ignorance has &#8220;frozen the genial current in their
+souls&#8221;&mdash;not merely through a vulgar preference for
+mechanical imitation of common and familiar forms;
+but from other causes not transient&mdash;not accidental.
+A classical education is not now, as heretofore, the
+<i>only</i> education given; and through an honest and
+intense sympathy with the life of their own experience,
+and through a dislike to vicious associations,
+though clothed in classical language and classical
+forms, <i>thence</i> is it that the people have turned with
+a sense of relief from gods and goddesses, Ledas and
+Antiopes, to shepherds and shepherdesses, groups of
+Charity, and young ladies in the character of Innocence,&mdash;harmless,
+picturesque inanities, bearing the
+same relation to classical sculpture that Watts&#8217;s
+hymns bear to Homer and Sophocles.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Classical attainments of any kind are rare in our
+English sculptors; therefore it is, that we find them
+often quite familiar with the conventional treatment
+and outward forms of the usual subjects of Greek
+art, without much knowledge of the original poetical
+conception, its derivation, or its significance; and
+equally without any real appreciation of the idea of
+which the form is but the vehicle. Hence they do<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">330</a></span>
+not seem to be aware how far this original conception
+is capable of being varied, modified, <i>animated</i>
+as it were, with an infusion of fresh life, without
+deviating from its essential truth, or transgressing
+those narrow limits, within which all sculpture must
+be bounded in respect to action and attitude. To
+express <i>character</i> within these limits is the grand
+difficulty. We must remember that too much value
+given to the head as the seat of mind, too much
+expression given to the features as the exponents
+of character, must diminish the importance of those
+parts of the form on which sculpture mainly depends
+for its effect on the imagination. To convey the
+idea of a complete individuality in a single figure,
+and under these restrictions, is the problem to be
+solved by the sculptor who aims at originality, yet
+feels his aspirations restrained by a fine taste and circumscribed
+by certain inevitable associations.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">It is therefore a question open to argument and
+involving considerations of infinite delicacy and
+moment, in morals and in art, whether the old
+Greek legends, endued as they are with an imperishable
+vitality derived from their abstract youth, may
+not be susceptible of a treatment in modern art analogous
+to that which they have received in modern
+poetry, where the significant myth, or the ideal
+character, without losing its classic grace, has been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">331</a></span>
+animated with a purer sentiment, and developed into
+a higher expressiveness. Wordsworth&#8217;s Dion and
+Laodomia; Shelley&#8217;s version of the Hymn to Mercury;
+Goethe&#8217;s Iphigenia; Lord Byron&#8217;s Prometheus;
+Keats&#8217;s Hyperion; Barry Cornwall&#8217;s Proserpina;
+are instances of what I mean in poetry. To
+do the same thing in art, requires that our sculptors
+should stand in the same relation to Phidias and
+Praxiteles, that our greatest poets bear to Homer or
+Euripides; that they should be themselves poets
+and interpreters, not mere translators and imitators.</p>
+
+<p>Further, we all know, that there is often a necessity
+for conveying abstract ideas in the forms of art.
+We have then recourse to allegory; yet allegorical
+statues are generally cold and conventional and
+addressed to the intellect merely. Now there are
+occasions, in which an abstract quality or thought is
+far more impressively and intelligibly conveyed by
+an <i>impersonation</i> than by a <i>personification</i>. I mean,
+that Aristides might express the idea of justice;
+Penelope, that of conjugal faith; Jonathan and
+David (or Pylades and Orestes), friendship; Rizpah,
+devotion to the memory of the dead; Iphigenia,
+the voluntary sacrifice for a good cause; and so of
+many others; and such figures would have this advantage,
+that with the significance of a symbol they
+would combine all the powers of a sympathetic
+reality.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">332</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-073-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="226" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h4>HELEN.</h4>
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span> <span class="smcap">have</span> never seen any statue of Helen, ancient or
+modern. Treated in the right spirit, I can hardly
+conceive a diviner subject for a sculptor. It would
+be a great mistake to represent the Greek Helen
+merely as a beautiful and alluring woman. This, at
+least, is not the Homeric conception of the character,
+which has a wonderful and fascinating individuality,
+requiring the utmost delicacy and poetic feeling to
+comprehend, and rare artistic skill to realise. The
+oft-told story of the Grecian painter, who, to create
+a Helen, assembled some twenty of the fairest models
+he could find, and took from each a limb or a feature,
+in order to compose from their separate beauties an
+ideal of perfection,&mdash;this story, if it were true, would
+only prove that even Zeuxis could make a great mistake.
+Such a combination of heterogeneous elements
+would be psychologically and artistically false, and
+would never give us a Helen.</p>
+
+<p>She has become the ideal type of a fatal, faithless,
+dissolute woman; but according to the Greek myth,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">333</a></span>
+she is <i>predestined</i>,&mdash;at once the instrument and the
+victim of that fiat of the gods which had long before
+decreed the destruction of Troy, and <i>her</i> to be the
+cause. She must not only be supremely beautiful,&mdash;&#8220;a
+daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and most
+divinely fair!&#8221;&mdash;but as the offspring of Zeus (the
+title by which she is so often designated in the Iliad),
+as the sister of the great twin demi-gods Castor and
+Pollux, she should have the heroic lineaments proper
+to her Olympian descent, touched with a pensive
+shade; for she laments the calamities which her fatal
+charms have brought on all who have loved her, all
+whom she has loved:&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Ah! had I died ere to these shores I fled,</span>
+<span class="i0">False to my country and my nuptial bed!&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>She shrinks from the reproachful glances of those
+whom she has injured; and yet, as it is finely intimated,
+wherever she appears her resistless loveliness
+vanquishes every heart, and changes curses into
+blessings. Priam treats her with paternal tenderness;
+Hector with a sort of chivalrous respect.</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;If some proud brother eyed me with disdain,</span>
+<span class="i0">Or scornful sister with her sweeping train,</span>
+<span class="i0">Thy gentle accents softened all my pain;</span>
+<span class="i0">Nor was it e&#8217;er my fate from thee to find</span>
+<span class="i0">A deed ungentle or a word unkind.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Helen, standing on the walls of Troy, and looking
+sadly over the battle plain, where the heroes of her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">334</a></span>
+forfeited country, her kindred and her friends, are
+assembled to fight and bleed for her sake, brings
+before us an image full of melancholy sweetness as
+well as of consummate beauty. Another passage in
+which she upbraids Venus as the cause of her fault&mdash;not
+as a mortal might humbly expostulate with
+an immortal, but almost on terms of equality, and
+even with bitterness,&mdash;is yet more characteristic.
+&#8220;For what,&#8221; she asks, tauntingly, &#8220;am I reserved?
+To what new countries am I destined to carry war
+and desolation? For what new lover must I break
+a second vow? Let me go hence! and if Paris
+lament my absence, let Venus console him, and for
+his sake ascend the skies no more!&#8221; A regretful
+pathos should mingle with her conscious beauty and
+her half-celestial dignity; and, to render her truly,
+her Greek elegance should be combined with a deeper
+and more complex sentiment than Greek art has
+usually sought to express.</p>
+
+<p>I am speaking here of Homer&#8217;s Helen&mdash;the
+Helen of the Iliad, not the Helen of the tragedians&mdash;not
+the Helen who for two thousand years has
+merely served &#8220;to point a moral;&#8221; and an artist
+who should think to realise the true Homeric conception,
+should beware of counterfeits, for such are
+abroad.<a name="FNanchor_B_2" id="FNanchor_B_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_B_2" class="fnanchor">2</a></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">335</a></span></p>
+<p>There is a wild Greek myth that it was not the
+real Helen, but the phantom of Helen, who fled with
+Paris, and who caused the destruction of Troy;
+while Helen herself was leading, like Penelope, a
+pattern life at Memphis. I must confess I prefer
+the proud humility, the pathetic elegance of Homer&#8217;s
+Helen, to such jugglery.</p>
+
+<p>It may flatter the pride of virtue, or it may move
+our religious sympathies, to look on the forlorn
+abasement of the Magdalene as the emblem of penitence;
+but there are associations connected with
+Helen&mdash;&#8220;sad Helen,&#8221; as she calls herself, and as I
+conceive the character,&mdash;which have a deep tragic
+significance; and surely there are localities for which
+the impersonation of classical art would be better
+fitted than that of sacred art.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know of any existing statue of Helen.
+Nicetas mentions among the relics of ancient art
+destroyed when Constantinople was sacked by the
+Latins in 1202, a bronze statue of Helen, with long
+hair flowing to the waist; and there is mention of
+an Etruscan figure of her, with wings (expressive of
+her celestial origin, for the Etruscans gave all their
+gods and demi-gods wings): in M&uuml;ller I find these
+two only. There are likewise busts; and the story
+of Helen, and the various events of her life, occur
+perpetually on the antique gems, bas-reliefs, and
+painted vases. The most frequent subject is her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">336</a></span>
+abduction by Paris. A beautiful subject for a bas-relief,
+and one I believe not yet treated, would be
+Helen and Priam mourning over the lifeless form of
+Hector; yet the difficulty of preserving the simple
+sculptural treatment, and at the same time discriminating
+between this and other similar funereal groups,
+would render it perhaps a better subject for a picture,
+as admitting then of such scenery and accessories as
+would at once determine the signification.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-028-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="208" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h4>
+PENELOPE.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;ALCESTIS.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;LAODAMIA.
+</h4>
+
+<p>Statues of Penelope and Helen might stand in
+beautiful and expressive contrast; but it is a contrast
+which no profane or prosaic hand should attempt to
+realise. Penelope is all woman in her tenderness
+and her truth; Helen, half a goddess in the midst of
+error and remorse.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is Penelope the only character which might
+stand as a type of conjugal fidelity in contrasted
+companionship with Helen: Alcestis, who died for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">337</a></span>
+her husband; or, better still, Laodamia, whose intense
+love and longing recalled hers from the shades
+below, are susceptible of the most beautiful statuesque
+treatment; only we must bear in mind that
+the leading <i>motif</i> in the Alcestis is <i>duty</i>, in the
+Laodamia, <i>love</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I remember a bas-relief in the Vatican, which
+represents Hermes restoring Protesilaus to his mourning
+wife. The interview was granted for three hours
+only; and when the hero was taken from her a second
+time, she died on the threshhold of her palace. This
+is a frequent and appropriate subject for sarcophagi
+and funereal vases. But there exists, I believe, no
+single statue commemorative of the wife&#8217;s passionate
+devotion.</p>
+
+<p>The modern sculptor should penetrate his fancy
+with the sentiment of Wordsworth&#8217;s Laodamia.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">While the pen is in my hand I may remark that
+two of the stanzas in the Laodamia have been
+altered, and, as it seems to me, not improved, since
+the first edition. Originally the poem opened thus:</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;With sacrifice, before the rising morn</span>
+<span class="i0">Perform&#8217;d, my slaughter&#8217;d lord have I required;</span>
+<span class="i0">And in thick darkness, amid shades forlorn,</span>
+<span class="i0">Him of the infernal Gods have I desired:</span>
+<span class="i0">Celestial pity I again implore;</span>
+<span class="i0">Restore him to my sight&mdash;great Jove, restore!&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">338</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Altered thus, and comparatively flat:&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;With sacrifice before the rising morn</span>
+<span class="i0">Vows have I made, by fruitless hope inspired;</span>
+<span class="i0">And from the infernal Gods, mid shades forlorn</span>
+<span class="i0">Of night, my slaughtered lord have I required:</span>
+<span class="i0">Celestial pity I again implore;</span>
+<span class="i0">Restore him to my sight&mdash;great Jove, restore!&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>In the early edition the last stanza but one stood
+thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Ah! judge her gently who so deeply loved!</span>
+<span class="i0">Her who, in reason&#8217;s spite, yet without crime,</span>
+<span class="i0">Was in a trance of passion thus removed;</span>
+<span class="i0">Delivered from the galling yoke of time,</span>
+<span class="i0">And these frail elements,&mdash;to gather flowers</span>
+<span class="i0">Of blissful quiet &#8217;mid unfading bowers!&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>In the later editions thus altered, and, to my taste,
+spoiled:&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;By no weak pity might the Gods be moved;</span>
+<span class="i0">She who thus perish&#8217;d not without the crime</span>
+<span class="i0">Of lovers that in Reason&#8217;s spite have loved,</span>
+<span class="i0">Was doomed to wander in a grosser clime</span>
+<span class="i0">Apart from happy ghosts, that gather flowers</span>
+<span class="i0">Of blissful quiet &#8217;mid unfading bowers.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Altered, probably, because Virgil has introduced
+the shade of Laodamia among the criminal and unhappy
+lovers,&mdash;an instance of extraordinary bad taste
+in the Roman poet; whatever may have been her
+faults, she surely deserved to be placed in better
+company than Ph&aelig;dra and Pasiph&auml;e. Wordsworth&#8217;s<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">339</a></span>
+intuitive feeling and taste were true in the first
+instance, and he might have trusted to them. In
+my own copy of Wordsworth I have been careful
+to mark the original reading in justice to the
+<i>original</i> Laodamia.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-064.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="258" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h4>
+HIPPOLYTUS.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;NEOPTOLEMUS.
+</h4>
+
+<p>I have never met with a statue, ancient or modern,
+of Hippolytus; the finest possible ideal of a Greek
+youth, touched with some individual characteristics
+which are peculiarly fitted for sculpture. He is a
+hunter, not a warrior; a tamer of horses, not a combatant
+with spear and shield. He should have the
+slight, agile build of a young Apollo, but nothing of
+the God&#8217;s effeminacy; on the contrary, there should
+be an infusion of the severe beauty of his Amazonian
+mother, with that sedateness and modesty which
+should express the votary and companion of Diana;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">340</a></span>
+while, as the fated victim of Venus, whom he had
+contemned, and of his stepmother Ph&aelig;dra, whom he
+had repulsed, there should be a kind of melancholy
+in his averted features. A hound and implements of
+the chase would be the proper accessories, and the
+figure should be undraped, or nearly so.</p>
+
+<p>A sculptor who should be tempted to undertake
+this fine, and, as I think, untried subject&mdash;at least
+as a single figure&mdash;must begin by putting Racine
+out of his mind, whose &#8220;Seigneur Hippolyte&#8221; makes
+sentimental love to the &#8220;Princesse Aricie,&#8221; and
+must penetrate his fancy with the conception of
+Euripides.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">I find in Schlegel&#8217;s &#8220;Essais litt&eacute;raires,&#8221; a few lines
+which will assist the fancy of the artist, in representing
+the person and character of Hippolytus.</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;Quant &agrave; l&#8217;Hippolyte d&#8217;Euripide il a une teinte
+si divine que pour le sentir dignement il faut, pour
+ainsi dire, &ecirc;tre initi&eacute; dans les myst&egrave;res de la beaut&eacute;,
+avoir respir&eacute; l&#8217;air de la Gr&egrave;ce. Rappelez vous ce que
+l&#8217;antiquit&eacute; nous a transmis de plus accompli parmi
+les images d&#8217;une jeunesse h&eacute;ro&iuml;que, les Dioscures de
+Monte-Cavallo, le M&eacute;l&eacute;agre et l&#8217;Apollon du Vatican.
+Le caract&egrave;re d&#8217;Hippolyte occupe dans la
+po&euml;sie &agrave; peu pr&egrave;s la m&ecirc;me place que ces statues
+dans la sculpture.&#8221; &#8220;On peut remarquer dans plusieurs
+beaut&eacute;s id&eacute;ales de l&#8217;antique que les anciens
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">341</a></span>
+voulant cr&eacute;er une image perfectionn&eacute;e de la nature
+humaine ont fondu les nuances du caract&egrave;re d&#8217;un
+sexe avec celui de l&#8217;autre; que Junon, Pallas, Diane,
+out une majest&eacute;, une s&eacute;v&eacute;rit&eacute; m&acirc;le; qu&#8217; Apollon,
+Mercure, Bacchus, au contraire, ont quelque chose
+de la grace et de la douceur des femmes. De m&ecirc;me
+nous voyons dans la beaut&eacute; h&eacute;ro&iuml;que et vierge
+d&#8217;Hippolyte l&#8217;image de sa m&egrave;re l&#8217;Amazone et le
+reflet de Diane dans un mortel.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>(The last lines are especially remarkable, and are
+an artistic commentary on what I have ventured to
+touch upon ethically at page 85.)</p>
+
+<p class="tb">The story of Hippolytus is to be found in bas-reliefs
+and gems; it occurs on a particularly fine
+sarcophagus now preserved in the cathedral at
+Agrigentum, of which there is a cast in the British
+Museum.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Under the heroic and classical form, Hippolytus
+conveys the same idea of manly chastity and self-control
+which in sacred art would be suggested by
+the figure of Joseph, the son of Jacob.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">A noble companion to the Hippolytus would be
+Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles. He is the young
+Greek warrior, strong and bold and brave; a fine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">342</a></span>
+ideal type of generosity and truth. The conception,
+as I imagine it, should be taken from the Philoctetes
+of Sophocles, where Neoptolemus, indignant at the
+craft of Ulysses, discloses the trick of which he had
+been made the unwilling instrument, and restores
+the fatal, envenomed arrows to Philoctetes. The
+celebrated lines in the Iliad spoken by Achilles&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Who dares think one thing and another tell</span>
+<span class="i0">My soul detests him as the gates of hell!&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>should give the leading characteristic <i>motif</i> in the
+figure of his son. There should be something of
+remorseful pity in the very youthful features; the
+form ought to be heroically treated, that is, undraped,
+and he should hold the arrows in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Neoptolemus, as the savage avenger of his father&#8217;s
+death, slaying the grey-haired Priam at the foot of
+the altar, and carrying off Andromache, is, of course,
+quite a different version of the character. He then
+figures as Pyrrhus&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,</span>
+<span class="i0">Black as his purpose, did the night resemble.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>The fine moral story of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes
+is figured on the Etruscan vases. Of the
+young, truth-telling, Greek hero I find no single
+statue.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">343</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-007.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="265" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h4>IPHIGENIA.</h4>
+
+<p>I have often been surprised that we have no statue
+of this eminently beautiful subject. We have the
+story of Iphigenia constantly repeated in gems and
+bas-reliefs; the most celebrated example extant being
+the Medici Vase. But no single figure of Iphigenia,
+as the Greek ideal of heroic maidenhood and self-devotion,
+exists, I believe, in antique sculpture.
+The small and rather feebly elegant statuette by
+Christian Tieck is the only modern example I have
+seen.</p>
+
+<p>Iphigenia may be represented under two very
+different aspects, both beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>First, as the Iphigenia in Aulis; the victim sacrificed
+to obtain a fair wind for the Grecian fleet
+detained on its way to Troy. Extreme youth and
+grace, with a tender resignation not devoid of
+dignity, should be the leading characteristics; for
+we must bear in mind that Iphigenia, while regretting
+life and the &#8220;lamp-bearing day,&#8221; and &#8220;the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">344</a></span>
+beloved light,&#8221; and her Argive home and her
+&#8220;Mycenian handmaids,&#8221; dies willingly, as the Greek
+girl ought to die, for the good of her country.
+She begins, indeed, with a prayer for pity, with lamentations
+for her untimely end, but she resumes
+her nobler self; and all her sentiments, when she is
+brought forth, crowned for sacrifice, are worthy of the
+daughter of Agamemnon. She even exults that she
+is called upon to perish for the good of Greece, and
+to avenge the cause of right on the Spartan Helen.
+&#8220;I give,&#8221; she exclaims, &#8220;my life for Greece! sacrifice
+me&mdash;and let Troy perish!&#8221; When her mother
+weeps, she reproves those tears: &#8220;It is not well,
+O my mother! that I should love life too much.
+Think that thou hast brought me forth for the common
+good of Greece, not for thyself only!&#8221; She
+glories in her anticipated renown, not vainly, since,
+while the world endures, and far as the influences
+of literature and art extend, her story and her
+name shall live. The scene in Euripides should be
+taken as the basis of the character&mdash;the finest
+scene in his finest drama. The tradition that Iphigenia
+was not really sacrificed, but snatched away
+from the altar by Diana, and a hind substituted in
+her place, should be present to the fancy of the
+artist, when he sets himself to represent the majestic
+resignation of the consecrated virgin; as adding a
+touch of the marvellous and ideal to the Greek elegance
+and simplicity of the conception.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">345</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The <i>picture</i> of Iphigenia as drawn by Tennyson
+is wonderfully vivid; but it wants the Greek dignity
+and statuesque feeling; it is emphatically a
+picture, all over colour and light, and crowded with
+accessories. He represents her as encountering
+Helen in the land of Shadows, and, turning from her
+&#8220;with sick and scornful looks averse,&#8221; for she remembers
+the tragedy at Aulis.</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;My youth (she said) was blasted with a curse:</span>
+<span class="i1">This woman was the cause!</span>
+<span class="i0">I was cut off from hope in that sad place</span>
+<span class="i1">Which yet to name my spirit loathes and fears.</span>
+<span class="i0">My father held his hand upon his face;</span>
+<span class="i1">I, blinded with my tears,</span>
+<span class="i0">Essayed to speak; my voice came thick with sighs</span>
+<span class="i1">As in a dream; dimly I could descry</span>
+<span class="i0">The stern black-bearded kings with wolfish eyes</span>
+<span class="i1">Waiting to see me die.</span>
+<span class="i0">The tall masts quiver&#8217;d as they lay afloat,</span>
+<span class="i1">The temples and the people and the shore;</span>
+<span class="i0">One drew a sharp knife thro&#8217; my tender throat</span>
+<span class="i1">Slowly&mdash;and nothing more.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>The famous picture of the sacrifice of Iphigenia by
+Timanthes, the theme of admiration and criticism for
+the last two thousand years, which every writer on art
+deems it proper to mention in praise or in blame, could
+hardly have been more vivid or more terrible than this.</p>
+
+<p>The analogous idea, that of heroic resignation and
+self-devotion in a great cause, would be conveyed in
+sacred art by the figure of Jephtha&#8217;s daughter; she
+too regrets the promises of life, but dies not the less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">346</a></span>
+willingly. &#8220;My father, if thou hast opened thy
+mouth unto the Lord, do to me according to that
+which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch
+as the Lord hath taken vengeance for thee of thine
+enemies, even of the children of Ammon.&#8221; And for
+a single statue, Jephtha&#8217;s daughter would be a fine
+subject&mdash;one to task the powers of our best sculptors;
+the <i>sentiment</i> would be the same as the Iphigenia,
+but the <i>treatment</i> altogether different.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">For the Iphigenia in Tauris I think the modern
+sculptor would do well to set aside the character as
+represented by Euripides, and rather keep in view the
+conception of Goethe.<a name="FNanchor_C_3" id="FNanchor_C_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_C_3" class="fnanchor">3</a> In his hand it has lost nothing
+of its statuesque elegance and simplicity, and has
+gained immeasurably in moral dignity and feminine
+tenderness. The Iphigenia in Tauris is no longer
+young, but she is still the consecrated virgin; no
+more the victim, but herself the priestess of those
+very rites by which she was once fated to perish.
+While Euripides has depicted her as stern and astute,
+Goethe has made her the impersonation of female
+devotedness, and mild, but unflinching integrity. She
+is like the young Neoptolemus when she disdains to
+use the stratagem which Pylades had suggested, when</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">347</a></span></p>
+<p>she dares to speak the truth, and trust to it alone for
+help and safety. The scene in which she is haunted
+by the recollection of her doomed ancestry, and
+mutters over the song of the Parc&aelig; on that far-off
+sullen shore, is sublime, but incapable of representation
+in plastic art. It should, however, be well
+studied, as helping the artist to the abstract conception
+of the character as a whole.</p>
+
+<p>Carstens made a design, suggested by this tragedy,
+of the Three Parc&aelig; singing their fatal mysterious
+song. A model of one of the figures (that of Atropos)
+used to stand in Goethe&#8217;s library, and a cast from
+this is before me while I write: every one who sees
+it takes it for an antique.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;"><img src="images/illus-020.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="183" width="500" /></div>
+
+<h4>EVE.</h4>
+
+<p>I have but a few words to say of Eve. As she is
+the only undraped figure which is allowable in sacred
+art, the sculptors have multiplied representations of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">348</a></span>
+her, more or less finely imagined; but what I conceive
+to be the true type has seldom, very seldom,
+been attained. The remarks which follow are, however,
+suggestive, not critical.</p>
+
+<p>It appears to me&mdash;and I speak it with reverence&mdash;that
+the Miltonic type is not the highest conceivable,
+nor the best fitted for sculptural treatment.
+Milton has evidently lavished all his power on this
+fairest of created beings; but he makes her too
+nymph-like&mdash;too goddess-like. In one place he
+compares her to a Wood-nymph, Oread, or Dryad
+of the groves; in another to Diana&#8217;s self, &#8220;though
+not, as she, with bow and quiver armed.&#8221; The scriptural
+conception of our first parent is not like this;
+it is ampler, grander, nobler far. I fancy her the
+sublime ideal of maternity. It may be said that
+this idea of her predestined motherhood should not
+predominate in the conception of Eve before the
+Fall: but I think it should.</p>
+
+<p>It is most beautifully imagined by Milton that
+Eve, separated from her mate, her Adam, is weak,
+and given over to the merely womanish nature, for
+only when linked together and supplying the complement
+to each other&#8217;s <i>moral</i> being, can man or
+woman be strong; but we must also remember that
+the &#8220;spirited sly snake,&#8221; in tempting Eve, even
+when he finds her alone, uses no vulgar allurements.
+&#8220;Ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">349</a></span>&#8221;
+Milton, indeed, seasons his harangue with flattery:
+but for this he has no warrant in Scripture.</p>
+
+<p>As the Eve of Paradise should be majestically
+sinless, so after the Fall she should not cower and
+wail like a disappointed girl. Her infinite fault,
+her infinite woe, her infinite penitence, should have
+a touch of grandeur. She has paid the inevitable
+price for that mighty knowledge of good and evil
+she so coveted; that terrible predestined experience&mdash;she
+has found it, or it has found her;&mdash;and
+she wears her crown of grief as erst her crown of
+innocence.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">I think the noble picture of Eve in Mrs. Browning&#8217;s
+Drama of Exile, as that of the Mother of our
+redemption not less than the Mother of suffering
+humanity, might be read and considered with advantage
+by a modern sculptor.</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i13">&#8220;Rise, woman, rise</span>
+<span class="i0">To thy peculiar and best altitudes</span>
+<span class="i0">Of doing good and of resisting ill!</span>
+<span class="i0">Something thou hast to bear through womanhood;</span>
+<span class="i0">Peculiar suffering answering to the sin,</span>
+<span class="i0">Some pang paid down for each new human life;</span>
+<span class="i0">Some weariness in guarding such a life,</span>
+<span class="i0">Some coldness from the guarded; some mistrust</span>
+<span class="i0">From those thou hast too well served; from those beloved</span>
+<span class="i0">Too loyally, some treason. But go, thy love</span>
+<span class="i0">Shall chant to itself its own beatitudes</span>
+<span class="i0">After its own life-working!</span>
+<span class="i0">I bless thee to the desert and the thorns,</span>
+<span class="i0"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">350</a></span></span>
+<span class="i0">To the elemental change and turbulence,</span>
+<span class="i0">And to the solemn dignities of grief;</span>
+<span class="i0">To each one of these ends, and to this end</span>
+<span class="i0">Of Death and the hereafter!</span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Eve.</i>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I accept,</span>
+<span class="i0">For me and for my daughters, this high part</span>
+<span class="i0">Which lowly shall be counted!&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>The figure of Eve in Raphael&#8217;s design (the one
+engraved by Marc Antonio) is exquisitely statuesque
+as well as exquisitely beautiful. In the moment
+that she presents the apple to Adam she looks&mdash;perhaps
+she ought to look&mdash;like the <i>Venus Vincitrice</i>
+of the antique time; but I am not sure; and,
+at all events, the less of the classical sentiment the
+better.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 350px;"><img src="images/illus-023-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="124" width="350" /></div>
+
+<h4>ADAM.</h4>
+
+<p>I have seen no statue of Adam; but surely he is
+a fine subject, either alone or as the companion of
+Eve; and the Miltonic type is here all-sufficient,
+combining the heroic ideal of Greek art with something
+higher still&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure,&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>whence true authority in men&mdash;in fact, essential
+manliness.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">351</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Goethe had the idea that Adam ought to be represented
+with a spade, as the progenitor of all who
+till the ground, and partially draped with a deerskin,
+that is, after the Fall; which would be well:
+but he adds that Adam should have a child at his
+feet in the act of strangling a serpent. This appears
+to me objectionable and ambiguous; if admissible at
+all, the accessory figure would be a fitter accompaniment
+for Eve.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-027.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="132" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h4>ANGELS.</h4>
+
+<p>Angels, properly speaking, are neither winged
+men nor winged children. Wings, in ancient art,
+were the symbols of a divine nature; and the early
+Greeks, who humanised their gods and goddesses,
+and deified humanity through the perfection of the
+forms, at first distinguished the divine and the
+human by giving wings to all the celestial beings;
+thus lifting them above the earth. Our religious
+idea of angels is altogether different. Give to the
+child-form wings, in other words, give to the child-nature,
+innocent, and pure, the adjuncts of wisdom
+and power, and thus you realise the idea of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">352</a></span>
+angel as Raphael conceived it. It is so difficult to
+imagine in the adult form the union of perfect purity
+and perfect wisdom, the absence of experience and
+suffering, and the capacity of thinking and feeling,
+a condition of being in which all conscious <i>motive</i> is
+lost in the <i>impulse</i> to good, that it remains a problem
+in art. The angels of Angelico da Fiesole, who
+are not only winged, but convey the idea of movement
+only by the wings, not by the limbs, are exquisite,
+as fitted to minister to us in heaven, but
+hardly as fitted to keep watch and ward for us on
+earth&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Against foul fiends to aid us militant.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>The feminine element always predominates in the
+conception of angels, though they are supposed to
+be masculine: I doubt whether it ought to be so.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">While these sheets are going through the press, I
+find the following beautiful passage relative to angels
+in the last number of &#8220;Fraser&#8217;s Magazine&#8221;:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&#8220;It is safer, even, and perhaps more orthodox and
+scriptural, to &#8216;impersonate&#8217; time and space, strength
+and love, and even the laws of nature, than to give
+us any more angel worlds, which are but dead skeletons
+of Dante&#8217;s creations without that awful and
+living reality which they had in his mind; or to fill
+children&#8217;s books, as the High Church party are doing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">353</a></span>
+now, with pictures and tales of certain winged hermaphrodites,
+in whom one cannot think (even by the
+extremest stretch of charity) that the writers or
+draughtsmen really believe, while one sees them servilely
+copying medi&aelig;val forms, and intermingling
+them with the ornaments of an extinct architecture;
+thus confessing <i>na&iuml;vely</i> to every one but themselves,
+that they accept the whole notion as an integral portion
+of a creed, to which, if they be members of the
+Church of England, they cannot well belong, seeing
+that it was, happily for us, expelled both by law and
+by conscience at the Reformation.&#8221;</p>
+
+<p>This is eloquent and true; but not the less true
+it is, that if we have to represent in art those &#8220;spiritual
+beings who walk this earth unseen, both when
+we sleep and when we wake&#8221;&mdash;beings, who (as the
+author of the above passage seems to believe) may
+be intimately connected with the phenomena of the
+universe&mdash;we must have a type, a bodily type,
+under which to represent them; and as we cannot do
+this from knowledge, we must do it symbolically.
+Angels, as we figure them, are <i>symbols</i> of moral and
+spiritual existences elevated above ourselves&mdash;we do
+not believe in the forms, we only accept their significance.
+I should be glad to see a better impersonation
+than the impossible creatures represented in art;
+but till some artist-poet, or poet-artist, has invented
+such an impersonation, we must employ that which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">354</a></span>
+is already familiarised to the eye and hallowed to
+the fancy without imposing on the understanding.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-022-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="214" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h4>
+MIRIAM.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;RUTH.
+</h4>
+
+<p>Both the Old and the New Testament abound in
+sculptural subjects; but fitly to deal with the Old
+Testament required a Michal-Angelo. Beautiful as
+are the gates of Ghiberti they are hardly what the
+Germans would call &#8220;alt-testamentische,&#8221; they are so
+essentially elegant and graceful, and the old Hebrew
+legends and personages are so tremendous. Even
+Miriam and Ruth dilate into a sort of grandeur. In
+representation I always fancy them above life-size.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">I doubt whether the same artist who could conceive
+the Prophets would be able to represent the Apostles,
+or that the same hand which gave us Moses could
+give us Christ. Michal-Angelo&#8217;s idea of Christ,
+both in painting and sculpture is, to me, revolting.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-023-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="138" width="300" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">355</a></span></p>
+
+<h4>
+CHRIST.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;SOLOMON.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;DAVID.
+</h4>
+
+<p>I do not like the idea of Moses and Christ placed
+together. Much finer in artistic and moral contrast
+would be the two teachers,&mdash;Christ as the divine and
+spiritual law-giver, Solomon as the type of worldly
+wisdom. They should stand side by side, or be seated
+each on his throne, a crowned King, with book and
+sceptre&mdash;but how different in character!</p>
+
+<p class="tb">We have multiplied statues of David. I have
+never seen one which realised the finest conception of
+his character, either as Hero, King, Prophet, or Poet.
+In general he figures as the slayer of Goliath, and is
+always too feeble and boyish. David, singing to his
+lute before Saul; David as the musician and poet,
+young, beautiful, half-draped, heaven-inspired, exorcising
+by his art the dark spirit of evil which possessed
+the jealous King:&mdash;this would be a theme for an
+artist, and would as finely represent the power of
+sacred song as a figure of St. Cecilia. But the sentiment
+should not be that of a young Apollo, or an
+Orpheus; therein would lie the chief difficulty.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-031-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="133" width="300" /></div><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">356</a></span></p>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-012-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="125" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h4>
+HAGAR.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;REBEKAH.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;RACHEL.
+</h4>
+
+<p>I remember to have seen fine statues of Hagar
+holding her pitcher, of Rebekah contemplating her
+bracelet, and of Rachel as the shepherdess. But I
+would have a different version; Hagar as the poor
+cast-away, driven forth with her boy into the wilderness;
+Rebekah as the exulting bride; and Rachel
+as the mild, pensive wife. They would represent, in
+a very complete manner, contrasted phases of the
+destiny of Woman, connected together by our religious
+associations, and appealing to our deepest human
+sympathies.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 250px;"><img src="images/illus-056-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="150" width="250" /></div>
+
+<h4>THE QUEEN OF SHEBA.</h4>
+
+<p>The Queen of Sheba would be a fine subject for a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">357</a></span>
+single statue, as the religious type of the queenly,
+intellectual woman, the treatment being kept as far
+as possible from that of a Pallas or a Muse.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">The journey of the Queen of the South to visit
+Solomon would be a capital subject for a processional
+bas-relief, and as a <i>pendant</i> to the journey of &#8220;the
+Wise Men of the East,&#8221; to visit a greater than Solomon.
+The latter has been perpetually treated from
+the fourth century. Of the journey of the Queen
+of Sheba I have seen, as yet, no example.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-011.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="203" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h4>LADY GODIVA.</h4>
+
+<p>With regard to statuesque subjects from modern
+history and poetry,&mdash;<i>Romantic Sculpture</i>, as it is
+styled,&mdash;the taste both of the public and the artist
+evidently sets in this direction. That the treatment
+of such subjects should not be classical is admitted;
+but in the development of this romantic tendency
+there is cause to fear that we may be inundated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">358</a></span>
+with all kinds of picturesque vagaries and violations
+of the just laws and limits of art.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">I remember, however, a circumstance which makes
+me hopeful as to the progress of feeling; knowledge
+may come hereafter. I remember about twenty
+years ago proposing the figure and story of Lady
+Godiva as beautiful subjects for sculpture and painting.
+There were present on that occasion, among
+others, two artists and a poet. The two artists
+laughed outright, and the poet extemporised an
+epigram upon Peeping Tom. If I were to propose
+Lady Godiva as a subject now<a name="FNanchor_D_4" id="FNanchor_D_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_D_4" class="fnanchor">4</a>, I believe it would
+be received with a far different feeling even by those
+very men. If I were Queen of England I would
+have it painted in Fresco in my council chamber.
+There should be seen the palfrey with its rich
+housings, and near it, as preparing to mount, the
+noble lady should stand, timid, but resolved: her
+veil should lie on the ground; the drapery just falling
+from her fair limbs and partly sustained by one hand,
+while with the other she loosens her golden tresses.
+A bevy of waiting-maids, with averted faces, disappear
+hurriedly beneath the massive porch of the Saxon</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">359</a></span></p>
+<p>palace, which forms the background, with sky and
+trees seen through openings in the heavy architecture.
+This is the picturesque version of the story; but
+there are many others. As a single statue, the
+figure of Lady Godiva affords an opportunity for
+the legitimate treatment of the undraped female form,
+sanctified by the purest, the most elevated associations;&mdash;by
+woman&#8217;s tearful pride and man&#8217;s respect
+and gratitude.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-029-1.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="136" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h4>JOAN OF ARC.</h4>
+
+<p>Shakspeare, who is so horribly unjust to Joan
+of Arc, has put a sublime speech into her mouth
+where she answers Burgundy who had accused her
+of sorcery,&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Because you want the grace that others have.</span>
+<span class="i0">You judge it straight a thing impossible</span>
+<span class="i0">To compass wonders but by help of devils!&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>The whole theory of popular superstition comprised
+in three lines!</p>
+
+<p>But Joan herself&mdash;how at her name the whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">360</a></span>
+heart seems to rise up in resentment, not so much
+against her cowardly executioners as against those
+who have so wronged her memory! Never was a
+character, historically pure, bright, definite, and perfect
+in every feature and outline, so abominably
+treated in poetry and fiction,&mdash;perhaps for this
+reason, that she was in herself so exquisitely wrought,
+so complete a specimen of the heroic, the poetic, the
+romantic, that she could not be touched by art or
+modified by fancy, without being in some degree
+profaned. As to art, I never saw yet any representation
+of &#8220;Jeanne la grande Pastoure,&#8221; (except, perhaps,
+the lovely statue by the Princess of Wurtemburg,)
+which I could endure to look at&mdash;and even
+that gives us the contemplative simplicity, but not
+the power, intellect, and energy, which must have
+formed so large a part of the character. Then as to
+the poets, what shall be said of them? First Shakspeare,
+writing for the English stage, took up the
+popular idea of the character as it prevailed in England
+in his own time. Into the hypothesis that the
+greater part of Henry VI. is not by Shakspeare,
+there is no occasion to enter here; the original
+conception of the character of Joan of Arc may not
+be his, but he has left it untouched in its principal
+features. The English hated the memory of the
+French Heroine because she had caused the loss of
+France and had humiliated us as a nation; and our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">361</a></span>
+chroniclers revenged themselves and healed their
+wounded self-love by imputing her victories to
+witchcraft. Shakspeare, giving her the attributes
+which the historians of his time assigned to her, represents
+her as a warlike, arrogant sorceress&mdash;a
+&#8220;monstrous woman&#8221;&mdash;attended and assisted by
+demons. I pass over the depraved and perverse
+spirit in which Voltaire profaned this divine character.
+A theme which a patriot poet would have
+approached as he would have approached an altar,
+he has made a vehicle for the most licentious parody
+that ever disgraced a national literature. Schiller
+comes next, and hardly seems to me more excusable.
+Not only has he missed the character, he has deliberately
+falsified both character and fact. His
+&#8220;Johanna&#8221; might have been called by any other
+name; and the scene of his tragedy might have been
+placed anywhere in the wide world with just the
+same probability and truth. Schiller and Goethe held a
+principle that all considerations were to yield before
+the proprieties of art. But Milton speaks somewhere
+of those &#8220;faultless proprieties of nature&#8221; which
+never can be violated with impunity: and Art can
+never move freely but in the domain of nature and
+of truth. All the fine writing in Schiller&#8217;s &#8220;Maid
+of Orleans&#8221; can never reconcile me to its absolute
+and revolting falsehood. The sublime, simple-hearted
+girl who to the last moment regarded herself as set<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">362</a></span>
+apart by God to do His work, he makes the victim
+of an insane passion for a young Englishman. In
+the love-sick classical heroines of Corneille and Racine
+there is nothing more Frenchified, more absurd,
+more revolting. Then he makes her die victorious
+on the field of battle defending the oriflamme;&mdash;far,
+far more glorious as well as more pathetic her
+real death&mdash;but it offended against Schiller&#8217;s &aelig;sthetic
+conception of the dignity of tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>Lastly, we have Southey&#8217;s epic: what shall be
+said of it?&mdash;even what he said of the Lusiad of
+Camoens, &#8220;that it is read with little emotion, and
+remembered with little pleasure.&#8221; No. I do not
+wish to see Joan turned into a heroine of tragedy or
+tale, because, as it seems to me, the whole life and
+death of this martyred girl is too near us, and too
+historically distinct, and, I will add, too sacred, to
+be dressed out in romantic prose or verse. What
+Walter Scott might have made of her I do not
+know&mdash;something marvellously picturesque and life-like,
+no doubt&mdash;and yet I am glad he did not try
+his hand on her. But she remains a legitimate and
+most admirable subject for representative art; and
+as yet nothing has been done in sculpture to fix the
+ideal and heroic in her character, nor in painting,
+worthy of her exploits. There exists no contemporary
+portrait of her except in the brief description of her
+in the old French Chronicle of the Siege of Orleans,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">363</a></span>
+where it is said that her figure was tall and slender,
+her bust fine, her hair and eyes black; that she wore
+her hair short, and could never be persuaded to put
+on a head-piece, and farther (and in this respect both
+Schiller and Southey have wronged her), that she
+had never slain a man, using her consecrated sword
+merely to defend herself. I should like to see a fine
+equestrian statue of her by one of our best English
+sculptors, set up in a conspicuous place among us, as
+a national expiation.</p>
+
+<p>Southey mentions that in the beginning of the
+last war, about 1795, when popular feeling, excited
+almost to frenzy, raged against France, a pantomime,
+or ballet, was performed at Covent Garden, from the
+story of Joan of Arc, at the conclusion of which she
+is carried away by demons, like a female Don Juan.
+This denouement caused such a storm of indignation,
+that the author&mdash;one James Cross&mdash;was obliged,
+after the first two or three representations, to change
+the demons into angels, and send her straight into
+Heaven:&mdash;an anecdote pleasant to record as illustrating
+the sure ultimate triumph of truth over falsehood;
+of all the better sympathies over prejudice
+and wrong;&mdash;in spite of history, and, what is more,
+in spite of Shakspeare!</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-041-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="66" width="200" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">364</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-038-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="186" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h4>CHARACTERS FROM SHAKSPEARE.</h4>
+
+<p>Joan of Arc is not, however, a Shakspearian
+character; and, in fact, there are very few of his personages
+susceptible of sculptural treatment. They
+are too dramatic, too profound, too complex in their
+essential nature where they are tragic; too many-sided
+and picturesque where they are comic.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, the attempt to condense into marble
+such light, evanescent, quaint creations as those in
+&#8220;The Midsummer&#8217;s Night&#8217;s Dream&#8221; is better avoided;
+we feel that a marble fairy must be a heavy absurdity.
+Oberon and Titania might perhaps float along
+in a bas-relief; but we cannot put away the thought
+that they have reality without substantiality, and we
+do not like to see them, or Ariel, or Caliban fixed
+in the definite forms of sculpture.</p>
+
+<p>There are, however, a few of Shakspeare&#8217;s characters
+which appear to me beautifully adapted for
+statuesque treatment: Perdita holding her flowers;
+Miranda lingering on the shore; might well replace<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">365</a></span>
+the innumerable &#8220;Floras&#8221; and &#8220;Nymphs preparing
+to bathe,&#8221; which people the <i>at&eacute;liers</i> of our sculptors.
+Cordelia has something of marble quietude about
+her; and Hermione is a statue ready made. And,
+by the way, it is observable that Shakspeare represents
+Hermione as a <i>coloured</i> statue. Paulina will
+not allow it to be touched, because &#8220;the colour is
+not yet dry.&#8221; Again,&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;Would you not deem those veins</span>
+<span class="i0 padb05">Did verily bear blood?</span>
+<span class="i0">&#8220;The very life seems warm upon her lips,</span>
+<span class="i0">The fixture of her eye hath motion in&#8217;t,</span>
+<span class="i0">And we are mocked by Art!</span>
+<span class="i0 padb05">The ruddiness upon her lip is wet,</span>
+<span class="i0">&#8220;You&#8217;ll mar it if you kiss it, stain your own</span>
+<span class="i0">With oily painting.&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>I think it possible to model small ornamental
+statuettes and groups from some few of the scenes in
+Shakspeare&#8217;s plays; but this is quite different from
+life-size figures of Hamlet, Othello, Shylock, Macbeth,
+which must either have the look of real individual
+portraiture, or become mere idealisations of
+certain qualities; and Shakspeare&#8217;s creations are
+neither the one nor the other.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-365.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="71" width="300" /></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">366</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-028-2.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="208" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h4>CHARACTERS FROM SPENSER.</h4>
+
+<p>Spenser is so essentially a picturesque poet, he
+depends for his rich effects so much on the combination
+of colour and imagery, and multiplied accessories,
+that one feels&mdash;at least <i>I</i> feel, on laying down a
+volume of the &#8220;Fairie Queene&#8221; dazzled as if I had
+been walking in a gallery of pictures. His &#8220;Masque
+of Cupid,&#8221; for instance, although a procession of
+poetical creations, could not be transferred to a bas-relief
+without completely losing its Spenserian character&mdash;its
+wondrous glow of colour. Thus Cupid
+&#8220;uprears himself exulting from the back of the
+ravenous lion;&#8221; removes the bandage from his eyes,
+that he may look round on his victims; &#8220;shakes
+the darts which his right hand doth strain full
+dreadfully,&#8221; and &#8220;claps on high his coloured wings
+twain.&#8221; This certainly is not the Greek Cupid, nor
+the Cupid of sculpture; it is the Spenserian Cupid.
+So of his Una, so of his Britomart, and the Red Cross
+Knight and Sir Guyon: one might make elegant
+<i>statuesque</i> impersonations of the allegories they involve,
+as of Truth, Chastity, Faith, Temperance; but
+then they would lose immediately their Spenserian<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">367</a></span>
+character and sentiment, and must become something
+altogether different.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 300px;"><img src="images/illus-014.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="179" width="300" /></div>
+
+<h4>
+THE LADY.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;COMUS.
+</h4>
+
+<p>It is not so with Milton. The &#8220;Lady&#8221; in
+Comus, whether she stands listening to the echos of
+her own sweet voice, or motionless as marble under
+the spell of the &#8220;false enchanter,&#8221; <i>looking</i> that divine
+reproof which in the poem she <i>speaks</i>,&mdash;</p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i05">&#8220;I hate when vice can bolt her arguments,</span>
+<span class="i0">And virtue has no tongue to check her pride&#8221;&mdash;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>is a subject perfectly fitted for sculpture, and never,
+so far as I know, executed. It would be a far more
+appropriate ornament for a lady&#8217;s <i>boudoir</i> than
+French statues of <span class="smcap">Modesty</span>, which generally have
+the effect of making one feel very much ashamed.<a name="FNanchor_E_5" id="FNanchor_E_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_E_5" class="fnanchor">5</a></p>
+
+<p>Sabrina has been beautifully treated by Marshall.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to render Comus without making
+him too like a Bacchus or an Apollo. He is neither.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">368</a></span></p>
+<p>He represents not the beneficent, but the intoxicating
+and brutifying power of wine. His joviality should
+not be that of a God, but with something mischievous,
+bestial, Faun-like; and he should have,
+with the Dionysian grace, a dash of the cunning and
+malignity of his Mother Circe. These characteristics
+should be in the mind of the artist. The panther&#8217;s
+skin, the coronal of vine leaves, and, instead of the
+Thyrsus, the magician&#8217;s wand, are the proper accessories.
+It is also worth notice, that in the antique
+representations Comus has wings as a demigod, and
+in a picture described by Philostratus (a night scene)
+he lies crouched in a drunken sleep. Little use, however,
+is made of him in the antique myths, and the
+Miltonic conception is that which should be embodied
+by the modern sculptor.</p>
+
+<p class="tb">Il Penseroso and L&#8217;Allegro, if embodied in
+sculpture as poetical abstractions (either masculine
+or feminine) of Melancholy and Mirth, would cease
+to be Miltonic, for the conceptions of the poet are
+essentially picturesque, and expressed in both cases
+by a luxuriant accumulation of images and accessories,
+not to be brought within the limits of plastic
+art without the most tasteless confusion and inconsistency.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 200px;"><img src="images/illus-054.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="126" width="200" /></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">369</a></span></p>
+
+<h4>SATAN.</h4>
+
+<p>The religious idea of a Satan&mdash;the impersonation
+of that mixture of the bestial, the malignant,
+the impious, and the hopeless, which constitute
+<span class="smcap">the Fiend</span>, the enemy of all that is human
+and divine&mdash;I conceive to be quite unfitted for
+the purpose of sculpture. Danton&#8217;s attempt degenerates
+into grim caricature. Milton&#8217;s Satan&mdash;&#8220;the
+archangel ruined,&#8221;&mdash;is however a strictly
+poetical creation, and capable of the most poetical
+statuesque treatment. But we must remember that,
+if it be a gross mistake, religious and artistic, to
+conceive the Messiah under the form of a larger,
+stronger humanity, with a <i>physique</i> like that of a
+wrestler, (as M. Angelo has done in the Last Judgement)
+it is equally a mistake to conceive the lost
+angel, our spiritual adversary, under any such coarse
+Herculean lineaments. There can be no image of
+the Miltonic Satan without the elements of beauty,
+&#8220;though changed by pale ire, envy, and despair!&#8221;
+Colossal he may be, vast as Mount Athos; but it is
+not necessary to express this that he should be hewn
+out of Mount Athos, or look like the giant Polypheme!
+His proportions, his figure, his features&mdash;like
+his power&mdash;are angelic. As the Hero&mdash;for he
+is so&mdash;of the &#8220;Paradise Lost,&#8221; the subject is open<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">370</a></span>
+to poetic treatment; but I am not aware that as yet
+it has been poetically treated.</p>
+
+<p>Of the Italian poetry and history, and all the
+wondrous and lovely shapes which come thronging
+out of that Elysian land,&mdash;I can say nothing now,&mdash;or
+only this,&mdash;that after all I am not <i>quite</i> sure that
+I am right about Spenser. For, at first view, what
+poet seems less amenable to statuesque treatment
+than Dante? One would have imagined that only a
+preternatural fusion of Michal-Angelo and Rembrandt
+could fitly render the murky recesses and
+ghastly and monstrous inhabitants of the Inferno, or
+attempt to shadow forth the dazzling mysteries of
+the Paradiso. Yet see what Flaxman has achieved!
+His designs are legitimate bas-reliefs, not pictures in
+outline. He has been true to his own art, and all
+that could be done within the limitations of his art he
+has accomplished. It is a translation of Dante&#8217;s
+<i>ideas</i> into sculpture, with every thing <i>peculiarly</i>
+Dantesque in the treatment, set aside.</p>
+
+<p>Now as to our more modern poets.&mdash;From amid
+the long array of beautiful subjects which seem to
+move in succession before the fancy, there are two
+which stand out prominent in their beauty. First,
+Lord Byron&#8217;s &#8220;Myrrha,&#8221; who with her Ionian elegance
+is susceptible of the purest classical treatment.
+She should hold a torch; but not with the air of a
+M&aelig;nad, nor of a Thais about to fire Persepolis.
