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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Discourses in America, by Matthew Arnold
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-Title: Discourses in America
-
-Author: Matthew Arnold
-
-Release Date: February 15, 2014 [EBook #44919]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
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-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DISCOURSES IN AMERICA ***
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44919 ***
 
   [Italics are marked with _underscores_.]
 
@@ -2368,366 +2337,4 @@ lines, hitherto unpublished, in which he speaks of Emerson thus:—
 
 End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Discourses in America, by Matthew Arnold
 
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+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 44919 ***
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Discourses in America, by Matthew Arnold
-
-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: Discourses in America
-
-Author: Matthew Arnold
-
-Release Date: February 15, 2014 [EBook #44919]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DISCOURSES IN AMERICA ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Sean (scribe_for_hire@yahoo.com), based on
-page images generously made available by the Internet
-Archive
-(https://archive.org/details/discoursesinamer00arnouoft).
-
-
-
-
-
-
-  [Italics are marked with _underscores_.
-
-   Transliterations of Greek appear in square brackets.]
-
-
-
-
-  DISCOURSES IN AMERICA
-
-
-  BY
-  MATTHEW ARNOLD
-
-
-  London
-  MACMILLAN AND CO.
-  1885
-
-
-
-
-  _Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh._
-
-
-
-
-  PREFACE.
-
-
-Of the three discourses in this volume, the second was originally given
-as the Rede Lecture at Cambridge, was recast for delivery in America,
-and is reprinted here as so recast. The first discourse, that on
-'Numbers,' was originally given in New York. It was afterwards published
-in the _Nineteenth Century_, and I have to thank Mr. Knowles for kindly
-permitting me to reprint it now. The third discourse, that on 'Emerson,'
-was originally given in Emerson's 'own delightful town,' Boston.
-
-I am glad of every opportunity of thanking my American audiences for the
-unfailing attention and kindness with which they listened to a speaker
-who did not flatter them, who would have flattered them ill, but who yet
-felt, and in fact expressed, more esteem and admiration than his words
-were sometimes, at a hasty first hearing, supposed to convey. I cannot
-think that what I have said of Emerson will finally be accounted scant
-praise, although praise universal and unmixed it certainly is not. What
-high esteem I feel for the suitableness and easy play of American
-institutions I have had occasion, since my return home, to say publicly
-and emphatically. But nothing in the discourse on 'Numbers' was at
-variance with this high esteem, although a caution, certainly, was
-suggested. But then some caution or other, to be drawn from the
-inexhaustibly fruitful truth that moral causes govern the standing and
-the falling of States, who is there that can be said not to need?
-
-All need it, we in this country need it, as indeed in the discourse on
-'Numbers' I have by an express instance shown. Yet as regards us in this
-country at the present moment, I am tempted, I confess, to resort to the
-great truth in question, not for caution so much as for consolation. Our
-politics are 'battles of the kites and the crows,' of the Barbarians and
-the Philistines; each combatant striving to affirm himself still, while
-all the vital needs and instincts of our national growth demand, not
-that either of the combatants should be enabled to affirm himself, but
-that each should be transformed. Our aristocratical class, the
-Barbarians, have no perception of the real wants of the community at
-home. Our middle classes, the great Philistine power, have no perception
-of our real relations to the world abroad, no clue, apparently, for
-guidance, where-ever that attractive and ever-victorious rhetorician,
-who is the Minister of their choice, may take them, except the formula
-of that submissive animal which carried the prophet Balaam. Our affairs
-are in the condition which, from such parties to our politics, might be
-expected. Yet amid all the difficulties and mortifications which beset
-us, with the Barbarians impossible, with the Philistines determining our
-present course, with our rising politicians seeking only that the mind
-of the Populace, when the Populace arrives at power, may be found in
-harmony with the mind of Mr. Carvell Williams, which they flatter
-themselves they have fathomed; with the House of Lords a danger, and the
-House of Commons a scandal, and the general direction of affairs
-infelicitous as we see it,--one consolation remains to us, and that no
-slight or unworthy one. Infelicitous the general direction of our
-affairs may be; but the individual Englishman, whenever and wherever
-called upon to do his duty, does it almost invariably with the old
-energy, courage, virtue. And this is what we gain by having had, as a
-people, in the ground of our being, a firm faith in conduct; by having
-believed, more steadfastly and fervently than most, this great law that
-moral causes govern the standing and the falling of men and nations. The
-law gradually widens, indeed, so as to include light as well as honesty
-and energy; to make light, also, a moral cause. Unless we are
-transformed we cannot finally stand, and without more light we cannot be
-transformed. But in the trying hours through which before our
-transformation we have to pass, it may well console us to rest our
-thoughts upon our life's law even as we have hitherto known it, and upon
-all which even in our present imperfect acception of it it has done for
-us.
-
-
-
-
-  CONTENTS.
-
-
-                                                      PAGE
-
-  Numbers; or, The Majority and the Remnant              1
-
-  Literature and Science                                72
-
-  Emerson                                              138
-
-
-
-
-  NUMBERS;
-  OR,
-  THE MAJORITY AND THE REMNANT.
-
-
-There is a characteristic saying of Dr. Johnson: 'Patriotism is the last
-refuge of a scoundrel.' The saying is cynical, many will even call it
-brutal; yet it has in it something of plain, robust sense and truth. We
-do often see men passing themselves off as patriots who are in truth
-scoundrels; we meet with talk and proceedings laying claim to
-patriotism, which are these gentlemen's last refuge. We may all of us
-agree in praying to be delivered from patriots and patriotism of this
-sort. Short of such, there is undoubtedly, sheltering itself under the
-fine name of patriotism, a good deal of self-flattery and self-delusion
-which is mischievous. 'Things are what they are, and the consequences of
-them will be what they will be; why, then, should we desire to be
-deceived?' In that uncompromising sentence of Bishop Butler's is surely
-the right and salutary maxim for both individuals and nations.
-
-Yet there is an honourable patriotism which we should satisfy if we can,
-and should seek to have on our side. At home I have said so much of the
-characters of our society and the prospects of our civilisation, that I
-can hardly escape the like topic elsewhere. Speaking in America, I
-cannot well avoid saying something about the prospects of society in the
-United States. It is a topic where one is apt to touch people's
-patriotic feelings. No one will accuse me of having flattered the
-patriotism of that great country of English people on the other side of
-the Atlantic, amongst whom I was born. Here, so many miles from home, I
-begin to reflect with tender contrition, that perhaps I have not,--I
-will not say flattered the patriotism of my own countrymen enough, but
-regarded it enough. Perhaps that is one reason why I have produced so
-very little effect upon them. It was a fault of youth and inexperience.
-But it would be unpardonable to come in advanced life and repeat the
-same error here. You will not expect impossibilities of me. You will not
-expect me to say that things are not what, in my judgment, they are, and
-that the consequences of them will not be what they will be. I should
-make nothing of it; I should be a too palpable failure. But I confess
-that I should be glad if in what I say here I could engage American
-patriotism on my side, instead of rousing it against me. And it so
-happens that the paramount thoughts which your great country raises in
-my mind are really and truly of a kind to please, I think, any true
-American patriot, rather than to offend him.
-
-The vast scale of things here, the extent of your country, your numbers,
-the rapidity of your increase, strike the imagination, and are a common
-topic for admiring remark. Our great orator, Mr. Bright, is never weary
-of telling us how many acres of land you have at your disposal, how many
-bushels of grain you produce, how many millions you are, how many more
-millions you will be presently, and what a capital thing this is for
-you. Now, though I do not always agree with Mr. Bright, I find myself
-agreeing with him here. I think your numbers afford a very real and
-important ground for satisfaction.
-
-Not that your great numbers, or indeed great numbers of men anywhere,
-are likely to be all good, or even to have the majority good. 'The
-majority are bad,' said one of the wise men of Greece; but he was a
-pagan. Much to the same effect, however, is the famous sentence of the
-New Testament: 'Many are called, few chosen,' This appears a hard
-saying; frequent are the endeavours to elude it, to attenuate its
-severity. But turn it how you will, manipulate it as you will, the few,
-as Cardinal Newman well says, can never mean the many. Perhaps you will
-say that the majority _is_, sometimes, good; that its impulses are good
-generally, and its action is good occasionally. Yes, but it lacks
-principle, it lacks persistence; if to-day its good impulses prevail,
-they succumb to-morrow; sometimes it goes right, but it is very apt to
-go wrong. Even a popular orator, or a popular journalist, will hardly
-say that the multitude may be trusted to have its judgment generally
-just, and its action generally virtuous. It may be better, it is better,
-that the body of the people, with all its faults, should act for itself,
-and control its own affairs, than that it should be set aside as
-ignorant and incapable, and have its affairs managed for it by a
-so-called superior class, possessing property and intelligence. Property
-and intelligence cannot be trusted to show a sound majority themselves;
-the exercise of power by the people tends to educate the people. But
-still, the world being what it is, we must surely expect the aims and
-doings of the majority of men to be at present very faulty, and this in
-a numerous community no less than in a small one. So much we must
-certainly, I think, concede to the sages and to the saints.
-
-Sages and saints are apt to be severe, it is true; apt to take a gloomy
-view of the society in which they live, and to prognosticate evil to it.
-But then it must be added that their prognostications are very apt to
-turn out right. Plato's account of the most gifted and brilliant
-community of the ancient world, of that Athens of his to which we all
-owe so much, is despondent enough. 'There is but a very small remnant,'
-he says, 'of honest followers of wisdom, and they who are of these few,
-and who have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession is wisdom, and
-who can fully see, moreover, the madness of the multitude, and that
-there is no one, we may say, whose action in public matters is sound,
-and no ally for whosoever would help the just, what,' asks Plato, 'are
-they to do? They may be compared,' says Plato, 'to a man who has fallen
-among wild beasts; he will not be one of them, but he is too unaided to
-make head against them; and before he can do any good to society or his
-friends, he will be overwhelmed and perish uselessly. When he considers
-this, he will resolve to keep still, and to mind his own business; as it
-were standing aside under a wall in a storm of dust and hurricane of
-driving wind; and he will endure to behold the rest filled with
-iniquity, if only he himself may live his life clear of injustice and of
-impiety, and depart, when his time comes, in mild and gracious mood,
-with fair hope.'
-
-Plato's picture here of democratic Athens is certainly gloomy enough. We
-may be sure the mass of his contemporaries would have pronounced it to
-be monstrously overcharged. We ourselves, if we had been living then,
-should most of us have by no means seen things as Plato saw them. No, if
-we had seen Athens even nearer its end than when Plato wrote the strong
-words which I have been quoting, Athens in the very last days of Plato's
-life, we should most of us probably have considered that things were not
-going badly with Athens. There is a long sixteen years'
-administration,--the administration of Eubulus,--which fills the last
-years of Plato's life, and the middle years of the fourth century before
-Christ. A temperate German historian thus describes Athens during this
-ministry of Eubulus: 'The grandeur and loftiness of Attic democracy had
-vanished, while all the pernicious germs contained in it were fully
-developed. A life of comfort and a craving for amusement were encouraged
-in every way, and the interest of the citizens was withdrawn from
-serious things. Conversation became more and more superficial and
-frivolous. Famous courtesans formed the chief topic of talk; the new
-inventions of Thearion, the leading pastry-cook in Athens, were hailed
-with loud applause; and the witty sayings which had been uttered in gay
-circles were repeated about town as matters of prime importance.'
-
-No doubt, if we had been living then to witness this, we should from
-time to time have shaken our heads gravely, and said how sad it all was.
-But most of us would not, I think, have been very seriously disquieted
-by it. On the other hand, we should have found many things in the Athens
-of Eubulus to gratify us. 'The democrats,' says the same historian whom
-I have just quoted, 'saw in Eubulus one of their own set at the head of
-affairs;' and I suppose no good democrat would see that without
-pleasure. Moreover, Eubulus was of popular character. In one respect he
-seems to have resembled your own 'heathen Chinee;' he had 'guileless
-ways,' says our historian, 'in which the citizens took pleasure.' He was
-also a good speaker, a thorough man of business; and, above all, he was
-very skilful in matters of finance. His administration was both popular
-and prosperous. We should certainly have said, most of us, if we had
-encountered somebody announcing his resolve to stand aside under a wall
-during such an administration, that he was a goose for his pains; and if
-he had called it 'a falling among wild beasts' to have to live with his
-fellow-citizens who had confidence in Eubulus, their country, and
-themselves, we should have esteemed him very impertinent.
-
-Yes;--and yet at the close of that administration of Eubulus came the
-collapse, and the end of Athens as an independent State. And it was to
-the fault of Athens herself that the collapse was owing. Plato was right
-after all; the majority were bad, and the remnant were impotent.
-
-So fared it with that famous Athenian State, with the brilliant people
-of art and intellect. Now let us turn to the people of religion. We have
-heard Plato speaking of the very small remnant which honestly sought
-wisdom. _The remnant!_--it is the word of the Hebrew prophets also, and
-especially is it the word of the greatest of them all, Isaiah. Not used
-with the despondency of Plato, used with far other power informing it,
-and with a far other future awaiting it, filled with fire, filled with
-hope, filled with faith, filled with joy, this term itself, _the
-remnant_, is yet Isaiah's term as well as Plato's. The texts are
-familiar to all Christendom. 'Though thy people Israel be as the sand of
-the sea, only a remnant of them shall return.' Even this remnant, a
-tenth of the whole, if so it may be, shall have to come back into the
-purging fire, and be again cleared and further reduced there. But
-nevertheless, 'as a terebinth tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in
-them, though they be cut down, so the stock of that burned tenth shall
-be a holy seed.'
-
-Yes, the small remnant should be a holy seed; but the great majority, as
-in democratic Athens, so in the kingdoms of the Hebrew nation, were
-unsound, and their State was doomed. This was Isaiah's point. The actual
-commonwealth of the 'drunkards' and the 'blind,' as he calls them, in
-Israel and Judah, of the dissolute grandees and gross and foolish common
-people, of the great majority, must perish; its perishing was the
-necessary stage towards a happier future. And Isaiah was right, as Plato
-was right. No doubt to most of us, if we had been there to see it, the
-kingdom of Ephraim or of Judah, the society of Samaria and Jerusalem,
-would have seemed to contain a great deal else besides dissolute
-grandees and foolish common people. No doubt we should have thought
-parts of their policy serious, and some of their alliances promising. No
-doubt, when we read the Hebrew prophets now, with the larger and more
-patient temper of a different race and an augmented experience, we often
-feel the blame and invective to be too absolute. Nevertheless, as to his
-grand point, Isaiah, I say, was right. The majority in the Jewish State,
-whatever they might think or say, whatever their guides and flatterers
-might think or say, the majority were unsound, and their unsoundness
-must be their ruin.
-
-Isaiah, however, does not make his remnant confine itself, like Plato's,
-to standing aside under a wall during this life and then departing in
-mild temper and good hope when the time for departure comes; Isaiah's
-remnant saves the State. Undoubtedly he means to represent it as doing
-so. Undoubtedly he imagines his Prince of the house of David who is to
-be born within a year's time, his royal and victorious Immanuel, he
-imagines him witnessing as a child the chastisement of Ephraim and the
-extirpation of the bad majority there; then witnessing as a youth the
-chastisement of Judah and the extirpation of the bad majority there
-also; but finally, in mature life, reigning over a State renewed,
-preserved, and enlarged, a greater and happier kingdom of the chosen
-people.
-
-Undoubtedly Isaiah conceives his remnant in this wise; undoubtedly he
-imagined for it a part which, in strict truth, it did not play, and
-could not play. So manifest was the non-fulfilment of his prophecy,
-taken strictly, that ardent souls feeding upon his words had to wrest
-them from their natural meaning, and to say that Isaiah directly meant
-something which he did not directly mean. Isaiah, like Plato, with
-inspired insight foresaw that the world before his eyes, the world of
-actual life, the State and city of the unsound majority, could not
-stand. Unlike Plato, Isaiah announced with faith and joy a leader and a
-remnant certain to supersede them. But he put the leader's coming, and
-he put the success of the leader's and the remnant's work, far, far too
-soon; and his conception, in this respect, is fantastic. Plato betook
-himself for the bringing in of righteousness to a visionary republic in
-the clouds; Isaiah,--and it is the immortal glory of him and of his race
-to have done so,--brought it in upon earth. But Immanuel and his reign,
-for the eighth century before Christ, were fantastic. For the kingdom of
-Judah they were fantastic. Immanuel and the remnant could not come to
-reign under the conditions there and then offered to them; the thing was
-impossible.
-
-The reason of the impossibility is quite simple. The scale of things, in
-petty States like Judah and Athens, is too small; the numbers are too
-scanty. Admit that for the world, as we hitherto know it, what the
-philosophers and prophets say is true: that the majority are unsound.
-Even in communities with exceptional gifts, even in the Jewish State,
-the Athenian State, the majority are unsound. But there is 'the
-remnant.' Now the important thing, as regards States such as Judah and
-Athens, is not that the remnant bears but a small proportion to the
-majority; the remnant always bears a small proportion to the majority.
-The grave things for States like Judah and Athens is, that the remnant
-must in positive bulk be so small, and therefore so powerless for
-reform. To be a voice outside the State, speaking to mankind or to the
-future, perhaps shaking the actual State to pieces in doing so, one man
-will suffice. But to reform the State in order to save it, to preserve
-it by changing it, a body of workers is needed as well as a leader;--a
-considerable body of workers, placed at many points, and operating in
-many directions. This considerable body of workers for good is what is
-wanting in petty States such as were Athens and Judah. It is said that
-the Athenian State had in all but 350,000 inhabitants. It is calculated
-that the population of the kingdom of Judah did not exceed a million and
-a quarter. The scale of things, I say, is here too small, the numbers
-are too scanty, to give us a remnant capable of saving and perpetuating
-the community. The remnant, in these cases, may influence the world and
-the future, may transcend the State and survive it; but it cannot
-possibly transform the State and perpetuate the State: for such a work
-it is numerically too feeble.
-
-Plato saw the impossibility. Isaiah refused to accept it, but facts were
-too strong for him. The Jewish State could not be renewed and saved, and
-he was wrong in thinking that it could. And therefore I call his grand
-point this other, where he was altogether right: that the actual world
-of the unsound majority, though it fancied itself solid, and though most
-men might call it solid, could not stand. Let us read him again and
-again, until we fix in our minds this true conviction of his, to edify
-us whenever we see such a world existing: his indestructible conviction
-that such a world, with its prosperities, idolatries, oppression,
-luxury, pleasures, drunkards, careless women, governing classes, systems
-of policy, strong alliances, shall come to nought and pass away; that
-nothing can save it. Let us do homage, also, to his indestructible
-conviction that States are saved by their righteous remnant, however
-clearly we may at the same time recognise that his own building on this
-conviction was premature.
-
-That, however, matters to us little. For how different is the scale of
-things in the modern States to which we belong, how far greater are the
-numbers! It is impossible to overrate the importance of the new element
-introduced into our calculations by increasing the size of the remnant.
-And in our great modern States, where the scale of things is so large,
-it does seem as if the remnant might be so increased as to become an
-actual power, even though the majority be unsound. Then the lover of
-wisdom may come out from under his wall, the lover of goodness will not
-be alone among the wild beasts. To enable the remnant to succeed, a
-large strengthening of its numbers is everything.
-
-Here is good hope for us, not only, as for Plato's recluse, in departing
-this life, but while we live and work in it. Only, before we dwell too
-much on this hope, it is advisable to make sure that we have earned the
-right to entertain it. We have earned the right to entertain it, only
-when we are at one with the philosophers and prophets in their
-conviction respecting the world which now is, the world of the unsound
-majority; when we feel what they mean, and when we go thoroughly along
-with them in it. Most of us, as I have said already, would by no means
-have been with them when they were here in life, and most of us are not
-really with them now. What is saving? Our institutions, says an
-American; the British Constitution, says an Englishman; the civilising
-mission of France, says a Frenchman. But Plato and the sages, when they
-are asked what is saving, answer: 'To love righteousness, and to be
-convinced of the unprofitableness of iniquity.' And Isaiah and the
-prophets, when they are asked the same question, answer to just the same
-effect: that what is saving is to 'order one's conversation right'; to
-'cease to do evil'; to 'delight in the law of the Eternal'; and to 'make
-one's study in it all day long.'
-
-The worst of it is, that this loving of righteousness and this
-delighting in the law of the Eternal sound rather vague to us. Not that
-they are vague really; indeed, they are less vague than American
-institutions, or the British Constitution, or the civilising mission of
-France. But the phrases sound vague because of the quantity of matters
-they cover. The thing is to have a brief but adequate enumeration of
-these matters. The New Testament tells us how righteousness is composed.
-In England and America we have been brought up in familiarity with the
-New Testament. And so, before Mr. Bradlaugh on our side of the water,
-and the Congress of American Freethinkers on yours, banish it from our
-education and memory, let us take from the New Testament a text showing
-what it is that both Plato and the prophets mean when they tell us that
-we ought to love righteousness and to make our study in the law of the
-Eternal, but that the unsound majority do nothing of the kind. A score
-of texts offer themselves in a moment. Here is one which will serve very
-well: 'Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are elevated,
-whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever
-things are amiable, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be
-any virtue, and if there be any praise; have these in your mind, let
-your thoughts run upon these.'[1] That is what both Plato and the
-prophets mean by loving righteousness, and making one's study in the law
-of the Eternal.
-
-Now the matters just enumerated do not come much into the heads of most
-of us, I suppose, when we are thinking of politics. But the philosophers
-and prophets maintain that these matters, and not those of which the
-heads of politicians are full, do really govern politics and save or
-destroy States. They save or destroy them by a silent, inexorable
-fatality; while the politicians are making believe, plausibly and
-noisily, with their American institutions, British Constitution, and
-civilising mission of France. And because these matters are what do
-really govern politics and save or destroy States, Socrates maintained
-that in his time he and a few philosophers, who alone kept insisting on
-the good of righteousness and the unprofitableness of iniquity, were the
-only real politicians then living.
-
-I say, if we are to derive comfort from the doctrine of _the remnant_
-(and there is great comfort to be derived from it), we must also hold
-fast to the austere but true doctrine as to what really governs
-politics, overrides with an inexorable fatality the combinations of the
-so-called politicians, and saves or destroys States. Having in mind
-things true, things elevated, things just, things pure, things amiable,
-things of good report; having these in mind, studying and loving these,
-is what saves States.
-
-There is nothing like positive instances to illustrate general
-propositions of this kind, and to make them believed. I hesitate to take
-an instance from America. Possibly there are some people who think that
-already, on a former occasion, I have said enough about America without
-duly seeing and knowing it. So I will take my instances from England,
-and from England's neighbour and old co-mate in history, France. The
-instance from England I will take first. I will take it from the grave
-topic of England's relations with Ireland. I am not going to reproach
-either England or Ireland. To reproach Ireland here would probably be
-indiscreet. As to England, anything I may have to say against my own
-countrymen I prefer to say at home; America is the last place where I
-should care to say it. However, I have no wish or intention now to
-reproach either the English or the Irish. But I want to show you from
-England's relations with Ireland how right the philosophers and prophets
-are. Every one knows that there has been conquest and confiscation in
-Ireland. So there has elsewhere. Every one knows that the conquest and
-the confiscation have been attended with cupidity, oppression, and
-ill-usage. So they have elsewhere. 'Whatsoever things are just' are not
-exactly the study, so far as I know, of conquerors and confiscators
-anywhere; certainly they were not the study of the English conquerors of
-Ireland. A failure in justice is a source of danger to States. But it
-may be made up for and got over; it has been made up for and got over in
-many communities. England's confiscations in Ireland are a thing of the
-past; the penal laws against Catholics are a thing of the past; much has
-been done to make up for the old failure in justice; Englishmen
-generally think that it has been pretty well made up for, and that
-Irishmen ought to think so too. And politicians invent Land Acts for
-curing the last results of the old failure in justice, for insuring the
-contentment of the Irish with us, and for consolidating the Union: and
-are surprised and plaintive if it is not consolidated. But now see how
-much more serious people are the philosophers and prophets than the
-politicians. _Whatsoever things are amiable!_--the failure in
-amiability, too, is a source of danger and insecurity to States, as well
-as the failure in justice. And we English are not amiable, or at any
-rate, what in this case comes to the same thing, do not appear so. The
-politicians never thought of that! Quite outside their combinations lies
-this hindrance, tending to make their most elaborate combinations
-ineffectual. Thus the joint operation of two moral causes together,--the
-sort of causes which politicians do not seriously regard,--tells against
-the designs of the politicians with what seems to be an almost
-inexorable fatality. If there were not the failure in amiability,
-perhaps the original failure in justice might by this time have been got
-over; if there had not been the failure in justice, perhaps the failure
-in amiability might not have mattered much. The two failures together
-create a difficulty almost insurmountable. Public men in England keep
-saying that it will be got over. I hope that it will be got over, and
-that the union between England and Ireland may become as solid as that
-between England and Scotland. But it will not become solid by means of
-the contrivances of the mere politician, or without the intervention of
-moral causes of concord to heal the mischief wrought by moral causes of
-division. Everything, in this case, depends upon the 'remnant,' its
-numbers, and its powers of action.
-
-My second instance is even more important. It is so important, and its
-reach is so wide, that I must go into it with some little fulness. The
-instance is taken from France. To France I have always felt myself
-powerfully drawn. People in England often accuse me of liking France and
-things French far too well. At all events I have paid special regard to
-them, and am always glad to confess how much I owe to them. M.
-Sainte-Beuve wrote to me in the last years of his life: 'You have passed
-through our life and literature by a deep inner line, which confers
-initiation, and which you will never lose.' _Vous avez traversé notre
-vie et notre littérature par une ligne intérieure, profonde, qui fait
-les initiés, et que vous ne perdrez jamais._ I wish I could think that
-this friendly testimony of that accomplished and charming man, one of my
-chief benefactors, were fully deserved. But I have pride and pleasure in
-quoting it; and I quote it to bear me out in saying, that whatever
-opinion I may express about France, I have at least been a not
-inattentive observer of that great country, and anything but a hostile
-one.
-
-The question was once asked by the town clerk of Ephesus: 'What man is
-there that knoweth not how that the city of the Ephesians is a
-worshipper of the great goddess Diana?' Now really, when one looks at
-the popular literature of the French at this moment,--their popular
-novels, popular stage-plays, popular newspapers,--and at the life of
-which this literature of theirs is the index, one is tempted to make a
-goddess out of a word of their own, and then, like the town clerk of
-Ephesus, to ask: 'What man is there that knoweth not how that the city
-of the French is a worshipper of the great goddess Lubricity?' Or
-rather, as Greek is the classic and euphonious language for names of
-gods and goddesses, let us take her name from the Greek Testament, and
-call her the goddess Aselgeia. That goddess has always been a sufficient
-power amongst mankind, and her worship was generally supposed to need
-restraining rather than encouraging. But here is now a whole popular
-literature, nay, and art too, in France at her service! stimulations and
-suggestions by her and to her meet one in it at every turn. She is
-becoming the great recognised power there; never was anything like it.
-M. Renan himself seems half inclined to apologise for not having paid
-her more attention. 'Nature cares nothing for chastity,' says he; _Les
-frivoles ont peut-être raison;_ 'The gay people are perhaps in the
-right,' Men even of this force salute her; but the allegiance now paid
-to her, in France, by the popular novel, the popular newspaper, the
-popular play, is, one may say, boundless.
-
-I have no wish at all to preach to the French; no intention whatever, in
-what I now say, to upbraid or wound them. I simply lay my finger on a
-fact in their present condition; a fact insufficiently noticed, as it
-seems to me, and yet extremely potent for mischief. It is well worth
-while to trace the manner of its growth and action.
-
-The French have always had a leaning to the goddess of whom we speak,
-and have been willing enough to let the world know of their leaning, to
-pride themselves on their Gaulish salt, their gallantry, and so on. But
-things have come to their present head gradually. Catholicism was an
-obstacle; the serious element in the nation was another obstacle. But
-now just see the course which things have taken, and how they all, one
-may say, have worked together, for this goddess. First, there was the
-original Gaul, the basis of the French nation; the Gaul, gay, sociable,
-quick of sentiment, quick of perception; apt, however, very apt, to be
-presumptuous and puffed up. Then came the Roman conquest, and from this
-we get a new personage, the Gallo-Latin; with the Gaulish qualities for
-a basis, but with Latin order, reason, lucidity, added, and also Latin
-sensuality. Finally, we have the Frankish conquest and the Frenchman.
-The Frenchman proper is the Gallo-Latin, with Frankish or Germanic
-qualities added and infused. No mixture could be better. The Germans
-have plenty of faults, but in this combination they seem not to have
-taken hold; the Germans seem to have given of their seriousness and
-honesty to the conquered Gallo-Latin, and not of their brutality. And
-mediæval France, which exhibits the combination and balance, under the
-influence then exercised by Catholicism, of Gaulish quickness and gaiety
-with Latin rationality and German seriousness, offers to our view the
-soundest and the most attractive stage, perhaps, in all French history.
-
-But the balance could not be maintained; at any rate, it was not
-maintained. Mediæval Catholicism lost its virtue. The serious Germanic
-races made the Reformation, feeling that without it there was no safety
-and continuance for those moral ideas which they loved and which were
-the ground of their being. France did not go with the Reformation; the
-Germanic qualities in her were not strong enough to make her go with it.
-'France did not want a reformation which was a moral one,' is Michelet's
-account of the matter: _La France ne voulait pas de réforme morale._ Let
-us put the case more favourably for her, and say that perhaps, with her
-quick perception, France caught sense, from the very outset, of that
-intellectual unsoundness and incompleteness in the Reformation, which is
-now so visible. But, at any rate, the Reformation did not carry France
-with it; and the Germanic side in the Frenchman, his Germanic qualities,
-thus received a check. They subsisted, however, in good force still; the
-new knowledge and new ideas, brought by the revival of letters, gave an
-animating stimulus; and in the seventeenth century the Gaulish gaiety
-and quickness of France, the Latin rationality, and the still subsisting
-German seriousness, all combining under the puissant breath of the
-Renascence, produced a literature, the strongest, the most substantial
-and the most serious which the French have ever succeeded in producing,
-and which has, indeed, consummate and splendid excellences.