+The sentiment should be deeper and quieter.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">371</a></span></p>
+
+<table summary="poem"><tr><td><div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">&#8220;Dost thou think</span>
+<span class="i0">A Greek girl dare not do for love that which</span>
+<span class="i0">An Indian widow does for custom?&#8221;</span>
+</div></div></td></tr></table>
+
+<p>Ion in Talfourd&#8217;s Tragedy&mdash;the boy-hero, in all
+the tenderness of extreme youth, already self-devoted
+and touched with a melancholy grace and an elevation
+beyond his years&mdash;is so essentially statuesque,
+that I am surprised that no sculptor has attempted
+it; perhaps because, in this instance, as in that of
+Myrrha, the popular realisation of both characters as
+subjects of formative art has been spoiled by theatrical
+trappings and associations.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 400px;"><img src="images/illus-371.png" alt="Decoration." title="" height="456" width="400" /></div>
+
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">1</span></a> &#8220;<i>Sancta Simplicitas!</i>&#8221; was the exclamation of Huss to the
+woman who, when he was burned at the stake, in her religious zeal
+brought a faggot to light the pile.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_B_2" id="Footnote_B_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_B_2"><span class="label">2</span></a> Canova&#8217;s bust of Helen is such a counterfeit; whereas the
+Helen of Gibson is, for a mere head, singularly characteristic.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_C_3" id="Footnote_C_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_C_3"><span class="label">3</span></a> There is a fine translation of the German Iphigenia by Miss
+Swanwick. (Dramatic Works of Goethe. Bohn, 1850.)</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_D_4" id="Footnote_D_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_D_4"><span class="label">4</span></a> 1848. At the moment I transcribe this (1854), a very charming
+statue of the Lady Godiva (suggested, I believe, by Tennyson&#8217;s
+poem) stands in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_E_5" id="Footnote_E_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_E_5"><span class="label">5</span></a> For example, the statue of Modesty executed for Josephine&#8217;s
+boudoir.</p></div>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h5><span class="smcap">London :</span><br />
+A. and <span class="smcap">G. A. Spottiswoode,</span><br />
+New-street-Square.</h5>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Commonplace Book of Thoughts,
+Memories, and Fancies., by Anna Jameson
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COMMONPLACE BOOK ***
+
+***** This file should be named 39680-h.htm or 39680-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/9/6/8/39680/
+
+Produced by Julia Miller, Turgut Dincer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/39680-h/images/frontispiece.png b/39680-h/images/frontispiece.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0c79f1a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/frontispiece.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-001.png b/39680-h/images/illus-001.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b2fb170
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-001.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-002.png b/39680-h/images/illus-002.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1f9bf5e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-002.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-006.png b/39680-h/images/illus-006.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ddb7d4f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-006.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-007.png b/39680-h/images/illus-007.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1d556c2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-007.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-008.png b/39680-h/images/illus-008.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..22f9da5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-008.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-010.png b/39680-h/images/illus-010.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6949627
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-010.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-011.png b/39680-h/images/illus-011.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1f90c93
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-011.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-012-1.png b/39680-h/images/illus-012-1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f41412f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-012-1.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-012-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-012-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..64bcdfa
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-012-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-013-1.png b/39680-h/images/illus-013-1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..471c7da
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-013-1.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-013-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-013-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9af8f6b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-013-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-014.png b/39680-h/images/illus-014.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6db83df
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-014.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-017-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-017-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..eecb16b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-017-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-018.png b/39680-h/images/illus-018.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..395e4c2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-018.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-019.png b/39680-h/images/illus-019.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e90f2b9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-019.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-020.png b/39680-h/images/illus-020.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..00bd1fd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-020.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-022-1.png b/39680-h/images/illus-022-1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c147e72
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-022-1.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-022-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-022-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..96dbdc9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-022-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-023-1.png b/39680-h/images/illus-023-1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a9f082d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-023-1.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-023-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-023-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6ff7171
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-023-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-024.png b/39680-h/images/illus-024.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3f0847d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-024.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-025.png b/39680-h/images/illus-025.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8b23b1e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-025.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-026.png b/39680-h/images/illus-026.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..71e6dad
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-026.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-027.png b/39680-h/images/illus-027.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8bab592
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-027.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-028-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-028-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..015e692
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-028-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-029-1.png b/39680-h/images/illus-029-1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..bb775ea
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-029-1.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-031-1.png b/39680-h/images/illus-031-1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8ad9069
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-031-1.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-031-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-031-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4aa7d05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-031-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-032-1.png b/39680-h/images/illus-032-1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..05de050
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-032-1.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-032-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-032-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e9b6c5b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-032-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-034.png b/39680-h/images/illus-034.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fb4ee54
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-034.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-035-1.png b/39680-h/images/illus-035-1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2316280
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-035-1.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-038-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-038-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d8692e8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-038-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-039-1.png b/39680-h/images/illus-039-1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..733c8ff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-039-1.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-039-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-039-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5dea844
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-039-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-040-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-040-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..83aaab9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-040-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-041-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-041-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fe1f63a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-041-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-045.png b/39680-h/images/illus-045.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a1b3bae
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-045.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-046.png b/39680-h/images/illus-046.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b486c67
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-046.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-047.png b/39680-h/images/illus-047.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9226a78
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-047.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-048.png b/39680-h/images/illus-048.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8df4dd9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-048.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-049.png b/39680-h/images/illus-049.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a27f253
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-049.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-050.png b/39680-h/images/illus-050.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..19759c4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-050.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-054.png b/39680-h/images/illus-054.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..16ee48b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-054.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-055.png b/39680-h/images/illus-055.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1ce793e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-055.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-056-1.png b/39680-h/images/illus-056-1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ba764bd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-056-1.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-059-1.png b/39680-h/images/illus-059-1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..588c806
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-059-1.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-060-1.png b/39680-h/images/illus-060-1.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..66c12fb
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-060-1.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-060-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-060-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a236c07
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-060-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-064.png b/39680-h/images/illus-064.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3df5bde
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-064.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-073-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-073-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..155ef83
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-073-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-077-2.png b/39680-h/images/illus-077-2.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6f68e2c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-077-2.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-078.png b/39680-h/images/illus-078.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1c38c78
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-078.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-079.png b/39680-h/images/illus-079.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..478525f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-079.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-114.png b/39680-h/images/illus-114.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cdd425b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-114.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-146.png b/39680-h/images/illus-146.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..17f0b7c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-146.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-147.png b/39680-h/images/illus-147.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..888fd7d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-147.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-155.png b/39680-h/images/illus-155.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..38cd000
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-155.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-194.png b/39680-h/images/illus-194.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6418094
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-194.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-196.png b/39680-h/images/illus-196.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2db1b87
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-196.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-275.png b/39680-h/images/illus-275.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e42f5c8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-275.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-276.png b/39680-h/images/illus-276.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..3aaadca
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-276.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-326.png b/39680-h/images/illus-326.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..972bff5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-326.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-365.png b/39680-h/images/illus-365.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b793cdc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-365.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-371.png b/39680-h/images/illus-371.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0a61b76
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-371.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-iv.png b/39680-h/images/illus-iv.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d96f6d5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-iv.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-ix.png b/39680-h/images/illus-ix.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d9b290d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-ix.png
diff --git a/39680-h/images/illus-viii.png b/39680-h/images/illus-viii.png
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6f5cc97
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680-h/images/illus-viii.png
diff --git a/39680.txt b/39680.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..253f027
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9596 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories,
+and Fancies., by Anna Jameson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+
+Title: A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
+       2nd ed.
+
+Author: Anna Jameson
+
+Release Date: May 12, 2012 [EBook #39680]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COMMONPLACE BOOK ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Julia Miller, Turgut Dincer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+   A
+
+   COMMONPLACE BOOK
+
+   OF
+
+   Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   A COMMONPLACE BOOK--
+
+   OF
+
+   Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies.
+
+   ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
+
+   PART I.--ETHICS AND CHARACTER.
+
+   PART II.--LITERATURE AND ART.
+
+   BY MRS. JAMESON.
+
+   "Un peu de chaque chose, et rien du tout,--a la francaise!"--MONTAIGNE.
+
+   With Illustrations and Etchings.
+
+   SECOND EDITION, CORRECTED.
+
+   LONDON:
+   LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, AND LONGMANS.
+   1855.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+I must be allowed to say a few words in explanation of the contents of
+this little volume, which is truly what its name sets forth--a book of
+common-places, and nothing more. If I have never, in any work I have
+ventured to place before the public, aspired to _teach_, (being myself a
+_learner_ in all things,) at least I have hitherto done my best to
+deserve the indulgence I have met with; and it would pain me if it could
+be supposed that such indulgence had rendered me presumptuous or
+careless.
+
+For many years I have been accustomed to make a memorandum of any
+thought which might come across me--(if pen and paper were at hand), and
+to mark (and _remark_) any passage in a book which excited either a
+sympathetic or an antagonistic feeling. This collection of notes
+accumulated insensibly from day to day. The volumes on Shakspeare's
+Women, on Sacred and Legendary Art, and various other productions,
+sprung from seed thus lightly and casually sown, which, I hardly know
+how, grew up and expanded into a regular, readable form, with a
+beginning, a middle, and an end. But what was to be done with the
+fragments which remained--without beginning, and without end--links of a
+hidden or a broken chain? Whether to preserve them or destroy them
+became a question, and one I could not answer for myself. In allowing a
+portion of them to go forth to the world in their original form, as
+unconnected fragments, I have been guided by the wishes of others, who
+deemed it not wholly uninteresting or profitless to trace the path,
+sometimes devious enough, of an "inquiring spirit," even by the little
+pebbles dropped as vestiges by the way side.
+
+A book so supremely egotistical and subjective can do good only in one
+way. It may, like conversation with a friend, open up sources of
+sympathy and reflection; excite to argument, agreement, or disagreement;
+and, like every spontaneous utterance of thought out of an earnest mind,
+suggest far higher and better thoughts than any to be found here to
+higher and more productive minds. If I had not the humble hope of such a
+possible result, instead of sending these memoranda to the printer, I
+should have thrown them into the fire; for I lack that creative faculty
+which can work up the teachings of heart-sorrow and world-experience
+into attractive forms of fiction or of art; and having no intention of
+leaving any such memorials to be published after my death, they must
+have gone into the fire as the only alternative left.
+
+The passages from books are not, strictly speaking, _selected_; they are
+not given here on any principle of choice, but simply because that by
+some process of assimilation they became a part of the individual mind.
+They "found _me_,"--to borrow Coleridge's expression,--"found me in some
+depth of my being;" I did not "find _them_."
+
+For the rest, all those passages which are marked by inverted commas
+must be regarded as borrowed, though I have not always been able to give
+my authority. All passages not so marked are, I dare not say, original
+or new, but at least the unstudied expression of a free discursive mind.
+Fruits, not advisedly plucked, but which the variable winds have shaken
+from the tree: some ripe, some "harsh and crude."
+
+Wordsworth's famous poem of "The Happy Warrior" (of which a new
+application will be found at page 87.), is supposed by Mr. De Quincey to
+have been first suggested by the character of Nelson. It has since been
+applied to Sir Charles Napier (the Indian General), as well as to the
+Duke of Wellington; all which serves to illustrate my position, that the
+lines in question are equally applicable to any man or any woman whose
+moral standard is irrespective of selfishness and expediency.
+
+With regard to the fragment on Sculpture, it may be necessary to state
+that it was written in 1848. The first three paragraphs were inserted in
+the Art Journal for April, 1849. It was intended to enlarge the whole
+into a comprehensive essay on "Subjects fitted for Artistic Treatment;"
+but this being now impossible, the fragment is given as originally
+written; others may think it out, and apply it better than I shall live
+to do.
+
+
+   August, 1854.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+   PART I.
+
+   Ethics and Character.
+
+
+ ETHICAL FRAGMENTS.                                        Page
+
+   Vanity                                                     1
+
+   Truths and Truisms                                         3
+
+   Beauty and Use                                             5
+
+   What is Soul?                                              7
+
+   The Philosophy of Happiness                                9
+
+   Cheerfulness a Virtue                                     10
+
+   Intellect and Sympathy                                    11
+
+   Old Letters                                               12
+
+   The Point of Honour                                       13
+
+   Looking up                                                14
+
+   Authors                                                   14
+
+   Thought and Theory                                        15
+
+   Impulse and Consideration                                 16
+
+   Principle and Expediency                                  16
+
+   Personality of the Evil Principle                         17
+
+   The Catholic Spirit                                       18
+
+   Death-beds                                                19
+
+   Thoughts on a Sermon                                      20
+
+   Love and Fear of God                                      22
+
+   Social Opinion                                            23
+
+   Balzac                                                    23
+
+   Political                                                 24
+
+   Celibacy                                                  25
+
+   Landor's Wise Sayings                                     26
+
+   Justice and Generosity                                    27
+
+   Roman Catholic Converts                                   28
+
+   Stealing and Borrowing                                    28
+
+   Good and Bad                                              29
+
+   Italian Proverb. Greek Saying                             30
+
+   Silent Grief                                              31
+
+   Past and Future                                           32
+
+   Suicide. Countenance                                      33
+
+   Progress and Progression                                  34
+
+   Happiness in Suffering                                    35
+
+   Life in the Future                                        36
+
+   Strength. Youth                                           38
+
+   Moral Suffering                                           40
+
+   The Secret of Peace                                       41
+
+   Motives and Impulses                                      42
+
+   Principle and Passion                                     43
+
+   Dominant Ideas                                            44
+
+   Absence and Death                                         45
+
+   Sydney Smith. Theodore Hook                               46
+
+   Werther and Childe Harold                                 50
+
+   Money Obligations                                         52
+
+   Charity. Truth                                            53
+
+   Women. Men                                                55
+
+   Compensation for Sorrow                                   57
+
+   Religion. Avarice                                         57
+
+   Genius. Mind                                              59
+
+   Hieroglyphical Colours                                    60
+
+   Character                                                 61
+
+   Value of Words                                            62
+
+   Nature and Art                                            64
+
+   Spirit and Form                                           67
+
+   Penal Retribution. The Church                             68
+
+   Woman's Patriotism                                        70
+
+   Doubt. Curiosity                                          71
+
+   Tieck. Coleridge                                          71
+
+   Application of a Bon Mot of Talleyrand                    73
+
+   Adverse Individualities                                   75
+
+   Conflict in Love                                          76
+
+   French Expressions                                        77
+
+   Practical and Contemplative Life                          78
+
+   Joanna Baillie. Macaulay's Ballads                        80
+
+   Cunning                                                   80
+
+   Browning's Paracelsus                                     81
+
+   Men, Women, and Children                                  84
+
+   Letters                                                  100
+
+   Madame de Stael. Deja                                    103
+
+   Thought too free                                         105
+
+   Good Qualities, not Virtues                              106
+
+   Sense and Phantasy                                       107
+
+   Use the Present                                          108
+
+   Facts                                                    109
+
+   Wise Sayings                                             111
+
+   Pestilence of Falsehood                                  112
+
+   Signs instead of Words. Relations with the World         113
+
+   Milton's Adam and Eve                                    115
+
+   Thoughts, sundry                                         116
+
+ A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD                                  117
+
+ THE INDIAN HUNTER AND THE FIRE;
+   an Allegory                                              147
+
+ POETICAL FRAGMENTS                                         152
+
+   Theological.
+
+
+ THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL                                155
+
+   Pandemonium                                              158
+
+   Southey on the Religious Orders                          162
+
+   Forms in Religion--Image Worship                         164
+
+   Religious Differences                                    165
+
+   Expansive Christianity                                   169
+
+ NOTES FROM VARIOUS SERMONS:--
+
+   A Roman Catholic Sermon                                  172
+
+   Another                                                  176
+
+   Church of England Sermon                                 178
+
+   Another                                                  181
+
+   Dissenting Sermon                                        187
+
+   Father Taylor of Boston                                  188
+
+
+   PART II.
+
+   Literature and Art.
+
+
+ NOTES FROM BOOKS:--
+
+   Dr. Arnold                                               198
+
+   Niebuhr                                                  220
+
+   Lord Bacon                                               230
+
+   Chateaubriand                                            240
+
+   Bishop Cumberland                                        247
+
+   Comte's Philosophy                                       250
+
+   Goethe                                                   261
+
+   Hazlitt's "Liber Amoris"                                 263
+
+   Francis Horner, "The Nightingale"                        267
+
+   Thackeray's "English Humourists"                         271
+
+
+ NOTES ON ART:--
+
+   Analogies                                                276
+
+   Definition of Art                                        279
+
+   No Patriotic Art                                         280
+
+   Verse and Colour                                         280
+
+   Dutch Pictures                                           281
+
+   Morals in Art                                            283
+
+   Physiognomy of Hands                                     288
+
+   Mozart and Chopin                                        289
+
+   Music                                                    293
+
+   Rachel, the Actress                                      294
+
+   English and German Actresses                             298
+
+   Character of Imogen                                      303
+
+   Shakspeare Club                                          305
+
+   "Maria Maddalena"                                        305
+
+   The Artistic Nature                                      307
+
+   Woman's Criticism                                        309
+
+   Artistic Influences                                      310
+
+   The Greek Aphrodite                                      311
+
+   Love, in the Greek Tragedy                               312
+
+   Wilkie's Life and Letters                                313
+
+   Wilhelm Schadow                                          317
+
+   Artist Life                                              321
+
+   Materialism in Art                                       323
+
+   A Fragment on Sculpture, and on certain Characters in
+     History and Poetry, considered as Subjects for Modern
+     Art                                                    326
+
+     Helen of Troy                                          332
+
+     Penelope--Laodamia                                     336
+
+     Hippolytus                                             339
+
+     Iphigenia                                              343
+
+     Eve                                                    347
+
+     Adam                                                   350
+
+     Angels                                                 351
+
+     Miriam--Ruth                                           354
+
+     Christ--Solomon--David                                 355
+
+     Hagar--Rebecca--Rachel--Queen of Sheba                 356
+
+     Lady Godiva                                            357
+
+     Joan of Arc                                            359
+
+     Characters from Shakspeare                             364
+
+     Characters from Spenser                                366
+
+     From Milton. The Lady--Comus--Satan                    367
+
+     From the Italian and Modern Poets                      370
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ETCHINGS.
+
+
+   1. Fruits and Flowers. After an old drawing.
+
+   2. Out of my garden.
+
+   3. Virgin Martyrs. Thought. Memory. Fancy. After Benedetto
+        da Matera.
+
+   4. La Penserosa. After Ambrogio Lorenzette.
+
+   5. La Fille du Feu. From a sketch by Von Schwind.
+
+   6. Laus Dei. Angel after Hans Hemmeling.
+
+   7. Eve and Cain. After Steinle.
+
+   8. Study. After an old print.
+
+   9. The Parcae. From a sketch by Carstens.
+
+   10. Antique Owlet. In Goethe's collection at Weimar.
+
+
+   *** The woodcuts are inserted to divide the
+   paragraphs and subjects, and are ornamental rather than
+   illustrative. Where the same vignette heads several paragraphs
+   consecutively, it is to signify that the _ideas_ expressed
+   stand in relation to each other.
+
+
+PART I.
+
+Ethics and Character.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Ethical Fragments.
+
+
+1.
+
+Bacon says, how wisely! that "there is often as great vanity in
+withdrawing and retiring men's conceits from the world, as in obtruding
+them." Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.
+When I see people haunted by the idea of self,--spreading their hands
+before their faces lest they meet the reflection of it in every other
+face, as if the world were to them like a French drawing-room, panelled
+with looking glass,--always fussily putting their obtrusive self behind
+them, or dragging over it a scanty drapery of consciousness, miscalled
+modesty,--always on their defence against compliments, or mistaking
+sympathy for compliment, which is as great an error, and a more vulgar
+one than mistaking flattery for sympathy,--when I see all this, as I have
+seen it, I am inclined to attribute it to the immaturity of the
+character, or to what is worse, a total want of simplicity. To some
+characters fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips,--they do
+well to turn away from it, who fear it will turn their heads. But to
+others, fame is "love disguised," the love that answers to love, in its
+widest most exalted sense. It seems to me, that we should all bring the
+best that is in us (according to the diversity of gifts which God has
+given us), and lay it a reverend offering on the altar of humanity,--if
+not to burn and enlighten, at least to rise in incense to heaven. So
+will the pure in heart, and the unselfish do; and they will not heed if
+those who _can_ bring nothing or _will_ bring nothing, unless they can
+blaze like a beacon, call out "VANITY!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+2.
+
+There are truths which, by perpetual repetition, have subsided into
+passive truisms, till, in some moment of feeling or experience, they
+kindle into conviction, start to life and light, and the truism becomes
+again a vital truth.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+3.
+
+It is well that we obtain what we require at the cheapest possible rate;
+yet those who cheapen goods, or beat down the price of a good article,
+or buy in preference to what is good and genuine of its kind an inferior
+article at an inferior price, sometimes do much mischief. Not only do
+they discourage the production of a better article, but if they be
+anxious about the education of the lower classes they undo with one hand
+what they do with the other; they encourage the mere mechanic and the
+production of what may be produced without effort of mind and without
+education, and they discourage and wrong the skilled workman for whom
+education has done much more and whose education has cost much more.
+
+Every work so merely and basely mechanical, that a man can throw into it
+no part of his own life and soul, does, in the long run, degrade the
+human being. It is only by giving him some kind of mental and moral
+interest in the labour of his hands, making it an exercise of his
+understanding, and an object of his sympathy, that we can really elevate
+the workman; and this is not the case with very cheap production of any
+kind. (Southampton, Dec. 1849.)
+
+
+Since this was written the same idea has been carried out, with far more
+eloquent reasoning, in a noble passage which I have just found in Mr.
+Ruskin's last volume of "The Stones of Venice" (the Sea Stories). As I
+do not _always_ subscribe to his theories of Art, I am the more
+delighted with this anticipation of a moral agreement between us.
+
+"We have much studied and much perfected of late, the great civilised
+invention of the division of labour, only we give it a false name. It is
+not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men:--divided
+into mere segments of men,--broken into small fragments and crumbs of
+life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man
+is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the
+point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now, it is a good and desirable
+thing truly to make many pins in a day, but if we could only see with
+what crystal sand their points are polished--sand of human soul, much to
+be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is,--we should think
+there might be some loss in it also; and the great cry that rises from
+all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace-blast, is all in
+very deed for this,--that we manufacture everything there except men,--we
+blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape
+pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single
+living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages; and all the
+evil to which that cry is urging our myriads, can be met only in one
+way,--not by teaching nor preaching; for to teach them is but to show
+them their misery; and to preach to them--if we do nothing more than
+preach,--is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding on
+the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men,
+raising them and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such
+convenience, or beauty or cheapness, as is to be got only by the
+degradation of the workman, and by equally determined demand for the
+products and results of a healthy and ennobling labour." ....
+
+"We are always in these days trying to separate the two (intellect and
+work). We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always
+working; and we call one a gentleman and the other an operative;
+whereas, the workman ought to be often thinking, and the thinker often
+working, and both should be gentlemen in the best sense. It is only by
+labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour
+can be made happy; and the two cannot be separated with impunity."
+
+Wordsworth, however, had said the same thing before either of us:
+
+                     "Our life is turn'd
+   Out of her course wherever man is made
+   An offering or a sacrifice,--a tool
+   Or implement,--a passive thing employed
+   As a brute mean, without acknowledgment
+   Of common right or interest in the end,
+   Used or abused as selfishness may prompt.
+   Say what can follow for a rational soul
+   Perverted thus, but weakness in all good
+   And strength in evil?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+And this leads us to the consideration of another mistake, analogous
+with the above, but referable in its results chiefly to the higher, or
+what Mr. Ruskin calls the _thinking_, classes of the community.
+
+It is not good for us to have all that we value of worldly material
+things in the form of money. It is the most vulgar form in which value
+can be invested. Not only books, pictures, and all beautiful things are
+better; but even jewels and trinkets are sometimes to be preferred to
+mere hard money. Lands and tenements are good, as involving duties; but
+still what is valuable in the market sense should sometimes take the
+ideal and the beautiful form, and be dear and lovely and valuable for
+its own sake as well as for its convertible worth in hard gold. I think
+the character would be apt to deteriorate when all its material
+possessions take the form of money, and when money becomes valuable for
+its own sake, or as the mere instrument or representative of power.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+4.
+
+We are told in a late account of Laura Bridgeman, the blind, deaf, and
+dumb girl, that her instructor once endeavoured to explain the
+difference between the material and the immaterial, and used the word
+"soul." She interrupted to ask, "What is soul?"
+
+"That which thinks, feels, hopes, loves,----"
+
+"And _aches_?" she added eagerly.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+5.
+
+I was reading to-day in the Notes to Boswell's Life of Johnson that "it
+is a theory which every one knows to be _false in fact_, that virtue in
+real life is always productive of happiness, and vice of misery." I
+should say that all my experience teaches me that the position is not
+false but true: that virtue _does_ produce happiness, and vice _does_
+produce misery. But let us settle the meaning of the words. By
+_happiness_, we do not necessarily mean a state of worldly prosperity.
+By _virtue_, we do not mean a series of good actions which may or may
+not be rewarded, and, if done for reward, lose the essence of virtue.
+Virtue, according to my idea, is the habitual sense of right, and the
+habitual courage to act up to that sense of right, combined with
+benevolent sympathies, the charity which thinketh no evil. This union of
+the highest conscience and the highest sympathy fulfils my notion of
+virtue. Strength is essential to it; weakness incompatible with it.
+Where virtue is, the noblest faculties and the softest feelings are
+predominant; the whole being is in that state of harmony which I call
+happiness. Pain may reach it, passion may disturb it, but there is
+always a glimpse of blue sky above our head; as we ascend in dignity of
+being, we ascend in happiness, which is, in my sense of the word, the
+feeling which connects us with the infinite and with God.
+
+And vice is necessarily misery: for that fluctuation of principle, that
+diseased craving for excitement, that weakness out of which springs
+falsehood, that suspicion of others, that discord with ourselves, with
+the absence of the benevolent propensities,--these constitute misery as a
+state of being. The most miserable person I ever met with in my life had
+12,000_l._ a year; a cunning mind, dexterous to compass its own ends;
+very little conscience, not enough, one would have thought, to vex with
+any retributive pang; but it was the absence of goodness that made the
+misery, obvious and hourly increasing. The perpetual kicking against the
+pricks, the unreasonable _exigeance_ with regard to things, without any
+high standard with regard to persons,--these made the misery. I can speak
+of it as misery who had it daily in my sight for five long years.
+
+I have had arguments, if it be not presumption to call them so, with
+Carlyle on this point. It appeared to me that he confounded happiness
+with pleasure, with self-indulgence. He set aside with a towering scorn
+the idea of living for the sake of happiness, so called: he styled this
+philosophy of happiness, "the philosophy of the frying-pan." But this
+was like the reasoning of a child, whose idea of happiness is plenty of
+sugar-plums. Pleasure, pleasurable sensation, is, as the world goes,
+something to thank God for. I should be one of the last to undervalue
+it; I hope I am one of the last to live for it; and pain is pain, a
+great evil, which I do not like either to inflict or suffer. But
+happiness lies beyond either pain or pleasure--is as sublime a thing as
+virtue itself, indivisible from it; and under this point of view it
+seems a perilous mistake to separate them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+6.
+
+Dante places in his lowest Hell those who in life were melancholy and
+repining without a cause, thus profaning and darkening God's blessed
+sunshine--_Tristi fummo nel' aer dolce_; and in some of the ancient
+Christian systems of virtues and vices, Melancholy is unholy, and a
+vice; Cheerfulness is holy, and a virtue.
+
+Lord Bacon also makes one of the characteristics of moral health and
+goodness to consist in "a constant quick sense of felicity, and a noble
+satisfaction."
+
+What moments, hours, days of exquisite felicity must Christ, our
+Redeemer, have had, though it has become too customary to place him
+before us only in the attitude of pain and sorrow! Why should he be
+always crowned with thorns, bleeding with wounds, weeping over the world
+he was appointed to heal, to save, to reconcile with God? The radiant
+head of Christ in Raphael's Transfiguration should rather be our ideal
+of Him who came "to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach the acceptable
+year of the Lord."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+7.
+
+A profound intellect is weakened and narrowed in general power and
+influence by a limited range of sympathies. I think this is especially
+true of C----: excellent, honest, gifted as he is, he does not do half the
+good he might do, because his sympathies are so confined. And then he
+wants gentleness: he does not seem to acknowledge that "the wisdom that
+is from above is _gentle_." He is a man who carries his bright intellect
+as a light in a dark-lantern; he sees only the objects on which he
+chooses to throw that blaze of light: those he sees vividly, but, as it
+were, exclusively. All other things, though lying near, are dark,
+because perversely he _will_ not throw the light of his mind upon them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+8.
+
+Wilhelm von Humboldt says, "Old letters lose their vitality."
+
+Not true. It is because they retain their vitality that it is so
+dangerous to keep some letters,--so wicked to burn others.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+9.
+
+A Man thinks himself, and is thought by others to be insulted when
+another man gives him the lie. It is an offence to be retracted at once,
+or only to be effaced in blood. To give a woman the lie is not
+considered in the same unpardonable light by herself or others,--is
+indeed a slight thing. Now, whence this difference? Is not truth as
+dear to a woman as to a man? Is the virtue itself, or the reputation of
+it, less necessary to the woman than to the man? If not, what causes
+this distinction,--one so injurious to the morals of both sexes?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+10.
+
+It is good for us to look up, morally and mentally. If I were tired I
+would get some help to hold my head up, as Moses got some one to hold up
+his arms while he prayed.
+
+"Ce qui est moins que moi m'eteint et m'assomme; ce qui est a cote de
+moi m'ennuie et me fatigue. II n'y a que ce qui est au-dessus de moi qui
+me soutienne et m'arrache a moi-meme."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+11.
+
+There is an order of writers who, with characters perverted or hardened
+through long practice of iniquity, yet possess an inherent divine sense
+of the good and the beautiful, and a passion for setting it forth, so
+that men's hearts glow with the tenderness and the elevation which live
+not in the heart of the writer,--only in his head.
+
+And there is another class of writers who are excellent in the social
+relations of life, and kindly and true in heart, yet who,
+intellectually, have a perverted pleasure in the ridiculous and
+distorted, the cunning, the crooked, the vicious,--who are never weary of
+holding up before us finished representations of folly and rascality.
+
+Now, which is the worst of these? the former, who do mischief by making
+us mistrust the good? or the latter, who degrade us by making us
+familiar with evil?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+12.
+
+"Thought and theory," said Wordsworth, "must precede all action that
+moves to salutary purposes. Yet action is nobler in itself than either
+thought or theory."
+
+Yes, and no. What we _act_ has its consequences on earth. What we
+_think_, its consequences in heaven. It is not without reason that
+action should be preferred before barren thought; but all action which
+in its result is worth any thing, must result from thought. So the old
+rhymester hath it:
+
+  "He that good thinketh good may do,
+   And God will help him there unto;
+   For was never good work wrought,
+   Without beginning of good thought."
+
+The result of impulse is the positive; the result of consideration the
+negative. The positive is essentially and abstractedly better than the
+negative, though relatively to facts and circumstances it may not be the
+most expedient.
+
+On my observing how often I had had reason to regret not having followed
+the first impulse, O. G. said, "In _good_ minds the first impulses are
+generally right and true, and, when altered or relinquished from regard
+to expediency arising out of complicated relations, I always feel sorry,
+for they remain right. Our first impulses always lean to the positive,
+our second thoughts to the negative; and I have no respect for the
+negative,--it is the vulgar side of every thing."
+
+On the other hand, it must be conceded, that one who stands endowed with
+great power and with great responsibilities in the midst of a thousand
+duties and interests, can no longer take things in this simple fashion;
+for the good first impulse, in its flow, meets, perhaps, some rock, and
+splits upon it; it recoils on the heart, and becomes abortive. Or the
+impulse to do good _here_ becomes injury _there_, and we are forced to
+calculate results; we cannot trust to them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I have not sought to deduce my principles from conventional notions of
+expediency, but have believed that out of the steady adherence to
+certain fixed principles, the right and the expedient _must_ ensue, and
+I believe it still. The moment one begins to solder right and wrong
+together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It requires merely passive courage and strength to resist, and in some
+cases to overcome evil. But it requires more--it needs bravery and
+self-reliance and surpassing faith--to act out the true inspirations of
+your intelligence and the true impulses of your heart.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Out of the attempt to harmonise our actual life with our aspirations,
+our experience with our faith, we make poetry,--or, it may be, religion.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+F---- used the phrase "_stung into heroism_" as Shelley said, "_cradled
+into poetry_," by wrong.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+13.
+
+Coleridge calls the personal existence of the Evil Principle, "a mere
+fiction, or, at best, an allegory supported by a few popular phrases and
+figures of speech, used incidentally or dramatically by the
+Evangelists." And he says, that "the existence of a personal,
+intelligent, Evil Being, the counterpart and antagonist of God, is in
+direct contradiction to the most express declarations of Holy Writ.
+'_Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it?_'--Amos,
+iii. 6. '_I make peace and create evil._'--Isaiah, xlv. 7. This is the
+deep mystery of the abyss of God."
+
+Do our theologians go with him here? I think not: yet, as a theologian,
+Coleridge is constantly appealed to by Churchmen.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+14.
+
+"We find (in the Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians), every where
+instilled as the essence of all well-being and well-doing, (without
+which the wisest public and political constitution is but a lifeless
+formula, and the highest powers of individual endowment profitless or
+pernicious,) the spirit of a divine sympathy with the happiness and
+rights,--with the peculiarities, gifts, graces, and endowments of other
+minds, which alone, whether in the family or in the Church, can impart
+unity and effectual working together for good in the communities of
+men."
+
+
+"The Christian religion was, in fact, a charter of freedom to the whole
+human race."--_Thom's Discourses on St. Paul's Epistle to the
+Corinthians._
+
+And this is the true Catholic spirit,--the spirit and the teaching of
+Paul,--in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic spirit,--the spirit and
+tendency of Peter, which stands upon forms, which has no respect for
+individuality except in so far as it can imprison this individuality
+within a creed, or use it to a purpose.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+15.
+
+Dr. Baillie once said that "all his observation of death-beds inclined
+him to believe that nature intended that we should go out of the world
+as unconscious as we came into it." "In all my experience," he added, "I
+have not seen one instance in fifty to the contrary."
+
+Yet even in such a large experience the occurrence of "one instance in
+fifty to the contrary" would invalidate the assumption that such was the
+law of nature (or "nature's intention," which, if it means any thing,
+means the same).
+
+The moment in which the spirit meets death is perhaps like the moment in
+which it is embraced by sleep. It never, I suppose, happened to any one
+to be conscious of the immediate transition from the waking to the
+sleeping state.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+16.
+
+_Thoughts on a Sermon._
+
+He is really sublime, this man! with his faith in "the religion of
+pain," and "the deification of sorrow!" But is he therefore right? What
+has he preached to us to-day with all the force of eloquence, all the
+earnestness of conviction? that "pain is the life of God as shown forth
+in Christ;"--"that we are to be crucified to the world and the world to
+us." This perpetual presence of a crucified God between us and a pitying
+redeeming Christ, leads many a mourner to the belief that this world is
+all a Golgotha of pain, and that we are here to crucify each other. Is
+this the law under which we are to live and strive? The missionary
+Bridaine accused himself of sin in that he had preached fasting,
+penance, and the chastisements of God to wretches steeped in poverty and
+dying of hunger; and is there not a similar cruelty and misuse of power
+in the servants of Him who came to bind up the broken-hearted, when
+they preach the necessity, or at least the theory, of moral pain to
+those whose hearts are aching from moral evil?
+
+Surely there is a great difference between the resignation or the
+endurance of a truthful, faithful, loving, hopeful spirit, and this
+dreadful theology of suffering as the necessary and appointed state of
+things! I, for one, will not accept it. Even while most miserable, I
+will believe in happiness; even while I do or suffer evil, I will
+believe in goodness; even while my eyes see not through tears, I will
+believe in the existence of what I do not see--that God is benign, that
+nature is fair, that the world is not made as a prison or a penance.
+While I stand lost in utter darkness, I will yet wait for the return of
+the unfailing dawn,--even though my soul be amazed into such a blind
+perplexity that I know not on which side to look for it, and ask "where
+is the East? and whence the dayspring?" For the East holds its wonted
+place, and the light is withheld only till its appointed time.
+
+God so strengthen me that I may think of pain and sin only as accidental
+apparent discords in his great harmonious scheme of good! Then I am
+ready--I will take up the cross, and hear it bravely, while I _must_; but
+I will lay it down when I can, and in any case I will never lay it on
+another.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+17.
+
+If I fear God it is because I love him, and believe in his love; I
+cannot conceive myself as standing in fear of any spiritual or human
+being in whose love I do not entirely believe. Of that Impersonation of
+Evil, who goes about seeking whom he may devour, the image brings to me
+no fear, only intense disgust and aversion. Yes, it is because of his
+love for me that I fear to offend against God; it is because of his love
+that his displeasure must be terrible. And with regard to human beings,
+only the being I love has the power to give me pain or inspire me with
+fear; only those in whose love I believe, have the power to injure me.
+Take away my love, and you take away my fear: take away _their_ love,
+and you take away the power to do me any harm which can reach me in the
+sources of life and feeling.
+
+
+18.
+
+Social opinion is like a sharp knife. There are foolish people who
+regard it only with terror, and dare not touch or meddle with it. There
+are more foolish people, who, in rashness or defiance, seize it by the
+blade, and get cut and mangled for their pains. And there are wise
+people, who grasp it discreetly and boldly by the handle, and use it to
+carve out their own purposes.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+19.
+
+While we were discussing Balzac's celebrity as a romance writer, she (O.
+G.) said, with a shudder: "His laurels are steeped in the tears of
+women,--every truth he tells has been wrung in tortures from some woman's
+heart."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+20.
+
+Sir Walter Scott, writing in 1831, seems to regard it as a terrible
+misfortune that the whole burgher class in Scotland should be gradually
+preparing for representative reform. "I mean," he says, "the middle and
+respectable classes: when a borough reform comes, which, perhaps, cannot
+long be delayed, ministers will no longer return a member for Scotland
+from the towns." "The gentry," he adds, "will abide longer by _sound_
+principles, for they are needy, and desire advancement for themselves,
+and appointments for their sons and so on. But this is a very hollow
+dependence, and those who sincerely hold ancient opinions are waxing
+old," &c. &c.
+
+With a great deal more, showing the strange moral confusion which his
+political bias had caused in his otherwise clear head and honest mind.
+The sound principles, then, by which educated people are to abide,--over
+the decay of which he laments,--are such as can only be upheld by the
+most vulgar self-interest! If a man should utter openly such sentiments
+in these days, what should we think of him?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In the order of absolutism lurk the elements of change and destruction.
+In the unrest of freedom the spirit of change and progress.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+21.
+
+"A single life," said Bacon, "doth well with churchmen, for charity will
+hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool."
+
+Certainly there are men whose charities are limited, if not dried up, by
+their concentrated domestic anxieties and relations. But there are
+others whose charities are more diffused, as well as healthier and
+warmer, through the strength of their domestic affections.
+
+Wordsworth speaks strongly of the evils of ordaining men as clergymen in
+places where they had been born or brought up, or in the midst of their
+own relatives: "Their habits, their manners, their talk, their
+acquaintanceships, their friendships, and let me say, even their
+domestic affections, naturally draw them one way, while their
+professional obligations point out another." If this were true
+universally, or even generally, it would be a strong argument in favour
+of the celibacy of the Roman Catholic clergy, which certainly is one
+element, and not the least, of their power.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+22.
+
+Landor says truly: "Love is a secondary passion in those who love most,
+a primary in those who love least: he who is inspired by it in the
+strongest degree is inspired by honour in a greater."
+
+"Whatever is worthy of being loved for any thing is worthy to be
+preserved."
+
+Again:--"Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely
+stab or suffocate their own fame, when God hath commanded them to stand
+on high for an example."
+
+"Weak motives," he says, "are sufficient for weak minds; whenever we see
+a mind which we believed a stronger than our own moved habitually by
+what appears inadequate, we may be certain that there is--to bring a
+metaphor from the forest--_more top than root_."
+
+Here is another sentence from the same writer--rich in wise sayings:--
+
+"Plato would make wives common to abolish selfishness; the very mischief
+which, above all others, it would directly and immediately bring forth.
+There is no selfishness where there is a wife and family. There the
+house is lighted up by mutual charities; everything achieved for them is
+a victory; everything endured a triumph. How many vices are suppressed
+that there may be no _bad_ example! How many exertions made to recommend
+and inculcate a _good_ one."
+
+True: and I have much more confidence in the charity which begins in the
+home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the world-wide
+philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge into
+egotism, of which I could show you many and notable examples.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out
+of a hundred, the safe side and the just side of a question is the
+generous side and the merciful side. This your mere worldly people do
+not seem to know, and therein make the sorriest and the vulgarest of all
+mistakes. "_Pour etre assez bon il faut l'etre trop_:" we all need more
+mercy than we deserve.
+
+How often in this world the actions that we condemn are the result of
+sentiments that we love and opinions that we admire!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+23.
+
+A.---- observed in reference to some of her friends who had gone over to
+the Roman Catholic Church, "that the peace and comfort which they had
+sought and found in that mode of faith was like the drugged sleep in
+comparison with the natural sleep: necessary, healing perhaps, where
+there is disease and unrest, not otherwise."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+24.
+
+"A poet," says Coleridge, "ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him
+borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine
+nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to your
+imagination than your memory."
+
+This advice is even more applicable to the painter, but true perhaps in
+its application to all artists. Raphael and Mozart were, in this sense,
+great borrowers.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+25.
+
+"What is the difference between being good and being bad? the good do
+not yield to temptation and the bad do."
+
+This is often the distinction between the good and the bad in regard to
+act and deed; but it does not constitute the difference between _being_
+good and _being_ bad.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+26.
+
+The Italians say (in one of their characteristic proverbs) _Sospetto
+licenzia Fede_. Lord Bacon interprets the saying "as if suspicion did
+give a passport to faith," which is somewhat obscure and ambiguous. It
+means, that suspicion discharges us from the duty of good faith; and in
+this, its original sense, it is, like many of the old Italian proverbs,
+worldly wise and profoundly immoral.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+27.
+
+IT was well said by Themistocles to the King of Persia, that "speech was
+like cloth of arras opened and put abroad, whereby the imagery doth
+appear in figure, whereas in thoughts they lie but in packs" (_i. e._
+rolled up or packed up). Dryden had evidently this passage in his mind
+when he wrote those beautiful lines:
+
+  "Speech is the light, the morning of the mind;
+   It spreads the beauteous images abroad,
+   Which else lie furled and shrouded in the soul."
+
+Here the comparison of Themistocles, happy in itself, is expanded into a
+vivid poetical image.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+28.
+
+"Those are the killing griefs that do not speak," is true of some, not
+all characters. There are natures in which the killing grief finds
+utterance while it kills; moods in which we cry aloud, "as the beast
+crieth, expansive not appealing." That is my own nature: so in grief or
+in joy, I say as the birds sing:
+
+  "Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt,
+   Gab mir ein Got zu sagen was ich leide!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+29.
+
+Blessed is the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted _from_
+the world!--yet more blessed and more dear the memory of those who have
+kept themselves unspotted _in_ the world!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+30.
+
+Everything that ever has been, from the beginning of the world till now,
+belongs to us, is ours, is even a part of us. We belong to the future,
+and shall be a part of it. Therefore the sympathies of _all_ are in the
+past; only the poet and the prophet sympathise with the future.
+
+When Tennyson makes Ulysses say, "I am a part of all that I have seen,"
+it ought to be rather the converse,--"What I have seen becomes a part of
+me."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+31.
+
+In what regards policy--government--the interest of the many is sacrificed
+to the few; in what regards society, the morals and happiness of
+individuals are sacrificed to the many.
+
+
+32.
+
+We spoke to-night of the cowardice, the crime of a particular suicide:
+O. G. agreed as to this instance, but added: "There is a different
+aspect under which suicide might be regarded. It is not always, I think,
+from a want of religion, or in a spirit of defiance, or a want of
+confidence in God that we quit life. It is as if we should flee to the
+feet of the Almighty and embrace his knees, and exclaim, 'O my father!
+take me home! I have endured as long as it was possible; I can endure no
+more, so I come to you!'"
+
+
+Of an amiable man with a disagreeable expressionless face, she said:
+"His countenance always gives me the idea of matter too strong, too hard
+for the soul to pierce through. It is as a plaster mask which I long to
+break (making the gesture with her hand), that I may see the countenance
+of his heart, for that must be beautiful!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+33.
+
+Carlyle said to me: "I want to see some institution to teach a man the
+truth, the worth, the beauty, the heroism of which his present existence
+is capable; where's the use of sending him to study what the Greeks and
+Romans did, and said, and wrote? Do ye think the Greeks and Romans would
+have been what they were, if they had just only studied what the
+Phoenicians did before them?" I should have answered, had I dared: "Yet
+perhaps the Greeks and Romans would not have been what they were if the
+Egyptians and Phoenicians had not been before them."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+34.
+
+Can there be _progress_ which is not _progression_--which does not leave
+a past from which to start--on which to rest our foot when we spring
+forward? No wise man kicks the ladder from beneath him, or obliterates
+the traces of the road through which he has travelled, or pulls down the
+memorials he has built by the way side. We cannot _get on_ without
+linking our present and our future with our past. All reaction is
+destructive--all progress conservative. When we have destroyed that
+which the past built up, what reward have we?--we are forced to fall
+back, and have to begin anew. "Novelty," as Lord Bacon says, "cannot be
+content to add, but it must deface." For this very reason novelty is not
+progress, as the French would try to persuade themselves and us. We gain
+nothing by defacing and trampling down the idols of the past to set up
+new ones in their places--let it be sufficient to leave them behind us,
+measuring our advance by keeping them in sight.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+35.
+
+E---- was compassionating to-day the old and the invalided; those whose
+life is prolonged in spite of suffering; and she seemed, even out of the
+excess of her pity and sympathy, to wish them fairly out of the world;
+but it is a mistake in reasoning and feeling. She does not know how much
+of happiness may consist with suffering, with physical suffering, and
+even with mental suffering.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+36.
+
+"Renoncez dans votre ame, et renoncez y fermement, une fois pour toutes,
+a vouloir vous connaitre au-dela de cette existence passagere qui vous
+est imposee, et vous redeviendrez agreable a Dieu, utile aux autres
+hommes, tranquille avec vous-memes."
+
+This does not mean "renounce hope or faith in the future." No! But
+renounce that perpetual craving after a selfish interest in the
+unrevealed future life which takes the true relish from the duties and
+the pleasures of this. We can conceive of no future life which is not a
+continuation of this: to anticipate in that _future_ life, _another_
+life, a _different_ life; what is it but to call in doubt our individual
+identity?
+
+If we pray, "O teach us where and what is peace!" would not the answer
+be, "In the grave ye shall have it--not before?" Yet is it not strange
+that those who believe most absolutely in an after-life, yet think of
+the grave as peace? Now, if we carry this life with us--and what other
+life can we carry with us, unless we cease to be ourselves--how shall
+there be peace?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+As to the future, my soul, like Cato's, "shrinks back upon herself and
+startles at destruction;" but I do not think of my own destruction,
+rather of that which I love. That I should cease to be is not very
+intolerable; but that what I love, and do now in my soul possess, should
+cease to be--there is the pang, the terror! I desire that which I love to
+be immortal, whether I be so myself or not.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Is not the idea which most men entertain of another, of an eternal life,
+merely a continuation of this present existence under pleasanter
+conditions? We cannot conceive another state of existence,--we only fancy
+we do so.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"I conceive that in all probability we have immortality already. Most
+men seem to divide life and immortality, making them two distinct
+things, when, in fact, they are one and the same. What is immortality
+but a continuation of life--life which is already our own? We have, then,
+begun our immortality even now."
+
+For the same reason, or, rather, through the same want of reasoning by
+which we make _life_ and _immortality_ two (distinct things), do we make
+_time_ and _eternity_ two, which like the others are really one and the
+same. As immortality is but the continuation of life, so eternity is but
+the continuation of time; and what we call time is only that part of
+eternity in which we exist _now_.--_The New Philosophy._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+37.
+
+Strength does not consist only in the _more_ or the _less_. There are
+different sorts of strength as well as different degrees:--The strength
+of marble to resist; the strength of steel to oppose; the strength of
+the fine gold, which you can twist round your finger, but which can bear
+the force of innumerable pounds without breaking.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+38.
+
+Goethe used to say, that while intellectual attainment is progressive,
+it is difficult to be as good when we are old, as we were when young.
+Dr. Johnson has expressed the same thing.
+
+Then are we to assume, that to _do_ good effectively and wisely is the
+privilege of age and experience? To _be_ good, through faith in
+goodness, the privilege of the young.
+
+To preserve our faith in goodness with an extended knowledge of evil, to
+preserve the tenderness of our pity after long contemplation of pain,
+and the warmth of our charity after long experience of falsehood, is to
+be at once good and wise--to understand and to love each other as the
+angels who look down upon us from heaven.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible
+completely to understand what we do not love.
+
+
+I observe, that in our relations with the people around us, we forgive
+them more readily for what they _do_, which they _can_ help, than for
+what they _are_, which they _cannot_ help.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+39.
+
+"Whence springs the greatest degree of moral suffering?" was a question
+debated this evening, but not settled. It was argued that it would
+depend on the texture of character, its more or less conscientiousness,
+susceptibility, or strength. I thought from two sentiments--from
+_jealousy_, that is, the sense of a wrong endured, in one class of
+characters; from _remorse_, that is, from the sense of a wrong
+inflicted, in another.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+40.
+
+The bread of life is love; the salt of life is work; the sweetness of
+life, poesy; the water of life, faith.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+41.
+
+I have seen triflers attempting to draw out a deep intellect; and they
+reminded me of children throwing pebbles down the well at Carisbrook,
+that they might hear them sound.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+42.
+
+A bond is necessary to complete our being, only we must be careful that
+the bond does not become bondage.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"The secret of peace," said A. B., "is the resolution of the lesser into
+the greater;" meaning, perhaps, the due relative appreciation of our
+duties, and the proper placing of our affections: or, did she not rather
+mean, the resolving of the lesser duties and affections into the higher?
+But it is true in either sense.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The love we have for Genius is to common love what the fire on the altar
+is to the fire on the hearth. We cherish it not for warmth or for
+service, but for an offering, as the expression of our worship.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+All love not responded to and accepted is a species of idolatry. It is
+like the worship of a dumb beautiful image we have ourselves set up and
+deified, but cannot inspire with life, nor warm with sympathy.
+No!--though we should consume our own hearts on the altar. Our love of
+God would be idolatry if we did not believe in his love for us--his
+responsive love.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In the same moment that we begin to speculate on the possibility of
+cessation or change in any strong affection that we feel, even from that
+moment we may date its death: it has become the _fetch_ of the living
+love.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Motives," said Coleridge, "imply weakness, and the reasoning powers
+imply the existence of evil and temptation. The angelic nature would act
+from impulse alone." This is the sort of angel which Angelico da Fiesole
+conceived and represented, and _he_ only.
+
+Again:--"If a man's conduct can neither be ascribed to the angelic or the
+bestial within him, it must be fiendish. Passion without appetite is
+_fiendish_."
+
+And, he might have added, appetite without passion, _bestial_. Love in
+which is neither appetite nor passion is _angelic_. The union of all is
+human; and according as one or other predominates, does the human being
+approximate to the fiend, the beast, or the angel.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+43.
+
+I don't mean to say that principle is not a finer thing than passion;
+but passions existed before principles: they came into the world with
+us; principles are superinduced.
+
+There are bad principles as well as bad passions; and more bad
+principles than bad passions. Good principles derive life, and strength,
+and warmth from high and good passions; but principles do not give life,
+they only bind up life into a consistent whole. One great fault in
+education is, the pains taken to inculcate principles rather than to
+train feelings. It is as if we took it for granted that passions could
+_only_ be bad, and are to be ignored or repressed altogether,--the old
+mischievous monkish doctrine.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+44.
+
+It is easy to be humble where humility is a condescension--easy to
+concede where we know ourselves wronged--easy to forgive where vengeance
+is in our power.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"You and I," said H. G., yesterday, "are alike in this:--both of us so
+abhor injustice, that we are ready to fight it with a broomstick if we
+can find nothing better!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+45.
+
+"The wise only _possess_ ideas--the greater part of mankind are
+_possessed by_ them. When once the mind, in despite of the remonstrating
+conscience, has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse or idea,
+then whatever tends to give depth and vividness to this idea or
+indefinite imagination, increases its despotism, and in the same
+proportion renders the reason and free will ineffectual." This paragraph
+from Coleridge sounds like a _truism_ until we have felt its _truth_.
+
+
+46.