-
-Still, the Germanic side in the Frenchman had received a check, and in
-the next century this side became quite attenuated. The Germanic
-steadiness and seriousness gave way more and more; the Gaulish salt, the
-Gaulish gaiety, quickness, sentiment, and sociability, the Latin
-rationality, prevailed more and more, and had the field nearly to
-themselves. They produced a brilliant and most efficacious
-literature,--the French literature of the eighteenth century. The
-goddess Aselgeia had her part in it; it was a literature to be praised
-with reserves; it was, above all, a revolutionary literature. But
-European institutions were then in such a superannuated condition,
-straightforward and just perception, free thought and rationality, were
-at such a discount, that the brilliant French literature in which these
-qualities predominated, and which by their predominance was made
-revolutionary, had in the eighteenth century a great mission to fulfil,
-and fulfilled it victoriously.
-
-The mission is fulfilled, but meanwhile the Germanic quality in the
-Frenchman seems pretty nearly to have died out, and the Gallo-Latin in
-him has quite got the upper hand. Of course there are individuals and
-groups who are to be excepted; I will allow any number of exceptions you
-please; and in the mass of the French people, which works and is silent,
-there may be treasures of resource. But taking the Frenchman who is
-commonly in view--the usual type of speaking, doing, vocal, visible
-Frenchman--we may say, and he will probably be not at all displeased at
-our saying, that the German in him has nearly died out, and the
-Gallo-Latin has quite got the upper hand. For us, however, this means
-that the chief source of seriousness and of moral ideas is failing and
-drying up in him, and that what remains are the sources of Gaulish salt,
-and quickness, and sentiment, and sociability, and sensuality, and
-rationality. And, of course, the play and working of these qualities is
-altered by their being no longer in combination with a dose of German
-seriousness, but left to work by themselves. Left to work by themselves,
-they give us what we call the _homme sensuel moyen_, the average sensual
-man. The highest art, the art which by its height, depth, and gravity
-possesses religiousness,--such as the Greeks had, the art of Pindar and
-Phidias; such as the Italians had, the art of Dante and Michael
-Angelo,--this art, with the training which it gives and the standard
-which it sets up, the French have never had. On the other hand, they had
-a dose of German seriousness, a Germanic bent for ideas of moral duty,
-which neither the Greeks had, nor the Italians. But if this dies out,
-what is left is the _homme sensuel moyen_. This average sensual man has
-his very advantageous qualities. He has his gaiety, quickness,
-sentiment, sociability, rationality. He has his horror of sour
-strictness, false restraint, hypocrisy, obscurantism, cretinism, and the
-rest of it. And this is very well; but on the serious, moral side he is
-almost ludicrously insufficient. Fine sentiments about his dignity and
-his honour and his heart, about the dignity and the honour and the heart
-of France, and his adoration of her, do duty for him here; grandiose
-phrases about the spectacle offered in France and in the French Republic
-of the ideal for our race, of the _épanouissement de l'élite de
-l'humanité_, 'the coming into blow of the choice flower of humanity.' In
-M. Victor Hugo we have (his worshippers must forgive me for saying so)
-the average sensual man impassioned and grandiloquent; in M. Zola we
-have the average sensual man going near the ground. 'Happy the son,'
-cries M. Victor Hugo, 'of whom, one can say, "He has consoled his
-mother!" Happy the poet of whom one can say, "He has consoled his
-country!"' The French themselves, even when they are severest, call this
-kind of thing by only the mild name of emphasis, '_emphase_,'--other
-people call it fustian. And a surly Johnson will growl out in answer, at
-one time, that 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'; at
-another time, that fine sentiments about _ma mère_ are the last refuge
-of a scoundrel. But what they really are is the creed which in France
-the average sensual man rehearses, to do duty for serious moral ideas.
-And, as the result, we have a popular literature and a popular art
-serving, as has been already said, the goddess Aselgeia.
-
-Such an art and literature easily make their way everywhere. In England
-and America the French literature of the seventeenth century is
-peculiarly fitted to do great good, and nothing but good; it can hardly
-be too much studied by us. And it is studied by us very little. The
-French literature of the eighteenth century, also, has qualities to do
-us much good, and we are not likely to take harm from its other
-qualities; we may study it to our great profit and advantage. And it is
-studied by us very little. The higher French literature of the present
-day has more knowledge and a wider range than its great predecessors,
-but less soundness and perfection, and it exerts much less influence
-than they did. Action and influence are now with the lower literature of
-France, with the popular literature in the service of the goddess
-Aselgeia. And this popular modern French literature, and the art which
-corresponds to it, bid fair to make their way in England and America far
-better than their predecessors. They appeal to instincts so universal
-and accessible; they appeal, people are beginning boldly to say, to
-Nature herself. Few things have lately struck me more than M. Renan's
-dictum, which I have already quoted, about what used to be called the
-virtue of chastity. The dictum occurs in his very interesting
-autobiography, published but the other day. M. Renan, whose genius I
-unfeignedly admire, is, I need hardly say, a man of the most perfect
-propriety of life; he has told us so himself. He was brought up for a
-priest, and he thinks it would not have been in good taste for him to
-become a free liver. But this abstinence is a mere matter of personal
-delicacy, a display of good and correct taste on his own part in his own
-very special circumstances. 'Nature,' he cries, 'cares nothing about
-chastity.' What a slap in the face to the sticklers for 'Whatsoever
-things are pure'!
-
-I have had to take a long sweep to arrive at the point which I wished to
-reach. If we are to enjoy the benefit, I said, of the comfortable
-doctrine of the remnant, we must be capable of receiving also, and of
-holding fast, the hard doctrine of the unsoundness of the majority, and
-of the certainty that the unsoundness of the majority, if it is not
-withstood and remedied, must be their ruin. And therefore, even though a
-gifted man like M. Renan may be so carried away by the tide of opinion
-in France where he lives, as to say that Nature cares nothing about
-chastity, and to see with amused indulgence the worship of the great
-goddess Lubricity, let us stand fast, and say that her worship is
-against nature, human nature, and that it is ruin. For this is the test
-of its being against human nature, that for human societies it is ruin.
-And the test is one from which there is no escape, as from the old tests
-in such matters there may be. For if you allege that it is the will of
-God that we should be pure, the sceptical Gallo-Latins will tell you
-that they do not know any such person. And in like manner, if it is said
-that those who serve the goddess Aselgeia shall not inherit the kingdom
-of God, the Gallo-Latin may tell you that he does not believe in any
-such place. But that the sure tendency and upshot of things establishes
-that the service of the goddess Aselgeia is ruin, that her followers are
-marred and stunted by it and disqualified for the ideal society of the
-future, is an infallible test to employ.
-
-The saints admonish us to let our thoughts run upon whatsoever things
-are pure, if we would inherit the kingdom of God; and the divine Plato
-tells us that we have within us a many-headed beast and a man, and that
-by dissoluteness we feed and strengthen the beast in us, and starve the
-man; and finally, following the divine Plato among the sages at a humble
-distance, comes the prosaic and unfashionable Paley, and says in his
-precise way that 'this vice has a tendency, which other species of vice
-have not so directly, to unsettle and weaken the powers of the
-understanding; as well as, I think, in a greater degree than other
-vices, to render the heart thoroughly corrupt.' True; and once admitted
-and fostered, it eats like a canker, and with difficulty can ever be
-brought to let go its hold again, but for ever tightens it. Hardness and
-insolence come in its train; an insolence which grows until it ends by
-exasperating and alienating everybody; a hardness which grows until the
-man can at last scarcely take pleasure in anything, outside the service
-of his goddess, except cupidity and greed, and cannot be touched with
-emotion by any language except fustian. Such are the fruits of the
-worship of the great goddess Aselgeia.
-
-So, instead of saying that Nature cares nothing about chastity, let us
-say that human nature, _our_ nature, cares about it a great deal. Let us
-say that, by her present popular literature, France gives proof that she
-is suffering from a dangerous and perhaps fatal disease; and that it is
-not clericalism which is the real enemy to the French so much as their
-goddess; and if they can none of them see this themselves, it is only a
-sign of how far the disease has gone, and the case is so much the worse.
-The case is so much the worse; and for men in such case to be so
-vehemently busy about clerical and dynastic intrigues at home, and about
-alliances and colonial acquisitions and purifications of the flag
-abroad, might well make one borrow of the prophets and exclaim, 'Surely
-ye are perverse'! perverse to neglect your really pressing matters for
-those secondary ones. And when the ingenious and inexhaustible M.
-Blowitz, of our great London _Times_, who sees everybody and knows
-everything, when he expounds the springs of politics and the causes of
-the fall and success of ministries, and the combinations which have not
-been tried but should be, and takes upon him the mystery of things in
-the way with which we are so familiar,--to this wise man himself one is
-often tempted, again, to say with the prophets: 'Yet the Eternal also is
-wise, and will not call back his words.' M. Blowitz is not the only wise
-one; the Eternal has his wisdom also, and somehow or other it is always
-the Eternal's wisdom which at last carries the day. The Eternal has
-attached to certain moral causes the safety or the ruin of States, and
-the present popular literature of France is a sign that she has a most
-dangerous moral disease.
-
-Now if the disease goes on and increases, then, whatever sagacious
-advice M. Blowitz may give, and whatever political combinations may be
-tried, and whether France gets colonies or not, and whether she allies
-herself with this nation or with that, things will only go from bad to
-worse with her; she will more and more lose her powers of soul and
-spirit, her intellectual productiveness, her skill in counsel, her might
-for war, her formidableness as a foe, her value as an ally, and the life
-of that famous State will be more and more impaired, until it perish.
-And this is that hard but true doctrine of the sages and prophets, of
-the inexorable fatality of operation, in moral failure of the unsound
-majority, to impair and destroy States. But we will not talk or think of
-destruction for a State with such gifts and graces as France, and which
-has had such a place in history, and to which we, many of us, owe so
-much delight and so much good. And yet if France had no greater numbers
-than the Athens of Plato or the Judah of Isaiah, I do not see how she
-could well escape out of the throttling arms of her goddess and recover.
-She must recover through a powerful and profound renewal, a great inward
-change, brought about by 'the remnant' amongst her people; and, for
-this, a remnant small in numbers would not suffice. But in a France of
-thirty-five millions, who shall set bounds to the numbers of the
-remnant, or to its effectualness and power of victory?
-
-In these United States (for I come round to the United States at last)
-you are fifty millions and more. I suppose that, as in England, as in
-France, as everywhere, so likewise here, the majority of people doubt
-very much whether the majority is unsound; or, rather, they have no
-doubt at all about the matter, they are sure that it is not unsound. But
-let us consent to-night to remain to the end in the ideas of the sages
-and prophets whom we have been following all along; and let us suppose
-that in the present actual stage of the world, as in all the stages
-through which the world has passed hitherto, the majority is and must be
-in general unsound everywhere,--even in the United States, even here in
-New York itself. Where is the failure? I have already, in the past,
-speculated in the abstract about you, perhaps, too much. But I suppose
-that in a democratic community like this, with its newness, its
-magnitude, its strength, its life of business, its sheer freedom and
-equality, the danger is in the absence of the discipline of respect; in
-hardness and materialism, exaggeration and boastfulness; in a false
-smartness, a false audacity, a want of soul and delicacy. 'Whatsoever
-things are _elevated_,'--whatsoever things are nobly serious, have true
-elevation,[2]--that perhaps, in our catalogue of maxims which are to
-possess the mind, is the maxim which points to where the failure of the
-unsound majority, in a great democracy like yours, will probably lie. At
-any rate let us for the moment agree to suppose so. And the philosophers
-and the prophets, whom I at any rate am disposed to believe, and who say
-that moral causes govern the standing and the falling of States, will
-tell us that the failure to mind whatsoever things are elevated must
-impair with an inexorable fatality the life of a nation, just as the
-failure to mind whatsoever things are just, or whatsoever things are
-amiable, or whatsoever things are pure, will impair it; and that if the
-failure to mind whatsoever things are elevated should be real in your
-American democracy, and should grow into a disease, and take firm hold
-on you, then the life of even these great United States must inevitably
-suffer and be impaired more and more, until it perish.
-
-Then from this hard doctrine we will betake ourselves to the more
-comfortable doctrine of _the remnant_. 'The remnant shall return;' shall
-'convert and be healed' itself first, and shall then recover the unsound
-majority. And you are fifty millions and growing apace. What a remnant
-yours may be, surely! A remnant of how great numbers, how mighty
-strength, how irresistible efficacy! Yet we must not go too fast,
-either, nor make too sure of our efficacious remnant. Mere multitude
-will not give us a saving remnant with certainty. The Assyrian Empire
-had multitude, the Roman Empire had multitude; yet neither the one nor
-the other could produce a sufficing remnant any more than Athens or
-Judah could produce it, and both Assyria and Rome perished like Athens
-and Judah.
-
-But you are something more than a people of fifty millions. You are
-fifty millions mainly sprung, as we in England are mainly sprung, from
-that German stock which has faults indeed,--faults which have diminished
-the extent of its influence, diminished its power of attraction and the
-interest of its history, and which seems moreover just now, from all I
-can see and hear, to be passing through a not very happy moment,
-morally, in Germany proper. Yet of the German stock it is, I think,
-true, as my father said more than fifty years ago, that it has been a
-stock 'of the most moral races of men that the world has yet seen, with
-the soundest laws, the least violent passions, the fairest domestic and
-civil virtues.' You come, therefore, of about the best parentage which a
-modern nation can have. Then you have had, as we in England have also
-had, but more entirely than we and more exclusively, the Puritan
-discipline. Certainly I am not blind to the faults of that discipline.
-Certainly I do not wish it to remain in possession of the field for
-ever, or too long. But as a stage and a discipline, and as means for
-enabling that poor inattentive and immoral creature, man, to love and
-appropriate and make part of his being divine ideas, on which he could
-not otherwise have laid or kept hold, the discipline of Puritanism has
-been invaluable; and the more I read history, the more I see of mankind,
-the more I recognise its value. Well, then, you are not merely a
-multitude of fifty millions; you are fifty millions sprung from this
-excellent Germanic stock, having passed through this excellent Puritan
-discipline, and set in this enviable and unbounded country. Even
-supposing, therefore, that by the necessity of things your majority must
-in the present stage of the world probably be unsound, what a remnant, I
-say,--what an incomparable, all-transforming remnant,--you may fairly
-hope with your numbers, if things go happily, to have!
-
-
-
-
-  LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.
-
-
-Practical people talk with a smile of Plato and of his absolute ideas;
-and it is impossible to deny that Plato's ideas do often seem
-unpractical and impracticable, and especially when one views them in
-connexion with the life of a great work-a-day world like the United
-States. The necessary staple of the life of such a world Plato regards
-with disdain; handicraft and trade and the working professions he
-regards with disdain; but what becomes of the life of an industrial
-modern community if you take handicraft and trade and the working
-professions out of it? The base mechanic arts and handicrafts, says
-Plato, bring about a natural weakness in the principle of excellence in
-a man, so that he cannot govern the ignoble growths in him, but nurses
-them, and cannot understand fostering any other. Those who exercise such
-arts and trades, as they have their bodies, he says, marred by their
-vulgar businesses, so they have their souls, too, bowed and broken by
-them. And if one of these uncomely people has a mind to seek
-self-culture and philosophy, Plato compares him to a bald little tinker,
-who has scraped together money, and has got his release from service,
-and has had a bath, and bought a new coat, and is rigged out like a
-bridegroom about to marry the daughter of his master who has fallen into
-poor and helpless estate.
-
-Nor do the working professions fare any better than trade at the hands
-of Plato. He draws for us an inimitable picture of the working lawyer,
-and of his life of bondage; he shows how this bondage from his youth up
-has stunted and warped him, and made him small and crooked of soul,
-encompassing him with difficulties which he is not man enough to rely on
-justice and truth as means to encounter, but has recourse, for help out
-of them, to falsehood and wrong. And so, says Plato, this poor creature
-is bent and broken, and grows up from boy to man without a particle of
-soundness in him, although exceedingly smart and clever in his own
-esteem.
-
-One cannot refuse to admire the artist who draws these pictures. But we
-say to ourselves that his ideas show the influence of a primitive and
-obsolete order of things, when the warrior caste and the priestly caste
-were alone in honour, and the humble work of the world was done by
-slaves. We have now changed all that; the modern majority consists in
-work, as Emerson declares; and in work, we may add, principally of such
-plain and dusty kind as the work of cultivators of the ground,
-handicraftsmen, men of trade and business, men of the working
-professions. Above all is this true in a great industrious community
-such as that of the United States.
-
-Now education, many people go on to say, is still mainly governed by the
-ideas of men like Plato, who lived when the warrior caste and the
-priestly or philosophical class were alone in honour, and the really
-useful part of the community were slaves. It is an education fitted for
-persons of leisure in such a community. This education passed from
-Greece and Rome to the feudal communities of Europe, where also the
-warrior caste and the priestly caste were alone held in honour, and
-where the really useful and working part of the community, though not
-nominally slaves as in the pagan world, were practically not much better
-off than slaves, and not more seriously regarded. And how absurd it is,
-people end by saying, to inflict this education upon an industrious
-modern community, where very few indeed are persons of leisure, and the
-mass to be considered has not leisure, but is bound, for its own great
-good, and for the great good of the world at large, to plain labour and
-to industrial pursuits, and the education in question tends necessarily
-to make men dissatisfied with these pursuits and unfitted for them!
-
-That is what is said. So far I must defend Plato, as to plead that his
-view of education and studies is in the general, as it seems to me,
-sound enough, and fitted for all sorts and conditions of men, whatever
-their pursuits may be. 'An intelligent man,' says Plato, 'will prize
-those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness,
-and wisdom, and will less value the others.' I cannot consider _that_ a
-bad description of the aim of education, and of the motives which should
-govern us in the choice of studies, whether we are preparing ourselves
-for a hereditary seat in the English House of Lords or for the pork
-trade in Chicago.
-
-Still I admit that Plato's world was not ours, that his scorn of trade
-and handicraft is fantastic, that he had no conception of a great
-industrial community such as that of the United States, and that such a
-community must and will shape its education to suit its own needs. If
-the usual education handed down to it from the past does not suit it, it
-will certainly before long drop this and try another. The usual
-education in the past has been mainly literary. The question is whether
-the studies which were long supposed to be the best for all of us are
-practically the best now; whether others are not better. The tyranny of
-the past, many think, weighs on us injuriously in the predominance given
-to letters in education. The question is raised whether, to meet the
-needs of our modern life, the predominance ought not now to pass from
-letters to science; and naturally the question is nowhere raised with
-more energy than here in the United States. The design of abasing what
-is called 'mere literary instruction and education,' and of exalting
-what is called 'sound, extensive, and practical scientific knowledge,'
-is, in this intensely modern world of the United States, even more
-perhaps than in Europe, a very popular design, and makes great and rapid
-progress.
-
-I am going to ask whether the present movement for ousting letters from
-their old predominance in education, and for transferring the
-predominance in education to the natural sciences, whether this brisk
-and flourishing movement ought to prevail, and whether it is likely that
-in the end it really will prevail. An objection may be raised which I
-will anticipate. My own studies have been almost wholly in letters, and
-my visits to the field of the natural sciences have been very slight and
-inadequate, although those sciences have always strongly moved my
-curiosity. A man of letters, it will perhaps be said, is not competent
-to discuss the comparative merits of letters and natural science as
-means of education. To this objection I reply, first of all, that his
-incompetence, if he attempts the discussion but is really incompetent
-for it, will be abundantly visible; nobody will be taken in; he will
-have plenty of sharp observers and critics to save mankind from that
-danger. But the line I am going to follow is, as you will soon discover,
-so extremely simple, that perhaps it may be followed without failure
-even by one who for a more ambitious line of discussion would be quite
-incompetent.
-
-Some of you may possibly remember a phrase of mine which has been the
-object of a good deal of comment; an observation to the effect that in
-our culture, the aim being _to know ourselves and the world_, we have,
-as the means to this end, _to know the best which has been thought and
-said in the world_. A man of science, who is also an excellent writer
-and the very prince of debaters, Professor Huxley, in a discourse at the
-opening of Sir Josiah Mason's college at Birmingham, laying hold of this
-phrase, expanded it by quoting some more words of mine, which are these:
-'The civilised world is to be regarded as now being, for intellectual
-and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action
-and working to a common result; and whose members have for their proper
-outfit a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one
-another. Special local and temporary advantages being put out of
-account, that modern nation will in the intellectual and spiritual
-sphere make most progress, which most thoroughly carries out this
-programme.'
-
-Now on my phrase, thus enlarged, Professor Huxley remarks that when I
-speak of the above-mentioned knowledge as enabling us to know ourselves
-and the world, I assert _literature_ to contain the materials which
-suffice for thus making us know ourselves and the world. But it is not
-by any means clear, says he, that after having learnt all which ancient
-and modern literatures have to tell us, we have laid a sufficiently
-broad and deep foundation for that criticism of life, that knowledge of
-ourselves and the world, which constitutes culture. On the contrary,
-Professor Huxley declares that he finds himself 'wholly unable to admit
-that either nations or individuals will really advance, if their outfit
-draws nothing from the stores of physical science. An army without
-weapons of precision, and with no particular base of operations, might
-more hopefully enter upon a campaign on the Rhine, than a man, devoid of
-a knowledge of what physical science has done in the last century, upon
-a criticism of life.'
-
-This shows how needful it is for those who are to discuss any matter
-together, to have a common understanding as to the sense of the terms
-they employ,--how needful, and how difficult. What Professor Huxley
-says, implies just the reproach which is so often brought against the
-study of _belles lettres_, as they are called: that the study is an
-elegant one, but slight and ineffectual; a smattering of Greek and Latin
-and other ornamental things, of little use for any one whose object is
-to get at truth, and to be a practical man. So, too, M. Renan talks of
-the 'superficial humanism' of a school-course which treats us as if we
-were all going to be poets, writers, preachers, orators, and he opposes
-this humanism to positive science, or the critical search after truth.
-And there is always a tendency in those who are remonstrating against
-the predominance of letters in education, to understand by letters
-_belles lettres_, and by _belles lettres_ a superficial humanism, the
-opposite of science or true knowledge.
-
-But when we talk of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, for instance,
-which is the knowledge people have called the humanities, I for my part
-mean a knowledge which is something more than a superficial humanism,
-mainly decorative. 'I call all teaching _scientific_,' says Wolf, the
-critic of Homer, 'which is systematically laid out and followed up to
-its original sources. For example: a knowledge of classical antiquity is
-scientific when the remains of classical antiquity are correctly studied
-in the original languages.' There can be no doubt that Wolf is perfectly
-right; that all learning is scientific which is systematically laid out
-and followed up to its original sources, and that a genuine humanism is
-scientific.
-
-When I speak of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, therefore, as a help
-to knowing ourselves and the world, I mean more than a knowledge of so
-much vocabulary, so much grammar, so many portions of authors in the
-Greek and Latin languages. I mean knowing the Greeks and Romans, and
-their life and genius, and what they were and did in the world; what we
-get from them, and what is its value. That, at least, is the ideal; and
-when we talk of endeavouring to know Greek and Roman antiquity, as a
-help to knowing ourselves and the world, we mean endeavouring so to know
-them as to satisfy this ideal, however much we may still fall short of
-it.
-
-The same also as to knowing our own and other modern nations, with the
-like aim of getting to understand ourselves and the world. To know the
-best that has been thought and said by the modern nations, is to know,
-says Professor Huxley, 'only what modern _literatures_ have to tell us;
-it is the criticism of life contained in modern literature.' And yet
-'the distinctive character of our times,' he urges, 'lies in the vast
-and constantly increasing part which is played by natural knowledge.'
-And how, therefore, can a man, devoid of knowledge of what physical
-science has done in the last century, enter hopefully upon a criticism
-of modern life?
-
-Let us, I say, be agreed about the meaning of the terms we are using. I
-talk of knowing the best which has been thought and uttered in the
-world; Professor Huxley says this means knowing _literature_. Literature
-is a large word; it may mean everything written with letters or printed
-in a book. Euclid's _Elements_ and Newton's _Principia_ are thus
-literature. All knowledge that reaches us through books is literature.
-But by literature Professor Huxley means _belles lettres_. He means to
-make me say, that knowing the best which has been thought and said by
-the modern nations is knowing their _belles lettres_ and no more. And
-this is no sufficient equipment, he argues, for a criticism of modern
-life. But as I do not mean, by knowing ancient Rome, knowing merely more
-or less of Latin _belles lettres_, and taking no account of Rome's
-military, and political, and legal, and administrative work in the
-world; and as, by knowing ancient Greece, I understand knowing her as
-the giver of Greek art, and the guide to a free and right use of reason
-and to scientific method, and the founder of our mathematics and physics
-and astronomy and biology,--I understand knowing her as all this, and
-not merely knowing certain Greek poems, and histories, and treatises,
-and speeches,--so as to the knowledge of modern nations also. By knowing
-modern nations, I mean not merely knowing their _belles lettres_, but
-knowing also what has been done by such men as Copernicus, Galileo,
-Newton, Darwin. 'Our ancestors learned,' says Professor Huxley, 'that
-the earth is the centre of the visible universe, and that man is the
-cynosure of things terrestrial; and more especially was it inculcated
-that the course of nature had no fixed order, but that it could be, and
-constantly was, altered.' But for us now, continues Professor Huxley,
-'the notions of the beginning and the end of the world entertained by
-our forefathers are no longer credible. It is very certain that the
-earth is not the chief body in the material universe, and that the world
-is not subordinated to man's use. It is even more certain that nature is
-the expression of a definite order, with which nothing interferes.' 'And
-yet,' he cries, 'the purely classical education advocated by the
-representatives of the humanists in our day gives no inkling of all
-this!'
-
-In due place and time I will just touch upon that vexed question of
-classical education; but at present the question is as to what is meant
-by knowing the best which modern nations have thought and said. It is
-not knowing their _belles lettres_ merely which is meant. To know
-Italian _belles lettres_ is not to know Italy, and to know English
-_belles lettres_ is not to know England. Into knowing Italy and England
-there comes a great deal more, Galileo and Newton, amongst it. The
-reproach of being a superficial humanism, a tincture of _belles
-lettres_, may attach rightly enough to some other disciplines; but to
-the particular discipline recommended when I proposed knowing the best
-that has been thought and said in the world, it does not apply. In that
-best I certainly include what in modern times has been thought and said
-by the great observers and knowers of nature.
-
-There is, therefore, really no question between Professor Huxley and me
-as to whether knowing the great results of the modern scientific study
-of nature is not required as a part of our culture, as well as knowing
-the products of literature and art. But to follow the processes by which
-those results are reached, ought, say the friends of physical science,
-to be made the staple of education for the bulk of mankind. And here
-there does arise a question between those whom Professor Huxley calls
-with playful sarcasm 'the Levites of culture,' and those whom the poor
-humanist is sometimes apt to regard as its Nebuchadnezzars.
-
-The great results of the scientific investigation of nature we are
-agreed upon knowing, but how much of our study are we bound to give to
-the processes by which those results are reached? The results have their
-visible bearing on human life. But all the processes, too, all the items
-of fact, by which those results are reached and established, are
-interesting. All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the
-knowledge of nature is interesting to all men. It is very interesting to
-know, that, from the albuminous white of the egg, the chick in the egg
-gets the materials for its flesh, bones, blood, and feathers; while,
-from the fatty yolk of the egg, it gets the heat and energy which enable
-it at length to break its shell and begin the world. It is less
-interesting, perhaps, but still it is interesting, to know that when a
-taper burns, the wax is converted into carbonic acid and water.
-Moreover, it is quite true that the habit of dealing with facts, which
-is given by the study of nature, is, as the friends of physical science
-praise it for being, an excellent discipline. The appeal, in the study
-of nature, is constantly to observation and experiment; not only is it
-said that the thing is so, but we can be made to see that it is so. Not
-only does a man tell us that when a taper burns the wax is converted
-into carbonic acid and water, as a man may tell us, if he likes, that
-Charon is punting his ferry-boat on the river Styx, or that Victor Hugo
-is a sublime poet, or Mr. Gladstone the most admirable of statesmen; but
-we are made to see that the conversion into carbonic acid and water does
-actually happen. This reality of natural knowledge it is, which makes
-the friends of physical science contrast it, as a knowledge of things,
-with the humanist's knowledge, which is, say they, a knowledge of words.
-And hence Professor Huxley is moved to lay it down that, 'for the
-purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education
-is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education.' And a
-certain President of the Section for Mechanical Science in the British
-Association is, in Scripture phrase, 'very bold,' and declares that if a
-man, in his mental training, 'has substituted literature and history for
-natural science, he has chosen the less useful alternative.' But whether
-we go these lengths or not, we must all admit that in natural science
-the habit gained of dealing with facts is a most valuable discipline,
-and that every one should have some experience of it.
-
-More than this, however, is demanded by the reformers. It is proposed to
-make the training in natural science the main part of education, for the
-great majority of mankind at any rate. And here, I confess, I part
-company with the friends of physical science, with whom up to this point
-I have been agreeing. In differing from them, however, I wish to proceed
-with the utmost caution and diffidence. The smallness of my own
-acquaintance with the disciplines of natural science is ever before my
-mind, and I am fearful of doing these disciplines an injustice. The
-ability and pugnacity of the partisans of natural science makes them
-formidable persons to contradict. The tone of tentative inquiry, which
-befits a being of dim faculties and bounded knowledge, is the tone I
-would wish to take and not to depart from. At present it seems to me,
-that those who are for giving to natural knowledge, as they call it, the
-chief place in the education of the majority of mankind, leave one
-important thing out of their account: the constitution of human nature.