+
+"La Volonte, en se dereglant, devient passion; cette passion continuee
+se change en habitude, et faute de resister a cette habitude elle se
+transforme en besoin."--_St. Augustin_. Which may be rendered--"out of the
+unregulated will, springs _passion_, out of passion gratified, _habit_;
+out of habits unresisted, _necessity_." This, also, is one of the truths
+which become, from the impossibility of disputing or refuting them,
+_truisms_--and little regarded, till the truth makes itself felt.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+47.
+
+I wish I could realise what you call my "_grand_ idea of being
+independent of the absent." I have not a friend worthy the name, whose
+absence is not pain and dread to me;--death itself is terrible only as it
+is absence. At some moments, if I could, I would cease to love those who
+are absent from me, or to speak more correctly, those whose path in life
+diverges from mine--whose dwelling house is far off;--with whom I am
+united in the strongest bonds of sympathy while separated by duties and
+interests by space and time. The presence of those whom we love is as a
+double life; absence, in its anxious longing, and sense of vacancy, is
+as a foretaste of death.
+
+"La mort de nos amis ne compte pas du moment ou ils meurent, mais de
+celui ou nous cessons de vivre avec eux;" or, it might rather be said,
+_pour eux_; but I think this arises from a want either of _faith_ or
+_faithfulness_.
+
+"La peur des morts est une abominable faiblesse! c'est la plus commune
+et la plus barbare des profanations; _les meres ne la connaissent
+pas_!"--And why? Because the most _faithful_ love is the love of the
+mother for her child.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+48.
+
+At dinner to-day there was an attempt made by two very clever men to
+place Theodore Hook above Sydney Smith. I fought with all my might
+against both. It seems to me that a mind must be strangely warped that
+could ever place on a par two men with aspirations and purposes so
+different, whether we consider them merely as individuals, or called
+before the bar of the public as writers. I do not take to Sydney Smith
+personally, because my nature feels the want of the artistic and
+imaginative in _his_ nature; but see what he has done for humanity, for
+society, for liberty, for truth,--for us women! What has Theodore Hook
+done that has not perished with him? Even as wits--and I have been in
+company with both--I could not compare them; but they say the wit of
+Theodore Hook was only fitted for the company of men--the strongest proof
+that it was not genuine of its kind, that when most bearable, it was
+most superficial. I set aside the other obvious inference, that it
+required to be excited by stimulants and those of the coarsest, grossest
+kind. The wit of Sydney Smith almost always involved a thought worth
+remembering for its own sake, as well as worth remembering for its
+brilliant vehicle: the value of ten thousand pounds sterling of sense
+concentrated into a cut and polished diamond.
+
+It is not true, as I have heard it said, that after leaving the society
+of Sydney Smith you only remembered how much you had laughed, not the
+good things at which you had laughed. Few men--wits by profession--ever
+said so many memorable things as those recorded of Sydney Smith.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+49.
+
+"When we would show any one that he is mistaken our best course is to
+observe on what side he considers the subject,--for his view of it is
+generally right on _this_ side,--and admit to him that he is right so
+far. He will be satisfied with this acknowledgment, that he was not
+wrong in his judgment, but only inadvertent in not looking at the whole
+of the case."--_Pascal._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+50.
+
+"We should reflect," says Jeremy Taylor, preaching against ambition,
+"that whatever tempts the pride and vanity of ambitious persons is not
+so big as the smallest star which we see scattered in disorder and
+unregarded on the pavement of heaven."
+
+Very beautiful and poetical, but certainly no good argument against the
+sin he denounces. The star is inaccessible, and what tempts our pride or
+our ambition is only that which we consider with hope as _accessible_.
+That we look up to the stars not desiring, not aspiring, but only
+loving--therein lies our hearts' truest, holiest, safest _devotion_ as
+contrasted with _ambition_.
+
+It is the "_desire_ of the moth for the star," that leads to its burning
+itself in the candle.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+51.
+
+The brow stamped "with the hieroglyphics of an eternal sorrow," is a
+strong and beautiful expression of Bishop Taylor's.
+
+He says truly: "It is seldom that God sends such calamities upon men as
+men bring upon themselves and suffer willingly." And again: "What will
+not tender women suffer to hide their shame!" What indeed! And again:
+"Nothing is intolerable that is necessary." And again: "Nothing is to be
+esteemed evil which God and nature have fixed with eternal sanctions."
+
+There is not one of these ethical sentences which might not be treated
+as a text and expounded, opening into as many "branches" of
+consideration as ever did a Presbyterian sermon. Yet several involve a
+fallacy, as it seems to me;--others a deeper, wider, and more awful
+signification than Taylor himself seems to have contemplated when he
+uttered them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+52.
+
+The same reasons which rendered Goethe's "Werther" so popular, so
+passionately admired at the time it appeared--just after the seven years'
+war,--helped to render Lord Byron so popular in his time. It was not the
+individuality of "Werther," nor the individuality of "Childe Harold"
+which produced the effect of making them, for a time, a pervading
+power,--a _part_ of the life of their contemporaries. It was because in
+both cases a chord was struck which was ready to vibrate. A phase of
+feeling preexistent, palpitating at the heart of society, which had
+never found expression in any poetic form since the days of Dante, was
+made visible and audible as if by an electric force; words and forms
+were given to a diffused sentiment of pain and resistance, caused by a
+long period of war, of political and social commotion, and of unhealthy
+moral excitement. "Werther" and "Childe Harold" will never perish;
+because, though they have ceased to be the echo of a wide despair, there
+will always be, unhappily, individual minds and hearts to respond to the
+individuality.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Lord Byron has sometimes, to use his own expression, "curdled" a whole
+world of meaning into the compass of one line:--
+
+   "The starry Galileo and his woes."
+
+   "The blind old man of Chio's rocky isle."
+
+Here every word, almost every syllable, paints an idea. Such lines are
+_picturesque_. And I remember another, from Thomson, I think:--
+
+   "Placed far amid the melancholy main."
+
+In general, where words are used in description, the objects and ideas
+flow with the words in succession. But in each of these lines the mind
+takes in a wide horizon, comprising a multitude of objects at once, as
+the eye takes in a picture, with scene, and action, and figures,
+fore-ground and background, all at once. That is the reason I call such
+lines _picturesque_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+53.
+
+I have a great admiration for power, a great terror of
+weakness--especially in my own sex,--yet feel that my love is for those
+who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation, through
+excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength; for those
+whose refinement and softness of nature mingling with high intellectual
+power and the capacity for strong passion, present to me a problem to
+solve, which, when solved, I take to my heart. The question is not,
+which of the two diversities of character be the highest and best, but
+which is most sympathetic with my own.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+54.
+
+C---- told me, that some time ago, when poor Bethune the Scotch poet first
+became known, and was in great hardship, C---- himself had collected a
+little sum (about 30_l._), and sent it to him through his publishers.
+Bethune wrote back to refuse it absolutely, and to say that, while he
+had head and hands, he would not accept _charity_. C---- wrote to him in
+answer, still anonymously, arguing against the principle, as founded in
+false pride, &c. Now poor Bethune is dead, and the money is found
+untouched,--left with a friend to be returned to the donors!
+
+This sort of disgust and terror, which all finely constituted minds feel
+with regard to pecuniary obligation,--my own utter repugnance to it, even
+from the hands of those I most love,--makes one sad to think of. It gives
+one such a miserable impression of our social humanity!
+
+Goethe makes the same remark in the Wilhelm Meister:--"Es ist sonderbar
+welch ein wunderliches Bedenken man sich macht, Geld von Freunden und
+Goennern anzunehmen, von denen man jede andere Gabe mit Dank und Freude
+empfangen wuerde."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+55.
+
+"In the celestial hierarchy, according to Dionysius Areopageta, the
+angels of Love hold the first place, the angels of Light the second, and
+the Thrones and Dominations the third. Among terrestrials, the
+Intellects, which act through the imagination upon the heart of man--_i.
+e._ poets and artists--may be accounted first in order; the merely
+scientific intellects the second; and the merely ruling intellects--those
+which apply themselves to the government of mankind, without the aid of
+either science or imagination--will not be disparaged if they are placed
+last."
+
+All government, all exercise of power--no matter in what form--which is
+not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny. It is not of
+God, and shall not stand.
+
+"A time will come when the operations of charity will no longer be
+carried on by machinery, relentless, ponderous, indiscriminate, but by
+human creatures, watchful, tearful, considerate, and wise."--_Westminster
+Review._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+56.
+
+"Those writers who never go further into a subject than is compatible
+with making what they say indisputably clear to man, woman, and child,
+may be the lights of _this_ age, but they will not be the lights of
+_another_."
+
+
+"It is not always necessary that truth should take a bodily form,--a
+material palpable form. It is sometimes better that it should dwell
+around us spiritually, creating harmony,--sounding through the air like
+the solemn sweet tone of a bell."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+57.
+
+Women are inclined to fall in love with priests and physicians, because
+of the help and comfort they derive from both in perilous moral and
+physical maladies. They believe in the presence of real pity, real
+sympathy, where the tone and look of each have become merely habitual
+and conventional,--I may say professional. On the other hand, women are
+inclined to fall in love with criminal and miserable men out of the pity
+which in our sex is akin to love, and out of the power of bestowing
+comfort or love. "Car les femmes out un instinct celeste pour le
+malheur." So, in the first instance, they love from gratitude or faith;
+in the last, from compassion or hope.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+58.
+
+"Men of all countries," says Sir James Mackintosh, "appear to be more
+alike in their best qualities than the pride of civilisation would be
+willing to allow."
+
+And in their _worst_. The distinction between savage and civilised
+humanity lies not in the _qualities_, but the _habits_.
+
+
+59.
+
+Coleridge notices "the increase in modern times of vicious associations
+with things in themselves indifferent," as a sign of unhealthiness in
+taste, in feeling, in conscience.
+
+The truth of this remark is particularly illustrated in the French
+literature of the last century.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+60.
+
+"And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
+understanding also after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation,
+a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at
+the moment unpaid loss and unpayable, but the sure years reveal the deep
+remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend,
+wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later
+assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates a
+revolution in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or youth
+which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a
+household, or a style of living, and allows the formation of new
+influences that prove of the first importance during the next
+years."--_Emerson._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+61.
+
+Religion, in its general sense, is properly the comprehension and
+acknowledgment of an unseen spiritual power and the soul's allegiance
+to it; and CHRISTIANITY, in its particular sense, is the comprehension
+and appreciation of the personal character of Christ, and the heart's
+allegiance to that.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+62.
+
+Avarice is to the intellect what _sensuality_ is to the morals. It is an
+intellectual form of sensuality, inasmuch as it is the passion for the
+acquisition, the enjoyment in the possession, of a palpable, tangible,
+selfish pleasure; and it would have the same tendency to unspiritualise,
+to degrade, and to harden the higher faculties that a course of grosser
+sensualism would have to corrupt the lower faculties. Both dull the edge
+of all that is fine and tender within us.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+63.
+
+A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an
+artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+As what we call Genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size
+of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonising with
+it the rest of the character.
+
+"Though it burn our house down, who does not venerate fire?" says the
+Hindoo proverb.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+64.
+
+An elegant mind informing a graceful person is like a spirit lamp in an
+alabaster vase, shedding round its own softened radiance and heightening
+the beauty of its medium. An elegant mind in a plain ungraceful person
+is like the same lamp enclosed in a vase of bronze; we may, if we
+approach near enough, rejoice in its influence, though we may not behold
+its radiance.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+65.
+
+Landor, in a passage I was reading to-day, speaks of a language of
+criticism, in which qualities should be graduated by colours; "as, for
+instance, _purple_ might express grandeur and majesty of thought;
+_scarlet_, vigour of expression; _pink_, liveliness; _green_, elegant
+and equable composition, and so on."
+
+_Blue_, then, might express contemplative power? _yellow_, wit?
+_violet_, tenderness? and so on.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+66.
+
+I quoted to A. the saying of a sceptical philosopher: "The world is but
+one enormous WILL, constantly rushing into life."
+
+"Is that," she responded quickly, "another new name for God?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+67.
+
+A death-bed repentance has become proverbial for its fruitlessness, and
+a death-bed forgiveness equally so. They who wait till their own
+death-bed to make reparation, or till their adversary's death-bed to
+grant absolution, seem to me much upon a par in regard to the moral, as
+well as the religious, failure.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+68.
+
+A character endued with a large, vivacious, active intellect and a
+limited range of sympathies, generally remains immature. We can grow
+_wise_ only through the experience which reaches us through our
+sympathies and becomes a part of our life. All other experience may be
+gain, but it remains in a manner extraneous, adds to our possessions
+without adding to our strength, and sharpens our implements without
+increasing our capacity to use them.
+
+
+Not always those who have the quickest, keenest, perception of character
+are the best to deal with it, and perhaps for that very reason. Before
+we can influence or deal with mind, contemplation must be lost in
+sympathy, observation must be merged in love.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+69.
+
+Montaigne, in his eloquent tirade against melancholy, observes that the
+Italians have the same word, _Tristezza_, for melancholy and for
+malignity or wickedness. The noun _Tristo_, "a wretch," has the double
+sense of our English word corresponding with the French noun
+_miserable_. So Judas Iscariot is called _quel tristo_. Our word
+"wretchedness" is not, however, used in the double sense of _tristezza_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"On ne considere pas assez les paroles comme des faits:" that was well
+said!
+
+Since for the purpose of circulation and intercommunication we are
+obliged to coin truth into words, we should be careful not to adulterate
+the coin, to keep it pure, and up to the original standard of
+significance and value, that it may be reconvertible into the truth it
+represents.
+
+If I use a term in a sense wherein I know it is not understood by the
+person I address, then I am guilty of using words (in so far as they
+represent truth), if not to ensnare intentionally, yet to mislead
+consciously; it is like adulterating coin.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Common people," said Johnson, "do not accurately adapt their words to
+their thoughts, nor their thoughts to the objects;"--that is to say, they
+neither apprehend truly nor speak truly--and in this respect children,
+half-educated women, and ill-educated men, are the "common people."
+
+It is one of the most serious mistakes in Education that we are not
+sufficiently careful to habituate children to the accurate use of words.
+Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth. If we looked into
+the matter we should probably find that all the varieties and
+modifications of conscious and unconscious lying--as exaggeration,
+equivocation, evasion, misrepresentation--might be traced to the early
+misuse of words; therefore the contemptuous, careless tone in which
+people say sometimes "words--words--mere words!" is unthinking and unwise.
+It tends to debase the value of that which is the only medium of the
+inner life between man and man: "Nous ne sommes hommes, et nous ne
+tenons les uns aux autres, que par la parole," said Montaigne.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+70.
+
+"We are happy, good, tranquil, in proportion as our inner life is
+accessible to the external life, and in harmony with it. When we become
+dead to the moving life of Nature around us, to the changes of day and
+night (I do not speak here of the sympathetic influences of our
+fellow-creatures), then we may call ourselves philosophical, but we are
+surely either bad or mad."
+
+"Or perhaps only sad?"
+
+
+There are moments in the life of every contemplative being, when the
+healing power of Nature is felt--even as Wordsworth describes it--felt in
+the blood, in every pulse along the veins. In such moments converse,
+sympathy, the faces, the presence of the dearest, come so near to us,
+they make us shrink; books, pictures, music, anything, any object which
+has passed through the medium of mind, and has been in a manner
+humanised, is felt as an intrusive reflection of the busy, weary,
+thought-worn self within us. Only Nature, speaking through no
+interpreter, gently steals us out of our humanity, giving us a foretaste
+of that more diffused disembodied life which may hereafter be ours.
+Beautiful and genial, and not wholly untrue, were the old superstitions
+which placed a haunting divinity in every grove, and heard a living
+voice responsive in every murmuring stream.
+
+
+This present Sunday I set off with the others to walk to church, but it
+was late; I could not keep up with the pedestrians, and, not to delay
+them, turned back. I wandered down the hill path to the river brink, and
+crossed the little bridge and strolled along, pensive yet with no
+definite or continuous subject of thought. How beautiful it was--how
+tranquil! not a cloud in the blue sky, not a breath of air! "And where
+the dead leaf fell there did it rest;" but so still it was that scarce a
+single leaf did flutter or fall, though the narrow pathway along the
+water's edge was already encumbered with heaps of decaying foliage.
+Everywhere around, the autumnal tints prevailed, except in one sheltered
+place under the towering cliff, where a single tree, a magnificent
+lime, still flourished in summer luxuriance, with not a leaf turned or
+shed. I stood still opposite, looking on it quietly for a long time. It
+seemed to me a happy tree, so fresh and fair and grand, as if its
+guardian Dryad would not suffer it to be defaced. Then I turned, for
+close beside me sounded the soft, interrupted, half-suppressed warble of
+a bird, sitting on a leafless spray, which seemed to bend with its tiny
+weight. Some lines which I used to love in my childhood came into my
+mind, blending softly with the presences around me.
+
+  "The little bird now to salute the morn
+   Upon the naked branches sets her foot,
+   The leaves still lying at the mossy root,
+   And there a silly chirruping doth keep,
+   As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep;
+   Praising fair summer that too soon is gone,
+   And sad for winter, too soon coming on!" _Drayton._
+
+The river, where I stood, taking an abrupt turn, ran wimpling by; not as
+I had seen it but a few days before,--rolling tumultuously, the dead
+leaves whirling in its eddies, swollen and turbid with the mountain
+torrents, making one think of the kelpies, the water wraiths, and such
+uncanny things,--but gentle, transparent, and flashing in the low
+sunlight; even the barberries, drooping with rich crimson clusters over
+the little pools near the bank, and reflected in them as in a mirror, I
+remember vividly as a part of the exquisite loveliness which seemed to
+melt into my life. For such moments we are grateful: we feel then what
+God _can_ do for us, and what man can not.--_Carolside, November 5th,
+1843._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+71.
+
+"In the early ages of faith, the spirit of Christianity glided into and
+gave a new significance to the forms of heathenism. It was not the forms
+of heathenism which encrusted and overlaid the spirit of Christianity,
+for in that case the spirit would have burst through such extraneous
+formulae, and set them aside at once and for ever."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+72.
+
+Questions. In the execution of the penal statutes, can the individual
+interest of the convict be reconciled with the interest of society? or
+must the good of the convict and the good of society be considered as
+inevitably and necessarily opposed?--the one sacrificed to the other, and
+at the best only a compromise possible?
+
+This is a question pending at present, and will require wise heads to
+decide it? How would Christ have decided it? When He set the poor
+accused woman free, was He considering the good of the culprit or the
+good of society? and how far are we bound to follow His example? If He
+consigned the wicked to weeping and gnashing of teeth, was it for
+atonement or retribution, punishment or penance? and how far are we
+bound to follow His example?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+73.
+
+I marked the following passage in Montaigne as most curiously applicable
+to the present times, in so far as our religious contests are concerned;
+and I leave it in his quaint old French.
+
+"C'est un effet de la Providence divine de permettre sa saincte Eglise
+etre agitee, comme nous la voyons, de tant de troubles et d'orages, pour
+eveiller par ce contraste les ames pies et les ravoir de l'oisivete et
+du sommeil ou les avail plongees une si longue tranquillite. Si nous
+contrepesons la perte que nous avons faite par le nombre de ceux qui se
+sont devoyes, au gain qui nous vient par nous etre remis en haleine,
+ressuscite notre zele et nos forces a l'occasion de ce combat, je ne
+sais si l'utilite ne surmonte point le dommage."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+74.
+
+"They (the friends of Cassius) were divided in opinion,--some holding
+that servitude was the extreme of evils, and others that tyranny was
+better than civil war."
+
+Unhappy that nation, wherever it may be, where the question is yet
+pending between servitude and civil war! such a nation might be driven
+to solve the problem after the manner of Cassius--with the dagger's
+point.
+
+"Surely," said Moore, "it is wrong for the lovers of liberty to identify
+the principle of resistance to power with such an odious person as the
+devil!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+75.
+
+"Where the question is of a great deal of good to ensue from a small
+injustice, men must pursue the things which are just in present, and
+leave the future to Divine Providence."
+
+This so simple rule of right is seldom attended to as a rule of life
+till we are placed in some strait in which it is forced upon us.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+76.
+
+A woman's patriotism is more of a sentiment than a man's,--more
+passionate: it is only an extension of the domestic affections, and with
+her _la patrie_ is only an enlargement of _home_. In the same manner, a
+woman's idea of fame is always a more extended sympathy, and is much
+more of a presence than an anticipation. To her the voice of fame is
+only the echo--fainter and more distant--of the voice of love.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+77.
+
+"La doute s'introduit dans l'ame qui reve, la foi descend dans l'ame qui
+souffre."
+
+The reverse is equally true,--and judging from my own experience, I
+should say oftener true.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+78.
+
+"La curiosite est si voisine a la perfidie qu'elle peut enlaidir les
+plus beaux visages."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+79.
+
+When I told Tieck of the death of Coleridge (I had just received the sad
+but not unexpected news in a letter from England), he exclaimed with
+emotion, "A great spirit has passed away from the earth, and has left no
+adequate memorial of its greatness." Speaking of him afterwards he said,
+"Coleridge possessed the creative and inventive spirit of poetry, not
+the productive; he _thought_ too much to produce,--the analytical power
+interfered with the genius: Others with more active faculties seized and
+worked out his magnificent hints and ideas. Walter Scott and Lord Byron
+borrowed the first idea of the form and spirit of their narrative poems
+from Coleridge's 'Christabelle.'" This judgment of one great poet and
+critic passed on another seemed to me worth preserving.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+80.
+
+Coleridge says, "In politics what begins in fear usually ends in folly."
+
+He might have gone farther, and added: In morals what begins in fear
+usually ends in wickedness. In religion what begins in fear usually ends
+in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning
+of all evil.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In another place he says,--
+
+"Talent lying in the understanding is often inherited; genius, being the
+action of reason and imagination, rarely or never."
+
+There seems confusion here, for genius lies not in the amount of
+intellect--it is a quality of the intellect apart from quantity. And the
+distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and
+uses; genius combines and creates.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Of Sara Coleridge, Mr. Kenyon said very truly and beautifully, "that
+like her father she had the controversial _intellect_ without the
+controversial _spirit_."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+81.
+
+We all remember the famous _bon mot_ of Talleyrand. When seated between
+Madame de Stael and Madame Recamier, and pouring forth gallantry, first
+at the feet of one, then of the other, Madame de Stael suddenly asked
+him if she and Madame Recamier fell into the river, which of the two he
+would save first? "Madame," replied Talleyrand, "je crois que vous savez
+nager!" Now we will match this pretty _bon mot_ with one far prettier,
+and founded on it. Prince S., whom I knew formerly, was one day
+loitering on the banks of the Isar, in the English garden at Munich, by
+the side of the beautiful Madame de V., then the object of his devoted
+admiration. For a while he had been speaking to her of his mother, for
+whom, _vaurien_ as he was, he had ever shown the strongest filial love
+and respect. Afterwards, as they wandered on, he began to pour forth his
+soul to the lady of his love with all the eloquence of passion. Suddenly
+she turned and said to him, "If your mother and myself were both to fall
+into this river, whom would you save first?" "My mother!" he instantly
+replied; and then, looking at her expressively, immediately added, "To
+save _you_ first would be as if I were to save _myself_ first!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+82.
+
+If we were not always bringing ourselves into comparison with others, we
+should know them better.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+83.
+
+There are ways of governing every mind which lies within the circle
+described by our own; the only question is, whether the means required
+be such as we _can_ use? and if so, whether we shall think it right to
+do so?
+
+
+You think I do not know you, or that I mistake you utterly, because I am
+actuated by the impulses of my own nature, rather than by my perception
+of the impulses of yours? It is not so.
+
+
+If we would retain our own consistency, without which there is no moral
+strength, we must stand firm upon our own moral life.
+
+  "Be true unto thyself;
+   And it shall follow as the night to day,
+   Thou canst not then be false to any man."
+
+But to be true to others as well as ourselves, is not merely to allow to
+them the same independence, but to sympathise with it. Unhappily here
+lies the chief difficulty. There are brains so large that they
+unconsciously swamp all individualities which come in contact or too
+near, and brains so small that they cannot take in the conception of any
+other individuality as a whole, only in part or parts. As in Religion,
+where there is a strong, sincere, definite faith, there is generally
+more or less intolerance; so in character, where there is strong
+individuality, self-assurance, and defined principles of action, there
+is usually something hard and intolerant of the individuality of others.
+In some characters we meet with, toleration is a principle of the
+reason, and intolerance a quality of the mind, and then the whole being
+strikes a discord.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+84.
+
+If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the
+more. It is as if the principle, that conflict is a necessary law of
+progress, were applicable even to love. For there is no love like that
+which has roused up the intensest feelings of our nature,--revealed us to
+ourselves, like lightning suddenly disclosing an abyss,--yet has survived
+all the storm and tumult of such passionate discord and all the terror
+of such a revelation.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+85.
+
+F has much, much to learn! Through power, through passion, through
+feeling we do much, but only through observation, reflection, and
+sympathy we learn much; hence it is that minds highly gifted often
+remain immature. Artist minds especially, so long as they live only or
+chiefly for their art, their faculties bent on creating or representing,
+remain immature on one side--the reasoning and reflecting side of the
+character.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+86.
+
+Said a Frenchman of his adversary, "Il se croit superieur a moi de toute
+la hauteur de sa betise!" There is a mingled felicity, politeness, and
+acrimony, in this phrase quite untranslatable.
+
+
+87.
+
+It is a pity that we have no words to express the French distinction
+between _rever_ and _revasser_. The one implies meditation on a definite
+subject: the other the abandonment of the mind to vague discussion,
+aimless thoughts.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+88.
+
+It seems to me that the conversation of the first converser in the world
+would _tire_ me, _pall_ on me at last, where I am not sure of the
+sincerity. Talk without truth is the hollow brass; talk without love is
+like the tinkling cymbal, and where it does not tinkle it gingles, and
+where it does not gingle, it jars.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+89.
+
+There are few things more striking, more interesting to a thoughtful
+mind, than to trace through all the poetry, literature, and art of the
+Middle Ages that broad ever-present distinction between the practical
+and the contemplative life. This was, no doubt, suggested and kept in
+view by the one grand division of the whole social community into those
+who were devoted to the religious profession (an immense proportion of
+both sexes) and those who were not. All through Dante, all through the
+productions of mediaeval art, we find this pervading idea; and we must
+understand it well and keep it in mind, or we shall never be able to
+apprehend the entire beauty and meaning of certain religious groups in
+sculpture and painting, and the significance of the characters
+introduced. Thus, in subjects from the Old Testament, Leah always
+represents the practical, Rachel, the contemplative life. In the New
+Testament, Martha and Mary figure in the same allegorical sense; and
+among the saints we always find St. Catharine and St. Clara patronising
+the religious and contemplative life, while St. Barbara and St. Ursula
+preside over the military or secular existence. It was a part, and a
+very important part, of that beautiful and expressive symbolism through
+which art in all its forms spoke to the popular mind.
+
+For myself, I have the strongest admiration for the _practical_, but the
+strongest sympathy with the _contemplative_ life. I bow to Leah and to
+Martha, but my love is for Rachel and for Mary.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+90.
+
+Bettina does not describe nature, she informs it, with her own life: she
+seems to live in the elements, to exist in the fire, the air, the water,
+like a sylph, a gnome, an elf; she does not contemplate nature, she _is_
+nature; she is like the bird in the air, the fish in the sea, the
+squirrel in the wood. It is one thing to describe nature, and quite
+another unconsciously so to inform nature with a portion of our own
+life.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+91.
+
+Joanna Baillie had a great admiration of Macaulay's Roman Ballads.
+"But," said some one, "do you really account them as poetry?" She
+replied, "They _are_ poetry if the sounds of the trumpet be music!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+92.
+
+All my own experience of life teaches me the _contempt_ of cunning, not
+the _fear_. The phrase "profound cunning" has always seemed to me a
+contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either
+shallow, or on some point diseased. People dissemble sometimes who yet
+hate dissembling, but a "cunning mind" emphatically delights in its own
+cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning. That "pleasure in deceiving
+and aptness to be deceived" usually go together, was one of the wise
+sayings of the wisest of men.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+93.
+
+It was a saying of Paracelsus, that "Those who would understand the
+course of the heavens above must first of all recognise the heaven in
+man:" meaning, I suppose, that all pursuit of knowledge which is not
+accompanied by praise of God and love of our fellow-creatures must turn
+to bitterness, emptiness, foolishness. We must imagine him to have come
+to this conclusion only late in life.
+
+Browning, in that wonderful poem of Paracelsus,--a poem in which there is
+such a profound far-seeing philosophy, set forth with such a luxuriance
+of illustration and imagery, and such a wealth of glorious eloquence,
+that I know nothing to be compared with it since Goethe and
+Wordsworth,--represents his aspiring philosopher as at first impelled
+solely by the appetite to _know_. He asks nothing of men, he despises
+them; but he will serve them, raise them, after a sort of God-like
+fashion, independent of their sympathy, scorning their applause, using
+them like instruments, cheating them like children,--all for their good;
+but it will not do. In Aprile, "who would love infinitely, and be
+beloved," is figured the type of the poet-nature, desiring only beauty,
+resolving all into beauty; while in Paracelsus we have the type of the
+reflecting, the inquiring mind desiring only knowledge, resolving all
+into knowledge, asking nothing more to crown his being. And both find
+out their mistake; both come to feel that love without knowledge is
+blind and weak, and knowledge without love barren and vain.
+
+
+  "I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE,
+   Excluding love as thou refused'st knowledge;
+   Still thou hast beauty and I power. We wake!
+
+          *       *       *       *       *
+
+  "Are we not halves of one dissever'd world,
+   Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part?--Never!
+   Till thou, the lover, know, and I, the knower,
+   Love--until both are saved!"
+
+
+After all, perhaps, only the same old world-renowned myth in another
+form--the marriage of Cupid and Psyche; Love and Intelligence long
+parted, long suffering, again embracing, and lighted on by Beauty to an
+immortal union. But to return to our poet. Aprile, exhausted by his own
+aimless, dazzling visions, expires on the bosom of him who knows; and
+Paracelsus, who began with a selfsufficing scorn of his kind, dies a
+baffled and degraded man in the arms of him who loves;--yet wiser in his
+fall than through his aspirations, he dies trusting in the progress of
+humanity so long as humanity is content to be _human_; to _love_ as well
+as to _know_;--to fear, to hope, to worship, as well as to aspire.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+94.
+
+Lord Bacon says: "I like a plantation (in the sense of colony) in a
+_pure_ soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to
+plant in others: for else it is rather an extirpation than a
+plantation." (Bacon, who wrote this, counselled to James I. the
+plantation of Ulster exactly on the principle he has here deprecated.)
+
+He adds, "It is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of
+people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant"
+(_i. e._ colonise). And it is only now that our politicians are
+beginning to discover and act upon this great moral truth and obvious
+fitness of things!--like Bacon, adopting practically, and from mere
+motives of expediency, a principle they would theoretically abjure!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+95.
+
+Because in real life we cannot, or do not, reconcile the high theory
+with the low practice, we use our wit to render the theory ridiculous,
+and our reason to reconcile us to the practice. We ought to do just the
+reverse.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Many would say, if they spoke the truth, that it had cost them a
+life-long effort to unlearn what they had been taught.
+
+For as the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so
+through social conventionalism the conscience becomes blinded to
+positive immorality.
+
+It is fatal in any mind to make the moral standard for men high and the
+moral standard for women low, or _vice versa_. This has appeared to me
+the very commonest of all mistakes in men and women who have lived much
+in the world, but _fatal_ nevertheless, and in three ways; first, as
+distorting the moral ideal, so far as it exists in the conscience;
+secondly, as perplexing the bounds, practically, of right and wrong;
+thirdly, as being at variance with the spirit and principles of
+Christianity. Admit these premises, and it follows inevitably that such
+a mistake is _fatal_ in the last degree, as disturbing the consistency
+and the elevation of the character, morally, practically, religiously.
+
+
+Akin to this mistake, or identical with it, is the belief that there are
+essential masculine and feminine virtues and vices. It is not, in fact,
+the quality itself, but the modification of the quality, which is
+masculine or feminine: and on the manner or degree in which these are
+balanced and combined in the individual, depends the perfection of that
+individual character--its approximation to that of Christ. I firmly
+believe that as the influences of religion are extended, and as
+civilisation advances, those qualities which are now admired as
+essentially _feminine_ will be considered as essentially _human_, such
+as gentleness, purity, the more unselfish and spiritual sense of duty,
+and the dominance of the affections over the passions. This is, perhaps,
+what Buffon, speaking as a naturalist, meant, when he said that with
+the progress of humanity, "_Les races se feminisent_;" at least I
+understand the phrase in this sense.
+
+
+A man who requires from his own sex manly direct truth, and laughs at
+the cowardly subterfuges and small arts of women as being _feminine_;--a
+woman who requires from her own sex tenderness and purity, and thinks
+ruffianism and sensuality pardonable in a man as being
+_masculine_,--these have repudiated the Christian standard of morals
+which Christ, in his own person, bequeathed to us--that standard which we
+have accepted as Christians--theoretically at least--and which makes no
+distinction between "the highest, holiest manhood," and the highest,
+holiest womanhood.
+
+I might illustrate this position not only scripturally but
+philosophically, by quoting the axiom of the Greek philosopher
+Antisthenes, the disciple of Socrates,--"The virtue of the man and the
+woman is the same;" which shows a perception of the moral truth, a sort
+of anticipation of the Christian doctrine, even in the pagan times. But
+I prefer an illustration which is at once practical and poetical, and
+plain to the most prejudiced among men or women.
+
+Every reader of Wordsworth will recollect, if he does not know by heart,
+the poem entitled "The Happy Warrior." It has been quoted often as an
+epitome of every manly, soldierly, and elevated quality. I have heard it
+applied to the Duke of Wellington. Those who make the experiment of
+merely substituting the word _woman_ for the word _warrior_, and
+changing the feminine for the masculine pronoun, will find that it reads
+equally well; that almost from beginning to end it is literally as
+applicable to the one sex as to the other. As thus:--
+
+
+CHARACTER OF THE HAPPY WOMAN.
+
+   Who is the happy _woman_? Who is _she_
+   That every _woman_ born should wish to be?
+   It is the generous spirit, who, when brought
+   Among the tasks of real life, had wrought
+   Upon the plan that pleased _her_ childish thought;
+   Whose high endeavours are an inward light,
+   That make the path before _her_ always bright:
+   Who, with a natural instinct to discern
+   What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;
+   Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,
+   But makes _her_ moral being _her_ prime care;
+   Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
+   And Fear, and Sorrow, miserable train!
+   Turns _that_ necessity to glorious gain;
+   In face of these doth exercise a power
+   Which is our human nature's highest dower:
+   Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves
+   Of their bad influence, and their good receives;
+   By objects, which might force the soul to abate
+   _Her_ feeling, rendered more compassionate;
+   Is placable--because occasions rise
+   So often that demand such sacrifice;
+   More skilful in self-knowledge, even more pure
+   As tempted more; more able to endure,
+   As more exposed to suffering and distress;
+   Thence, also, more alive to tenderness.
+   'Tis _she_ whose law is reason; who depends
+   Upon that law as on the best of friends;
+   Whence in a state where men are tempted still
+   To evil for a guard against worse ill,
+   And what in quality or act is best,
+   Doth seldom on a right foundation rest,
+   _She_ fixes good on good alone, and owes
+   To virtue every triumph that _she_ knows.
+   Who, if _she_ rise to station of command,
+   Rises by open means; and there will stand
+   On honourable terms, or else retire.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+   Who comprehends _her_ trust, and to the same
+   Keeps faithful with a singleness of aim;
+   And therefore does not stoop, nor lie in wait
+   For wealth, or honours, or for worldly state;
+   Whom they must follow; on whose head must fall
+   Like showers of manna, if they come at all:
+   Whose powers shed round _her_ in the common strife
+   Or mild concerns of ordinary life,
+   A constant influence, a peculiar grace;
+   But who, if _she_ be called upon to face
+   Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined
+   Great issue, good or bad for human kind,
+   Is happy as a lover; and attired
+   With sudden brightness, like to one inspired;
+   And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law
+   In calmness made, and sees what _she_ foresaw;
+   Or if an unexpected call succeed,
+   Come when it will, is equal to the need!
+
+
+In all these fifty-six lines there is only one line which cannot be
+feminised in its significance,--that which I have filled up with
+asterisks, and which is totally at variance with our ideal of A HAPPY
+WOMAN. It is the line--
+
+   "And in himself possess his own desire."
+
+No woman could exist happily or virtuously in such complete independence
+of all external affections as these words express. "Her desire is to her
+husband,"--this is the sort of subjection prophesied for the daughters of
+Eve. A woman doomed to exist without this earthly rest for her
+affections, does not "in herself possess her own desire;" she turns
+towards God; and if she does not make her life a life of worship, she
+makes it a life of charity, (which in itself is worship,) or she dies a
+spiritual and a moral death. Is it much better with the man who
+concentrates his aspirations in himself? I should think not.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Swift, as a man and a writer, is one of those who had least sympathy
+with women; and I have sometimes thought that the exaggeration, even to
+morbidity, of the coarse and the cruel in his character, arose from this
+want of sympathy; but his strong sense showed him the one great moral
+truth as regards the two sexes, and gave him the courage to avow it.
+
+He says, "I am ignorant of any one quality that is amiable in a woman
+which is not equally so in a man. I do not except even modesty and
+gentleness of nature; nor do I know one vice or folly which is not
+equally detestable in both." Then, remarking that cowardice is an
+_infirmity_ generally allowed to women, he wonders that they should
+fancy it becoming or graceful, or think it worth improving by
+affectation, particularly as it is generally allied to cruelty.
+
+
+Here is a passage from one of Humboldt's letters, which I have seen
+quoted with sympathy and admiration, as applied to the manly character
+only:--
+
+"Masculine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first
+requisite for the formation of a character of real manly worth. The man
+who suffers himself to be deceived and carried away by his own weakness,
+may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be called a
+good man; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a woman, for
+a truly beautiful and purely feminine nature should be attracted only by
+what is highest and noblest in the character of man."
+
+
+Now we will take this bit of moral philosophy, and, without the
+slightest alteration of the context, apply it to the female character.
+
+"Feminine independence of mind I hold to be in reality the first
+requisite for the formation of a character of real feminine worth. The
+woman who allows herself to be deceived and carried away by her own
+weakness may be a very amiable person in other respects, but cannot be
+called a good woman; such beings should not find favour in the eyes of a
+man, for the truly beautiful and purely manly nature should be attracted
+only by what is highest and noblest in the character of woman."
+
+
+After reading the above extracts, does it not seem clear, that by the
+exclusive or emphatic use of certain phrases and epithets, as more
+applicable to one sex than to the other, we have introduced a most
+un-christian confusion into the conscience, and have prejudiced it early
+against the acceptance of the larger truth?
+
+It might seem, that where we reject the distinction between masculine
+and feminine virtues, one and the same type of perfection should suffice
+for the two sexes; yet it is clear that the moment we come to consider
+the personality, the same type will not suffice: and it is worth
+consideration that when we place before us the highest type of manhood,
+as exemplified in Christ, we do not imagine him as the father, but as
+the son; and if we think of the most perfect type of womanhood, we never
+can exclude the mother.
+
+
+Montaigne deals with the whole question in his own homely
+straightforward fashion:--
+
+"Je dis que les males et les femelles sont jettes en meme moule; sauf
+l'institution et l'usage la difference n'y est pas grande. Platon
+appelle indifferemment les uns et les autres a la societe de touts
+etudes, exercises, charges, et vocations guerrieres et paisibles en sa
+republique, et le philosophe Antisthenes otait toute distinction entre
+leur vertu et la notre. Il est bien plus aise d'accuser un sexe que
+d'excuser l'autre: c'est ce qu'on dit, 'le fourgon se moque de la
+poele.'"
+
+Not that I agree with Plato,--rather would leave all the fighting,
+military and political, if there must be fighting, to the men.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Among the absurdities talked about women, one hears, perhaps, such an
+aphorism as the following quoted with a sort of ludicrous
+complacency,--"The woman's strength consists in her weakness!" as if it
+were not the weakness of a woman which makes her in her violence at once
+so aggravating and so contemptible, in her dissimulation at once so
+shallow and so dangerous, and in her vengeance at once so cowardly and
+so cruel.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+I should not say, from my experience of my own sex, that a woman's
+nature is flexible and impressible, though her feelings are. I know
+very few instances of a very inferior man ruling the mind of a superior
+woman, whereas I know twenty--fifty--of a very inferior woman ruling a
+superior man. If he love her, the chances are that she will in the end
+weaken and demoralise him. If a superior woman marry a vulgar or
+inferior man he makes her miserable, but he seldom governs her mind, or
+vulgarises her nature, and if there be love on his side the chances are
+that in the end she will elevate and refine him.
+
+The most dangerous man to a woman is a man of high intellectual
+endowments morally perverted; for in a woman's nature there is such a
+necessity to approve where she admires, and to believe where she
+loves,--a devotion compounded of love and faith is so much a part of her
+being,--that while the instincts remain true and the feelings
+uncorrupted, the conscience and the will may both be led far astray.
+Thus fell "our general mother,"--type of her sex,--overpowered, rather
+than deceived, by the colossal intellect,--half serpent, half angelic.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Coleridge speaks, and with a just indignant scorn, of those who consider
+chastity as if it were a _thing_--a thing which might be lost or kept by
+external accident--a thing of which one might be robbed, instead of a
+state of being. According to law and custom, the chastity of Woman is as
+the property of Man, to whom she is accountable for it, rather than to
+God and her own conscience. Whatever people may say, such is the common,
+the social, the legal view of the case. It is a remnant of Oriental
+barbarism. It tends to much vice, or, at the best, to a low standard of
+morality, in both sexes. This idea of property in the woman survives
+still in our present social state, particularly among the lower orders,
+and is one cause of the ill treatment of wives. All those who are
+particularly acquainted with the manners and condition of the people
+will testify to this; namely, that when a child or any weaker individual
+is ill treated, those standing by will interfere and protect the victim;
+but if the sufferer be _the wife_ of the oppressor, it is a point of
+etiquette to look on, to take no part in the fray, and to leave the
+brute man to do what he likes "with his own." Even the victim herself,
+if she be not pummelled to death, frequently deprecates such an
+interference with the dignity and the rights of her owner. Like the poor
+woman in the "Medecin malgre lui:"--"Voyez un peu cet impertinent qui
+vent empecher les maris de battre leurs femmes!--et si je veux qu'il me
+batte, moi?"--and so ends by giving her defender a box on the ear.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Au milieu de tous les obstacles que la nature et la societe out semes
+sur les pas de la femme, la seule condition de repos pour elle est de
+s'entourer de barrieres que les passions ne puissent franchir; incapable
+de s'approprier l'existence, elle est toujours semblable a la Chinoise
+dont les pieds ont ete mutiles et pour laquelle toute liberte est un
+leurre, toute espace ouverte une cause de chute. En attendant que
+l'education ait donne aux femmes leur veritable place, malheur a celles
+qui brisent les lisses accoutumees! pour elles l'independance ne sera,
+comme la gloire, qu'un deuil eclatant du bonheur!"--_B. Constant._
+
+This also is one of those common-places of well-sounding eloquence, in
+which a fallacy is so wrapt up in words we have to dig it out. If this
+be true, it is true only so long as you compress the feet and compress
+the intellect,--no longer.
+
+Here is another:--
+
+"L'experience lui avait appris que quel que fut leur age, ou leur
+caractere, toutes les femmes vivaient avec le meme reve, et qu'elles
+avaient toutes au fond du coeur un roman commence dont elles attendaient
+jusqu'a la mort le heros, comme les juifs attendent le Messie."
+
+This "roman commence," (et qui ne finit jamais), is true as regards
+women who are idle, and who have not replaced dreams by duties. And what
+are the "barrieres" which passion cannot overleap, from the moment it
+has subjugated the will? How fine, how true that scene in Calderon's
+"Magico Prodigioso," where Justina conquers the fiend only by not
+_consenting_ to ill!
+
+                       ----"This agony
+   Of passion which afflicts my heart and soul
+   May sweep imagination in its storm;
+   The will is firm."
+
+And the baffled demon shrinks back,--
+
+  "Woman, thou hast subdued me
+   Only by not owning thyself subdued!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A friend of mine was once using some mincing elegancies of language to
+describe a high degree of moral turpitude, when a man near her
+interposed, with stern sarcasm, "Speak out! Give things their proper
+names! _Half words are the perdition of women!_"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"I observe," said Sydney Smith, "that _generally_ about the age of
+forty, women get tired of being virtuous and men of being honest." This
+was said and received with a laugh as one of his good things; but, like
+many of his good things, how dreadfully true! And why? because,
+_generally_, education has made the virtue of the woman and the honesty
+of the man a matter of external opinion, not a law of the inward life.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Dante, in his lowest hell, has placed those who have betrayed women; and
+in the lowest deep of the lowest deep those who have betrayed trust.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Inveterate sensuality, which has the effect of utterly stupifying and
+brutifying lower minds, gives to natures more sensitively or more
+powerfully organised a horrible dash of ferocity. For there is an awful
+relation between animal blood-thirstiness and the proneness to
+sensuality, and in some sensualists a sort of feline propensity to
+torment and lacerate the prey they have not the appetite to devour.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"La Chevalerie faisait une tentative qui n'a jamais reussi, quoique
+souvent essayee; la tentative de se servir des passions humaines, et
+particulierement de l'amour pour conduire l'homme a la vertu. Dans cette
+route l'homme s'arrete toujours en chemin. L'amour inspire beaucoup de
+bons sentiments--le courage, le devouement, le sacrifice des biens et de
+la vie; mais il ne se sacrifie pas lui-meme, et c'est la que la
+faiblesse humaine reprend ses droits."--_St. Marc-Girardin._
+
+
+I am not sure that this well-sounding remark is true--or, if true, it is
+true of the mere passion, not of love in its highest phase, which is
+self-sacrificing, which has its essence in the capability of
+self-sacrifice.
+
+                                "Love was given,
+     Encouraged, sanctioned, chiefly for this end;
+   For this the passion to excess was driven,
+     That _self_ might be annull'd."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear, there is a
+strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell next door to
+hate; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such
+intense haters.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Our present social opinion says to the man, "You may be a vulgar brutal
+sensualist, and use the basest means to attain the basest ends; but so
+long as you do not offend against conventional good manners you shall be
+held blameless." And to the woman it says, "You shall be guilty of
+nothing but of yielding to the softest impulses of tenderness, of
+relenting pity; but if you cannot add hypocrisy you shall be punished as
+the most desperate criminal."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+96.
+
+"It is worthy of notice that the external expressions appropriated to
+certain feelings undergo change at different periods of life and in
+different constitutions. The child cries and sobs from fear or pain, the
+adult more generally from sudden grief or warm affection, or sympathy
+with the feeling of others."--_Dr. Holland._
+
+Those who have been accustomed to observe the ways of children will
+doubt the accuracy of this remark, though from the high authority of
+one of the most accomplished physiologists of our time. Children cry
+from grief, and from sympathy with grief, at a very early age. I have
+seen an infant in its mother's arms, before it could speak, begin to
+whimper and cry when it looked up in her face, which was disturbed and
+bathed with tears; and that has always appeared to me an exquisite touch
+of most truthful nature in Wordsworth's description of the desolation of
+Margaret:--
+
+                        "Her little child
+   Had from its mother caught the trick of grief,
+   And sighed amid its playthings."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+97.
+
+"LETTERS," said Sir James Mackintosh, "must not be on a subject. Lady
+Mary Wortley's letters on her journey to Constantinople are an admirable
+book of travels, but they are not letters. A meeting to discuss a
+question of science is not conversation, nor are papers written to
+another to inform or discuss, letters. Conversation is relaxation, not
+business, and must never appear to be occupation;--nor must letters."
+
+"A masculine character may be a defect in a female, but a masculine
+genius is still a praise to a writer of whatever sex. The feminine
+graces of Madame de Sevigne's genius are exquisitely charming, but the
+philosophy and eloquence of Madame de Stael are above the distinctions
+of sex."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+98.
+
+OF the wars between Napoleon and the Holy Alliance, Madame de Stael once
+said with most admirable and prophetic sense:--"It is a contest between a
+_man_ who is the enemy of liberty, and a _system_ which is equally its
+enemy." But it is easier to get rid of a man than of a system: witness
+the Russians, who assassinate their czars one after another, but cannot
+get rid of their _system_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+99.
+
+The Empress Elizabeth of Russia during the war with Sweden commanded the
+old Hetman of the Cossacks to come to court on his way to Finland. "If
+the Emperor, your father," said the Hetman, "had taken my advice, your
+Majesty would not now have been annoyed by the Swedes." "What was your
+advice?" asked the Empress. "To put all the nobility to death, and
+transplant the people into Russia." "But that," said the Empress, "would
+have been cruel!" "I do not see that," he replied quietly; "they are all
+dead now, and they would only have been dead if my advice had been
+taken."
+
+Something strangely comprehensive and unanswerable in this barbarian
+logic!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+100.
+
+IT was the Abbe Boileau who said of the Jesuits, that they had
+lengthened the Creed and shortened the Decalogue. The same witty
+ecclesiastic being asked why he always wrote in Latin, took a pinch of
+snuff, and answered gravely, "Why, for fear the bishops should read
+me!"
+
+101.
+
+When Talleyrand once visited a certain reprobate friend of his, who was
+ill of cholera, the patient exclaimed in his agony, "Je sens les
+tourmens de l'enfer!"
+
+"Deja?" said Talleyrand.
+
+Much in a word! I remember seeing a pretty French vaudeville wherein a
+lady is by some accident or contrivance shut up perforce with a lover
+she has rejected. She frets at the _contretemps_. He makes use of the
+occasion to plead his cause. The cruel fair one will not relent. Still
+he pleads--still she turns away. At length they are interrupted.
+
+"Deja!" exclaims the lady, in an accent we may suppose to be very
+different from that of Talleyrand; and on the intonation of this one
+word, pronounced as only an accomplished French actress could pronounce
+it, depends the _denouement_ of the piece.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+102.
+
+Louis XVI. sent a distinguished physician over to England to inquire
+into the management of our hospitals. He praised them much, but added,
+"Il y manque deux choses; nos cures et nos hospitalieres;" that is, he
+felt the want of the religious element in the official and medical
+treatment of the sick. A want which, I think, is felt at present and
+will be supplied.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+103.
+
+Those who have the largest horizon of thought, the most extended vision
+in regard to the relation of things, are not remarkable for
+self-reliance and ready judgment. A man who sees limitedly and clearly,
+is more sure of himself, and more direct in his dealings with
+circumstances and with others, than a man whose many-sided capacity
+embraces an immense extent of objects and _objections_,--just as, they
+say, a horse with blinkers more surely chooses his path, and is less
+likely to shy.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+104.
+
+What we truly and earnestly aspire _to be_, that in some sense we _are_.
+The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment
+realises itself.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+105.
+
+There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when
+they only feel.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+106.
+
+There are moments when the liberty of the inner life, opposed to the
+trammels of the outer, becomes too oppressive: moments when we wish that
+our mental horizon were less extended, thought less free; when we long
+to put the discursive soul into a narrow path like a railway, and force
+it to run on in a straight line to some determined goal.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+107.
+
+If the deepest and best affections which God has given us sometimes
+brood over the heart like doves of peace,--they sometimes suck out our
+life-blood like vampires.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+108.
+
+To a Frenchman the words that express things seem often to suffice for
+the things themselves, and he pronounces the words _amour_, _grace_,
+_sensibilite_, as if with a relish in his mouth--as if he tasted them--as
+if he possessed them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+109.
+
+There are many good qualities, and valuable ones too, which hardly
+deserve the name of virtues. The word Virtue was synonymous in the old
+time with valour, and seems to imply contest; not merely passive
+goodness, but active resistance to evil. I wonder sometimes why it is
+that we so continually hear the phrase, "a virtuous woman," and scarcely
+ever that of a "virtuous man," except in poetry or from the pulpit.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+110.
+
+A Lie, though it be killed and dead, can sting sometimes,--like a dead
+wasp.
+
+
+111.