-But I put this forward on the strength of some facts not at all
-recondite, very far from it; facts capable of being stated in the
-simplest possible fashion, and to which, if I so state them, the man of
-science will, I am sure, be willing to allow their due weight.
-
-Deny the facts altogether, I think, he hardly can. He can hardly deny,
-that when we set ourselves to enumerate the powers which go to the
-building up of human life, and say that they are the power of conduct,
-the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power
-of social life and manners,--he can hardly deny that this scheme, though
-drawn in rough and plain lines enough, and not pretending to scientific
-exactness, does yet give a fairly true representation of the matter.
-Human nature is built up by these powers; we have the need for them all.
-When we have rightly met and adjusted the claims of them all, we shall
-then be in a fair way for getting soberness and righteousness, with
-wisdom. This is evident enough, and the friends of physical science
-would admit it.
-
-But perhaps they may not have sufficiently observed another thing:
-namely, that the several powers just mentioned are not isolated, but
-there is, in the generality of mankind, a perpetual tendency to relate
-them one to another in divers ways. With one such way of relating them I
-am particularly concerned now. Following our instinct for intellect and
-knowledge, we acquire pieces of knowledge; and presently, in the
-generality of men, there arises the desire to relate these pieces of
-knowledge to our sense for conduct, to our sense for beauty,--and there
-is weariness and dissatisfaction if the desire is baulked. Now in this
-desire lies, I think, the strength of that hold which letters have upon
-us.
-
-All knowledge is, as I said just now, interesting; and even items of
-knowledge which from the nature of the case cannot well be related, but
-must stand isolated in our thoughts, have their interest. Even lists of
-exceptions have their interest. If we are studying Greek accents, it is
-interesting to know that _pais_ and _pas_, and some other monosyllables
-of the same form of declension, do not take the circumflex upon the last
-syllable of the genitive plural, but vary, in this respect, from the
-common rule. If we are studying physiology, it is interesting to know
-that the pulmonary artery carries dark blood and the pulmonary vein
-carries bright blood, departing in this respect from the common rule for
-the division of labour between the veins and the arteries. But every one
-knows how we seek naturally to combine the pieces of our knowledge
-together, to bring them under general rules, to relate them to
-principles; and how unsatisfactory and tiresome it would be to go on for
-ever learning lists of exceptions, or accumulating items of fact which
-must stand isolated.
-
-Well, that same need of relating our knowledge, which operates here
-within the sphere of our knowledge itself, we shall find operating,
-also, outside that sphere. We experience, as we go on learning and
-knowing,--the vast majority of us experience,--the need of relating what
-we have learnt and known to the sense which we have in us for conduct,
-to the sense which we have in us for beauty.
-
-A certain Greek prophetess of Mantineia in Arcadia, Diotima by name,
-once explained to the philosopher Socrates that love, and impulse, and
-bent of all kinds, is, in fact, nothing else but the desire in men that
-good should for ever be present to them. This desire for good, Diotima
-assured Socrates, is our fundamental desire, of which fundamental desire
-every impulse in us is only some one particular form. And therefore this
-fundamental desire it is, I suppose,--this desire in men that good
-should be for ever present to them,--which acts in us when we feel the
-impulse for relating our knowledge to our sense for conduct and to our
-sense for beauty. At any rate, with men in general the instinct exists.
-Such is human nature. And the instinct, it will be admitted, is
-innocent, and human nature is preserved by our following the lead of its
-innocent instincts. Therefore, in seeking to gratify this instinct in
-question, we are following the instinct of self-preservation in
-humanity.
-
-But, no doubt, some kinds of knowledge cannot be made to directly serve
-the instinct in question, cannot be directly related to the sense for
-beauty, to the sense for conduct. These are instrument-knowledges; they
-lead on to other knowledges, which can. A man who passes his life in
-instrument-knowledges is a specialist. They may be invaluable as
-instruments to something beyond, for those who have the gift thus to
-employ them; and they may be disciplines in themselves wherein it is
-useful for every one to have some schooling. But it is inconceivable
-that the generality of men should pass all their mental life with Greek
-accents or with formal logic. My friend Professor Sylvester, who is one
-of the first mathematicians in the world, holds transcendental doctrines
-as to the virtue of mathematics, but those doctrines are not for common
-men. In the very Senate House and heart of our English Cambridge I once
-ventured, though not without an apology for my profaneness, to hazard
-the opinion that for the majority of mankind a little of mathematics,
-even, goes a long way. Of course this is quite consistent with their
-being of immense importance as an instrument to something else; but it
-is the few who have the aptitude for thus using them, not the bulk of
-mankind.
-
-The natural sciences do not, however, stand on the same footing with
-these instrument-knowledges. Experience shows us that the generality of
-men will find more interest in learning that, when a taper burns, the
-wax is converted into carbonic acid and water, or in learning the
-explanation of the phenomenon of dew, or in learning how the circulation
-of the blood is carried on, than they find in learning that the genitive
-plural of _pais_ and _pas_ does not take the circumflex on the
-termination. And one piece of natural knowledge is added to another, and
-others are added to that, and at last we come to propositions so
-interesting as Mr. Darwin's famous proposition that 'our ancestor was a
-hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably
-arboreal in his habits.' Or we come to propositions of such reach and
-magnitude as those which Professor Huxley delivers, when he says that
-the notions of our forefathers about the beginning and the end of the
-world were all wrong, and that nature is the expression of a definite
-order with which nothing interferes.
-
-Interesting, indeed, these results of science are, important they are,
-and we should all of us be acquainted with them. But what I now wish you
-to mark is, that we are still, when they are propounded to us and we
-receive them, we are still in the sphere of intellect and knowledge. And
-for the generality of men there will be found, I say, to arise, when
-they have duly taken in the proposition that their ancestor was 'a hairy
-quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in
-his habits,' there will be found to arise an invincible desire to relate
-this proposition to the sense in us for conduct, and to the sense in us
-for beauty. But this the men of science will not do for us, and will
-hardly even profess to do. They will give us other pieces of knowledge,
-other facts, about other animals and their ancestors, or about plants,
-or about stones, or about stars; and they may finally bring us to those
-great 'general conceptions of the universe, which are forced upon us
-all,' says Professor Huxley, 'by the progress of physical science.' But
-still it will be _knowledge_ only which they give us; knowledge not put
-for us into relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty,
-and touched with emotion by being so put; not thus put for us, and
-therefore, to the majority of mankind, after a certain while,
-unsatisfying, wearying.
-
-Not to the born naturalist, I admit. But what do we mean by a born
-naturalist? We mean a man in whom the zeal for observing nature is so
-uncommonly strong and eminent, that it marks him off from the bulk of
-mankind. Such a man will pass his life happily in collecting natural
-knowledge and reasoning upon it, and will ask for nothing, or hardly
-anything, more. I have heard it said that the sagacious and admirable
-naturalist whom we lost not very long ago, Mr. Darwin, once owned to a
-friend that for his part he did not experience the necessity for two
-things which most men find so necessary to them,--religion and poetry;
-science and the domestic affections, he thought, were enough. To a born
-naturalist, I can well understand that this should seem so. So absorbing
-is his occupation with nature, so strong his love for his occupation,
-that he goes on acquiring natural knowledge and reasoning upon it, and
-has little time or inclination for thinking about getting it related to
-the desire in man for conduct, the desire in man for beauty. He relates
-it to them for himself as he goes along, so far as he feels the need;
-and he draws from the domestic affections all the additional solace
-necessary. But then Darwins are extremely rare. Another great and
-admirable master of natural knowledge, Faraday, was a Sandemanian. That
-is to say, he related his knowledge to his instinct for conduct and to
-his instinct for beauty, by the aid of that respectable Scottish
-sectary, Robert Sandeman. And so strong, in general, is the demand of
-religion and poetry to have their share in a man, to associate
-themselves with his knowing, and to relieve and rejoice it, that,
-probably, for one man amongst us with the disposition to do as Darwin
-did in this respect, there are at least fifty with the disposition to do
-as Faraday.
-
-Education lays hold upon us, in fact, by satisfying this demand.
-Professor Huxley holds up to scorn mediæval education, with its neglect
-of the knowledge of nature, its poverty even of literary studies, its
-formal logic devoted to 'showing how and why that which the Church said
-was true must be true.' But the great mediæval Universities were not
-brought into being, we may be sure, by the zeal for giving a jejune and
-contemptible education. Kings have been their nursing fathers, and
-queens have been their nursing mothers, but not for this. The mediæval
-Universities came into being, because the supposed knowledge, delivered
-by Scripture and the Church, so deeply engaged men's hearts, by so
-simply, easily, and powerfully relating itself to their desire for
-conduct, their desire for beauty. All other knowledge was dominated by
-this supposed knowledge and was subordinated to it, because of the
-surpassing strength of the hold which it gained upon the affections of
-men, by allying itself profoundly with their sense for conduct, their
-sense for beauty.
-
-But now, says Professor Huxley, conceptions of the universe fatal to the
-notions held by our forefathers have been forced upon us by physical
-science. Grant to him that they are thus fatal, that the new conceptions
-must and will soon become current everywhere, and that every one will
-finally perceive them to be fatal to the beliefs of our forefathers. The
-need of humane letters, as they are truly called, because they serve the
-paramount desire in men that good should be for ever present to
-them,--the need of humane letters, to establish a relation between the
-new conceptions, and our instinct for beauty, our instinct for conduct,
-is only the more visible. The Middle Age could do without humane
-letters, as it could do without the study of nature, because its
-supposed knowledge was made to engage its emotions so powerfully. Grant
-that the supposed knowledge disappears, its power of being made to
-engage the emotions will of course disappear along with it,--but the
-emotions themselves, and their claim to be engaged and satisfied, will
-remain. Now if we find by experience that humane letters have an
-undeniable power of engaging the emotions, the importance of humane
-letters in a man's training becomes not less, but greater, in proportion
-to the success of modern science in extirpating what it calls 'mediæval
-thinking.'
-
-Have humane letters, then, have poetry and eloquence, the power here
-attributed to them of engaging the emotions, and do they exercise it?
-And if they have it and exercise it, _how_ do they exercise it, so as to
-exert an influence upon man's sense for conduct, his sense for beauty?
-Finally, even if they both can and do exert an influence upon the senses
-in question, how are they to relate to them the results,--the modern
-results,--of natural science? All these questions may be asked. First,
-have poetry and eloquence the power of calling out the emotions? The
-appeal is to experience. Experience shows that for the vast majority of
-men, for mankind in general, they have the power. Next do they exercise
-it? They do. But then, _how_ do they exercise it so as to affect man's
-sense for conduct, his sense for beauty? And this is perhaps a case for
-applying the Preacher's words: 'Though a man labour to seek it out, yet
-he shall not find it; yea, farther, though a wise man think to know it,
-yet shall he not be able to find it.'[3] Why should it be one thing, in
-its effect upon the emotions, to say, 'Patience is a virtue,' and quite
-another thing, in its effect upon the emotions, to say with Homer,
-
-    [Greek: tlêton gar Moirai thumon thesan anthrôpoisin]--[4]
-
-'for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the children of
-men?' Why should it be one thing, in its effect upon the emotions, to
-say with the philosopher Spinoza, _Felicitas in eo consistit quod homo
-suum esse conservare potest_--'Man's happiness consists in his being
-able to preserve his own essence,' and quite another thing, in its
-effect upon the emotions, to say with the Gospel, 'What is a man
-advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, forfeit
-himself?' How does this difference of effect arise? I cannot tell, and I
-am not much concerned to know; the important thing is that it does
-arise, and that we can profit by it. But how, finally, are poetry and
-eloquence to exercise the power of relating the modern results of
-natural science to man's instinct for conduct, his instinct for beauty?
-And here again I answer that I do not know how they will exercise it,
-but that they can and will exercise it I am sure. I do not mean that
-modern philosophical poets and modern philosophical moralists are to
-come and relate for us, in express terms, the results of modern
-scientific research to our instinct for conduct, our instinct for
-beauty. But I mean that we shall find, as a matter of experience, if we
-know the best that has been thought and uttered in the world, we shall
-find that the art and poetry and eloquence of men who lived, perhaps,
-long ago, who had the most limited natural knowledge, who had the most
-erroneous conceptions about many important matters, we shall find that
-this art, and poetry, and eloquence, have in fact not only the power of
-refreshing and delighting us, they have also the power,--such is the
-strength and worth, in essentials, of their authors' criticism of
-life,--they have a fortifying, and elevating, and quickening, and
-suggestive power, capable of wonderfully helping us to relate the
-results of modern science to our need for conduct, our need for beauty.
-Homer's conceptions of the physical universe were, I imagine, grotesque;
-but really, under the shock of hearing from modern science that 'the
-world is not subordinated to man's use, and that man is not the cynosure
-of things terrestrial,' I could, for my own part, desire no better
-comfort than Homer's line which I quoted just now,
-
-    [Greek: tlêton gar Moirai thumon thesan anthrôpoisin]--
-
-'for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the children of
-men!'
-
-And the more that men's minds are cleared, the more that the results of
-science are frankly accepted, the more that poetry and eloquence come to
-be received and studied as what in truth they really are,--the criticism
-of life by gifted men, alive and active with extraordinary power at an
-unusual number of points;--so much the more will the value of humane
-letters, and of art also, which is an utterance having a like kind of
-power with theirs, be felt and acknowledged, and their place in
-education be secured.
-
-Let us therefore, all of us, avoid indeed as much as possible any
-invidious comparison between the merits of humane letters, as means of
-education, and the merits of the natural sciences. But when some
-President of a Section for Mechanical Science insists on making the
-comparison, and tells us that 'he who in his training has substituted
-literature and history for natural science has chosen the less useful
-alternative,' let us make answer to him that the student of humane
-letters only, will, at least, know also the great general conceptions
-brought in by modern physical science; for science, as Professor Huxley
-says, forces them upon us all. But the student of the natural sciences
-only, will, by our very hypothesis, know nothing of humane letters; not
-to mention that in setting himself to be perpetually accumulating
-natural knowledge, he sets himself to do what only specialists have in
-general the gift for doing genially. And so he will probably be
-unsatisfied, or at any rate incomplete, and even more incomplete than
-the student of humane letters only.
-
-I once mentioned in a school-report, how a young man in one of our
-English training colleges having to paraphrase the passage in _Macbeth_
-beginning,
-
-    'Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?'
-
-turned this line into, 'Can you not wait upon the lunatic?' And I
-remarked what a curious state of things it would be, if every pupil of
-our national schools knew, let us say, that the moon is two thousand one
-hundred and sixty miles in diameter, and thought at the same time that a
-good paraphrase for
-
-    'Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?'
-
-was, 'Can you not wait upon the lunatic?' If one is driven to choose, I
-think I would rather have a young person ignorant about the moon's
-diameter, but aware that 'Can you not wait upon the lunatic?' is bad,
-than a young person whose education had been such as to manage things
-the other way.
-
-Or to go higher than the pupils of our national schools. I have in my
-mind's eye a member of our British Parliament who comes to travel here
-in America, who afterwards relates his travels, and who shows a really
-masterly knowledge of the geology of this great country and of its
-mining capabilities, but who ends by gravely suggesting that the United
-States should borrow a prince from our Royal Family, and should make him
-their king, and should create a House of Lords of great landed
-proprietors after the pattern of ours; and then America, he thinks,
-would have her future happily and perfectly secured. Surely, in this
-case, the President of the Section for Mechanical Science would himself
-hardly say that our member of Parliament, by concentrating himself upon
-geology and mineralogy, and so on, and not attending to literature and
-history, had 'chosen the more useful alternative.'
-
-If then there is to be separation and option between humane letters on
-the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other, the great majority
-of mankind, all who have not exceptional and overpowering aptitudes for
-the study of nature, would do well, I cannot but think, to choose to be
-educated in humane letters rather than in the natural sciences. Letters
-will call out their being at more points, will make them live more.
-
-I said that before I ended I would just touch on the question of
-classical education, and I will keep my word. Even if literature is to
-retain a large place in our education, yet Latin and Greek, say the
-friends of progress, will certainly have to go. Greek is the grand
-offender in the eyes of these gentlemen. The attackers of the
-established course of study think that against Greek, at any rate, they
-have irresistible arguments. Literature may perhaps be needed in
-education, they say; but why on earth should it be Greek literature? Why
-not French or German? Nay, 'has not an Englishman models in his own
-literature of every kind of excellence?' As before, it is not on any
-weak pleadings of my own that I rely for convincing the gainsayers; it
-is on the constitution of human nature itself, and on the instinct of
-self-preservation in humanity. The instinct for beauty is set in human
-nature, as surely as the instinct for knowledge is set there, or the
-instinct for conduct. If the instinct for beauty is served by Greek
-literature and art as it is served by no other literature and art, we
-may trust to the instinct of self-preservation in humanity for keeping
-Greek as part of our culture. We may trust to it for even making the
-study of Greek more prevalent than it is now. Greek will come, I hope,
-some day to be studied more rationally than at present; but it will be
-increasingly studied as men increasingly feel the need in them for
-beauty, and how powerfully Greek art and Greek literature can serve this
-need. Women will again study Greek, as Lady Jane Grey did; I believe
-that in that chain of forts, with which the fair host of the Amazons are
-now engirdling our English universities, I find that here in America, in
-colleges like Smith College in Massachusetts, and Vassar College in the
-State of New York, and in the happy families of the mixed universities
-out West, they are studying it already.
-
-_Defuit una mihi symmetria prisca_,--'The antique symmetry was the one
-thing wanting to me,' said Leonardo da Vinci; and he was an Italian. I
-will not presume to speak for the Americans, but I am sure that, in the
-Englishman, the want of this admirable symmetry of the Greeks is a
-thousand times more great and crying than in any Italian. The results of
-the want show themselves most glaringly, perhaps, in our architecture,
-but they show themselves, also, in all our art. _Fit details strictly
-combined, in view of a large general result nobly conceived;_ that is
-just the beautiful _symmetria prisca_ of the Greeks, and it is just
-where we English fail, where all our art fails. Striking ideas we have,
-and well-executed details we have; but that high symmetry which, with
-satisfying and delightful effect, combines them, we seldom or never
-have. The glorious beauty of the Acropolis at Athens did not come from
-single fine things stuck about on that hill, a statue here, a gateway
-there;--no, it arose from all things being perfectly combined for a
-supreme total effect. What must not an Englishman feel about our
-deficiencies in this respect, as the sense for beauty, whereof this
-symmetry is an essential element, awakens and strengthens within him!
-what will not one day be his respect and desire for Greece and its
-_symmetria prisca_, when the scales drop from his eyes as he walks the
-London streets, and he sees such a lesson in meanness as the Strand, for
-instance, in its true deformity! But here we are coming to our friend
-Mr. Ruskin's province, and I will not intrude upon it, for he is its
-very sufficient guardian.
-
-And so we at last find, it seems, we find flowing in favour of the
-humanities the natural and necessary stream of things, which seemed
-against them when we started. The 'hairy quadruped furnished with a tail
-and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits,' this good fellow
-carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop
-into a necessity for humane letters. Nay, more; we seem finally to be
-even led to the further conclusion that our hairy ancestor carried in
-his nature, also, a necessity for Greek.
-
-And therefore, to say the truth, I cannot really think that humane
-letters are in much actual danger of being thrust out from their leading
-place in education, in spite of the array of authorities against them at
-this moment. So long as human nature is what it is, their attractions
-will remain irresistible. As with Greek, so with letters generally: they
-will some day come, we may hope, to be studied more rationally, but they
-will not lose their place. What will happen will rather be that there
-will be crowded into education other matters besides, far too many;
-there will be, perhaps, a period of unsettlement and confusion and false
-tendency; but letters will not in the end lose their leading place. If
-they lose it for a time, they will get it back again. We shall be
-brought back to them by our wants and aspirations. And a poor humanist
-may possess his soul in patience, neither strive nor cry, admit the
-energy and brilliancy of the partisans of physical science, and their
-present favour with the public, to be far greater than his own, and
-still have a happy faith that the nature of things works silently on
-behalf of the studies which he loves, and that, while we shall all have
-to acquaint ourselves with the great results reached by modern science,
-and to give ourselves as much training in its disciplines as we can
-conveniently carry, yet the majority of men will always require humane
-letters; and so much the more, as they have the more and the greater
-results of science to relate to the need in man for conduct, and to the
-need in him for beauty.
-
-
-
-
-  EMERSON.
-
-
-Forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in
-the air there which haunt my memory still. Happy the man who in that
-susceptible season of youth hears such voices! they are a possession to
-him for ever. No such voices as those which we heard in our youth at
-Oxford are sounding there now. Oxford has more criticism now, more
-knowledge, more light; but such voices as those of our youth it has no
-longer. The name of Cardinal Newman is a great name to the imagination
-still; his genius and his style are still things of power. But he is
-over eighty years old; he is in the Oratory at Birmingham; he has
-adopted, for the doubts and difficulties which beset men's minds to-day,
-a solution which, to speak frankly, is impossible. Forty years ago he
-was in the very prime of life; he was close at hand to us at Oxford; he
-was preaching in St. Mary's pulpit every Sunday; he seemed about to
-transform and to renew what was for us the most national and natural
-institution in the world, the Church of England. Who could resist the
-charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light
-through the aisles of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then, in
-the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and
-thoughts which were a religious music,--subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem
-to hear him still, saying: 'After the fever of life, after wearinesses
-and sicknesses, fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness,
-struggling and succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this
-troubled, unhealthy state,--at length comes death, at length the white
-throne of God, at length the beatific vision.' Or, if we followed him
-back to his seclusion at Littlemore, that dreary village by the London
-road, and to the house of retreat and the church which he built
-there,--a mean house such as Paul might have lived in when he was
-tent-making at Ephesus, a church plain and thinly sown with
-worshippers,--who could resist him there either, welcoming back to the
-severe joys of church-fellowship, and of daily worship and prayer, the
-firstlings of a generation which had well-nigh forgotten them? Again I
-seem to hear him: 'The season is chill and dark, and the breath of the
-morning is damp, and worshippers are few; but all this befits those who
-are by their profession penitents and mourners, watchers and pilgrims.
-More dear to them that loneliness, more cheerful that severity, and more
-bright that gloom, than all those aids and appliances of luxury by which
-men nowadays attempt to make prayer less disagreeable to them. True
-faith does not covet comforts; they who realise that awful day, when
-they shall see Him face to face whose eyes are as a flame of fire, will
-as little bargain to pray pleasantly now as they will think of doing so
-then.'
-
-Somewhere or other I have spoken of those 'last enchantments of the
-Middle Age' which Oxford sheds around us, and here they were! But there
-were other voices sounding in our ear besides Newman's. There was the
-puissant voice of Carlyle; so sorely strained, over-used, and mis-used
-since, but then fresh, comparatively sound, and reaching our hearts with
-true, pathetic eloquence. Who can forget the emotion of receiving in its
-first freshness such a sentence as that sentence of Carlyle upon Edward
-Irving, then just dead: 'Scotland sent him forth a herculean man; our
-mad Babylon wore and wasted him with all her engines,--and it took her
-twelve years!' A greater voice still,--the greatest voice of the
-century,--came to us in those youthful years through Carlyle: the voice
-of Goethe. To this day,--such is the force of youthful associations,--I
-read the _Wilhelm Meister_ with more pleasure in Carlyle's translation
-than in the original. The large, liberal view of human life in _Wilhelm
-Meister_, how novel it was to the Englishman in those days! and it was
-salutary, too, and educative for him, doubtless, as well as novel. But
-what moved us most in _Wilhelm Meister_ was that which, after all, will
-always move the young most,--the poetry, the eloquence. Never, surely,
-was Carlyle's prose so beautiful and pure as in his rendering of the
-Youths' dirge over Mignon!--'Well is our treasure now laid up, the fair
-image of the past. Here sleeps it in the marble, undecaying; in your
-hearts, also, it lives, it works. Travel, travel, back into life! Take
-along with you this holy earnestness, for earnestness alone makes life
-eternity.' Here we had the voice of the great Goethe;--not the stiff,
-and hindered, and frigid, and factitious Goethe who speaks to us too
-often from those sixty volumes of his, but of the great Goethe, and the
-true one.
-
-And besides those voices, there came to us in that old Oxford time a
-voice also from this side of the Atlantic,--a clear and pure voice,
-which for my ear, at any rate, brought a strain as new, and moving, and
-unforgettable, as the strain of Newman, or Carlyle, or Goethe. Mr.
-Lowell has well described the apparition of Emerson to your young
-generation here, in that distant time of which I am speaking, and of his
-workings upon them. He was your Newman, your man of soul and genius
-visible to you in the flesh, speaking to your bodily ears, a present
-object for your heart and imagination. That is surely the most potent of
-all influences! nothing can come up to it. To us at Oxford Emerson was
-but a voice speaking from three thousand miles away. But so well he
-spoke, that from that time forth Boston Bay and Concord were names
-invested to my ear with a sentiment akin to that which invests for me
-the names of Oxford and of Weimar; and snatches of Emerson's strain
-fixed themselves in my mind as imperishably as any of the eloquent words
-which I have been just now quoting. 'Then dies the man in you; then once
-more perish the buds of art, poetry, and science, as they have died
-already in a thousand thousand men.' 'What Plato has thought, he may
-think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen
-any man, he can understand.' 'Trust thyself! every heart vibrates to
-that iron string. Accept the place the Divine Providence has found for
-you, the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great
-men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius
-of their age; betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring
-at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their
-being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest spirit the
-same transcendent destiny; and not pinched in a corner, not cowards
-fleeing before a revolution, but redeemers and benefactors, pious
-aspirants to be noble clay plastic under the Almighty effort, let us
-advance and advance on chaos and the dark!' These lofty sentences of
-Emerson, and a hundred others of like strain, I never have lost out of
-my memory; I never _can_ lose them.
-
-At last I find myself in Emerson's own country, and looking upon Boston
-Bay. Naturally I revert to the friend of my youth. It is not always
-pleasant to ask oneself questions about the friends of one's youth; they
-cannot always well support it. Carlyle, for instance, in my judgment,
-cannot well support such a return upon him. Yet we should make the
-return; we should part with our illusions, we should know the truth.
-When I come to this country, where Emerson now counts for so much, and
-where such high claims are made for him, I pull myself together, and ask
-myself what the truth about this object of my youthful admiration really
-is. Improper elements often come into our estimate of men. We have
-lately seen a German critic make Goethe the greatest of all poets,
-because Germany is now the greatest of military powers, and wants a poet
-to match. Then, too, America is a young country; and young countries,
-like young persons, are apt sometimes to evince in their literary
-judgments a want of scale and measure. I set myself, therefore,
-resolutely to come at a real estimate of Emerson, and with a leaning
-even to strictness rather than to indulgence. That is the safer course.
-Time has no indulgence; any veils of illusion which we may have left
-around an object because we loved it, Time is sure to strip away.
-
-                 *        *        *        *        *
-
-I was reading the other day a notice of Emerson by a serious and
-interesting American critic. Fifty or sixty passages in Emerson's poems,
-says this critic,--who had doubtless himself been nourished on Emerson's
-writings, and held them justly dear,--fifty or sixty passages from
-Emerson's poems have already entered into English speech as matter of
-familiar and universally current quotation. Here is a specimen of that
-personal sort of estimate which, for my part, even in speaking of
-authors dear to me, I would try to avoid. What is the kind of phrase of
-which we may fairly say that it has entered into English speech as
-matter of familiar quotation? Such a phrase, surely, as the 'Patience on
-a monument' of Shakespeare; as the 'Darkness visible' of Milton; as the
-'Where ignorance is bliss' of Gray. Of not one single passage in
-Emerson's poetry can it be truly said that it has become a familiar
-quotation like phrases of this kind. It is not enough that it should be
-familiar to his admirers, familiar in New England, familiar even
-throughout the United States; it must be familiar to all readers and
-lovers of English poetry. Of not more than one or two passages in
-Emerson's poetry can it, I think, be truly said, that they stand
-ever-present in the memory of even many lovers of English poetry. A
-great number of passages from his poetry are no doubt perfectly familiar
-to the mind and lips of the critic whom I have mentioned, and perhaps of
-a wide circle of American readers. But this is a very different thing
-from being matter of universal quotation, like the phrases of the
-legitimate poets.
-
-And, in truth, one of the legitimate poets, Emerson, in my opinion, is
-not. His poetry is interesting, it makes one think; but it is not the
-poetry of one of the born poets. I say it of him with reluctance,
-although I am sure that he would have said it of himself; but I say it
-with reluctance, because I dislike giving pain to his admirers, and
-because all my own wish, too, is to say of him what is favourable. But I
-regard myself, not as speaking to please Emerson's admirers, not as
-speaking to please myself; but rather, I repeat, as communing with Time
-and Nature concerning the productions of this beautiful and rare spirit,
-and as resigning what of him is by their unalterable decree touched with
-caducity, in order the better to mark and secure that in him which is
-immortal.
-
-Milton says that poetry ought to be simple, sensuous, impassioned. Well,
-Emerson's poetry is seldom either simple, or sensuous, or impassioned.
-In general it lacks directness; it lacks concreteness; it lacks energy.
-His grammar is often embarrassed; in particular, the want of
-clearly-marked distinction between the subject and the object of his
-sentence is a frequent cause of obscurity in him. A poem which shall be
-a plain, forcible, inevitable whole he hardly ever produces. Such good
-work as the noble lines graven on the Concord Monument is the exception
-with him; such ineffective work as the 'Fourth of July Ode' or the
-'Boston Hymn' is the rule. Even passages and single lines of thorough
-plainness and commanding force are rare in his poetry. They exist, of
-course; but when we meet with them they give us a slight shock of
-surprise, so little has Emerson accustomed us to them. Let me have the
-pleasure of quoting one or two of these exceptional passages:--
-
-   'So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
-      So near is God to man,
-    When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_,
-      The youth replies, _I can_.'
-
-Or again this:--
-
-   'Though love repine and reason chafe,
-    There came a voice without reply:
-    "'Tis man's perdition to be safe,
-    When for the truth he ought to die."'
-
-Excellent! but how seldom do we get from him a strain blown so clearly
-and firmly! Take another passage where his strain has not only
-clearness, it has also grace and beauty:--
-
-   'And ever, when the happy child
-    In May beholds the blooming wild,
-    And hears in heaven the bluebird sing,
-    "Onward," he cries, "your baskets bring!
-    In the next field is air more mild,
-    And in yon hazy west is Eden's balmier spring."'
-
-In the style and cadence here there is a reminiscence, I think, of Gray;
-at any rate the pureness, grace, and beauty of these lines are worthy
-even of Gray. But Gray holds his high rank as a poet, not merely by the
-beauty and grace of passages in his poems; not merely by a diction
-generally pure in an age of impure diction: he holds it, above all, by
-the power and skill with which the evolution of his poems is conducted.
-Here is his grand superiority to Collins, whose diction in his best
-poem, the 'Ode to Evening,' is purer than Gray's; but then the 'Ode to
-Evening' is like a river which loses itself in the sand, whereas Gray's
-best poems have an evolution sure and satisfying. Emerson's 'Mayday,'
-from which I just now quoted, has no real evolution at all; it is a
-series of observations. And, in general, his poems have no evolution.
-Take, for example, his 'Titmouse.' Here he has an excellent subject; and
-his observation of Nature, moreover, is always marvellously close and
-fine. But compare what he makes of his meeting with his titmouse with
-what Cowper or Burns makes of the like kind of incident! One never quite
-arrives at learning what the titmouse actually did for him at all,
-though one feels a strong interest and desire to learn it; but one is
-reduced to guessing, and cannot be quite sure that after all one has
-guessed right. He is not plain and concrete enough,--in other words, not
-poet enough,--to be able to tell us. And a failure of this kind goes
-through almost all his verse, keeps him amid symbolism and allusion and
-the fringes of things, and, in spite of his spiritual power, deeply
-impairs his poetic value. Through the inestimable virtue of
-concreteness, a simple poem like 'The Bridge' of Longfellow, or the
-'School Days' of Mr. Whittier, is of more poetic worth, perhaps, than
-all the verse of Emerson.
-
-I do not, then, place Emerson among the great poets. But I go further,
-and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the great men
-of letters. Who are the great men of letters? They are men like Cicero,
-Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire,--writers with, in the first
-place, a genius and instinct for style; writers whose prose is by a kind
-of native necessity true and sound. Now the style of Emerson, like the
-style of his transcendentalist friends and of the 'Dial' so
-continually,--the style of Emerson is capable of falling into a strain
-like this, which I take from the beginning of his 'Essay on Love':
-'Every soul is a celestial being to every other soul. The heart has its
-sabbaths and jubilees, in which the world appears as a hymeneal feast,
-and all natural sounds and the circle of the seasons are erotic odes and
-dances.' Emerson altered this sentence in the later editions. Like
-Wordsworth, he was in later life fond of altering; and in general his
-later alterations, like those of Wordsworth, are not improvements. He
-softened the passage in question, however, though without really mending
-it. I quote it in its original and strongly-marked form. Arthur Stanley
-used to relate that about the year 1840, being in conversation with some
-Americans in quarantine at Malta, and thinking to please them, he
-declared his warm admiration for Emerson's 'Essays,' then recently
-published. However, the Americans shook their heads, and told him that
-for home taste Emerson was decidedly too _greeny_. We will hope, for
-their sakes, that the sort of thing they had in their heads was such
-writing as I have just quoted. Unsound it is, indeed, and in a style
-almost impossible to a born man of letters.
-
-It is a curious thing, that quality of style which marks the great
-writer, the born man of letters. It resides in the whole tissue of his
-work, and of his work regarded as a composition for literary purposes.
-Brilliant and powerful passages in a man's writings do not prove his
-possession of it; it lies in their whole tissue. Emerson has passages of
-noble and pathetic eloquence, such as those which I quoted at the
-beginning; he has passages of shrewd and felicitous wit; he has crisp
-epigram; he has passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature.
-Yet he is not a great writer; his style has not the requisite wholeness
-of good tissue. Even Carlyle is not, in my judgment, a great writer. He
-has surpassingly powerful qualities of expression, far more powerful
-than Emerson's, and reminding one of the gifts of expression of the
-great poets,--of even Shakespeare himself. What Emerson so admirably
-says of Carlyle's 'devouring eyes and pourtraying hand,' 'those thirsty
-eyes, those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine, those
-fatal perceptions,' is thoroughly true. What a description is Carlyle's
-of the first publisher of _Sartor Resartus_, 'to whom the idea of a new
-edition of _Sartor_ is frightful, or rather ludicrous, unimaginable'; of
-this poor Fraser, in whose 'wonderful world of Tory pamphleteers,
-conservative Younger-brothers, Regent Street loungers, Crockford
-gamblers, Irish Jesuits, drunken reporters, and miscellaneous unclean
-persons (whom nitre and much soap will not wash clean), not a soul has
-expressed the smallest wish that way!' What a portrait, again, of the
-well-beloved John Sterling! 'One, and the best, of a small class extant
-here, who, nigh drowning in a black wreck of Infidelity (lighted up by
-some glare of Radicalism only, now growing _dim_ too), and about to
-perish, saved themselves into a Coleridgian Shovel-Hattedness.' What
-touches in the invitation of Emerson to London! 'You shall see
-blockheads by the million; Pickwick himself shall be visible,--innocent
-young Dickens, reserved for a questionable fate. The great Wordsworth
-shall talk till you yourself pronounce him to be a bore. Southey's
-complexion is still healthy mahogany brown, with a fleece of white hair,
-and eyes that seem running at full gallop. Leigh Hunt, man of genius in
-the shape of a cockney, is my near neighbour, with good humour and no
-common-sense; old Rogers with his pale head, white, bare, and cold as
-snow, with those large blue eyes, cruel, sorrowful, and that sardonic
-shelf chin.' How inimitable it all is! And finally, for one must not go
-on for ever, this version of a London Sunday, with the public-houses
-closed during the hours of divine service! 'It is silent Sunday; the
-populace not yet admitted to their beer-shops, till the respectabilities
-conclude their rubric mummeries,--a much more audacious feat than beer.'
-Yet even Carlyle is not, in my judgment, to be called a great writer;
-one cannot think of ranking him with men like Cicero and Plato and Swift
-and Voltaire. Emerson freely promises to Carlyle immortality for his
-histories. They will not have it. Why? Because the materials furnished
-to him by that devouring eye of his, and that pourtraying hand, were not
-wrought in and subdued by him to what his work, regarded as a
-composition for literary purposes, required. Occuring in conversation,
-breaking out in familiar correspondence, they are magnificent,
-inimitable; nothing more is required of them; thus thrown out anyhow,
-they serve their turn and fulfil their function. And, therefore, I
-should not wonder if really Carlyle lived, in the long run, by such an
-invaluable record as that correspondence between him and Emerson, of
-which we owe the publication to Mr. Charles Norton,--by this and not by
-his works, as Johnson lives in Boswell, not by his works. For Carlyle's
-sallies, as the staple of a literary work, become wearisome; and as time
-more and more applies to Carlyle's works its stringent test, this will
-be felt more and more. Shakespeare, Molière, Swift,--they, too, had,
-like Carlyle, the devouring eye and the pourtraying hand. But they are
-great literary masters, they are supreme writers, because they knew how
-to work into a literary composition their materials, and to subdue them
-to the purposes of literary effect. Carlyle is too wilful for this, too
-turbid, too vehement.
-
-You will think I deal in nothing but negatives. I have been saying that
-Emerson is not one of the great poets, the great writers. He has not
-their quality of style. He is, however, the propounder of a philosophy.
-The Platonic dialogues afford us the example of exquisite literary form
-and treatment given to philosophical ideas. Plato is at once a great
-literary man and a great philosopher.
-
-If we speak carefully, we cannot call Aristotle or Spinoza or Kant great
-literary men, or their productions great literary works. But their work
-is arranged with such constructive power that they build a philosophy,
-and are justly called great philosophical writers. Emerson cannot, I
-think, be called with justice a great philosophical writer. He cannot
-build; his arrangement of philosophical ideas has no progress in it, no
-evolution; he does not construct a philosophy. Emerson himself knew the
-defects of his method, or rather want of method, very well; indeed, he
-and Carlyle criticise themselves and one another in a way which leaves
-little for any one else to do in the way of formulating their defects.
-Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his friend's poetic and
-literary production when he says of the 'Dial': 'For me it is too
-ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense
-themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy.' And,
-speaking of Emerson's orations, he says: 'I long to see some concrete
-Thing, some Event, Man's Life, American Forest, or piece of Creation,
-which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well _Emersonised_,--depictured
-by Emerson, filled with the life of Emerson, and cast forth from him,
-then to live by itself. If these orations balk me of this, how
-profitable soever they may be for others, I will not love them.' Emerson
-himself formulates perfectly the defect of his own philosophical
-productions when he speaks of his 'formidable tendency to the lapidary
-style. I build my house of boulders.' 'Here I sit and read and write,'
-he says again, 'with very little system, and, as far as regards
-composition, with the most fragmentary result; paragraphs
-incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.' Nothing
-can be truer; and the work of a Spinoza or Kant, of the men who stand as
-great philosophical writers, does not proceed in this wise.
-
-Some people will tell you that Emerson's poetry, indeed, is too
-abstract, and his philosophy too vague, but that his best work is his
-_English Traits_. The _English Traits_ are beyond question very pleasant
-reading. It is easy to praise them, easy to commend the author of them.
-But I insist on always trying Emerson's work by the highest standards. I
-esteem him too much to try his work by any other. Tried by the highest
-standards, and compared with the work of the excellent markers and
-recorders of the traits of human life,--of writers like Montaigne, La
-Bruyère, Addison,--the _English Traits_ will not stand the comparison.
-Emerson's observation has not the disinterested quality of the
-observation of these masters. It is the observation of a man
-systematically benevolent, as Hawthorne's observation in _Our Old Home_
-is the work of a man chagrined. Hawthorne's literary talent is of the
-first order. His subjects are generally not to me subjects of the
-highest interest; but his literary talent is of the first order, the
-finest, I think, which America has yet produced,--finer, by much, than
-Emerson's. Yet _Our Old Home_ is not a masterpiece any more than
-_English Traits_. In neither of them is the observer disinterested
-enough. The author's attitude in each of these cases can easily be
-understood and defended. Hawthorne was a sensitive man, so situated in
-England that he was perpetually in contact with the British Philistine;
-and the British Philistine is a trying personage. Emerson's systematic
-benevolence comes from what he himself calls somewhere his 'persistent
-optimism'; and his persistent optimism is the root of his greatness and
-the source of his charm. But still let us keep our literary conscience
-true, and judge every kind of literary work by the laws really proper to
-it. The kind of work attempted in the _English Traits_ and in _Our Old
-Home_ is work which cannot be done perfectly with a bias such as that
-given by Emerson's optimism or by Hawthorne's chagrin. Consequently,
-neither _English Traits_ nor _Our Old Home_ is a work of perfection in
-its kind.
-
-Not with the Miltons and Grays, not with the Platos and Spinozas, not
-with the Swifts and Voltaires, not with the Montaignes and Addisons, can
-we rank Emerson. His work of various kinds, when one compares it with
-the work done in a corresponding kind by these masters, fails to stand
-the comparison. No man could see this clearer than Emerson himself. It
-is hard not to feel despondency when we contemplate our failures and
-shortcomings: and Emerson, the least self-flattering and the most modest
-of men, saw so plainly what was lacking to him that he had his moments
-of despondency. 'Alas, my friend,' he writes in reply to Carlyle, who
-had exhorted him to creative work,--'Alas, my friend, I can do no such
-gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low
-department of literature,--the reporters; suburban men.' He deprecated
-his friend's praise; praise 'generous to a fault,' he calls it; praise
-'generous to the shaming of me,--cold, fastidious, ebbing person that I
-am. Already in a former letter you had said too much good of my poor
-little arid book, which is as sand to my eyes. I can only say that I
-heartily wish the book were better; and I must try and deserve so much
-favour from the kind gods by a bolder and truer living in the months to
-come,--such as may perchance one day release and invigorate this cramp
-hand of mine. When I see how much work is to be done; what room for a
-poet, for any spiritualist, in this great, intelligent, sensual, and
-avaricious America,--I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering
-tongue.' Again, as late as 1870, he writes to Carlyle: 'There is no
-example of constancy like yours, and it always stings my stupor into
-temporary recovery and wonderful resolution to accept the noble
-challenge. But "the strong hours conquer us;" and I am the victim of
-miscellany,--miscellany of designs, vast debility, and procrastination.'
-The forlorn note belonging to the phrase, 'vast debility,' recalls that
-saddest and most discouraged of writers, the author of _Obermann_,
-Senancour, with whom Emerson has in truth a certain kinship. He has, in
-common with Senancour, his pureness, his passion for nature, his single
-eye; and here we find him confessing, like Senancour, a sense in himself
-of sterility and impotence.
-
-                 *        *        *        *        *
-
-And now I think I have cleared the ground. I have given up to envious
-Time as much of Emerson as Time can fairly expect ever to obtain. We
-have not in Emerson a great poet, a great writer, a great
-philosophy-maker. His relation to us is not that of one of those
-personages; yet it is a relation of, I think, even superior importance.
-His relation to us is more like that of the Roman Emperor Marcus
-Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is not a great writer, a great
-philosophy-maker; he is the friend and aider of those who would live in
-the spirit. Emerson is the same. He is the friend and aider of those who
-would live in the spirit. All the points in thinking which are necessary
-for this purpose he takes; but he does not combine them into a system,
-or present them as a regular philosophy. Combined in a system by a man
-with the requisite talent for this kind of thing, they would be less
-useful than as Emerson gives them to us; and the man with the talent so
-to systematise them would be less impressive than Emerson. They do very
-well as they now stand;--like 'boulders,' as he says;--in 'paragraphs
-incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.' In such
-sentences his main points recur again and again, and become fixed in the
-memory.
-
-We all know them. First and foremost, character. Character is
-everything. 'That which all things tend to educe,--which freedom,
-cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver,--is
-character.' Character and self-reliance. 'Trust thyself! every heart
-vibrates to that iron string.' And yet we have our being in a _not
-ourselves_. 'There is a power above and behind us, and we are the
-channels of its communications.' But our lives must be pitched higher.
-'Life must be lived on a higher plane; we must go up to a higher
-platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there the whole
-scene changes.' The good we need is for ever close to us, though we
-attain it not. 'On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are
-miserably dying.' This good is close to us, moreover, in our daily life,
-and in the familiar, homely places. 'The unremitting retention of simple
-and high sentiments in obscure duties,--that is the maxim for us. Let us
-be poised and wise, and our own to-day. Let us treat the men and women
-well,--treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are. Men live in
-their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for
-successful labour. I settle myself ever firmer in the creed, that we
-should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we
-are, by whomsoever we deal with; accepting our actual companions and
-circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom
-the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. Massachusetts,
-Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear
-loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and if
-we will tarry a little we may come to learn that here is best. See to it
-only that thyself is here.' Furthermore, the good is close to us _all_.
-'I resist the scepticism of our education and of our educated men. I do
-not believe that the differences of opinion and character in men are
-organic. I do not recognise, besides the class of the good and the wise,
-a permanent class of sceptics, or a class of conservatives, or of
-malignants, or of materialists. I do not believe in the classes. Every
-man has a call of the power to do something unique.' Exclusiveness is
-deadly. 'The exclusive in social life does not see that he excludes
-himself from enjoyment in the attempt to appropriate it. The
-exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven
-on himself in striving to shut out others. Treat men as pawns and
-ninepins, and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their
-heart you shall lose your own: The selfish man suffers more from his
-selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important
-benefit.' A sound nature will be inclined to refuse ease and
-self-indulgence. 'To live with some rigour of temperance, or some
-extreme of generosity, seems to be an asceticism which common
-good-nature would appoint to those who are at ease and in plenty, in
-sign that they feel a brotherhood with the great multitude of suffering
-men.' Compensation, finally, is the great law of life; it is everywhere,
-it is sure, and there is no escape from it. This is that 'law alive and
-beautiful, which works over our heads and under our feet. Pitiless, it
-avails itself of our success when we obey it, and of our ruin when we
-contravene it. We are all secret believers in it. It rewards actions
-after their nature. The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
-The thief steals from himself, the swindler swindles himself. You must
-pay at last your own debt.'
-
-This is tonic indeed! And let no one object that it is too general; that
-more practical, positive direction is what we want; that Emerson's
-optimism, self-reliance, and indifference to favourable conditions for
-our life and growth have in them something of danger. 'Trust thyself;'
-'what attracts my attention shall have it;' 'though thou shouldst walk
-the world over thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or
-ignoble;' 'what we call vulgar society is that society whose poetry is
-not yet written, but which you shall presently make as enviable and
-renowned as any.' With maxims like these, we surely, it may be said, run
-some risk of being made too well satisfied with our own actual self and
-state, however crude and imperfect they may be. 'Trust thyself?' It may
-be said that the common American or Englishman is more than enough
-disposed already to trust himself. I often reply, when our sectarians
-are praised for following conscience: Our people are very good in
-following their conscience; where they are not so good is in
-ascertaining whether their conscience tells them right. 'What attracts
-my attention shall have it?' Well, that is our people's plea when they
-run after the Salvation Army, and desire Messrs. Moody and Sankey. 'Thou
-shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble?' But think
-of the turn of the good people of our race for producing a life of
-hideousness and immense ennui; think of that specimen of your own New
-England life which Mr. Howells gives us in one of his charming stories
-which I was reading lately; think of the life of that ragged New England
-farm in the _Lady of the Aroostook_; think of Deacon Blood, and Aunt
-Maria, and the straight-backed chairs with black horse-hair seats, and
-Ezra Perkins with perfect self-reliance depositing his travellers in the
-snow! I can truly say that in the little which I have seen of the life
-of New England, I am more struck with what has been achieved than with
-the crudeness and failure. But no doubt there is still a great deal of
-crudeness also. Your own novelists say there is, and I suppose they say
-true. In the New England, as in the Old, our people have to learn, I
-suppose, not that their modes of life are beautiful and excellent
-already; they have rather to learn that they must transform them.
-
-To adopt this line of objection to Emerson's deliverances would,
-however, be unjust. In the first place, Emerson's points are in
-themselves true, if understood in a certain high sense; they are true
-and fruitful. And the right work to be done, at the hour when he
-appeared, was to affirm them generally and absolutely. Only thus could
-he break through the hard and fast barrier of narrow, fixed ideas, which
-he found confronting him, and win an entrance for new ideas. Had he
-attempted developments which may now strike us as expedient, he would
-have excited fierce antagonism, and probably effected little or nothing.
-The time might come for doing other work later, but the work which
-Emerson did was the right work to be done then.
-
-In the second place, strong as was Emerson's optimism, and unconquerable
-as was his belief in a good result to emerge from all which he saw going
-on around him, no misanthropical satirist ever saw shortcomings and
-absurdities more clearly than he did, or exposed them more courageously.
-When he sees 'the meanness,' as he calls it, 'of American politics,' he
-congratulates Washington on being 'long already happily dead,' on being
-'wrapt in his shroud and for ever safe.' With how firm a touch he
-delineates the faults of your two great political parties of forty years
-ago! The Democrats, he says, 'have not at heart the ends which give to
-the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our
-American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has
-no ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive only out of hatred and
-selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the
-most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid,
-and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to
-no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy. From
-neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to expect in
-science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the
-nation.' Then with what subtle though kindly irony he follows the
-gradual withdrawal in New England, in the last half century, of tender
-consciences from the social organisations,--the bent for experiments
-such as that of Brook Farm and the like,--follows it in all its
-'dissidence of dissent and Protestantism of the Protestant religion!' He
-even loves to rally the New Englander on his philanthropical activity,
-and to find his beneficence and its institutions a bore! 'Your
-miscellaneous popular charities, the education at college of fools, the
-building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many of these now
-stand, alms to sots, and the thousand-fold relief societies,--though I
-confess with shame that I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, yet it
-is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to
-withhold.' 'Our Sunday schools and churches and pauper societies are
-yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural
-ways of arriving at the same ends at which these aim, but do not
-arrive.' 'Nature does not like our benevolence or our learning much
-better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the
-caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition convention, or the Temperance
-meeting, or the Transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says
-to us: "So hot, my little sir?"'
-
-Yes, truly, his insight is admirable; his truth is precious. Yet the
-secret of his effect is not even in these; it is in his temper. It is in
-the hopeful, serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are
-indissolubly joined; in which they work, and have their being. He says
-himself: 'We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the
-perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.' If
-this be so, how wise is Emerson! for never had man such a sense of the
-inexhaustibleness of nature, and such hope. It was the ground of his
-being; it never failed him. Even when he is sadly avowing the
-imperfection of his literary power and resources, lamenting his fumbling
-fingers and stammering tongue, he adds: 'Yet, as I tell you, I am very
-easy in my mind and never dream of suicide. My whole philosophy, which
-is very real, teaches acquiescence and optimism. Sure I am that the
-right word will be spoken, though I cut out my tongue.' In his old age,
-with friends dying and life failing, his tone of cheerful,
-forward-looking hope is still the same. 'A multitude of young men are
-growing up here of high promise, and I compare gladly the social poverty
-of my youth with the power on which these draw.' His abiding word for
-us, the word by which being dead he yet speaks to us, is this: 'That
-which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is
-cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavour to realise our aspirations.
-Shall not the heart, which has received so much, trust the Power by
-which it lives?'
-
-One can scarcely overrate the importance of thus holding fast to
-happiness and hope. It gives to Emerson's work an invaluable virtue. As
-Wordsworth's poetry is, in my judgment, the most important work done in
-verse, in our language, during the present century, so Emerson's
-_Essays_ are, I think, the most important work done in prose. His work
-is more important than Carlyle's. Let us be just to Carlyle, provoking
-though he often is. Not only has he that genius of his which makes
-Emerson say truly of his letters, that 'they savour always of eternity.'
-More than this may be said of him. The scope and upshot of his teaching
-are true; 'his guiding genius,' to quote Emerson again, is really 'his
-moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and
-justice.' But consider Carlyle's temper, as we have been considering
-Emerson's! take his own account of it! 'Perhaps London is the proper
-place for me after all, seeing all places are _im_proper: who knows?
-Meanwhile, I lead a most dyspeptic, solitary, self-shrouded life;
-consuming, if possible in silence, my considerable daily allotment of
-pain; glad when any strength is left in me for writing, which is the
-only use I can see in myself,--too rare a case of late. The ground of my
-existence is black as death; too black, when all _void_ too; but at
-times there paint themselves on it pictures of gold, and rainbow, and
-lightning; all the brighter for the black ground, I suppose. Withal, I
-am very much of a fool.'--No, not a fool, but turbid and morbid, wilful
-and perverse. 'We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope.'
-
-Carlyle's perverse attitude towards happiness cuts him off from hope. He
-fiercely attacks the desire for happiness; his grand point in _Sartor_,
-his secret in which the soul may find rest, is that one shall cease to
-desire happiness, that one should learn to say to oneself: 'What if thou
-wert born and predestined not to be happy, but to be unhappy!' He is
-wrong; Saint Augustine is the better philosopher, who says: 'Act we
-_must_ in pursuance of what gives us most delight.' Epictetus and
-Augustine can be severe moralists enough; but both of them know and
-frankly say that the desire for happiness is the root and ground of
-man's being. Tell him and show him that he places his happiness wrong,
-that he seeks for delight where delight will never be really found; then
-you illumine and further him. But you only confuse him by telling him to
-cease to desire happiness; and you will not tell him this unless you are
-already confused yourself.
-
-Carlyle preached the dignity of labour, the necessity of righteousness,
-the love of veracity, the hatred of shams. He is said by many people to
-be a great teacher, a great helper for us, because he does so. But what
-is the due and eternal result of labour, righteousness,
-veracity?--Happiness. And how are we drawn to them by one who, instead
-of making us feel that with them is happiness, tells us that perhaps we
-were predestined not to be happy but to be unhappy?
-
-You will find, in especial, many earnest preachers of our popular
-religion to be fervent in their praise and admiration of Carlyle. His
-insistence on labour, righteousness, and veracity, pleases them; his
-contempt for happiness pleases them too. I read the other day a tract
-against smoking, although I do not happen to be a smoker myself.
-'Smoking,' said the tract, 'is liked because it gives agreeable
-sensations. Now it is a positive objection to a thing that it gives
-agreeable sensations. An earnest man will expressly avoid what gives
-agreeable sensations.' Shortly afterwards I was inspecting a school, and
-I found the children reading a piece of poetry on the common theme that
-we are here to-day and gone to-morrow. I shall soon be gone, the speaker
-in this poem was made to say,--
-
-   'And I shall be glad to go,
-    For the world at best is a dreary place,
-    And my life is getting low.'
-
-How usual a language of popular religion that is, on our side of the
-Atlantic at any rate! But then our popular religion, in disparaging
-happiness here below, knows very well what it is after. It has its eye
-on a happiness in a future life above the clouds, in the New Jerusalem,
-to be won by disliking and rejecting happiness here on earth. And so
-long as this ideal stands fast, it is very well. But for very many it
-now stands fast no longer; for Carlyle, at any rate, it had failed and
-vanished. Happiness in labour, righteousness, and veracity,--in the life
-of the spirit,--here was a gospel still for Carlyle to preach, and to
-help others by preaching. But he baffled them and himself by preferring
-the paradox that we are not born for happiness at all.
-
-Happiness in labour, righteousness, and veracity; in all the life of the
-spirit; happiness and eternal hope;--that was Emerson's gospel. I hear
-it said that Emerson was too sanguine; that the actual generation in
-America is not turning out so well as he expected. Very likely he was
-too sanguine as to the near future; in this country it is difficult not
-to be too sanguine. Very possibly the present generation may prove
-unworthy of his high hopes; even several generations succeeding this may
-prove unworthy of them. But by his conviction that in the life of the
-spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this life of the spirit will
-come more and more to be sanely understood, and to prevail, and to work
-for happiness,--by this conviction and hope Emerson was great, and he
-will surely prove in the end to have been right in them. In this country
-it is difficult, as I said, not to be sanguine. Very many of your
-writers are over-sanguine, and on the wrong grounds. But you have two
-men who in what they have written show their sanguineness in a line
-where courage and hope are just, where they are also infinitely
-important, but where they are not easy. The two men are Franklin and
-Emerson.[5] These two are, I think, the most distinctively and
-honourably American of your writers; they are the most original and the
-most valuable. Wise men everywhere know that we must keep up our courage
-and hope; they know that hope is, as Wordsworth well says,--
-
-   'The paramount _duty_ which Heaven lays,
-    For its own honour, on man's suffering heart.'
-
-But the very word _duty_ points to an effort and a struggle to maintain
-our hope unbroken. Franklin and Emerson maintained theirs with a
-convincing ease, an inspiring joy. Franklin's confidence in the
-happiness with which industry, honesty, and economy will crown the life
-of this work-day world, is such that he runs over with felicity. With a
-like felicity does Emerson run over, when he contemplates the happiness
-eternally attached to the true life in the spirit. You cannot prize him
-too much, nor heed him too diligently. He has lessons for both the
-branches of our race. I figure him to my mind as visible upon earth
-still, as still standing here by Boston Bay, or at his own Concord, in
-his habit as he lived, but of heightened stature and shining feature,
-with one hand stretched out towards the East, to our laden and labouring
-England; the other towards the ever-growing West, to his own
-dearly-loved America,--'great, intelligent, sensual, avaricious
-America.' To us he shows for guidance his lucid freedom, his
-cheerfulness and hope; to you his dignity, delicacy, serenity,
-elevation.
-
-
-  THE END.
-
-
-  _Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh._
-
-
-
-
-  [Footnotes]
-
-1. _Philippians_, iv, 8.
-
-2. [Greek: Hosa semna].
-
-3. _Ecclesiastes_, viii. 17.
-
-4. _Iliad_, xxiv. 49.
-
-5. I found with pleasure that this conjunction of Emerson's name with
-Franklin's had already occurred to an accomplished writer and delightful
-man, a friend of Emerson, left almost the sole survivor, alas! of the
-famous literary generation of Boston,--Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Dr.
-Holmes has kindly allowed me to print here the ingenious and interesting
-lines, hitherto unpublished, in which he speaks of Emerson thus:--
-
-   'Where in the realm of thought, whose air is song,
-    Does he, the Buddha of the West, belong?
-    He seems a wingéd Franklin, sweetly wise,
-    Born to unlock the secret of the skies;
-    And which the nobler calling--if 'tis fair
-    Terrestrial with celestial to compare--
-    To guide the storm-cloud's elemental flame,
-    Or walk the chambers whence the lightning came
-    Amidst the sources of its subtile fire,
-    And steal their effluence for his lips and lyre?'
-
-
-
-
-
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 <div class='pagination frontmatter'>
 <p style='font-size:1.6em; letter-spacing:0.05em;'>DISCOURSES IN<br />
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Discourses in America, by Matthew Arnold
-
-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: Discourses in America
-
-Author: Matthew Arnold
-
-Release Date: February 15, 2014 [EBook #44919]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ASCII
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DISCOURSES IN AMERICA ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Sean (scribe_for_hire@yahoo.com), based on
-page images generously made available by the Internet
-Archive
-(https://archive.org/details/discoursesinamer00arnouoft).