+
+"On me dit toute la journee dans le monde, telle opinion, telle idee,
+sont _recues_. On ne sait donc pas qu'en fait d'opinion, et d'idees
+j'aime beaucoup mieux les choses qui sont rejettees que celles qui sont
+recues?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+112.
+
+"Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some
+eighteenpence a day, but for phantasy, planets and solar systems will
+not suffice." And _thence_ do you infer the superiority of sense over
+phantasy? Shallow reasoning! God who made the soul of man of sufficient
+capacity to embrace whole worlds and systems of worlds, gave us thereby
+a foretaste of our immortality.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+113.
+
+"Faith in the _hereafter_ is as necessary for the intellectual as the
+moral character, and to the man of letters as well as to the Christian,
+the present forms but the slightest portion of his
+existence."--_Southey._
+
+Goethe did not think so. "Genutzt dem Augenblick," "_Use_ the present,"
+was _his_ favourite maxim; and always this notion of sacrificing or
+slighting the present seems to me a great mistake. It ought to be the
+most important part of our existence, as it is the only part of it over
+which we have power. It is in the present only that we absolve the past
+and lay the foundation for the future.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+114.
+
+"Je allseitigen, je individueller," is a beautiful significant phrase,
+quite untranslateable, used, I think, by Rahel (Madame Varnhagen). It
+means that the more the mind can multiply on every side its capacities
+of thinking and feeling, the more individual, the more original, that
+mind becomes.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+115.
+
+"I wonder," said C., "that facts should be called _stubborn_ things." I
+wonder, too, seeing you can always oppose a fact with another fact, and
+that nothing is so easy as to twist, pervert, and argue or misrepresent
+a fact into twenty different forms. "Il n'y a rien qui s'arrange aussi
+facilement que les faits,"--Nothing so _tractable_ as facts,--said
+Benjamin Constant. True; so long as facts are only material,--or as one
+should say, mere matter of fact,--you can modify them to a purpose, turn
+them upside down and inside out; but once vivify a fact with a feeling,
+and it stands up before us a living and a very stubborn thing.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+116.
+
+Every human being is born to influence some other human being; or many,
+or all human beings, in proportion to the extent and power of the
+sympathies, rather than of the intellect.
+
+It was said, and very beautifully said, that "one man's wit becomes all
+men's wisdom." Even more true is it that one man's virtue becomes a
+standard which raises our anticipation of possible goodness in all men.
+
+
+117.
+
+It is curious that the memory, most retentive of images, should yet be
+much more retentive of feelings than of facts: for instance, we remember
+with such intense vividness a period of suffering, that it seems even to
+renew itself through the medium of thought; yet, at the same time, we
+perhaps find difficulty in recalling, with any distinctness, the causes
+of that pain.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+118.
+
+"Truth has never manifested itself to me in such a broad stream of light
+as seems to be poured upon some minds. Truth has appeared to my mental
+eye, like a vivid, yet small and trembling star in a storm, now
+appearing for a moment with a beauty that enraptured, now lost in such
+clouds, as, had I less faith, might make me suspect that the previous
+clear sight had been a delusion."--_Blanco White._
+
+Very exquisite in the aptness as well as poetry of the comparison! Some
+walk by daylight, some walk by starlight. Those who see the sun do not
+see the stars; those who see the stars do not see the sun.
+
+He says in another place:--
+
+"I am averse to too much activity of the imagination on the future life.
+I hope to die full of confidence that no evil awaits me: but any picture
+of a future life distresses me. I feel as if an eternity of existence
+were already an insupportable burden on my soul."
+
+How characteristic of that lassitude of the soul and sickness of the
+heart which "asks not happiness, but longs for rest!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+119.
+
+"Those are the worst of suicides who voluntarily and prepensely stab or
+suffocate their fame when God hath commanded them to stand on high for
+an example."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+120.
+
+Carlyle thus apostrophised a celebrated orator, who abused his gift of
+eloquence to insincere purposes of vanity, self-interest, and
+expediency:--"You blasphemous scoundrel! God gave you that gifted tongue
+of yours, and set it between your teeth, to make known your true meaning
+to us, not to be rattled like a muffin-man's bell!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+121.
+
+I think, with Carlyle, that a lie should be trampled on and extinguished
+wherever found. I am for fumigating the atmosphere when I suspect that
+falsehood, like pestilence, breathes around me. A. thinks this is too
+_young_ a feeling, and that as the truth is sure to conquer in the end,
+it is not worth while to fight every separate lie, or fling a torch into
+every infected hole. Perhaps not, so far as we are ourselves concerned;
+but we should think of others. While secure in our own antidote, or wise
+in our own caution, we should not leave the miasma to poison the
+healthful, or the briars to entangle the unwary. There is no occasion
+perhaps for truth to sally forth like a knight-errant tilting at every
+vizor, but neither should she sit self-assured in her tower of strength,
+leaving pitfalls outside her gate for the blind to fall into.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+122.
+
+"There is a way to separate memory from imagination--we may narrate
+without painting. I am convinced that the mind can employ certain
+indistinct signs to represent even its most vivid impressions; that
+instead of picture writing, it can use something like algebraic symbols:
+such is the language of the soul when the paroxysm of pain has passed,
+and the wounds it received formerly are skinned over, not healed:--it is
+a language very opposite to that used by the poet and the
+novel-writer."--_Blanco White._
+
+True; but a language in which the soul can converse only with itself; or
+else a language more conventional than words, and like paper as a tender
+for gold, more capable of being defaced and falsified. There is a
+proverb we have heard quoted: "Speech is silver, silence is golden." But
+better is the silver diffused than the talent of gold buried.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+123.
+
+However distinguished and gifted, mentally and morally, we find that in
+conduct and in our external relations with, society there is ever a
+levelling influence at work. Seldom in our relations with the world, and
+in the ordinary commerce of life, are the best and highest within us
+brought forth; for the whole system of social intercourse is levelling.
+As it is said that law knows no distinction of persons but that which it
+has itself instituted; so of society it may be said, that it allows of
+no distinction but those which it can recognise--external distinctions.
+
+We hear it said that general society--the _world_, as it is called--and a
+public school, are excellent educators; because in one the man, in the
+other the boy, "finds, as the phrase is, his own level." He does not; he
+finds the level of others. _That_ may be good for those below
+mediocrity, but for those above it _bad_: and it is for those we should
+most care, for if once brought down in early life by the levelling
+influence of numbers, they seldom rise again, or only partially. Nothing
+so dangerous as to be perpetually measuring ourselves against what is
+beneath us, feeling our superiority to that which we force ourselves to
+assimilate to. This has been the perdition of many a schoolboy and many
+a man.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+124.
+
+"Il me semble que le plus noble rapport entre le ciel et la terre, le
+plus beau don que Dieu ait fait a l'homme, la pensee, l'inspiration, se
+decompose en quelque sorte des qu'elle est descendue dans son ame. Elle
+y vient simple et desinteressee; il la reproduit corrompue par tous les
+interets auxquels il l'associe; elle lui a ete confiee pour la
+multiplier a l'avantage de tous; il la publie au profit de son
+amour-propre."--_Madame de Saint-Aulaire._
+
+There would be much to say about this, for it is not always, nor
+generally, _amour-propre_ or interest; it is the desire of sympathy,
+which impels the artist mind to the utterance in words, or the
+expression in form, of that thought or inspiration which God has sent
+into his soul.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+125.
+
+Milton's Eve is the type of the masculine standard of perfection in
+woman; a graceful figure, an abundance of fine hair, much "coy
+submission," and such a degree of unreasoning wilfulness as shall risk
+perdition.
+
+And the woman's standard for the man is Adam, who rules and demands
+subjection, and is so indulgent that he gives up to blandishment what
+he would refuse to reason, and what his own reason condemns.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+126.
+
+Every subject which excites discussion impels to thought. Every
+expression of a mind humbly seeking truth, not assuming to have found
+it, helps the seeker after truth.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+128.
+
+As a man just released from the rack stands bruised and broken,--bleeding
+at every pore, and dislocated in every limb, and raises his eyes to
+heaven, and says, "God be praised! I suffer no more!" because to that
+past sharp agony the respite comes like peace--like sleep,--so we stand,
+after some great wrench in our best affections, where they have been
+torn up by the root; when the conflict is over, and the tension of the
+heart-strings is relaxed, then comes a sort of rest,--but of what kind?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+129.
+
+To trust religiously, to hope humbly, to desire nobly, to think
+rationally, to will resolutely, and to work earnestly,--may this be
+mine.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+A REVELATION OF CHILDHOOD.
+
+(FROM A LETTER.)
+
+
+We are all interested in this great question of popular education; but I
+see others much more sanguine than I am. They hope for some immediate
+good result from all that is thought, written, spoken on the subject day
+after day. I see such results as possible, probable, but far, far off.
+All this talk is of systems and methods, institutions, school houses,
+schoolmasters, schoolmistresses, school books; the ways and the means by
+which we are to instruct, inform, manage, mould, regulate, that which
+lies in most cases beyond our reach--the spirit sent from God. What do we
+know of the mystery of child-nature, child-life? What, indeed, do we
+know of any life? All life we acknowledge to be an awful mystery, but
+child-life we treat as if it were no mystery whatever--just so much
+material placed in our hands to be fashioned to a certain form according
+to our will or our prejudices,--fitted to certain purposes according to
+our notions of expediency. Till we know how to _reverence_ childhood we
+shall do no good. Educators commit the same mistake with regard to
+childhood that theologians commit with regard to our present earthly
+existence; thinking of it, treating of it, as of little value or
+significance in itself, only transient, and preparatory to some
+condition of being which is to follow--as if it were something separate
+from us and to be left behind us as the creature casts its skin. But as
+in the sight of God this life is also something for its own sake, so in
+the estimation of Christ, childhood was something for its own
+sake,--something holy and beautiful in itself, and dear to him. He saw it
+not merely as the germ of something to grow out of it, but as perfect
+and lovely in itself as the flower which precedes the fruit. We
+misunderstand childhood, and we misuse it; we delight in it, and we
+pamper it; we spoil it ingeniously, we neglect it sinfully; at the best
+we trifle with it as a plaything which we can pull to pieces and put
+together at pleasure--ignorant, reckless, presumptuous that we are!
+
+And if we are perpetually making the grossest mistakes in the physical
+and practical management of childhood, how much more in regard to what
+is spiritual! What do we know of that which lies in the minds of
+children? we know only what we put there. The world of instincts,
+perceptions, experiences, pleasures, and pains, lying there without
+self-consciousness,--sometimes helplessly mute, sometimes so imperfectly
+expressed, that we quite mistake the manifestation--what do we know of
+all this? How shall we come at the understanding of it? The child lives,
+and does not contemplate its own life. It can give no account of that
+inward, busy, perpetual activity of the growing faculties and feelings
+which it is of so much importance that we should know. To lead children
+by questionings to think about their own identity, or observe their own
+feelings, is to teach them to be artificial. To waken self-consciousness
+before you awaken conscience is the beginning of incalculable mischief.
+Introspection is always, as a habit, unhealthy: introspection in
+childhood, fatally so. How shall we come at a knowledge of life such as
+it is when it first gushes from its mysterious fountain head? We cannot
+reascend the stream. We all, however we may remember the external scenes
+lived through in our infancy, either do not, or cannot, consult that
+part of our nature which remains indissolubly connected with the inward
+life of that time. We so forget it, that we know not how to deal with
+the child-nature when it comes under our power. We seldom reason about
+children from natural laws, or psychological data. Unconsciously we
+confound our matured experience with our memory: we attribute to
+children what is not possible, exact from them what is
+impossible;--ignore many things which the child has neither words to
+express, nor the will nor the power to manifest. The quickness with
+which children perceive, the keenness with which they suffer, the
+tenacity with which they remember, I have never seen fully appreciated.
+What misery we cause to children, what mischief we do them by bringing
+our own minds, habits, artificial prejudices and senile experiences, to
+bear on their young life, and cramp and overshadow it--it is fearful!
+
+Of all the wrongs and anomalies that afflict our earth, a sinful
+childhood, a suffering childhood, are among the worst.
+
+O ye men! who sit in committees, and are called upon to legislate for
+children,--for children who are the offspring of diseased or degenerate
+humanity, or the victims of a yet more diseased society,--do you, when
+you take evidence from jailors, and policemen, and parish schoolmasters,
+and doctors of divinity, do you ever call up, also, the wise physician,
+the thoughtful physiologist, the experienced mother? You have
+accumulated facts, great blue books full of facts, but till you know in
+what fixed and uniform principles of nature to seek their solution, your
+facts remain a dead letter.
+
+I say nothing here of teaching, though very few in truth understand that
+lowest part of our duty to children. Men, it is generally allowed,
+_teach_ better than women because they have been better taught the
+things they teach. Women _train_ better than men because of their quick
+instinctive perceptions and sympathies, and greater tenderness and
+patience. In schools and in families I would have some things taught by
+men, and some by women: but we will here put aside the art, the act of
+teaching: we will turn aside from the droves of children in national
+schools and reformatory asylums, and turn to the individual child,
+brought up within the guarded circle of a home or a select school,
+watched by an intelligent, a conscientious influence. How shall we deal
+with that spirit which has come out of nature's hands unless we remember
+what we were ourselves in the past? What sympathy can we have with that
+state of being which we regard as immature, so long as we commit the
+double mistake of sometimes attributing to children motives which could
+only spring from our adult experience, and sometimes denying to them the
+same intuitive tempers and feelings which actuate and agitate our
+maturer life? We do not sufficiently consider that our life is not made
+up of separate parts, but is _one_--is a progressive whole. When we talk
+of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river
+flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+121.
+
+I will here put together some recollections of my own child-life; not
+because it was in any respect an exceptional or remarkable existence,
+but for a reason exactly the reverse, because it was like that of many
+children; at least I have met with many children who throve or suffered
+from the same or similar unseen causes even under external conditions
+and management every way dissimilar. Facts, therefore, which can be
+relied on, may be generally useful as hints towards a theory of conduct
+in education. What I shall say here shall be simply the truth so far as
+it goes; not something between the false and the true, garnished for
+effect,--not something half-remembered, half-imagined,--but plain,
+absolute, matter of fact.
+
+No; certainly I was not an extraordinary child. I have had something to
+do with children, and have met with several more remarkable for
+quickness of talent, and precocity of feeling. If any thing in
+particular, I believe I was particularly naughty,--at least so it was
+said twenty times a day. But looking back now, I do not think I was
+particular even in this respect; I perpetrated not more than the usual
+amount of mischief--so called--which every lively active child perpetrates
+between five and ten years old. I had the usual desire to know, and the
+usual dislike to learn; the usual love of fairy tales, and hatred of
+French exercises. But not of what I learned, but of what I did _not_
+learn; not of what they taught me, but of what they could _not_ teach
+me; not of what was open, apparent, manageable, but of the under
+current, the hidden, the unmanaged or unmanageable, I have to speak, and
+you, my friend, to hear and turn to account, if you will, and how you
+will. As we grow old the experiences of infancy come back upon us with a
+strange vividness. There is a period when the overflowing, tumultuous
+life of our youth rises up between us and those first years; but as the
+torrent subsides in its bed we can look across the impassable gulf to
+that haunted fairy land which we shall never more approach, and never
+more forget!
+
+
+In memory I can go back to a very early age. I perfectly remember being
+sung to sleep, and can remember even the tune which was sung to
+me--blessings on the voice that sang it! I was an affectionate, but not,
+as I now think, a loveable nor an attractive child. I did not, like the
+little Mozart, ask of every one around me, "Do you love me?" The
+instinctive question was, rather, "Can I love you?" Yet certainly I was
+not more than six years old when I suffered from the fear of not being
+loved where I had attached myself, and from the idea that another was
+preferred before me, such anguish as had nearly killed me. Whether those
+around me regarded it as a fit of ill-temper, or a fit of illness, I do
+not know. I could not then have given a name to the pang that fevered
+me. I knew not the cause, but never forgot the suffering. It left a
+deeper impression than childish passions usually do; and the
+recollection was so far salutary, that in after life I guarded myself
+against the approaches of that hateful, deformed, agonising thing which
+men call jealousy, as I would from an attack of cramp or cholera. If
+such self-knowledge has not saved me from the pain, at least it has
+saved me from the demoralising effects of the passion, by a wholesome
+terror, and even a sort of disgust.
+
+With a good temper, there was the capacity of strong, deep, silent
+resentment, and a vindictive spirit of rather a peculiar kind. I
+recollect that when one of those set over me inflicted what then
+appeared a most horrible injury and injustice, the thoughts of vengeance
+haunted my fancy for months: but it was an inverted sort of vengeance. I
+imagined the house of my enemy on fire, and rushed through the flames
+to rescue her. She was drowning, and I leaped into the deep water to
+draw her forth. She was pining in prison, and I forced bars and bolts to
+deliver her. If this were magnanimity, it was not the less vengeance;
+for, observe, I always fancied evil, and shame, and humiliation to my
+adversary; to myself the _role_ of superiority and gratified pride. For
+several years this sort of burning resentment against wrong done to
+myself and others, though it took no mean or cruel form, was a source of
+intense, untold suffering. No one was aware of it. I was left to settle
+it; and my mind righted itself I hardly know how: not certainly by
+religious influences--they passed over my mind, and did not at the time
+sink into it,--and as for earthly counsel or comfort, I never had either
+when most needed. And as it fared with me then, so it has been in after
+life; so it has been, _must_ be, with all those who, in fighting out
+alone the pitched battle between principle and passion, will accept no
+intervention between the infinite within them and the infinite above
+them; so it has been, _must_ be, with all strong natures. Will it be
+said that victory in the struggle brings increase of strength? It may be
+so with some who survive the contest; but then, how many sink! how many
+are crippled morally for life! how many, strengthened in some particular
+faculties, suffer in losing the harmony of the character as a whole!
+This is one of the points in which the matured mind may help the
+childish nature at strife with itself. It is impossible to say how far
+this sort of vindictiveness might have penetrated and hardened into the
+character, if I had been of a timid or retiring nature. It was expelled
+at last by no outer influences, but by a growing sense of power and
+self-reliance.
+
+
+In regard to truth--always such a difficulty in education,--I certainly
+had, as a child, and like most children, confused ideas about it. I had
+a more distinct and absolute idea of honour than of truth,--a mistake
+into which our conventional morality leads those who educate and those
+who are educated. I knew very well, in a general way, that to tell a lie
+was _wicked_; to lie for my own profit or pleasure, or to the hurt of
+others, was, according to my infant code of morals, worse than wicked--it
+was _dishonourable_. But I had no compunction about telling
+_fictions_;--inventing scenes and circumstances, which I related as real,
+and with a keen sense of triumphant enjoyment in seeing the listener
+taken in by a most artful and ingenious concatenation of
+impossibilities. In this respect "Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, that liar of
+the first magnitude," was nothing in comparison to me. I must have been
+twelve years old before my conscience was first awakened up to a sense
+of the necessity of truth as a principle, as well as its holiness as a
+virtue. Afterwards, having to set right the minds of others cleared my
+own mind on this and some other important points.
+
+
+I do not think I was naturally obstinate, but remember going without
+food all day, and being sent hungry and exhausted to bed, because I
+would not do some trifling thing required of me. I think it was to
+recite some lines I knew by heart. I was punished as wilfully obstinate:
+but what no one knew then, and what I know now as the fact, was, that
+after refusing to do what was required, and bearing anger and threats in
+consequence, I lost the power to do it. I became stone: the _will_ was
+petrified, and I absolutely _could_ not comply. They might have hacked
+me in pieces before my lips could have unclosed to utterance. The
+obstinacy was not in the mind, but on the nerves; and I am persuaded
+that what we call obstinacy in children, and grownup people, too, is
+often something of this kind, and that it may be increased, by
+mismanagement, by persistence, or what is called firmness, in the
+controlling power, into disease, or something near to it.
+
+
+There was in my childish mind another cause of suffering besides those I
+have mentioned, less acute, but more permanent and always
+unacknowledged. It was fear--fear of darkness and supernatural
+influences. As long as I can remember anything, I remember these horrors
+of my infancy. How they had been awakened I do not know; they were never
+revealed. I had heard other children ridiculed for such fears, and held
+my peace. At first these haunting, thrilling, stifling terrors were
+vague; afterwards the form varied; but one of the most permanent was the
+ghost in Hamlet. There was a volume of Shakspeare lying about, in which
+was an engraving I have not seen since, but it remains distinct in my
+mind as a picture. On one side stood Hamlet with his hair on end,
+literally "like quills upon the fretful porcupine," and one hand with
+all the fingers outspread. On the other strided the ghost, encased in
+armour with nodding plumes; one finger pointing forwards, and all
+surrounded with a supernatural light. O that spectre! for three years it
+followed me up and down the dark staircase, or stood by my bed: only the
+blessed light had power to exorcise it. How it was that I knew, while I
+trembled and quaked, that it was unreal, never cried out, never
+expostulated, never confessed, I do not know. The figure of Apollyon
+looming over Christian, which I had found in an old edition of the
+"Pilgrim's Progress," was also a great torment. But worse, perhaps, were
+certain phantasms without shape, things like the vision in Job--"_A
+spirit passed before my face; it stood still, but I could not discern
+the form thereof_:"--and if not intelligible voices, there were strange
+unaccountable sounds filling the air around with a sort of mysterious
+life. In daylight I was not only fearless, but audacious, inclined to
+defy all power and brave all danger,--that is, all danger I could see. I
+remember volunteering to lead the way through a herd of cattle (among
+which was a dangerous bull, the terror of the neighbourhood) armed only
+with a little stick; but first I said the Lord's Prayer fervently. In
+the ghastly night I never prayed; terror stifled prayer. These visionary
+sufferings, in some form or other, pursued me till I was nearly twelve
+years old. If I had not possessed a strong constitution and a strong
+understanding, which rejected and contemned my own fears, even while
+they shook me, I had been destroyed. How much weaker children suffer in
+this way, I have since known; and have known how to bring them help and
+strength, through sympathy and knowledge, the sympathy that soothes and
+does not encourage--the knowledge that dispels, and does not suggest, the
+evil.
+
+
+People, in general, even those who have been much interested in
+education, are not aware of the sacred duty of _truth_, exact truth in
+their intercourse with children. Limit what you tell them according to
+the measure of their faculties; but let what you say be the truth.
+Accuracy not merely as to fact, but well-considered accuracy in the use
+of words, is essential with children. I have read some wise book on the
+treatment of the insane, in which absolute veracity and accuracy in
+speaking is prescribed as a _curative_ principle; and deception for any
+purpose is deprecated as almost fatal to the health of the patient. Now,
+it is a good sanatory principle, that what is curative is preventive;
+and that an unhealthy state of mind, leading to madness, may, in some
+organisations, be induced by that sort of uncertainty and perplexity
+which grows up where the mind has not been accustomed to truth in its
+external relations. It is like breathing for a continuance an impure or
+confined air.
+
+Of the mischief that may be done to a childish mind by a falsehood
+uttered in thoughtless gaiety, I remember an absurd and yet a painful
+instance. A visitor was turning over, for a little girl, some prints,
+one of which represented an Indian widow springing into the fire kindled
+for the funeral pile of her husband. It was thus explained to the child,
+who asked innocently, whether, if her father died, her mother would be
+burned? The person to whom the question was addressed, a lively, amiable
+woman, was probably much amused by the question, and answered, giddily,
+"Oh, of course,--certainly!" and was believed implicitly. But
+thenceforth, for many weary months, the mind of that child was haunted
+and tortured by the image of her mother springing into the devouring
+flames, and consumed by fire, with all the accessories of the picture,
+particularly the drums beating to drown her cries. In a weaker
+organisation, the results might have been permanent and serious. But to
+proceed.
+
+These terrors I have described had an existence external to myself: I
+had no power over them to shape them by my will, and their power over me
+vanished gradually before a more dangerous infatuation,--the propensity
+to reverie. This shaping spirit of imagination began when I was about
+eight or nine years old to haunt my _inner_ life. I can truly say that,
+from ten years old to fourteen or fifteen, I lived a double existence;
+one outward, linking me with the external sensible world, the other
+inward, creating a world to and for itself, conscious to itself only. I
+carried on for whole years a series of actions, scenes, and adventures;
+one springing out of another, and coloured and modified by increasing
+knowledge. This habit grew so upon me, that there were moments--as when I
+came to some crisis in my imaginary adventures,--when I was not more
+awake to outward things than in sleep,--scarcely took cognisance of the
+beings around me. When punished for idleness by being placed in
+solitary confinement (the worst of all punishments for children), the
+intended penance was nothing less than a delight and an emancipation,
+giving me up to my dreams. I had a very strict and very accomplished
+governess, one of the cleverest women I have ever met with in my life;
+but nothing of this was known or even suspected by her, and I exulted in
+possessing something which her power could not reach. My reveries were
+my real life: it was an unhealthy state of things.
+
+Those who are engaged in the training of children will perhaps pause
+here. It may be said, in the first place, How are we to reach those
+recesses of the inner life which the God who made us keeps from every
+eye but his own? As when we walk over the field in spring we are aware
+of a thousand influences and processes at work of which we have no exact
+knowledge or clear perception, yet must watch and use accordingly,--so it
+is with education. And secondly, it may be asked, if such secret
+processes be working unconscious mischief, where the remedy? The remedy
+is in employment. Then the mother or the teacher echoes with
+astonishment, "Employment! the child is employed from morning till
+night; she is learning a dozen sciences and languages; she has masters
+and lessons for every hour of every day: with her pencil, her piano,
+her books, her companions, her birds, her flowers,--what can she want
+more?" An energetic child even at a very early age, and yet farther as
+the physical organisation is developed, wants something more and
+something better; employment which shall bring with it the bond of a
+higher duty than that which centres in self and self-improvement;
+employment which shall not merely cultivate the understanding, but
+strengthen and elevate the conscience; employment for the higher and
+more generous faculties; employment addressed to the sympathies;
+employment which has the aim of utility, not pretended, but real,
+obvious, direct utility. A girl who as a mere child is not always being
+taught or being amused, whose mind is early restrained by the bond of
+definite duty, and thrown out of the limit of self, will not in after
+years be subject to fancies that disturb or to reveries that absorb, and
+the present and the actual will have that power they ought to have as
+combined in due degree with desire and anticipation.
+
+The Roman Catholic priesthood understand this well: employment, which
+enlists with the spiritual the sympathetic part of our being, is a means
+through which they guide both young and adult minds. Physicians who have
+to manage various states of mental and moral disease understand this
+well; they speak of the necessity of employment (not mere amusement) as
+a curative means, but of employment with the direct aim of usefulness,
+apprehended and appreciated by the patient, else it is nothing. It is
+the same with children. Such employment, chosen with reference to
+utility, and in harmony with the faculties, would prove in many cases
+either preventive or curative. In my own case, as I now think, it would
+have been both.
+
+There was a time when it was thought essential that women should know
+something of cookery, something of medicine, something of surgery. If
+all these things are far better understood now than heretofore, is that
+a reason why a well educated woman should be left wholly ignorant of
+them? A knowledge of what people call "common things"--of the elements of
+physiology, of the conditions of health, of the qualities, nutritive or
+remedial, of substances commonly used as food or medicine, and the most
+economical and most beneficial way of applying both,--these should form a
+part of the system of every girls' school--whether for the higher or the
+lower classes. At present you shall see a girl studying chemistry, and
+attending Faraday's lectures, who would be puzzled to compound a
+rice-pudding or a cup of barley-water: and a girl who could work quickly
+a complicated sum in the Rule of Three, afterwards wasting a fourth of
+her husband's wages through want of management.
+
+In my own case, how much of the practical and the sympathetic in my
+nature was exhausted in airy visions!
+
+As to the stuff out of which my waking dreams were composed, I cannot
+tell you much. I have a remembrance that I was always a princess-heroine
+in the disguise of a knight, a sort of Clorinda or Britomart, going
+about to redress the wrongs of the poor, fight giants, and kill dragons;
+or founding a society in some far-off solitude or desolate island, which
+would have rivalled that of Gonsalez, where there were to be no tears,
+no tasks, and no laws,--except those which I made myself,--no caged birds
+nor tormented kittens.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Enough of the pains, and mistakes, and vagaries of childhood; let me
+tell of some of its pleasures equally unguessed and unexpressed. A
+great, and exquisite source of enjoyment arose out of an early,
+instinctive, boundless delight in external beauty. How this went hand in
+hand with my terrors and reveries, how it could coexist with them, I
+cannot tell now--it was so; and if this sympathy with the external,
+living, beautiful world, had been properly, scientifically cultivated,
+and directed to useful definite purposes, it would have been the best
+remedy for much that was morbid: this was not the case, and we were,
+unhappily for me, too early removed from the country to a town
+residence. I can remember, however, that in very early years the
+appearances of nature did truly "haunt me like a passion;" the stars
+were to me as the gates of heaven; the rolling of the wave to the shore,
+the graceful weeds and grasses bending before the breeze as they grew by
+the wayside; the minute and delicate forms of insects; the trembling
+shadows of boughs and leaves dancing on the ground in the highest noon;
+these were to me perfect pleasures of which the imagery now in my mind
+is distinct. Wordsworth's poem of "The Daffodils," the one beginning--
+
+   "I wandered lonely as a cloud,"
+
+may appear to some unintelligible or overcharged, but to me it was a
+vivid truth, a simple fact; and if Wordsworth had been then in my hands
+I think I must have loved him. It was this intense sense of beauty which
+gave the first zest to poetry: I love it, not because it told me what I
+did not know, but because it helped me to words in which to clothe my
+own knowledge and perceptions, and reflected back the pictures
+unconsciously hoarded up in my mind. This was what made Thomson's
+"Seasons" a favourite book when I first began to read for my own
+amusement, and before I could understand one half of it; St. Pierre's
+"Indian Cottage" ("La Chaumiere Indienne") was also charming, either
+because it reflected my dreams, or gave me new stuff for them in
+pictures of an external world quite different from that I
+inhabited,--palm-trees, elephants, tigers, dark-turbaned men with flowing
+draperies; and the "Arabian Nights" completed my Oriental intoxication,
+which lasted for a long time.
+
+I have said little of the impressions left by books, and of my first
+religious notions. A friend of mine had once the wise idea of collecting
+together a variety of evidence as to the impressions left by certain
+books on childish or immature minds: If carried out, it would have been
+one of the most valuable additions to educational experience ever made.
+For myself I did not much care about the books put into my hands, nor
+imbibe much information from them. I had a great taste, I am sorry to
+say, for forbidden books; yet it was not the forbidden books that did
+the mischief, except in their being read furtively. I remember
+impressions of vice and cruelty from some parts of the Old Testament and
+Goldsmith's "History of England," which I shudder to recall. Shakspeare
+was on the forbidden shelf. I had read him all through between seven
+and ten years old. He never did me any moral mischief. He never soiled
+my mind with any disordered image. What was exceptionable and coarse in
+language I passed by without attaching any meaning whatever to it. How
+it might have been if I had read Shakspeare first when I was fifteen or
+sixteen, I do not know; perhaps the occasional coarsenesses and
+obscurities might have shocked the delicacy or puzzled the intelligence
+of that sensitive and inquiring age. But at nine or ten I had no
+comprehension of what was unseemly; what might be obscure in words to
+wordy commentators, was to me lighted up by the idea I found or
+interpreted for myself--right or wrong.
+
+No; I repeat, Shakspeare--bless him!--never did me any moral mischief.
+Though the Witches in Macbeth troubled me,--though the Ghost in Hamlet
+terrified me (the picture that is,--for the spirit in Shakspeare was
+solemn and pathetic, not hideous),--though poor little Arthur cost me an
+ocean of tears,--yet much that was obscure, and all that was painful and
+revolting was merged on the whole in the vivid presence of a new,
+beautiful, vigorous, living world. The plays which I now think the most
+wonderful produced comparatively little effect on my fancy: Romeo and
+Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, struck me then less than the historical plays,
+and far less than the Midsummer Night's Dream and Cymbeline. It may be
+thought, perhaps, that Falstaff is not a character to strike a child, or
+to be understood by a child:--no; surely not. To me Falstaff was not
+witty and wicked--only irresistibly fat and funny; and I remember lying
+on the ground rolling with laughter over some of the scenes in Henry the
+Fourth,--the mock play, and the seven men in buckram. But The Tempest and
+Cymbeline were the plays I liked best and knew best.
+
+Altogether I should say that in my early years books were known to me,
+not as such, not for their general contents, but for some especial image
+or picture I had picked out of them and assimilated to my own mind and
+mixed up with my own life. For example out of Homer's Odyssey (lent to
+me by the parish clerk) I had the picture of Nasicaa and her maidens
+going down in their chariots to wash their linen: so that when the first
+time I went to the Pitti Palace, and could hardly see the pictures
+through blinding tears, I saw _that_ picture of Rubens, which all
+remember who have been at Florence, and it flashed delight and
+refreshment through those remembered childish associations. The Syrens
+and Polypheme left also vivid pictures on my fancy. The Iliad, on the
+contrary, wearied me, except the parting of Hector and Andromache, in
+which the child, scared by its father's dazzling helm and nodding
+crest, remains a vivid image in my mind from that time.
+
+The same parish clerk--a curious fellow in his way--lent me also some
+religious tracts and stories, by Hannah More. It is most certain that
+more moral mischief was done to me by some of these than by all
+Shakspeare's plays together. These so-called pious tracts first
+introduced me to a knowledge of the vices of vulgar life, and the
+excitements of a vulgar religion,--the fear of being hanged and the fear
+of hell became co-existent in my mind; and the teaching resolved itself
+into this,--that it was not by being naughty, but by being found out,
+that I was to incur the risk of both. My fairy world was better!
+
+About Religion:--I was taught religion as children used to be taught it
+in my younger days, and are taught it still in some cases, I
+believe--through the medium of creeds and catechisms. I read the Bible
+too early, and too indiscriminately, and too irreverently. Even the New
+Testament was too early placed in my hands; too early made a lesson
+book, as the custom then was. The _letter_ of the Scriptures--the
+words--were familiarised to me by sermonising and dogmatising, long
+before I could enter into the _spirit_. Meantime, happily, another
+religion was growing up in my heart, which, strangely enough, seemed to
+me quite apart from that which was taught,--which, indeed, I never in
+any way regarded as the same which I was taught when I stood up wearily
+on a Sunday to repeat the collect and say the catechism. It was quite
+another thing. Not only the taught religion and the sentiment of faith
+and adoration were never combined, but it never for years entered into
+my head to combine them; the first remained extraneous, the latter had
+gradually taken root in my life, even from the moment my mother joined
+my little hands in prayer. The histories out of the Bible (the Parables
+especially) were, however, enchanting to me, though my interpretation of
+them was in some instances the very reverse of correct or orthodox. To
+my infant conception our Lord was a being who had come down from heaven
+to make people good, and to tell them beautiful stories. And though no
+pains were spared to _indoctrinate_ me, and all my pastors and masters
+took it for granted that my ideas were quite satisfactory, nothing could
+be more confused and heterodox.
+
+
+It is a common observation that girls of lively talents are apt to grow
+pert and satirical. I fell into this danger when about ten years old.
+Sallies at the expense of certain people, ill-looking, or ill-dressed,
+or ridiculous, or foolish, had been laughed at and applauded in company,
+until, without being naturally malignant, I ran some risk of becoming
+so from sheer vanity.
+
+The fables which appeal to our higher moral sympathies may sometimes do
+as much for us as the truths of science. So thought our Saviour when he
+taught the multitude in parables.
+
+A good clergyman who lived near us, a famous Persian scholar, took it
+into his head to teach me Persian (I was then about seven years old),
+and I set to work with infinite delight and earnestness. All I learned
+was soon forgotten; but a few years afterwards, happening to stumble on
+a volume of Sir William Jones's works--his Persian grammar--it revived my
+Orientalism, and I began to study it eagerly. Among the exercises given
+was a Persian fable or poem--one of those traditions of our Lord which
+are preserved in the East. The beautiful apologue of "St. Peter and the
+Cherries," which Goethe has versified or imitated, is a well known
+example. This fable I allude to was something similar, but I have not
+met with the original these forty years, and must give it here from
+memory.
+
+"Jesus," says the story, "arrived one evening at the gates of a certain
+city, and he sent his disciples forward to prepare supper, while he
+himself, intent on doing good, walked through the streets into the
+market place.
+
+"And he saw at the corner of the market some people gathered together
+looking at an object on the ground; and he drew near to see what it
+might be. It was a dead dog, with a halter round his neck, by which he
+appeared to have been dragged through the dirt; and a viler, a more
+abject, a more unclean thing, never met the eyes of man.
+
+"And those who stood by looked on with abhorrence.
+
+"'Faugh!' said one, stopping his nose; 'it pollutes the air.' 'How
+long,' said another, 'shall this foul beast offend our sight?' 'Look at
+his torn hide,' said a third; 'one could not even cut a shoe out of it.'
+'And his ears,' said a fourth, 'all draggled and bleeding!' 'No doubt,'
+said a fifth, 'he hath been hanged for thieving!'
+
+"And Jesus heard them, and looking down compassionately on the dead
+creature, he said, 'Pearls are not equal to the whiteness of his teeth!'
+
+"Then the people turned towards him with amazement, and said among
+themselves, 'Who is this? this must be Jesus of Nazareth, for only HE
+could find something to pity and approve even in a dead dog;' and being
+ashamed, they bowed their heads before him, and went each on his way."
+
+I can recall, at this hour, the vivid, yet softening and pathetic
+impression left on my fancy by this old Eastern story. It struck me as
+exquisitely humorous, as well as exquisitely beautiful. It gave me a
+pain in my conscience, for it seemed thenceforward so easy and so vulgar
+to say satirical things, and so much nobler to be benign and merciful,
+and I took the lesson so home, that I was in great danger of falling
+into the opposite extreme,--of seeking the beautiful even in the midst of
+the corrupt and the repulsive. Pity, a large element in my composition,
+might have easily degenerated into weakness, threatening to subvert
+hatred of evil in trying to find excuses for it; and whether my mind has
+ever completely righted itself, I am not sure.
+
+
+Educators are not always aware, I think, how acute are the perceptions,
+and how permanent the memories, of children. I remember experiments
+tried upon my temper and feelings, and how I was made aware of this, by
+their being repeated, and, in some instances, spoken of, before me.
+Music, to which I was early and peculiarly sensitive, was sometimes made
+the medium of these experiments. Discordant sounds were not only
+hateful, but made me turn white and cold, and sent the blood backward to
+my heart; and certain tunes had a curious effect, I cannot now account
+for: for though, when heard for the first time, they had little effect,
+they became intolerable by repetition; they turned up some hidden
+emotion within me too strong to be borne. It could not have been from
+association, which I believe to be a principal element in the _emotion_
+excited by music. I was too young for that. What associations could such
+a baby have had with pleasure or with pain? Or could it be possible that
+associations with some former state of existence awoke up to sound? That
+our life "hath elsewhere its beginning, and cometh from afar," is a
+belief or at least an instinct, in some minds, which music, and only
+music, seems to thrill into consciousness. At this time, when I was
+about five or six years old, Mrs. Arkwright--she was then Fanny
+Kemble--used to come to our house, and used to entrance me with her
+singing. I had a sort of adoration for her, such as an ecstatic votary
+might have for a Saint Cecilia. I trembled with pleasure when I only
+heard her step. But her voice!--it has charmed hundreds since; whom has
+it ever moved to a more genuine passion of delight than the little child
+that crept silent and tremulous to her side? And she was fond of
+me,--fond of singing to me, and, it must be confessed, fond also of
+playing these experiments on me. The music of "Paul and Virginia" was
+then in vogue, and there was one air--a very simple air--in that opera,
+which, after the first few bars, always made me stop my ears and rush
+out of the room. I became at last aware that this was sometimes done by
+particular desire to please my parents, or amuse and interest others by
+the display of such vehement emotion. My infant conscience became
+perplexed between the reality of the feeling and the exhibition of it.
+People are not always aware of the injury done to children by repeating
+before them things they say, or describing things they do: words and
+actions, spontaneous and unconscious, become thenceforth artificial and
+conscious. I can speak of the injury done to myself, between five and
+eight years old. There was some danger of my becoming a precocious
+actress,--danger of permanent mischief such as I have seen done to other
+children,--but I was saved by the recoil of resistance and resentment
+excited in my mind.
+
+This is enough. All that has been told here refers to a period between
+five and ten years old.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+THE INDIAN HUNTER AND THE FIRE.
+
+(FROM THE GERMAN.)
+
+
+Once upon a time the lightning from heaven fell upon a tree standing in
+the old primeval forest and kindled it, so that it flamed on high. And
+it happened that a young hunter, who had lost his path in that
+wilderness, beheld the gleam of the flames from a distance, and, forcing
+his way through the thicket, he flung himself down in rapture before the
+blazing tree.
+
+"O divine light and warmth!" he exclaimed, stretching forth his arms.
+"O blessed! O heaven-descended Fire! let me thank thee! let me adore
+thee! Giver of a new existence, quickening thro' every pulse, how lost,
+how cold, how dark have I dwelt without thee! Restorer of my life!
+remain ever near me, and, through thy benign and celestial influence,
+send love and joy to illuminate my soul!"
+
+And the Fire answered and said to him, "It is true that my birth is from
+heaven, but I am now, through mingling with earthly elements, subdued to
+earthly influences; therefore, beware how you choose me for thy friend,
+without having first studied my twofold nature. O youth! take heed lest
+what appear to thee now a blessing, may be turned, at some future time,
+to fiery pain and death." And the youth replied, "No! O no! thou blessed
+Fire, this could never be. Am I then so senseless, so inconstant, so
+thankless? O believe it not! Let me stay near thee; let me be thy
+priest, to watch and tend thee truly. Ofttimes in my wild wintry life,
+when the chill darkness encompassed me, and the ice-blast lifted my
+hair, have I dreamed of the soft summer breath,--of the sunshine that
+should light up the world within me and the world around me. But still
+that time came not. It seemed ever far, far off; and I had perished
+utterly before the light and the warmth had reached me, had it not been
+for thee!"
+
+Thus the youth poured forth his soul, and the Fire answered him in
+murmured tones, while her beams with a softer radiance played over his
+cheek and brow: "Be it so then. Yet do thou watch me constantly and
+minister to me carefully; neglect me not, leave me not to myself, lest
+the light and warmth in which thou so delightest fail thee suddenly, and
+there be no redress; and O watch thyself also! beware lest thou too
+ardently stir up my impatient fiery being! beware lest thou heap too
+much fuel upon me; once more beware, lest, instead of life, and love,
+and joy, I bring thee only death and burning pain!" And the youth
+passionately vowed to keep her behest: and in the beginning all went
+well. How often, for hours together, would he lie gazing entranced
+toward the radiant beneficent Fire, basking in her warmth, and throwing
+now a leafy spray, now a fragment of dry wood, anon a handful of odorous
+gums, as incense, upon the flame, which gracefully curling and waving
+upwards, quivering and sparkling, seemed to whisper in return divine
+oracles; or he fancied he beheld, while gazing into the glowing depths,
+marvellous shapes, fairy visions dancing and glancing along. Then he
+would sing to her songs full of love, and she, responding to the song
+she had herself inspired, sometimes replied, in softest whispers, so
+loving and so low, that even the jealous listening woods could not
+overhear; at other times she would shoot up suddenly in rapturous
+splendour, like a pillar of light, and revealed to him all the wonders
+and the beauties which lay around him, hitherto veiled from his sight.
+
+But at length, as he became accustomed to the glory and the warmth, and
+nothing more was left for the fire to bestow, or her light to reveal,
+then he began to weary and to dream again of the morning, and to long
+for the sun-beams; and it was to him as if the fire stood between him
+and the sun's light, and he reproached her therefore, and he became
+moody and ungrateful; and the fire was no longer the same, but unquiet
+and changeful, sometimes flickering unsteadily, sometimes throwing out a
+lurid glare. And when the youth, forgetful of his ministry, left the
+flame unfed and unsustained, so that ofttimes she drooped and waned, and
+crept in dying gleams along the damp ground, his heart would fail him
+with a sudden remorse, and he would cast on the fuel with such a rough
+and lavish hand that the indignant fire hissed thereat, and burst forth
+in a smoky sullen gleam,--then died away again. Then the youth, half
+sorrowful, half impatient, would remember how bright, how glowing, how
+dazzling was the flame in those former happy days, when it played over
+his chilled and wearied limbs, and shed its warmth upon his brow, and he
+desired eagerly to recall that once inspiring glow. And he stirred up
+the embers violently till they burned him, and then he grew angry, and
+then again he wearied of all the watching and the care which the subtle,
+celestial, tameless element required at his hand: and at length, one day
+in a sullen mood, he snatched up a pitcher of water from the fountain
+and poured it hastily on the yet living flame.----
+
+For one moment it arose blazing towards heaven, shed a last gleam upon
+the pale brow of the youth, and then sank down in darkness extinguished
+for ever!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+PAULINA.
+
+FROM AN UNFINISHED TALE, 1823.
+
+   And think'st thou that the fond o'erflowing love
+     I bear thee in my heart could ever be
+   Repaid by careless smiles that round thee rove,
+     And beam on others as they beam on me?
+
+   Oh, could I speak to thee! could I but tell
+   The nameless thoughts that in my bosom swell,
+   And struggle for expression! or set free
+   From the o'er mastering spirit's proud control
+   The pain that throbs in silence at my soul,
+   Perhaps--yet no--I will not sue, nor bend,
+   To win a heartless pity--Let it end!
+
+   I have been near thee still at morn, at eve;
+   Have mark'd thee in thy joy, have seen thee grieve;
+   Have seen thee gay with triumph, sick with fears,
+   Radiant in beauty, desolate in tears:
+   And communed with thy heart, till I made mine
+   The echo and the mirror unto thine.
+   And I have sat and looked into thine eyes
+   As men on earth look to the starry skies,
+   That seek to read in Heaven their human destinies!
+
+   Too quickly I read mine,--I knew it well,--
+   I judg'd not of thy heart by all it gave,
+   But all that it withheld; and I could tell
+   The very sea-mark where affection's wave
+   Would cease to flow, or flow to ebb again,
+   And knew my lavish love was pour'd in vain,
+   As fruitless streams o'er sandy deserts melt,
+   Unrecompensed, unvalued, and unfelt!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+LINES.--1840.
+
+   Take me, my mother Earth, to thy cold breast,
+   And fold me there in everlasting rest,
+         The long day is o'er!
+         I'm weary, I would sleep--
+         But deep, deep,
+         Never to waken more!
+
+   I have had joy and sorrow; I have proved
+   What life could give; have lov'd, have been belov'd;
+         I am sick, and heart sore,
+         And weary,--let me sleep!
+         But deep, deep,
+         Never to waken more!
+
+   To thy dark chambers, mother Earth, I come,
+   Prepare my dreamless bed in my last home;
+         Shut down the marble door,
+         And leave me,--let me sleep!
+         But deep, deep,
+         Never to waken more!
+
+   Now I lie down,--I close my aching eyes,
+   If on this night another morn must rise,
+         Wake me not, I implore!
+         I only ask to sleep,
+         And deep, deep,
+         Never to waken more!
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Theological Fragments.
+
+
+1.
+
+THE HERMIT AND THE MINSTREL.
+
+(A PARABLE, FROM ST. JEROME.)
+
+
+A certain holy anchorite had passed a long life in a cave of the
+Thebaid, remote from all communion with men; and eschewing, as he would
+the gates of Hell, even the very presence of a woman; and he fasted and
+prayed, and performed many and severe penances; and his whole thought
+was how he should make himself of account in the sight of God, that he
+might enter into his paradise.
+
+And having lived this life for three score and ten years he was puffed
+up with the notion of his own great virtue and sanctity, and, like to
+St. Anthony, he besought the Lord to show him what saint he should
+emulate as greater than himself, thinking perhaps, in his heart, that
+the Lord would answer that none was greater or holier. And the same
+night the angel of God appeared to him, and said, "If thou wouldst excel
+all others in virtue and sanctity, thou must strive to be like a certain
+minstrel who goes begging and singing from door to door."
+
+And the holy man was in great astonishment, and he arose and took his
+staff and ran forth in search of this minstrel; and when he had found
+him he questioned him earnestly, saying, "Tell me, I pray thee, my
+brother, what good works thou hast performed in thy lifetime, and by
+what prayers and penances thou hast made thyself acceptable to God?"
+
+And the man, greatly wondering and ashamed to be so questioned, hung
+down his head as he replied, "I beseech thee, holy father, mock me not!
+I have performed no good works, and as to praying, alas! sinner that I
+am, I am not worthy to pray. I do nothing but go about from door to door
+amusing the people with my viol and my flute."
+
+And the holy man insisted and said, "Nay, but peradventure in the midst
+of this thy evil life thou hast done some good works?" And the minstrel
+replied, "I know of nothing good that I have done." And the hermit,
+wondering more and more, said, "How hast thou become a beggar: hast thou
+spent thy substance in riotous living, like most others of thy calling?"
+and the man answering, said, "Nay; but there was a poor woman whom I
+found running hither and thither in distraction, for her husband and her
+children had been sold into slavery to pay a debt. And the woman being
+very fair, certain sons of Belial pursued after her; so I took her home
+to my hut and protected her from them, and I gave her all I possessed to
+redeem her family, and conducted her in safety to the city, where she
+was reunited to her husband and children. But what of that, my father;
+is there a man who would not have done the same?"
+
+And the hermit, hearing the minstrel speak these words, wept bitterly,
+saying, "For my part, I have not done so much good in all my life; and
+yet they call me a man of God, and thou art only a poor minstrel!"
+
+
+At Vienna, some years ago, I saw a picture by Von Schwind, which was
+conceived in the spirit of this old apologue. It exhibited the lives of
+two twin brothers diverging from the cradle. One of them, by profound
+study, becomes a most learned and skilful physician, and ministers to
+the sick; attaining to great riches and honours through his labours and
+his philanthropy. The other brother, who has no turn for study, becomes
+a poor fiddler, and spends his life in consoling, by his music,
+sufferings beyond the reach of the healing art. In the end, the two
+brothers meet at the close of life. He who had been fiddling through the
+world is sick and worn out: his brother prescribes for him, and is seen
+culling simples for his restoration, while the fiddler touches his
+instrument for the solace of his kind physician.
+
+It is in such representations that painting did once speak, and might
+again speak to the hearts of the people.
+
+Another version of the same thought, we find in De Berenger's pretty
+ballad, "_Les deux Soeurs de Charite_."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+2.
+
+When I was a child, and read Milton for the first time, his Pandemonium
+seemed to me a magnificent place. It struck me more than his Paradise,
+for _that_ was beautiful, but Pandemonium was terrible and beautiful
+too. The wondrous fabric that "from the earth rose like an exhalation
+to the sound of dulcet symphonies and voices sweet,"--the splendid piles
+of architecture sweeping line beyond line, "Cornice and frieze with
+bossy sculptures graven,"--realised a certain picture of Palmyra I had
+once seen, and which had taken possession of my imagination: then the
+throne, outshining the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind,--the flood of light
+streaming from "starry lamps and blazing cressets" quite threw the
+flames of perdition into the shade. As it was said of Erskine, that he
+always spoke of Satan with respect, as of a great statesman out of
+place, a sort of leader of the Opposition; so to me the grand arch-fiend
+was a hero, like my _then_ favourite Greeks and Romans, a Cymon, a
+Curtius, a Decius, devoting himself for the good of his country;--such
+was the moral confusion created in my mind. Pandemonium inspired no
+horror; on the contrary, my fancy revelled in the artistic beauty of the
+creation. I felt that I should like to go and see it; so that, in fact,
+if Milton meant to inspire abhorrence, he has failed, even to the height
+of his sublimity. Dante has succeeded better. Those who dwell with
+complacency on the doctrine of eternal punishments must delight in the
+ferocity and the ingenuity of his grim inventions, worthy of a vengeful
+theology. Wicked latitudinarians may shudder and shiver at the images
+called up--grotesque, abominable, hideous--but then Dante himself would
+sternly rebuke them for making their human sympathies a measure for the
+judgments of God, and compassion only a veil for treason and rebellion:--
+
+  "Chi e piu scellerato di colui
+   Ch' al giudicio divin passion porta?"
+
+  "Who can show greater wickedness than he
+   Whose passion by the will of God is moved?"
+
+However, it must be said in favour of Dante's Inferno, that no one ever
+wished to go there.