-
-
-
-
-
-
-  [Italics are marked with _underscores_.
-
-   Transliterations of Greek appear in square brackets.]
-
-
-
-
-  DISCOURSES IN AMERICA
-
-
-  BY
-  MATTHEW ARNOLD
-
-
-  London
-  MACMILLAN AND CO.
-  1885
-
-
-
-
-  _Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh._
-
-
-
-
-  PREFACE.
-
-
-Of the three discourses in this volume, the second was originally given
-as the Rede Lecture at Cambridge, was recast for delivery in America,
-and is reprinted here as so recast. The first discourse, that on
-'Numbers,' was originally given in New York. It was afterwards published
-in the _Nineteenth Century_, and I have to thank Mr. Knowles for kindly
-permitting me to reprint it now. The third discourse, that on 'Emerson,'
-was originally given in Emerson's 'own delightful town,' Boston.
-
-I am glad of every opportunity of thanking my American audiences for the
-unfailing attention and kindness with which they listened to a speaker
-who did not flatter them, who would have flattered them ill, but who yet
-felt, and in fact expressed, more esteem and admiration than his words
-were sometimes, at a hasty first hearing, supposed to convey. I cannot
-think that what I have said of Emerson will finally be accounted scant
-praise, although praise universal and unmixed it certainly is not. What
-high esteem I feel for the suitableness and easy play of American
-institutions I have had occasion, since my return home, to say publicly
-and emphatically. But nothing in the discourse on 'Numbers' was at
-variance with this high esteem, although a caution, certainly, was
-suggested. But then some caution or other, to be drawn from the
-inexhaustibly fruitful truth that moral causes govern the standing and
-the falling of States, who is there that can be said not to need?
-
-All need it, we in this country need it, as indeed in the discourse on
-'Numbers' I have by an express instance shown. Yet as regards us in this
-country at the present moment, I am tempted, I confess, to resort to the
-great truth in question, not for caution so much as for consolation. Our
-politics are 'battles of the kites and the crows,' of the Barbarians and
-the Philistines; each combatant striving to affirm himself still, while
-all the vital needs and instincts of our national growth demand, not
-that either of the combatants should be enabled to affirm himself, but
-that each should be transformed. Our aristocratical class, the
-Barbarians, have no perception of the real wants of the community at
-home. Our middle classes, the great Philistine power, have no perception
-of our real relations to the world abroad, no clue, apparently, for
-guidance, where-ever that attractive and ever-victorious rhetorician,
-who is the Minister of their choice, may take them, except the formula
-of that submissive animal which carried the prophet Balaam. Our affairs
-are in the condition which, from such parties to our politics, might be
-expected. Yet amid all the difficulties and mortifications which beset
-us, with the Barbarians impossible, with the Philistines determining our
-present course, with our rising politicians seeking only that the mind
-of the Populace, when the Populace arrives at power, may be found in
-harmony with the mind of Mr. Carvell Williams, which they flatter
-themselves they have fathomed; with the House of Lords a danger, and the
-House of Commons a scandal, and the general direction of affairs
-infelicitous as we see it,--one consolation remains to us, and that no
-slight or unworthy one. Infelicitous the general direction of our
-affairs may be; but the individual Englishman, whenever and wherever
-called upon to do his duty, does it almost invariably with the old
-energy, courage, virtue. And this is what we gain by having had, as a
-people, in the ground of our being, a firm faith in conduct; by having
-believed, more steadfastly and fervently than most, this great law that
-moral causes govern the standing and the falling of men and nations. The
-law gradually widens, indeed, so as to include light as well as honesty
-and energy; to make light, also, a moral cause. Unless we are
-transformed we cannot finally stand, and without more light we cannot be
-transformed. But in the trying hours through which before our
-transformation we have to pass, it may well console us to rest our
-thoughts upon our life's law even as we have hitherto known it, and upon
-all which even in our present imperfect acception of it it has done for
-us.
-
-
-
-
-  CONTENTS.
-
-
-                                                      PAGE
-
-  Numbers; or, The Majority and the Remnant              1
-
-  Literature and Science                                72
-
-  Emerson                                              138
-
-
-
-
-  NUMBERS;
-  OR,
-  THE MAJORITY AND THE REMNANT.
-
-
-There is a characteristic saying of Dr. Johnson: 'Patriotism is the last
-refuge of a scoundrel.' The saying is cynical, many will even call it
-brutal; yet it has in it something of plain, robust sense and truth. We
-do often see men passing themselves off as patriots who are in truth
-scoundrels; we meet with talk and proceedings laying claim to
-patriotism, which are these gentlemen's last refuge. We may all of us
-agree in praying to be delivered from patriots and patriotism of this
-sort. Short of such, there is undoubtedly, sheltering itself under the
-fine name of patriotism, a good deal of self-flattery and self-delusion
-which is mischievous. 'Things are what they are, and the consequences of
-them will be what they will be; why, then, should we desire to be
-deceived?' In that uncompromising sentence of Bishop Butler's is surely
-the right and salutary maxim for both individuals and nations.
-
-Yet there is an honourable patriotism which we should satisfy if we can,
-and should seek to have on our side. At home I have said so much of the
-characters of our society and the prospects of our civilisation, that I
-can hardly escape the like topic elsewhere. Speaking in America, I
-cannot well avoid saying something about the prospects of society in the
-United States. It is a topic where one is apt to touch people's
-patriotic feelings. No one will accuse me of having flattered the
-patriotism of that great country of English people on the other side of
-the Atlantic, amongst whom I was born. Here, so many miles from home, I
-begin to reflect with tender contrition, that perhaps I have not,--I
-will not say flattered the patriotism of my own countrymen enough, but
-regarded it enough. Perhaps that is one reason why I have produced so
-very little effect upon them. It was a fault of youth and inexperience.
-But it would be unpardonable to come in advanced life and repeat the
-same error here. You will not expect impossibilities of me. You will not
-expect me to say that things are not what, in my judgment, they are, and
-that the consequences of them will not be what they will be. I should
-make nothing of it; I should be a too palpable failure. But I confess
-that I should be glad if in what I say here I could engage American
-patriotism on my side, instead of rousing it against me. And it so
-happens that the paramount thoughts which your great country raises in
-my mind are really and truly of a kind to please, I think, any true
-American patriot, rather than to offend him.
-
-The vast scale of things here, the extent of your country, your numbers,
-the rapidity of your increase, strike the imagination, and are a common
-topic for admiring remark. Our great orator, Mr. Bright, is never weary
-of telling us how many acres of land you have at your disposal, how many
-bushels of grain you produce, how many millions you are, how many more
-millions you will be presently, and what a capital thing this is for
-you. Now, though I do not always agree with Mr. Bright, I find myself
-agreeing with him here. I think your numbers afford a very real and
-important ground for satisfaction.
-
-Not that your great numbers, or indeed great numbers of men anywhere,
-are likely to be all good, or even to have the majority good. 'The
-majority are bad,' said one of the wise men of Greece; but he was a
-pagan. Much to the same effect, however, is the famous sentence of the
-New Testament: 'Many are called, few chosen,' This appears a hard
-saying; frequent are the endeavours to elude it, to attenuate its
-severity. But turn it how you will, manipulate it as you will, the few,
-as Cardinal Newman well says, can never mean the many. Perhaps you will
-say that the majority _is_, sometimes, good; that its impulses are good
-generally, and its action is good occasionally. Yes, but it lacks
-principle, it lacks persistence; if to-day its good impulses prevail,
-they succumb to-morrow; sometimes it goes right, but it is very apt to
-go wrong. Even a popular orator, or a popular journalist, will hardly
-say that the multitude may be trusted to have its judgment generally
-just, and its action generally virtuous. It may be better, it is better,
-that the body of the people, with all its faults, should act for itself,
-and control its own affairs, than that it should be set aside as
-ignorant and incapable, and have its affairs managed for it by a
-so-called superior class, possessing property and intelligence. Property
-and intelligence cannot be trusted to show a sound majority themselves;
-the exercise of power by the people tends to educate the people. But
-still, the world being what it is, we must surely expect the aims and
-doings of the majority of men to be at present very faulty, and this in
-a numerous community no less than in a small one. So much we must
-certainly, I think, concede to the sages and to the saints.
-
-Sages and saints are apt to be severe, it is true; apt to take a gloomy
-view of the society in which they live, and to prognosticate evil to it.
-But then it must be added that their prognostications are very apt to
-turn out right. Plato's account of the most gifted and brilliant
-community of the ancient world, of that Athens of his to which we all
-owe so much, is despondent enough. 'There is but a very small remnant,'
-he says, 'of honest followers of wisdom, and they who are of these few,
-and who have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession is wisdom, and
-who can fully see, moreover, the madness of the multitude, and that
-there is no one, we may say, whose action in public matters is sound,
-and no ally for whosoever would help the just, what,' asks Plato, 'are
-they to do? They may be compared,' says Plato, 'to a man who has fallen
-among wild beasts; he will not be one of them, but he is too unaided to
-make head against them; and before he can do any good to society or his
-friends, he will be overwhelmed and perish uselessly. When he considers
-this, he will resolve to keep still, and to mind his own business; as it
-were standing aside under a wall in a storm of dust and hurricane of
-driving wind; and he will endure to behold the rest filled with
-iniquity, if only he himself may live his life clear of injustice and of
-impiety, and depart, when his time comes, in mild and gracious mood,
-with fair hope.'
-
-Plato's picture here of democratic Athens is certainly gloomy enough. We
-may be sure the mass of his contemporaries would have pronounced it to
-be monstrously overcharged. We ourselves, if we had been living then,
-should most of us have by no means seen things as Plato saw them. No, if
-we had seen Athens even nearer its end than when Plato wrote the strong
-words which I have been quoting, Athens in the very last days of Plato's
-life, we should most of us probably have considered that things were not
-going badly with Athens. There is a long sixteen years'
-administration,--the administration of Eubulus,--which fills the last
-years of Plato's life, and the middle years of the fourth century before
-Christ. A temperate German historian thus describes Athens during this
-ministry of Eubulus: 'The grandeur and loftiness of Attic democracy had
-vanished, while all the pernicious germs contained in it were fully
-developed. A life of comfort and a craving for amusement were encouraged
-in every way, and the interest of the citizens was withdrawn from
-serious things. Conversation became more and more superficial and
-frivolous. Famous courtesans formed the chief topic of talk; the new
-inventions of Thearion, the leading pastry-cook in Athens, were hailed
-with loud applause; and the witty sayings which had been uttered in gay
-circles were repeated about town as matters of prime importance.'
-
-No doubt, if we had been living then to witness this, we should from
-time to time have shaken our heads gravely, and said how sad it all was.
-But most of us would not, I think, have been very seriously disquieted
-by it. On the other hand, we should have found many things in the Athens
-of Eubulus to gratify us. 'The democrats,' says the same historian whom
-I have just quoted, 'saw in Eubulus one of their own set at the head of
-affairs;' and I suppose no good democrat would see that without
-pleasure. Moreover, Eubulus was of popular character. In one respect he
-seems to have resembled your own 'heathen Chinee;' he had 'guileless
-ways,' says our historian, 'in which the citizens took pleasure.' He was
-also a good speaker, a thorough man of business; and, above all, he was
-very skilful in matters of finance. His administration was both popular
-and prosperous. We should certainly have said, most of us, if we had
-encountered somebody announcing his resolve to stand aside under a wall
-during such an administration, that he was a goose for his pains; and if
-he had called it 'a falling among wild beasts' to have to live with his
-fellow-citizens who had confidence in Eubulus, their country, and
-themselves, we should have esteemed him very impertinent.
-
-Yes;--and yet at the close of that administration of Eubulus came the
-collapse, and the end of Athens as an independent State. And it was to
-the fault of Athens herself that the collapse was owing. Plato was right
-after all; the majority were bad, and the remnant were impotent.
-
-So fared it with that famous Athenian State, with the brilliant people
-of art and intellect. Now let us turn to the people of religion. We have
-heard Plato speaking of the very small remnant which honestly sought
-wisdom. _The remnant!_--it is the word of the Hebrew prophets also, and
-especially is it the word of the greatest of them all, Isaiah. Not used
-with the despondency of Plato, used with far other power informing it,
-and with a far other future awaiting it, filled with fire, filled with
-hope, filled with faith, filled with joy, this term itself, _the
-remnant_, is yet Isaiah's term as well as Plato's. The texts are
-familiar to all Christendom. 'Though thy people Israel be as the sand of
-the sea, only a remnant of them shall return.' Even this remnant, a
-tenth of the whole, if so it may be, shall have to come back into the
-purging fire, and be again cleared and further reduced there. But
-nevertheless, 'as a terebinth tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in
-them, though they be cut down, so the stock of that burned tenth shall
-be a holy seed.'
-
-Yes, the small remnant should be a holy seed; but the great majority, as
-in democratic Athens, so in the kingdoms of the Hebrew nation, were
-unsound, and their State was doomed. This was Isaiah's point. The actual
-commonwealth of the 'drunkards' and the 'blind,' as he calls them, in
-Israel and Judah, of the dissolute grandees and gross and foolish common
-people, of the great majority, must perish; its perishing was the
-necessary stage towards a happier future. And Isaiah was right, as Plato
-was right. No doubt to most of us, if we had been there to see it, the
-kingdom of Ephraim or of Judah, the society of Samaria and Jerusalem,
-would have seemed to contain a great deal else besides dissolute
-grandees and foolish common people. No doubt we should have thought
-parts of their policy serious, and some of their alliances promising. No
-doubt, when we read the Hebrew prophets now, with the larger and more
-patient temper of a different race and an augmented experience, we often
-feel the blame and invective to be too absolute. Nevertheless, as to his
-grand point, Isaiah, I say, was right. The majority in the Jewish State,
-whatever they might think or say, whatever their guides and flatterers
-might think or say, the majority were unsound, and their unsoundness
-must be their ruin.
-
-Isaiah, however, does not make his remnant confine itself, like Plato's,
-to standing aside under a wall during this life and then departing in
-mild temper and good hope when the time for departure comes; Isaiah's
-remnant saves the State. Undoubtedly he means to represent it as doing
-so. Undoubtedly he imagines his Prince of the house of David who is to
-be born within a year's time, his royal and victorious Immanuel, he
-imagines him witnessing as a child the chastisement of Ephraim and the
-extirpation of the bad majority there; then witnessing as a youth the
-chastisement of Judah and the extirpation of the bad majority there
-also; but finally, in mature life, reigning over a State renewed,
-preserved, and enlarged, a greater and happier kingdom of the chosen
-people.
-
-Undoubtedly Isaiah conceives his remnant in this wise; undoubtedly he
-imagined for it a part which, in strict truth, it did not play, and
-could not play. So manifest was the non-fulfilment of his prophecy,
-taken strictly, that ardent souls feeding upon his words had to wrest
-them from their natural meaning, and to say that Isaiah directly meant
-something which he did not directly mean. Isaiah, like Plato, with
-inspired insight foresaw that the world before his eyes, the world of
-actual life, the State and city of the unsound majority, could not
-stand. Unlike Plato, Isaiah announced with faith and joy a leader and a
-remnant certain to supersede them. But he put the leader's coming, and
-he put the success of the leader's and the remnant's work, far, far too
-soon; and his conception, in this respect, is fantastic. Plato betook
-himself for the bringing in of righteousness to a visionary republic in
-the clouds; Isaiah,--and it is the immortal glory of him and of his race
-to have done so,--brought it in upon earth. But Immanuel and his reign,
-for the eighth century before Christ, were fantastic. For the kingdom of
-Judah they were fantastic. Immanuel and the remnant could not come to
-reign under the conditions there and then offered to them; the thing was
-impossible.
-
-The reason of the impossibility is quite simple. The scale of things, in
-petty States like Judah and Athens, is too small; the numbers are too
-scanty. Admit that for the world, as we hitherto know it, what the
-philosophers and prophets say is true: that the majority are unsound.
-Even in communities with exceptional gifts, even in the Jewish State,
-the Athenian State, the majority are unsound. But there is 'the
-remnant.' Now the important thing, as regards States such as Judah and
-Athens, is not that the remnant bears but a small proportion to the
-majority; the remnant always bears a small proportion to the majority.
-The grave things for States like Judah and Athens is, that the remnant
-must in positive bulk be so small, and therefore so powerless for
-reform. To be a voice outside the State, speaking to mankind or to the
-future, perhaps shaking the actual State to pieces in doing so, one man
-will suffice. But to reform the State in order to save it, to preserve
-it by changing it, a body of workers is needed as well as a leader;--a
-considerable body of workers, placed at many points, and operating in
-many directions. This considerable body of workers for good is what is
-wanting in petty States such as were Athens and Judah. It is said that
-the Athenian State had in all but 350,000 inhabitants. It is calculated
-that the population of the kingdom of Judah did not exceed a million and
-a quarter. The scale of things, I say, is here too small, the numbers
-are too scanty, to give us a remnant capable of saving and perpetuating
-the community. The remnant, in these cases, may influence the world and
-the future, may transcend the State and survive it; but it cannot
-possibly transform the State and perpetuate the State: for such a work
-it is numerically too feeble.
-
-Plato saw the impossibility. Isaiah refused to accept it, but facts were
-too strong for him. The Jewish State could not be renewed and saved, and
-he was wrong in thinking that it could. And therefore I call his grand
-point this other, where he was altogether right: that the actual world
-of the unsound majority, though it fancied itself solid, and though most
-men might call it solid, could not stand. Let us read him again and
-again, until we fix in our minds this true conviction of his, to edify
-us whenever we see such a world existing: his indestructible conviction
-that such a world, with its prosperities, idolatries, oppression,
-luxury, pleasures, drunkards, careless women, governing classes, systems
-of policy, strong alliances, shall come to nought and pass away; that
-nothing can save it. Let us do homage, also, to his indestructible
-conviction that States are saved by their righteous remnant, however
-clearly we may at the same time recognise that his own building on this
-conviction was premature.
-
-That, however, matters to us little. For how different is the scale of
-things in the modern States to which we belong, how far greater are the
-numbers! It is impossible to overrate the importance of the new element
-introduced into our calculations by increasing the size of the remnant.
-And in our great modern States, where the scale of things is so large,
-it does seem as if the remnant might be so increased as to become an
-actual power, even though the majority be unsound. Then the lover of
-wisdom may come out from under his wall, the lover of goodness will not
-be alone among the wild beasts. To enable the remnant to succeed, a
-large strengthening of its numbers is everything.
-
-Here is good hope for us, not only, as for Plato's recluse, in departing
-this life, but while we live and work in it. Only, before we dwell too
-much on this hope, it is advisable to make sure that we have earned the
-right to entertain it. We have earned the right to entertain it, only
-when we are at one with the philosophers and prophets in their
-conviction respecting the world which now is, the world of the unsound
-majority; when we feel what they mean, and when we go thoroughly along
-with them in it. Most of us, as I have said already, would by no means
-have been with them when they were here in life, and most of us are not
-really with them now. What is saving? Our institutions, says an
-American; the British Constitution, says an Englishman; the civilising
-mission of France, says a Frenchman. But Plato and the sages, when they
-are asked what is saving, answer: 'To love righteousness, and to be
-convinced of the unprofitableness of iniquity.' And Isaiah and the
-prophets, when they are asked the same question, answer to just the same
-effect: that what is saving is to 'order one's conversation right'; to
-'cease to do evil'; to 'delight in the law of the Eternal'; and to 'make
-one's study in it all day long.'
-
-The worst of it is, that this loving of righteousness and this
-delighting in the law of the Eternal sound rather vague to us. Not that
-they are vague really; indeed, they are less vague than American
-institutions, or the British Constitution, or the civilising mission of
-France. But the phrases sound vague because of the quantity of matters
-they cover. The thing is to have a brief but adequate enumeration of
-these matters. The New Testament tells us how righteousness is composed.
-In England and America we have been brought up in familiarity with the
-New Testament. And so, before Mr. Bradlaugh on our side of the water,
-and the Congress of American Freethinkers on yours, banish it from our
-education and memory, let us take from the New Testament a text showing
-what it is that both Plato and the prophets mean when they tell us that
-we ought to love righteousness and to make our study in the law of the
-Eternal, but that the unsound majority do nothing of the kind. A score
-of texts offer themselves in a moment. Here is one which will serve very
-well: 'Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are elevated,
-whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever
-things are amiable, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be
-any virtue, and if there be any praise; have these in your mind, let
-your thoughts run upon these.'[1] That is what both Plato and the
-prophets mean by loving righteousness, and making one's study in the law
-of the Eternal.
-
-Now the matters just enumerated do not come much into the heads of most
-of us, I suppose, when we are thinking of politics. But the philosophers
-and prophets maintain that these matters, and not those of which the
-heads of politicians are full, do really govern politics and save or
-destroy States. They save or destroy them by a silent, inexorable
-fatality; while the politicians are making believe, plausibly and
-noisily, with their American institutions, British Constitution, and
-civilising mission of France. And because these matters are what do
-really govern politics and save or destroy States, Socrates maintained
-that in his time he and a few philosophers, who alone kept insisting on
-the good of righteousness and the unprofitableness of iniquity, were the
-only real politicians then living.
-
-I say, if we are to derive comfort from the doctrine of _the remnant_
-(and there is great comfort to be derived from it), we must also hold
-fast to the austere but true doctrine as to what really governs
-politics, overrides with an inexorable fatality the combinations of the
-so-called politicians, and saves or destroys States. Having in mind
-things true, things elevated, things just, things pure, things amiable,
-things of good report; having these in mind, studying and loving these,
-is what saves States.
-
-There is nothing like positive instances to illustrate general
-propositions of this kind, and to make them believed. I hesitate to take
-an instance from America. Possibly there are some people who think that
-already, on a former occasion, I have said enough about America without
-duly seeing and knowing it. So I will take my instances from England,
-and from England's neighbour and old co-mate in history, France. The
-instance from England I will take first. I will take it from the grave
-topic of England's relations with Ireland. I am not going to reproach
-either England or Ireland. To reproach Ireland here would probably be
-indiscreet. As to England, anything I may have to say against my own
-countrymen I prefer to say at home; America is the last place where I
-should care to say it. However, I have no wish or intention now to
-reproach either the English or the Irish. But I want to show you from
-England's relations with Ireland how right the philosophers and prophets
-are. Every one knows that there has been conquest and confiscation in
-Ireland. So there has elsewhere. Every one knows that the conquest and
-the confiscation have been attended with cupidity, oppression, and
-ill-usage. So they have elsewhere. 'Whatsoever things are just' are not
-exactly the study, so far as I know, of conquerors and confiscators
-anywhere; certainly they were not the study of the English conquerors of
-Ireland. A failure in justice is a source of danger to States. But it
-may be made up for and got over; it has been made up for and got over in
-many communities. England's confiscations in Ireland are a thing of the
-past; the penal laws against Catholics are a thing of the past; much has
-been done to make up for the old failure in justice; Englishmen
-generally think that it has been pretty well made up for, and that
-Irishmen ought to think so too. And politicians invent Land Acts for
-curing the last results of the old failure in justice, for insuring the
-contentment of the Irish with us, and for consolidating the Union: and
-are surprised and plaintive if it is not consolidated. But now see how
-much more serious people are the philosophers and prophets than the
-politicians. _Whatsoever things are amiable!_--the failure in
-amiability, too, is a source of danger and insecurity to States, as well
-as the failure in justice. And we English are not amiable, or at any
-rate, what in this case comes to the same thing, do not appear so. The
-politicians never thought of that! Quite outside their combinations lies
-this hindrance, tending to make their most elaborate combinations
-ineffectual. Thus the joint operation of two moral causes together,--the
-sort of causes which politicians do not seriously regard,--tells against
-the designs of the politicians with what seems to be an almost
-inexorable fatality. If there were not the failure in amiability,
-perhaps the original failure in justice might by this time have been got
-over; if there had not been the failure in justice, perhaps the failure
-in amiability might not have mattered much. The two failures together
-create a difficulty almost insurmountable. Public men in England keep
-saying that it will be got over. I hope that it will be got over, and
-that the union between England and Ireland may become as solid as that
-between England and Scotland. But it will not become solid by means of
-the contrivances of the mere politician, or without the intervention of
-moral causes of concord to heal the mischief wrought by moral causes of
-division. Everything, in this case, depends upon the 'remnant,' its
-numbers, and its powers of action.
-
-My second instance is even more important. It is so important, and its
-reach is so wide, that I must go into it with some little fulness. The
-instance is taken from France. To France I have always felt myself
-powerfully drawn. People in England often accuse me of liking France and
-things French far too well. At all events I have paid special regard to
-them, and am always glad to confess how much I owe to them. M.
-Sainte-Beuve wrote to me in the last years of his life: 'You have passed
-through our life and literature by a deep inner line, which confers
-initiation, and which you will never lose.' _Vous avez traverse notre
-vie et notre litterature par une ligne interieure, profonde, qui fait
-les inities, et que vous ne perdrez jamais._ I wish I could think that
-this friendly testimony of that accomplished and charming man, one of my
-chief benefactors, were fully deserved. But I have pride and pleasure in
-quoting it; and I quote it to bear me out in saying, that whatever
-opinion I may express about France, I have at least been a not
-inattentive observer of that great country, and anything but a hostile
-one.
-
-The question was once asked by the town clerk of Ephesus: 'What man is
-there that knoweth not how that the city of the Ephesians is a
-worshipper of the great goddess Diana?' Now really, when one looks at
-the popular literature of the French at this moment,--their popular
-novels, popular stage-plays, popular newspapers,--and at the life of
-which this literature of theirs is the index, one is tempted to make a
-goddess out of a word of their own, and then, like the town clerk of
-Ephesus, to ask: 'What man is there that knoweth not how that the city
-of the French is a worshipper of the great goddess Lubricity?' Or
-rather, as Greek is the classic and euphonious language for names of
-gods and goddesses, let us take her name from the Greek Testament, and
-call her the goddess Aselgeia. That goddess has always been a sufficient
-power amongst mankind, and her worship was generally supposed to need
-restraining rather than encouraging. But here is now a whole popular
-literature, nay, and art too, in France at her service! stimulations and
-suggestions by her and to her meet one in it at every turn. She is
-becoming the great recognised power there; never was anything like it.
-M. Renan himself seems half inclined to apologise for not having paid
-her more attention. 'Nature cares nothing for chastity,' says he; _Les
-frivoles ont peut-etre raison;_ 'The gay people are perhaps in the
-right,' Men even of this force salute her; but the allegiance now paid
-to her, in France, by the popular novel, the popular newspaper, the
-popular play, is, one may say, boundless.
-
-I have no wish at all to preach to the French; no intention whatever, in
-what I now say, to upbraid or wound them. I simply lay my finger on a
-fact in their present condition; a fact insufficiently noticed, as it
-seems to me, and yet extremely potent for mischief. It is well worth
-while to trace the manner of its growth and action.
-
-The French have always had a leaning to the goddess of whom we speak,
-and have been willing enough to let the world know of their leaning, to
-pride themselves on their Gaulish salt, their gallantry, and so on. But
-things have come to their present head gradually. Catholicism was an
-obstacle; the serious element in the nation was another obstacle. But
-now just see the course which things have taken, and how they all, one
-may say, have worked together, for this goddess. First, there was the
-original Gaul, the basis of the French nation; the Gaul, gay, sociable,
-quick of sentiment, quick of perception; apt, however, very apt, to be
-presumptuous and puffed up. Then came the Roman conquest, and from this
-we get a new personage, the Gallo-Latin; with the Gaulish qualities for
-a basis, but with Latin order, reason, lucidity, added, and also Latin
-sensuality. Finally, we have the Frankish conquest and the Frenchman.
-The Frenchman proper is the Gallo-Latin, with Frankish or Germanic
-qualities added and infused. No mixture could be better. The Germans
-have plenty of faults, but in this combination they seem not to have
-taken hold; the Germans seem to have given of their seriousness and
-honesty to the conquered Gallo-Latin, and not of their brutality. And
-mediaeval France, which exhibits the combination and balance, under the
-influence then exercised by Catholicism, of Gaulish quickness and gaiety
-with Latin rationality and German seriousness, offers to our view the
-soundest and the most attractive stage, perhaps, in all French history.
-
-But the balance could not be maintained; at any rate, it was not
-maintained. Mediaeval Catholicism lost its virtue. The serious Germanic
-races made the Reformation, feeling that without it there was no safety
-and continuance for those moral ideas which they loved and which were
-the ground of their being. France did not go with the Reformation; the
-Germanic qualities in her were not strong enough to make her go with it.
-'France did not want a reformation which was a moral one,' is Michelet's
-account of the matter: _La France ne voulait pas de reforme morale._ Let
-us put the case more favourably for her, and say that perhaps, with her
-quick perception, France caught sense, from the very outset, of that
-intellectual unsoundness and incompleteness in the Reformation, which is
-now so visible. But, at any rate, the Reformation did not carry France
-with it; and the Germanic side in the Frenchman, his Germanic qualities,
-thus received a check. They subsisted, however, in good force still; the
-new knowledge and new ideas, brought by the revival of letters, gave an
-animating stimulus; and in the seventeenth century the Gaulish gaiety
-and quickness of France, the Latin rationality, and the still subsisting
-German seriousness, all combining under the puissant breath of the
-Renascence, produced a literature, the strongest, the most substantial
-and the most serious which the French have ever succeeded in producing,
-and which has, indeed, consummate and splendid excellences.