+
+These be the Christian poets! but they must yield in depth of imagined
+horrors to the Christian Fathers. Tertullian (writing in the second
+century) not only sends the wicked into that dolorous region of despair,
+but makes the endless measureless torture of the doomed a part of the
+joys of the redeemed. The spectacle is to give them the same sort of
+delight as the heathen took in their games, and Pandemonium is to be as
+a vast amphitheatre for the amusement of the New Jerusalem. "How
+magnificent," exclaims this pious doctor of the Church, "will be the
+scale of that game! With what admiration, what laughter, what glee, what
+triumph, shall I behold so many mighty monarchs, who had been given out
+as received into the skies, moaning in unfathomable gloom! Persecutors
+of the Christians liquefying amid shooting spires of flame! Philosophers
+blushing before their disciples amid those ruddy fires! Then," he goes
+on, still alluding to the amphitheatre, "then is the time to hear the
+tragedians doubly pathetic, now that they bewail their own agonies! To
+observe actors released by the fierceness of their torments from all
+restraints on their gestures! Then may we admire the charioteer glowing
+all over in his car of torture, and watch the wrestlers struggling, not
+in the gymnasium but with flames!" And he asks exultingly, "What praetor,
+or consul, or questor, or priest, can purchase you by his munificence a
+game of triumph like this?"
+
+And even more terrible are the imaginations of good Bishop Taylor, who
+distils the essence from all sins, all miseries, all sorrows, all
+terrors, all plagues, and mingles them in one chalice of wrath and
+vengeance to be held to the lips and forced down the unwilling throats
+of the doomed "with violence of devils and accursed spirits!" Are these
+mere words? Did any one ever fancy or try to realise what they express?
+
+
+3.
+
+I was surprised to find this passage in one of Southey's letters:--
+
+
+"A Catholic Establishment would be the best, perhaps the only means of
+civilising Ireland. Jesuits and Benedictines, though they would not
+enlighten the savages, would humanise them and bring the country into
+cultivation. A petition that asked for this, saying plainly, 'We are
+Papists, and will be so, and this is the best thing that can be done for
+us and you too,'--such a petition I would support, considering what the
+present condition of Ireland is, how wretchedly it has always been
+governed, and how hopeless the prospect." (1805.)
+
+
+Southey was thinking of what the religious orders had done for Paraguay;
+whether he would have penned the same sentiments twenty or even ten
+years later, is more than doubtful.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+4.
+
+The old monks and penitents--dirty, ugly, emaciated old fellows they
+were!--spent their days in speaking and preaching of their own and
+others' sinfulness, yet seem to have had ever present before them a
+standard of beauty, brightness, beneficence, aspirations which nothing
+earthly could satisfy, which made their ideas of sinfulness and misery
+_comparative_, and their scale was graduated from themselves _upwards_.
+We philosophers reverse this. We teach and preach the spiritual dignity,
+the lofty capabilities of humanity. Yet, by some mistake, we seem to be
+always speculating on the amount of evil which may or can be endured,
+and on the amount of wickedness which may or must be tolerated; and our
+scale is graduated from ourselves _downwards_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+5.
+
+"So long as the ancient mythology had any separate establishment in the
+empire, the spiritual worship which our religion demands, and so
+essentially implies as only fitting for it, was preserved in its purity
+by means of the salutary contrast; but no sooner had the Church become
+completely triumphant and exclusive, and the parallel of Pagan idolatry
+totally removed, than the old constitutional appetite revived in all its
+original force, and after a short but famous struggle with the
+Iconoclasts, an image worship was established, and consecrated by bulls
+and canons, which, in whatever light it is regarded, differed in no
+respect but the names of its objects from that which had existed for so
+many ages as the chief characteristic of the religious faith of the
+Gentiles."--_H. Nelson Coleridge._
+
+I think, with submission, that it differed in sentiment; for in the
+mythology of the Pagans the worship was to _beauty_, _immortality_, and
+_power_, and in the Christian mythology--if I may call it so--of the
+Middle Ages, the worship was to _purity_, _self-denial_, and _charity_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+6.
+
+"A narrow half-enlightened reason may easily make sport of all those
+forms in which religious faith has been clothed by human imagination,
+and ask why they are retained, and why one should be preferred to
+another? It is sufficient to reply, that some forms there must be if
+Religion is to endure as a social influence, and that the forms already
+in existence are the best, if they are in unison with human sympathies,
+and express, with the breadth and vagueness which every popular
+utterance must from its nature possess, the interior convictions of the
+general mind. What would become of the most sacred truth if all the
+forms which have harboured it were destroyed at once by an unrelenting
+reason, and it were driven naked and shivering about the earth till some
+clever logician had devised a suitable abode for its reception? It is on
+these outward forms of religion that the spirit of artistic beauty
+descends and moulds them into fitting expressions of the invisible grace
+and majesty of spiritual truth."--_Prospective Review_, Feb. 24. 1845.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+7.
+
+"Have not Dying Christs taught fortitude to the virtuous sufferer? Have
+not Holy Families cherished and ennobled domestic affections? The tender
+genius of the Christian morality, even in its most degenerate state, has
+made the Mother and her Child the highest objects of affectionate
+superstition. How much has that beautiful superstition by the pencils of
+great artists contributed to humanise mankind?"--_Sir James Mackintosh_,
+writing in 1802.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+8.
+
+I remember once at Merton College Chapel (May, 1844), while Archdeacon
+Manning was preaching an eloquent sermon on the eternity of reward and
+punishment in the future life, I was looking at the row of windows
+opposite, and I saw that there were seven, all different in pattern and
+construction, yet all harmonising with each other and with the building
+of which they formed a part;--a symbol they might have been of
+differences in the Church of Christ. From the varied windows opposite I
+looked down to the faces of the congregation, all upturned to the
+preacher, with expression how different! Faith, hope, fear, in the open
+mouths and expanded eyelids of some; a sort of silent protest in the
+compressed lips and knitted brows of others; a speculative inquiry and
+interest, or merely admiring acquiescence in others; as the high or low,
+the wide or contracted head prevailed; and all this diversity in
+organisation, in habits of thought, in expression, harmonised for the
+time by one predominant object, one feeling! the hungry sheep looking up
+to be fed! When I sigh over apparent disagreement, let me think of those
+windows in Merton College Chapel, and the same light from heaven
+streaming through them all!--and of that assemblage of human faces,
+uplifted with the same aspiration one and all!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+9.
+
+I have just read the article (by Sterling, I believe), in the "Edinburgh
+Review" for July; and as it chanced, this same evening, Dr. Channing's
+"Discourse on the Church," and Captain Maconochie's "Report on Secondary
+Punishments" from Sydney, came before me.
+
+And as I laid them down, one after another, _this_ thought struck
+me:--that about the same time, in three different and far divided regions
+of the globe, three men, one military, the other an ecclesiastic, the
+third a lawyer, and belonging apparently to different religious
+denominations, all gave utterance to nearly the same sentiments in
+regard to a Christian Church. Channing says, "A church destined to
+endure through all ages, to act on all, to blend itself with new forms
+of society, and with the highest improvements of the race, cannot be
+expected to ordain an immutable mode of administration, but must leave
+its modes of worship and communion to conform themselves silently and
+gradually to the wants and progress of humanity. The rites and
+arrangements which suit one period lose their significance or efficiency
+in another; the forms which minister to the mind _now_ may fetter it
+hereafter, and must give place to its free unfolding," &c., and more to
+the same purpose.
+
+The reviewer says, "We believe that in the judgment of an enlightened
+charity, many Christian societies who are accustomed to denounce each
+others' errors, will at length come to be regarded as members in common
+of one great and comprehensive Church, in which diversity of forms are
+harmonised by an all-pervading unity of spirit." And more to the same
+purpose. The soldier and reformer says, "I believe there may be error
+because there must be imperfection in the religious faith of the best
+among us; but that the degree of this error is not vital in any
+Christian denomination seems demonstrable by the best fruits of
+faith--good works--being evidenced by all."
+
+It is pleasant to see benign spirits divided in opinion, but harmonised
+by faith, thus standing hand in hand upon a shore of peace, and looking
+out together in serene hope for the dawning of a better day, instead of
+rushing forth, each with his own farthing candle, under pretence of
+illuminating the world--every one even more intent on putting out his
+neighbour's light than on guarding his own.
+
+   (Nov. 15. 1841.)
+
+
+While the idea of possible harmony in the universal Church of Christ (by
+which I mean all who accept His teaching and are glad to bear His name)
+is gaining ground theoretically, _practically_ it seems more and more
+distant; since 1841 (when the above was written) the divergence is
+greater than ever; and, as in politics, moderate opinions appear (since
+1848) to merge on either side into the extremes of ultra conservatism
+and ultra radicalism, as fear of the past or hope of the future
+predominate, so it is in the Church. The sort of dualism which prevails
+in politics and religion might give some colour to Lord Lindsay's theory
+of "progress through antagonism."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+10.
+
+I Incline to agree with those who think it a great mistake to consider
+the present conditions or conception of Christianity as complete and
+final: like the human soul to which it was fitted by Divine love and
+wisdom, it has an immeasurable capacity of development, and "The Lord
+hath more truth yet to break forth out of his Holy Word."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+11.
+
+The nations of the present age want not _less_ religion, but _more_.
+They do not wish for less community with the Apostolic times, but for
+more; but above all, they want their wounds healed by a Christianity
+showing a life-renewing vitality allied to reason and conscience, and
+ready and able to reform the social relations of life, beginning with
+the domestic and culminating with the political. They want no negations,
+but positive reconstruction--no conventionality, but an honest _bona
+fide_ foundation, deep as the human mind, and a structure free and
+organic as nature. In the meantime let no national form be urged as
+identical with divine truth, let no dogmatic formula oppress conscience
+and reason, and let no corporation of priests, no set of dogmatists, sow
+discord and hatred in the sacred communities of domestic and national
+life. This view cannot be obtained without national efforts, Christian
+education, free institutions, and social reforms. Then no zeal will be
+called Christian which is not hallowed by charity,--no faith Christian
+which is not sanctioned by reason."--_Hippolitus._
+
+"Any author who in our time treats theological and ecclesiastical
+subjects frankly, and therefore with reference to the problems of the
+age, must expect to be ignored, and if that cannot be done, abused and
+reviled."
+
+The same is true of moral subjects on which strong prejudices (or shall
+I say strong _convictions_?) exist in minds not very strong.
+
+It is not perhaps of so much consequence what we believe, as it is
+important that we believe; that we do not affect to believe, and so
+belie our own souls. Belief is _not_ always in our power, but truth is.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+12.
+
+It seems an arbitrary limitation of the design of Christianity to
+assume, as Priestley does, that "it consists solely in the revelation of
+a future life confirmed by the bodily resurrection of Christ." This is
+truly a very material view of Christianity. If I were to be sure of
+annihilation I should not be less certain of the truth of Christianity
+as a system of morals exquisitely adapted for the improvement and
+happiness of man as an individual; and equally adapted to conduce to the
+amelioration and progressive happiness of mankind as a species.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+NOTES FROM VARIOUS SERMONS,
+
+MADE ON THE SPOT;
+
+SHOWING SOME THINGS IN WHICH ALL GOOD MEN ARE AGREED.
+
+
+I.
+
+_From a Roman Catholic Sermon._
+
+
+When travelling in Ireland, I stayed over one Sunday in a certain town
+in the north, and rambled out early in the morning. It was cold and wet,
+the streets empty and quiet, but the sound of voices drew me in one
+direction, down a court where was a Roman Catholic chapel. It was so
+crowded that many of the congregation stood round the door. I remarked
+among them a number of soldiers and most miserable-looking women. All
+made way for me with true national courtesy, and I entered at the moment
+the priest was finishing mass, and about to begin his sermon. There was
+no pulpit, and he stood on the step of the altar; a fine-looking man,
+with a bright face, a sonorous voice, and a _very_ strong Irish accent.
+His text was from Matt. v. 43, 44.
+
+He began by explaining what Christ really meant by the words "Love thy
+neighbour." Then drew a picture in contrast of hatred and dissension,
+commencing with dissension in families, between kindred, and between
+husband and wife. Then made a most touching appeal in behalf of children
+brought up in an atmosphere of contention where no love is. "God help
+them! God pity them! small chance for them of being either good or
+happy! for their young hearts are saddened and soured with strife, and
+they eat their bread in bitterness!"
+
+Then he preached patience to the wives, indulgence to the husbands, and
+denounced scolds and quarrelsome women in a manner that seemed to glance
+at recent events: "When ye are found in the streets vilifying and
+slandering one another, ay, and fighting and tearing each other's hair,
+do ye think ye're women? no, ye're not! ye're devils incarnate, and
+ye'll go where the devils will be fit companions for ye!" &c. (Here some
+women near me, with long black hair streaming down, fell upon their
+knees, sobbing with contrition.) He then went on, in the same strain of
+homely eloquence, to the evils of political and religious hatred, and
+quoted the text, "If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live
+peaceably with all men." "I'm a Catholic," he went on, "and I believe in
+the truth of my own religion above all others. I'm convinced, by long
+study and observation, it's the best that is; but what then? Do ye think
+I hate my neighbour because he thinks differently? Do ye think I _mane_
+to force my religion down other people's throats? If I were to preach
+such uncharity to ye, my people, you wouldn't listen to me, ye oughtn't
+to listen to me. Did Jesus Christ force His religion down other people's
+throats? Not He! He endured all, He was kind to all, even to the wicked
+Jews that afterwards crucified Him." "If you say you can't love your
+neighbour because he's your enemy, and has injured you, what does that
+mane? '_ye can't! ye can't!_' as if that excuse will serve God? hav'n't
+ye done more and worse against Him? and didn't He send His only Son into
+the world to redeem ye? My good people, you're all sprung from one
+stock, all sons of Adam, all related to one another. When God created
+Eve, mightn't He have made her out of any thing, a stock or a stone, or
+out of nothing at all, at all? but He took one of Adam's ribs and
+moulded her out of that, and gave her to him, just to show that we're
+all from one original, all related together, men and women, Catholics
+and Protestants, Jews and Turks and Christians; all bone of one bone,
+and flesh of one flesh!" He then insisted and demonstrated that all the
+miseries of life, all the sorrows and mistakes of men, women, and
+children; and, in particular, all the disasters of Ireland, the bankrupt
+landlords, the religious dissensions, the fights domestic and political,
+the rich without thought for the poor, and the poor without food or
+work, all arose from nothing but the want of love. "Down on your knees,"
+he exclaimed, "and ask God's mercy and pardon; and as ye hope to find
+it, ask pardon one of another for every angry word ye have spoken, for
+every uncharitable thought that has come into your minds; and if any man
+or woman have aught against his neighbour, no matter what, let it be
+plucked out of his heart before he laves this place, let it be forgotten
+at the door of this chapel. Let me, your pastor, have no more rason to
+be ashamed of you; as if I were set over wild bastes, instead of
+Christian men and women!"
+
+After more in this fervid strain, which I cannot recollect, he gave his
+blessing in the same earnest heartfelt manner. I never saw a
+congregation more attentive, more reverent, and apparently more touched
+and edified. (1848.)
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+II.
+
+_From another Roman Catholic Sermon, delivered in the private chapel of
+a Nobleman._
+
+This Discourse was preached on the festival of St. John the Baptist, and
+was a summary of his doctrine, life, and character. The text was taken
+from St. Luke, iii. 9. to 14.; in which St. John answers the question of
+the people, "what shall we do then?" by a brief exposition of their
+several duties.
+
+"What is most remarkable in all this," said the priest, "is truly that
+there is nothing very remarkable in it. The Baptist required from his
+hearers very simple and very familiar duties,--such as he was not the
+first to preach, such as had been recognised as duties by all religions;
+and do you think that those who were neither Jews nor Christians were
+therefore left without any religion? No! never did God leave any of his
+creatures without religion; they could not utter the words _right_,
+_wrong_,--_beautiful_, _hateful_, without recognising a religion written
+by God on their hearts from the beginning--a religion which existed
+before the preaching of John, before the coming of Christ, and of which
+the appearance of John and the doctrine and sacrifice of Christ, were
+but the fulfilment. For Christ came to _fulfil_ the law, not to destroy
+it. Do you ask what law? Not the law of Moses, but the universal law of
+God's moral truth written in our hearts. It is, my friends, a folly to
+talk of _natural_ religion as of something different from _revealed_
+religion.
+
+"The great proof of the truth of John's mission lies in its
+comprehensiveness: men and women, artisans and soldiers, the rich and
+the poor, the young and the old, gathered to him in the wilderness; and
+he included all in his teaching, for he was sent to all; and the best
+proof of the truth of his teaching lies in its harmony with that law
+already written in the heart and the conscience of men. When Christ came
+afterwards, he preached a doctrine more sublime, with a more
+authoritative voice; but here, also, the best proof we have of the truth
+of that divine teaching lies in this--that he had prepared from the
+beginning the heart and the conscience of man to harmonise with it."
+
+
+This was a very curious sermon; quiet, elegant, and learned, with a good
+deal of sacred and profane history introduced in illustration, which I
+am sorry I cannot remember in detail. It made, however, no appeal to
+feeling or to practice; and after listening to it, we all went in to
+luncheon and discussed our newspapers.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+III.
+
+_Fragments of a Sermon (Anglican Church)._
+
+Text, Luke iv., from the 14th to the 18th, but more especially the 18th
+verse. This sermon was extempore.
+
+
+The preacher began by observing, that our Lord's sermon at Nazareth
+established the second of two principles. By his sermon from the Mount,
+in which he had addressed the multitude in the open air, under the vault
+of the blue heaven alone, he has left to us the principle that all
+places are fitted for the service of God, and that all places may be
+sanctified by the preaching of his truth. While, by his sermon in the
+Synagogue (that which is recorded by St. Luke in this passage), he has
+established the principle, that it is right to set apart a place to
+assemble together in worship and to listen to instruction; and it is
+observable that on this occasion our Saviour taught in the synagogue,
+where there was no sacrifice, no ministry of the priests, as in the
+Temple; but where a portion of the law and the prophets might be read by
+any man; and any man, even a stranger (as he was himself), might be
+called upon to expound.
+
+Then reading impressively the whole of the narrative down to the 32nd
+verse, the preacher closed the sacred volume, and went on to this
+effect:--
+
+"There are two orders of evil in the world--Sin and Crime. Of the second,
+the world takes strict cognisance; of the first, it takes comparatively
+little; yet _that_ is worse in the eyes of God. There are two orders of
+temptation: the temptation which assails our lower nature--our appetites;
+the temptation which assails our higher nature--our intellect. The
+_first_, leading to sin in the body, is punished in the body,--the
+consequence being pain, disease, death. The _second_, leading to sins of
+the soul, as pride chiefly, uncharitableness, selfish sacrifice of
+others to our own interests or purposes,--is punished in the soul--in the
+Hell of the Spirit."
+
+(All this part of his discourse very beautiful, earnest, eloquent; but I
+regretted that he did not follow out the distinction he began with
+between _sin_ and _crime_, and the views and deductions, religious and
+moral, which that distinction leads to.)
+
+He continued to this effect: "Christ said that it was a part of his
+mission to heal the broken-hearted. What is meant by the phrase 'a
+broken heart?'" He illustrated it by the story of Eli, and by the wife
+of Phineas, both of whom died broken in heart; "and our Saviour himself
+died on the cross heart-broken by sorrow rather than by physical
+torture."--
+
+(I lost something here because I was questioning and doubting within
+myself, for I have always had the thought that Christ must have been
+_glad_ to die.)
+
+He went on:--"To heal the broken-hearted is to say to those who are beset
+by the remembrance and the misery of sin, 'My brother, the past is
+past--think not of it to thy perdition; arise and sin no more.'" (All
+this, and more to the same purpose, wonderfully beautiful! and I became
+all soul--subdued to listen.) "There are two ways of meeting the pressure
+of misery and heart-break: first, by trusting to time" (then followed a
+quotation from Schiller's "Wallenstein," in reference to grief, which
+sounded strange, and yet beautiful, from the pulpit, "Was verschmerzte
+nicht der Mensch?"--what cannot man grieve down?); "secondly, by defiance
+and resistance, setting oneself resolutely to endure. But Christ taught
+a different way from either--by _submission_--by the complete surrender of
+our whole being to the will of God.
+
+"The next part of Christ's mission was to preach deliverance to the
+captives." (Then followed a most eloquent and beautiful exposition of
+Christian freedom--of who were free; and who were not free, but properly
+spiritual captives.) "To be content within limitations is freedom; to
+desire beyond those limitations is bondage. The bird which is content
+within her cage is free; the bird which can fly from tree to tree, yet
+desires to soar like the eagle,--the eagle which can ascend to the
+mountain peak yet desires to reach the height of that sun on which his
+eye is fixed,--these are in bondage. The man who is not content within
+his sphere of duties and powers, but feels his faculties, his position,
+his profession; a perpetual trammel,--_he_ is spiritually in bondage. The
+only freedom is the freedom of the soul, content within its external
+limitations, and yet elevated spiritually far above them by the inward
+powers and impulses which lift it up to God."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+IV.
+
+_Recollections of another Church of England Sermon preached extempore._
+
+The text was taken from Matt. xii. 42.: "The Queen of the South shall
+rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it," &c.
+
+
+The preacher began by drawing that distinction between knowledge and
+wisdom which so many comprehend and allow, and so few apply. He then
+described the two parties in the great question of popular education.
+Those who would base all human progress on secular instruction, on
+knowledge in contradistinction to ignorance, as on light opposed to
+darkness;--and the mistake of those who, taking the contrary extreme,
+denounce all secular instruction imparted to the poor as dangerous, or
+contemn it as useless. The error of those who sneer at the triumph of
+intellect he termed a species of idiocy; and the error of those who do
+not see the insufficiency of knowledge, blind presumption. Then he
+contrasted worldly wisdom and spiritual; with a flow of gorgeous
+eloquence he enlarged on the picture of worldly wisdom as exhibited in
+the character of Solomon, and of intellect, and admiration for
+intellect, in the character of the Queen of Sheba. "In what consisted
+the wisdom of Solomon? He made, as the sacred history assures us, three
+thousand proverbs, mostly prudential maxims relating to conduct in life;
+the use and abuse of riches; prosperity and adversity. His acquirements
+in natural philosophy seem to have been confined to the appearances of
+material and visible things; the herbs and trees, the beasts and birds,
+the creeping things and fishes. His political wisdom consisted in
+increasing his wealth, his dominions, and the number of his subjects and
+cities. On his temple he lavished all that art had then accomplished,
+and on his own house a world of riches in gold, and silver, and precious
+things: but all was done for his own glory--nothing for the improvement
+or the happiness of his people, who were ground down by taxes, suffered
+in the midst of all his magnificence, and remained ignorant in spite of
+all his knowledge. Witness the wars, tyrannies, miseries, delusions, and
+idolatries which followed after his death."
+
+"But the Queen of Sheba came not from the uttermost parts of the earth
+to view the magnificence and wonder at the greatness of the King, she
+came to hear his wisdom. She came not to ask anything from him, but to
+prove him with hard questions. No idea of worldly gain, or selfish
+ambition was in her thoughts; she paid even for the pleasure of hearing
+his wise sayings by rare and costly gifts."
+
+"Knowledge is power; but he who worships knowledge not for its own sake,
+but for the power it brings, worships power. Knowledge is riches; but he
+who worships knowledge for the sake of all it bestows, worships riches.
+The Queen of Sheba worshipped knowledge solely for its own sake; and the
+truths which she sought from the lips of Solomon she sought for truth's
+sake. She gave, all she could give, in return, the spicy products of her
+own land, treasures of pure gold, and blessings warm from her heart. The
+man who makes a voyage to the antipodes only to behold the constellation
+of the Southern Cross, the man who sails to the North to see how the
+magnet trembles and varies, these love knowledge for its own sake, and
+are impelled by the same enthusiasm as the Queen of Sheba." He went on
+to analyse the character of Solomon, and did not treat him, I thought,
+with much reverence either as sage or prophet. He remarked that, "of the
+thousand songs of Solomon one only survives, and that both in this song
+and in his proverbs his meaning has often been mistaken; it is supposed
+to be spiritual, and is interpreted symbolically, when in fact the
+plain, obvious, material significance is the true one."
+
+He continued to this effect,--but with a power of language and
+illustration which I cannot render. "We see in Solomon's own description
+of his dominion, his glory, his wealth, his fame, what his boasted
+wisdom achieved; what it could, and what it could not do for him. What
+was the end of all his magnificence? of his worship of the beautiful? of
+his intellectual triumphs? of his political subtlety? of his ships, and
+his commerce, and his chariots, and his horses, and his fame which
+reached to the ends of the earth? All--as it is related--ended in
+feebleness, in scepticism, in disbelief of happiness, in sensualism,
+idolatry, and dotage! The whole 'Book of Ecclesiastes,' fine as it is,
+presents a picture of selfishness and epicurism. This was the King of
+the Jews! the King of those that know! (_Il maestro di color chi
+sanno._) Solomon is a type of worldly wisdom, of desire of knowledge for
+the sake of all that knowledge can give. We imitate him when we would
+base the happiness of a people on knowledge. When we have commanded the
+sun to be our painter, and the lightning to run on our errands, what
+reward have we? Not the increase of happiness, nor the increase of
+goodness; nor--what is next to both--our faith in both."
+
+"It would seem profane to contrast Solomon and Christ had not our
+Saviour himself placed that contrast distinctly before us. He
+consecrated the comparison by applying it--'Behold a greater than Solomon
+is here.' In quoting these words we do not presume to bring into
+comparison the two _natures_, but the two intellects--the two aspects of
+truth. Solomon described the external world; Christ taught the moral
+law. Solomon illustrated the aspects of nature; Christ helped the
+aspirations of the spirit. Solomon left as a legacy the saying that 'in
+much wisdom there is much grief;' and Christ preached to us the lowly
+wisdom which can consecrate grief; making it lead to the elevation of
+our whole being and to ultimate happiness. The two majesties--the two
+kings--how different! Not till we are old, and have suffered, and have
+laid our experience to heart, do we feel the immeasurable distance
+between the teaching of Christ and the teaching of Solomon!"
+
+Then returning to the Queen of Sheba, he treated the character as the
+type of the intellectual woman. He contrasted her rather favourably with
+Solomon. He described with picturesque felicity, her long and toilsome
+journey to see, to admire, the man whose wisdom had made him
+renowned;--the mixture of enthusiasm and humility which prompted her
+desire to learn, to prove the truth of what rumour had conveyed to her,
+to commune with him of all that was in her heart. And she returned to
+her own country rich in wise sayings. But did the final result of all
+this glory and knowledge reach her there? and did it shake her faith in
+him she had bowed to as the wisest of kings and men?
+
+He then contrasted the character of the Queen of Sheba with that of
+Mary, the mother of our Lord, that feminine type of holiness, of
+tenderness, of long-suffering; of sinless purity in womanhood, wifehood,
+and motherhood: and rising to more than usual eloquence and power, he
+prophesied the regeneration of all human communities through the social
+elevation, the intellect, the purity, and the devotion of Woman.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+V.
+
+_From a Sermon (apparently extempore) by a Dissenting Minister._
+
+
+The ascetics of the old times seem to have had a belief that all sin was
+in the body; that the spirit belonged to God, and the body to his
+adversary the devil; and that to contemn, ill-treat, and degrade by
+every means this frame of ours, so wonderfully, so fearfully, so
+exquisitely made, was to please the Being who made it; and who, for
+gracious ends, no doubt, rendered it capable of such admirable
+development of strength and beauty. Miserable mistake!
+
+To some, this body is as a prison from which we are to rejoice to escape
+by any permitted means: to others, it is as a palace to be luxuriously
+kept up and decorated within and without. But what says Paul (Cor. vi.
+19.),--"Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit which
+is in you, which ye have from God, and which is not your own?"
+
+Surely not less than a temple is that form which the Divine Redeemer
+took upon him, and deigned, for a season, to inhabit; which he
+consecrated by his life, sanctified by his death, glorified by his
+transfiguration, hallowed and beautified by his resurrection!
+
+It is because they do not recognise _this_ body as a temple, built up by
+God's intelligence, as a fitting sanctuary for the immortal Spirit, and
+_this_ life equally with any other form of life as dedicate to Him, that
+men fall into such opposite extremes of sin:--the spiritual sin which
+contemns the body, and the sensual sin which misuses it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+When I was at Boston I made the acquaintance of Father Taylor, the
+founder of the Sailors' Home in that city. He was considered as the
+apostle of the seamen, and I was full of veneration for him as the
+enthusiastic teacher and philanthropist. But it is not of his virtues or
+his labours that I wish to speak. He struck me in another way, _as a
+poet_; he was a born poet. Until he was five-and-twenty he had never
+learned to read, and his reading afterwards was confined to such books
+as aided him in his ministry. He remained an illiterate man to the last,
+but his mind was teeming with spontaneous imagery, allusion, metaphor.
+One might almost say of him,
+
+             "He could not ope
+   His mouth, but out there flew a trope!"
+
+These images and allusions had a freshness, an originality, and
+sometimes an oddity that was quite startling, and they were generally,
+but not always, borrowed from his former profession--that of a sailor.
+
+
+One day we met him in the street. He told us in a melancholy voice that
+he had been burying a child, and alluded almost with emotion to the
+great number of infants he had buried lately. Then after a pause,
+striking his stick on the ground and looking upwards, he added, "There
+must be something wrong somewhere! there's a storm brewing, when the
+doves are all flying aloft!"
+
+
+One evening in conversation with me, he compared the English and the
+Americans to Jacob's vine, which, planted on one side of the wall, grew
+over it and hung its boughs and clusters on the other side,--"but it is
+still the same vine, nourished from the same root!"
+
+
+On one occasion when I attended his chapel, the sermon was preceded by a
+long prayer in behalf of an afflicted family, one of whose members had
+died or been lost in a whaling expedition to the South Seas. In the
+midst of much that was exquisitely pathetic and poetical, refined ears
+were startled by such a sentence as this,--"Grant, O Lord! that this rod
+of chastisement be sanctified, every twig of it, to the edification of
+their souls!"
+
+
+Then immediately afterwards he prayed that the Divine Comforter might be
+near the bereaved father "when his aged heart went forth from his bosom
+to flutter round the far southern grave of his boy!" Praying for others
+of the same family who were on the wide ocean, he exclaimed, stretching
+forth his arms, "O save them! O guard them! thou angel of the deep!"
+
+
+On another occasion, speaking of the insufficiency of the moral
+principles without religious feelings, he exclaimed, "Go heat your ovens
+with snowballs! What! shall I send you to heaven with such an icicle in
+your pocket? I might as well put a millstone round your neck to teach
+you to swim!"
+
+
+He was preaching against violence and cruelty:--"Don't talk to me," said
+he, "of the savages! a ruffian in the midst of Christendom is the savage
+of savages. He is as a man freezing in the sun's heat, groping in the
+sun's light, a straggler in paradise, an alien in heaven!"
+
+In his chapel all the principal seats in front of the pulpit and down
+the centre aisle were filled by the sailors. We ladies, and gentlemen,
+and strangers, whom curiosity had brought to hear him, were ranged on
+each side; he would on no account allow us to take the best places. On
+one occasion, as he was denouncing hypocrisy, luxury, and vanity, and
+other vices of more civilised life, he said emphatically, "I don't mean
+_you_ before me here," looking at the sailors; "I believe you are wicked
+enough, but honest fellows in some sort, for you profess less, not more,
+than you practise; but I mean to touch _starboard_ and _larboard_
+there!" stretching out both hands with the forefinger extended, and
+looking at us on either side till we quailed.
+
+
+He compared the love of God in sending Christ upon earth to that of the
+father of a seaman who sends his eldest and most beloved son, the hope
+of the family, to bring back the younger one, lost on his voyage, and
+missing when his ship returned to port.
+
+
+Alluding to the carelessness of Christians, he used the figure of a
+mariner, steering into port through a narrow dangerous channel, "false
+lights here, rocks there, shifting sand banks on one side, breakers on
+the other; and who, instead of fixing his attention to keep the head of
+his vessel right, and to obey the instructions of the pilot as he sings
+out from the wheel, throws the pilot overboard, lashes down the helm,
+and walks the deck whistling, with his hands in the pockets of his
+jacket." Here, suiting the action to the word, he put on a true
+sailor-like look of defiant jollity;--changed in a moment to an
+expression of horror as he added, "See! See! she drifts to destruction!"
+
+
+One Sunday he attempted to give to his sailor congregation an idea of
+Redemption. He began with an eloquent description of a terrific storm at
+sea, rising to fury through all its gradations; then, amid the waves, a
+vessel is seen labouring in distress and driving on a lee shore. The
+masts bend and break, and go overboard; the sails are rent, the helm
+unshipped, they spring a leak! the vessel begins to fill, the water
+gains on them; she sinks deeper, deeper, _deeper! deeper!_ He bent over
+the pulpit repeating the last words again and again; his voice became
+low and hollow. The faces of the sailors as they gazed up at him with
+their mouths wide open, and their eyes fixed, I shall never forget.
+Suddenly stopping, and looking to the farthest end of the chapel as into
+space, he exclaimed, with a piercing cry of exultation, "A life boat! a
+life boat!" Then looking down upon his congregation, most of whom had
+sprung to their feet in an ecstasy of suspense, he said in a deep
+impressive tone, and extending his arms, "_Christ is that life boat!_"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+VII.
+
+RELIGION AND SCIENCE.
+
+
+"It is true, that science has not made Nature as expressive of God in
+the first instance, or to the beginner in religion, as it was in earlier
+times. Science reveals a rigid, immutable order; and this to common
+minds looks much like self-subsistence, and does not manifest
+intelligence, which is full of life, variety, and progressive operation.
+Men, in the days of their ignorance, saw an immediate Divinity
+accomplishing an immediate purpose, or expressing an immediate feeling,
+in every sudden, striking change of nature--in a storm, the flight of a
+bird, &c.; and Nature, thus interpreted, became the sign of a present,
+deeply interested Deity. Science undoubtedly brings vast aids, but it is
+to _prepared_ minds, to those who have begun in another school. The
+greatest aid it yields consists in the revelation it makes of the
+Infinite. It aids us not so much by showing us marks of design in this
+or that particular thing as by showing the _Infinite_ in the _finite_.
+Science does this office when it unfolds to us the unity of the
+universe, which thus becomes the sign, the efflux of one unbounded
+intelligence, when it reveals to us in every work of Nature infinite
+connections, the influences of all-pervading laws--when it shows us in
+each created thing unfathomable, unsearchable depths, to which our
+intelligence is altogether unequal. Thus Nature explored by science is a
+witness of the Infinite. It is also a witness to the same truth by its
+beauty; for what is so undefined, so mysterious as beauty?"--_Dr.
+Channing._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+PART II.
+
+Literature and Art.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Notes from Books.
+
+
+1.
+
+"A great advantage is derived from the occasional practice of reading
+together, for each person selects different beauties and starts
+different objections: while the same passage perhaps awakens in each
+mind a different train of associated ideas, or raises different images
+for the purposes of illustration."--_Francis Horner._
+
+
+2.
+
+"C'est ainsi que je poursuis la communication de quelque esprit fameux,
+non afin qu'il m'enseigne mais afin que je le connaisse, et que le
+connaissant, s'il le faut, je l'imite."--_Montaigne._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+DR. ARNOLD.
+
+3.
+
+I sat up till half-past two this morning reading Dr. Arnold's "Life and
+Letters," and have my soul full of him to-day.
+
+On the whole I cannot say that the perusal of this admirable book has
+changed any notion in my mind, or added greatly to my stock of ideas.
+There was no height of inspiration, or eloquence, or power, to which I
+looked _up_; no profound depth of thought or feeling into which I looked
+_down_; no _new_ lights; no _new_ guides; no absolutely _new_ aspects of
+things human or spiritual.
+
+On the other hand, I never read a book of the kind with a more
+harmonious sense of pleasure and _approbation_,--if the word be not from
+me presumptuous. While I read page after page, the mind which was
+unfolded before me seemed to me a brother's mind--the spirit, a kindred
+spirit. It was the improved, the elevated, the enlarged, the enriched,
+the every-way superior reflection of my own intelligence, but it was
+certainly _that_. I felt it so from beginning to end. Exactly the
+reverse was the feeling with which I laid down the Life and Letters of
+Southey. I was instructed, amused, interested; I profited and admired;
+but with the _man_ Southey I had no sympathies: my mind stood off from
+his; the poetical intellect attracted, the material of the character
+repelled me. I liked the embroidery, but the texture was disagreeable,
+repugnant. Now with regard to Dr. Arnold, my entire sympathy with the
+character, with the _material_ of the character, did not extend to all
+its manifestations. I liked the texture better than the
+embroidery;--perhaps, because of my feminine organisation.
+
+Nor did my admiration of the intellect extend to the acceptance of _all_
+the opinions which emanated from it; perhaps because from the manner
+these were enunciated, or merely touched upon (in letters chiefly), I
+did not comprehend clearly the reasoning on which they may have been
+founded. Perhaps, if I had done so, I must have respected them more,
+perhaps have been convinced by them; so large, so candid, so rich in
+knowledge, and apparently so logical, was the mind which admitted them.
+
+And yet this excellent, admirable man, seems to have _feared_ God, in
+the common-place sense of the word fear. He considered the Jews as out
+of the pale of equality; he was against their political emancipation
+from a hatred of Judaism. He subscribed to the Athanasian Creed, which
+stuck even in George the Third's orthodox throat. He believed in what
+Coleridge could not admit, in the existence of the spirit of evil as a
+person. He had an idea that the Church _of God_ may be destroyed by an
+Antichrist; he speaks of such a consummation as possible, as probable,
+as impending; as if any institution really from God could be destroyed
+by an adverse power!--and he thought that a lawyer could not be a
+Christian.
+
+
+4.
+
+Certain passages filled me with astonishment as coming from a churchman,
+particularly what he says of the sacraments (vol. ii. pp. 75. 113.); and
+in another place, where he speaks of "the _pestilent_ distinction
+between clergy and laity;" and where he says, "I hold that one form of
+Church government is exactly as much according to Christ's will as
+another." And in another place he speaks of the Anglican Church (with
+reference to Henry VIII. as its father, and Elizabeth as its
+foster-mother), as "the child of regal and aristocratical selfishness
+and unprincipled tyranny, who has never dared to speak boldly to the
+great, but has contented herself with lecturing the poor;" but he forgot
+at the moment the trial of the bishops in James's time, and their noble
+stand against regal authority.
+
+
+5.
+
+With regard to conservatism (vol. ii. pp. 19. 62.), he seems to mean--as
+I understand the whole passage,--that it is a good _instinct_ but a bad
+_principle_. Yet as a principle is it, as he says, "always wrong?"
+Though as the adversary of progress, it must be always wrong, yet as the
+adversary of change it _may_ be sometimes right.
+
+
+6.
+
+He remarks that most of those who are above sectarianism are in general
+indifferent to Christianity, while almost all who profess to value
+Christianity seem, when they are brought to the test, to care only for
+their own sect. "Now," he adds, "it is manifest to me, that all our
+education must be Christian, and not be sectarian." Yet the whole aim of
+education up to this time has been, in this country, eminently
+sectarian, and every statesman who has attempted to place it on a
+broader basis has been either wrecked or stranded.
+
+"All sects," he says in another place, "have had among them marks of
+Christ's Catholic Church in the graces of his Spirit and the confession
+of his name," and he seems to wish that some one would compile a book
+showing side by side what professors of all sects have done for the good
+of Christ's Church,--the martyrdoms, the missionary labours of
+Catholics, Protestants, Arians, &c.; "a grand field," he calls it,--and
+so it were; but it lies fallow up to this time.
+
+
+7.
+
+"the philosophy of medicine, I imagine, is at zero; our practice is
+empirical, and seems hardly more than a course of guessing, more or less
+happy." In another place (vol. ii. p. 72.), he says, "yet I honour
+medicine as the most beneficent of all professions."
+
+
+8.
+
+He says (vol. ii. p. 42.), "Narrow-mindedness tends to wickedness,
+because it does not extend its watchfulness to every part of our moral
+nature." "Thus, a man may have one or more virtues, such as are
+according to his favourite ideas, in great perfection; and still be
+nothing, because these ideas are his idols, and, worshipping them with
+all his heart, there is a portion of his heart, more or less
+considerable, left without its proper object, guide, and nourishment;
+and so this portion is left to the dominion of evil," &c.
+
+(One might ask _how_, if a man worship these ideas with _all_ his heart,
+a portion could be left? but the sense is so excellent, I cannot quarrel
+with a slight inaccuracy in the expression. I never quite understood
+before why it is difficult to subscribe to the truth of the phrase "He
+is a good but a narrow-minded man," but _felt_ the incompatibility.)
+
+
+9.
+
+He says "the word _useful_ implies the idea of good robbed of its
+nobleness." Is this true? the _useful_ is the _good_ applied to
+practical purposes; it need not, therefore, be less noble. The nobleness
+lies in the spirit in which it is so applied.
+
+
+10.
+
+Benthamism (what _is_ it?), Puritanism, Judaism, how he hates them! I
+suppose, because he _fears_ God and _fears_ for the Church of God.
+Hatred of all kinds seems to originate in fear.
+
+
+11.
+
+What he says of conscience, very remarkable!
+
+"Men get embarrassed by the common cases of a misguided conscience: but
+a compass may be out of order as well as a conscience; and you can trace
+the deranging influence on the latter quite as surely as on the former.
+The needle may point due south if you hold a powerful magnet in that
+direction; still the compass, generally speaking, is a true and sure
+guide," &c.; and then he adds, "he who believes his conscience to be
+God's law, by obeying it obeys God."
+
+I think there would be much to say about all this passage relating to
+conscience, nor am I sure that I quite understand it. Derangement of the
+intellect is madness; is not derangement of the conscience also madness?
+might it not be induced, as we bring on a morbid state of the other
+faculties, by over use and abuse? by giving it more than its due share
+of power in the commonwealth of the mind? It should preside, not
+tyrannise; rule, not exercise a petty cramping despotism. A healthy
+courageous conscience gives to the powers, instincts, impulses, fair
+play; and having once settled the order of government with a strong
+hand, is not always meddling though always watchful.
+
+Then again, how is conscience "God's law?" Conscience is not the law,
+but the interpreter of the law; it does not teach the difference between
+right and wrong, it only impels us to do what we believe to be right,
+and smites us when we _think_ we have been wrong. How is it that many
+have done wrong, and every day do wrong for conscience' sake?--and does
+that sanctify the wrong in the eyes of God, as well as in those of John
+Huss?[1]
+
+
+12.
+
+"Prayer," he says, "and kindly intercourse with the poor, are the two
+great safeguards of spiritual life--its more than food and raiment."
+
+True; but there is something higher than this fed and clothed spiritual
+life; something more difficult, yet less conscious.
+
+
+13.
+
+In allusion to Coleridge, he says very truly, that the power of
+contemplation becomes diseased and perverted when it is the main
+employment of life. But to the same great intellect he does beautiful
+justice in another passage. "Coleridge seemed to me to love truth
+really, and, therefore, truth presented herself to him, not negatively,
+as she does to many minds, who can see that the objections against her
+are unfounded, and therefore that she is to be received; but she filled
+him, as it were, heart and mind, imbuing him with her very self, so that
+all his being comprehended her fully, and loved her ardently; and that
+seems to me to be true wisdom."
+
+
+14.
+
+Very fine is a passage wherein he speaks against meeting what is wrong
+and bad with negatives, with merely proving the wrong to be wrong, and
+the false to be false, without substituting for either the positively
+good and true.
+
+
+15.
+
+He contrasts as the two forms of the present danger to the Church and to
+society, the prevalent epicurean atheism, and the lying and formal
+spirit of priestcraft. He seems to have had an impression that the
+Church of God may be "utterly destroyed"(?), or, he asks, "must we look
+forward for centuries to come to the mere alternations of infidelity and
+superstition, scepticism, and Newmanism?" It is very curious to see two
+such men as Arnold and Carlyle both overwhelmed with a terror of the
+magnitude of the mischiefs they see impending over us. They are
+oppressed with the anticipation of evil as with a sense of personal
+calamity. Something alike, perhaps, in the temperaments of these two
+extraordinary men;--large conscientiousness, large destructiveness, and
+small hope: there was great mutual sympathy and admiration.
+
+
+16.
+
+Very admirable what he says in favour of comprehensive reading, against
+exclusive reading in one line of study. He says, "Preserve proportion in
+your reading, keep your view of men and things extensive, and depend
+upon it a mixed knowledge is not a superficial one; as far as it goes
+the views that it gives are true; but he who reads deeply in one class
+of writers only, gets views which are almost sure to be perverted, and
+which are not only _narrow but false_."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+17.
+
+All his descriptions of natural scenery and beauty show his intense
+sensibility to them, but nowhere is there a trace of the love or the
+comprehension of art, as the reflection from the mind of man of the
+nature and the beauty he so loved. Thus, after dwelling on a scene of
+exquisite natural beauty, he says, "Much more beautiful, because made
+truly after God's own image, are the forms and colours of kind, and
+wise, and holy thoughts, words, and actions;" that is to say--although he
+knew not or made not the application--ART, in the high sense of the word,
+for that is the embodying in beautiful hues and forms, what is kind,
+wise, and holy; in one word--_good_. In fact, he says himself, art,
+physical science, and natural history, were not included within the
+reach of his mind; the first for want of taste, the second for want of
+time, and the third for want of inclination.
+
+
+18.
+
+He says, "The whole subject of the brute creation is to me one of such
+painful mystery, that I dare not approach it." This is very striking
+from such a man. How deep, consciously or unconsciously, does this
+feeling lie in many minds!
+
+Bayle had already termed the acts, motives, and feelings of the lower
+order of animals, "un des plus profonds abimes sur quoi notre raison
+peut s'exerciser."
+
+There is nothing, as I have sometimes thought, in which men so blindly
+sin as in their appreciation and treatment of the whole lower order of
+creatures. It is affirmed that love and mercy towards animals are not
+inculcated by any direct precept of Christianity, but surely they are
+included in its spirit; yet it has been remarked that cruelty towards
+animals is far more common in Western Christendom than in the East. With
+the Mahometan and Brahminical races humanity to animals, and the
+sacredness of life in all its forms, is much more of a religious
+principle than among ourselves.
+
+Bacon, in his "Advancement of Learning," does not think it beneath his
+philosophy to point out as a part of human morals, and a condition of
+human improvement, justice and mercy to the lower animals--"the extension
+of a noble and excellent principle of compassion to the creatures
+subject to man." "The Turks," he says, "though a cruel and sanguinary
+nation both in descent and discipline, give alms to brutes, and suffer
+them not to be tortured."
+
+It should seem as if the primitive Christians, by laying so much stress
+upon a future life in contradistinction to this life, and placing the
+lower creatures out of the pale of hope, placed them at the same time
+out of the pale of sympathy, and thus laid the foundation for this utter
+disregard of animals in the light of our fellow creatures. The
+definition of virtue among the early Christians was the same as
+Paley's--that it was good performed for the sake of ensuring everlasting
+happiness--which of course excluded all the so-called brute creatures.
+Kind, loving, submissive, conscientious, much enduring, we know them to
+be; but because we deprive them of all stake in the future, because they
+have no selfish calculated aim, these are not virtues; yet if we say "a
+_vicious_ horse," why not say a _virtuous_ horse?
+
+The following passage, bearing curiously enough on the most abstruse
+part of the question, I found in Hallam's Literature of the Middle
+Ages:--"Few," he says, "at present, who believe in the immateriality of
+the human soul, would deny the same to an elephant; but it must be owned
+that the discoveries of zoology have pushed this to consequences which
+some might not readily adopt. The spiritual being of a sponge revolts a
+little our prejudices; yet there is no resting-place, and we must admit
+this, or be content to sink ourselves into a mass of medullary fibre.
+Brutes have been as slowly emancipated in philosophy as some classes of
+mankind have been in civil polity; their souls, we see, were almost
+universally disputed to them at the end of the seventeenth century, even
+by those who did not absolutely bring them down to machinery. Even
+within the recollection of many, it was common to deny them any kind of
+reasoning faculty, and to solve their most sagacious actions by the
+vague word instinct. We have come of late years to think better of our
+humble companions; and, as usual in similar cases, the preponderant bias
+seems rather too much of a levelling character."
+
+When natural philosophers speak of "the higher reason and more limited
+instincts of man," as compared with animals, do they mean savage man or
+cultivated man? In the savage man the instincts have a power, a range, a
+certitude, like those of animals. As the mental faculties become
+expanded and refined the instincts become subordinate. In tame animals
+are the instincts as strong as in wild animals? Can we not, by a process
+of training, substitute an entirely different set of motives and habits?
+
+Why, in managing animals, do men in general make brutes of themselves to
+address what is most _brute_ in the lower creature, as if it had not
+been demonstrated that in using our higher faculties, our reason and
+benevolence, we develop sympathetically higher powers in _them_, and in
+subduing them through what is best within us, raise them and bring them
+nearer to ourselves?
+
+In general the more we can gather of facts, the nearer we are to the
+elucidation of theoretic truth. But with regard to animals, the
+multiplication of facts only increases our difficulties and puts us to
+confusion.
+
+"Can we otherwise explain animal instincts than by supposing that the
+Deity himself is virtually the active and present moving principle
+within them? If we deny them _soul_, we must admit that they have some
+spirit direct from God, what we call _unerring_ instinct, which holds
+the place of it." This is the opinion which Newton adopts. Then are we
+to infer that the reason of man removes him further from God than the
+animals, since we cannot offend God in our instincts, only in our
+reason? and that the superiority of the human animal lies in the power
+of sinning? Terrible power! terrible privilege! out of which we deduce
+the law of progress and the necessity for a future life.
+
+The following passage bearing on the subject is from Bentham:--
+
+"The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those
+rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand
+of tyranny. It may come one day to be recognised that the number of
+legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the _os sacrum_,
+are reasons insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the caprice
+of a tormentor. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line?
+is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the faculty of discourse? But
+a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational as well
+as a more conversable animal than an infant of a day, a week, or even a
+month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The
+question is not, 'can they reason?' nor 'can they speak?' but 'can they
+suffer?'"
+
+I do not remember ever to have heard the kind and just treatment of
+animals enforced upon Christian principles or made the subject of a
+sermon.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+19.
+
+Once, when I was at Vienna, there was a dread of hydrophobia, and orders
+were given to massacre all the dogs which were found unclaimed or
+uncollared in the city or suburbs. Men were employed for this purpose,
+and they generally carried a short heavy stick, which they flung at the
+poor proscribed animal with such certain aim as either to kill or maim
+it mortally at one blow. It happened one day that, close to the edge of
+the river, near the Ferdinand's-Bruecke, one of these men flung his stick
+at a wretched dog, but with such bad aim that it fell into the river.
+The poor animal, following his instinct or his teaching, immediately
+plunged in, redeemed the stick, and laid it down at the feet of its
+owner, who, snatching it up, dashed out the creature's brains.
+
+I wonder what the Athenians would have done to such a man? they who
+banished the judge of the Areopagus because he flung away the bird which
+had sought shelter in his bosom?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+20.
+
+I return to Dr. Arnold. He laments the neglect of our cathedrals and the
+absurd confusion in so many men's minds "between what is really Popery,
+and what is but wisdom and beauty adopted by the Roman Catholics and
+neglected by us."
+
+
+21.
+
+He says, "Then, only, can opportunities of evil be taken from us, when
+we lose also all opportunity of doing or becoming good." An obvious,
+even common place thought, well and tersely expressed. The inextricable
+co-relation and apparent antagonism of good and evil were never more
+strongly put.
+
+
+22.
+
+The defeat of Varus by the Germans, and the defeat of the moors by
+Charles Martel, he ranked as the two most important battles in the
+history of the world. I see why. The first, because it decided whether
+the north of Europe was to be completely Latinised; the second, because
+it decided whether all Europe was to be completely Mahomedanised.
+
+
+23.
+
+"How can he who labours hard for his daily bread--hardly and with
+doubtful success--be made wise and good, and therefore how can he be made
+happy? This question undoubtedly the Church was meant to solve; for
+Christ's kingdom was to undo the evil of Adam's sin; but the Church has
+not solved it nor attempted to do so, and no one else has gone about it
+rightly. How shall the poor man find time to be educated?"