-
-Still, the Germanic side in the Frenchman had received a check, and in
-the next century this side became quite attenuated. The Germanic
-steadiness and seriousness gave way more and more; the Gaulish salt, the
-Gaulish gaiety, quickness, sentiment, and sociability, the Latin
-rationality, prevailed more and more, and had the field nearly to
-themselves. They produced a brilliant and most efficacious
-literature,--the French literature of the eighteenth century. The
-goddess Aselgeia had her part in it; it was a literature to be praised
-with reserves; it was, above all, a revolutionary literature. But
-European institutions were then in such a superannuated condition,
-straightforward and just perception, free thought and rationality, were
-at such a discount, that the brilliant French literature in which these
-qualities predominated, and which by their predominance was made
-revolutionary, had in the eighteenth century a great mission to fulfil,
-and fulfilled it victoriously.
-
-The mission is fulfilled, but meanwhile the Germanic quality in the
-Frenchman seems pretty nearly to have died out, and the Gallo-Latin in
-him has quite got the upper hand. Of course there are individuals and
-groups who are to be excepted; I will allow any number of exceptions you
-please; and in the mass of the French people, which works and is silent,
-there may be treasures of resource. But taking the Frenchman who is
-commonly in view--the usual type of speaking, doing, vocal, visible
-Frenchman--we may say, and he will probably be not at all displeased at
-our saying, that the German in him has nearly died out, and the
-Gallo-Latin has quite got the upper hand. For us, however, this means
-that the chief source of seriousness and of moral ideas is failing and
-drying up in him, and that what remains are the sources of Gaulish salt,
-and quickness, and sentiment, and sociability, and sensuality, and
-rationality. And, of course, the play and working of these qualities is
-altered by their being no longer in combination with a dose of German
-seriousness, but left to work by themselves. Left to work by themselves,
-they give us what we call the _homme sensuel moyen_, the average sensual
-man. The highest art, the art which by its height, depth, and gravity
-possesses religiousness,--such as the Greeks had, the art of Pindar and
-Phidias; such as the Italians had, the art of Dante and Michael
-Angelo,--this art, with the training which it gives and the standard
-which it sets up, the French have never had. On the other hand, they had
-a dose of German seriousness, a Germanic bent for ideas of moral duty,
-which neither the Greeks had, nor the Italians. But if this dies out,
-what is left is the _homme sensuel moyen_. This average sensual man has
-his very advantageous qualities. He has his gaiety, quickness,
-sentiment, sociability, rationality. He has his horror of sour
-strictness, false restraint, hypocrisy, obscurantism, cretinism, and the
-rest of it. And this is very well; but on the serious, moral side he is
-almost ludicrously insufficient. Fine sentiments about his dignity and
-his honour and his heart, about the dignity and the honour and the heart
-of France, and his adoration of her, do duty for him here; grandiose
-phrases about the spectacle offered in France and in the French Republic
-of the ideal for our race, of the _epanouissement de l'elite de
-l'humanite_, 'the coming into blow of the choice flower of humanity.' In
-M. Victor Hugo we have (his worshippers must forgive me for saying so)
-the average sensual man impassioned and grandiloquent; in M. Zola we
-have the average sensual man going near the ground. 'Happy the son,'
-cries M. Victor Hugo, 'of whom, one can say, "He has consoled his
-mother!" Happy the poet of whom one can say, "He has consoled his
-country!"' The French themselves, even when they are severest, call this
-kind of thing by only the mild name of emphasis, '_emphase_,'--other
-people call it fustian. And a surly Johnson will growl out in answer, at
-one time, that 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel'; at
-another time, that fine sentiments about _ma mere_ are the last refuge
-of a scoundrel. But what they really are is the creed which in France
-the average sensual man rehearses, to do duty for serious moral ideas.
-And, as the result, we have a popular literature and a popular art
-serving, as has been already said, the goddess Aselgeia.
-
-Such an art and literature easily make their way everywhere. In England
-and America the French literature of the seventeenth century is
-peculiarly fitted to do great good, and nothing but good; it can hardly
-be too much studied by us. And it is studied by us very little. The
-French literature of the eighteenth century, also, has qualities to do
-us much good, and we are not likely to take harm from its other
-qualities; we may study it to our great profit and advantage. And it is
-studied by us very little. The higher French literature of the present
-day has more knowledge and a wider range than its great predecessors,
-but less soundness and perfection, and it exerts much less influence
-than they did. Action and influence are now with the lower literature of
-France, with the popular literature in the service of the goddess
-Aselgeia. And this popular modern French literature, and the art which
-corresponds to it, bid fair to make their way in England and America far
-better than their predecessors. They appeal to instincts so universal
-and accessible; they appeal, people are beginning boldly to say, to
-Nature herself. Few things have lately struck me more than M. Renan's
-dictum, which I have already quoted, about what used to be called the
-virtue of chastity. The dictum occurs in his very interesting
-autobiography, published but the other day. M. Renan, whose genius I
-unfeignedly admire, is, I need hardly say, a man of the most perfect
-propriety of life; he has told us so himself. He was brought up for a
-priest, and he thinks it would not have been in good taste for him to
-become a free liver. But this abstinence is a mere matter of personal
-delicacy, a display of good and correct taste on his own part in his own
-very special circumstances. 'Nature,' he cries, 'cares nothing about
-chastity.' What a slap in the face to the sticklers for 'Whatsoever
-things are pure'!
-
-I have had to take a long sweep to arrive at the point which I wished to
-reach. If we are to enjoy the benefit, I said, of the comfortable
-doctrine of the remnant, we must be capable of receiving also, and of
-holding fast, the hard doctrine of the unsoundness of the majority, and
-of the certainty that the unsoundness of the majority, if it is not
-withstood and remedied, must be their ruin. And therefore, even though a
-gifted man like M. Renan may be so carried away by the tide of opinion
-in France where he lives, as to say that Nature cares nothing about
-chastity, and to see with amused indulgence the worship of the great
-goddess Lubricity, let us stand fast, and say that her worship is
-against nature, human nature, and that it is ruin. For this is the test
-of its being against human nature, that for human societies it is ruin.
-And the test is one from which there is no escape, as from the old tests
-in such matters there may be. For if you allege that it is the will of
-God that we should be pure, the sceptical Gallo-Latins will tell you
-that they do not know any such person. And in like manner, if it is said
-that those who serve the goddess Aselgeia shall not inherit the kingdom
-of God, the Gallo-Latin may tell you that he does not believe in any
-such place. But that the sure tendency and upshot of things establishes
-that the service of the goddess Aselgeia is ruin, that her followers are
-marred and stunted by it and disqualified for the ideal society of the
-future, is an infallible test to employ.
-
-The saints admonish us to let our thoughts run upon whatsoever things
-are pure, if we would inherit the kingdom of God; and the divine Plato
-tells us that we have within us a many-headed beast and a man, and that
-by dissoluteness we feed and strengthen the beast in us, and starve the
-man; and finally, following the divine Plato among the sages at a humble
-distance, comes the prosaic and unfashionable Paley, and says in his
-precise way that 'this vice has a tendency, which other species of vice
-have not so directly, to unsettle and weaken the powers of the
-understanding; as well as, I think, in a greater degree than other
-vices, to render the heart thoroughly corrupt.' True; and once admitted
-and fostered, it eats like a canker, and with difficulty can ever be
-brought to let go its hold again, but for ever tightens it. Hardness and
-insolence come in its train; an insolence which grows until it ends by
-exasperating and alienating everybody; a hardness which grows until the
-man can at last scarcely take pleasure in anything, outside the service
-of his goddess, except cupidity and greed, and cannot be touched with
-emotion by any language except fustian. Such are the fruits of the
-worship of the great goddess Aselgeia.
-
-So, instead of saying that Nature cares nothing about chastity, let us
-say that human nature, _our_ nature, cares about it a great deal. Let us
-say that, by her present popular literature, France gives proof that she
-is suffering from a dangerous and perhaps fatal disease; and that it is
-not clericalism which is the real enemy to the French so much as their
-goddess; and if they can none of them see this themselves, it is only a
-sign of how far the disease has gone, and the case is so much the worse.
-The case is so much the worse; and for men in such case to be so
-vehemently busy about clerical and dynastic intrigues at home, and about
-alliances and colonial acquisitions and purifications of the flag
-abroad, might well make one borrow of the prophets and exclaim, 'Surely
-ye are perverse'! perverse to neglect your really pressing matters for
-those secondary ones. And when the ingenious and inexhaustible M.
-Blowitz, of our great London _Times_, who sees everybody and knows
-everything, when he expounds the springs of politics and the causes of
-the fall and success of ministries, and the combinations which have not
-been tried but should be, and takes upon him the mystery of things in
-the way with which we are so familiar,--to this wise man himself one is
-often tempted, again, to say with the prophets: 'Yet the Eternal also is
-wise, and will not call back his words.' M. Blowitz is not the only wise
-one; the Eternal has his wisdom also, and somehow or other it is always
-the Eternal's wisdom which at last carries the day. The Eternal has
-attached to certain moral causes the safety or the ruin of States, and
-the present popular literature of France is a sign that she has a most
-dangerous moral disease.
-
-Now if the disease goes on and increases, then, whatever sagacious
-advice M. Blowitz may give, and whatever political combinations may be
-tried, and whether France gets colonies or not, and whether she allies
-herself with this nation or with that, things will only go from bad to
-worse with her; she will more and more lose her powers of soul and
-spirit, her intellectual productiveness, her skill in counsel, her might
-for war, her formidableness as a foe, her value as an ally, and the life
-of that famous State will be more and more impaired, until it perish.
-And this is that hard but true doctrine of the sages and prophets, of
-the inexorable fatality of operation, in moral failure of the unsound
-majority, to impair and destroy States. But we will not talk or think of
-destruction for a State with such gifts and graces as France, and which
-has had such a place in history, and to which we, many of us, owe so
-much delight and so much good. And yet if France had no greater numbers
-than the Athens of Plato or the Judah of Isaiah, I do not see how she
-could well escape out of the throttling arms of her goddess and recover.
-She must recover through a powerful and profound renewal, a great inward
-change, brought about by 'the remnant' amongst her people; and, for
-this, a remnant small in numbers would not suffice. But in a France of
-thirty-five millions, who shall set bounds to the numbers of the
-remnant, or to its effectualness and power of victory?
-
-In these United States (for I come round to the United States at last)
-you are fifty millions and more. I suppose that, as in England, as in
-France, as everywhere, so likewise here, the majority of people doubt
-very much whether the majority is unsound; or, rather, they have no
-doubt at all about the matter, they are sure that it is not unsound. But
-let us consent to-night to remain to the end in the ideas of the sages
-and prophets whom we have been following all along; and let us suppose
-that in the present actual stage of the world, as in all the stages
-through which the world has passed hitherto, the majority is and must be
-in general unsound everywhere,--even in the United States, even here in
-New York itself. Where is the failure? I have already, in the past,
-speculated in the abstract about you, perhaps, too much. But I suppose
-that in a democratic community like this, with its newness, its
-magnitude, its strength, its life of business, its sheer freedom and
-equality, the danger is in the absence of the discipline of respect; in
-hardness and materialism, exaggeration and boastfulness; in a false
-smartness, a false audacity, a want of soul and delicacy. 'Whatsoever
-things are _elevated_,'--whatsoever things are nobly serious, have true
-elevation,[2]--that perhaps, in our catalogue of maxims which are to
-possess the mind, is the maxim which points to where the failure of the
-unsound majority, in a great democracy like yours, will probably lie. At
-any rate let us for the moment agree to suppose so. And the philosophers
-and the prophets, whom I at any rate am disposed to believe, and who say
-that moral causes govern the standing and the falling of States, will
-tell us that the failure to mind whatsoever things are elevated must
-impair with an inexorable fatality the life of a nation, just as the
-failure to mind whatsoever things are just, or whatsoever things are
-amiable, or whatsoever things are pure, will impair it; and that if the
-failure to mind whatsoever things are elevated should be real in your
-American democracy, and should grow into a disease, and take firm hold
-on you, then the life of even these great United States must inevitably
-suffer and be impaired more and more, until it perish.
-
-Then from this hard doctrine we will betake ourselves to the more
-comfortable doctrine of _the remnant_. 'The remnant shall return;' shall
-'convert and be healed' itself first, and shall then recover the unsound
-majority. And you are fifty millions and growing apace. What a remnant
-yours may be, surely! A remnant of how great numbers, how mighty
-strength, how irresistible efficacy! Yet we must not go too fast,
-either, nor make too sure of our efficacious remnant. Mere multitude
-will not give us a saving remnant with certainty. The Assyrian Empire
-had multitude, the Roman Empire had multitude; yet neither the one nor
-the other could produce a sufficing remnant any more than Athens or
-Judah could produce it, and both Assyria and Rome perished like Athens
-and Judah.
-
-But you are something more than a people of fifty millions. You are
-fifty millions mainly sprung, as we in England are mainly sprung, from
-that German stock which has faults indeed,--faults which have diminished
-the extent of its influence, diminished its power of attraction and the
-interest of its history, and which seems moreover just now, from all I
-can see and hear, to be passing through a not very happy moment,
-morally, in Germany proper. Yet of the German stock it is, I think,
-true, as my father said more than fifty years ago, that it has been a
-stock 'of the most moral races of men that the world has yet seen, with
-the soundest laws, the least violent passions, the fairest domestic and
-civil virtues.' You come, therefore, of about the best parentage which a
-modern nation can have. Then you have had, as we in England have also
-had, but more entirely than we and more exclusively, the Puritan
-discipline. Certainly I am not blind to the faults of that discipline.
-Certainly I do not wish it to remain in possession of the field for
-ever, or too long. But as a stage and a discipline, and as means for
-enabling that poor inattentive and immoral creature, man, to love and
-appropriate and make part of his being divine ideas, on which he could
-not otherwise have laid or kept hold, the discipline of Puritanism has
-been invaluable; and the more I read history, the more I see of mankind,
-the more I recognise its value. Well, then, you are not merely a
-multitude of fifty millions; you are fifty millions sprung from this
-excellent Germanic stock, having passed through this excellent Puritan
-discipline, and set in this enviable and unbounded country. Even
-supposing, therefore, that by the necessity of things your majority must
-in the present stage of the world probably be unsound, what a remnant, I
-say,--what an incomparable, all-transforming remnant,--you may fairly
-hope with your numbers, if things go happily, to have!
-
-
-
-
-  LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.
-
-
-Practical people talk with a smile of Plato and of his absolute ideas;
-and it is impossible to deny that Plato's ideas do often seem
-unpractical and impracticable, and especially when one views them in
-connexion with the life of a great work-a-day world like the United
-States. The necessary staple of the life of such a world Plato regards
-with disdain; handicraft and trade and the working professions he
-regards with disdain; but what becomes of the life of an industrial
-modern community if you take handicraft and trade and the working
-professions out of it? The base mechanic arts and handicrafts, says
-Plato, bring about a natural weakness in the principle of excellence in
-a man, so that he cannot govern the ignoble growths in him, but nurses
-them, and cannot understand fostering any other. Those who exercise such
-arts and trades, as they have their bodies, he says, marred by their
-vulgar businesses, so they have their souls, too, bowed and broken by
-them. And if one of these uncomely people has a mind to seek
-self-culture and philosophy, Plato compares him to a bald little tinker,
-who has scraped together money, and has got his release from service,
-and has had a bath, and bought a new coat, and is rigged out like a
-bridegroom about to marry the daughter of his master who has fallen into
-poor and helpless estate.
-
-Nor do the working professions fare any better than trade at the hands
-of Plato. He draws for us an inimitable picture of the working lawyer,
-and of his life of bondage; he shows how this bondage from his youth up
-has stunted and warped him, and made him small and crooked of soul,
-encompassing him with difficulties which he is not man enough to rely on
-justice and truth as means to encounter, but has recourse, for help out
-of them, to falsehood and wrong. And so, says Plato, this poor creature
-is bent and broken, and grows up from boy to man without a particle of
-soundness in him, although exceedingly smart and clever in his own
-esteem.
-
-One cannot refuse to admire the artist who draws these pictures. But we
-say to ourselves that his ideas show the influence of a primitive and
-obsolete order of things, when the warrior caste and the priestly caste
-were alone in honour, and the humble work of the world was done by
-slaves. We have now changed all that; the modern majority consists in
-work, as Emerson declares; and in work, we may add, principally of such
-plain and dusty kind as the work of cultivators of the ground,
-handicraftsmen, men of trade and business, men of the working
-professions. Above all is this true in a great industrious community
-such as that of the United States.
-
-Now education, many people go on to say, is still mainly governed by the
-ideas of men like Plato, who lived when the warrior caste and the
-priestly or philosophical class were alone in honour, and the really
-useful part of the community were slaves. It is an education fitted for
-persons of leisure in such a community. This education passed from
-Greece and Rome to the feudal communities of Europe, where also the
-warrior caste and the priestly caste were alone held in honour, and
-where the really useful and working part of the community, though not
-nominally slaves as in the pagan world, were practically not much better
-off than slaves, and not more seriously regarded. And how absurd it is,
-people end by saying, to inflict this education upon an industrious
-modern community, where very few indeed are persons of leisure, and the
-mass to be considered has not leisure, but is bound, for its own great
-good, and for the great good of the world at large, to plain labour and
-to industrial pursuits, and the education in question tends necessarily
-to make men dissatisfied with these pursuits and unfitted for them!
-
-That is what is said. So far I must defend Plato, as to plead that his
-view of education and studies is in the general, as it seems to me,
-sound enough, and fitted for all sorts and conditions of men, whatever
-their pursuits may be. 'An intelligent man,' says Plato, 'will prize
-those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness,
-and wisdom, and will less value the others.' I cannot consider _that_ a
-bad description of the aim of education, and of the motives which should
-govern us in the choice of studies, whether we are preparing ourselves
-for a hereditary seat in the English House of Lords or for the pork
-trade in Chicago.
-
-Still I admit that Plato's world was not ours, that his scorn of trade
-and handicraft is fantastic, that he had no conception of a great
-industrial community such as that of the United States, and that such a
-community must and will shape its education to suit its own needs. If
-the usual education handed down to it from the past does not suit it, it
-will certainly before long drop this and try another. The usual
-education in the past has been mainly literary. The question is whether
-the studies which were long supposed to be the best for all of us are
-practically the best now; whether others are not better. The tyranny of
-the past, many think, weighs on us injuriously in the predominance given
-to letters in education. The question is raised whether, to meet the
-needs of our modern life, the predominance ought not now to pass from
-letters to science; and naturally the question is nowhere raised with
-more energy than here in the United States. The design of abasing what
-is called 'mere literary instruction and education,' and of exalting
-what is called 'sound, extensive, and practical scientific knowledge,'
-is, in this intensely modern world of the United States, even more
-perhaps than in Europe, a very popular design, and makes great and rapid
-progress.
-
-I am going to ask whether the present movement for ousting letters from
-their old predominance in education, and for transferring the
-predominance in education to the natural sciences, whether this brisk
-and flourishing movement ought to prevail, and whether it is likely that
-in the end it really will prevail. An objection may be raised which I
-will anticipate. My own studies have been almost wholly in letters, and
-my visits to the field of the natural sciences have been very slight and
-inadequate, although those sciences have always strongly moved my
-curiosity. A man of letters, it will perhaps be said, is not competent
-to discuss the comparative merits of letters and natural science as
-means of education. To this objection I reply, first of all, that his
-incompetence, if he attempts the discussion but is really incompetent
-for it, will be abundantly visible; nobody will be taken in; he will
-have plenty of sharp observers and critics to save mankind from that
-danger. But the line I am going to follow is, as you will soon discover,
-so extremely simple, that perhaps it may be followed without failure
-even by one who for a more ambitious line of discussion would be quite
-incompetent.
-
-Some of you may possibly remember a phrase of mine which has been the
-object of a good deal of comment; an observation to the effect that in
-our culture, the aim being _to know ourselves and the world_, we have,
-as the means to this end, _to know the best which has been thought and
-said in the world_. A man of science, who is also an excellent writer
-and the very prince of debaters, Professor Huxley, in a discourse at the
-opening of Sir Josiah Mason's college at Birmingham, laying hold of this
-phrase, expanded it by quoting some more words of mine, which are these:
-'The civilised world is to be regarded as now being, for intellectual
-and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action
-and working to a common result; and whose members have for their proper
-outfit a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one
-another. Special local and temporary advantages being put out of
-account, that modern nation will in the intellectual and spiritual
-sphere make most progress, which most thoroughly carries out this
-programme.'
-
-Now on my phrase, thus enlarged, Professor Huxley remarks that when I
-speak of the above-mentioned knowledge as enabling us to know ourselves
-and the world, I assert _literature_ to contain the materials which
-suffice for thus making us know ourselves and the world. But it is not
-by any means clear, says he, that after having learnt all which ancient
-and modern literatures have to tell us, we have laid a sufficiently
-broad and deep foundation for that criticism of life, that knowledge of
-ourselves and the world, which constitutes culture. On the contrary,
-Professor Huxley declares that he finds himself 'wholly unable to admit
-that either nations or individuals will really advance, if their outfit
-draws nothing from the stores of physical science. An army without
-weapons of precision, and with no particular base of operations, might
-more hopefully enter upon a campaign on the Rhine, than a man, devoid of
-a knowledge of what physical science has done in the last century, upon
-a criticism of life.'
-
-This shows how needful it is for those who are to discuss any matter
-together, to have a common understanding as to the sense of the terms
-they employ,--how needful, and how difficult. What Professor Huxley
-says, implies just the reproach which is so often brought against the
-study of _belles lettres_, as they are called: that the study is an
-elegant one, but slight and ineffectual; a smattering of Greek and Latin
-and other ornamental things, of little use for any one whose object is
-to get at truth, and to be a practical man. So, too, M. Renan talks of
-the 'superficial humanism' of a school-course which treats us as if we
-were all going to be poets, writers, preachers, orators, and he opposes
-this humanism to positive science, or the critical search after truth.
-And there is always a tendency in those who are remonstrating against
-the predominance of letters in education, to understand by letters
-_belles lettres_, and by _belles lettres_ a superficial humanism, the
-opposite of science or true knowledge.
-
-But when we talk of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, for instance,
-which is the knowledge people have called the humanities, I for my part
-mean a knowledge which is something more than a superficial humanism,
-mainly decorative. 'I call all teaching _scientific_,' says Wolf, the
-critic of Homer, 'which is systematically laid out and followed up to
-its original sources. For example: a knowledge of classical antiquity is
-scientific when the remains of classical antiquity are correctly studied
-in the original languages.' There can be no doubt that Wolf is perfectly
-right; that all learning is scientific which is systematically laid out
-and followed up to its original sources, and that a genuine humanism is
-scientific.
-
-When I speak of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, therefore, as a help
-to knowing ourselves and the world, I mean more than a knowledge of so
-much vocabulary, so much grammar, so many portions of authors in the
-Greek and Latin languages. I mean knowing the Greeks and Romans, and
-their life and genius, and what they were and did in the world; what we
-get from them, and what is its value. That, at least, is the ideal; and
-when we talk of endeavouring to know Greek and Roman antiquity, as a
-help to knowing ourselves and the world, we mean endeavouring so to know
-them as to satisfy this ideal, however much we may still fall short of
-it.
-
-The same also as to knowing our own and other modern nations, with the
-like aim of getting to understand ourselves and the world. To know the
-best that has been thought and said by the modern nations, is to know,
-says Professor Huxley, 'only what modern _literatures_ have to tell us;
-it is the criticism of life contained in modern literature.' And yet
-'the distinctive character of our times,' he urges, 'lies in the vast
-and constantly increasing part which is played by natural knowledge.'
-And how, therefore, can a man, devoid of knowledge of what physical
-science has done in the last century, enter hopefully upon a criticism
-of modern life?
-
-Let us, I say, be agreed about the meaning of the terms we are using. I
-talk of knowing the best which has been thought and uttered in the
-world; Professor Huxley says this means knowing _literature_. Literature
-is a large word; it may mean everything written with letters or printed
-in a book. Euclid's _Elements_ and Newton's _Principia_ are thus
-literature. All knowledge that reaches us through books is literature.
-But by literature Professor Huxley means _belles lettres_. He means to
-make me say, that knowing the best which has been thought and said by
-the modern nations is knowing their _belles lettres_ and no more. And
-this is no sufficient equipment, he argues, for a criticism of modern
-life. But as I do not mean, by knowing ancient Rome, knowing merely more
-or less of Latin _belles lettres_, and taking no account of Rome's
-military, and political, and legal, and administrative work in the
-world; and as, by knowing ancient Greece, I understand knowing her as
-the giver of Greek art, and the guide to a free and right use of reason
-and to scientific method, and the founder of our mathematics and physics
-and astronomy and biology,--I understand knowing her as all this, and
-not merely knowing certain Greek poems, and histories, and treatises,
-and speeches,--so as to the knowledge of modern nations also. By knowing
-modern nations, I mean not merely knowing their _belles lettres_, but
-knowing also what has been done by such men as Copernicus, Galileo,
-Newton, Darwin. 'Our ancestors learned,' says Professor Huxley, 'that
-the earth is the centre of the visible universe, and that man is the
-cynosure of things terrestrial; and more especially was it inculcated
-that the course of nature had no fixed order, but that it could be, and
-constantly was, altered.' But for us now, continues Professor Huxley,
-'the notions of the beginning and the end of the world entertained by
-our forefathers are no longer credible. It is very certain that the
-earth is not the chief body in the material universe, and that the world
-is not subordinated to man's use. It is even more certain that nature is
-the expression of a definite order, with which nothing interferes.' 'And
-yet,' he cries, 'the purely classical education advocated by the
-representatives of the humanists in our day gives no inkling of all
-this!'
-
-In due place and time I will just touch upon that vexed question of
-classical education; but at present the question is as to what is meant
-by knowing the best which modern nations have thought and said. It is
-not knowing their _belles lettres_ merely which is meant. To know
-Italian _belles lettres_ is not to know Italy, and to know English
-_belles lettres_ is not to know England. Into knowing Italy and England
-there comes a great deal more, Galileo and Newton, amongst it. The
-reproach of being a superficial humanism, a tincture of _belles
-lettres_, may attach rightly enough to some other disciplines; but to
-the particular discipline recommended when I proposed knowing the best
-that has been thought and said in the world, it does not apply. In that
-best I certainly include what in modern times has been thought and said
-by the great observers and knowers of nature.
-
-There is, therefore, really no question between Professor Huxley and me
-as to whether knowing the great results of the modern scientific study
-of nature is not required as a part of our culture, as well as knowing
-the products of literature and art. But to follow the processes by which
-those results are reached, ought, say the friends of physical science,
-to be made the staple of education for the bulk of mankind. And here
-there does arise a question between those whom Professor Huxley calls
-with playful sarcasm 'the Levites of culture,' and those whom the poor
-humanist is sometimes apt to regard as its Nebuchadnezzars.
-
-The great results of the scientific investigation of nature we are
-agreed upon knowing, but how much of our study are we bound to give to
-the processes by which those results are reached? The results have their
-visible bearing on human life. But all the processes, too, all the items
-of fact, by which those results are reached and established, are
-interesting. All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the
-knowledge of nature is interesting to all men. It is very interesting to
-know, that, from the albuminous white of the egg, the chick in the egg
-gets the materials for its flesh, bones, blood, and feathers; while,
-from the fatty yolk of the egg, it gets the heat and energy which enable
-it at length to break its shell and begin the world. It is less
-interesting, perhaps, but still it is interesting, to know that when a
-taper burns, the wax is converted into carbonic acid and water.
-Moreover, it is quite true that the habit of dealing with facts, which
-is given by the study of nature, is, as the friends of physical science
-praise it for being, an excellent discipline. The appeal, in the study
-of nature, is constantly to observation and experiment; not only is it
-said that the thing is so, but we can be made to see that it is so. Not
-only does a man tell us that when a taper burns the wax is converted
-into carbonic acid and water, as a man may tell us, if he likes, that
-Charon is punting his ferry-boat on the river Styx, or that Victor Hugo
-is a sublime poet, or Mr. Gladstone the most admirable of statesmen; but
-we are made to see that the conversion into carbonic acid and water does
-actually happen. This reality of natural knowledge it is, which makes
-the friends of physical science contrast it, as a knowledge of things,
-with the humanist's knowledge, which is, say they, a knowledge of words.
-And hence Professor Huxley is moved to lay it down that, 'for the
-purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education
-is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education.' And a
-certain President of the Section for Mechanical Science in the British
-Association is, in Scripture phrase, 'very bold,' and declares that if a
-man, in his mental training, 'has substituted literature and history for
-natural science, he has chosen the less useful alternative.' But whether
-we go these lengths or not, we must all admit that in natural science
-the habit gained of dealing with facts is a most valuable discipline,
-and that every one should have some experience of it.
-
-More than this, however, is demanded by the reformers. It is proposed to
-make the training in natural science the main part of education, for the
-great majority of mankind at any rate. And here, I confess, I part
-company with the friends of physical science, with whom up to this point
-I have been agreeing. In differing from them, however, I wish to proceed
-with the utmost caution and diffidence. The smallness of my own
-acquaintance with the disciplines of natural science is ever before my
-mind, and I am fearful of doing these disciplines an injustice. The
-ability and pugnacity of the partisans of natural science makes them
-formidable persons to contradict. The tone of tentative inquiry, which
-befits a being of dim faculties and bounded knowledge, is the tone I
-would wish to take and not to depart from. At present it seems to me,
-that those who are for giving to natural knowledge, as they call it, the
-chief place in the education of the majority of mankind, leave one
-important thing out of their account: the constitution of human nature.
-But I put this forward on the strength of some facts not at all
-recondite, very far from it; facts capable of being stated in the
-simplest possible fashion, and to which, if I so state them, the man of
-science will, I am sure, be willing to allow their due weight.
-
-Deny the facts altogether, I think, he hardly can. He can hardly deny,
-that when we set ourselves to enumerate the powers which go to the
-building up of human life, and say that they are the power of conduct,
-the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power
-of social life and manners,--he can hardly deny that this scheme, though
-drawn in rough and plain lines enough, and not pretending to scientific
-exactness, does yet give a fairly true representation of the matter.