+
+This question, which "the Church has not yet solved," men have now set
+their wits to solve for themselves.
+
+
+24.
+
+When in Italy he writes:--"It is almost awful to look at the beauty which
+surrounds me and then think of moral evil. It seems as if heaven and
+hell, instead of being separated by a great gulf from us and from each
+other, were close at hand and on each other's confines."
+
+"Might but the sense of moral evil be as strong in me as is my delight
+in external beauty!"
+
+A prayer I echo, Amen! if by the _sense_ he mean the abhorrence of it;
+otherwise, to be perpetually haunted with the perception of moral evil
+were dreadful; yet, on the other hand, I am half ashamed sometimes of a
+conscious shrinking within myself from the sense of moral evil, merely
+as I should shrink from external filth and deformity, as hateful to
+perception and recollection, rather than as hateful to God and
+subversive of goodness.
+
+
+25.
+
+Here is a very striking passage. He says, "A great school is very
+trying; it never can present images of rest and peace; and when the
+spring and activity of youth are altogether unsanctified by anything
+pure and elevated in its desires, it becomes a spectacle that is
+dizzying and almost more morally distressing than the shouts and gambols
+of a set of lunatics. It is very startling to see so much of sin
+combined with so little of sorrow. In a parish, amongst the poor,
+whatever of sin exists there is sure also to be enough of suffering:
+poverty, sickness, and old age are mighty tamers and chastisers. But,
+with boys of the richer classes, one sees nothing but plenty, health,
+and youth; and these are really awful to behold, when one must feel that
+they are unblessed. On the other hand, few things are more beautiful
+than when one does see all holy and noble thoughts and principles, not
+the forced growth of pain, or infirmity, or privation, but springing up
+as by God's immediate planting, in a sort of garden of all that is fresh
+and beautiful; full of so much hope for this world as well as for
+heaven."
+
+To this testimony of a schoolmaster let us add the testimony of a
+schoolboy. De Quincey thus describes in himself the transition from
+boyhood to manhood: "Then first and suddenly were brought powerfully
+before me the change which was worked in the aspects of society by the
+presence of woman; woman, pure, thoughtful, noble, coming before me as
+Pandora crowned with perfections. Right over against this ennobling
+spectacle, with equal suddenness, I placed the odious spectacle of
+schoolboy society--no matter in what region of the earth,--schoolboy
+society, so frivolous in the matter of its disputes, often so brutal in
+the manner; so childish and yet so remote from simplicity; so foolishly
+careless, and yet so revoltingly selfish; dedicated ostensibly to
+learning, and yet beyond any section of human beings so conspicuously
+ignorant."
+
+There is a reverse to this picture, as I hope and believe. If I have met
+with those who looked back on their school-days with horror, as having
+first contaminated them with "evil communication," I have met with
+others whose remembrances were all of sunshine, of early friendships, of
+joyous sports.
+
+Nor do I think that a large school composed wholly of girls is in any
+respect better. In the low languid tone of mind, the petulant tempers,
+the small spitefulnesses, the cowardly concealments, the compressed or
+ill-directed energies, the precocious vanities and affectations, many
+such congregations of _Femmelettes_ would form a worthy pendant to the
+picture of boyish turbulence and vulgarity drawn by De Quincey.
+
+I am convinced from my own recollections, and from all I have learned
+from experienced teachers in large schools, that one of the most fatal
+mistakes in the training of children has been the too early separation
+of the sexes. I say, _has been_, because I find that everywhere this
+most dangerous prejudice has been giving way before the light of truth
+and a more general acquaintance with that primal law of nature, which
+ought to teach us that the more we can assimilate on a large scale the
+public to the domestic training, the better for all. There exists still,
+the impression--in the higher classes especially--that in early education,
+the mixture of the two sexes would tend to make the girls masculine and
+the boys effeminate, but experience shows us that it is all the other
+way. Boys learn a manly and protecting tenderness, and the girls become
+at once more feminine and more truthful. Where this association has
+begun early enough, that is, before five years old, and has been
+continued till about ten or twelve, it has uniformly worked well; on
+this point the evidence is unanimous and decisive. So long ago as 1812,
+Francis Horner, in describing a school he visited at Enmore, near
+Bridgewater, speaks with approbation of the boys and the girls standing
+up together in the same class: it is the first mention, I find, of this
+innovation on the old collegiate, or charity-school plan,--itself a
+continuation of the monkish discipline. He says, "I liked much the
+placing the boys and girls together at an early age; it gave the boys a
+new spur to emulation." When I have seen a class of girls stand up
+together, there has been a sort of empty tittering, a vacancy in the
+faces, an inertness, which made it, as I thought, very up-hill work for
+the teacher; so when it was a class of boys, there has been often a
+sluggishness--a tendency to ruffian tricks--requiring perpetual effort on
+the part of the master. In teaching a class of boys and girls,
+accustomed to stand up together, there is little or nothing of this.
+They are brighter, readier, better behaved; there is a kind of mutual
+influence working for good; and if there be emulation, it is not mingled
+with envy or jealousy. Mischief, such as might be apprehended, is in
+this case far less likely to arise than where boys and girls, habitually
+separated from infancy, are first thrown together, just at the age when
+the feelings are first awakened and the association has all the
+excitement of novelty. A very intelligent schoolmaster assured me that
+he had had more trouble with a class of fifty boys, than with a school
+of three hundred boys and girls together (in the midst of whom I found
+him); and that there were no inconveniences resulting which a wise and
+careful and efficient superintendence could not control. "There is,"
+said he, "not only more emulation, more quickness of brain, but
+altogether a superior healthiness of tone, body and mind, where the boys
+and girls are trained together till about ten years old; and it extends
+into their after life:--I should say because it is in accordance with the
+laws of God in forming us with mutual sympathies, moral and
+intellectual, and mutual dependence for help from the very beginning of
+life."
+
+What is curious enough, I find many people--fathers, mothers,
+teachers,--who are agreed that in the schools for the lower classes, the
+two sexes may be safely and advantageously associated, yet have a sort
+of horror of the idea of such an innovation in schools for the higher
+classes. One would like to know the reason for such a distinction,
+instead of being encountered, as is usual, by a sneer or a vile
+innuendo.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+NIEBUHR.
+
+LIFE AND LETTERS, 1852.
+
+26.
+
+In a letter to a young student in philology there are noble passages in
+which I truly sympathise. He says, among other things: "I wish you had
+less pleasure in satires, not excepting those of Horace. Turn to the
+works which elevate the heart, in which you contemplate great men and
+great events, and live in a higher world. Turn away from those which
+represent the mean and contemptible side of ordinary circumstances and
+degenerate days: they are not suitable for the young, who in ancient
+times would not have been suffered to have them in their hands. Homer,
+AEschylus, Sophocles, Pindar,--these are the poets for youth." And again:
+"Do not read the ancient authors in order to make aesthetic reflections
+on them, but in order to drink in their spirit and to fill your soul
+with their thoughts; and in order to gain that by reading which you
+would have gained by reverently listening to the discourses of great
+men."
+
+We should turn to works of art with the same feeling.
+
+On the whole, all my own educational experience has shown me the
+dangerous--in some cases fatal--effects on the childish intellect, where
+precocious criticism was encouraged, and where caricatures and ugly
+disproportioned figures, expressing vile or ridiculous emotions, were
+placed before the eyes of children, as a means of amusement.
+
+If I were a legislator I would forbid travesties and ridiculous
+burlesques of Shakspeare's finest and most serious dramas to be acted
+in our theatres. That this has been done and recently (as in the case of
+the Merchant of Venice) seems to me a national disgrace.
+
+
+27.
+
+It is strange, confounding, to hear Niebuhr speak thus of Goethe:--
+
+"I am inclined to think that Goethe is utterly destitute of
+susceptibility to impressions from the fine arts."(!!) He afterwards
+does more justice to Goethe--certainly one of the profoundest critics in
+art who ever lived; although I am inclined to think that his was an
+educated perception rather than a natural sensibility. Niebuhr's
+criticism on Goethe's Italian travels,--on Goethe's want of sympathy with
+the people,--his regarding the whole country and nation simply as a sort
+of bazaar of art and antiquities, an exhibition of beauty and a
+recreation for himself: his habit of surveying all moral and
+intellectual greatness, all that speaks to the heart, with a kind of
+patronising superiority, as if created for his use,--and finding
+amusement in the folly, degeneracy, and corruption of the people;--all
+this appears to me admirable, and so far I had strong sympathy with
+Niebuhr; for I well remember that in reading Goethe's "Italianische
+Reise," I had the same perception of the artless and the superficial in
+point of feeling, in the midst of so much that was fine and valuable in
+criticism. It is well to be artistic in art, but not to walk about the
+world _en artiste_, studying humanity, and the deepest human interests,
+as if they were _art_.
+
+Niebuhr afterwards says, in speaking of Rome, "I am sickened here of
+art, as I should be of sweetmeats instead of bread." So it _must_ be
+where art is separated wholly from morals.
+
+
+28.
+
+He speaks of the "wretched superstition," and the "utter incapacity for
+piety" in the people of the Roman States.
+
+Superstition and the want of piety go together; and the combination is
+not peculiar to the Italians, nor to the Roman Catholic faith.
+
+
+29.
+
+In speaking of the education of his son, he deprecates the learning by
+rote of hymns. "To a happy child, hymns deploring the misery of human
+life are without meaning." (And worse.) "So likewise to a good child are
+those expressing self-accusation and contrition." (He might have added,
+and self-applause.)
+
+I am quite sure, from my own experience of children who have been
+allowed to learn penitential psalms and hymns, that they think of
+wickedness as a sort of thing which gives them self-importance.
+
+
+30.
+
+"Only what the mind takes in willingly can it assimilate with itself,
+and make its own, part of its life."
+
+A truism of the greatest value in education; but who thinks of it when
+cramming children's minds with all sorts of distasteful heterogeneous
+things?
+
+
+31.
+
+"When reflection has become too one-sided and too domineering over a
+deeply feeling heart, it is apt to lead us into errors in our treatment
+of others."
+
+And all that follows--very wise! for the want of this reflection leaves
+us stranded and wrecked through feeling and perception merely.
+
+
+32.
+
+Very curious and interesting, as a trait of character and feeling, is
+the passage in which he represents himself, in the dangerous confinement
+of his second wife, as praying to his first wife for succour. "In my
+terrible anxiety," he says, "I prayed most earnestly, and entreated my
+Milly, too, for help. I comforted Gretchen by telling her that Milly
+would send help. When she was at the worst, she sighed out, 'Ah, cannot
+your Amelia send me a blessing?'"
+
+This is curious from a Protestant and a philosopher. It shows that there
+may be something nearly allied to our common nature in the Roman
+Catholic invocation to the saints, and to the souls of the dead.
+
+
+33.
+
+Niebuhr, speaking of a lady (Madame von der Recke, I think,--the "Elise"
+of Goethe) who had patronised him, says, "I will receive roses and
+myrtles from female hands, but no laurels."
+
+This makes one smile; for most of the laurels which Niebuhr will receive
+in this country will be through female hands--through the admirable
+translation and arrangement of his life and letters by Susanna
+Winkworth.
+
+
+34.
+
+The following I read with cordial agreement:--"While I am ready to adopt
+any well-grounded opinion" (regarding, I suppose, mere facts, or
+speculations as to things), "my inmost soul revolts against receiving
+the judgment of others respecting persons; and whenever I have done so I
+have bitterly repented of it."
+
+
+35.
+
+He says, "I cannot worship the abstraction of Virtue. She only charms me
+when she addresses herself to my heart, and speaks thus the love from
+which she springs. I really love nothing but what actually exists."
+
+What _does_ actually exist to us but that which we believe in? and where
+we strongly love do we not believe sometimes in the _unreal_? is it not
+_then_ the existing and the actual to us?
+
+
+36.
+
+"A faculty of a quite peculiar kind, and for which we have no word, is
+the recognition of the incomprehensible. It is something which
+distinguishes the seer from the ordinary learned man."
+
+But in religion this is _faith_. Does Niebuhr admit this kind of faith,
+"the recognition of the incomprehensible," in philosophy, and not in
+religion? for he often complains of the want in himself of any faith but
+an historic faith.
+
+
+37.
+
+"In times of good fortune it is easy to appear great--nay, even to act
+greatly; but in misfortune very difficult. The greatest man will commit
+blunders in misfortune, because the want of proportion between his means
+and his ends progressively increases, and his inward strength is
+exhausted in fruitless efforts."
+
+This is true; but under all extremes of good or evil fortune we are apt
+to commit mistakes, because the tide of the mind does not flow equally,
+but rushes along impetuously in a flood, or brokenly and distractedly in
+a rocky channel, where its strength is exhausted in conflict and pain.
+The extreme pressure of circumstances will produce extremes of feeling
+in minds of a sensitive rather than a firm cast.
+
+
+38.
+
+This next passage is curious as a scholar's opinion of "free trade" in
+the year 1810; though I believe the phrase "free trade" was not even
+invented at that time--certainly not in use in the statesman's
+vocabulary.
+
+"I presume you will admit that commerce is a good thing, and the first
+requisite in the life of any nation. It appears to me, that this much
+has now been palpably demonstrated, namely, that an advanced and
+complicated social condition like this in which we live can only be
+maintained by establishing mutual relationships between the most remote
+nations; and that the limitation of commerce would, like the sapping of
+a main pillar, inevitably occasion the fall of the whole edifice; and
+also that commerce is so essentially beneficial and in accordance with
+man's nature, that the well-being of each nation is an advantage to all
+the nations that stand in connection with it."
+
+It is strange how long we have been (forty years, and more) in
+recognising these simple principles; and in Germany, where they were
+first enunciated, they are not recognised yet.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CHARACTER OF DEMADES.
+
+(FROM NIEBUHR's LECTURES.)
+
+
+39.
+
+"By his wit and his talent, and more especially by his gift as an
+improvisatore, he rose so high that he exercised a great influence upon
+the people, and sometimes was more popular even than Demosthenes. With a
+shamelessness amounting to honesty, he bluntly told the people
+everything he felt and what all the populace felt with him. When hearing
+such a man the populace felt at their ease: he gave them the feeling
+that they might be wicked without being disgraced, and this excites with
+such people a feeling of gratitude. There is a remarkable passage in
+Plato, where he shows that those who deliver hollow speeches, without
+being in earnest, have no power or influence; whereas others, who are
+devoid of mental culture, but say in a straightforward manner what they
+think and feel, exercise great power. It was this which in the
+eighteenth century gave the materialist philosophy in France such
+enormous influence with the higher classes; for they were told there was
+no need to be ashamed of the vulgarest sensuality; formerly people had
+been ashamed, but now a man learned that he might be a brutal
+sensualist, provided he did not offend against elegant manners and
+social conventionalism. People rejoiced at hearing a man openly and
+honestly say what they themselves felt. Demades was a remarkable
+character. He was not a bad man; and I like him much better than
+Eschines."
+
+What an excuse, what a sanction is here for the demagogues who direct
+the worst passions of men to the worst and the most selfish purposes,
+and the most debasing consequences! Demades "not a bad man?" then what
+_is_ a bad man?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+LORD BACON.
+
+(1849.)
+
+
+40.
+
+"It was not the pure knowledge of nature and universality, but it was
+the proud knowledge of good and evil, with an intent in man to give the
+law unto himself, which was the form of the first temptation."
+
+But, in this sense, the first temptation is only the type of the
+perpetual and ever-present temptation--the temptation into which we are
+to fall through necessity, that we may rise through love.
+
+
+41.
+
+Here is an excellent passage--a severe commentary on the unsound,
+un-christian, unphilosophical distinction between morals and politics in
+government:--
+
+"Although men bred in learning are perhaps to seek in points of
+convenience and reasons of state and accommodations for the present,
+yet, on the other hand, to recompense this they are perfect in those
+same plain grounds of religion, justice, honour, and moral virtue which,
+if they be well and watchfully pursued, there will be seldom use of
+those other expedients, no more than of physic in a sound, well-directed
+body."
+
+
+42.
+
+"Now (in the time of Lord Bacon, that is,) now sciences are delivered to
+be believed and accepted, and not to be farther discovered; and
+therefore, sciences stand at a clog, and have done for many ages."
+
+In the present time, this is true only, or especially, of theology as an
+art, and divinity as a science; so made by the schoolmen of former ages,
+and not yet emancipated.
+
+
+43.
+
+"Generally he perceived in men of devout simplicity this opinion, that
+the secrets of nature were the secrets of God, part of that glory into
+which man is not to press too boldly."
+
+God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given
+us on this side of the grave. But not the less will he keep his own
+secrets from us. Has he not proved it? who has opened that door to the
+knowledge of a future being which it has pleased him to keep shut fast,
+though watched by hope and by faith?
+
+
+44.
+
+The Christian philosophy of these latter times appears to be
+foreshadowed in the following sentence, where he speaks of such as have
+ventured to deduce and confirm the truth of the Christian religion from
+the principles and authorities of philosophers: "Thus with great pomp
+and solemnity celebrating the intermarriage of faith and sense as a
+lawful conjunction, and soothing the minds of men with a pleasing
+variety of matter, though, at the same time, rashly and unequally
+intermixing things divine and things human."
+
+This last common-place distinction seems to me, however, unworthy of
+Bacon. It should be banished--utterly set aside. Things which are divine
+should be human, and things which are human, divine; not as a mixture,
+"a medley," in the sense of Bacon's words, but an interfusion; for
+nothing that we esteem divine can be anything to us but as we make it
+_ours_, _i. e._ humanise it; and our humanity were a poor thing but for
+"the divinity that stirs within us." We do injury to our own nature--we
+misconceive our relations to the Creator, to his universe, and to each
+other, so long as we separate and studiously keep wide apart the
+_divine_ and the _human_.
+
+
+45.
+
+"Let no man, upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied
+moderation, think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too
+well studied either in the book of God's word or the book of God's
+works." Well advised! But then he goes on to warn men that they do not
+"unwisely mingle or confound their learnings together:" mischievous this
+contradistinction between God's word and God's works; since both, if
+emanating from him, must be equally true. And if there be one truth,
+then, to borrow his own words in another place, "the voice of nature
+will consent, whether the voice of man do so or not."
+
+
+46.
+
+Apropos to education--here is a good illustration: "Were it not better
+for a man in a fair room to set up one great light or branching
+candlestick of lights, than to go about with a rushlight into every dark
+corner?"
+
+And here is another: "It is one thing to set forth what ground lieth
+unmanured, and another to correct ill husbandry in that which _is_
+manured."
+
+47.
+
+"It is without all controversy that learning doth make the minds of men
+gentle and generous, amiable, and pliant to government, whereas
+ignorance maketh them churlish, thwarting, and mutinous."
+
+
+48.
+
+"An impatience of doubt and an unadvised haste to assertion without due
+and mature suspension of the judgment, is an error in the conduct of the
+understanding."
+
+"In contemplation, if a man begin with certainties he shall end in
+doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in
+certainties." Well said and profoundly true.
+
+This is a celebrated and often-cited passage; an admitted principle in
+theory. I wish it were oftener applied in practice,--more especially in
+education. For it seems to me that in teaching children we ought not to
+be perpetually dogmatising. We ought not to be ever placing before them
+only the known and the definite; but to allow the unknown, the
+uncertain, the indefinite, to be suggested to their minds: it would do
+more for the growth of a truly religious feeling than all the catechisms
+of scientific facts and creeds of theological definitions that ever were
+taught in cut and dried question and answer. Why should not the young
+candid mind be allowed to reflect on the unknown, as such? on the
+doubtful, as such--open to inquiry and liable to discussion? Why will
+teachers suppose that in confessing their own ignorance or admitting
+uncertainties they must diminish the respect of their pupils, or their
+faith in truth? I should say from my own experience that the effect is
+just the reverse. I remember, when a child, hearing a very celebrated
+man profess his ignorance on some particular subject, and I felt
+awe-struck--it gave me a perception of the infinite,--as when looking up
+at the starry sky. What we unadvisedly cram into a child's mind in the
+same form it has taken in our own, does not always healthily or
+immediately assimilate; it dissolves away in doubts, or it hardens into
+prejudice, instead of mingling with the life as truth ought to do. It is
+the early and habitual surrendering of the mind to authority, which
+makes it afterwards so ready for deception of all kinds.
+
+
+49.
+
+He speaks of "legends and narrations of miracles wrought by martyrs,
+hermits, monks, which, though they have had passage for a time by the
+ignorance of the people, the superstitious simplicity of some, and the
+politic toleration of others, holding them but as divine poesies; yet
+after a time they grew up to be esteemed but as old wives' fables, to
+the great scandal and detriment of religion."
+
+Very ambiguous, surely. Does he mean that it was to the great scandal
+and detriment of religion that they existed at all? or that they came to
+be regarded as old wives' fables?
+
+
+50.
+
+He says, farther on, "though truth and error are carefully to be
+separated, yet rarities and reports that seem incredible are not to be
+suppressed or denied to the memory of men."
+
+"For it is not yet known in what cases and how far effects attributed to
+superstition do participate of natural causes."
+
+
+51.
+
+"To be speculative with another man to the end to know how to work him
+or wind him, proceedeth from a heart that is double and cloven, and not
+entire and ingenuous; which, as in friendship, it is a want of
+_integrity_, so towards princes or superiors it is a want of _duty_."
+(No occasion, surely, for the distinction here drawn; inasmuch as the
+want of integrity involves the want of _every_ duty.)
+
+Then he speaks of "the stooping to points of necessity and convenience
+and outward basenesses," as to be accounted "submission to the occasion,
+not to the person." Vile distinction! an excuse to himself for his
+dedication to the King, and his flattery of Carr and Villiers.
+
+
+52.
+
+Our English Universities are only now beginning to show some sign
+(reluctant sign) of submitting to that re-examination which the great
+philosopher recommended two hundred and fifty years ago, when he says:
+"Inasmuch as most of the usages and orders of the universities were
+derived from more obscure times, it is the more requisite they be
+reexamined"--and more to the same purpose.
+
+
+53.
+
+"If that great Workmaster (God) had been of a human disposition, he
+would have cast the stars into some pleasant and beautiful works and
+orders like the frets in the roofs of houses; whereas, one can scarce
+find a posture in square or triangle or straight line amongst such an
+infinite number, so differing an harmony there is between the spirit of
+man and the spirit of nature."
+
+Perhaps if our human vision could be removed to a sufficient distance to
+contemplate the whole of what we now see in part, what appears disorder
+might appear beautiful order. The stars which now appear as if flung
+about at random, would perhaps be resolved into some exquisitely
+beautiful and regular edifice. The fly on the cornice, "whose feeble ray
+scarce spreads an inch around," might as well discuss the proportions of
+the Parthenon as we the true figure and frame of God's universe.
+
+I remember seeing, through Lord Rosse's telescope, one of those nebulae
+which have hitherto appeared like small masses of vapour floating about
+in space. I saw it composed of thousands upon thousands of brilliant
+stars, and the effect to the eye--to mine at least--was as if I had had my
+hand full of diamonds, and suddenly unclosing it, and flinging them
+forth, they were dispersed as from a centre, in a kind of partly
+irregular, partly fan-like form; and I had a strange feeling of suspense
+and amazement while I looked, because they did not change their relative
+position, did not fall--though in act to fall--but seemed fixed in the
+very attitude of being flung forth into space;--it was most wondrous and
+beautiful to see!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+54.
+
+It is pleasant to me to think that Bacon's stupendous intellect believed
+in the moral progress of human societies, because it is my own belief,
+and one that I would not for worlds resign. I indeed believe that each
+human being must here (or hereafter?) work out his own peculiar moral
+life: but also that the whole race has a progressive moral life: just as
+in our solar system every individual planet moves in its own orbit,
+while the whole system moves on together; we know not whither, we know
+not round what centre--"_ma pur si muove!_"
+
+
+55.
+
+Yet he says in another place, with equal wit and sublimity, "Every
+obtaining of a desire hath a _show_ of advancement, as motion in a
+circle hath a _show_ of progression." Perhaps our movement may be
+_spiral_? and every revolution may bring us nearer and nearer to some
+divine centre in which we may be absorbed at last?
+
+
+56.
+
+He refers in this following passage to that theory of the angelic
+existences which we see expressed in ancient symbolic Art, first by
+variation of colour only, and later, by variety of expression and form.
+He says,--"We find, as far as credit is to be given to the celestial
+hierarchy of that supposed Dionysius, the senator of Athens, that the
+first place or degree is given to the Angels of Love, which are called
+Seraphim; the second to the Angels of Light, which are termed Cherubim;
+and the third, and so following, to Thrones, Principalities, and the
+rest (which are all angels of power and ministry); so as the angels of
+knowledge and illumination are placed before the angels of office and
+domination."
+
+--But the Angels of LOVE are first and over all. In other words, we have
+here in due order of precedence, 1. LOVE, 2. KNOWLEDGE, 3. POWER,--the
+angelic Trinity, which, in unity, is our idea of GOD.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CHATEAUBRIAND.
+
+("MEMOIRES D'OUTRE TOMBE." 1851.)
+
+
+57.
+
+Chateaubriand tells us that when his mother and sisters urged him to
+marry, he resisted strongly--he thought it too early; he says, with a
+peculiar naivete, "Je ne me sentais aucune qualite de mari: toutes mes
+illusions etaient vivantes, rien n'etait epuise en moi, l'energie meme
+de mon existence avait double par mes courses," &c.
+
+So then the "_existence epuise_" is to be kept for the wife! "_la vie
+usee_"--"_la jeunesse abusee_," is good enough to make a husband!
+Chateaubriand, who in many passages of his book piques himself on his
+morality, seems quite unconscious that he has here given utterance to a
+sentiment the most profoundly immoral, the most fatal to both sexes,
+that even his immoral age had ever the effrontery to set forth.
+
+
+58.
+
+"Il parait qu'on n'apprend pas a mourir en tuant les autres."
+
+Nor do we learn to suffer by inflicting pain: nothing so patient as
+pity.
+
+
+59.
+
+"Le cynisme des moeurs ramene dans la societe, en annihilant le sens
+moral, une sorte de barbares; ces barbares de la civilisation, propres a
+detruire comme les Goths, n'ont pas la puissance de fonder comme eux;
+ceux-ci etaient les enormes enfants d'une nature vierge; ceux-la sont
+les avortons monstrueux d'une nature depravee."
+
+We too often make the vulgar mistake that undisciplined or overgrown
+passions are a sign of strength; they are the signs of immaturity, of
+"enormous childhood."--And the distinction (above) is well drawn and
+true. The real savage is that monstrous, malignant, abject thing,
+generated out of the rottenness and ferment of civilisation. And yet
+extremes meet: I remember seeing on the shores of Lake Huron some
+Indians of a distant tribe of Chippawas, who in appearance were just
+like those fearful abortions of humanity which crawl out of the
+darkness, filth, and ignorance of our great towns, just so miserable, so
+stupid, so cruel,--only, perhaps, less _wicked_.
+
+
+60.
+
+Chateaubriand was always comparing himself with Lord Byron--he hints more
+than once, that Lord Byron owed some of his inspiration to the perusal
+of his works--more especially to Renee. In this he was altogether
+mistaken.
+
+
+61.
+
+"Une intelligence superieure n'enfante pas le mal sans douleur, parceque
+ce n'est pas son fruit naturel, et qu'elle ne devait pas le porter."
+
+
+62.
+
+Madame de Coeslin (whom he describes as an impersonation of aristocratic
+_morgue_ and all the pretension and prejudices of the _ancien regime_),
+"lisant dans un journal la mort de plusieurs rois, elle ota ses lunettes
+et dit en se mouchant, 'Il y a donc une _epizootie sur ces betes a
+couronne_!"
+
+I once counted among my friends an elderly lady of high rank, who had
+spent the whole of a long life in intimacy with royal and princely
+personages. In three different courts she had filled offices of trust
+and offices of dignity. In referring to her experience she never either
+moralised or generalised; but her scorn of "ces betes a couronne," was
+habitually expressed with just such a cool epigrammatic bluntness as
+that of Madame de Coeslin.
+
+
+63.
+
+"L'aristocratie a trois ages successifs; l'age des superiorites, l'age
+des privileges, l'age des vanites; sortie du premier, elle degenere dans
+le second et s'eteint dans le dernier."
+
+In Germany they are still in the first epoch. In England we seem to have
+arrived at the second. In France they are verging on the third.
+
+
+64.
+
+Chateaubriand says of himself:--
+
+"Dans le premier moment d'une offense je la sens a peine; mais elle se
+grave dans ma memoire; son souvenir au lieu de decroitre, s'augmente
+avec le temps. Il dort dans mon coeur des mois, des annees entieres,
+puis il se reveille a la moindre circonstance avec une force nouvelle,
+et ma blessure devient plus vive que le premier jour: mais si je ne
+pardonne point a mes ennemis je ne leur fais aucun mal; je suis
+_rancunier_ et ne suis point _vindicatif_."
+
+A very nice and true distinction in point of feeling and character, yet
+hardly to be expressed in English. We always attach the idea of
+malignity to the word _rancour_, whereas the French words _rancune_,
+_rancunier_, express the relentless without the vengeful or malignant
+spirit.
+
+Such characters make me turn pale, as I have done at sight of a tomb in
+which an offending wretch had been buried alive. There is in them always
+something acute and deep and indomitable in the internal and exciting
+emotion; slow, scrupulous, and timid in the external demonstration.
+Cordelia is such a character.
+
+
+65.
+
+Chateaubriand says of his friend Pelletrie,--"Il n'avait pas precisement
+des vices, mais il etait ronge d'une vermine de petits defauts dont on
+ne pouvait l'epurer." I know such a man; and if he had committed a
+murder every morning, and a highway robbery every night,--if he had
+killed his father and eaten him with any possible sauce, he could not
+be more intolerable, more detestable than he is!
+
+
+66.
+
+"Un homme nous protege par ce qu'il vaut; une femme par ce que vous
+valez: voila pourquoi de ces deux empires l'un est si odieux, l'autre si
+doux."
+
+
+67.
+
+He says of Madame Roland, "Elle avait du caractere plutot que du genie;
+le premier peut donner le second, le second ne peut donner le premier."
+What does the man mean? this is a mistake surely. What the French call
+_caractere_ never could give genius, nor genius, _caractere_. _Au
+reste_, I am not sure that Madame Roland--admirable creature!--had genius;
+but for talent, and _caractere_--first rate.
+
+
+68.
+
+"Soyons doux si nous voulons etre regrettes. La hauteur du genie et les
+qualites superieures ne sont pleurees que des anges."
+
+"Veillons bien sur notre caractere. Songeons que nous pouvons avec un
+attachement profond n'en pas moins empoisonner des jours que nous
+racheterions au prix de tout notre sang. Quand nos amis sont descendus
+dans la tombe, quels moyens avons nous de reparer nos torts? nos
+inutiles regrets, nos vains repentirs, sont ils un remede aux peines que
+nous leurs avons faites? Ils auraient mieux aime de nous un sourire
+pendant leur vie que toutes nos larmes apres leur mort."
+
+
+69.
+
+"L'amour est si bien la felicite qu'il est poursuivi de la chimere
+d'etre toujours; il ne veut prononcer que des serments irrevocables; au
+defaut de ses joies, il cherche a eterniser ses douleurs; ange tombe, il
+parle encore le langage qu'il parlait au sejour incorruptible; son
+esperance est de ne cesser jamais. Dans sa double nature et dans sa
+double illusion, ici-bas il pretend se perpetuer par d'immortelles
+pensees et par des generations intarissables."
+
+
+70.
+
+Madame d'Houdetot, after the death of Saint Lambert, always before she
+went to bed used to rap three times with her slipper on the floor,
+saying,--"Bon soir, mon ami; bon soir, bon soir!"
+
+So then, she thought of her lover as gone _down_--not _up_?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+BISHOP CUMBERLAND.
+
+BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH IN 1691.
+
+
+71.
+
+Bishop Cumberland founds the law of God, as revealed in the Scriptures,
+upon the general law of nature. He does not attempt to found the laws of
+nature upon the Bible. "We believe," he says, "in the truth of
+Scripture, because it promotes and illustrates the fundamental laws of
+nature in the government of the world."
+
+Then does the Bishop mean here that the Bible is not the WORD nor the
+WILL of God, but the exposition of the WORD and the record of the WILL,
+so far as either could be rendered communicable to human comprehension
+through the medium of human language and intelligence?
+
+There is a striking passage in Bunsen's Hippolytus, which may be
+considered with reference to this opinion of the Bishop.
+
+He (Bunsen) says, that "what relates the history of 'the word of God'
+in his humanity, and in this world, and what records its teachings, and
+warnings, and promises (that is, the Bible?) was mistaken for 'the word
+of God' itself, in its proper sense."
+
+Does he mean that we deem erroneously the collection of writings we call
+the Bible to be "the word of God;" whereas, in fact, it is "the history,
+the record of the word of God?" that is, of all that God has spoken to
+man--in various revelations--through human life--by human deeds?--because
+this is surely a most important and momentous distinction.
+
+
+72.
+
+According to Bishop Cumberland, _benevolence_, in its large sense,--that
+is, a regard for all GOOD, universal and particular,--is the primary law
+of nature; and _justice_ is one form, and a secondary form, of this law:
+a moral virtue, not a law of nature,--if I understand his meaning
+rightly.
+
+Then which would he place _highest_, the law of nature or the moral law?
+
+If you place them in contradistinction, then are we to conclude that the
+law of nature _precedes_ the moral law, but that the moral law
+_supersedes_ the law of nature? Yet no law of nature (as I understand
+the word) _can_ be superseded, though the moral law may be based upon
+it, and in that sense may be _above_ it.
+
+
+73.
+
+In this following passage the Bishop seems to have anticipated what in
+more modern times has been called the "_greatest happiness principle_."
+He says:--
+
+"The good of all rational beings is a complex whole, being nothing but
+the aggregate of good enjoyed by each." "We can only act in our proper
+spheres, labouring to do good, but this labour will be fruitless, or
+rather mischievous, if we do not keep in mind the higher gradations
+which terminate in universal benevolence. Thus, no man must seek his own
+pleasure or advantage otherwise than as his family permits; or provide
+for his family to the detriment of his country; or promote the good of
+his country at the expense of mankind; or serve mankind, if it were
+possible, without regard to the majesty of God."
+
+
+74.
+
+Paley deems the recognition of a future state so essential that he even
+makes the definition of virtue to consist in this, that it is good
+performed for the sake of everlasting happiness. That is to say, he
+makes it a sort of bargain between God and man, a contract, or a
+covenant, instead of that obedience to a primal law, from which if we
+stray in will, we do so at the necessary expense of our happiness.
+Bishop Cumberland has no reference to this doctrine of Paley's;--seems,
+indeed, to set it aside altogether, as contrary to the essence of
+virtue.
+
+
+On the whole, this good Bishop appears to have treated ethics not as an
+ecclesiastic, but as Bacon treated natural philosophy;--the pervading
+spirit is the perpetual appeal to experience, and not to authority.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+COMTE'S PHILOSOPHY.
+
+1852.
+
+
+75.
+
+Comte makes out three elements of progress, "les philosophes, les
+proletaires, et les femmes;"--types of intellect, material activity, and
+sentiment.
+
+From Woman, he says, is to proceed the preponderance of the social
+duties and affections over egotism and ambition. (La preponderance de la
+sociabilite sur la personalite.) He adds:--"Ce sexe est certainement
+superieure au notre quant a l'attribut le plus fondamentale de l'espece
+humaine, la tendence de faire prevaloir la _sociabilite_ sur la_
+personalite_."
+
+
+76.
+
+"S'il ne fallait _qu'aimer_ comme dans l'Utopie Chretienne, sur une vie
+future affranchie de toute egoiste necessite materielle, la femme
+regnerait; mais il faut surtout _agir_ et _penser_ pour combattre contre
+les rigueurs de notre vraie destinee: des-lors l'homme doit commander
+malgre sa moindre moralite."
+
+"Malgre?" Sometimes man commands _because_ of the "moindre moralite:"--it
+spares much time in scruples.
+
+
+77.
+
+"L'influence feminine devient l'auxiliaire indispensable de tout pouvoir
+spirituel, comme le moyen age l'a tant montre."
+
+
+"Au moyen age la Catholicisme occidentale ebaucha la systematisation de
+la puissance morale en superposant a l'ordre pratique une libre autorite
+spirituelle, habituellement secondee par les femmes."
+
+
+78.
+
+"La Force, proprement dite, c'est ce qui regit les actes, sans regler
+les volontes."
+
+Herein lies a distinction between Force and Power; for Power, properly
+so called, does both.
+
+
+79.
+
+He insists throughout on the predominance of _sociabilite_ over
+_personalite_--and what is that but the Christian law philosophised?
+and again, "Il n'y a de directement morale dans notre nature que
+l'amour." Where did he get this, if not in the Epistle of St. John?
+
+"Celui qui se croirait independant des autres dans ses affections, ses
+pensees, ou ses actes, ne pourrait meme formuler un tel blaspheme sans
+une contradiction immediate--puisque son langage meme ne lui appartient
+pas."
+
+
+80.
+
+He says that if the women regret the age of chivalry, it is not for the
+external homage then paid to them, but because "l'element le plus moral
+de l'humanite" (woman, to wit), "doit preferer a tout autre le seul
+regime qui erigea directement en principe la preponderance de la morale
+sur la politique. Si elles regrettent leur douce influence anterieure,
+c'est surtout comme s'effacant aujourd'hui sous un grossier egoisme.
+
+"Leurs voeux spontanes seconderont toujours les efforts directes des
+philosophes et des proletaires pour transformer enfin les debats
+politiques en transactions sociales en faisant prevaloir les _devoirs_
+sur les _droits_."
+
+This is admirable; for we are all inclined to think more about our
+_rights_ (and our wrongs too) than about our _duties_.
+
+
+81.
+
+"Si donc aimer nous satisfait mieux que d'etre aime, cela constate la
+superiorite naturelle des affections desinteressees."
+
+Meaning--what is true--that the love we bear to another, much more fills
+the whole soul and is more a possession of an actuating principle, than
+the love of another for us:--but both are necessary to the complement of
+our moral life. The first is as the air we breathe; the last is as our
+daily bread.
+
+
+82.
+
+He says that the only true and firm friendship is that between man and
+woman, because it is the only affection "exempte de toute concurrence
+actuelle ou possible."
+
+In this I am inclined to agree with him, and to regret that our
+conventional morality or immorality, and the too early severance of the
+two sexes in education, place men and women in such a relation to each
+other, socially, as to render such friendships difficult and rare.
+
+
+83.
+
+"En verite l'amour ne saurait etre profond, s'il n'est pas pur."
+
+Christianity, he says, "a favorise l'essor de la veritable passion,
+tandisque le polytheisme consacrait surtout les appetits."
+
+He is speaking here as teacher, philosopher, and legislator, not as poet
+or sentimentalist. Perhaps it will come to be recognised sooner or
+later, that what people are pleased to call the _romance_ of life is
+founded on the deepest and most immutable laws of our being, and that
+any system of ecclesiastical polity, or civil legislation, or moral
+philosophy, which takes no account of the primal instincts and
+affections, which are the springs of life and on which God made the
+continuation of his world to depend, _must_ of necessity fail.
+
+I have just read a volume of Psychological Essays by one of the most
+celebrated of living surgeons, and closed the book with a feeling of
+amazement: a long life spent in physiological experiences, dissecting
+dead bodies, and mending broken bones, has then led him, at last, to
+some of the most obvious, most commonly known facts in mental
+philosophy? So some of our profound politicians, after a long life spent
+in governing and reforming men, may arrive, _at last_, at some of the
+commonest facts in social morals.
+
+
+84.
+
+He contends for the indissolubility of marriage, and against divorce;
+and he thinks that education should be in the hands of women to the age
+of ten or twelve, "Afin que le coeur y prevale toujours sur l'esprit:"
+all very excellent principles, but supposing a _hypothetical_ social and
+moral state, from which we are as yet far removed. What he says,
+however, of the indissolubility of the marriage bond is so beautiful and
+eloquent, and so in accordance with my own moral theories, that I cannot
+help extracting it from a mass of heavy and sometimes unintelligible
+matter. He begins by laying it down as a principle that the
+"amelioration morale de l'homme constitue la principale mission de la
+femme," and that "une telle destination indique aussitot que le lien
+conjugal doit etre unique et indissoluble, afin que les relations
+domestiques puissent acquerir la plenitude et la fixite qu'exige leur
+efficacite morale." This, however, supposes the holiest and completest
+of all bonds to be sealed on terms of equality, not that the latter end
+of a man's life, _la vie usee et la jeunesse epuisee_, are to be tacked
+on to the beginning of a woman's fresh and innocent existence; for then
+influences are reversed, and instead of the amelioration of the
+masculine, we have the demoralisation of the feminine, nature. He
+supposes the possibility of circumstances which demand a personal
+separation, but even then _sans permettre un nouveau mariage_. In such a
+case his religion imposes on the innocent victim (whether man or woman)
+"une chastete compatible d'ailleurs avec la plus profonde tendresse. Si
+cette condition lui semble rigoureuse, il doit l'accepter, d'abord, en
+vue de l'ordre general; puis, comme une juste consequence de son erreur
+primitive."
+
+There would be much to say upon all this, if it were worth while to
+discuss a theory which it is not possible to reduce to general practice.
+We cannot imagine the possibility of a second marriage where the first,
+though perhaps unhappy or early ruptured, has been, not a personal
+relation only, but an interfusion of our moral being,--of the deepest
+impulses of life--with those of another; _these_ we cannot have a second
+time to surrender to a second object;--but this might be left to Nature
+and her holy instincts to settle. However, he goes on in a strain of
+eloquence and dignity, quite unusual with him, to this effect:--"Ce n'est
+que par l'assurance d'une inalterable perpetuite que les liens intimes
+peuvent acquerir la consistance et la plenitude indispensable a leur
+efficacite morale. La plus meprisable des sectes ephemeres que suscita
+l'anarchie moderne (the Mormons, for instance?) me parait etre celle qui
+voulut eriger l'inconstance en condition de bonheur.".... "Entre deux
+etres aussi complexes et aussi divers que l'homme et la femme, ce n'est
+pas trop de toute la vie pour se bien connaitre et s'aimer dignement.
+Loin de taxer d'illusion la haute idee que deux vrais epoux se forment
+souvent l'un de l'autre, je l'ai presque toujours attribuee a
+l'appreciation plus profonde que procure seule une pleine intimite, que
+d'ailleurs developpe des qualites inconnues aux indifferents. On doit
+meme regarder comme tres-honorable pour notre espece, cette grande
+estime que ses membres s'inspirent mutuellement quand ils s'etudient
+beaucoup. _Car la haine et l'indifference meriteraient seules le
+reproche d'aveuglement qu'une appreciation superficielle applique a
+l'amour._ Il faut donc juger pleinement conforme a la nature humaine
+l'institution qui prolonge au-dela du tombeau l'indentification de deux
+dignes epoux."
+
+He lays down as one of the primal instincts of human kind "_l'homme doit
+nourrir la femme_." This may have been, as he says, a universal
+_instinct_; perhaps it ought to be one of our social ordinations;
+perhaps it may be so at some future time; but we know that it is not a
+present fact; that the woman must in many cases maintain herself or
+perish, and she asks nothing more than to be allowed to do so.
+
+However, I agree with Comte that the position of a woman, enriched and
+independent by her own labour, is anomalous and seldom happy. It is a
+remark I have heard somewhere, and it appears to me true, that there
+exists no being so hard, so keen, so calculating, so unscrupulous, so
+merciless in money matters as the wife of a Parisian shopkeeper, where
+she holds the purse and manages the concern, as is generally the case.
+
+
+85.
+
+Here is a passage wherein he attacks that egotism which with many good
+people enters so largely into the notion of another world:--which Paley
+inculcated, and which Coleridge ridiculed, when he spoke of "_this_
+worldliness," and the "_other_ worldliness."
+
+"La sagesse sacerdotale, digne organe de l'instinct public, y avait
+intimement rattache les principales obligations sociales a titre de
+condition indispensable du salut personnel: mais la recompense infinie
+promise ainsi a tous les sacrifices ne pouvait jamais permettre une
+affection pleinement desinteressee."
+
+This perpetual iteration of a system of future reward and punishment, as
+a principle of our religion and a motive of action, has in some sort
+demoralised Christianity; especially in minds where love is not a chief
+element, and which do not love Christ for his love's sake, but for his
+power's sake, and because judgment and punishment are supposed to be in
+his hand.
+
+
+86.
+
+Putting the test of revelation out of the question, and dealing with the
+philosopher philosophically, the best refutation of Comte's system is
+contained in the following criticism: it seems to me final.
+
+"In limiting religion to the relations in which we stand to each other,
+and towards _Humanity_, Comte omits one very important consideration.
+Even upon his own showing, this _Humanity_ can only be the _supreme
+being_ of _our_ planet, it cannot be the _Supreme Being_ of the
+Universe. Now, although in this our terrestrial sojourn, all we can
+distinctly know must be limited to the sphere of our planet; yet,
+standing on this ball and looking forth into infinitude, we know that it
+is but an atom of the infinitude, and that the humanity we worship
+_here_, cannot extend its dominion _there_. If our relations to humanity
+may be systematised into a cultus, and made a religion as they have
+formerly been made a morality, and if the whole of our practical
+priesthood be limited to this religion, there will, nevertheless remain
+for us, outlying this terrestrial sphere,--the sphere of the infinite, in
+which our thoughts must wander, and our emotions will follow our
+thoughts; so that besides the religion of humanity there must ever be a
+religion of the Universe. Or, to bring this conception within ordinary
+language, there must ever remain the old distinctions between _religion_
+and _morality_, our relations to God, and our relations towards man. The
+only difference being, that in the _old_ theology moral precepts were
+inculcated with a view to a celestial habitat; in the _new_, the moral
+precepts are inculcated with a view to the general progress of the
+race."--_Westminster Review._
+
+
+In fact the doctrine of the non-plurality of worlds as recently set
+forth by an eminent professor and D. D. would exactly harmonise with
+Comte's "Culte du Positif," as not merely limiting our sympathies to
+this one form of intellectual being, but our religious notions to this
+one habitable orb.
+
+But to those who take other views, the argument above contains the
+_philosophical_ objection to Comte's _system_, as such; and I repeat,
+that it seems to me unanswerable; but there are excellent things in his
+theory, notwithstanding;--things that make us pause and think. In some
+parts it is like Christianity with Christ, as a _personalite_, omitted.
+For Christ the humanised divine, he substitutes an abstract deified
+humanity. 1854.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+GOETHE.
+
+(DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT.)
+
+
+87.
+
+"As a man embraces the determination to become a soldier and go to the
+wars, bravely resolved to bear dangers, and difficulties, and wounds,
+and death itself, but at the same time never anticipating the particular
+form in which those evils may surprise us in an extremely unpleasant
+manner;--just so we rush into authorship!"
+
+
+88.
+
+Goethe says of Lavater, "that the conception of humanity which had been
+formed in himself, and in his own humanity, was so akin to the living
+image of Christ, that it was impossible for him to conceive how a man
+could live and breathe without being a Christian. He had, so to speak, a
+physical affinity with Christianity; it was to him a necessity, not
+only morally, but from organisation."
+
+Lavater's individual feeling was, perhaps, but an anticipation of that
+which may become general, universal. As we rise in the scale of being,
+as we become more gentle, spiritualised, refined, and intelligent, will
+not our "physical affinity" with the religion of Christ become more and
+more apparent, till it is less a doctrine than a principle of life? So
+its Divine Author knew, who prepared it for us, and is preparing and
+moulding us through progressive improvement to comprehend and receive
+it.
+
+
+89.
+
+Goethe speaks of "polishing up life with the varnish of fiction;" the
+artistic turn of the man's mind showed itself in this love of creating
+an effect in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. But what can
+fiction--what can poetry do for life, but present some one or two out of
+the multitudinous aspects of that grand, beautiful, terrible, and
+infinite mystery? or by _life_, does he mean here the mere external
+forms of society?--for it is not clear.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+HAZLITT'S "LIBER AMORIS."
+
+1827.
+
+
+90.
+
+Is love, like faith, ennobled through its own depth and fervour and
+sincerity? or is it ennobled through the nobility, and degraded through
+the degradation of its object? Is it with love as with worship? Is it a
+_religion_, and holy when the object is pure and good? Is it a
+_superstition_, and unholy when the object is impure and unworthy?
+
+
+Of all the histories I have read of the aberrations of human passion,
+nothing ever so struck me with a sort of amazed and painful pity as
+Hazlitt's "Liber Amoris." The man was in love with a servant girl, who
+in the eyes of others possessed no particular charms of mind or person,
+yet did the mighty love of this strong, masculine, and gifted being,
+lift her into a sort of goddess-ship; and make his idolatry in its
+intense earnestness and reality assume something of the sublimity of an
+act of faith, and in its expression take a flight equal to anything that
+poetry or fiction have left us. It was all so terribly real, he sued
+with such a vehemence, he suffered with such resistance, that the
+powerful intellect reeled, tempest-tost, and might have foundered but
+for the gift of expression. He might have said like Tasso--like Goethe
+rather--"Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen was ich leide!" And this faculty of
+utterance, eloquent utterance, was perhaps the only thing which saved
+life, or reason, or both. In such moods of passion, the poor uneducated
+man, dumb in the midst of the strife and the storm, unable to comprehend
+his intolerable pain or make it comprehended, throws himself in a blind
+fury on the cause of his torture, or hangs himself in his neckcloth.
+
+
+91.
+
+Hazlitt takes up his pen, dips it in fire and thus he writes:--
+
+
+"Perfect love has this advantage in it, that it leaves the possessor of
+it nothing farther to desire. There is one object (at least), in which
+the soul finds absolute content;--for which it seeks to live or dares to
+die. The heart has, as it were, filled up the moulds of the
+imagination; the truth of passion keeps pace with, and outvies, the
+extravagance of mere language. There are no words so fine, no flattery
+so soft, that there is not a sentiment beyond them that it is impossible
+to express, at the bottom of the heart where true love is. What idle
+sounds the common phrases _adorable creature_, _divinity_, _angel_, are!
+What a proud reflection it is to have a feeling answering to all these,
+rooted in the breast, unalterable, unutterable, to which all other
+feelings are light and vain! Perfect love reposes on the object of its
+choice, like the halcyon on the wave, and the air of heaven is around
+it!"
+
+
+92.
+
+"She stood (while I pleaded my cause before her with all the earnestness
+and fondness in the world) with the tears trickling from her eye-lashes,
+her head drooping, her attitude fixed, with the finest expression that
+ever was seen of mixed regret, pity, and stubborn resolution, but
+without speaking a word--without altering a feature. _It was like a
+petrifaction of a human face in the softest moment of passion._"
+
+
+93.
+
+"Shall I not love her," he exclaims, "for herself alone, in spite of
+fickleness and folly? to love her for her regard for me, is not to love
+her but myself. She has robbed me of herself, shall she also rob me of
+my love of her? did I not live on her smile? is it less sweet because it
+is withdrawn from me? Did I not adore her every grace? and does she bend
+less enchantingly because she has turned from me to another? Is my love
+then in the power of fortune or of her caprice? No, I will have it
+lasting as it is pure; and I will make a goddess of her, and build a
+temple to her in my heart, and worship her on indestructible altars, and
+raise statues to her, and my homage shall be unblemished as her
+unrivalled symmetry of form. And when that fails, the memory of it shall
+survive, and my bosom shall be proof to scorn as hers has been to pity;
+and I will pursue her with an unrelenting love, and sue to be her slave
+and tend her steps without notice, and without reward; and serve her
+living, and mourn for her when dead; and thus my love will have shown
+itself superior to her hate, and I shall triumph and then die. This is
+my idea of the only true and heroic love, and such is mine for her."
+
+
+Hazlitt, when he wrote all this, seemed to himself full of high and calm
+resolve. The hand did not fail, the pen did not stagger over the paper
+in a formless scrawl, yet the brain was reeling like a tower in an
+earthquake. "Passion," as it has been well said, "when in a state of
+solemn and omnipotent vehemence, always appears to be calmness to him
+whom it domineers;" not unfrequently to others also, as the tide at its
+highest flood looks tranquil, and "neither way inclines."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE NIGHTINGALE.