-Human nature is built up by these powers; we have the need for them all.
-When we have rightly met and adjusted the claims of them all, we shall
-then be in a fair way for getting soberness and righteousness, with
-wisdom. This is evident enough, and the friends of physical science
-would admit it.
-
-But perhaps they may not have sufficiently observed another thing:
-namely, that the several powers just mentioned are not isolated, but
-there is, in the generality of mankind, a perpetual tendency to relate
-them one to another in divers ways. With one such way of relating them I
-am particularly concerned now. Following our instinct for intellect and
-knowledge, we acquire pieces of knowledge; and presently, in the
-generality of men, there arises the desire to relate these pieces of
-knowledge to our sense for conduct, to our sense for beauty,--and there
-is weariness and dissatisfaction if the desire is baulked. Now in this
-desire lies, I think, the strength of that hold which letters have upon
-us.
-
-All knowledge is, as I said just now, interesting; and even items of
-knowledge which from the nature of the case cannot well be related, but
-must stand isolated in our thoughts, have their interest. Even lists of
-exceptions have their interest. If we are studying Greek accents, it is
-interesting to know that _pais_ and _pas_, and some other monosyllables
-of the same form of declension, do not take the circumflex upon the last
-syllable of the genitive plural, but vary, in this respect, from the
-common rule. If we are studying physiology, it is interesting to know
-that the pulmonary artery carries dark blood and the pulmonary vein
-carries bright blood, departing in this respect from the common rule for
-the division of labour between the veins and the arteries. But every one
-knows how we seek naturally to combine the pieces of our knowledge
-together, to bring them under general rules, to relate them to
-principles; and how unsatisfactory and tiresome it would be to go on for
-ever learning lists of exceptions, or accumulating items of fact which
-must stand isolated.
-
-Well, that same need of relating our knowledge, which operates here
-within the sphere of our knowledge itself, we shall find operating,
-also, outside that sphere. We experience, as we go on learning and
-knowing,--the vast majority of us experience,--the need of relating what
-we have learnt and known to the sense which we have in us for conduct,
-to the sense which we have in us for beauty.
-
-A certain Greek prophetess of Mantineia in Arcadia, Diotima by name,
-once explained to the philosopher Socrates that love, and impulse, and
-bent of all kinds, is, in fact, nothing else but the desire in men that
-good should for ever be present to them. This desire for good, Diotima
-assured Socrates, is our fundamental desire, of which fundamental desire
-every impulse in us is only some one particular form. And therefore this
-fundamental desire it is, I suppose,--this desire in men that good
-should be for ever present to them,--which acts in us when we feel the
-impulse for relating our knowledge to our sense for conduct and to our
-sense for beauty. At any rate, with men in general the instinct exists.
-Such is human nature. And the instinct, it will be admitted, is
-innocent, and human nature is preserved by our following the lead of its
-innocent instincts. Therefore, in seeking to gratify this instinct in
-question, we are following the instinct of self-preservation in
-humanity.
-
-But, no doubt, some kinds of knowledge cannot be made to directly serve
-the instinct in question, cannot be directly related to the sense for
-beauty, to the sense for conduct. These are instrument-knowledges; they
-lead on to other knowledges, which can. A man who passes his life in
-instrument-knowledges is a specialist. They may be invaluable as
-instruments to something beyond, for those who have the gift thus to
-employ them; and they may be disciplines in themselves wherein it is
-useful for every one to have some schooling. But it is inconceivable
-that the generality of men should pass all their mental life with Greek
-accents or with formal logic. My friend Professor Sylvester, who is one
-of the first mathematicians in the world, holds transcendental doctrines
-as to the virtue of mathematics, but those doctrines are not for common
-men. In the very Senate House and heart of our English Cambridge I once
-ventured, though not without an apology for my profaneness, to hazard
-the opinion that for the majority of mankind a little of mathematics,
-even, goes a long way. Of course this is quite consistent with their
-being of immense importance as an instrument to something else; but it
-is the few who have the aptitude for thus using them, not the bulk of
-mankind.
-
-The natural sciences do not, however, stand on the same footing with
-these instrument-knowledges. Experience shows us that the generality of
-men will find more interest in learning that, when a taper burns, the
-wax is converted into carbonic acid and water, or in learning the
-explanation of the phenomenon of dew, or in learning how the circulation
-of the blood is carried on, than they find in learning that the genitive
-plural of _pais_ and _pas_ does not take the circumflex on the
-termination. And one piece of natural knowledge is added to another, and
-others are added to that, and at last we come to propositions so
-interesting as Mr. Darwin's famous proposition that 'our ancestor was a
-hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably
-arboreal in his habits.' Or we come to propositions of such reach and
-magnitude as those which Professor Huxley delivers, when he says that
-the notions of our forefathers about the beginning and the end of the
-world were all wrong, and that nature is the expression of a definite
-order with which nothing interferes.
-
-Interesting, indeed, these results of science are, important they are,
-and we should all of us be acquainted with them. But what I now wish you
-to mark is, that we are still, when they are propounded to us and we
-receive them, we are still in the sphere of intellect and knowledge. And
-for the generality of men there will be found, I say, to arise, when
-they have duly taken in the proposition that their ancestor was 'a hairy
-quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in
-his habits,' there will be found to arise an invincible desire to relate
-this proposition to the sense in us for conduct, and to the sense in us
-for beauty. But this the men of science will not do for us, and will
-hardly even profess to do. They will give us other pieces of knowledge,
-other facts, about other animals and their ancestors, or about plants,
-or about stones, or about stars; and they may finally bring us to those
-great 'general conceptions of the universe, which are forced upon us
-all,' says Professor Huxley, 'by the progress of physical science.' But
-still it will be _knowledge_ only which they give us; knowledge not put
-for us into relation with our sense for conduct, our sense for beauty,
-and touched with emotion by being so put; not thus put for us, and
-therefore, to the majority of mankind, after a certain while,
-unsatisfying, wearying.
-
-Not to the born naturalist, I admit. But what do we mean by a born
-naturalist? We mean a man in whom the zeal for observing nature is so
-uncommonly strong and eminent, that it marks him off from the bulk of
-mankind. Such a man will pass his life happily in collecting natural
-knowledge and reasoning upon it, and will ask for nothing, or hardly
-anything, more. I have heard it said that the sagacious and admirable
-naturalist whom we lost not very long ago, Mr. Darwin, once owned to a
-friend that for his part he did not experience the necessity for two
-things which most men find so necessary to them,--religion and poetry;
-science and the domestic affections, he thought, were enough. To a born
-naturalist, I can well understand that this should seem so. So absorbing
-is his occupation with nature, so strong his love for his occupation,
-that he goes on acquiring natural knowledge and reasoning upon it, and
-has little time or inclination for thinking about getting it related to
-the desire in man for conduct, the desire in man for beauty. He relates
-it to them for himself as he goes along, so far as he feels the need;
-and he draws from the domestic affections all the additional solace
-necessary. But then Darwins are extremely rare. Another great and
-admirable master of natural knowledge, Faraday, was a Sandemanian. That
-is to say, he related his knowledge to his instinct for conduct and to
-his instinct for beauty, by the aid of that respectable Scottish
-sectary, Robert Sandeman. And so strong, in general, is the demand of
-religion and poetry to have their share in a man, to associate
-themselves with his knowing, and to relieve and rejoice it, that,
-probably, for one man amongst us with the disposition to do as Darwin
-did in this respect, there are at least fifty with the disposition to do
-as Faraday.
-
-Education lays hold upon us, in fact, by satisfying this demand.
-Professor Huxley holds up to scorn mediaeval education, with its neglect
-of the knowledge of nature, its poverty even of literary studies, its
-formal logic devoted to 'showing how and why that which the Church said
-was true must be true.' But the great mediaeval Universities were not
-brought into being, we may be sure, by the zeal for giving a jejune and
-contemptible education. Kings have been their nursing fathers, and
-queens have been their nursing mothers, but not for this. The mediaeval
-Universities came into being, because the supposed knowledge, delivered
-by Scripture and the Church, so deeply engaged men's hearts, by so
-simply, easily, and powerfully relating itself to their desire for
-conduct, their desire for beauty. All other knowledge was dominated by
-this supposed knowledge and was subordinated to it, because of the
-surpassing strength of the hold which it gained upon the affections of
-men, by allying itself profoundly with their sense for conduct, their
-sense for beauty.
-
-But now, says Professor Huxley, conceptions of the universe fatal to the
-notions held by our forefathers have been forced upon us by physical
-science. Grant to him that they are thus fatal, that the new conceptions
-must and will soon become current everywhere, and that every one will
-finally perceive them to be fatal to the beliefs of our forefathers. The
-need of humane letters, as they are truly called, because they serve the
-paramount desire in men that good should be for ever present to
-them,--the need of humane letters, to establish a relation between the
-new conceptions, and our instinct for beauty, our instinct for conduct,
-is only the more visible. The Middle Age could do without humane
-letters, as it could do without the study of nature, because its
-supposed knowledge was made to engage its emotions so powerfully. Grant
-that the supposed knowledge disappears, its power of being made to
-engage the emotions will of course disappear along with it,--but the
-emotions themselves, and their claim to be engaged and satisfied, will
-remain. Now if we find by experience that humane letters have an
-undeniable power of engaging the emotions, the importance of humane
-letters in a man's training becomes not less, but greater, in proportion
-to the success of modern science in extirpating what it calls 'mediaeval
-thinking.'
-
-Have humane letters, then, have poetry and eloquence, the power here
-attributed to them of engaging the emotions, and do they exercise it?
-And if they have it and exercise it, _how_ do they exercise it, so as to
-exert an influence upon man's sense for conduct, his sense for beauty?
-Finally, even if they both can and do exert an influence upon the senses
-in question, how are they to relate to them the results,--the modern
-results,--of natural science? All these questions may be asked. First,
-have poetry and eloquence the power of calling out the emotions? The
-appeal is to experience. Experience shows that for the vast majority of
-men, for mankind in general, they have the power. Next do they exercise
-it? They do. But then, _how_ do they exercise it so as to affect man's
-sense for conduct, his sense for beauty? And this is perhaps a case for
-applying the Preacher's words: 'Though a man labour to seek it out, yet
-he shall not find it; yea, farther, though a wise man think to know it,
-yet shall he not be able to find it.'[3] Why should it be one thing, in
-its effect upon the emotions, to say, 'Patience is a virtue,' and quite
-another thing, in its effect upon the emotions, to say with Homer,
-
-    [Greek: tleton gar Moirai thumon thesan anthropoisin]--[4]
-
-'for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the children of
-men?' Why should it be one thing, in its effect upon the emotions, to
-say with the philosopher Spinoza, _Felicitas in eo consistit quod homo
-suum esse conservare potest_--'Man's happiness consists in his being
-able to preserve his own essence,' and quite another thing, in its
-effect upon the emotions, to say with the Gospel, 'What is a man
-advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, forfeit
-himself?' How does this difference of effect arise? I cannot tell, and I
-am not much concerned to know; the important thing is that it does
-arise, and that we can profit by it. But how, finally, are poetry and
-eloquence to exercise the power of relating the modern results of
-natural science to man's instinct for conduct, his instinct for beauty?
-And here again I answer that I do not know how they will exercise it,
-but that they can and will exercise it I am sure. I do not mean that
-modern philosophical poets and modern philosophical moralists are to
-come and relate for us, in express terms, the results of modern
-scientific research to our instinct for conduct, our instinct for
-beauty. But I mean that we shall find, as a matter of experience, if we
-know the best that has been thought and uttered in the world, we shall
-find that the art and poetry and eloquence of men who lived, perhaps,
-long ago, who had the most limited natural knowledge, who had the most
-erroneous conceptions about many important matters, we shall find that
-this art, and poetry, and eloquence, have in fact not only the power of
-refreshing and delighting us, they have also the power,--such is the
-strength and worth, in essentials, of their authors' criticism of
-life,--they have a fortifying, and elevating, and quickening, and
-suggestive power, capable of wonderfully helping us to relate the
-results of modern science to our need for conduct, our need for beauty.
-Homer's conceptions of the physical universe were, I imagine, grotesque;
-but really, under the shock of hearing from modern science that 'the
-world is not subordinated to man's use, and that man is not the cynosure
-of things terrestrial,' I could, for my own part, desire no better
-comfort than Homer's line which I quoted just now,
-
-    [Greek: tleton gar Moirai thumon thesan anthropoisin]--
-
-'for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the children of
-men!'
-
-And the more that men's minds are cleared, the more that the results of
-science are frankly accepted, the more that poetry and eloquence come to
-be received and studied as what in truth they really are,--the criticism
-of life by gifted men, alive and active with extraordinary power at an
-unusual number of points;--so much the more will the value of humane
-letters, and of art also, which is an utterance having a like kind of
-power with theirs, be felt and acknowledged, and their place in
-education be secured.
-
-Let us therefore, all of us, avoid indeed as much as possible any
-invidious comparison between the merits of humane letters, as means of
-education, and the merits of the natural sciences. But when some
-President of a Section for Mechanical Science insists on making the
-comparison, and tells us that 'he who in his training has substituted
-literature and history for natural science has chosen the less useful
-alternative,' let us make answer to him that the student of humane
-letters only, will, at least, know also the great general conceptions
-brought in by modern physical science; for science, as Professor Huxley
-says, forces them upon us all. But the student of the natural sciences
-only, will, by our very hypothesis, know nothing of humane letters; not
-to mention that in setting himself to be perpetually accumulating
-natural knowledge, he sets himself to do what only specialists have in
-general the gift for doing genially. And so he will probably be
-unsatisfied, or at any rate incomplete, and even more incomplete than
-the student of humane letters only.
-
-I once mentioned in a school-report, how a young man in one of our
-English training colleges having to paraphrase the passage in _Macbeth_
-beginning,
-
-    'Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?'
-
-turned this line into, 'Can you not wait upon the lunatic?' And I
-remarked what a curious state of things it would be, if every pupil of
-our national schools knew, let us say, that the moon is two thousand one
-hundred and sixty miles in diameter, and thought at the same time that a
-good paraphrase for
-
-    'Can'st thou not minister to a mind diseased?'
-
-was, 'Can you not wait upon the lunatic?' If one is driven to choose, I
-think I would rather have a young person ignorant about the moon's
-diameter, but aware that 'Can you not wait upon the lunatic?' is bad,
-than a young person whose education had been such as to manage things
-the other way.
-
-Or to go higher than the pupils of our national schools. I have in my
-mind's eye a member of our British Parliament who comes to travel here
-in America, who afterwards relates his travels, and who shows a really
-masterly knowledge of the geology of this great country and of its
-mining capabilities, but who ends by gravely suggesting that the United
-States should borrow a prince from our Royal Family, and should make him
-their king, and should create a House of Lords of great landed
-proprietors after the pattern of ours; and then America, he thinks,
-would have her future happily and perfectly secured. Surely, in this
-case, the President of the Section for Mechanical Science would himself
-hardly say that our member of Parliament, by concentrating himself upon
-geology and mineralogy, and so on, and not attending to literature and
-history, had 'chosen the more useful alternative.'
-
-If then there is to be separation and option between humane letters on
-the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other, the great majority
-of mankind, all who have not exceptional and overpowering aptitudes for
-the study of nature, would do well, I cannot but think, to choose to be
-educated in humane letters rather than in the natural sciences. Letters
-will call out their being at more points, will make them live more.
-
-I said that before I ended I would just touch on the question of
-classical education, and I will keep my word. Even if literature is to
-retain a large place in our education, yet Latin and Greek, say the
-friends of progress, will certainly have to go. Greek is the grand
-offender in the eyes of these gentlemen. The attackers of the
-established course of study think that against Greek, at any rate, they
-have irresistible arguments. Literature may perhaps be needed in
-education, they say; but why on earth should it be Greek literature? Why
-not French or German? Nay, 'has not an Englishman models in his own
-literature of every kind of excellence?' As before, it is not on any
-weak pleadings of my own that I rely for convincing the gainsayers; it
-is on the constitution of human nature itself, and on the instinct of
-self-preservation in humanity. The instinct for beauty is set in human
-nature, as surely as the instinct for knowledge is set there, or the
-instinct for conduct. If the instinct for beauty is served by Greek
-literature and art as it is served by no other literature and art, we
-may trust to the instinct of self-preservation in humanity for keeping
-Greek as part of our culture. We may trust to it for even making the
-study of Greek more prevalent than it is now. Greek will come, I hope,
-some day to be studied more rationally than at present; but it will be
-increasingly studied as men increasingly feel the need in them for
-beauty, and how powerfully Greek art and Greek literature can serve this
-need. Women will again study Greek, as Lady Jane Grey did; I believe
-that in that chain of forts, with which the fair host of the Amazons are
-now engirdling our English universities, I find that here in America, in
-colleges like Smith College in Massachusetts, and Vassar College in the
-State of New York, and in the happy families of the mixed universities
-out West, they are studying it already.
-
-_Defuit una mihi symmetria prisca_,--'The antique symmetry was the one
-thing wanting to me,' said Leonardo da Vinci; and he was an Italian. I
-will not presume to speak for the Americans, but I am sure that, in the
-Englishman, the want of this admirable symmetry of the Greeks is a
-thousand times more great and crying than in any Italian. The results of
-the want show themselves most glaringly, perhaps, in our architecture,
-but they show themselves, also, in all our art. _Fit details strictly
-combined, in view of a large general result nobly conceived;_ that is
-just the beautiful _symmetria prisca_ of the Greeks, and it is just
-where we English fail, where all our art fails. Striking ideas we have,
-and well-executed details we have; but that high symmetry which, with
-satisfying and delightful effect, combines them, we seldom or never
-have. The glorious beauty of the Acropolis at Athens did not come from
-single fine things stuck about on that hill, a statue here, a gateway
-there;--no, it arose from all things being perfectly combined for a
-supreme total effect. What must not an Englishman feel about our
-deficiencies in this respect, as the sense for beauty, whereof this
-symmetry is an essential element, awakens and strengthens within him!
-what will not one day be his respect and desire for Greece and its
-_symmetria prisca_, when the scales drop from his eyes as he walks the
-London streets, and he sees such a lesson in meanness as the Strand, for
-instance, in its true deformity! But here we are coming to our friend
-Mr. Ruskin's province, and I will not intrude upon it, for he is its
-very sufficient guardian.
-
-And so we at last find, it seems, we find flowing in favour of the
-humanities the natural and necessary stream of things, which seemed
-against them when we started. The 'hairy quadruped furnished with a tail
-and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits,' this good fellow
-carried hidden in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop
-into a necessity for humane letters. Nay, more; we seem finally to be
-even led to the further conclusion that our hairy ancestor carried in
-his nature, also, a necessity for Greek.
-
-And therefore, to say the truth, I cannot really think that humane
-letters are in much actual danger of being thrust out from their leading
-place in education, in spite of the array of authorities against them at
-this moment. So long as human nature is what it is, their attractions
-will remain irresistible. As with Greek, so with letters generally: they
-will some day come, we may hope, to be studied more rationally, but they
-will not lose their place. What will happen will rather be that there
-will be crowded into education other matters besides, far too many;
-there will be, perhaps, a period of unsettlement and confusion and false
-tendency; but letters will not in the end lose their leading place. If
-they lose it for a time, they will get it back again. We shall be
-brought back to them by our wants and aspirations. And a poor humanist
-may possess his soul in patience, neither strive nor cry, admit the
-energy and brilliancy of the partisans of physical science, and their
-present favour with the public, to be far greater than his own, and
-still have a happy faith that the nature of things works silently on
-behalf of the studies which he loves, and that, while we shall all have
-to acquaint ourselves with the great results reached by modern science,
-and to give ourselves as much training in its disciplines as we can
-conveniently carry, yet the majority of men will always require humane
-letters; and so much the more, as they have the more and the greater
-results of science to relate to the need in man for conduct, and to the
-need in him for beauty.
-
-
-
-
-  EMERSON.
-
-
-Forty years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, voices were in
-the air there which haunt my memory still. Happy the man who in that
-susceptible season of youth hears such voices! they are a possession to
-him for ever. No such voices as those which we heard in our youth at
-Oxford are sounding there now. Oxford has more criticism now, more
-knowledge, more light; but such voices as those of our youth it has no
-longer. The name of Cardinal Newman is a great name to the imagination
-still; his genius and his style are still things of power. But he is
-over eighty years old; he is in the Oratory at Birmingham; he has
-adopted, for the doubts and difficulties which beset men's minds to-day,
-a solution which, to speak frankly, is impossible. Forty years ago he
-was in the very prime of life; he was close at hand to us at Oxford; he
-was preaching in St. Mary's pulpit every Sunday; he seemed about to
-transform and to renew what was for us the most national and natural
-institution in the world, the Church of England. Who could resist the
-charm of that spiritual apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light
-through the aisles of St. Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then, in
-the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence with words and
-thoughts which were a religious music,--subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem
-to hear him still, saying: 'After the fever of life, after wearinesses
-and sicknesses, fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness,
-struggling and succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this
-troubled, unhealthy state,--at length comes death, at length the white
-throne of God, at length the beatific vision.' Or, if we followed him
-back to his seclusion at Littlemore, that dreary village by the London
-road, and to the house of retreat and the church which he built
-there,--a mean house such as Paul might have lived in when he was
-tent-making at Ephesus, a church plain and thinly sown with
-worshippers,--who could resist him there either, welcoming back to the
-severe joys of church-fellowship, and of daily worship and prayer, the
-firstlings of a generation which had well-nigh forgotten them? Again I
-seem to hear him: 'The season is chill and dark, and the breath of the
-morning is damp, and worshippers are few; but all this befits those who
-are by their profession penitents and mourners, watchers and pilgrims.
-More dear to them that loneliness, more cheerful that severity, and more
-bright that gloom, than all those aids and appliances of luxury by which
-men nowadays attempt to make prayer less disagreeable to them. True
-faith does not covet comforts; they who realise that awful day, when
-they shall see Him face to face whose eyes are as a flame of fire, will
-as little bargain to pray pleasantly now as they will think of doing so
-then.'
-
-Somewhere or other I have spoken of those 'last enchantments of the
-Middle Age' which Oxford sheds around us, and here they were! But there
-were other voices sounding in our ear besides Newman's. There was the
-puissant voice of Carlyle; so sorely strained, over-used, and mis-used
-since, but then fresh, comparatively sound, and reaching our hearts with
-true, pathetic eloquence. Who can forget the emotion of receiving in its
-first freshness such a sentence as that sentence of Carlyle upon Edward
-Irving, then just dead: 'Scotland sent him forth a herculean man; our
-mad Babylon wore and wasted him with all her engines,--and it took her
-twelve years!' A greater voice still,--the greatest voice of the
-century,--came to us in those youthful years through Carlyle: the voice
-of Goethe. To this day,--such is the force of youthful associations,--I
-read the _Wilhelm Meister_ with more pleasure in Carlyle's translation
-than in the original. The large, liberal view of human life in _Wilhelm
-Meister_, how novel it was to the Englishman in those days! and it was
-salutary, too, and educative for him, doubtless, as well as novel. But
-what moved us most in _Wilhelm Meister_ was that which, after all, will
-always move the young most,--the poetry, the eloquence. Never, surely,
-was Carlyle's prose so beautiful and pure as in his rendering of the
-Youths' dirge over Mignon!--'Well is our treasure now laid up, the fair
-image of the past. Here sleeps it in the marble, undecaying; in your
-hearts, also, it lives, it works. Travel, travel, back into life! Take
-along with you this holy earnestness, for earnestness alone makes life
-eternity.' Here we had the voice of the great Goethe;--not the stiff,
-and hindered, and frigid, and factitious Goethe who speaks to us too
-often from those sixty volumes of his, but of the great Goethe, and the
-true one.
-
-And besides those voices, there came to us in that old Oxford time a
-voice also from this side of the Atlantic,--a clear and pure voice,
-which for my ear, at any rate, brought a strain as new, and moving, and
-unforgettable, as the strain of Newman, or Carlyle, or Goethe. Mr.
-Lowell has well described the apparition of Emerson to your young
-generation here, in that distant time of which I am speaking, and of his
-workings upon them. He was your Newman, your man of soul and genius
-visible to you in the flesh, speaking to your bodily ears, a present
-object for your heart and imagination. That is surely the most potent of
-all influences! nothing can come up to it. To us at Oxford Emerson was
-but a voice speaking from three thousand miles away. But so well he
-spoke, that from that time forth Boston Bay and Concord were names
-invested to my ear with a sentiment akin to that which invests for me
-the names of Oxford and of Weimar; and snatches of Emerson's strain
-fixed themselves in my mind as imperishably as any of the eloquent words
-which I have been just now quoting. 'Then dies the man in you; then once
-more perish the buds of art, poetry, and science, as they have died
-already in a thousand thousand men.' 'What Plato has thought, he may
-think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen
-any man, he can understand.' 'Trust thyself! every heart vibrates to
-that iron string. Accept the place the Divine Providence has found for
-you, the society of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great
-men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius
-of their age; betraying their perception that the Eternal was stirring
-at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their
-being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest spirit the
-same transcendent destiny; and not pinched in a corner, not cowards
-fleeing before a revolution, but redeemers and benefactors, pious
-aspirants to be noble clay plastic under the Almighty effort, let us
-advance and advance on chaos and the dark!' These lofty sentences of
-Emerson, and a hundred others of like strain, I never have lost out of
-my memory; I never _can_ lose them.
-
-At last I find myself in Emerson's own country, and looking upon Boston
-Bay. Naturally I revert to the friend of my youth. It is not always
-pleasant to ask oneself questions about the friends of one's youth; they
-cannot always well support it. Carlyle, for instance, in my judgment,
-cannot well support such a return upon him. Yet we should make the
-return; we should part with our illusions, we should know the truth.
-When I come to this country, where Emerson now counts for so much, and
-where such high claims are made for him, I pull myself together, and ask
-myself what the truth about this object of my youthful admiration really
-is. Improper elements often come into our estimate of men. We have
-lately seen a German critic make Goethe the greatest of all poets,
-because Germany is now the greatest of military powers, and wants a poet
-to match. Then, too, America is a young country; and young countries,
-like young persons, are apt sometimes to evince in their literary
-judgments a want of scale and measure. I set myself, therefore,
-resolutely to come at a real estimate of Emerson, and with a leaning
-even to strictness rather than to indulgence. That is the safer course.
-Time has no indulgence; any veils of illusion which we may have left
-around an object because we loved it, Time is sure to strip away.
-
-                 *        *        *        *        *
-
-I was reading the other day a notice of Emerson by a serious and
-interesting American critic. Fifty or sixty passages in Emerson's poems,
-says this critic,--who had doubtless himself been nourished on Emerson's
-writings, and held them justly dear,--fifty or sixty passages from
-Emerson's poems have already entered into English speech as matter of
-familiar and universally current quotation. Here is a specimen of that
-personal sort of estimate which, for my part, even in speaking of
-authors dear to me, I would try to avoid. What is the kind of phrase of
-which we may fairly say that it has entered into English speech as
-matter of familiar quotation? Such a phrase, surely, as the 'Patience on
-a monument' of Shakespeare; as the 'Darkness visible' of Milton; as the
-'Where ignorance is bliss' of Gray. Of not one single passage in
-Emerson's poetry can it be truly said that it has become a familiar
-quotation like phrases of this kind. It is not enough that it should be
-familiar to his admirers, familiar in New England, familiar even
-throughout the United States; it must be familiar to all readers and
-lovers of English poetry. Of not more than one or two passages in
-Emerson's poetry can it, I think, be truly said, that they stand
-ever-present in the memory of even many lovers of English poetry. A
-great number of passages from his poetry are no doubt perfectly familiar
-to the mind and lips of the critic whom I have mentioned, and perhaps of
-a wide circle of American readers. But this is a very different thing
-from being matter of universal quotation, like the phrases of the
-legitimate poets.
-
-And, in truth, one of the legitimate poets, Emerson, in my opinion, is
-not. His poetry is interesting, it makes one think; but it is not the
-poetry of one of the born poets. I say it of him with reluctance,
-although I am sure that he would have said it of himself; but I say it
-with reluctance, because I dislike giving pain to his admirers, and
-because all my own wish, too, is to say of him what is favourable. But I
-regard myself, not as speaking to please Emerson's admirers, not as
-speaking to please myself; but rather, I repeat, as communing with Time
-and Nature concerning the productions of this beautiful and rare spirit,
-and as resigning what of him is by their unalterable decree touched with
-caducity, in order the better to mark and secure that in him which is
-immortal.
-
-Milton says that poetry ought to be simple, sensuous, impassioned. Well,
-Emerson's poetry is seldom either simple, or sensuous, or impassioned.
-In general it lacks directness; it lacks concreteness; it lacks energy.
-His grammar is often embarrassed; in particular, the want of
-clearly-marked distinction between the subject and the object of his
-sentence is a frequent cause of obscurity in him. A poem which shall be
-a plain, forcible, inevitable whole he hardly ever produces. Such good
-work as the noble lines graven on the Concord Monument is the exception
-with him; such ineffective work as the 'Fourth of July Ode' or the
-'Boston Hymn' is the rule. Even passages and single lines of thorough
-plainness and commanding force are rare in his poetry. They exist, of
-course; but when we meet with them they give us a slight shock of
-surprise, so little has Emerson accustomed us to them. Let me have the
-pleasure of quoting one or two of these exceptional passages:--
-
-   'So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
-      So near is God to man,
-    When Duty whispers low, _Thou must_,
-      The youth replies, _I can_.'
-
-Or again this:--
-
-   'Though love repine and reason chafe,
-    There came a voice without reply:
-    "'Tis man's perdition to be safe,
-    When for the truth he ought to die."'
-
-Excellent! but how seldom do we get from him a strain blown so clearly
-and firmly! Take another passage where his strain has not only
-clearness, it has also grace and beauty:--
-
-   'And ever, when the happy child
-    In May beholds the blooming wild,
-    And hears in heaven the bluebird sing,
-    "Onward," he cries, "your baskets bring!