+
+
+94.
+
+Reading the Life and Letters of Francis Horner, in the midst of a
+correspondence about Statistics and Bullion, and Political Economy, and
+the Balance of Parties, I came upon the following exquisite passage in a
+letter to his friend Mrs. Spencer:--
+
+"I was amused by your interrogatory to me about the Nightingale's note.
+You meant to put me in a dilemma with my politics on one side and my
+gallantry on the other. Of course you consider it as a plaintive note,
+and you were in hopes that no idolater of Charles Fox would venture to
+agree with that opinion. In this difficulty I must make the best escape
+I can by saying, that it seems to me neither cheerful nor
+melancholy,--but always according to the circumstances in which you hear
+it, the scenery, your own temper of mind, and so on. I settled it so
+with myself early in this month, when I heard them every night and all
+day long at Wells. In daylight, when all the other birds are in active
+concert, the Nightingale only strikes you as the most active, emulous,
+and successful of the whole band. At night, especially if it is a calm
+one, with light enough to give you a wide indistinct view, the solitary
+music of this bird takes quite another character, from all the
+associations of the scene, from the languor one feels at the close of
+the day, and from the stillness of spirits and elevation of mind which
+comes upon one when walking out at that time. But it is not always
+so--different circumstances will vary in every possible way the effect.
+Will the Nightingale's note sound alike to the man who is going on an
+adventure to meet his mistress (supposing he heeds it at all), and when
+he loiters along upon his return? The last time I heard the Nightingale
+it was an experiment of another sort. It was after a thunderstorm in a
+mild night, while there was silent lightning opening every few minutes,
+first on one side of the heavens then on the other. The careless little
+fellow was piping away in the midst of all this terror. To _me_, there
+was no melancholy in his note, but a sort of sublimity; yet it was the
+same song which I had heard in the morning, and which then seemed
+nothing but bustle."
+
+And in the same spirit Portia moralises:--
+
+   The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
+   When every goose is cackling, would be thought
+   No better a musician than the wren.
+   How many things by season, seasoned are
+   To their right praise and true perfection!
+
+Nor will Coleridge allow the song of the nightingale to be always
+plaintive,--"most musical, most _melancholy_;" he defies the epithet
+though it be Milton's.
+
+               'Tis the _merry_ nightingale,
+   That crowds and hurries and precipitates
+   With thick fast warble his delicious notes,
+   As he were fearful that an April night
+   Would be too short for him to utter forth
+   His love-chaunt, and disburthen his full soul
+   Of all its music.
+
+As a poetical commentary on these beautiful passages, every reader of
+Joanna Baillie will remember the night scene in De Montfort, where the
+cry of the Owl suggests such different feelings and associations to the
+two men who listen to it, under such different circumstances. To De
+Montfort it is the screech-owl, foreboding death and horror,--and he
+stands and shudders at the "instinctive wailing." To Rezenvelt it is the
+sound which recalls his boyish days, when he merrily mimicked the
+night-bird till it returned him cry for cry,--and he pauses to listen
+with a fanciful delight.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THACKERAY'S LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH HUMORISTS
+
+(1833.)
+
+
+95.
+
+A Lecture should not read like an essay; and, therefore, it surprises me
+that these lectures so carefully prepared, so skilfully adapted to meet
+the requirements of oral delivery, should be such agreeable reading. As
+_lectures_, they wanted only a little more point, and emphasis and
+animation on the part of the speaker: as _essays_, they atone in
+eloquence and earnestness for what they want in finish and purity of
+style.
+
+Genius and sunshine have this in common that they are the two most
+precious gifts of heaven to earth, and are dispensed equally to the just
+and the unjust. What struck me most in these lectures, when I heard
+them, (and it strikes me now in turning over the written pages,) is
+this: we deal here with writers and artists, yet the purpose, from
+beginning to end, is not artistic nor critical, but moral. Thackeray
+tells us himself that he has not assembled his hearers to bring them
+better acquainted with the writings of these writers, or to illustrate
+the wit of these wits, or to enhance the humour of these humourists;--no;
+but to deal justice on the men as _men_--to tell us how _they_ lived, and
+loved, suffered and made suffer, who still have power to pain or to
+please; to settle _their_ claims to our praise or blame, our love or
+hate, whose right to fame was settled long ago, and remains undisputed.
+This is his purpose. Thus then he has laid down and acted on the
+principle that "morals have something to do with art;" that there is a
+moral account to be settled with men of genius; that the power and the
+right remains with us to do justice on those who being dead yet rule our
+spirits from their urns; to try them by a standard which perhaps neither
+themselves, nor those around them, would have admitted. Did Swift when
+he bullied men, lampooned women, trampled over decency and humanity,
+flung round him filth and fire, did he anticipate the time when before a
+company of intellectual men, and thinking, feeling women, in both
+hemispheres, he should be called up to judgment, hands bound,
+tongue-tied? Where be now his gibes? and where his terrors? Thackeray
+turns him forth, a spectacle, a lesson, a warning; probes the lacerated
+self-love, holds up to scorn, or pity more intolerable, the miserable
+egotism, the half-distempered brain. O Stella! O Vanessa! are you not
+avenged?
+
+Then Sterne--how he takes to pieces his feigned originality, his feigned
+benevolence, his feigned misanthropy--all feigned!--the licentious parson,
+the trader in sentiment, the fashionable lion of his day, the man
+without a heart for those who loved him, without a conscience for those
+who trusted him! yet the same man who gave us the pathos of "Le Fevre,"
+and the humours of "Uncle Toby!" Sad is it? ungrateful is it? ungracious
+is it?--well, it cannot be helped; you cannot stifle the conscience of
+humanity. You might as well exclaim against any natural result of any
+natural law. Fancy a hundred years hence some brave, honest,
+human-hearted Thackeray standing up to discourse before our
+great-great-grandchildren in the same spirit, with the same stern truth,
+on the wits, and the poets and the artists of the present time! Hard is
+your fate, O ye men and women of genius! very hard and pitiful, if ye
+must be subjected to the scalpel of such a dissector! You, gifted
+sinner, whoever you may be, walking among us now in all the impunity of
+conventional forbearance, dealing in oracles and sentimentalisms,
+performing great things, teaching good things, you are set up as one of
+the lights of the world:--Lo! another time comes; the torch is taken out
+of your hand, and held up to your face. What! is it a mask, and not a
+face? "Off, off ye lendings!" O God! how much wiser, as well as better,
+not to study how to _seem_, but how to _be_! How much wiser and better,
+not to have to shudder before the truth as it oozes out from a thousand
+unguessed, unguarded apertures, staining your lawn or your ermine; not
+to have to tremble at the thought of that future Thackeray, who "shall
+pluck out the heart of your mystery," and shall anatomise you, and
+deliver lectures upon you, to illustrate the standard of morals and
+manners in Queen Victoria's reign!
+
+In these lectures, some fine and feeling and discriminative passages on
+character, make amends for certain offences and inconsistencies in the
+novels; I mean especially in regard to the female portraits. No woman
+resents his Rebecca--inimitable Becky!--no woman but feels and
+acknowledges with a shiver the completeness of that wonderful and
+finished artistic creation; but every woman resents the selfish inane
+Amelia, and would be inclined to quote and to apply the author's own
+words when speaking of 'Tom Jones:'--"I can't say that I think Amelia a
+virtuous character. I can't say but I think Mr. Thackeray's evident
+liking and admiration for his Amelia shows that the great humourist's
+moral sense was blunted by his life, and that here in art and ethics
+there is a great error. If it be right to have a heroine whom we are to
+admire, let us take care at least that she is admirable."
+
+Laura, in 'Pendennis,' is a yet more fatal mistake. She is drawn with
+every generous feeling, every good gift. We do not complain that she
+loves that poor creature Pendennis, for she loved him in her childhood.
+She grew up with that love in her heart; it came between her and the
+perception of his faults; it is a necessity indivisible from her nature.
+Hallowed, through its constancy, therein alone would lie its best
+excuse, its beauty and its truth. But Laura, faithless to that first
+affection; Laura, waked up to the appreciation of a far more manly and
+noble nature, in love with Warrington, and then going back to Pendennis,
+and marrying _him_! Such infirmity might be true of some women, but not
+of such a woman as Laura; we resent the inconsistency, the indelicacy of
+the portrait.
+
+And then Lady Castlewood,--so evidently a favourite of the author, what
+shall we say of her? The virtuous woman, _par excellence_, who "never
+sins and never forgives," who never resents, nor relents, nor repents;
+the mother, who is the rival of her daughter; the mother, who for years
+is the _confidante_ of a man's delirious passion for her own child, and
+then consoles him by marrying him herself! O Mr. Thackeray! this will
+never do! such women _may_ exist, but to hold them up as examples of
+excellence, and fit objects of our best sympathies, is a fault, and
+proves a low standard in ethics and in art. "When an author presents to
+us a heroine whom we are called upon to admire, let him at least take
+care that she is admirable." If in these, and in some other instances,
+Thackeray has given us cause of offence, in the lectures we may thank
+him for some amends: he has shown us what he conceives true womanhood
+and true manliness ought to be; so with this expression of gratitude,
+and a far deeper debt of gratitude left unexpressed, I close his book,
+and say, good night!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+Notes on Art.
+
+
+96.
+
+Sometimes, in thoughtful moments, I am struck by those beautiful
+analogies between things apparently dissimilar--those awful
+approximations between things apparently far asunder--which many people
+would call fanciful and imaginary, but they seem to bring all God's
+creation, spiritual and material, into one comprehensive whole; they
+give me, thus associated, a glimpse, a perception of that overwhelming
+unity which we call the universe, the multitudinous ONE.
+
+Thus the principle of the highest ideal in art, as conceived by the
+Greeks, and unsurpassed in its purity and beauty, lay in considering
+well the characteristics which distinguish the _human_ form from the
+brute form; and then, in rendering the human form, the first aim was to
+soften down, or, if possible, throw out wholly, those characteristics
+which belong to the brute nature, or are common to the brute and the
+man; and the next, to bring into prominence and even enlarge the
+proportions of those manifestations of forms which distinguish humanity;
+till, at last, the _human_ merged into the _divine_, and the God in
+look, in limb, in feature, stood revealed.
+
+Let us now suppose this broad principle which the Greeks applied to
+form, ethically carried out, and made the basis of all education--the
+training of men as a race. Suppose we started with the general axiom
+that all propensities which we have in common with the lower animals are
+to be kept subordinate, and so far as is consistent with the truth of
+nature refined away; and that all the qualities which elevate, all the
+aspirations which ally us with the spiritual, are to be cultivated and
+rendered more and more prominent, till at last the human being, in
+faculties as well as form, approaches the God-like--I only
+say--suppose?----
+
+Again: it has been said of natural philosophy (Zoology) that in order to
+make any real progress in the science, as such, we must more and more
+disregard _differences_, and more and more attend to the obscured but
+essential conditions which are revealed in _resemblances_, in the
+constant and similar relations of primitive structure. Now if the same
+principle were carried out in theology, in morals, in art, as well as in
+science, should we not come nearer to the essential truth in _all_?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+97.
+
+"There is an instinctive sense of propriety and reality in every mind;
+and it is not true, as some great authority has said, that in art we are
+satisfied with contemplating the work without thinking of the artist. On
+the contrary, the artist himself is one great object in the work. It is
+as embodying the energies and excellences of the human mind, as
+exhibiting the efforts of genius, as symbolising high feeling, that we
+most value the creations of art; without design the representations of
+art are merely fantastical, and without the thought of a design acting
+upon fixed principles in accordance with a high standard of goodness and
+truth, half the charm of design is lost."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+98.
+
+"Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture, and
+music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It
+is, therefore, the power of humanising nature, of infusing the thoughts
+and passions of man into everything which is the object of his
+contemplation. Colour, form, motion, sound, are the elements which it
+combines, and it stamps them into unity in the mould of a _moral_ idea."
+
+This is Coleridge's definition:--Art then is nature, _humanised_; and in
+proportion as humanity is elevated by the interfusion into our life of
+noble aims and pure affections will art be spiritualised and moralised.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+99.
+
+If faith has elevated art, superstition has everywhere debased it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+100.
+
+Goethe observes that there is no patriotic art and no patriotic
+science--that both are universal.
+
+There is, however, _national_ art, but not _national_ science: we say
+"national art," "natural science."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+101.
+
+"Verse is in itself music, and the natural symbol of that union of
+passion with thought and pleasure, which constitutes the essence of all
+poetry as contradistinguished from history civil or
+natural."--_Coleridge._
+
+In the arts of design, colour is to form what verse is to prose--a more
+harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+102.
+
+Subjects and representations in art not elevated nor interesting in
+themselves, become instructive and interesting to higher minds from the
+_manner_ in which they have been treated; perhaps because they have
+passed through the medium of a higher mind in taking form.
+
+This is one reason, though we are not always conscious of it, that the
+Dutch pictures of common and vulgar life give us a pleasure apart from
+their wonderful finish and truth of detail. In the mind of the artist
+there must have been the power to throw himself into a sphere _above_
+what he represents. Adrian Brouwer, for instance, must have been
+something far better than a sot; Ostade something higher than a boor;
+though the habits of both led them into companionship with sots and
+boors. In the most farcical pictures of Jan Steen there is a depth of
+feeling and observation which remind me of the humour of Goldsmith; and
+Teniers, we know, was in his habits a refined gentleman; the brilliant
+elegance of his pencil contrasting with the grotesque vulgarity of his
+subjects. To a thinking mind, some of these Dutch pictures of character
+are full of material for thought, pathetic even where least sympathetic:
+no doubt, because of a latent sympathy with the artist, apart from his
+subject.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+103.
+
+Coleridge says,--"Every human feeling is greater and larger than the
+exciting cause." (A philosophical way of putting Rochefoucauld's neatly
+expressed apophthegm: "Nous ne sommes jamais ni si heureux ni si
+malheureux que nous l'imaginons.") "A proof," he proceeds, "that man is
+designed for a higher state of existence; and this is deeply implied in
+music, in which there is always something more and beyond the immediate
+expression."
+
+But not music only, every production of art ought to excite emotions
+greater and thoughts larger than itself. Thoughts and emotions which
+never perhaps were in the mind of the artist, never were anticipated,
+never were intended by him--may be strongly suggested by his work. This
+is an important part of the morals of art, which we must never lose
+sight of. Art is not only for pleasure and profit, but for good and for
+evil.
+
+Goethe (in the _Dichtung und Wahrheit_) describes the reception of Marie
+Antoinette at Strasbourg, where she passed the frontier to enter her new
+kingdom. She was then a lovely girl of sixteen. He relates that on
+visiting before her arrival the reception room on the bridge over the
+Rhine, where her German attendants were to deliver her into the hands of
+the French authorities, he found the walls hung with tapestries
+representing the ominous story of Jason and Medea--of all the marriages
+on record the most fearful, the most tragic in its consequences. "What!"
+he exclaims, his poetical imagination struck with the want of moral
+harmony, "was there among these French architects and decorators no man
+who could perceive that pictures represent things,--that they have a
+meaning in themselves,--that they can impress sense and feeling,--that
+they can awaken presentiments of good or evil?" But, as he tells us, his
+exclamations of horror were met by the mockery of his French companions,
+who assured him that it was not everybody's concern to look for
+significance in pictures.
+
+These self-same tapestries of the story of Jason and Medea were after
+the Restoration presented by Louis XVIII. to George IV., and at present
+they line the walls of the Ball-room in Windsor Castle. We might repeat,
+with some reason, the question of Goethe; for if pictures have a
+significance, and speak to the imagination, what has the tragedy of
+Jason and Medea to do in a ball-room?
+
+
+Goethe, who thus laid down the principle that works of art speak to the
+feelings and the conscience, and can awaken associations tending to good
+and evil, by some strange inconsistency places art and artists out of
+the sphere of morals. He speaks somewhere with contempt and ridicule of
+those who take their conscience and their morality with them to an opera
+or a picture gallery. Yet surely he is wrong. Why should we not? Are our
+conscience and our morals like articles of dress which we can take off
+and put on again as we fancy it convenient or expedient?--shut up in a
+drawer and leave behind us when we visit a theatre or a gallery of art?
+or are they not rather a part of ourselves--our very life--to graduate the
+worth, to fix the standard of all that mingles with our life? The idea
+that what we call _taste_ in art has something quite distinctive from
+conscience, is one cause that the popular notions concerning the
+productions of art are abandoned to such confusion and uncertainty; that
+simple people regard _taste_ as something forensic, something to be
+learned, as they would learn a language, and mastered by a study of
+rules and a dictionary of epithets; and they look up to a professor of
+taste, just as they would look up to a professor of Greek or of Hebrew.
+Either they listen to judgments lightly and confidently promulgated with
+a sort of puzzled faith and a surrender of their own moral sense, which
+are pitiable; as if art also had its infallible church and its hierarchy
+of dictators!--or they fly into the opposite extreme, and seeing
+themselves deceived and misled, fall away into strange heresies. All
+from ignorance of a few laws simple in their form, yet infinite in their
+application;--_natural_ laws we must call them, though here applied to
+art.
+
+In my younger days I have known men conspicuous for their want of
+elevated principle, and for their dissipated habits, held up as arbiters
+and judges of art; but it was to them only another form of epicurism and
+self-indulgence; and I have seen them led into such absurd and fatal
+mistakes for want of the power to distinguish and to generalise, that I
+have despised their judgment, and have come to the conclusion that a
+really high standard of taste and a low standard of morals are
+incompatible with each other.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+104.
+
+"The fact of the highest artistic genius having manifested itself in a
+polytheistic age, and among a people whose moral views were essentially
+degraded, has, we think, fostered the erroneous notion that the sphere
+of art has no connection with that of morality. The Greeks, with
+penetrative insight, dilated the essential characteristics of man's
+organism as a vehicle of superior intelligence, while their intense
+sympathy with physical beauty made them alive to its most subtle
+manifestations; and reproducing their impressions through the medium of
+art, they have given birth to models of the human form, which reveal its
+highest possibilities, and the excellence of which depends upon their
+being individual expressions of ideal truth. Thus, too, in their
+descriptions of nature, instead of multiplying insignificant details,
+they seized instinctively upon the characteristic features of her
+varying aspects, and not unfrequently embodied a finished picture in one
+comprehensive and harmonious word. In association with their marvellous
+genius, however, we find a cruelty, a treachery, and a licence which
+would be revolting if it were not for the historical interest which
+attaches to every genuine record of a bygone age. Their low moral
+standard cannot excite surprise when we consider the debasing tendency
+of their worship, the objects of their adoration being nothing more than
+their own degraded passions invested with some of the attributes of
+deity. Now, among the modifications of thought introduced by
+Christianity, there is perhaps none more pregnant with important results
+than the harmony which it has established between religion and
+morality. The great law of right and wrong has acquired a sacred
+character, when viewed as an expression of the divine will; it takes its
+rank among the eternal verities, and to ignore it in our delineations of
+life, or to represent sin otherwise than as treason against the supreme
+ruler, is to retain in modern civilisation one of the degrading elements
+of heathenism. Conscience is as great a fact of our inner life as the
+sense of beauty, and the harmonious action of both these instinctive
+principles is essential to the highest enjoyment of art, for any
+internal dissonance disturbs the repose of the mind, and thereby
+shatters the image mirrored in its depths."--_A. S._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+105.
+
+"Mais vous autres artistes, vous ne considerez pour la plupart dans les
+oeuvres que la beaute ou la singularite de l'execution, sans vous
+penetrer de l'idee dont cet oeuvre est la forme; ainsi votre intelligence
+adore souvent l'expression d'un sentiment que votre coeur repousserait
+s'il en avait la conscience."--_George Sand._
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+106.
+
+Lavater told Goethe that on a certain occasion when he held the velvet
+bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe
+only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual, the
+shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in
+dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and
+individually characteristic.
+
+What then shall we say of Van Dyck, who painted the hands of his men and
+women, not from individual nature, but from a model hand--his own very
+often?--and every one who considers for a moment will see in Van Dyck's
+portraits, that, however well painted and elegant the hands, they in
+very few instances harmonise with the _personalite_;--that the position
+is often affected, and as if intended for display,--the display of what
+is in itself a positive fault, and from which some little knowledge of
+comparative physiology would have saved him.
+
+There are hands of various character; the hand to catch, and the hand to
+hold; the hand to clasp, and the hand to grasp. The hand that has
+worked or could work, and the hand that has never done anything but hold
+itself out to be kissed, like that of Joanna of Arragon in Raphael's
+picture.
+
+Let any one look at the hands in Titian's portrait of old Paul IV.:
+though exquisitely modelled, they have an expression which reminds us of
+claws; they belong to the face of that grasping old man, and could
+belong to no other.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+107.
+
+Mozart and Chopin, though their genius was differently developed, were
+alike in some things: in nothing more than this, that the artistic
+element in both minds wholly dominated over the social and practical,
+and that their art was the element in which they moved and lived,
+through which they felt and thought. I doubt whether either of them
+could have said, "_D'abord je suis homme et puis je suis artiste_;"
+whereas this could have been said with truth by Mendelsohn and by
+Litzst. In Mendelsohn the enormous creative power was modified by the
+intellect and the conscience. Litzst has no creative power.
+
+Litzst has thus drawn the character of Chopin:--"Rien n'etait plus pur et
+plus exalte en meme temps que ses pensees; rien n'etait plus tenace,
+plus exclusif, et plus minutieusement devoue que ses affections. Mais
+cet etre ne comprenait que ce qui etait identique a lui-meme:--le reste
+n'existait pour lui que comme une sorte de reve facheux, auquel il
+essayait de se soustraire en vivant au milieu du monde. Toujours perdu
+dans ses reveries, la realite lui deplaisait. Enfant il ne pouvait
+toucher a un instrument tranchant sans se blesser; homme il ne pouvait
+se trouver en face d'un homme different de lui, sans se heurter contre
+cette contradiction vivante."
+
+"Ce qui le preservait d'un antagonisme perpetuel c'etait l'habitude
+volontaire et bientot inveteree de ne point voir, de ne pas entendre ce
+qui lui deplaisait: en general sans toucher a ses affections
+personelles, les etres qui ne pensaient pas comme lui devenaient a ses
+yeux comme des especes de fantomes; et comme il etait d'une politesse
+charmante, on pouvait prendre pour une bienveillance courtoise ce qui
+n'etait chez lui qu'un froid dedain--une aversion insurmontable."
+
+
+108.
+
+The father of Mozart was a man of high and strict religious principle.
+He had a conviction--in his case more truly founded than is usual--that
+he was the father of a great, a surpassing genius, and consequently of a
+being unfortunate in this, that he must be in advance of his age,
+exposed to error, to envy, to injustice, to strife; and to do his duty
+to his son demanded large faith and large firmness. But because he _did_
+estimate this sacred trust as a duty to be discharged, not only with
+respect to his gifted son, but to the God who had so endowed him; so, in
+spite of many mistakes, the earnest straightforward endeavour to do
+right in the parent seems to have saved Mozart's moral life, and to have
+given that completeness to the productions of his genius, which the
+harmony of the moral and creative faculties alone can bestow.
+
+
+"The modifying power of circumstances on Mozart's style, is an
+interesting consideration. Whatever of striking, of new or beautiful he
+met with in the works of others left its impression on him; and he often
+reproduced these efforts, not servilely, but mingling his own nature and
+feelings with them in a manner not less surprising than delightful."
+
+This is true equally of Shakespeare and of Raphael, both of whom adapted
+or rather adopted much from their precursors in the way of material to
+work upon; and whose incomparable originality consisted in the
+interfusion of their own great individual genius with every subject
+they touched, so that it became theirs, and could belong to no other.
+
+
+The Figaro was composed at Vienna. The Don Juan and Clemenza di Tito at
+Prague;--which I note because the localities are so characteristic of the
+operas. Cimarosa's Matrimonio Segreto was composed at Prague; it was on
+the fortification of the Hradschin one morning at sun-rise that he
+composed the _Pria che spunti in ciel l'aurora_.
+
+
+When called upon to describe his method of composing, what Mozart said
+of himself was very striking from its _naivete_ and truth. "I do not,"
+he said, "aim at originality. I do not know in what my originality
+consists. Why my productions take from my hand that particular form or
+style which makes them _Mozartish_, and different from the works of
+other composers is probably owing to the same cause which makes my nose
+this or that particular shape; makes it, in short, Mozart's nose, and
+different from other people's."
+
+Yet, as a composer, Mozart was as _objective_, as dramatic, as
+Shakspeare and Raphael; Chopin, in comparison, was wholly
+_subjective_,--the Byron of Music.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+109.
+
+Talking once with Adelaide Kemble, after she had been singing in the
+"Figaro," she compared the music to the bosom of a full blown rose in
+its voluptuous, intoxicating richness. I said that some of Mozart's
+melodies seemed to me not so much composed, but found--found on some
+sunshiny day in Arcadia, among nymphs and flowers. "Yes," she replied,
+with ready and felicitous expression, "not _inventions_, but
+_existences_."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+110.
+
+Old George the Third, in his blindness and madness, once insisted on
+making the selection of pieces for the concert of ancient music (May,
+1811),--it was soon after the death of the Princess Amelia. "The
+programme included some of the finest passages in Handel's 'Samson,'
+descriptive of blindness; the 'Lamentation of Jephthah,' for his
+daughter; Purcel's 'Mad Tom,' and closed with 'God save the King,' to
+make sure the application of all that went before."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+111.
+
+Every one who remembers what Madlle. Rachel was seven or eight years
+ago, and who sees her now (1853), will allow that she has made no
+progress in any of the essential excellences of her art:--a certain proof
+that she is not a great artist in the true sense of the word. She is a
+finished actress, but she is nothing more, and nothing better; not
+enough the artist ever to forget or conceal her art; consequently there
+is a want somewhere, which a mind highly toned and of quick perceptions
+feels from beginning to end. The parts in which she once excelled--the
+Phedre and the Hermione, for instance--have become formalised and hard,
+like studies cast in bronze; and when she plays a new part it has no
+freshness. I always go to see her whenever I can. I admire her as what
+she is--the Parisian actress, practised in every trick of her _metier_. I
+admire what she does, I think how well it is all _done_, and am inclined
+to clap and applaud her drapery, perfect and ostentatiously studied in
+every fold, just with the same feeling that I applaud herself.
+
+As to the last scene of Adrienne Lecouvreur, (which those who are
+_avides de sensation_, athirst for painful emotion, go to see as they
+would drink a dram, and critics laud as a miracle of art,) it is
+altogether a mistake and a failure; it is beyond the just limits of
+terror and pity--beyond the legitimate sphere of _art_. It reminds us of
+the story of Gentil Bellini and the Sultan. The Sultan much admired
+Bellini's picture of the decollation of John the Baptist, but informed
+him that it was inaccurate--surgically--for the tendons and muscles ought
+to shrink where divided; and then calling for one of his slaves, he drew
+his scimitar, and striking off the head of the wretch, gave the
+horror-struck artist a lesson in practical anatomy. So we might possibly
+learn from Rachel's imitative representation, (studied in an hospital as
+they say,) how poison acts on the frame, and how the limbs and features
+writhe into death; but if she were a great moral artist she would feel
+that what is allowed to be true in painting, is true in art generally;
+that mere imitation, such as the vulgar delight in, and hold up their
+hands to see, is the vulgarest and easiest aim of the imitative arts,
+and that between the true interpretation of poetry in art and such base
+mechanical means to the lowest ends, there lies an immeasurable
+distance.
+
+I am disposed to think that Rachel has not genius, but talent, and that
+her talent, from what I see year after year, has a downward
+tendency,--there is not sufficient moral seasoning to save it from
+corruption. I remember that when I first saw her in Hermione she
+reminded me of a serpent, and the same impression continues. The long
+meagre form with its graceful undulating movements, the long narrow face
+and features, the contracted jaw, the high brow, the brilliant
+supernatural eyes which seem to glance every way at once; the sinister
+smile; the painted red lips, which look as though they had lapped, or
+could lap, blood; all these bring before me the idea of a Lamia, the
+serpent nature in the woman's form. In Lydia, and in Athalie, she
+touches the extremes of vice and wickedness with such a masterly
+lightness and precision, that I am full of wondering admiration for the
+actress. There is not a turn of her figure, not an expression in her
+face, not a fold in her gorgeous drapery, that is not a study; but
+withal such a consciousness of her art, and such an ostentation of the
+means she employs, that the power remains always _extraneous_, as it
+were, and exciting only to the senses and the intellect.
+
+Latterly she has become a hard mannerist. Her face, once so flexible,
+has lost the power of expressing the nicer shades and softer gradations
+of feeling; so much so, that they write dramas for her with
+supernaturally wicked and depraved heroines to suit her especial powers.
+I conceive that an artist could not sink lower in degradation. Yet to
+satisfy the taste of a Parisian audience and the ambition of a Parisian
+actress this was not enough, and wickedness required the piquancy of
+immediate approximation with innocence. In the Valeria she played two
+characters, and appeared on the stage alternately as a miracle of vice
+and a miracle of virtue: an abandoned prostitute and a chaste matron.
+There was something in this contrasted impersonation, considered simply
+in relation to the aims and objects of art, so revolting, that I sat in
+silent and deep disgust, which was partly deserved by the audience which
+could endure the exhibition.
+
+It is the entire absence of the high poetic and moral element which
+distinguishes Rachel as an actress, and places her at such an
+immeasurable distance from Mrs. Siddons, that it shocks me to hear them
+named together.
+
+
+112.
+
+It is no reproach to a capital actress to play effectively a very wicked
+character. Mrs. Siddons played the abandoned Milwood as carefully, as
+completely as she played Hermoine and Constance; but if it had required
+a perpetual succession of Calistas and Milwoods to call forth her
+highest powers, what should we think of the woman and the artist?
+
+
+113.
+
+When dramas and characters are invented to suit the particular talent of
+a particular actor or actress, it argues rather a limited range of the
+artistic power; though within that limit the power may be great and the
+talent genuine.
+
+
+Thus for Liston and for Miss O'Neil, so distinguished in their
+respective lines of Comedy and Tragedy, characters were especially
+constructed and plays written, which have not been acted since their
+time.
+
+
+114.
+
+A celebrated German actress (who has quitted the stage for many years)
+speaking of Rachel, said that the reason she must always stop short of
+the highest place in art, is because she is nothing but an actress--that
+only; and has no aims in life, has no duties, feelings, employments,
+sympathies, but those which centre in herself in the interests of her
+art;--which thus ceases to be _art_ and becomes a _metier_.
+
+This reminded me of what Pauline Viardot once said to me:--"D'abord je
+suis _femme_, avec les devoirs, les affections, les sentiments d'une
+femme; et puis je suis _artiste_."
+
+
+115.
+
+The same German actress whose opinion I have quoted, told me that the
+Leonora and the Iphigenia of Goethe were the parts she preferred to
+play. The Thekla and the Beatrice of Schiller next. (In all these she
+excelled.) The parts easiest to her, requiring no effort scarcely, were
+Jerta (in Houwald's Tragedy, "Die Schuld"), and Claerchen in Egmont; of
+the character of Jerta, she said beautifully:--"Ich habe es nicht
+gespielt, Ich habe es gesagt!" (I did not _play_ it, I _uttered_ it.)
+This was extremely characteristic of the woman.
+
+I once asked Mrs. Siddons, which of her great characters she preferred
+to play? She replied, after a moment's consideration, and in her rich
+deliberate emphatic tones:--"Lady Macbeth is the character I have most
+_studied_." She afterwards said that she had played the character during
+thirty years, and scarcely acted it once, without carefully reading
+over the part and generally the whole play in the morning; and that she
+never read over the play without finding something new in it;
+"something," she said, "which had not struck me so much as it _ought_ to
+have struck me."
+
+
+Of Mrs. Pritchard, who preceded Mrs. Siddons in the part of Lady
+Macbeth, it was well known that she had never read the play. She merely
+studied her own part as written out by the stage-copyist; of the other
+parts she knew nothing but the _cues_.
+
+
+116.
+
+When I asked Mrs. Henry Siddons, which of her characters she preferred
+playing? she said at once "Imogen, in Cymbeline, was the character I
+played with most ease to myself, and most success as regarded the
+public; it cost no effort."
+
+This was confirmed by others. A very good judge said of her--"In some of
+her best parts, as Juliet, Rosalind, and Lady Townley, she may have been
+approached or equalled. In Viola and Imogen she was never equalled. In
+the grace and simplicity of the first, in the refinement and shy but
+impassioned tenderness of the last, _I_ at least have never seen any one
+to be compared to her. She hardly seemed to _act_ these parts; they came
+naturally to her."
+
+This reminds me of another anecdote of the same accomplished actress and
+admirable woman. The people of Edinburgh, among whom she lived, had so
+identified her with all that was gentle, refined and noble, that they
+did not like to see her play wicked parts. It happened that Godwin went
+down to Edinburgh with a tragedy in his pocket, which had been accepted
+by the theatre there, and in which Mrs. Henry Siddons was to play the
+principal part--that of a very wicked woman (I forget the name of the
+piece). He was warned that it risked the success of his play, but her
+conception of the part was so just and spirited, that he persisted. At
+the rehearsal she stopped in the midst of one of her speeches and said,
+with great _naivete_, "I am afraid, Mr. Godwin, the people will not
+endure to hear me say this!" He replied coolly, "My dear, you cannot be
+always young and pretty--you must come to this at last,--go on." He
+mistook her meaning and the feeling of "the people." The play failed;
+and the audience took care to discriminate between their disapprobation
+of the piece and their admiration for the actress.
+
+
+117.
+
+Madame Schroeder Devrient told me that she sung with most pleasure to
+herself in the "Fidelio;" and in this part I have never seen her
+equalled.
+
+Fanny Kemble told me the part she had played with most pleasure to
+herself, was Camiola, in Massinger's "Maid of Honour." It was an
+exquisite impersonation, but the play itself ineffective and not
+successful, because of the weak and worthless character of the hero.
+
+
+118.
+
+Mrs. Charles Kean told me that she had played with great ease and
+pleasure to herself, the part of Ginevra, in Leigh Hunt's "Legend of
+Florence." She _made_ the part (as it is technically termed), and it was
+a very complete and beautiful impersonation.
+
+
+These answers appear to me psychologically, as well as artistically,
+interesting, and worth preserving.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+119.
+
+Mrs. Siddons, when looking over the statues in Lord Lansdowne's gallery,
+told him that one mode of expressing intensity of feeling was suggested
+to her by the position of some of the Egyptian statues with the arms
+close down at the sides and the hands clenched. This is curious, for the
+attitude in the Egyptian gods is intended to express repose. As the
+expression of intense passion self-controlled, it might be appropriate
+to some characters and not to others. Rachel, as I recollect, uses it in
+the Phedre:--Madame Rettich uses it in the Medea. It would not be
+characteristic in Constance.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+120.
+
+On a certain occasion when Fanny Kemble was reading Cymbeline, a lady
+next to me remarked that Imogen ought not to utter the words "Senseless
+linen!--happier therein than I!" aloud, and to Pisanio,--that it detracted
+from the strength of the feeling, and that they should have been uttered
+aside, and in a low, intense whisper. "Iachimo," she added, "might
+easily have won a woman who could have laid her heart so bare to a mere
+attendant!"
+
+On my repeating this criticism to Fanny Kemble, she replied just as I
+had anticipated: "Such criticism is the mere expression of the natural
+emotions or character of the critic. _She_ would have spoken the words
+in a whisper; _I_ should have made the exclamation aloud. If there had
+been a thousand people by, I should not have cared for them--I should not
+have been conscious of their presence. I should have exclaimed before
+them all, 'Senseless linen!--happier therein than I!'"
+
+And thus the artist fell into the same mistake of which she accused her
+critic--she made Imogen utter the words aloud, because _she_ would have
+done so herself. This sort of subjective criticism in both was quite
+feminine; but the question was not how either A. B. or F. K. would have
+spoken the words, but what would have been most natural in such a woman
+as Imogen?
+
+And most undoubtedly the first criticism was as exquisitely true and
+just as it was delicate. Such a woman as Imogen would _not_ have uttered
+those words aloud. She would have uttered them in a whisper, and turning
+her face from her attendant. With such a woman, the more intense the
+passion, the more conscious and the more veiled the expression.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+121.
+
+I read in the life of Garrick that, "about 1741, a taste for Shakespeare
+had lately been revived by the encouragement of some distinguished
+persons of taste of both sexes; but more especially by the ladies who
+formed themselves into a society, called the 'Shakespeare Club.'" There
+exists a Shakespeare Society at this present time, but I do not know
+that any ladies are members of it, or allowed to be so.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+122.
+
+The "Maria Maddalena" of Friedrich Hebbel is a domestic tragedy. It
+represents the position of a young girl in the lower class of society-a
+character of quiet goodness and feeling, in a position the most usual,
+circumstances the most common-place. The representation is from the
+life, and set forth with a truth which in its naked simplicity, almost
+hardness, becomes most tragic and terrible. Around this girl, portrayed
+with consummate delicacy, is a group of men. First her father, an honest
+artisan, coarse, harsh, despotic. Then a light-minded, good-natured,
+dissipated brother, and two suitors. All these love her according to
+their masculine individuality. To the men of her own family she is as a
+part of the furniture--something they are accustomed to see--necessary to
+the daily well-being of the house, without whom the fire would not be on
+the hearth, nor the soup on the table; and they are proud of her charms
+and good qualities as belonging to them. By her lovers she is loved as
+an object they desire to possess--and dispute with each other. But no one
+of all these thinks of _her_--of what she thinks, feels, desires,
+suffers, is, or may be. Nor does she seem to think of it herself, until
+the storm falls upon her, enwraps her, overwhelms her. Then she stands
+in the midst of the beings around her, and who are one and all in a kind
+of external relation to her, completely alone. In her grief, in her
+misery, in her amazement, her perplexity, her terror, there is no one to
+take thought for her, no one to help, no one to sympathise. Each is
+self-occupied, self-satisfied. And so she sinks down and perishes, and
+they stand wondering at what they had not the sense to see, wringing
+their hands over the irremediable. It is the Lucy Ashton of vulgar life.
+
+The manners and characters of this play are essentially German; but the
+_stuff_--the material of the piece--the relative position of the
+personages, might be true of any place in this christian, civilised
+Europe. The whole is wonderfully, painfully natural, and strikes home to
+the heart, like Hood's "Bridge of Sighs." It was a surprise to me that
+such a piece should have been acted, and with applause, at the Court
+Theatre at Vienna; but I believe it has not been given since 1849.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+123.
+
+Here is a very good analysis of the artistic nature: "Il ressent une
+veritable emotion, mais il s'arrange pour la montrer. Il fait un peu ce
+que faisait cet acteur de l'antiquite qui, venant de perdre son fils
+unique et jouant quelque temps apres le role d'Electre embrassant l'urne
+d'Oreste, prit entre ses mains l'urne qui contenait les cendres de son
+enfant, et joua sa propre douleur, dit Aulus Gellius, au lieu de jouer
+celle de son role. Ce melange de l'emotion naturelle et de l'emotion
+theatrale est plus frequent qu'on ne croit, surtout a certaines epoques
+quand le raffinement de l'Education fait que l'homme ne sent pas
+seulement ses emotions, mais qu'il sent aussi l'effet qu'elles peuvent
+produire. Beaucoup de gens alors, sont naturellement comediens; c'est a
+dire qu'ils donnent un role a leurs passions: ils sentent en dehors au
+lieu de sentir en dedans; leurs emotions sont _en relief_ au lieu d'etre
+_en profondeur_."--_St. Marc Girardin._
+
+I think Margaret Fuller must have had the above passage in her mind when
+she worked out this happy illustration into a more finished form. She
+says:--"The difference between the artistic nature and the unartistic
+nature in the hour of emotion, is this: in the first the feeling is a
+cameo, in the last an intaglio. Raised in relief and shaped _out_ of the
+heart in the first; cut _into_ the heart, and hardly perceptible till
+you take the impression, in the last."
+
+And to complete this fanciful and beautiful analogy, we might add, that
+because the artistic nature is demonstrative, it is sometimes thought
+insincere; and insincere it _is_ where the form is hollow in proportion
+as it is cast outward, as in the casts and electrotype copies of the
+solid sculpture. And because the unartistic nature is undemonstrative,
+it is sometimes thought cold, unreal; for of this also there are
+imitations; and in passing the touch over certain intaglios, we feel by
+contact that they are not so deep as we supposed.
+
+God defend us from both! from the hollowness that imitates solidity,
+and the shallowness that imitates depth!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+124.
+
+Goethe said of some woman, "She knew something of devotion and love, but
+of the pure admiration for a glorious piece of man's handiwork--of a mere
+sympathetic veneration for the creation of the human intellect--she could
+form no idea."
+
+This may have been true of the individual woman referred to; but that
+female critics look for something in a production of art beyond the mere
+handiwork, and that "our sympathetic veneration for a creation of human
+intellect," is often dependent on our moral associations, is not a
+reproach to us. Nor, if I may presume to say so, does it lessen the
+value of our criticism, where it can be referred to principles. Women
+have a sort of unconscious logic in these matters.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+125.
+
+"When fiction," says Sir James Mackintosh, "represents a degree of ideal
+excellence superior to any virtue which is observed in real life, the
+effect is perfectly analogous to that of a model of ideal beauty in the
+fine arts."
+
+That is to say--As the Apollo exalts our idea of possible beauty, in
+form, so the moral ideal of man or woman exalts our idea of possible
+virtue, provided it be _consistent_ as a whole. If we gave the Apollo a
+god-like head and face and left a part of his frame below perfection,
+the elevating effect of the whole would be immediately destroyed, though
+the figure might be more according to the standard of actual nature.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+126.
+
+"In Dante, as in Shakespeare, every man selects by instinct that which
+assimilates with the course of his own previous occupations and
+interests." (_Merivale._) True, not of Dante and Shakespeare only, but
+of all books worth reading; and not merely of books and authors, but of
+all productions of mind in whatever form which speak to mind; all works
+of art, from which we _imbibe_, as it were, what is sympathetic with our
+individuality. The more universal the sympathies of the writer or the
+artist, the more of such individualities will be included in his domain
+of power.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+127.
+
+The distinction so cleverly and beautifully drawn by the Germans (by
+Lessing first I believe) between "Bildende" and "Redende Kunst" is not
+to be rendered into English without a lengthy paraphrase. It places in
+immediate contradistinction the art which is evolved in _words_, and the
+art which is evolved in _forms_.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+128.
+
+Venus, or rather the Greek Aphrodite, in the sublime fragment of
+Eschylus (the Danaides) is a grand, severe, and pure conception; the
+principle eternal of beauty, of love, and of fecundity--or the law of the
+continuation of being through beauty and through love. Such a
+conception is no more like the Ovidean Roman Venus than the Venus of
+Milo is like the Venus de Medicis.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+129.
+
+In the Greek tragedy, love figures as one of the laws of nature--not as a
+power, or a passion; these are the aspects given to it by the Christian
+imagination.
+
+Yet this higher idea of love _did_ exist among the ancients--only we must
+not seek it in their poetry, but in their philosophy. Thus we find it in
+Plato, set forth as a beautiful philosophical theory; not as a passion,
+to influence life, nor as a poetic feeling, to adorn and exalt it. Nor
+do we moderns owe this idea of a mystic, elevated, and elevating love to
+the Greek philosophy. I rather agree with those who trace it to the
+mingling of Christianity with the manners of the old Germans, and their
+(almost) superstitious reverence for womanhood. In the Middle Ages,
+where morals were most depraved, and women most helpless and oppressed,
+there still survived the theory formed out of the combination of the
+Christian spirit, and the Germanic customs; and when in the 15th
+century Plato became the fashion, then the theory became a science, and
+what had been religion became again philosophy. This sort of speculative
+love became to real love what theology became to religion; it was a
+thesis to be talked about and argued in universities, sung in sonnets,
+set forth in art; and so being kept as far as possible from all bearings
+on our moral life, it ceased to find consideration either as a primaeval
+law of God, or as a moral motive influencing the duties and habits of
+our existence; and thus we find the social code in regard to it
+diverging into all the vagaries of celibacy on one hand, and all the
+vilenesses of profligacy on the other.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+130.
+
+Wilkie's "Life and Letters" have not helped me much. His opinions and
+criticisms on his own art are sensible, not suggestive. I find, however,
+one or two passages strongly illustrative of the value of _truth_ as a
+principle in art, and the sort of _vitality_ it gives to scenery and
+objects.
+
+He writes, when travelling in Holland, to his friend, Sir George
+Beaumont;--
+
+"One of the first circumstances that struck me wherever I went was what
+you had prepared me for; the resemblance that everything bore to the
+Dutch and Flemish pictures. On leaving Ostend, not only the people,
+houses, trees, but whole tracks of country reminded me of Teniers, and
+on getting further into the country this was only relieved by the
+pictures of Rubens and Wouvermans, or some other masters taking his
+place.
+
+"I thought I could trace the particular districts in Holland where
+Ostade, Cuyp, and Rembrandt had studied, and could almost fancy the spot
+where the pictures of other masters had been painted. Indeed nothing
+seemed new to me in the whole country; and what one could not help
+wondering at, was, that these old masters should have been able to draw
+the materials of so beautiful a variety of art, from so contracted and
+monotonous a theme."
+
+Their variety arose out of their truthfulness. I had the same feeling
+when travelling in Holland and Belgium. It was to me a perpetual
+succession of reminiscences, and so it has been with others. Rubens and
+Rembrandt (as landscape painters)--Cuyp, Hobbima, were continually in my
+mind; occasionally the yet more poetical Ruysdaal; but who ever thinks
+of Wouvermans, or Bergham, or Karel du Jardin, as national or natural
+painters? their scenery is all _got up_ like the scenery in a ballet,
+and I can conceive nothing more tiresome than a room full of their
+pictures, elegant as they are.
+
+
+131.
+
+Again, writing from Jerusalem, Wilkie says, "Nothing here requires
+revolution in our opinions of the finest works of art: with all their
+discrepancies of detail, they are yet constantly recalled by what is
+here before us. The background of the Heliodorus of Raphael is a Syrian
+building; the figures in the Lazarus of Sebastian del Piombo are a
+Syrian people; and the indescribable tone of Rembrandt is brought to
+mind at every turn, whether in the street, the Synagogue, or the
+Sepulchre." And again: "The painter we are always referring to, as one
+who has most truly given the eastern people, is Rembrandt."
+
+He partly contradicts this afterwards, but says, that Venetian art
+reminds him of Syria. Now, the Venetians were in constant communication
+with the East; all their art has a tinge of orientalism. As to
+Rembrandt, he must have been in familiar intercourse with the Jew
+merchants and Jewish families settled in the Dutch commercial towns; he
+painted them frequently as portraits, and they perpetually appear in his
+compositions.
+
+
+132.
+
+In the following passage Wilkie seems unconsciously to have anticipated
+the invention (or rather the _discovery_) of the Daguerreotype, and some
+of its results. He says:--"If by an operation of mechanism, animated
+nature could be copied with the accuracy of a cast in plaster, a tracing
+on a wall, or a reflection in a glass, without modification, and without
+the proprieties and graces of art, all that utility could desire would
+be perfectly attained, but it would be at the expense of almost every
+quality which renders art delightful."
+
+One reason why the Daguerreotype portraits are in general so
+unsatisfactory may perhaps be traced to a natural law, though I have not
+heard it suggested. It is this: every object that we behold we see not
+with the eye only, but with the soul; and this is especially true of the
+human countenance, which in so far as it is the expression of mind we
+see through the medium of our own individual mind. Thus a portrait is
+satisfactory in so far as the painter has sympathy with his subject, and
+delightful to us in proportion as the resemblance reflected through
+_his_ sympathies is in accordance with _our own_. Now in the
+Daguerreotype there is no such medium, and the face comes before us
+without passing through the human mind and brain to our apprehension.
+This may be the reason why a Daguerreotype, however beautiful and
+accurate, is seldom satisfactory or agreeable, and that while we
+acknowledge its truth as to fact, it always leaves something for the
+sympathies to desire.
+
+
+133.
+
+He says, "One thing alone seems common in all the stages of early art;
+the desire of making all other excellences tributary to the expression
+of thought and sentiment."
+
+The early painters had _no other_ excellences except those of thought
+and expression; therefore could not sacrifice what they did not possess.
+They drew incorrectly, coloured ineffectively, and were ignorant of
+perspective.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+134.
+
+When at Dusseldorf, I found the President of the Academy, Wilhelm
+Schadow, employed on a church picture in three compartments; Paradise
+in the centre; on the right side, Purgatory; on the left side, Hell. He
+explained to me that he had not attempted to paint the interior of
+Paradise as the sojourn of the blessed, because he could imagine no kind
+of occupation or delight which, prolonged to eternity, would not be
+wearisome. He had therefore represented the exterior of Paradise, where
+Christ, standing on the threshold with outstretched arms, receives and
+welcomes those who enter. (This was better and in finer taste than the
+more common allegory of St. Peter and his keys.) On one side of the
+door, the Virgin Mary and a group of guardian angels encourage those who
+approach. Among these we distinguish a martyr who has died for the
+truth, and a warrior who has fought for it. A care-worn, penitent mother
+is presented by her innocent daughter. Those who were "in the world and
+the world knew them not," are here acknowledged--and eyes dim with
+weeping, and heads bowed with shame, are here uplifted, and bright with
+the rapturous gleam which shone through the portals of Paradise.
+
+The idea of Purgatory, he told me, was suggested by a vision or dream
+related by St. Catherine of Genoa, in which she beheld a great number of
+men and women shut up in a dark cavern; angels descending from heaven,
+liberate them from time to time, and they are borne away one after
+another from darkness, pain, and penance, into life and light--again to
+behold the face of their Maker--reconciled and healed. In his picture,
+Schadow has represented two angels bearing away a liberated soul. Below
+in the fore-ground groups of sinners are waiting, sadly, humbly, but not
+unhopefully, the term of their bitter penance. Among these he had placed
+a group of artists and poets who, led away by temptation, had abused
+their glorious gifts to wicked or worldly purposes;--Titian, Ariosto,
+and, rather to my surprise, the beautiful, lamenting spirit of Byron.
+Then, what was curious enough, as types of ambition, Lady Macbeth and
+her husband, who, it seems, were to be ultimately saved, I do not know
+why--unless for the love of Shakespeare.
+
+Hell, like all the hells I ever saw, was a failure. There was the usual
+amount of fire and flames, dragons and serpents, ghastly, despairing
+spirits, but nothing of original or powerful conception. When I looked
+in Schadow's face, so beautiful with benevolence, I wondered _how_ he
+could--but in truth he could _not_--realise to himself the idea of a hell;
+all the materials he had used were borrowed and common-place.
+
+But among his cartoons for pictures already painted, there was one
+charming idea of quite a different kind. It was for an altar, and he
+called it "THE FOUNTAIN OF LIFE." Above, the sacrificed Redeemer lies
+extended in his mother's arms. The pure abundant Waters of Salvation,
+gushing from the rock beneath their feet, are received into a great
+cistern. Saints, martyrs, teachers of the truth, are standing round,
+drinking or filling their vases, which they present to each other. From
+the cistern flows a stream, at which a family of poor peasants are
+drinking with humble, joyful looks; and as the stream divides and flows
+away through flowery meadows, little sportive children stoop to drink of
+it, scooping up the water in their tiny hands, or sipping it with their
+rosy smiling lips. A beautiful and significant allegory beautifully
+expressed, and as intelligible to the people as any in the "Pilgrim's
+Progress."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+135.
+
+Haydon discussed "High Art" as if it depended solely on the knowledge
+and the appreciation of _form_. In this lay his great mistake. Form is
+but the vehicle of the highest art.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+136.
+
+Southey says that the Franciscan Order "excluded all art, all
+science;--no pictures might profane their churches." This is a most
+extraordinary instance of ignorance in a man of Southey's universal
+learning. Did he forget Friar Bacon? had he not heard of that museum of
+divine pictures, the Franciscan church and convent at Assisi? And that
+some of the greatest mathematicians, architects, mosaic workers,
+carvers, and painters, of the 13th and 14th centuries were Franciscan
+friars?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+137.