-    In the next field is air more mild,
-    And in yon hazy west is Eden's balmier spring."'
-
-In the style and cadence here there is a reminiscence, I think, of Gray;
-at any rate the pureness, grace, and beauty of these lines are worthy
-even of Gray. But Gray holds his high rank as a poet, not merely by the
-beauty and grace of passages in his poems; not merely by a diction
-generally pure in an age of impure diction: he holds it, above all, by
-the power and skill with which the evolution of his poems is conducted.
-Here is his grand superiority to Collins, whose diction in his best
-poem, the 'Ode to Evening,' is purer than Gray's; but then the 'Ode to
-Evening' is like a river which loses itself in the sand, whereas Gray's
-best poems have an evolution sure and satisfying. Emerson's 'Mayday,'
-from which I just now quoted, has no real evolution at all; it is a
-series of observations. And, in general, his poems have no evolution.
-Take, for example, his 'Titmouse.' Here he has an excellent subject; and
-his observation of Nature, moreover, is always marvellously close and
-fine. But compare what he makes of his meeting with his titmouse with
-what Cowper or Burns makes of the like kind of incident! One never quite
-arrives at learning what the titmouse actually did for him at all,
-though one feels a strong interest and desire to learn it; but one is
-reduced to guessing, and cannot be quite sure that after all one has
-guessed right. He is not plain and concrete enough,--in other words, not
-poet enough,--to be able to tell us. And a failure of this kind goes
-through almost all his verse, keeps him amid symbolism and allusion and
-the fringes of things, and, in spite of his spiritual power, deeply
-impairs his poetic value. Through the inestimable virtue of
-concreteness, a simple poem like 'The Bridge' of Longfellow, or the
-'School Days' of Mr. Whittier, is of more poetic worth, perhaps, than
-all the verse of Emerson.
-
-I do not, then, place Emerson among the great poets. But I go further,
-and say that I do not place him among the great writers, the great men
-of letters. Who are the great men of letters? They are men like Cicero,
-Plato, Bacon, Pascal, Swift, Voltaire,--writers with, in the first
-place, a genius and instinct for style; writers whose prose is by a kind
-of native necessity true and sound. Now the style of Emerson, like the
-style of his transcendentalist friends and of the 'Dial' so
-continually,--the style of Emerson is capable of falling into a strain
-like this, which I take from the beginning of his 'Essay on Love':
-'Every soul is a celestial being to every other soul. The heart has its
-sabbaths and jubilees, in which the world appears as a hymeneal feast,
-and all natural sounds and the circle of the seasons are erotic odes and
-dances.' Emerson altered this sentence in the later editions. Like
-Wordsworth, he was in later life fond of altering; and in general his
-later alterations, like those of Wordsworth, are not improvements. He
-softened the passage in question, however, though without really mending
-it. I quote it in its original and strongly-marked form. Arthur Stanley
-used to relate that about the year 1840, being in conversation with some
-Americans in quarantine at Malta, and thinking to please them, he
-declared his warm admiration for Emerson's 'Essays,' then recently
-published. However, the Americans shook their heads, and told him that
-for home taste Emerson was decidedly too _greeny_. We will hope, for
-their sakes, that the sort of thing they had in their heads was such
-writing as I have just quoted. Unsound it is, indeed, and in a style
-almost impossible to a born man of letters.
-
-It is a curious thing, that quality of style which marks the great
-writer, the born man of letters. It resides in the whole tissue of his
-work, and of his work regarded as a composition for literary purposes.
-Brilliant and powerful passages in a man's writings do not prove his
-possession of it; it lies in their whole tissue. Emerson has passages of
-noble and pathetic eloquence, such as those which I quoted at the
-beginning; he has passages of shrewd and felicitous wit; he has crisp
-epigram; he has passages of exquisitely touched observation of nature.
-Yet he is not a great writer; his style has not the requisite wholeness
-of good tissue. Even Carlyle is not, in my judgment, a great writer. He
-has surpassingly powerful qualities of expression, far more powerful
-than Emerson's, and reminding one of the gifts of expression of the
-great poets,--of even Shakespeare himself. What Emerson so admirably
-says of Carlyle's 'devouring eyes and pourtraying hand,' 'those thirsty
-eyes, those portrait-eating, portrait-painting eyes of thine, those
-fatal perceptions,' is thoroughly true. What a description is Carlyle's
-of the first publisher of _Sartor Resartus_, 'to whom the idea of a new
-edition of _Sartor_ is frightful, or rather ludicrous, unimaginable'; of
-this poor Fraser, in whose 'wonderful world of Tory pamphleteers,
-conservative Younger-brothers, Regent Street loungers, Crockford
-gamblers, Irish Jesuits, drunken reporters, and miscellaneous unclean
-persons (whom nitre and much soap will not wash clean), not a soul has
-expressed the smallest wish that way!' What a portrait, again, of the
-well-beloved John Sterling! 'One, and the best, of a small class extant
-here, who, nigh drowning in a black wreck of Infidelity (lighted up by
-some glare of Radicalism only, now growing _dim_ too), and about to
-perish, saved themselves into a Coleridgian Shovel-Hattedness.' What
-touches in the invitation of Emerson to London! 'You shall see
-blockheads by the million; Pickwick himself shall be visible,--innocent
-young Dickens, reserved for a questionable fate. The great Wordsworth
-shall talk till you yourself pronounce him to be a bore. Southey's
-complexion is still healthy mahogany brown, with a fleece of white hair,
-and eyes that seem running at full gallop. Leigh Hunt, man of genius in
-the shape of a cockney, is my near neighbour, with good humour and no
-common-sense; old Rogers with his pale head, white, bare, and cold as
-snow, with those large blue eyes, cruel, sorrowful, and that sardonic
-shelf chin.' How inimitable it all is! And finally, for one must not go
-on for ever, this version of a London Sunday, with the public-houses
-closed during the hours of divine service! 'It is silent Sunday; the
-populace not yet admitted to their beer-shops, till the respectabilities
-conclude their rubric mummeries,--a much more audacious feat than beer.'
-Yet even Carlyle is not, in my judgment, to be called a great writer;
-one cannot think of ranking him with men like Cicero and Plato and Swift
-and Voltaire. Emerson freely promises to Carlyle immortality for his
-histories. They will not have it. Why? Because the materials furnished
-to him by that devouring eye of his, and that pourtraying hand, were not
-wrought in and subdued by him to what his work, regarded as a
-composition for literary purposes, required. Occuring in conversation,
-breaking out in familiar correspondence, they are magnificent,
-inimitable; nothing more is required of them; thus thrown out anyhow,
-they serve their turn and fulfil their function. And, therefore, I
-should not wonder if really Carlyle lived, in the long run, by such an
-invaluable record as that correspondence between him and Emerson, of
-which we owe the publication to Mr. Charles Norton,--by this and not by
-his works, as Johnson lives in Boswell, not by his works. For Carlyle's
-sallies, as the staple of a literary work, become wearisome; and as time
-more and more applies to Carlyle's works its stringent test, this will
-be felt more and more. Shakespeare, Moliere, Swift,--they, too, had,
-like Carlyle, the devouring eye and the pourtraying hand. But they are
-great literary masters, they are supreme writers, because they knew how
-to work into a literary composition their materials, and to subdue them
-to the purposes of literary effect. Carlyle is too wilful for this, too
-turbid, too vehement.
-
-You will think I deal in nothing but negatives. I have been saying that
-Emerson is not one of the great poets, the great writers. He has not
-their quality of style. He is, however, the propounder of a philosophy.
-The Platonic dialogues afford us the example of exquisite literary form
-and treatment given to philosophical ideas. Plato is at once a great
-literary man and a great philosopher.
-
-If we speak carefully, we cannot call Aristotle or Spinoza or Kant great
-literary men, or their productions great literary works. But their work
-is arranged with such constructive power that they build a philosophy,
-and are justly called great philosophical writers. Emerson cannot, I
-think, be called with justice a great philosophical writer. He cannot
-build; his arrangement of philosophical ideas has no progress in it, no
-evolution; he does not construct a philosophy. Emerson himself knew the
-defects of his method, or rather want of method, very well; indeed, he
-and Carlyle criticise themselves and one another in a way which leaves
-little for any one else to do in the way of formulating their defects.
-Carlyle formulates perfectly the defects of his friend's poetic and
-literary production when he says of the 'Dial': 'For me it is too
-ethereal, speculative, theoretic; I will have all things condense
-themselves, take shape and body, if they are to have my sympathy.' And,
-speaking of Emerson's orations, he says: 'I long to see some concrete
-Thing, some Event, Man's Life, American Forest, or piece of Creation,
-which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well _Emersonised_,--depictured
-by Emerson, filled with the life of Emerson, and cast forth from him,
-then to live by itself. If these orations balk me of this, how
-profitable soever they may be for others, I will not love them.' Emerson
-himself formulates perfectly the defect of his own philosophical
-productions when he speaks of his 'formidable tendency to the lapidary
-style. I build my house of boulders.' 'Here I sit and read and write,'
-he says again, 'with very little system, and, as far as regards
-composition, with the most fragmentary result; paragraphs
-incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.' Nothing
-can be truer; and the work of a Spinoza or Kant, of the men who stand as
-great philosophical writers, does not proceed in this wise.
-
-Some people will tell you that Emerson's poetry, indeed, is too
-abstract, and his philosophy too vague, but that his best work is his
-_English Traits_. The _English Traits_ are beyond question very pleasant
-reading. It is easy to praise them, easy to commend the author of them.
-But I insist on always trying Emerson's work by the highest standards. I
-esteem him too much to try his work by any other. Tried by the highest
-standards, and compared with the work of the excellent markers and
-recorders of the traits of human life,--of writers like Montaigne, La
-Bruyere, Addison,--the _English Traits_ will not stand the comparison.
-Emerson's observation has not the disinterested quality of the
-observation of these masters. It is the observation of a man
-systematically benevolent, as Hawthorne's observation in _Our Old Home_
-is the work of a man chagrined. Hawthorne's literary talent is of the
-first order. His subjects are generally not to me subjects of the
-highest interest; but his literary talent is of the first order, the
-finest, I think, which America has yet produced,--finer, by much, than
-Emerson's. Yet _Our Old Home_ is not a masterpiece any more than
-_English Traits_. In neither of them is the observer disinterested
-enough. The author's attitude in each of these cases can easily be
-understood and defended. Hawthorne was a sensitive man, so situated in
-England that he was perpetually in contact with the British Philistine;
-and the British Philistine is a trying personage. Emerson's systematic
-benevolence comes from what he himself calls somewhere his 'persistent
-optimism'; and his persistent optimism is the root of his greatness and
-the source of his charm. But still let us keep our literary conscience
-true, and judge every kind of literary work by the laws really proper to
-it. The kind of work attempted in the _English Traits_ and in _Our Old
-Home_ is work which cannot be done perfectly with a bias such as that
-given by Emerson's optimism or by Hawthorne's chagrin. Consequently,
-neither _English Traits_ nor _Our Old Home_ is a work of perfection in
-its kind.
-
-Not with the Miltons and Grays, not with the Platos and Spinozas, not
-with the Swifts and Voltaires, not with the Montaignes and Addisons, can
-we rank Emerson. His work of various kinds, when one compares it with
-the work done in a corresponding kind by these masters, fails to stand
-the comparison. No man could see this clearer than Emerson himself. It
-is hard not to feel despondency when we contemplate our failures and
-shortcomings: and Emerson, the least self-flattering and the most modest
-of men, saw so plainly what was lacking to him that he had his moments
-of despondency. 'Alas, my friend,' he writes in reply to Carlyle, who
-had exhorted him to creative work,--'Alas, my friend, I can do no such
-gay thing as you say. I do not belong to the poets, but only to a low
-department of literature,--the reporters; suburban men.' He deprecated
-his friend's praise; praise 'generous to a fault,' he calls it; praise
-'generous to the shaming of me,--cold, fastidious, ebbing person that I
-am. Already in a former letter you had said too much good of my poor
-little arid book, which is as sand to my eyes. I can only say that I
-heartily wish the book were better; and I must try and deserve so much
-favour from the kind gods by a bolder and truer living in the months to
-come,--such as may perchance one day release and invigorate this cramp
-hand of mine. When I see how much work is to be done; what room for a
-poet, for any spiritualist, in this great, intelligent, sensual, and
-avaricious America,--I lament my fumbling fingers and stammering
-tongue.' Again, as late as 1870, he writes to Carlyle: 'There is no
-example of constancy like yours, and it always stings my stupor into
-temporary recovery and wonderful resolution to accept the noble
-challenge. But "the strong hours conquer us;" and I am the victim of
-miscellany,--miscellany of designs, vast debility, and procrastination.'
-The forlorn note belonging to the phrase, 'vast debility,' recalls that
-saddest and most discouraged of writers, the author of _Obermann_,
-Senancour, with whom Emerson has in truth a certain kinship. He has, in
-common with Senancour, his pureness, his passion for nature, his single
-eye; and here we find him confessing, like Senancour, a sense in himself
-of sterility and impotence.
-
-                 *        *        *        *        *
-
-And now I think I have cleared the ground. I have given up to envious
-Time as much of Emerson as Time can fairly expect ever to obtain. We
-have not in Emerson a great poet, a great writer, a great
-philosophy-maker. His relation to us is not that of one of those
-personages; yet it is a relation of, I think, even superior importance.
-His relation to us is more like that of the Roman Emperor Marcus
-Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is not a great writer, a great
-philosophy-maker; he is the friend and aider of those who would live in
-the spirit. Emerson is the same. He is the friend and aider of those who
-would live in the spirit. All the points in thinking which are necessary
-for this purpose he takes; but he does not combine them into a system,
-or present them as a regular philosophy. Combined in a system by a man
-with the requisite talent for this kind of thing, they would be less
-useful than as Emerson gives them to us; and the man with the talent so
-to systematise them would be less impressive than Emerson. They do very
-well as they now stand;--like 'boulders,' as he says;--in 'paragraphs
-incompressible, each sentence an infinitely repellent particle.' In such
-sentences his main points recur again and again, and become fixed in the
-memory.
-
-We all know them. First and foremost, character. Character is
-everything. 'That which all things tend to educe,--which freedom,
-cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver,--is
-character.' Character and self-reliance. 'Trust thyself! every heart
-vibrates to that iron string.' And yet we have our being in a _not
-ourselves_. 'There is a power above and behind us, and we are the
-channels of its communications.' But our lives must be pitched higher.
-'Life must be lived on a higher plane; we must go up to a higher
-platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there the whole
-scene changes.' The good we need is for ever close to us, though we
-attain it not. 'On the brink of the waters of life and truth, we are
-miserably dying.' This good is close to us, moreover, in our daily life,
-and in the familiar, homely places. 'The unremitting retention of simple
-and high sentiments in obscure duties,--that is the maxim for us. Let us
-be poised and wise, and our own to-day. Let us treat the men and women
-well,--treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are. Men live in
-their fancy, like drunkards whose hands are too soft and tremulous for
-successful labour. I settle myself ever firmer in the creed, that we
-should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we
-are, by whomsoever we deal with; accepting our actual companions and
-circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom
-the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. Massachusetts,
-Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear
-loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and if
-we will tarry a little we may come to learn that here is best. See to it
-only that thyself is here.' Furthermore, the good is close to us _all_.
-'I resist the scepticism of our education and of our educated men. I do
-not believe that the differences of opinion and character in men are
-organic. I do not recognise, besides the class of the good and the wise,
-a permanent class of sceptics, or a class of conservatives, or of
-malignants, or of materialists. I do not believe in the classes. Every
-man has a call of the power to do something unique.' Exclusiveness is
-deadly. 'The exclusive in social life does not see that he excludes
-himself from enjoyment in the attempt to appropriate it. The
-exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven
-on himself in striving to shut out others. Treat men as pawns and
-ninepins, and you shall suffer as well as they. If you leave out their
-heart you shall lose your own: The selfish man suffers more from his
-selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important
-benefit.' A sound nature will be inclined to refuse ease and
-self-indulgence. 'To live with some rigour of temperance, or some
-extreme of generosity, seems to be an asceticism which common
-good-nature would appoint to those who are at ease and in plenty, in
-sign that they feel a brotherhood with the great multitude of suffering
-men.' Compensation, finally, is the great law of life; it is everywhere,
-it is sure, and there is no escape from it. This is that 'law alive and
-beautiful, which works over our heads and under our feet. Pitiless, it
-avails itself of our success when we obey it, and of our ruin when we
-contravene it. We are all secret believers in it. It rewards actions
-after their nature. The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
-The thief steals from himself, the swindler swindles himself. You must
-pay at last your own debt.'
-
-This is tonic indeed! And let no one object that it is too general; that
-more practical, positive direction is what we want; that Emerson's
-optimism, self-reliance, and indifference to favourable conditions for
-our life and growth have in them something of danger. 'Trust thyself;'
-'what attracts my attention shall have it;' 'though thou shouldst walk
-the world over thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or
-ignoble;' 'what we call vulgar society is that society whose poetry is
-not yet written, but which you shall presently make as enviable and
-renowned as any.' With maxims like these, we surely, it may be said, run
-some risk of being made too well satisfied with our own actual self and
-state, however crude and imperfect they may be. 'Trust thyself?' It may
-be said that the common American or Englishman is more than enough
-disposed already to trust himself. I often reply, when our sectarians
-are praised for following conscience: Our people are very good in
-following their conscience; where they are not so good is in
-ascertaining whether their conscience tells them right. 'What attracts
-my attention shall have it?' Well, that is our people's plea when they
-run after the Salvation Army, and desire Messrs. Moody and Sankey. 'Thou
-shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble?' But think
-of the turn of the good people of our race for producing a life of
-hideousness and immense ennui; think of that specimen of your own New
-England life which Mr. Howells gives us in one of his charming stories
-which I was reading lately; think of the life of that ragged New England
-farm in the _Lady of the Aroostook_; think of Deacon Blood, and Aunt
-Maria, and the straight-backed chairs with black horse-hair seats, and
-Ezra Perkins with perfect self-reliance depositing his travellers in the
-snow! I can truly say that in the little which I have seen of the life
-of New England, I am more struck with what has been achieved than with
-the crudeness and failure. But no doubt there is still a great deal of
-crudeness also. Your own novelists say there is, and I suppose they say
-true. In the New England, as in the Old, our people have to learn, I
-suppose, not that their modes of life are beautiful and excellent
-already; they have rather to learn that they must transform them.
-
-To adopt this line of objection to Emerson's deliverances would,
-however, be unjust. In the first place, Emerson's points are in
-themselves true, if understood in a certain high sense; they are true
-and fruitful. And the right work to be done, at the hour when he
-appeared, was to affirm them generally and absolutely. Only thus could
-he break through the hard and fast barrier of narrow, fixed ideas, which
-he found confronting him, and win an entrance for new ideas. Had he
-attempted developments which may now strike us as expedient, he would
-have excited fierce antagonism, and probably effected little or nothing.
-The time might come for doing other work later, but the work which
-Emerson did was the right work to be done then.
-
-In the second place, strong as was Emerson's optimism, and unconquerable
-as was his belief in a good result to emerge from all which he saw going
-on around him, no misanthropical satirist ever saw shortcomings and
-absurdities more clearly than he did, or exposed them more courageously.
-When he sees 'the meanness,' as he calls it, 'of American politics,' he
-congratulates Washington on being 'long already happily dead,' on being
-'wrapt in his shroud and for ever safe.' With how firm a touch he
-delineates the faults of your two great political parties of forty years
-ago! The Democrats, he says, 'have not at heart the ends which give to
-the name of democracy what hope and virtue are in it. The spirit of our
-American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has
-no ulterior and divine ends, but is destructive only out of hatred and
-selfishness. On the other side, the conservative party, composed of the
-most moderate, able, and cultivated part of the population, is timid,
-and merely defensive of property. It vindicates no right, it aspires to
-no real good, it brands no crime, it proposes no generous policy. From
-neither party, when in power, has the world any benefit to expect in
-science, art, or humanity, at all commensurate with the resources of the
-nation.' Then with what subtle though kindly irony he follows the
-gradual withdrawal in New England, in the last half century, of tender
-consciences from the social organisations,--the bent for experiments
-such as that of Brook Farm and the like,--follows it in all its
-'dissidence of dissent and Protestantism of the Protestant religion!' He
-even loves to rally the New Englander on his philanthropical activity,
-and to find his beneficence and its institutions a bore! 'Your
-miscellaneous popular charities, the education at college of fools, the
-building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many of these now
-stand, alms to sots, and the thousand-fold relief societies,--though I
-confess with shame that I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, yet it
-is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to
-withhold.' 'Our Sunday schools and churches and pauper societies are
-yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural
-ways of arriving at the same ends at which these aim, but do not
-arrive.' 'Nature does not like our benevolence or our learning much
-better than she likes our frauds and wars. When we come out of the
-caucus, or the bank, or the Abolition convention, or the Temperance
-meeting, or the Transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she says
-to us: "So hot, my little sir?"'
-
-Yes, truly, his insight is admirable; his truth is precious. Yet the
-secret of his effect is not even in these; it is in his temper. It is in
-the hopeful, serene, beautiful temper wherewith these, in Emerson, are
-indissolubly joined; in which they work, and have their being. He says
-himself: 'We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, knowing that the
-perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature is an immortal youth.' If
-this be so, how wise is Emerson! for never had man such a sense of the
-inexhaustibleness of nature, and such hope. It was the ground of his
-being; it never failed him. Even when he is sadly avowing the
-imperfection of his literary power and resources, lamenting his fumbling
-fingers and stammering tongue, he adds: 'Yet, as I tell you, I am very
-easy in my mind and never dream of suicide. My whole philosophy, which
-is very real, teaches acquiescence and optimism. Sure I am that the
-right word will be spoken, though I cut out my tongue.' In his old age,
-with friends dying and life failing, his tone of cheerful,
-forward-looking hope is still the same. 'A multitude of young men are
-growing up here of high promise, and I compare gladly the social poverty
-of my youth with the power on which these draw.' His abiding word for
-us, the word by which being dead he yet speaks to us, is this: 'That
-which befits us, embosomed in beauty and wonder as we are, is
-cheerfulness and courage, and the endeavour to realise our aspirations.
-Shall not the heart, which has received so much, trust the Power by
-which it lives?'
-
-One can scarcely overrate the importance of thus holding fast to
-happiness and hope. It gives to Emerson's work an invaluable virtue. As
-Wordsworth's poetry is, in my judgment, the most important work done in
-verse, in our language, during the present century, so Emerson's
-_Essays_ are, I think, the most important work done in prose. His work
-is more important than Carlyle's. Let us be just to Carlyle, provoking
-though he often is. Not only has he that genius of his which makes
-Emerson say truly of his letters, that 'they savour always of eternity.'
-More than this may be said of him. The scope and upshot of his teaching
-are true; 'his guiding genius,' to quote Emerson again, is really 'his
-moral sense, his perception of the sole importance of truth and
-justice.' But consider Carlyle's temper, as we have been considering
-Emerson's! take his own account of it! 'Perhaps London is the proper
-place for me after all, seeing all places are _im_proper: who knows?
-Meanwhile, I lead a most dyspeptic, solitary, self-shrouded life;
-consuming, if possible in silence, my considerable daily allotment of
-pain; glad when any strength is left in me for writing, which is the
-only use I can see in myself,--too rare a case of late. The ground of my
-existence is black as death; too black, when all _void_ too; but at
-times there paint themselves on it pictures of gold, and rainbow, and
-lightning; all the brighter for the black ground, I suppose. Withal, I
-am very much of a fool.'--No, not a fool, but turbid and morbid, wilful
-and perverse. 'We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope.'
-
-Carlyle's perverse attitude towards happiness cuts him off from hope. He
-fiercely attacks the desire for happiness; his grand point in _Sartor_,
-his secret in which the soul may find rest, is that one shall cease to
-desire happiness, that one should learn to say to oneself: 'What if thou
-wert born and predestined not to be happy, but to be unhappy!' He is
-wrong; Saint Augustine is the better philosopher, who says: 'Act we
-_must_ in pursuance of what gives us most delight.' Epictetus and
-Augustine can be severe moralists enough; but both of them know and
-frankly say that the desire for happiness is the root and ground of
-man's being. Tell him and show him that he places his happiness wrong,
-that he seeks for delight where delight will never be really found; then
-you illumine and further him. But you only confuse him by telling him to
-cease to desire happiness; and you will not tell him this unless you are
-already confused yourself.
-
-Carlyle preached the dignity of labour, the necessity of righteousness,
-the love of veracity, the hatred of shams. He is said by many people to
-be a great teacher, a great helper for us, because he does so. But what
-is the due and eternal result of labour, righteousness,
-veracity?--Happiness. And how are we drawn to them by one who, instead
-of making us feel that with them is happiness, tells us that perhaps we
-were predestined not to be happy but to be unhappy?
-
-You will find, in especial, many earnest preachers of our popular
-religion to be fervent in their praise and admiration of Carlyle. His
-insistence on labour, righteousness, and veracity, pleases them; his
-contempt for happiness pleases them too. I read the other day a tract
-against smoking, although I do not happen to be a smoker myself.
-'Smoking,' said the tract, 'is liked because it gives agreeable
-sensations. Now it is a positive objection to a thing that it gives
-agreeable sensations. An earnest man will expressly avoid what gives
-agreeable sensations.' Shortly afterwards I was inspecting a school, and
-I found the children reading a piece of poetry on the common theme that
-we are here to-day and gone to-morrow. I shall soon be gone, the speaker
-in this poem was made to say,--
-
-   'And I shall be glad to go,
-    For the world at best is a dreary place,
-    And my life is getting low.'
-
-How usual a language of popular religion that is, on our side of the
-Atlantic at any rate! But then our popular religion, in disparaging
-happiness here below, knows very well what it is after. It has its eye
-on a happiness in a future life above the clouds, in the New Jerusalem,
-to be won by disliking and rejecting happiness here on earth. And so
-long as this ideal stands fast, it is very well. But for very many it
-now stands fast no longer; for Carlyle, at any rate, it had failed and
-vanished. Happiness in labour, righteousness, and veracity,--in the life
-of the spirit,--here was a gospel still for Carlyle to preach, and to
-help others by preaching. But he baffled them and himself by preferring
-the paradox that we are not born for happiness at all.
-
-Happiness in labour, righteousness, and veracity; in all the life of the
-spirit; happiness and eternal hope;--that was Emerson's gospel. I hear
-it said that Emerson was too sanguine; that the actual generation in
-America is not turning out so well as he expected. Very likely he was
-too sanguine as to the near future; in this country it is difficult not
-to be too sanguine. Very possibly the present generation may prove
-unworthy of his high hopes; even several generations succeeding this may
-prove unworthy of them. But by his conviction that in the life of the
-spirit is happiness, and by his hope that this life of the spirit will
-come more and more to be sanely understood, and to prevail, and to work
-for happiness,--by this conviction and hope Emerson was great, and he
-will surely prove in the end to have been right in them. In this country
-it is difficult, as I said, not to be sanguine. Very many of your
-writers are over-sanguine, and on the wrong grounds. But you have two
-men who in what they have written show their sanguineness in a line
-where courage and hope are just, where they are also infinitely
-important, but where they are not easy. The two men are Franklin and
-Emerson.[5] These two are, I think, the most distinctively and
-honourably American of your writers; they are the most original and the
-most valuable. Wise men everywhere know that we must keep up our courage
-and hope; they know that hope is, as Wordsworth well says,--
-
-   'The paramount _duty_ which Heaven lays,
-    For its own honour, on man's suffering heart.'
-
-But the very word _duty_ points to an effort and a struggle to maintain
-our hope unbroken. Franklin and Emerson maintained theirs with a
-convincing ease, an inspiring joy. Franklin's confidence in the
-happiness with which industry, honesty, and economy will crown the life
-of this work-day world, is such that he runs over with felicity. With a
-like felicity does Emerson run over, when he contemplates the happiness
-eternally attached to the true life in the spirit. You cannot prize him
-too much, nor heed him too diligently. He has lessons for both the
-branches of our race. I figure him to my mind as visible upon earth
-still, as still standing here by Boston Bay, or at his own Concord, in
-his habit as he lived, but of heightened stature and shining feature,
-with one hand stretched out towards the East, to our laden and labouring
-England; the other towards the ever-growing West, to his own
-dearly-loved America,--'great, intelligent, sensual, avaricious
-America.' To us he shows for guidance his lucid freedom, his
-cheerfulness and hope; to you his dignity, delicacy, serenity,
-elevation.
-
-
-  THE END.
-
-
-  _Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh._
-
-
-
-
-  [Footnotes]
-
-1. _Philippians_, iv, 8.
-
-2. [Greek: Hosa semna].
-
-3. _Ecclesiastes_, viii. 17.
-
-4. _Iliad_, xxiv. 49.
-
-5. I found with pleasure that this conjunction of Emerson's name with
-Franklin's had already occurred to an accomplished writer and delightful
-man, a friend of Emerson, left almost the sole survivor, alas! of the
-famous literary generation of Boston,--Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Dr.
-Holmes has kindly allowed me to print here the ingenious and interesting
-lines, hitherto unpublished, in which he speaks of Emerson thus:--
-
-   'Where in the realm of thought, whose air is song,
-    Does he, the Buddha of the West, belong?
-    He seems a winged Franklin, sweetly wise,
-    Born to unlock the secret of the skies;
-    And which the nobler calling--if 'tis fair
-    Terrestrial with celestial to compare--
-    To guide the storm-cloud's elemental flame,
-    Or walk the chambers whence the lightning came
-    Amidst the sources of its subtile fire,
-    And steal their effluence for his lips and lyre?'
-
-
-
-
-
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