+
+Wordsworth's remark on Sir Joshua Reynolds as a painter, that "he lived
+too much for the age and the people among whom he lived," is hardly
+just; as a portrait-painter he could not well do otherwise; his
+profession was to represent the people among whom he lived. An artist
+who takes the higher, the creative and imaginative walks of art, and who
+thinks he can, at the same time, live for and with the age, and for the
+passing and clashing interests of the world, and the frivolities of
+society, does so at a great risk: there must be perilous discord between
+the inner and the outer life--such discord as wears and irritates the
+whole physical and moral being. Where the original material of the
+character is not strong, the artistic genius will be gradually
+enfeebled and conventionalised, through flattery, through sympathy,
+through misuse. If the material be strong, the result may perhaps be
+worse; the genius may be demoralised and the mind lose its balance. I
+have seen in my time instances of both.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+138.
+
+"The man," says Coleridge, "who reads a work meant for immediate effect
+on one age, with the notions and feelings of another, may be a refined
+gentleman but a very sorry critic."
+
+This is especially true with regard to art: but Coleridge should have
+put in the word, _only_, ("only the notions and feelings of another
+age,") for a very great pleasure lies in the power of throwing ourselves
+into the sentiments and notions of one age, while feeling _with_ them,
+and reflecting _upon_ them, with the riper critical experience which
+belongs to another age.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+139.
+
+A _good_ taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a
+_just_ taste discriminates the degree,--the _poco-piu_ and the
+_poco-meno_. A _good_ taste rejects faults; a _just_ taste selects
+excellences. A _good_ taste is often unconscious; a _just_ taste is
+always conscious. A _good_ taste may be lowered or spoilt; a _just_
+taste can only go on refining more and more.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+140.
+
+Artists are interesting to me as men. Their work, as the product of
+mind, should lead us to a knowledge of their own being; else, as I have
+often said and written, our admiration of art is a species of atheism.
+To forget the soul in its highest manifestation is like forgetting God
+in his creation.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+141.
+
+"Les images peints du corps humain, dans les figures ou domine par trop
+le savoir anatomique, en revelant trop clairement a l'homme les secrets
+de sa structure, lui en decouvrent aussi par trop ce qu'on pourrait
+appeler le point de vue _materiel_, ou, si l'on veut, _animal_."
+
+This is the fault of Michal-Angelo; yet I have sometimes thought that
+his very materialism, so grand, and so peculiar in character, may have
+arisen out of his profound religious feeling, his stern morality, his
+lofty conceptions of our _mortal_, as well as _immortal_ destinies. He
+appears to have beheld the human form only in a pure and sublime point
+of view; not as the animal man, but as the habitation, fearfully and
+wondrously constructed, for the spirit of man,--
+
+           "The outward shape,
+   And unpolluted temple of the mind."
+
+This is the reason that Michal-Angelo's materialism affects us so
+differently from that of Rubens. In the first, the predominance of form
+attains almost a moral sublimity. In the latter, the predominance of
+flesh and blood is debased into physical grossness. Michal-Angelo
+believed in the resurrection of THE BODY, emphatically; and in his Last
+Judgment the dead rise like Titans, strong to contend and mighty to
+suffer. It is the apotheosis of form. In Ruben's picture of the same
+subject (at Munich) the bodily presence of resuscitated life is
+revolting, reminding us of the text of St. Paul--"Flesh and blood shall
+_not_ inherit the kingdom of God." Both pictures are _aesthetically_
+false, but _artistically_ miracles, and should thus be considered and
+appreciated.
+
+I have never looked on those awful figures in the Medici Chapel without
+thinking what stupendous intellects must inhabit such stupendous
+forms--terrible in their quietude; but they are supernatural, rather than
+divine.
+
+   "Heidnische Ruhe und Christliche Milde, sie bleiben Dir fremde;
+    Alt-testamentisch bist Du, Zuernender, wie ist Dein Gott!"
+
+John Edward Taylor, in his profound and beautiful essay "MICHAEL-ANGELO,
+A POET," says truly that "Dante worshipped the philosophy of religion,
+and Michael-Angelo adored the philosophy of art." The religion of the
+one and the art of the other were evolved in a strange combination of
+mysticism, materialism, and moral grandeur. The two men were congenial
+in character and in genius.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+A FRAGMENT ON SCULPTURE.
+
+
+AND ON CERTAIN CHARACTERS IN HISTORY AND POETRY CONSIDERED AS
+SUBJECTS OF MODERN ART.
+
+1848.
+
+
+I Should begin by admitting the position laid down by Frederick
+Schlegel, that art and nature are not identical. "Men," he says,
+"traduce nature, who falsely give her the epithet of artistic;" for
+though nature comprehends all art, art cannot comprehend all nature.
+Nature, in her sources of pleasures and contemplation is infinite; and
+art, as her reflection in human works, finite. Nature is boundless in
+her powers, exhaustless in her variety; the powers of art and its
+capabilities of variety in production are bounded on every side. Nature
+herself, the infinite, has circumscribed the bounds of finite art; the
+one is the divinity; the other, the priestess. And if poetic art in the
+_interpreting_ of nature share in her infinitude, yet in _representing_
+nature through material, form, and colour, she is,--oh, how limited!
+
+
+If each of the forms of poetic art has its law of limitation as
+determined as the musical scale, narrowest of all are the limitations of
+sculpture, to which, notwithstanding, we give the highest place; and it
+is in regard to sculpture, we find most frequently those mistakes which
+arise from a want of knowledge of the true principles of art.
+
+Admitting, then, as necessary and immutable, the limitations of the art
+of sculpture as to the management of the material in giving form and
+expression; its primal laws of repose and simplicity; its rejection of
+the complex and conventional; its bounded capabilities as to choice of
+subject; must we also admit, with some of the most celebrated critics of
+art, that there is but one style of sculpture, the Greek? And that every
+deviation from pure Greek art must be regarded as a depravation and
+perversion of the powers and subjects of sculpture? I do not see that
+this follows.
+
+
+It is absolute that Greek art reached long ago the term of its
+development. In so far as regards the principles of beauty and
+execution, it can go no farther. We may stand and look at the relics of
+the Parthenon in awe and in despair; we can do neither more, nor better.
+But we have not done with Greek sculpture. What in it is purely _ideal_,
+is eternal; what is conventional, is in accordance with the primal
+conditions of all imitative art. Therefore though it may have reached
+the point at which development stops, and though its capability of
+adaptation be limited by necessary laws; still its all-beautiful, its
+immortal imagery is ever near us and around us; still "doth the old
+feeling bring back the old names," and with the old names, the forms;
+still, in those old familiar forms we continue to clothe all that is
+loveliest in visible nature; still, in all our associations with Greek
+art--
+
+  "'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great,
+   And Venus who brings every thing that's fair."
+
+That the supreme beauty of Greek art--that the majestic significance of
+the classical myths--will ever be to the educated mind and eye as things
+indifferent and worn out, I cannot believe.
+
+
+But on the other hand it may well be doubted whether the impersonation
+of the Greek allegories in the purest forms of Greek art will ever give
+intense pleasure to the people, or ever speak home to the hearts of the
+men and women of these times. And this not from the want of an innate
+taste and capacity in the minds of the masses--not because ignorance has
+"frozen the genial current in their souls"--not merely through a vulgar
+preference for mechanical imitation of common and familiar forms; but
+from other causes not transient--not accidental. A classical education is
+not now, as heretofore, the _only_ education given; and through an
+honest and intense sympathy with the life of their own experience, and
+through a dislike to vicious associations, though clothed in classical
+language and classical forms, _thence_ is it that the people have turned
+with a sense of relief from gods and goddesses, Ledas and Antiopes, to
+shepherds and shepherdesses, groups of Charity, and young ladies in the
+character of Innocence,--harmless, picturesque inanities, bearing the
+same relation to classical sculpture that Watts's hymns bear to Homer
+and Sophocles.
+
+
+Classical attainments of any kind are rare in our English sculptors;
+therefore it is, that we find them often quite familiar with the
+conventional treatment and outward forms of the usual subjects of Greek
+art, without much knowledge of the original poetical conception, its
+derivation, or its significance; and equally without any real
+appreciation of the idea of which the form is but the vehicle. Hence
+they do not seem to be aware how far this original conception is
+capable of being varied, modified, _animated_ as it were, with an
+infusion of fresh life, without deviating from its essential truth, or
+transgressing those narrow limits, within which all sculpture must be
+bounded in respect to action and attitude. To express _character_ within
+these limits is the grand difficulty. We must remember that too much
+value given to the head as the seat of mind, too much expression given
+to the features as the exponents of character, must diminish the
+importance of those parts of the form on which sculpture mainly depends
+for its effect on the imagination. To convey the idea of a complete
+individuality in a single figure, and under these restrictions, is the
+problem to be solved by the sculptor who aims at originality, yet feels
+his aspirations restrained by a fine taste and circumscribed by certain
+inevitable associations.
+
+
+It is therefore a question open to argument and involving considerations
+of infinite delicacy and moment, in morals and in art, whether the old
+Greek legends, endued as they are with an imperishable vitality derived
+from their abstract youth, may not be susceptible of a treatment in
+modern art analogous to that which they have received in modern poetry,
+where the significant myth, or the ideal character, without losing its
+classic grace, has been animated with a purer sentiment, and developed
+into a higher expressiveness. Wordsworth's Dion and Laodomia; Shelley's
+version of the Hymn to Mercury; Goethe's Iphigenia; Lord Byron's
+Prometheus; Keats's Hyperion; Barry Cornwall's Proserpina; are instances
+of what I mean in poetry. To do the same thing in art, requires that our
+sculptors should stand in the same relation to Phidias and Praxiteles,
+that our greatest poets bear to Homer or Euripides; that they should be
+themselves poets and interpreters, not mere translators and imitators.
+
+Further, we all know, that there is often a necessity for conveying
+abstract ideas in the forms of art. We have then recourse to allegory;
+yet allegorical statues are generally cold and conventional and
+addressed to the intellect merely. Now there are occasions, in which an
+abstract quality or thought is far more impressively and intelligibly
+conveyed by an _impersonation_ than by a _personification_. I mean, that
+Aristides might express the idea of justice; Penelope, that of conjugal
+faith; Jonathan and David (or Pylades and Orestes), friendship; Rizpah,
+devotion to the memory of the dead; Iphigenia, the voluntary sacrifice
+for a good cause; and so of many others; and such figures would have
+this advantage, that with the significance of a symbol they would
+combine all the powers of a sympathetic reality.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+HELEN.
+
+I have never seen any statue of Helen, ancient or modern. Treated in the
+right spirit, I can hardly conceive a diviner subject for a sculptor. It
+would be a great mistake to represent the Greek Helen merely as a
+beautiful and alluring woman. This, at least, is not the Homeric
+conception of the character, which has a wonderful and fascinating
+individuality, requiring the utmost delicacy and poetic feeling to
+comprehend, and rare artistic skill to realise. The oft-told story of
+the Grecian painter, who, to create a Helen, assembled some twenty of
+the fairest models he could find, and took from each a limb or a
+feature, in order to compose from their separate beauties an ideal of
+perfection,--this story, if it were true, would only prove that even
+Zeuxis could make a great mistake. Such a combination of heterogeneous
+elements would be psychologically and artistically false, and would
+never give us a Helen.
+
+She has become the ideal type of a fatal, faithless, dissolute woman;
+but according to the Greek myth, she is _predestined_,--at once the
+instrument and the victim of that fiat of the gods which had long before
+decreed the destruction of Troy, and _her_ to be the cause. She must not
+only be supremely beautiful,--"a daughter of the gods, divinely tall, and
+most divinely fair!"--but as the offspring of Zeus (the title by which
+she is so often designated in the Iliad), as the sister of the great
+twin demi-gods Castor and Pollux, she should have the heroic lineaments
+proper to her Olympian descent, touched with a pensive shade; for she
+laments the calamities which her fatal charms have brought on all who
+have loved her, all whom she has loved:--
+
+  "Ah! had I died ere to these shores I fled,
+   False to my country and my nuptial bed!"
+
+She shrinks from the reproachful glances of those whom she has injured;
+and yet, as it is finely intimated, wherever she appears her resistless
+loveliness vanquishes every heart, and changes curses into blessings.
+Priam treats her with paternal tenderness; Hector with a sort of
+chivalrous respect.
+
+  "If some proud brother eyed me with disdain,
+   Or scornful sister with her sweeping train,
+   Thy gentle accents softened all my pain;
+   Nor was it e'er my fate from thee to find
+   A deed ungentle or a word unkind."
+
+Helen, standing on the walls of Troy, and looking sadly over the battle
+plain, where the heroes of her forfeited country, her kindred and her
+friends, are assembled to fight and bleed for her sake, brings before us
+an image full of melancholy sweetness as well as of consummate beauty.
+Another passage in which she upbraids Venus as the cause of her
+fault--not as a mortal might humbly expostulate with an immortal, but
+almost on terms of equality, and even with bitterness,--is yet more
+characteristic. "For what," she asks, tauntingly, "am I reserved? To
+what new countries am I destined to carry war and desolation? For what
+new lover must I break a second vow? Let me go hence! and if Paris
+lament my absence, let Venus console him, and for his sake ascend the
+skies no more!" A regretful pathos should mingle with her conscious
+beauty and her half-celestial dignity; and, to render her truly, her
+Greek elegance should be combined with a deeper and more complex
+sentiment than Greek art has usually sought to express.
+
+I am speaking here of Homer's Helen--the Helen of the Iliad, not the
+Helen of the tragedians--not the Helen who for two thousand years has
+merely served "to point a moral;" and an artist who should think to
+realise the true Homeric conception, should beware of counterfeits, for
+such are abroad.[2]
+
+There is a wild Greek myth that it was not the real Helen, but the
+phantom of Helen, who fled with Paris, and who caused the destruction of
+Troy; while Helen herself was leading, like Penelope, a pattern life at
+Memphis. I must confess I prefer the proud humility, the pathetic
+elegance of Homer's Helen, to such jugglery.
+
+It may flatter the pride of virtue, or it may move our religious
+sympathies, to look on the forlorn abasement of the Magdalene as the
+emblem of penitence; but there are associations connected with
+Helen--"sad Helen," as she calls herself, and as I conceive the
+character,--which have a deep tragic significance; and surely there are
+localities for which the impersonation of classical art would be better
+fitted than that of sacred art.
+
+I do not know of any existing statue of Helen. Nicetas mentions among
+the relics of ancient art destroyed when Constantinople was sacked by
+the Latins in 1202, a bronze statue of Helen, with long hair flowing to
+the waist; and there is mention of an Etruscan figure of her, with wings
+(expressive of her celestial origin, for the Etruscans gave all their
+gods and demi-gods wings): in Mueller I find these two only. There are
+likewise busts; and the story of Helen, and the various events of her
+life, occur perpetually on the antique gems, bas-reliefs, and painted
+vases. The most frequent subject is her abduction by Paris. A beautiful
+subject for a bas-relief, and one I believe not yet treated, would be
+Helen and Priam mourning over the lifeless form of Hector; yet the
+difficulty of preserving the simple sculptural treatment, and at the
+same time discriminating between this and other similar funereal groups,
+would render it perhaps a better subject for a picture, as admitting
+then of such scenery and accessories as would at once determine the
+signification.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   PENELOPE.        ALCESTIS.        LAODAMIA.
+
+Statues of Penelope and Helen might stand in beautiful and expressive
+contrast; but it is a contrast which no profane or prosaic hand should
+attempt to realise. Penelope is all woman in her tenderness and her
+truth; Helen, half a goddess in the midst of error and remorse.
+
+Nor is Penelope the only character which might stand as a type of
+conjugal fidelity in contrasted companionship with Helen: Alcestis, who
+died for her husband; or, better still, Laodamia, whose intense love
+and longing recalled hers from the shades below, are susceptible of the
+most beautiful statuesque treatment; only we must bear in mind that the
+leading _motif_ in the Alcestis is _duty_, in the Laodamia, _love_.
+
+I remember a bas-relief in the Vatican, which represents Hermes
+restoring Protesilaus to his mourning wife. The interview was granted
+for three hours only; and when the hero was taken from her a second
+time, she died on the threshhold of her palace. This is a frequent and
+appropriate subject for sarcophagi and funereal vases. But there exists,
+I believe, no single statue commemorative of the wife's passionate
+devotion.
+
+The modern sculptor should penetrate his fancy with the sentiment of
+Wordsworth's Laodamia.
+
+
+While the pen is in my hand I may remark that two of the stanzas in the
+Laodamia have been altered, and, as it seems to me, not improved, since
+the first edition. Originally the poem opened thus:
+
+  "With sacrifice, before the rising morn
+   Perform'd, my slaughter'd lord have I required;
+   And in thick darkness, amid shades forlorn,
+   Him of the infernal Gods have I desired:
+   Celestial pity I again implore;
+   Restore him to my sight--great Jove, restore!"
+
+Altered thus, and comparatively flat:--
+
+  "With sacrifice before the rising morn
+   Vows have I made, by fruitless hope inspired;
+   And from the infernal Gods, mid shades forlorn
+   Of night, my slaughtered lord have I required:
+   Celestial pity I again implore;
+   Restore him to my sight--great Jove, restore!"
+
+In the early edition the last stanza but one stood thus:--
+
+
+  "Ah! judge her gently who so deeply loved!
+   Her who, in reason's spite, yet without crime,
+   Was in a trance of passion thus removed;
+   Delivered from the galling yoke of time,
+   And these frail elements,--to gather flowers
+   Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers!"
+
+In the later editions thus altered, and, to my taste, spoiled:--
+
+  "By no weak pity might the Gods be moved;
+   She who thus perish'd not without the crime
+   Of lovers that in Reason's spite have loved,
+   Was doomed to wander in a grosser clime
+   Apart from happy ghosts, that gather flowers
+   Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers."
+
+Altered, probably, because Virgil has introduced the shade of Laodamia
+among the criminal and unhappy lovers,--an instance of extraordinary bad
+taste in the Roman poet; whatever may have been her faults, she surely
+deserved to be placed in better company than Phaedra and Pasiphaee.
+Wordsworth's intuitive feeling and taste were true in the first
+instance, and he might have trusted to them. In my own copy of
+Wordsworth I have been careful to mark the original reading in justice
+to the _original_ Laodamia.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+   HIPPOLYTUS.      NEOPTOLEMUS.
+
+I have never met with a statue, ancient or modern, of Hippolytus; the
+finest possible ideal of a Greek youth, touched with some individual
+characteristics which are peculiarly fitted for sculpture. He is a
+hunter, not a warrior; a tamer of horses, not a combatant with spear and
+shield. He should have the slight, agile build of a young Apollo, but
+nothing of the God's effeminacy; on the contrary, there should be an
+infusion of the severe beauty of his Amazonian mother, with that
+sedateness and modesty which should express the votary and companion of
+Diana; while, as the fated victim of Venus, whom he had contemned, and
+of his stepmother Phaedra, whom he had repulsed, there should be a kind
+of melancholy in his averted features. A hound and implements of the
+chase would be the proper accessories, and the figure should be
+undraped, or nearly so.
+
+A sculptor who should be tempted to undertake this fine, and, as I
+think, untried subject--at least as a single figure--must begin by putting
+Racine out of his mind, whose "Seigneur Hippolyte" makes sentimental
+love to the "Princesse Aricie," and must penetrate his fancy with the
+conception of Euripides.
+
+
+I find in Schlegel's "Essais litteraires," a few lines which will assist
+the fancy of the artist, in representing the person and character of
+Hippolytus.
+
+"Quant a l'Hippolyte d'Euripide il a une teinte si divine que pour le
+sentir dignement il faut, pour ainsi dire, etre initie dans les mysteres
+de la beaute, avoir respire l'air de la Grece. Rappelez vous ce que
+l'antiquite nous a transmis de plus accompli parmi les images d'une
+jeunesse heroique, les Dioscures de Monte-Cavallo, le Meleagre et
+l'Apollon du Vatican. Le caractere d'Hippolyte occupe dans la poesie a
+peu pres la meme place que ces statues dans la sculpture." "On peut
+remarquer dans plusieurs beautes ideales de l'antique que les anciens
+voulant creer une image perfectionnee de la nature humaine ont fondu les
+nuances du caractere d'un sexe avec celui de l'autre; que Junon, Pallas,
+Diane, out une majeste, une severite male; qu' Apollon, Mercure,
+Bacchus, au contraire, ont quelque chose de la grace et de la douceur
+des femmes. De meme nous voyons dans la beaute heroique et vierge
+d'Hippolyte l'image de sa mere l'Amazone et le reflet de Diane dans un
+mortel."
+
+(The last lines are especially remarkable, and are an artistic
+commentary on what I have ventured to touch upon ethically at page 85.)
+
+
+The story of Hippolytus is to be found in bas-reliefs and gems; it
+occurs on a particularly fine sarcophagus now preserved in the cathedral
+at Agrigentum, of which there is a cast in the British Museum.
+
+Under the heroic and classical form, Hippolytus conveys the same idea of
+manly chastity and self-control which in sacred art would be suggested
+by the figure of Joseph, the son of Jacob.
+
+A noble companion to the Hippolytus would be Neoptolemus, the son of
+Achilles. He is the young Greek warrior, strong and bold and brave; a
+fine ideal type of generosity and truth. The conception, as I imagine
+it, should be taken from the Philoctetes of Sophocles, where
+Neoptolemus, indignant at the craft of Ulysses, discloses the trick of
+which he had been made the unwilling instrument, and restores the fatal,
+envenomed arrows to Philoctetes. The celebrated lines in the Iliad
+spoken by Achilles--
+
+  "Who dares think one thing and another tell
+   My soul detests him as the gates of hell!"
+
+should give the leading characteristic _motif_ in the figure of his son.
+There should be something of remorseful pity in the very youthful
+features; the form ought to be heroically treated, that is, undraped,
+and he should hold the arrows in his hand.
+
+Neoptolemus, as the savage avenger of his father's death, slaying the
+grey-haired Priam at the foot of the altar, and carrying off Andromache,
+is, of course, quite a different version of the character. He then
+figures as Pyrrhus--
+
+  "The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms,
+   Black as his purpose, did the night resemble."
+
+The fine moral story of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes is figured on the
+Etruscan vases. Of the young, truth-telling, Greek hero I find no single
+statue.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+IPHIGENIA.
+
+I have often been surprised that we have no statue of this eminently
+beautiful subject. We have the story of Iphigenia constantly repeated in
+gems and bas-reliefs; the most celebrated example extant being the
+Medici Vase. But no single figure of Iphigenia, as the Greek ideal of
+heroic maidenhood and self-devotion, exists, I believe, in antique
+sculpture. The small and rather feebly elegant statuette by Christian
+Tieck is the only modern example I have seen.
+
+Iphigenia may be represented under two very different aspects, both
+beautiful.
+
+First, as the Iphigenia in Aulis; the victim sacrificed to obtain a fair
+wind for the Grecian fleet detained on its way to Troy. Extreme youth
+and grace, with a tender resignation not devoid of dignity, should be
+the leading characteristics; for we must bear in mind that Iphigenia,
+while regretting life and the "lamp-bearing day," and "the beloved
+light," and her Argive home and her "Mycenian handmaids," dies
+willingly, as the Greek girl ought to die, for the good of her country.
+She begins, indeed, with a prayer for pity, with lamentations for her
+untimely end, but she resumes her nobler self; and all her sentiments,
+when she is brought forth, crowned for sacrifice, are worthy of the
+daughter of Agamemnon. She even exults that she is called upon to perish
+for the good of Greece, and to avenge the cause of right on the Spartan
+Helen. "I give," she exclaims, "my life for Greece! sacrifice me--and let
+Troy perish!" When her mother weeps, she reproves those tears: "It is
+not well, O my mother! that I should love life too much. Think that thou
+hast brought me forth for the common good of Greece, not for thyself
+only!" She glories in her anticipated renown, not vainly, since, while
+the world endures, and far as the influences of literature and art
+extend, her story and her name shall live. The scene in Euripides should
+be taken as the basis of the character--the finest scene in his finest
+drama. The tradition that Iphigenia was not really sacrificed, but
+snatched away from the altar by Diana, and a hind substituted in her
+place, should be present to the fancy of the artist, when he sets
+himself to represent the majestic resignation of the consecrated virgin;
+as adding a touch of the marvellous and ideal to the Greek elegance and
+simplicity of the conception.
+
+The _picture_ of Iphigenia as drawn by Tennyson is wonderfully vivid;
+but it wants the Greek dignity and statuesque feeling; it is
+emphatically a picture, all over colour and light, and crowded with
+accessories. He represents her as encountering Helen in the land of
+Shadows, and, turning from her "with sick and scornful looks averse,"
+for she remembers the tragedy at Aulis.
+
+  "My youth (she said) was blasted with a curse:
+     This woman was the cause!
+   I was cut off from hope in that sad place
+     Which yet to name my spirit loathes and fears.
+   My father held his hand upon his face;
+     I, blinded with my tears,
+   Essayed to speak; my voice came thick with sighs
+     As in a dream; dimly I could descry
+   The stern black-bearded kings with wolfish eyes
+     Waiting to see me die.
+   The tall masts quiver'd as they lay afloat,
+     The temples and the people and the shore;
+   One drew a sharp knife thro' my tender throat
+     Slowly--and nothing more."
+
+The famous picture of the sacrifice of Iphigenia by Timanthes, the theme
+of admiration and criticism for the last two thousand years, which every
+writer on art deems it proper to mention in praise or in blame, could
+hardly have been more vivid or more terrible than this.
+
+The analogous idea, that of heroic resignation and self-devotion in a
+great cause, would be conveyed in sacred art by the figure of Jephtha's
+daughter; she too regrets the promises of life, but dies not the less
+willingly. "My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord, do
+to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth; forasmuch
+as the Lord hath taken vengeance for thee of thine enemies, even of the
+children of Ammon." And for a single statue, Jephtha's daughter would be
+a fine subject--one to task the powers of our best sculptors; the
+_sentiment_ would be the same as the Iphigenia, but the _treatment_
+altogether different.
+
+
+For the Iphigenia in Tauris I think the modern sculptor would do well to
+set aside the character as represented by Euripides, and rather keep in
+view the conception of Goethe.[3] In his hand it has lost nothing of its
+statuesque elegance and simplicity, and has gained immeasurably in moral
+dignity and feminine tenderness. The Iphigenia in Tauris is no longer
+young, but she is still the consecrated virgin; no more the victim, but
+herself the priestess of those very rites by which she was once fated to
+perish. While Euripides has depicted her as stern and astute, Goethe has
+made her the impersonation of female devotedness, and mild, but
+unflinching integrity. She is like the young Neoptolemus when she
+disdains to use the stratagem which Pylades had suggested, when
+she dares to speak the truth, and trust to it alone for help and safety.
+The scene in which she is haunted by the recollection of her doomed
+ancestry, and mutters over the song of the Parcae on that far-off sullen
+shore, is sublime, but incapable of representation in plastic art. It
+should, however, be well studied, as helping the artist to the abstract
+conception of the character as a whole.
+
+Carstens made a design, suggested by this tragedy, of the Three Parcae
+singing their fatal mysterious song. A model of one of the figures (that
+of Atropos) used to stand in Goethe's library, and a cast from this is
+before me while I write: every one who sees it takes it for an antique.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+EVE.
+
+I have but a few words to say of Eve. As she is the only undraped figure
+which is allowable in sacred art, the sculptors have multiplied
+representations of her, more or less finely imagined; but what I
+conceive to be the true type has seldom, very seldom, been attained. The
+remarks which follow are, however, suggestive, not critical.
+
+It appears to me--and I speak it with reverence--that the Miltonic type is
+not the highest conceivable, nor the best fitted for sculptural
+treatment. Milton has evidently lavished all his power on this fairest
+of created beings; but he makes her too nymph-like--too goddess-like. In
+one place he compares her to a Wood-nymph, Oread, or Dryad of the
+groves; in another to Diana's self, "though not, as she, with bow and
+quiver armed." The scriptural conception of our first parent is not like
+this; it is ampler, grander, nobler far. I fancy her the sublime ideal
+of maternity. It may be said that this idea of her predestined
+motherhood should not predominate in the conception of Eve before the
+Fall: but I think it should.
+
+It is most beautifully imagined by Milton that Eve, separated from her
+mate, her Adam, is weak, and given over to the merely womanish nature,
+for only when linked together and supplying the complement to each
+other's _moral_ being, can man or woman be strong; but we must also
+remember that the "spirited sly snake," in tempting Eve, even when he
+finds her alone, uses no vulgar allurements. "Ye shall be as Gods,
+knowing good and evil." Milton, indeed, seasons his harangue with
+flattery: but for this he has no warrant in Scripture.
+
+As the Eve of Paradise should be majestically sinless, so after the Fall
+she should not cower and wail like a disappointed girl. Her infinite
+fault, her infinite woe, her infinite penitence, should have a touch of
+grandeur. She has paid the inevitable price for that mighty knowledge of
+good and evil she so coveted; that terrible predestined experience--she
+has found it, or it has found her;--and she wears her crown of grief as
+erst her crown of innocence.
+
+I think the noble picture of Eve in Mrs. Browning's Drama of Exile, as
+that of the Mother of our redemption not less than the Mother of
+suffering humanity, might be read and considered with advantage by a
+modern sculptor.
+
+                             "Rise, woman, rise
+   To thy peculiar and best altitudes
+   Of doing good and of resisting ill!
+   Something thou hast to bear through womanhood;
+   Peculiar suffering answering to the sin,
+   Some pang paid down for each new human life;
+   Some weariness in guarding such a life,
+   Some coldness from the guarded; some mistrust
+   From those thou hast too well served; from those beloved
+   Too loyally, some treason. But go, thy love
+   Shall chant to itself its own beatitudes
+   After its own life-working!
+   I bless thee to the desert and the thorns,
+   To the elemental change and turbulence,
+   And to the solemn dignities of grief;
+   To each one of these ends, and to this end
+   Of Death and the hereafter!
+   _Eve._                     I accept,
+   For me and for my daughters, this high part
+   Which lowly shall be counted!"
+
+The figure of Eve in Raphael's design (the one engraved by Marc Antonio)
+is exquisitely statuesque as well as exquisitely beautiful. In the
+moment that she presents the apple to Adam she looks--perhaps she ought
+to look--like the _Venus Vincitrice_ of the antique time; but I am not
+sure; and, at all events, the less of the classical sentiment the
+better.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+ADAM.
+
+I have seen no statue of Adam; but surely he is a fine subject, either
+alone or as the companion of Eve; and the Miltonic type is here
+all-sufficient, combining the heroic ideal of Greek art with something
+higher still--
+
+   "Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure,"
+
+whence true authority in men--in fact, essential manliness.
+
+Goethe had the idea that Adam ought to be represented with a spade, as
+the progenitor of all who till the ground, and partially draped with a
+deerskin, that is, after the Fall; which would be well: but he adds that
+Adam should have a child at his feet in the act of strangling a serpent.
+This appears to me objectionable and ambiguous; if admissible at all,
+the accessory figure would be a fitter accompaniment for Eve.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+ANGELS.
+
+Angels, properly speaking, are neither winged men nor winged children.
+Wings, in ancient art, were the symbols of a divine nature; and the
+early Greeks, who humanised their gods and goddesses, and deified
+humanity through the perfection of the forms, at first distinguished the
+divine and the human by giving wings to all the celestial beings; thus
+lifting them above the earth. Our religious idea of angels is altogether
+different. Give to the child-form wings, in other words, give to the
+child-nature, innocent, and pure, the adjuncts of wisdom and power, and
+thus you realise the idea of the angel as Raphael conceived it. It is
+so difficult to imagine in the adult form the union of perfect purity
+and perfect wisdom, the absence of experience and suffering, and the
+capacity of thinking and feeling, a condition of being in which all
+conscious _motive_ is lost in the _impulse_ to good, that it remains a
+problem in art. The angels of Angelico da Fiesole, who are not only
+winged, but convey the idea of movement only by the wings, not by the
+limbs, are exquisite, as fitted to minister to us in heaven, but hardly
+as fitted to keep watch and ward for us on earth--
+
+   "Against foul fiends to aid us militant."
+
+The feminine element always predominates in the conception of angels,
+though they are supposed to be masculine: I doubt whether it ought to be
+so.
+
+
+While these sheets are going through the press, I find the following
+beautiful passage relative to angels in the last number of "Fraser's
+Magazine":--
+
+"It is safer, even, and perhaps more orthodox and scriptural, to
+'impersonate' time and space, strength and love, and even the laws of
+nature, than to give us any more angel worlds, which are but dead
+skeletons of Dante's creations without that awful and living reality
+which they had in his mind; or to fill children's books, as the High
+Church party are doing now, with pictures and tales of certain winged
+hermaphrodites, in whom one cannot think (even by the extremest stretch
+of charity) that the writers or draughtsmen really believe, while one
+sees them servilely copying mediaeval forms, and intermingling them with
+the ornaments of an extinct architecture; thus confessing _naively_ to
+every one but themselves, that they accept the whole notion as an
+integral portion of a creed, to which, if they be members of the Church
+of England, they cannot well belong, seeing that it was, happily for us,
+expelled both by law and by conscience at the Reformation."
+
+This is eloquent and true; but not the less true it is, that if we have
+to represent in art those "spiritual beings who walk this earth unseen,
+both when we sleep and when we wake"--beings, who (as the author of the
+above passage seems to believe) may be intimately connected with the
+phenomena of the universe--we must have a type, a bodily type, under
+which to represent them; and as we cannot do this from knowledge, we
+must do it symbolically. Angels, as we figure them, are _symbols_ of
+moral and spiritual existences elevated above ourselves--we do not
+believe in the forms, we only accept their significance. I should be
+glad to see a better impersonation than the impossible creatures
+represented in art; but till some artist-poet, or poet-artist, has
+invented such an impersonation, we must employ that which is already
+familiarised to the eye and hallowed to the fancy without imposing on
+the understanding.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   MIRIAM.        RUTH.
+
+Both the Old and the New Testament abound in sculptural subjects; but
+fitly to deal with the Old Testament required a Michal-Angelo. Beautiful
+as are the gates of Ghiberti they are hardly what the Germans would call
+"alt-testamentische," they are so essentially elegant and graceful, and
+the old Hebrew legends and personages are so tremendous. Even Miriam and
+Ruth dilate into a sort of grandeur. In representation I always fancy
+them above life-size.
+
+
+I doubt whether the same artist who could conceive the Prophets would be
+able to represent the Apostles, or that the same hand which gave us
+Moses could give us Christ. Michal-Angelo's idea of Christ, both in
+painting and sculpture is, to me, revolting.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   CHRIST.      SOLOMON.       DAVID.
+
+I do not like the idea of Moses and Christ placed together. Much finer
+in artistic and moral contrast would be the two teachers,--Christ as the
+divine and spiritual law-giver, Solomon as the type of worldly wisdom.
+They should stand side by side, or be seated each on his throne, a
+crowned King, with book and sceptre--but how different in character!
+
+
+We have multiplied statues of David. I have never seen one which
+realised the finest conception of his character, either as Hero, King,
+Prophet, or Poet. In general he figures as the slayer of Goliath, and is
+always too feeble and boyish. David, singing to his lute before Saul;
+David as the musician and poet, young, beautiful, half-draped,
+heaven-inspired, exorcising by his art the dark spirit of evil which
+possessed the jealous King:--this would be a theme for an artist, and
+would as finely represent the power of sacred song as a figure of St.
+Cecilia. But the sentiment should not be that of a young Apollo, or an
+Orpheus; therein would lie the chief difficulty.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   HAGAR.       REBEKAH.       RACHEL.
+
+I remember to have seen fine statues of Hagar holding her pitcher, of
+Rebekah contemplating her bracelet, and of Rachel as the shepherdess.
+But I would have a different version; Hagar as the poor cast-away,
+driven forth with her boy into the wilderness; Rebekah as the exulting
+bride; and Rachel as the mild, pensive wife. They would represent, in a
+very complete manner, contrasted phases of the destiny of Woman,
+connected together by our religious associations, and appealing to our
+deepest human sympathies.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+THE QUEEN OF SHEBA.
+
+The Queen of Sheba would be a fine subject for a single statue, as the
+religious type of the queenly, intellectual woman, the treatment being
+kept as far as possible from that of a Pallas or a Muse.
+
+
+The journey of the Queen of the South to visit Solomon would be a
+capital subject for a processional bas-relief, and as a _pendant_ to the
+journey of "the Wise Men of the East," to visit a greater than Solomon.
+The latter has been perpetually treated from the fourth century. Of the
+journey of the Queen of Sheba I have seen, as yet, no example.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+LADY GODIVA.
+
+With regard to statuesque subjects from modern history and
+poetry,--_Romantic Sculpture_, as it is styled,--the taste both of the
+public and the artist evidently sets in this direction. That the
+treatment of such subjects should not be classical is admitted; but in
+the development of this romantic tendency there is cause to fear that we
+may be inundated with all kinds of picturesque vagaries and violations
+of the just laws and limits of art.
+
+
+I remember, however, a circumstance which makes me hopeful as to the
+progress of feeling; knowledge may come hereafter. I remember about
+twenty years ago proposing the figure and story of Lady Godiva as
+beautiful subjects for sculpture and painting. There were present on
+that occasion, among others, two artists and a poet. The two artists
+laughed outright, and the poet extemporised an epigram upon Peeping Tom.
+If I were to propose Lady Godiva as a subject now[4], I believe it would
+be received with a far different feeling even by those very men. If I
+were Queen of England I would have it painted in Fresco in my council
+chamber. There should be seen the palfrey with its rich housings, and
+near it, as preparing to mount, the noble lady should stand, timid, but
+resolved: her veil should lie on the ground; the drapery just falling
+from her fair limbs and partly sustained by one hand, while with the
+other she loosens her golden tresses. A bevy of waiting-maids, with
+averted faces, disappear hurriedly beneath the massive porch of the
+Saxon palace, which forms the background, with sky and trees seen
+through openings in the heavy architecture. This is the picturesque
+version of the story; but there are many others. As a single statue, the
+figure of Lady Godiva affords an opportunity for the legitimate
+treatment of the undraped female form, sanctified by the purest, the
+most elevated associations;--by woman's tearful pride and man's respect
+and gratitude.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+JOAN OF ARC.
+
+Shakspeare, who is so horribly unjust to Joan of Arc, has put a sublime
+speech into her mouth where she answers Burgundy who had accused her of
+sorcery,--
+
+  "Because you want the grace that others have.
+   You judge it straight a thing impossible
+   To compass wonders but by help of devils!"
+
+The whole theory of popular superstition comprised in three lines!
+
+But Joan herself--how at her name the whole heart seems to rise up in
+resentment, not so much against her cowardly executioners as against
+those who have so wronged her memory! Never was a character,
+historically pure, bright, definite, and perfect in every feature and
+outline, so abominably treated in poetry and fiction,--perhaps for this
+reason, that she was in herself so exquisitely wrought, so complete a
+specimen of the heroic, the poetic, the romantic, that she could not be
+touched by art or modified by fancy, without being in some degree
+profaned. As to art, I never saw yet any representation of "Jeanne la
+grande Pastoure," (except, perhaps, the lovely statue by the Princess of
+Wurtemburg,) which I could endure to look at--and even that gives us the
+contemplative simplicity, but not the power, intellect, and energy,
+which must have formed so large a part of the character. Then as to the
+poets, what shall be said of them? First Shakspeare, writing for the
+English stage, took up the popular idea of the character as it prevailed
+in England in his own time. Into the hypothesis that the greater part of
+Henry VI. is not by Shakspeare, there is no occasion to enter here; the
+original conception of the character of Joan of Arc may not be his, but
+he has left it untouched in its principal features. The English hated
+the memory of the French Heroine because she had caused the loss of
+France and had humiliated us as a nation; and our chroniclers revenged
+themselves and healed their wounded self-love by imputing her victories
+to witchcraft. Shakspeare, giving her the attributes which the
+historians of his time assigned to her, represents her as a warlike,
+arrogant sorceress--a "monstrous woman"--attended and assisted by demons.
+I pass over the depraved and perverse spirit in which Voltaire profaned
+this divine character. A theme which a patriot poet would have
+approached as he would have approached an altar, he has made a vehicle
+for the most licentious parody that ever disgraced a national
+literature. Schiller comes next, and hardly seems to me more excusable.
+Not only has he missed the character, he has deliberately falsified both
+character and fact. His "Johanna" might have been called by any other
+name; and the scene of his tragedy might have been placed anywhere in
+the wide world with just the same probability and truth. Schiller and
+Goethe held a principle that all considerations were to yield before the
+proprieties of art. But Milton speaks somewhere of those "faultless
+proprieties of nature" which never can be violated with impunity: and
+Art can never move freely but in the domain of nature and of truth. All
+the fine writing in Schiller's "Maid of Orleans" can never reconcile me
+to its absolute and revolting falsehood. The sublime, simple-hearted
+girl who to the last moment regarded herself as set apart by God to do
+His work, he makes the victim of an insane passion for a young
+Englishman. In the love-sick classical heroines of Corneille and Racine
+there is nothing more Frenchified, more absurd, more revolting. Then he
+makes her die victorious on the field of battle defending the
+oriflamme;--far, far more glorious as well as more pathetic her real
+death--but it offended against Schiller's aesthetic conception of the
+dignity of tragedy.
+
+Lastly, we have Southey's epic: what shall be said of it?--even what he
+said of the Lusiad of Camoens, "that it is read with little emotion, and
+remembered with little pleasure." No. I do not wish to see Joan turned
+into a heroine of tragedy or tale, because, as it seems to me, the whole
+life and death of this martyred girl is too near us, and too
+historically distinct, and, I will add, too sacred, to be dressed out in
+romantic prose or verse. What Walter Scott might have made of her I do
+not know--something marvellously picturesque and life-like, no doubt--and
+yet I am glad he did not try his hand on her. But she remains a
+legitimate and most admirable subject for representative art; and as yet
+nothing has been done in sculpture to fix the ideal and heroic in her
+character, nor in painting, worthy of her exploits. There exists no
+contemporary portrait of her except in the brief description of her in
+the old French Chronicle of the Siege of Orleans, where it is said that
+her figure was tall and slender, her bust fine, her hair and eyes black;
+that she wore her hair short, and could never be persuaded to put on a
+head-piece, and farther (and in this respect both Schiller and Southey
+have wronged her), that she had never slain a man, using her consecrated
+sword merely to defend herself. I should like to see a fine equestrian
+statue of her by one of our best English sculptors, set up in a
+conspicuous place among us, as a national expiation.
+
+Southey mentions that in the beginning of the last war, about 1795, when
+popular feeling, excited almost to frenzy, raged against France, a
+pantomime, or ballet, was performed at Covent Garden, from the story of
+Joan of Arc, at the conclusion of which she is carried away by demons,
+like a female Don Juan. This denouement caused such a storm of
+indignation, that the author--one James Cross--was obliged, after the
+first two or three representations, to change the demons into angels,
+and send her straight into Heaven:--an anecdote pleasant to record as
+illustrating the sure ultimate triumph of truth over falsehood; of all
+the better sympathies over prejudice and wrong;--in spite of history,
+and, what is more, in spite of Shakspeare!
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CHARACTERS FROM SHAKSPEARE.
+
+Joan of Arc is not, however, a Shakspearian character; and, in fact,
+there are very few of his personages susceptible of sculptural
+treatment. They are too dramatic, too profound, too complex in their
+essential nature where they are tragic; too many-sided and picturesque
+where they are comic.
+
+For instance, the attempt to condense into marble such light,
+evanescent, quaint creations as those in "The Midsummer's Night's Dream"
+is better avoided; we feel that a marble fairy must be a heavy
+absurdity. Oberon and Titania might perhaps float along in a bas-relief;
+but we cannot put away the thought that they have reality without
+substantiality, and we do not like to see them, or Ariel, or Caliban
+fixed in the definite forms of sculpture.
+
+There are, however, a few of Shakspeare's characters which appear to me
+beautifully adapted for statuesque treatment: Perdita holding her
+flowers; Miranda lingering on the shore; might well replace the
+innumerable "Floras" and "Nymphs preparing to bathe," which people the
+_ateliers_ of our sculptors. Cordelia has something of marble quietude
+about her; and Hermione is a statue ready made. And, by the way, it is
+observable that Shakspeare represents Hermione as a _coloured_ statue.
+Paulina will not allow it to be touched, because "the colour is not yet
+dry." Again,--
+
+  "Would you not deem those veins
+   Did verily bear blood?
+
+  "The very life seems warm upon her lips,
+   The fixture of her eye hath motion in't,
+   And we are mocked by Art!
+   The ruddiness upon her lip is wet,
+
+  "You'll mar it if you kiss it, stain your own
+   With oily painting."
+
+I think it possible to model small ornamental statuettes and groups from
+some few of the scenes in Shakspeare's plays; but this is quite
+different from life-size figures of Hamlet, Othello, Shylock, Macbeth,
+which must either have the look of real individual portraiture, or
+become mere idealisations of certain qualities; and Shakspeare's
+creations are neither the one nor the other.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+CHARACTERS FROM SPENSER.
+
+Spenser is so essentially a picturesque poet, he depends for his rich
+effects so much on the combination of colour and imagery, and multiplied
+accessories, that one feels--at least _I_ feel, on laying down a volume
+of the "Fairie Queene" dazzled as if I had been walking in a gallery of
+pictures. His "Masque of Cupid," for instance, although a procession of
+poetical creations, could not be transferred to a bas-relief without
+completely losing its Spenserian character--its wondrous glow of colour.
+Thus Cupid "uprears himself exulting from the back of the ravenous
+lion;" removes the bandage from his eyes, that he may look round on his
+victims; "shakes the darts which his right hand doth strain full
+dreadfully," and "claps on high his coloured wings twain." This
+certainly is not the Greek Cupid, nor the Cupid of sculpture; it is the
+Spenserian Cupid. So of his Una, so of his Britomart, and the Red Cross
+Knight and Sir Guyon: one might make elegant _statuesque_ impersonations
+of the allegories they involve, as of Truth, Chastity, Faith,
+Temperance; but then they would lose immediately their Spenserian
+character and sentiment, and must become something altogether different.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+   THE LADY.        COMUS.
+
+It is not so with Milton. The "Lady" in Comus, whether she stands
+listening to the echos of her own sweet voice, or motionless as marble
+under the spell of the "false enchanter," _looking_ that divine reproof
+which in the poem she _speaks_,--
+
+  "I hate when vice can bolt her arguments,
+   And virtue has no tongue to check her pride"--
+
+is a subject perfectly fitted for sculpture, and never, so far as I
+know, executed. It would be a far more appropriate ornament for a lady's
+_boudoir_ than French statues of MODESTY, which generally have the
+effect of making one feel very much ashamed.[5]
+
+Sabrina has been beautifully treated by Marshall.
+
+It is difficult to render Comus without making him too like a Bacchus or
+an Apollo. He is neither.
+
+He represents not the beneficent, but the intoxicating and brutifying
+power of wine. His joviality should not be that of a God, but with
+something mischievous, bestial, Faun-like; and he should have, with the
+Dionysian grace, a dash of the cunning and malignity of his Mother
+Circe. These characteristics should be in the mind of the artist. The
+panther's skin, the coronal of vine leaves, and, instead of the Thyrsus,
+the magician's wand, are the proper accessories. It is also worth
+notice, that in the antique representations Comus has wings as a
+demigod, and in a picture described by Philostratus (a night scene) he
+lies crouched in a drunken sleep. Little use, however, is made of him in
+the antique myths, and the Miltonic conception is that which should be
+embodied by the modern sculptor.
+
+
+Il Penseroso and L'Allegro, if embodied in sculpture as poetical
+abstractions (either masculine or feminine) of Melancholy and Mirth,
+would cease to be Miltonic, for the conceptions of the poet are
+essentially picturesque, and expressed in both cases by a luxuriant
+accumulation of images and accessories, not to be brought within the
+limits of plastic art without the most tasteless confusion and
+inconsistency.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+SATAN.
+
+The religious idea of a Satan--the impersonation of that mixture of the
+bestial, the malignant, the impious, and the hopeless, which constitute
+THE FIEND, the enemy of all that is human and divine--I conceive to be
+quite unfitted for the purpose of sculpture. Danton's attempt
+degenerates into grim caricature. Milton's Satan--"the archangel
+ruined,"--is however a strictly poetical creation, and capable of the
+most poetical statuesque treatment. But we must remember that, if it be
+a gross mistake, religious and artistic, to conceive the Messiah under
+the form of a larger, stronger humanity, with a _physique_ like that of
+a wrestler, (as M. Angelo has done in the Last Judgement) it is equally
+a mistake to conceive the lost angel, our spiritual adversary, under any
+such coarse Herculean lineaments. There can be no image of the Miltonic
+Satan without the elements of beauty, "though changed by pale ire, envy,
+and despair!" Colossal he may be, vast as Mount Athos; but it is not
+necessary to express this that he should be hewn out of Mount Athos, or
+look like the giant Polypheme! His proportions, his figure, his
+features--like his power--are angelic. As the Hero--for he is so--of the
+"Paradise Lost," the subject is open to poetic treatment; but I am not
+aware that as yet it has been poetically treated.
+
+Of the Italian poetry and history, and all the wondrous and lovely
+shapes which come thronging out of that Elysian land,--I can say nothing
+now,--or only this,--that after all I am not _quite_ sure that I am right
+about Spenser. For, at first view, what poet seems less amenable to
+statuesque treatment than Dante? One would have imagined that only a
+preternatural fusion of Michal-Angelo and Rembrandt could fitly render
+the murky recesses and ghastly and monstrous inhabitants of the Inferno,
+or attempt to shadow forth the dazzling mysteries of the Paradiso. Yet
+see what Flaxman has achieved! His designs are legitimate bas-reliefs,
+not pictures in outline. He has been true to his own art, and all that
+could be done within the limitations of his art he has accomplished. It
+is a translation of Dante's _ideas_ into sculpture, with every thing
+_peculiarly_ Dantesque in the treatment, set aside.
+
+Now as to our more modern poets.--From amid the long array of beautiful
+subjects which seem to move in succession before the fancy, there are
+two which stand out prominent in their beauty. First, Lord Byron's
+"Myrrha," who with her Ionian elegance is susceptible of the purest
+classical treatment. She should hold a torch; but not with the air of a
+Maenad, nor of a Thais about to fire Persepolis. The sentiment should be
+deeper and quieter.
+
+                   "Dost thou think
+   A Greek girl dare not do for love that which
+   An Indian widow does for custom?"
+
+Ion in Talfourd's Tragedy--the boy-hero, in all the tenderness of extreme
+youth, already self-devoted and touched with a melancholy grace and an
+elevation beyond his years--is so essentially statuesque, that I am
+surprised that no sculptor has attempted it; perhaps because, in this
+instance, as in that of Myrrha, the popular realisation of both
+characters as subjects of formative art has been spoiled by theatrical
+trappings and associations.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] "_Sancta Simplicitas!_" was the exclamation of Huss to the woman
+who, when he was burned at the stake, in her religious zeal brought a
+faggot to light the pile.
+
+[2] Canova's bust of Helen is such a counterfeit; whereas the Helen of
+Gibson is, for a mere head, singularly characteristic.
+
+[3] There is a fine translation of the German Iphigenia by Miss
+Swanwick. (Dramatic Works of Goethe. Bohn, 1850.)
+
+[4] 1848. At the moment I transcribe this (1854), a very charming statue
+of the Lady Godiva (suggested, I believe, by Tennyson's poem) stands in
+the Exhibition of the Royal Academy.
+
+[5] For example, the statue of Modesty executed for Josephine's boudoir.
+
+
+   LONDON:
+   A. and G. A. SPOTTISWOODE,
+   New-street-Square.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Commonplace Book of Thoughts,
+Memories, and Fancies., by Anna Jameson
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COMMONPLACE BOOK ***
+
+***** This file should be named 39680.txt or 39680.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/3/9/6/8/39680/
+
+Produced by Julia Miller, Turgut Dincer and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/39680.zip b/39680.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d3e1684
--- /dev/null
+++ b/39680.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..49de7ec
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #39680 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39680)
author	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-14 20:13:23 -0700
committer	Roger Frank <rfrank@pglaf.org>	2025-10-14 20:13:23 -0700
commit	ee175181d58d84f38e4309019f15792b63f2c9dc (patch)
tree	d449763f9153acf436616a73c8a91a29fa9a7e31